The coup kids are in charge now
Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.
Continental
Who cares about African heritage?
While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.
Elimination by other means
From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.
The invention of foreigners
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
The geography of a storm
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
Entries, exits, permits
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.
Energy for whom?
Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.
Who pays for Africa’s food future?
A new movement is challenging the financial stranglehold of agribusiness and foreign lenders, arguing that Africa’s future lies not in extractive monocultures but in agroecology, sovereignty, and collective resistance.
Redrawing liberation
From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.
Beyond multipolarity
The SCO summit in Beijing revealed cracks in Western dominance—but whether they become openings for justice depends on African agency, not new patrons.
The price of plugging in
Floating power plants from Turkey promise to solve blackouts in the Global South. But easy fixes come with political risks.
The demise of curiosity
In an era when AI delivers the answer before the question is even asked, the sanctity of wonder is slipping away, and soon the act of asking might vanish entirely.
On Safari
On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.
Enemies of progress
Delayed, underfunded, and undermined, this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations has exposed not just neglect but active sabotage from CAF and national federations.
The grift tank
In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.
The specter of Bandung
Once a symbol of anti-imperial unity, BRICS now risks becoming the very thing Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.
Against climate resilience
Development agendas framed around “resilience” promise empowerment but often reproduce colonial power dynamics in the guise of climate adaptation.
Whose game is remembered?
The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.