Three footballers walk into a stadium
What the presence of an unlikely trio of football icons at AFCON tells us about migration, African identity, and the histories that continue to shape the modern game
Continental
Sounds of the Africa Cup of Nations
What it sounds like on the ground in Morocco at the 2025 edition of Africa Cup of Nations.
On the pitch
This year, instead of taking a publishing break, we will be covering the African Cup of Nations. To transition, we consider why football still matters in an era of enclosure, mediated presence, and thinning publics.
Paying for citizenship
What began as a revenue lifeline for small island states has become a global market where the wealthy buy mobility and sovereignty itself becomes a commodity.
What Graham Platner reveals about the US left
The economic emancipation of the American working class cannot come at the expense of the global working class.
Beyond independence
The post-colonial settlement has left Africa vulnerable to conflict, external pressure, and intellectual dependency. What comes next?
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.
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.