• Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

What if migrant environments, so often cast as scenes of abjection, border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, are instead repositories of knowledge, craft, and refined domesticity?

• Eliel Peterson

Ousmane Sembène’s and Souleymane Cissé’s debut features end with women who choose death. What is more uncomfortable to confront: their deaths, or the conditions that made life itself unbearable?

• Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Africa’s football federations stood by Gianni Infantino through FIFA’s sell-off scandal. What would it take for them to spend that leverage on something that lasts?

• Marta Mboka Tveit

Thomas More’s Utopia was not written as a metaphor for paradise, but for those trying to organize. What would an African equivalent look like?

• Kévin Drif

Julia Ducournau’s third film places a North African family at the center of a national trauma, but French critics largely missed what that choice makes visible.

• Richard Seymour

Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.

• Ngozi Nwosu-Juba

From the Women’s War of 1929 to the Anlu uprising three decades later, African women were organizing and resisting long before donors arrived to ‘give them a voice.’

• Robert Philipson

Long before modern sexual identities reached the East African coast, the Swahili shoga occupied a recognized place in women’s society, until colonialism and later Western frameworks remade them.

• William Shoki

This publishing break, we contemplate why we’re all feeling so burnt out.

• Hilmelda Tenkeu

A charter twenty African governments just endorsed defends seed sovereignty and economic independence in one breath, and moves to gut abortion and queer rights in the next. 

• Lucas Souza
• Matthew Kirwin

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel follows a Pittsburgh writer chasing a West African wonderkid. It’s also a story about who profits every time the world goes looking for the next Eusébio.

• Lee Nxumalo

From the Epstein files to a World Cup trailed by rape charges and a hush-money settlement, the public has gotten remarkably good at feeling outrage. What it hasn’t learned is what to do with it.

• Awonusi Ayomide Jesudamilare

Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
• Scott Timcke

From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it

• Gerard Akindes

Can a continent dominate global football while losing control of its own game?

• Olufemi Terry

Football’s three mixed Maghrebi and Black African stars are not emissaries of a new pan-Africanism. And the continent doesn’t need them to be.

• Giovanni Wanneh

Part performer, part cultural ambassador, and increasingly, a political flashpoint.

• Alex Hochuli

As club football becomes increasingly placeless and commercialized, international football begins to feel strangely real again.

• Nyasha Karimakwenda

Despite renewed efforts to criminalize and erase queerness, LGBTQ Africans continue to challenge the myth that their lives and identities are somehow un-African.

• Dawson McCall

The refusal of the US government to admit Somali referee Omar Artan is a reminder that the United States has a long history of using sports as a tool of exclusion, especially when it comes to African and African-descended athletes.