• Simon Adetona Akindes

Behind the refereeing drama and rising revenues, AFCON 2025 exposed a tournament increasingly shaped by global capital rather than the long-term health of African football.

• Ayodele Ibiyemi

Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction—leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.

• Ainehi Edoro

What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology?

• Ayisha Osori

By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.

• Lee Nxumalo

iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.

• Ibrahim Williams

Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?

• Rachel Etter-Phoya

From colonial accounting tricks to modern tax havens, Nkrumah understood how capital escapes, and why political independence was never enough.

• Gerard Akindes

From air travel costs and border regimes to television culture and class exclusion, the problem of attendance at AFCON is structural, not because fans lack passion.

• Gerard Akindes

Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.

• Maher Mezahi

From national redemption and continental dominance to personal legacy and political ambition, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final means everything to Africans.

• Maher Mezahi

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

• Maher Mezahi

What it sounds like on the ground in Morocco at the 2025 edition of Africa Cup of Nations.

• William Shoki

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.

• Kristin Surak

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.

• Riley Singh

The economic emancipation of the American working class cannot come at the expense of the global working class.

• Mbaye Bashir Lo

The post-colonial settlement has left Africa vulnerable to conflict, external pressure, and intellectual dependency. What comes next?

• Faisal Ali

Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.

• Ngaire Blankenberg

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.

• Jwan Zreiq

From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.

• Ntsika Dapo

From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.