• Eglal Hamid

Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.

• David Goldblatt

Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.

• Abdullahi Mohamed Boru

The withdrawal from the port city of Berbera by regional powers distracted by war, marks the end of an external system that managed the Horn of Africa—and the beginning of a deeper structural collapse.

• 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.