Pope Leo and the strongmen
The Pope’s African tour tested whether the papacy can speak to ordinary people without becoming a prop for authoritarian power.
Continental
Fields of dependency
As the US-Israel war on Iran disrupts fertilizer supply, Africa’s reliance on imported inputs exposes the deeper political economy driving food insecurity.
The demographic dividend no one wants to pay
Although increasingly celebrated as an asset, Africa’s youth remain locked out of power and decent work.
Who gets to be a civilian?
Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.
You can’t kick politics out of football
Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.
After the subcontracting state
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.
Remember AFCON?
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.
Atayese
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.
The roots of our storytelling
What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology?
A world reimagined in Black
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.
The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
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.
Co-opting African literature
Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?
What Kwame Nkrumah knew about profit shifting
From colonial accounting tricks to modern tax havens, Nkrumah understood how capital escapes, and why political independence was never enough.
Who is AFCON for?
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.
À qui s’adresse la CAN ?
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.
What’s in an AFCON final?
From national redemption and continental dominance to personal legacy and political ambition, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final means everything to Africans.
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
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.