Nigeria's petrol subsidy was also an electricity policy
When the grid fails, a fuel subsidy can double as an electricity policy. What happens to the people who rely on it when the state removes it before building anything to replace it?
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There are no apolitical girls in war
To understand the war in Sudan requires looking far beyond its borders, without losing sight of the people who believed that another Sudan was possible.
El Fasher, a year later
One year after the Rapid Support Forces took the city, the fight over how many died has become part of the crime.
Tanzania’s peace was never peaceful
A year after security forces opened fire on protesters across Tanzania, the violence looks less like a rupture than the return of a colonial past.
It’s not the refugees, it’s the austerity measures!
Rather than the cause of Africa’s economic crises, refugees are themselves victims of the political and economic decisions that produce displacement, deprivation, and insecurity.
Morocco’s long game
How Morocco stopped waiting for golden generations to emerge and began building the systems needed to compete at the highest level.
Eyes open in Addis
In Addis Ababa, the war in Tigray once arrived only in fragments. What happens when the dark we made for ourselves no longer holds?
How a child inherits care
Across generations of displacement, struggle, and war in Sudan, ordinary acts of care become a form of inheritance that no violence can erase.
Why does Tunisia become African only when Europe needs it to be?
Tunisia is a Mediterranean market when Brussels wants trade, and an African frontier when Brussels wants border control.
Deported to Liberia, again
Two centuries after the American Colonization Society shipped free black Americans to Liberia, Washington is sending its unwanted there once more.
What Nollywood owes the ancestors
Masquerade custodians in Lagos keep saying no to Nollywood. Nollywood keeps returning to masquerades anyway.
The radical openness of the popular economy
From traders’ credit circles to self-built water networks, Africa’s urban majority keeps finding ways to thicken city life. Can these popular economies still decouple the future from capital’s calculations, even as they open new frontiers for capture?
Is "khawa khawa" a North African myth?
Political rivalries increasingly overshadow the bonds between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, as social media amplifies the contradictions of Maghrebi identity.
Reading List: 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?
Death as liberation
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?
Forward, but for whom?
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?
We are not a novelty
Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.
Utopia is not a metaphor
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?
Brazil’s racket society
As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?
Old Nollywood 2.0
Some of Nigeria’s biggest filmmakers now look to YouTube for opportunity instead of cinemas and streamers. But is what looks like a new era really a return to an old one?