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.
Latest
Somalia’s uncertain hand-off
As the UN and the US pull back from Somalia’s security architecture within months of each other, Mogadishu insists it is ready. The gap between that confidence and the country’s political reality tells a different story.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
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
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
The politics of demography
Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.
Technology
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
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
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.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.