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.
Latest
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?
AI
The extinction pitch
Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.
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
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalized from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
Culture
This book was born in the streets
Kenya’s youth uprising was documented in real time through music, murals, memes, and essays. Publishing that history became an act of resistance in its own right.
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
Who profits from ‘saving’ women?
From the Women’s War of 1929 to the Anlu uprising three decades later, African women were organizing and resisting long before donors arrived to ‘give them a voice.’
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
