Music Break. Sayat Demissie
Ethiopian pop from this past summer. Sayat Demissie is a former beauty queen. Her decision to embark on an acting and singing career divides the Ethiopian blogosphere.
Further Reading
Fictions of freedom
K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.
When things fall apart
Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.
The General sleeps
As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.
Enemies of progress
Delayed, underfunded, and undermined, this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations has exposed not just neglect but active sabotage from CAF and national federations.
Gen Z and the spirit of Mau Mau
Kenya’s largest-ever protests have drawn striking comparisons to the Mau Mau uprising. But for today’s movement to endure, it must move beyond the streets and invest in political education.
The climate finance crisis
As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it.
All pull together
The 2025 Kenyan protests once again declared themselves “tribeless, leaderless, partyless.” But what does the idiom of unity hide?
Eurafrique reloaded
Emmanuel Macron’s recognition of Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara is a calculated pivot in a decades-old plan to reassert French influence across the Sahel.
The grift tank
In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.
Helen Zille’s transphobia
In echoing the anti-trans panic sweeping the Global North, South African political heavyweight Helen Zille joins a reactionary tradition of racialized sex policing.
The specter of Bandung
Once a symbol of anti-imperial unity, BRICS now risks becoming the very thing Bandung opposed: a club of powerful states reproducing global inequality in a new key.
Matchday 2: The Battle of Omdurman
A new season of the African Five-a-side podcast asks, “what is the greatest match in the history of men’s African football?”
Kagame’s hidden war
Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.
Against climate resilience
Development agendas framed around “resilience” promise empowerment but often reproduce colonial power dynamics in the guise of climate adaptation.
After the coups
Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.
The quiet violence of peace deals
Trump’s Congo-Rwanda deal is hailed as diplomatic triumph. But behind the photo ops lies a familiar exchange: African resources for Western power.
In death, we part
What happens when a former president suddenly dies? The curious case of Edgar Lungu.
Whose game is remembered?
The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.
The sound of black identity
A landmark documentary uncovers the radical soul scene that electrified 1970s Rio, inspired Black consciousness, and terrified Brazil’s military dictatorship.
No ritmo da identidade black
Um documentário marcante revela a cena soul radical que eletrificou o Rio dos anos 1970, inspirou a consciência negra e aterrorizou a ditadura militar brasileira.