More commerce than chaos
In Johannesburg’s Jeppe precinct, what looks like disorder is in fact a dense, transnational system of trade, labor, and survival at the heart of the global economy.
6394 Article(s) by:
Nathan Chiume
Nathan Chiume is an Africa analyst and consultant.
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.
The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya’s informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
Whose progress?
A new documentary reveals how Ethiopia’s manufacturing push redistributes land, labor, and opportunity—delivering gains for some while displacing others.
Art has never been innocent
Paulo Nazareth’s latest show in Berlin follows the cunning architecture of power, from Germany to Brazil and across continents and epochs.
Between fandom and dissent
Eritrea’s recent progress in AFCON qualifying offered a rare feel-good moment, but new player defections underline how fragile that progress remains amid the country’s political realities.
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.
The making of Arundhati Roy
In revisiting her relationship with her mother, Roy shows how intimacy, violence, and love forged the sensibility behind her uncompromising political life.
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
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.
In Guadalajara, we found joy
In Guadalajara, fans from three continents celebrated football together in what was a taste of a World Cup that most won’t be able to afford or attend.
À Guadalajara, nous avons trouvé la joie
A Guadalajara, des fans venus des trois continents ont célébrer le football ensemble dans un avant-goût de ce que sera, pour eux, la Coupe du monde : une fête à laquelle ils ne pourront pas assister
Being right at the wrong time
Prominent cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s calls for negotiation reflect practices already in use, but in Nigeria’s polarized digital space, nuance is punished.
Could expanding protected land undermine biodiversity?
Paradoxically, conservation efforts in Liberia and Senegal are threatening native ecology.
Where mining and conservation meet
Far from signaling a break from the past, the convergence of mining and conservation in West Africa underscores a recurring pattern that stretches back to colonialism.
Waiting to believe
After years of heartbreak, Congolese fans are guarding their expectations ahead of a decisive play-off for a place at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Trumpism in Nigeria
Why does the anti-Black racism of the US president have defenders in Africa’s largest Black nation?
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.
Cooking up the city
A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what—and how—Kenya eats.
Who owns the memory of struggle?
An exhibition in Ibadan recovers Nigeria’s buried history of activism, raising urgent questions about access, erasure, and whether archives can inspire new political action.