Sunday service on two wheels
In Johannesburg, a new generation of Black cyclists is redefining joy, movement, and solidarity—taking over the streets to ride, to reclaim space, and to reimagine freedom.
6423 Article(s) by:
Paul Milchick
Paul Milchik is a pseudonym for the author of this piece. His name has been changed due to his status as an international student in the US during the second Trump administration, in a context where foreign students have been targeted for detention and deportation as a result of expressing pro-Palestinian views.
Kenya’s femicide problem
A lack of reliable statistics and coherent strategy to address femicide in Kenya, has left a culture of everyday insecurity for women in the country.
How to unmake the world
In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.
A migrant’s tale
On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.
The global gateway to nowhere
Europe’s flagship development plan promises investment and partnership—but delivers debt, displacement, and old colonial patterns dressed up in green.
What Portugal forgets
In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.
Quando Portugal esquece
Em ‘Contos do Esquecimento,’ Dulce Fernandes desenterrou histórias esquecidas da escravidão em Portugal, desafiando uma mitologia nacional construída sobre viagens marítimas, silêncio e memória seletiva.
Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation
Web3 utopians promised a sovereign future for the African diaspora—but what they delivered was a networking club for elites, wrapped in crypto-libertarian hype and Afro-futurist aesthetics.
After the digging, who remembers?
In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.
Velvet rebellions
The oppositional sartorial lens of Congolese sapeurs exposes the limits and frailties of representation work in New York’s Met Gala.
South Africa’s American refugees
Cape Town’s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops—but behind the matcha lattes and “social impact days” lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality.
The other route to the American dream
With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US—via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility.
The politics of class from above
In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them—but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power.
Green hydrogen, old colonialism
The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.
Trump tariffs and US Imperialism
Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.
Cinema against silence
A new Malian film takes on the tradition of forced marriage with humor, intimacy, and defiance—reimagining African cinema as both tribute and rupture.
The end of US empire is not the end of the world
As American hegemony unravels, the Global South must resist both nostalgia and passivity. Multipolarity won’t arrive on its own—it must be built through struggle.
Re-writing the rules of Tunisian rap
Blending Tunisian rap with Egyptian mahraganat, Lully Snake defies sexist norms, blurs borders, and opens a new space for feminist rebellion in North African popular culture.
Sanctions as civilizational warfare
Framed as hard diplomacy, economic sanctions are a subtler form of warfare—one that erodes sovereignty, punishes civilians, and extends colonial power under a new name.
Paul Biya, the last Kaiser
A meditation on the oldest ruler in the world.