It’s not the refugees, it’s the austerity measures!
Rather than the cause of Africa’s economic crises, refugees are themselves victims of the political and economic decisions that produce displacement, deprivation, and insecurity.
Blog
Morocco’s long game
How Morocco stopped waiting for golden generations to emerge and began building the systems needed to compete at the highest level.
Eyes open in Addis
In Addis Ababa, the war in Tigray once arrived only in fragments. What happens when the dark we made for ourselves no longer holds?
How a child inherits care
Across generations of displacement, struggle, and war in Sudan, ordinary acts of care become a form of inheritance that no violence can erase.
Why does Tunisia become African only when Europe needs it to be?
Tunisia is a Mediterranean market when Brussels wants trade, and an African frontier when Brussels wants border control.
Deported to Liberia, again
Two centuries after the American Colonization Society shipped free black Americans to Liberia, Washington is sending its unwanted there once more.
What Nollywood owes the ancestors
Masquerade custodians in Lagos keep saying no to Nollywood. Nollywood keeps returning to masquerades anyway.
The radical openness of the popular economy
From traders’ credit circles to self-built water networks, Africa’s urban majority keeps finding ways to thicken city life. Can these popular economies still decouple the future from capital’s calculations, even as they open new frontiers for capture?
Is "khawa khawa" a North African myth?
Political rivalries increasingly overshadow the bonds between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, as social media amplifies the contradictions of Maghrebi identity.
Reading List: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
What if migrant environments, so often cast as scenes of abjection, border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, are instead repositories of knowledge, craft, and refined domesticity?
Death as liberation
Ousmane Sembène’s and Souleymane Cissé’s debut features end with women who choose death. What is more uncomfortable to confront: their deaths, or the conditions that made life itself unbearable?
Forward, but for whom?
Africa’s football federations stood by Gianni Infantino through FIFA’s sell-off scandal. What would it take for them to spend that leverage on something that lasts?