Had he been buried
Binyavanga Wainaina was cremated in a private ceremony in 2019. In his final year, the writer kept returning to a colonial chief’s grave beneath a sacred fig tree in Nairobi — as if contemplating what remains of a life.
Blog
Is football still capable of scandal?
From the Epstein files to a World Cup trailed by rape charges and a hush-money settlement, the public has gotten remarkably good at feeling outrage. What it hasn’t learned is what to do with it.
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.
Africa’s last philosopher king
Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.
No president will save Nigeria
Nigeria’s democracy has become dangerously fixated on capturing the presidency. Reviving regional politics may be the country’s best hope for rebuilding democratic accountability.
The politics of demography
Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.
Who will pay to belong to South Africa?
A landmark housing ruling in Cape Town and anti-migrant marches in Durban look like opposite stories. But they are two extremes of the same colonial question: who is permitted to occupy space?
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
Odyssey to Africa’s last colony
Backed by Moroccan state subsidies, Christopher Nolan’s decision to film The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara is the latest and highest-profile chapter in a five-decade campaign to normalize colonial rule.
From colonial storage to open access
For a century, African musical heritage was recorded, boxed, and shipped to museums abroad. In Nairobi, a new generation of archives is bringing cultural memory home — and putting it online.
Ethiopia’s debt problem
Successive debt regimes in Ethiopia have shown that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development, sometimes all at once.
Measured bodies and moving men
In apartheid South Africa, Drum magazine showed Black readers what it meant to be modern. But not everyone got to be modern in the same way.