The footballing gods
Why are the religious practices of African footballers treated as strange when athletes around the world turn to faith and superstition to navigate the game’s uncertainty?
Blog
What Bafana Bafana teaches South Africa about itself
For decades, Bafana Bafana embodied the disappointments of the democratic era. As the team recovers, South Africans are once again projecting their political aspirations and fears onto the national side.
A World Cup without the world?
The exclusion of Somali referee Omar Artan hardens the contradiction at the heart of the 2026 World Cup: a global tournament increasingly shaped by the politics of exclusion.
Not all empires look the same
Although the UAE doesn’t occupy territory, it arms militias, controls ports, and launders violence through the language of development. Sudan is paying the price.
The left does not need priests of purity
If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.
Nothing left
A much-anticipated “Conference of the Left” was supposed to unite South Africa’s progressive forces. Instead, it confirmed the harder truth: the left doesn’t need unity, it needs rebuilding.
What is the World Cup for?
The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
The right to belong imperfectly
In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.
Frames of reference
At the 61st Venice Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial vision shaped a landmark exhibition, even as questions of representation, solidarity, and cultural authority continued to haunt the African pavilions.
Who's afraid of Michael Jackson?
The new Michael Jackson biopic turns a politically conscious Black artist into a raceless fantasy figure, erasing the civil rights struggles, global solidarities, and histories that shaped him.
Walking through the ruins of French Cameroon
A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon.