This book was born in the streets
Kenya’s youth uprising was documented in real time through music, murals, memes, and essays. Publishing that history became an act of resistance in its own right.
Blog
Who killed the Shoga?
Long before modern sexual identities reached the East African coast, the Swahili shoga occupied a recognized place in women’s society, until colonialism and later Western frameworks remade them.
Somalia’s uncertain hand-off
As the UN and the US pull back from Somalia’s security architecture within months of each other, Mogadishu insists it is ready. The gap between that confidence and the country’s political reality tells a different story.
Reading List: Faraaz Mahomed
How do the struggles of one generation echo, decades later, in another’s?
Who started Nollywood?
Kenneth Nnebue made 27 Yoruba-language films before Living in Bondage. Why does Nigeria still only remember the one he made in Igbo?
On Safari
This publishing break, we contemplate why we’re all feeling so burnt out.
A border spectacle
When thousands of young Moroccans stormed Ceuta last week, it was not an invasion, but the latest in a five-year pattern of coercive migration diplomacy on a border with five centuries of colonial history behind it.
Between feminism and pan-Africanism
A charter twenty African governments just endorsed defends seed sovereignty and economic independence in one breath, and moves to gut abortion and queer rights in the next.
The prosecutions that never happen
Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency secures thousands of convictions every year, but when it comes to politically-connected elites, it’s a different story.
The price of potential
Joseph O’Neill’s new novel follows a Pittsburgh writer chasing a West African wonderkid. It’s also a story about who profits every time the world goes looking for the next Eusébio.
Sovereign rot
From Eko Atlantic to the Niger Delta, elite enclaves have become the defining spatial expression of Nigeria’s political order.
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.