An island nation, everywhere
When Cabo Verde qualified for the World Cup, celebrations erupted from Praia to Rotterdam. The Blue Sharks’ rise shows how a scattered people built a global team rooted in home.
Blog
Hospitals versus stadiums
As Morocco prepares to host AFCON and the 2030 World Cup, a decentralized youth movement is demanding real investment in public services over sporting spectacle.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
We must learn to sit in the dark together
At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.
Entries, exits, permits
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.
Zoë Wicomb’s local universalisms
The passing of the pioneering South African writer and critic leaves behind a body of work that challenged racial mythologies, unsettled identity politics, and grounded transhistorical vision in the particulars of place.
Reading List: Brooks Marmon
The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.
Repoliticizing a generation
Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.
The king of Kinshasa
Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.
Drip is temporary
The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.
Making space for the ordinary
MADEYOULOOK’s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.
Cameroon’s last election
The outcome of the October 12 elections may make or break the resource-rich Central African nation.