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.
Blog
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.
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?