• Gathanga Ndung’u

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.

• Robert Philipson

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.

• Faraaz Mahomed

How do the struggles of one generation echo, decades later, in another’s?

• Jummai Bulama-Ashebu

Kenneth Nnebue made 27 Yoruba-language films before Living in Bondage. Why does Nigeria still only remember the one he made in Igbo?

• Lucas Souza
• Matthew Kirwin

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.

• Lee Nxumalo

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.

• Sarah Setlaelo

Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
• Scott Timcke

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

• Eoghan Gilmartin

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.

• Furaha Ruguru

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.

• Sabeeka Al-Kuwari

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.

• Mery Vieira

Cabo Verde’s historic run and the breakthrough performances of fellow African and Caribbean nations changed the conversation about visibility, opportunity, and the future of African football.

• Gerard Akindes

Can a continent dominate global football while losing control of its own game?

• Olufemi Terry

Football’s three mixed Maghrebi and Black African stars are not emissaries of a new pan-Africanism. And the continent doesn’t need them to be.

• Giovanni Wanneh

Part performer, part cultural ambassador, and increasingly, a political flashpoint.

• Alex Hochuli

As club football becomes increasingly placeless and commercialized, international football begins to feel strangely real again.

• Maher Mezahi

In Algeria, football stadiums have long been sites of protest, expression, and resistance. As public space shrinks and surveillance rises, their political future hangs in the balance.

• Duncan Nortier

Bafana Bafana’s World Cup exploits has South Africans chanting “No DNA, just RSA!” But against a rising tide of xenophobia, what South Africa are we actually rooting for?

• Fiifi Anaman

In 1957, three months after Ghanaian independence, the world’s most celebrated footballer came to Accra to teach. What Stanley Matthews left behind changed Ghanaian football forever.

• Aomar Boum
• Brahim El Guabli

When Ayyoub Bouaddi chose Morocco over France, he wasn’t just making a football decision, he was enacting a theory of citizenship that has been in the making since 1880.