Afrobeats after Fela
Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance
Culture
Whose language is the nation’s?
Senegal’s bilingual education reforms challenge the dominance of French—but foreign aid dependence and internal linguistic politics complicate the path to decolonizing the classroom.
À qui appartient la langue de la nation?
Les réformes de l’éducation bilingue au Sénégal contestent la domination du français, mais la dépendance à l’aide étrangère et les rivalités linguistiques internes compliquent la décolonisation de l’école.
There is no vernacular
The architecture of southeastern Nigeria unsettles the neat binary between “indigenous” and “foreign.”
Progress is exhausting
Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”
The rubble of empire
Built by Italian Fascists in 1928, Mogadishu Cathedral was meant to symbolize “peaceful conquest.” Today its ruins force Somalis to confront the uneasy afterlife of colonial power and religious authority.
Remember AFCON?
Behind the refereeing drama and rising revenues, AFCON 2025 exposed a tournament increasingly shaped by global capital rather than the long-term health of African football.
Bread or Messi?
Angola’s golden jubilee culminated in a multimillion-dollar match against Argentina. The price tag—and the secrecy around it—divided a nation already grappling with inequality.
The roots of our storytelling
What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology?
Whose story gets to be heard?
A new film investigates the long-standing land disputes between Kenyans, the government, and multinational corporations, whose expansive plantations are the site of much of the Kikuyu people’s hardship.
Who owns Ghana’s mission schools?
A constitutional challenge over religious practice reveals the unresolved colonial and postcolonial politics of Ghana’s mission-founded secondary schools.
A world reimagined in Black
By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.
The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
Co-opting African literature
Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?
Who gets to tell the history of Mau Mau?
David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.
When charity poses for a Grammy
Burna Boy’s highly publicized Lagos prison visit looked like generosity, but it also looked like content. Who was it really for?
Empire’s middlemen
From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.
Who is AFCON for?
From air travel costs and border regimes to television culture and class exclusion, the problem of attendance at AFCON is structural, not because fans lack passion.
À qui s’adresse la CAN ?
Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.
Lions in the rain
The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.