The mirage of progress in women’s football
Select success stories obscure the intentional underdevelopment of women’s football in Africa.
Culture
Rooting for everybody black
The Olympics, with its provocative patriotism, are the perfect forum for using a broader diasporic focus to push back against hypernationalism.
Rolling with the punches
Removed from the facts, the firestorm around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest attempt by the right-wing in the West to find fodder for its culture war.
Pretty girl from Soweto
In South Africa, a popular beauty contest is revealing the specter of ultranationalism and anti-blackness.
Food wars
The theft dispute between Onezwa Mbola and Nara Smith reveals the consumerist undertones behind content for women in the online creative economy.
Not an obvious hero
In a new film, former UN-Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld is portrayed as a defender of a fledgling postcolonial state. But his role in the Congo Crisis is more complicated.
When a star dies
On the tragic death of 24-year-old marathon record holder Kelvin Kiptum.
The anti-extractivism of Mdou Moctar
'Funeral for Justice' is a bracing recording that blends the critical sensibility of Frantz Fanon with the melodies of a genre born from an ongoing liberation struggle.
Who are the Olympics for?
Beneath the image of togetherness, the world’s biggest athletic spectacle is still beset by discrimination and exclusion.
Who dreams of sunrise?
Siddhartha Deb’s latest book asks readers to consider incarceration as both a metaphor and fact of life in India today.
Speaking poetry to power
Amid the turmoil of the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon, a unique group of individuals has emerged as powerful agents of change.
The puzzle as propaganda
At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences.
Edson in Accra
It happened in 1969. But just how did he world’s greatest, richest and most sought-after footballer at the time, end up in Ghana?
More than Fela’s mum
Bolanle Austen-Peters' new biopic on Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti often feels too simple and safe.
We are producing, they are eating
Nigeria's archives of revolutionary printmaking offers us insights into the dissident voices of the country's old left, which are surprisingly relevant today.
Chasing shadows
A docuseries about the Springbok rugby team invites us to examine the enduring legacy of Rainbowism in South Africa.
How to avoid the sixth extinction
Since independence, Botswana has relied on its natural resources. But to secure its future, it needs to turn to its cultural heritage too.
The dreamer
As Africa’s first filmmakers made their unique steps in Africanizing cinema, few were as bold as Djibril Diop Mambéty who employed cinema to service his dreams.
Out of the fire
Senegalese art historian El Hadji Malick Ndiaye on curating one of the two longest-serving biennales on the African continent.
Born coloured, not born free
Jazz bassist Benjamin Jeptha’s latest project interrogates the meaning of Creole identity in South Africa, thirty years after the end of white-minority rule.