• Wini Omer

Rather than the cause of Africa’s economic crises, refugees are themselves victims of the political and economic decisions that produce displacement, deprivation, and insecurity.

• Elyas Mabchour

How Morocco stopped waiting for golden generations to emerge and began building the systems needed to compete at the highest level.

• Samuel Giraut
• Semhar Haile
• Mwangi Mwaura
• David Njenga
• Elvira Pietrobon
• Pierre Wenzel
• AbdouMaliq Simone

From traders’ credit circles to self-built water networks, Africa’s urban majority keeps finding ways to thicken city life. Can these popular economies still decouple the future from capital’s calculations, even as they open new frontiers for capture?

• Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

What if migrant environments, so often cast as scenes of abjection, border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, are instead repositories of knowledge, craft, and refined domesticity?

• Eliel Peterson

Ousmane Sembène’s and Souleymane Cissé’s debut features end with women who choose death. What is more uncomfortable to confront: their deaths, or the conditions that made life itself unbearable?

• Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Africa’s football federations stood by Gianni Infantino through FIFA’s sell-off scandal. What would it take for them to spend that leverage on something that lasts?

• Marta Mboka Tveit

Thomas More’s Utopia was not written as a metaphor for paradise, but for those trying to organize. What would an African equivalent look like?

• Joshua W.J. Brown

What happens after abolition, when control over human movement still has a price?

• Kévin Drif

Julia Ducournau’s third film places a North African family at the center of a national trauma, but French critics largely missed what that choice makes visible.

• Richard Seymour

Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.

• Ngozi Nwosu-Juba

From the Women’s War of 1929 to the Anlu uprising three decades later, African women were organizing and resisting long before donors arrived to ‘give them a voice.’

• Sushovan Dhar

A joke born from a Chief Justice’s insult grew to 22 million followers and forced out a cabinet minister in eight weeks. What does this reveal about India and about the limits of leaderless revolt everywhere?

• Ahlam Chemlali
• Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde

European officials are calling the EU-Mauritania migration deal a success. Here’s what the numbers don’t count.

• 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.

• William Shoki

This publishing break, we contemplate why we’re all feeling so burnt out.

• Hilmelda Tenkeu

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. 

• 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.

• Awonusi Ayomide Jesudamilare

Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.

• 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