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

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.

Inside Cameroon’s most overcrowded prison, a recording studio turned incarcerated men into artists. Its founders spent six years filming what it became.

The UAE shares no border with Sudan and faces no refugee crisis from its war. It has only an interest in the country’s gold, ports, and in making sure a popular revolution doesn’t spread.

What becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down?

A diaspora vote won Snit Tewoldemedhin the People’s Choice Award at Miss World. But the freedom to choose is exactly what Eritreans at home don’t have.

eLDee’s latest single reignited an old debate about women, money, and dating in Nigeria. But no one really chooses these gendered arrangements shaped by economic insecurity and unequal access to oppor...

YouTube video by African Five-a-Side podcast

A dispute inside a household in N’Djamena becomes a lesson in what money cannot substitute for: recognition, trust, and everyday human dignity.

Dangote’s refinery ended Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel and became Africa’s most important energy asset overnight when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz. But it also became the country’s most powe...

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

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.’

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 eve...

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

Washington’s own record of intervention in the Horn of Africa — not Mogadishu’s — is the strongest case against recognizing Somaliland now.

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.

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.

The Constitutional Court has delivered a significant blow to Shell and Impact Africa's Wild Coast exploration plans, setting aside their exploration right. The court found that thousands of affected c...

As the UN and the US pull back from Somalia’s security architecture within months of each other, Mogadishu insists it is ready. The gap between that confidence and the country’s political reality tell...

Thirty years ago, South Africa was heralded as a harbinger of a just and non-racial order. After decades of a criminal, repellent regime, Nelson Mandela’s ascension to the presidency and…

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

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

YouTube video by Africa Is a Country

--- an interview with Boima Tucker --- Boima Tucker has spent the last few years making a film about extraction, energy, colonialism an...

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

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 his...

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.

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency secures thousands of convictions every year, but when it comes to politically-connected elites, it’s a different story.

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.

From Eko Atlantic to the Niger Delta, elite enclaves have become the defining spatial expression of Nigeria’s political order.

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

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

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.

YouTube video by JanetJacksonVEVO

In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.

Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.

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?

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

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 colonia...