Nigeria’s biggest filmmakers are ditching cinemas and streamers for YouTube. But what looks like a new era is really a return to an old one.

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?

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 opportunity.

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 powerful monopoly.

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 everywhere?

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.

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 tells a different story.

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?

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 history behind it.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina was cremated in a private ceremony in 2019. In his final year, the writer kept returning to a colonial chief’s grave beneath a sacred fig tree in Nairobi — as if contemplating what remains of a life.

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.

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.

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 colonial rule.

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.

Successive debt regimes in Ethiopia have shown that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development, sometimes all at once.

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.

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.

The Kenyan government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience resembles the way colonial regimes used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”

Kevin Cox’s NLR essay on South Africa claims to correct liberal and culturalist accounts through historical materialism. But it reproduces the very epistemic and analytical failures it sets out to overcome.

The Conference of the Left was not a solution to the crisis of the South African left, but an opening. What follows must be built differently from what came before.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Despite renewed efforts to criminalize and erase queerness, LGBTQ Africans continue to challenge the myth that their lives and identities are somehow un-African.