AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

MAY 23. 2025

The global gateway to nowhere

Europe’s flagship development plan promises investment and partnership—but delivers debt, displacement, and old colonial patterns dressed up in green.

MAY 22. 2025

What Portugal forgets

In 'Tales of Oblivion, ' Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

MAY 21. 2025

Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation

Web3 utopians promised a sovereign future for the African diaspora—but what they delivered was a networking club for elites, wrapped in crypto-libertarian hype and Afro-futurist aesthetics.

MAY 20. 2025

After the digging, who remembers?

In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy.

MAY 19. 2025

Velvet rebellions

The oppositional sartorial lens of Congolese sapeurs exposes the limits and frailties of representation work in New York's Met Gala.

MAY 16. 2025

South Africa’s American refugees

Cape Town’s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops—but behind the matcha lattes and “social impact days” lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality.

MAY 15. 2025

The other route to the American dream

With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US—via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility.

MAY 14. 2025

The politics of class from above

In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them—but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power.

MAY 13. 2025

Green hydrogen, old colonialism

The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.

MAY 12. 2025

Trump tariffs and US Imperialism

Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.

MAY 9. 2025

Cinema against silence

A new Malian film takes on the tradition of forced marriage with humor, intimacy, and defiance—reimagining African cinema as both tribute and rupture.

MAY 8. 2025

The end of US empire is not the end of the world

As American hegemony unravels, the Global South must resist both nostalgia and passivity. Multipolarity won’t arrive on its own—it must be built through struggle.

MAY 7. 2025

Re-writing the rules of Tunisian rap

Blending Tunisian rap with Egyptian mahraganat, Lully Snake defies sexist norms, blurs borders, and opens a new space for feminist rebellion in North African popular culture.

MAY 6. 2025

Sanctions as civilizational warfare

Framed as hard diplomacy, economic sanctions are a subtler form of warfare—one that erodes sovereignty, punishes civilians, and extends colonial power under a new name.