FEATURED
WHAT'S NEW
How Africa can stop being a pawn and become the grandmaster
ACCESSORIES
A Priceless Lesson from Congo’s Failed Coup
African Food Sovereignty – A Matter of Life, Death, and Revival
WINDOWS PHONE
A Rolled Joint, a Stopped Breath: West Africa’s Kush Crisis
LATEST ARTICLES
How a Pan-African Army Defeated Italy in Ethiopia
There is a lazy story we have been trained to repeat. That Italy lost Ethiopia because “the Allies” arrived, waved a flag, and the occupation collapsed like a cheap tent in a storm. But when you pull the curtain back, you see something far more powerful and far more African. You see an army that was pan-African in its bloodstream. East Africans....
AFCON Chaos. VAR Drama. How Sadio Mané Led Senegal to a Historic Victory
Sadio Mané has a habit of stepping into the fire when everyone else is running away from it. On Sunday 18th January 2026, Senegal’s Africa Cup of Nations final against Morocco teetered on the edge of collapse. A Senegal goal was disallowed. A late VAR review produced a penalty for Morocco. Senegal’s players walked off in protest. The match stalled...
Why Africa Must Accept The Possibility of a Third World War and Prepare Accordingly
In Europe, the people paid to imagine the worst are speaking out loud. NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte, has warned about the risk of wider conflict and the need for readiness. In November 2025, General Fabien Mandon, the Head of France's Armed Forces, delivered a blunt message about preparedness, sacrifice, and the possibility of confrontation within the next few...
Is Kenya the Capital of Africa? A Question I First Heard in Cairo
The first time I stood in Cairo, in 2005, I was in my twenties and working with the United Nations Environment Programme as the Africa Environment Outlook for Youth Regional Coordinator. I had come to meet national coordinators for a project that would eventually produce UNEP’s first youth authored publication. But the work, important as it was, kept getting...
The Lethal Handshake: How “Non Interference” Legitimizes Autocracy and Boomerangs Back
On Saturday, January 10, 2026, at State House in Dar es Salaam, President Samia Suluhu Hassan met China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Smiles, handshakes, cameras, communiqués. The whole theatre of respectability. But for many Tanzanians and many Africans watching this moment through the lens of recent repression, it did not look like diplomacy. It looked like a verdict. It looked like...
What iShowSpeed’s Nairobi Livestream Reveals About Pan African Power and the Algorithm
When iShowSpeed went live in Nairobi, Kenya set a digital record that felt bigger than entertainment. Within about five hours, Speed gained 360,000 subscribers and hit 48 million subscribers. Before leaving, he said Kenya was number one. In less than 24 hours, the Kenya YouTube livestream sat at about nine million views. That is more than a viral moment. It...
The Maji Maji Rebellion’s Powerful Lessons for Today’s Tanzania
Imagine a crowd moving through the bush of southern Tanganyika in 1905, carrying spears, bows, a few old rifles, and a new kind of certainty. Not the calm certainty of strategy, but the electric certainty of a story that makes fear smaller. A spirit medium has said the Germans can be defeated. A “medicine” has been shared. Bullets, they...
Congo’s Deadliest, Most Consistent Import: Mercenaries
There is a pattern in Congo’s modern wars that keeps repeating like a bad chorus. When the national army looks tired, when commanders panic, when allies bargain, Kinshasa reaches for a familiar shortcut: white mercenaries. They arrive with new accents, new passports, and the same old promise. “We can fix this.” Then Congo pays the bill twice. First in dollars....
The Pinga Pact: How Congo’s State Birthed Wazalendo Militia
In eastern Congo, war does not only happen at the front. It also happens in meeting rooms, in decrees, in recruitment drives, and on the roads where armed men decide who passes and who pays. “Wazalendo” is often described as a grassroots patriotic response to the return of M23. That description is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The Wazalendo...
Five Reasons Why Congo’s Army Lost Uvira to M23
I cannot stop seeing Uvira the way I see a tense football match when the crowd slowly realizes their team is in trouble. At first, it is disbelief. Then a kind of bargaining. Then anger. Then silence. You look at the pitch and you ask yourself a question that is both simple and brutal: how did we lose this...
