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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A rolled leaf, a stolen future
I keep thinking about how a society can collapse quietly. Not with bombs. Not with tanks. With a small rolled leaf passed from hand to hand, smoked in full daylight, and strong enough to...
Why M23’s Warning Should Terrify the Global Economy
“Uvira est tombée. Nous mettons le cap sur le Katanga.”
That was the message attributed to M23 after they captured Uvira, a strategic town hugging Lake Tanganyika. To many Congolese, it sounded like...
What Nyerere Would Have Said Today
I have walked the streets of Dar es Salaam enough times to understand why Tanzanians still whisper Mwalimu’s name with a reverence that borders on spiritual. Julius Kambarage Nyerere was not a man of...
Cotonou at Dawn: A Memory, A Question, A Warning
My only encounter with Benin was brief, almost whispered. I was in transit through the Cotonou Cadjehoun International Airport on my way to Lagos. I was heading there to write two...
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