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...
A Rolled Joint, a Stopped Breath: West Africa’s Kush Crisis
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 turn a living young person into a moving funeral. That is what “kush” is doing across West Africa. Sierra Leone has...
Uvira Has Fallen. Is Katanga Next?
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 just another threat in a war that has never really ended. To the global economy, however, it should have landed...
Nyerere Would Have Called for the Presidential Election to be Nullified
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 perfect policies but he was a man of perfect intention. He believed that the sovereignty of a people was not...
How a Failed Coup Exposed France’s Grip on Benin
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 memoirs for the father of my former UNEP boss, Akpezi Ogbuigwe, as well as for her mother-in-law. I remember leaning against...
