Is your mobile phone company seeing like a state?
How phones change the terrain on which Kenyans can make claims for services, redistribution, and recognition.
Blog
If Africa is a country, then Fidel Castro is one of our national heroes
On 25 November 2016, Fidel Castro passed away. To many Africans Fidel was a hero, playing a central role in their liberation from colonialism.
The Nigerians are coming
Nigerian cinema is finally being embraced outside Nollywood for its diversity and capacity to adapt to dramatic technological and infrastructural shifts.
Don’t call me Toubab
"White person!," people passing by shout, smiling and waving at me. I am black. I am African. I am Rwandan."
Many Missing Bodies
The many extra-judicial executions that happen in the poor, and predominantly, eastern urban settlements of Kenya's capital, Nairobi.
Do informal workers’ lives matter?
What is the death of a pregnant informal fish seller in Dakar to the suffering of sweatshop workers in Bangladesh or refugees at the borders of Europe?
Crisis and the meaning of money in Zimbabwe
All sorts of countercultural, even radical signifiers have been ransacked of their meaning in Zimbabwe.
The myth of Trump’s white working-class support
The role of the left should not be to focus its efforts on bargaining with the often misrepresented and caricatured concerns of a small sector of the working classes.
Shutting Down Dadaab Endangers Refugees
Those, mostly Somalis, born in Dadaab, since its creation in 1991, could be sent to a country they have never known.
Modern Muslims in Sudan
In his memoir, the sociologist Steve Howard writes about experiencing Ramadan in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
Trump’s America
What does it say about a country that could elect such an unsavory character?
Feet & Cars
Growing up in 1980s Congo-Brazzaville there wasn’t a lot of technology going around. Computer games, cellphones and tablets were alien concepts and we spent our days in the streets playing, when we weren’t at school or doing homework. The streets of Pointe Noire were safe; we turned them into soccer fields, racing tracks, a place […]