Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.
Public-infrastructure signage is the most visible everyday material expression of national-language policy. The Maghrebine signage politics of Tifinagh (Amazigh) inclusion alongside Arabic and French — and the differential …
*Fonio* (*Digitaria exilis*) is a small-grained millet that has been cultivated in the West African Sahel for at least three thousand years. The Dogon plateau in Mali, the …
*Mehari* (Tigrinya: 'compassionate' or 'merciful'), the Mekelle-based Tigrinya-language literary quarterly, was the most important post-Derg Tigrinya literary venue from its 1994 founding through the 2020 war shutdown. Ras …
*Kalindula* — the Bemba-language guitar-and-banjo dance music that became Zambia's first distinctively post-independence popular genre — emerged from the late 1970s Lusaka recording scene and dominated Zambian airwaves …
Zimbabwean literature in English has, over the last fifteen years, become one of the most internationally visible African literary streams — Petina Gappah's *An Elegy for Easterly* (2009) …
The 2024 edition of *Le Robert* included roughly forty new Senegalese-French entries drawn from Wolof — *gor*, *mbeur*, *dem dik*, *teranga*, *thiof*, *yaye*, and others long current in …
The 2020–2022 Tigray war devastated the Tigrinya-language publishing infrastructure. The Mekelle University press, the Ras Publishing house, and the regional newspaper-archive network were either physically destroyed, looted, or …
In 2011 the Moroccan constitution made Tamazight — the umbrella name for Berber/Amazigh languages — an official language alongside Arabic. In 2016 the Algerian constitution did the same. …