Threads

Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.

All eras Ancient (before 500 CE) Medieval (500–1500 CE) Pre-colonial (1500–1884) Colonial era (1884–1960s) Independence era (1960s–2000) Contemporary (2000–present) Future systems & solutions

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

GERD and the Nile riparians — what the negotiations actually settled, and what they did not

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam's fifth and final filling completed in September 2024. The dam now holds approximately 74 billion cubic metres at full reservoir, generating up to …

2 min read · Nile Basin, East Africa · 21 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Cape Town day-zero — the inequity of how the response was distributed

Cape Town's 2017–2018 drought brought the city within an estimated 90 days of 'day zero' — the point at which municipal water supply would have been shut off …

1 min read · Southern Africa, South Africa · 20 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Climate-smart agriculture in SADC — the implementation gap behind the rhetoric

The Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) framework — formally adopted by the FAO in 2010 and now embedded in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Malabo Declaration …

2 min read · Southern Africa, SADC · 19 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Fulani transhumance corridors — the slow criminalisation of mobility from Senegal to Sudan

Across roughly 5,000 kilometres of Sahelian rangeland — from the Ferlo in northern Senegal to the Butana east of Khartoum — Fulani pastoralist households move cattle and small …

5 min read · Sahel, West Africa · 21 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

The Nile Basin water dispute — sovereignty, dams, and a 1959 treaty nobody else signed

The current Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan is the latest episode in a sixty-year argument about Nile water rights. The argument's legal core …

1 min read · Nile Basin, East Africa · 27 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Bambara groundnut, fonio, teff — the orphan crops that aren't orphans

Agricultural research funding has, for the last sixty years, concentrated on three cereals: maize, rice, wheat. Together they receive roughly 75% of global crop-research funding and account for …

2 min read · Pan-African · 20 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Pfumvudza scaling — Zimbabwe's conservation agriculture programme at five years

The *Pfumvudza* (Shona: 'new season' or 'rebirth') conservation agriculture programme was launched by Zimbabwe's Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement in 2020 and has now run through …

2 min read · Southern Africa, Zimbabwe · 20 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

South African land reform at thirty — restitution, redistribution, and what actually happened

The 1994 transition committed the new South African state to three land-reform tracks: *restitution* (returning land dispossessed under the 1913 Natives Land Act and successor legislation), *redistribution* (transferring …

1 min read · Southern Africa, South Africa · 20 views

Environment & Land Contemporary (2000–present)

Smallholder seed sovereignty — the OAPI/ARIPO regimes and what farmers can save

Two regional intellectual-property organisations cover most of the African continent. The Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OAPI) covers 17 mostly francophone states. The African Regional Intellectual Property …

2 min read · Pan-African · 20 views