Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.
The Sahelian transhumance corridor system — the seasonal cattle-movement routes linking Sahelian dry-season grazing in southern Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger with Sudanian-zone wet-season grazing further …
Look at a map of the Sahara as drawn by the Berlin Conference in 1885 and the same area as Tuareg and Toubou populations have inhabited it for …
Nairobi's three largest informal settlements — Kibera, Mathare, and Mukuru — together house roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million residents, depending on whose census you accept. The official population …
The East African Community's Common External Tariff (CET), revised in 2022 to introduce a fourth tariff band at 35% for finished goods, is the most consequential trade-policy instrument …
Morocco recognized Tamazight as an official language alongside Arabic in the 2011 constitutional referendum. Algeria followed in the 2016 constitutional revision. In both cases the recognition followed decades …
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 Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit (DART) opened Phase 1 in May 2016 along the Morogoro Road corridor, the second operational BRT in mainland sub-Saharan Africa after Lagos. …
Every SADC country except South Africa has run a fertilizer subsidy programme in the last fifteen years. Malawi's Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) is the longest-running and most …
The ANC's loss of its absolute parliamentary majority in May 2024 — falling to 40.18% of the national vote, from 57.5% in 2019 — is the most consequential …
ECOWAS leaders adopted, in 2000, a plan for a single West African currency — the *Eco* — to be introduced by 2003. The plan was delayed to 2005, …
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 …
Pfumvudza — Shona for 'a new season' — is the conservation-agriculture protocol the Zimbabwean Ministry of Agriculture promoted hard from 2020 onward as the answer to a decade …