Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.
The standard development economics framing of African agriculture is a productivity story: yields per hectare are below world averages, therefore the policy task is to raise yields. Hybrid …
*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 …
The Alliance of Sahel States (AES — Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), formed under the Liptako-Gourma framework in September 2023 and consolidated by the January 2024 withdrawal from ECOWAS, …
The Congo River drops 96 metres over a 14-kilometre stretch at Inga, west of Kinshasa. The hydropower potential at that stretch is, by World Bank reckoning, 44,000 MW …
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 …
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory's mid-frequency telescope (SKA-Mid) is under construction in the Karoo semi-desert of South Africa's Northern Cape, with the low-frequency component (SKA-Low) being built …
In November 2018, John Magufuli's government deployed the Tanzanian People's Defence Force to confiscate roughly 220,000 tonnes of unsold cashew nuts from buyers who had refused to purchase …
The Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885 is treated, in most African high-school curricula, as the moment Africa was 'partitioned' by European powers. The framing is …
The community health worker (CHW) is one of the most evidence-supported interventions in twenty-first-century public health. The Bangladesh BRAC model, scaled from the late 1970s onward, demonstrated that …
If you arrive at Kigali International Airport and your taxi drops you in the Nyarugenge district, you will notice: the streets are clean, the traffic is orderly, the …
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 …