Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.
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 standard European narrative of the Indian Ocean places Vasco da Gama's 1498 arrival at Calicut as the moment the ocean became a connected commercial space. The Indian …
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 …
Mediterranean classical scholarship has, for two centuries, treated the eastern Roman frontier as ending at the Sinai and resuming at India. Between those points, the maps tend to …
One of the most consequential mistranslations in colonial administration was the equation of *communal* land tenure with *terra nullius* — land belonging to no one, available for the …
Mansa Musa I of Mali's 1324-1325 pilgrimage to Mecca has, in recent years, become a viral subject under the framing 'the richest person in history.' The viral version …
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, …