Artificial intelligence has become one of the defining technologies of our time, shaping economies, societies and the intimacies of daily life. Yet, as global debates focus on Silicon Valley breakthroughs or Chinese innovation, Africa’s place in this unfolding story is often overlooked or treated as marginal. This erasure is not accidental. It reflects longer histories of technological dependency, the undervaluing of African labour, and the persistent framing of the continent as a consumer rather than a co-creator of knowledge. To speak of Africa and AI, then, is not simply to ask what AI might ‘do’ for the continent but to insist on a broader reckoning with the asymmetries of power, representation and material resources that shape the digital present.

We’ve chosen to title this issue using a line of code. In programming, while(empire): disrupt() is a loop, a condition (to disrupt) that keeps running as long as the variable ‘empire’ exists. For us at The Republic, it’s a metaphor. A way of thinking about how power replicates itself in new forms, and why disruption, resistance and reimagining must be ongoing practices, not just events.

There’s a quiet persistence to how empire adapts; how it learns to dress itself in the language of innovation, of neutrality, of code even. In the story of Africa’s digital future, we’re often told we’ve entered a new ‘frontier’, one driven by data, automation and intelligence. But beneath the headline terms, familiar patterns remain. The extractive logic hasn’t changed—only the interface has.

With writing from Angola to South Sudan, this issue is an attempt to reckon with that tension. To ask who gets to imagine the future of technology in Africa, who gets heard, and who gets hidden. From the silent, essential and increasingly disruptive roles African workers play in data annotation (cogently captured on the cover by Olalekan Jeyifous), to the ecological burdens of energy-intensive data centres, to the geopolitical struggles over digital infrastructure, our contributors ask us to rethink Africa’s relationship to AI as one of agency rather than absence. In exploring stories of innovation, resistance and critique, they underscore that Africa is not merely at the receiving end of technological change but is actively shaping its trajectories—through local ingenuity, policy interventions and cultural philosophies that demand justice and inclusivity. In doing so, this edition not only confronts the myths of neutrality and inevitability that often accompany AI but also foregrounds Africa as central to any serious conversation about the technological futures of our world.

And now, the stories.