The growth of generative AI has led to debates about its acceptability in art and whether artists are being conservative for rejecting its use.

Our latest issue, An African Manual for Debugging Empire , confronts the erasure of Africans in global tech debates and highlights the ways the continent is actively shaping, contesting and redefining the futures of AI.

From his mother’s community chemist shop in Enugu to a Toronto lab, Nigerian pharmacist Chukwunonso Nwabufo is building a device that could save lives by revealing how your genes respond to drugs, but his real revolution may be redefining what is ‘rare’ in medical research.

As Africa races to power its digital future with Chinese solar panels and AI-ready data centres, it risks becoming both the supplier of critical minerals and the dumping ground for toxic waste in a new form of green extractivism, wrapped in the language of digital and climate progress.

‘Jikwe, why did you not marry?’ Okenwa asks, his gaze holding Mgbeojikwe’s. ‘What were you thinking?’ … ‘I could have married you,’ he says, adjusting in his seat, ‘In a different world.

In a country failed by peace agreements, connection didn’t disappear—it went online. South Sudan’s digital diaspora challenges the glossy myths of Silicon Valley and insists that innovation thrives not only in wealth and infrastructure, but in resilience, memory, and connection across borders.

The parallels between colonialism and bias in modern technology offer an instructive analysis that reveals how contemporary digital infrastructures perpetuate colonial power even as they claim to connect the world and advance social justice issues.

In today’s digital age, history-making lightbulb moments don’t always strike in boardrooms or after soul-searching mountain hikes. Sometimes, they unfold casually on the X timeline.

With AI proponents promising to ‘save’ Africa, Nanjala Nyabola asks an urgent question: what happens when a continent’s future is outsourced to someone else’s imagination?