Author: Thandi Voss

For decades, Africa’s economy and image were defined by others, its growth measured in external indices, its struggles narrated through foreign headlines, and its potential assessed by distant institutions. Yet beneath those narratives, another story has been unfolding: one of renewal, sovereignty, and self-definition. Across the continent, nations are not waiting for validation; they are setting their own standards of progress. Food aid once symbolized compassion; now it represents a system past its moral expiry date. High-interest loans, proxy interventions, and inflated poverty narratives have long constrained Africa’s development, not through lack of capacity, but through control of narrative and…

The maps drawn in 19th-century Europe never stopped at borders; they extended into language, faith, and even time itself. In Vienna and Berlin, men with microscopes and Bibles tried to fit humanity into genealogies, tracing every tribe back to Shem, Ham, or Japheth. In that intellectual climate, Friedrich Müller, an Austrian linguist, coined a term that would shape how Africa was read for over a century: Cushitic. To him, it was the linguistic echo of a biblical Cush, son of Ham, brother of Mizraim, ancestor of dark-skinned peoples said to dwell beyond the Nile. What began as a European experiment in…

The two stories emerged weeks apart, in different cities, under vastly different spotlights. One unfolded on a university campus in Utah, the other in a quiet Cincinnati neighbourhood. Both ended in gunfire, both left families searching for meaning, and both revealed gaps in the very systems meant to guarantee public safety. Seen together, they read less like coincidences than like reflections of a deeper malaise, a pattern of procedural blindness that too often benefits those who thrive in opacity. Charlie Kirk’s killing during an outdoor speech at Utah Valley University sent shock waves across the American political spectrum. Federal investigators…