Learning Africa

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In 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stood in Oslo and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He'd ended a twenty-year war with Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, and made his country believe things could be different. Fourteen months later, he launched a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of his own people.

This episode tells that story: the reforms, the Nobel Prize, the election that barely ...

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African Americans and Africans share the most important origin story in the modern world. They also have a relationship that is complicated, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, and almost never spoken about honestly.

This Juneteenth, Learning Africa goes there. From Marcus Garvey's ships to Ghana's Year of Return. From the Door of No Return on Gorée Island to the word obroni (foreigner) that some African Americans hear w...

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 When xenophobic violence escalated across South Africa this May, African governments did something that should not have been necessary: they sent planes. Ghana chartered a flight. Mozambique deployed buses. Nigeria negotiated waivers so its citizens could leave without being detained. Malawi bused 150 people home from camps in the Western Cape. This episode follows the crisis six weeks on — the violence ...

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Cameroon 1990. Senegal 2002. Ghana 2010. Morocco 2022. Four times Africa was close enough to believe. Four times it wasn't enough. Now ten teams head to North America. This is the story of what has held African football back — and what it would actually mean if that finally changed. 

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In 1884, fourteen European powers met in Berlin and divided Africa among themselves. Not a single African voice was in the room. Today, China controls the mines, Russia is selling security to coup leaders, Turkey is taking over French military bases, and the Gulf states are funding opposite sides of the same war. The new scramble is here. On this episode of Learning Africa, we ask the question the original scramble ...

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Sixty years ago, the world said Africa wasn't ready to govern itself. Africans decided not to wait for permission. In this Africa Day special, we mark what has actually been built since: the years of life gained, the democracies defended, the technology that leapfrogged a century of infrastructure in a decade. Honest about what's unfinished, yet, proud of what's real!

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At a summit in Nairobi last week, Emmanuel Macron called himself a Pan-Africanist. The outrage was immediate — and fair. But the more interesting question is the one underneath it: what is Pan-Africanism actually, what does it demand, and how much of it have we built? This episode goes into the argument at the heart of the idea — Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor, three men who all believed in it and disagreed a...

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Africa has not held the UN Secretary-General position in twenty years. Macky Sall wants to change that. But his path to the world's top diplomatic job runs through a fractured African Union that never officially backed him, a home country that publicly distanced itself, and a domestic record that hands his critics easy ammunition. Learning Africa goes inside the 2026 UN Secretary-General race: the politics, the pers...

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 What do you do when the government you elected stops being worth defending? That's the question millions of people across West Africa have been living with for the past five years, and in country after country, their answer has been to let the soldiers in. This episode traces nine coups across six countries: the failures that made them feel like relief, the foreign powers that moved into the vacuum, and the ha...

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Enjoyed this one? Got a take? A correction? A story I should know about? Come find me on Instagram @dieng_amadu or @afrovoices and tell me what you think. What landed, what missed, what you want more of. 

This show is built around the idea that Africa is not a simple story, and neither are the people listening to it. Your perspective is part of that. Slide into the DMs, leave a comment, or just t...