Learning Africa

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When FIFA asked its 211 members to approve a $20 billion plan to sell a stake in the World Cup, UEFA voted 55-0 to boycott. CONCACAF revolted. Asia's confederation joined them. A senior FIFA adviser resigned in protest. CAF, the confederation representing 54 African nations, the second-largest bloc of votes in the sport, confirmed it had received the letter, and said it would "assess and evaluate." Nothing more. Four days later, the plan was dead, withdrawn by Infantino himself, before CAF's own committee ever had to say where it stood.

This episode sits inside that silence. Not to condemn it, not to excuse it, but to understand it. CAF was weighing an offer it may have genuinely needed, from a confederation in real financial distress, while carrying its own credibility crisis: a disputed AFCON final, a general secretary's sudden resignation, a case still unresolved at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Is CAF's silence financial pragmatism? Discipline that let others spend the political capital? Or an institution with no independent voice, waiting to see what everyone else does first?

CAF got the outcome it may have wanted without ever going on record. That's not a small thing to get away with. It's also not obviously a victory.

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

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Before 2007, sending money across Kenya meant a bus ride and a stranger you had to trust. Then a loan-repayment pilot got hijacked by its own users, and became M-Pesa, the mobile money system that now moves more value in a year than Kenya's entire economy produces. It's a rare African-built success story that the rest of the world has spent two decades failing to copy. But scale creates its own risks: debt, dependency, and a majority stake that just went to a foreign shareholder. Learning Africa digs into both halves of the story. 

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

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 Cape Verde just won the internet's heart at the World Cup, a nation of 530,000 that took defending champions Argentina to extra time. But the real story is what's underneath: a culture built on leaving, an economy that turned emigration into infrastructure, and one of Africa's most stable democracies. Episode 1 of Anatomy of a Continent. 

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

Send us Fan Mail

 Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a cell barely eight feet long. He refused an early release that would have required him to say something he didn't mean. He walked out of prison in 1990 and immediately set about building a country for the people who had imprisoned him. This episode asks the question his life kept answering, and what it actually looks like to honor him beyond sixty-seven minutes. 

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

Send us Fan Mail

 European football runs on African talent, but African clubs receive just 1.1% of global transfer income despite developing much of it. This episode traces the colonial pipeline that built modern recruiting, how FIFA's eligibility rules were rewritten to make it easier, and the paradox at the center: Africa loses when its talent leaves for good and still doesn't fully win when it gets that talent back. 

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

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On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 countries said yes. The United States, Israel, and Argentina said no. 52 others — including the entire European Union, the UK, Canada, and Australia — abstained.

This episode is about what that vote means, who made it happen, and what the countries that built their wealth on enslaved labor had to say for themselves when they could no longer stay silent.

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

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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 happened, and the Tigray war that the world mostly didn't watch. It asks a harder question too: what does it mean when the most recognizable peace award on earth goes to someone who, not long after, oversaw one of the deadliest conflicts of the twenty-first century?

Topics covered: Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize, the TPLF, the Tigray war, the 2021 Ethiopian election, Eritrea, and the question of whose suffering gets covered and whose doesn't.

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

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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 when they arrive looking for home. The reunion is real, so is the estrangement. This episode holds both.

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

Send us Fan Mail

 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 that continued after the shutdown, the two presidential addresses that tried and partly failed to meet the moment, and what it means when the country that Ubuntu built starts telling Africans they don't belong. 

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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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

Send us Fan Mail

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. 

Support the show

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 tag me when you share it. I read everything.

See you in the next one.