Curious and expansive Learning Africa is a podcast for anyone who wants to understand the continent beyond the headlines. Each episode explores the stories, people, and forces shaping Africa today, from political upheaval and economic transformation to culture, history, and the ideas driving the next generation. Hosted by Amadou Dieng, it's a space to ask honest questions, sit with complexity, and come away knowing Africa a little better than before.
CAF Said Nothing, And FIFA's $20B World Cup Plan Died Anyway
Send us Fan Mail 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 Four days later, the plan was dead, withdrawn by Infantino himse...
29 Jul 2026
M-PESA: The App That Became a Country's - Kenya- Bank
Send us Fan Mail 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 sharehol...
22 Jul 2026
Cabo Verde: The Country the World Fell in Love With
Send us Fan Mail 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. Support the show Enjoyed this one? Got a take? A correction? A story I should know about? Come find me on Instagram @dieng_amadu...
15 Jul 2026
MADIBA: The man behind the icon, on Mandela Day
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. Support the show Enjoyed this one? Got a take? A correction? A story ...
8 Jul 2026
African Players in European Jerseys: a World Cup Tale
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. Support the show Enjoyed this one? Got a take? A correction? A ...
1 Jul 2026
What Did UN Say About Slavery?!?
Send us Fan Mail 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 lo...
24 Jun 2026
Ethiopia's Civil War and the Nobel Prize Winner Who Started a War
Send us Fan Mail 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 wa...
17 Jun 2026
Juneteenth: The News That Arrived Late
Send us Fan Mail 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...
10 Jun 2026
South Africa: Xenophobia and Anti-migration Crisis
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 t...
3 Jun 2026
Can Africa Win the World Cup?
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 ...
27 May 2026
The Recolonization of Africa, and the role of Africans?
Send us Fan Mail 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 never had to answer: can Africans win this time? Suppor...
25 May 2026
Happy Africa Day!!!
Send us Fan Mail 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! Support the show Enjoyed this one? Got a take? A correction? A story I should know about? Come find me on Ins...
20 May 2026
So Macron Is a Pan-Africanist Now!?!
Send us Fan Mail 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 about almost everything else — and asks what it still requires of us today...
14 May 2026
Can an African Man Lead the UN?
Send us Fan Mail 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 person, and the question that outlasts any single candidacy: whos...
8 May 2026
Is Democracy Failing Africa, Or Is Africa Failing Democracy?
Send us Fan Mail 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 harder truth that coups haven't delivered either. Twenty minute...
3 May 2026
When Africa Turns on Africa: South African Anti-Migrant Movement
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
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