Benjamin Watch

Yesterday’s prompt was about whether AI is helping or harming African creativity, and I landed on a position that the human being must remain the author while AI works underneath them as a capable but occasionally wrong agent, and today’s prompt pushes the conversation forward into more immediate territory, because the question is no longer philosophical, it is operational, and it is asking…

When I look at today’s prompt I want to go further than the usual conversation about AI as a tool, because I think the most interesting frontier for African creatives right now is not whether to use AI, but how far to take it, and my honest answer is that we should be taking it all the way to the level of agent rather than stopping at the level of assistant.Let me tell you what that looks like in…

I have a podcast called the East African Perspective, and on one of our episodes we hosted an AI expert from Makerere University, and at the end of a very rich conversation she said something that I have not been able to put down since, that Africa should not be deciding whether to use Chinese AI or American AI, but that we should be building our own models, and I think that observation is the…

A General Reflection on What Happened When Sixty Africans Refused to Stop ThinkingThere is something that happens when you gather African voices around difficult questions, something that transforms the person into the structural, the individual into evidence, the private interrogation into collective understanding. Week 1 of WinterABC26 proved this across five consecutive days of deliberate,…

Uganda is not simply navigating a presidential succession. It is navigating the future of the most consequential military institution in East and Central Africa. The question is not who leads next. It is whether whoever leads next understands the difference between statecraft, statehood, and nationhood, because Libya and Sudan did not. Statehood “Does the state exist?” The legal and…

With today’s prompt, “My Language — Preserving African languages before they become museum pieces” I am tempted to discuss the place of African languages in the African Union Agenda 2063, but that is boring for Friday, for day 5 of this great Blogging Challenge. It would be boring because there is a likelihood that like me you have a different vernacular from your spouse and your child will learn…

The best part of this blogging challenge, for me, is the reading. Every single day I make sure I write first and read after, because I have learned that if you read fifteen or more entries before you sit down to write your own, something from someone else’s voice finds its way into your sentences without you even noticing. It is not plagiarism. It is influence, and influence is how writing works.…

For a moment, imagine that Nazi Germany had won the Second World War. Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle attempted to paint that picture, but it never fully did so from an African perspective. Perhaps that is because Africa is often treated as a footnote in global history, even when it was at the center of some of humanity’s most defining moments. For starters, the Germans had…

I have been thinking about today’s prompt since morning. It followed me through my whole day, the way a good song does, surfacing between tasks, between conversations, between the ordinary minutes of adult life that somehow feel both fuller and emptier than they used to. Nostalgic Africa. Childhood, playhood, womanhood, manhood, and the cultures that shaped us. By the time evening came I had not…

  WinterABC 2026 · Week 1 · Africa and Identity Its June, I get to write on this blog more, since of late writing is more than a hobby, but again it all started from here, this Blogging Challenge gave me the ability to write consistently under certain conditions. So I am a geography person, jave been since school, and that love never left with the final exams. Long after school was done I kept…

The Statistical Grey Areas That Sports Data Leaves BehindYesterday, Uganda’s Lady Cranes lost 47–20 to South Africa in the Rugby Africa Women’s Cup. At half time the score was 19–17. South Africa led by two points. Two points. The kind of margin that in any honest reading of a contest means the game is open, the result is undecided, and either team can win. By full time it was 47–20. That…

Six-club Premier, six-club Championship, regional base. Ten-week top-flight season, home and away within the six, top of table wins the title with no playoff. Two relegated from the Premier, two promoted from Championship. Two relegated from Championship, two promoted from regions. Uganda Rugby does not have a performance problem. It has a structure problem, a commercial problem, and a courage…

The continent that has everything is running out of time to use itOne time Professor Jeffrey Sachs made an observation so obvious, it was embarrassing that it needs saying out loud, “Africa, China, and India each have approximately 1.4 billion people. China is one country. India is one country. Africa is 55. That single fact explains more about why those other two civilisations have risen while…

We know the millennial script by now. The trained sequence is clear and it is always try something, find it unfulfilling, then get out. Our generation has access to education at a scale never seen before and this is how we are taking  this on, one day we are into medicine the next education then journalism to law to business. It’s the same way we relate to people around us  with the drama of…

The Protection of Sovereignty Bill 2026 presents what is arguably the most damaging self contradiction in Uganda’s recent policy history, yes a country we have a policy culture, and yes we are that sophisticated like all African, meanwhile a law framed in the language of the new multipolar world order that functionally undermines Uganda’s ability to participate in it. To understand why, you have…

How Geopolitics Overrunning Globalization Redefines Africa’s Geoeconomic Future is something that I have been talking about in the last 24 hours after a collogue shared with an article from the Foreign Affairs. Part Two The first is logistics sovereignty. The Northern and Central Corridors are not merely trade routes. They are the arteries of East Africa’s economic integration. Investment in…

How Geopolitics Overrunning Globalization Redefines Africa’s Geoeconomic Future is something that I have been talking about in the last 24 hours after a collogue shared with an article from the Foreign Affairs. Part One The Foreign Affairs essay by Eswar Prasad makes a compelling case that globalization, once imagined as the great pacifier of interstate rivalry or Great power contestation of…