Benjamin Watch

Picture the scene, if you will, because it is playing out somewhere in Uganda right now with the reliability of a public holiday and the nutritional value of one. A minister arrives at a government facility, surrounded by journalists, camera lights, microphones, and the particular energy of people who have decided that today is the day accountability happens. Technicians scatter. Engineers…

The most successful rebranding project of the 21st century did not come from a corporation. It came from a podcast, a morning routine, and the quiet return of the oldest colonial logic on earth, dressed in a gym kit and calling itself self-improvement. Asset Depreciation Over Time AgeStageDescription22First ReturnsInitial stage of growth.27Peak GrindMaximum potential reached, high…

People keep saying African teams have a mentality problem when they lose to European teams. It is not mentality. It is funding, it is colonialism, and it is the structural oppression of the Global South wearing a referee’s whistle. When Sport Became Foreign Policy: Three Defining Moments 1936 – Berlin Olympics Jesse Owens wins four gold medals in front of Hitler. One Black American athlete…

The feeling you describe, that silent war between wanting to belong to a country while simultaneously questioning what exactly you belong to, is perhaps one of the defining political experiences of our generation. It is not unique to Uganda, nor is it unique to Africa. Across the Global South there are millions of young people who inherited states they never participated in building,…

People who know me well will tell you I am not playful, and they are right, I am not playful the way someone who is light and carefree and unburdened is playful, I am playful the way a person who has figured out that play is the only reliable mechanism keeping them functional in a world that does not slow down for anyone is playful, which is to say that play, for me, is not leisure in the…

I will be honest with you from the first sentence, which is that I find this prompt genuinely uncomfortable, not because I have nothing to say about faith, but because I have too many things to say and the culture we are discussing does not always create safe space for saying them, so let me say them anyway, because that is precisely what this blogging challenge is for. Including an opening…

For Day 18 of the Winter African Blogging Challenge 2026, #WinterABC26, the prompt is “Everything is a Subscription — Are We Complying or Quietly Fighting Back?” and it is one I approach with mixed feelings. On one hand, I have always been critical of capitalism and the way it finds new ways to monetize everyday life, but on the other, I understand that people deserve to be paid for their work.…

For Day 17 of WinterABC26, the prompt, “Passion vs Paycheque — The Real Cost of Choosing Purpose Over a 9-to-5,” is one that immediately caught my attention because it sits at the center of one of the biggest myths of the modern economy. Before I get into it, I have always wondered about people who claim to have no passions at all. How do they process a prompt like this? How do they navigate a…

I loathe Black Tax. I also respect it critically, because to understand it fully is to understand everything that African governments have failed to build, everything that capitalism has never been designed to provide, and everything that Ubuntu promises but cannot deliver when it only flows in one direction. 44% South African households supporting multiple generations in 2025, up from 41% in…

The East African Perspective — Season 1 Update | Benjamin Watch :root { –void: #0b0f1a; –studio: #111827; –lift: #1c2535; –rail: #253048; –teal: #2dd4bf; –teal2: #0f766e; –amber: #f59e0b; –gold: #d97706; –cream: #fef3c7; –text: #cbd5e1; –mid: #64748b; –dim: #374151; –red: #ef4444; } *, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0; padding: 0; } html { scroll-behavior: smooth; } body…

There is a scene that repeats itself in the history of great power contestation, where the powerful sit across a table from each other and negotiate the fate of territories and peoples who are not in the room, and Africa has been that territory more times than any other region on earth, from the Berlin Conference of 1884 where European powers divided the continent among themselves with a ruler…

For Day 15, and the final day of Week 3 of WinterABC26, the prompt “Relationships in the Noise — Keeping human connection alive in the age of outrage, algorithms, and online chaos” is one I have been looking forward to because I think we often misunderstand what relationships actually are. We tend to confuse friendship with relationships when friendship is only a small part of the much bigger…

I think the best writers are often those who possess the ability to write about the places they have been to, because there is something almost magical about a person who can visit a town, a village, a city, a mountain range, or a coastline and then return with a story that allows everyone else to experience that place through their eyes. It is a kind of superpower, not because it requires…

When most people think about the new faces of African narrative, they think about poetry slams and Afrobeat and the science fiction renaissance that writers like Nnedi Okorafor have built, and they almost never think about gaming, which I find genuinely strange, because gaming is quietly becoming one of the most consequential storytelling mediums on this continent, and the world has used video…

To be honest, I am often very critical of how Africans tell their stories, especially those stories that eventually land major publishing deals and find their way onto international bestseller lists. Sometimes it feels as though certain versions of Africa become more marketable than others, and certain narratives are rewarded while others are quietly pushed to the margins. Yet as I have grown…

Every great civilisation has imagined itself into existence before it built itself into existence, because Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four did not predict surveillance states so much as warn the ones that were already forming, and Asimov’s Foundation did not simply entertain readers with galactic empires but gave generations of scientists and policymakers a working vocabulary for thinking about the…