Birgit Umaigba-Omoruyi

Swimming hats for people with Afro hair have been banned from the Olympics as the official body says elite athletes “don’t require caps of such size”

Brionna Johnson was told she would have to end her pregnancy and undergo a hysterectomy. Instead, a 27-pound fibroid was removed while preserving her pregnancy and her ability to have children. Too often, Black women face limited options or are not heard. This outcome shows what is possible when patients are listened to and given real care. Equity in maternal care is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

Brionna Johnson was told she would have to end her pregnancy and undergo a hysterectomy. Instead, a 27-pound fibroid was removed while preserving her pregnancy and her ability to have children. Too often, Black women face limited options or are not heard. This outcome shows what is possible when patients are listened to and given real care. Equity in maternal care is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

It is 2026, and people are still telling us to move on from colonialism as though the system packed its bags and left when they handed us a flag and an anthem. You have to be either profoundly shallow, spectacularly ignorant, or deliberately dishonest to look at a system still running on full wheels under a different name and tell the people living under it that discussing it is an obsession with the past. You really think those of us who analyse colonialism have no interest in the future? That we are archaeologists who enjoy the ruins for the aesthetic? We do this because what you call the past is the operating system of the present. The capital flight is present. The rigged trade rules are present. The weapons used to repress citizens demanding accountability were manufactured last year and delivered last month. None of this is the past. It is current state of our affairs. And then comes the other argument: blame the corrupt African leaders. Fine! Let us talk about the leaders. But first tell us who put them there. Patrice Lumumba wanted Congo’s mineral wealth to serve Congolese people and was murdered with Belgian and American coordination. Thomas Sankara refused to pay odious debts and was assassinated by a man France then protected for 27 years. Kwame Nkrumah was toppled in a CIA-backed coup while he was on a plane. Every African leader who looked at the extraction machine and decided his people deserved better was removed, exiled, imprisoned or killed, and replaced with someone more willing to sign whatever was put in front of him and call it governance. My own country has been ruled for 59 years by a father and then a son. It began when an illiterate man, captured from his village and conscripted by force into the French colonial army, trained to beat and torture and assassinate other Africans who challenged colonial rule, was handed a weapon and the equivalent of a few hundred dollars to kill a highly educated economist who spoke six languages and was building a national currency to free his people from French monetary control. France recognised the junta that replaced him within days and nobody was ever tried. The killer eventually seized total power and ruled until his death, when his son inherited the country like a family business. For 59 years we have been fighting to remove that regime thousands were martyred in the process. The regime remains in power and every single decade since 1967, the Togolese tried uprisings and they were massacred. The regime held in place by French diplomatic protection and Israeli surveillance technology rented to monitor, trace and silence anyone who organises against it. So when you say blame the African leaders, I am asking you to follow the chain of command. Those are not African leaders. They are local administrators with black faces placed at the top of a structure designed by others, for others, serving others. We were given an anthem, a flag, a useless seat at the United Nations, and told that was independence. Well it is mot! It was a franchise arrangement, and the franchisor has never loosened its grip. Who hides the money they loot? In whose banks does it sit? On whose streets do they buy their properties? London, Washington, Paris, Dubai, Zurich. The looted wealth of African nations is not hidden under mattresses in Lomé, Kinshasa or Libreville. It moves through financial systems in capitals that simultaneously lecture us about governance. Who supplies the weapons used to crush us when we protest? Who send “international observers” that look the other way during stolen elections and sends congratulations to the “winner” that claims 94% while the head of the opposition is either jailed or exiled? Who buys our minerals at a fraction of their actual value and writes the contracts that ensure the numbers never add up in Africa’s favour? You want us to move on? Show us the way to dignity and sovereignty that does not require dismantling this system and we will gladly follow

A white doctor put a pair of scissors into the genitals of a black mother who had just given birth and intentionally cut an artificial 4th degree laceration, a birthing injury that tears the rectum and the vagina into a single hole, so that a white student doctor could practice.

A white doctor put a pair of scissors into the genitals of a black mother who had just given birth and intentionally cut an artificial 4th degree laceration, a birthing injury that tears the rectum and the vagina into a single hole, so that a white student doctor could practice.