Africa Is a Country View RSS

Entries, exits, permits 20 Oct 2:00 AM (yesterday, 2:00 am)

A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.

Doha had an eerie unnaturalness to it. Like existing in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. I had left the fake Venice of the Bellagio in Vegas only to find myself in a newer, faker, Venice in the Villagio in Doha.

The world exists in the same algorithm. I swear, there is the same coffee shop, in every corner of every city. Everything is just one giant “for you” page, ready to be scrolled.

At the airport in Doha, a woman tries to check in at the counter before me. She is dressed in a black flowing Abaya. The check in agent scans through her passport. After a few seconds he returns it back to her. “You do not have an exit permit from your sponsor.” He says. She stares blankly but knowingly at the agent, collects her passport back, and quietly moves to the side of the counter to give me access. Her face contains multitudes of emotions – a migrant worker caught in between, never completely staying, never completely leaving.

Las Vegas, United States

On this Friday I am wearing a blue jellabiya, and the Vegas wind swirls it around my body as I figure out directions to the mosque. A cab with a casino advert highlighted on its roof slows down in the middle of the street. A middle-aged man puts his head through the window and shouts towards me:

“Going to the mosque?”

This stranger gives me a five-minute lift to the mosque. Every minute or so, he slightly opens the door of the car mid-ride to spit some of the kolanut in his mouth, all this while ranting about Trump.

“He signs a paper and cancels everything. You know. Paper signed. He cancels me. Paper signs. He cancels you. Paper signs and everybody is sent away.” I do not say a word throughout the ride.

*

Another Friday, I walk on an almost empty campus when a red Toyota corolla that has been circling around the lot, speeds towards me with headlights fully on. A man winds down the side window and smiles at me.

“Yo! How do I get the fuck out of this school?”

LAX – Los Angeles International Airport

I am at the airport in LA on a phone call with Salma. There is a 9-hour time difference between our bodies, but the sound waves of our voices place our conversation in the same space. “You know, there are 7 million vending machines in the US” she casually mentions mid-sentence.

Now all I see are vending machines: a Kylie Jenner machine; a farmers healthy snacks machine, a 24 hours flower vending machine. Who will ever need to get a flower in the middle of the night?

When I sleep on the flight, there are vending machines haunting me in my dreams. I wake up, panting, connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi and google fun facts about vending machines.

Whenever in her lifetime Salma happens to visit Japan, I will call her and let her know once she lands in Tokyo: there is a vending machine for every 20 people in Japan! Ha!

Juba, South Sudan

On April 5, at the Juba airport in South Sudan, the United Stated deported a man in what became an international merry-go-round. South Sudan refused his entry, insisting that he is Congolese, and then deported him back to the United States. In response, Marco Rubio threw a tantrum and banned all visas of South Sudanese passports, plus sent this man again back to South Sudan. Because Africa is a country.

I have a printed picture of Makula Kintu pasted on my work desk. He is wearing a red t-shirt and a grey jacket on top of it. He has his fingers clasped together, his mouth agape, like a meme of astonishment.

For his first flight, he had been deported from the United States to South Sudan via Egypt Air, which means over the days he had been moved around from the US, through a connecting flight in Cairo, and then another flight from Cairo to Juba in South Sudan. For his second trip, from Juba, he would then have been returned through another intermediate country and then back to the United States where he would be denied entry at the border.

For a third trip, Makula Kintu was then again returned back, from the United States connecting through another country and again to Juba where he was finally kept under detention. Makula had first entered into the United States in 2003.

In all the news articles about Makula Kintu, he is not provided a voice by the press. Airport officials, foreign secretaries; custom and border agents speak for him. This is the only picture of him used in all the press filings – mouth agape and confused. In all of those flight miles he collected over days, no journalist asked Makula Kintu even if it is just for his opinion on how terrible the in-flight meals can be.

*

On different coordinates, on different maps, stories repeat. Cities absorb other cities, vending machines multiply like viruses. Humans are trapped in bureaucratic loops. The world is a continuous scroll: how do we get out? How do we make the algorithm stop repeating itself? In every existence, there are black bodies bearing witness.

Zoë Wicomb’s local universalisms 20 Oct 12:00 AM (yesterday, 12:00 am)

The passing of the pioneering South African writer and critic leaves behind a body of work that challenged racial mythologies, unsettled identity politics, and grounded transhistorical vision in the particulars of place.

Zoë Wicomb’s passing, on October 13 at the age of 76, has prompted an outpouring of tributes from black women writers and scholars across the globe, a reflection of the immense political and literary impact of her work. Figures like Pumla Gqola and Gabeba Baderoon have highlighted her fearless critique of colonial and racial mythologies, her insistence on complexity, and her refusal to be co-opted by easy solidarities. These tributes speak to Wicomb’s lifelong commitment to unraveling the social fictions that continue to shape South African life: fictions of race, gender, belonging, memory, and power. As a writer, critic, and teacher, she challenged her readers not with loud declarations, but with careful, unsettling questions.

Her 1992 reading of Bessie Head’s Maru is an early marker of this political vision, as is her seminal 1998 essay on shame in the South African literary imagination. There, Wicomb showed how the category “colouredness” had been shaped by a history of symbolic associations—tainted bloodlines, racial impurity, miscegenation—and how these myths, far from being neutral descriptors, continued to saturate post-apartheid discourse. Yet her analysis was often misread. Some critics mistook her deconstruction of these colonial fictions as a tacit endorsement of them, folding her into the very discursive lineage—figures like Olive Schreiner or Sarah Gertrude Millin—that she so precisely challenged. This kind of misreading was not unfamiliar to Wicomb. In fact, her work bears a certain affinity with that of J.M. Coetzee: both writers have at times been accused of “naturalizing” racial discourses when, in fact, they were intimately deconstructing them.

Another important way in which Wicomb contributed to South African political debate is through her sustained engagement with the figure of Sara Baartman. Baartman—an elusive but recurring presence in her novel David’s Story—looms large across Wicomb’s oeuvre as an index of historical memory. Yet unlike many South African, North American, and Black diasporic poets, playwrights, and novelists who have sought to convey definitive “truths” about Baartman, Wicomb turns her gaze instead to the politics of re-membering itself. What demands interrogation, she insists, is not Baartman’s historical “truth,” but the ways she is made to serve the symbolic needs of the present—the ways she is repeatedly projected upon, claimed, and conscripted to suit others’ purposes.

This point is made forcefully in her interview in the 2021 collection Surfacing, where she critiques certain currents of “woke” politics, particularly those associated with what she calls “bright young things.” In their eagerness to “speak truth to power,” Wicomb suggests, these voices can end up hardening complex truths, collapsing the contradictions of the past into performances of moral clarity that often reflect the psycho-political needs of the present more than the realities of history.

It is, in fact, deeply ironic for us to acknowledge—as we write this piece—that we, too, are implicated in this dynamic. Already, there are those who seek to claim and contain “Zoe” as a fully knowable figure (in the same way that many have already claimed, owned, and distorted Sara Baartman), ready to be remembered and reified. In this respect, our act of tribute risks echoing the very gestures Wicomb so often questioned the drive to fix, possess, and project an authoritative version of a life that resists such closure.

The political commitments described above were essential to Wicomb’s writing, her teaching, and her public commentary. All were shaped by the Black Consciousness politics that also nourished the vision of her contemporary, Jakes Gerwel, the celebrated rector of the University of the Western Cape, her alma mater, and the university at which she taught for many years. Wicomb boldly and consistently defended the strategic essentialism of “Biko blackness” in the mid-1990s, at a time when coloured separatism (and ethnic consciousness more generally) had begun to surface with virulent force. She challenged students at UWC, UCT, and Stellenbosch, as well as the broader public, condemning forms of identity politics that produced new essentialisms, exclusions, and at times, outright xenophobia. Like another of her contemporaries, Njabulo Ndebele, she stressed how these patterns found their origins in the very colonial and racist biopolitics they claimed to oppose.

Still, the scope of Wicomb’s vision, despite its deep-rootedness in South Africa and the local, was also astoundingly broad. Some may wonder why she focused so insistently on South Africa while living in Glasgow, Scotland, when a global and transhistorical perspective—so evident in her latest novel Still Life—was always available to her. But like Bessie Head, a South African writer she deeply admired, Wicomb chose to ground her expansive, universalist vision in the particulars of place: a view of the local that was at once compassionate and sharply critical. And like Head, Wicomb’s universality was never of the abstract, liberal-humanist kind; it was transhistorical and embedded, political and aesthetic at once. Still Life and October are both testaments to this. So too is the eclecticism of her critical writing, where canonical thinkers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and JM Coetzee appear alongside marginalized knowledge-makers—lesser-known Black South African women writers, or “dated” critics like Lewis Nkosi—without hierarchy or defensiveness.

Wicomb’s “local” was a South Africa she knew intimately—at least in the 1990s and early 2000s—and which she wrote about with respect, love, and also with a passionate outrage at the injustices that endured. Her local was also the realm of sharp social commentary: she wrote about colorism among those classified as African and Coloured, about the anxieties of Black women around hair texture in a world still governed by white-centric beauty standards. And her writing was lyrical too, often poetic: evoking the striking landscapes and flora of Namaqualand, where she was born (as in October), or capturing the speech patterns and idioms of people of color from the Northern Cape and the streets and mountains of the Western Cape.

For us, she’s been a wonderful friend: inspiring, hilariously funny, outrageously adventurous, and incredibly generous. But she’s also been a pioneering South African writer of novels, social commentary, and literary and cultural criticism. A great loss to many is that she did not live long enough to write even more.

As spring returns and the Namaqualand flowers bloom—just as they do in October, the novel that bears the season’s name—we are reminded of her deep feeling for place and its quiet rebellions. In that novel, one of Wicomb’s more complex, though minor, characters, Sylvie, reflects on the patch of land she has shaped into her own:

Here…where she has planted the vygie…she has always known is for her, Sylvie, and her alone. That is why she turned the patch into a garden, arranged the stones…In the veld she dug up kanniedood and koekemakranka, and planted them around to show up the glorious purple. … If, as AntieMa says, the devil has blown in her blood, then that blood is the screaming purple here at her feet…

It is hard not to read this as a kind of quiet credo, one that speaks to Wicomb’s sensibility as a writer who tended her literary and political garden with fierce attention, irony, and love. The screaming purple at our feet is hers, too.

Reading List: Brooks Marmon 17 Oct 4:00 AM (3 days ago)

The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.

For prominent Zimbabwean legal minds seeking to dismantle white domination in their homeland, 1975 was a trying year. The renegade British colony’s first black lawyer, Herbert Chitepo, who led the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) from exile, was killed in a car bomb in Lusaka in March. In October, ZANU’s former publicity secretary, Edson Sithole, one of the most prominent nationalists who had not gone abroad, disappeared after leaving a well-known hotel in downtown Harare (then Salisbury).

Sithole, a self-made legal scholar with a Doctor of Law degree from the University of South Africa, was born in rural Southern Rhodesia to illiterate parents in 1935. Regrettably, his political thought and actual contributions to Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle have been subsumed by the unexplained nature of his demise (agents reporting to Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith were believed to be responsible).

A forthcoming book I’ve compiled for the Voices of Liberation series of South Africa’s HSRC Press serves up a political biography of Sithole (written by me), accompanied by the full reproduction of some two dozen writings and speeches by Sithole from the late 1950s until days before his elimination. Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s contribution to this series on ZANU’s founding leader, Ndabaningi Sithole (a distant relative), crystallized the idea for this manuscript.

As a PhD student researching the politics of decolonization in colonial Zimbabwe in the 1950s and 1960s, I was acutely aware of the standard historiographical lament: that the continent’s independence-era stalwarts left behind a limited archive. Although the personal papers of their white settler counterparts are disproportionately preserved, the example of figures such as Sithole leads me to believe that this claim is overstated.

As the Voices of Liberation and AIAC’s own Revolutionary Papers series demonstrate, a significant cohort of pan-African, anti-colonial nationalists embraced the power of the pen to assail colonialism.

During my doctoral studies, a thorough review of the African Daily News, a newspaper targeting a predominantly black readership, revealed that Sithole frequently contributed op-eds on political developments not only in Rhodesia, but across the continent. Like many similar periodicals, it has not been digitized. Thus, not only are his words out of circulation, but the research to recover them is a painstaking process. These essays form the bulk of Sithole’s voice in the forthcoming book.

Sithole was among a coterie of young turks contributing a stream of opinion pieces in this paper that have gone underacknowledged in the historiography. However, I was particularly drawn to his voice. A notable strand of my thesis, Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership (now published in book form), argued that the era’s emphasis on pan-Africanism sowed the seeds of authoritarianism, promoting absolute unity at almost any cost.

Sithole stood out as an exception. In 1961, Zimbabwe’s nationalist movement, under the direction of Joshua Nkomo, initially agreed to British-mediated constitutional reforms that preserved minority white rule. In African Daily News think pieces, such as “Nkomo was Tricked by Britain, but We Cannot Accept Clumsy Explanations to the People,” Sithole went against the dominant tenor of the struggle to denounce Nkomo’s prevarications.

Initially a rather solitary voice, Sithole’s condemnations of Nkomo gathered momentum, leading Ndabaningi Sithole to oversee the launch of ZANU, which provided a viable challenge against Nkomo. Sithole celebrated that development in a 1963 op-ed entitled, “Nkomo’s Sun is Setting.”

Sithole also critiqued African statesmen who he felt betrayed the nationalist cause. Nigerian Prime Minister, Abubakara Tafawa Balewa, who flirted with the white settlers of Southern Africa more than has generally been acknowledged, was another target. Sithole’s “The Role of Nigeria in Africa’s Struggle” displays an impressive knowledge of Nigerian domestic politics in a pre-digital age and a courageous willingness to call out the leader of one of Africa’s most powerful states.

When Ian Smith came to power in 1964, white rule in Rhodesia became even more repressive.  Sithole was jailed, his party (ZANU) was outlawed, and the African Daily News was banned.  References to African nationalist politicians in the local press became verboten.

In the early 1970s, Sithole emerged from several years of imprisonment to become the publicity secretary of another liberation movement, the African National Council. With his law practice thriving and party duties consuming much of his time, his for-attribution writings decreased.

However, an assortment of interviews and other materials, complimented by the emergence of an ANC-aligned newspaper in 1975, The National Observer, ensures that Sithole’s voice can be tracked into the 1970s. The Observer, a poorly preserved periodical, published what was likely Sithole’s last opinion piece, “How We Formed the ANC,” just four days before his disappearance. It continued his long-running criticisms of Nkomo and countered his nemesis’s framing of the liberation struggle’s trajectory.

Still, I felt like something was missing to tie together the various elements of Sithole’s discourse.  In taking a leadership role in the ANC, seen as a more conciliatory party due to the presence of comparatively restrained intellectual voices and ecumenical figures in its leadership, Sithole appeared to have backtracked on his prior revolutionary zeal. Then, on a trip to the UK National Archives, I found the transcript of a 1973 address by Sithole, “Where Now, Rhodesia?”

The remarks were delivered to the Rhodesia National Affairs Association, a white dominated civil affairs society, just as the armed struggle heated up. They indicate a pragmatic attempt to avert the explosion of bloodshed that marked the second half of the decade in Rhodesia. That tumult cost Sithole his life, and its legacy continues to plague Zimbabwe today.

I hope that this recovery of Sithole’s political thought not only recognizes his intellectual role in African independence struggles, but also illuminates the repercussions of intransigence by powerful elites who seek to maintain their dominance.

Edson Sithole: Law, Liberation and the Cost of Dissent (2025), edited by Brooks Marmon, is forthcoming on HSRC Press.

Repoliticizing a generation 16 Oct 4:00 AM (4 days ago)

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Yesterday marked the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Sankara, who, on October 15, 1987, was killed alongside twelve of his comrades during a coup led by Blaise Compaoré. Sankara’s brief but transformative presidency (1983–1987) reoriented Burkina Faso’s political economy toward self-reliance, gender equality, ecological stewardship, and non-alignment in global affairs.

For more than three decades, Aziz Salmone Fall, a pan-African activist, political scientist, and coordinator of the International Campaign Justice for Sankara (ICJS), has worked with Sankara’s family, Burkinabè activists, and international allies to demand truth and accountability. The long struggle has yielded historic breakthroughs: Compaoré, his former chief of staff, Gilbert Diendéré, and former Burkinabè army captain, Hyacinthe Kafando, were convicted of complicity in murder by a military court in Ouagadougou in April 2022. Significant questions remain regarding the enforcement of the verdict (each was sentenced to life imprisonment), the release of the French archives, and the larger fight against impunity.

In this conversation between Amber Murrey and Aziz Fall, Fall reflects on the enduring significance of Sankara’s revolutionary ideas and the ongoing movement for justice. They explore how the campaign navigates legal and diplomatic obstacles; how new regional dynamics such as Senegal’s political shift to the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States, shape ongoing political and economic struggles; and how a generation of African youth is being reinvigorated by Sankara’s vision of a sovereign, ecologically attuned, and socially just future.

Aziz envisions a renewed pan-African and anti-imperialist front grounded in what he calls the “Great South:” a collective of emancipatory forces reclaiming political and epistemic agency from the global periphery. Through his concepts of transinternationalism and a revived “Bandung 2” internationalism, he calls for a 21st-century alliance that transcends the nation-state, uniting peoples of the South and North in a shared struggle against imperialism and capitalist domination.

Amber Murrey

The campaign you coordinate has long demanded justice for the assassination of Thomas Sankara. What were some of the lessons you learned over these three decades of organization? 

Aziz Salmone Fall

Thank you, Amber, for this opportunity to reflect at this important historical moment. The first lesson is that when we organize ourselves with self-sacrifice, courage, and audacity, anything is possible. In the summer of 1997, a few months before the [administration’s claimed] 10-year statute of limitations expired, Sankara’s widow, Mariam Serme Sankara, courageously filed a complaint against X for forgery. Our lawyers Dieudonné Nkounkou from Montpellier and Bénéwendé Sankara from Ouaga took up the case and assumed her defense. GRILA launched the ICJS international campaign Justice for Sankara in the form of an appeal against impunity. The appeal was endorsed by several organizations and prominent figures. I had the honor of coordinating this group of some 20 lawyers and, over the course of these decades, exhausting all remedies before the Burkinabè courts, which were manipulated within la Françafrique, and we appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and obtained an international precedent against impunity in 2006.

Relentless campaigns to raise awareness of Sankarism and Pan-Africanism have borne fruit. Young people have taken up the cause. With the overthrow of the Compaoré regime, a new administration has allowed a new trial to be organized. It opened on October 11, 2021, and has resulted in the conviction of those who murdered Sankara and his comrades.

The second lesson is that some consider this to be a Pyrrhic victory. I have a great moral responsibility in this matter and am uncomfortable with its outcome. Most of the families who agreed to allow me to exhume the bodies were disappointed to see that there was insufficient DNA evidence to identify them. It must be said that the previous regime had not protected the Sankara site, where liquids had been poured over his grave in an act of desecration. The state preferred to use laboratories of its own choosing rather than those we had recommended. And when it came to reburying the bodies, the Sankarist supporters were divided between those who (along with the majority of the families) believed that they should not be buried at the Council of Entente where they had been slaughtered, and those who, supported by the current regime, and other Sankarist supporters, believed that a memorial should be erected there: the Sankara Memorial. It was recently inaugurated and is now their final resting place. In order not to embarrass the families, I declined the state’s invitation to the inauguration and the medal that was to be awarded to me. I had proposed a vacant space between the Cuban Embassy and the Council of Entente as a compromise, but this proposal was not accepted.

The third lesson is that despite our struggles, the culture of impunity can persist. The chief orchestrator is still protected by Françafrique, which refuses to die, and the current authorities—who claim to be Sankarists—have yet to request his extradition.

Amber Murrey

Where do we stand today in terms of accountability and impunity, particularly concerning the conviction in absentia of Blaise Compaoré? What concrete steps will be taken next to ensure that the verdict is enforced?

Aziz Salmone Fall

It may be surprising that a person who has committed so many atrocities, who has murdered his close comrades and many other opponents, whose henchmen have threatened us with death, who enriched himself by plundering the sub-region and who, moreover, contributed to introducing terrorism there, can enjoy, in complete tranquillity, the nationality of Côte d’Ivoire, a country he helped to destabilise, and live there in luxury. We take this opportunity to reiterate our request to Burkina Faso to demand his extradition, to Côte d’Ivoire to respect the deserved sentence he has received, and to France to stop supporting him. Perhaps the current regime in Burkina Faso fears Compaoré’s capacity for harm if he were imprisoned in Ouagadougou, but that is just speculation on our part. For our part, while once again congratulating our courageous lawyers, this part of the trial has been resolved, and we have achieved our objective of ensuring that justice is heard, something that had been denied us for so many years. At the level of international law, following the deaths of human rights experts [Louis] Joinet and [Doudou] Guissé, and despite their courageous efforts, we still do not have a binding convention on impunity.

Amber Murrey

Access to national and international archives is vital to establishing historical truth. What progress has been made in releasing key documents from France or other countries? What strategies are being used to overcome political and diplomatic obstacles to full declassification? Is your sense that the thin portfolio of archives released by the French during the trial is the end of that process?

Aziz Salmone Fall

We have spent decades requesting the declassification of secret and strategic documents. France has disclosed a batch of strategic documents, but these do not incriminate it. A third batch that was to be provided has been blocked by the French authorities. The rogatory commission that was to work on opening the international aspect of the trial, which was separated by the Burkina authorities, appears to still not have been set up [as of 2025]. There is a clear lack of willingness on both sides to finalize the resolution of this case. Our lawyers have unsuccessfully tried to get the authorities to take action. It is true that the situation of terrorist insecurity in the country and the region does not help matters. My reading of the documents and my assumptions clearly point to international sponsors, mainly French and American, and a few regional second-tier players.

Amber Murrey

The recent political changes in Senegal have generated hope, including the appointment of Ousmane Sonko as prime minister and the plans to phase out the presence of French military forces. How do you assess the prospects for progressive change under the new government, and what role could Senegal play in supporting justice initiatives, such as the campaign for justice for Sankara?

Aziz Salmone Fall

I have already had the pleasure of seeing the current prime minister give an interview at the beginning of his term, with a large poster of Sankara in the background, and he even attended the recent inauguration of the Sankara memorial. These are strong political signals. However, we did not receive any support or show of solidarity from his party during our campaign. It must be said that one of the characteristics of the AES and Senegalese regimes is that they are distinguished by their declarative and sometimes even active sovereignty, but they do not associate with revolutionaries. This may be a tactic in the face of imperialism, which is indeed powerful against young and fragile regimes. For the moment, we have a polite and distant relationship with all these regimes, which are not unaware of our pan-African sacrifices and struggles, which they themselves claim to support. In the case of Senegal, I proposed the pan-African platform Seen Égal-e Seen Égalité, a progressive, feminist, and ecological self-reliant social project. Seven parties have endorsed it and six candidates have chosen to draw on elements of it for their programs.

The regime has not endorsed it, but there is a certain influence, and it espouses an anti-neocolonial and anti-imperialist rhetoric. In practice, however, there will be no anti-capitalist break, but rather a pragmatic liberal management of the crisis, which we hope will be more patriotic than that of the former regime. But if there is already patriotic management of public funds and the settlement of impunity for financial and bloody crimes, that would already be a lot. We believe in a gradual break and will therefore continue in this vein, as we see no other options for Africa.

Amber Murrey

Young people across the Sahel and wider Africa are increasingly politically active in digital spaces and online communities. How does the Justice for Sankara Movement inspire and connect with this new generation to build pan-African alternatives to both external domination and authoritarian statecraft, for example, in Cameroon, Chad, and elsewhere?

Aziz Salmone Fall

We are convinced that our struggle against apartheid and for national liberation, followed by three decades of fighting against impunity and promoting Sankarism and Pan-Africanism, have helped to shape thousands of young people and generations of conscious Africans. At the same time, this politicisation is often superficial, as young people globally have been affected by three decades of depoliticisation caused by neoliberalism and the divestment of the state. I believe that those who have accompanied us in this struggle against autocracies, foreign bases, or pan-African development, and who have even supported it, are different from others in their pan-African consciousness. But it is a long and difficult struggle against a hostile world order and stubborn and perverse autocracies that have contributed to perpetuating ignorance, obscurantism, and all kinds of diversions to distract young people from their historical responsibility for transformation. But the contradictions and demands of life and survival are leading these young people to discover our struggles, which are identical to theirs, and the ancestors of the future, from Cabral to Ben Barka, from Lumumba to Fanon, who illuminate our struggles.

Amber Murrey

The formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger marks a shift in Sahel geopolitics and autonomy. From the standpoint of the region’s peoples and movements, what are the most exciting aspects of recent moves?

Aziz Salmone Fall

Undoubtedly, greater collective self-esteem. The simple fact that African countries are uniting in the face of adversity is progress. The fact that these are military juntas does not seem problematic to me; Sankara and his comrades were indeed soldiers with a certain social conscience. The sovereigntist stance and determination to fight the terrorist hydra, even if it means abandoning historical external support and favoring others, cannot be achieved at the expense of democracy or regional and pan-African dynamics. We need an open stance toward all peoples and all their components, and not just the military, which does not have a monopoly on politics. We must be confident and not suspicious. We must stand up against the tide of autocracy on the continent. In Tunisia, my comrade Khayam Turki has been accused of conspiracy and sentenced to two decades in prison with complete impunity; in Benin, my comrade Lehady Soglo is still convicted and in exile on unclear charges; our comrade Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire was previously rendered ineligible for major elections [this ineligibility was lifted in 2023]; Maurice Kamto in Cameroon has also been brutally sidelined [in the 12 October 2025 presidential elections]… Libya, Congo, and Sudan are being carved up and preyed upon by profiteers, bandits, extractive industries, and more. These circumstances do not allow for the clarity and serenity needed to build Pan-Africanism. For example, the AES is falling out with Algeria and paradoxically turning to Morocco. What about the Sahara issue, or other West African trade routes? Our leaders must learn to disconnect to ensure better accumulation, consult each other more strategically, let our peoples flourish, and not adorn themselves with medals, honours and enrichment; and concern themselves with questioning the old model of development by opting for a balance in symbiosis with nature that satisfies the essential needs of those who are deprived, proposing strategies for full employment, redressing inequalities, particularly concerning the status of women, and educating for progressive knowledge… these are some of the signs we are waiting for in concrete terms.

Amber Murrey

As you know, this month marks the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Sankara. In his 1987 address to the OAU, Thomas Sankara warned that “He who feeds you, controls you,” and elsewhere cautioned that, “It is natural to fear to be outside the norm, but the courage to refuse conformity is the beginning of freedom.” In your view, what concrete forms of economic or diplomatic refusal allow African countries to assert autonomy, sovereignty, and justice in today’s international world order, with nested global racial hierarchies, and capitalist expansion?

Aziz Salmone Fall

Everywhere, the struggle to preserve equality or to increase inequality continues. The balance of power is political and, depending on the worldview and the period, gives rise to increasingly sophisticated superstructures to resolve issues of wealth, power, and meaning. The resulting institutions can be immutable for a long time, or they can be brutally overturned, creating new relationships of power and knowledge.

It is up to us, in this exceptional historic moment of redeployment of imperialism in the 21st century, to help complete the efforts of so many people, like Sankara, who have fought for our freedoms and our development. In the current state of disarray and expectation, and without nostalgia, a lucid response from the organic forces of the Great South is inexorably becoming aware of its anti-systemic potential. This presupposes recovering the state’s room for manoeuvre, rediscovering the organizing potential of peoples and the coherence of the convergence of transversal struggles beyond sovereignty against transnationals, war, and the rapacity of the market, and in defense of the equal status of women and the protection of the common good and the environment. This is not a time for nostalgia and mere commemoration, but for understanding that the non-aligned must now have the courage to align themselves against imperialism and reinvent a transinternationalism of peoples. If the latter accepts the leadership of BRICS, the industrial champions of the Great South, it rejects their sub-imperialist temptations and reaches out to the peoples of the core countries to fight barbarism.

I propose transinternationalism starting from the Great South first, so that once it has crystallised, and without sub-imperialism, it can irradiate the peoples of the North whose interests are not so opposed to ours, confronted as they are with the rigours of their uniformising economic, cultural, educational, and political standards and systems. Universality will only exist when other homeomorphic and endogenous equivalents have irrigated it, and when hegemony fades through fertile and reciprocal acculturation.

The Great South must take back the epistemic initiative and restore the sense to participate in the uninhibited construction and non-Eurocentric reconstitution of knowledge. All the peoples and nations that have suffered colonization and continue to suffer its after-effects must learn to work together to emerge from their condition. Whether through South-South cooperation at all levels, bilateral, multilateral, or simply as citizens.

We need to deconstruct the Eurocentrism embedded in our cognitive frames that are deeply enmeshed in our thoughts and practices of knowledges. By transnational, I mean the extra-state and national dimension, both infra- and supra-national, which incorporates progressive internationalisms, mainly those of workers and the jobless, ecologists and feminists. So we’re going beyond the first internationalism and adapting it to the 21st century, to its equivalents in different parts of the world, in order to achieve real universalism. Transinternationalism makes it possible to incorporate internationalism, which itself went beyond the national question by advocating workers’ solidarity, transcending it to deploy politically, socio-culturally, and psychologically a progressive rearguard and vanguard front of organic forces to meet the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.

We need to build a collective internationalist network of resistance to imperialism, starting by strengthening its axis in the most promising parts of its periphery. There is an urgent need for a political level, which exists only sporadically on an event-driven basis. This organized and diverse nebula must bring together, based on Bandung 2 internationalism, the fronts, parties, movements, and individuals likely to propose to the peoples, the alter-globalist network, as well as to the social formations and productive or unemployed forces of the world, an alternative project to capitalism. A project against the modernization of pauperization and technocratic depoliticization, a free, egalitarian, democratic, feminist, and solidarity-based project for the construction of a responsible universalist order without oppression for humans and nature alike. This must be done in a respectful, democratic, and united way, in the diversity of our obedience(s), with the prospect of rebuilding a world labor front conscious of the issue of the commons, the last non-commodified public spaces, and the importance of adopting a universal declaration for the common good of humanity.

The challenge of an anti-systemic response based on the spirit of Bandung should consider the feminist, ecological, and progressive challenge at the heart of any analysis aimed at democratically re-politicizing peoples with a view to an upsurge in the defense of peace, of the commons and an alternative to capitalism. The democratic re-politicization of our popular masses on the basis of dynamic balance and a stand against the militarization of the world requires the re-foundation of a tricontinental front to counter the military impetus of collective imperialism and move toward the equivalent of a 5th International. At the very least, it is important to recall the eight principles we set out in 2006, during the World Social Forum in the Bamako Appeal.

Amber Murrey

Thank you so much for your time.

Aziz Salmone Fall

The king of Kinshasa 15 Oct 3:00 AM (5 days ago)

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Chéri Samba is the undisputed king of popular painting from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the last 45 years or so he has been depicting the everyday concerns of his countrymen and women, reflecting on everything from education, morality, sexuality, and corruption in his paintings, using himself as a subject to comment on the social and political realities in his country. These scenes are depicted in his trademark style of humor, in vivid color, and often accompanied with text in his native Lingala or French.

Born in 1956, Samba’s artworks first came to international attention in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the Earth) at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris. Since then, his artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Tate Modern in London; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris; the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Venice Biennale; Documenta; and other places. Riason Naidoo met up with Chéri Samba in Paris in 2020 at galerie Magnin-A in Paris.

Riason Naidoo

This painting is fun, J’aime le jeu de relais (I Like the Relay Game), 2018.

Chéri Samba

The relay game, yes. I like it because you don’t want old people to spend all the time in the positions they hold. They would still have to have the spirit of wanting to leave room for young people too. If we have to appropriate places from young people all the time, why then do young people study? Why have children if we do not allow time for them to move on in life as well? That’s why I like the relay game. Let children take the place that adults have previously occupied.

Riason Naidoo

You say you were born an artist. Can you expand on that? 

Chéri Samba

When you come into the world, you don’t choose what you should be; it’s like, in a curious way, doing a job you didn’t choose. When I was a child, I saw myself drawing something in the sand; like everyone else, every child needs to play, to play in other skies. I had no materials. I used my fingers to scribble something in the sand, and little by little when I was in school I started to have some white paper with the ballpoint pens. With pencils, I was making drawings. I copied comics from the entertainment magazines that were all the rage at home in Kinshasa. I would keep them in notebooks; it was my hobby. My fellow students bought it. That’s why I said later I was born an artist. I didn’t choose it, it just happened.

Riason Naidoo

You’ve been in Kinshasa ever since you moved there from your village as a young man. What is so special about Kinshasa?

Chéri Samba

Kinshasa is the city to which I am drawn, but I was born in Kinto M’Vuila in lower Congo eighty kilometres from Kinshasa. We do not choose the place of birth. After dropping out of school, I preferred to go to Kinshasa because almost everyone wanted to live in the capital of the Congo. It is a desire. I changed my studio recently [after many years] from the corner of Avenues Birmanie and Cassa Boubou to 250 Avenue Commerciale, and that is where I am, until now.

Riason Naidoo

Who were the artists that inspired you in then Zaire? 

Chéri Samba

Frankly, I didn’t have a role model. At the beginning, it was as if I existed all alone in the world. It was just after several years [of being an artist] that I heard about others. I thought I had to try to see what these artists were about. We got together, we rubbed shoulders, but I wanted to be true to myself. As we are at the show of three artists [now in Paris], the other two being Bodys Isek Kingelez and Moké; they were my colleagues, my friends. They came on stage before me, and I appreciated their work. I met them; they accepted me. Each one was different.

Riason Naidoo

What makes your work different from theirs? 

Chéri Samba

Isek Kingelez, he was a model maker, so that was a big difference between painting and models; Moké, a painter. We can see very well that the processing of my images is not the same. I preferred to do a little realism … even if it could have a little flaw. There is another difference: I wanted to put some text in my paintings, because before I set out on this adventure, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t see a painting that bore text, and I almost suffered for it.

The people from the Academy of Fine Arts [in Kinshasa], the teachers from that school (who wanted to take care of my work, while I was not their student) said, “But how can this artist afford to put texts, to write on his paintings? Maybe he doesn’t know how to make his images understood.” I said, “Let me do what I want to do.” My desire is to hold the attention of people in front of my work so that they take time to contemplate my work. There are people who read and understand very quickly everything that is written. I read slowly, word by word; it takes time. I told myself that there might be others like me [who take time to read]; [the text] will delay people in front of my painting. This is what I wanted. This was not the case with my colleagues. That was the difference.

Riason Naidoo

I’ve read that you make up to three versions of the same painting. If that is true, it is very unusual in modern and contemporary art that relies on a unique painting. 

Chéri Samba

Sometimes they ask me, “Why make the painting in several versions?” Before Chéri Samba, there were also other painters who did paintings in a series. In my case, if I paint the picture several times, it’s because there are paintings that I don’t want to sell.

If I paint a subject, I would like everyone to see it so that it circulates all over the world. I, myself, would like to keep a copy so as not to take photos or make prints, as you say. Sometimes, I wanted to do it again for myself. It happened to me that a painting that I might reserve for myself ends up in someone else’s home. There is already an existence of this subject, which is already gone. I think to myself that it is not good that I repeat the same subject for someone else who is interested. But the person concerned tells me, “No, I want that,” and there are some who asked me for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth version of the painting, and I said to them “No!” In this case, I like to limit myself to three versions, so it was not me who chose, but it is the requests that I receive that resulted in the additional versions. I was surprised that there were back-and-forth requests, demands from so-called art connoisseurs who asked me to make another version of a painting for them. So, finally, I said to myself, in order for people not to miss the work, I would have to continue. It’s not my choice to reproduce all the time, but what should I do?

I’m talking about the painting, such as I Love Color, also the subject. I think a lot of people liked it, and it hurt me that it was only found at someone’s friends place while everyone wished to see it.

Riason Naidoo

Could you describe for me the Art partout exhibition in Kinshasa in 1978 and the atmosphere around it?  

Chéri Samba

I think it’s one of the exhibitions that also shed a lot of light on the thought that if art did not exist only at a given point in the world, it did not exist. The idea was to show that there are artists everywhere in the world; that they are not only in the West, as we used to say in the past. And what was a little ambiguous is that we thought that where there are no galleries, museums, there are no artists, and it was a false discussion. Whether there are galleries or museums, artists are everywhere, and art is everywhere in the world; that was the idea behind the exhibition [that took place in the streets].

Riason Naidoo

What do you mean by “paintings with no soul”? What are your thoughts on contemporary art you see in museums around the world when you visit? 

Chéri Samba

I was just saying that there are things you can easily understand and things you don’t. I compared a little the work dictated by the so-called connoisseurs in the fine arts schools and there, I said, there are works, which sometimes, the people for whom the works are intended had difficulty understanding the message. It’s not to say it was well done or that it was bad—no. The message is only for initiates, art connoisseurs, insiders.

If someone wants to challenge the conscience and wants to talk with these compatriots, why code the message? This is why I was saying I would like to paint in what I would call “folk art.” Of course, the word “popular” was also not very well understood, especially in the West. People thought “popular” was without thought. We pick things up without thinking. I said that “popular” is a painting that comes from art and goes toward the people, and the people are easily recognized there. So, there is this relationship between the art understood by the people and art that is intended for the initiated, while the world belongs to everyone. For me, you have to give the message to everyone unambiguously.

 

Riason Naidoo

Is it true you wrote words in your paintings in Lingala to be invited abroad? 

Chéri Samba

Yes, it’s true, it’s not only in Lingala that I wrote, I also wrote in Kikongo, in Swahili, etc. I wanted to write the words from my country so that I would be known outside my country, then I could be invited to speak; that was the strategy.

Riason Naidoo

Did it work?

Chéri Samba

I don’t know if it worked, because sometimes it’s not just what I write that interests people, but what I present in pictures. This is what people see first.

Riason Naidoo

You first met André Magnin in 1987. Tell me about that meeting.

Chéri Samba

I saw a gentleman who arrived in my studio who introduced himself as André Magnin. He wanted to do for the very first time an exhibition, which was to bring together several artists from Africa, from all over the world, approximately 100 artists. I was chosen. He told me that I wasn’t going to do anything else. If I had a trip in mind, I must just forget about it … I just trusted Mr. Magnin, who was going to present my work at the exhibition, and it paid off. I did what he asked me to do, and we developed a mutual trust.

Riason Naidoo

And what about the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989? What was it like to be part of the exhibition? Could you describe the moment of going to Paris and participating at the Centre Pompidou? 

Chéri Samba

Magicians of the Earth was an exhibition that brought together several tendencies of artwork we were doing. There were already people who exhibited in museums, and there were others that we did not know, as if they were not artists … but André Magnin saw that this misunderstanding should not continue to exist. So, he said that he found many other artists more interesting. Why not include them in this exhibition? Like the word said, “magicians,”—people who presented incredible things but who were not recognized as artists. The exhibition pissed off a few artists, it has been said, but we will not talk about that. It was the artists at that time that André Magnin and his colleagues had found who really made the difference in that year.

Riason Naidoo

Are you a strategist and politician as well as an artist? I’m thinking of your inclusion of Europeans in your paintings, also of other artists such as Picasso, to broaden your audience.

Chéri Samba

It’s true, I’m an artist, what I say and what people seem to ignore. Whether we are in politics or not, we are in the water. Artists also help politicians to change their position. In my opinion, it is the artists who help the politicians to improve themselves. In my work, in my country, it has paid off; it helped to make sense of politics.

You know, our policies had instituted the system of learning only foreign languages, ​​and we ignore our languages … Everyone speaks English, German … We do not know our languages. When I was given an award by the Prince Claus Fund in 2005 in Amsterdam, it was for my satire and the recognition of the languages in my paintings. I spoke about it during my presentation and saw in the schools at home that language learning was initiated at the source. This is what I mean when I say that the artist helps the politician to improve himself. Whether we play politics or not, we are in it.

Riason Naidoo

The universal themes in your paintings (the everyday, education, politics, sexuality, humor) are part of this strategy to reach more collectors or a wider audience? 

Chéri Samba

Yes, all these themes are universal. If I look at my recent painting On est tous pareils, (We Are All the Same), 2020, I think it’s universal. In J’aime la couleur (I Love Color), 2010, I told people that we should turn our heads a bit like in the spiral to know everything around us, which is only color. Whereas there are people who ignore the notion of colors so there is only one color, black. I say that I am not black, even though I can dress in black. We were told, this is a conventional color, as if there are no other colors.

Riason Naidoo

Why do you often depict yourself in your paintings?

Chéri Samba

First, I think it’s a joy in yourself to know how to achieve perfect things in their exactness. If I represent a rooster, a hen, we do not see a pigeon, so there is a pride to know how to succeed in things that can surprise others. It is this representation that makes me happy and not to annoy people unnecessarily. When you present the face of yourself, you eliminate the risks. I once presented on purpose a painting with the face of a stranger. A second gentleman, and everyone who saw the artwork, said that it was the second gentleman that I had captured in the painting—that I had titled Les Abyssales [meaning, someone who hid the dirty clothes under the mattress]—which was false. For that I had paid fines, and I said to myself that I don’t need this kind of bullshit again. I don’t represent animals, so if I have to present a face, then it would have to be my own face whether I succeed or not, but it should be me.

Riason Naidoo

How has the technique in your work evolved over all these years? 

Chéri Samba

At the time, I was able to do five or ten paintings in a week, and today when I see the paintings done several years ago, I cannot believe it. Without knowing it, I saw that the technique has changed a lot, not to say improved. My production is a lot less now. I finished a painting after a few breaks because I focus on doing small details, and this takes a lot of my time. In the past, I didn’t worry too much about depicting details, but now I do. I think that has changed a lot, in a good way.

Riason Naidoo

And for the themes?

Chéri Samba

I have suitcases full of ideas that I can take at any time, but it’s not so easy anymore, because I work a bit like a journalist. They work on a daily basis. I don’t have to resort to things that happened years ago because there are always new things happening. I have had a hard time dipping into my suitcase, and the suitcase fills up all the time. So, I take things that affect me from everyday life.

Riason Naidoo

I’ve read that Escher and Picasso are references in your work. Are there any African artists who inspire you, living or dead?

Chéri Samba

Léger, Picasso, Magritte, or anyone else are not my references. I went into this painter’s adventure without any knowledge of other artists. It was during the time that I was in the profession that I heard about these artists, and my eyes did not prevent me from seeing what they were doing.

I saw their work … and saw that it wasn’t bad, that there were things that interested me also in their technique. To satisfy myself, to cheer myself up, I thought to myself what they did, I can do too. I might not be able to compete with them, but I thought I too can do this. At the beginning, I was talking about other paintings at the art fair; those did not impress me, these artists whose works cost millions. I will not mention the names, but it is as if it was my children’s work.

The artists you mentioned are not my models, but I appreciated their work after I got into art, into this art adventure. There are a lot of artists in my country who were not my role models, but whose work I admired, such as Pilipili Mulongoy, Albert Lubaki, Pierre Bodo. There are also young people such as JP Mika, the work he presents; I had the impression that things were moving.

There was a client who asked me, can you do something that moves? I said, but how can you do something that moves in painting, like something that gives you the chills? Don’t tell me the Légers, the Picassos. They existed before me and did a good job that I admired, but that does not mean that they were my models. I am my own role model.

You know, I had three bosses before I set out on my own, but they didn’t draw paintings like me. They were people who were writing [signboards]. I don’t even know if I can call them artists. And those gentlemen there, when I was doing a painting, when I was doing a portrait, if the customer refused, my bosses weren’t able to correct where I had gone wrong. We used to say that we couldn’t work well there, because we are on the main artery; there is too much noise from vehicles [on the road]. This is why we took the work home to work quietly. And when it came back, we could see the difference. That’s why I said I didn’t have a master. It was I who pushed myself.

The interview was conducted in French in Paris on September 11, 2020, at Galerie Magnin-A. Transcription in French by Eric Mercier. First published in New Frame (Johannesburg) in October 2020.

Drip is temporary 14 Oct 2:00 AM (7 days ago)

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

My ghetto is not your inspiration.

Lekau Sehoana’s clothing business had been around for nearly half a decade—but its sudden popularity and the humble beginnings of its founder made it look like a miracle out of nowhere. Founded in 2019, after a series of other genuine attempts at entrepreneurship, Sehoana sold Drip to consumers as the township dream; it was what happens when the enduring legacies of colonialism—and apartheid—that continue to make townships a spatial reality in democratic South Africa aren’t a factor. That tagline—the township dream—could often be seen splashed in bright letters on the company’s fleet of vehicles and the billboards that came to be at the center of a controversy that will likely come to define the legacy of a man once thought to be South Africa’s most popular entrepreneur. The poster boy of the country’s neoliberal possibilities.

In 2022, during an interview with Sehoana, popular radio presenter and podcaster Sibusiso Leope remarked that the colorful billboards advertising Drip sneakers on Sandton’s M1 road were like “an announcement of a new sheriff in town.” A relatively new and black-managed business advertising in Sandton isn’t insignificant: Sandton is the largest and most visible concentration of South Africa’s symbols of inequality. In 2019 Time magazine put photographer Jonny Miller’s drone image of a leafy Sandton neighborhood against an Alexandra township defined by the congestion of informal settlement structures on its cover. The point? Illustrating the sharp inequality that now defines much of the country. It’s in the few kilometers that divide Alexandra township and Sandton City that the country’s contradictions are most vivid. For Sehoana, advertising in Sandton was more than the pronouncement of a business or product; to advertise in Sandton is to announce both flight and arrival—like many who found success in the continent’s richest square mile—he had defied the dispiriting conditions of the working-class neighborhood that raised him. But as he would come to find out, defying spatial colonialism as a young businessperson eager to prove himself was one thing—sustaining a business was another.

There was something joyous—even exciting—about watching someone who once described himself as “a hoodrunk” realize the height of his potential. That joy was rooted in the impossibility of starting a business and holding your own. Only 1 percent of South African start-ups are said to grow to become viable enterprises. Drip was an attempt to distill an ungenerous township experience into a symbol of resilience. Its success lent weight to a broader cultural argument by some contemporary post-apartheid designers—about decolonizing the aesthetic and language—that defines the value of a cultural brand. They argued that a vernacular term and the history that tints it—stitched on a pair of jeans—can come to carry as much cultural value as a foreign luxury brand, even as its target market, elites in the South African context, seeks to mimic a Western lifestyle. Though “drip” is not a classical vernacular or indigenous term, it relied on and advanced that argument more than any other local brand that shied away from the politics of decolonial aesthetics and language.

Like any country marching to the beat of neoliberal capitalism, South Africa places great importance on acumen and sees business as a logical answer to some of its socioeconomic problems. What followed Sehoana in the wake of Drip’s liquidation were all the arguments about what he should’ve done and not done. Sehoana himself was a neoliberal crusader, often speaking of not just building a business but setting up systems that would ensure that the business outlives him. He was acutely aware of both the stakes and technicalities of turning a start-up into a behemoth. But there’s no amount of business acumen—or policy literacy—that can compensate for a poor cultural argument.

“Clothing is so close to the body, audiences take massaging from brands personally. More so, in the South African context where we already have so many issues around exclusion, audiences are sensitive to messaging that echoes exclusion as it relates to class, gender, and race,” says fashion writer and historian Khensani Mohlatlole when I ask whether a poor cultural reading of an audience or consumer base can be fatal to a business. Sehoana successfully packaged social fugitivity into a sneaker—but could not sell it at the market. As a result, Drip as a symbol of upward mobility came to be more important than Drip as … a decent product.

When he announced its liquidation, much of the discourse about Drip revolved around what everyone considered to be his obvious mistake: rapid expansion (at the peak of his business, Sehoana oversaw 18 retail stores across the country). But the most obvious mistake and inherent limit of Sehoana’s business was a lack of cultural buy-in. Many of the South African local clothing brands that have been successful in the post-apartheid era anchored their survival and success on courting or attaching to a cultural phenomenon. Mzwandile Nzimande and Sechaba Mogale exploited South Africa’s hip-hop scene to make their clothing brand Loxion Kulca synonymous with cool. On the cover art of their 2008 album Can’t Touch This members of the legendary South African kwaito group Trompies stand against a split background of tires, scrap metal, and an empty township street, a tribute to their respective working-class backgrounds. They wear Dickies’ iconic utility shirts that have come to be synonymous with certain aspects of Kwaito’s visual or aesthetic culture. It isn’t a sponsored image but speaks to the American clothing brand’s success in embedding itself with a South African cultural symbol which has ensured its success as a business. Dickies has never officially endorsed or sponsored Trompies but ask any South African which brand they associate with the group they’ll say Dickies. Or which group they associate with the brand, they’ll say South African kwaito group Trompies. It was the same reason American brand Reebok broke rank with international apparel brands’ unspoken boycott of kwaito, because despite its popularity and crossover appeal, it was essentially a critique of the exploitative conditions (“hase mo’state mo”) that attracted foreign brands to the country and offered kwaito star Kabelo Mabalane the country’s first sneaker (Bouga Luv) endorsement deal in 2005.

Sehoana joined with Southern Africa’s biggest pop star, Refiloe Phoolo, a.k.a. Cassper Nyovest, in what he called the most significant partnership ever created between a non-athlete personality and an athleisure brand rumored to be worth US$5 million. Sehoana compared the structure of the deal to that between Nike and basketball legend Michael Jordan, which made the brand synonymous with US sporting and popular culture. With that agreement, he hoped to mirror what Nike did with Jordan and Dickies did with kwaito. At the time of the signing Phoolo was still Southern Africa’s biggest star at least by the numbers. To date, he remains the only independent Southern African rapper—of his generation—to fill successive major venues, including stadiums, to capacity. But for all his cultural weight, Phoolo could neither carry nor save Drip. It wasn’t the first time a business agreement centered around a celebrity fails to transform the fortunes of a local business. In the late 2000s, South African telecommunications company Cell C, attempting to hold its own in a fiercely contested markett, decided to rope in Bonginkosi “Zola” Dlamini, then Southern Africa’s biggest pop star. For three years, Dlamini would be the face of the company and have a brand of products, as part of what was billed then as the first endorsement deal of its kind. But though popular, Dlamini’s cultural weight would have little bearing on the fortunes of the company. Sehoana seems to have been hatching his bets on the miracle of a business deal driven by the appeal of celebrity too. It might have worked, but his corporate expansion seemed to have been moving faster than he could make a cultural argument about why people should ditch their treasured Nikes and embrace an obscure label out of a South African township.

In the world’s most unequal country, everything comes down to appreciating the nuances of class and race, but aspirant capitalists like Sehoana, who rely on the allure of upward mobility as a unique selling point of their business, rarely anticipate resistance or their intentions being read critically. This is how Drip, a brand that claimed a working-class background as inspiration, ends up with billboards in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the continent, assuming it will be read as a triumph and attract new business. It is also how Phoolo, a millionaire pop star, becomes the face of Drip when it claims to want to appeal to working-class consumers. Of course, as a businessperson in a country where the face of corruption and failure is black, Sehoana was always going to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to scrub the stench of failure that comes with surviving structural issues.

The argument of a celebrity endorsement or marketing deal is that if enough elites embrace something, then ordinary people will uncritically embrace that same thing. Sehoana and Drip weren’t wrong to hatch their bet on Phoolo; he’s Southern Africa’s most significant cultural figure of the last decade. But if one listened closely, part of what went wrong in Phoolo’s partnership with Drip could be heard in his music. In the song “Phumakim” from his acclaimed 2015 debut album Tsholofelo Phoolo raps about being rich enough to transcend both the racial and class context of his upbringing. Phoolo was delivered to superstardom mainly by young black South Africans trying to escape and redefine the class context of their parents. So, it was easy to celebrate attaining wealth as a sufficient condition for social freedom, but as they’ve grown to become weary adults in the world’s most unequal country, it’s only natural that most would struggle to relate to materialism as a symbol of success. By the time Sehoana and Drip offered him a deal based on his celebrity status, the context of Phoolo’s fame was different. He was no longer the rapper who commanded the adoration of 20-year-olds who could be told to flock to Drip stores to purchase sneakers.

Phoolo’s partnership with Drip was part of a scorched-earth approach to their marketing campaign that made Drip popular even as the logical opium of the cool. But it comes undone when every cultural symbol Seohana deploys to hook the market misfires. A kit sponsorship of South African legendary football club Moroka Swallows, a collaboration with South Korean brand Fila, and another celebrity partnership with veteran house DJ Zinhle as the face of Drip’s signature perfume Finesse were all meant to inject the brand with cultural mileage. At best, those partnerships were an ode to a bygone era—Sehoana might have hoped that a bit of nostalgia and economic nationalism would endear Drip to a consumer base. But love and nostalgia are not tangible or even sustainable market goods.

At some point, Drip would have to qualify its claim as a business that is conscious of the realities of the township. Or a business that contends with the context of the environment it’s operating in or its market, in Drip’s case, the grit of township life. Sehoana sang praises to the township as an inspiration for Drip, but what seemed to have got lost in the liberal hymn of upward mobility is that townships are ultimately war zones. That people have made a life and community out of a township doesn’t alter the fabric of its reality: Poor policing and underfunded public health facilities mean death stalks every township corner. Overcrowded classrooms and a lack of recreational activities mean a disrupted childhood. Sehoana sold hope in a market saturated with hope dealers—when he should’ve been selling survival. Root of Fame (ROF), Phoolo’s signature sneaker and Drip’s most popular offering, is a case in point. ROF teased comfort but it’s quite clear from its design that a sewerage-spilling township street was not a factor in that process. The township of Sehoana’s imagination is not a place intentionally starved of resources to function effectively as a cheap labor camp but a portal of social possibilities. That might have been his most fatal mistake.

It’s not that Drip was above failure—life’s greatest teacher is often failure. In many cases, it’s even necessary—but Sehoana carried a different weight; the burden of culture. He was not allowed to fail in all the normal ways a person might fail. He was not a cultural immigrant. Unlike corporations, he didn’t have to exploit or harvest the intimacy and genius of the township to sell his product. More than anyone, he should’ve known the limits of his argument; one can only go so far with the narrative of triumph.

Making space for the ordinary 13 Oct 4:00 AM (7 days ago)

MADEYOULOOK’s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.

MADEYOULOOK is an interdisciplinary collaboration formed by Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa. The two met while studying art at WITS University in Johannesburg, where they graduated in 2009. The work Sermon on the Train, a series of public readings on Johannesburg trains, dates back to that period. Fifteen years have passed since then, and they continue to meet weekly to exchange ideas and implement projects.

Like other black South African artists of their generation (they were both born in the late 1980s), they say the origin of their work was “in response to the feeling that the university, and particularly the art school, did not consider our context.” Over the years, their work has explored different languages—they often call it “undisciplined”—but has kept long-term research and collaborations as its methodology, and the everyday life practices of black people in South Africa as its focus. Their project, “Quiet Ground,” was selected by curator Portia Malatjie to represent South Africa at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024.

MADEYOULOOK’s “Dinokana” is a 20-minute, 8-channel sound installation that explores the cultural significance of rain and water in traditional South African life. The soundscape is experienced within a constructed environment, which alludes to Bokoni’s terraced hillsides, and where visitors can sit. The artwork takes as its point of departure the histories of the Bahurutse and Bakoni, and their cycles of displacement and return. It includes clippings of the resurrection plant, a symbol of healing and resilience linked to rain, traditional medicine, and regeneration. It is possible to see the work at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation until November 15 as part of the exhibition “Structures” curated by Stephen Hobbs, Rebecca Potterton, and Wolff Architects. The project is divided into three sections: Situatedness, Infrastructures, and Typologies. Together, the works examine the relationship between space and subjectivity through the lenses of translation, memory, heritage, and migration; investigate how architecture—both formal and informal—embodies power and ideology, contrasting ideological frameworks with iconography; and explore the sensorial and abstract dimensions of personal and collective practices and rituals in both urban and rural contexts. The exhibition features: Igshaan Adams (ZA); Kader Attia (DZ/ FR); Kamyar Bineshtarigh (IR/ZA); Jellel Gasteli (TN/FR); David Goldblatt (ZA); Kiluanji Kia Henda (AO); MADEYOULOOK (ZA); Matri-Archi(tecture) (ZA/CH); Hélio Oiticica (BR); Hajra Waheed (IN)

In Section 3: Typologies, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho from MADEYOULOOK present “Landscapes of Repair,” where they discuss their interest in everyday black practices in South Africa, and reflect on their understanding of what it means to have a relationship with nature. They speak about sixteen years of working collaboratively and highlight several of their projects. Molemo and Nare also share insights into the process behind their multimedia installation “Dinokana,” which was commissioned for the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 and can now be experienced in South Africa for the first time as part of the “Structures” exhibition.

In this conversation, conducted online in March 2024 as part of “Southern Thought on a Northern Biennale” project, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho discuss their interest in everyday black practices in South Africa.

Laura Burocco

How did you start working as a duo, and how would you describe your practice?

Molemo Moiloa

We met at university, and we shared a similar feeling. It just felt like there was a whole other art world beyond being at that university. It just didn’t connect with it at all. And so in a way, our initial way of working together was a very reactionary kind of thing,  and very much engaged with public space as well. And that shifted over time. I think the thing that’s stayed cool from that period has been this idea of working with the everyday and thinking about sort of everyday black life as a kind of locus of thought and intellectual production. So that continues… We both had jobs and, therefore, were able to just keep working independently. So we would meet every Thursday. We have done that pretty much for the last 15 years and made projects over very long periods of time. Usually, our work is very research-based, and it is very iterative, like a lot of our projects have many, many versions. And it has definitely informed the kind of way of working, in the sense that our work is very project-based. It’s often quite multi-modal —like we’ll have a large discursive programme, we will have sort of exhibition practices, and then we will have writing practice, all related to certain ideas. And that’s because we’re more interested in the exploration of ideas than necessarily developing pictorial representations that go on walls.

Laura Burocco

When describing your works, reference is often made to “practices of everyday life of black people in South Africa,” but also the defamiliarization with this everyday life. Can you develop more?

Nare Mokgotho

I think some of the art comes out from the disquiet we had with our arts education. So, almost feeling like our lives, and black life in general, was kind of underrepresented in our education […] and to have that feeling that what you’re speaking about doesn’t really constitute knowledge can be quite a damaging feeling. But also to have that legitimized by someone who’s nodding as you’re speaking and who has a similar kind of somatic and lip experience as you, and can interpret things that others may not be able to see, and begin to legitimize that as knowledge, I think, is again very powerful.

The way of working around defamiliarizing I think is to look at things that you see again and again and again in a slightly different way […] And so what our practice has really been about is actually taking very familiar practices to us and relooking them and going actually, “hang on, there’s so much more going on here than we ourselves actually even understand.”

Molemo Moiloa

An early text that also really informed our thinking is Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary. That text is kind of an early ‘90s response to kind of moving away from the notion of the spectacular. Ndebele’s critique is that anti-apartheid artistic practices tended to be spectacularizing: they aimed to represent either oppression—thus needing to display the blood and gore of violence—or resistance—thus needing to heroize. As a result, art was always driven by spectacle. Because of the political pressure to resist through artistic practice, ordinary life was not allowed to be explored; artists did not have the luxury of engaging with the everyday or the mundane. This “rediscovery of the ordinary” therefore becomes an effort to reclaim the ordinary as a space of power, depth, and beauty.

I think this notion of defamiliarization is also deeply connected to that, to our strong interest in examining the minute details of everyday life and then diving very deeply into them. For example, taking something as simple as your grandmother’s garden as a starting point, and then going deeper and deeper into it to unpack questions about group areas act, forced removal, photographic archives of Black life, notions of pleasure, and so on.

Nare Mokgotho

Belonging here.

Laura Burocco

You were selected by the South African curator Portia Malatjie to represent South Africa at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, which opened on April 20, 2024. Can you tell me about the work you presented in Venice, “Quiet Ground”?

Molemo Moiloa

Our work speaks very specifically to the notions of questions of repair and how we kind of lean on histories of South African land relationships to think about how we create modes of belonging, and repair our relationships to home. And thinking very much about relationships to nature and indigenous knowledge systems, and kind of using oral histories to make those connections. In particular, water. So this work really engages with infrastructures of water from two particular histories that we’ve been looking at.

Nare Mokgotho

So the way we’re thinking about water is very much as connected to the land and not as something entirely different from it. So we have been looking at two historical sites. One of them is called Dinokana, an area in the northwest of South Africa, which historically was a water-rich area and quite green. The people of the area often grew surplus food. In the early 1900s, there were successful farmers to the point that they could sell some of their produce […] The Bantustan [system] completely starved this area of the water, which they naturally had access to through two fountains by re-channelling them. So this village is now completely arid, whereas previously it had a close relationship to water.

The other site that we have been thinking through is an area in Mpumalanga which is the historical home of people called the Bokoni, who since about the 1800s have had quite a cycle of loss and removal and displacement from their land, but also have a history of returning to particular portions of their land, trying to begin to reconnect and repair the relationships to land.

So these are the two sides that we are kind of seeing as models for how we can think about repair, because our histories in South Africa of land have been very much about displacement. Even in the 1980s, there are still communities that are being displaced, but there are communities that continue to insist on their relationship with the land.

Molemo Moiloa

One of the things we resist in our work is the reductive way of treating South Africa’s history as the black-and-white image of apartheid. The cycles of violence and land dispossession we talk about are not purely colonial. And so these questions about cycles of reparations do not fit so easily into the simple black-and-white narratives in which South Africa can often find itself involved.

Laura Burocco

Can it be said that your work also refers to the relationship of Indigenous people with the land, or in some way, indigeneity?

Molemo Moiloa

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of side of repair is definitely much more the emphasis, and I don’t know if we talk about indigeneity, but definitely speak to notions of kind of indigenous knowledge systems. So, I’m thinking about where a politics of epistemic power emerges. And thinking also about how relationships to the land sort of span this spiritual, economic,  technical, or scientific, and these kinds of crossings, and grade points, or undisciplined ways of approaching knowledge systems. And definitely kind of thinking about how we might reclaim some of these. So we’re looking through the sound archive in particular to unpack some of those complexities.. I think our work is not so concerned with what constitutes the Indigenous per say, and in part because one of the things we’re also resisting a bit in this work is that the work that we’ve done particularly around Bokoni, but in Dinokana as well, these cycles of violence and land dispossession are not purely colonial […] And so those are kind of like internal displacements […] they’re not the sort of black and white apartheid removal sort of image. And so these questions of cycles of repair don’t fit all that easily into simple narratives of black and white that South Africa can often find itself engaging in.

Laura Burocco

So the artwork is a sound installation…

Nare Mokgotho

So we really have worked in a very multi-modal way, but we’ve also worked in a way that’s very undisciplined. So, the core of our practice is actually driven by the exploration of the ideas, and however that is expressed for us really isn’t always a huge hang up […] But sound has always been something that we have been interested in since 2012, but not so much when we started the “Non-Monuments” project, a kind of oral history, working with archives and going into sound archives. The sort of composed sound is something that is quite new, and somehow people now mistake us as sound artists, which we aren’t. We’re just undisciplined. We just move about where the ideas carry us. That’s where we go. So the “Non Monuments” was about people engaging with underrepresented histories, which were just captured in a sonic way.

Molemo Moiloa

We’re looking at Beti and Tswana songs because of the two places we’re working from. If you’re South African, you know the songs immediately. You can sing the songs you know, and you know what those songs mean. You know the politics of those songs. Immediately  […] And yeah, I think if you know those sounds, they also make you feel in a very particular kind of way.

Laura Burocco

A sound installation, with references to sound archives, that uses Bantu languages, with strong references for those familiar with South Africa.. How do you think “the other” can understand it [in Venice]?

Molemo Moiloa

I think, particularly with that work, we didn’t really need people to understand; we needed people to feel. And what we found is that people who wanted to feel, they felt.

Laura Burocco

What excited you and what concerned you about Venice?

Nare Mokgotho

I think what excites us is to do, again, a deep dive into the work we’ve started. This is something we’ve been doing for the past seven years, and the research we’ve been doing for that time has led to multiple projects in the “Project Ejaradini” and the Documenta work [“Mafolofolo”] to a film work that we did [“Menagano”]. And I think what excites us is to explore the potentials of sound, and then that sort of affective response that a lot of people had to our work. We want to explore that a bit further and see what the logical conclusion of that might be. It’s something I think we’ve been working on for the past 14 years,  to try and get beauty and affection into conceptual work. And what happened with “Mafolofolo,” I think, was beautiful because of that, so I wanted to see again how much further we can push that.

Molemo Moiloa

I think in terms of a thing that concerns us [ …] is that usually our work is not just an exhibition. Usually, we would enable more discursive engagement, and like we would often try to connect with the local context in some way, meet with people interested in similar themes, and run programs and engage with them. And for various reasons, that’s kind of not looking possible […] It’s the nature of Venice. It’s, I suppose, very much exhibition. So that feels maybe a bit strange for how we usually work. It’s not a big concern; it’s just maybe a bit different. But the intention is very much for this work to come to South Africa and to be shown in South Africa. So I think in the South African context, there’ll be much more capacity for that.

Laura Burocco

Any expectations?

Nare Mokgotho

The expectation is to make it good and then bring it home. That’s what we’re most excited about. I think people think of us a lot of times as just exhibition artists doing large-scale installations, which is nice. It’s one part of our work. But there’s also this very discursive part of our work, which I think in South Africa we’re much more known for. And the work that travels doesn’t always get to be seen here because of the economics of things. We’ve been able to show like two major works, two major works in South Africa: “Ejaradini,” at Johannesburg Art Gallery [JAG], and “Corner Loving” at the Goethe project space.

Molemo Moiloa

We do work here a lot, but then it’s often the cheaper stuff that happens here. The work we do here [ South Africa] is experiential, discursive. Kind of convening work. But in terms of actually showing our work, work like the Documenta work, we wanted to bring it home, but we didn’t manage. We’ve done some listening sessions, but we’ve never brought the work back. And that’s purely because the South African scene is so defined by the commercial sector, and the only kind of work you get to see here is stuff that is commercially viable, which is not our case. It just means that it’s really difficult to show anything here that is pricey for us to make. Even just in terms of where you exhibit things, it’s quite challenging. There are not a lot of substantial exhibition spaces that you can show in. We did a work at the JAG and we did it ourselves. So yeah, I think it’s really important for us to finally be able to bring something back because all the work we make is for South African audiences.

We think about our work as sort of operating on many layers. So you can enter into the work at a sort of initial entry layer if you’re from another place and you don’t speak the language or whatever. And the more you know about the context, about the language, about the references, the more you have access to the multiple layers, and, inevitably, the deepest layer is a South African audience. And yet we don’t get to show our work yet. So I think it’s really an important thing for us.

Nare Mokgotho

To bring this back and have people listen to the work as intended would be very amazing.

Molemo Moiloa

Yeah. We’re learning some lessons from Documenta. We’re even building the islands in such a way that you can unpack it. It’s like IKEA furniture, so you can put it back in a box and bring it home!

Laura Burocco

It seems like an excellent way to use Venice…

“Dinokana” will be exhibiting at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) until November 15, Tuesday to Friday, (9am–5pm. Admission to JCAF is free and by appointment only. Book here.

Cameroon’s last election 10 Oct 2:41 AM (10 days ago)

The outcome of the October 12 elections may make or break the resource-rich Central African nation.

In July 2025, President Paul Biya made a simple post on X. “I am a candidate for the … presidential election,” he wrote, adding, “Rest assured that my determination to serve you is commensurate with the serious challenges facing us… The best is still to come.” If his acolytes are to be believed, the impetus behind the 92-year-young Biya’s choice was merely a response to the people’s call—at least, from his loyal supporters. But what stood out most was the emphasis on the medium of the announcement itself: social media. The head of state’s camp painted Biya’s use of X as proof of his connection to young Cameroonians, who are the most active users of the platforms and make up about 60 percent of Cameroon’s  population. It is an allegation steeped in irony, as for more than four decades of Biya’s rule, the country’s youth have been consistently sidelined, excluded from meaningful political participation and decision-making.

After more than four decades of Biya’s rule, Cameroon appears to be sliding backwards. Public infrastructure is crumbling, insecurity and corruption are on the rise, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, the government is deep in debt, and the threat of secession in English-speaking Cameroon continues to hang over the nation. Given the fragile state of affairs, Cameroonians have taken to calling the impending vote “Cameroon’s last election,” for many reasons—notable among them being that if the incumbent leader wins, Biya will be nearly 100 years old by the end of his eighth term.

Earlier this year, we had predicted that Biya’s victory was a foregone conclusion if he decided to run again for Cameroon’s top job, but a lot has changed on the ground. Two of Biya’s long-standing allies, former Minister of Employment and Vocational Training Issa Tchiroma Bakary and erstwhile Tourism and Leisure Minister Bello Bouba Maigari, shocked the country by resigning from his government. Resignations are not new under Biya, but the departure of these particular figures is significant—the timing, geography, and political bases they command allow for an otherwise unprecedented dialogue over the elderly head of state’s mandate. Coming from the predominantly Muslim northern regions of Cameroon—Adamawa, North, and Far North—with a large voter base making up about 32 percent of Cameroon’s registered voters, Issa Tchiroma and Maigari could significantly disrupt Biya’s usual landslide victories or even push him out of power.

The secretary general at the presidency of Cameroon, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, often seen as the de facto leader cum “shadow president,” earlier on turned the presidency into what looked like a campaign hub of his own. He received delegations from all walks of life: religious leaders, youth representatives, and political elites, who, in return, pledged their support for the incumbent. Biya, who remains largely absent from the scene of daily politicking, had ceded his signature authority to Ngoh Ngoh, a move that has stirred growing resentment among sections of the political elite, who accuse him of usurping power from the “democratically elected president.”

“A country cannot exist in the service of one man,” declared Issa Tchiroma, now a candidate in the upcoming elections. He now refers to the Biya government as “broken.” According to Biya’s one-time spin doctor, centralization has failed. In an unexpected twist of events, Tchiroma—who once linked federalism to secession when Anglophone Cameroonians asked for it—is now proposing the same system of government as the magic wand that will take Cameroon out of the woods. Addressing a crowd in his hometown, Tchiroma is heard urging his people to take their destinies into their own hands. “We haven’t solved your old problems. But if we unite now, we can solve them for good,” he said. “It’s time to act. When the time comes, put in your envelope what will end our misery.”

Before joining the Biya government, both Tchiroma and Maigari were once its victims. Maigari served as Biya’s first prime minister from 1982 to 1983, shortly after Biya came to power. In 1984, however, he was forced into exile following accusations of involvement in a failed coup led by allies of former president Ahmadou Ahidjo, mostly from the north. He later returned and founded the National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP) in 1992. The party remained in alliance with Biya until 2025, when Maigari began showing interest in the presidency.

Tchiroma, unlike Maigari, did not manage to escape after the coup attempt. He was arrested and spent six years in prison. During his detention, he learned English—a skill that would later shape his political career. After his release, he joined Maigari’s UNDP but left in 2007 to form his own party, the Front for the Cameroon National Salvation(FNSC). Like the UNDP, his party maintained a marriage of convenience with the Biya regime until he, too, announced his intention to run for the country’s top job.

What makes Tchiroma and Maigari different from most of Biya’s former allies is that they have strong political foundations of their own. They are not members of the ruling party; instead, each leads a separate political party with genuine grassroots support, particularly in the north. For years now, they have been clamoring for power to “come back home,” having produced Cameroon’s first president—and the patience of these two northern powerbrokers appears to have worn thin.

But Tchiroma and Maigari are not the only ones seeking to end Biya’s 43-year rule over Cameroon. Ten other candidates have also been cleared by the elections body to take part. In total, a record 83 people submitted their candidacies for the presidency; only 13, including Biya, were approved. Missing from that list: Biya’s main challenger, Prof. Maurice Kamto, who finished second in the last election with over 14 percent of the vote. His dream of running again was cut short after the election body ELECAM rejected his candidacy through the African Movement for New Independence and Democracy (MANIDEM), a move that was widely considered by Cameroonians as a political maneuver by the ruling class designed to sideline Biya’s most formidable challenger.

Kamto is often called the “Pope of Law” in Cameroon. To his critics, the title mocks the “all-knowing law professor” who was outmaneuvered by the Biya regime. But his supporters highlight his key role in the landmark 2002 International Court of Justice ruling that granted Cameroon sovereignty over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, a territory also claimed by Nigeria. His international reputation as a lawyer and his courage to challenge the Biya regime, especially after the 2018 presidential election boosted his political profile; his earlier service in the Biya government also gave him insider knowledge of the system he now opposes. Kamto mobilized supporters to protest what he called a rigged election—a move that led to his arrest and nine months in detention on charges of insurrection and seemingly strengthened his credibility among many Cameroonians as a symbol of resistance. The candidate he endorses would gain a major advantage, leveraging both Kamto’s clout and the tribe’s significant financial support to become a frontrunner. Kamto has set strict conditions: He will only give his endorsement to a coalition that includes Tchiroma and Maigari. Otherwise, he has urged voters to “follow their conscience.”

With the Pope of Law out of the race, the only real chance of defeating the incumbent now lies in a coalition—but the question of who would lead it hangs unresolved, and Cameroon’s long history of a fragmented opposition makes the dream of a united front seem unlikely. While opposition parties have been discussing this idea—two of the three candidates who originate from Anglophone Cameroon have already withdrawn to endorse Maigari—key opposition figures such as Maigari, Joshua Osih of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), and Cabral Libii, the young politician who came third in the last presidential elections, have vowed to never be part of any coalition. Despite Tchiroma and Maigari presenting themselves as insiders who are capable of sending Biya packing, Cameroonians remain skeptical, accusing them of enjoying the perks of Biya’s government for years and turning against him only now that it suits their ambitions.  Célestin Djamen, another opposition leader, described the two politicians as “situationists, profiteers, and mercenaries of politics.”

The campaign promises have been swift and all-encompassing. Osih has pledged to resolve the Anglophone crisis within his first 100 days in office. Maigari promises to convene an inclusive national dialogue within six months of his presidency and to grant amnesty to all prisoners of conscience as part of national reconciliation. Cabral Libii also supports dialogue with Anglophone leaders, regardless of their stance, and has even suggested relocating the presidency to one of the English-speaking regions as a gesture of unity. Tchiroma, who once labeled protesting Anglophones as “terrorists” while serving as minister of communication, now attributes the crisis to Biya’s over-centralized system and believes federalism is the only lasting solution.

While opposition parties in Cameroon struggle to agree on a single candidate to face the ruling party, many of them share similar ideas on major national issues. All the candidates vow to fight corruption, the hallmark of Biya’s Cameroon, and to reform key institutions—Tchiroma plans to conduct a full state audit at the start of his term, while Maigari proposes reducing the presidential term from seven to five years, renewable once, lowering the voting age from 20 to 18, and guaranteeing judicial independence. Tchiroma, Osih, and Cabral Libii all propose a federal system of government to address the long-debated “form of the state.” Cabral Libii, however, suggests a model he calls community federalism—inspired partly by Ethiopia’s system, though he compares it to Belgium and South Africa. Maigari, on the other hand, says he would let Cameroonians themselves decide through a national consultation. Given the country’s growing dissatisfaction with decades of centralized rule, public sentiment currently leans toward federalism.

Looming over the highly sectarian voter base is the lingering question of the fraught Anglophone crisis. The Anglophone regions of Cameroon in the Northwest and Southwest, home to about 20 percent of the population, have been locked in a secessionist war with the central government for nearly nine years. Fighters seeking to create an independent state they call Ambazonia have vowed to disrupt the upcoming presidential elections. Ironically, this unrest works in favor of the ruling party, which can use its control of security forces to protect loyal voters and manage the few polling stations that will open in the conflict  zones, which has been a failsafe modus operandi in past elections. Before the crisis, Anglophone Cameroon was the stronghold of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), but insecurity has since helped Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) dominate politics in the area. For the opposition to win what is now Biya’s stronghold, the crisis must end; they simply don’t have the funds to motivate and protect supporters willing to risk voting.

Unfortunately for the opposition movement, coalitions alone will not suffice in restoring a long-entrenched lack of trust in Cameroon’s electing bodies. With members appointed directly by the president, it is hard for Cameroonians to lay their confidence on their impartiality, driving low voter turnout and increasingly daunting levels of  voter apathy. While Cameroonians are genuinely hungry for change, turnout at the polls has always been disappointingly low compared to the number of people eligible to vote. In the 2018 presidential election, for example, about 6.6 million registered, but only around 3.5 million actually voted—out of a national population of nearly 27 million. The 2011 elections were no different: 7 million registered, but only 5 million showed up to vote. Part of the problem is trust—or the lack of it. The elections body inspires little confidence, engendering a self-fulfilling prophecy of minimal change in the country’s executive administration.

As October 12 draws nearer, the question lingers: Is this finally the twilight of Biya’s rule, or just another chapter in his endless reign? While Cameroon appears to be sliding backwards, a spectrum of challengers have arisen in the hopes of taking the country to its next era: Some promising X, and others promising Y. For Cameroon to have a chance of progressing past decades of business-as-usual melancholia, a coalition will need to come from this discord—one that seeks to address regional sectarianism, neocolonial neglect, and youthful discontent.

Armed with October 9 Oct 1:00 AM (12 days ago)

From Sudan to Toronto, a revolutionary poem echoes across time, showing how people’s movements confront militarism, mining, and imperial order with the enduring force of collective struggle.

Every translation is an act of migration—this one especially so. Rather than a literal translation of El-Mekki’s work, this is LINE/BREAK’s composite of and variation on pre-existing translations by Taghreed Elsanhouri, Adil Babikir, and Oswa Shafei. To all these writers, as to all this poem’s countless readers and singers, and to everyone who has recited it in crowds in the streets and everyone who has enacted it in ways both preserved and forgotten by time, we are indebted.

In November 2024, the Sudan Solidarity Collective and LINE/BREAK hosted an event in Toronto about Sudan’s resistance committees. The centerpiece of our gathering was Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim’s 1964 poem “October Al Akhdar” (“Green October”).

Like that event, this essay—a longer version of which first appeared in ArabLit—offers a collective reading of “Green October.” Below, we interweave LINE/BREAK’s translation of the poem with lessons from liberation struggles in Sudan.

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October Al Akhdar

Green October

 

By Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim (Khartoum, 1964)

Trans. from the Arabic by Fathima Cader (Toronto, LINE/BREAK, 2024)**

 

اسمك الظافر ينمو في ضمير الشعب إيمانا وبشرى وعلى الغابة والصحراء يلتفّ وشاحا وبأيدينا توهّجت ضياء وسلاحا فتسلّحنا بأكتوبر لن نرجع شبرا سندقّ الصخر حتّى يخرج الصخر لنا زرعاً وخضرة ونرود المجد حتّى يحفظ الدهر لنا إسماً وذكرا باسمك الأخضر يا أكتوبر الأرض تغنّي الحقول اشتعلت قمحاً ووعداً وتمنّي والكنوز انفتحت في باطن الأرض تنادي باسمك الشعب انتصر حائط السجن انكسر والقيود انسدلت جدلة عرسٍ في الأيادي

Your name, triumphant, blossoms in people’s hearts, announcing faith and good tidings. In the forest, and in the desert, in our hands, wrapped in a scarf, glowed a torch and a weapon. So we armed ourselves with October, and we shall not retreat. We shall pound upon stone, until the stone bears for us plants and greenery. We shall stay the course of glory, until time preserves for us our names and our memory. In your green name, oh October, the land sings. The fields are on fire with wheat and promise and with hope, and the land has flung open its treasures, calling, in your name– that the people are victorious, and the prison gates are crushed and the shackles are lifted, and they are a bride’s bracelets, dangling from her wrist!

 

Two months before we gathered to study “October Al Akhdar,” El-Mekki died. Transnationalism was matter-of-course for 1960s revolutionaries, so perhaps he would have not been surprised that his call for a Green October had reached across six decades, from Khartoum to Toronto. Perhaps his ghost, still new to the afterlife, enjoyed hearing comrades translate his Arabic into Kutchi, Tamil, and Urdu.

We read El-Mekki’s poem together as a reverberation through time and place, across the interconnections of our oppressions and our resistances. From Tkaronto to Gaza, from Khartoum to the Dahieh, from the belly of the beast here on these borderlands to colonial outposts the world over, his verses reminded us that it is the duty of the artist to join the ranks of struggle.

“Green October” insists on victory: fa satallahna bi oktober. The word is small, but the poem is clear: we are armed with October. The struggle is itself our weapon. From the individual reading it alone at home to the collective voice roaring it in protest on the street, these stanzas are firm: The prisons must be crushed, and from shackles we will carve love.

In your green name, يا أكتوبر, the people will be victorious.

Victory: In 1956, Sudan achieved independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule, but freedom remained out of reach for most people, because the British had left behind a political system that favored the Nubian and Arab elite in Sudan’s north and center. The economy was reliant on cash crops.

This tactic of using race/ethnicity to cover for class exploitation is widely familiar. Muzan Alneel explains how the postcolonial rise of the comprador bourgeoisie class throughout the Global South is partly a result of how often newly independent states “prioritised abstract concepts like national pride and state sovereignty over people-centred goals such as self-governance and equitable resource distribution. These concepts were often used to mask the failure of post-colonial governments to improve the lives of the majority.”

Independence in Sudan was quickly followed by recurring waves of popular resistance and military coups.  Eventually, in 1989, Omar al-Bashir commenced what would become the country’s longest dictatorship. Under the guise of Islamic rule, his regime followed instructions from the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and liberalized the economy and privatized the public sector. Unemployment mounted. Drinking water, health care, and education became inaccessible.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) created the Janjaweed militia, recruiting especially from nomadic groups. This tactic was part of a general approach by successive Sudanese governments to inflame conflicts over resources between farmers and nomadic communities.

State violence against non-Arab communities intensified. Western media coverage of the subsequent 2003 genocide in Darfur was pronounced, but selective: It described the violence only in terms of race hatred. This approach concealed the genocide’s root causes, including the fact that international mining companies were benefitting from the genocide.

As farmer and union organizer Abdelraouf Omer observes, “The state displaced millions of non-Arab Darfurian farmers in order to exploit the region’s gold and uranium. The international community intervened primarily to provide shelter and aid to displaced Darfurians, which ultimately cost less than the mineral wealth extracted by companies working with regime leaders.”

This is just one example of how genocides anywhere in the world—whether in Palestine or by Canada—are often framed in purely identitarian terms, even though their causes and purposes are typically material. This includes land theft, water restrictions, and manufactured famine. Mining, as we note below, remains a key vector of mass death in Sudan.

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Eventually, the al-Bashir regime shifted Sudan’s economy to crude oil. But Sudan lost its oil revenues when South Sudan (where most of the oil was produced) achieved independence in 2011 (following resistance and a war over its co-optation as a “quasi internal colony” of Sudan).

Sudan then turned to gold. It is now one of Africa’s biggest exporters of gold. About 90 percent of Sudanese gold is smuggled into the UAE, who sells it internationally. This gold rush benefited only the elite. For everyone else, hunger worsened. Protests erupted in 2012.

The SAF responded by formalizing the Janjaweed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The SAF brought the RSF to the urban core, where the RSF massacred protesters in Khartoum in September 2013. Most of the martyrs were high school students, who had been instrumental in starting the protests.

Soon afterwards, the al-Bashir regime appointed the RSF as Sudan’s primary border control force. The Sudanese state then played a key role in coordinating the infamous “Khartoum Process,” an agreement whereby the European Union has paid African states €4.5 billion to block African immigration to Europe. Sudan is a key transit point for people traveling across Africa to Europe. Despite recent attempts by the EU to publicly distance itself from the RSF, the RSF continues to congratulate itself on its “advanced role … in protecting the European Union by preventing the flow of illegal migrants.”

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Amid this state violence, resistance committees rose to prominence in 2013, leading to Bashir’s ousting in 2019. However, the path forward was rocky: Labor strikes by the public were met with massacres by the state. By force, the SAF instituted a Transitional Military Council, which included the RSF. International powers, like the UN, supported the military junta, but on the streets, the “Three Nos” slogan resounded: no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimization with the military.

Eventually, the council came to a power-sharing agreement with some civilian elite. But the SAF and RSF reneged on that agreement and launched a joint coup in 2021.

Meanwhile, the resistance committees remained so popular in their opposition to the military that for over a year, the military struggled to form a government.

In February 2023, 8,000 resistance committees across Sudan issued a Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Powers. It denounced the local elite and declared that “the totalitarian state model has proven time and time again that it has no alternatives for the rural communities other than famines, violence, and slow death.”

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Weeks later, the SAF and RSF turned on each other, bringing about war in April 2023.

The SAF, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is reportedly supported by Egypt, Ukraine, Iran, and others. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti, is supported by the UAE and its provision of French arms.

Estimates from last year placed the war’s death toll as high as 150,000. This is likely an undercount, given the targeted destruction of hospitals and morgues. Outbreaks of preventable and treatable illnesses like dengue, malaria, and cholera exacerbate this death toll. Additionally, this is the world’s largest displacement crisis today, with over 14 million people displaced. Sudan was once renowned as the breadbasket of the Middle East, but its people are now suffering the worst famine the country has seen in 40 years.

Amid this ruination, Sudan announced record levels of gold production last year. It is because the war has been so lucrative that it has remained so protracted.

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The people of Sudan have remained armed with October: The resistance committees run emergency response rooms that direct aid war-relief efforts across Sudan, including distributing food and medicine, coordinating burials, assisting evacuations, and more. Yusra Khogali, a Sudan Solidarity Collective member, explains that these rooms are “filling the void of an absent international aid community and a civilian state.” This demonstrates how elite bodies like the state, military, and international NGOs are incapable of creating real change—and are in fact aligned against it. True power is instead manifested through organized mass movements of regular people.

Indeed, despite the scale of their work, and the dangers they face, revolutionaries in Sudan have refused international co-optation. For example, in 2021, the UN mission in Sudan tried to persuade the resistance committees to join negotiations with the military council. Finally, the resistance committees agreed, on one condition: The meeting had to be live-streamed to the public.

The UN not only rejected this proposal, it canceled the meeting altogether. Alneel notes that the resistance committees’ “success in exposing the nature of the UN mission and the process it promoted was … based on an understanding of the impact of public participation in the balance of power against the elite.”

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For those of us in the Global North—including here in Toronto—our responsibilities and complicities are not abstract, they are material. Canada is currently accepting only 4,000 people from Sudan as government-assisted refugees, in contrast to the approximately 300,000 Ukrainians Canada has accepted. Quebec, meanwhile, has altogether banned its residents from applying to resettle relatives from Sudan, unless those relatives go to a different province.

In March 2025, hundreds of protestors gathered in the bitter cold outside the annual convention for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) in Toronto. This is the largest mining convention in the world and it attracted protestors from Treaty 6, the DRC Congo, Chile, and more.

At that protest, Elamin told the crowd about how, after the SAF and RSF staged their joint coup in 2021, the Canadian mining company Orca Gold signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the Sudanese regime to construct a large gold mine in northern Sudan.

“It is therefore our duty,” she reminded us, “as people living in proximity to the headquarters where this consortium of corporate murderers sit—comfortably plotting how to up their profits through war—to disrupt their business as usual.”

In heeding that call, we arm ourselves with October, knowing that the struggle is long, but victory is ours. لن نرجع شبرا—we shall not retreat.

The Sudan Solidarity Collective is a volunteer collective that was formed in response to the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023. Since then, the Collective has been supporting civilian-led groups and grassroots relief efforts in the country’s hardest-hit regions, where people are facing militarized violence, catastrophic famine, and the most extreme displacement crisis in the world:

Rethinking the boundaries of blackness 8 Oct 3:30 AM (12 days ago)

South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.

Jordache Ellapen’s Brown Photo Album work brought the analytic rigor of Tina Campt to the Indian South African family photo archive, and his latest book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness, takes the reader through a visual feast of artists, such as Sabelo Mlangeni, Kutti Collective, Lebohang Kganye and Sharlene Khan, who break with normativity—whether through gender performance or sexuality. His thinking about Afronormativity, which is a regulatory regime that limits the boundaries of authentic blackness, and the naming of Afro-Indian positionalities and identities animate Ellapen’s discussion of visual cultures. What emerges from the depths is indenture aesthetics: a way of seeing that centers the vulnerable, the feminine, and the feminized.

The following conversation between Ellapen and Youlendree Appasamy has been edited for length and clarity.

Youlendree Appasamy

Congrats on your book! When reading, I felt like your disruption of merchant, trader, passenger Indian narrative goes alongside your disruption of the default indentured male figure as well. You kind of did those two movements together, which I really appreciated because the scholarship and the historiography feels—it’s so difficult to be basing your work off of footnotes.

Jordache Ellapen

That’s so true, right? I felt like that disruption had to occur simultaneously because I was very conscious of the fact that I wanted to tell a kind of story of Indianness that did not fall back on the normative logics of sexuality, of race. I also mark that indenture aesthetics is different from indenture history. And this [book] is not a history of indenture. And I think that’s what I was trying to do with the book because one of the things—and you’re talking about the Guptas and this different class of Indians—and one of the things that I always kind of struggled with is that, and I only found the language later on, but within the South African imaginary, all Indians occupy the positionality of the merchant class. And I think that was a strategic construction by the colonial apartheid state, and that was how they managed the racial hierarchy. The Indian was positioned as a buffer community between the settler population and between local black African communities. And they used it as a way to manage black African anxieties around settler colonialism and white supremacy. All the evil, the dangers, the problems become kind of transferred onto this imagination of what the Indian is. To disrupt this, I had to make that critique of the merchant trader class in that we are not the same in terms of language, community, caste.

Youlendree Appasamy

I was thinking about the beautiful literature and creative works about enslavement and the feminine in and around the Cape. I’m thinking of people like Yvette Abrahams, Amie Soudien, Lebo Mashile and Gabeba Baderoon. And there’s a really beautiful academic world where people are working with the ghostly residues from the period of enslavement. I appreciate the insistence on not erasing the movement of enslaved people from South or Southeast Asia to what’s now known as Cape Town in your discussion on unfree and coercive labor in the country. I’d love to get more of your thoughts on the slavery-indentureship spectrum in South Africa.

Jordache Ellapen

The very histories of slavery and indentureship and indigenous forms of indentureship and African forms of indentureship in southern Africa are so significantly different that we need different frameworks to think about race, particularly blackness, than the Atlantic world offers us. Because even if you think about what slavery looked like in the Cape in the early years of slavery, it was people who were from South Asian countries that were enslaved and then it started shifting to people from Mozambique and other parts of East and West Africa but mixing with indigenous communities and indentured communities. Indigenous communities couldn’t be enslaved, but they could be indentured, and what a lot of the literature reveals of that era is that it was hard to make distinctions between enslaved, indentured, and other forms of indentured peoples, so the very categories of slavery and indentureship as one being associated with the contract and then one being associated with coercive labor falls apart. Even within the Americas, the notion of the contract doesn’t secure autonomy over one’s labor relations so the contract has been fetishized in literature of indenture, and it doesn’t exist within transatlantic slavery, but the distinction between the two is shaky. I think it’s in Coolie Woman [by Gauitra Bahadur] where she talks about how the same ships that enslaved Africans were used with for indentured laborers. Britain saw India as a replacement for Africa, and they saw Indian bodies as a replacement for African bodies. … I’m interested in the afterlife of indentureship, and indentureship is the afterlife for slavery.

Youlendree Appasamy

It’s important to understand indenture and enslavement in southern Africa as part of the same matrix of oppression. 

Jordache Ellapen

And also the category Indian was part of the category Coloured until 1960, but we’ve kind of cleaved ourselves into the separate racial identities—oh, you know, we’ve been made to believe that we are so distinct, but it was violently policed in Cape Town and urban areas, whereas before the Glen Gray Act it was pretty porous.

Youlendree Appasamy

What scholars were you reading when writing this book? Keguro Macharia’s concept of “rubbing” from Frottage is beautifully carried throughout the text.

Jordache Ellapen

A lot of the [historical] work I’ve encountered on indentureship [has been from] Betty Govinden, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed, Surendra Bhana. Fatima Meer is very important to my work actually. Like Fatima, I am trained in black studies so I was always very interested in thinking about Indianness in South Africa as part of the black experience. I was interested in returning to Steve Biko’s work, because I think he offers us a kind of framework around rubbing around these different racial groups and thinking about blackness more capaciously, not just as a kind of identity formation or categories, because I feel like they actually function as sites of capture and containment. Although we know that the boundaries between these different racial categories have always been porous, but I was interested in what happens when we start thinking outside of these categories and what kinds of knowledge gets produced about Indianness or about blackness when we kind of release ourselves from these categories. That’s where I found Steve Biko’s work useful, even though he’s been heavily criticized for his gender and sexual politics. Thinking about vulnerability, I went back to Fatima Meer’s work and Shireen Hassim’s book on Fatima Meer, and also her work in relationship to Steve Biko, which is in conversation with Keguro Macharia, and then other person that’s really important in my work is actually Frantz Fanon.

Youlendree Appasamy

Fatima Meer gets it. Your book made me turn back to [her book] Portrait of Indian South Africans and particularly the section on Tin Town, now called Springfield Park, in Durban. I absolutely adore her approach to it, which is to have people’s words, dreams, turns of phrases in there verbatim. She gives you a sentence or two to stitch it together, and there are beautiful pictures by Ranjith Kally. But yeah, I mean, even the use of collage in that book is so groundbreaking. It’s so indicative of the black studies that she was involved in creating in South Africa.

Jordache Ellapen

One of the things her work, read in relation to Sharlene Khan artwork When the Moon Waxes Red, made me think about is how within the South African imaginary, Indian poverty is unimaginable. Meer has those thick sociological descriptions of those spaces, but she doesn’t just focus on it as a space of lack, poverty, and disenfranchisement, but she focuses on the everyday lived experiences. She focuses on the way they decorate their homes and the way they go to the movies and the way they create community. And there’s life, there’s love, there’s a livingness within these spaces, and we know that, right? My whole book questions the very notion of freedom and what black freedom means in post-apartheid South Africa. And to think about freedom in South Africa, we also have to trouble the very category “black,” because blackness is not homogenous, like Indianness, and blackness has significantly transformed in the post-apartheid period—who is black and who can claim blackness has transformed from the kind of anti-apartheid logics around black solidarity to the post-apartheid logics around the authentic national subject and how blackness becomes attached to a particular kind of nativism and heteronormativity. … And I was interested in those that fall outside of that normative idea of blackness and how we think about solidarity from the margins, from those that are excluded: the feminine, the feminized, the vulnerable, and how that allows us to think differently about nation, about community, about kin, and about race.

Youlendree Appasamy

You make a really strong case for the indentured class as complicating the black-white racial binary and, therefore, always and forever being queer. Tell me more.

Jordache Ellapen

I wanted to complicate the ways in which we understood or thought about Indian South African histories, because a lot of it is so straight it doesn’t leave space for anything else. The historical record may not show ABC’ [queerness during indentureship], but number one, we have an imagination, and number two, we need different kinds of histories, we need different kinds of queered experiences.

Youlendree Appasamy

In The Mercury newspaper there’s a line from the then editor about when indentured laborers first reached Port Natal that they were considered “a very queer and oriental looking crowd,” and I was like, “Yes, oh, okay, fruity!” There are many ways to understand the word queer, especially in 1860, but it’s a choice. That actually takes me to the chapter with Reshma Chhiba and FAKA. I love FAKA’s early work, I was there at the Sex exhibition at Stevenson in Braamfontein that you write about—oh my god—and at AfterSex, which was the after party in a basement somewhere in the CBD. I remember the performance so vividly—the sense of curiosity, confusion, disgust, arousal at watching their live art. It was also just such an interesting time in the art world in Joburg. I remember I just moved up and Stevenson had so many great shows, and you could tell there was this energy from #FeesMustFall and from students that was also feeding into art practices that were different, weird, anticolonial, pushing boundaries, just like rebellious. FAKA took that on in their own cunty ways. Something that I have been curious about is where the grotesque fits into this, right?

Jordache Ellapen

It’s like the carnivalesque subversion of everything, and you can trace the grotesque throughout the book—I think that could be a framework to actually think about some of these incursions that are happening. When you think about the grotesque, you think about the body, and I think that’s a chapter that takes us to the body in a different way, like Chhiba’s huge sculpture of a walk-in vagina or works of Kali’s gushing blood out of the head, and FAKA’s focus on the anal erotic, pleasure, and bodily fluids from semen to sweat to feces. Body as archive, the body is the site through which we need to decolonize. With FAKA’s work, I’m very interested in the body as a site of sex and pleasure, like there’s something pleasurable about their photography and live artwork, and it’s not that pleasure is disconnected from labor, but pleasure is routed through labor instead of leisure.

Youlendree Appasamy

I have so many questions about pleasure on the plantations and how many of our ancestors were sex workers. Listen, we can yap all day, but I need to get my cat’s supper!

Jordache Ellapen

It was so lovely, and I was nervous, but this was amazing. Thank you so much!

Indenture Aesthetics by Jordache Ellapen (2025) is available from Duke University Press.

Reading List: Olufemi Terry 7 Oct 2:00 AM (14 days ago)

What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?

My novel, Wilderness of Mirrors, follows Emil, a young medical student, to an austral metropolis very like Cape Town, where he’s to pursue the dubious errand of rescuing his drifting cousin. In Stadmutter, he meets three people who wrench him off the path he has mapped for himself. Tamsin, a historian of psychoanalysis, is coming to terms with a country where the standing of whites is both reduced and uncertain. German-Haitian Bolling uses his wealth to advance a reactionary and romantic anti-modernism that exerts a puzzling allure on Emil. The third, Braeem Shaka—Creole like Emil—is a wannabe revolutionary who has grasped that stoking resentment of the country’s Black majority offers an opening to power.

In my earliest conception, the novel was to form the third and final instalment of a Cape Town trilogy that began with JM Coetzee’s Disgrace and continued through K Sello Duiker’s Quiet Violence of Dreams. I have written elsewhere that I read Quiet Violence during the nights while working for a month in Acholiland, Uganda. Part of the inspiration of these novels lay in their depictions of Cape Town as protean, having no essence.

V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas influenced my wish to create a miasma of sullenness over Stadmutter, a localized mood of resistance to change and modernity, while exploring the links between geography, class, and political tension. On the first page of Guerrillas, Naipaul writes:

The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than color; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust from the bauxite loading station. After the market, where refrigerated trailers were unloading; after the rubbish dump burning in the remnant of mangrove swamp, with black carrion corbeaux squatting hunched on fence posts or hopping about on the ground; after the built-up hillsides; after the new housing estates, rows of unpainted boxes of concrete and corrugated iron already returning to the shantytowns that had been knocked down for this development; after the naked children playing in the red dust of the straight new avenues, the clothes hanging like rags from back yard lines; after this, the land cleared a little. And it was possible to see over what the city had spread: on one side, the swamp, drying out to a great plain; on the other side, a chain of hills, rising directly from the plain.

In Guerrillas, Naipaul refuses to romanticize his revolutionary firebrand: Jimmy Ahmed remains resolutely human, a product of his circumstances and limitations.

A remark attributed to the Trinidadian writer provides another frame for Cape Town real and imagined. “All of this will revert—it will go back to bush,” Naipaul reportedly told Paul Theroux of Uganda, and Africa more generally. Cape Town, by contrast, does not encroach, being mostly semi-desert and having little in the way of critters, with the implication that freeing man of the mission to contend with nature leads to nothing good.

Naipaul is not the only controversial writer to influence the book. Hovering behind Wilderness (as it does for so much writing about Africa) is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its subtext of Africa as a void space that lures civilised man into direct contact with his id (going native).

In my novel, the German Haitian Bolling owes something to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, among the most transgressive works I’ve encountered.  Holden, Cormac McCarthy strongly implies, is some sort of demiurge, intermediate between man and God.

Toward the end of the novel, McCarthy describes the apparition of Holden thus:

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

My admiration for Goncalo Tavares’ Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, translated from Portuguese, encouraged me to be fuzzy about geography and temporality in my own novel. And the novel was influential in another way: its protagonist’s musings on the tension between man and nature inject a distinctly philosophical, Romantic-inflected tone into the narrative.

The reader of Learning to Pray is continually enticed to revisit conventional wisdom (delusions?) concerning human mastery and dominion over the natural world:

Man tries to resist [disease], finding allies in…centuries of medical and technical development, while on the other hand there is illness, likewise strengthened by centuries of its own particular history, to which men have no access. Illnesses have not stayed still.

The protagonist displays a grudging, paranoid admiration for the natural world.  “There was a new light in the cities… which had only increased the hatred that the most ancient elements in the world seemed always to have harbored for man.”

And it goes on in this vein:

Like illness, nature has its own past if not a history, its own rules and triumphs, and is enduringly at odds with humans’ own course. And nature’s permanence (Nature hasn’t even invented fire yet.), its impermeability to history was [its] major weapon. Meanwhile if materials and the ways of transforming them had…evolved human passions had nonetheless been immobilized.

Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light, with its exploration of drug-induced blindness and altered perception, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, with its magical realist approach to displacement and migration, also shaped aspects of the narrative.

Wilderness of Mirrors (2025) by Olufemi Terry is available from Restless Books.

Energy for whom? 6 Oct 1:30 AM (15 days ago)

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.

The second Africa Climate Summit (ACS-2) took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between September 8 and 10, and was ostensibly convened towards shaping the continent’s priorities and commitments ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, later this year.  Like the first edition, which was held in 2023, this forum was promoted as a critical space to champion homegrown solutions for “adaptation” and “systems-level shifts.” However, African civil society organizations (CSOs) raised concerns about the prominence of external actors, noting that “African CSOs appear to be clustered largely around the pre-summit days or side events, rather than being woven into the central conversations.”

Ultimately, they were sounding the alarm that the omission of a diversity of African voices from the main fora reinforced perceptions of ACS-2 as being hijacked by those who “define Africa’s problems and prescribe Africa’s solutions, while African people are left as witnesses rather than decision-makers.”

Without a doubt, this hijacking of the ACS-2 agenda undermines African priorities, redefining them to fit foreign interests, be it those of transnational corporations or international financial institutions—essentially neocolonialism.

One can argue that the difference between neocolonialism and colonialism is that the former gives you an illusion of sovereignty, but decisions are dictated to you from elsewhere. Nothing exemplifies this better than the activities of big oil companies in Africa.

Take the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project, for instance. This 1,443-kilometer pipeline linking Uganda’s oil fields to Tanzania’s port city of Tanga is touted as an initiative that will catalyze economic transformation in the region. Yet it continues to reflect classic neocolonial extraction patterns: land loss, displacement, and the unraveling of communities, while big oil and their affiliated politicians, both local and international, profit.

Together with many brave people, I have spent the past six years working with frontline communities in East Africa, challenging fossil fuel projects that jeopardize their livelihoods and undermine their right to a clean and healthy environment. This includes work with fisherfolk in Lamu opposing a proposed coal plant, forest communities evicted despite their conservation efforts, and now efforts towards the Stop EACOP project, which will and has paved the road for much harm.

The EACOP project is, certainly, a representation of the larger neocolonial model. Consider its ownership; this project is East African only in name—the real owner is the French oil giant TotalEnergies, which owns 62 percent of its shares. But don’t take my word for it. A 2024 study by researchers Marcel Llavero-Pasquina and colleagues makes some bold assertions, including that TotalEnergies’ extraction deals are often intentionally made with undemocratic regimes, and backed by problematic French diplomacy. Their study concludes that “one cannot understand TotalEnergies today without the political history of French colonialism.”

Today, communities in Uganda and Tanzania are left wondering how this project, which came with so many promises, has resulted in so much pain with no end. To paint the picture, in 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) conducted 90 interviews, including with 75 displaced families in the five districts of Uganda where the pipeline crosses, and found that households were now  worse off than before.

In this same report, a 48-year-old woman supporting seven children, whose land was taken to pave way for the pipeline, shared that during the community’s first meeting with TotalEnergies, they were told that things were about to change for them and that they would no longer be poor. This report quotes her as saying: “Now, with the oil project starting, we are landless and are the poorest in the country.”

It doesn’t get better. In 2024, a Ugandan court ordered that 80 households be evicted for the pipeline despite genuine concerns causing the delays, including issues related to compensation that was below market value, among others. What’s more, if TotalEnergies is expected to receive a ten-year income tax exemption and the project’s life cycle is 25 years, noting that oil is finite, the taxable profits the government could have earned in revenue during these first ten years will be lost, and during the post-tax exemption, the volume would be insufficient to generate any significant revenue in taxes.

If you also consider that TotalEnergies is expected to receive substantial tax holidays, you can understand that the frontline communities that have had their environment and sources of livelihood sacrificed in the name of national good suffer a double tragedy, because the national government is receiving minimal financial benefit. Meanwhile, the oil will flow out to international markets, TotalEnergies will make its profit, and communities in East Africa will be left dealing with disrupted livelihoods, deepened poverty, and accelerated climate impacts

Additionally, considering the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that global oil will peak in the 2030s, doesn’t this clearly indicate that EACOP will end up being a stranded asset for the two governments, Tanzania and Uganda, while the investors will have recouped their investment, leaving the host governments to deal with a disgruntled population that has already sacrificed too much for so little?

Fast-forward to 2025, and the case that affected communities have filed with the help of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) Uganda in December 2024, which was due for hearing on August 18, 2025, was not heard, because the case file was, supposedly, missing. This hearing would have been instrumental in stopping their planned eviction and demolition of their properties. Meanwhile, the case against them by the government, filed on August 14, 2025, was fast-tracked, and a hearing date for August 25 was scheduled in a record four days.

While the majority of unfortunate examples I’ve cited here focus on Uganda, project-affected people in Tanzania are facing similar challenges, as documented in a report titled Climate of Fear by Global Witness, which reveals similar promises of transformed lives, only to lead to further impoverishment.

These experiences demonstrate the neocolonial nature of this controversial project. This is not a “development” initiative as it is claimed; it is the same colonial extraction repackaged in contemporary investment language. The pipeline will transport oil in its crude form to the global market without addressing any local needs, leaving the host communities to deal with the environmental and social impacts, especially considering the project will emit 379 million tons CO2e (MtCO2e) for the full value chain during its life cycle, as has been documented by the Climate Accountability Institute.

In postcolonial Africa, fossil fuel extraction has thrived because of Big Oil’s ability to co-opt governments to make decisions against their citizens and due to weak institutions that cannot challenge them to ensure communities are not harmed. Reflecting this trend, the national environmental management authorities in Uganda and Tanzania have come under sharp focus as concerns grow over their role in ensuring proper environmental and social impact assessments for EACOP are conducted.

This explains why movements like the StopEACOP campaign emerge. Neocolonialism may continue rearing its ugly head, but African communities are refusing to take it lying down. As Hardy Merriman argues in We Need People Power to Address a World in Peril, when formal institutions fail to protect people and the planet, movements emerge as democracy’s last line of defense. The StopEACOP coalition is, therefore, a result of communities coming together to support one another, backed by international allies working to dismantle enduring and repackaged colonial forces. When communities along the pipeline route mobilize to stop EACOP, they fulfill the role that strong, independent institutions should play in ensuring that only projects meeting the threshold of a livable future are granted permits.

As a journalist, I have seen how media “objectivity” has undermined frontline voices and propped up a model prioritizing profits over people, the environment, and the climate.

The outcome of this reporting is a portrayal of community struggles as a mere perspective to be balanced against well-oiled—pun intended—PR statements. It is this false equivalence that undermines lived experiences (and while I’m on the subject of the media, it is worth mentioning that we have some outlets that are keen on highlighting people-centered narratives and publishing stories that otherwise get killed in most newsrooms).

With such dynamics in our institutions, whether within state environmental management organizations or the media, it is therefore not surprising that even events focused on Africa, like the ACS, lack autonomous African leadership. This underscores the need for African movements to occupy and reclaim these key spaces, and the imperative for all to remain vigilant about how energy conversations shape up, within the African Climate Summit and beyond, and ask questions such as: Energy for what and for whom?

When the victim isn’t perfect 3 Oct 12:00 AM (18 days ago)

Rungano Nyoni’s latest film challenges audiences to confront the collective complicity that sustains abuse.

Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s sophomore feature On Becoming A Guinea Fowl is a surrealist look at the tensions between a dead family member and their living secrets. The film follows Shula (Susan Chardy) as she navigates the grand Bemba funeral of her uncle, Fred. As aunts, grandmothers, and cousins buzz around her and work themselves into a frenzy preparing for the ceremony, Shula and her irreverent cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisel) try to process some difficult truths about the deceased. Early in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, the pair happens upon Fred’s cold body in the middle of a road. The discovery doesn’t shock Shula, who was returning from a fancy dress party, or Nsansa, who drunkenly stumbles upon the scene moments later, because they are among a handful of people who don’t believe Fred’s death is a sorrowful occasion.

The notion of otherness typically exists within the context of dominant and subordinate groups, in which the imposing body stigmatizes a physical or ideological difference between itself and individuals who lack certain traits. Nyoni seems to be drawn to “othered” characters—the ostracized, the atypical. In her BAFTA-winning debut film, I Am Not a Witch (2017), the director’s lens observes a young girl cast out by her village on suspicion of being a sorceress. Shula, played by Maggie Mulubwa, is taken to a camp populated by elder witches forced to labor for a corrupt government official. She’s told she can’t escape and is subsequently paraded around the county and used as a glorified tourist attraction. I Am Not a Witch explores gender-based discrimination and otherness in non-familial communal spaces.

Nyoni expands and complicates these themes in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl by making women a part of both the dominant and othered groups and situating the dramatic action  exclusively within a matriarchal familial space. Unlike I Am Not a Witch, where men were overtly complicit in the ostracizing, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl allows us to observe the formation of a “them vs us” dynamic devoid of overt patriarchal interjections from men—save for the critical, catalytic death of Uncle Fred. Shula, Nsansa, their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini), and Fred’s widow, Chichi (Norah Mwansa) share an unpleasant history with the deceased. Each has been sexually abused by Uncle Fred—some repeatedly and others with lasting physical consequences. While the aunties and mothers are aware, they do not believe his passing is the time to stir up past grievances.

This “othering” of characters is evident early on in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl through visual and narrative introductions of the characters. Shula, a prim and proper career woman, is not emotional or traditional enough for her family’s liking. When she finds solace from the evening’s whirlwind in a hotel room instead of her family house—where the funeral is being hosted — her aunties are quick to drag her back home, peeved by the ease with which she abandons customary rites for work. Nsansa, more liberal and relaxed compared to her conservative kin, is mostly ignored by the family. She is possibly perceived as a bad influence because of her drinking habits. Uncle Fred’s widow, Chichi, who is only referred to as “the widow” in conversation, is tagged a bad wife for not supporting her husband through his gambling problem, extramarital affairs, and alcoholism.

When we’re first introduced to Chichi, she’s concealed by tree branches and blanketed by the darkness of the night. Shula confronts her during this late hour, and Chichi reveals that she is banned by the aunties from using the indoor toilet. It’s not until the next scene that we finally see the widow clearly, dutifully submitting to tradition by crawling around the family house. Bupe, still a university student, is also concealed by the night’s darkness when introduced on screen. Shula arrives at her university dorm to fetch her for the funeral. “I’m glad he’s dead,” Bupe whispers, sprawled on her bed, head buried in a pillow. She collapses on the floor as she tries to get up. Then, a quick edit transports us to a moment in which the young woman lies in a hospital bed. When we finally see her full visage, it’s in a confessional video about Uncle Fred’s abuse.

The atmosphere in which we’re introduced to these women plays a significant role in how the audience eventually sees them as “other.” Before we came to know them intimately, the narrative coaxes us into profiling them based on family perception. During a wailing session, the aunties express their displeasure with Shula’s inability to cry dramatically. “Why are you cold-hearted?” one whispers to Shula. Later, these same women withhold food from Chichi and her children until Uncle Fred is laid to rest, reinforcing their belief that his widow doesn’t deserve basic hospitality. While Bupe’s mother shows concern, she is not willing to address the gravity of her daughter’s confession and later hospitalisation. She merely dismisses the events, perhaps as teenage tomfoolery.

By presenting these women as “flawed”—Shula as unfeeling, Bupe as only but a clueless child, Chichi as a defiant wife, and Nsansa as uncouth— before revealing them as survivors, Nyoni forces audiences to confront their preconceptions about the profile of sexual abuse victims. How is the pursuit of justice impacted when incriminating odds are perceived to be self-induced by the victims? Do these biases affect victims’ right to call out their abuser? Does it make it harder for us to believe them?.

Out of our four women, Chichi plays another role in challenging the internalized biases of abuse victims. She interrogates the myth of the perfect victim. Here is a girl of 16 or 17 years old, a mother to six children, respectful, quiet, mindful of cultural traditions, and subservient to the fragility of patriarchy. And yet, she doesn’t receive support from Fred’s sisters: despite being a teenager and enduring her husband’s infidelity and violence, she isn’t spared from the dehumanizing widow rites.

Despite the judge and juror situation Nyoni elicits within the viewer, this othering of Shula, Nsansa, Bupe, and Chichi serves a greater purpose for them: a way to unite quietly. Many conversations between the four women take place in pantry closets, shadows, alleyways, and abandoned rooms. Tucking them away creates an atmosphere of vulnerability among characters. Nsansa opens up about being raped by Uncle Fred while she and Shula track down a coal seller late at night. Her laugh-laced, humorous retelling reveals her wit as a self-preserving tactic. It’s not until the final quarter of the film, with Shula and Nsansa cocooned in Shula’s car, that  Shula’s encounters with Uncle Fred are laid bare. It is then that Shula realizes what she must do to protect them all.

With this revelation and sense of unity, the four women and other vulnerable family members approach the funeral ceremony the next day, clucking and screeching like guinea fowls. The final frame of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a clear portrait of this sense of how these women, despite being preyed upon and othered, band together to support one another.

The mourning of a man, the mirror of a nation 2 Oct 4:00 AM (18 days ago)

Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home.

Two weeks ago, few South Africans could have picked Charlie Kirk out of a lineup. He was not ours. His face did not beam from our pulpits, nor did it dominate most of our social media algorithms. To most South Africans, he was an unfamiliar name stitched to a tired lie about “white genocide,” one of those imported paranoias that make the rounds on US cable news. And yet, when Kirk was shot down in Utah, our timelines trembled with recognition. The concentrated conversations about Kirk were because of the US’s ability to consume the world with its own domestic affairs. Strikingly, many locals who were unfamiliar with Kirk himself were nevertheless fluent in the worldview he championed.

This paradox, an obscure man sparking outsized debate, speaks to the global cultural reach of American evangelical media and ideology. Even without knowing Kirk, South Africans recognized the contours of his message, because elements of it were already entrenched in local religious and political discourse. The blend of Christian nationalism, conservative “family values,” and combative culture war rhetoric he espoused has long had resonance here, in part because South Africa has grappled with its own versions of that ideology for decades. Christian nationalism has deep roots in South African history, dating back to the Afrikaner nationalists’ use of Calvinist theology to justify apartheid. More recently, local evangelical and Pentecostal churches have absorbed many of the same teachings and political talking points that energize the American religious right. By the time of Kirk’s sudden demise, the ideological groundwork that made his stances familiar had been laid by years of transnational evangelical exchange. South Africans didn’t need to know Kirk as a personality to find his ideas recognizable; they had already heard similar themes in Sunday sermons, social media feeds, and WhatsApp prayer groups.

The surprise is not that South Africans mourned a stranger; it is how natural it felt to some to drape his memory in reverence. A man barely known to us became a topic of mourning and debate. And yet, what we were really grappling with was not Kirk the man but Kirk the symbol. The immediate reactions to Kirk’s death from some South African public figures illustrate this dynamic. Television personality Rorisang Thandekiso took to Instagram to praise Kirk’s “boldness to stand for [his] convictions” and lament that “you [Kirk] died because someone didn’t like your view or opinion. No one should have to die.” Talk radio host Clement Manyathela devoted airtime to commend his “bravery” for his passion for God, and he “loved Jesus, and he didn’t compromise on that.” They both acknowledged that they didn’t share all his views, except those that were related to his religious fervor. Former radio DJs Gareth Cliff and Euphonik joined in, and the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), a small but vocal conservative political party, issued a formal statement mourning Kirk as “a fearless advocate for Christian values and free speech.”

This outpouring of grief suggests that Kirk was a household name in South Africa. He wasn’t. What it reveals instead is how deeply the ideology he championed, a blend of Christian nationalism, patriarchal gender essentialism, and anti-LBGTQ+ rhetoric thinly veiled in religious conviction and devotion, has permeated South African religious and political discourse through American evangelical influence. In their eulogies, we see how US Christian nationalist ideas can circulate abroad in disaggregated form: detached from their original context, distilled into universal-sounding values that ring familiar to Christian believers across the globe.

How did Euro-American evangelical culture penetrate so deeply that a person in South Africa, or Kenya, might weep for an American racist provocateur they’d barely heard of a year ago? The answer lies in decades of indoctrination and cultural exchange that have made the concerns of the American Christian right into a global evangelical preoccupation. To understand why Kirk’s message rang so familiar in South Africa, we must trace the deep roots of evangelical exchange between the US and this country. The story begins in the twilight of apartheid, when the regime searched desperately for allies as the world condemned it. Segments of the American religious right found in South Africa a frontier for their own battles. Prominent televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, aired a series of reports on his Christian Broadcasting Network lauding the Afrikaner government’s “struggle” against the African National Congress. His 700 Club broadcasts defended the apartheid regime at a time when even mainstream churches worldwide were condemning apartheid. American evangelical broadcasters didn’t just cheer from afar; they actively set up shop in South Africa. In 1985, Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), struck deals with the apartheid government to beam Christian TV across the country. The TBN was granted licenses to broadcast on apartheid’s terms, even building stations in “bantustans” such as Ciskei to skirt international sanctions and embed American-style televangelism into South African living rooms.

This mattered. American evangelicals were laying ideological infrastructure that would outlive apartheid itself. When the regime finally fell in 1994, that infrastructure did not dissolve; rather, it blossomed in the fertile soil of a liberalized media environment. The late James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful US evangelical ministries, established a division in South Africa that broadcast his teachings on parenting and marriage to a broad audience. On the surface, these lessons appeared wholesome to many, apolitical even. But embedded within them were the same culture war themes that animated US conservatives: mistreatment of children, opposition to abortion, hostility to feminism, and suspicion of LGBTQ+ people. The message was clear: family values were political values. The US religious right provided a template, and by the time South Africa transitioned into democracy, it had already seeped into the bloodstream of our religious culture. It also provided a template for political organizing. In 1993, on the cusp of democracy, South Africa saw the launch of the ACDP—a party explicitly modeled on Christian moral principles in politics. The ACDP’s platform of opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and “anti-family” laws closely mirrored that of US Christian conservatives. This was no coincidence. Figures such as Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, the political party’s founder, moved in transnational evangelical circles, and others followed.

If apartheid laid the groundwork, the democratic era gave the American-inspired evangelical project new oxygen. The fall of the system created an ironic opening: while political freedom expanded, so too did the reach of foreign ideological currents. Into that space stepped a generation of South African culture war entrepreneurs who studied, trained, and borrowed directly from the US religious right. Errol Naidoo is perhaps the most emblematic figure. A former ACDP communications director, Naidoo established the Family Policy Institute (FPI) in the 2000s. According to his own lore, he spent six months in Washington DC training with the Family Research Council, a flagship US religious right organization that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010.

What Naidoo brought back was not simply rhetoric but an entire playbook: how to lobby against abortion, how to frame Comprehensive Sexuality Education as a threat to children, and how to cloak anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy in the language of parental rights. It was a politics of fear dressed in the garb of family protection. Yet in South Africa, Naidoo’s message carries the weight of moral authority for many believers. Additionally, Naidoo has close ties to the founder of Family Watch International’s which is also designated as a hate group. In Power and Faith: How evangelical churches are quietly shaping our democracy, I recall how, in September 2022, Naidoo and others convened the first Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Africa Summit at the University of South Africa (UNISA). The event drew backing from Slater’s outfit, Family Policy Institute, the Film and Publication Board, and even the university’s own Bureau of Market Research. With institutional sponsorship from the country’s oldest university and formal recognition by its senior leadership, the agenda was granted a veneer of credibility and authority. Watching the summit recordings later, I was alarmed, not only by the ideas being platformed, but also by the promotion of such an event: were these institutions unaware of the stakes, or are they complicit in ushering anti-rights politics into the South African mainstream?

An American-inspired evangelical ecosystem is alive in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, propagating through media and politics the same blend of Christian nationalism and conservative social values championed by Kirk and his allies. The shape of our culture wars looks too familiar because it is, in many ways, imported wholesale. Campaigns to block Comprehensive Sexuality Education, roll back reproductive rights, and oppose LGBTQ+ equality bear the fingerprints of US and European conservative movements. CitizenGO, a Spain-based platform with links to the US, has run petitions in South Africa to “reject harmful sex education,” often recycling fear-based claims about children as young as nine being “sexualised” in classrooms. These petitions are marketed as grassroots African initiatives but are in fact part of a coordinated global strategy, with CitizenGO’s Africa office based in Nairobi. At the same time, groups such as Freedom of Religion South Africa (FOR SA) have taken their cues directly from US evangelical radicals. Their legal submissions and public campaigns reproduce almost verbatim the arguments of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the most powerful anti-LGBTQ+ legal groups in the world. The ADF has fought high-profile US court cases defending bakers who refused gay couples and lobbying to curtail trans rights. Representatives of the ADF appeared before the South African Parliament in 2023 to testify against proposed hate crimes legislation, announcing their involvement as though our legislature was just another stop on their global tour. Earlier this year, FOR SA mounted a public campaign against a new Early Childhood Education gender toolkit, accusing the education department of smuggling “transgender ideology” into classrooms—borrowing directly from ADF’s arguments in American courtrooms. This is how Kirk’s message had already arrived before he did. By the time South Africans read his obituaries, the ideas he espoused had long since been translated, localized, and circulated under familiar banners: family, faith, tradition.

If there is one arena where the marriage of US and South African evangelical activism is most tangible, it is the fight over abortion. South Africa legalized abortion with the 1996 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, a law hailed as among the most liberal in the world. But as early as 1993, before the legislation was even passed, anti-abortion groups were already mobilizing. Across the country, dozens of so-called “crisis pregnancy centres”, which rebranded into “pregnancy help organizations,” operate in the shadows of our healthcare system. They present themselves as neutral non-profits, but their mission is singular: to discourage women from terminating pregnancies. Once inside, women are met with a barrage of misinformation and emotional manipulation. I saw this firsthand during an undercover visit to a Pretoria-based organization in 2018. Pamphlets in the waiting area warned, falsely, that abortions cause breast cancer and infertility. Behind closed doors, training manuals instruct staff to gently but firmly shame women, delay appointments long enough that the legal window might pass, and press adoption or continuing the pregnancy at all costs. Today, over 50 of these organizations exist across South Africa and are rapidly spreading to neighbouring countries. They are funded, in part, by US-based anti-abortion association Heartbeat International, whose messages are laden with Christian right-wing views.

This pattern extends beyond sexuality education and abortion into the unjustly contested terrain of gender identity. In mid-2025, former DA leader Helen Zille began amplifying British and American “gender-critical” talking points, warning that trans women threatened the rights of “real” women. Almost immediately, a small group calling itself First Do No Harm Southern Africa (FDNHSA) issued a statement thanking her for her “courage,” insisting that sex “cannot be changed.” FDNHSA presents itself as an evidence-based medical network, but its public statements lift extensively from the much-debunked Cass Review in the UK and a handful of Scandinavian studies, the same citations US and UK anti-trans activists deploy. Their rhetoric claims that Europe is abandoning trans healthcare and that South Africa should follow, which illustrates how foreign ideology launders itself into our national conversation under the guise of local expertise. The effect is subtle but devastating. What begins as a controversy elsewhere migrates into South African discourse as if it were native to our political soil. By the time it reaches the masses, it has been stripped of its foreignness. The strategy works because it appeals to pre-existing anxieties: the sanctity of the nuclear family, the baseless fear of cultural erosion, the suspicion that liberal and progressive democracy is a foreign imposition.

The story of Charlie Kirk in South Africa is, in truth, not a story about Charlie Kirk at all. It is about how the world’s most powerful empire can take the death of a man who barely mattered here and turn it into a mirror in which we see ourselves. It is about how grief, admiration, and outrage can be stirred not by familiarity with the man but by fluency in the language he spoke, because that language has been whispered to us for decades. What stands out is not that some South Africans joined the chorus but how seamlessly they did so. To speak Kirk’s gospel was not to adopt something foreign but to affirm something already stitched into the seams of our own fabric. He became a cipher, an empty vessel into which people poured their own faith and conviction.

So, we return to Kirk. Not as a man whose name we should have known, but as a figure who reminds us of the architecture already standing in our midst. Charlie Kirk was never ours. And yet, in the silence of pulpits and the echoes of prayer groups, he somehow always was.

Who pays for Africa’s food future? 1 Oct 3:00 AM (19 days ago)

A new movement is challenging the financial stranglehold of agribusiness and foreign lenders, arguing that Africa’s future lies not in extractive monocultures but in agroecology, sovereignty, and collective resistance.

In March 2025, more than 100 participants, including farmers, activists, researchers, and policymakers, gathered at the Manzoni Lodge in Nairobi for a three-day forum hosted by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). They came from across the continent to share experiences and build strategies for a fairer food system that prioritizes equity, environmental sustainability, and economic viability throughout the entire food supply chain.

The clear message was that corporations and foreign banks must not dictate the future of Africa’s food system. As Anne Maina of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA Kenya) put it, “Africa’s future is agroecological, and we will not allow destructive industrial agriculture to dictate our destiny.”

Africa’s current agricultural crisis didn’t happen overnight. It’s rooted in colonial farming systems that prioritized crops—mainly, cotton, coffee, tobacco, and tea—for export rather than feeding local people. After independence, many African countries faced pressure from international lenders such as the World Bank and the IMF to adopt new economic policies. Structural Adjustment Programs forced governments to privatize land, remove support for small farmers, and open their markets to foreign goods. As a result, local food systems collapsed under the weight of imported agricultural products and large-scale industrial monoculture farming. As the regional director for World Neighbors East Africa, Chris Macoloo put it, there is a loss of autonomy in African agricultural policymaking:

One is the fact that the food policy and agricultural policy in Africa is formulated in Washington DC, in London, and in Paris. And once they formulate these policies, then they provide funds to implement the policies, and therefore they dictate the kind of agriculture that the countries in Africa can actually produce.

This extractive system didn’t just continue; it evolved. Today, large financial institutions like the African Development Bank (AfDB) and private investors are promoting a new version of industrial farming that benefits big corporations. For example, the AfDB’s massive $61billion agricultural plan seeks to transform more than 25 million hectares of land into export-oriented agribusiness zones across 40 African countries that outline pathways to improving food security and productivity. If realized, this will displace more than 11 million smallholder farmers.

At the same time, agroecology, a holistic, fairer, and more sustainable approach rooted in African traditions and biodiversity, has been dismissed as irrelevant or “too small.” A good example is when agroecology was sidelined in the Post-Malabo and Kampala Declaration process of shaping the next 10 years of the CADAAP strategy. However, it has unquestionable support from African governments.

Philanthropic actors such as AGRA and the Gates Foundation continue to support industrial models promoting genetically modified seeds and highly polluting synthetic chemicals in the name of development. African activists are now asking the Gates Foundation for reparations for the damage caused. As Macoloo highlighted: “Agribusiness is basically just agriculture as a business… exploiting our fertile soils to grow things… not for our economy, not for our own benefit but to benefit their own people… almost like slavery.”

The problems created by industrial agriculture are growing fast. Soils are losing nutrients, water sources are polluted, and biodiversity is shrinking. In Kenya alone, the Route to Food Report shows that 76% of pesticides used are classified as highly hazardous, with many banned in Europe. These chemicals don’t just affect nature; they poison communities and contribute to rising cases of cancer and other non-communicable diseases.

Land grabbing is another primary concern. More than 30 million hectares of land have already been taken by private agribusinesses and foreign investors, forcing out local farmers and pastoralists in countries such as Senegal and Tanzania. The phenomenon is driven by direct foreign investment, government incentives, and global food and biofuel demands. These land deals, often shrouded in opaque contracts and executed without meaningful consultation with local communities, routinely violate customary land rights. Large-scale sugarcane and rice projects in Tanzania have displaced pastoralist Maasai communities and smallholder farmers. At the same time, the Senegal River Valley has become a leasing hotspot, triggering water shortages and local conflict. Notable examples include the controversial 20,000-hectare Senhuile-Sénéthanol lease in Senegal, which displaced 37 villages, and the sugarcane-driven evictions in Tanzania’s Kilombero Valley, where land deemed “idle” by the government was transferred to foreign investors, often without adequate consultation or compensation for local communities who had settled and cultivated these lands.

These processes have severely disrupted subsistence farming, particularly harming pastoralists and women, who often lose access to communal lands first. GRAIN and Land Matrix report that more than 40% of all documented global land grabs occur in Africa. Many are framed as developmental but primarily serve export-oriented agribusiness rather than food security, with the 30 million hectare figure reflecting confirmed rather than speculative acquisitions.

Trade agreements such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have the potential to reshape African agriculture, but they also raise serious concerns about exacerbating existing inequalities in food systems. Critics argue that AfCFTA could enable multinational corporations to patent seeds, undermining traditional seed systems, which millions of African smallholders rely on.

Under expanded intellectual property protections aligned with international agreements like UPOV 1991, seed varieties, often bred and passed down through generations, can be claimed by companies, limiting farmers’ rights to save, share, or reuse seeds. Without legal safeguards to protect community rights, the AfCFTA framework risks turning African agriculture into a corporate-driven model that marginalizes smallholders and erodes traditional ecological knowledge. Experts and organizations such as GRAIN, Oxfam, and bilaterals.org warn that seed diversity and local food systems could be severely compromised unless trade integration efforts include robust protections for farmers’ rights.

Despite being sidelined, agroecology empowers communities to take control of their food systems. It’s proving to be a powerful and practical solution based on local knowledge that works harmoniously with nature. For example, in Kenya’s Muranga County, the new agroecology policy supports agroecology by subsidizing organic inputs and building local markets. The Seed Savers Network has set up over 100 community seed banks in Kenya to protect disappearing indigenous seed varieties.

Agroecology isn’t just about farming. It improves the health of people and ecosystems, supports local economies, strengthens communities, and helps African countries adapt to climate change. Yet it still receives only a tiny fraction of funding. Between 2016 and 2018, just 2.7% of EU support to agriculture in Africa went toward agroecological approaches, according to the CIDSE Finance for Agroecology Report.

As Michel Pimbert from Coventry University said during the Manzoni gathering, “The money is there, what’s needed is political will.”Agroecology has proven its worth. It’s time the funding matched its potential. Money is at the heart of this food systems issue. Agricultural funding supports industrial agriculture. One speaker in the gathering said, “We have realized that organizations and donors and even governments tend to fund industrial agriculture at the expense of agroecology.” Development Finance Institutions, such as the AfDB and British International Investment, channel billions into private equity funds that back supermarket chains and agribusiness companies. These investments rarely reach small farmers and often work against their interests. It is not about missing opportunities; it’s about injustice.

Oxfam International reports that in 2022, 722 major global corporations earned more than $1 trillion in windfall profits. If just a portion of this wealth were taxed and redirected, it could often fund sustainable agriculture across Africa.

Participants at the Manzoni AFSA forum didn’t just complain, they called for action. They demanded debt cancellation, taxes on speculative financial trading and billionaire wealth, and reparations for slavery and colonization. They also proposed the creation of African-led financial institutions; public banks, community savings groups, an agroecology Fund for Africa, and participatory budgets that serve people rather than profit.

As AFSA’s General Coordinator, Million Belay Ali warned, “Our policies are being shaped by those who control the money.” Changing that means shifting who holds the power.

The Nairobi forum didn’t end with talk. It launched a bold continent-wide campaign. Participants devised a straightforward strategy to challenge harmful funding systems and build a financial foundation for agroecology. Their plan includes advocating for defunding industrial agriculture by calling for cutting support to Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), banning dangerous pesticides, and redirecting subsidies toward agroecological practices. It also calls for creating new African-led systems, community banks, participatory finance models, and grassroots-led advocacy efforts. Youth, women, and smallholder farmers are central to this movement. Social media, education, litigation, and strategic storytelling are all part of the campaign’s tools.

A symbolic moment from the gathering captured the stakes: participants imagined industrial agriculture as a multiheaded monster, a hydra of land grabs and a serpent of financial control. Their message was simple but powerful: only collective resistance can bring the monster down.

The fight ahead is challenging, but the momentum is real. AFSA and its allies are building a campaign to shift funding, reshape policies, and reclaim the continent’s food future. They are publishing new research, organizing national dialogues, and mobilizing youth and women to lead the way.

One speaker said, “The fight is brutal, but the vision is clear. When we unite, even giants fall”. As the mock headlines from the event declared, “Africa Declares Agroecology the Future” and “AGRA Defeated,” the message is loud and clear: the time to reclaim financial power is now.

Back on track 30 Sep 4:00 AM (20 days ago)

A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.

The train moves through landscapes stitched with violence, carrying bodies and destinies alike… where to every birth its blood flows on tracks of both exile and homecoming.

Trains loom large in the narrative of Black South Africans, alien artifacts, metallic centipedes of colonial extraction that carry the weight of colonialism, dislodgment, resilience, and aspiration. In South African cultural production, they function as metaphors and lived realities that intersect with themes of spatial justice, economic migration, and political struggle.

Whether it is in Stimela’s songs about labor featuring Ray Phiri’s musical narratives, or Busi Mhlongo’s explorations of urbanization with railway metaphors, trains are evoked as sonic carriers of displacement, worker solidarity, and the aspiration for healing and reunion—embedding collective memory and resistance within cultural expression.

Hugh Masekela’s iconic song, Stimela (Coal Train), vividly captures the historical role of trains as instruments of exploitation during colonial and Apartheid South Africa:

There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi, There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe, There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique, … Bringing with them strange men with a strange language … To work on contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg.

European colonial powers built railways in Africa mainly to extract and export valuable resources—minerals, timber, and agricultural products—from the interior to coastal ports linked to global markets. In the gospel of development (and the romantic memories of unreconstructed supremacist settlers), trains are always good news. Heavy steel meets mobility, turning “unclaimed” and wasted land productive. In South Africa, railway lines connected the mineral-rich interior, notably Johannesburg’s goldfields and Kimberley’s diamond mines, to the coastal ports of Durban and Cape Town.

Trains have never been just a means of transporting goods and people. More than simple tools, trains embody ideology and metaphor; they are as much political and social constructs as they are industrial devices. They carry power, memory, and myth. Beneath the romanticism of trains lies an uglier story—one of extraction, erasure, and infrastructural betrayal.

Where settler states like the US built railways to consolidate national space and craft a mythology of internal expansion (however violent), colonial powers in Africa laid tracks without such fiction. Railways were designed to sever, not stitch. From the Congo to Kenya to the former Transvaal, lines ran from resource-rich areas to ports, bypassing indigenous economies, languages, and ecologies.

It was never about nation-building. Colonial and apartheid rail networks were acts of spatial violence that reinforced and entrenched racial segregation and social hierarchies. Built to connect mines with markets, they bypassed communities considered irrelevant to the extractive economy, creating a “dual economy” where development clustered along rail corridors serving white settlers. At the same time, Black nations were confined to marginalized homelands and segregated urban areas with poor infrastructure access.

In Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, trains signify the political and physical mobility essential to resistance against apartheid. They evoke the ruptures in segregated landscapes caused by racialized spatial engineering, but also the possibility of re-connection and social transformation. Trains are metaphors for dislocation, labor migration, and collective political momentum—the very forces that structured apartheid’s geography and continue to shape South Africa’s uneven terrain.

In 2025, something unusual is happening across Africa. Morocco swiftly moves passengers from Tangier to Casablanca at 320 km/h, and Egypt develops Chinese-financed networks across the desert. At the same time, South Africa, with greater financial and industrial capacity than either, remains stuck in the legacy of its colonial infrastructure and routes.

A South African high-speed rail (HSR) corridor, linking Johannesburg and Cape Town via Kimberley and Bloemfontein, could become a test case for spatial rectification if its design incorporated building a green industrial spine.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are about trains. These memories are more pleasant than those commonly associated with Black South Africa and, ironically, highlight a positive aspect of living in a totalitarian police state; it was safe for a nine-year-old to travel alone to Vereeniging, a town 50km from Soweto, where I lived.

My mother’s older sister lived in Sharpeville, a township outside Vereeniging. My mother grew up in Sharpeville after her family was forcibly removed from Topville, or “Top Location,” as they called it. Sharpeville was “officially” constructed to replace Topville due to “overcrowding” and “illnesses like pneumonia.” But in my family’s telling, the real illness was the apartheid state’s obsession with containment, its refusal to allow Black life to flourish on its own terms. The Topville of their stories was not a slum or a health hazard. It was a place built through self-organization, kinship networks, and quiet defiance, a community shaped by Sunday church services and backyard economies. The removals from Topville began in 1958. The Sharpeville Massacre, which was crucial in changing the course and nature of resistance to apartheid settler colonialism, occurred two years later.

The train I took from Orlando Stadium in Soweto wove through the segregated layout of apartheid. It arrived in Orlando from Johannesburg, dropping off Black workers who then had to navigate the sprawling area of Soweto. From there, it headed to the “Indian” suburb of Lenasia (Lenz), then passed through a series of small white-only towns such as Lawley, Grassmere, Leeuhof, and Duncanville, before reaching Vereeniging.

I remember Vereeniging and its surrounding white suburbs, particularly Three Rivers, as a Stepford-like community of implausible physical and metaphysical whiteness. It was more than just the stern-looking residents. More than anywhere else I had ever been in South Africa, Vereeniging embodied apartheid and its supremacist hierarchy. Vereeniging was an ordered, ethno-Gilead without the costumes—it was as a god with a chosen race envisioned the world.

Vereeniging is part of the Vaal Triangle, the metaphorical heart of industrial South Africa, where the apartheid government created and nurtured its ambitions for industrial independence. The establishment of Sasol and Iscor—two iconic symbols of the apartheid industrial complex—transformed this region into the center of a coal-based manufacturing value chain that made South Africa both the continent’s most industrialized country and one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. The first railway to Vereeniging arrived in 1892, connecting the Cape and Johannesburg via Bloemfontein, an essential infrastructure development that channeled imported goods, mining equipment, and labor into the interior mining areas, enabling efficient resource extraction and industrial activities. The old trains carried more than freight; they carried the smell of coal, the sting of iron in the air, and the unspoken knowledge that the line served somewhere else’s wealth.

The first Cape-Johannesburg line was a carbon artery. Coal-fired steam locomotives hauled machinery, chemicals, and migrant labor north to the goldfields, and sent bullion, diamonds, and manufactured goods south to the ports. Every kilometer was built to feed an energy-and carbon-intensive economy: from the collieries of Vereeniging to the blast furnaces of Iscor, the line linked extraction to combustion, and combustion to export. The smoke was not only in the air; it was embedded in the economic logic, in the way value moved out and left little behind.

The main rail corridor from Cape Town to Johannesburg still passes through landscapes marked as much by absence as by presence. Under apartheid, those absences were often by design. Passenger services on trunk lines seldom stopped in or near Black townships, while branch lines were oriented toward mines, grain silos, and white-owned farming towns. Where stations did exist in Black settlements, they were typically under-serviced, freight-only, or deliberately under-invested, reinforcing patterns of exclusion documented in transport planning archives from the 1960s and 1970s.

A HSR line could follow that same path but run on a different fuel and a different idea. Powered by renewable energy, wind from the Cape coast, solar from the Karoo, it could transport people and goods without the plume of coal dust trailing behind. Its stations could anchor new industries in green manufacturing, agro-processing, and clean logistics. But changing the power source is not the same as changing the power relations. A sleek, solar-powered train can still move inequality at high speed. Whether this new line becomes a green spine for shared prosperity or just a cleaner engine for old patterns will depend on who it stops for, and who it speeds past.

Today, many of the gaps remain. Between the Cape Winelands and the Vaal Triangle lie dozens of intermediate towns, De Aar, Beaufort West, Hanover, Colesberg, Springfontein—whose rail-dependent economies have contracted sharply since the 1980s. In De Aar, once the country’s largest marshalling yard, railway employment fell from more than 3,000 jobs in the early 1980s to under 400 by the late 2000s. Beaufort West’s railway depot closed in the 1990s, leaving road freight and tourism as the main employers. Farm mechanization has reduced seasonal labor demand across the Karoo, while the diversion of high-value freight from rail to the N1 and N12 highways has hollowed out sidings and goods sheds along the route.

In the periurban zones of Bloemfontein, Kimberley, and the Vaal, informal settlements now extend along service roads and railway verges without access to affordable, reliable passenger trains. Small towns such as Brandfort and Luckhoff have experienced population stagnation or decline, functioning mainly as commuter dormitories for nearby cities or as welfare-dependent service points. These settlements were once the labor reservoirs, freight hubs, and seasonal markets that supported the colonial and apartheid economies. Currently, they are situated mainly outside the post-1994 growth hubs, bypassed by both national logistics corridors and metropolitan development plans.

A future HSR network could change this trajectory, but the outcome is not predetermined. International evidence varies: in France and Spain, intermediate HSR stations have stimulated regional manufacturing and logistics hubs when paired with targeted investment; in Morocco, the Tangier–Casablanca line has so far brought benefits mainly to its terminal cities. In South Africa, a Cape-Johannesburg HSR could either link these towns into the country’s economic framework or reinforce their marginality by passing through at 300km/h.

If integrated into a green industrialization strategy, the line could serve as a hub for agro-processing in the Karoo, renewable-energy manufacturing in the Northern Cape, and climate-resilient housing developments around selected station towns. Each stop could act as a node within a clean-energy logistics network, connecting solar farms, wind corridors, and regional food markets to the rest of the country.

Even green corridors can become extractive if they move energy, labor, and goods outward without fostering prosperity along their path. Whether this shift turns into a story of renewal or repetition depends on the maps we draw now—maps that determine who is included in the journey and who remains left off the timetable.

Done well, the line would do more than shorten journeys between two cities. It could bind together the fractured body of South Africa—stitching its skipped-over towns into a shared future of economic life and social vitality. Done poorly, it could harden the very exclusions it has the power to undo.

In a country where geography is biography, and memory is place-based, mobility has always been political. Apartheid criminalized Black movement. Democracy promised freedom of movement, but delivered dangerous taxis, slow buses, and long waits. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow explores the ambivalence of train imagery in the postapartheid urban milieu, where trains represent flux and identity disruption. Here, railways narrate the complex rhythms of migration and urban instability, signalling both connection and rupture within evolving community landscapes.

For South Africa, where apartheid carved enduring fault lines of spatial exclusion, high-speed rail is not just about faster trains; it is about redrawing the very geography of apartheid and colonialism and reimagining the nation-state as modernized indigenous communities.

South Africa is not ideal for HSR because it is vast. It is ideal for HSR because it is broken. Not in some abstract developmental sense. But in the most literal, cartographic sense, the country’s geography is fractured, deliberately. Colonialism structured its provinces and cities to be apart. Apartheid engineered its cities and neighborhoods, its peoples to be separate. Apart from the land, separate from each other, disconnected from power. Colonialism and apartheid were not just racial regimes; they were spatial projects. They redrew space to institutionalize separation, then laid the tracks and paved the roads to enforce it. What this left behind is not just distance, but discontinuity. A landscape full of skipped-over towns, labor-sending zones, and ghost lines of movement that never made sense to begin with.

The long-haul road from Johannesburg to Cape Town is not just long because the country is large. It is long because everything in between was made invisible. So when we talk about HSR, when we imagine sleek trains threading Gauteng to the Cape in five hours instead of fifteen, we are talking about an opportunity to rewrite the logic of extractive settler colonialism and apartheid ethno-capitalism. However, this will only happen if we actively engage with what is almost certainly an inevitability and act to counter dysfunctional elite design and capture.

In To Every Birth Its Blood, trains carry both the possibility of connection and the violence of dislocation. In South Africa, HSR can become a reckoning in motion, a way of the patchwork kilt of a new, genuine nation rather than the disoriented Frankenstein monster that settler colonialism and apartheid engineering tried to stitch together. But only if it is built with memory and intent. Because infrastructure, even with the best aspirations, is never neutral. It can build, but it can also dislocate. It can integrate, but it can also dispossess.

Suppose South Africa’s HSR moonshot is to be more than a technocratic fantasy or an elite vanity project. In that case, it must be yoked to a democratic vision: one that centers spatial justice, builds local capability, resists accumulation without redistribution, and honors the land’s precolonial past as much as its post-carbon future.

This is not about speed. It is about direction.

The poetics of protest 29 Sep 4:00 AM (21 days ago)

From rooftop beginnings to open mics that echo on the streets, Kenya’s newest literary collective shows how art can archive struggle and energize dissent.

To situate the conception of Qwani, as with all other Literary collectives in Kenya, demands that we understand what Carey Baraka said in his 2019 article, “The Kenyan Literary Hustle.” In a conversation he was having with a fellow Enkare Review founder, the fellow said, “In a few years, a new group of kids will come up and decide that the lit scene in Kenya does not work, and gatekeepers be gatekeeping and that we need new names, and they will start something new.”

That was in 2016. Fast forward to October 2022, and a group of eight 20-year-old kids is seated at the rooftop of an apartment building in Parklands, staring out at the sunset. Vindicating the Enkare Review founder as a clairvoyant, the eight kids whine about how the lit scene in Kenya does not work, how gatekeepers are gatekeeping, and decide that they will start something new.

Having only written in their personal blogs, the kids decide to come together and call out to any other young writer at the time who was struggling to break through into the literary scene. Together, they start a literary collective—Qwani—as homage to Kwani?, the older collective that succeeded in making a significant mark on Kenya’s literary scene.

Their first product—Qwani 01—was launched on April 1, 2023, and with it, they introduced 37 new writers to the scene. The book was a collection of short stories, poems, essays, art/music/ film reviews, scripts, and even pieces written in Sheng (the local lingo).

In Kwani? fashion, the program of the launch contained poetry readings as well as musical performances from other young artists who had volunteered to perform. It was quite a felicitous moment, attended by an audience of 400 people at the Alliance Française Multimedia Library in the Nairobi Central Business District.

At the end of the day, we thought our work was done. However, two weeks later, several attendees sent positive feedback about the session and asked when the next event would be held. This wasn’t something we had anticipated, but we decided to offer the people what they wanted.

On the last Friday of that month, we hosted an Open Mic at Alliance Française Multimedia Library, inviting interested poets, spoken word artists, and even musicians to showcase their craft. Despite it being a rainy day, at least 200 young people turned up to the event, and we had such awe-inspiring performances. We held another session the following month, and it went equally well. By then, we realized we could, or rather should, build a community around this. In addition to publishing literary works, we added Open Mics to our main ventures. With the Alliance Française Multimedia Library offering us their space, we began hosting events every month.

To begin, we had no thematic limits, and so we attracted all kinds of poets and spoken word artists, especially those just starting out and looking to showcase their work. Just like that, it became a cultural hangout, where artists could meet and share ideas as they listened to one another. The additional benefit was that we did not restrict attendance to artists only; everyone was invited to indulge in the performances. Over time, even the performers grew with regard to their craft, and we began seeing prize-worthy work. Even veteran performers such as Dorphanage and Ngartia began attending our shows, much to our surprise!

Soon enough, we adopted themes for each month’s Open Mic. In June this year we marked the anniversary of the June 2024 protests with a poetry session, “Poetry for Protests.” In this session, the participants performed pieces addressing the state’s poor governance, wanton corruption, as well as police brutality.

Hosted in collaboration with and as the launch event of the Africa Is a Country Festival in Nairobi, this was our most impactful session. In addition to the performances, we organized a panel discussion featuring Oyamo Richard (writer, poet, spoken-word artist, and co-founder of Rafinki), Seise Bagbo (performing artist and educator), Clifton Gachagua (author of Madman at Kilifi and Cartographer of Water), Dorphanage (the 34th Slam Africa champion), and Ngartia (storyteller and co-founder of Too Early for Birds, a theater production that focuses on telling Kenya’s history).

In the panel discussion, the panelists spoke about the role that poetry holds in protests. This came two days before the June 25 protests, and notwithstanding the potential threat that came with hosting a politically-charged event at this time, we went ahead with it. And it definitely invigorated many people in the audience to take to the streets to fight for our country.

The panelists reminded us that art is the simplest yet the most unwavering form of conveying our emotions. Artists play a very crucial role in uniting the people through their messages, as well as communicating the society’s mood. We were reminded of the role that Eric Wainaina’s song Daima played in uniting Kenyans in 2002. Or the role that Kwani?’s anthologies played in documenting stories from the 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence. Or the role that Pawa254 plays in protest exhibitions.

The biggest project we had been working on around the protests was the third issue of our anthology—Qwani 03—which was themed “Maandamano.” For this issue, we had called upon writers, comic artists, and even visual artists to submit pieces focusing on last year’s protests.

The book featured more than 45 pieces, among them essays on how best to organize and mobilize protests, poems relaying the mood of the people, non-fictional pieces narrating individual experiences during the protests, music reviews on songs and albums that defined the protests, a photo gallery of images taken during the protests, and even comic art. The plan was to release it in June this year, during the “Maandamano Anniversary @ 1” celebrations.

However, the security risk posed by this book was very high because the proposed launch date coincided with a period when many abductions were happening. Therefore, we have shelved the book, and hopefully we will release it in the future. It will serve as an archive, informing future generations of the events of June 2024. That, clearly, is the duty of artists.

Nepal’s Gen Z reckoning 26 Sep 4:00 AM (24 days ago)

On the AIAC podcast, we speak with Feyzi Ismail about Nepal’s Gen Z uprising that toppled the ruling establishment.

In September 2025, Nepal experienced one of the most significant waves of political unrest in its recent history. Led largely by Gen Z protesters, the movement brought down the governing coalition and forced a national reckoning with the failures of a political class that had long promised transformation but delivered little. Coming nearly two decades after the end of the Maoist civil war and the abolition of the monarchy, the uprising was not just about corruption or unemployment—it was about a deeper sense of betrayal. What had happened to the revolution?

In this episode, editor William Shoki speaks to Feyzi Ismail, a political scientist and longtime observer of Nepalese politics, about what the uprising revealed—and what might come next. Together, they trace the longue durée of struggle in Nepal, from the armed insurgency and the resulting fragile peace, to the rise and demobilization of the Maoists, to today’s fractured political landscape. What does the Gen Z rebellion tell us about the future of left politics in Nepal? What kind of economic or geopolitical program could emerge from this moment? And is it possible to imagine a new political formation rising from the ashes of disillusionment?

Listen to the show and read a transcript below, and subscribe on your favorite platform.

William Shoki

Feyzi, thank you very much for coming onto the Africa Is a Country podcast.

Feyzi Ismail

Thanks for inviting me—it’s a pleasure, absolutely.

William Shoki

It’s interesting to be having this conversation with you now. Just last week, I spoke with Sungu Oyoo, a Kenyan socialist who is running for president there, and we discussed Kenya’s own Gen Z uprisings, which took place last year and this year. Having that conversation against the backdrop of what was happening in Nepal was striking. So I wanted to start by asking you—especially for listeners who might not have been paying close attention, given how overwhelming the news cycle is these days—if you could walk us through what happened over those two days in Nepal. We saw an inspired movement of young people bring down an entire political establishment. In the international press, familiar terms were used—like in Kenya, this too was described as a Gen Z revolution. The ostensible trigger was a social media ban, but the protests quickly expanded to take on a range of other demands. Could you set the scene for us? What were the immediate triggers, and what deeper context produced the uprising?

Feyzi Ismail

Yes, as you say, the trigger—or at least the pretext—was the social media ban. The Nepal government had announced the banning of 26 social media sites—so, the familiar ones: Facebook, Instagram, even WhatsApp. That was the spark, and that’s how it’s been portrayed in much of the media. The government gave these corporations a week to register locally, and of course most of them didn’t. So the government was about to institute the ban when the protests broke out—and very quickly, within days, they reversed course. I would call it an uprising. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a revolution, but it was certainly an uprising.

Of course, you have to look at the context in which this is taking place. I think what’s clear—even in the mainstream press—is that it wasn’t just about social media. This movement was coming off the back of decades of anger and resentment toward the political elite and the mainstream political parties. That includes the three main ones: the Nepali Congress; the UML, or Unified Marxist-Leninist Party; and the Maoists, the Communist Party of Nepal. The anger was particularly directed at KP Oli, who was the prime minister and came from the UML. His leadership style was extremely authoritarian. Under his rule, dissent was routinely cracked down on, corruption flourished, and he himself was widely implicated. The gap between rich and poor widened significantly—Nepal saw its first billionaire just over a decade ago, while life for the vast majority of people hasn’t really improved.

Nepal is, of course, famously dependent on remittances. It’s one of the top remittance-receiving countries as a share of GDP. That inflow has kept people surviving, but it hasn’t led to transformative change in people’s lives. Remittances are used largely for daily survival. Some families have managed to buy land and so on, but the vast majority remain deeply dependent on this system. Meanwhile, there’s a jobs crisis. There hasn’t been any serious outlet for people—no sense that things are improving, or that the future looks more promising. So I think all of that anger and resentment exploded—and yes, it was among young people, especially in urban centers.

William Shoki

And does that explain, demographically, why this was a Gen Z–driven protest? In the piece you co-wrote with Fraser Sugden for Africa Is a Country, you highlight how Nepal witnessed the growth of a higher-education sector that’s produced a large number of graduates who aren’t being absorbed into the job market. Is it fair to say there’s now a class of downwardly mobile young people—economically starved, politically disillusioned—who are confronting an elite that seems completely indifferent to their reality? I’d love for you to describe that demographic a bit more, and explain why they were the ones to lead this moment.

And then secondly—why the social media ban? What exactly was the government trying to achieve? I didn’t realize, until you said it, that these companies were given just a week to register. But even so, that’s an incredibly short time frame. What was driving the government’s desire to crack down, and were they really so surprised at the backlash? It’s strange that they thought they could get away with it.

Feyzi Ismail

Yes—first, on remittances and the investment in education—I think that’s a crucial part of what’s going on. What we say in the article is that there’s a kind of desperation—a search for a way out of the experience of work, particularly agricultural work. Many families don’t want their children to continue farming, and young people themselves often don’t see a future in it, at least in terms of stable livelihoods. So there’s been a huge investment in education, and a lot of remittances are channeled into that. You have many young people from rural areas moving to cities—not just Kathmandu but also district headquarters—to study. Nepal has a young population, and the growth of educational institutions reflects that demographic. A much smaller group, of course, goes abroad. But the general sentiment is that if we invest in education, our children will have better lives—and of course, that’s a universal hope, not unique to Nepal. In some cases, this investment pays off, but structurally there’s a deep jobs crisis. There simply isn’t enough employment to absorb the growing ranks of educated young people.

A lot of this is rooted in the decimation of domestic industry and the failure to develop what was possible. Like many countries, Nepal underwent neoliberal economic reforms beginning in the early 1990s—privatization, liberalization, and so on. Much of its industry was sold off, primarily to Indian capital, and wasn’t allowed to grow. Nepal once had a relatively well-developed garment sector, as well as jute, rubber, and other industries. More could have been done, but because of trade arrangements and economic policy choices, that potential was never realized. As a result, there’s been a serious structural failure to create jobs at scale.

In 2024 alone, about 870,000 people left the country for work. Most families have at least one member working abroad—often not even in Kathmandu, but directly from the village to India, the Gulf, or elsewhere. This kind of migration is incredibly common. And it’s not just that people are going abroad—they’re doing some of the worst jobs, under very harsh conditions. The government has largely facilitated this process. It provides passports and oversees the bare minimum, but there’s not nearly enough regulation to protect migrant workers from exploitation by middlemen and recruitment agencies. It’s a system that enables people to leave but doesn’t create the conditions for them to stay. There hasn’t been any concerted effort to develop the domestic labor market or expand industrial employment.

To be clear, some things have changed over the past 20 to 30 years. Nepal is now a service economy, and there’s been some growth in small businesses and entrepreneurship. But this isn’t the result of proactive government policy. The welfare state is extremely basic, and there’s been no serious effort to address the structural crisis of employment. So what you see is a government deeply disconnected from the reality facing most people.

The decision to ban social media is emblematic of that disconnect. It reflects a profound misreading of how people live, communicate, and participate in political and cultural life. The idea that you could just ban major platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok—and expect no backlash is baffling. It’s not even clear why they gave companies just a week to register. Maybe it was an attempt to flex their muscle, to show the state still had authority. But it backfired, massively. KP Oli himself was particularly arrogant and authoritarian. He mocked the Gen Z activists, suggesting they should be focused on their studies instead of wasting time online. He failed to see that it was he who would end up eating his words.

William Shoki

I want to ask you now about Nepal’s recent political history, because I think for an outsider looking at the political landscape, it’s quite confounding. KP Oli himself comes from the Communist Party of Nepal—the Unified Marxist-Leninist formation. The People’s Socialist Party was part of his Fourth Oli Cabinet. And then there’s the Maoist Communist Party, which led the ten-year insurgency between 1996 and 2006—a movement that ended the constitutional monarchy and helped establish the republic.

Given this history—of a mass grassroots uprising against monarchy in 1990, followed by a decade-long insurgency animated by the desire to end inequalities based on class, caste, gender, and ethnicity—you’d think that when the Maoists came to power in 2008, they would have had a clear mandate to transform Nepali society. One would expect they’d pursue an economic program aimed at building an industrial base, a self-sustaining economy, and a just social order. But what you’ve described instead is something very different: an economy hollowed out by neoliberalism, austerity, and liberalization. In a way, it mirrors the path many countries have taken over the past two decades.

Part of me can understand how that happened. The Maoists came to power in 2008, right when the global financial crisis hit. So perhaps the structural conditions weren’t favorable. But could you talk us through how we got here? How did a movement that was so deeply rooted in popular mobilization and committed to ending elite rule end up producing a system where once again people are forced to rise up—this time against elites who were themselves part of that earlier revolutionary generation? What happened to that mandate?

Feyzi Ismail

So, what happened in 1990 was a mass movement—I would call it a revolution. The party-less Panchayat system, an authoritarian political system, was abolished after several hundred thousand people took to the streets demanding change. This was part of a broader global wave in the early 1990s, not unique to Nepal, that ushered in or restored democratic systems in many places. But very soon after that, the Maoists recognized that the promises of democratic transition were not transforming people’s lives in meaningful ways—socially, politically, and especially economically. So they launched what they called the People’s War.

Maoism has a long history in Nepal. The first Communist Party was established in 1949–1950, following in the footsteps of comrades in India. Organizing had already begun even earlier, dating back to the 1930s. The Maoists were the first political force to go deep into rural areas, to speak to people directly, to introduce ideas of rights and human dignity—human rights in the broadest sense. They built an organizational vehicle that people could actually join, fight with, and use to demand those rights from a government that was, by and large, disconnected from the majority of the population. Politics was mostly happening in Kathmandu. Rural areas, although they had some local governance structures and received some state resources, were not politically integrated in a substantive way. So there was a huge gap between what people expected from the democratic movement of 1990 and what was actually delivered. The Maoists capitalized on that disillusionment—and they became hugely popular.

They fought a ten-year civil war. And while some mainstream narratives claim that ordinary people were caught between the state army and Maoist insurgents—as if both sides were equivalent—that doesn’t really capture what the Maoists were trying to do. Their project had mass support. Now, they ultimately failed to realize that project, and I think a lot of that has to do with Indian influence at the state level. India, of course, has its own Maoist insurgency and is fiercely opposed to such movements. After 9/11, the Nepalese government used the global “war on terror” discourse to frame the Maoists as terrorists. They secured international support, including weapons and funding, to fight the insurgency—much of it facilitated by India.

Militarily, it ended in a kind of stalemate. The Nepalese army was heavily armed and better equipped, but it couldn’t defeat the Maoists. At the same time, the Maoists couldn’t achieve a military victory either. The real defeat came politically. Some sections of the Maoist leadership began looking for a negotiated exit. In 2006, a peace deal was brokered in Delhi, and that was essentially the beginning of the end—though you could argue the turning point came even earlier, when they entered peace talks.

Strategically and theoretically, the Maoist leadership made a profound miscalculation. They concluded that Nepal needed to develop a capitalist economy first, and that socialism could only come later. This line of thinking—that the working class is too small, the unions too weak, the people not ready—isn’t unique to Nepal. But it led them to compromise. Despite still being the most popular party in 2008, when the Constituent Assembly elections were held and the king was forced to abdicate, the Maoists had lost their revolutionary edge. There was no longer a mass movement. No serious space for popular expression. They held a general strike in 2010—that was really the last significant mobilization. After that, things fell apart.

Young people in particular began to lose faith—not just in the Maoists, but in politics more generally. The Maoists had held so much promise, but they squandered it. They got caught up in the elite politicking of Kathmandu. The leadership became just as corrupt as the parties they once opposed. So while the Communist Party still holds a certain symbolic appeal—Nepal is a very left-leaning society, and people vote for communist parties because they associate them with justice and concern for the poor—that trust has been profoundly eroded. People feel utterly betrayed.

I think there’s now a generalized disillusionment across the country. The dynamics are, of course, different between rural and urban areas, but that sense of distrust is widespread. People don’t know who to believe anymore, and that’s largely due to the collapse of the Maoist project. There are still many left-wing parties—probably too many, in fact—operating outside of parliament. But the challenge for them is enormous: How do you build trust again? These parties often have no funding, and organizing requires resources. So the question is: How do we reconnect with a population that’s so disenchanted?

At the same time, I think the mainstream parties are in trouble. This really does feel like a political rupture. I don’t think people want to see any of the current elite in power again. There are six or seven major figures who’ve just been rotating positions for the last 25–30 years. I don’t think they’ll be able to simply return to business as usual. This feels like a new political reality.

William Shoki

What do you think makes this moment feel so decisive? One thing that’s long surprised me about Nepali politics is how resilient the ruling parties have been. You’ve said that you don’t think they’ll be able to reassert control again—that we’ve entered a new political paradigm where the public is so thoroughly disillusioned with the existing leadership that there’s no way back. But on the other hand, there’s a vacuum. And I wonder whether, unless that vacuum is quickly filled by the kinds of extra-parliamentary movements and formations you’ve mentioned, it might pave the way for other forces—still cut from the same elite cloth—to swoop in and stabilize the moment through counterrevolutionary rhetoric, talking in the language of order, discipline, and normalcy. That’s something we’ve seen happen in other contexts.

Already, we’re seeing debates about the violence. Not the violence by the security forces against protesters, but the reverse—by protesters who burned down a few buildings or stormed homes. And I’ve noticed how some people are starting to distance themselves from those actions. I’m not on the ground, so I don’t know how much of that is authentic or how much of it might be part of a broader strategy to delegitimize the protests. But I’m curious to hear what you make of this moment: Are we really witnessing a break so deep that the political establishment can’t recover?

Feyzi Ismail

It’s complex. There is a vacuum now, yes—but at the same time, the state has responded in the way most states do: by sending in the army to restore order and return things to “normal” as quickly as possible. The first thing Sushila Karki did—she’s the former chief justice who has now been appointed interim prime minister—was to promise to repair the damaged buildings and prepare the country for elections. That makes sense, and it’s necessary at one level. But it raises a deeper question: What’s actually going to change? Who is going to run in those elections scheduled for March? Will the elections even happen? I don’t think the old leaders can make a return—Oli’s resignation was deeply humiliating, and during the demonstrations, people held placards with the faces of all the major political leaders. They were all tarred with the same brush.

That said, the political ties these parties have built over decades won’t simply vanish. These are deep-rooted patronage networks. And of course, we can’t ignore international influences. China, for instance, might intervene and try to broker some sort of unity among the communist factions. You could imagine a scenario where new leaders are brought in under familiar party banners, especially if there are no viable alternatives that people recognize or trust. It’s still very difficult to see a truly radical break emerging. But the space is certainly there for alternative parties and leaders to rise—and many people are hoping that this will happen.

We also need to distinguish between the Gen Z protesters and those who were involved in more violent actions, like burning down buildings. I don’t think they were the same people. It’s hard to know exactly who the arsonists were—perhaps some were linked to the Rastriya Swatantra Party, the National Independence Party—but it’s speculative. It certainly wasn’t the young women in school uniforms or the young men planning the protests online who were storming the homes of politicians. So there may have been an element of provocation or even infiltration. It’s unclear.

What is clearer is the role of external powers. People talk a lot about Indian influence—and it’s definitely there—but the US is also very powerful in Nepal. China, too. Oli was famously pro-China and facilitated major investments from them. But now, under the interim government, three of the most important ministries—finance, home, and energy—are all led by people with links to U.S. support. That suggests this may be a kind of correction, a geopolitical recalibration after a decade or more of strong Chinese presence.

Of course, Delhi is watching all of this closely. Nepal is not the only place where we’ve seen youth-led uprisings in the region. Bangladesh last year, Sri Lanka the year before that. India doesn’t want something similar to happen on its own soil. The inequality exists. The conditions are there. And with social media, young people see everything. That’s part of what makes this moment so combustible—the same internet spaces where ordinary people share their struggles are also filled with images of politicians flaunting their wealth, their lifestyles, their impunity. It generates disgust, anger, and a visceral sense of betrayal, especially when the promises of democracy and development haven’t been fulfilled.

People are suffering—there’s a jobs crisis, there’s mass migration into the most exploitative labor sectors, there’s rural stagnation. The 2015 earthquake, the unmet promises of the constitution, the devastation of COVID—all of that is still part of the backdrop. And while many of these patterns echo what we’ve seen elsewhere, Nepal’s history and conditions are unique. What’s driving this moment is real and widespread rage, particularly among a young generation that has invested everything in the idea of a better future—only to be met with betrayal. That anger is both the engine of protest and the terrain on which external and domestic actors are now maneuvering.

William Shoki

I want to touch on two things you’ve just raised—though maybe let’s take them one at a time. First, I want to focus on what you’ve described as the onslaught against working people that’s occurred not only in Nepal but globally over the past two or three decades. We’re talking about a situation in which the majority of the population is immiserated—pushed out, frustrated, cut off from opportunity—and then, crucially, they go online. They scroll through social media and see the children of elites flaunting obscene levels of wealth. And it breeds a deep anger, a resentment that simmers until it finally explodes.

So I want to ask you about the role played by the digital in all of this. Social media now has an outsized influence on the way political mobilizations unfold in the 21st century. What does that look like in the Nepalese context? What’s the nature of social media consumption in Nepal—and do you see it giving rise to new forms of politicization? In the absence of traditional political vehicles and parties, has social media become a kind of substitute infrastructure for political expression? Or would that be overstating its role?

And at the same time, are there tensions or contradictions that come with that digital sphere—especially in terms of unevenness? I’m thinking here in particular about the rural-urban dynamic in Nepal, which I’d love to hear more about. The character of these protests seemed largely urban-centered. Do you think that reflects how social media is used and who has access to it? If not, how have people in rural Nepal been responding to this moment? Are they in the conversation, or are they still largely left out of it?

Feyzi Ismail

Something like three-quarters of the population in Nepal has a mobile phone, and just over half have access to the internet. So a significant portion of the population is connected to these digital spaces. That said, yes—it’s been primarily an urban movement, not just in Kathmandu but in other urban centers as well. Still, I haven’t seen any strong evidence that the rural population feels excluded from what happened. If anything, I think they probably support it—because it was a clear blow against the political elite, which they absolutely deserved. Rural communities have been enduring the same neglect and hardship for years.

In many rural areas, the young men have already left for work abroad. There’s a phenomenon people refer to as the feminization of agriculture—women are now doing much of the labor men used to do. They manage households, they work the fields, often with less help than before. In some places, people are returning to older, cooperative labor practices—like bartering work between households. But in general, a lot of agricultural land is simply being left fallow. There’s reforestation in areas where farming has been abandoned. So rural life is hard, and it’s mostly older people, women, and children who remain. That creates its own forms of social tension and loss.

Many rural residents do feel left behind. They don’t want to leave their homes—but they’re being forced to migrate, often into exploitative and dangerous labor abroad. Most migrants don’t want to go. They want jobs at home. So there’s a deep resentment that after 35 years of democracy, a decade of this new constitution, and over a decade of being a republic, life still hasn’t changed in any fundamental way. Yes, there have been improvements. But even seasonal migration doesn’t transform household incomes, and long-term migration, while more significant, still doesn’t radically improve the lives of most families.

So there’s a sense of shared anger. People may not miss Oli’s rule—certainly, I don’t think anyone’s lamenting his departure—but the bigger feeling is: Finally, something has shifted. A space has opened. One thing we haven’t mentioned yet is the pro-monarchy movement, which had been gaining some traction, particularly since 2023. I think this Gen Z uprising has undercut that momentum somewhat, which is a good thing. The monarchy isn’t widely seen as a viable future, and this protest moment likely reinforced that rejection.

Of course, urban and rural dynamics remain different. But this wasn’t just an urban tantrum—it was a blow to the elite from a frustrated population more broadly. I think older generations, even in urban areas, resonate with that feeling. While it’s youth-led, I don’t think it’s purely a youth movement in the sense that young people alone have a vision or plan for what comes next. The movement is largely leaderless. It lacks structure. That’s part of what makes it so dynamic, but it could also become a problem—especially in terms of transparency, internal democracy, or articulating a clear vehicle through which people’s demands can be channeled.

So yes, people have been politicized. Social media has played a role in that. But social media alone isn’t politics. It can’t replace political parties. Under capitalism, that remains the system we have. Voting still matters. So Gen Z activists—and others—will have to figure out how to relate to parliamentary politics. Do they support a new force in Parliament? Can they become one? That’s part of the short- and medium-term challenge.

But we also need extra-parliamentary forces—especially on the left—to ensure this energy isn’t hijacked by right-wing populism or the remnants of the monarchy. There’s always a danger that resentment is redirected into hatred, division, and violence—along lines of ethnicity or other identities. So the goal should be to connect this generalized politicization—the awareness of inequality, the recognition that life isn’t getting better for most people—with new political formations that can express that anger constructively.

The real question is: How do we put this all together into a mass political vehicle that reflects people’s actual concerns, and how do we connect that with Parliament?

William Shoki

Do you think there’s anyone in Nepal—any formations or individuals—who are exploring that question in inventive and productive ways? Not just looking ahead to the parliamentary contest in March 2026, but thinking more strategically about how to maintain extra-parliamentary pressure in the medium term? How does this movement avoid the risks of co-optation and demobilization that face so many movements once they reach a peak?

You mentioned that the movement is leaderless and structureless—arguably the archetypal form of political organization today. Do you think that makes it more vulnerable? Or is it also a source of strength? How do you imagine this moment bridging the short-term risks of fragmentation with the longer-term horizon of building something durable and expansive?

And is any of that already visible in the demands people are making on the streets? A lot of what’s been said publicly has spoken to the big issues—inequality, corruption, elite impunity. But have there also been articulations of a more specific political vision? And if so, what do you think that vision looks like?

Feyzi Ismail

I don’t see any single political formation right now that’s advancing a comprehensive national vision for what needs to happen in Nepal. That’s not to say they don’t exist—there are left parties out there, some of them with very good ideas. But the issue is unity. None of them have a strong enough national presence to command widespread attention, and even if they do have good ideas, they’re still very small, fragmented, and extra-parliamentary. That makes it hard to be visible, to be trusted, to be believed when you say you have a vision for the country.

Some of these parties are involved in broader movements—for example, campaigns against loan-sharking and exploitative microcredit. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are trapped in usurious lending schemes they can’t pay back. There was a major march to the capital in recent years, with people coming from rural areas—especially from the southern plains—to demand that the government regulate or eliminate these predatory practices. Some of the smaller left parties have been quite vocal in those efforts. But again, unity is difficult when you’re small, when resources are limited, and when trust is lacking between different formations. Without adequate funding, they can’t campaign widely, can’t travel to every district, can’t build a mass presence.

Still, I don’t think the challenge is insurmountable. One way to break through is through mass campaigns. Corruption is an obvious starting point. But the critique can’t stop there. If all people demand is an end to corruption, there’s a risk that change is interpreted narrowly—just replacing some leaders with others within the same political framework. That’s what some of the liberal intelligentsia might prefer: new faces, same system. But that’s not enough.

There are efforts underway to strengthen coalitions, to build toward unity. But the March 2026 elections will be an important test. It’ll show us to what extent the old guard can reorganize and reassert themselves. I suspect most of the same leaders won’t return—but the parties themselves may survive, even if under new leadership. The deeper question is whether the political vision has changed. Because what Nepal needs, at the very least, is a genuine social democratic program—strong welfare policies backed by real political will. And from there, I’d say even more radical change is needed: structural transformation of the economic system and political order.

There are plenty of anti-corruption laws and bodies already in place in Nepal. They’re just not implemented. That’s the problem. And then there’s the question of the constitution, which has been a major political fault line for decades. In many ways, the 2007 interim constitution was more progressive than the 2015 version, which was rushed through after the earthquake. It was almost opportunistic—people were reeling, and the elite took advantage of that moment to push through a more conservative document.

The restructuring of the state into a federal republic was supposed to make resources more accessible at the local level. But in practice, that hasn’t happened. Local governments don’t have real autonomy or capacity. So the promises of federalism, like the promises of the new constitution, remain unfulfilled. It’s been ten years. That kind of broken promise—especially in a place where people have waited so long for change—is fertile ground for anger. Something like this Gen Z uprising was bound to happen, regardless of the specific trigger.

Yes, the new government must investigate corruption. Yes, they must protect freedom of expression and respond to the demands of the Gen Z movement. But we also need radical change, urgently. The question is: Who will provide the leadership for that? What kind of political formation will take it forward?

It’s a process. I never expect these things to happen overnight. And I know there are people on the left working day in and day out to build unity, to draft a real vision, to prepare to contest elections. They’re not sitting on their hands. But we don’t know yet how far they’ll get.

At the same time, we shouldn’t dismiss the Gen Z movement just because it’s leaderless or lacks formal structure. That’s part of its context, part of what gives it its strength. Still, if the left can reach out to the movement, and if the movement itself commits to democratic transparency—to creating structure, to electing accountable leaders—then I think something genuinely new could emerge. Something that breaks with the past.

William Shoki

It’s fascinating. The Nepali landscape—despite its unique characteristics—sounds so familiar to many postcolonial contexts. I’m interested in the composition of the extra-parliamentary left. Who does it include? And how does it distinguish itself from the official left represented in Parliament? I mean, those parties are nominally “left”—many have words like communist, Marxist-Leninist, or Maoist in their names—but they’ve long since shed any meaningful leftist credentials while in power.

How does the extra-parliamentary left claim the mantle of being genuinely left? And is part of why they’ve struggled to make inroads with the general population that the language of “left” and “right” doesn’t really resonate anymore—at least not with young people? Maybe in the 20th century that spectrum had meaning, but today’s youth seem less concerned with ideology and more concerned with trust: If you say you’re going to do something, will you follow through? That’s what matters. And in many places—Nepal included—leftist parties in power over the past few decades have failed to live up to their promises, whether those promises came out of anticolonial, national liberation, or anti-monarchy struggles.

Feyzi Ismail

It’s a very good question. And it’s quite challenging to follow the splits and mergers in Nepal’s left landscape—there are about a dozen or more extra-parliamentary left parties. Some are splits from the Maoists, formed by people who disagreed with what they see as a capitulation—the decision to enter mainstream parliamentary politics. Others critique Maoism itself and want to forge a different path. Some of these groups don’t even call themselves communist, but they are undeniably left-wing.

Often these parties have particular bases or associations—with Dalits, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups. But I think among at least a section of them, there’s a real recognition that things haven’t gone as they’d hoped. They believe what happened with the Maoists wasn’t just about entering parliament. It was a betrayal of class struggle. A betrayal of revolutionary politics. These parties genuinely want to do things differently. And part of that means reconnecting with the mass of the population around the issues that matter most to them—loan-sharking, migration, gender inequality. Issues rooted in people’s everyday experiences.

Now, I really hope they move toward unity. Because one of the biggest challenges is sectarianism. These parties don’t always agree on seemingly small points—and I don’t want to downplay that, because to them, those disagreements are significant. That’s why they organize separately. But the reality is that this moment—right now—is an opportunity. The Gen Z movement proved it’s possible to oust political elites quickly. People have seen that. And there’s real urgency: It’s been over a decade since the republic was declared, more than 15 years since the Maoists’ last real show of force in 2010, and the public is fed up.

This moment shouldn’t be wasted. It’s essential that these parties take seriously the role of trade unions, the role of the working class—not just the peasantry. They must treat the working class not just as a category but as a political force, capable of withholding labor and demanding change. That means taking Marxist politics seriously again—not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that is attuned to the present.

We can’t afford the idea that socialism is some far-off dream, and what we need right now is to build capitalism first. That idea is outdated. And yet, that’s what some leaders are still saying in the press—that the ideas of abolishing private property or the dictatorship of the proletariat are irrelevant now. But I’d argue the opposite. What Nepal needs is unity on the extra-parliamentary left that can eventually express itself within Parliament. Not because Parliament is the solution, but because that terrain can’t be ceded either.

That requires learning from the Maoist experience—both practically and theoretically. There’s a lot to revisit and clarify, organizationally too. And people are thinking on that level—it’s just a question of whether unity can be built, whether the public’s trust can be won.

The past two weeks have shown that the political space is open. Many things could happen. If the left doesn’t step in, then the right will, or the status quo will reassert itself under new forms. That’s inevitable. So it’s absolutely essential that the left respond, and I think the conditions are ripe. People aren’t just asking for social media access and freedom of expression—although those matter. They want something more. They want a different kind of economy, and they want institutions that can actually deliver on the promises they’ve heard so many times before—but never seen fulfilled.

William Shoki

What would it look like, programmatically, to give real expression to that popular desire for change? If, let’s say, some unified left-wing formation were able to contest elections next year—or at least organize itself sufficiently to exert serious extra-parliamentary pressure—what would that actually entail? On the one hand, as you’ve already said, the traditional “stageist theory” of socialist transformation—the idea that you must first go through a period of capitalist development before any kind of revolution—is by now thoroughly discredited. That idea has mostly served as a kind of license for ostensibly socialist or social democratic parties to keep indefinitely postponing the serious question of how to transition beyond capitalism.

But on the other hand, we’re clearly not in a revolutionary situation. And I’d be curious to hear more about why you’ve been calling this moment an uprising, but not a revolution—what are the stakes of that distinction? Because, as you’ve pointed out, even the economic interventions that are on the table—however progressive—are still largely social democratic in character, and would necessarily take place within the constraints of capitalist conditions. And these are extraordinarily unfavorable conditions: stagnant growth, rising inequality, deepening ecological crisis, intensifying geopolitical instability.

Which brings me to the geopolitical question. What role are outside powers playing here—primarily China, India, and the United States? Where are their interests aligned, and where do they diverge? I imagine there’s some alignment, for instance, between India and the US at various junctures. So what kind of tactical flexibility would be required of a left administration? Would it mean adopting a formally nonaligned position? Could it mean developing warmer ties with China? Or maybe something else entirely?

To put it simply: If, on the off chance, a genuinely left administration comes to power—one that sincerely wants to respond to popular demands—what would that look like, programmatically? On the economy, on geopolitics, on social issues? How does such a government govern, given the constraints?

Feyzi Ismail

It’s a bit of a million-dollar question. Why don’t I call it a revolution? Mainly because what happened in 1990 and 2006 were complete restructurings of the state. In 1990, Nepal transitioned from the Panchayat system to a democratic constitutional monarchy. Then in 2006, it abolished a 240-year-old monarchy altogether, moving from monarchy to republic. That was a real, substantive transformation in the form of the state. What we saw this time was the dismissal of a prime minister. That’s not to say it couldn’t develop into a revolution—and I hope it does, eventually—but right now it was a change of government, not of state form.

Nepal faces a very specific, objective difficulty: It has two major powers, India and China, right on its borders, and they are in tension with one another. Geographically, Nepal is divided by the Himalayas—Everest literally separates it from China—while to the south, it shares an open border with India. Historically, ethnically, linguistically, Nepal has been closer to India. But China has increasingly asserted influence—investing heavily through the Belt and Road Initiative, which Nepal joined in 2017. So Nepal has to play an extremely difficult balancing act. I don’t underestimate that, and I certainly don’t underestimate the challenges that any government—especially a left government—would face in that geopolitical context.

Economically, Nepal remains one of the world’s least developed countries, and yes, it needs funds. But there are internal possibilities too. I remember very clearly when the Maoist government came to power in 2011—three years into the republic. Baburam Bhattarai was the finance minister, and for the first time, he managed to collect taxes in a serious way. Elite families, who had never paid their fair share, were suddenly shocked to find they actually had to comply. That moment showed that it was possible to generate internal revenue and begin redistributing resources. It’s true the funds weren’t always spent the way they should have been, but the broader point is that fiscal policy is a tool. A government that’s ideologically committed—willing to tackle corruption, implement a progressive taxation system, and prioritize redistribution—can do something meaningful.

There’s no inherent reason Nepal can’t industrialize. If industry existed here in the 1970s and 1980s, it can exist now. A few decades ago, Nepal was a rice-exporting country; now it imports rice. That speaks to broader issues—land use, agricultural labor shortages—but they’re not unsolvable. You can invest in mechanization. You can redistribute land. These aren’t even radical ideas; they’re just smart social democratic policies. This isn’t unique to Nepal. In many parts of the world, just implementing basic redistributive and developmental measures would be a massive step forward.

And of course, addressing the jobs crisis is essential. Industry and agriculture are both part of that. But there’s also a broader reconstruction and development agenda—roads, electrification, infrastructure. There’s no shortage of work to be done. The key is to make sure that donor money, if it comes, is accepted on Nepal’s terms. Any support has to be aligned with a national plan. And that plan should reflect the priorities of the people, not the logic of the market.

In this sense, economic sovereignty is inseparable from political strategy. I would even argue—just as I’ve argued for nationalization in the UK—that targeted public investment can work extremely well. If you invest wisely, in sectors that matter, you can build capacity. That, in turn, allows you to stabilize geopolitically. Neither India nor China may like such a direction, but they might tolerate it if a left administration has deep popular legitimacy. That’s why maintaining a connection to the mass of the population is so important. One of the most important interfaces for that connection is the mass movement itself—movements that give voice to people’s desires and concerns. The moment a left government becomes disconnected from those movements, it risks doing things that people don’t understand or support. That’s what breeds resentment and anger.

It’s not that difficult to not be corrupt. It’s not impossible to implement at least some of these reforms. I’m not underestimating the challenges—Nepal’s terrain, its history, the geopolitical pressure—but the task is not insurmountable. What’s required is a very strong and ideologically committed political force, one that stays rooted in the people and is willing to govern on that basis. If that exists, it becomes possible to begin building something different.

William Shoki

Feyzi, I think that’s a great note for us to end on. Thank you very much.

Feyzi Ismail

Pleasure. Thanks a lot.

William Shoki

Thank you very much to Feyzi, and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We’ve been discussing Nepal with Feyzi Ismail, who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include the politics of protest, labor, the climate crisis, and anti-imperialism. She is also active in the British antiwar and trade union movements. If you haven’t already, check out her piece on Africa Is a Country, which frames much of what we discussed today. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and we’ll be back next week with another conversation on current affairs from a pan-African and left perspective. My name is William Shoki. Until next time—goodbye.

Feyzi Ismail

The sound of revolt 25 Sep 4:01 AM (25 days ago)

On his third album, Afro-Portuguese artist Scúru Fitchádu fuses ancestral wisdom with urban revolt, turning memory and militancy into a soundtrack for resistance.

Lee em português aqui.

“What strength is that?” asked Sérgio Godinho, one of the most important Portuguese singer-songwriters, in 1972, when Portugal was still submerged in the long night of fascism—dragging out the agony of its colonial system, condemning people to an unjust war, and spreading the carnage in massacres like the one that took place that year in Wiriyamu, Mozambique. Those were harsh times, marked by a “dormensia ku korrenti” (dormancy with chains), as Scúru Fitchádu would later write and sing in Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu (2023), his second album, where he reworked and re-signified the poetics of the guerilla and African liberation movements, placing them in the cold concrete thickets of the contemporary city.

More than 50 years have passed since that distant 1972, though the frictions of that memory remain alive in the present. After all, as we’ve recently witnessed in Portugal, where the racist far-right political party Chega had 22.5 percent in the 2025 elections, the serpent’s egg was never properly incinerated—there it is today, transformed into a hydra with 50 furious heads, ready to crush anyone who dares to resist. There they sit, all of them—sons and grandsons of fascists, colonialists, and repackaged terrorist bombers—now comfortably nestled in the honorable seats of Parliament.

By historical coincidence, Scúru Fitchádu’s third album, Griots i Riots, was released the morning after the 2025 election, a day of hangover and shock for those who grew up believing that fascism belonged to the past tense—that places of repression like Tarrafal, or the political violence of the militias in the street, would remain matters of memory, not future threats looming on the horizon. That historical coincidence, as we said, made this album all the more urgent, a symptom of its own time. Urgent, because it’s impossible to hear the unrelenting shout of “Kema palasio kema” without picturing the pigs who would roast beautifully in that redemptive fire. And symptomatic of our time because to the fifty pigs named in the track “Resistensia,” the album’s final piece, we now need to add at least eight more—and, perhaps, sharpen the blades, load the spit a little heavier, and throw some extra fuel into the blaze.

“What strength is that?” Let’s return to Sérgio Godinho’s question. What strength do we “carry in our arms,” one that “demands only obedience”? What force puts us at “ease with others but at odds with ourselves”? These days, we look around lost, downcast, already tasting blood in our mouths. And still, this music—this immanent fury—cuts through the daze, offering not a manifesto of ready-made ideas, but a concrete possibility: to give rage a sense of collective power.

That possibility emerges from the meeting of griots—whose patient wisdom crosses time and space—and riots, urgent responses to immediate violence, a right to self-defense for those who, to borrow again from the last album’s words, refuse to live as a “bakan kontenti tristi i filiss koitadu / ku se sina la dentu borsu i ku korda na piskoss ben marradu” (content, dumb, sad and happy fool / playing with fate in your pocket and a tight rope around the neck).

Griots i Riots picks up exactly where Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu left off. In “Treinament,” the final track of that record, it spoke of waking up once again with a purpose—“like a dog with clenched teeth and a sore jaw, red eyes waiting for night to fall.” It called for a “prepared militancy” like a root growing strong, turning to weapons and theory with a precise dilemma: “liberation or death.” Not coincidentally, those are also the first words heard on Griots i Riots, wrapped in the crystalline sound of a kora played by Mbye Ebrima, then immediately disrupted by the distorted low-end frequencies that define Scúru Fitchádu’s sonic world.

Guided by this political mantra, the album is built upon the tension between theory and practice, word and action, body and orality, the city and self-interrogation—conceiving of revolution not as a distant utopia but as a concrete, daily possibility. Not something that will come from palaces, vanguard leaders, or expert commissions, but from the praxis of lived experience, rooted in committed communities.

Knowing there is no revolutionary theory without revolutionary practice, Griots i Riots confronts the hard time of reality with the slow time of ancestral wisdom; it challenges the anesthetized apathy of political and cultural intervention by conjuring a dissension that opens cracks toward another future. This confrontation between times and tensions—between memory and urgency, between word and action—is not just a poetic or political gesture. It’s also the compositional principle structuring the album, shaping its rhythm and breath. We hear it right away in “Griot i Riot,” the intro, where ancestral wisdom, carried by the kora, is layered over and gradually contaminated by sonic grime—punctuated by background screams and urgent vocalizations.

Once the blueprint is set, the strategy follows. “Idukasan i saud,” a fast-paced shout of popular revolt that reworks poetic lines from Sérgio Godinho’s À Queima Roupa (1974), is followed by “Kel karta di alfuria…,” a bass-heavy, reflective track about the traps of false liberations lost in the bourgeois entanglements of the Big House. “Funda na poss,” a visceral blow against pop culture’s submissive posture, is succeeded by “Du ta morrê,” an austere and slow meditation on death and grief. The accelerated precision of “Kema palasio kema” clashes with the poetic delivery and harmonized distortion of “Símia Kodjê”—a track with Conan Osiris, where a fado-tinged voice has never sounded so richly defiled. “Prekariadu,” a battle cry against the suffocating precarity of lives in the urban jungle, gives way to “Caoberdiano Barela,” a moving reinterpretation of Princezito’s classic, reminding us that this is a long story still unfolding. Finally, “Resistensia” closes the album, ensuring we don’t forget the clear identification of the targets: the pigs that squeal, the wolves that howl, the sheep that let their guard down.

By his third record, Scúru Fitchádu has lost neither the searing, rough dissent of Un Kuza Runhu (2020) nor the poetic, ethical, and sonic density of Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu. In Griots i Riots, we hear the same insubordination, the original impulse, the same grime meant to disrupt the management of a rotten peace. But we also hear an artist who is increasingly a dense and sagacious poet, seeking to expand and master his own language, without ever yielding to the cynical reason of our times. Above all, a creator who writes about his time and his people, attuned to their latent anger, invested in the search for new answers born from everyday struggle. A creator whose music becomes the soundtrack of those who refuse to live in chains, yet who allows himself to explore—in both sound and content—deeper reflections on the human condition, the possibilities of agency, the consciousness of death, and the potential for what’s to come: an ongoing attempt to answer Sérgio Godinho’s question: What strength is this that we carry in our arms? Let us keep asking—and keep fighting. On this side of the barricade, no one will die on their knees.

O som da revolta 25 Sep 4:00 AM (25 days ago)

No seu terceiro álbum, o artista afro-português Scúru Fitchádu funde a sabedoria ancestral com a revolta urbana, transformando memória e militância em uma trilha sonora para a resistência.

Read in English here.

“Que força é essa?” perguntou Sérgio Godinho, um dos mais importantes cantores e compositores portugueses, em 1972, quando Portugal ainda estava submerso na longa noite do fascismo — arrastando a agonia de seu sistema colonial, condenando pessoas a uma guerra injusta e espalhando a carnificina em massacres como o que ocorreu naquele ano em Wiryamu, Moçambique. Aqueles eram tempos difíceis, marcados por uma “dormensia ku korrenti”, como Scúru Fitchádu viria a escrever e cantar mais tarde em Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu (2023), seu álbum posterior, onde ele retrabalhou e ressignificou a poética da guerrilha e dos movimentos de libertação africanos, colocando-os nas frias e concretas matas da cidade contemporânea.

Mais de cinquenta anos se passaram desde aquele distante 1972, embora as fricções dessa memória permaneçam vivas no presente. Afinal, como testemunhamos recentemente em Portugal, onde o partido político racista de extrema-direita Chega teve 22,5% nas eleições recentes (2025), o ovo da serpente nunca foi devidamente incinerado — lá está ele hoje, transformado em uma hidra com cinquenta cabeças furiosas, prontas para esmagar qualquer um que ouse resistir. Lá estão eles, todos eles — filhos e netos de fascistas, colonialistas e terroristas reempacotados — agora confortavelmente aninhados nos assentos honrosos do Parlamento.

Por coincidência histórica, o terceiro álbum de Scúru Fitchádu, Griots i Riots, foi lançado na manhã seguinte às eleições mais recentes (2025), um dia de ressaca e choque para aqueles que cresceram acreditando que o fascismo pertencia ao passado — que lugares de repressão como Tarrafal, ou a violência política das milícias na rua, permaneceriam como questões de memória, não ameaças futuras que pairam no horizonte. Essa coincidência histórica, como dissemos, tornou este álbum ainda mais urgente, um sintoma de seu próprio tempo. Urgente, porque é impossível ouvir o grito implacável de “Kema palasio kema” sem imaginar os porcos que assariam lindamente naquele fogo redentor. E sintomático de nosso tempo porque aos cinquenta porcos nomeados na faixa ‘Resistensia,’ a peça final do álbum, agora precisamos adicionar pelo menos mais oito — e, talvez, afiar as lâminas, carregar o espeto um pouco mais pesado, e jogar um pouco mais de combustível na fogueira.

“Que força é essa?” Voltemos à pergunta de Sérgio Godinho. Que força “carregamos nos braços”, uma que “exige apenas obediência”? Que força nos coloca “à vontade com os outros, mas em desacordo com nós mesmos”? Nos dias de hoje, olhamos em volta perdidos, cabisbaixos, já sentindo o gosto de sangue na boca. E ainda assim, esta música — esta fúria imanente — corta o torpor, oferecendo não um manifesto de ideias prontas, mas uma possibilidade concreta: dar à raiva um sentido de poder coletivo.

Essa possibilidade emerge do encontro de griots — cuja sabedoria paciente atravessa o tempo e o espaço — e riots (revoltas), respostas urgentes à violência imediata, um direito à autodefesa para aqueles que, para pegar emprestado novamente as palavras do último álbum, se recusam a viver como um “bakan kontenti tristi i filiss koitadu / ku se sina la dentu borsu i ku korda na piskoss ben marradu”.

Griots i Riots retoma exatamente de onde Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu parou. Em “Treinament,” a faixa final do álbum, fala sobre acordar mais uma vez com um propósito — “como um cão com dentes cerrados e mandíbula dolorida, olhos vermelhos esperando a noite cair”. Convocava uma “militância preparada” como uma raiz crescendo forte, voltando-se para armas e teoria com um dilema preciso: “libertação ou morte.” Não por coincidência, essas são também as primeiras palavras ouvidas em Griots i Riots, envoltas no som cristalino de uma kora tocada por Mbye Ebrima, então imediatamente perturbadas pelas frequências graves distorcidas que definem o mundo sonoro de Scúru Fitchádu.

Guiado por este mantra político, o álbum é construído sobre a tensão entre teoria e prática, palavra e ação, corpo e oralidade, a cidade e a auto-interrogação — concebendo a revolução não como uma utopia distante, mas como uma possibilidade concreta e diária. Não algo que virá de palácios, líderes de vanguarda ou comissões de especialistas, mas da práxis da experiência vivida, enraizada em comunidades comprometidas.

Sabendo que não há teoria revolucionária sem prática revolucionária, Griots i Riots confronta o tempo difícil da realidade com o tempo lento da sabedoria ancestral; desafia a apatia anestesiada da intervenção política e cultural ao conjurar uma dissensão que abre rachaduras em direção a outro futuro. Este confronto entre tempos e tensões — entre memória e urgência, entre palavra e ação — não é apenas um gesto poético ou político. É também o princípio composicional que estrutura o álbum, moldando seu ritmo e fôlego. Nós o ouvimos de imediato em “Griot i Riot,” a introdução, onde a sabedoria ancestral, carregada pela kora, é sobreposta e gradualmente contaminada pela sujeira sonora — pontuada por gritos de fundo e vocalizações urgentes.

Uma vez que o plano é estabelecido, a estratégia segue. “Idukasan i saud,” um grito acelerado de revolta popular que retrabalha linhas poéticas de À Queima Roupa de Sérgio Godinho (1974), é seguido por “Kel karta di alfuria…,” uma faixa pesada de baixo, reflexiva, sobre as armadilhas das falsas libertações perdidas nos emaranhados burgueses da Casa Grande. “Funda na poss,” um golpe visceral contra a postura submissa da cultura pop, é sucedida por “Du ta morrê,” uma meditação austera e lenta sobre a morte e o luto. A precisão acelerada de “Kema palasio kema” choca-se com a entrega poética e a distorção harmonizada de “Símia Kodjê”— uma faixa com Conan Osíris, onde uma voz com toques de fado nunca soou tão ricamente profanada. “Prekariadu,” um grito de batalha contra a precariedade sufocante das vidas na selva urbana, dá lugar a “Caoberdiano Barela,” uma reinterpretação comovente do clássico de Princezito, lembrando-nos de que esta é uma longa história que ainda se desenrola. Finalmente, “Resistensia” fecha o álbum, garantindo que não nos esqueçamos da clara identificação dos alvos: os porcos que grunhem, os lobos que uivam, as ovelhas que baixam a guarda.

Em seu terceiro disco, Scúru Fitchádu não perdeu nem a dissensão áspera e incisiva de Un Kuza Runhu (2020), nem a densidade poética, ética e sonora de Nez txada skúru dentu skina na braku fundu. Em Griots i Riots, ouvimos a mesma insubordinação, o impulso original, a mesma sujeira destinada a perturbar a gestão de uma paz podre. Mas também ouvimos um artista que é cada vez mais um poeta denso e sagaz, buscando expandir e dominar sua própria linguagem, sem jamais ceder à razão cínica de nossos tempos. Acima de tudo, um criador que escreve sobre seu tempo e seu povo, sintonizado com sua raiva latente, investido na busca por novas respostas nascidas da luta cotidiana. Um criador cuja música se torna a trilha sonora daqueles que se recusam a viver acorrentados, mas que se permite explorar — tanto em som quanto em conteúdo — reflexões mais profundas sobre a condição humana, as possibilidades de agência, a consciência da morte e o potencial do que está por vir: uma tentativa contínua de responder à pergunta de Sérgio Godinho — Que força é essa que carregamos nos braços? Continuemos a perguntar — e a lutar. Deste lado da barricada, ninguém morrerá de joelhos.