Africa Is a Country

Calling Trump’s bluff

2025-12-04T09:48:29Z

As the White House hypes “Christian genocide” and floats military action, northern Nigerians are responding with satire.

Traditional dancers from northern Nigeria. Image credit Goge Africa via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.

Earlier in November, President Trump threatened military action against Nigeria for allowing what has been described in right-wing media as a “Christian genocide.” This followed Nigeria’s designation as a “Country of Particular Concern,” due to its perceived tolerance of religious persecution of Christians, especially in northern Nigeria, where the population is predominantly Muslim. While Nigerian Christians have been victims of violence in an increasingly unstable Nigeria, they have shared this victimhood with Muslims, practitioners of traditional religions, and atheists, a fact acknowledged by security experts familiar with the situation in Nigeria. The Trump administration has conveniently ignored this reality as they trump up claims of Christian persecution for political reasons. Trump’s warning, supported by a concrete plan for military action, was alarming to many Nigerians.

The Tinubu administration responded with a statement condemning the United States’ characterization of events, affirming Nigeria’s religious tolerance and willingness to collaborate with the United States to address Nigeria’s security issues. Prominent northern Nigerian citizens issued a statement blaming poor leadership for insecurity in Nigeria, while calling on President Trump to withdraw the military threats issued. Members of the Shi’a community in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, protested against a possible US military invasion. But perhaps the most interesting responses came from the margins, from the skits and videos circulated on northern Nigerian social media and WhatsApp networks.

With 100 million Nigerian Internet users, Nigerians are increasingly coming online to cope with their condition. The 2020 #EndSARS protests against police brutality were largely coordinated on Twitter, showing how integral online spaces are for organizing and resistance. In a lighter sense, online platforms also provide a space for Nigerians to cope through humor. Skitmakers abound on Instagram, easily gaining a following by criticizing the Nigerian system.

For Hausa people, the majority ethnic group in northern Nigeria, humor has long been a tool for advancing social critiques. Precolonially, praise singers composed satirical songs that described the excesses of emirs and lampooned enemies of their patrons. In 2015, Hausa political and pop musician Dauda Kahutu “Rarara” composed a satirical song against Goodluck Jonathan that galvanized northern Nigerians to vote for Muhammadu Buhari. His smash hit, Masu Gudu Su Gudu (Those With Cause to Flee, Should Flee), continued the historical tradition of humor as protest while utilizing radio and the Internet to reach a wider audience. Now, in the face of an increasingly belligerent United States foreign policy agenda and a Nigerian government that is passive towards addressing Nigeria’s multidimensional security issues, Hausaphone Nigerians are once again turning to the Internet to share their feelings through posts and videos that toe the line between satire and solemnity.

Thus, I wasn’t surprised when my social media feed was split between outrage against the misinformation fueling American military threats and posts criticizing the situation from a lighter standpoint. These posts focused on claims of a US military invasion and reflected a preparedness to protect Nigerian sovereignty.

In one post, a group of men pose as soldiers waiting for a superior’s orders. Standing atop a hill, they hold a “missile” crafted from cardboard, repeating, “Umarnin ka kawai mu ke jira” (We’re just waiting for your orders [to fire]). They fidget with the controls, preparing the missile to fire as they wait for orders. Finally, the superior calls, and they answer, assuring him that they are ready for action. Then comes the plot twist: they’re told that the Americans have decided against firing and that they should deprogram the missile. They conclude that the Americans must have been scared and given up.

Will Nigeria call America’s bluff? This skit certainly hopes so. While American officials have called for military action and have repeatedly taken steps to manufacture consent for (eventual) military action, they have not moved towards action, perhaps in fear of a protracted military engagement, given the multifactorial nature of Nigeria’s state of unrest.

Another video takes America’s threats of military action more seriously. A local malam (Islamic teacher) is shown preparing Qur’anic litanies and amulets against the American forces. Almajirai (Islamic school students) sit cross-legged, and on top of their heads are tablets filled with Arabic writing—most likely Qur’anic verses. As the malam goes around placing herbs on top of the tablets, he states, “Ai tunda suka taba Hausawa, ai sun halaka” (Since they [the Americans] have come for Hausa people—here standing in for the broader northern Nigerian populace—they will not prevail.)

Here, the malam demonstrates the spiritual dimension of Nigerian resistance against American neoimperialism. Hausa and Fulani Islamic scholars have been integral to resistance movements in northern Nigeria and the diaspora. Across the Atlantic in Bahia, Brazil, enslaved Hausa Muslims participated in the 1835 Malê revolt using amulets to protect them as they fought against slaveholding powers. In 1903, the then Sarkin Musulmi (Commander of the Faithful), Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru I, led a resistance against the British, which ultimately led to his death. The same theological understandings guide Hausa Muslims today, as they turn to Islamic cosmology for protection in the face of an impending neocolonial encroachment.

Uncertainty clouds Nigeria’s future as the United States escalates claims of Christian persecution to the United Nations, and wanton killings and civilian abductions continue with no end in sight. Wherever Nigeria is headed, these posts show a willingness among northern Nigerians to counter American propaganda and defend against neoimperialist intrusions on their region and country.

Paying for citizenship

2025-12-04T09:47:58Z

What began as a revenue lifeline for small island states has become a global market where the wealthy buy mobility and sovereignty itself becomes a commodity.

Photo by Radik Sitdikov on Unsplash.

In October 2017, the tiny country of Montenegro was abuzz. Nestled in the mountains along the Adriatic coast and with a population of merely 620,000, it’s a place that has been overlooked by many. Formerly a part of Yugoslavia, it remained an appendage of Serbia until it gained full independence in 2006.

Given the country’s size, it didn’t take much to create a lot of hype for the Global Citizen Forum. In the capital city of Podgorica, billboards projected mammoth images of the event’s headline speakers, a glitterati lineup including actor Robert De Niro, musician Wyclef Jean, and General Wesley Clark.

Along the coastline, black-and-gold forum banners lined the highway, challenging drivers to “inspire change” and “provoke innovation.” At the airport, posters greeted new arrivals by proclaiming, “The future starts now: keep the conversation going.” Over two days, nearly four hundred participants would gather in the small Balkan country to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world today. Millionaires milled around the samovars and chatted with DJs and supermodels. Prime ministers and politicians dropped in by helicopter. Filling the spaces in between was a hodgepodge of philanthropists, NGO workers, bankers, creatives, and a few royals. There was little hint as to what was actually financing the lavish proceedings: golden passports.

Several guests I talked to had never even heard of golden passports. When the topic came up, it was almost in passing. Still, it lurked in the background. A representative from the Montenegrin government in one session described the new citizenship by investment (CBI) program they were planning:

It’s a way to attract people who have knowledge and experience to come and teach others, and to move the country forward. If executed and monitored properly, it’s a big opportunity for countries like Montenegro. We don’t want to sell passports; we want to buy excellence.

I spoke with him and a few officials from other countries that were looking to develop their own CBI programs—Georgia, Macedonia, and Moldova were all showing interest. A civil servant from Armenia explained to me over coffee that his country, lacking oil or gas, was exploring ways to build a business environment that would attract foreign capital, and it saw CBI as a means to develop its competitiveness. “We’re looking for a tool to place the country within the right networks,” he clarified. If inserting oneself into elite networks was the goal, the Global Citizen Forum was the place to do it.

As of 2025, at least nineteen countries had a legal basis for naturalizing individuals who invest in the country or donate a specified amount, with over a dozen hosting active CBI programs. The Caribbean is home to five: Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts, and Saint Lucia. The greater Mediterranean region is another hotbed, with Turkey, Egypt, North Macedonia, and Jordan offering programs, even as Malta, Cyprus, and Montenegro exit the scene. In Asia, Cambodia has a CBI program, and in the South Pacific, Vanuatu has a smorgasbord of available options.

Until recently, CBI schemes have been the preserve of small island countries with populations of less than one million. For such microstates, a sizable injection of foreign funds brought through CBI can have a considerable economic impact. However, the landscape has recently begun to change as more substantial nations, like Turkey and Egypt, enter the game. As other countries like Armenia, Croatia, Georgia, and Panama discuss options, CBI doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

On the face of it, these programs appear minuscule. Only around fifty thousand individuals naturalize though them each year—a negligible number among a global population of eight billion people. Yet the significance of the figure is much clearer when placed in context. The population of likely consumers is relatively small — largely members of the nouveau riche from countries outside the Global North. Figures available from Malta, Antigua, Cyprus, Saint Lucia, and Dominica suggest that buyers mainly come from three regions: China and Southeast Asia, Russia and the post-Soviet countries, and the Middle East.

Some people from wealthy democracies may apply, including a growing number of US citizens. Driving demand, however, is a smaller population of wealthy peo-ple from countries with “bad” passports and authoritarian regimes. It’s the non-Western winners of globalization — those doing well on Branko Milanović’s famous “elephant curve” — who want it. For governments aiming high, these global elites are the target audience of citizenship for sale.

Yet not all countries have been equally successful in attracting investor citizens, despite the continuous growth of demand. In the early 2010s, investors went for Caribbean programs, which accounted for about 90 percent of naturalizations globally. By the middle of the decade, however, they began turning to new offerings in the Pacific and Mediterranean, and since 2018 have sent Turkey to the top of the charts. It’s now the country of choice for most investor citizens and accounts for around half of all such naturalizations globally. Even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Ankara was approving around a thousand applications per month.

Citizenship is not only an unusual commodity; it is also unusual as a commodity, which presents distinct challenges when building a market around it. States can shield populaces from the worst effects of the market by compensating them when markets fail. Yet in the case of citizenship, the state is both the key market regulator and the sole producer of the good, for in the contemporary world, only states make citizens. If a government does not recognize a grant of citizenship as its own, the status is null and void.

Even Stefano Černetić, Prince of Montenegro and Macedonia, had to face this reality. His high-society life, which included knighting Hollywood actress Pamela Anderson, came to an abrupt end when police discovered that this Italian citizen, with a closet full of fake uniforms and royal robes, was merely posing as the head of state. He could not even turn to his self-proclaimed kingdom for help.

Stateless people, like the Rohingya of Myanmar or ethnic Russians of Latvia, know the dire consequences that can result when a government disavows them as outsiders. Even if they once had claims to belonging, their citizenship no longer counts if the state doesn’t stand behind it. The result is that the state is the only legitimate seller of citizenship. Even if bureaucratic hurdles extend the naturalization process, and even if chains of intermediaries connect the buyer and seller, the state must sign off on every citizenship transaction. As such, there can be no legal secondary market.

Because citizenship is a state monopoly, even its smallest incumbents—microstates of less than a million inhabitants, lacking the economic and military heft that we typically associate with statehood—can employ this tool to raise revenue. What matters is not size but sovereignty.

Effectively, the state wears two hats when it sells citizenship, serving as both the sole producer of the product and the ultimate rule-maker of the market. The double role has at times yielded ethically questionable but entirely legal cases of countries selling citizenship to the criminally suspect. Tadamasa Goto, a Japanese mob boss who became Cambodian for a sizable donation, is one example.

Still, when the state both structures the field of play and serves as an indispensable player in the game, it calls into question conventional assumptions about what is needed for a market to work. In the case of sovereign debt, for example, the possibility of default without compensation remains a looming risk because sovereign immunity limits the available tools for enforcing payments or seizing assets. Governments can also influence macroeconomic indicators, making it difficult for creditors to verify their economic health. To protect against such threats and secure liquidity, intermediaries with separate reputational risks enter the transaction.

Citizenship has its own version of sovereign debt default: nonrecognition. When, for example, Grenada closed down its economic citizenship channel in 2001 following pressure from the United States, it dealt with its investor citizens by simply refusing to recognize them as such, effectively erasing their citizenship. Similar incidents occurred in the Pacific across the 1990s.

However, this strategy becomes more difficult once these channels are formalized into full-fledged CBI programs. When citizenship is granted through an extended bureaucratic procedure involving a division of labor and external oversight, such willful disregard can more readily be challenged, and membership can be severed only through formal, legal denaturalization.

If anything, the post-2020 process of deglobalization is likely to push demand for CBI programs even higher as people look for ways to guarantee access and opportunity should countries delink or seal themselves off into regional blocks. As states turn inward, supply also may increase among countries struggling with the economic fallout.

Even if globalization presses on, a different outcome is unlikely. CBI will continue to grow in a world of risk, uncertainty, and inequality—the hallmarks of the capitalist expansion that drives much of contemporary globalization. Demand for the programs will persist as long as countries continue to produce wealthy citizens looking to improve their mobility or opportunities, or for an insurance policy against their own governments. Supply is unlikely to falter as states with limited revenue sources turn to this source of easy money, particularly when other economic streams dry up.

Increasingly, our world is one of mobility rather than migration, in which people move—or seek movement options—with greater flexibility and on a shorter time horizon than is captured by the heavy notions of immigration and settlement. But this does not render citizenship obsolete. Instead it becomes more powerful precisely because it is portable and still holds force even outside the granting state. A doctor who moves to a different country may lose her credentials, but the same does not hold for citizenship: you take it with you wherever you go. For this reason, even in an age of mobility, citizenship still has fundamental importance, and its implications for global inequality are profound. Citizenship is about far more than a valued bond between sovereign and subject. It is the differences between citizenships that define their worth.

Indicative of CBI’s future may be the most recent entrant into the coterie of golden passport countries: Nauru. Until 2023, the microstate gained about two-thirds of its revenue by hosting an offshore detention center for Australia. When individuals sought refuge in Australia, Canberra would have them shipped to a massive holding facility on Nauru. Over time, this became the remote island’s economic lifeline, employing as much as 15 percent of the local population directly and much of the rest of its twelve thousand inhabitants indirectly.

When the center was shut down in 2023, the government had to find a new hustle to make ends meet. This time it has tried the other end of the mobility spectrum: elite citizenship. In November 2024, it launched a new golden passport program enabling investors to naturalize for just $105,000 plus $25,000 in fees. But what does citizenship in Nauru bring? Not only a new set of documents but also visa-free entry to both Russia and the UK—an interesting combination, but one that hangs in the balance.

Nauru is facing even greater challenges with rising sea levels threatening the country’s very existence. As climate change presses on, it will be the poorer and more fragile island microstates that suffer the most, even if they have contributed the least to a crisis that does not stop at state borders.

Would a subaquatic country still be able to sell citizenship? The question may seem ludicrous, but it pinpoints the challenges that microstates face, leaving the people there to hustle as best they can. The delicacy of their position today underscores the complexities of global inequality and the geopolitical maneuvering that define our world.

What Graham Platner reveals about the US left

2025-12-02T11:49:00Z

The economic emancipation of the American working class cannot come at the expense of the global working class.

Photo by Patrick Lalonde on Unsplash

In 2005, the late historian Howard Zinn delivered a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in which he pointed out how the “Myth of American Exceptionalism” created problems both within the US and its relationship with the rest of the world. In his speech, he quotes the former American Secretary of War, Elia Root, at the time of the US’s invasion of the Philippines:

The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advanced guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.

Giving this speech in the wake of revelations about Abu Gharaib, the infamous torture facility used by US occupation forces in Iraq, Zinn’s deconstruction of American exceptionalism involved shredding the idealized image of the “virtuous American soldier.” Instead, Zinn frames them as active enforcers of America’s geopolitical hegemony, who operate outside the boundaries of international law while the state apparatus manufactures consent to pacify a population whose entire worldview is based on American moral primacy. However, one can only be blind to the truth for so long and in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Zinn noted with optimism that the image of the “virtuous American soldier” was being eroded, and a more progressive American population are now becoming aware of the belligerence of the US military machine.

What Zinn failed to account for, however, was that while the American population grew more disillusioned with the idea of “fighting foreign wars,” that doesn’t mean it’s a sign of breakage from an American supremacist orthodoxy. Twenty years later, much of the American population still struggles to rid itself of uncritical support and even praise for those who serve in the country’s military. In a way, the paradigm has remained completely unchanged, as veterans still retain this image of prestige in their duty of occupation and imperialism. The only thing that has changed since the “War on Terror” was that a large section of the American population realized that the imperial pursuits of the US State Department mostly did not benefit working-class Americans but rather a select economic elite who are directly tied to the pillaging of foreign nations and subjugation of its people. In this sense, what we see is not a problem with imperialism in principle but rather a problem with the way in which the bounties of imperialism are redistributed. This gives wiggle room to the idea that there may be wars that Americans (or Westerners in general) can support if it does benefit broader domestic society rather than titans of industry.

The Western left, which in principle should be the loudest voices against any normalization of imperialism, has shown that they themselves are not immune to this way of thinking. None of this is as apparent as seeing how American leftists consistently try to justify their endorsement of Graham Platner, a candidate running in the Democratic primary for US Senate in Maine.

Platner postures himself as a leftist, paying lip service to progressive ideals in America, such as free and universal healthcare, yet he remains unrepentant for his history serving the US empire. Platner served three tours in Iraq (where he was a guard at the aforementioned Abu Gharaib), then attended George Washington University in 2009. Feeling like he had not had enough of what he found as “enjoyable” he re-enlisted in the US Army and was deployed to Afghanistan for a fourth tour. Returning in 2011, he took up a job bartending, but then returned to Afghanistan as a private military contractor (PMC) in 2018 for Blackwater, a company whose war crimes in Iraq were so notorious they had to change their name to Constellis.

Before announcing his candidacy for the primary, Platner’s political record is less known for working class advocacy, but instead as a participant in illegal wars, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. And yet, his candidacy has not only been backed by the democratic establishment but reaffirmed by supposedly principled leftists.

The normalization of an individual such as Platner, naturally, has his proponents scrambling to excuse, rationalize and reframe his service history, making the argument that he was simply poor and because the US government does not support veterans post-service, it is seemingly justifiable for him to have done mercenary work. Firstly, the premise of this argument is false, as it has since been discovered that Platner is from an affluent family. Additionally, Platner has stated numerous times on his now-deleted “P-Hustle” Reddit account that the reason he enlisted was not out of dire financial needs but because he wanted to kill people.

However, even if he was working-class, the rationale that because he was poor, it is justifiable for him to do mercenary work as part of an occupation force only makes sense if you consider the victims of said mercenary work as “worth it” for the pay. In other words, the lives of Iraqis and Afghans can be seen as disposable if an American were to materially benefit from their subjugation and death. Herein lies the underlying chauvinism that many Americans seem oblivious to, as they don’t seem to stop to consider that the victims of Platner and others like him are also working-class and, in many ways, far poorer than the average American. You can only ignore this if—whether consciously or subconsciously—you deem American lives more valuable than the lives of non-Americans. Indeed, this supremacist orthodoxy only grows bolder as leftists attempt to justify their support of him, stating that to discard someone like Platner would otherwise alienate the formation of a working-class movement.

The narrative here is that Platner is a representative (or at least marketable to) the “average American.” However, the advance of this working class movement seems to be framed around an American (mostly white) electorate and seems to omit the poorest elements of the working class—those in the global South who have been made victims by people like Platner. Even in the US itself, the most marginalized elements of the working class are brown and black immigrants who often flee the destabilization brought upon their country by US foreign policy. Abandoning an internationalist conception of class struggle, Western leftists forego socialism in place of chauvinism, centering their goals not in protecting marginalized people but rather a Western (predominantly white) working class base as a means to secure an electoral victory.

Ironically, Graham Platner’s prominence in leftist discourse has less to do with his policy positions or the potential political power he may wield, but rather because it acts as a case study to show how little priority anti-imperialism has in the American left. Part of this is simply that a lot of Western, particularly American leftists still cannot disentangle their relationship within the imperial core.

Thus, you have someone like Platner rising to prominence, whose campaign platform reveals a deeply militaristic worldview hiding behind the veneer of progressive aesthetics. His platform is very clearly built around preserving American imperialism and shows he is not as reformed as many would like you to believe. Platner proudly highlights his military service not as regret but as credentials and advocates for closing the shipbuilding gap, a blatantly imperialist endeavor meant to counter China’s trade infrastructure. He states that he would ensure that Americans aren’t sent overseas for “pointless wars.” Reading between the lines of liberalism, the implication is that there are useful wars, so long as it comes with the right justification. The framing here is that the real problem with US military interventions (such as the Iraq war) is not its role in the plundering of developing countries, but rather that those involved in the plundering do not benefit from its bounties. Instead of confronting the harms that the US military inflicts upon millions of people, Platner focuses on securing better pay and benefits for US soldiers. This would naturally incentivize military enlistment and ensure a continuation of the American imperial apparatus.

Platner talks about bolstering the working class, but seeks to uphold the colonial system that exploits the global working class. Backing him shows that the American left is willing to compromise its values to install a palatable candidate within the electoral system. Whether Platner is genuine in his working-class advocacy is neither here nor there; what matters most is that his advocacy only pertains to those within America’s borders.

One may call this focus on domestic politics a form of economic protectionism, no different from similar calls progressive movements around the world have been making in an era of global capitalism. However, one look at Platner’s own words reveals that he certainly thinks there is an asymmetry between the livelihoods of people in the US versus people in black or brown countries. Indeed, seeing Platner refer to a possible US invasion of Syria as justifiable—even if millions die—simply because he views their way of life as inferior to Americans. The message behind this transcends the individual itself, but rather highlights an unfortunate contradiction amongst Americans. The very same contradiction that existed within its European colonial predecessors. Under the notion of “enlightenment,” Europeans often proclaimed the importance of human rights and liberty, yet denied them to millions under colonial domination.

This same malaise inflicts the neocolonial American Empire. Americans are concerned with only improving their material conditions, which is why having a war criminal such as Platner may not seem like an ideological contradiction for them at all. He claims to advocate for what they advocate for: a steadfast, combative approach against the billionaire oligarchs while making gains for the poor. However, without addressing the imperial structure within the American capitalist economy, the system will not be abolished, but instead change into a paradigm of capital ownership along bourgeois nationalism, in which class antagonism still exists, but between US workers and workers of the global South.

Friedrich Engels and later Vladimir Lenin described a group of workers in imperialist countries who, thanks to the benefits they received from capitalism, no longer shared the same interests as the broader working class. This group, known as the “labor aristocracy,” was seen as too comfortable to support revolutionary change. Lenin developed this idea in the early 20th century, but global conditions have since shifted. Today, many of the jobs that once separated the labor aristocracy from the rest have been outsourced to the global South. As a result, much of the Western working class now benefits—often unknowingly—from the exploitation of workers and resources in poorer countries.

For example, the dominance of the US dollar since the fall of the post-war Bretton Woods monetary system has allowed it to run trade deficits for decades. Unequal exchange allows the US to import cheap goods from the global South (often sourced through cheap labor) and thus its population are able to live well beyond its means through a consumer-provider relationship between itself and its global periphery. In a globalized economic order pioneered by American supremacy, much of the Western working class is reconfined to a position of labor aristocracy, pitted against the neocolonial worker of the Third World. It is this class contradiction that exists in many Western leftists which keeps them alienated from a genuinely internationalist posture.

Indeed, this is most apparent when you hear Americans—regardless of perceived political background—talk about foreign policy. Both supposed leftists as well as “America First” conservatives frame their opposition to US foreign intervention in terms of it being “pointless,” which does little to challenge American militarism and instead reinforces the status quo.

Whether this exceptionalist paradigm is coated in the gloss of isolationism or justified under redistributive capitalism, the result is still the same: the ambition to continue the exploitation of workers and resources in the global South. Thus, it will prove to be vital for those outside of the West not to rely on them to build a socialist movement. The liberation of the American working-class will not guarantee a liberation for the global working-class, and in certain cases may prove harder to confront.

What would happen if a country like South Africa or the Congo decided to nationalize their mines and ensure that its mineral wealth benefited its citizens? Or if Haiti decides to pursue trade partners outside America’s sphere of influence? This would undoubtedly harm the interests of the US, not only the corporate oligarch but also the consumer interests as well.

Unless the American has been educated in its role in imperialism and seeks to dismantle it, you will inevitably see them use every asset in their disposal—from their eight hundred military bases around the world to sanctions—to ensure that their standard of living doesn’t slip to the benefit of the global working class.

Fortunately, as US hegemony wanes economically and politically, there is a gap for socialist movements in the global South to gain a foothold. The “Gen Z” protests in southeast Asia and in several African countries show that there is mass disillusionment with neoliberal parties that serve as Western stooges. And, while there are certainly American comrades genuine in their anti-imperialist beliefs, it is abundantly clear that we in the global South must focus on forging solidarity with those who share our interests, to end not just the unequal relations under domestic structures but also the unequal relations between us and the Western working class.

Beyond independence

2025-12-01T09:39:39Z

The post-colonial settlement has left Africa vulnerable to conflict, external pressure, and intellectual dependency. What comes next?

Kwame Nkrumah at the OAU 1963. Image via @GhanaianMuseum on Twitter.

As Africa marks its 65th year of independence, the evolutionary framework chosen at the dawn of this era has failed; now only a revolutionary-pragmatic path can secure the continent’s future. The African Union must reimagine regional integration, prioritize human dignity, and undertake a genuine decolonization of knowledge.

The year 1960 was widely celebrated as the year of Africa’s independence, with seventeen African countries gaining freedom from European rule. Three years later, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of today’s African Union, was founded with 32 member states. The leaders, many of whom were the founding fathers of their newly independent nations, gathered in Addis Ababa with enthusiasm, fervor, and a profound sense of possibility. Yet this enthusiasm was rooted in an optimistic belief in evolution rather than revolution. Compromise and cooperation were prioritized over more transformative alternatives for building a new Africa.

At its first summit in Cairo, the OAU adopted a charter that laid out seven foundational principles to guide the political direction of the postcolonial era. These principles can be summarized as follows: unity and sovereignty, a commitment to decolonization and the anti-apartheid struggle, respect for existing borders, non-Interference in internal affairs, and pan-African cooperation and economic development.

This evolutionary path was championed by the Monrovia Group, leaving an unmistakable imprint on the post-colonial trajectory. In his detailed account of the OAU compromises, Colin Legum documents the debates between the Casablanca and Monrovia blocs leading to the 1963 Addis Ababa Charter. The post-independence evolution of the continent was largely driven by a French-educated elite, notably the conservative leaders Léopold Sédar Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny, who resisted any genuine push for liberation. The outcome bore the clear hallmark of the Monrovia position: it was conciliatory rather than militant, idealistic rather than pragmatic, conservative rather than revolutionary, and—most crucially—it compromised on the single most fundamental issue that should have marked a rupture from the colonial past: the inherited colonial boundaries.

Not all Africans were convinced by these limited forms of independence. The revolutionary camp—politically expressed through the Casablanca Group, wanted a political union and subscribed to the idea that “the state and the party are one and the same.”Members were compelled to compromise rather than persuaded. Nevertheless, its intellectual tradition flourished, captivating the imagination of the masses at home and in the diaspora with visions of healing and rebuilding a new Africa. There was Cheikh Anta Diop, who grounded African unity in a shared cultural, linguistic, and civilizational heritage; there was President Sékou Touré, who insisted on radical political sovereignty and the dignity of the African person; there was Kwame Nkrumah, who exposed the contradictions inherent in the principles of political independence without economic liberation; and Patrice Lumumba embodied the cost of resisting neocolonial entanglements.

If Sékou Touré was the most iconic political embodiment of this orientation, Cheikh Anta Diop was its most dedicated intellectual advocate. In his seminal book The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State, he argued that African unity cannot be a mere political agenda but must instead be a cultural revolution anchored in historical facts and a civilizational renaissance. Seven years before independence, Diop warned his fellow Africans of the danger posed by France: “Of all the European powers that dominate Africa, France is one of the most colonialist—if not the most colonialist.” In under Alarm in the Tropics, Diop warned Africans about the dangers looming in the aftermath of colonialism, emphasizing the need to confront questions of religious and cultural longing and belonging across the Sahel, Libya and Sudan. Like Nkrumah, Diop was right: many post-colonial challenges could have been avoided had Africa embraced a unified, borderless political union.

After sixty-five years of independence, the evolutionary path has proven faulty and disastrous for Africans. In hindsight, it may have been premature to celebrate independence, as mere anti-colonial solidarity was not a sufficient foundation for the moral and institutional architecture of the OAU. None of the main five founding principles, except the commitment to decolonization and the anti-apartheid Struggle, paid dividends to Africa. The continent consistently ranks low on all economic indicators and experienced an estimated 164 intrastate armed conflicts between 1960 and 2017. Conditions are worsening as Africa becomes increasingly entangled in the mercies of foreign dictates from NGOs, the EU, the World Bank, and the IMF. Recent conflict trend analyses reveal that in 2018 alone, Africa experienced 21 civil conflicts—the highest annual number since the colonial era. Even the most revered OAU principle, the rejection of new sovereign states, was disregarded by its own members. Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia in 1993, and South Sudan from Sudan in 2011. In addition, there are the de facto independent regions of Somaliland and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (administered by the Polisario Front).

The principle of non-interference was a failure of judgment, detached from the lived reality on the ground. As tribes and political groups continued to mutate from their original colonial arrangements, neighboring states repeatedly deployed their armies or proxy forces to pursue regime change next door—such as in the case of Idi Amin in Uganda and Tanzania’s intervention in 1979. Armies also crossed borders to seize territory for mineral extraction, as Rwanda did in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or to extend regional influence, as Algeria has been doing in northern Mali.

The former colonial powers were not exempt from such violations either: France intervened in Côte d’Ivoire to remove President Gbagbo in 2011, and again in Mali in 2013 to shape political outcomes. Moreover, NATO intervened in Libya in 2011 to oust Colonel Gaddafi. It is as if the African Charter was adopted only to be repeatedly violated.

Nowhere is the ineffectiveness of the African Union more visible than in its indifference to the ongoing crises in the Sahel region, where nearly eighty million Africans in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso face the daily, relentless violence of terrorism. The AU is paralyzed by its own logic of neoliberal idealism. It remains absent, caught in the contradictory stance of refusing to engage the three governing leaders in the name of not supporting military coups while also refusing to engage the jihadists under the pretext of not talking to terrorists. This represents a clear institutional failure, and inability to address the lived realities of Africans. For instance, it has no representative in the US-brokered framework to address the current crisis in Sudan, while Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE all do.

An institution is better served by articulating inspirational principles than by promoting charters it cannot enforce. The former strengthens credibility; the latter exposes weakness and undermines legitimacy. This tension helps explain why the African Union has grown increasingly ineffective. The failure of the evolutionary path has also allowed Western narratives to frame Africans as inherently poor administrators and to portray disorder as a natural condition of the continent.

Evidence of this condescension is abundant. In President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes (1969–1971), he refers to African diplomats as “childlike,” “not ready for responsibilities,” and even claims that “the Africans just can’t run things.” Nixon was clearly exploiting Africa’s troubled post-colonial trajectory to recycle long-standing US racial stereotypes about Blacks. The United States was not alone. Two decades later—during Africa’s so-called “lost decade” of the 1980s—French writers Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz further patronized the continent. In their rhetorical provocation, they asked whether Africa “really works,” before condescendingly concluding that disorder in Africa constitutes a functioning order.

It is precisely against this backdrop of external paternalism and internal stagnation that a new direction becomes necessary. A revolutionary-pragmatic path is, in fact, a return to—and modern synthesis of—the Casablanca Group’s ideology as championed by Nkrumah, Touré, and Diop. What would it mean for Africa to declare its independence again? I cannot offer a full blueprint, but I can say unequivocally what such a declaration must entail.

It must be revolutionary and pragmatic in regional integration, mirroring the vision of united African states. It must focus on repairing internal deficits rather than merely responding to Euro-American shortcomings in Africa. Fostering regional integration should reflect the vision of African mobility and migration. Decolonizing African knowledge should be grounded in Africa’s own historical past, rather than allowing it to emerge solely from the narratives of catastrophes produced by Europe’s hegemonic relationship with the continent, such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism. In practice, this means prioritizing national languages, valuing skills over degrees, and privileging know-how over mere knowledge. The pragmatic path also requires looking outward for comparable, non-neoliberal models.

Looking toward successful and comparable models, not idealistic neoliberal utopias is imperative. Both China and India are comparable to Africa in terms of population and post-colonial ambitions. China has a population of 1.4 billion people; India has roughly 1.47 billion; and Africa has about 1.55 billion. By 2050, one-fourth of the world’s population will be African, surpassing both China and India.

The longstanding emphasis on human dignity in African languages and cultural practices offers a compelling starting point and deserves a central role in this discourse. In the nineteenth century, the Moroccan historian Aḥmad ibn Khālid al-Nāṣirī questioned the European-promoted value of freedom, arguing that it emphasized access and convenience rather than genuine human freedom of action—an orientation he viewed as the antithesis of the divine virtue of justice. This raises a fundamental question: with the failure of the liberal order in Africa, what kind of human virtue should Africans prioritize, one that still preserves the role of freedom? To remain faithful to a revolutionary principle, Africans should choose the Chinese model: the virtue of human dignity should take precedence over the virtue of human liberty, assuming, of course, that true human dignity does not exclude human liberty

To uphold a pragmatic approach to this principle, the dominant discourse on Africa must also address the persistent confusion between what is Arabic and what is Islamic—an issue that has had catastrophic consequences in the Sahel and Sudan. Central to these tensions is the absence, or failure, of the Africanization of Islam. This demand is not unusual: in Europe, Christianity was Europeanized; in Iran, Islam was Persianized; in Turkey, Islam was Turkified. The success of any religious tradition in a given region depends on its capacity for local adaptation. The continual attempts to exempt Africans from this natural process of religious domestication have been a root cause of some of Africa’s most enduring conflicts—Sudan being the clearest example.

In contrast, Sufism in Senegal and the Gambia, for instance, stands out as a successful model of religious adaptation. While it is true that Sufi movements pioneered the domestication of Islam in the Africa, the rise of Political Islam has continually challenged this project of Africanization. Consequently, Political Islam has become a threat to Africa’s quest for a unified spiritual and political horizon.

The revolutionary-pragmatic ideal is best embodied by African musicians. No group of Africans has been more pragmatic about what the continent truly needs than its musicians. Like the griots of yesterday, they remain rooted in tradition while mastering the possibilities of modernity. Whether of the diaspora or at home, they inspire pride and cultural dignity, mourn national suffering, and envision unity that transcends borders and ethnic lines. Diop was right to say that:

When the African get out of his secular routine and begins to compose music in accordance with a defined method, he will easily attain a level of musical expression which, while retaining what it has in common with Jazz in terms of sensitivity, will possess something more dignified, more majestic, more complete, more occult.

I remain loyal to an older conviction: modern Africans might have been better served by the wisdom of their musicians than by the directives of post-colonial politicians. Musicians are often more revolutionary in their convictions and more pragmatic in their craft. From Alpha Blondy in Ivory Coast to Tilahun Gessesse in Ethiopia, and from Miriam Makeba to Bob Marley, the message has remained consistent: love and African unity beyond boundaries and the confines of the nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that politicians committed to an evolutionary, incremental model often found themselves at odds with these musicians.

For example, when President Senghor and his closest confidants, Abdu Diouf and Jean Collin—a French bureaucrat and colonial holdover who effectively ran the country’s daily affairs for years—would tolerate no overt criticism of France, the musician Ouza Diallo offered a dissenting reply in a song: “Wallu, wallu, wallu: toubab yaa ngi nagou sunu alal” (Help, help, help: the white men are draining our wealth). The song was informally banned from Senegalese airwaves, pushing the artist into self-exile in The Gambia, where his sorrowful voice could be heard only through Gambian radio broadcasts. As the ballakh rhythm swells, the trembling voice of the artist continues to recount Africa’s malaise, Europe draining what belongs to Africans: diamonds, gold, petroleum, coffee. And so, Africa cries for Wallu. Wallu, an old Wolof term, is the call one neighbor makes when another is being victimized by someone stronger.

But for Senghor and his loyal partisans, Wallu against France was unthinkable—an echo of the revolutionary path for Africa that he had long resisted. He was a profoundly conservative leader who celebrated African cultures as symbols yet remained resistant to any genuine push for Africa’s departure from French orbit.

The question is not whether Africa can repeat independence, but how it can achieve an independence grounded not only in freedom from external powers but also in the creation of self-determined and united African futures. In a world at a crossroads, Africa must transform its approach to regional governance and continental development. The continent should embrace a revolutionary-pragmatic path: fostering regional integration, prioritizing human dignity, adapting religion to local contexts, and building knowledge systems that address internal deficits rather than merely respond to external critiques. True independence will not be measured solely by the absence of colonial oversight, but by Africa’s ability to shape its own institutions, secure its own peace, and chart a united, self-determined future.

Trump’s beef with Nigeria

2025-11-28T10:38:01Z

Trump’s threats of military action against Nigeria are not about Christian genocide, but are about rare earths, China, and the scramble to control Africa’s mineral future.

Presidents Trump and Buhari at the White House in 2018. Official White House photo credit Andrea Hanks via Flickr CC0.

The widely circulated article in Global Geopolitics, “America’s Hypocrisy as Policy,” offers a thoughtful reaction to US President Donald Trump’s insane but self-serving threat to invade Nigeria under the pretext of stopping a so-called Christian genocide. Trump tweeted on 31 October 31 and November 1st 2025 that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” named Nigeria as “a country of particular concern,” and announced that the US was “ready, willing and able to save our Great Christian population around the World.” He also ordered the military to prepare to intervene in Nigeria and boasted that “if we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet.”

Trump has often been described as a narcissist—someone who is deeply self-infatuated and impulsively seeks attention and adulation. Earlier this year, John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, writing in The Guardian, described him instead as a solipsist—a word he borrowed from the investigative psychiatrist Robert Lifton. A solipsist is someone who makes no attempt to court or please others, since the only point of reference is himself. Solipsists revel in making outrageous statements because they love being attacked to draw attention to themselves.

It is easy to dismiss Trump’s inflamed anti-Nigeria rhetoric as the rants of a narcissist or solipsist, since anyone who is familiar with Nigeria knows that the violence in that country affects both Christians and Muslims. “He cannot be serious,” some have argued. However, his insanity or wild outbursts may not be without material foundation. Trump often follows through on his rants if he does not face stiff resistance—especially when his anger is directed at groups, individuals or institutions he considers weak.

There are always interests and a method in his madness or egotistical rants. As the Global Geopolitics article notes, Nigeria is located within a resource-rich region that is important to the supply chains of US hi-tech companies and defense industries. That region stretches from Nigeria through Niger and Chad to Sudan and is endowed with vast amounts of rare earth minerals.

Apart from oil, Nigeria has enormous reserves of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other rare earths, which are embedded in solid rock and heavy mineral sands. It is ranked fifth globally in the production of rare earth elements—behind China, the US, Myanmar and Australia. Segun Adeyemi recently reported in Business Insider Africa that Chinese companies have invested more than USD 1.3 billion in Nigeria’s fast-growing lithium-processing industry. Combined with the leverage that Russia now wields in the mineral-rich Sahel states of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, China’s growing economic influence in West Africa’s regional power, Nigeria, should be of serious concern to the US, since China already dominates the global rare earths industry.

The US has been strategizing about how to end its high level of dependence on China for rare earths, which are essential for clean energy, such as electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines, and in electronic consumer products, such as LED television screens, computers and smart phones. These minerals are also required to produce jet engines, missile guidance and defense systems, satellites and GPS equipment.

After threatening China with a 140 per cent tariff when China imposed restrictions on the global supply of rare earths, Trump quickly made a U-turn in his recent meeting with China’s president, Xi. He realized that a trade war with China on rare earths would profoundly hurt the US economy. Under the deal he struck with Xi, Trump agreed to end the tariff threat and lift the ban on Chinese companies’ access to US chips, while Xi agreed to restart China’s supply of rare earths and purchase US soybeans for one year. Trump praised Xi as a great leader when he returned to the US.

The US is in panic mode in the geopolitics of rare earths trade. On his recent visit to Southeast Asia, Trump signed a raft of agreements with several countries in the region to beef up the production and processing of rare earths and exports to the US.

Various reports by experts in geopolitics indicate that the Trump administration sees Africa as an important source of critical minerals that will help wean the US off China. The administration brokered a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda in June 2025, which included an investment agreement that allows the US to invest in DRC’s minerals.

Deals with other countries, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Malawi and Namibia are being discussed or supported. In 2022, the US and other Western countries launched a fourteen-member minerals security partnership (MSP) to boost the production and supply of critical minerals that will benefit member states. The MSP works with the multilateral financial institutions and export credit agencies to provide finance for specific projects. It holds forums with a number of countries that produce rare earths, including the DRC, Botswana and Zambia.

What does the US really want?

The history of the US’s quest for foreign resources indicates that it uses multiple strategies, such as coercion, war, bribery and diplomacy, to achieve its goals. Coercion involves suspending aid or other economic benefits and political support to compel an adversary to bend to the will of the US.

When Trump suspended the US’s aid program and declared a trade war with the rest of the world in April 2025, several African and other leaders rushed to make deals with him. Global Witness revealed in July 2025, that seventeen countries (including six from Africa—i.e Angola, DRC, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Somalia) have hired Trump loyalists as lobbyists to help broker deals, “with many bartering key resources including minerals in exchange for humanitarian or military support.”

The use of war to pursue US strategic and economic interests is well documented in the field of geopolitics and international political economy. During the Cold War, the US and other Western countries simply intervened in countries that threatened their vital interests without bothering to disguise their actions with lofty humanitarian objectives.

One of the most famous cases was the US invasion of Guatemala in 1954 to stop the land reform programme by Jacobo Arbenz Guzman’s leftist government that threatened the land holdings of the United Fruit Company—a US multinational with considerable power and interests in Central America. The brazen Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 when Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal is another well-known case.

Often, when US interests were threatened, rather than go to war US leaders relied on the CIA to work with local disaffected elements in the military to engineer a change of government or kill the incumbent president. The cases are overwhelming—such as the murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, and the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953. All these countries had huge mineral resources.

The rationale used by the US and its Western allies for invading countries changed when the Cold War ended in the 1990s and the US emerged as the sole superpower. The concept of humanitarian intervention gained ground within the United Nations system. This involved the US and other Western powers working through the UN to end wars and rebuild war-battered societies.

During that period, the US felt it did not face any existential threat, like communism, and could act as a moral force or policeman of the world while hiding its real interests. That posture rhymed with the values of the unipolar world: the spread of democracy, human rights and economic or market liberalism.

The US, however, faced strong resistance from most countries when it tried to use humanitarianism to overthrow governments it did not like without evidence to support its claims. Matters came to a head in 2003 over Iraq, which the US invaded under the humanitarian pretext of disarming it of weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that there were no such weapons. The US was simply after Iraq’s oil and helping to dismember a formidable foe of Israel.

As the Global Geopolitics article demonstrates, US interventions under the pretext of humanitarianism have always been catastrophic for those who live in the affected countries. After the old regime has been dislodged, the US often leaves the shattered countries to sort out the mess while it retains control of the resources that are the hidden but real reason for the interventions.

Understanding the violence in Nigeria

Numerous reports and studies have shown that Nigeria’s violence affects Christians and Muslims. No group is insulated from it. I can think of six types of violence in the country. The first three are the Boko Haram, Islamist-inspired violence in the Northeast, whose main victims are Muslims who reject the group’s Islamist ideology; banditry in the Northwest, which affects Muslims and Christians in equal measure; and the ‘herder-farmer’ conflict in the Middle Belt, which affects Christians and Muslims, although reports indicate that Christians are the main victims of that violence.

The other three types of violence are the ‘herder-farmer’ violence in the Northwest, in which Fulani herders are reportedly pitched against Hausa farmers (both groups are Muslim); the violence inflicted by the Indigenous People of Biafra and bandits in the East against their own people, Igbos, who are Christian; and general banditry in large parts of the country, which has rendered traveling by road between cities risky.

The Nigerian state has been terribly negligent in its duty to protect the lives of Nigerians. And its poor record of economic management, corruption and poverty has driven many people to the edge. However, as can be seen from the above review, the state itself is not the key actor generating the violence. Non-state actors actively drive it.

If Christians and Muslims are equally affected by Nigeria’s multilayered violence, how did the narrative of Christian genocide emerge? A narrative of Christian genocide and Fulanisation has been developing among some groups in Nigeria who feel helpless as raw terror takes hold of their lives and communities, especially during the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani, who was accused of being soft on Fulani herders when they committed wanton atrocities against other ethnic communities in the Middle Belt. That narrative feeds into Nigeria’s often toxic ethnic and religious discourse on domination and marginalisation. Lately, some of these groups have intensified their narrative to win support from powerful Western constituencies. These groups have mastered the techniques of misinformation through various social media outlets, networking and lobbying to insert their grievances into the politics of far-right movements in the US. Having a president like Trump who thrives on culture wars is seen as a boon.

White far-right groups in South Africa provided the road map. When, in February 2025, Trump accused the South African government of genocide against white farmers and condemned that country’s new land ownership law as racist, it was the post-apartheid discourse of white victimhood and lobbying activities of a right-wing Afrikaner pressure group, AfriForum, that got the Christian Right in the US, Republican policymakers and Trump to adopt the narrative of white genocide.

Some disaffected groups in Nigeria have copied from the playbook of AfriForum by drumming up the rhetoric of Christian genocide. Phillip van Niekerk reports in the Daily Maverick that diaspora “Biafran separatists” have “repackaged” their secessionist grievance as a struggle to save “persecuted Christians”’ and have been engaged in a lobbying campaign in Washington in partnership with Mercury Public Affairs, BW Global Group and Daniel Golden.

There is also a video circulating on WhatsApp, which shows a Catholic Bishop of Makurdi Diocese in Benue State in Nigeria, Wilfred Anagbe, addressing an audience in the US, in which he paints a dire picture of the fate of Nigerian Christians, alleging that Nigeria is being turned into an Islamic state and Christians are being wiped out. And in a letter signed by the president and vice president of the American Veterans of Igbo Descent to Trump, the organization declared that they “are ready and willing to assist in any efforts aimed at the liberation and protection of Christians in Nigeria.”

These campaigns have resonated with American Christian nationalists, whose politics is driven by the notion of Christian civilisation under siege and the imperative of defending it. Hard-right politicians in the Republican Party, such as Ted Cruz, conservative political commentator, Bill Maher, Black corporate democrats and corporate journalists, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Van Jones, and many others in Trump’s MAGA base, have jumped on the bandwagon. Cruz introduced a bill in the US Senate in September 2025 that designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and imposed sanctions on Nigerian officials who are perceived as facilitating ‘“Islamist jihadist violence” and blasphemy laws.

Does Trump have beef with Tinubu?

Why didn’t Trump try to discuss his alleged grievances with Tinubu instead of threatening him with war? Where a vassal relationship exists between a great power and a weak state, recourse to war is never the first option in making demands. The great power can use various methods, including coercion, to get the vassal state to do its bidding. This is what Trump has done in Ukraine and the DRC. He has been able to gain access to the mineral wealth of those two countries without declaring war on them.

Recent developments suggest that relations between Trump and Tinubu may not be that cordial. Trump has been unable to get Tinubu and his government to support several of his pet projects in the foreign policy field. We could start with the Niger-ECOWAS conflict, which Trump inherited from Biden. Just after taking office in 2023, Tinubu gave the impression in the eyes of many that he had signed up to the project of policing the West African region on behalf of Western interests. As Chair of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), he issued an ultimatum to the military leader of Niger, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, who had staged a coup, to hand power back to the deposed leader, Mohammed Bazoum or face military intervention. Some of the most draconian sanctions in Africa were imposed on Niger, including cutting off the electricity supply and trade relations, and blocking financial transactions between ECOWAS and Niger.

It seemed that Tinubu, who had just won a highly disputed election and seemed unaware of Nigeria’s core strategic interests, was being egged on by Alassane Ouattara of Côte D’Ivoire and Macky Sall of Senegal—both regarded as client leaders of the French president, Emmanuel Macron—to reverse the coup in Niger by military force. France, supported by the EU and the US, was not willing to lose control of Niger’s rich deposits of uranium and its military base. The US was also worried about its drone base in the south of Niger, which served as part of its counterterrorism activities.

However, Tinubu faced significant opposition from Nigerians, especially Northern clerics, civil society activists and the National Assembly. He huffed and puffed but failed to pull the trigger. His abrupt climb down bolstered the confidence of the military leaders of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali to withdraw from ECOWAS, which they described as a neocolonial instrument of Western powers; they formed an alternative organization—the Alliance of Sahel States.

The failure of ECOWAS under Tinubu to reverse Niger’s military coup may have convinced Trump that he could not be relied on to carry out the West’s agenda in West Africa, even though he continues to maintain cordial relations with Macron in France. The US may also have faced a rebuff from the Tinubu administration to relocate its Niger base to Nigeria when Niger’s military leader ordered the US to shut down its base in Niger. Civil society activists raised the alarm that there were active discussions between the US and the Tinubu administration to relocate the base to Nigeria. Growing opposition to the idea forced the US and Nigerian authorities to deny the allegations.

Two other areas of conflict are worth highlighting to underscore the strained relations between Trump and Tinubu. The first is Nigeria’s emphatic rejection of Trump’s request to accept Venezuelan deportees or third-party prisoners from the US. Adding insult to injury, Tinubu’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, evoked a famous remark from the US rap group Public Enemy in rejecting the request: “In the words of the famous US rap group Public Enemy … You’ll remember a line from Flav Flav—a member of the group—who said: ‘Flav Flav has problems of his own. I cannot do nothin’ for you man,’.” This must have rankled Trump, especially as other African countries, such as Ghana, Rwanda, Eswatini, South Sudan and Uganda, had agreed to accept his deportees.

It is important to note that Trump has a dystopian view of Africa, which he described during his first term in office as a continent of “shithole countries.” John McDermott, Chief Africa correspondent at The Economist, highlighted comments made by Trump about Africa on Air Force One, which reveal his “generally apocalyptic assumptions about Africa.” As McDermott reported, Trump said, “[In Africa] They have other countries, very bad also, you know that part of the world, very bad …” With these kinds of views, Trump would not expect an African leader to turn down his request for help. Such a leader should be taught a lesson, he would imagine.

Then there is Nigeria’s decision to stick to its longstanding policy of supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Tinubu’s foreign minister, Tuggar, has also been clear and forthright in condemning Israel’s genocidal carnage in Gaza. He described the violence as “something every human being should stand up and oppose.” Nigeria was part of 119 states that voted for immediate ceasefire in Gaza when the violence first erupted in 2023. It also voted, in 2024, against Israel’s occupation of Gaza.

So, what we have is a confluence of interests—local and foreign, and economic and ethnoreligious—as well as personal grievances and a warped view of Africa that have shaped Trump’s decision to threaten military action in Nigeria. However, no great power threatens war to save the souls of foreign people it despises or with whom it shares no strong bonds. History suggests that lurking behind every US intervention is the pursuit of economic and geopolitical interests.

I have tried to imagine what the US would do if it were to carry out its military threat. Would it bomb the Tinubu government out of existence, which would lead it to confront the real terror groups? Or would it ignore the Tinubu government and conduct a bombing campaign against the terrorists, who operate clandestinely in small groups? Either way, the US would be involved in a messy and costly guerrilla war that it will have no stomach to fight.

It is important to note that the US has never been successful in defeating terrorist groups in their own countries. It lacks the zeal, commitment and technique to sustain a long-drawn-out war. The US history of intervention to save humanity is littered with abject failures: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia hold sobering lessons. However, the chaos of intervention may not prevent the US from trying to control Nigeria’s rich resources. Mining companies have a reputation of thriving in conflict zones by striking deals with local militias.

Tinubu has released a press statement in which he highlighted his government’s policy of engagement with Christian and Muslim leaders since 2023, to address security challenges that affect “citizens across faiths and regions.” He affirmed that Nigeria is not a religiously intolerant country and opposes “religious persecution.” He has followed this up with a twenty-four-page document on “Nigeria and Religious Persecution: Deconstructing a Linear Narrative,” prepared by the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (2025), which challenges in substantial depth the narrative of a Christian genocide.

However, Tinubu’s conclusion in his press release that his ‘administration is committed to working with the United States government and the international community to deepen understanding and cooperation on protection of communities of all faiths’ has raised eyebrows.

Could this be what Trump really wants to achieve with his military threat? Get the Tinubu administration to open talks with the US, which will then try to introduce the issue of rare earths and other economic and strategic issues in the negotiations, and force a deal?

Davido’s jacket

2025-11-27T16:36:15Z

Davido’s appearance at 'Amapiano’s biggest concert' turned a night of celebration into a study in Afrophobia, fandom, and the fragile borders of South African cultural nationalism.

Davido in concert 2022. Image via Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0.

If you listened to the crowd’s reaction as he made his way to the main stage at the Scorpio Kings and Friends Live concert at Loftus Stadium in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Nigerian Afrobeats star David Adedeji Adeleke (Davido) for a local. That’s because in a country where immigration discourse now turns on how carefully we tiptoe around ultranationalist anxieties—and where Afrophobia has become a social currency used to revive fading political careers—a 50,000-seat stadium doesn’t usually erupt in cheers for a Nigerian, no matter how famous. The violent history of being an African immigrant in post-apartheid South Africa certainly wouldn’t suggest such a welcome.

In the years of state failure and the disappointment that followed the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, nationalists have come to see African migrants—particularly Nigerians, navigating the chaos of South Africa’s urban inequality and deindustrialization—as the embodiment of all that’s gone wrong with the sociopolitical order. Culture has become the definitive battleground for this conflict, and as some of the most visible symbols of immigrant resilience, it was inevitable that Nigerian Afrobeats stars would become targets of South African ultranationalist ire. What really has nationalists in a knot is the suggestion that Amapiano owes its success in the West to the collaborative reach and popularity of Afrobeats artists. What began as a debate over class and regional roots (which part of South Africa gets credit for popularizing the genre) has since been overtaken by nationalism.

Yet, any sincere Amapiano fan will tell you that Adeleke, a Nigerian, has long been a North Star for the genre—one of its most consistent champions as it rises in global prominence. It made perfect sense, then, that what was dubbed “Amapiano’s biggest concert” would center on his appearance. He has embraced the genre sincerely, but unlike many of his Afrobeats contemporaries—who, on their path to Western success, often tested their sound in South African cities before reaching international resonance—there’s little to suggest that South Africa’s cultural scene was ever critical to Adeleke’s ascent. It’s only after hitting a creative ceiling in Afrobeats, following a string of underwhelming albums, that he began looking south to expand his sound.

Nationalists have tried to portray the “Lagos-to-the-West via Johannesburg” pipeline as some kind of foundational influence on West African Afrobeats. It’s true that Amapiano has left a lasting mark—some would even say it has become a vital organ of the West African sound. But Adeleke’s rise tells a different story: Afrobeats was already making headway in the West before Amapiano had even entered its infancy. In many ways, it is West African Afrobeats that has shaped the global reception of Amapiano, more than the other way around.

Scorpio Kings and Friends Live wasn’t Adeleke’s first major South African performance. He’d recently supported controversial US singer Chris Brown on the second leg of his South African tour in December last year. But Loftus was different. This time, Adeleke wasn’t a supporting act—he was central to the point the organizers were trying to make: Amapiano was now global enough to summon any star to its cause.

Part of the crisis besetting the genre since it began gaining traction in the West has been a lingering anxiety about its appeal and staying power. Can it command a following across the diaspora the way Afrobeats has? Can it stand on its own as an African sound with international authority? These questions haunt the genre’s rise. They also explain why Amapiano attracts nationalists so easily—people who have no qualms draping it in national colors, even as it stretches beyond South African borders.

That crisis is rooted in the genre’s cardinal ingredient: anarchy. Amapiano was born from the desire to rewrite the rules of South Africa’s exploitative music industry. And though it rarely offers a direct critique of the social conditions that shaped it, its stars have mastered the art of distilling the disappointments of democracy into sound. It’s the most disruptive cultural phenomenon since kwaito in the late 1990s. But as the genre goes global, growing calls for it to become more structured and professional have come to clash with the anarchic spirit at its core.

This contradiction shows up in everything from public frustration over artists missing shows or arriving late, to behind-the-scenes disarray around contracts and payments. The demand for coherence—reliability, branding, management—is in part a response to the polished success of Afrobeats. While Afrobeats stars sign lucrative deals with Western record labels and sell out stadiums abroad, Amapiano artists are still negotiating their way out of the genre’s domestic roots.

In that light, Adeleke’s appearance was more critical to the genre than many Amapiano fans might be willing to concede. His presence contradicted the creeping nationalism that now threatens to erode the genre’s anarchist ethos—and the progressive interior of its fan base. As Afrobeats has steadily claimed its place as the sound of the diaspora, Amapiano’s fans and pioneers have struggled to articulate a coherent critique of why it hasn’t matched that rise. Lacking clear answers, many have turned instead to populism and nationalism.

Nationalism may be useful as a geographical or archival marker—but it cannot explain Amapiano as a phenomenon, and it certainly can’t contain its cultural influence. What frustrates nationalists is Afrobeats’ indifference to the colonial boundaries they still hold dear. For them, the West African genre represents a dangerous idea: that immigration is an inevitable part of African life, not a crisis to be solved, but a flow to be embraced. The resentment about Afrobeats’ influence on Amapiano—and the attempts to rewrite the genre’s history through nationalist or regionalist frames—come from this discomfort. Amapiano refuses to tell the story that nationalists want to hear about post-apartheid South Africa.

They want the genre to reflect a socially coherent country, supported by a functional state. They want to plaster its success over the failures of neoliberal governance. But Amapiano insists otherwise. It is not the soundtrack of a triumphant nation—it is the exception that proves the rule. A byproduct of neglect and exploitation. A sound that exists despite the state, not because of it.

As Amapiano continues to leave its imprint on Afrobeats, nationalists have started treating it as an endangered national treasure—projecting the fantasies of the nation-state onto a genre. They see Afrobeats as a parasite threatening to absorb Amapiano whole. Because Afrobeats is more structurally advanced, they say, it will inevitably erase Amapiano’s local distinctiveness. But this isn’t a concern about artistic integrity or the exploitation of working-class musicians. It’s not even a critique of how neoliberalism commodifies and betrays cultural possibility. What nationalists fear is the loss of control over the genre’s narrative—especially if Amapiano is placed within a properly pan-African context.

And if it’s pan-Africanism they fear, then that future has already arrived—quietly, like a thief in the night. Amapiano is in the midst of an unambiguous pan-Africanist phase. Weekly collaborations between Afrobeats and Amapiano artists continue to defy nationalist arguments and deepen the genres’ mutual dependence. As I write this, Amapiano pioneer Themba Sekowe (DJ Maphorisa), Afrobeats icon Ayodeji Balogun (Wizkid), and Nigerian producer Michael Adeyinka (DJ Tunez) have just released “Money Constant” from the South Gidi EP—a collection of sounds that forcefully demonstrate the absurdity of trying to box a genre within the colonial fiction of the nation-state. On the track, South African and West African influences collide seamlessly.

Those who want to draw borders around Amapiano might accuse Sekowe and others of dragging the genre toward an abyss. But they would struggle to explain the 50,000-strong crowd at Loftus Stadium erupting as Adeleke, the living embodiment of the Afrobeats–Amapiano fusion, made his entrance. That moment may go down as the most important in the genre’s brief history. And the clearest evidence yet that Amapiano cannot be contained—by nation, region, or ideology.

Its significance had less to do with defying nationalism and more to do with what the genre makes possible. It was a celebration of what Afrophobic South Africans often vilify: Nigerian migrants carving out a life in Johannesburg. For nationalists, these migrants are not the promise of a society seeking justice beyond colonial borders. They are symptoms of a liberal state high on its own supply. They argue that South Africa, as the poster child of the post–Cold War liberal order, has paid a steep price for its commitment to human rights. But the irony is this: the very nation-state they claim is under threat is itself a product of that same liberal order they now despise.

The last time a Nigerian artist tried to sell out a South African stadium was in 2023, when Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu (Burna Boy) was forced to cancel his scheduled FNB Stadium concert in Johannesburg. A lack of ticket sales and production issues were cited as reasons for the cancellation. But on social media, nationalists proudly claimed credit. They had actively campaigned for the concert to fail—as payback for Ogulu’s 2019 protest against Afrophobia in South Africa, where he went so far as to vow never to return until the issue was addressed.

It wasn’t naïve for Ogulu to think he could sell out a 90,000-seater stadium. More than any other Afrobeats artist, he’s enjoyed consistent success in South Africa. He was topping local charts long before Amapiano or even Afrobeats had become global mainstream genres. In 2015, it was impossible to go anywhere in South Africa without hearing “Soke” from his breakout album On a Spaceship. His popularity wasn’t an anomaly. Zimbabwean folk legend Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi had found similar success in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially after the resurgence of his song “Neria,” the soundtrack to Godwin Mawuru’s 1991 film of the same name. But Ogulu miscalculated the extent to which nationalism now shapes South Africa’s cultural scene—and how unforgiving it can be when an artist refuses to play along.

Adeleke’s South African experience has been notably different. His unambiguous embrace of Amapiano has helped propel the genre’s westward march, turning him into one of its most visible champions. That embrace has made South African crowds more receptive to his music and presence. But if someone of Ogulu’s stature can be punished for speaking out against the treatment of immigrants, it would be dishonest to suggest that Adeleke’s silence—or, at best, his ambiguity—on the same issue doesn’t help endear him to South African audiences.

Some Nigerian fans see his silence as strategic. They interpret it as part of a subtle rivalry with Ogulu: that an Amapiano fan base hostile to Burna Boy ultimately benefits Davido. To them, Adeleke has compromised principles of solidarity in order to sell music and appease South African nationalists. His turn to Amapiano is not always viewed as a genuine creative move, but as a calculated reinvention. Having hit a ceiling in the saturated Western Afrobeats market—and watched his contemporaries like Ogulu eclipse him—Adeleke looked south. And in Amapiano, he found his salvation.

That salvation became Timeless, his fourth studio album—an overt pivot to Amapiano, anchored by collaborations with South African producer Musa Makamu (Musa Keys) and artist Lethabo Sebetso (Focalistic). If there’s a price for that embrace, it’s indifference—the indifference that comes when solidarity is seen as optional, not necessary.

But Afrobeats is not as vulnerable to nationalism as Amapiano is. The border is far less consequential to its identity. It’s a sound shaped by a different genealogy—where Amapiano emerges from a domestic class struggle, Afrobeats, like much of Nigeria’s cultural industry, is what filmmaker Biyi Bandele once called “the child of necessity.” Nigerian artists understand they are cultural beggars of a sort—products of a weak postcolonial state with limited support systems, making art in the belly of a hostile global empire.

South Africans have been slower to read the writing on the wall—that the curtains are slowly falling on Africa’s most industrialized economy. The attempt to draw borders around Amapiano is, in part, a refusal to confront that reality. Amapiano’s pioneers are the anarchist children of South African neoliberalism. Where Afrobeats artists see opportunity in structure, Amapiano artists see exploitation and the theft of creative freedom. As I’ve argued, nationalism might be useful as a branding tool in the genre’s pursuit of Western success—but it runs against the very spirit of Amapiano.

As Adeleke belted out the songs that made him beloved among Amapiano fans, I couldn’t shake the irony: here was a Nigerian artist commanding a sold-out South African crowd at a time of hyper-nationalism. And then there was the jacket.

On stage, Adeleke wore a custom piece by HollyAndroo—a US-based Liberian–Sierra Leonean designer—styled after the South African flag, with its five colors, and stitched with the words “Biko – Mandela” under the left breast. These are the names that immigrants in South Africa often invoke when confronted by violence: Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, the two political figures most associated with Black solidarity and liberation.

It was a striking image. The contradictions of that moment were so glaring, I assumed it would make headlines. But Afrophobes like Gayton McKenzie—South Africa’s Minister of Arts, Sports, and Culture, who built his political profile by encouraging violence against “illegal immigrants”—said nothing. McKenzie had boasted online about the success of the concert and his ministry’s involvement. Yet he saw nothing strange, let alone subversive, in Adeleke’s performance. For nationalists, the presence of a Nigerian artist on South Africa’s biggest Amapiano stage was not a contradiction. It was confirmation. In their eyes, Adeleke was “kissing the ring.” He was proof that immigration should be measured not by solidarity or justice, but by utility: by how much labor the state can extract. The South African flag was stitched across his chest, but it was the state that ended up wearing him.

Empty riddles

2025-11-26T11:58:57Z

Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.

"Identity is Fragile V," Serge Alain Nitegeka (2021). Photo Nina Lieska. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery.

Objects can change as a reflection of how circumstances of the people who carry them do so too. In cases of forced migration, the load is at once physical and psychological. Backpacks, plastic sheets, and duffel bags stretch and take on new forms and textures. These modified objects become adequate to carry personal belongings over long distances. As refugees deal with the immediacy of the journey, negotiate the differences in language, food, weather and the different kinds of obstacles encountered along the way, a sense of uncertainty prevails. It is a labyrinth in which the exit moves all the time, an unstable ground that requires constant adjustment. There is the trauma of the journey, and there is the trauma that led to forcibly leaving in the first place. For artist Serge Alain Nitegeka, who had to flee Rwanda at a young age during the genocide (April – July 1994) first to Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, on foot, “you look at what you can carry and sort of get rid of things you don’t need. It’s a very small list you have to deal with…you know? You have to cut off the excess. And it’s not like you have a lot to cut off, but [you ask yourself] ‘what can I carry with me forever, indefinitely?’ ”

After leaving Rwanda, Nitegeka and his family first stayed in a refugee camp in Goma, then moved to Kenya, and eventually settled in South Africa in 2003, where he studied Fine Arts at Wits University. I had a conversation with him that oscillated between reflections of his recent solo exhibition Black Subjects at the Wits Art Museum (WAM) in Johannesburg, his last fifteen years of practice and what mechanisms he has found to cope with trauma.

Installation at WAM depicting “Fragile Cargo” (2010) and “Fragile Cargo VI: Studio Study I” (2012) by Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo Nina Lieska. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery.

Owing to his own life experiences and the effects this continues to have in his creative decisions, Nitegeka believes a lot lies in “dealing with trauma (…) dealing with the experience of having it and having to carry it because it’s one that doesn’t let go of you. It’s something you live with every day. It’s learning how to look at it, configure it to your own personal physique, your own personal abilities.” Something salient was his view on how abstraction and minimalist design can counter the mind clutter as a sanitised language that “denies everything, admits nothing (…) You don’t deal with anything directly. You express yourself in riddles, empty riddles, and you as the author are the one who has the breakdown of what certain forms mean to you.” In essence, abstraction becoming a shield of sorts, an antithesis to exposure.

But no matter how shielded a person is, identity needs work too, because as abstract as this construct might be, it is fragile, it needs maintenance and, the artist argues, vigilance. This is explicitly posed in the self-portrait Identity is Fragile V (2021), but unravelled most interestingly in one of Nitegeka’s most unassuming pieces titled Fragile Cargo from 2010. In our conversation, we spoke extensively about this work; a small sculpture with a piece of bent plywood tightly fitted in a black frame. The three-dimensional frame stands for the conditions that need to happen for something to keep its shape, to be in a particular way. The containment is visible and there is a balanced tension in how the plywood is delicately fitted. “It is about identity over material: how it changes, how it’s forced, how it’s molded, how the environment shapes it… (…) But then that abstraction of identity, how it’s made and how it needs to be maintained was surprisingly very touching to a lot of people that have attended my walkabouts [at WAM]”, shared Nitegeka.

He hadn’t seen the sculpture in more than ten years, and was reunited with it in Johannesburg this year where he “saw it unravelling in front of my eyes the periods I was going there [to WAM]. I had to go and fix it a bit more, sort of put back, because it’s quite resistant. I put it in that sort of cage to keep it the way it was because, on its own, it kept on wanting to snap back into the plywood it was.”

“Structural Response V,” Serge Alain Nitegeka (2025). Photo Nina Lieska. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery.

Structural Response V is the latest iteration of Nitegeka’s iconic large scale all-black wooden plank installations that have been widely exhibited in South Africa and overseas. In these installations, visitors are immersed and made to feel small in relation to the scale of the beams that cross above and around them at sharp angles. There is a sense of danger for those who visit the installation. Movement is difficult, but not impossible, echoing the hurdles migrants have to go through as they move from country to country. At WAM, the Structural Response V had a new addition in between the wooden beams: tents lit with a warm light from the inside, giving the impression of occupied spaces. The tents had been previously shown as Camp, a standalone outdoor installation at Nirox Sculpture Park (2025) and Spier Light Art Festival (2025), but never shown as part of the Structural Response. The contrast between the softness of the tents and the hostility of the beams is not only material, it is conceptual. That is, while the beams signal to the hardships of forced migration, the tents point towards a private moment of leisure and rest. These temporary shelters evoke the existence of scenes that the audience does not, cannot, access. Visitors can, however, get close enough to witness that fictional intimacy inside the tents and be part of it as observers.

The artist shared that the tents function as a tool to create a bridge with the audience, as these structures not only refer to the precarity experienced by refugees, but they also signal to other, more joyful, associations with tents: travel, childhood, family holidays, camping and so on. Nitegeka experiments with that overlap between precarity and play in order to get closer to visitors and create what he calls an “audience relatability.” He expanded:

So the idea of camping and its associations in South Africa is a relatable experience. So to have that experience of, you know, joy, relaxation, vacation, family, togetherness (…) and you juxtapose that with displaced people. [You] have a situation whereby you reduce the gap of ‘the other’, ‘the displaced’, ‘the asylum seeker’, ‘the refugee’… You sort of shorten the gap between the host country and the displaced people (…) we all have a kind of common, shared, appreciation to camping or shelter that is a necessity. So on one level, there is an association that’s made, and I think all that goes a long way towards an understanding of tolerance, if you might.

Nitegeka’s “Black Subjects” exhibition at WAM. Photo Nina Lieska. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery.

For years, Nitegeka only used black in his work, as this related with central themes in his work such as the uncertainty of the future and the void, but also to his identity as a black man. His choice of materials was intentional from the get go, as he mostly worked with found materials and crates because “they’ve lived in the world, they’ve done things.” Although most of Nitegeka’s works aren’t figurative, the figures that do appear are always the same ones covered in all-black suits. The suits strip away physical features, past experiences and individual identities, rendering the figures anonymous and equal within their shared circumstances. The ‘subjects’ Nitegeka depicts struggling through uneasy paths, pushing against walls, and lifting mended objects could be anyone. As characters of an unfinished story, these figures could be spotted at WAM in the film Black Subjects (2012) and in large scale paintings like Displaced Peoples in Situ: Studio Study XXXVIII (2025). He explained that “the reason for that conceptually, is to put the same people in different environments… that they are moving. There’s this movement: today there are in this painting, then they’re going to end up in a different painting, and they’re going to be in a different environment and landscape. They’re going to be figuring out and in this mess where they, you know, pushing things, they’re trying to organize, and this perpetual, never ending exercise that they’re involved in. They’re in this liminal space indefinitely…”

In 2008, while he was in his third year of Fine Arts at Wits University, Nitegeka rubbed himself with a mix of Vaseline and crushed charcoal. Once fully covered, he jumped inside a crate, closed the lid, hammered himself in and then tried to get out. Because of the charcoal, as he attempted to get out, he left traces of his frantic efforts on the wood. What was later exhibited in the student show were broken crate pieces with imprints of his body, remnants of that performance nobody witnessed. Back then, Serge deliberately subjected himself to difficulty in producing that work, pursuing a type of permanent ‘readiness’ – an impossible task that continues to obsess him. He shared about his rationale:

“The mindset is to be ready, physically, mentally and constantly put myself into the unknown and uncertain positions and see how I respond to sort of learn something about myself…Some of it is quite labor intensive and physically demanding. I think the idea is to have that chosen suffering to prepare myself for the unchosen suffering. I think it’s a counter trauma, sort of self generated response to that. I’ve read up quite a bit about trauma and how different people deal with it, but the one I relate to is the one of physical exhaustion, exertion is a way of living with something. Momentarily check out, but it’s also an affirmation that you’re strong, you know, that you’re not as vulnerable, and that you’re gonna be ready for the next thing.”

Nitegeka’s “Black Subjects” exhibition at WAM. Photo Nina Lieska. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery.

In the liminal space between the known and the unknown, adaptability emerges as a necessity. People change in the movement across countries because they have to, and traces of that history are visible: in the body, in the adoption of new cultures and languages, and sometimes even in weary rehearsals of ‘readiness’ for whatever might come. There is also nostalgia in the pain that accompanies the journey, as the artist described on his Instagram: “Getting caught up in the reordering of perceptions amid frequent repetitions, failures and triumphs builds character. One endures, whatever it takes. However, one never gets quite there. There is history in the way. You look back, indulgent of the past, to a time when things were a bit more settled.”

Serge has never gone back to Rwanda, though he says he would like to. He mentioned he often thinks about his work as a celebration of the endurance of the human body and the human mind. His art speaks about a series of experiences, some very private, which most of the audience will never decipher because it is posed as a riddle that can’t be solved. The point being that, to build that “audience relatability” Nitegeka speaks about, it is not necessary for the people engaging with his work to know about the exact intention or experience behind it, but rather to have an openness to the various social and emotional associations objects might carry. For some, a tent may relate to joy; for others, it may evoke memories of displacement. The key is if such differing responses can find room beside each other. If an artwork—be it through a piece of plywood or a lit tent—can prompt that, and if it can resist evolving meanings in time, then part of the empty riddle’s work is already done.

Heritage on horseback

2025-11-25T12:35:56Z

A photo essay on Nigeria’s Durbars and the power of royal pageantry.

Horsemen (Mahayan Doki) raging out of the palace to clear a path for the Emir’s procession at the Durbar Festival, 2025. ©Dave Alao for Cultural Canvas.

What is a Durbar?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a Durbar refers to the court of an Indian ruler or a ceremonial reception held by an Indian prince or British governor. However, in Nigeria, a durbar is much more than a colonial holdover; it is a vibrant expression of cultural identity, Islamic tradition, and royal heritage.

Most famously celebrated in the ancient city of Kano, the Durbar has been observed for more than five centuries. The Kano Durbar is a spectacular showcase of horsemanship, regal pageantry, and cultural performance. Held annually during the Islamic holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the festival features grand processions of horses, musicians, and dignitaries, culminating in a ceremonial display of power and allegiance to the Emir of Kano.

The Durbar festival is a dazzling display of northern Nigeria’s regal heritage, celebrated in Kano, Ilorin, Jigawa, and other northern states. Though rooted in Islamic tradition and royal pageantry, each region brings its own historical, sociopolitical, and cultural nuances to the celebration.

Kano remains the most prominent stage for the Durbar. The city’s version is widely regarded as the most elaborate, visually intense, and well-attended durbar in Nigeria—and arguably Africa. This multi-day event, steeped in military symbolism, features synchronized processions of royal guards, the Hawan Daushe and Hawan Nassarawa parades, intricately dressed titleholders, and a dazzling array of horsemen from across the emirate.

Unique to Kano are awe-inspiring side shows such as the Hyena Man’s daring street performance, horses adorned in full royal regalia, and majestic drums played atop dromedaries—reserved solely for the presence of the Emir. These elements blend mystique with ceremonial formality. The Durbar also transcends spectacle, serving as a platform for the Emir to raise important community issues, including erosion control and police infrastructure.

The Ilorin Durbar offers a markedly different but equally powerful cultural experience. Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, is predominantly Yoruba with a strong Fulani presence. Like Kano, the Durbar here centers around the Emir, Alhaji Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, and is held during the Eid festivities.

In Ilorin, the Durbar emphasizes cultural fusion and social harmony, reflecting the city’s unique identity as a meeting point of Yoruba, Fulani, and other ethnic groups. The Emir’s procession is understated yet symbolic: no armed security, only a traditional whip-bearing entourage weaving through a historic town square rich with faith and festivity.

Families and community groups dressed in matching Aso Ebi (coordinated attire) add a celebratory, grassroots dimension. Notably, Ilorin’s youth play a vital role—capturing and livestreaming the events, turning the Durbar into a global digital showcase while preserving its sacred nature.

With the Kano Durbar suspended in 2024 and 2025 due to the ongoing royal dispute between Muhammadu Sanusi II and Aminu Ado Bayero, attention has shifted to lesser-known but equally rich traditions in states like Jigawa.

Although Jigawa’s Durbar is newer in public perception, it is deeply rooted in history. Although not as structurally elaborate as Kano’s, the event is rich in symbolism and local loyalty. Governor Umar Namadi personally received the Emir of Dutse, Hameem Nuhu Sunusi, along with his 26 district heads—each of whom knelt in royal obeisance, symbolizing respect and unity.

Beyond celebration, the Emir’s speech tackled community challenges such as erosion and flooding, urging state-led solutions. Each district presented uniquely decorated horses, showcasing the emirate’s internal cultural diversity. Crowds of children, women, and elders filled rooftops and balconies, demonstrating a deep, unfiltered connection between the people and their heritage.

The Ojude Oba Festival in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, deserves special mention. Rooted in Yoruba tradition, Ojude Oba shares some parallels with the northern Durbar, particularly its equestrian parades and celebration of royal leadership.

Held during Eid al-Adha in honor of the Awujale (king) of Ijebuland, Ojude Oba emphasizes social hierarchy, fashion, and diaspora involvement. Unlike the aristocratic tone of northern Durbars, Ojude Oba embraces democratic pride in cultural heritage, welcoming both Muslims and Christians in a colorful, inclusive celebration.

Equestrian parades, coordinated dances, rich textiles, and historical reenactments led by Balogun families and community organizations create a vibrant cultural identity that resonates both locally and internationally.

Notwithstanding regional differences, all Durbar festivals and Ojude Oba share several unifying elements, including: regal equestrian displays (horseback riding remains central, symbolizing strength, dignity, and royal prestige); cultural embellishments (music, ancestral chants, and intricately adorned regalia elevate both the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the events); leadership and symbolism (the presence of Emirs and kings reasserts the enduring relevance of traditional authority in civic life); and community participation (from elders to tech-savvy youth, intergenerational involvement fuels the festivals’ ongoing vibrancy and mass appeal). Kano’s royal grandeur, Ilorin’s harmonious fusion, Jigawa’s grassroots revival, and Ijebu Ode’s communal pride highlight a powerful truth: while Nigeria is a tapestry of cultures, tradition continues to be a unifying force. The Durbar, in its various forms, reaffirms the authority of heritage and the evolving dialogue between history, leadership, and the people. In an era often defined by fragmentation, the Durbar remains a cultural beacon, reminding Nigerians and the world that identity can be both richly diverse and beautifully shared.

When Moscow looked to the horn

2025-11-24T08:39:26Z

Half a century after the Soviets built their base on the Gulf of Aden, the same strategic coastline is once more drawing in foreign powers, old and new.

During a hot sunny day in Berbera, the American delegation led by Senator Dewey F. Bartlett arrived. It was in 1975, and the port city, a sleepy coastal city-turned-Soviet outpost, found itself at the center of a tug-of-war. As the American senators followed the Somali military officer giving them a tour, they observed and noted any signs that confirmed the allegations that Somalia is hosting a missile center owned by the Soviets. The visit, referred to in the US diplomatic cables as the “Berbera Affair,” became important for various actors to present a geopolitical narrative suited to their interests. The US secretary of defense at the time, James Schlesinger, claimed that the Soviets had built a missile storage facility and presented pictures. It was followed by the American lawmakers using this issue as a justification for opening a military base in Diego Garcia; the Soviet Union didn’t miss the opportunity to paint the visit as another American imperialist expansion in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. For Somalia, though, President Siad Barre juggled loyalties to Moscow, to Washington, and above all, himself. He used the visit to project an image of independence from Soviet influence in Somalia, as the latter had enjoyed strong relations with Moscow.

Berbera again finds itself entangled with a geopolitical competition whose main actors include not only the US but also China and the middle powers of the Middle East. Somaliland, which formally reclaimed its sovereignty from Somalia in 1991, is bargaining Berbera’s strategic value to gain something it has craved for so long: international acceptance and recognition. This piece draws parallels from historical events of the Cold War to help us understand the significance of this part of the world and why the world needs to understand what’s at stake. Berbera’s location is key to securing global shipments passing by the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors, a gateway to landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan. As Houthis’ attacks on international shipments escalate as a result of Israel’s war in Gaza, this maritime route is increasingly getting the attention of major powers.

Berbera lies in the Gulf of Aden, facing the Yemeni coast in the north. For centuries, ships from Arabia, Asia, and beyond have stopped there to trade salt, goods, and hides. When British colonialism arrived, they found Berbera as a strategic location, basing their governor there before moving their administration to Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital.

Decades later, a global power saw the same strategic promise. In 1962, the Soviets secured an agreement to build a deep seaport in Berbera, a project that was concluded in 1969, the same year the military leader, Mohamed Siad Barre, staged a military coup. By the 1970s the Soviets completed the long runway in Berbera’s airport, long enough that the Americans suspected it was serving military purposes for Moscow.

Relations with Moscow remained intact, even stronger, as the military regime decreed scientific socialism as the state ideology, a break from the multiparty democracy the civilian government had adopted. A treaty of friendship and fraternity was signed in 1974, the first of its kind that Moscow signed with an African state after Egypt. This opened the fledgling postcolonial state with much-needed support in infrastructure, military assistance, and technical expertise. For Moscow, it presented an opportunity to project power and influence in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, something Barre agreed to as a fellow socialist comrade.

The Soviets slowly built a naval base in Berbera. Radoslav A. Yordanov wrote in his doctoral research on the Soviet Union’s relations with Ethiopia and Somalia that the Soviet construction of a missile storage site in Berbera was conducted without the knowledge or even understanding of the Somali military government. He refers to US delegation reports of perceived lack of knowledge of the Somali officers of Moscow’s activities in Berbera.

Meanwhile, the US government kept expanding its security and diplomatic relations in Africa. It remained an ally to Ethiopia, Somalia’s regional nemesis, and maintained a CIA listening station in Kagnew, in modern-day Eritrea. Washington saw an ally in Ethiopia in containing the spread of communist reach in Eastern Africa by propping up the imperial government of Ethiopia militarily and economically.

However, this did not last long. A wave of changes rocked the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a Marxist military regime in 1974, and seeing the fragile Ethiopia, Somalia launched a major war to annex the Somali region under Ethiopian control. The Soviets were unhappy about the two communist allies in the Horn fighting, tried to mediate first, but eventually sided with Ethiopia. At the time, The New York Times reported the expulsion of Soviet military advisors from Somalia, who numbered around 6,000 people. For long, the Soviet Union was perplexed by the territorial dispute between the two countries. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader from 1953 to 1964, noted how challenging it was for him to deal with this situation in his memoir.

Berbera again became the center of this relationship as the Carter administration suspended aid to Ethiopia. Somalia sought to align itself with America’s allies—namely, Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, and the Shah of Iran, who both promised assistance to Somalia against Ethiopia.

Half a century later, flags have changed, but the scripts remain the same. Where the Soviets operated facilities in Berbera, now it’s Emirati contractors who are paving the runways. Chinese investors were eyeing the Port of Berbera as an export point for the oil and gas from Ethiopia, and Somaliland’s leaders are playing all these cards against one another in an attempt to secure recognition. The Emirati-owned company DP World has developed the Port of Berbera into a massive project, one of the several ports DP World is managing in Africa. In today’s Horn and Eastern Africa, leaders aren’t calling Washington or Moscow in times of emergencies, but they’re calling Abu Dhabi, Ankara, and Doha, shifting the change in geopolitical order in the region. For instance, when the Ethiopian government was embroiled in a bitter civil war in the Tigray region, it was the UAE, Turkey, and Iran that came to Ethiopia’s aid, not the US or the Russians.

Although the Emirates abandoned their base project in Berbera as their calculations in the Yemeni war changed, the base, which was initially built by the Soviets, remains up for the highest bidder. The US government expressed an interest and sent an AFRICOM delegation in what many speculate is the great American return to Berbera. The US today is not fighting a major power in the Red Sea but rather a non-state actor group in Yemen, the Houthis, who are threatening the global shipments as their conflict with Israel escalates.

Contestation for legitimacy is at the heart of Somaliland’s geopolitical calculation. As the West championed democracy promotion globally, Somaliland successfully implemented multiparty democracy with a good record of electoral success. Now, as the language of politics intensifies around great power competition, Hargeisa is aligning its narrative around geopolitics. As Bruno Maçães notes, “The case of Somaliland is really illustrative of what the US order has become.” Ten years ago, it was trying to get recognition, arguing that it had a vibrant democracy. Then it realized the US cares nothing about this, so it started arguing it could help counter China in the Red Sea and the Horn. In 2020, Somaliland formed diplomatic ties with Taiwan to the displeasure of China. As the Asian power tried to dissuade Somaliland from this, the latter seemed locked into furthering this agenda for greater cooperation with the US, and now conservative figures in the Congress and the Senate are calling on President Trump to seek deeper cooperation with Somaliland.

Russia under Vladimir Putin is also expanding its network in the African continent. As the Crisis Group recently noted, the Russian state-affiliated Africa Corps (formerly known as the Wagner Group) is currently active in multiple conflict sites in Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Central African Republic. Sudan, which was caught up in a brutal (uncivil) war, has reportedly been courted by Putin for access to a base in the Red Sea. Its foreign minister, Ali Youssouef, said that there are no obstacles to a Russian Red Sea base.

But most importantly, Russia seems not to abandon its former Soviet outpost in Berbera. In October 2017, the Russian delegation arrived in Somaliland to discuss deepening ties, and in 2025, a letter surfaced online from the Russian embassy in Ethiopia reaching out to the Somaliland government to schedule a visit. Social media users speculated about the purpose of that planned visit and the details involved, but I wouldn’t rule out the Russian glory of seeing Berbera’s base back in their fold.

How much does a Nigerian intellectual cost?

2025-11-21T09:54:55Z

The country that once produced some of Africa’s fiercest moral voices now struggles to sustain independent thought.

In the early 2000s, during one of the prolonged strikes of the Academic Staff Union of Universities that shuttered Nigerian campuses for months, I encountered an essay in the Nigerian Tribune that challenged my understanding of literature’s place in the world and the mediating power of language. The article, written by the late Abubakar Gimba, examined the government’s criminal neglect of the education sector while also appealing to striking academics to consider the children caught in the crossfire of institutional failure.

I was deeply drawn by the architecture of his argument. The way his prose moved from indictment to appeal without sacrificing its intellectual honesty; literature as a kind of surgery on the body politic, painful but necessary, demanding that we confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society.

I came to literature through writers who understood that in societies still bleeding from the wounds of colonial extraction, one of the writer’s key obligations was to serve as witness, agitator, and keeper of the collective memory, a generation of intellectuals who refused to accept that independence had been achieved merely by the lowering of one flag and the raising of another.

From the anti-colonial pamphleteers of the 1940s to the Newswatch generation, Nigeria’s intellectuals once stood between citizen and state like unpaid sentries. Dele Giwa lost his life to a parcel bomb in 1986; Ken Saro‑Wiwa lost his to Abacha’s hangman in 1995. Between 1994 and 1998, hundreds of writers, editors, and organisers slipped through the borders to escape Abacha’s bloodlust. The National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), formed in May 1994, was the fulcrum of exile politics. Wole Soyinka, Anthony Enahoro, Ayo Opadokun, and others carried the struggle from London basements to Capitol Hill hearing rooms. Within this matrix was Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a fugitive senator with deep pockets and deeper ambitions.

Depending on who’s telling it, Tinubu was either a hero of Nigeria’s democratic struggle or a successful Third Republic politician whose financial contributions earned him proximity to the moral glow of exile politics and helped launder his credentials.

According to NADECO lore, Tinubu, who had fled Nigeria through a hospital window in those heady days, became a source of financial succor to the movement’s exiled group of intellectuals and activists: trading rice with Taiwan to support the cause, in Soyinka’s telling; contributing to the purchase of the transmitter that powered Radio Kudirat, the pirate station that rattled the junta at large. Political exile makes for complicated bedfellows: Trotsky once found himself dependent on the hospitality of bourgeois democracies he had spent his life denouncing; the ANC in exile accepted funds from Scandinavian governments and multinational unions with their own interests to protect; Ho Chi Minh collaborated briefly with the American OSS against Japan. Sometimes the geography of the struggle blurs conviction and convenience.

Tinubu returned to Nigeria following the restoration of democracy in the late 1990s as a hero, Saul among the prophets. His NADECO aura played no small part in his ascension to the governorship of Lagos State. When Chief Anthony Enahoro returned from exile in 2000 to a reception hosted in Lagos, Frank Kokori, the respected unionist and stalwart of the pro-democracy struggle, remarked:

What I told Pa Enahoro in America has today come to pass. Revolutionaries must have a base. We don’t just boycott the political process. If Tinubu does not reign (as governor) in Lagos today, we would not have been able to give Pa Enahoro this kind of rousing welcome…

More than two decades later, when Tinubu was elected President after the 2023 elections, a columnist writing for the Vanguard described it as, “a reward for NADECO, June 12 struggles.”

Yet the story of NADECO reveals the deeper pathology that would eventually consume Nigeria’s oppositional culture. The same individuals who once organized against military dictatorship would later become architects of the very system they had once opposed: radicals turned governors, columnists turned presidential advisers. Reuben Abati swapped The Guardian’s back page for Aso Rock’s briefing room; Femi Adesina would do the same under Buhari. The title “Special Adviser on Media and Communication” became Abuja’s gilded quarantine for former scolds.

Meanwhile, the lecture halls that produced earlier generations of intellectuals and visionaries have progressively declined. Over the last quarter-century, Nigerian universities have been closed for nearly 1,600 days, equivalent to more than four academic years, due to ASUU strikes. Even when classrooms reopen, they do so on starvation rations: the 2024 federal budget allotted barely 7% to education, less than half of UNESCO’s recommended floor.

Tinubu’s evolution, from NADECO financier to one of Nigeria’s most powerful political godfathers, represents the systematic and structural transformation of opposition into complicity. More than any of his contemporaries, he grasped the psychological economy of power and had a practised instinct for making even his opponents dependent on his largesse. What has emerged under his watch is a sophisticated system in which intellectuals, clergy, thugs, and politicians alike have been drawn into a single patronage network whose gravitational pull is so strong it now defines the political horizon itself. At least five governors from the opposition party and a retinue of state and federal legislators have recently defected to the ruling APC, marking a near-perfect consolidation of a decades-long project of converting dissent into property. The Nigerian state, having learned from the Abacha years that direct repression generated too much international attention, developed more sophisticated methods for neutralizing opposition. Instead of killing intellectuals, it began buying them.

Still, for clarity, we must expand our lens beyond individuals and consider structure. That the post-colonial state in Africa inherited its colonial borders along with the colonizer’s extractive psychology has been rigorously observed. The unfortunate archetype of nationalist intellectuals, who once promised liberation, has been thoughtfully drawn out, separately, by Fanon and Cabral, as the transmission line between the nation-state and a predatory bourgeoisie. Yet Nigeria’s variant of this tragedy is intensified by its peculiar history of dehumanisation.

The British did not so much govern Nigeria as manage its competing interests and contradictions. To the colonial authorities, Nigerians were resources, measurable in tonnage, taxation, and labor. The moral questions of citizenship and belonging were ceded to the new political elite who inherited the machine. What ensued, predictably, was an existential scramble for positioning. The government became a factory for privilege, and ordinary Nigerians were the raw material it consumed.

The deeper tragedy lies in how this extractive order deformed the moral imagination. Few governments in human history have treated their citizens with as much disdain as the Nigerian government. The people have been literally made to eat shit and say thank you while at it. In a society where the state’s primary function is predation over protection, the people have learned to survive through mimicry: by bending rules and currying favour, shamelessly cultivating proximity to power, a Darwinian survivalism that has since hardened into culture.

This is why the Nigerian obsession with status and the bloated sense of self-importance should not be mistaken for mere vanity. It is a kind of self-defence, a desperate performance of worth in a system that recognizes only power and indexes your humanity to wealth. To be poor is to be invisible. And so, every act of corruption, every betrayal of principle, every silence purchased with a contract or appointment, is animated by a quiet terror: the fear of returning to nothingness.

It is from this context that the contemporary Nigerian intellectual class emerges, more mirror than counterforce, fluent in critique, yet complicit in the very hierarchies they diagnose. To speak truth to power has become less a civic duty than a career strategy. Nigeria’s sheer size, its violent fusions of ethnicity and religion, and its oil wealth have all intensified the collapse of trust between citizen and state. The result is a moral economy where the vocabulary of value has been inverted: wealth without work, faith without ethics, intellect without integrity.

Under this dispensation, the intellectual who maintains principled opposition to corruption is seen as naive or, worse, unsuccessful. The writer or journalist who refuses to sell their platform to the highest bidder is viewed as lacking business acumen. The academic who turns down lucrative government consultancies to maintain their independence is considered foolish rather than principled.

Nowhere are these issues more evident than in the approach to political engagement. What was once a testing ground for ideas and ideals has since degenerated into another avenue for personal advancement. The phrase “politics is not a do-or-die affair” has been weaponised to justify the most cynical forms of opportunism, as if treating politics as a matter of life and death were somehow primitive rather than an appropriate response to systems that literally determine who lives and dies.

When former critics become government apologists, the very language of accountability becomes corrupted. Citizens lose the ability to distinguish between propaganda and analysis, between genuine reform and cosmetic changes designed to manage public perception. This has created more than a crisis of interpretation in Nigerian public life.

The absence of intellectuals capable of articulating a hope grounded in serious analysis and concrete possibilities has left Nigerians vulnerable to both despair and false prophets. Within a single generation, a tradition that had produced some of the world’s most powerful voices for justice and human dignity has been largely destroyed. The country that gave the world Achebe’s moral clarity and Soyinka’s righteous fury now struggles to produce intellectuals capable of sustained critique of even the most obvious failures.

The digital revolution, which might have democratized access to information and expanded platforms for dissent, has, instead, accelerated the degradation of public discourse. Social media platforms that could have served as modern equivalents of the newspaper columns where intellectuals once published their critiques have become echo chambers of misinformation and tribal antagonism.

The Occupy Nigeria crowd of social media agitators, who contributed significantly to hounding Goodluck Jonathan out of office, have also found plush jobs in government or found themselves close enough to leverage influence for personal ends. The space that figures like Abubakar Gimba once occupied, characterized by thoughtful, nuanced, and morally serious engagement with public issues, has been replaced by performative outrage and simplified sloganeering that digital platforms reward.

Any counteracting effort, beyond nostalgia for a golden age that may have been less golden than memory suggests, must begin with a recognition that intellectual independence cannot be sustained in conditions of economic desperation. Where rent is unpaid and children go hungry, the space for moral courage inevitably collapses into the daily arithmetic of survival. Nothing that can be said about integrity will hold if the social structure rewards sycophancy and punishes honesty. Nigeria’s unending cycle of poverty and precarity can be effectively seen as an instrument of control that renders citizens docile through exhaustion.

But what is made can be unmade. The search for a just society has not been abandoned. The moral voice has become itinerant, diffused into new forms across non-traditional routes; data collectives pushing for transparency, feminist movements with unrelenting civic courage, satirists, independent presses, and citizen archives. A new civic imagination is struggling to assert itself. It is imperfect, fragmented, and often co-opted, but the work of re-establishing a baseline for shared ethical imagination continues. The #EndSARS protests revealed a generation’s rage and its longing for dignity, a demand for accountability rooted in the simplest of civic rights: that a citizen’s life should count. Despite the fresh wave of migration it triggered after it was crushed by the Nigerian military, ghosts of its discontent still linger.

Yet moral renewal cannot rely on outrage alone. It will require the deliberate rebuilding of the intellectual and imaginative infrastructure that allows a people to see themselves truthfully. For all the failures of the state, the imagination remains the one institution the powerful cannot fully capture. It is there, in the stubborn work of writing, teaching, organizing, and making, of refusing to be silenced or bought, that moral authority can be rebuilt. In classrooms kept alive by teachers who refuse despair; in newsrooms that still risk integrity for accuracy; in reading collectives, film labs, community libraries, and digital platforms that prize inquiry over impression.

As with everything else that ensures their continued survival, Nigerians must, on their own, continue the slow restoration of conditions in which knowledge can exist for its own sake, untethered from the demand for utility. They must lean further into new forms of patronage and community, networks of solidarity that enlarge interiority: citizen-funded art spaces, regional residencies, literary festivals, and community gatherings that nurture the life of the mind. These are the laboratories where the moral imagination must again come alive.

Whether these efforts can overcome the internal and external fissures that contend with Nigerian life and coalesce into a critical and functional mass is a question that time alone can answer. What is certain is that without them, Nigeria will continue its descent into moral and intellectual darkness, making genuine development impossible. The choice, as always, is between the easy path of accommodation and the difficult, necessary work of building alternatives.

The sound of what remains

2025-11-20T11:48:58Z

Jean Maxime Baptiste’s latest film listens to how grief and history reverberate across generations in French Guiana.

Image courtesy of BlackStar Film Festival.

This year’s Philadelphia BlackStar Film Festival returned to film lovers, artists, and curious thinkers with a 10:30 am screening of Jean Maxime Baptiste’s enthralling documentary Kouté Vwa, directly translating to Listen to the Voices. As the Suzanne Roberts theater filled slowly that rainy July morning, I found myself in awe. Unfolding on screen was a captivating meditation exploring the infinite nature of grief.

Since the start of its festival run in 2024, this documentary has traveled widely, screening at festivals and independent theaters around the world, highlighting the tenderness of French Guiana, a region typically exempt from cinematic conversations.

In Kouté Vwa, Baptiste constructs a visual landscape where memory and the present are inextricably bound. Delicately playing with form, this film dissolves the distance often found in documentary filmmaking, oscillating between traditional observational scenes, archival footage, and moments where the camera is intimately absorbed. It follows Melrick, a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, during a visit to his grandmother, Nicole. Eleven years have passed since the untimely death of his uncle, Lucas Diomar, better known to the community as DJ Turbulence, yet his loss continues to reverberate through the lives of Melrick, Nicole, and Yannick, Lucas’s best friend.

While the nexus of Kouté Vwa is the violent and premature loss of Lucas Diomar, Lucas himself is never physically present in the film. His image appears only in fragments: on a mural and in print images from a community parade that celebrated his life and legacy. The film allows Lucas to emerge through the intimate memories of those who loved him most.

Set in French Guiana, an overseas department of France in South America, Baptiste delivers a visually lush experience where suave, gold-adorned characters invite audiences into life in a territory bearing the weight of its colonial rule.

Melrick, with his wide, searching eyes, is the emotional core of this documentary. We follow a boisterously curious young boy from France during his summer vacation, anticipating eighth grade. Though there is a clear duration of his stay, Melrick is neither a tourist nor merely a visitor; rather, he occupies an in-between space that mirrors the dual condition of French Guiana: simultaneously autonomous and dependent, familiar and foreign, home and elsewhere.

This country feels instinctive to Melrick, his friendships, his bond with his grandmother, and his participation in a local music group, as he learns to play the drums like his uncle Lucas, grounds him within the community. There is no performance of discovery typically associated with encountering a new place. Instead, his awe, in which audiences are invited to share, is in moments reflecting on the beauty of French Guiana.

Baptiste captures Melrick at a liminal moment, navigating the curiosities of adolescence, while developing a deeper understanding of the larger forces that shape his world. Melrick’s innocence is acknowledged but never isolated from the realities of grief and colonial structures that define his present.

Early in the film, a scene between Melrick and his friends riding bicycles and talking about their dreams encapsulates this duality. Their youthful camaraderie and easy laughter coexist with an acute awareness of the colonial conditions surrounding them. French Guiana remains tethered to the republic through a complex colonial legacy: French by law, yet often regarded as peripheral in practice. The boys speak about the gentrification happening in their hood, Mont Lucas, predicting a slow start before engulfing all they know. They joke about what they would do if they were the president of French Guiana. Playfully recognizing that they can’t be a president because they are not independent, but “Just imagine,” one says.

Kouté Vwa’s greatest strength lies in this tango of imagination and inheritance, allowing audiences into the most intimate constructions of life within a colonial territory, one where there is an everyday reckoning with independence, nationality, and statehood. Baptiste resists framing these realities as moments of shocking discovery; instead, they are present through a quiet, almost mundane awareness; a weight that even the youngest and most innocent are never fully spared from.

Yannick Carbert and Nicole Diomar are two delightful powerhouses to watch in this film, but it’s Nicole, tattooed, pierced, and sporting a half-shaved head of gray hair, who immediately enchants. Carrying the unimaginable loss of her son, Lucas, we see how she learns to live with her grief, never denying it, but also never allowing it to consume her.

There is a real radicalism in the way Nicole moves through the world. She is candid and self-assured, speaking to Melrick about being single, abandoning the church, and her life in French Guiana. Her sense of self is rooted in an openness not born from rebellion, but from a refusal to let loss, age, or expectation define her. Most of her moments with Merlrick are captured intimately, with the camera kissing their faces as they exchange thoughts and teases. It’s in these many intimate moments throughout the documentary that we see Nicole become more than an elder and matriarchal figure; she is a companion, someone with whom Melrick can test and articulate his expanding worldview.

One of the film’s most affecting moments comes during a drive to Melrick’s drumming performance in honor of Lucas, when the conversation turns to the men responsible for his violent death. Melrick challenges his grandmother’s presumed piety, questioning how she can forgive. Nicole meets his challenge without defensiveness, recounting an encounter she had with one of Lucas’s killers after his release from prison. In this exchange, honest, vulnerable, and raw, Baptiste captures a cross-generational moment of healing, born from the courage to speak openly.

Yannick serves as the film’s most visceral link to Lucas—his best friend, his brother. Tall and striking, with locs cascading down his back, Yannick is deeply marked by the loss of his best friend. Present the night Lucas died, the weight of that moment lingers in his every pulse. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see him reflecting on his desire to leave French Guiana, not out of disdain, but in reflection of the violence and hardship he’s experienced. His words reflect the complex relationship he has with the colonial territory he calls home.

In the scenes between Yannick and Melrick, Baptiste captures the gentle mirroring between their bodies, one grown and one still growing. As stoic as he may appear, Yannick is the current that keeps Kouté Vwa in flow. We watch him in deeply enchanting sequences processing grief, crying as a mural of DJ Turbulence comes to life, mentoring Melrick, and gently continuing the role Lucas once held.

Kouté Vwa’s brilliance lies in how it traces this triangulation of healing across generations, across love and loss, and across the ever-present question of home.

The coup kids are in charge now

2025-11-19T11:45:40Z

Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.

Across Africa, militaries have long been more than mere instruments of state security. Among the most cohesive and disciplined institutions on the continent, they have often shaped the course of nations, particularly when civilian leaders prove feckless, corrupt, or unable to meet public expectations. Since 2020, coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Niger have shown armies increasingly willing to step out of their barracks, claiming the mantle of governance in times of crisis and promising to steer the country back to safe shores.

African militaries, unlike those on any other continent, appear bolder in their willingness to take the reins when things go wrong—either to reset their political systems and steer them back on course, or to seize control directly or through proxies. A recent study found that while coups have become less frequent globally, Africa remains a “high-risk” region for coups. These interventions—varied in their causes but concentrated across what has now been dubbed Africa’s “coup belt,” a swathe of military-ruled states stretching from Guinea to Sudan—reflect both the growing confidence of uniformed leaders and the normalization of their presence in politics in recent years. After Niger’s coup in 2023—the eighth in three years—Aïssata Tall Sall, Senegal’s then foreign minister, declared it “one coup too many.” But the trend didn’t stop there. Gabon followed, and most recently, Madagascar, bringing the total to 10 coups in five years and showing contagion outside the core coup area.

In Madagascar, we got to see the normalization of military rule on full display in mid-October. Colonel Michael Randrianirina’s overthrow of President Andry Rajoelina came after weeks of youth-led protests over water and power shortages. The coup reached its dramatic climax when Randrianirina undermined Rajoelina’s authority by appointing a new army chief and then declaring himself president. He traded his military fatigues for a dark suit as he was sworn in before Madagascar’s High Constitutional Court as head of a “refounded” republic. The colonel has promised up to two years of military stewardship in which he has vowed to take the country in a new direction. “We are committed to breaking with the past. Our primary mission is to profoundly reform the country’s administrative, socio-economic, and political systems of governance,” he declared.

This is not Madagascar’s first military intervention. In 2009, the same elite unit, CAPSAT, orchestrated the removal of President Marc Ravalomanana and installed Rajoelina in his place before stepping back into the barracks. The crucial difference this time is that Randrianirina has made himself head of state, buoyed by public sympathy after he intervened against police during the protests, publicly condemning the violent crackdown. What we know from Randrianirina’s biography suggests that his rise to the top was not merely a quirk of being one of the country’s most senior military figures. Randrianirina had previously been arrested for plotting against Rajoelina and was a long-standing critic of his administration, clearly exhibiting strong political convictions of his own.

Another recent coup leader with strong political convictions is Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso. While at the University of Ouagadougou as a geology student, he was a member of the National Association of Students of Burkina Faso (ANEB), an organization with pronounced Marxist, anti-imperialist, and pan-African leanings. Traoré’s trajectory suggests those formative years stayed with him into adulthood. His chance to act on his convictions came when he overthrew his superior, Paul-Henri Damiba, just eight months after Damiba had seized power in a coup. But not before his convictions were likely hardened by his own lived experiences.

Napoleon is said to have remarked that to understand a man, you must understand what was happening around him when he was 20. Traoré spent those years in peacekeeping operations, battling an insurgency that arose after a Western intervention in Libya flooded the Sahel region with arms and militants. Despite the seriousness of the threat Burkina Faso faced at the time, and continues to face, in an interview with French daily Le Monde, he bristled at the fact that Burkinabes fighting the al-Qaida-affiliated insurgents were “four to five soldiers for one Kalashnikov,” whilst civilian leaders handled “suitcases of money.” “It really hurts soldiers to see that. Worse, we were taunted,” he said.

Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who led before the brace of coups, was dubbed the “diesel president” for the lethargy of his response and perceived inability to meet the moment. Traoré reached a similar verdict on the first coup leader, Damiba, whom he swiftly deposed. The country needed a serious wartime leader, he told the public, and he was the man for the job.

This is where a key theme in the rise of several African militaries becomes clear. Traoré and his fellow plotters dismissed the civilian leader (and his successor) as incompetent and broadened their own sense of duty to include defending the country through direct political intervention, much like in Madagascar. Traoré—or IB, as Burkinabès call him—has since become an internet sensation, blending a slick yet hard-edged military aesthetic (he has never been seen in a suit). Even the Financial Times has conceded that he is an “icon.”

The inability of his regime to push back armed groups—which are believed to control more than half the country and have propelled Burkina Faso to the top of the Global Terrorism Index—has done little to dent his appeal. None of his fans around the world care because that appeal doesn’t come from what he does, or who he is, but his ability to put into words what a lot of people think, and the viral nature of many of his remarks slamming the West and comprador elites across Africa.

Not all coups are created equal, however. In some cases, they are simply power struggles among elites, as seen in Niger and Sudan. Though it has since been largely buried, Niger’s Abdourahamane Tchiani did not initially overthrow President Mohamed Bazoum for being too pro-Western. In fact, Tchiani was close to Bazoum’s predecessor, whom The Economist described as a “staunch ally of the West.” Bazoum sought to replace Tchiani, who believed he knew better what was needed for Niger than a newbie president and decided to pull the plug on his boss. The anti-Western rhetoric probably came after Tchiani realized that he wouldn’t receive support from Paris, the US, or the EU due to the coup against an elected leader. There is little evidence that he held strong beliefs about the West before assuming power.

In Sudan, a similar power struggle unfolded when the army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—created and empowered by the army to do its dirty work—turned on each other after toppling civilian leader Abdalla Hamdok in October 2021. Sudan has a long and complex history of hybrid civilian–military regimes, but in this instance, as in previous coups, the military believed it knew best and forced its way into the driver’s seat.

Another notable feature is how the military often disguises itself when it seizes power. Although Egypt’s coup took place over a decade ago, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has fully civilianized his regime, as has Mahamat Déby in Chad, who succeeded his father—also a soldier—in a dynastic transition. In other countries, such as Algeria, where the military has long acted as a kind of laissez-faire ventriloquist, there has been no need to handpick rulers directly.

However, these militaries choose to rule—whether directly or through civilian proxies—they depict themselves as stepping in to save the nation from a corrupt civilian elite that has betrayed its responsibilities. This narrative resonates powerfully: from Madagascar to Burkina Faso, populations endure grinding poverty, deteriorating security, and vanishing prospects for improvement.

Daniel Paget, a scholar of African politics at the University of Sussex, has developed the concept of “elitist plebeianism” to describe how certain political leaders construct themselves not as representatives of the people’s will, but as superior guardians acting in the people’s interests, irrespective of what the people actually want. In this framework, society divides into three tiers: a “moral elite” at the top, “the corrupt” in the middle, and “the people” below. The moral elite’s role is not to respond to popular demands, but to fight the corrupt on behalf of the people, wielding authority that flows downward rather than upward.

Africa’s coup-making militaries have adopted precisely this structure, constructing what we might call “praetorian plebeianism.” They position themselves as the incorruptible guardians at the apex—disciplined, self-sacrificing soldiers who have witnessed corruption firsthand. The enemy is not “the elite” in general, but specifically the corrupt civilian political class: the politicians handling “suitcases of money” while citizens lack water and electricity.

This is why military takeovers are framed by soldiers as revolutions, while scholars often call them “coupvolutions,” a tidy portmanteau of coup and revolution that helps explain the dynamics at play. Samuel Fury Childs Daly, author of Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, told me that the sense of responsibility soldiers feel has several important drivers, rooted in the nationalist pedagogic ethos of the military as an institution:

Their claim to be more patriotic probably has some truth to it. They’re educated in the only institution that had patriotism drummed into them from the very beginning… Armed forces also tend to be more representative of the demographic make-up of their populations, not perfectly, of course, but generally speaking. This gives them a national outlook in a way that other people in the countries they’re tasked with protecting may not. That makes them feel entitled to step in when things don’t go the way they want.

However, the military form of governance lost legitimacy in many countries, Daly adds. “The military regimes that governed at the end of the 20th century were so obviously bad that they were discredited in the eyes of many. They have a bad record on economic performance and aren’t always great at enhancing security,” he said. That verdict was delivered across the continent in the early 1990s, when a wave of democratization took hold and around a dozen nations began transitioning from one-party or military rule to some form of electoral democracy. Now, however, a reverse wave appears to be underway, a trend Daly partly attributes to Africa’s youth bulge, which means fewer people remember the realities of military rule. They hear promises of change and improvement, but are often unaware of how rarely military regimes deliver on them.

That early enthusiasm, however, tends to fade quickly. There are exceptions—such as Niger, where GDP growth officially reached 11%—but such figures have done little to improve the lives of ordinary people. As a recent UN Development Program report noted, the “ephemeral nature of the popularity” of military regimes soon becomes clear when the promised “change is not forthcoming.”

These coups stand in sharp contrast to the case of Senegal, where a popular movement organized around a political party managed to unseat entrenched elites through the ballot box in 2024. Then-President Macky Sall was replaced by a youth movement led by today’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and President Bassirou Diomaye Faye around PASTEF. Ayisha Osori, a Nigerian lawyer and Director in the Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop, dubbed it a “people’s coup.”

What made Senegal different wasn’t the depth of popular frustration that existed across the coup belt. It was the presence of conditions conspicuously absent elsewhere: a military with an unbroken 60-year tradition of remaining in barracks, a resilient civil society capable of mass mobilization, and democratic institutions strained but not shattered. While the jury is still out on Faye’s ability to address the discontent that led to Sall’s removal from office, the Senegalese have shown that, under the right conditions, it is possible to remove an entrenched elite from the bottom up. Unfortunately, this rare example remains the exception that proves the rule.

As it stands, the fate of a large swathe of Africa rests in the hands of soldiers. Whether their particular brand of “praetorian plebeianism” will truly benefit the countries they aim to govern is hard to say, and it is unlikely that any generalizable conclusion will emerge. In the end, this period will either bring painful lessons from the past back into sharp focus or pave the way for the potential sanitization of military regimes if they succeed. I’m not betting much on the latter.

Who cares about African heritage?

2025-11-18T10:49:27Z

While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.

Basotho Cultural Village. Image via South African National Parks website (Fair Use).

Two-and-a-half years ago, I returned home to South Africa after more than a decade in Europe and North America working as a museum and heritage consultant, and a bruising and short-lived stint as the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAFA).

I came home exhausted; tired of taking on battles that often felt unwinnable. I felt as though I had spent all my time fighting for African visibility and restitution and explaining that we were fully human. I was relieved to be back home. This is where I started my museum career 15 years earlier, setting up some of the new post-apartheid museums during the ambitious period of Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Legacy Projects. I wanted to see how these public heritage projects and others were faring.

I started with the Kliptown Open Air Museum at the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Soweto, celebrating 50 years since the signing of the Freedom Charter in 1955, and the heart of an ambitious urban development and housing project. Between 2004-5, we had spent months and months working on a powerful exhibit with a team of local researchers and artisans. It was abandoned. The Square was also in disrepair, and the area in a worse state than before the “development.”

Disheartened but not discouraged, I continued visiting sites across the country. As I planned my next chapter, I wanted to take stock of the state of museums and heritage institutions, not only in South Africa, but across the continent.

In Groot Marico, in the North West Province, we stumbled on a monument identifying the site where our former president was arrested in 1963 and subsequently imprisoned. An adjacent double-story thatched “visitor center” was empty except for three faded banners featuring Jacob Zuma, Oliver Tambo, and the Freedom Charter, covered in dust and bat poo. Two security guards—the only people on site—knew nothing about the history or significance of the monument. The monument doesn’t feature on Google or Apple Maps, or at the Groot Marico Visitor Information Centre a few minutes away.

An hour before closing time at the Shaka Memorial & Visitor Centre in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, at the actual site of King Shaka’s grave, I convinced a single, bored attendant to reluctantly let the week’s only visitors—my colleagues and I—into a moldy room to watch an outdated video.

Across the street, a new-looking Kwadukuza Museum promised something more. The promises were empty, the place closed. I searched online for basic information about exhibitions, opening hours, etc., but all I could find was a brief article reporting on the requisite official ribbon-cutting ceremony a year earlier. Nothing else.

We visited the Stellenbosch Museum on the high street of Stellenbosch—a very wealthy town of students and Afrikaans billionaires in the Cape Winelands. Initially, we weren’t allowed to enter, as the museum only took cash, and we had none. We managed to talk our way in nonetheless, but most of the building was empty anyway, with some familiar pull-up banners in dark, dusty rooms, definitely not telling the stories of the Khoi and the San who lived in the area for thousands of years before European settlement. Not far away however, the privately run and financed heritage village at Babylonstoren tells its own selective and very chic version of the past. A little further, billionaire Johann Rupert’s impressive car and art collection are given ample space and care.

At the Basotho Cultural Village at the Golden Gate National Park, Free State, we visited the remarkable Basotho huts, each one a snapshot of architecture and interiors from various periods. Immediately adjacent, we noticed 15 or so accommodation rondavels that we were told had been closed since Covid, despite a tender being apparently awarded for their refurbishment three years ago. We chatted with two young artists painting a mural at the visitor center who were deeply invested in their own Basotho heritage. A subsequent call with the manager revealed a place that was predominantly for international tourists and school groups, but came alive during the annual Basotho New Year Celebrations. She was keen to do more.

I spoke to other front-line staff and managers. Too many were like the disinterested attendant we had encountered in Stanger, but a few were eager to engage. They told me about their desire to attract new audiences, but they were stymied not only by a lack of funds, but also, more disturbingly, by inattention from their immediate supervisors, often far away in the provincial or national capitals.

Eager to understand the challenges and to also see how I could support a more sustainable approach, I tried to reach out to heritage, tourism, arts, and culture managers and directors at national and provincial governments, national and provincial parks, and municipal councils. I sent emails, made phone calls, and sent more emails and more phone calls.

Nothing.

Artists, makers, curators, community activists, and heritage enthusiasts from South Africa, but also Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ghana, Togo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and the Seychelles have told me about similar experiences; it is almost impossible to get the attention of the people-in-charge. When it comes to public museums, the door is shut to collaborations, conversations, or solutions.

So, why are the heritage and ancestral knowledge of some people more known, shared, and referenced than others?

Europe is home to half the population of Africa and a fraction of its cultural diversity, and yet it hosts five times the number of World Heritage Sites and forty times as many museums. Western heritage traditions are cited and referenced far more frequently than African ones, with Africa accounting for only a small single-digit share of outputs in most datasets.

The West doesn’t just occupy space and knowledge about itself. The biggest collections of African material culture are in museums in the UK, Europe, and North America. Ironically, even on articles on restitution, non-Africans are 17 times more likely to be published, referenced, or interviewed than Africans.

But as angry as we can be about the colonial pillaging of our cultures, and as much as European powers have hoarded our arts, culture, and heritage, they collect their own tenfold.

Across Europe and North America, there is a layered and supported arts, culture, and heritage ecosystem that continues to ensure generations of cultural producers and researchers are able and willing to keep the arts, cultures, and heritages of the Global North remembered, prolific, and shared. This ecosystem is a dynamic and valued interplay between enabling policies, supported “talent,” an engaged public, diverse funding mechanisms, and effective institutions—such as museums, archives, and libraries.

While I was away, at the helm of one of these institutions, I developed an increased appreciation for their role and their symbolism. In the West, museums are regarded as more trustworthy than researchers and scientists, NGOs generally, various news organizations, and the government. They turn memory into organized, documented knowledge. That knowledge becomes power for those who produce it and those who can access it. Europeans and Americans know this—it’s why the Trump administration is attacking them in the US, and it’s why Europeans fund their cultural sector so well.

So what about our ecosystem?

We don’t need new policies—we have solid policies. We don’t need more talent—we have incredible cultural producers and we have an interested and engaged public. The curse of the post-colonial era in Africa is our struggle to build viable institutions and our seeming lack of patrons (public and private) with a long view on supporting organizations that are responsible for keeping African heritage spaces open and alive.

On the continent, the pace of urban growth is unprecedented: by 2050, the African population living in cities will double. As more people move away from the village, and form relationships with people who are not like them—in person and online—we can no longer rely on regular conversations with the elders or participating in or observing community rituals and events to learn or remember traditional knowledge.

Institutions provide continuity, memory, and resilience across generations and geographies. In a world where knowledge is increasingly produced and sought via AI and its digitized information sources, we, on this incredibly wise and beautiful continent, are in danger of what and how we know being completely omitted not only from the world’s cultural record but also from our own. Without African institutions to preserve, digitize, defend, and promote our rich cultural legacies and heritages, we risk obsolescence.

At the most basic levels, our public museums and heritage sites are simply not working, and the leaders and managers who are responsible for making them work are failing to do so. We are in a big, scary, deeply unglamorous crisis.

It is hard to mobilize public excitement and interest in making sure that contact details are updated, emails answered, websites maintained, and opening hours honored. It’s almost impossible to find donors and private patrons prepared to fund the kind of long-term institutional culture change that addresses bottlenecks in bureaucratic chains of command, or that helps to fill positions that have been vacant for months and, in some instances, years.

And yet this is what the crisis looks like. It can be measured in bounced messages and unanswered calls. It can be measured in dusty cases, empty galleries, and artists, crafters, and indigenous knowledge producers who stop practicing and teaching because it is easier and more lucrative to work in a call center. The effects of what doesn’t happen when institutions flounder have never been more profound.

When follow-through lags, accountability does too. Poor follow-up is a symptom of broader institutional dysfunction across the heritage landscape. It speaks to a system where procedural rigidity and compliance replace initiative and implementation, and an administrative culture obsessed with avoiding blame rather than achieving impact.

This dysfunction means that stolen sacred and ritual objects and subjects do not return to communities. The dysfunction leads to colonial classifications that still separate craft from art, performance from scholarship, and science from cultural history. The dysfunction means that errors and erasure in documentation—requiring research and community collaboration—do not get rectified; Indigenous knowledge is not collected, produced, digitized, or transmitted; it means new generations of African artists, designers, researchers, gamers, IT developers, marketers or entrepreneurs struggle to find the African knowledge and practices that can both ground them and inspire them.

We are locked in a cycle of short-termism. Short-term festivals, events, and projects that offer ample ribbon-cutting opportunities are supported over the slow, unsexy work of institutional development. The daily disciplines of heritage—community collaboration, research, documentation, digitization, conservation, transmission—require years of investment, technical skill, indigenous knowledge, and strategic planning.

Yet the scant funding that requires a ridiculous amount of time-consuming, irrelevant paperwork to access penalizes anything that extends beyond a single financial year, and rarely allows for salaries, rent, or maintaining physical or digital infrastructure.

An ecosystem is a community of interconnected and interdependent organisms. Each element needs to do its part so that the whole stays healthy. When it comes to safeguarding, stewarding, and producing our cultural heritage of today and tomorrow, we need more than the intent of policies, the imagination of cultural producers, or the participation of communities. We need well-funded, effective, and accountable institutions that get the basics right.

Our institutions should be powered by people and tech that make it easy to find, visit, participate, stay, shop, and learn from heritage places. Our places of culture should seek repeat visitation by seeing heritage as a service and tending to the emotional, spiritual, and physical wellness of individuals and communities. They should be places that are as crowded as the Tate Modern, as followed as the Palace Museum, with African design, meaning, and sensibilities that make us proud.

For this to happen, we need many to recognize and play their part. We need the board members to seek and reward out-of-the-box leadership and effective systems; we need the managers to innovate and collaborate; we need the curators and educators to show and teach indigenous epistemologies and expressions; we need the compliance officer to differentiate between a software license and a digitized recording of a N|uu oral tradition.

We need the person at the door to smile and say welcome; we need the people to show up at the door. We need the corporate donors who look for more than short-term brand recognition; we need the galleries, collectors, and art fairs to support the artist’s archive as much as the artist’s production; we need the foreign institutes to consider reparations as long-term institutional support, not just conferences and artistic exchanges.

We need everyone to care in the way that he, she, or they can—because who we are is important to who he, she, or they are. This is the African arts, culture, and heritage ecosystem the world needs. It can only exist if we build the African institutions to power it forward and secure our place not just in history, but in the present and far into the future.

Life after aid cuts

2025-11-23T16:34:11Z

Trump’s aid cuts have gutted HIV programs across Nigeria—forcing local women-led groups to rebuild health and dignity from below.

Since January 2025, the Trump administration’s cuts have fundamentally transformed foreign aid. While the negative impact on health programs was almost immediate, the scale of the damage remains unknown.

Comfort*, a peer leader at Unique Royal Sisters, a Nigerian NGO providing HIV-related services to female sex workers, drug users, and other vulnerable people, helped me see the big picture in the starkest terms: It is now impossible for her clients to get the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) —they are no longer eligible to receive PrEP because of the aid restrictions. On the open market, the price of PrEP has jumped by 25%. But the problems run much deeper as Comfort explained:

There are high levels of poverty in this country. Most of us women have responsibilities to our families and must work. Though we have education, we can’t get jobs. We don’t have connections. Men demand sex in exchange for jobs. How do we survive but by selling sex?

For Comfort and millions of other women, health and economic survival are inseparable. In this post-USAID moment, the world mustn’t abandon holistic development programs that address disease alongside gender discrimination and poverty.

What aid that is still available is largely focused on health commodities and does not allow for multisectoral approaches of the sort that Comfort wants to see. A recent analysis by KFF, a health policy research organization, found that although the US President’s Plan for AIDS Emergency Relief (PEPFAR) was given a limited waiver in February—only “life-saving” HIV-related activities have been authorized to continue. Testing and PrEP are only allowed for pregnant and breastfeeding women—even programs for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) have been stopped. In KFF’s survey, almost three-quarters of PEPFAR-funded organizations had cut at least one activity. This narrowed remit will surely set back the wider gains achieved in PEPFAR’s two decades of “spillover effects, including significant reductions in all-cause mortality, increases in childhood immunizations and in GDP growth, and retention of children in school.”

A civil society initiative is currently underway in Nigeria to continue work in the many areas adjacent to health. In July 2025, the development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC)—a Nigerian intermediary non-profit with 32 years of experience of sub-granting and strengthening local civil society organisations supporting vulnerable populations—redirected a portion of its Ford Foundation BUILD grant to make rapid stabilising funds available for local community groups. Choosing projects that could “impact positively on the lives of women and girls,” 17 out of 837 applications received grants of up to five million naira each (about USD3390) to cover work between May and September 2025. The emergency funds went to a wide range of activities: equipping women farmers with fresh high-yield seeds and financial planning advice, teaching girls digital literacy after school to reduce drop out, and providing health and counselling services for female sex workers. Some of these community organizations were sub-grantees of USAID and PEPFAR, while others had other sources.

The Center’s internal analysis of the 837 applications reveals some important insights. First, almost one-quarter of NGO applicants with a history of USAID and USAID-related funding streams conducted HIV-related activities, the most of any program area, followed by 13% of projects involved in humanitarian interventions. These two areas eclipsed other sectors such as non-HIV healthcare, health systems investment, democracy-building, education, gender-based violence prevention, press freedom, and water and sanitation. This distribution shows how disease-centered approaches have shaped the operational landscape of local NGOs in Nigeria. Second, the sample of NGOs without USAID funding worked in more diversified areas, with education being the most dominant theme cutting across digital literacy, teacher capacity training, school retention, and girls’ empowerment. They had less funding, and the aid cuts made things even harder. These Nigerian NGOs, not funded by the US, built their missions in the gaps left by international donor priorities.

The differing emphases among Nigerian NGOs, depending on their funding sources, lend weight to the argument of Catherine Kyobutungi, Ebere Okereke, and Seye Abimbola that aid has often been attuned to donor priorities that tend to benefit their own economies. They argue that “aid should be a catalyst for development, not to run essential care programmes indefinitely in parallel in less functional healthcare systems.” Merely resupplying medical and food commodities should not be the main strategy of development in the coming decades.

Comfort’s perspective points in the direction of investment in women’s empowerment, which is essential to communal survival and life chances. Family Life and Community Health Society (FLACHS), another NSI-funded project in rural central Nigeria, found the same issue when families of OVC impacted by HIV could no longer get food and other necessities that US aid had subsidized. Emergency funds were used to purchase seeds for a local staple crop—cowpeas—to enhance the farms of the vulnerable children’s grandmothers, aunts, and mothers who are caregivers and make up the majority female agricultural workforce in their state. The FLACHS also convened sessions where women farmers met with local government officials to learn what public resources they could access, leading to the formation of a newly recognized rural cooperative association.

The NSI grantees, such as Unique Royal Sisters and FLACHS, are all small women-led and/or female-focused community non-profits delivering services at a limited community scale. Though their resources are limited, these Nigerian development workers are responding to needs from what they see on the ground. They keep the lights on at the “third sector” organizations that make development—an otherwise abstract concept—a reality.

*Personal names have been changed to protect individuals.

This essay contains internal data reporting shared by dRPC with the author.

Whose transition is it anyway?

2025-11-14T08:03:15Z

Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent—or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.

When the G20 meets in Johannesburg this November, President Cyril Ramaphosa will step into the spotlight as host. It is a historic first for Africa. With an agenda heavy on critical minerals, energy transition, and financing, this is a chance that could, in theory, reshape the terms of the global economy to better serve Africa’s interests. Yet Ramaphosa’s G20 presidency risks becoming another performance of elite-driven extractivism dressed up as a “just transition.”

The so-called green transition is not unfolding in isolation from older forms of extraction; it is their continuation under a different name. Across the continent, the minerals fueling the world’s clean energy revolution are being sourced through the same exploitative models that have long dispossessed African communities. It is a transition that is green for some, but deadly for others.

This G20 presidency arrives in a city whose own streets tell the story of extractive capitalism and lay bare its consequences. The glittering origins of Johannesburg—Egoli, the “City of Gold”—have now given way to cracked roads, failing water systems, and widening inequality. The same city that once powered colonial industry now struggles to keep its lights on. It is a fitting stage for a summit where leaders will unveil their ambitions for lithium, cobalt, and graphite to power “green growth,” against the backdrop of a city built off gold but now literally collapsing under the weight of its own history of extraction, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Johannesburg’s story is not an exception, but a warning of what has happened—and will continue to happen—in mining regions across Africa.

The green energy race is fueling a 21st-century scramble for Africa’s critical minerals, this time justified by the climate imperatives rather than colonial civilizing missions. While China expands its reach through the Belt and Road Initiative, the United States and European Union are trying to curb China’s influence by securing mineral supply chains through investments in projects like the Lobito Corridor. Amid this competition, countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and DRC are cast as “strategic partners” yet treated merely as sites of resources to be extracted.

Ramaphosa’s South Africa, straddling BRICS and the G20, markets its “strategic non-alignment” as a form of sovereignty. But in practice, it risks becoming the broker between competing imperial centers—facilitating access for all sides while communities at home bear the costs.

Ramaphosa has long presented himself as a champion of investment and growth, but those gains have flowed upward and exacerbated inequality. Before entering politics, he made his fortune through Black Economic Empowerment deals in the mining sector, becoming one of South Africa’s richest men. His family continues to benefit from the industry. His brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe, is a mining magnate with sprawling interests in platinum, manganese, and increasingly, green energy ventures. Ramaphosa himself has sat on the boards of the very corporations now lining up to expand into Africa’s lithium, cobalt, and graphite sectors. From Marikana, where striking miners were massacred while he sat on the board of Lonmin, to today’s “just transition”—through privatization of state entities—his record reflects a leader aligned more with capital than with workers or communities.

This overlap between political leadership and corporate mining interests is not incidental. It is the architecture of South Africa’s export-oriented, elite-driven economy. Now, as G20 president, Ramaphosa arrives at a moment when critical minerals have become the crown jewel of the summit agenda. Yet beneath the language of transition lies a familiar logic that casts Africa as the quarry for the world’s future industries, and that turns mining regions into sacrifice zones where communities face land dispossession, disrupted livelihoods, environmental degradation, and cultural loss.

In Zimbabwe’s Buhera District, families face displacement for lithium projects destined for European electric vehicles. Farms, homes, and even graves have been dug up in the pursuit of lithium. But graves, homes, and livelihoods do not figure into the G20’s metrics of success; what matters is securing a “stable supply” of lithium for global markets. In Ulanga, Tanzania, graphite mining threatens food security as fertile farmland is swallowed by pits. For G20 leaders, graphite is a “strategic mineral”; for farmers, it is a threat to survival. And in the DRC’s Ruashi, cobalt extraction leaves water poisoned and children ill, even as cobalt is celebrated in G20 communiqués as vital for “clean” batteries and “green” energy. Inequalities are stark: While mining companies reap enormous profits and consume vast amounts of energy, local communities remain impoverished and without access to electricity.

These are not isolated tragedies. They are the ground-level expression of the very policies now being formalized in G20 working groups and mechanisms, that frame Africa’s mineral wealth as a global resource to be secured, stabilized, and monetized. Through financing arms like the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the new G20 Task Force on critical minerals, the summit’s agenda is shaping the next phase of extractive expansion.

President Ramaphosa stated, “As minerals extraction accelerates to match the needs of the energy transition, the countries and local communities endowed with these resources must be the ones to benefit the most.” But the people whose lands, water, and bodies are most directly affected are excluded from the conversation. Communities facing displacement in Buhera, farmers in Ulanga, and families in Ruashi are never invited to the policy tables where their futures are negotiated. Instead, those spaces are dominated by governments, corporations, and financiers whose priority is securing minerals for global markets. The language of “investment” and “partnerships” sounds progressive, but it masks the absence of free, prior, and informed consent, the silencing of local visions for development, and the criminalization of dissent.

Ramaphosa could, in theory, use South Africa’s G20 presidency to break this cycle. He could push for policies that insist on value addition within Africa, not just raw exports; for technology transfers to build African processing industries; for financing models that prioritize community consent and ecological protection, not elite enrichment. He could demand that “just transition” means more than a slogan; that it includes reparations for destruction, fair taxation of transnational corporations, and space for communities themselves to decide the terms of development.

But this seems unlikely. That would require a break with the very logic that underpins his political project. Ramaphosa’s alignment with mining capital is not merely personal or financial; it is ideological. He subscribes to the belief that Africa’s route to development runs through extraction, that resource-led growth is the continent’s comparative advantage. This worldview is shared by many African leaders who, in the absence of industrial alternatives and under pressure from creditors, see mineral exports as the fastest route to revenue and legitimacy. It feels as if the die is already cast for Africa’s first G20 presidency to become another performance where leaders proclaim sovereignty while signing deals that deepen dependency, and Ramaphosa styling himself as a champion of the continent while mining elites carve up the spoils.

The G20 summit is an opportunity, yes, but only if Africa refuses to be cast once more as the quarry for the world’s green ambitions. Unless Ramaphosa, a man so deeply tied to mining capital, is willing to break with the logic of extractivism, his presidency will not mark the desperately needed new chapter of genuinely championing the rights of communities resisting displacement and ecological devastation. If Ramaphosa doesn’t move the G20 beyond rhetoric, the summit will only reinforce the very economic model that made him and his family billionaires. South Africans, and Africans more broadly, must insist that this just transition belongs to us and demand that the G20, led by Ramaphosa, recognize us. Communities across the continent are showing us the way. From Buhera to Ulanga to Ruashi, they are articulating different visions of justice within energy transitions, rooted in land rights, democratic participation, self-determination and ecological care. Their struggles remind us that a truly just transition cannot be brokered by the elites in closed boardrooms or G20 task forces. It must begin with those whose futures are most directly at stake. If not, the G20 will not mark a turning point for Africa and Africans. It will mark a repetition—a ceremony of elite enrichment dressed in the language of justice.

And so, the G20, like Johannesburg, the city of gold turned city of decay, must move beyond extraction and global capitalism, towards a future where what glitters gives life, not takes it.

Elimination by other means

2025-11-13T10:43:32Z

From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.

What lengths men will go in order to carry out, to their extreme limit, the rites of a collective self-worship which fills them with a sense of righteousness and complacent satisfaction in the midst of the most shocking injustices and crimes.

– Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Much of what can be said about Iraq overwhelms the mind; it’s hard to even know where to begin. Like so many in the Middle East, people see what happened in Iraq as a civil war, perhaps even as a struggle against a dictator. Why then should I, an Arab from elsewhere, care? We were trained to think this way: to look inward, to stake only what is ours, to repeat the hollow mantras of Egypt first, and Lebanon first, and so many other neighboring countries. A logic unmistakably, obviously mirrored in “America First.”

This conditioning of the collective mind did not emerge from nowhere; it was institutionalized through decades of “postcolonial” state-building projects, through national education systems designed by departing colonial powers, through media that celebrated bounded sovereignty while ignoring how that sovereignty had already been compromised. The Arab League itself, founded in 1945, enshrined this logic of separate nation-states even as it claimed pan-Arab solidarity. Each state learned to police its own borders, to suppress internal dissent in the name of national unity, to view neighboring Arab populations as foreign rather than our own people and extended community. This outcome didn’t emerge organically from the natural progression of human societies but rather was deliberately engineered to divide populations, benefiting certain interests while tearing apart formerly unified nations and setting them against one another.

Such slogans mentioned above are repeated as a way of celebrating one’s own “nation,” but what if we think beyond the surface? By putting Egypt first or Syria first, what comes as second? And what is entirely left out of the equation? Slogans, like many other things, condition us to focus only on immediate concerns, discarding critical thinking about how such wars and attacks on sovereignty were allowed to happen on Arab soil in the first place. How could atrocities against one’s own blood go so far, and still continue? One must ask: If they managed to divide nations into countries, then what comes next?

Looking at Iraq today: a country divided into zones, authorized by religious and tribal lines. What once was Arab territory became partitioned by Sykes-Picot, the same division that allowed the colonization of Palestine, and later, further divided internally along tribal lines. Nowadays, Iraqis, like Lebanese and Syrians, must identify not only by nationality but also by religion to determine which tribe they belong to. As if one can belong to the wrong tribe, and such so, you can find yourself killed.

But we must understand how this division operated in practice. In Europe, after the French Revolution, nations fought each other over borders, identities, and power. To contain these conflicts, European powers established the modern nation-state system: fixed borders, national identities, citizenship tied to territory. This system emerged from European civil wars, from populations already divided and fighting.

Then Europe carried this logic to the Levant, but with a particular ambition in the background: Zionism. When Sykes and Picot carved up the region in 1916, their design was meant to enable the colonization of Palestine. The British created Iraq in 1920, enforced religious identification on official documents, appointed leaders through sectarian calculations, and distributed power along communal lines. The French did the same in Syria and Lebanon. They imposed the nation-state model on populations that were not at war with each other, dividing communities that had coexisted for centuries. These were not ancient hatreds but modern divisions, constructed through census categories, identity cards, and the patronage networks that rewarded sectarian loyalty, all to make colonial governance easier and Zionist settlement possible.

And when we say the British “created” Iraq, it is not to deny that Iraqis existed before, but to expose the logic of colonial fabrication, a logic Zionists later used against Palestinians, claiming that because there was no “official” Palestinian state by their definition of a state before British or Ottoman rule, the people, the Palestinians themselves, had no claim to the land or merely just did not exist. As if the state precedes the people, and not the other way around.

Why is the US to blame here? The answer is simple. The divide-and-conquer strategy, an inherited practice of imperial administration, one perfected across centuries from British India to French Africa to American interventions in Latin America. Why would the US want that? Control over oil and influence over global capitalism.

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then US President Jimmy Carter announced that any attempt to control the Persian Gulf would be considered an assault on US vital interests, justifying military response. Implicitly, oil was a US strategic interest, and threats to its flow were treated as threats to the United States. Carter made this explicit in his 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” In this sense, the reserves and sovereignty of one country can be quickly seized by another, thousands of miles away, under no legitimate right, and certainly without the consent of the real owners and inhabitants.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was initially useful during the Iran-Iraq War, but became expendable once he threatened US regional dominance. What followed the 1991 Gulf War was a different kind of warfare: comprehensive sanctions that lasted over a decade, targeting not the regime but the Iraqi people themselves. The sanctions regime destroyed healthcare systems, contaminated water supplies, and caused mass child mortality, which UN officials on the ground called genocidal in effect. When confronted in 1996 about whether half a million dead Iraqi children were an acceptable cost, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s reply was chilling in its clarity: “We think the price is worth it.” Here, we can see the imperial calculation made explicit, Iraqi lives measured against American strategic interests and found worthless. The 2003 invasion extended this logic, moving from slow strangulation achieved by sanctions to direct occupation and military occupation. The Carter Doctrine continues to structure American policy in the region, translating resource extraction into the language of security and freedom. Whose security, whose freedom? Certainly not the Iraqis, whose existence was made subordinate if not irrelevant to the functioning of the American empire.

If Iraq taught us anything, it is that the destruction of a country is never only about that country. Looking at Syria and Palestine. The logic is the same, as the destruction rains down, turning cities to rubble, yet we’re fed this mindset that these are “civil wars” or “isolated conflicts,” tragedies that begin and end only within their own borders. If we’ve learned to see each other through the lens of division—nation over people, tribe over community, Sunni over Shia, Christian over Muslim—it’s not because our histories made it inevitable. It’s because an entire system was built to make these divisions feel natural. Borders were drawn, identities hardened, loyalties fragmented. The result is a region where solidarity is rare, and outrage is selective—where the suffering of one’s “own” is met with grief, but the destruction of neighbors is met with silence.

But empire doesn’t just divide. It destroys. Not only lives but the very conditions that make life possible. Not only bodies but the social bonds that sustain meaning, culture, continuity. This destruction has a name. And understanding it clearly is the first step in resisting it. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. As Azmi Bishara argues in The War on Gaza: Politics, Ethics, and International Law, what matters is intent, not numbers. Whether one person dies or a million, if the motive is to eliminate people based on their identity, it qualifies as genocide. The Convention outlines five categories: (a) killing group members; (b) inflicting serious physical or psychological harm; (c) imposing conditions designed to destroy the group; (d) preventing births; (e) forcibly removing children. Crucially, genocide extends beyond direct killing to include creating conditions meant to bring about a group’s destruction. What unfolds before us is also sociocide. By definition, it is a strategic annihilation of the structures that make collective life possible. It goes hand in hand with genocide: Where genocide targets the people themselves, sociocide destroys their ability to exist as a society by stripping people of the means to sustain life, envision futures, or exist as anything beyond isolated survivors.

The architecture of sociocide reveals itself most clearly in the weapon of comprehensive sanctions, a form of violence so gradual it escapes the category of war, yet so devastating it achieves what bombs alone cannot. The logic that governed Iraq’s sanctions extends through Gaza’s blockade, now stretching beyond seventeen years. Even before October 2023, the numbers told the story: unemployment at 45 percent, water contamination at 95 percent, and electricity available only four to six hours each day. This wasn’t the randomness of conflict but the methodical application of controlled deprivation. Israel regulates every calorie entering Gaza, every medical item, every building material. The blockade does more than limit movement. It engineers malnutrition, portions out survival, and maintains conditions where a population can subsist but never flourish.

Both cases reveal sanctions as sociocide’s primary instrument: the deliberate strangulation of economic life, the prevention of social reproduction, the rendering of entire populations into mere biological existence stripped of political possibility. What Iraq taught the empire, Gaza perfects. The same international “law” that permitted Iraq’s destruction now frames Gaza’s siege as a security measure rather than a crime. And the same Arab nationalist frameworks that atomized our response to Iraq, “not our country, not our concern,” now repeat in the face of Gaza’s annihilation. Iraq, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank: sharing the same architecture of destruction. Sociocide weakens societies, genocide erases them. The empire doesn’t need to eliminate populations when it can dismantle the structures that make collective life possible—and when those structures collapse, the population follows.

As the ceasefire came, so did collective amnesia. Gaza vanished from our feeds, our conversations, our conscience. No sustained demands to lift the seventeen-year blockade or dismantle the siege strangling two million people. The urgency died with the spectacle, revealing the truth: our attention was never about liberation, only our discomfort with witnessing destruction. What may be most alarming, though, is the ease with which ordinary individuals, not just governments, mentally detach from those enduring systematic oppression. Even people connected by lineage or shared identity learn to turn away, accept the situation as inevitable, and adopt “What can we do?” as their shield. So let’s answer it: What can we really do? And more importantly, what are we willing to do when we stop pretending powerlessness is truth?

To see empire for what it is requires recognizing how it operates across multiple scales simultaneously: through international institutions like the UN Security Council, through military alliances, through economic sanctions and debt structures, through media representations that determine whose suffering is deemed worthy of attention. But it also requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: Empire operates not just against us but through us. How we have internalized its logic and policed its limitations ourselves. This is not passive victimhood but active complicity—and therefore, our responsibility. Through the conditioning of the Arab collective to think of one’s own nation first, through deep patriotism that blinds us to shared struggles, through borders drawn by colonial powers that we now police ourselves.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq cannot be separated from the 1979 Carter Doctrine, the 1953 CIA coup in Iran, or the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to the 1948 establishment of Israel. Each intervention builds upon the infrastructure of previous ones, a cumulative architecture of domination spanning more than a century. And in its essence, this architecture survives not just through military force but through the fragmentation of collective consciousness, through teaching us to see each other as separate nations, even within the same “country” rather than as people under the same system of control.

Even while writing this, a certain guilt rises. How can we reduce so much human death, so much suffering, to lessons and patterns? Yet we must. To save the next life, the next child, the next nation. To see the empire for what it is and refuse its lies. To recognize how US imperialism wields our own resources, our own divisions, our own conditioned thinking against us. The question is no longer whether we see the pattern, but whether we can unlearn what the empire taught us to believe about ourselves.

The mirror and becoming

2025-11-18T10:57:36Z

In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.

Image from Najaax Harun on Instagram.

“Shush, don’t tell Hooyo/mom”

I had to learn

How to transform this body

To something I alone own

Sometimes

When the sun is about to set

Towards the late horizons

And the chaos of the city

Descends behind the buildings

I can feel my mother’s eyes

Slowly penetrating my bones

I can hear her whisper

How dare that I took

Something only she could own

– Najaax Harun

A mirror does not lie; it can dissemble. In the haunting space of Najaax Harun’s paintings, it often does. The painting that first arrested me and has since refused to release its grip, “The dark night of the soul” (2024), depicts a woman in a moment of private reckoning, confronting a reflection that is both hers and profoundly other. These figures, rendered in spectral, distorted forms, float within an abstracted domestic void. Light in this intimate chamber is felt rather than clearly seen: It bleeds from the warmth of orange floors and pools in the mirror’s surface, which itself seems to defy its own physicality. A hand from the reflection rests upon the subject’s shoulder, a gesture that is less a caress than an elemental merging; an attempt to communicate care through the silent language of touch.

This mirrored double returns the subject’s look with an expressive, knowing gaze. She observes the differences that delineate them—the fissures between self and image, between being and becoming—and meets them without judgment. It is a quiet, unsettling acceptance. This suspended moment is the core of Harun’s power. It visualizes the psychic gap that exists after one acquires a new freedom but before one has learned to inhabit it; the lingering, liminal pause before embodiment of newness, before the self sheds its old skin to become something else, something almost unrecognizable, yet truly its own.

I encountered this piece in March of this year at a group exhibition at Munyu. The exhibition, Progressions, was co-curated by Rose Jepkorir and Melanie Manosi, and invited contemplation on progression, movement, the passage of time and memory. Dismiss my apophenia when I insist that the showing and validation of such uniquely deep work, which transcends this reality’s parameters, had to be at Munyu. As a space that defines itself as a “sheltering/space for theoretical and practical forms generated by artists and affiliating practices,” Munyu provides a crucial platform for emerging artists like Harun, offering a viable alternative to traditional art institutions and fostering the kind of experimental, lifelong practice her work exemplifies. It was within this supportive yet critically engaged environment that her paintings first commanded a wider audience.

Najaax Harun is an artist whose practice is a deep and unflinching excavation of the cultural and personal dimensions of emotion, representation, and memory. That her work feels so visceral, so fully formed, makes it surprising to learn that her encounter with the institutional art world was not until she was in her mid-20s. In our conversation, she said that a trip to an Addis Ababa gallery in her early 20s was a point of fascination, but not yet a revelation. The catalyst arrived later through her own necessity for expression. Born in Hargeisa in the aftermath of Somalia’s civil war, she inherited a collective psyche marked by trauma. The energy that Najaax had experienced in the world had to come out through her, and first found its outlet in poetry and prose—a retreat into the creative. The pivot to painting came via a gift: a friend’s gift of a painting set. In it, she discovered a medium that could give voice to all that words could not contain, and a belonging; a way to talk back, and a way to hide in plain sight.

Najaax Harun, “Heavy shadows,” 2024. Acrylic with charcoal, 77 x 102 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Munyu.

This negotiation of visibility and concealment charges her work with a raw, magnetic energy. Her paintings pull you in across a room with their vibrant, almost violent, color fields of oranges that glow with interior heat, reds that signal both wound and vitality, blues that are depths and bruises. You move closer, compelled by a curiosity that quickly becomes a confrontation.

Harun trains this formidable expressive force primarily on the women of her society, subjects she paints with a deliberate, defiant honesty. There is a lot of flesh in her work, and it is not all curated to be beautiful. She strips away the obligatory performance of beauty to ask a more urgent question: What remains of a woman when that demand is taken off the table? My answer is everything. Everything raw, powerful, vulnerable, and complex.

She lends us their eyes, and through them, we are forced to see the architecture of constraint: the cultural setbacks of upbringing, the narrow horizons of “acceptable” futures, the constant negotiation of autonomy. We become a woman who, in many cases, is forced to comply for mere survival, often at the expense of her life. And, simultaneously, we are the woman who chooses another dimension of existence. A woman who is determined to become, and the one who insists on the dignity of that becoming.

Installation view, Progressions, Munyu, 2024. Image courtesy of Munyu.

Without formal arts institutions around her, Harun’s education was one of self-determination, pieced together from the digital archives of online tutorials. This autodidactic path is perhaps why her work feels so untethered from established parameters, as it echoes the transcendental vision of modernism but is filtered through a deeply personal, contemporary experience. Her figures exist both within and beyond their bodies, within and beyond the room, within and beyond a single narrative.

Since her resonant showing in the group exhibition Progressions, Harun’s trajectory has been ascendant, with presentations at the Basel Social Club, Catinca Tabacaru, and the French Institute in Timisoara. Her works are now part of the esteemed collection of the KADIST Art Foundation, a testament to their immediate and powerful impact.

Najaax Harun does not offer easy reflections. She offers portals. Her work is an invitation to stare into the mirror until it dissolves, until the frozen self, with heart finally open, thaws and steps through.

Filming what survives

2025-11-11T11:26:51Z

Made just as Sudan descended into war, 'Khartoum' captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.

Still from Khartoum (2025). All images courtesy of Native Voice Films.

When the directors of the documentary film Khartoum set out to craft its story, they could never have been prepared for one of the deadliest wars of our times breaking out. In April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia and the Sudanese Armed Forces began warring with each other. Throughout Sudan, life would never be the same. Since the start of the fighting, some eight million people have been displaced internally, and four million fled the country. Tens of thousands have been killed. Food insecurity and famine triggered by the war have left half of Sudan’s population—almost 25 million—facing extreme hunger. From the onset, Khartoum, its sister city Omdurman, and the surrounding areas became battlegrounds for intense fighting. More than two years later the intensity has only spread. In October, El Fasher, a key city in the Darfur region, fell to the RSF militia giving them control of the area. It is a clash that might be a civil war on its face, but it has international stakes. The United Arab Emirates’ support for the RSF militia continues, while arms from China, Russia, Serbia, Türkiye, and others have been identified.

To illustrate this complex moment in Sudan, directors Ibrahim Snoopy, Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, and Timeea Ahmed turned to the inner workings of life in Khartoum. They found five civilians: Khadmallah, a tea vendor; Lokain and Wilson, two young boys who collect plastic bottles for money; Majdi, a civil servant Majdi and Jawad, a Sufi Rastafarian resistance organizer, to show the city’s inner workings. Each coming from different backgrounds, they represent the mix of classes and ethnicities that come together in Khartoum. Partially shot before the devastation of the 2023 war, the film unintentionally became a time capsule. When fighting became untenable, both directors and subjects made the decision to leave, finding refuge in Nairobi. At some points, the film takes a step back and turns the camera on itself, showing the directors and each of their subjects pausing filming to console one another on set, the background graphics at once displaying Khartoum streets cut back to their natural state, a green screen.

In the end, despite weathering some of the greatest challenges a film production could face, the four directors and their creative director, Phil Cox, along with the production team, completed Khartoum. Released this year, the film has been making its rounds through screenings around the world. Last week, I spoke to Snoopy and Cox about making a film during war, director-subject relationships, and their hopes for the film. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Feven Merid

Can we start with how the film started?

Ibrahim Snoopy

It started as a joint production between Native Voice Films, a UK-based production company, and Sudan Film Factory, a Sudanese-based production company, and Ayin network [a Sudanese news outlet].

Phil Cox

I was in Khartoum in 2021, I was making another film called The Spider Man of Sudan. So we got some seed funding, and I wrote an outline of a workshop that was making a poem of the city, kind of cinematic poem of Khartoum. We did a call out and selected filmmakers, we started the workshop, and the filming was like a nonnarrative poem of the city at a kind of pivotal moment. Civilian society was still on the street, there was a coup happening, and it was like, what can we do that kind of brings another depth to this?

Feven Merid

This film starts with footage shot before the war started in 2023. Can you talk about how the fighting impacted production?

Ibrahim Snoopy

We started filming in the last quarter of 2022 until the beginning of 2023. And we all decided that it would happen at the end of April because it was Ramadan and everyone was fasting, and, you know, it’s a little bit difficult to film under the scorching sun. And so we were aiming to shoot at the end of April, but then war broke out on April 15, and that ruined the whole plan. We had to regroup again after a few months in Nairobi.

We were trying to figure out whether Nairobi is the best place to regroup again. Nairobi is perfect, you know, the weather is fine. There were also talks about how to get out; the directors got out of Sudan first. And then we had a couple of workshops on what to do at this point, whether to finish the film or not. How are we going to continue making the film? We all agreed that it’s necessary to finish the film right now. Also, it has a bigger purpose now to highlight what’s happening in Sudan, because there wasn’t a lot of media coverage of what the film observed. We got the participants, one by one. Some of them were easy to get to Nairobi; they already had passports. Some of them took a few weeks or months to get them here, you know, with the paperwork and the whole chaotic thing.

Phil Cox

We got money from the World Cinema Fund and all these sorts of things, and then we spent it all on getting the people out. So it took six months, getting the directors out and the participants out, then rehousing the documents all in Kenya. And then we got, like, mental health support for everyone, but then the money ran out. Tens of thousands of pounds were spent on getting people out, the production budget went. You’ve got maybe 15 people across different areas of Sudan, all needing documents, clandestine routes, air tickets, buses, food, and travel liaisons. We got a couple of weeks of trauma care, sitting together, rethinking: How is everyone? Does everyone want to continue? From then onwards, two things kind of emerged. One is for everybody; there was a bigger picture of life, death, and loss, so nobody really spent their time arguing about the film. And second, the film became a kind of cathartic process, a reason to contribute energy, a reason to do something, not just be a refugee. So then it was about trying to find a way creatively to continue which didn’t cost any money.

Feven Merid

How did you find a way to continue?

Ibrahim Snoopy

We had the footage that we shot in Sudan, but didn’t know what to do next. Part of the story is the participants going out of Sudan, but we couldn’t film them getting out. It was too dangerous to go back and film. It was a challenge to get them out in the first place. We were experimenting a lot with green screen, with interviews, all of that, and we just wanted to have different options so that later on in the edit, we would find the best way to tell the story. We tried animation, interviews, reenactments, and also, because we watched a couple of films, and it really worked, especially in the conditions that we were in. There was a film called Neighbor Abdi, which was doing reenactment in a green screen about the war in Somalia. So that was a great approach, especially in countries where you can’t go back anymore, war zones.

Directing a scene against green screen.

Phil Cox

The creativity came because we had no footage. So it was like, where’s the story? Well, it’s inside all of our subjects. We did the reconstructions, and we also asked people to dream or remember a physical geographical memory of space. It’s realizing that we all carry physical space as memory inside us.

Feven Merid

How was finding and getting different people to agree to share their stories? How did they feel about reenacting things?

Ibrahim Snoopy

In Sudan, we don’t have that camera culture, you know, like everyone sees the camera as something that’s going to expose them, so it took us a while until we gained their trust. Actually, as directors, we reenacted our own things, and that vulnerability, you know, allowed them to open up, because now we don’t have that director-participant hierarchy, right, like how we were in Sudan. Now we’re all just in one building, sharing together our pains, griefs, and even happy moments, everything. You’re not opening up to someone you don’t know or don’t trust. It’s the same person that you wake up next to in the morning, and then you go to sleep at the end of the day, having breakfast and lunch. We would already have these conversations off-screen during the day, so now it’s just a matter of recording what you’re saying. So then they felt like, okay, they were even more excited to actually open up about what they’ve been through, their dreams and ambitions, looking for a better day, a future away from war.

Phil Cox

We were also never quite sure whether the directors would be in the film or not. So if you see, it gets like meta, meta: filming of the process, the filming of the directors, and then the filming behind [the scenes].

From left to right: Directors Ibrahim Snoopy, Rawia Alhag, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, and Anas Saeed.

Feven Merid

I think one of the strongest elements that came through was the bonds that were developed.

Ibrahim Snoopy

It was stories about these five individuals in the city of Khartoum, and also these different layers and social classes, the difference between the kids, the tea vendor and Jawad [resistance volunteer], and other characters that were there. So it’s like an overview of the city of Khartoum, because there are so many tribes in Sudan, and how, to some extent, they’re living together in harmony, but also the underlying layer of what’s erupting and boiling beneath. Because at the end, there was a full-scale war that happened, not overnight, but it was something that was being crafted for years. So we wanted to spotlight all these different people from different ethnicities and different social classes.

Phil Cox

This film could never have been made without the circumstances of the war. And I say that because the participants would never have all sat together and been together, because they’re all from such different social classes, ethnicities. Majdi [civil servant] would never touch Wilson and Lokain, the boys would never touch Majdi, and suddenly they’re all sharing the same mattress behind the camera. The directors are also from very different backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities. So before the war, there wasn’t a bond. They were young filmmakers coming together. But after the war, everyone was living in one space. So that’s what cemented it. The creativity was born out of circumstance, and the unity was born out of the collective experience of war and displacement.

Feven Merid

Now that it’s out in the world, how do you feel, and what’s next?

Ibrahim Snoopy

My next movie is pretty much also about war, but in the same way as how Kharotum was made. It’s not directed to the war; it’s not a war movie, but it’s always there in the background. All my stories, whether I like it or not, are evolving around Sudan right now. I think sometimes I should do films that aren’t necessarily relevant to what’s happening, but it’s our responsibility to document what’s happening right now in this part of history. Because it’s very necessary for me and future generations to know what was happening in the 2023 war and what led to it, and how people were living, because the only thing that we can learn through is history. Whether it’s reading books or watching movies. I think things weren’t really documented that well over the last few decades. And that’s why we keep doing the same thing over and over.

Phil Cox

I think one of the differences between me and the filmmakers is that I know films can fail and disappear. I think they all had great belief in it, and what we were doing was kind of creatively bold, so it could have been a disaster. And I think the grounding point was that even if it did fail, at least it was a document that would suffice for a city and time before the war. All the footage that we filmed in the workshop, you know, it was a Khartoum that no longer existed. So even if the film failed, the film, the work, and the documentary would still have a value.

The invention of foreigners

2025-11-10T12:54:36Z

From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.

Yeoville market, Johannesburg, 2010. Image credit Sweggs via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

There’s no shortage of analysis when it comes to xenophobia in South Africa. We’ve heard it explained as the outcome of deep structural inequality, the failure of post-apartheid redistribution, or the slow-burning crisis of unemployment and social insecurity. Writers like Patrick Bond, Mary Galvin, Mazibuko Jara, Trevor Ngwane, Christopher Classen, and Phillip J. Lewis have all helped build this picture. I don’t disagree with their work. But I want to come at the issue from a slightly different angle—one rooted in political theory, and in how we understand the very idea of who belongs.

There’s a short but quietly radical paper by Mahmood Mamdani called “Democratic Theory and Democratic Struggles.” In it, he argues that democratic movements in Africa have too often taken their cues from Euro-American traditions—importing ideas about rights and citizenship without stopping to ask whether those frameworks actually make sense in our context. The problem isn’t just imitation. It’s that we’ve accepted, almost by default, a model of democracy that was never built to deal with the complexities of our histories.

Mamdani’s first critique is that democratic theory is treated as a universal script—as something given, static, and ready-made. His second is that we’ve failed to learn seriously from our own anticolonial struggles, especially those that erupted after the Second World War. That was the moment when colonial powers, faced with rising resistance, scrambled to reconfigure their rule—not by relinquishing power, but by reorganizing it. They redesigned colonial societies to contain revolt. And they did so, crucially, by reshaping political identities.

At the core of Mamdani’s argument is a reckoning with the tradition of rights that emerged in Europe: the belief that nations are the rightful bearers of collective self-determination, and that citizens, by virtue of belonging to those nations, hold individual rights. This idea didn’t emerge overnight. It gathered force across centuries, from Renaissance humanism to Enlightenment philosophy, from the French Revolution to Wilson’s post–World War I principles. As Allen Lynch has noted, “self-determination” was already in the air long before it became the slogan of decolonization.

But in the European context, something else was happening alongside the spread of rights: The nation was coming to be imagined as a shared cultural community. Once self-determination was attached to this idea of cultural sameness, it became a way of defining not only who was entitled to govern themselves but who counted as a political subject in the first place. Rights became tied to nationality. Citizenship became the gatekeeper of belonging. And in this framework, where you’re born—and whether your name, language, or history match the imagined nation—determines whether you’re entitled to rights at all. This is the legacy that many postcolonial states inherited without question. And it’s this template—of equating political inclusion with nationality—that, Mamdani suggests, helps explain why xenophobia and ethnic violence continue to haunt the African continent.

But what does any of this have to do with xenophobia in Africa—especially since Africa is, after all, not Europe or America? The answer starts with a reminder: The modern state in Africa was not born through negotiation or consent. It was imposed, violently, through the colonial project. Speaking about the 2013 political crisis in Sudan—which left thousands dead and drove many more into exile—Mamdani argued that the roots of that conflict stretch back to British colonialism. The British, in attempting to consolidate internal sovereignty in Sudan, redrew the social map. They carved up the territory along ethnic lines and transformed cultural identities into political ones.

This was not an accidental byproduct of colonial rule—it was central to its logic. The British defined ethnicity as an exclusive category. They tied each ethnic group to a specific, bounded homeland. They then installed local authorities—drawn from the same ethnic group—to govern those homelands. These authorities were given sweeping powers: to control land, settle disputes, and administer customary law. But they were not accountable to the people they governed. Their authority was propped up by the colonial state, and justified in the name of “tradition.”

The consequences were far-reaching. Those who could claim indigeneity—those seen as “natives” of a given homeland—were recognized as having rights under customary law. Those who could not were treated as outsiders, with no claims to land, protection, or participation. The effect was to harden identity into a rigid and exclusionary system. What might once have been fluid—language, lineage, belonging—was turned into something fixed. Ethnicity became a political passport. The “tribe” became a kind of micro-state. And rights were rationed out accordingly.

This wasn’t unique to Sudan. The same pattern held across colonial Africa—whether in Kenya under the British, South Africa under apartheid, or Nigeria under indirect rule. Once the colonial state brought multiple ethnic groups under a single sovereign authority, it had to answer a basic question: How do you govern people you do not intend to empower? The answer was to divide them. To codify cultural differences. To draw hard lines around identity. And, just as crucially, to manage labor.

Colonial economies depended on the movement of people. Migrant labor didn’t begin with colonialism, but under the colonial state it was transformed. Labor migration was engineered as a way to displace, divide, and exploit. Migrant workers were deliberately excluded from political life. They were used to undercut local wages, to destabilize communities, and to provide the cheap labor that capitalist accumulation required. In other words, the roots of both ethnic exclusion and migrant marginalization in Africa lie in the colonial attempt to manage difference—not by transcending it, but by weaponizing it.

Modern Africa’s reality has been shaped by two entangled legacies: colonial rule and migrant labor. Neither can be separated from the other. As Mamdani reminds us, even when the United Nations declared the “right to self-determination of peoples” and the universal protection of “human rights” after the Second World War, a question hung in the air: Who are the “peoples” and “humans” being spoken of?

Europe’s answer to the violence of state formation—the genocides, expulsions, and forced assimilations carried out in the name of national unification—was to affirm the right of every nation to self-determination. But as Mamdani points out, turning national minorities into national majorities has never solved the deeper problem: the question of co-belonging. These solutions merely redrew the lines of exclusion. Worse still, they trained generations to see the world through the lens of separation—of who “we” are, who counts as part of the political community, and who doesn’t. Who is entitled to rights, and who must live without them.

The tragedy of postcolonial states is that they did not take these histories seriously. Instead, they inherited the European tradition of rights wholesale, without examining how it had been used to divide and govern in colonial contexts. The result is that much of today’s xenophobia—along with ethnic and so-called tribal conflict—can be traced back to these unexamined inheritances.

Take South Africa. The country never truly detribalized. The post-apartheid imagination of the nation still draws its boundaries around certain ethnic categories deemed “indigenous” or “authentic” to the state. That much was made clear during the recent Chidimma Adetshina saga, when Patriotic Alliance leader Kenny Kunene argued that only people with South African names—by which he meant Xhosa or Zulu names—deserve recognition. Or consider Operation Dudula, which has physically barred Black people suspected of being “foreign nationals” from accessing public health care.

These incidents may look different on the surface, but they share the same logic. At their core is the idea that certain people—those whose names or accents or skin shade are read as foreign—do not belong to the “we” of the South African nation. That they are outside the circle of rights, not because of what they’ve done, but because of where they (supposedly) come from. This is what happens when ethnicity is tied to geography, when cultural identity is mistaken for national purity. And it is telling that white South Africans, whose lineage is not remotely indigenous, are rarely subjected to this same scrutiny.

The truth is that we do not have nation-states in Africa, not in the way Europe imagined them. What passes for nationalism on this continent is, more often than not, a statist ideology. And this ideology—designed to manage labor and maintain order—creates sharp divides between citizen workers and non-citizen workers, between those entitled to rights and those rendered invisible.

This is why popular slogans like “tighten the borders” or “put South Africans first” are not just xenophobic—they are politically empty. Sometimes these ideas even edge into tribalism, as when people are told to “go back to your province” as if crossing internal borders made them suspect. But as Mamdani reminds us, apartheid itself was built on the denial of rights to non-citizen labor. Laws like the pass system or the Urban Areas Act didn’t just restrict Black mobility—they erased Black citizenship, rendering millions into deportable, temporary, and utterly exploitable workers. The Bantustan system followed the same logic: create categories of people who live on the land but have no claim to it.

If we want a political order that actually reflects our history, then we have to stop using the Euro-American template. We have to rethink what rights are and whom they are for. Rights must be tied not to where someone was born, but to where they live and labor. Migrant presence—residence, contribution, life—should be the basis of political belonging. Not paperwork. Not passports. Not ethnicity dressed up as nationhood.

When solidarity becomes spectacle

2025-11-10T10:45:12Z

Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.

Photo by Gregory Fullard on Unsplash

There is a particular theater to South African political life: we know how to gather, how to convene, how to fill auditoriums when history arrives clothed in urgency. We clap when we should clap. We nod with seriousness. We ask familiar questions with grave voices. And then we go home feeling as though participation is enough. Our gestures are precise, our cadences rehearsed. We have mastered the choreography of conscience.

On Sunday, October 26, as Francesca Albanese spoke, something in the room felt deeply familiar—a choreography of solidarity, ritualistic and almost liturgical. Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, had just delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg before coming to Cape Town’s Groote Kerk, where around 1,000 people packed the pews and overflowed onto the streets outside to listen. She praised South Africa’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice but called on the country—and on individuals—to go further: to end trade with Israel, to suspend all military and diplomatic ties, to stop consuming products from companies complicit in occupation. “Are you still drinking Coke?” she asked the audience. “Stop drinking Coca-Cola first and then blame the government.”

The applause was thunderous. It had the atmosphere of a revival meeting—righteous, moved, rehearsed. People repeated what we already know: that BDS matters, that sanctions work, that we must “raise awareness.” The question that always arrives, as predictably as applause, was asked again: What can we do? There was earnestness in the room, yes, and a beating heart. But there was also performance—an economy of optics that governs public conscience like a currency traded at a premium.

South Africans have built an identity on moral memory. We invoke ’94 like scripture, rehearsing the vocabulary of liberation as if reciting a catechism. We remember Sharpeville and Soweto with disciplined reverence. Yet too often, the memory becomes a mask. It is easy to say “Not in our name” when the world already expects it. It is far harder to move from memory to material action, to recognize that being anti-apartheid in 2025 is not radical but merely the minimum entry requirement for dignity. We mistake repetition for conviction. We confuse moral nostalgia with moral duty.

Sitting in that room, listening to Albanese, I realized the questions rarely change, not because we lack information, but because we cling to the comfort of asking them. We have turned inquiry itself into ritual. To ask What can we do? is safer than doing; it preserves our innocence, our distance, our sense of virtue. This is the seduction of optics—solidarity as ritual, not responsibility.

South Africa often positions itself as moral witness. But witness without consequence is not solidarity; it is spectatorship. We condemn the occupation, we denounce genocide, we mourn Gaza, but we also consume it. We share images like devotional icons, circulate grief like currency, and flood timelines with vocabulary that soothes us into believing we have acted. In this economy of optics, participation substitutes for commitment, and grief becomes theater.

And then, of course, there is the United Nations—the grand stage of international morality. We must name the farce plainly: a structure that watches genocide and calls it procedure; a bureaucracy where veto power, that relic of imperial spoils, is treated as natural law; a club that preserves the colonial architecture of power and congratulates itself for its longevity. The UN is not broken—it functions exactly as designed. It observes, reports, debates, and issues statements like confetti while states bulldoze lives. It invites the arsonist to comment on fire safety. We pretend this is internationalism; in truth, it is administrative coloniality—a system built not to restrain power but to sanctify it.

Francesca Albanese spoke with clarity and courage, but the room—we, the audience—must interrogate ourselves. We have turned exceptional dissenters into icons, polished them with reverence until the sheen itself becomes a distraction. I wanted to ask her, “How do you navigate the idolatry and hero-worship, especially from liberal, often white audiences who convert moral courage into spectacle? Does this adulation depoliticize the struggle you represent?” We sanctify figures like her because sanctification feels like action. But icons can domesticate struggle. Hero worship is soft politics: it validates emotion without demanding confrontation.

The questions that haunt us remain unasked, perhaps because we already know their answers. How does the UN claim legitimacy when veto power replicates global settler logic? How does one speak truth within an institution structured to mute it? And what does it mean, for those of us in South Africa, to inhabit a nation that once defied empire but now mistakes its moral reputation for ongoing resistance?

When Albanese framed Palestine not simply through the lens of occupation but through the language of colonial erasure, she did what the UN refuses to do: name power as power. That vocabulary matters. It pierces the myth of neutrality that international law hides behind. Words can be weapons, but they can also be shields, and for too long, law has chosen the latter.

So what remains for us here in South Africa, a country that holds liberation memory like inherited scripture? Memory is not enough. Sympathy is not enough. Watching is not enough. There is no virtue in being historically adjacent to struggle if we only perform its remembrance. To “stand with Palestine” cannot mean simply attending the talk, posting the quote, or wearing the keffiyeh at the right conference. Liberation is not a brand identity. It requires cost. It requires risk. It requires material consequence, not just moral posturing.

The real question, then, is not “what can we do?”, but “what are we afraid to do?” Whose comfort are we protecting when we ask safe questions? Whose illusions do we preserve through politeness? Solidarity is not an optic; it is a disruption. It is noisy, uncomfortable, often isolating. It pulls reputation apart rather than polishing it.

South Africa remembers apartheid so that we might not repeat it, and yet we reproduce its most dangerous habit: believing that moral clarity is the same as moral action. We are too fluent in the language of outrage, too comfortable in the posture of virtue. History will not absolve spectatorship, even when spectators cheer for the right side. Liberation requires more than applause. It demands consequence. And the theater of solidarity must finally give way to the labor of it. Otherwise, we are simply watching.