Kobuthi has long been a trenchant observer of the Kenyan public sphere, and in this wide-ranging roundtable, he reflects on the country’s shifting political landscape: from the promises of the 2010 constitution and the disillusionment of Jubilee-era politics to the emergence of a new Gen Z–led revolt demanding a wholesale renegotiation of Kenya’s social contract.

As fellow travelers in the struggle to build a more critical, independent, and solidaristic media, we approached this conversation with Kobuthi not simply as observers but as participants. The crises facing Kenya—shrinking civic space, intensified repression, the return of theological-authoritarian rhetoric—are not unique. They resonate across the continent and beyond, including in our own work. What are our responsibilities, as editors and writers, in such a moment? What new forms of public imagination are needed? How do we hold space for resistance while sustaining institutions of critique?

This wide-ranging discussion explores those questions. From the ghosts of Kenya’s post-independence promises to the radical promise of Gen Z revolt, from the ideological decay wrought by structural adjustment to the shifting terrain of faith and power, Kobuthi offers a sobering and searching diagnosis of where things stand—and what might come next.

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

For weeks, the streets became a site of generational reckoning. Disillusioned with formal politics and disconnected from traditional civil society, a new political subjectivity emerged—youth-led, digitally coordinated, ideologically inchoate but morally resolute. Even after the Finance Bill was withdrawn, the protests continued. By June 2025, they had reignited in response to the death of Albert Omondi Ojwang in police custody, now squarely targeting state violence and the wider political order. The demands had shifted: no longer just focused on reform, but on complete rupture. Still, if the movement has posed powerful questions, there remains the matter of answers: What comes next? How do we sustain this moment? Who is building a politics for the long term?

In this episode of the Africa Is a Country podcast, editor William Shoki is joined by Sungu Oyoo, a longtime activist, writer, and community organizer based in Nairobi—and a 2027 presidential candidate in Kenya’s presidential elections. Sungu is the national spokesperson of Kongamano La Mapinduzi (“Congress of the Revolution”), a socialist formation that emerged out of years of student and community organizing. He is also a founding member of the Kenya Left Alliance, a broad coalition of progressive organizations that is trying to turn the country’s popular discontent into a durable, anti-capitalist political force.

In this conversation, they discuss Sungu’s personal path to politics, the failure of Kenya’s elite-led independence project, the broken promises of the 2010 constitution, and why the post-2022 period has been marked by such sharp disillusionment. They also talk through the class composition of the recent protests, the limits of “Gen Z” as a political category, and what it means to build a left electoral project without falling into the traps of clientelism or cynicism.

But what is often missing from these conversations are the perspectives and practical considerations of citizens who interact with multiple currencies by necessity or by choice —whether through trade, remittances, or other forms of cross-border exchange. To what extent is de-dollarization already a practical outcome of increasing Africa-China trade? Are Igbo importers of Chinese-made goods at the vanguard of a multi-currency fluency which nation-states will ultimately have to adopt?

The Nigerian Scam explores these issues on the most recent Africa Is a Country podcast through a conversation with Dr. Jing Jing Liu, focused on her recently published study “Decentering the Dollar in Africa–China Trade: How Nigerian Entrepreneurs Navigate Currency Swaps and Digital Currencies in an Era of USD Hegemony and RMB Internationalization.”

On one hand, the suspended senator’s cause has been championed by supporters of women’s rights and feminist politics, who have grown increasingly vocal in the past two decades. This is evident in the rising prominence of women’s rights advocacy in the media and civic spaces, the proliferation of online feminist organizing, and the recurrence of feminist-oriented protests and organizations, such as the Market March protests against sexual harassment in 2019 and the role played by the Feminist Coalition in the 2020 #EndSARS protests. The gains of Nigerian women in recent times are also manifest in the realms of culture and international organizations. Leading lights such as acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and United Nations  Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed have broken barriers for women within and beyond Nigeria. The measure of public outcry and protest that has accompanied the suspension of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan is best understood within the context of these moderate advancements in the struggle for women’s rights and recognition in Nigeria.

On the other hand, a powerful constituency—which appears to include the majority of her fellow senators—have accepted or even applauded the suspension of Akpoti-Uduaghan. Likewise, the handful of women in elective office, which, to be fair, are a vanishing minority in Nigeria, have given lukewarm support at best or been critical of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan. This all suggests that despite the momentum in public discourse, popular culture, and international institutions, the achievements of the women’s movement in the realm of formal politics in Nigeria have been severely limited. The profound inequalities experienced by women in the workplace and across most other metrics of development appear as both a cause and consequence of their political marginalization under conditions of nominal democracy. Such political marginalization persists despite the fact that women’s organizing, in the form of popular organizations such as Women in Nigeria (WIN), played leading roles in the pro-democracy struggle. Nor has the emergence in recent years of a multimillion-dollar global industry for funding and programming for “women’s political leadership” improved the state of women’s political participation in Nigeria.

This contradictory situation—characterized by both new momentum and enduring marginalization—prompts critical questions about the state of the women’s movement in contemporary Nigeria. What are the origins and history of feminism in Nigeria? How did the forms of Nigerian feminist and women’s organizing evolve from the colonial and military period till the present? Why, despite the modest achievements of Nigerian women, has Nigerian politics remained desperately patriarchal?

In this episode, Sa’eed Husaini and Emeka Ugwu are joined by Hauwa Mustapha, a Nigerian feminist, trade unionist, and development economist, to explore the past, present, and future trajectory of Nigerian...]]>This episode was recorded in the wake of the recent public controversy surrounding the suspension of Nigerian Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, following sexual harassment allegations she leveled against Godswill Akpabio, the current president of the Nigerian senate. Nigerian public commentary has been polarized by the controversy, reflecting a deeper division that is characteristic of debates about the current state of women in Nigeria. 

On one hand, the suspended senator’s cause has been championed by supporters of women’s rights and feminist politics, who have grown increasingly vocal in the past two decades. This is evident in the rising prominence of women’s rights advocacy in the media and civic spaces, the proliferation of online feminist organizing, and the recurrence of feminist-oriented protests and organizations, such as the Market March protests against sexual harassment in 2019 and the role played by the Feminist Coalition in the 2020 #EndSARS protests. The gains of Nigerian women in recent times are also manifest in the realms of culture and international organizations. Leading lights such as acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and United Nations  Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed have broken barriers for women within and beyond Nigeria. The measure of public outcry and protest that has accompanied the suspension of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan is best understood within the context of these moderate advancements in the struggle for women’s rights and recognition in Nigeria.

On the other hand, a powerful constituency—which appears to include the majority of her fellow senators—have accepted or even applauded the suspension of Akpoti-Uduaghan. Likewise, the handful of women in elective office, which, to be fair, are a vanishing minority in Nigeria, have given lukewarm support at best or been critical of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan. This all suggests that despite the momentum in public discourse, popular culture, and international institutions, the achievements of the women’s movement in the realm of formal politics in Nigeria have been severely limited. The profound inequalities experienced by women in the workplace and across most other metrics of development appear as both a cause and consequence of their political marginalization under conditions of nominal democracy. Such political marginalization persists despite the fact that women’s organizing, in the form of popular organizations such as Women in Nigeria (WIN), played leading roles in the pro-democracy struggle. Nor has the emergence in recent years of a multimillion-dollar global industry for funding and programming for “women’s political leadership” improved the state of women’s political participation in Nigeria.

This contradictory situation—characterized by both new momentum and enduring marginalization—prompts critical questions about the state of the women’s movement in contemporary Nigeria. What are the origins and history of feminism in Nigeria? How did the forms of Nigerian feminist and women’s organizing evolve from the colonial and military period till the present? Why, despite the modest achievements of Nigerian women, has Nigerian politics remained desperately patriarchal?

In this episode, Sa’eed Husaini and Emeka Ugwu are joined by Hauwa Mustapha, a Nigerian feminist, trade unionist, and development economist, to explore the past, present, and future trajectory of Nigerian feminism. 

A three-decade-long tradition of electoral alternation between two dominant political parties has earned Ghana a reputation as a bastion of democracy in coup-prone West Africa. Yet its spiraling inequality, recurrent debt crises, and growing civic unrest suggest a society that is far from prosperous. Ghana’s seemingly stable neoliberal present sharply contrasts with the more turbulent early years of its postcolonial history—characterized by the high-modernist project of the Nkrumah government to push through the industrial transformation of a primary export economy crashing against the rocks of vested domestic and international interests.

How did that period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ambition and intrigue give way to the seemingly tamed Ghana of today? Why has a two-party system characterized by alternation without change proven so durable? In light of the anti-galamsey protests, the emergence of social movements critical of the economic status quo, and the rise of the nominally anti-imperialist military regimes to its north, are there indications in Ghanaian society of what might replace the neoliberal two-party system? To examine these themes, Sa’eed Husaini, Africa Is a Country’s West Africa regional editor and cohost of The Nigerian Scam podcast, is joined by Gyekye Tanoh, the Ghanaian social activist, political economist, and former head of the Political Economy Unit at Third World Network-Africa

The rivalry between these two nations has intensified since 2014, when Nigeria’s GDP-rebasing exercise revealed it had surpassed South Africa as Africa’s largest economy. While much of the bilateral banter about who really owns amapiano or why the Super Eagles are vastly superior to Bafana Bafana may seem harmless and mildly humorous, it has occasionally spilled into more serious territory, with incidents of deliberate sabotage, hostile clashes, and xenophobic violence emerging in both countries. Recent examples illustrating this tension include the so-called “bolt for bolt” battle between Lagos and Johannesburg, along with the controversy surrounding the Miss South Africa competition and the xenophobic backlash faced by Chidimma Adetshina.

This backdrop frames our conversation about what is really happening between these two nations. Is it time to admit that Nigeria is winning? But more seriously: what, if anything, is at stake in the competition? What drives the vitriol? And what would a normal relationship look like? To explore these questions—and hopefully find some clarity—we're joined by the esteemed Khanya Mtshali, a critic and staff writer for Africa Is a Country.

On this episode of Just Us Under A Tree, Tanveer Jeewa and Dan Mafora host Civil and Political Rights expert Mudzuli Rakhivhane to unpack the recent threats to challenge the outcome of the May 29 national elections in South Africa. What does it mean to have free and fair elections? Dan and Mudzuli, who were on the ground on election day, share their observations of various irregularities, as the three discuss whether they were indeed “so egregious as to vitiate the entire elections,” as has been alleged on many occasions. Tanveer is a constitutional law and property law lecturer, and Dan is a lawyer in Cape Town and the author of Capture in the Court (Tafelberg, 2023).

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In light of this, it is understandable that some applause accompanied the announcement about a decade ago that Aliko Dangote, Nigeria’s billionaire cement magnate, and Africa’s richest man, had broken ground on a new mega-project to construct the continent’s largest crude oil refinery in Lagos. 

Fast-forward to the present day. Following the government’s removal of petrol subsidies in mid-2023 and the intensification of an economic crisis that has left Nigerians reeling in the aftermath, many hoped that a reduction in energy costs would swiftly follow the announcement in mid-September that the first trucks laden with refined petrol had started leaving the Dangote Refinery.

Now, nearly a month later, fuel costs have not only remained high but continued to rise––amid a highly public spat between Dangote and Nigerian government officials––prompting confusion, conspiracy, and much questioning about why the Dangote Refinery has not saved Nigeria.

This episode, recorded amid the madness, attempts to make sense of the facts and fiction surrounding the refinery, the ever-spiraling price of petrol products, and the interaction between indigenous capitalist classes and the post-colonial state in Nigeria.

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Data from Algeria’s National Independent Authority for Elections (ANIE) suggest that just 23 percent of the population voted for a candidate. Only three regime-approved candidates contested, with Tebboune's main challengers being conservative Abdelaali Hassani Cherif and socialist Youcef Aouchiche, who received 3 percent and 2.1 percent of the vote, respectively.

The widespread disaffection reflects the legacy of 2019’s Hirak movement—whose complaint was not just against Bouteflika but the entire Algerian political system—and many activists from this generation have been forced into exile or detained while numerous associations and media outlets have shuttered. Tebboune has managed discontent through social spending to improve quality of life, while his foreign policy has focused on key geopolitical questions around Palestine, Western Sahara, the Sahel, and Libya. Algiers-based AIAC contributing editor Maher Mezahi joins the podcast to discuss what the elections mean for Algeria’s future and its role in the region.

Macron called the elections in early June after elections for the European Parliament resulted in a big swing to the right across the continent. Of the 81 seats designated for France in the 720-member body (the second-largest allocation of any member state after Germany), the National Rally won the most—30 to be exact. Faced with an uncertain parliamentary mandate, Macron seemingly called the elections to test the national mood, a gambit that many commentators say has backfired. 

Joining the podcast to discuss these elections, is AIAC’s Francophone regional editor, Shamira Ibrahim. Why are these elections significant? Why is Macron so popular, and how come it's the once-fringe right-wing benefitting, rather than the left? What might the normalization of anti-migrant policies mean for black and brown people in France, as well as the more than two million people who live in France’s overseas territories?  In addition to being our Francophone regional editor, Shamira is a Brooklyn-based writer by way of Harlem, Canada, and the Comoros, who explores identity, cultural production, and technology.

Initially, the bill proposed controversial tax hikes on basic commodities such as bread and cooking oil, which were dropped on June 19 after the first wave of protests the day before. Nonetheless, Kenya’s parliament passed the bill, which still included provisions on a 16 percent tax on goods and services to be used to equip specialized hospitals with over 50 beds, which some worried would increase the cost of health care. 

After protests continued, President William Ruto announced on June 26 that he would not sign the bill, conceding that the “people have spoken.” The day before, however, he called some actions of protesters—particularly, the storming of parliament after police shot at demonstrators with live ammunition—an “unprecedented attack on democracy.” Meanwhile, security forces have killed at least 22 people, with witness reports suggesting that the death toll could be significantly higher.

Why are these protests significant? Writing this week in Africa Is a Country, Kari Mugo observed that “this historic week marks a new era after many years of discontent and political apathy. A renewed desire for political engagement has ignited in Kenya.” The protests have wide demographic appeal but have been led primarily by Gen Z, who in Kenya is a group that largely did not participate in the 2022 general elections. And although the bill has been put on hold, protestors are still taking to the streets demanding Ruto’s outright resignation. Ruto—who came to power in a 2022 election after narrowly defeating Raila Odinga—is widely viewed as out of touch, despite styling himself as an “everyman hustler.” 

His time in office has been marked by deepening austerity that is worsening an escalating cost-of-living crisis. It is in this context that Ruto has regularly told Kenyans to tighten their belts. But in one of many examples of “do as I say, not as I do,” Ruto angered many when last month he chartered a private jet, instead of using the presidential carrier, to visit Joe Biden in Washington—the first visit by an African leader in sixteen years.

So, to talk about these protests and what lies ahead for Kenya, I am joined by Wangui Kimari, who is our East Africa regional editor. Wangui is also an anthropologist based at the American University Nairobi Center and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), a community-based organization in Nairobi, Kenya.

Sa’eed Husaini is a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, and a regional editor for Africa Is a Country. OAG is a food security management postgraduate with a passion for revolutionary politics and discourse. He lives in Hull, UK. Emeka Ugwu is a Lagos-based book critic/co-founder of Wawa Book Review. He is also a data analyst.

They also touch on the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice on South Africa’s request for amending the provisional orders against Israel under the Genocide Convention. Tanveer is a constitutional law and property law lecturer, Dan is a lawyer in Cape Town and the author of Capture in the Court (Tafelberg, 2023), and Elisha teaches law and politics in Cape Town.

In the first syndicated episode, Sa’eed Husaini, OAG, and Emeka Ugwu consider the uses and abuses of centering “the scam” as a tool for understanding the failures of independence and the emergence of capitalism in Nigeria. Why did Nigeria come to be associated with the classic internet scam, a.k.a. “yahoo-yahoo” (among other fraudulent activities)? To what extent can the phenomenon of fraud in Nigeria be neatly separated from “legitimate” forms of capital accumulation, such as in the oil sector, the music industry, or Nollywood? Is Nigeria’s case really unique, or is it a slight variation of the failures of petty bourgeois-led independence movements in Africa?  

Sa’eed is a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, and a regional editor for Africa Is a Country. OAG is a food security management postgraduate with a passion for revolutionary politics and discourse who lives in Hull, UK, and Emeka is a Lagos-based book critic/co-founder of Wawa Book Review. He is also a data analyst. 

On this episode, Tanveer Jeewa, Dan Mafora, Johan Lorenzen, and Elisha Kunene host International Human Rights Law and Children’s Rights expert, Bryony Fox, to unpack the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice on South Africa’s request for provisional orders against Israel under the Genocide Convention. Tanveer is a constitutional law and property law lecturer, Dan is a lawyer in Cape Town and the author of Capture in the Court (Tafelberg, 2023), Johan works for Richard Spoor suing companies who injure indigenous communities, workers, and consumers, and Elisha teaches law and politics in Cape Town.

Sisi took power in 2013 through a popular military takeover that deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Since then, his regime has cracked down on dissent, with tens of thousands of his political opponents (like Alaa Abd el-Fattah) jailed. Economically, Sisi handed the levers of the economy to his comrades in the junta, ballooning the country’s public debt by building scores of grandiose, white elephant projects. For ordinary people, the price of basic commodities has soared as economic restructuring by the IMF looms.

The election in December is expected to be a foregone conclusion in favor of Sisi. In early October when he announced his candidacy, Sisi addressed the dire economic situation by exclaiming, “By God almighty, if the price of the nation’s progressing and prospering is that it doesn’t eat and drink as others do, then we won’t eat and drink.” This angered Egyptians and in some parts of the country (like Marsa Matrouh), spontaneous protests broke out. 

Is Egypt on the verge of another uprising? What space is there for dissidents, both on the street and on the ballot box? Do Sisi’s challengers—like Ahmed Tantawi—have any chance of rallying opposition against him? Joining us on the podcast to discuss all this is Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist and scholar-activist, currently based in Germany. Hossam has written for various outlets, including the Guardian, New York Times, Jacobin, Middle East Eye, New Arab, Al-Jazeer, and others. He also maintains a regular newsletter on Egyptian politics on Substack.

Image credit Simon Matzinger CC BY 2.0 Deed.

This was an unpopular decision in some quarters, especially in Europe’s Top Five leagues which have long complained about key African players being unavailable at a pivotal stage of the football season. Last week, the footballing world was left puzzled when Italian club Napoli uploaded videos to TikTok mocking their star Nigerian striker, Victor Osimhen. Speculation ran wild, and tellingly, one popular explanation was that Napoli's president Aurelio De Laurentiis was trying to force Osimhen out of the club, due to his expected absence given AFCON duty (Osimhen missed out on the 2021 tournament, and the Super Eagles are strong favorites for next year’s contest). In 2022, De Laurentiis controversially said Napoli wouldn’t sign African players unless they backed out of AFCON.

Joining us on the podcast to discuss the politics and spectacle of AFCON, is football journalist Maher Mezehi. What can we expect from the tournament in 2024? And what political motives are behind the successful 2025 and 2027 bids, especially with Morocco outbidding Algeria, with both countries resorting to sports diplomacy in their geopolitical rivalry? Notwithstanding the constant consternation from Europe, why is AFCON a tournament that African players treasure above all? 

Maher Mezahi is an independent football journalist based in Algiers. He covers North African football extensively, and his work has been published in the international media including the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ESPN FC, and Al Jazeera English. 

Like the rest of the continent, the country is facing a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by global economic shocks. In August 2022, protests in this regard in Freetown, Makeni, and Kamakwie triggered a crackdown from the state, and 20 people were killed. When Bio came to power in 2018, having succeeded APC president Ernest Koroma, he promised to undo the legacy of heavy-handedness and intolerance to criticism that Koroma’s presidency became associated with. Now, many Sierra Leoneans are seeing more of the same.

Ahead of the elections, restrictions on gatherings have been enforced, as well as a change to the voting system which is causing confusion. Kamara is also facing corruption charges originating from his time as foreign minister under Koroma, and the glacial pace that the case is moving through the courts has resulted in suspicions that Bio is weaponizing the state apparatus to frustrate Kamara’s candidacy.

This week on the podcast, we are joined from Freetown by Sierra Leonean and American author Ishmael Beah to discuss the elections. Does Kamara represent much of a difference to Bio? How strong are Sierra Leone’s ethnic divisions, which inform most voting preferences? And, what of the youth who led the country’s cost-of-living protests? Ishmael, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel, and Little Family released in 2020. AIAC director of operations, Boima Tucker, also joins as a special guest.

The conflict originated in Sudan’s 2019 revolution, when Omar al-Bashir, the country’s military despot, was ousted after 30 years. Thereafter, the military agreed to a power-sharing deal and transition to civilian rule (after massacring protestors in Khartoum in June 2019). But in October 2021, the SAF and RSF joined forces to depose Sudan’s interim civilian leader, Abdallah Hamdok.

The proximate causes of today’s fighting stem from a dispute over integrating the RSF into Sudan’s security apparatus. Fundamentally, both sides see the other as an existential threat, a possible foil to their control of vast economic interests, such as gold and gum Arabic. The international community—with its own interests in the Sudanese economy—is also to blame, being overcommitted to the military factions as elite brokers of the transitional process. Excluded in all this are the Sudanese people. Joining the podcast to discuss the roots of the crisis and how ordinary Sudanese people are proving resilient, is Mahder Serekberhan. Mahder Serekberhan is a political science PhD student at Syracuse University. She is the vice chairperson of the Global Pan-African Movement, North America Delegation.

This is how we usually understand austerity, as caused by some kind of economic shock. But what if that is not the case? What if rather than being exceptional to modern capitalism, austerity is in fact inherent to its stability? This is what Clara Mattei argues in The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Rather than painful medicine states are forced to administer in times of crisis, austerity is a fundamental tool for stabilizing class relations and increasing market dependence. But if austerity is intrinsic to capitalism, what does this mean for the anti-austerity agenda that has captured the global left? Can we resist austerity without dismantling capitalism? This week on the podcast we explore these questions with Mattei, an assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

The government has proposed a set of sweeping judicial reforms that, in the main, would drastically restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down laws passed by parliament deemed unconstitutional. The move has prompted mass demonstrations across Israel's major urban centers, such as Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, with many calling these reforms a threat to Israel’s democracy.

However, as Jewish American commentator Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Times, “The principle that Mr. Netanyahu’s liberal Zionist critics say he threatens—a Jewish and democratic state—is in reality a contradiction.” The contradiction is expressed in the reality of apartheid in which five million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem are under direct Israeli control but are denied basic rights and freedoms. These mass demonstrations are happening amidst an escalation of violence—Israeli forces have killed 65 Palestinians since the start of the year, while 11 Israeli civilians have been killed. Earlier this month, settlers from the Occupied West Bank (illegal settlements in the West Bank number close to 500,000) carried out a violent pogrom in the village of Huwara near Nablus, torching homes and businesses. Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, subsequently made comments calling for the government to “wipe out” the village. 

On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Peter Beinart to discuss the political instability in Israel, the trajectories of ethno-nationalism, and whether there are any ways out of the impasse. Could the vision of a secular, democratic state for Palestianians and Jews between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea gain traction? Is this vision compatible with Zionism? And what of the role of the US, the Israeli’s state’s most ardent international backer? 

Peter Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. He is also Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York and author of The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.

Successive leaders have been brought in to steer the sinking ship ashore, and all of them have veered adrift. The latest failure is Andre De Ruyter’s, who resigned from Eskom in December last year, and then stepped down with immediate effect after conducting an explosive interview on South African television that revealed the extent of looting at the organization. De Ruyter—whose beginnings were in the private sector—was widely viewed as a steady hand at the wheel. During his tenure, a consensus rose in favor of Eskom’s complete privatization. This would finalize a process inaugurated in 1983 when the apartheid government corporatized Eskom. 

But, is this the only way? Can there be a public pathway towards rebuilding Eskom’s capacity and decarbonizing South Africa’s energy sector? On the podcast this week, Will chats to Andile Zulu, a writer and regular contributor to Africa Is A Country, who is also the energy democracy officer at the Alternative Information Development Centre in Cape Town, South Africa.

But it’s not these veterans who are captivating hearts and minds. Instead, it is Peter Obi, a wealthy businessman and ex-governor of Anambra state, who is causing a stir. Initially, Obi intended to  compete for  the PDP nomination  but crossed the floor to the Labour Party after being frustrated with the PDP’s primary process. His move to the Labour Party—a hitherto relatively unknown, social-democratic platform—is viewed by many as a bold, anti-establishment move. Young Nigerians are attracted to his seeming “outsider” image, his good governance politics, and his entrepreneurial background, which exemplifies the dream of upward mobility that evades many young Nigerians. Obi has cultivated a cult following, with many of his fans dubbing themselves “Obidients.”

Obi’s hype, along with an endorsement from Obasanjo, makes him look like the natural frontrunner. But can Obi really transform Nigeria’s political and economic system, marred by staggering inequality, regional and ethno-religious divides, and corruption? Or is his politics vacuous and empty, based on vague promises to “turn things around?” And how does the Left feature in all of this? What of the initiatives born from the mass mobilizations of the mid-2010s, such as #OccupyNigeria and the Take It Back Movement? And above all, #EndSARS?  

This week, Will is joined by the hosts of an exciting new podcast on Nigerian politics, the Nigerian Scam, to discuss the upcoming election and its possible outcomes. Sa'eed Husaini is a contributing editor at Africa Is a Country, who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria, wrapping up a fellowship at the University of Lagos, and O.A.G has a postgraduate degree in food security, and is a political commentator with great interest in revolutionary thought in and out of the African continent.

Bolsonaro, for now, remains in self-imposed exile in Florida, while Lula’s government proceeds with arrests of those who bear responsibility for the failed putsch. Just how much of a threat to Brazil’s democracy is Bolsonarismo, and how can its wide, cross-class appeal be explained? And will Lula be able to govern in spite of the country’s ongoing legitimation crisis, the contradictions of his own, broad coalition, and the pressing challenges the country faces such as food insecurity and climate change? As Sabrina Fernandes wrote before Lula’s victory in Africa Is A Country, “The challenge, then, is at least threefold: to elect a progressive government and maintain power, to fix recent losses in a short amount of time, and to propose more ambitious politics that can win the people over.” Sabrina joins will to discuss the prospects and challenges for Lula’s third term, and whether Lula can lead a strengthened effort for progressive, Third World internationalism. 

Sabrina Fernandes is a sociologist, ecosocialist organizer and communicator from Brazil. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with CALAS at the University of Guadalajara working on just transitions from the margins, and is also the person behind the radical left education project Tese Onze.

As Tim Sahay argues, “Countries like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have refused to sacrifice their national interests to punish Russia. Most importantly, they believe their bargaining power in the new Cold War will result in sweeter trade, technology, and weapons deals from the West.” Although the old non-alignment was rooted in moral and political principles, today’s one is driven by pragmatism.  Tim joins Will to discuss the future of non-alignment in the era of great power competition between the West and the China-Russia axis. Will non-aligned countries mount a co-ordinated response to global challenges such as energy and security? And, how will they respond to the coming debt crisis precipitated by the West’s monetary policy tightening to contain inflation?

Tim Sahay is currently the senior policy manager at Green New Deal Network, a coalition of labor, climate and environmental justice organizations growing a movement to pass national and international green policies. 

Articles referenced:

Tim Sahay, ‘A New Non-Alignment,’ Phenomenal World https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/non-alignment-brics/

Rana Foroohar, ‘A new world energy order is taking shape,’ Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/d34dfd79-113c-4ac7-814b-a41086c922fa

Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics,’ New Left Review https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-seven-theses-on-american-politics

These events have triggered a nation-wide backlash, with protests in the capital, Lima, as well as Peru’s rural highlands. Protestors are calling for Boluarte to step down, and for elections to take place immediately. Others are calling for Castillo’s reinstatement, and others still, for the wholesale secession from Lima province, given Peru’s stark regional divide between the metropole and the rest of the country. So far, the military repression has been intense, and more than forty people have been killed by security forces.

What comes next for Peru? Will these protests generate momentum for a new constitution to correct Peru’s deep inequalities? Or are they the beginnings of another democratic backslide? This week, Will is joined by Nicolas Allen and José Miguel Munive Vargas to discuss. Nicolas is a graduate student in Latin American history, commissioning editor at (US) Jacobin Magazine and managing editor at Jacobin America Latina. José Miguel is a Peruvian PhD student in Latin American history at Stony Brook University with interests in Andean history (particularly Peru); race, gender, and nationalism.

The editor of the collection, Achal Prabhala is a writer, filmmaker and public health activist who lives in Bangalore, India. Neo Musangi is an experimental self-taught queer artist whose practice uses performance, text, visual and audio installations. Neo also teaches gender studies at American and St. Lawrence Universities. Dayo Forster is an internationally published novelist who also has a parallel career in financial inclusion. Originally from the Gambia, she lived in Kenya for several years.

Zachary Levenson’s latest book, Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (OUP, 2022) seeks to make sense of land occupations and housing struggles in South Africa. Why does the state see them as an obstacle to housing delivery? And if, as the left tends to represent them, they constitute social movements, what kind of movement is a land occupation?

Zach, a regular AIAC contributor, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg.

In his new book, Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa (Inkani Books, 2022), regular AIAC contributor Christopher McMichael places the institution of policing in its wider, historical context, and argues that democratic and humanistic alternatives for public safety are possible. A world without police need not mean a world without safety.

Christopher is a cultural critic and political commentator. He has a PhD in political science from Rhodes University and writes on power, crime and culture.

Vivek Chibber is a Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. He is a contributor to the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review, the New Left Review and Jacobin. He is also the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Temitope is a Marxist historian with a central focus on African economic history in the Department of History and International Studies, Osun State University, as well as a budding social justice activist and epistemic-decolonizer; and Sa'eed is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Lagos and a contributor at Africa Is a Country plus Jacobin Magazine. Sa’eed is also a regular guest host of The Nigerian Scam, a leftist podcast examining politics, history, and the fraudulence of bourgeois society from class and ideological perspectives—be sure to check it out.

Will chats with John Lechner about whether Russia seeks influence for its own sake, or whether its motives are more nuanced. And whether, war with Ukraine means African countries will at some point, have to pick a side. John is a freelance journalist writing on the politics of the former Soviet Union, Turkey, and Africa, and is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

And yet, these stories are still at the margins of Senegalese discourse, and despite some recent advances—such as a law passed in 2020 criminalizing rape—so is much of women’s rights. In this episode, Will chats to Marame Gueye and Coumba Toure about the scourge of gender-based violence in Senegal, and importantly, how feminists are resisting it. Marame is an associate professor of African and African diaspora literatures at East Carolina University, and Coumba is a writer, storyteller, and coordinator for Africans Rising for Peace Justice and Dignity based in Dakar.

And then, Will talks to Na’eem Jeenah about Israel’s efforts to acquire accreditation at the African Union, and the dearth of Palestinian solidarity on the continent. Na’eem is Executive Director of the Afro-Middle East Centre, a research institute dedicated to studying the Middle East and North Africa and relations between that region and the rest of Africa

This week on AIAC Talk, we chat to Maha ben Gadha, the economic program manager at the Tunis-based, North Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. We dig into the roots of the political crisis, uncovering how Tunisia’s political class has lost legitimacy since the 2011 revolution by failing to deliver social transformation. Beyond the right to vote, Tunisians want a democracy that includes jobs and dignity too. With fiscal pressures growing and an IMF loan on the cards, will the president be able to respond to popular demands?

Of course, we know that this man is the only true revolutionary in the film because Omar Blondin Diop was a revolutionary in real life. His appearance in the film counts as the only record of him speaking available, and part of a handful of visuals in general. Blondin Diop never had much of a chance to fully announce himself to the world—at 26 years old, he suspiciously died in Senegalese detention in May 1973, 14 months into a three-year sentence handed to him by Léopold Sedar Senghor’s regime. Senghor is equally thought of as a revolutionary, and a significant intellectual for theorizing Négritude. But why would one revolutionary be an existential threat to another?

Writing of the “Senghor myth,” AIAC contributor Florian Bobin notes that “Once you’ve exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.” Senghor was the quintessential philosopher-king, and as Bobin further observes, “Under the single-party rule of Senghor’s Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), authorities resorted to brutal methods; intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing and killing dissidents.” A prime example was when Senghor accused Mamadou Dia, the president of Senegal’s Council of Ministers, of attempting to stage a coup against him. Dia had long been advocating for decentralizing power and vesting it in the hands of peasant communities. Despite being a fighter, moving to wage a military campaign against Senghor’s regime, Blondin Diop was thinking against him too. In his segment in La Chinoise, Blondin Diop (who at 21, was already a student-professor) answers the question he puts to the group by affirming democracy, political and economic. Just ideas come from social interaction, from the fight to produce, and scientific research, but above all, “From the class struggle. Some classes are victorious, others are defeated. That’s history. The history of all civilizations.” Who is victorious in Senegal?

In this AIAC Talk then, we want to investigate Senegal’s post-colonial history, especially to grapple with it in the context of Senegal’s ongoing civil unrest against incumbent president Macky Sall. This will not be the first time a popular uprising has emerged in Senegal’s recent history to resist creeping authoritarianism. On June 23, 2011, the Senegalese people mobilized to challenge former president Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to change the constitution to permit him to run for a third term and to win elections by securing less of the vote. The moment produced the M23, a broad movement for democratization in Senegal, as well as groupings like “Y’En A Marre”; which means “Fed up” and is a collective of mostly rappers and youth disgruntled with Senegal’s political and economic stagnation. What have become of...]]>Now treated as a prescient representation of the 1968 generation that forever transformed left-wing politics, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise portrays a group of French students forming a Maoist collective and living together in a cosy Parisian apartment where fierce discussions over politics and revolutionary strategy happen with religious devotion. On the only occasion an outsider enters the secret enclave, it’s to deliver a seminar on the “Prospects for the European Left.” The gentleman, introduced only as Omar, is also the film’s only black character. In the seminar’s Q&A, one of the French students asks if a non-socialist revolution can peacefully be changed into a socialist one. In answering the question (“Yes, but under specific conditions”), Omar claims it is based on a false, underlying notion, and asks back: “Where do just ideas arise? Where do just ideas come from?”

Of course, we know that this man is the only true revolutionary in the film because Omar Blondin Diop was a revolutionary in real life. His appearance in the film counts as the only record of him speaking available, and part of a handful of visuals in general. Blondin Diop never had much of a chance to fully announce himself to the world—at 26 years old, he suspiciously died in Senegalese detention in May 1973, 14 months into a three-year sentence handed to him by Léopold Sedar Senghor’s regime. Senghor is equally thought of as a revolutionary, and a significant intellectual for theorizing Négritude. But why would one revolutionary be an existential threat to another?

Writing of the “Senghor myth,” AIAC contributor Florian Bobin notes that “Once you’ve exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.” Senghor was the quintessential philosopher-king, and as Bobin further observes, “Under the single-party rule of Senghor’s Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), authorities resorted to brutal methods; intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing and killing dissidents.” A prime example was when Senghor accused Mamadou Dia, the president of Senegal’s Council of Ministers, of attempting to stage a coup against him. Dia had long been advocating for decentralizing power and vesting it in the hands of peasant communities. Despite being a fighter, moving to wage a military campaign against Senghor’s regime, Blondin Diop was thinking against him too. In his segment in La Chinoise, Blondin Diop (who at 21, was already a student-professor) answers the question he puts to the group by affirming democracy, political and economic. Just ideas come from social interaction, from the fight to produce, and scientific research, but above all, “From the class struggle. Some classes are victorious, others are defeated. That’s history. The history of all civilizations.” Who is victorious in Senegal?

In this AIAC Talk then, we want to investigate Senegal’s post-colonial history, especially to grapple with it in the context of Senegal’s ongoing civil unrest against incumbent president Macky Sall. This will not be the first time a popular uprising has emerged in Senegal’s recent history to resist creeping authoritarianism. On June 23, 2011, the Senegalese people mobilized to challenge former president Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to change the constitution to permit him to run for a third term and to win elections by securing less of the vote. The moment produced the M23, a broad movement for democratization in Senegal, as well as groupings like “Y’En A Marre”; which means “Fed up” and is a collective of mostly rappers and youth disgruntled with Senegal’s political and economic stagnation. What have become of these movements in the 10 years since their inception? How do we make sense of the fact that, this time round, dissident energy is rallied behind Ousmane Sonko, the opposition leader whose arrest following accusations of rape are what precipitated the current crisis?

We are joined by Florian Bobin and Marame Gueye to help us make sense of all of this. Florian is a student in African history and host of Elimu Podcast. His research focuses on post-colonial liberation struggles and state violence from the 1960s and 1970s in Senegal. Marame is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures at East Carolina University. Her work explores gender, verbal art, and migration. She is also an activists of women’s rights in Senegal and its diaspora.

Our guests for this episode of AIAC Talk are Lina Benabdallah, AIAC contributing editor and Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. She is the author of  'Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations' (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Abdou Rehim Lema, from Benin, who is a Yenching Scholar of Peking University, where he completed a Master’s Degree in China Studies, focusing on Politics and International Relations and Christopher J. Lee, an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, author of six books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, 2nd edition 2019).

In a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2002 called “The Foreigners Home,” the late American writer Toni Morrison offers a reflection on the inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders: real, metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology and the so-called clash of cultures in our search to belong. African and American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs. 

African and American artists have to come to terms with this too. A recent virtual exhibition created by Cedric Brown, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and an award-winning social impact leader, called “The Shape of Blackness”, offers a perspective on the black experience by South African and American visual artists—one a black majority nation, and the other a black minority nation. Cedric is joined by South African designer and director of Gallery MOMO Johannesburg, Odysseus Shirindza, who is also one of the exhibition’s curators.  

After, we chat with Khalid Shamis, director and editor of “The Colonel’s Stray Dogs”, a film about his dad, Ashur, who lives in London and played a leading role in the exiled resistance against Muammar Gaddafi’s one party, repressive rule. The film is also about family. As Khalid says in the film: “For the forty years he was in exile in England, it felt like killing Gaddafi was more important to him than living with us.” In the end, Gaddafi did fall (we know that because it is history) and Ashur Shamis went back to Libya to help rebuild, but would he be welcome? And did the country move on from him. 

We’re pleased to have the opportunity to ask Khalid these and other questions. The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is not the first film he has made about his family; a previous film, Imam and I, dealt with his maternal grandfather, Imam Haron, and his murder by apartheid police in South Africa. As an editor, Khalid's credits include Afrikaaps (2010), Action Kommandant (2016), Scenes from a Dry City (2018) and The Sound of Masks (2018) amongst many others.

We want this episode to transport us to the realm of not simply understanding the injustice of apartheid, but of grappling with its totalizing brutality—and it is often the case, that literature, film and poetry can evoke images of places we’ve never been, can allow us to bear witness to feelings we’ve never experienced. Relating the importance of black art in relaying the black experience during apartheid, the South African poet Mafika Gwala declared in his seminal 1984 essay, “Writing as a Cultural Weapon”: “ When you face a truth and there is challenging need to express it, you can most emphatically capture it through poetry, because there is no way you can twist it about in a poem. You have to bring out the truth as it is, or people will see through your lines. It is also through poetry that you find, most soberly, that there has never been such a thing as pure language.”

This episode features South African writers Rustum Kozain, Siphokazi Jonas and Heidi Grunebaum reading the poetry and prose of Palestinian writers and some of their own. Together with Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Al Shaer (with translation by Katharine Halls) and Basman Elderawi, as well as author and essayist Adania Shibli. 

South Africans know the despair and suffering of apartheid. But South Africans also know that apartheid can end. And so, as Palestinians continue to resist, we hope for this to serve as a small gesture of solidarity as they dream of freedom.

Marley achieved an iconography befitting only the legendary, able to transcend the boundaries of the aesthetic, political, and spiritual in his music and life. But this was not without the contradiction which always befalls the greats. As renowned historian of the black Atlantic Paul Gilroy writes, “Marley’s stardom also makes sense in the historical and cultural context provided by the end of Rock and Roll. He was the last rock star and the first figure of a new phase identified as the beginning of what has come to be known as ‘world music’, a significant marketing category that helps to locate historically the slow terminal demise of the music-led youth-culture which faded out with the embers of the twentieth century.”

There was, on one side, the Bob Marley that emerged as a revolutionary symbol, a representative of the Third World that advanced a critique of global capitalism and the imperial domination it depended upon. As Marley declares in War, “Until the philosophy which hold one race superior, and another inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned—everywhere is war.” Naturally, with an upbringing in this context and explorations in Rastafarian Ethopianism, Africa loomed large in Marley’s life.

There is also a Marley, one arriving posthumously, that becomes sanitized, commoditized, and packaged for mass production. This is the Marley coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of history. Mobilized as the poster boy for liberal multiculturalism, the Marley of “One Love” became “an affecting soundtrack to essentially boring and empty activities like shopping and getting stoned” says Gilroy. Reggae, once a source of not only creative expression but also a spiritual outlook and emancipatory posture, became watered down as just another genre of music for consumers to select from like they do items on a store shelf. What became of the movement of Jah people?

Joining us on AIAC Talk to discuss the life and legacy of Marley, are Matthew Smith and Erin MacLeod. Matthew is a professor of history and director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. He is also co-editor of the new Jamaica Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Erin writes and teaches on identity, culture, class, race and geography, and is the author of a book about Rastafari who returned to Africa, Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014).

Marxism’s reception in Africa is especially in decline. Such a decline appears stark when considering that in the 20th century, anti-colonial resistance claimed allegiance to Marx. African political leaders particularly adapted Lenin’s idiosyncratic synthesis, or adopted their own “African socialism.” Marx’s use in liberation movements was never straightforward; it was sometimes shallow and opportunistic, vindicating Marx’s own observation that “precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” One reason for the decline of Marxism in Africa is that all the Marxists have gone. Where to? Many are now in government and presiding over the very economic programs they once denounced.

So, what is Marxism, and who is a Marxist? For his part, not even Marx considered himself one. There are those who believe that Marxism is a living school of thought and practice, open to internal critique and revision when confronting new realities; and those who see it as static and doctrinaire. Who should we believe? Joining us on AIAC Talk to debate if the third world still needs Marx are Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Zeyad el Nabolsy. Annie is an independent researcher based in London, working on legacies of empire and the complex histories of race; and Zeyad is a PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, working on African philosophy of culture, African Marxism, and  the philosophy of science and modern African intellectual history.

The period between the moment of emancipation and the contemporary moment marking it has arguably become consequential for considering both country’s fates. In Sierra Leone, that period has been longer as the idea of freedom was at the core of Sierra Leone’s founding over two hundred years ago, and the contestation over the meaning of that concept shaped its political trajectory since. The capital, Freetown, was first founded in the late eighteenth century by British abolitionists. This would set up a unique relationship between Sierra Leone and the British empire. The colony sat at the head of the British colonial administration in West Africa, with a “westernized” black population fit to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy in its colonizing project. A negotiated independence, won without mass struggle, would leave the work of decolonization incomplete, and a series of coups and military dictatorships, would culminate in a devastating civil war between 1991 and 2002. Following that, Sierra Leone took on another epochal mark, becoming a “post-conflict state.” Other than a brief re-appearance to the world as one of the hardest hit places during the Ebola epidemic between 2013 and 2016, plus a general election in 2018, there has been little interest from the international media to go deeper into what’s behind either the successes and failures of the Sierra Leonean national project.

In South Africa, the fascination has often gone the other way—focusing on the country’s  supposed peace. Indeed, the post-apartheid transition period when the African National Congress (ANC) spearheaded negotiations with the National Party are touted as remarkable for avoiding a collapse into civil war. But South Africa is extremely violent. As Africa Is A Country contributing editor Sisonke Msimang recently wrote for Lapham’s Quarterly, “After the historic 1994 elections that installed the ANC as the ruling party, there were hopes that the violence would end. Murders and rapes decreased in the years that immediately followed, but violent crime remained high. The gruesome statistics have once again begun to rise.” And while the mainstream South African media likes to portray this violence as cultural pathology, it too arises from deeper social and political realities, being most pronounced when citizens confront the post-apartheid state on its failures. 

In this week’s episode of AIAC Talk we’re asking what liberation comes after independence. We are joined by Sisonke Msimang, Oluwaseun Babalola, and Ishmael Beah. Sisonke is a South African writer whose work is focused on race, gender, and democracy, and on top of writing for a range of international publications, she is the author of Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018). Oluwaseun is a Sierra Leonean-Nigerian-American filmmaker; she founded DO Global Productions, a video production company specializing in documentaries. Her focus is to create and collaborate on projects across the...]]>April 27th is a significant date for two countries on the African continent, separated by more than 5,000 km across the Atlantic ocean. On this day, both Sierra Leone and South Africa celebrate emancipation from minority rule. For Sierra Leone, it was becoming freed from the British in 1961, and for South Africa, the end of apartheid in 1994, some several decades later. 

The period between the moment of emancipation and the contemporary moment marking it has arguably become consequential for considering both country’s fates. In Sierra Leone, that period has been longer as the idea of freedom was at the core of Sierra Leone’s founding over two hundred years ago, and the contestation over the meaning of that concept shaped its political trajectory since. The capital, Freetown, was first founded in the late eighteenth century by British abolitionists. This would set up a unique relationship between Sierra Leone and the British empire. The colony sat at the head of the British colonial administration in West Africa, with a “westernized” black population fit to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy in its colonizing project. A negotiated independence, won without mass struggle, would leave the work of decolonization incomplete, and a series of coups and military dictatorships, would culminate in a devastating civil war between 1991 and 2002. Following that, Sierra Leone took on another epochal mark, becoming a “post-conflict state.” Other than a brief re-appearance to the world as one of the hardest hit places during the Ebola epidemic between 2013 and 2016, plus a general election in 2018, there has been little interest from the international media to go deeper into what’s behind either the successes and failures of the Sierra Leonean national project.

In South Africa, the fascination has often gone the other way—focusing on the country’s  supposed peace. Indeed, the post-apartheid transition period when the African National Congress (ANC) spearheaded negotiations with the National Party are touted as remarkable for avoiding a collapse into civil war. But South Africa is extremely violent. As Africa Is A Country contributing editor Sisonke Msimang recently wrote for Lapham’s Quarterly, “After the historic 1994 elections that installed the ANC as the ruling party, there were hopes that the violence would end. Murders and rapes decreased in the years that immediately followed, but violent crime remained high. The gruesome statistics have once again begun to rise.” And while the mainstream South African media likes to portray this violence as cultural pathology, it too arises from deeper social and political realities, being most pronounced when citizens confront the post-apartheid state on its failures. 

In this week’s episode of AIAC Talk we’re asking what liberation comes after independence. We are joined by Sisonke Msimang, Oluwaseun Babalola, and Ishmael Beah. Sisonke is a South African writer whose work is focused on race, gender, and democracy, and on top of writing for a range of international publications, she is the author of Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018). Oluwaseun is a Sierra Leonean-Nigerian-American filmmaker; she founded DO Global Productions, a video production company specializing in documentaries. Her focus is to create and collaborate on projects across the globe, while providing positive representation for people of color; and Ishmael, born in Sierra Leone, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel, with his latest novel Little Family released in 2020.

But as former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson once said, “There is more politics in football than in politics.” Rather than separate from society, sports are often a mirror of it—a testament to the prevailing attitudes, to the evolving social and economic relations. If our society has become more globalized, commercialized and unequal, then the nature of sport will develop this way too. 

It is in the interests of the footballing world to project an image of itself as both separate from politics, while simultaneously also being ahead of it. For example, sports boycotts are widely lauded as an effective tool against oppressive regimes, and something which sports players, organizations and their investors are historically inclined to do. In the final analysis, sports emerge in divided societies as a “great unifier.” Describing how this narrative plays out in South Africa, the historian Peter Alegi writes:  

In the opening act, the consolidation of apartheid in the 1950s inspires sport activists to build an antiracist network seeking to racially integrate national teams, thereby casting sport in the political spotlight. The second act is set in the 1960s and 1970s as the sport boycott ostracizes white South Africa from the Olympic movement, world football, and nearly every other major sport—important symbolic victories in the larger quest for freedom. The third and final act unfolds against the backdrop of apartheid giving way to democracy in the early 1990s. Segregated sport federations merge into unified, nonracial institutions and South Africa’s re-entry into global sport is celebrated with home victories in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 1996 African Cup of Nations, unleashing a wave of rainbow nationalist euphoria throughout the sports-mad nation.  

But what would be the more complicated story? What if, rather than simply being made by politics, football itself was something that made politics too. Writing about the history of white football in South Africa, Chris Bolsmann observes that during apartheid, “white football players, organizations, and administrators maintained close links with Britain, the Commonwealth and the notion of Empire and were at the forefront of globalizing football.” 

Chris joins us on AIAC Talk this week to discuss the forgotten entanglement of South African football with English football at the nexus of empire. His most recent journal article is on the great English footballer, Stanley Matthews’ long association with South African football. Together with Peter Alegi, Chris co-edited South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond (2010) as well as Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa (2013).  

In this week’s AIAC Talk, we’re joined by Niall, Mazibuko Jara and Tasneem Essop to discuss and debate the question of whether South Africa’s left needs a new party. Some are not convinced – as this editorial of South African publication New Frame claims, “Party politics as a whole is an expression of the failures of the past quarter of a century and carries no possibility of a viable way forward, let alone any emancipatory prospects.” Instead, “a Left that could find a way out of the gathering crisis would need to be rooted in genuinely popular organisations, grounded in democratic practices, able to speak to the lived experience of the escalating social and political crisis and directly articulated to actual, existing struggles – from workplaces to communities and campuses.”

Or, should we be persuaded by AIAC Talk co-host Sean Jacobs, who, claiming that South Africa needs democratic socialism, wrote with Benjamin Fogel that, “Like it or not the majority of South Africans believe in democracy. Dismissing their belief as false consciousness and elections—which so many fought and died for—as a mere trick of the bourgeoisie, insults our struggle. Any future left project needs to begin with the premise that 1994 marked a victory for democracy and progressive forces, something that should be built upon rather than rejected or dismissed.”

Niall Reddy, from South Africa, is a doctoral student in sociology at New York University, Tasneem Essop is a researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and Mazibuko Khanyiso Jara is an activist, trainer and popular educator and a former national spokesperson of the South African Communist Party also serving on the Amandla editorial collective.

These debates often proceed as non-starters because there is very little precision over what exactly is being debated. Beyond the terms in use (which is what typically clouds things), there is a need to ask what is decolonization for? For all of its supposed weaknesses as a theory and practice, what need must it be addressing for it to demonstrate such resilience in spite of those weaknesses? This week on AIAC Talk we are exploring two scholars and activists whose body of work, though once marginal, are beginning to grow in prominence as these questions become more pressing. With Bongani Nyoka and Joshua Myers, we will discuss the social and political thought of Archie Mafeje and Cedric Robinson.

In his seminal text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson posits the group of black intellectuals challenging Marxism at the height of anticolonial consciousness as forming a distinct, political tradition, one whose critiques constituted “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.” What should we make of figures like Mafeje and Robinson, and the range of concerns they championed, which, although they did not use the term, could be read as a project to decolonize classical left-wing theory? What informs their resurgence today, and is it a project that in its assertion of an African cultural heritage, eschews the universal? Or, should we take our cue from Mafeje, who in his defense of Africanization in the essay “Africanity: A Combative Ideology” argued that “‘if what we say and do has relevance for our humanity, its international relevance is guaranteed.”

Dr. Bongani Nyoka is a Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, and is the author of two books on Mafeje: Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2019) and The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje (Wits University Press, 2020). Joshua Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 as well as a new biography of Cedric Robinson, which is called Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, forthcoming with Polity Books.

Much of the anniversary-related commentary on the legacy of the Arab Spring fixates on how this challenge failed. We are told to look at Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and especially Libya—things haven’t changed, or they are much worse than before. But, the mistake of this diagnosis is its assumption that the historical process started by the Arab Spring is complete. We are still in the interregnum from which it started, and for Iranian-American scholar Asef Bayat, the Arab Spring typified the political mobilizations characteristic of the interregnum, what he calls the “non-movement”—“Non-movements refers to the collective actions of non-collective actors; they embody the shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations.”

For Bayat, the post-2008 outpouring of non-movements constitute “revolution without revolutionaries”—but the journal Endnotes turns this on its head, noting that instead, “we are witnessing the production of revolutionaries without revolution, as millions descend onto the streets and are transformed by their collective outpouring of rage and disgust, but without (yet) any coherent notion of transcending capitalism.” From the Arab Spring itself to moments like #FeesMustFall, the non-movement provides the organizational form for a disorganized age. 

In this episode of AIAC Talk we explore how much longer the revolution will remain deferred, and are joined by Nihal El Aasar and Zachariah Mampilly. Nihal is an Egyptian independent researcher currently based in London and Zachariah is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York.

A new documentary, Murder in Paris, makes a notable contribution to undoing the silence around September. Directed by Enver Samuel, whose most recent films include Indians Can’t Fly in 2015 (about the death in detention of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol), as well as Someone To Blame in 2017 (about the eventual inquest into Timol’s death), the film, which features investigative journalist Evelyn Groenink’s quest to get to the bottom of Dulcie’s murder, adds to a body of work that seeks to relook unresolved and buried apartheid traumas. This week on AIAC Talk, we are pleased to be joined by Enver and Evelyn, author of Incorruptible: The Story of the Murders of Dulcie September, Anton Lubowski and Chris Hani. 

There are many families – like that of Ms September’s – who until now don’t know who took their loved ones, or where they disappeared to. For many, the scars are still fresh, the anger still deep. In our last segment we talk to Madeleine Fullard, who leads the Missing Person’s Task Team, an organization that emerged from the TRC and which is responsible for finding the remains of murdered anti-apartheid activists.

But, as women continue to wage these struggles, it is important to look beyond the North American and European history, and to recognize the contributions of feminists from elsewhere since as Rama Salla Dieng emphasizes for Africa Is a Country series “Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue”: “There has been a deliberate erasure of generations of women from Africa, The Caribbean, India and Latin America because they contest mainstream feminism so their voices should also be heard, the specificities and nuances of their diverse struggles acknowledged.” So this week on AIAC Talk, we’re interviewing Professor Shireen Hassim, Rosebell Kagumire and Rama Salla Dieng. Shireen, a South African academic, is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics at Carleton University, Rosebell is a Ugandan writer, award-winning blogger and pan-African feminist, and Rama is a Senegalese writer, activist and lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African studies at the University of Edinburgh.

This seems like a good thing. Now more than ever, Africans have access to not just content, but also big-budget content that is locally produced. Netflix, for example, is using original programming as a way to attract African audiences, a market which could grow to 13 million subscribers by 2025. Shows like Queen Sono, Blood & Water and recently, Namaste Wahala, have globally trended and made Africans feel like for once, they are the ones exerting cultural influence on the West rather than it being the other way round. But how true is this actually? As an AIAC contributor pointed out in a review of Queen Sono not so long ago, “Since Hollywood cinematic conventions have been entrenched as hegemonic cinematic conventions, the possibility for international filmmakers to work outside of that mold is almost impossible.”

Consider another recent intervention, this time by the acclaimed American director Martin Scorsese in Harper’s Magazine, suggesting that some artistic integrity can be salvaged through streaming if it’s structured around curation rather than content: “Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist,’ a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.”

So joining us on AIAC Talk to discuss how digital technologies are changing African film and TV are Mahen Bonetti, Dylan Valley, Sara Hanaburgh and Tsogo Kupa. First, we’ll be joined by Mahen, a pioneer in bringing contemporary African films to Western audiences. In the early 1990s, Mahen started the New York African Film Festival, which changed the way Americans consumed films from and about Africa. Mahen has also firsthand experienced the transformation from primarily offline viewing to being available on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Showmax, Iroko TV or Criterion Collection. We want to ask, what does the film festival look like in the age of streaming? And what stories are African filmmakers trying to tell, what makes one worthy of being showcased, and who is watching them anyway?

Then, we’ll talk to Dylan, Sara and Tsogo, who all happen to be AIAC contributors, with Dylan also serving on our editorial board. Dylan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and lecturer at the University of Cape Town, Sara is a scholar of African literatures and cinemas at St. John’s University, and Tsogo is a writer and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. It was Tsogo who made the observation about Queen Sono cited above, and with the three of them we’d like to explore the general prospects and limitations of streaming on the continent. While the more popular offerings on streaming platforms could crudely be seen as simply “candy floss entertainment,” more “content” in the ocean of mass culture–as distribution mechanisms, do they make it possible to, as Sara asks in a recent piece, “conceive of a future where African auteur films can enjoy shooting and editing on the continent, uninhibited by national and international politics…can African cinema find...]]>It’s no surprise that streaming services are growing on the African continent. Although Africa is treated as the final frontier of global internet connectivity, its fortunes are fast changing, indicated by heightening efforts to improve digital infrastructure and make data and broadband more readily available. So, as more Africans become digital denizens, streaming services are taking notice – the decision by Netflix in December to appoint Strive Masiyiwa to its board (a Zimbabwean businessman who founded of Liquid Telecom, Africa’s largest independent fibre operator), announces their serious intention to gain a foothold on the continent.

This seems like a good thing. Now more than ever, Africans have access to not just content, but also big-budget content that is locally produced. Netflix, for example, is using original programming as a way to attract African audiences, a market which could grow to 13 million subscribers by 2025. Shows like Queen Sono, Blood & Water and recently, Namaste Wahala, have globally trended and made Africans feel like for once, they are the ones exerting cultural influence on the West rather than it being the other way round. But how true is this actually? As an AIAC contributor pointed out in a review of Queen Sono not so long ago, “Since Hollywood cinematic conventions have been entrenched as hegemonic cinematic conventions, the possibility for international filmmakers to work outside of that mold is almost impossible.”

Consider another recent intervention, this time by the acclaimed American director Martin Scorsese in Harper’s Magazine, suggesting that some artistic integrity can be salvaged through streaming if it’s structured around curation rather than content: “Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist,’ a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.”

So joining us on AIAC Talk to discuss how digital technologies are changing African film and TV are Mahen Bonetti, Dylan Valley, Sara Hanaburgh and Tsogo Kupa. First, we’ll be joined by Mahen, a pioneer in bringing contemporary African films to Western audiences. In the early 1990s, Mahen started the New York African Film Festival, which changed the way Americans consumed films from and about Africa. Mahen has also firsthand experienced the transformation from primarily offline viewing to being available on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Showmax, Iroko TV or Criterion Collection. We want to ask, what does the film festival look like in the age of streaming? And what stories are African filmmakers trying to tell, what makes one worthy of being showcased, and who is watching them anyway?

Then, we’ll talk to Dylan, Sara and Tsogo, who all happen to be AIAC contributors, with Dylan also serving on our editorial board. Dylan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and lecturer at the University of Cape Town, Sara is a scholar of African literatures and cinemas at St. John’s University, and Tsogo is a writer and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. It was Tsogo who made the observation about Queen Sono cited above, and with the three of them we’d like to explore the general prospects and limitations of streaming on the continent. While the more popular offerings on streaming platforms could crudely be seen as simply “candy floss entertainment,” more “content” in the ocean of mass culture–as distribution mechanisms, do they make it possible to, as Sara asks in a recent piece, “conceive of a future where African auteur films can enjoy shooting and editing on the continent, uninhibited by national and international politics…can African cinema find distribution beyond the festival circuit?”

And actually, what do we make of the category “African cinema” to begin with? Monolithic description, or useful shorthand?

This week on AIAC Talk, we’re looking at both the successes (and shortcomings) of how places in Asia and the Pacific (like Bhutan, Vietnam, Japan and the Indian state of Kerala) responded to COVID-19, widely praised as avoiding the false dichotomy of saving lives or saving livelihoods. We are interested in developing a comparative perspective that refrains from oversimplifying it to a single factor. To help us assess these countries varied efforts we’ll be joined Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a development economist and professor of International Affairs at The New School, where her teaching and research have focused on human rights and development as well as global health.

Derek Hook, a South African-born professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and the editor of a recent collection of over 300 of Sobukwe’s letters called "Lie on your wounds: the prison correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe" (Wits University Press, 2019). Precious Bikitsha, a history graduate student at the University of Cape Town, researching the writings and contributions of black women to South Africa’s political history,. Phethani Madzivhandila, a pan-Africanist historian, activist and AIAC contributor.

More on Africa Is a Country: http://africasacountry.com

And then, from unpacking one medium, we move to another. Next, we’re talking to Aimée Bessire and Erin Hyde Nolan. Aimée is an affiliated scholar who teaches African art history and cultural studies at Bates College, and Erin is a visiting assistant professor at Maine College of Art, where she teaches the history of photography, and visual culture, and Islamic art. Both of them, are the authors of Todd Webb in Africa (Thames & Hudson, 2021), a collection of photographs taken in Africa by the renowned photographer Todd Webb. While his shots of everyday life in big, Western cities like Paris and New York are well-known, less so are the ones from his travels in Africa, taken in 1958 across Togo, Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, and what we now know as Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. That some of these countries were once known by different names, summarizes the period of tremendous change and upheaval that the photographs capture, located at the “interstices of colonialism and independence” as the authors write in the book’s introduction. We want to talk about the photographs, the people and places portrayed in them, but we also want to talk about the politics of photography itself—whose gaze reflects them, what narrative are they trying to push? For example, what are we to make of the fact that Webb’s project was commissioned by the United Nations?

Joining us to discuss Cabral’s legacy are António Tomás and Ricci Shryock. António is an anthropologist, trained at Columbia University and currently teaching in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Using newly available archival resources, António has just written a new biographical study of the life and thought of Cabral, called Amílcar Cabral, the Life of a Reluctant Nationalist (forthcoming, 2021). Ricci is a journalist and photographer living in Dakar, Senegal, covering West and Central Africa. She is also part of Africa Is A Country’s inaugural class of fellows, working on a project about the role of women in Guinea-Bissau’s liberation war.

For the first AIAC Talk show of 2021, we are joined by Achal Prabhala, coordinator of AccessIBSA, a tri-continental project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in the developing world, specifically India, Brazil and South Africa. As well as Indira Govender, a medical doctor and public health medicine specialist based at the Africa Health Research Institute, Somkhele campus, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Indira is currently working on projects related to TB infection prevention and control for The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and joins us to discuss COVID-quackery and denialism.

Our guest is Elleni Centime Zeleke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964–2016 (Brill, 2019) among other published works.

For today's show we are joined by Colombian multimedia journalist, writer, translator and author, Pablo Medina Uribe. Pablo has covered politics, sports, culture and their intersections, and has published in Spanish, English and Italian. His work has featured in Al Jazeera, Sports Illustrated, Fusion, Roads & Kingdoms, Africa is a Country, Latino Rebels, Play Too Much, Deutsche-Welle’s Generation Change Podcast, La Silla Vacía, Señal Colombia and L’Undici to name but a few.

Later in the show we are joined by Tony Karon, who teaches on the politics of global soccer in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He is editorial lead at AJ Plus and before that spent 15 years at TIME magazine, where he was a senior editor.

Today's episode looks at the relationship of hip hop to politics, both on the continent and in the US. Taking as a point of departure Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's article on the site, The Hip Hop President? in which she writes:

"First, while I don’t think hip hop support for Trump is particularly astute, I also do not find it so surprising. If getting paid is the aim, then capitalism is the game, and that by its nature will lead to all kinds of relationships to power. Second, it is a call for interrogating what really are our visions of liberation. If, as the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it, then can we really financially plan our way to freedom? Can we all be billionaires? And should that even be our goal? Simply put, can we get rid of racism if we don’t also get rid of capitalism?"

Su’ad is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, a scholar-artist-activist whose work examines the intersections of race, religion and popular culture. She is the author of “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States” and has a deep commitment to public scholarship. She is also Senior Editor at Sapelo Square, an online forum that celebrates and analyzes the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States, creating a space in which to reflect on the vitality of Black Muslim Life and the long tradition of Islam in Black America.

Su'ad is joined by Tseliso Monaheng and Warrick Moses. Tseliso, a longtime contributor to the site whose writing has appeared in print and online in Chimurenga, The Guardian, The Fader, Red Bull and Rolling Stone as well as New Frame, joins us from South Africa to give some perspective from the continent.

Warrick Moses received his PhD in African and African American Studies with a secondary field in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation project, "In the Mix," explores expressions of “mixed race” or “coloured” socio-political, linguistic, and cultural identity in Cape Town-based hip hop music. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the CIPHER Hip Hop Interpellation project at University College Cork, Ireland.

But is Trump really the worst thing that’s happened to America? As Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times not so long ago, “Everything we’ve seen in the last four years—the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable—is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations.” No group of people know the nature of America as this paradox of lofty dreams and failed state—open to all but selectively so—more than the people who desperately try to get in, and who in turn, America desperately tries to keep out.

Joining us on this week’s episode of AIAC Talk to speak about African migration to the United States are Abraham T. Zere and Aya Saed. Abraham is a US-based Eritrean exiled writer/journalist and Aya a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging unlawful detentions, counterterrorism practices, the criminalization of dissent, and systemic unlawful policing practice.

Why are Africans treated as the biggest threat, and not only in Europe where their dangerous journeys for a better life are much profiled, but in America as well, where little is spoken about them at all?

How has Trump’s presidency emboldened entities in border control and immigration enforcement like ICE so much so that they’ve become a logic unto themselves? Who else is empowering them? How has their evolution been enabled by successive US presidents, and why are they so hard to reign in?

Although Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari disbanded SARS on October 11, the demonstrations have persisted and have come to represent more than simply opposition to police violence, but a deep frustration with the status quo and the political class defending it. Driven by Nigeria’s youth, the protests are a seminal moment for discrediting widespread stereotypes that they are lazy and complacent, and reflect the disillusionment of young people globally who see the post-Cold War political-economic settlement as delivering nothing but inequality, joblessness, climate catastrophe and downright misery. They want something better.

Joining us to discuss these demonstrations and where they’re next headed are Sa’eed Husaini and Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Sa’eed is a political scientist based in Lagos and contributing editor to Africa Is a Country, and has previously appeared on AIAC Talk to discuss Nigerian politics, where he touched on some of the mobilizations which have preceded this moment such as Occupy Nigeria in 2012, the Take It Back Movement of 2018, as well as the #RevolutionNow movement started in 2019. How do these protests movements inform what we are seeing today? Considering that the #RevolutionNow campaign had protests as recently as August and is co-ordinated by a party platform, the Coalition for Revolution (CORE), how does its existence and efforts compare with the rapid growth of #EndSARS, which for now steadfastly remains a decentralized movement?

Annie is a British-Nigerian independent researcher based in London, working on legacies of empire and the complex histories of race. On a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera, Annie wrote that “The movement is being supported financially not only by the large diaspora and Nigeria’s biggest stars, but also by foreign celebrities, such as American rapper Noname.” Adding to this list are Cardi B, Rihanna, Drake, Trey Songz, Kanye West, Lewis Hamilton as well as football stars like Marcus Rashford, Odion Ighalo and Mesut Ozil. How do we make sense of this level of global attention, rare for protests happening in Africa? Does this express a newfound global consciousness around issues of police violence on the heels of #BlackLivesMatter international, or does their susceptibility to celebrity and corporate attention also make them easy to co-opt?

The co-authors sent out a survey to their colleagues and found they mostly teach works by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and J.M. Coetzee. The majority of writers that make the cut are from Nigeria and South Africa. In short, only a few canonical texts continue to dominate curricula.

Join us as we speak with Bhakti Shringapure and Lily Saint to discuss their findings.

Later in the program, they will be joined by Mukoma wa Ngugi, himself a novelist (author of six books) and Associate Professor at the newly renamed department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

Then, political scientist Christopher McMichael, from South Africa, will speak on the spread of right-wing ideas, conspiracy theories, and political movements on the continent, especially in South Africa where there is a significant white minority.

For more visit: http://africasacountry.com

We will also interview legal scholar Sohela Surajpal on reimagining what we mean by feminist justice.

Three years after independence, Nkrumah had promoted himself to President. It was a post he held until 1966 when his enemies in the army overthrew him (as Euro-American powers looked the other way). In Ghana, his ideas and memory were largely marginalized in the 1970s as its successive governments made a turn to the right. He died in Romania in 1972 following exile in Sekou Toure’s Guinea. Today, Nkrumah is making a comeback, and it is the impact of his legacy on today’s generation that we will explore on this week’s show.

This week we kick off our inaugural season of our weekly livestream talk show, AIAC Talk, with a discussion on the life and legacy of Steve Biko. Dan Magaziner (Yale University) and an editorial board member of Africa Is a Country joins us for the first half of the show. Magaziner will talk about his book, "The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977."

Two young South African activists and thinkers will join us in the second half of the show to talk about what Biko means today: pan-Africanist historian Phethani Madzivhandila and University of Cape Town student activist Alex Hotz.

For more visit http://africasacountry.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C6Lzc-xUHU