There has been intense investment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) across the African continent. The argument is that technological investment is the future. Relatedly, there has also been intense investment in Business, Technical, Vocational Education and Training (BTVET). While investments in STEM and BTVET are undoubtedly worthy investments, Africans tend to invest in them in juxtaposition with the humanities and social sciences. They problematically establish hierarchies in the disciplines — STEM subjects are superior to the arts — and not only invest more in STEM, but ironically cut investment in the arts and social sciences. In Uganda, the government even remunerates teachers in the natural sciences way higher (about USh4 million, over US$1,050) than their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences (USh1.5–2 million, about US$600). About 100 percent more.

As one watches the continent — especially black Africa — pitting STEM against the arts and social sciences, the irony is not lost that this was actually a British colonial policy. With lessons from India, the British did not support the opening of universities teaching the arts and humanities in Africa for fear that this would produce philosophers and revolutionaries. Thus, they opened colleges to train clerks, carpenters, engineers, and medical doctors. Established in 1922, Makerere College served all of East Africa before the opening of the Royal Technical College in Kenya in 1956. They opened Achimota College in Ghana in 1927 and Kumasi College of Technology in 1951. In Sudan, they had opened Gordon Memorial College in 1902. Apart from teaching Shakespeare, they feared that students educated in the arts and the humanities tended to craft anti-exploitation arguments and stir revolt.

What is entirely missing in our current World Bank-designed curricula that privilege the natural sciences over the arts is the understanding that the knowledge and practice of natural sciences are governed by politics. STEM and BTVET are social sciences in the first instance, before becoming natural sciences. The design of a chair is a political intervention; it is a radical negotiation. Furniture is not simply a quest for comfort and beauty, it is also an identity of class and social standing, like clothes. It is not an innocent assemblage of timber, glue and nails but a series of debates and histories, arguments and counter-arguments reflecting both the time and environment. So are architecture and mechanical engineering. They are legitimized and influenced by regimes of politics and violence. (I hope I’m not being too PhD!)

The truth is that without a firm ideological and moral guidance — rooted in the arts, theological and social sciences — STEM can be deployed in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, bring about ecocide, or gangster capitalism. Anchored right, the same sciences can be used in the manufacture of cancer treatment therapy. Internet technology has been used for the promotion of pornography, the commodification and objectification of women (Pornhub and OnlyFans) — a very profitable business — instead of being used for the advancement of the human condition.

I need to stress a couple of points here — with lessons from Iran. Firstly, investment in the social sciences and the arts is as crucial as investment in the natural sciences. Maybe even more so. If we look at Iran and the advances the country has made in the natural sciences (STEM), one has to appreciate the ideological anchors guiding its scientific breakthroughs. Schooled in the arts and social sciences of religion and spirituality, Iran’s scholar-Ayatollahs have been core guides in this journey. No wonder Iran is the only country with an anti-nuclear weapons fatwa — built on religious ethics and scholarly traditions — despite the country’s ability and capacity to make nuclear weapons. (You can argue with that if you like.)

The second point, again building on Iran, is that we ought to aspire to the best education, all the way to the top. We need as many master’s degrees and PhDs as possible. But at the same time, we will definitely need to create space for these PhDs to thrive. Notice that when individuals spend years immersing themselves in learning and acquiring knowledge, it is unlikely that they will double up as revolutionaries at the same time. (In an environment that privileges STEM over the humanities, earning a PhD is in itself an act of resistance. Even a PhD in STEM is a revolutionary act. One or two PhD scholars might double up as street revolutionaries — as has become commonplace in Iran — but being a graduate with this top qualification is a revolution in itself.) The point I want to stress here is that whoever is lucky enough to take power ought to invite PhDs and master’s degree graduates to serve the country. We need the best from among us, and presently, the best yardstick (could be imperfect, undoubtedly) is education. Power without the best brains and hands is nothing but itself a highway to national destruction (see what Trump is doing to the United States?).

I agree entirely. Many PhDs in Kampala, Nairobi, Accra, London, and New York have been entirely disappointing. And the disdain they receive is warranted. But this does not diminish the need for more of them. You cannot replace a well-trained football team — because of poor performance — with an eleven of untrained good people. It is also true that non-PhDs — even complete illiterates — have done amazing things. But there are more guarantees with educated folks than with our non-educated successful compatriots. If a PhD was taken as a metaphor for good education, and if a bachelor’s degree is undoubtedly good, why not aspire for the best that can be?

I will stress one more time: PhDs shine best under regimes of power that appreciate their learning. Again, the majority of PhDs are workers and thinkers. They can be revolutionaries too, but these are essentially workers and thinkers — providing the intellectual base for revolution. Under a regime of corrupted revolutionaries, PhDs would be as captured as everyone else.

Following the rabid embrace of IMF and World Bank neoliberal policies in the 1980s (to the point of calling university education a luxury), bwana Yoweri Museveni has been very successful in cheapening education and other higher qualifications. Realizing there would be no need for any public investment and local expertise (since the economy was in the hands of corporate capital from the western world), Museveni transformed himself into some form of AI engine or Google, with answers to each and every question; he is not only the country’s lead economist, but he is also the best virologist (COVID-19 showed us that), the best university admin, educationist, industrialist, linguist, cleric, all of them.

If Museveni recruits a PhD to work in his government — and there are so many examples — they have to subject their learning to his omnipotent expertise. And thus, despite the personal failing of many PhDs in Museveni’s government, their expertise was never needed in the first place. They fail for simply being there, not because of anything they would have done. The problem is that we have used “disappointing PhDs” under Yoweri Museveni to judge all PhDs. We needed a new yardstick, a new space to see PhDs in action, and Tehran has graciously offered us one.

Sadly, to underscore the extent of the malaise, even folks in the opposition actually agree with Museveni on the “uselessness” of educated folks. You’ll hear them repeating tired and hackneyed pronouncements that the “educated are the problem,” to which Museveni responds by giving the country a “cabinet of fishermen” — his own words. No country ever transformed itself by not deploying its best to safeguard its core interests. I will say it one more time: you cannot replace a team of professional, well-trained footballers — because of bad performance — with a team of fans, because they are good noisemakers. If there is anything we should take from Iran (and there are too many things to count), it is that the more PhDs, the more solid the country and the government.

The English Premier League and British football hardly featured notable African players before Arsène Wenger arrived as manager of Arsenal F.C. in 1996. The few high-profile exceptions were Tony Yeboah and Lucas Radebe at Leeds United F.C. and Daniel Amokachi at Everton F.C.

By the time Arsenal dismissed Arsène Wenger in 2018, he and the club had earned the distinction of being primarily responsible for mainstreaming African footballers in the top flight of the English game. At one point in the mid-to-late 2000s, at least seven of Arsenal’s eleven starters on any given match day were black, either the children of African migrants to Europe, African-descended players from the Caribbean, or, more to the point, players born in an African country. By 2025, more than two dozen African-born players had played for Arsenal, primarily due to Wenger’s doing.

At least three African players — Lauren, Kolo Touré, and Nwankwo Kanu — were regular starters on the “Invincibles,” the legendary Arsenal team that went unbeaten for a whole season in 2003–2004. It is also a striking coincidence that the last major player Wenger signed at Arsenal was an African: the Gabonese Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

In this way, Arsenal inaugurated a revolution about race in British and global football culture. On the field, represented by these players and their successors, Arsenal came to represent London’s diversity, especially its African diaspora. Arsenal legend Thierry Henry (his parents are immigrants from the French Caribbean; his mother from Martinique and his father from Guadeloupe) commented on the occasion of his retirement from the club that Arsenal, by being one of the first clubs to have black players at the heart of its team, became “the club of the people and the streets.” All this combined to cement Arsenal’s place in African football lore and to make it one of the most supported football clubs on the continent, especially among football fans who came of age in the 21st century.

Like other professional clubs at the pinnacle of the English game, Arsenal had historically recruited only white players from Africa. The first was a descendant of white South African settlers, Dan le Roux. He had an unremarkable career at Arsenal between 1957 and 1958, playing in only seven matches. The first black player to play for Arsenal was Brendon Batson, a Grenadian-born immigrant to Britain from Trinidad. Batson played 10 times for the club between 1971 and 1974 before moving to West Bromwich Albion F.C., where, together with Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham, he became part of perhaps the most iconic trio of black players at an English top-flight club in the 1970s. Batson’s signing also opened the way for a smattering of black players whose parents were also from the Caribbean to run out for Arsenal for the first time, and the side that in 1989 won the Gunners their first title in 18 years featured the unforgettable trio of Michael Thomas, Paul Davis, and David Rocastle.

When the Premier League was born in 1992, Coventry City F.C. was the first, that season, to pick an African footballer to start a league match: Peter Ndlovu from Zimbabwe.

It was left to Wenger to sign Arsenal’s first player from the African continent, Christopher Wreh, from Liberia. One of Wreh’s distinctions is that he is one of only two players (the other is Thierry Henry) signed by Wenger during Wenger’s time at both AS Monaco FC and Arsenal. But perhaps a more significant detail of Wreh’s biography and Wenger’s time at AS Monaco is that he is a cousin of George Weah, later president of Liberia, who, as a footballer, won the Ballon d’Or in 1995 — the first and still only player to have done so while representing an African country. Wenger’s relationship and success with George Weah at Monaco also explain his subsequent affinity for African players. (It bears mentioning that when Weah won the Ballon d’Or, he called Wenger on stage and handed him the trophy instead. Later, when Weah became president, he invited Wenger for an official visit and awarded him Liberia’s highest honor: “Knight Grand High Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption.”)

Christopher Wreh had a decent career at Arsenal, spending four years at the club and an additional three years on loan. He contributed to Arsenal’s FA Cup (scoring the goal that won the semifinal) and Premier League double in 1998. It was Kanu, however, whose 1999 arrival forever changed the perception of African players in England. He had previously won the UEFA Champions League with AFC Ajax and the Olympic Games with Nigeria. A proven winner and a tall, rangy player able to score goals from apparently impossible angles, Kanu was, in Wenger’s words, “a genius, creative, technical, brave, a player everyone admired.” He quickly became a cult hero at the club.

In 2000, Kanu was followed by Lauren, the son of Equatorial Guinean exiles who settled in Cameroon (for whom Lauren later played at the World Cup) and then Spain, where Lauren started his football career. In 2002, after a short trial, Kolo Touré joined Arsenal from an academy in Côte d’Ivoire. In his book about his time at Arsenal, Wenger singles out Touré, along with Sol Campbell, as “fundamentally important” to the success of the Invincibles. Bought on the cheap (he cost just 150,000 pounds), in Wenger’s words, Touré “became one of the best central defenders in the game.”

Next came Emmanuel Éboué, who also started his career at the same academy as Éboué in Côte d’Ivoire. (Yaya Touré, Kolo’s younger brother, had a trial at Arsenal in 2003, but Wenger decided not to sign him.)

These players, along with recruits from France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere (at one point, controversially, Wenger fielded no British-born players), would form the nucleus of Arsenal’s success in the first decade of the 21st century.

At the beginning of the 2010s, as that first group aged and moved on, Wenger made another run with a new crop of players and another group of African players at its core — including Alex Song, Alex Iwobi, Emmanuel Adebayor, and Gervinho. Both Song and Iwobi are part of African football’s familial legacies, respectively those of Rigobert Song and Jay-Jay Okocha. However, success became more elusive for Wenger’s second generation: these teams won the FA Cup multiple times and qualified for the Champions League every season, but never won the Premier League again.

By 2013, Arsenal fans were beginning to call for Wenger’s dismissal. With Wenger’s eventual retirement, Arsenal’s reliance on players from Africa also came to an end. However, Wenger’s successors would continue this legacy by signing the children of African immigrants in London, such as Eddie Nketiah and Bukayo Saka.

Wenger also signed a number of North African players or players of North African descent, most notably Mohamed Elneny from Egypt, Marouane Chamakh from Morocco, and Samir Nasri from France. And, from South and Central America, players like Joel Campbell (Costa Rica) and the Brazilians, Gilberto Silva and Julio Baptista.

When Wenger signed players like Kanu, Lauren, Touré, and Éboué, English football was still distrustful of foreigners, especially players and coaches from outside Europe. African fans, watching via satellite television, recognized themselves in Wenger’s Arsenal (he was one of the first foreign coaches in the Premier League). Their accents, hairstyles, fashion, and joyful football (though when they needed to, they could also play a physical style) stood in stark contrast to the tactics of their opponents at other clubs. Wenger also seemed unfazed by African players flying off every two years for a month to play in the Africa Cup of Nations, further endearing him to African fans who felt disrespected by Europe’s top leagues, their clubs, and football managers when their native sons were denied the opportunity to represent their countries.

Today, the African legacy at Arsenal is felt more off the field than on. Among the popular “Fan TV” outlets on social media for English Premier League teams, those aimed at Arsenal fans are the most diverse. On YouTube, Kelechi, a Nigerian immigrant scientist and Arsenal fan, is now equally recognizable as Saka. Kelechi autotunes afropop songs to describe his mood before giving his match analysis on AFTV or, increasingly, on his own social media channels. That channel and its offshoots have done more to mainstream African participation in the World Cup and the Africa Cup of Nations among young Euro-American football supporters. All this has cemented the view of Arsenal as open, welcoming, and diverse, and above all as representing democracy, antiracism, and forward-looking values, something in short supply on the continent.

There is, therefore, a grim irony in the fact that the same club spent years (from 2018 until 2025) advertising one of Africa’s most efficient dictatorships through its “Visit Rwanda” sponsorship. Although Arsenal’s sleeve sponsorship agreement with Rwanda has now come to an end, the controversy surrounding the partnership left unresolved questions about the contradictory relationship between global football branding, authoritarian image-making, and the political aspirations of the new generation of African supporters who found an affinity and identity with the club.

On the eve of Ghana’s 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifier against Sudan, Ghana Football Association (GFA) president Kurt Okraku joined the Black Stars players at the dining room of their hotel in Accra.

He didn’t take a seat. He wasn’t in the mood to. He had come neither to greet nor to eat, but to speak. And what a speech it turned out to be: a 17-minute monologue, a monumental meltdown, filled with fury and frustration.

The players — the likes of Iñaki Williams, Tariq Lamptey, Antoine Semenyo, Mohammed Kudus, and Jordan Ayew — were all there, sporting a soulless stare, awkwardly fidgeting as Okraku’s eyes scanned their faces, his mouth scolding them scathingly.

Kurt was hurt. A month earlier, the Black Stars had started their qualification for the 2025 AFCON on a numbing note: a 1–0 loss to Angola at the Baba Yara Stadium in Kumasi, the team’s first loss at the venue in 24 years. A few days later, it got worse: they drew 1–1 with Niger.

“We drew 1–1 against Niger?! You’re making me crazy!” Okraku complained at the hotel, slapping his temples with both hands. “Sorry, total disrespect to Niger, for me, yes. But it’s crazy! I can’t understand it!”

The next day, October 10, 2024, it got crazier. Ghana went on to draw against Sudan — a side coached by former Ghana coach Kwesi Appiah, whom Okraku had sacked years earlier.

Fast-forward to November 18. Niger came to Accra for the second leg and defeated the Black Stars 2–1. It was the last day of the qualifiers, making sure Ghana was not going to be at an AFCON for the first time in 20 years.

That game had been a culmination of accumulated humiliation. The Black Stars had played a whole qualifying campaign for an Afcon — six straight games — without winning a single one. The AFCON in Morocco was going to feature 24 of Africa’s 54 teams, and the Black Stars — four-time AFCON champions, a team that finished in the top four of six consecutive tournaments between 2008 and 2017 — had not been good enough to be a part of this 24. It was surreal and senseless, terrible enough to turn on another Okraku tantrum.

In truth, that rant at the hotel, as blunt as it was, felt like a stunt, not least because it wasn’t discreetly done. It was, in fact, officially filmed by the FA and shared on its social media platforms with the subtle narrative of a no-nonsense leader in control, a powerful, passionate perfectionist panning players for a poor performance.

The tirade was essentially a charade, which was unsurprising, because Okraku is a man who understands politics and its optics. According Muftawu Nabila Abdulai, who apart from being the reigning Sports Journalist of the Year in Ghana is also the biggest thorn in the flesh of Okraku’s administration, Okraku is a “smart politician.”

Okraku is a seasoned power player, without a doubt. He has earned his stripes, having been in the business of football administration for close to 40 years. This seems strange considering that he is only 55. But it can be explained by the fascinating fact that he founded Shooting Stars FC, a colts club in Accra, when he was just 17 — a demonstration of his prodigious talent for the trade.

He is well qualified, too, having undergone a tedious trajectory in tertiary education, one that took him from Ghana (the University of Ghana and the Ghana Institute of Journalism) to the UK (Emile Woolf College, University of Liverpool, and Manchester Trinity College) honing his skills in journalism, marketing, and football industries.

Returning to Ghana, he worked his way up the ladder, building his reputation across various roles, before earning a big break as marketing director with giants Hearts of Oak. He then worked with the Ghana League Clubs Association (GHALCA), before going on to found his own club, Dreams FC, in 2009. Dreams, under his laudable leadership, became one of the most well-branded, most professionally run clubs in Ghana — a beautiful breath of fresh air in a system saturated with stale standards.

Deservedly, he got elected onto the GFA’s Executive Committee (ExCo) in 2015, and in 2016, began serving on the organizing committee of the Ghana FA Cup. This was the role that raised his ratings through the roof: Okraku was seen as the orchestrator behind the transformation of the FA Cup into the most attractive competition on the FA calendar — perhaps even more attractive than the Ghana Premier League.

In October 2019, from the debris of the demolition of the GFA, detonated by the “Number 12” corruption scandal that toppled the 13-year reign of former GFA president Kwesi Nyantakyi, Kurt Edwin Simeon-Okraku emerged.

In the heat of a close and controversial election, Okraku pounced on power, despite not being the most popular or preferred candidate. The top two candidates, Wilfred “Palmer” Osei Kwaku and George Afriyie, had suffered setbacks: The former was disqualified and disgruntled, while the latter was bleeding from a beef with Nyantakyi, whom he had served as a vice.

According to Abdulai’s insider information, Okraku’s fortunes for the elections dramatically changed on October 24, 2019, the night before the poll, when Kwesi Nyantakyi himself — the shadow kingmaker and puppet master of the elections, despite having been banned by FIFA — effectively anointed Okraku as his successor by rallying delegates to vote for him.

Okraku was ordained in 2019, and maintained in 2023. Before assuming power, he colorfully campaigned on the manifesto mantra “Game Changer,” and after assuming office, rolled out a social media slogan dubbed #BringBackTheLove — a promise to restore public affection for the GFA and the Black Stars. His advent was the classic savior story — the heralding of a hero hewn by hype and hope, ready for history.

Seven years down the line, however, things don’t seem fine. That failure to qualify for the 2025 AFCON — a fiasco so frightening and unfathomable — was not just game-changing, it was also the coffin in which love for the GFA and the Black Stars was buried.

It is inexplicable how Okraku, one of the brightest brains in football administration in Africa — a man who serves as a CAF vice president and chairman of FIFA’s anti-racism and anti-discrimination committee — has overseen what can only be described as one of the most enigmatic epochs in Ghanaian football history. Enigmatic here, by the way, is just a euphemism for disastrous. It’s been so bad that not even qualifying for two World Cups has done much for his record or reputation.

Before delving into the details of the disaster, however, there has to be some contextual clarity. The two trips to the Mundial are not isolated successes: Women’s football has seen great growth and visible vibrancy, culminating in the Black Queens finishing third in the Women’s African Cup of Nations (WAFCON) and the Black Princesses (U-20) getting gold medals in the 2023 African Games. The U-20 male team, the Black Satellites, were champions of West Africa and Africa in 2021, and gold medalists at the African Games in 2023.

Even a critic like Abdulai, who is currently locked in a legal tussle against Okraku’s GFA, admits that Okraku has done well in transforming the GFA into a world-class institution, mainly across management and marketing. “His leadership style has leaned on corporate governance principles: structure, committees and decentralization,” Abdulai says. “Administratively, there has been emphasis on transparency, with regular congress meetings and public engagements.”

The GFA says its leader “stands as one of the most influential and transformative figures in modern Ghanaian football,” which, to be fair, on some level, isn’t entirely praise-singing. But, as Abdulai explains, “his failures outnumber his successes.” This is hard to argue against.

If the temperature of a country’s national team is often indicative of the state of its overall football health, then Ghana is feverish — suffering from a serious disease of decline.

Not only did the Black Stars miss an AFCON for the first time in 20 years, the previous two Afcons were also the worst ever in Ghana’s history. At the 2021 Afcon in Cameroon, Ghana went winless, and finished 19th out of 24 teams. At the 2023 Afcon in Cote Ivoire, Ghana went winless again, finishing 17th out of 24 teams. Before those two tournaments, Ghana had never gone winless in an AFCON in its history.

When Okraku took over at the GFA, the Black Stars were ranked 47th in the world and sixth in Africa on the FIFA Rankings. Seven years later, the team has dropped 27 places down: 74th in the world and 14th in Africa — its worst rating since August 2004.

The Black Stars have won just 40 percent of the games (30 out of 75) played under Okraku’s administration, without ever making it out of the group in any tournament.

Okraku’s administration has a master of arts degree in the hiring and firing of coaches, having successfully completed four courses in the last six years: C. K. Akonnor (January 2020 to September 2021), Milovan Rajevac (September 2021 to January 2022), Chris Hughton (February 2023 to January 2024), and Otto Addo (March 2024 to March 2026). It was an expensive degree, too, costing “over $1.1 million” alone in severance packages, according to Abdulai.

As a leader, Okraku has been “ruthless” — as Abdulai describes — in his pursuit of success, as seen in this saga of sackings. Ironically, he would be the first to be sacked if the GFA presidency was subject to public determination; if the ruthlessness of Ghanaian football fans carried any weight.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. The power to uphold or uproot Okraku’s administration is in the hands of the “football people,” as delegates within the GFA are known, and Okraku has these football people on a leash. They voted overwhelmingly to give him a second term in August 2023 and, two years later, voted unanimously in favor of an amendment to increase the presidential term limit from two to three, paving way for him to contest for another four-year term in 2027.

Domestically, the Ghana Premier League has suffered from a poverty of intrigue: There is a disheartening disconnection with the fans, attendances are at an all-time low, and murmurs of match-fixing still linger post–Number 12. The top flight is currently without a title sponsor: A promising three-year deal worth $6 million signed with betPawa in August 2022 was gone by November 2023.

Ghana’s CAF club ranking, which determines how many of its clubs can play in continental competitions, dropped from 19th in 2019 to 27th in 2024. It only shot back up to 14th due to a fairy-tale run by Okraku’s club, Dreams FC — a club that has brought him allegations of cronyism and corruption — into the semifinal of the CAF Confederation Cup. As chairman of CAF’s inter-club competitions committee, Okraku, more than anyone else, understands the pathetic paradox of a Ghanaian heading a body that oversees competitions Ghanaian clubs are barely qualifying for.

The perfect story to sum up the comedy of errors at the heart of the Okraku leadership is from January 2024.

In the wake of the dismissal of Chris Hughton at the helm of the Black Stars, the GFA said they were looking for a new coach who should be a “proven winner in coaching top men’s national teams,” and with at least “15 years of experience.”

Then they went on to hire Otto Addo, a man who had never coached any club or country in a substantive role, and whose CV roles read: “scout,” “talent coach,” “youth team coach,” and “assistant coach.” It was a decision that was beyond befuddling; blatantly bizarre — an appointment “through the backdoor,” as respected football administrator Kudjoe Fianoo put it.

Two years later, Otto Addo is gone, sacked 72 days to the 2026 World Cup. Yet Okraku stays, standing strong in a world of many wrongs. And like the motto of his club, Dreams FC, says, he expects Ghanaians to “still believe” in him.

Deep down, he knows that to expect this belief is to dream.

On May 13, the regional winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for best piece of unpublished short fiction were announced. The five were Lisa-Anne Julien (South Africa, Africa region), Sharon Aruparayil (India, Asia region), John Edward DeMicoli (Malta, Canada and Europe region), Jamir Nazir (Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean region), and Holly Ann Miller (New Zealand, Pacific region). They were selected from a pool of 7,806 entries, the second-highest number in the prize’s history. The regional winners will now progress to the final round of judging, and a winner will be announced in an online ceremony on June 30, 2026. The prize comes with a £2,500 cash award for the four regional winners and a £5,000 cash award for the overall winner. But what is perhaps more coveted than the cash prize is the winners’ publication on the Granta website. The storied London-based literary magazine has launched many African writers into the Euro-American mainstream, including Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Binyavanga Wainaina.

To be published in Granta in many ways announces that one has arrived, at least in the metropolitan Euro-American context. What happened next with Jamir Nazir’s winning story is, therefore, not only a scandal about AI fraud, but is also a revealing episode in a much longer history of how elite, metropolitan literary institutions have read — and misread — writing from the postcolonial world. While Granta does not participate in the judging of the Commonwealth Prize, it has an agreement with the foundation to publish the writings of all the regional winners on its website. This is how readers happened on “The Serpent in the Grove,” the winning entry from the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, which was published on May 12, 2026. The first few days after its publication, things were relatively quiet, but as more and more people read the piece, a maelstrom began to brew on the internet, with many accusing Nazir of having used AI to write the piece.

The saga would come to a crescendo on May 18, with posts on X (formerly Twitter) calling out the magazine and the Commonwealth Foundation. It was not just a matter of em dashes and grouping things in threes, a stylistic preference of AI and many writers alike. No, the tells were far less ambiguous — incomprehensible metaphors, parallelism, and stilted writing. The metaphors not only disoriented but also got in the way of the plot. By the end of reading the piece, one was left wondering what it was even about. Choice lines include: “Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth”; “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc”; and “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”

What exactly were the judges thinking when they selected this story? Surely, there were other, more worthy winners. According to Sharma Taylor, the judge for the Caribbean region, the story was selected for the following reasons:

Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority — a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.

If these feel like vague and uninspiring platitudes, that’s because they are. It is almost as if someone put postcolonial keywords in a blender and served up the slop. What they reveal is a critical vocabulary that has become entirely decorative — terms like “richly evocative,” “sensory detail,” and “melodic voice” floating free of any engagement with the actual sentences on the page. Nazir’s selection, therefore, is less about him using AI and more about the irony of Euro-American conceptions about the unintelligibility of postcolonial writing. Despite years of literary criticism seeking to undo the idea of the inscrutable Other, here we were. . . . 

Granta, understandably, went into a frenzy. Initially, it took down the piece from its website. Then, it put it back up. Amidst these vacillations, publisher Sigrid Rausing had somehow also decided to upload the piece onto Claude AI to assess whether AI had been used — an astonishing decision to participate in the use of AI themselves. Claude came back with a lengthy explanation — outlined in the letter authored by Granta’s publisher, Sigrid Rausing — that the piece was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.” But it cautioned that there were passages in the short story that “don’t fit the pattern” of AI. Passages such as: “Zoongie evaporating like sweat, rum courage scuttling, a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, a magistrate’s eyes not meeting his, a boy grown without a mother narrowing his eyes at the world.” As May 18 rolled into May 19, the tide had once again changed. Now, Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation were doubling down their respective positions: Granta on its decision to publish, and the Commonwealth Foundation on its decision to award the prize to Nazir. The Commonwealth Foundation explained that the writers who had submitted pieces to the competition had all committed to abiding by their entry rules and guidelines. In other words, it is up to writers to self-report their use of AI in the authorship of their pieces, an unlikely occurrence. They also emphasized that the piece had undergone a “rigorous” judging process.

The fact is that nobody but the writer can say with total certainty whether or not the piece was generated using AI. There are those who have done the stealth work of searching his social media profiles, particularly Facebook, where he appears to be an AI enthusiast and the author of what some deem bad poetry. Whatever the case may be, it is bad writing. Its elevation to a platform like Granta suggests that when it comes to postcolonial writing, the expectation is unintelligibility. Granta has attempted to distance itself from the fiasco by emphasizing in a new header accompanying the piece on its website that the magazine is not part of the selection process. That doesn’t minimize the damage.

There is something worth pausing over here about what AI actually does when it generates prose. Large language models do not invent anything. Trained on vast corpora of existing text, they learn to predict what kinds of sentences tend to follow other kinds of sentences. This means that when an LLM generates “literary” fiction set in the postcolonial Caribbean, it does not reach for originality — it reaches for the most probable version of what such fiction has looked like in the texts it has been trained on. It reproduces the expected atmospheric density, the expected weight of landscape and labor, and the expected imagery of poverty and endurance. The scandal is that the existing formulae for “authentic” postcolonial prose are already so codified that a language model can reproduce them convincingly. In this way, AI does not disrupt literary taste so much as expose its furniture.

Euro-American publishers have a history of misrepresenting colonial and postcolonial writing from the Global South. It is ironic, too, that Granta is the platform that launched Binyavanga Wainaina’s now-famed satirical essay “How to Write About Africa.” The Commonwealth Foundation jury, through their selection, has fallen into the trap of perpetuating tropes of poverty, silenced women, and stubborn survival. Others have pointed out that some of the judges themselves are from the Global South, which would mean it is not a simple story of metropolitan outsiders imposing their expectations. But actually, this would make it something more insidious: a set of aesthetic assumptions so thoroughly institutionalized that they can be reproduced from within. The whole affair reminds me of Amos Tutuola’s dealings with the British publishing house Faber and Faber, then under the helm of T. S. Eliot, in the 1950s. An untutored writer, he asked the editors to correct what he called his “WRONG English.” The editors did not, because Faber and Faber thought his writing depicted the unmediated utterance of the primitive Other, rather than the writings of someone who didn’t have mastery of the language. Tutuola, to his credit, had impressively discovered the novel form and applied himself diligently, through the use of a dictionary, to adapt and transform Yoruba folktales into novelistic stories.

Faber and Faber published what would eventually become known as The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952. Unfortunately for Tutuola, his desired edits were directly at odds with the aesthetic sensibilities and ideologies that Faber and Faber brought to bear on the novel. Within a Euro-American aesthetic chronology, his work was seen as a cultural artifact that discursively affirmed modernism’s necessary “primitive” Other. For metropolitan writers and editors, Tutuola could only be located within modernism, a partially formed subject with an “unsophisticated” West African mind, but could never be recognized as one of its authors, no matter how experimental and iconoclastic his writing. If we look at the paratextual material that surrounds My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, most notably the preface (written by a professor of comparative religion), it suggests that there is something exceptional about the novel that requires a non-literary, academic framing in order for readers to feel like they can navigate the narrative. This immediately places the text outside the realm of the purely literary.

No doubt Tutuola was gifted, but editorial irresponsibility meant that his writings were mismanaged. It is worth being precise about this: what was mismanaged was not Tutuola’s talent, which was considerable and which generated some of the most inventive English-language prose of the twentieth century, but rather the institutional frame placed around it. Faber did not celebrate him despite his linguistic unevenness; in an important sense, they celebrated him because of it. The “wrongness” of the English was the point — it authenticated the primitive. Here, the irresponsibility of the judges meant that, rather than seeing the AI for what it was, the nonsense writing was seen as ingenuity. The structure of the error is identical across seven decades: Incoherence that would disqualify a European writer is reframed as authenticity when it is attached to the right cultural geography. This is what the AI controversy ultimately reveals — not a new problem introduced by technology, but an old one made newly legible. The real question this affair leaves us with is why a particular form of trained, statistical incoherence was so readily legible to its judges as postcolonial seriousness. The answer to that question should unsettle us more than any language model.

“Today, it’s no longer about class struggle between capital and labor but about an economy that either serves life or death.” This remark by Gustavo Petro was at the center of a conference in Colombia on “The Economy for Life,” coorganized by the Progressive International, the Colombian government, and local think tanks. The phrase, cited by many participants, captures something real about the planetary crisis.

Climate change, external debt, extractivism, ecological destruction, hunger, and war all force us to ask what kind of economy is being organized and for whom. But it also reveals a danger in much of the contemporary progressive discourse: that is, the replacement of political economy with moral language.

An “economy for life” is a compelling slogan. Yet unless it is tied to the concrete interests of workers, distribution of income and power, and structures of global capitalism, it risks becoming too vague to guide policy. Neoliberalism has not been an abstract war against life in general. It has been, more specifically, a regime favorable to capital, as noted by David Harvey in his classic book on the subject. It has weakened labor, disciplined the periphery, restricted policy space, and reorganized the global economy around the requirements of capital accumulation. A serious alternative cannot simply be an economy for life in the abstract. It must be an economy organized around workers.

Welfare is not a moral abstraction. It is the concrete improvement of the living conditions of the majority, and the majority are workers. This is especially important because neoliberal ideology has consistently tried to erase workers as a political category. Under neoliberalism, there are no workers; everyone is, or potentially can become, an entrepreneur. It is a market world, with consumers and entrepreneurs, and no power relations. Progressive political economy must reject that narrative. The central subject of an alternative economic order is not the consumer or the entrepreneur but the worker.

This matters because the dominant diagnosis about the current state of affairs is often incorrect, and it also exaggerates the weakness of capital. At least since the 2008 global financial crisis, the dominant view has been that neoliberal capitalism is in crisis. There is a social and environmental crisis that has in many ways become one of political legitimacy, and the neoliberal order has suffered shocks. But the system has adapted to new circumstances remarkably well, and the foundations of the neoliberal regime remain surprisingly resilient.

Labor markets remain disciplined, unions are weak, and wage growth is sluggish. Inequality remains high. Fiscal policy remains constrained by policy rules, often implemented by progressive governments. Central banks remain independent and mainly concerned with inflation and bailing out investors. Progressive governments, even when elected, often find themselves operating within institutional limits created by neoliberal governments.

In that sense, neoliberalism is not failing. It is doing much of what it was designed to do. It has created favorable conditions for capital accumulation and has kept workers in line. Rising inequality, often cited as a sign of the crisis of the neoliberal order, is not necessarily a sign of neoliberalism’s breakdown. It is, in many respects, evidence of its success. The same can be said about environmental degradation or the crisis of democracy.

Another frequent misunderstanding is the comparison between the current moment and the crisis of the 1970s. The crisis of the 1970s was one of postwar regulated capitalism, or what is often called the Keynesian consensus. It was marked by intense distributive conflict, resting on two pillars that no longer exist: the bargaining power of organized labor and the ability of oil-producing countries, through the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), to influence global prices. Note that the United States was also a net importer of energy back then. Today the conditions are diametrically opposed. Organized labor is weak. OPEC’s relative geopolitical power has evaporated. The United States is now a major energy producer and a net exporter.

This is not the collapse of neoliberal capitalism in the way the 1970s marked the exhaustion of the postwar order. These are the tensions of a global capitalist society — what Branko Milanović would call “capitalism, alone” — that has already disciplined workers and much of the periphery. But precisely because neoliberalism succeeded in reorganizing the world economy, it also created the conditions for the undermining of some of its own economic structures.

The rise of China represents a change in the global order. China is central to any serious account of the new world order that has emerged in this century. China has become the world’s great manufacturing productive center. This was not an accident nor was it simply a Chinese national miracle. It was facilitated by US geopolitical and economic strategy. First through Richard Nixon’s opening to China in the 1970s, then through Bill Clinton’s granting of permanent normal trade relations and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The result is what has been called China 2.0.

The first China shock involved the export of low-cost manufactured goods that devastated manufacturing employment in most of the advanced countries and large parts of the periphery of the capitalist world. The second is more profound. China is no longer merely a low-wage assembler of simple consumer goods. It is now moving aggressively into high-tech and high-value manufacturing, including electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and more. China is in many ways part of the center, similar to its counterparts and rivals in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

This also requires challenging myths about advanced capitalist economies. One of the most persistent is that the advanced economies, especially the United States, abandoned industrial policy and have only recently rediscovered it. The rediscovery of industrial policy has been touted by Jake Sullivan, a member of the Biden administration, as part of the so-called New Washington Consensus, and, more recently, by the World Bank. But this is largely false.

The United States has long practiced industrial policy through the military-industrial complex; Fred Block called it a hidden developmental state that always provided strategic support for key technologies. What changed was not the existence of state intervention but the ideological narrative. It was free markets for the periphery and industrial policy for the center. The rise of China has forced the United States and Europe to be more explicit about what they do and have always done. They kicked the ladder away, as Ha-Joon Chang suggested, over and over again.

However, and more importantly, this transformation in production has not been matched by an equivalent transformation in monetary matters. The hegemony of the dollar remains intact. China’s rise has changed the geography of global manufacturing, but it has not displaced the financial and military architecture centered on the United States. The geography of money has been more stable than often understood.

This is the crucial point missed by most accounts of the new multipolar world order. This is not a simple transition from American to Chinese hegemony. It is a more contradictory process, one in which productive power has shifted significantly toward China, while monetary and military power remain organized around the United States. But neoliberal capitalism remains in charge.

This is particularly important for Latin America. The region is now inserted into the world economy in a dual peripheral position. Commercially, it is increasingly tied to China, often through exports of commodities and imports of manufactured goods. Financially and geopolitically, however, it remains subordinate to the dollar system and ultimately to US power, or the Donroe Doctrine, as it has been renamed. Latin American progressive governments therefore confront a world in which China offers markets, mostly for its commodities; credit, often with harsh conditions; infrastructure investment, with many strings attached; and manufactured goods, but not development.

This distinction is essential. The Global South is not the same thing as Raúl Prebisch’s periphery. The term Global South often obscures more than it reveals. It suggests a unity of interest that does not exist. China, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, India, and South Africa do not occupy the same position in the world economy. Nor should we assume that deeper ties with China automatically generate development.

China has a national strategy, as it should. It has no interest in promoting development in Latin America, or the rest of the Global South for that matter. That means development must be conceived from the periphery itself. It must be oriented toward workers, reducing social vulnerabilities by promoting domestic productive capacity, and external vulnerability by protecting policy autonomy. South-South integration can create opportunities, but it is not a panacea or a substitute for a national development strategy.

From the standpoint of development strategy, it is crucial to distinguish between what has worked in practice and what orthodoxy prescribes. What has worked in developing countries has not been fiscal austerity, full financial liberalization, or strict central bank independence. What has worked, when it has worked at all, are policies that reduce external vulnerability and expand domestic growth, while reducing inequality.

Some of these were applied during the Pink Tide in the region, admittedly under more favorable external conditions, before the 2008 financial crisis. Avoiding debt in foreign currency, accumulating international reserves, maintaining relatively stable nominal exchange rates within flexible regimes; raising real minimum wages; supporting transfer programs for the poor; using public banks to promote domestic technological capabilities; and promoting industrial policy, particularly using government procurement policies. Capital controls can help in some circumstances, though their effectiveness depends on institutional conditions and their usefulness is limited in a world in which the issuer of the global currency promotes financial openness and deregulation.

But this also means that the central political battle is against fiscal rules and austerity. The issue is not simply whether central banks should be independent or whether interest rates should be somewhat higher or lower. Those questions matter, especially in peripheral economies subject to the pressures of dollar hegemony and US monetary policy. Note that China keeps large amounts of dollar reserves and has not completely liberalized its capital account. But the deeper constraint is the self-imposed fiscal frameworks that prevent governments from using the state’s budget as an instrument of development.

Fiscal rules are often presented as neutral devices for credibility and stability. In practice, they limit the capacity of elected governments to expand demand, sustain employment, invest in infrastructure, and transform the productive structure. Fiscal policy is not merely a tool for short-run stabilization. It can create domestic productive capacity. It can sustain full employment, and, more importantly, it can create good-quality jobs, support domestic producers, and promote new technologies.

Public spending can shape markets and direct resources toward social needs that private capital will not meet on its own. Fiscal policy is the basis of Mariana Mazzucato’s entrepreneurial state. A serious development strategy requires fiscal policy to be used not only to compensate the poor but to build the productive and technological foundations of a more egalitarian society.

In the periphery, central banks do not operate in a vacuum. Their decisions are constrained by the global financial environment, especially by US monetary policy. Higher interest rates in the United States put pressure on developing countries to maintain relatively high rates in order to stabilize exchange rates, avoid capital flight, and contain depreciation that can be both inflationary and contractionary. But precisely for this reason, fiscal policy becomes even more central. If monetary policy is partially constrained by the hegemony of the dollar, then the struggle over domestic policy space must focus on freeing fiscal policy from rules that reproduce austerity.

Public investment is central. There is no serious development strategy without it. Nor is there a serious green transition without it. The idea that markets will spontaneously reorganize production around social and ecological needs is one of the great illusions of liberal environmentalism. Green development requires planning, coordination, and a state willing to discipline capital.

Policy autonomy is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It is desirable because it creates the space for policies that can directly increase the power of the working class. A state committed to full employment, good-quality jobs, rising wages, and stronger public services can fundamentally improve the lives of the majority. These conditions provide not only material security but also greater bargaining power for labor, giving workers a stronger voice in their workplaces and in society as a whole. Of course, this potential cannot be realized by top-down policy alone. It requires sustained organization from the bottom up to ensure that the benefits are widely shared and that the gains are politically durable.

The current geopolitical conjuncture may provide an opening for such a strategy. While the rise of China does not create an alternative economic system in the way the Soviet Union once did, the transformation of the global order may give peripheral countries, and workers in the advanced economies, greater room to maneuver. This space, however, must be used strategically to reduce external dependence and strengthen domestic productive capacity.

Even then, it is important to recognize the limits of this approach. Strengthening the working class will not solve every problem, as fundamental environmental challenges will remain, especially when the material interests of workers in the center and the periphery diverge, even if neoliberalism is defeated.

This brings us back to Petro’s phrase. An economy that serves life cannot be built by moral appeal alone. It requires confronting capital and rebuilding labor power. It requires understanding the hierarchy of the world economy. It requires recognizing that neoliberalism is not defeated, that the 1970s analogy is misleading, that China’s rise is real but partial, and that dollar hegemony remains central.

The great danger for the left is to substitute ideology for analysis. It is possible to agree with many of the goals of the “economy for life” agenda — better living conditions, public goods, ecological sustainability, food security, peace, and human dignity, to name the most important — while disagreeing with the diagnosis that sometimes accompanies it.

The problem is not that the slogan is wrong but that it can obscure the central conflict between capital and labor. It lacks an adequate analytical core based on the understanding of distributive and geopolitical conflict. It names desirable ethical goals but does not explain the mechanisms through which capitalism produces inequality, ecological destruction, financial subordination, and austerity. The task, therefore, is not to choose between moral urgency and political economy. It is to connect them.

In a video posted on Boiler Room’s Instagram, a voice declares: “Singeli is the national rhythm of Tanzania.” In just a little over a decade, Singeli, with its electronic, high-tempo fusion of Mchiriku, Taarab, and traditional drumming, has garnered more domestic and global acclaim than any other Tanzanian music genre.

Originating from the bustling block parties of Dar es Salaam’s working-class areas, Tandale, Manzese, and Mbagala, Singeli started as an underground trance-inducing sound. The state initially disapproved of its cheeky, sometimes vulgar lyricism, as well as the rave-like, uninhibited, and sexually suggestive dance culture, but the young artists who devised the sound saw entrepreneurial potential in its authenticity.

While the genre’s emergence is owed to the authentic expression of youth experience of uswahilini — a signifier of both the spaces and cultural practices that working-class Tanzanians embody — its ascension has largely relied on its universalization and mollification. You can now expect to hear Singeli in the streets, nightclubs, family events, political rallies, and government ceremonies alike.

Now, state officials have not only come around to embracing it as a source of national pride, but they have also vowed financial investment and commitment to its growth. In May 2025, the Tanzanian Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports (MICAS) solidified its investment by submitting a nomination dossier for Singeli to be listed in UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. An article reporting on a MICAS and UNESCO-organized workshop in preparation for the nomination put it aptly: “from festive events to political rallies, Singeli continues to evolve as a dynamic form of cultural and social expression, bridging generations and honoring tradition.”

How might we contextualize this dynamism? How might we understand the genre’s transition from underground working-class expression to something the Tanzanian state is eager to nationalize? One way is to interpret Singeli’s dynamism as, in fact, ambivalence. The genre’s ability to both challenge and reproduce dominant narratives — precisely what has contributed to its ascension — has also made it susceptible to state appropriation.

To understand Singeli’s prominence as well as its criticisms, it is important to situate its emergence within Tanzanian cultural history.

Post-independence Tanzania embarked on a nation-building project to counteract a colonial legacy that cast indigenous cultures as a source of shame. In his inaugural address to parliament in 1962, then-president Julius Nyerere charged the Ministry of National Culture and Youth with building a national culture that was both uniquely Tanzanian and globally compatible. At the forefront of this was ngoma (the Kiswahili word for drum, as well as traditional song and dance from Tanzanian ethnic groups), selected for its accessibility across the population regardless of religious or educational background. This national culture was expected to be supra-ethnic, such that ngomas from over 120 ethnic groups would merge and transform into unifying national ngomas.

Commercial ngoma dance troupes like Muungano or TOT in the urban landscape of Dar es Salaam quickly found that it was difficult to merge ngomas from different ethnic groups, which were intimately tethered to their own language and histories. They also found that it was ngomas like Sindimba of the Makonde and Lizombe of the Ngoni — both erotic dances from ethnic groups in southern Tanzania with an emphasis on kukata kiuno (waist gyration) — that were popular among urban audiences. However, the state viewed these ngomas as primitive and lewd and instead preferred to use the more restrained and desexualized ngomas as a national symbol. In her book Performance and Politics in Tanzania, Lauran Edmondson refers to these as “tourist ngomas,” which exclusively communicated the tasteful, respectable version of Tanzania invented by the state.

Of all the performance art forms inspired by ngoma that have sprung from Tanzanian urban centers, Singeli bears the closest resemblance. There is a likeness in the use of drumming and other percussive sounds as the backbone of Singeli, as well as an emphasis on performance and dance. The two genres are also similar in their uninhibited, sexualized expression through dance. A signature of Singeli dance culture is the chura dance, named after the frog position that women assume as they frantically kata kiuno and twerk on the ground. Sometimes men also echo this expression through kukata kiuno. The all-day ngoma parties of the old rural Tanzanian days closely resemble vigodoro — the all-nighter parties of today where the genre prevails.

Just as the ngomas that were deemed lewd, much of what makes Singeli what it is has often been criticized for challenging dominant norms around respectability that have prevailed since Tanzania’s flag independence. The initial reputation of Singeli as a genre for uhuni (hooliganism) is reminiscent of the moral panic around the popularity of Lizombe and Sindimba, which culminated in the latter being briefly banned from public performance in the early 1960s.

A key distinction, however, is that Singeli has been able to achieve the supra-ethnic quality that ngoma could not. In her dissertation, “The Struggle for Real Tanzanian Music,” Anke Van der Stockt interviews Singeli artist K. Mziwanda, who cites the genre’s generality as more representative of the national population than specific ngomas could ever be. She says:

To us, every tribe has its own traditional music. Zigua people have their music, Makonde people they have their own too, but we need to have one thing which will stand neutral and represent all the tribes. . . . That’s why I decided to do Singeli music because it can include all the elements from other traditional music and can get support from all the corners of the country.

Instead of awkwardly foisting ready-made ngomas, Singeli is an organic product of an urban cultural melting pot.

The result is a genre that is unifying and accessible in ways other artistic expressions have not been, but with core elements that are deemed lascivious and vulgar. The state’s response has been to embrace the former while criticizing and even outright rejecting the latter. Far more pacified versions of the genre have been platformed on state-sanctioned stages, with sounds and lyrics that are much less encouraging of the rave-like quality we were first introduced to. In an article in The Citizen reporting on a halftime show featuring Singeli artists, George Msigwa, the MICAS Permanent Secretary, assured audiences of “excessive” Singeli content before adding, “if any artist steps out of line, there are systems in place to address that.” The genre even features in political rallies as jingles for electoral campaigns, and in 2024, notable Singeli artist Montana Boshen released a Singeli track in praise of the ruling party, titled CCM Daima Singeli.

Singeli’s prominence exists at a very different time than its predecessor, ngoma. The state’s eagerness to nationalize Singeli is explicable when we consider its long-standing ambition for a symbol of national pride, even at the expense of the genre’s authenticity.

Scholar Francis Nyamjoh suggests that the performance of culture can be viewed as an adaptation to one’s environment, rather than through the binary structure of hegemony and resistance. The embodiment of uswahilini, and its manifestation in Singeli has not always been legible or accepted in mainstream Tanzanian media, so it is tempting to think of Singeli as a counterculture — as something wholly resisting dominant narratives. But when we use Nyamjoh’s framework, we see that Singeli is not necessarily resisting hegemony; it is instead a response of working-class youth to their living conditions. The way the genre sets itself apart is not by resistance, but by a strategy of creation. That is to say, Singeli is not trying to change core values; it is instead concerned with illuminating how these values show up in the environments where the artists reside.

The hit track Afande by Dogo Paten and Zuchu re-enacts dialogue between a police officer and the accused as they justify their choices as a matter of financial necessity rather than insolence. Zuchu sings, “Afande niache. . . . Nikadange, nipe namba ntawatumieni.” The first part translates to “Officer, let me go. . . . ” In the second part, we understand that the character is going kudanga (a slang term for the practice of entertaining for money, adjacent to — but not quite — sex work), and will thereafter send the officer some of the money made. It is a proposition said with the tacit knowledge that the officer will likely acquiesce to the promise of a future bribe. Afande addresses multiple societal issues, including poverty, crime, and the corrupt police force, while retaining its humor and simplicity. It is not resistance per se, but it illustrates how Tanzanians are maneuvering around structural shortcomings and financial insecurity.

Similarly, Meja Kunta’s Madanga ya Mke Wangu is also complex in its analysis of dominant narratives. Its lyrics depict an alternative framework for womanhood, but one that is perhaps even less geared towards dignity. In the song, a husband encourages his wife kudanga for their household income: “Kesho o usije kurudi bila hela/. . . . Kama ukipata bwana wa kizungu/ Nenda nae kwa Mpalange/ Mi mumeo nimekuruhusu kadange/ Mwaka huu wife lazima tujenge” (“Tomorrow do not return without money. . . .  If you get a white man/ Go with him to Mpalange/ I, your husband, have allowed you to entertain him/ This year my wife we must build”). The idea that husbands are the sole breadwinners is being subverted, sure, but through exposing a sordid power imbalance that could afford a man the authority to objectify his wife and her body for income.

Singeli and the artists who make it are not necessarily striving to be radical. The genre is more accurately a looking glass into the conflicting embodiment of Tanzanian values and norms, without a plea for any sort of intervention. To be clear, artistic expressions need not condemn what they are depicting to be considered valuable. The observation of an often-undervalued working-class population that constitutes the majority of the country is crucial.

But here is an example where an ambivalence — one that is actually read as neutral and ordinary — makes Singeli an easier site for appropriation. These lyrics, often received as the everyday happenings of uswahilini, are then viewed as the status quo, instead of what they actually are: symptoms of systematic inequalities that ought not to exist. Somewhere along a Singeli track’s release and its reception, there is a stripping of all confrontational quality. While the state does indeed go out of its way to pick on and amplify Singeli’s most mollified iterations, the genre’s offerings have, over time, also lent themselves to appropriation through their insistence on ambivalence.

The bulk of Singeli’s resistance lies in its sonic experimentation. But here too, it is difficult to ignore that the most hardcore interpretations of the genre — the ones that really lean into its rave-like, electronic qualities — are often met with local suspicion or outright disapproval.

Consider DJ Travella’s 2022 avant-garde, almost psychedelic album Mr. Mixondo, which would certainly fall under what the Permanent Secretary describes as noisy, but that marked my initiation from casual Singeli listener to fan. Or even the much tamer Sisso and Maiko DJ sets that are still able to blend the most interesting and unconventional makings of the genre with Kiswahili traditions — the DJ duo is often clad in white vests, with kikois wrapped around their waists and kofias to match. You would be hard-pressed to hear these iterations of Singeli on the radio, at the club, and certainly not at a state-sanctioned event.

Of course, this sort of co-option also relies on economic precarity. Singeli’s rise to being a sonic powerhouse has not translated into financial success for many of its artists. This is unsurprising and sufficiently discussed; the poor infrastructure that underpins the Tanzanian art scene turns all art media into risky endeavors. Artists often end up at the mercy of state sanctions, and in turn, the state can symbolically align itself with the working-class population that conceived the artistic expression, without changing the power dynamics that necessitated it in the first place.

It is difficult not to be cynical, but perhaps there is still room for the genre’s legacy to be one of genuine dynamism, and not one defined by how easily it seems to have been co-opted.

What is an Arab? In the US, where race is a particularly potent myth with real consequences, they have long been categorized as white — until Biden-era proposals for a new Middle East and North Africa (MENA) category emerged for the 2030 census, only to be potentially delayed by the Trump administration.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump himself seemingly benefited from appealing to Arabs as a distinct and unified racial group, one that grew increasingly disgruntled with the Democrats throughout the campaign period due to the party’s financial, material, and ideological support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. While some Arab Americans abstained from voting altogether, many shifted their support to the Republican Party. This is a clear reversal of the dynamics of the Bush presidency, which saw many abandoning the Republicans after their ruthless war on terror killed Arabs abroad and discriminated against them at home in the US.

Because of the lack of detailed research on Arab Americans that decisively distinguishes them as a racial or ethnic group as a result of this policy, data on their electoral impact is difficult to come by. However, many turn to the figures in Michigan to quantify their support; Trump won the pivotal swing state by a little over 80,000 votes, more than two-thirds of which came from Arab-majority cities Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck. The narrative that Arab Americans were something of a decisive factor in helping Trump win the election swirled in legacy media and even more ferociously on social platforms, where many Black Americans expressed feelings of abandonment after supporting pro-Palestinian advocacy efforts on the ground and online. TikTok’s attempts to mobilize Black Americans to engage in something of an anti-boycott gained hundreds of thousands of likes and comments, with particularly disgruntled individuals filming themselves pejoratively consuming Starbucks and McDonald’s products.

Despite their apparent support for the Republicans, the coalition formerly known as Arabs for Trump now identifies as Arabs for Peace after Trump and Netanyahu jointly presented the so-called “Gaza Riviera” proposal at a press conference in February 2025. This suggests that the thrust of Arab-American approval hinged not on support of Trump’s broader agenda, but a poorly informed belief that he would follow through on the false promises he delivered to end the genocide during a campaign rally in Novi, Michigan in late 2024. Online discourse between these two groups became rife with jilted feelings, with Black Americans voicing concerns that Arab Americans were exercising a kind of selfishness by being single-issue voters without considering how a Trump presidency could disproportionately subjugate Black Americans. So, when Trump backpedaled on his Gaza-related promises to Arab Americans, there was little sympathy to be found from other marginalized groups.

Indeed, one of the most successful mechanisms in disrupting solidarity between these two key demographics in the US is the legally enshrined racial identity of Arabs and North Africans as white. Many lamented that by voting for Trump, Arab Americans acted to protect their whiteness. Though discourse has intensified on the matter in recent years, the racial character of Arabs across Southwest Asia and North Africa has long been a contentious matter in the US, both legislatively and culturally. Famously, the legal battles of George Dow circa the early 20th century have become emblematic of the pursuit of functional and legal whiteness among Arab Americans. Dow’s petition, like the curious case of Arabs for Trump, prompts inquiry: who does it hurt to navigate the ever-changing racial caste system of the US by seeking privilege? Though once enforced through the law, this dynamic is now largely acted out through more discreet mechanisms — namely, cultural norms and social practices that keep the legacy of race-based oppression alive despite increasingly unstable anti-discrimination legislation in Trump’s America.

Between Arab and White, Sara Gualtieri’s 2009 book, describes her own Syrian community’s journey navigating racialized naturalization laws in early 20th-century America. Indeed, there were questions about their origins in Asia, which were equally confounding and ultimately found unfitting due to their differences from the so-called “yellow race.” As Gualtieri describes, the fight for whiteness was inextricably connected to the fight for Americanness, but even where they succeeded in achieving legal status as white people for the sake of naturalization, their social and thus socioeconomic experiences as new Americans remained racialized.

In wondering what makes an Arab beyond the particular lands of the Arabian peninsula, in the diasporic context, more discreet and marginal sub-groups are erased as broader racial categories come to the fore, defined by simplistic, colonially-established regional associations rather than longstanding historical ones. There is the obvious association with the Arabic language. However, the region commonly described as the Middle East, whose people are most often referred to rather generally as Arabs, is made up of many countries with over 60 different languages spoken. Additionally, Arabic is the primary language of record in many countries outside of what is considered the Middle East.

The next obvious unifier is religion. Despite the religious complexity of the region, it tends to be flattened through xenophobic essentialism that overidentifies it with Islam. American historian Joel Carmichael, the son of founders of the American Zionist movement and an active Zionist and scholar himself, wrote at length about Arab identity in his The Shaping of the Arabs: A Study in Ethnic Identity (1967), in which he chalks up Arab identity as a process of religious unification between disparate, nomadic, and primitive Bedouin tribes after the time of the Prophet Mohamed. His version of history is shared by a great number of ideologically aligned scholars who find the region to be underwritten by loosely articulated boundaries and groupings passed from empire to empire, possessing little claim over their lands, conducive to modern conceptions of nationhood. Carmichael, without explicitly naming it, begins his book by introducing the concept of the Islamic ummah, drawing on the religious idea that believers should primarily see themselves as part of a unified community. He uses this framework to challenge and weaken the significance of older communal identities and state structures that underpin the countries that later emerged in the Middle East.

Indeed, the Arab League of 1945 and other expressions of Pan-Arabism (and their success over Pan-Africanism) indicate some form of transregional self-articulation, but it is important to keep in mind the contexts of subjugation through which these identities emerged. As noted by Marc Lynch in an earlier AIAC article, racial formations in the French Maghreb and British Middle East, apparently distinct from those of the surrounding African and Asian countries, were imagined and forged by competing colonial agendas in the region. Pan-Arabism, then, emerging predominantly as an anti-colonial movement, reflects not any real technical Arab heritage across the involved nations, but a desire for strategic regional unification on the basis of coherence forged by shared linguistic, religious, and cultural qualities.

It is important to acknowledge that much of the Arab world is within Africa, possessing ethnic and cultural distinctions from the rest of the Middle East, and regional affiliations with other states on the African continent. Various interest groups, however, promulgate anti-scientific and anti-historical race-replacement theories that allege the erasure of indigenous groups throughout various North African countries — particularly the ever-contentious Egypt — with the intent to undermine their indigeneity through racial essentialism. This strategy is reminiscent, perhaps even an outpost, of the Arabization of Palestinians by Zionists, who will only refer to the indigenous peoples of the land unspecifically as Arabs. Of course, the distinction between northern Africa and the rest is needlessly constructed by race, a fact that is increasingly contested by North Africans themselves in the wake of a growing decolonial consciousness. Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, and Zachariah Mampilly note that the artificial separation of Middle Eastern and African Studies is itself deeply racial, often severing analysis and continuing to manufacture the notion of Arab-as-race. They point to the rise of emphasis on indigenous identities like Amazigh as a metric for growing African consciousness in the region that tethers the northernmost nations to the continent, rather than strictly to the Middle East.

Nevertheless, in the US, so-called Arabs, wherever they may hail from, so long as they are not Black, are legally white. For anti-Arab Americans, the Arab umbrella widens further; indeed, in the wake of September 11, anyone loosely appearing to be one may be a victim of racial violence intended for Arabs, including Sikhs. For this reason, one might argue that the Arab has functionally become a racial category. With the title Arab totally detached from its original referent, the term operates, like other racial categories, as pure Baudrillardian simulacra. As Baudrillard argues:

It is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory. . . .  but it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other.

Race itself functions just this way. Detached from its referent, essentializing and flat, a desert of meaning that becomes confused for the real terrain of lived experience along cultural, religious, ethnic, or national lines.

This subversion of reality is a weapon that sustains itself and is readily available to various interest groups. Zionists like Carmichael benefit from arguing the Arabness of Palestinians, because it grants permission to cast them away into other Arab countries, where they would apparently be among their racially indistinguishable kinfolk — close enough to home — just as George Bush benefited from flattening the Arabness of the 9/11 attackers, because it gave him an excuse to be geographically inexact in his foreign policy response so long as the missiles landed in the Middle East. Israel’s attack on Gaza has been framed, like the aggressions that preceded it, by an approach that erases Palestinian and its various religious, ethnic, and other textures, and prescribes Arab.

Although many Arab migrants embraced the pursuit of whiteness described by Gualtieri, Arab Americans have nevertheless maintained historical and ideological ties with communities situated at the opposite end of the American racial order. Malcolm X famously stated after his time in Egypt that he “was among brothers” and “felt the spirit of brotherhood,” experiences that later transformed his racial outlook. Indeed, Black Americans often shed their slave names for Arabic ones, embracing Islam as an avenue for self-determination and a vehicle for racial revolution. Although religious sects and institutions remained highly segregated as new expressions of Islam emerged to address the unique conditions of Black American life, a potentially status-quo-threatening kinship developed between Black Americans and Arab Americans along religious lines, even as many Muslims from Southwest Asia and North Africa viewed groups such as the Nation of Islam as excessively heterodox. Highlighting this legacy is essential not to overlook legitimate concerns regarding anti-Black sentiment as an element of Arab racial formation, but to understand how such sentiments function primarily to reinforce imperial power rather than materially improve the socioeconomic position of Arab Americans.

Counter to figures like Elijah Mohammed, Muhammad Ali, Amiri Baraka, and others who sought to develop Black America as a diasporic outpost of Africa and the Middle East, more heavily canonized and state-sanctioned individuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. publicly suggested that their solidarity should lie with Israel, not with Arabs. Black nationalist Edward Wilmot Blyden, who would later immigrate to Liberia, was amazed by “that marvellous movement called Zionism,” identifying a kinship between Black Americans and Jews, “closely allied both by Divine declaration and by a history almost identical of sorrow and oppression.” Marcus Garvey similarly maintained, “When the Jews said, ‘We shall have Palestine!’ the same sentiment came to us when we said, ‘We shall have Africa.’” In the 20th century, it seemed that rallying support among Black Americans for Zionism was (and remains) heavily dependent on religious affiliations. Despite the religious complexity of the Middle East, Islam has remained the central axis of solidarity between Black Americans and Arabs.

On the one hand, the racial essentialism underpinning the Arab other in the post-9/11 cultural landscape enables a uniquely diffuse cruelty in both domestic and foreign policy. On the other hand, the legal classification of Arabs as white erodes political visibility while promoting a racial narrative that undermines solidarity with other marginalized groups, particularly Black Americans. What the emergence of Arabs for Trump ultimately reveals is the strategic flexibility of Arab racial formation within the US: Arabs can be rendered nonwhite when surveillance, exclusion, and war are required, yet absorbed into whiteness when cross-racial solidarity threatens the geopolitical interests of colonial states invested in the Middle East, particularly the US and Israel.

More than a month has passed since the Democratic Republic of Congo qualified for their second World Cup, their first after 52 years. The intercontinental playoff was one of the most emotionally intense moments that I’ve experienced in my life. I can still hear the “Congo, hermano, ya eres mexicano!” chants echoing in my head. For a country that had waited and suffered, it was a collective release. But now that ample time has passed, the question that continues to resurface is: Now what? What can this moment actually bring to Congo at this critical juncture?

To answer that question, I think back to the beginning of my trip to Guadalajara, which was cobbled together at the final minute. The Congolese government included our media outlet on a chartered airplane that arrived on March 30, the eve of the match. After a long journey aboard an obscure Bulgarian airline, we landed in Mexico. My back was killing me, but the sheer excitement drowned out the pain.

It was my first time in Mexico, yet the airport felt strangely familiar. I decided to Google the airport to figure out why, and I saw that weeks earlier, I had seen it on television following the killing of El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco cartel. His death and the subsequent retaliation by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel caused widespread panic.

Yet, beyond the tension, there was a sense of order and structure about Guadalajara. After taking a stroll in the city center, I remarked that the streets could put Paris or New York to shame in terms of cleanliness. It is a simplistic way of thinking about things, but visiting Guadalajara — the cultural heart of this global South country of 130 million people — inspired me to imagine possibilities for my own country. If them, why not us?

In the streets, our Congolese delegation and traveling fans did not go unnoticed with our flags, chants, and colors. The local Mexican population responded by beeping horns and beaming smiles our way.

“Vamos Congo!”

All of a sudden, the corny slogans of football politicians make sense when they talk about our sport, “bringing the world together.” Although it was only for two days, I felt the solidarity in real time.

It didn’t help our opponents Jamaica that Mexico has a nominal regional rivalry with them during CONCACAF competitions. Therefore, support in Guadalajara drifted naturally toward the Congolese. The match itself was far from perfect. It was played at 1,500 meters above sea level under the effects of jet lag and very harsh sunlight. It was only natural, therefore, that the Leopards performance was tense and sometimes messy. Congo mostly dominated but couldn’t finish.

Earlier that morning, Cédric Bakambu’s father had told me, with unexpected calm: “We’re going to qualify. I had a dream. Look what is going to happen.”

I tried to remember his words of wisdom even after two of his son’s goals were ruled offside. But Papa Bakambu was right. In the 99th minute, Axel Tuanzebe rose to meet a corner. It wasn’t a beautiful goal, but that didn’t matter. The stadium erupted.

Born in Bunia, Ituri, a region scarred by conflict, Tuanzebe had just delivered a moment of collective release for a nation that had learned how to endure. The ball crossed the line, and with it, 52 years of waiting were erased. It felt fitting because this qualification was never going to be about being perfect; it was more about resilience. Tuanzebe’s unconventional but decisive goal was the third consecutive time Congo eliminated World Cup playoff opponents after 90 minutes. For years, mental fragility had been one of the team’s weaknesses; now, it is arguably our greatest strength.

After the final whistle, the scenes were unlike anything I had experienced. Congolese and Mexicans celebrated together in communion as the stadium vibrated with the chant: “Congo, hermano, ya eres mexicano!” A Mexican boy, maybe sixteen, begged one of my friends to give him his huge Congolese flag, and got emotional when my friend wrapped him up in it. In those moments, football transcended linguistic or cultural barriers. Suddenly, I no longer saw Congo and Mexico as distant worlds, but as two societies of the global South shaped by similar energies: hospitality, loud joy, music, and a deep attachment to ancestral traditions. . . .  and football.

Back in Congo, the celebrations spread everywhere from Kinshasa, of course, to Goma and Bukavu — regions marked by conflict and occupation. People took to the streets and sang the national anthem in scenes of pure joy. In Ituri, the birth region of goalscorer Tuanzebe, the celebrations were particularly important. The eastern province, home of the beautiful and endemic Okapi, is also rich in gold and cocoa. Their long-lost son’s success uplifted a region that badly needed it. In a country threatened by political balkanization and ethnic division, football had once again done what little else could: It reminded us that Congo is still one.

Now what? I think most casual fans would be content with sitting around and waiting for the World Cup to roll around in June, and who could blame them? Yet, my mind is already thinking about how we ensure that it doesn’t take another 50 years to get back to the World Cup. Because, what the Leopards’ qualification also exposed was the contradictions of Congolese football. Of the 26 players selected, only five played football as youngsters in Congo. Our diaspora carries our national team. That is an undeniable strength that we must tap into, but also a symptom of deep-lying structural issues.

For a country of over 100 million people, the untapped potential is immense. Congolese youth were blessed with football talent, yet due to a lack of infrastructure and qualified coaching, very few are scouted, let alone make it to the top.

This qualification must be an inflection point. It should mean that the Federation and the state invest in youth development and talent identification across all provinces. Without that, Congolese football will remain dependent on external systems. On one hand, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Many structures in our country are propped up on external foundations. Yet, football doesn’t have to follow that path; it can become a powerful tool only if there is a vision.

Upgrading football infrastructure is one obvious example. Professional stadiums are lacking in the Congo, but so are even more basic amenities, such as accessible community pitches. In Kinshasa, playing football on a decent pitch is not free, and far too expensive for most young athletes — a cruel irony considering football is supposed to be “the people’s game.” In many Western countries, and even elsewhere in Africa, such as Morocco, small quality football pitches have multiplied in working-class neighborhoods, allowing young people to practice in decent conditions instead of on dusty, uneven grounds.

Solutions do not necessarily require enormous creativity. One could imagine the government requiring foreign corporations extracting Congo’s vast mineral wealth to fund local sports infrastructure projects as part of their contracts. A football pitch here. A community facility there. The idea may sound simple, but it reflects a broader truth: foreign investment in Congo should not only extract, but also build.

Talent detection and youth development remain another major issue. Unlike Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, or even Cameroon, Congo still lacks a globally recognized football academy system. Yet sometimes, a single academy can transform an entire football culture. Paradou Academy in Algeria helped develop many of the local pillars of the current national team. In Congo, TP Mazembe’s Katumbi Football Academy — founded in the 2010s by then-president and former Katanga governor Moïse Katumbi — remains the only notable example. Still, it is a private initiative rather than part of a national structure.

External structures such as FIFA Forward funds, when properly managed, can also become transformative tools. Mauritania — ranked 206 in the world in 2013 and nowhere near the continental elite stage — used these programs to renovate infrastructure, modernize its federation, scout talent, and thereby qualify for three consecutive Africa Cup of Nations tournaments between 2019 and 2023.

Meanwhile, Congo is preparing to end four years of FIFA-led normalization with federation elections scheduled for May 20. Among the leading candidates is Veron Mosengo Omba, the well-connected but controversial former FIFA official who helped oversee the implementation of the FIFA Forward program worldwide.

As outlined, perhaps the worst part about the position the country’s infrastructure is in is that solutions are readily available. The diagnosis is not difficult or complex; the only uncertainty is in the possibility of successfully implementing far-reaching measures while the country remains in such a precarious situation.

It was in May 1979 — 47 years ago — that Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom. What followed was Thatcherism: the gospel of the market, the shrinking of the state, the insistence that even survival must pay for itself. Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing from 1980. What is less often remembered is how eagerly South Africa’s post-apartheid government took notes. In 1996, then deputy president Thabo Mbeki openly called himself a Thatcherite, and the government introduced the decidedly conservative Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy as the country’s new economic framework. The democratic government was, in other words, fawning over the Iron Lady.

That inheritance sits at the center of South Africa’s municipal crisis today. The core assumption that people can pay market rates for basic services in an economy with the highest unemployment rate in the world was always flawed. With expanded unemployment above 40%, the model of cost-recovery finance that Thatcherism inspired, where municipalities depend on selling water, electricity, and sanitation to residents, is not just impractical, but is also fundamentally anti-poor and anti-working class.

For millions of South Africans, survival is already stretched to its limit. Households juggle transport costs just to access work, rent or bond payments to keep a roof overhead, school fees and transport for their children, and the rising cost of food. In this daily arithmetic, a municipal bill is not simply another expense. It is often the tipping point between eating and going hungry.

The government itself keeps publishing evidence of municipal dysfunction — leaking infrastructure, billions in irregular expenditure flagged by the Auditor General, vast sums lost to interest payments on debt, and the outsourcing of basic functions that the state should be delivering directly. Austerity budgets are allocating less and less to municipalities. Yet rather than confront these failures honestly, the response has been to deflect — to blame poor residents and double down on cost recovery as the solution.

When residents cannot afford to pay, municipalities respond predictably: service restrictions, disconnections, and escalating debt. What politicians frame as a “culture of non-payment” is in fact a crisis of affordability, one rooted in structural unemployment and inequality that the state itself has failed to address. Instead of spending on service delivery, municipalities are wasting growing sums on what they call “revenue protection” — hiring contractors to harass and disconnect poor households. At the national level, budget reallocations have gone toward installing prepaid smart meters that automatically cut people off when they can’t pay. In the 2024/25 Municipal Financial Management Act Budget Circular, Treasury confirmed that R2 billion was reprioritized from the integrated national electrification program to fund a new smart meters grant. The electricity-poor are being made to fund the infrastructure of their own disconnection.

The state’s fallback is indigent policies, supposedly a safety net for the poor. But these policies reproduce the injustices they claim to address. To qualify, households must prove their poverty through bureaucratic processes that are often invasive and degrading. Many are excluded because of documentation requirements, administrative failures, or arbitrary income thresholds. As poverty deepens, the net is getting smaller, not bigger.

Across working-class communities, residents are also reporting inflated and inconsistent water bills that bear little relation to what they actually consumed. The meters are highly sensitive to water pressure fluctuations. When supply is unstable — which, in many communities, it frequently is — the meters record usage inaccurately. When water returns after a shutdown, the surge in pressure can cause meters to over-record consumption dramatically. Residents report being charged three to four times their normal usage, even during periods when the water supply was intermittent or completely cut off. The cruelty of this is almost geometric: communities suffer water shortages and then receive bills as though the taps never stopped running.

Local governments receive only around 10% of the national budget and are expected to generate the rest through service charges. This forces municipalities to operate like businesses in a society defined by deep inequality. That was always going to fail. What is new is how aggressively the state is doubling down on this approach rather than rethinking it.

Operation Vulindlela — the capstone policy of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration — is the latest iteration of a familiar South African story. We had RDP, then GEAR, then ASGISA — each representing a steady retreat from social responsibility toward market-friendly policy. As the name suggests, Operation Vulindlela is about “opening up” the economy to private investment, locally and internationally. In the realm of basic services, this means private companies gaining ownership and control over water, electricity, and sanitation. The problem is straightforward: private companies exist to generate profit. Once water becomes a profit-generating commodity, only those with enough money will reliably have access to it. The state is visibly failing to deliver services — but handing that failure to the private sector will not fix it. It will simply shift who bears the consequences, and poor people will bear them most.

The policy changes driving this shift are already underway: amendments to the Water Services Act; simplified legislation around public-private partnerships at both municipal and national levels; the creation of a National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency; the establishment of a National Water Partnership Office explicitly designed to turn water provision into “bankable projects.” Similar restructuring is happening across the electricity sector.

Municipalities receive most of their operating budgets through national government grants — funded, ultimately, by our taxes. A recent change ties those grants to conditions: metros can only access certain conditional funding if they have a “business plan” and begin restructuring their trading services — water, sanitation, electricity, and solid waste — in ways that open the door to private sector involvement. Revenue collection from households is itself a condition for receiving the grant. Municipalities are, in effect, being incentivized to squeeze their residents harder. In his recent budget speech, South Africa’s Finance Minister Enoch Godongwane confirmed that R27.7 billion (more than 1.5 billion USD) has been allocated over the medium term to this performance-linked Metro Trading Services Reform, with budgets cut for metros that miss targets. The program is also backed by a $925 million World Bank loan, which comes, as World Bank loans always do, with its own conditions.

Local government elections in November 2026 make this the right moment to ask what a just alternative actually looks like. The path forward is not complicated to describe, even if it will be hard to win. A new municipal finance model must guarantee universal access to basic services — not as a commercial transaction but as a right. That means significantly increasing national transfers to municipalities, implementing progressive taxation so that large corporations and wealthy households pay proportionally more, and fixing the broken billing systems that are currently penalizing people for water they never received. Right now, big corporations benefit from cheap water and electricity tariff agreements while poor households face rising fees and the threat of disconnection. The state spends money and resources on disconnecting people who cannot pay and on servicing World Bank loans. That money should be going toward expanding infrastructure and fixing leaking pipes, not installing smart meters designed to automate exclusion.

I have attended many artistic forums and hangouts around the continent. You soon realize that there are two types of artistic enclaves: those that have made it and whose framing and outputs fetch a good fortune from non-locals primarily, and the struggling artistic spaces, which are sighing in relief that somebody at least cared to keep the lights on, which they direly need, not just to sell, but also to make themselves affordable and accessible. I have noticed that expats don’t necessarily or quickly relate to local artistic expressions, new money types often lack the sophistication to appreciate them, and the struggling but appreciative class may be too broke to afford what is on offer.

Thus, most artistic spaces tend to be more of a charity affair, and none of the parties involved can derive the maximum anticipated utility from such exhibitions. A westerner may, for instance, buy a painting, but the motivation may be more sympathetic than authentic. For Africans who genuinely appreciate art, they may be locked out on two levels: sometimes artists and creatives feel obliged to cater to Eurocentric sensibilities, so locals may struggle to appreciate their work, and sometimes pricing may lock them out, as art becomes a luxury at that level.

This same dynamic is easy to trace as it ripples across the continent. The layered dynamics of desire, affordability, accessibility, and appreciation for artistic expression are the subject of the inaugural edition of this digital magazine published by the Pan-African Network for Artistic Freedom (PANAF) in December 2025. It brings together writers, artists, and activists from Zimbabwe to Nigeria, Uganda to Ethiopia, Kenya to South Africa, to examine the subject of artistic freedom — or more precisely, the grinding, daily assault on it. But what makes this collection remarkable is not its catalogue of outrages, although those are plentiful. It is the insistence that art, even under siege, remains the most potent weapon the dispossessed possess.

The introductory essay opens with a class-level observation and establishes the collection’s central tension. It describes a range of artistic expressions around the question of cost and affordability: the African nouveau riche lacks the sophistication to appreciate what they might purchase, and the struggling but appreciative class — the people who would most value the work — cannot afford the entry price.

This is not merely an economic problem. It is a structural one that weaves through every contribution in this collection. Writing from Sudan and Egypt, Reem Aljeally puts it plainly: “Class determines not only who creates art, but who gets to witness it, collect it, and sustain a career within it.” She describes how, in Khartoum, access to art education was theoretically open but practically constrained by social expectations that funneled young people toward practical fields. Those with family resources could study abroad; others taught themselves in informal workshops, only to have their work later dismissed as folkloric by the very institutions that should have nurtured it.

Aljeally’s piece is devastating because it refuses easy villains. The problem is not simply corrupt officials or indifferent elites — although those appear throughout. It is the way the entire architecture of cultural production, from art schools to galleries to grant applications written in fluent English, systematically excludes anyone without the right class credentials. “A young artist with fluent English could navigate these circles,” she writes. “Language barriers excluded others before their talent was even considered.”

If class is the collection’s first preoccupation, the female body is its second. Sanya Osha’s “Art by Rock Hard African Women” traces a lineage from San rock art to contemporary South African photographers Zanele Muholi and Ingrid Masondo, from the brutal exhibition of Sarah Bartmann in 19th-century London to Tracey Rose’s defiant performances. The through-line is violence: the colonial impulse to enslave, violate, and exterminate the black female body, and the artistic counter-impulse to reclaim it.

Osha recalls the attempted staging of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in Kampala in 2005. The then Minister for Information claimed the play would “undermine the morals of society.” The Uganda Medical Council offered support, arguing that the play promoted lesbianism and homosexuality. What they could not say — what Osha says for them — is that the play’s frank discussion of female anatomy and pleasure confronted the core that patriarchy strives to protect and conceal.

“The fear, ultimately, is of the vagina itself, and of the political reorganization that would follow if women controlled their own bodies.”

Muholi’s photographs — which prompted a South African arts minister to walk out of an exhibition, calling them pornographic — operate in the same register. They are not merely documentation but reclamation. “In a good number of her photographs,” Osha writes, “Muholi is able to wrest power away from her masculinist oppressor, thereby asserting her own strength, resilience, and individuality.”

Joel Mukisa’s “Artistic Repression Goes Regional in East Africa” traces a chilling pattern of transnational censorship. When Ugandan opposition politician Kizza Besigye was abducted from Nairobi in November 2024 and driven across the border to face a military court, it was not an isolated incident. It was part of a coordinated jumuiya — a regional strategy of silencing dissent across borders. Mukisa notes that some of the laws used to block Bobi Wine’s concerts were passed during British colonial rule. “The British also prosecuted any artist who practiced their traditional dances and culture, which were deemed satanic and obscene.” The postcolonial state, in other words, inherited the machinery of suppression and painted it in national colors.

Philani A. Nyoni’s “How Not to Go to Jail for Drawing Stuff” offers the collection’s most intimate account of this machinery in action. He tells the story of Owen Maseko, a Zimbabwean artist who created an exhibition called Sibathontisele — “Let’s drip on them” — depicting the torture methods used by the Fifth Brigade during the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s. Maseko was arrested and charged with “undermining the authority of the president,” spending years in legal limbo. His exhibition space remained cordoned off for half a decade, its windows eventually taped over with newspapers, then sealed with black-tinted film.

Nyoni’s genius is in the details he adds. He describes flying from Harare to Nairobi, worried about whether security would find 28 grams of dagga in his luggage — not because he carries drugs, but because Maseko, who has locs and is therefore presumed to be a Rastafarian, was recently caught with cannabis at the airport. The absurdity compounds: a state that once arrested a man for drawings now arrests him for the drugs he must surely possess, because everyone knows how artists look.

Not everything in PANAF Voices is despair. The collection repeatedly returns to the internet as a space of possibility, however compromised. Social media allows artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers. During Kenya’s Gen Z protests against the Finance Bill in 2024, protesters created Spotify playlists, turned their profile pictures into filters honoring the slain, and transformed X into a living archive of dissent. Darius Okolla’s own “Art is Maandamano” — which closes the collection — describes how young Kenyans weaponized their high school curriculum, pulling characters from Francis Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City and Timothy Arege’s Mstahiki Meya to articulate their grievances.

This is not naive techno-optimism. Chief Nyamweya’s Q&A on AI and art is a bracing corrective for anyone who thinks algorithms will save us. He describes training an AI storyboard agent and discovering that he spent more time crafting prompts than he would have spent simply drawing. He raises the ethical nightmare of AI models trained on artists’ work without their consent or compensation. And he points to the hidden cost: underpaid Kenyan workers exposed to violent content while cleaning AI training data for western users. “We can disrupt the production pipeline all we want,” he concludes, “but if we don’t disrupt the cold, capitalist logic of distribution and profit, we’re merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

The collection’s most hopeful contribution may be Soreti Kadir’s “Finfinnee is the Third Space.” Kadir distinguishes between Addis Ababa — the heavily surveilled capital of the Ethiopian state, where survival depends on selling one’s labor — and Finfinnee, the Oromo name for the same geographical location, which once served as a convergence point for the five Gadaa assemblies, where dialogue could continue for months under the branches of the sycamore tree. “Finfinnee is the site within Ethiopia where a multi-national class revolution becomes a possibility,” Kadir writes. “It provides the depth of recalibration needed for us to re-enter the communion of person-to-person dialogue, to extend mutual care and solidarity, and to remember a relationship to land that goes beyond extraction.”

This is the collection’s implicit argument, threaded through every piece: that the work of art is not only to protest but to prefigure. To imagine a space — Finfinnee, the digital commons, the occupied street — where different rules apply. Where the artist is not a criminal, the female body is not a battlefield, and the person who works the land is not an object of ridicule.

PANAF Voices Issue One is not a comfortable read. It is a meticulously assembled document of an ongoing catastrophe. But it is also a document of persistence. The artists described here — Maseko, Muholi, Babirye, the Gen Z protesters in Nairobi — have not stopped creating. They have found ways to speak when speaking is illegal, to draw when drawing is a crime, to sing when the state has banned the venue. The collection closes with an appeal: “Here is a call for the elite to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of life, and for the masses to join in the consumption of art.” It is a modest plea, given everything that precedes it. But perhaps modesty is the point. Art, after all, does not need to save the world. It only needs to survive it.

Playing in Mexico’s top men’s club football division, Liga MX, is not the most common career path for African footballers. However, there is a long history between Mexico and the African continent, including in football. That connection will surely deepen this coming June when at least three African countries make Mexico their “home base” for the 2026 World Cup.

The first player in history to play for a Mexican professional football club was a Moroccan footballer named Mohamed “Abdul” Abderrazak. Little is known about him, but he played at Club Puebla in 1951. The most successful era for African players in the Liga MX came in the early to late 1990s, when some of Africa’s finest players came to play in the league. The most famous were Zambian striker Kalusha Bwalya, who played for Club América in Mexico City, and Cameroonians François Omam-Biyik and Jean-Claude Pagal. Omam-Biyik and Pagal were members of the Cameroon side that shocked the world at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, beating defending champions Argentina in the opening match, and then going on to reach the quarterfinals. Omam-Biyik became a cult hero at Club America, while Bwalya, who currently serves as president of the Zambian FA, is unfortunately best remembered for missing an open net against Cruz Azul.

Later, the wonderfully creative Achille Emaná, who was Cameroon’s number 10, won the 2014 CONCACAF Champions League with Cruz Azul. In this era, Cape Verdean Djaniny Tavares (at Santos Laguna between 2014 and 2018) and Moroccan Oussama Idrissi (at Pachuca in 2023) also became fan favorites. Both countries are heading to the World Cup this year, but while both players have represented their national teams in the past, neither will be going this time around.

Currently, there are only three African men signed to Liga MX clubs (with one in the U-20 league), however, African women — especially a trio of stars from South Africa — are reviving the golden era of Bwalya and Omam Biyik in the Liga MX Femenil. They are Amogelang Motau (Tijuana), Hildah Magaia (who has recently left Tijuana for Deportivo de La Coruña’s women’s team), and Jermaine Seoposenwe (who is now at Monterey, where she has already won two championships after retiring from international duty). At the last Women’s AFCON, Liga MX had five players in the tournament. Liga MX Femenil has become increasingly popular and lucrative over the last few years, so it’s no surprise that African players choose it to showcase their talents.

In addition to local professional leagues, events of the last few months around the Men’s FIFA World Cup may have also signaled a new chapter in the relationship between African football and Mexico. This past March, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was in Guadalajara for its intercontinental playoff match against Jamaica. Thousands of Mexican football fans filled the streets and traveling Congolese fans were met with respect and love. The chant “Congo hermano ya eres mexicano” (“Congo, my brother, you are now Mexican”) became a rallying cry of solidarity throughout their visit. Before the match, the hotel staff in Guadalajara even gave the Congolese players a guard of honor, complete with pompoms and balloons. Win or lose, the team felt the camaraderie, which is something this 2026 World Cup will desperately need.

This is not the first year that African teams will be in Mexico for a World Cup. Morocco came in 1970 when, after boycotting the 1966 edition, African countries were awarded their first direct qualification slot. In 1986, both Algeria and Morocco represented the continent — Algeria couldn’t advance out of the group stage, but Morocco made it to the Round of 16 where they were eliminated by West Germany. This time, however, feels different. And, if the hospitality given to the DRC during the intercontinental playoffs is anything to go by, visiting African teams and their fans are in for a treat.

The DRC will be based in Houston, but will travel back to Guadalajara for a group stage match versus Colombia on the 23rd. They and their fans can surely expect the same passion and warmth they felt in March. South Africa has decided to set up a base camp in Pachuca, the capital of the state of Hidalgo, known by Mexican fans as the “birthplace of Mexican football.” Hugo Broos, South Africa’s manager, said he wanted the team to acclimatize to the high altitude of Mexico City before their opening match on June 11, so the nearby home of Pachuca Football Club was an appropriate venue. On a recent visit for a facility pre-check, he complimented quality and was taken back by the warm reception given to him by the Mexican people. Tunisia is choosing Monterrey as its base camp, where it will play two games. Khalil Chemmam — a former player that was selected for the 2018 World Cup squad but did not make the final twenty-two, and now a board member of Tunisia’s FA — said he hopes Mexican locals support his team.

Beyond the pitch, Mexico and the African continent share a deep history. According to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, about 2.6 million people in Mexico identify as Afro-Mexican, underscoring a significant but often underrecognized dimension of the country’s identity. They include people brought as slaves during Spanish colonization or more recent immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa itself. The most famous African person born in Mexico is the actress Lupita Nyong’o, who was born there while her father, an academic, was working there. She holds Mexican citizenship.

Afro-Mexican presence is also visible in football. Among the most prominent Afro-Mexican figures are the dos Santos brothers, Giovani and Jonathan, sons of Afro-Brazilian footballer Zizinho. Giovani, in particular, holds a symbolic place in this story, having started in the opening match against South Africa at the 2010 World Cup — one of the most visible moments of Afro-Mexican representation on the national team.

On the pitch, Mexico’s encounters with African teams have been limited but meaningful. Tunisia defeated Mexico at the 1978 World Cup, and South Africa famously opened the 2010 World Cup with a draw against Mexico on June 11, 2010. Sixteen years to the day after that opener, the same fixture will reappear as the opening match of the 2026 World Cup, echoing that earlier moment and symbolically renewing the connection between Mexico and the African continent.

On March 19, the vibe was — as the Danes would say — hygge at a small, volunteer-run movie theater in the southwestern district of Valby in Copenhagen. On offer was the Bollywood flick Dhurandhar: The Revenge. Diaspora Indian families, young Indian students with their European classmates, and desi expats with their Danish partners had all flocked to the theater to watch this highly anticipated film.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is the final installment of a duology that follows an Indian intelligence officer who infiltrates a Karachi crime syndicate and Pakistani politics while undercover as a Baloch named Hamza Ali Mazari, to upend the economic and political network that sustains terrorism in India. The first part, Dhurandhar, released in December last year, shocked but also endeared audiences with its gratuitous violence, jingoism, Islamophobia, and muscular Hindu nationalism. It became the highest-grossing Bollywood film of 2025 and is now the third-highest-earning Hindi movie of all time. For many fans, the second instalment did not disappoint. In fact, it turned up the dial on the gory violence and the blatant Islamophobia. It has now overtaken the first installment and become the second-highest-grossing Hindi film of all time.

The Dhurandhar duology is indeed a cultural phenomenon. This is evident to a global audience, not least to the Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who, while jogging with the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Hyde Park, was heard saying that his Instagram following received a huge boost in India when he mentioned that he had seen Dhurandhar before his recent visit to the country.

This was also evident to me during the screening of the final installment of the duology in Copenhagen. The audience celebrated when Hamza Ali Mazari ripped out the guts, tore off the limbs, or crushed the skulls of the “terrorists.” They erupted with laughter when the film’s leading men delivered quippy one-liners sprinkled into scenes of brutal violence. And when the blood-soaked Mazari emerged victorious and stood over his vanquished enemy, they swooned. Some even snuck in selfies, with the triumphant hero on screen in the background.

Why are the Dhurandhar films such a phenomenon? Because they relay an appealing story of a new India that is willing and able to enter the pits of unequivocal evil — which, for Dhurandhar fans, is personified by Pakistan — and eliminate the scourge of terrorism.

This framing of the new India is very much an extension of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own brand as a leader who can keep the nation safe. On the campaign trail in 2019, he routinely uttered the phrase “Ghar mein ghus ke marenge” or “We will enter your home to kill you.” This was in reference to the airstrikes carried out by India in early 2019 against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Balakot, Pakistan. They were in response to an attack on Indian security forces in Pulwama, carried out by a JeM member.

The same filmmaker behind the Dhurandhar films also made Uri: The Surgical Strike, which was released a few months before the 2019 Indian general elections and dramatized India’s 2016 operation across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It was — as the Government of India put it — a surgical strike inside enemy territory in response to an attack by JeM on an Indian army base in Uri in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Of course, the Dhurandhar duology also works because of the way in which it relays this story of a new India and its “War on Terror.” It strings the narrative arc around real events that have been a source of collective pain, trauma, and national humiliation.

The first in the series begins by depicting the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 by members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. After negotiations, and in exchange for the hostages, the Indian government agreed to release three militants. The film then depicts the 2001 Indian parliament attack, where one of the militants killed by the Indian security forces was also one of the Flight 814 hijackers. The film also references the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks carried out by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba operatives that killed more than 160 people.

Who are the culprits? In the Dhurandhar storyline, they are the radical Muslim evildoers, amply supported by the enemy within (namely, corrupt Indian politicians, Muslim criminals, and Sikh separatists). They are driven by the singular, pathological goal of destroying India. They all seem to coalesce around the criminal and political network in the Lyari neighborhood of Karachi. Here, crime bosses, currency counterfeiters, and illicit businessmen readily collaborate with politicians and the highest-ranking operatives of Pakistan’s intelligence agency. Together, they provide the funding, the political backing, the logistical support, and the weapons to carry out terror attacks in India.

The characters that appear in the film are based on real people like Rehman Dakait, the Lyari-based Baloch crime boss; Ilyas Kashmiri, the former member of Pakistan’s Special Service Group and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam (HuJI) and al-Qa’ida operative; Altaf Sattar Khanani, the Karachi-based money launderer; and Ajmal Kasab, the militant who participated in the Mumbai attacks along with mastermind David Headley. Even the Indian gangster Dawood Ibrahim, who is said to be behind the 1993 Bombay bombings, makes an appearance in the second instalment.

With evil depicted in this manner, Mazari emerges as the embodiment of the wounded but deadly nation, ready to seek revenge. Indeed, the onscreen violence is meant to represent the cathartic outburst of the Hindu nation. As if to drive home this point, one of the Flight 814 hijackers reappears in the final instalment. In the opening scenes of the first film, this individual triumphantly says that Hindus are a cowardly people. In the closing scenes of Dhurandhar: The Revenge, he is made to say “Bharat Mata ki jai” or “Victory to Mother India” as Mazari holds a gun to his head, before being shot dead.

The films also serve as vindication of Modi’s brand of politics, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction. In the films, the radical Muslim evildoers are portrayed as petrified by his rise to the political helm in India. For instance, one of the many illicit Karachi businessmen is shown as visibly anxious, watching the results of the 2014 Indian general elections on television. He is stunned that Modi emerges victorious despite all the money funneled into the rights groups, journalists, and civil society. Notably, Indian authorities frequently justify the crackdown on Modi’s critics by accusing them of carrying out “anti-national activities,” funded by illicit foreign entities.

Even the Modi government’s 2016 demonization drive is dramatized in Dhurandhar: The Revenge. The move that took 86 percent of banknotes in use out of circulation has often been described as a policy failure. Scores died as a direct consequence of the chaos created by this policy, some collapsing while in line waiting to withdraw money at an ATM. Yet, demonetization — repackaged as Operation Green Leaf — is portrayed in the film as a policy that stopped the flow of millions in counterfeit banknotes from Pakistan. No publicly available record concretely proves that this was, in fact, the real purpose of the demonetization drive.

To be sure, there is always a gulf between discourse and reality. The slick, cunning, and covert anti-terror operation depicted in the Dhurandhar duology may seem a far cry from the security and intelligence lapses that led to the 2025 Pahalgam attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. The Indian response across the Line of Control in the form of Operation Sindoor was meant to underline the “military asymmetry between India and Pakistan.” But the initial losses of “air assets” took the shine off the purported tactical successes of this mission.

Nonetheless, stories and narratives matter. And the narrative of the Dhurandhar films serves the purpose of boosting India’s self-perception as strong and uncompromising in its quest to vanquish what it regards as the forces of terror and evil in the world today.

The decapitation of Venezuela’s government. Saber-rattling over the annexation of Greenland. The US and Israeli war of choice against Iran. The opening months of 2026 have seen a dramatic escalation in Donald Trump’s bellicose militarism. And if much separates the three crises, what they share is the US president’s quest for American control over strategic flows of raw materials, whether that’s China’s oil and gas partners in Caracas and Tehran, or the more distant prospect of Arctic mineral wealth.

Elsewhere, the US resource offensive is playing out with far less bombast. Take the relatively quieter push to carve out an American sphere of influence in a country that once seemed peripheral to US designs: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A sprawling country in the heart of equatorial Africa, the DRC boasts considerable resource reserves, including copper, cobalt, and lithium. Metals like these are key for high technology applications such as microchips, electric vehicle batteries, and the most sophisticated weapons systems.

Already underway during Joe Biden’s administration, the US rapprochement with the DRC picked up speed with Trump’s return to the White House, when authorities in the capital, Kinshasa, purportedly approached the incoming US president to seek support in their protracted battle with breakaway militia groups in the eastern Kivu and Katanga regions. It was capped off this past December with the signing at the White House of a strategic partnership between the United States and the DRC.

Providing for special US access to the DRC’s mineral wealth, that accord followed up on last summer’s much-touted peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda, a country that supports the March 23 Movement (M23) paramilitaries in their devastating civil war with Kinshasa. Despite the White House’s claims to have ushered in a new era of peace in the DRC, fighting persists to this day. On March 2, the United States slapped sanctions on the Rwandan military for its continued support of anti-Kinshasa militia groups.

To some observers, Trump’s warming to Kinshasa builds on the minerals-for-protection approach first concocted in the spring 2025 minerals agreement with Ukraine. For now, the US government’s direct engagement with the DRC is largely limited to support for president Félix Tshisekedi — whom Trump praised as a “brave man” at the February 5 national prayer breakfast in Washington — and diplomatic advocacy for US investors. Yet American defense contractors, such as former Blackwater chief Erik Prince, are openly pining for closer security ties. Agents of Vectus Global, a new Prince-owned security company, were reportedly involved alongside forces of the central government in the early January battle for Uvira, an eastern DRC city abutting Lake Tanganyika.

Viewed from Congolese civil society, there is little doubt that the US push is about anything more than business. Without more democratic control of the country’s mineral wealth, the fear is that the people of the DRC could once again be left with a minimal share of the benefits as US capital embarks on an investment spree that seems most of all primed to grease the wheels of corrupt governance — and the balance sheets of foreign corporations. “Anti-corruption has been totally thrown aside by the American administration,” said Jean-Claude Mputu, a spokesperson for the Congo n’est pas à vendre (CNPAV, “Congo Is Not for Sale”) collective. “The Congolese population lives atop vast mineral wealth, but they don’t benefit from it because money is siphoned off by local elites, and because the foreign corporations that poison our soil pay off our political leaders so that they don’t face legal pursuits.”

The Trump administration’s attempt to carve out a foothold in the DRC is not without obstacles. The country is already under the sway of US rivals like China, whose companies are currently estimated to control some 80 percent of the DRC’s mineral wealth, including many of its prime, most secure assets. Tshisekedi, for his part, has opened the door to a surge in US investment, but seems just as keen to play competing foreign interests off each other. US industry insiders hope that Washington’s offer of a more proactive partnership, in contrast to Beijing’s hands-off approach, can level the playing field. But there are a few signs that China looks unsettled. On March 26, the DRC and China strengthened their ties with a new minerals cooperation agreement, which includes provisions for greater local processing of metals.

Leading the US counteroffensive are a new roster of investment funds, mining consortiums, and exploratory mining start-ups, all backed with critical US diplomatic support and public funding. Since Trump’s return to the White House, they have been laying the groundwork for a revived US sphere of influence in the DRC.

One actor to emerge in the US resource push is a relatively obscure company called Orion Resource Partners, which manages some $8.6 billion worth of global mining investments. It is now plying its entry into the Congolese market, having already established a foothold in places like Guinea and Namibia, where it harvests bauxite, iron, and lithium. With financial backing from the US government, last October Orion founded the Orion Critical Minerals Consortium (Orion CMC), a combined investment vehicle that raised $4 billion in capital.

In February, Orion CMC announced a partnership with Anglo-Swiss mining major Glencore, which ceded a 40 percent stake in its DRC operations to the US-led consortium in a deal valued at $9 billion. The partnership will give Orion CMC and its investors, including the US government, control over a share of the output from Glencore’s DRC copper and cobalt mines. In March, Orion CMC likewise provided financing for US-based venture Virtus Minerals’ acquisition of Chemaf, a Dubai-based mining corporation active in the DRC since the early 2000s.

Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the US government has been closely implicated in these maneuvers. In 2024, the Biden administration pressured the Congolese government to block the sale of Chemaf to the Chinese firm Norinco. The Trump administration has lobbied Kinshasa to sideline executives at the state-owned mining group Gécamines who opposed the handover of Chemaf to US investors.

Another critical gauge of support is the financial backstop provided by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which is propping up the private companies leading the US offensive. Founded in 2019 during Trump’s first term, the DFC is chartered to facilitate the projection of US economic interests abroad, providing seed capital for investments in external raw material supply chains. In December 2024, the Biden-era DFC provided over $500 million in backing for the construction of the Lobito Corridor railway designed to facilitate the extraction of minerals toward the Atlantic coast of Angola from landlocked Zambia and the southeastern DRC. The DFC’s $600 million investment in Orion CMC last fall is being billed as its largest capital injection to date, speaking to its strategic importance in Trump’s African mining push.

Then there’s the US tech sector. Silicon Valley is also carving out a direct stake in African mining, with its all-hands-on-deck bet on artificial intelligence feeding expectations of a surge in demand for critical minerals in the coming years. In the early 2020s, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was even rumored to be considering an acquisition of Glencore, the world’s largest mining conglomerate in terms of annual revenue.

KoBold Metals, a mining company founded in 2018, claims to use artificial intelligence and advanced research methods to chart out unexploited deposits of mineral wealth. The company counts among its investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund founded in 2016 by Bill Gates and whose stakeholders include Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg. In an agreement signed last summer with the DRC government, KoBold was granted seven exploratory permits for lithium, coltan, and rare earth deposits across 1,600 square kilometers of territory.

When US mining major Freeport-McMoRan moved to sell its DRC assets to Chinese firms in the mid-2010s, it looked like American capital was throwing in the towel. Faced with the steep costs of mining in a region riven by instability — and the litigation risks inherent to working in a business climate plagued by endemic corruption — US companies seemed at a structural disadvantage to the state-backed behemoths of the Chinese mining sector.

Ten years later, a new generation of US corporations is back and ready to get their hands dirty. They can also expect a long leash from a US administration that wholly assumes the transactional nature of its resource offensive in the DRC.

A 2025 investigation into Orion’s activities in Guinea from the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) uncovered evidence of bribes to Guinean officials to expedite mineral exportation, alongside other environmental and due diligence abuses. A 2023 industrial accident by an Orion subsidiary resulted in the spilling of some 7,500 tons of bauxite — an incident that the group’s executives sought to cover up. Internal sources told PPLAAF that the firm has yet to commit $15 million in pledged community investment contributions, as the profits of the country’s minerals systematically avoid the grasp of local populations.

“What is particularly worrying about Orion’s conduct in Guinea is the overall mismanagement and the fact that their sole and immediate interest is profit, regardless of working conditions and the effects on local communities,” said PPLAAF Executive Director Jimmy Kande. “This sets a precedent that should have alerted the DFC and prevented it from backing Orion as its operational arm on the continent, given the corruption allegations and environmental crimes that have been investigated, including by Guinean authorities, and which remain subject to ongoing proceedings.”

Orion CMC’s deal with Glencore also has the US government-backed entity potentially entangled in one of the more sordid corruption cases in the recent history of DRC mining. The deal brings the group — and its investors, including the DFC — into implicit partnership with Israeli mining billionaire Dan Gertler, who has been under sanction by the US Treasury Department since 2017. In its decision to sanction Gertler under the 2012 Magnitsky Act, the Treasury deemed that the Israeli mining magnate had amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the DRC. Thanks to a scheme to pay Gertler’s mining royalties in euros and not in dollars, Gertler has continued to skim off wealth from his partnerships with Glencore.

In 2017, the US Treasury estimated that the shortfall for the DRC’s budget, resulting from those dealings, amounted to some $1.3 billion. Musk has denied vying for the full acquisition of Glencore, but one study suggests that Tesla’s agreement to purchase six thousand tons of cobalt per year from the Anglo-Swiss firm results in $4–$5 million of annual royalties for the Israeli billionaire.

“Dan Gertler is perhaps the individual who has most profited from Congo’s mineral wealth. He built a massive system of corruption that was sanctioned by the US government, but which has been skirted with the complicity of Glencore,” said Mputu, of the CNPAV collective. “Everyone seems to have made their peace with this situation. With Trump’s return to power, one of our concerns now is that those sanctions get lifted to allow Orion to work with Glencore.”

The DFC and Orion did not respond to a request for comment.

But there can be little doubt that other priorities are taking center stage as the US returns to the DRC resource race. Trump, for his part, did not mince his words when he celebrated last December’s deal from the White House: “We’re going to take out some of the rare earth, take out some of the assets and pay. Everybody is going to make a lot of money.”

On the night of October 8, 2000, I left my university campus in downtown Cairo and drove to Giza, where I was to meet for the first time Ahmed Fouad Negm, the legendary leftist colloquial poet whose words had inspired some of the most iconic Egyptian and Arab protest songs since the late 1960s.

Negm had heard of me and asked to meet after learning of my role in organizing the mass student protests that swept the country with the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. As I made my way through the crowded streets, I realized I was being followed. Suddenly, two cars cut across the road, and gunmen in plain clothes dragged me from my car, blindfolded me with the Palestinian scarf I was wearing, and shoved me into the back seat of one of their vehicles. They sped off to Lazoghly Square in central Cairo, to the compound housing the Ministry of Interior and its secret police, the State Security Investigations Service (SS).

For four days, I endured a torture odyssey of beatings, sleep deprivation, and verbal abuse, blindfolded and stripped naked, threatened with rape. The final two nights were spent in a cramped underground cell with detainees labeled “jihadi” suspects. My SS interrogators believed they could intensify the pressure by locking a Marxist in with “Islamist terrorists,” hoping those hours between torture sessions would be unbearable. They would likely have been disappointed: I was treated with kindness.

The detainees shared food and tried to make space in the overcrowded cell. As we spoke, their stories emerged and were strikingly similar. None belonged to militant groups, but many had relatives who had joined one — or were simply suspected of doing so. SS arrested those relatives, then swept up all the men in their families, subjecting them to torture and indefinite detention without trial. The aim was not intelligence-gathering; the officers knew most were innocent. It was about sending a message: anyone who dared to resist the state would see not only themselves but their entire families, friends, and colleagues punished. This was Egypt’s war on terror — backed, armed, financed, and enabled by the West.

It was not my last detention. Over the next decade, as I pursued activism within the socialist movement, I remained a constant target of state violence. My political engagement began in 1996, during my sophomore year, and deepened when I joined the Revolutionary Socialists in 1998. I belonged to a generation that helped rebuild the left on university campuses after the collapse of the Third Wave of Egyptian Communism and the suppression of the 1977 bread uprising. As a student activist — and later as a journalist, photographer, and labor organizer — I regularly faced the security services, from raids, arrests, and torture to surveillance, intimidation, blacklisting, and smear campaigns. These experiences sharpened my determination to study the enemy and to deconstruct the war on terror, whose destructive impact I had witnessed both as a teenager in the 1990s and again in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution’s defeat.

Hosni Mubarak’s war on terror was long hailed as a success by local media and Western officials, providing a key rationale for sustained international support despite his failures in governance. After the suppression of the Arab revolutions (2010–13), counterrevolutionary regimes — including Abdel el-Sisi’s — revived this discourse to legitimize their rule at home and abroad.

My interest gradually shifted toward the faceless enablers of this war — the army, police, and General Intelligence Service — examining their ideology, interests, and interactions with both each other and the wider population. Together these institutions form one of the oldest and most powerful repressive apparatuses in the Middle East. Yet for decades, they remained fragmented, often competing even as they safeguarded regime survival. Understanding their internal dynamics is essential to grasping their role before, during, and after the 2011 uprisings.

Counterrevolutions are often assumed to restore the ancien régime, but Egypt’s trajectory under Sisi challenges this notion. While the counterrevolution triumphed, its leader set out to construct an entirely new order — what he called a “New Republic” or “Second Republic.” Figures from the Mubarak era may still linger, but their influence has steadily waned as they adapt to new rules in an unfamiliar political landscape.

My book Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic does not attempt a full anatomy of this order; instead, it traces its evolution through the lens of repression. I argue that Sisi, for the first time since 1952, succeeded in unifying Egypt’s coercive apparatus and empowering it to dominate the state. The result is a republic without a social contract, devoid of hegemony, locked in an existential war against its own people, and operating more like a colonial occupier than a national government.

At the 19th Ambassadors’ Conference in Nairobi last month, President William Ruto told Kenya’s diplomats what they are now for. Their missions abroad must function as "frontline engines" for trade expansion and investment attraction. Embassies will be evaluated on measurable economic outcomes. The language of regional stability and pan-African solidarity was present, but ornamental, a mere paragraph after the main argument. Kenya, Ruto was saying, can no longer afford to be the Horn of Africa’s conscience. It has bills to pay.

This was not a surprise to anyone who has been following Kenya’s domestic political landscape.

As of May 2025, Kenya’s debt service to revenue ratio stood at 67.1%, which stands at 37.1 percentage points above the IMF’s recommended threshold of 30% and second-highest among major African economies, behind only Nigeria, nearly four times the rate of neighboring Uganda. For every three shillings Kenya collects, two go to creditors before a single teacher is paid, a single road is built, or a single diplomat is deployed to calm a neighboring war. This is a structural condition that makes the performance of regional leadership not just expensive but also impossible under foreign debt.

Ruto arrived at the presidency in 2022 with genuine regional ambitions. He chaired the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Quartet mediating Sudan’s civil war. He launched the Tumaini Initiative in South Sudan. He deployed Kenyan troops to eastern DRC and positioned Nairobi as an alternative peacemaker in the Horn of Africa, which some analysts read as an attempt to fill the vacuum left by Ethiopia’s internal collapse, In May 2024, at his peak, he was at the White House as the first Kenyan head of state to receive a full state visit in 16 years, designated a major non-NATO ally, and celebrated as Africa’s indispensable partner.

Six weeks later, his parliament was on fire.

The finance bill that triggered the Gen-Z protests was not a policy error. It was a debt repayment instrument. The IMF publicly endorsed it as “an important step in correcting course,” the course being Kenya’s obligations under its Extended Credit Facility. When protesters held signs reading “IMF, World Bank Stop the Modern Day Slavery” outside a burning parliament, they were identifying the bill’s true authors more accurately than most diplomatic analysis managed. Independent human rights organizations estimated that in the crackdown there were between 60 and 65 deaths, with more than 1,200 arrests and more than 60 documented enforced disappearances. Two years on, the bill is withdrawn, and Kenya has drawn the logical conclusion: a state that cannot make autonomous fiscal decisions cannot credibly perform autonomous foreign policy. The state’s violence against its own citizens, and the IMF conditionality that provoked it, destroyed Kenya’s credibility as a neutral broker in precisely the moment the Horn needed one most. Sudan’s armed forces had already rejected Ruto’s leadership of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Quartet, accusing him of commercial ties with the RSF. Kenya’s credibility as a mediator in the Sudanese conflict further deteriorated when, in February 2025, Kenya hosted an RSF-aligned political roadmap, leading analysts to describe Ruto as a “war enabler.”

It would be naive and colonial to name this as a failure of Kenya’s rather than the economic system it is hostage to. The African Union has committed to financing 25% of its own peace operations. The remaining 75% comes from Brussels, Washington, and Beijing. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the body through which Kenya was supposed to be mediating Sudan, runs its peace and security division on EU Trust Funds. The AU Mission to Somalia received €1.94 billion from the European Union between 2007 and 2019; when Brussels threatened to reduce contributions, AU officials were unprepared, and the mission remained donor-dependent. The EU has now replaced the African Peace Facility with the European Peace Facility, a restructuring that explicitly allows Brussels to bypass the AU’s own PSC mandate and fund African military operations directly when it judges this as more strategically convenient. The architecture of African peace and security, from the individual indebted state to the regional body to the continental organization, is structurally dependent on external money that comes with conditions, directions, and the ability to be withdrawn.

To ask why Kenya could not be a neutral broker in Sudan is to ask the wrong question. Neutrality is a luxury unavailable to states whose fiscal choices are made in a foreign capital. The more honest question is: what would genuine African diplomatic sovereignty actually require? An African peace architecture that does not depend on the European Peace Facility for 75% of its funding, and African states that do not spend two-thirds of their revenue servicing loans before they can afford to send an envoy.

The AU’s first Debt Conference, held in Lomé in May 2025, gestured toward this by proposing a Pan-African Credit Rating Agency and reforms to enforce creditor participation in debt restructuring. It is a beginning. Whether those proposals survive contact with the IMF’s next review cycle is the real question, and the answer will determine whether the Horn has any prospect of being stabilised by Africans rather than managed by the conditions attached to the money that pays for the management.

Kenya’s pivot to economic diplomacy at last month’s Ambassadors' Conference was not cynical. It reflects the colonial economic system that, like Kenya, holds so many African nations hostage to debt repayment. It is a luxury to be neutral. It is a luxury to have an independent foreign policy.