Nelson Mandela, the first democratic president of South Africa (1994–1999), secured a catalytic and at times confounding place in world history. He was neither an enthralling orator, an imposing Great Man, nor a formidable intellectual. Yet his birthday, July 18, has been marked by the United Nations as “Nelson Mandela International Day.” He is the only former head of state in contemporary times to enjoy such transnational iconic status. Here, I claim that his unique place in history can be explained by how closely he resembles a philosopher king.

The “philosopher king” or “philosopher ruler” is a western philosophy concept that originates in the following claim by Greek philosopher Socrates, found in his mentee Plato’s book The Republic: “The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.”

South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More adds that a philosopher is not only a scholar of the subject, but also “an individual who has the capacity to make an original contribution to the development of philosophical thought and to the world of ideas irrespective of his [her] training in the discipline.”

Although the concept referred to state rule by the monarchy or aristocracy when The Republic was written (between 380 and 375 BCE), in contemporary democratic politics the term is not used literally. It has come to refer to heads of state such as presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors, as well as the remaining monarchs. It simultaneously captures the Janusian contradiction of an ideal form of rational and ethical leadership (the philosophical element) and a caution of autocratic leadership (the king, ruler, or political element).

Africa’s first post-independence heads of state, also referred to as “Africa’s Founding Fathers,” were conferred this mantle because they were not only political leaders but also thought leaders. Political scholar Vusi Gumede asserts that a “thought leader is someone who possesses the right kind of knowledge needed to challenge an existing paradigm in order to advance new thinking and to inspire others as well.” They challenged Western imperialist and colonial paradigms.

Despite their flaws, Africa’s Founding Fathers became beacons of inspiration for their people during the euphoric era of independence and decolonization. Collectively, as Africa’s philosopher kings, they formulated or promoted theories and concepts, delivered eloquent speeches, and wrote influential works pertaining to African communalism, African nationalism, African socialism, Afrocentrism, Négritude, Nkrumaism, Consciencism, and Ujamaa.

South Africa is a unique outlier in this landscape. After the colonial settlement of the Dutch from the 17th century — predating the European Scramble for Africa (1880–1914) — together with Britain’s colonial stake in the late 19th century, the country endured a further four decades of white minority, Afrikaner nationalist, and apartheid (separate development) rule. Thus, South Africa’s liberation was only realized in 1994.

Hence, Mandela became the last 20th-century post-independence leader on the continent to assume office. The delayed independence of South Africa provided Mandela with a unique vantage point to observe the successes and failures of other African leaders over four decades. Mandela read and studied widely throughout his 27-year prison term. He had the opportunity to contemplate, in solitude and together with fellow imprisoned comrades, the state of a nation and continent in crisis. Those reflections, the letters he wrote, and the meetings he held while still in prison refined his philosophy and politics.

His brand of philosophical leadership can be distinguished from that of his African (and global) peers by the absence of ideological purism and the presence of ideological pragmatism. This is his original and philosophical contribution to the world of ideas. Whereas purism leaves no room for the dialectical tensions inherent in human existence, pragmatism navigates gray areas, straddles contradictions, embraces paradoxes, and facilitates synthesis of equal and competing interests.

Arguably, this cultivated in him a range of ideal attributes that the philosopher king should possess:

For they are lovers of the knowledge of the eternal and of all truth; they are haters of falsehood; their meaner desires are absorbed in the interests of knowledge; they are spectators of all time and all existence. . . .  Also they are of a social, gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance. They learn and remember easily; they have harmonious, well-regulated minds; truth flows to them sweetly by nature.

Socrates acknowledges that it would be very rare to find someone who possesses all these qualities. I suggest that Mandela came remarkably close.

He was born into the Xhosa Thembu aristocracy and was destined to succeed his father as a chief but instead traded that role to pursue becoming a lawyer. He later became a leader of ethnic groups beyond his own as the nation’s “Madiba” — his family clan name. Those who met him speak of how he exuded nobility — Socrates’s “social, gracious disposition.” At the same time, he was “equally free from cowardice and arrogance,” as he was both assertive and humble. Giving up his inherited chieftaincy and stepping down after one presidential term distinguished him from African peers who aspired to lifelong presidential power.

As he rose the political leadership ladder, he straddled several ideological positions and tensions. At once, he promoted the African nationalism and socialism that undergirded much of postcolonial Africa and his party, the African National Congress (ANC). He subscribed to communism as a secret member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He became a patron of the multiracial United Democratic Front (UDF) while an inmate of Pollsmoor Prison in 1983. Ultimately, he presided over the architecture of the new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), which is acclaimed as a beacon of liberal democracy. Holding all these ideologies cultivated his proficiency in political, social, cultural, and ethical pluralism.

He initially advocated nonviolence when he joined the ANC in the 1940s, then changed his strategy as a founding commander-in-chief of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe paramilitary wing in the 1960s. During the transition to democracy, he subsequently pivoted definitively to nonviolence. The ability to entertain the continuum of violence from pacifism to radicalism inculcated his discernment of when violence serves a greater purpose and when it is merely gratuitous.

Once he was released from prison, he modeled the surmounting of “meaner desires” such as retribution by championing forgiveness and reconciliation. He became a leader who mediated between victims and villains to bring about a synthesis greater than the interests of either side.

Even though he is sometimes accused of abandoning the more substantive and economic claims of the Freedom Charter of 1955 when he became president, his moral compass was firmly trained on the charter’s preamble: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” The values of nonracialism and multiculturalism drove his proactive engagement with stakeholders of all races, ethnicities, religions, identities, and interests.

Affectionately known as “Tata” (the isiXhosa term for father), he displayed the kind of unconditional love that a “father” strives to have toward “children” of diverging personalities, different capacities, and competing interests. An apt demonstration of his cultural pluralism was his embrace of rugby (a sport historically dominated by the white minority as players and fans) when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and his successful support of the bid to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup in football (a sport dominated by the black majority).

As a revolutionary activist, he made the terrorist lists of many countries, only to be awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize — none of the other African philosopher kings had this privilege. He went on to become a consummate statesman who received more than 250 honors for his life’s work. His name became shorthand for “moral leadership.”

Haig Patapan, in his book Modern Philosopher Kings: Wisdom and Power in Politics (2023), argues that “democracy appears as the most formidable obstacle to all modern attempts to secure philosopher kings.” Yet paradoxically, there is a need for “noble attempts to civilize power and to empower wisdom.” We should bear in mind, though, that while “politics is open to wisdom and philosophy, there are also powerful elements within it resistant to such a union.”

Mandela’s ideological pragmatism intuitively and strategically located the sweet spot where democracy and aristocracy, wisdom and power, philosophy and politics meet.

Nigeria’s political system is becoming more concentrated around the presidency, with weakening institutional and electoral competition since 1999. The 2027 elections may become the first real test of this new order. If current trends continue, it could also become the most dangerous.

The primary issue in this case is actually Nigerians’ imagination of what politics could be or should be. For much of the electorate, politics has come to mean little more than voting for or against executive candidates every four years, whether federal or state, while legislatures and parties have become comparatively weak sites of democratic accountability, as such day-to-day governance remains distant and unaccountable.

This has coincided with a gradual and continuous concentration of power inside one ruling party. As of May 2026, the All Progressives Congress (APC) controls the overwhelming majority of the state governors in Nigeria. Opposition governors continue to defect into the ruling party, often less out of ideological conviction and more for political survival and proximity to federal power. The old multiparty equilibrium of the Fourth Republic is continuously waning.

The country’s recent electoral history reinforces this pattern. Muhammadu Buhari’s 2015 victory was driven by a widespread belief that he represented moral rescue: an incorruptible figure capable of restoring order to a decaying state. This messianic framing elevated a single individual as the solution to systemic failure rather than strengthening the institutions meant to address it. Bola Tinubu’s rise in the 2023 electoral cycle reflected a different logic but produced the same outcome. His “emi lokan” (“it is my turn”) declaration framed the presidency as political entitlement owed after years of elite bargaining within the ruling party.

We are increasingly seeing similar patterns emerge around both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi. Around Atiku lingers the language of “his turn,” a belief that decades of political persistence and repeated presidential attempts have earned him the right to finally occupy the presidency. Around Obi has emerged an intensely emotional movement in which supporters often frame him as a moral corrective to the Nigerian state itself. Across personalist divides, presidential politics consistently produce the same presidential imagination: the belief that national redemption lies in one man capturing Abuja.

This expectation persists even though Nigeria already functions politically in a more fragmented way. Voting patterns in recent elections reveal strong regional concentrations of support. Peter Obi maintains significant influence in the South East and parts of the South South. Rabiu Kwankwaso commands a loyal base in the North West, particularly Kano. Atiku Abubakar remains politically relevant in the North East. Political loyalty, voting behavior, and mobilization are deeply shaped by regional dynamics, even when expressed through national elections. Yet these regional political realities are forced into a single presidential contest that rewards total national victory.

The cost of participating in this system reinforces its exclusivity. The ruling APC set the price of its 2027 presidential nomination form at 100 million naira. This figure is significantly higher than the total legal earnings of a Nigerian president over a four-year term. It is also far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. With record inflation since the assumption of Bola Tinubu’s presidency and the severe collapse of working-class purchasing power, proximity to the federal government appears to many political actors as the only reliable route to financial security and influence.

Yet while politics becomes more expensive at the top, economic conditions continue deteriorating for ordinary Nigerians. The August 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests emerged from widespread anger over worsening living conditions after the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira. Policies designed to attract foreign investment instead intensified inflation and deepened hardship for millions already struggling to survive. Across the country, many Nigerians increasingly experience the state as an extraction site for the political class, who remain trapped within personality cults.

Within this context, the National Assembly has increasingly lost independence, operating largely in alignment with executive priorities. The APC dominates both federal and most state structures, leading to weakened legislative oversight and defections. The result is a system that is structurally concentrated and not fully democratic.

A more regionally representative political structure could potentially reduce some of these distortions. Regional politics would require less money, shorter campaign distances, deeper familiarity with local realities, and stronger governance credibility among represented populations. Politicians would be forced to maintain proximity to the people they claim to represent rather than disappear into distant federal power structures. Such a shift would not automatically eliminate corruption or political powerhouses, but it could weaken the dangerous overconcentration of political and economic power currently attached to the presidency and federal institutions.

If Bola Tinubu completes eight years in office while the opposition remains fragmented around presidential ambition, Nigeria could drift toward an effectively dominant-party system with little meaningful resistance at the federal level. The cycle would simply repeat itself in another election cycle: opposition figures exhausting themselves pursuing the presidency while gradually losing regional organizational strength.

Obi, Kwankwaso, and Atiku need to focus less obsessively on capturing federal power and more on consolidating genuine regional representation that could collectively form a formidable counterweight to whoever occupies the presidency. There would be a need to abandon the current obsession with presidential messianism for a politics that is more rooted in accountable political blocs with direct responsibility to their constituencies. Politicians would no longer campaign as national saviors promising miraculous transformation from Abuja. They would instead be compelled to negotiate, govern, and deliver within regions where their legitimacy is strongest.

Until political power is decentralized in practice, not just constitutionally, elections will continue to revolve around presidential capture rather than governance. Right now, presidential candidates are often too far removed from the people they claim to represent. Campaigns revolve around personality cults and messianic expectations rather than durable political accountability. The presidency turns every major politician into someone pursuing personal access to total power rather than someone building long-term democratic institutions. The future of Nigerian democracy lies not in endlessly fighting over Abuja but in weakening Abuja itself.

This would require a radical rethinking of Nigerian political culture: stronger regional autonomy, deeper local accountability, and reduced federal concentration. It would also require citizens to stop treating national elections as moments of emotional salvation. No president is coming to rescue Nigeria. As long as federal power remains the ultimate prize, politics will continue rewarding patronage networks, political dynasties, and financial gatekeeping over competence or ideas.

Over the month of April, multiple headlines announced a “decline in marriages” and an “increase in divorces,” proclaiming with alarm that the institution of marriage was in crisis, that Tunisian women had become too fixated on their careers to care for families, that there were fewer childbirths and more abortions, and that the falling fertility rates may no longer replace the aging Tunisian population.

Since then, these “crises” have become a site of intense political debates. Asma Jabri, the minister of Family, Women, Children and the Elderly, called for the state to urgently implement a strategic plan to help Tunisians “prepare for their married life.” For her, improving “positive communication” between the husband and the wife was all that was needed to preserve the institution of marriage and magically bring the fertility rates up; the weight of rising living costs, stagnating incomes, and growing unemployment were secondary in Jabri’s explanation of the demographic shifts.

As I scroll through discussions over these “crises” on Facebook, I wonder if the ghost that haunts the Tunisian mind is not only the fear of a shrinking population but also the society’s “colonization” by sub-Saharan migrants, threatening to make Tunisia black. Since the pandemic in 2020, the belief that Tunisia was becoming “African” — as black migrants are ironically called across North Africa — has seeped into conversations across cafés, WhatsApp groups, and social media. Sitting next to me in a café in Tunis back in 2022, Riadh, a Tunisian man in his 70s, told me with fear that “in about 20years, the Tunisian population will be majority black since the Africans are arriving in mass and the Tunisians are suffering from a crisis of values.” Like him, many Tunisians I spoke with said that all the good Tunisian men were migrating to Europe, that the black sub-Saharan men were luring away all the good Tunisian women so that they could multiply into black children, that black women and men were too sexual and too fertile, and that a million of them were already colonizing Tunisia.

This empirically empty logic was later espoused by Tunisian President Kais Saied in 2023, describing the black migration as “a criminal arrangement that has been prepared since the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” And these ideas continue to circulate, in spite of evidence that this migrant population has never exceeded 50,000.

The demand for dignity — a revolutionary call that filled Tunisia’s streets in 2011 — has been desecrated by the governing elite to mean the preservation of state sovereignty and purity, as scholar Nadia Marzouki has noted. And what is emerging over the last three years is that sovereignty has become synonymous with reproducing racially pure Tunisians — Arab and Muslim rather than African, as President Saied himself put it. The political intent to annihilate the black migrant population, be it by expelling them into the desert lands in Algeria and Libya or drowning them in the sea, is also the one that is coercing Tunisian women to stay in their marriages, however violent they may be, with the hope that this would lead to more childbirths. And the duty of preserving Tunisia’s sovereignty has fallen onto the bodies of women: on Tunisian women to act as reproductive citizens, and on black migrant women to control their excess sexuality.

This obsession with racial dynamics of reproduction is neither new nor confined to black migrants alone, as many black Tunisian citizens often told me. Starting from their childhood, black Tunisians — who make up between 10 and 15 percent of the total population — are socialized into the racial lines that separate who they can love and marry, with racial endogamy being the norm. Marriages between black and non-black Tunisians lead to fantasies about the skin-color of the future children, with non-black families often praying that their “family blood doesn’t turn into black savages.” In the case of black migrants, endogamy is not only expected but it is hoped that they do not reproduce at all and that they disappear without any trace.

The moment reproduction becomes a question of sovereignty, any state control over women’s bodies becomes morally justified. In Tunisia, political rhetoric calling for this control is already growing; while Jabri suggests schooling women in family values to coerce them into childbirth, parliamentarian Fatima el-Masdi has called for the state implementation of a “radical solution” whereby birth control will be forced onto black migrant women.

The increasingly explicit project of racial purity opens the possibility of state-sanctioned reproductive control, with policies that have dangerous historical precedents. For example, el-Masdi’s suggestions can be used to justify forced sterilization of black migrant women, similar to those carried out by the Nazi German regime on women they considered racially inferior or biologically flawed. In addition, calls for coercing childbirth among Tunisian women can justify the dismantling of family-planning services, including legal access to abortion and contraception that Tunisian feminists have fought for since the country’s independence.

Trends towards these alarming prospects are already visible in Tunisia. For example, in 2013, parliamentarian Najiba Berioul proposed to criminalize abortion, employing Islamic pro-life arguments similar to those found among Christian conservatives in the United States. And while the 1973 law guaranteeing access to abortion remains in place today, medical staff often pressure women to continue unwanted pregnancies. In parallel, the state has sought to control migrant reproduction by making it difficult for pregnant migrants to access medical care in spite of the universal right to health care enshrined in the Tunisian law. These difficulties include racially discriminatory behavior from medical staff, language barriers, as well as the fear of getting deported. Often, these black women give birth in makeshift migrant camps without any medical assistance.

While the conceptual fluidity between individual dignity and national sovereignty has derailed the democratization project towards racial nationalism, this fluidity may paradoxically serve as “an enduring resource for democratic revival,” in the words of Marzouki. Today, the deadly border infrastructure that Tunisia is expanding in the name of sovereignty kills not only black migrants but also Tunisians who dare to imagine their own freedom of movement. This shared human condition can itself become a site to claim collective dignity, as the “kulna muhajirun” (“we are all migrants”) banner that led the march against racism on June 20, 2026, already demonstrates.

Property investment and xenophobia are two extremes of spatial apartheid in South Africa. Where do we draw the border? Two recent developments proved that the question of who belongs where is still being settled. On June 30 in Durban, the March and March movement told a crowd of more than 5,000 that it would return to the streets every Thursday for six months, until every undocumented migrant among them was gone. On July 2, the Constitutional Court found that the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government had, for a decade, failed their constitutional duty to create affordable housing within the city.

In 2016, the Western Cape government sold a disused remedial school on Sea Point’s Main Road to a private Jewish day school for R135 million, setting off a decade of housing activism demanding social housing on the site. Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla, delivering a unanimous judgment this July, explained that a city’s architecture tells the story of its soul, and that Cape Town’s still tells one of division, of spatial apartheid. Location, she said, is not a peripheral consideration in housing policy but integral to it.

The displacement and alienation of black people in South Africa predates democracy and apartheid, was structural to the development of modern South Africa, and will not end with a court order. Sea Point’s property prices now sit at roughly one and a half times the citywide median, up from 1.2 times a decade ago. A quarter of the suburb’s apartments are no longer homes but Airbnb listings, which have grown by nearly 200 percent since 2022. But the renter priced out does not disappear. Many end up in the peripheral settlements and townships that apartheid planning built at the city’s edge to distance white areas and central business districts from the black population.

These peripheries host long-established black African and coloured communities, and absorb whoever the inner city prices out, citizen and migrant alike. They are not exclusively black spaces, and they are not the only destination for the displaced, but they remain the most under-resourced part of the city: fewer clinics, thinner policing, underserviced water and electricity, and schools starved of the resources that the ones across the highway receive.

The anthropologist Kenneth Tafira describes this kind of enforced proximity as “coerced co-habitation,” a growing population living side by side because they have nowhere else to stay, placing pressure on already under-resourced areas. It is precisely this arrangement, not any inherent hostility between neighbors, that makes friction between the excluded citizen and the excluded migrant so combustible. The Constitution’s promise of dignity is not evenly distributed, and Cape Town’s funding and resources show who it reaches. The province markets itself as a gateway for the foreign capital that displaces the locals.

Spatial apartheid, displacement, and xenophobia in South Africa are recurring historical events. The researcher William Mpofu argues that “what is termed xenophobia is actually racism” — the same colonial logic that once sorted black South Africans from settlers now sorts citizens from black migrants.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the same colonial logic of who is permitted to occupy space operates by inversion. Where Cape Town’s property market prices the poor out of the center to make room for wealth, March and March organizes to push the foreign poor out of the country altogether, chanting the slogan: Mabahambe, they must go. Its organizers have met with the Democratic Alliance, ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance, the Inkatha Freedom Party, and the uMkhonto weSizwe party, and its founder has thanked ANC figures, including Gauteng’s premier, from the stage. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni observed that “nationalism is nativist in character,” and each party, in its own dialect, has found something in this movement worth affirming about belonging.

Responses to migration are, as the political scientist Audie Klotz argues, “intricately linked to the demarcation of borders” drawn under colonial rule and inherited, almost unquestioned, by the democracy that replaced it. The barriers to being declared a “legal” and “documented” foreigner are language (consider the difference between being called an expat and an immigrant), money, location, and origin. Documentation is a privilege built on the histories of war, dispossession, and dislocation that produce the undocumented in the first place. South Africans know this all too well — and yet find themselves marching into a repeated history.

Sea Point and Durban sit at different extremes of the same reality: spatial apartheid. One displaces the local and houses the foreigner. The other displaces the foreigner and alienates the local. Both rest on a history that the country never unlearned: deciding which body has earned the right to stay. And this raises the question: can Africans belong in South Africa? And can South Africa belong to Africa?

In the boardrooms of Addis Ababa and the tech hubs of Nairobi, a new worldmaking project is underway. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the central arenas where African states negotiate their position in an unequal global order. To speak of “AI in Africa” is not simply to describe the arrival of a technology, but to encounter a set of competing discursive frames through which political desires, developmental ambitions, ethical claims, and governance priorities are translated into technical agendas. As national strategies and regional protocols are rolled out, what comes into view is a struggle over how Africa is imagined within this machine age, and what kinds of futures that imagination makes thinkable.

These frames are not simply different ways of describing a new technology. They are competing scripts for what Africa is, what AI is for, and who ought to shape its future. Some cast the continent as a site of leapfrogging and renewal; others as a zone of exposure, extraction, sovereignty, moral repair, or improvised adaptation. Each brings some actors and possibilities into focus while pushing others to the margins. That is why the issue is not only what AI means for Africa, but what pictures of Africa are being called into view through AI discourse.

The first terrain is shaped by promise and protection. One of the most pervasive registers is promissory. In the African renaissance 2.0 frame, visible in the AU Continental AI Strategy, AI appears as a leapfrogging device through which Africa can bypass the chokepoint of traditional industrialization and enter prosperity through technical modernization. Here, the ethical subject is the developmental state or planner charged with delivering growth, inclusion, and renewal. What comes into view is capacity, competitiveness, and beneficial transformation. What recedes from view are the historical and political-economic conditions that make acceleration so attractive in the first place: debt, infrastructural dependence, uneven ownership, and the possibility that AI may deepen rather than overcome inherited asymmetries.

Running alongside this is a protective register. In this vulnerability frame, Africa is not late but exposed to surveillance, bias, exclusion, and systems introduced into settings where safeguards are weak and redress is limited. As the CIVICUS report on AI surveillance in Africa suggests, the issue is not only future risk but already existing forms of technologically mediated harm. The ethical subject here is the harm-bearing population — the data subject, precarious worker, surveilled citizen, and linguistically marginal user most likely to absorb the costs of badly governed AI. This frame is ethically indispensable because it foregrounds rights, harm, and institutional fragility, including the uneven but growing architecture of data protection on the continent. Its limit, however, is that it can cast Africa chiefly as a site to be protected rather than one from which technological futures are actively contested and shaped.

A second terrain is shaped by structure and sovereignty. Alongside these promissory and protective registers sits a more structural critique. In the anti-colonial frame, AI appears as a socio-technical order built through unequal material relations: not only data extraction, but also mineral supply chains, outsourced labor, environmental degradation, foreign-owned infrastructures, and asymmetrical control over the institutions that govern digital life. From this perspective, Africa is not outside the AI order looking in; it is already deeply inserted into it, though often on subordinated terms. The ethical subject is the dispossessed worker, community, or polity whose labor, resources, and data are drawn into AI systems while ownership and value are captured elsewhere. What becomes visible is the political economy of AI — an approach that makes it harder to sustain the comforting idea that Africa’s main problem is simply one of readiness or delayed entry. But the frame has limits. In foregrounding dispossession, it can flatten internal differentiation, externalize agency too completely, and become so totalizing that the uneven realities of negotiation and strategic inhabitation recede from view.

The sovereignty frame shifts the question from extraction to control: AI is cast as a problem of authority over infrastructure, procurement, standards, and rulemaking, a concern visible in South Africa’s National Data and Cloud Computing Policy. Its appeal lies in insisting that African states must govern technological systems in the public interest rather than merely consume them on external terms; the ethical subject is the sovereign polity, imagined above all as the state charged with authoring technological futures on its own terms. But sovereignty should not be romanticized. Declaring authority is not the same as possessing material control, especially where states remain dependent on foreign cloud infrastructures, imported models, consultants, and opaque procurement chains. Equally, this frame can too quickly presume the state to be the vehicle of emancipation.

A third terrain is shaped by ethics and language. Beneath these macro-struggles lie cultural and ethical frames. In the Ubuntu frame, Africa appears as a moral resource: a source of relational vocabularies of dignity, community, interdependence, and solidarity that unsettle liberal individualism in mainstream AI ethics. At its strongest, this frame asks what kind of human subject AI presupposes and produces. Its ethical subject is the person-in-community, understood less as an isolated rights-bearer than as a being constituted through relations of community, solidarity, and mutual recognition. At its weakest, it risks remaining symbolically reparative and romantic rather than politically disruptive: a moral vocabulary that pluralizes AI ethics without redistributing authority over infrastructure, capital, or standards.

The linguistic justice frame relocates the issue to language, depicting Africa as linguistically marginalized. Initiatives such as Lelapa and Masakhane insist that language is not a neutral interface but a site through which recognition and opportunity are distributed in digital life. An AI system that cannot adequately process Yoruba, Wolof, or Zulu does more than inconvenience its speakers; it helps reproduce a hierarchy in which some languages, and the worlds they carry, are made computationally peripheral. The ethical subject here is the speaker, the language community, and the knower whose access to digital life is mediated through systems not built with them in mind. Yet linguistic inclusion alone does not resolve ownership, infrastructure, or power. An AI that speaks African languages can still be embedded in extractive or externally governed systems.

A final terrain is shaped by markets and adaptation. The market pragmatist frame, visible in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Protocol on Digital Trade, casts Africa as a jurisdictional space to be made legible to capital — a continent whose frictions must be reduced so that innovation, trade, and platform expansion can move more easily across borders through harmonization, regulatory alignment, and investment readiness. Here, the ethical subject is the investor, firm, regulator, and entrepreneurial ecosystem said to require clear rules and scalable markets. What becomes visible is efficiency, interoperability, and growth. What recedes from view is the fact that harmonization is never merely technical. It can distribute advantage, privileging certain actors over others, and can also displace questions of labor and ownership while eclipsing democratic accountability behind the smoother language of market access.

The frugal innovator frame — the jua kali of tech — foregrounds small-scale, improvised solutions that work offline, on cheap devices, and in low-resource settings. Lelapa AI’s InkubaLM is the sharpest contemporary example. This frame’s appeal lies in refusing the assumption that meaningful technical work must begin from abundance. Africa appears as inventive under pressure, capable of repurposing constraints into forms of practical intelligence. The ethical subject is the builder, bricoleur, local entrepreneur, and community improviser who makes systems work where industrial-scale infrastructures are absent. What becomes apparent is creativity, resilience, and situated responsiveness. But it can also romanticize necessity, making scarcity look like authenticity rather than a political condition to be transformed. It can overstate what ingenuity can compensate for and understate the need for public investment, industrial policy, and durable institutional support.

In the end, what matters about these eight frames is not whether any one of them finally tells the truth about Africa and AI. It is that each organizes moral and political attention differently — foregrounding development while muting dependency, naming extraction and harm while narrowing agency, valorizing language and ethics without redistributing material authority. As a constellation of concerns, they reveal less a single African AI trajectory than a struggle over what Africa is imagined and allowed to be in technological modernity.

That is why AI in Africa is not just about chips, code, or competitiveness. It is about who gets to architect the future, under what terms, and in whose interests. The stakes are not simply adoption or regulation, but the representational politics through which certain subjects, institutions, and futures become thinkable while others fall from view.

Yet these frames do not only describe Africa; they help make it where they are taken up. This is the worldmaking with which we began. What a frame brings into view becomes what institutions are built to serve, and what it lets recede goes ignored. Nor do the frames work alone. They overlap and prop one another up: sovereignty talk can leverage the anti-colonial critique, market pragmatism needs the renaissance’s promissory optimism, and the frugal innovator’s ingenuity is enlisted to soften the very scarcity it works within. The future, then, will not be settled by one script defeating the others, but by which come to dominate the mixture — and whose interests that mixture ends up serving — as it hardens into the continent’s legal, institutional, and material infrastructure. Whether this moment marks a structural shift or the repetition of old patterns turns on that.

In the run-up to its theatrical release, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey became embroiled in online polemics after Elon Musk attacked the movie’s supposed “woke” casting. Yet beyond this contrived spectacle lies a far more important criticism to be made of the filmmakers: their decision to shoot part of the movie in Africa’s last colony, Western Sahara. Enjoying generous subsidies from the Moroccan state, they lent legitimacy to its illegal occupation regime.

As Nolan and his crew filmed along the coast around the port city of Dakhla last summer, an open letter condemning the move was signed by prominent figures in world cinema, including Javier Bardem, Pedro Almodóvar, and Paul Laverty. “Mr. Nolan filmed there without the consent of the Sahrawi people,” it read, in reference to the majority nationality in Western Sahara. “The only consent he received came from the occupying force: Morocco.”

In particular, Oscar-winning actor Bardem did not hold back. As he posted the letter on his Instagram account, he added: “For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city.”

Covering an area the size of Britain, Western Sahara is designated as a “non-self-governing territory” by the United Nations and remains on its official list of territories still awaiting decolonization. Retained by Francisco Franco’s Spain even as other European colonies won their freedom, it did not gain independence even after the dictator’s demise in 1975. Instead, neighboring Morocco and Mauritania invaded — with at least 40 percent of the Sahrawi population at the time fleeing to neighboring Algeria to escape the Moroccan air force’s bombing campaign. Half a century later, 173,000 Sahrawis still remain in Algerian refugee camps. The native Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation are subject to what Freedom House categorizes as among the least free political systems on the planet.

The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco’s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew’s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump’s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.

For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

If the construction of the vast defensive berm in the 1980s was Morocco’s attempt to entrench its military control over Western Sahara, the transformation of Dakhla into a tourist destination and green energy hub in recent years aims to consolidate the occupation as an irreversible economic reality. From the Moroccan leadership’s perspective, Sahrawi independence will look increasingly unrealistic if it can develop the territory in conjunction with international investors. It is also incentivizing Moroccan settlers to move to the territory with generous subsidies and jobs.

The clearest expression of this strategy is Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which looks to provide landlocked countries in the Sahel region with maritime access to the Atlantic via a new €1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028). Positioning the occupied city as a key logistics hub for northwestern Africa, the project aims to further integrate Western Sahara into regional trade networks.

Tourism is also key to normalizing Moroccan control, with Dakhla in particular recast as an international destination for kitesurfing and ecotourism. On a 2022 visit, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were photographed at one of the growing number of high-end hotels on Dakhla peninsula, as well as on the sweeping Atlantic coastline that would later attract the film crew shooting The Odyssey. The couple’s holiday photo shoot offered a vision of luxury resorts and leisure in which the military occupation and indigenous Sahrawi population were erased from view.

Airline Ryanair’s announcement in 2024 that it was opening new direct routes connecting Spain with Dakhla and the Sahrawi capital El Aaiún marked a further expansion of this model of occupation tourism — even as the European Commission informed airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would not be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement. At the same time, international journalists, trade unionists, and human rights defenders have looked to break the Moroccan media blockade by boarding these low-cost flights over the last 18 months, only to be detained at the airport or arrested when they made contact with local Sahrawi activists. Footage from last year even showed a left-wing delegation from the European Parliament being physically blocked from disembarking a Ryanair flight by Moroccan security forces.

The Odyssey’s subsidized production forms part of this same effort to establish Dakhla as an international — but firmly Moroccan — destination while limiting scrutiny of the occupation itself. Yet as news of the Dakhla shoot emerged last summer, Sahrawi filmmakers, journalists, and activists took to social media to contrast the free rein afforded to Nolan’s Hollywood production with the systematic repression they faced in trying to document the Moroccan state’s human rights violations, or simply in exercising creative freedom.

“I grew up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and today, as a Sahrawi filmmaker from the occupied city of Dakhla, I cannot freely enter my homeland to tell my own stories,” director Brahim Chagaf posted as part of the online campaign organized by The Western Sahara International Film Festival. “That is the great contradiction behind this landscape: while a few privileged people like Nolan can turn it into a movie, others are still waiting for the day when we can simply return to it.”

Campaigner Ghalia Djimi’s message was even starker: “Mr Nolan: I am a human rights defender. Morocco disappeared me for 3 years and 7 months in a secret prison in occupied El Aaiún.”

Her experience is far from exceptional. In its latest 2024 report, human rights NGO CODESA catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces that year. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of 18 student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.

As The Odyssey opens at the global box office, one of the Gdeim Izik prisoners, Enaâma Asfari, is currently in the fourth week of an indefinite hunger strike. In calling for his immediate release last month, Frontline Defenders said it was “concerned about reports describing medical neglect, reprisals and other forms of ill-treatment against Sahrawi human rights defenders in prison.”

“When Christopher Nolan steps on the red carpet on his way to the premiere’s screening, he will also be stepping on International Law,” insisted María Carrión, executive director of The Western Sahara International Film Festival, last month. “We ask the public to treat this film as they would a movie made in occupied Ukraine with [Vladimir] Putin’s permits, or in the illegal settlements in Palestine with [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s blessing.”

A series of rulings from the European Union’s highest court back this claim. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly found that Western Sahara is a territory with a “separate and distinct” status to Morocco and that legally its resources cannot be exploited without the consent of the Sahrawi people. Those judgments concern specific EU-Moroccan trade agreements, which the EU has tried to revive despite successive rulings from its own courts that they contravened international law. But the rulings raise broader questions about the responsibilities of international companies operating in the occupied territory, including film studios.

Given his back catalog, Nolan’s brilliance as a writer and director is unquestionable. Yet with The Odyssey, he and Universal Pictures have set a dangerous precedent as they pioneered a new form of filmmaking for our Trumpian age: occupation cinema. A country subject to a brutal colonization and a system of effective apartheid is not a legitimate backdrop for either international tourism or a Hollywood blockbuster.

It’s a cozy Thursday evening in Nairobi, and important conversations are about to begin. I ask my sound engineer, “Are you ready to record?” She signals yes. Deep breath in. Hold the mic close.

“Welcome to Hadithi Hangout Chapter. . . . ”

This is just one of the many conversations recorded and archived across Africa every single week. But why do we do it? Every single day, African creatives produce live performances, radio shows, DJ mixes, panel discussions, and cultural conversations. But where do these moments go after all is said and done?

Our continent has a long tradition of preserving and sharing knowledge through oral literature — songs, proverbs, and legends. During the colonial era, foreign researchers, institutions and labels recorded African musical heritage and took them away. Today, many of these sound recordings remain caged in museums abroad or locked behind academic paywalls, accessible only to researchers and those who can afford them.

To access the 14,000 recordings held by the African Music Archive, for example, you still need to travel to Mainz, Germany. Meanwhile, the International Library of African Music (ILAM), founded in South Africa in 1954 by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, has only recently begun digitizing parts of its vast collection and making them available online.

The question remains: who gets to access African cultural memory?

Kenyan sound artist KMRU explored this question in his 2023 album Temporary Stored. Blending sound synthesizers, field recordings, and archival recordings from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, the project liberates these stolen sounds from the colonial archive.

Today, African creatives and organizations are increasingly taking music preservation into their own hands. Empowered with digital technology, recording equipment, and online platforms, they are documenting traditional music, digitizing historical recordings, and creating new archives that are finally accessible to African audiences. Why does accessibility matter? Because preservation without access is still exclusion. Accessible archives help us reclaim culture, challenge colonial interpretations, and ensure African artists are the ones telling their own stories.

Here are four music archives in Kenya doing exactly that.

Based at The Mall in Westlands, Nairobi, Tamasha Records is one of East Africa’s most important custodians of recorded African music history. The company was established in the early 1990s, after Polygram East Africa exited the region, leaving behind one of the largest recorded music catalogs in East Africa. The collection contains more than 10,000 recordings from artists active between the 1950s and 1980s.

Tamasha has spent decades digitizing vinyl and CD recordings by legendary artists such as Franco Luambo, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Daudi Kabaka. These recordings are now available through streaming and download platforms. For many music listeners, Tamasha’s YouTube channel has become a nostalgic bridge into the world of classic East African music, also known as zilizopendwa. This is music which might have otherwise disappeared into storage rooms and deteriorating master tapes.

A similar urgency, if a different approach, shapes Singing Wells. In 2011, cultural practitioners Tabu Osusa of Ketebul Music and Jimmy Allen of the UK’s Abubilla Music bonded over one common concern — traditional East African music was disappearing as older musicians passed away and younger generations gravitated toward global popular culture. So what did they do? They founded the Singing Wells project, got their teams in a van, and traveled across East Africa recording musicians in their own communities rather than bringing them into urban studios.

15 years later, Singing Wells has become the world’s largest open archive of traditional East African music. Its online collection contains hundreds of recordings documenting music and dance traditions from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Beyond music, Singing Wells also publishes musician biographies, field reports, and instrument documentation on their website, making it an invaluable resource for researchers, educators, and artists alike, who are seeking to reconnect and gain inspiration from their cultural roots.

Founded in 2013 by David Tinning and Gregg Tendwa, Santuri East Africa has become a leader in music education, artist development, and cultural innovation. While Tamasha preserves historical recordings and Singing Wells documents traditional music, Santuri archives the present.

Through Santuri Salon at The Mall, the community space hosts panel discussions, listening sessions, and artist talks focused on music, culture, and technology. Many of these conversations are recorded and uploaded online, creating a living archive of contemporary East African culture. One such archive is Hadithi Hangout, a monthly reading group exploring Kenya’s political and musical histories. Listeners can revisit conscious conversations on everything from the impact of colonialism on contemporary music to the evolution of Kenyan music across the generations. For future researchers looking to understand East Africa’s creative landscape in the 2020s, these recordings may be just as valuable as historical music collections.

The fourth is Calotropis Radio, which flips the model: if traditional archives collect history after it happens, this community radio station records it as it unfolds. Founded in Nairobi and also based at The Mall, Calotropis describes itself as a dealer in sound, music, and poetry. When they are not playing eclectic music selections on their website, they live-stream and archive DJ sets, community conversations, and cultural events. Since 2025, they have partnered with Kilele Summit, Santuri’s annual festival for adventurous music and technology, streaming panel discussions and artist workshops to audiences far beyond Nairobi. Calotropis demonstrates that sometimes archives are built live, one broadcast at a time.

These African archives remind us that the power to tell and preserve our own stories is now in our hands. Preserving African culture does not look one way. It can mean digitizing old records, documenting traditional musicians in remote villages, recording community discussions, or live-streaming experimental performances to audiences around the world.

What matters is that these stories remain available. Accessible archives allow culture to be studied, remembered, and reimagined. And they help future generations understand who we were, what we created, and what we valued. Ultimately, sometimes, preserving culture begins with something as simple as holding a microphone close and pressing record.

On June 29, Ethiopia announced an agreement in principle with a committee representing about 45 percent of the holders of its defaulted $1 billion Eurobond. The proposed exchange would cut the bond’s principal by 12 percent, pay nearly $100 million in missed coupons, and attach a warrant that could give investors access to a future international bond. It is an important exit ramp. It is not yet the exit: nonfinancial terms, wider creditor acceptance, and the exchange itself remain unfinished.

The deal arrives more than two and a half years after Ethiopia allowed a 14-day grace period to expire on a $33 million coupon in December 2023. That missed payment was widely read as the collapse of an African growth story. For more than a decade, Ethiopia had combined rapid output growth with roads, power plants, railways, industrial parks, schools, and clinics. The default appeared to reveal that the boom had been built on unaffordable debt.

That interpretation is too simple. Ethiopia’s crisis did not result from borrowing alone, and it cannot be explained by either foreign exploitation or domestic incompetence in isolation. It emerged from a succession of debt regimes: historically specific arrangements among rulers, creditors, institutions, and social groups. Imperial governments borrowed selectively to preserve autonomy; the Derg used geopolitical credit to sustain a militarized state; the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) borrowed to accelerate structural transformation; and the present government has exchanged developmental discretion for emergency finance and restructuring. In every period, external money expanded state power. In every period, the state failed to build a sufficiently durable base of exports, foreign exchange, and accountable institutions to match its ambitions.

The central lesson is not that debt is inherently destructive. It is that sovereignty depends less on avoiding finance than on governing it: choosing investments that generate broad returns, disclosing liabilities, resolving political conflicts, and protecting citizens when adjustment becomes unavoidable. Ethiopia’s experience also exposes a weakness in the international system. A creditor architecture designed to restore sustainability can take years to coordinate, while the debtor absorbs inflation, investment delays, and deteriorating services.

Ethiopia’s rulers have long treated finance as a question of political independence. Emperor Menelik II granted a foreign concession for the railway from the French-controlled port of Djibouti in 1894. The line strengthened commerce, customs collection, and state reach, but it also tied a strategic corridor to European capital and diplomacy. The Bank of Abyssinia, inaugurated in 1906 under a concession involving the British-controlled National Bank of Egypt, similarly modernized payments while giving foreign shareholders an influential position in the country’s monetary system.

Later imperial governments remained cautious borrowers by the standards of the regimes that followed. That restraint protected one dimension of sovereignty: Ethiopia was less vulnerable to creditor demands and external-market shocks. But the achievement should not be romanticized. A narrow tax base, limited administrative capacity, and an unequal agrarian order left the state unable to finance the infrastructure, education, and productive transformation that political independence required. Ethiopia also was not uniquely “never colonized”: Liberia maintained formal independence, and Italy occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941. Formal sovereignty did not eliminate economic constraint.

The Derg, which seized power in 1974, reversed the imperial approach. Its debt regime was organized less by bond markets or International Monetary Fund conditions than by Cold War patronage. Soviet-bloc credit supplied arms and supported a state fighting Somalia and insurgencies in Eritrea, Tigray, and elsewhere. By the late 1990s, Ethiopia still carried roughly $10 billion in external debt inherited largely from the Derg; a World Bank assessment estimated that 62 percent was bilateral and owed mainly to Russia for Soviet-era military purchases.

Calling all of this “odious debt” has moral force but limited legal precision. The doctrine is contested, and the borrowed resources did not serve a single purpose: the Derg also financed state enterprises, social programs, imports, and emergency needs. Yet the political economy is clear. War, coercive agricultural policies, inefficient state projects, drought, and famine produced few export earnings with which to repay foreign obligations. The regime traded market dependence for strategic dependence on a patron. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the financial and military architecture sustaining the state disintegrated with it.

The EPRDF inherited that overhang in 1991 and spent the next decade normalizing relations with creditors. In 2004, Ethiopia reached the completion point of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. The IMF and World Bank estimated total debt-service relief at about $3.3 billion in nominal terms, including additional relief granted because lower coffee prices and exchange-rate changes had worsened the debt burden. Relief was not a blank check: it followed an IMF-supported program, a poverty-reduction strategy, and policy conditions covering macroeconomic management, social spending, and structural reform.

The reset created room for one of the developing world’s most ambitious public-investment drives. Ethiopia’s developmental state did what orthodox prescriptions often tell poor countries not to do: it used public banks, state-owned enterprises, directed credit, and external loans to build ahead of private demand. The results were substantial. Growth ran near double digits for much of the 2000s and 2010s. The national poverty rate fell from 44 percent in 2000 to about 24 percent in 2016. Roads, electricity, telecommunications, health, and education expanded. These gains were not statistical fiction, even though official growth estimates and their distribution remain debated.

The developmentalist argument for borrowing is strongest here. A country with low savings, weak private capital markets, and enormous infrastructure deficits cannot transform by waiting for tax revenue to accumulate. Public debt can “crowd in” investment by reducing transport, energy, and coordination costs. Ethiopia also diversified its creditor base. Multilateral institutions remained central, while Chinese policy banks, export-credit agencies, bilateral lenders, and — after the 2014 Eurobond — private investors financed projects that Western donors often considered too large or risky.

But the model’s internal test was not whether concrete was poured. It was whether investment raised productivity, tax revenue, and foreign-exchange earnings fast enough to service obligations denominated in dollars and other foreign currencies. That conversion repeatedly failed. The Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway improved a vital corridor but required a roughly $2.5 billion loan from China’s Export-Import Bank and later restructuring. Industrial parks produced exports and jobs, but a World Bank review found that net exports from the parks were only $163 million in fiscal 2019–20 — meaningful, yet far below the scale needed to transform the balance of payments. Public sugar projects suffered delays, cost overruns, and weak output. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, often grouped carelessly with foreign-debt projects, was financed predominantly through domestic bonds and public contributions rather than conventional external sovereign loans.

By the late EPRDF period, the decisive constraint was not simply the public-debt-to-GDP ratio. It was liquidity in foreign currency. Many state-owned enterprises borrowed abroad to import machinery, then earned revenue in birr. Exports remained concentrated in low-value commodities and services. The central bank rationed scarce foreign exchange, creating queues, preferential allocation, and a widening parallel-market premium. In 2018, the IMF classified Ethiopia as at high risk of external debt distress; reserves stood at about $2.8 billion, or only 1.6 months of prospective imports, while goods exports had stagnated.

This is where a purely neoclassical account and a purely critical account both become inadequate. Fiscal discipline mattered: projects with weak cash flows and opaque guarantees created liabilities that the state ultimately had to manage. But the problem was not excessive consumption financed by foreign bondholders. Much of the debt funded investment, often on concessional terms. Conversely, creditor hierarchy mattered: access to dollars and the terms set by official and commercial lenders constrained policy. But Ethiopia’s leaders were not passive. They chose projects, controlled state banks, delayed exchange-rate adjustment, limited scrutiny of state-owned enterprises, and used visible infrastructure to sustain political legitimacy.

Domestic politics made the balance-sheet weakness more dangerous. Land expropriation, youth unemployment, uneven regional development, and authoritarian allocation of investment contributed to the protests that destabilized the EPRDF after 2015. The party-state’s capacity to mobilize resources had been a developmental advantage; the concentration of decision-making also reduced independent appraisal and public accountability. When political cohesion fractured, the same system was less able to correct failing projects or distribute losses transparently.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government initially promised to preserve growth while liberalizing the economy. Its 2019 Homegrown Economic Reform agenda overlapped substantially with IMF priorities: reducing central-bank financing, strengthening state-owned-enterprise oversight, opening sectors to private capital, and moving toward a more flexible exchange rate. A first IMF program was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by the Tigray war. The 2020–22 war, subsequent conflicts in Amhara and Oromia, drought, and reduced donor support damaged production, public services, and investor confidence while increasing humanitarian and security demands.

Ethiopia requested treatment under the Group of 20 Common Framework in February 2021, before the Eurobond default. In July 2024, after the government introduced a market-based foreign-exchange regime, the IMF approved a four-year, $3.4 billion program, and the World Bank announced a large financing package. The reform sharply depreciated the official exchange rate, reduced the gap with the parallel market, and helped restore exports and reserves. It also raised the birr cost of imported fuel, food, medicine, and foreign-currency liabilities.

Ethiopia’s debt stock explains why restructuring became so complicated. The Ministry of Finance reported $31.0 billion in public-sector external debt at the end of September 2024. Of that, $28.6 billion was public and publicly guaranteed debt; the remainder included non-guaranteed external liabilities of entities such as Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio telecom. Multilateral institutions accounted for 53.8 percent of the total public-sector external debt, non-Paris Club official creditors for 26.5 percent, private creditors for 16.3 percent, and Paris Club creditors for only 3.4 percent. China was pivotal as the largest bilateral lender, but it did not dominate Ethiopia’s overall creditor structure.

The official-creditor committee, co-chaired by China and France, agreed in 2025 to reschedule covered debt until fiscal 2038–39. The treatment did not reduce nominal principal; it lowered the present value through longer maturities and reduced interest, providing substantial near-term debt-service relief. The agreement also required Ethiopia to obtain “comparable treatment” from other creditors. That phrase became the center of the bondholder dispute. Official creditors argued that private investors should accept relief at least as favorable. Bondholders argued that opaque official terms and conservative export projections demanded too much from a single $1 billion bond.

The June 2026 preliminary settlement splits the difference. Bondholders would take a 12 percent face-value reduction, but receive arrears in full and a warrant linked to Ethiopia’s future market access. The IMF’s fifth program review, completed two days later, reported stronger exports, revenue collection, and reserves, while warning that external shocks and debt vulnerabilities remained significant. The Fund projected reserves at 2.1 months of imports in fiscal 2025–26 — an improvement from 0.7 months two years earlier, but still a thin buffer.

The Common Framework did not cause Ethiopia’s default. The country entered it because its debt trajectory and foreign-exchange position were already unsustainable. Yet the process did demonstrate the system’s institutional weakness. It took more than five years from Ethiopia’s request to reach a preliminary private-creditor agreement. Multilateral lenders generally retain preferred-creditor status; bilateral lenders negotiate through political committees; bondholders rely on contracts and litigation threats. Comparability is demanded but not defined by an enforceable, transparent formula. Each group can delay the others while the debtor remains partly excluded from finance.

Debt restructuring reallocates claims among creditors. Adjustment reallocates income within Ethiopia. For several years, inflation near 30 percent eroded wages and savings. The exchange-rate reform made exporters more competitive and improved the supply of foreign currency through official channels, but it also transmitted the devaluation to imported essentials. Fiscal restraint and tighter monetary policy can reduce inflation over time; they do not decide who survives the transition.

The social crisis cannot be attributed to the IMF or the debt workout alone. Conflict destroyed facilities, displaced communities, and interrupted schooling; climate shocks and aid shortfalls compounded the damage. UNICEF estimated in late 2024 that 8 million Ethiopian children were out of school, mainly in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray, and linked the figure primarily to conflict and damaged schools. In 2025, public health workers staged a month-long strike over pay and working conditions, amid arrests and the suspension of a professional association. These episodes are not proof that every stabilization measure is austerity. They show why macroeconomic reform without credible social protection can undermine the human systems on which recovery depends.

The three dominant interpretations of Ethiopia’s debt each capture only part of the record. Neoclassical analysis correctly emphasizes debt-service capacity, inflation, and the need to stop monetary financing of deficits; it often treats institutions and distribution as secondary. Developmentalism correctly argues that poor countries must borrow to overcome infrastructure bottlenecks; it can underestimate political incentives, project failure, and the difficulty of generating exports. Critical political economy correctly identifies asymmetric creditor power and the tendency to shift adjustment costs downward; it becomes deterministic when it treats domestic elites as mere agents of external capital or creditors as a unified bloc. Ethiopia’s crisis arose from the interaction of all three logics.

Ethiopia can improve its position without pursuing the fantasy of complete financial independence. The first requirement is disclosure. The government should publish a quarterly, loan-by-loan register of public and publicly guaranteed debt, including creditor, currency, maturity, collateral, project, and restructuring status, and extend comparable disclosure to state-owned enterprises and public banks. Parliament and the auditor general need authority to review major borrowing before commitments become irreversible. Transparency will not remove political conflict, but it will reduce the space in which contingent liabilities accumulate unnoticed.

The second requirement is a narrower and more realistic industrial policy. Ethiopia still needs infrastructure and patient public finance, but projects should be judged against their ability to raise productivity, exports, or fiscal revenue — not their visibility. Logistics, agricultural processing, tradable digital services, tourism, and reliable power for competitive firms may yield more foreign exchange than another generation of prestige projects. State-owned enterprises that cannot cover operating costs require restructuring, but rushed privatization in a depressed market would merely transfer public assets at weak prices.

The third requirement is distributional protection. Health, primary education, nutrition, and targeted cash transfers should be specified as real — not merely nominal — floors in the government’s budget and in IMF program reviews. Foreign-exchange allocation should be transparent enough to prioritize essential medicines and productive inputs without recreating discretionary rationing. Durable stabilization also depends on political settlements in conflict-affected regions; no debt operation can compensate for the fiscal and human costs of recurrent war.

Creditors also need to change. The Common Framework should require simultaneous negotiations across creditor classes, standardized disclosure, a public method for calculating comparable treatment, and an automatic standstill on eligible debt service while good-faith talks continue. State-contingent clauses could link payments to export earnings or major disasters, reducing the need for repeated restructuring. These reforms involve trade-offs: creditors will price uncertainty, and poorly designed contingencies can be manipulated. But a system that resolves a relatively small bond only after years of delay is already imposing a large uncertainty premium.

Ethiopia’s tentative exit from default should therefore be treated as a beginning. Debt relief can create breathing room; it cannot substitute for export capacity, institutional oversight, peace, or a fair allocation of adjustment. The country’s successive debt regimes show that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development — sometimes all at once. The durable measure of autonomy is not whether Ethiopia borrows. It is whether citizens can see, contest, and benefit from the choices made in their name.

In 1950s apartheid South Africa, visibility was never neutral. To appear publicly as Black, urban, fashionable, and modern carried political meaning in a society built on racial segregation and control. It was within this environment that Drum magazine emerged as one of the most influential publications for Black readers across the country. Founded in Johannesburg in 1951, the magazine documented township life, jazz culture, fashion, sport, politics, and everyday urban experiences. Its pages offered images of Black modernity at a moment when apartheid attempted to confine and regulate Black life.

Alongside its reporting on township life, Drum regularly featured beauty contests, fashion spreads, musicians, athletes, and political figures, offering readers images of Black modernity at a time when apartheid sought to deny it. Yet the magazine did not present modernity in the same way for everyone. Women were more often associated with beauty, fashion, and respectability, while men tended to be portrayed through music, sport, politics, and public life. Two covers published only a year apart reveal how differently the magazine represented young African women and men.

The August 1956 issue, titled “Special Beauty Page — Inside,” shows a young Black woman standing in a fitted yellow dress while several men surround her with tape measures. One crouches near her legs. Another measures her waist. Others observe her body from different angles. At first glance, the image appears glamorous and playful, almost theatrical. The woman stands confidently at the center of the frame, her bright dress sharply contrasting with the darker suits around her.

Yet the longer one looks, the stranger the image becomes. The tape measures divide her body into sections: waist, hips, height. The men lean inward, forming a loose circle around her. While she is the focal point of the cover, she is also its object. Her visibility depends on being evaluated. Even her posture feels restrained. Her arms rest slightly behind her back rather than confidently occupying space. She does not look directly at the viewer or at the men measuring her. Instead, she appears distant from the activity surrounding her, as though the image is happening around her rather than with her.

The cover reflects what scholar Rachel Johnson describes as the figure of the “modern miss” in Drum magazine, where young women became highly visible as symbols of urban modernity while simultaneously remaining tied to scrutiny, beauty standards, and respectability politics. Fashionable clothing and public visibility offered women new ways of imagining themselves as modern subjects, but that visibility was rarely free from regulation. On the beauty-page cover, modernity arrives through measurement. Glamour becomes inseparable from inspection.

A year earlier, Drum presented a very different image of Black modernity. The August 1955 cover features a Black male jazz saxophonist captured mid-performance. Unlike the woman on the beauty-page cover, he appears alone. There are no figures surrounding him, no visible systems of judgment, no tools measuring or evaluating him. His body is not fragmented into parts but defined through movement. The diagonal line of the saxophone creates a sense of rhythm and motion across the frame. His posture feels active and fluid. Even though only the upper half of his body is visible, he appears more expansive than the woman, whose entire body occupies the previous cover.

What matters is not simply that one image depicts a woman and the other a man. It is that the two covers imagine modernity differently. The woman’s body becomes the site through which modernity is assessed and disciplined. The musician’s body becomes the site through which modernity is performed.

This contrast becomes especially revealing within apartheid South Africa, where Black visibility itself was already shaped by surveillance and restriction. Drum is often remembered for challenging racist representations by portraying Black South Africans as cosmopolitan, stylish, and culturally sophisticated. And in many ways, it did. Jazz musicians, beauty queens, athletes, writers, and urban youth all appeared throughout the magazine’s pages as part of a modern African world that apartheid ideology attempted to deny. At the same time, these images also reveal how unevenly that freedom was distributed.

The beauty-page cover places the woman at the center of the frame, yet her visibility intensifies control rather than autonomy. The more visible she becomes, the more closely she is measured. Her body is transformed into something legible and standardized, open to judgment and comparison. The saxophonist occupies visibility differently. His body is associated with action, rhythm, and expression rather than evaluation. He appears absorbed in performance rather than aware of being watched.

Yet even this freedom is partial. The image removes the pressures shaping Black male life under apartheid: police surveillance, economic precarity, pass laws, and racial violence remain outside the frame. Freedom becomes aestheticized. The musician appears self-contained partly because the conditions limiting him are invisible.

Looking at the two covers together reveals how media images do not simply reflect social reality but actively organize it. This broader relationship between representation and identity is also reflected in the work of scholar Mamadou Diouf, who argues that representations of African youth and public space help shape how modern identities are imagined rather than simply reflecting existing social realities. Drum offered Black readers powerful images of urban modernity, but it also reproduced different conditions for how femininity and masculinity could appear in public space. Women were often made visible through beauty, discipline, and evaluation. Men were more often represented through movement, performance, and cultural expression.

What makes these covers striking today is how contemporary they still feel. The beauty-page image resembles digital cultures where women remain hypervisible yet constantly assessed through beauty standards, desirability, and online scrutiny. The jazz musician, meanwhile, anticipates forms of masculine visibility still associated with movement, performance, and creative freedom.

Long before social media transformed visibility into a daily performance, Drum already understood something important: visibility is never simply about being seen. It is also about who gets to move freely within the frame.

It happened. Cabo Verde lost to Argentina and exited the 2026 FIFA World Cup. And I couldn’t be prouder. As a former football player, lifelong lover of the beautiful game, and Cabo Verdean-American, watching Cabo Verde compete on the world stage for the first time felt bigger than sports. What this team represented went far beyond the final score.

At the start of the tournament, predictive models gave Cabo Verde almost no chance against former world champions Spain. The result: a stunning 0–0 draw anchored by seven saves from goalkeeper Josimar “Vozinha” Dias.

Against Uruguay, analysts dismissed Cabo Verde’s disciplined defensive strategy as no match for Marcelo Bielsa’s aggressive attacking system. Commentators insisted Cabo Verde would never score. The result: a thrilling 2–2 draw, including the nation’s first-ever World Cup goal from midfielder Kevin Pina.

Then came another scoreless draw against Saudi Arabia, securing Cabo Verde a second-place group finish and a historic place as the smallest nation ever to reach the knockout rounds. By the time Cabo Verde faced defending champions Argentina, the world was paying attention and rooting for the underdogs.

And for a moment, many of us believed the impossible could happen. When Deroy Duarte equalized to make it 1–1, we felt hope. When Sidny Lopes Cabral scored again to make it 2–2, belief swept across the world.

Even after Argentina secured a 3–2 victory in extra time, Cabo Verde exited the tournament undefeated at the 90-minute mark against three former world champions. The loss hurt deeply. But not our pride. We may not have won on the scoreboard, but we won the respect of football fans around the world.

In the days following the match, widely shared reports estimated that the Argentina versus Cabo Verde match attracted as many as 2.7 billion viewers worldwide. While those figures have not yet been officially verified by FIFA, the extraordinary claim reflected something that was unmistakably true: millions of people had fallen in love with Cabo Verde’s Cinderella story.

For a nation of just over 500,000 people, that kind of global attention is extraordinary.

Cabo Verde, an archipelago of 10 islands, was previously colonized by Portugal in the fifteenth century. It was a central port in the transatlantic slave trade before gaining independence in 1975.

That independence came through the liberation struggle led by Amílcar Cabral, whose African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) fought Portuguese colonialism across both territories. Although Cabral was assassinated in 1973, two years before the independence, he helped make Cabo Verde’s independence possible, and remains one of Africa’s most influential revolutionary thinkers.

Today, the Cabo Verdean diaspora is estimated at roughly one million people, nearly double the resident population. More Cabo Verdeans now live in the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Brazil, Senegal, Angola, and elsewhere other than on the islands themselves.

For decades, Cabo Verde existed on the margins of global football.

The national team first entered FIFA World Cup qualification during the 2002 cycle and spent years competing against larger, wealthier, and better-funded football nations before finally qualifying for the 2026 tournament.

The turning point came in the 2010s. The Blue Sharks qualified for their first Africa Cup of Nations in 2013 and stunned the continent by reaching the quarterfinals. Since then Cabo Verde has become regular AFCON competitors, and made their return to the quarterfinals in 2023.

This was not a team built on global superstars or massive sponsorships.

Many players came from lower-division clubs across Europe and the diaspora. Some were recruited through personal networks and online outreach, including LinkedIn, where the federation famously connected with Irish-based defender Roberto “Pico” Lopes after he initially overlooked an earlier message written in Portuguese.

What united the squad was discipline, camaraderie, and belief.

Under manager Pedro “Bubista” Leitão Brito, Cabo Verde played with tactical structure, composure, courage, and intelligence.

In doing so, they challenged many of the assumptions often placed on African teams and Black athletes across sports: that they lack tactical discipline; that they rely more on physicality than strategy; or that they cannot compete at the highest level.

Instead, Cabo Verde demonstrated that talent exists everywhere, even when visibility, infrastructure, and resources do not. One of the clearest examples of that visibility came through Vozinha. Before the World Cup, the 40-year-old goalkeeper was approaching retirement with a modest social media following of roughly 50,000 people.

By the end of Cabo Verde’s historic run, he had become one of the breakout stars of the tournament and the most-followed goalkeeper in the world, with more than 26 million Instagram followers. Visibility changes careers.

It creates sponsorship opportunities, attracts media attention, opens commercial doors, and reshapes how athletes, and the nations they represent, are perceived around the world.

But this story is bigger than one player or one nation. The expanded World Cup also brought unprecedented visibility to African and Caribbean teams including Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, and Curaçao.

These nations were expected merely to make an appearance. Instead, they arrived prepared to compete. And that visibility matters. For a few extraordinary weeks, the world saw Cabo Verde not as a footnote, but as a nation worthy of respect, admiration, and serious attention.

Together with the other African and Caribbean nations, they helped reshape the global conversation about the expanded 48-team tournament, the continued socio-political and economic realities facing emerging football nations, and the transformative power of access, opportunity, and visibility.

In the words of Cabo Verde manager Bubista: “We wanted to show that you can achieve great things regardless of your challenges, just as long as you have a dream and chase after it.”

Thank you, Cabo Verde.

And thank you to every African and Caribbean nation that stepped onto the world stage. Your fearlessness, resilience, and courage reminded the world that greatness has never been limited by geography. The future of African football is bright.

The tales told of the origins of colonial Nairobi, formerly Enkare Nyirobi, are awash with references to railways, guns and the Imperial British East Africa Company. Animating them are hunters and loyalists; resistors displaced and burned, new locomotive terrains forged.

Yet, I would also argue that there are two critical chronicles often displaced in both formal and popular narratives about this urban space. This is, first, the important and tragic histories of its enslaved foundations; the reality that “old slave-traders [had] skirted the forests” of this region, and that many of its current thoroughfares are former slave trader caravan tracks.

As Andrew Hake wrote in 1977, in his book African Metropolis: Nairobi’s Self-Help City,

From 1850, the northern route, passing through Ngong close to the Nairobi River, was increasingly developed in spite of the fierce reputation of the Maasai and Wakwavi. Arab and Somali traders, sometimes financed by Indian Banyans at the coast, penetrated up-country in search not only of ivory, but also of porters who would carry it to the coast and then themselves be sold as slaves.

This is a history that we have chosen not to remember, yet whose afterlives we remain surrounded by. Undoubtedly, in our postcolonial governments’ conscious negation of our own blood-filled histories of enslavement, we deliberately disconnect from our people’s elsewhere — those who were forcefully displaced, tortured, killed and trafficked.

Building onto these histories of the enslaved, are, I suggest (and this is the second off-staged chronicle), other Nairobi protagonists whose sojourns in this city are not given enough weight.

Enter the “detribalized native.”

A small note here before I move forward, to say that I am not a fan of the words “tribe,” “tribal,” “detribalized,” but seek to sit, instead, in the kinds of fear that this “detribalized” population provoked in the colonial state, and which can be paralleled to the post-June 25, 2024 surveillance, violence, extrajudicial actions and the “treason” and “terrorism” policies that have been launched by the Ruto government in the last two years.

As in the “legal” and extralegal regimes of the colonial bureaucracy, these state actions targeted a population (through lawfare, slander, and inhumane violent actions) that really was just trying to make do with the new conditions of their lives; statuses indelibly and violently marked by the illegitimate rule, displacement, alienation, taxation and brutality of a settler colonial regime.

What the colonial government saw as the “insolent” behaviors of the detribalized native — of claiming their right to movement, to determine their own lives — in many ways mirrors our present.

Ruto’s remarks about “treasonous” protestors, whose right to assemble is guaranteed by the constitution, the patronizing statements by brown-nosing leaders about the need to “raise” our teenagers well, the need to discipline them to “respect” a structure that long lost any ounce of humanity, echo the vacuous disciplining broadcasts of the colonial state.

The “problem” made explicit in these illusory narratives — both then and now — is not the state itself (or the self-serving and extractive actions of parliamentarians), but those who dare question its violence. Recall the words of Kimani Ichungwa — Ichung’wah is the majority leader of Kenya’s National Assembly and one of President Ruto’s closest allies — when he dismissed Gen Z protestors as constituting a “KFC eating, Uber riding generation”? Deflecting attention from its own impotencies (that only survive by its sheer monopoly of force), the government asserts that it is “unruly” young people — as it was previously “illegitimate” and “ungovernable” African city dwellers — who are misplaced in their understanding of the present; they are ungenerous to the “progress” that has been made for them.

The imperatives of the moment, therefore, and which draw on genealogies of colonial interventions fixated on the “detribalized native,” are that one must obey and not question, that we should pay allegiance to structures that are every day and in multiple ways death-making.

But the detribalized natives remained defiant (as many of the colonial Nairobi City Council reports show); the gunfire of the colonial state could never make them obedient, or their obedience total.

Report after report (both those that survived and likely those that were burned) document a litany of African contraventions, even despite the proliferation of colonial weapons. So preoccupied was the city administration by this “detribalized” (and possibly detribalizing) force away from their “natural” rural home, that they were the target of numerous laments, parliamentary discussions (even in the British House of Lords), and city bylaws.

Although this is not a claim that the current socio-political conditions are equal, I would argue that the Ruto government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience has some genealogy in the interventions that the colonial regime used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”

And as with the colonial government, the expansion of state violence (abductions, bodies dumped in quarries, the killing of bloggers, city-wide barricades) illustrates that the government, like the population, is not even convinced of its own supremacy.

What took place in June 2024 was unparalleled in post-independence Kenya. The sheer unity, courage, defiance, complexity, imagination and love that both those on and off the streets showed in demanding better, setting afoot another Kenya, continue to shape our lives in many material and immaterial ways.

“Compensation” money cannot change this, nor will it make us forget all the lives that were prematurely stolen from us — from Rex Maasai to Kennedy Onyango (Rex Maasai was the first protester killed in the June 2024 demonstrations, and Kennedy Onyango was a 12-year-old shot dead by police; both became emblems of the state’s violence against the movement).

But while the moment may appear novel, it draws on a longer legacy of African disobedience — small and big challenges by “natives” to illegitimate rule.

The seeds of our current defiance flourish following the actions of Africans who paid fines to the colonial government for (as the archives document) holding illegal “ngoma” parties, pushing a handcart down the wrong side of the road, not leaving the town when their work contracts were over, living as urban “eyesores” who did not respect borders. Certainly, while forcefully confined to the interstices, through their disobedience, they gradually reclaimed the center.

This they also did through the Harry Thuku protests, the 1950 Nairobi General Strike, the Mau Mau uprising, and many more urban African actions.

Without a doubt, the lives of Kenya’s Gen Z are shaped by the afterlives of colonialism. And, as with the early African generations in the city, this demographic is still creating lives from within the city’s excluded arenas, while knowing that their role is at its center.

Through protests, dance, collective imaginations, political education during picnics and drunken lecture series, art, digital spaces, and beyond, other frontiers are forged. They rebel, as those earlier “detribalized” generations did, against the state’s imposed and violent choreographies and cartographies.

These youthful forms of political being and becoming are not perfect, nor can they be romanticized, but their power — as we learn from those before us — must never be underestimated.

The state knows this too; in its oscillation between lawfare and gunspeak, as in the colonial bureaucracy, the present regime performs an empty prowess.

The fear of this demographic that the government exhibits — even as they are dismissed as “spoilt,” a “youth bulge,” “terrorists,” “treasonous,” or “kids” — mirrors a colonial state’s preoccupation with the “detribalized” native and what it could eventually portend.

In this sense, the ruling coalition’s fears are well-founded; they should know that Gen Z, as the detribalized native, will always strike back.

Football in Africa is more than a sport. It is a scene of dreams, stories of post-colonial expectation, and an image reflecting the continent’s frictional integration into the global capitalist system. From its colonial introduction through the independence era to the age of football as “big business,” the game has been continuously adapted by Africans. Yet while the world celebrates stars like Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, and Didier Drogba, a closer look reveals a landscape marked by neoliberal economics, talent drain, and a growing gap between European-based diaspora and struggling local leagues. Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this essay traces African football’s journey from colonial adoption through political awakening and World Cup heartbreaks and victories, to its current era of commodification, governance struggles, and a growing divergence between the financially successful Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) and the continent’s struggling domestic leagues.

The introduction of football to Africa was neither benign nor neutral. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European colonial administrators, missionaries, and settlers brought the game to ports and outposts from Algiers to Cape Town, from Lagos to Dar es Salaam. Initially reserved for Europeans, football was intended as a civilizing tool to inculcate discipline. Africans were relegated to ball boys or second-class spectators.

Yet, in a classic act of resistance, the colonized turned the master’s tool against him. By the 1930s and 1940s, indigenous communities in Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, and Senegal formed their own clubs, turning pitches into arenas of anti-colonial expression. Matches between African and colonist teams became proxy battles for dignity. The Orlando Pirates of South Africa (founded in 1937) were not just a sports club but an organization of cultural resistance. Football became a democratic space where colonial subjects could momentarily challenge racial hierarchy. By the time independence movements gained momentum in the 1950s, football was already an effective symbol of a unified, ambitious, and combative Africa.

Independence brought political freedom and national sports associations, but for African football, the road to global recognition was paved with boycott, political activism, and power struggles.

The Confederation of African Football (CAF), founded in 1957 by Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and South Africa, quickly made anti-apartheid a core principle. South Africa’s white-only association refused to field multi-racial teams. Led by Sudanese official Abdel Halim Mohammed, CAF pushed for expulsion. In 1961, FIFA gave South Africa an ultimatum: integrate or leave. After refusal, South Africa was suspended in 1964 and expelled in 1976. This moral victory established CAF as an anti-apartheid political force, proving that football could serve justice and liberation.

Despite political gains, World Cup allocations remained grossly inequitable. Until 1966, Africa, Asia, and Oceania shared a single pre-qualifying spot. Led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and his minister of sport, Ohene Gyan, CAF boycotted the 1966 qualifiers entirely. In 1970, Africa finally received one guaranteed spot. Morocco became the first African nation to qualify directly, but representation remained a token.

Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) qualified for the 1974 World Cup, becoming the first sub-Saharan African nation to reach the finals. Preparation was a disaster of political vanity: unpaid bonuses, psychological terror, and no real training. Zaire lost 2–0 to Scotland, 9–0 to Yugoslavia, and 3–0 to Brazil. The “Zaire disaster” fed a narrative of African naivety, but it was not a failure of talent; it was a failure of governance. Four years later, Tunisia secured Africa’s first World Cup victory (3–1 over Mexico), signaling progress.

The redemption arc began in Spain in 1982. Algeria stunned reigning European champions West Germany, winning 2–1, only to be eliminated by a collusive result between West Germany and Austria — the “Gijón disgrace.” The injustice felt by Africans was rooted in colonial memory and asymmetrical global power. Algeria and Cameroon proved African teams could tactically outplay Europeans. Cameroon’s 1990 run, led by 38-year-old Roger Milla, saw it defeat the defending champion, Argentina, and reach the quarterfinals. Milla’s corner-flag dance shattered the stereotype of the technically gifted but tactically naive African side.

Meanwhile, FIFA’s introduction of youth World Cups (U-20 in 1977, U-17 in 1987) put young Africans in the global spotlight. African teams have won the U-20 World Cup twice (Ghana, 2009; Morocco, 2025) and the U-17 World Cup eight times. These platforms accelerated European recruitment of African talent.

Cameroon’s 1990 heroics, combined with the achievements of African U-20 and U-17 teams, did more than delight African fans; they helped establish African football’s respectability at a moment when the global game was being fundamentally transformed. That remaking was driven by satellite broadcasting, media deregulation, and liberalized player transfers across Europe — culminating in the 1995 Bosman ruling. Together, these forces pulled African football deeper into the global market — but on unequal terms. The same dynamics that showcased African talent also contributed to weakening the continent’s own football economy.

The 1990s marked a turning point. African football ceased to be primarily a political statement and became a competitive sport — and, increasingly, a commodity. CAF, once a pan-Africanist body, began operating as a transnational confederation, monetizing the AFCON, its flagship competition. Under presidents Issa Hayatou (1988–2017) and later Patrice Motsepe, sponsorship deals soared. Since 2016, TotalEnergies has been the title sponsor of CAF’s ten main competitions, including the AFCON. The Africa Cup of Nations expanded from eight to 24 teams in 2019 and will reach 28 teams in 2027. This increase leads to more games and, consequently, more broadcasting rights, sponsorship, and advertising revenue.

In 2000, CAF signed a $50 million deal with German firm Sportfive to broadcast four AFCON tournaments. European broadcasters historically paid low fees due to limited demand. Yet the exponential rise of African stars in the English Premier League and other top European leagues — Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto’o, Sadio Mané, Mohamed Salah, Achraf Hakimi — has boosted AFCON’s global visibility. Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal further reinforced the competitiveness of African football on the world stage. New ott platforms now reach niche audiences that traditional broadcasters ignore. CAF reports that the 2025 AFCON in Morocco achieved commercial success, generating a 90% increase in competition revenue and attracting 23 sponsors. CAF also reports that, since the 2023 AFCON in Côte d’Ivoire, the competition has seen a 50% increase in international broadcast partners and a 61% increase in audiences across European, Asian, and South American markets.

The AFCON’s commercial success stands in stark contrast to the struggles of most local leagues. Fans in Accra, Abidjan, Lagos, and Nairobi would rather watch Liverpool, Arsenal, or Real Madrid than attend a local derby. DStv, Canal+, and beIN Sports deliver highly produced European football season after season — outgunning local broadcasters on both production value and rights. Except in North Africa and South Africa, stadium attendance is extremely low. Outside the North African leagues and a few clubs with wealthy patrons or sustained government subsidies, most local clubs survive on meager gate receipts, with no media rights income or sponsorship — even as numerous well-trained young players emerge from academies.

The struggles of local leagues persists despite — and in some ways because of — the emergence of private football academies, which, for the best ones, offered higher-quality youth training and led to more consistent African team performance at the World Cup. After Cameroon’s 1990 heroics and Senegal’s 2002 quarterfinal run (including a 1–0 upset of defending champions France), private academies multiplied across the continent. From Right to Dream in Ghana to asec Mimosas in Côte d’Ivoire (which produced the golden generation of the 2000s), and Generation Foot and Diambars in Senegal, academies became essential pipelines feeding European clubs. Their economic model is built on transfer fees paid by European clubs, plus FIFA solidarity payments — fixed percentages distributed to clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23.

Today, the majority of players on Africa’s most successful national teams — except South Africa and Egypt — play outside the continent. Increasingly, they are dual citizens, European-born, raised, and trained in Europe, highlighting an additional challenge. In a fascinating reversal, the 2010s saw a “reverse muscle drain.” Second- and third-generation African immigrants born in France (Riyad Mahrez, Algeria), England (Victor Moses, Nigeria), or the Netherlands (Hakim Ziyech, Morocco) began representing their ancestral nations. Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal run was powered by a team mostly born and trained in Europe. While this improves competitiveness, it deepens the gap between these players — products of European academies — and local ones. The reverse drain, a quick fix for improved performance, helps the national team win without strong local football development systems but contributes little to local leagues or grassroots development.

On the surface, AFCON is a roaring success. Beneath the spectacle lies a structural challenge. The 2023 edition in Côte d’Ivoire generated record viewership, with 2.5 billion cumulative digital views. Diaspora fans in Paris, New Jersey, and London created a global carnival. FIFA has championed this as a model of “football development.” CAF’s deal with FIFA to host the expanded 32-team Club World Cup in Africa is presented as validation. The spectacle is undeniably colorful, dramatic, and commercially viable.

In 2022, Senegal won AFCON with a squad of 26 players, only one of whom played in the Senegalese league. Local league matches in the country are played in near-empty stadiums, with fans preferring European football on TV or streams. Local players are paid late, if at all.

Meanwhile, CAF’s “Our AFCON, Our Pride” slogan celebrates a tournament that has become a curated export product — a performance of African excellence that overshadows the deteriorating infrastructure in many countries. These nations often cannot host their national team’s matches at home, let alone produce that same excellence locally.

The story of African football is one of structural irony. Born in colonial resistance, sharpened through the anti-apartheid struggle and the fight for World Cup representation, and matured through World Cup heroics, it has finally achieved global recognition. Yet that recognition has come at a fundamental price. The commodity logic of global football has reduced many local leagues to ghost events and turned millions of African children’s dreams into speculative assets for agents and academies.

The success of Morocco’s and Senegal’s academies and diaspora proves African talent is world class, but it also shows that players must leave Africa to make a good living and become stars. When European-born dual citizens choose to represent their ancestral nations, they bring joy to Africans everywhere — a genuine pan-African achievement. But it also exposes a complex and uncomfortable reality: The continent’s domestic football infrastructure and governance are decaying even as its exported stars shine weekly through the world sports media complex.

If the game is to truly serve the continent, the goal cannot be merely to export talent, produce a commercial AFCON every two years — soon every four — or win prestigious matches at the World Cup. The goal must be to build the local ecosystem: to ensure a child in Kano or Kinshasa can grow up to be a professional in their own country, earn a dignified wage, play in a full stadium, and watch their league in prime time. Until then, the global visibility of African stars will remain just that — a reflection of individual brilliance extracted from a system that cannot yet sustain it. World Cup successes bring real continental pride. But can the achievements of a handful of stars and national teams truly speak to the lives of 1.5 billion Africans, let alone offer a path forward for the hundreds of millions of young players polishing their skills on any open patch of ground they can find?

If Spain and France meet in the semifinals of the 2026 World Cup, as the bookies predict, three of the brightest talents currently playing the game will take the field, all sharing a quality entirely unrelated to footballing skills. Kylian Mbappé, Michael Olise, and Lamine Yamal are all of mixed Maghrebi and Black African descent. France legend Thierry Henry has described Mbappé and Olise as France’s Most Valuable Player and Most Important Player, respectively, for the way the two combined to deadly effect against Senegal. The teenage Yamal scored for Spain against Saudi Arabia and showed flashes of the brilliance that has drawn comparisons to Messi despite not being 100 percent fit.

Three of the brightest stars, all with the same improbable trans-Saharan ancestry. But if anyone expects these three to be emissaries of some all-encompassing pan-Africanism, disappointment lies ahead. While there are signs that the gap between the Maghreb and Black Africa has narrowed, closer integration is being fueled not by iconic Afropeans playing the beautiful game but by trade, travel, and mutual economic interest.

None of this is to dismiss the globalized immigrant youth culture of Bondy, Marseille, and Brussels as influential in European sport and the creative industries, and increasingly in West and Central Africa too. This culture is also subtly reshaping who and what codes as African.

Take Kylian Mbappé and his younger brother Ethan. A few years ago, in Abidjan, where I live, I asked an Algerian journalist whether there was any appetite back home to claim Kylian — not for the Fennecs, it was too late for that, but as an icon, a son of the soil, the way Kenya claimed Obama. He scoffed; Algerians did not think of Kylian as one of theirs.

Yet there are news reports that the Algerian federation is now pursuing Ethan, who, because less gifted, is unlikely to get a look in with the French team. Ethan is gettable, football is soft power, and the practice of mining the diaspora for talent is only gathering pace. Now, Senegal and Morocco are not only competing with France for talent, they also battle each other to win commitments from eligible diaspora players.

How, whether — and how quickly — perceptions about where the line is drawn between Maghrebi and Black African will shift owing to players like Ethan Mbappé, who has yet to commit to any team, and even more so to the less well-known Issa Diop, who plays for Fulham in the English Premier League. Of mixed Senegalese-Moroccan heritage, Diop chose to play for Morocco and repaid the choice by heading home a stoppage-time equalizer against the Netherlands on June 30. After that goal forced extra time, Morocco went through on penalties to the round of 16.

On an instinctive level, it makes sense that it should be Morocco at the forefront from the North African side, which “feels” closer culturally and economically to countries like Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire than, say, Tunisia or Algeria. Like Brazil, perhaps, the country has emerged as a sort of leader within the Global South because it scans as multiracial and progressive. In a recent New Yorker essay, Dan Greene accurately notes that the Global South embraced Morocco’s 2022 World Cup team, which reached the tournament’s semifinals. Morocco and its national football team position themselves as representing all of Africa and the Arab world.

And yet it’s proved easier to win over the Global South than the African continent, which polices the boundaries of Pan-Africanism stringently (as an aside: South Africa has learned during this World Cup that not only North African countries risk being ostracized by the African community of nations). It’s a safe bet that most Africans would root for Morocco in a tournament only in the absence of a Black African team, and irritation with the country surged during the 2025 AFCON as a result of Towelgate and the charged tournament final between Senegal and Morocco.

African and diaspora news and social media channels are filled with accusations of perfidy, racism, and foul play by the two sides. As the fallout dragged on, the whole debacle began to seem like the resumption of a long-running family quarrel.

A post by the Instagram influencer, the Merc, caught my eye. Black Africans had never thrown North Africa out of the continent, he said in a video screed; North Africa had walked out on its own. Among his other charges: America had put a man of Black African descent in its highest office before a single North African country had trusted a Black face with real power. How many North African families would be proud enough to celebrate seeing a daughter marry a dark-skinned man from Khartoum or Accra? If the honest answer was no, how African were they, really?

Hyperbolic accusations of this sort are mostly about clicks and engagement, of course, but the Merc’s reading of the tension is ahistorical (perhaps he has never heard of Anwar Sadat?) and shallow. Algiers was a capital of African and even Black liberation as much as Accra or Kinshasa, playing host to the Black Panthers and Frantz Fanon. Its national stadium today is named for Mandela, who once trained with its guerrillas. And if we are implicating Africans in advancing colonialism, then the thousands of West and Central African tirailleurs who deployed first to Indochina and then to Algeria must be added to the ledger.

I don’t want to take the Merc as more than a single — if heavily amplified — voice. There were many other voices in the social media sphere that took a light-hearted teasing tone in commenting about Towelgate, and many of the memes were pointed but not racist.

And the sentiments expressed on Moroccan social media? Some voices were defensive and dismissive of the charges that Morocco was not playing fair, but there was also plenty of contrition. Reddit’s main Morocco thread was thick with self-reproach rather than excuse. National team captain Jihan Hakimi conceded he was not proud of the image his team had given; another player, Ismael Saibari, sought out Senegal goalkeeper Édouard Mendy at the airport to apologize.

It is messy, as these things are. The 2026 World Cup will settle one question at least: if Morocco go deep, will the rest of Africa come with them, or sit on its hands? As for Mbappé, Olise, and Yamal, if all three play in the semifinal, the world will watch three brown men with funny names playing for Europe’s two best teams.

In African football, simplicity is a snooze. While a casual spectator might be content to sit and shout: “Yay!” to celebrate a late goal, for the superfan — the continent’s own brand of match-day superhero — expectations of exaltation are sky-high. The form these icons take is as unpredictable as the game itself; step into any stadium across the continent, and you’re just as likely to encounter a local witch doctor, a diy Avenger, or a reincarnated political figure.

Long before pre-match commentary has begun, another force has already been at work. It does not step onto the pitch, yet it shapes the gravity of the contest. This is the energy of the “12th man,” expressed with unmatched intensity across the African continent. From Accra to Algiers and Kinshasa to Casablanca, support is continuous rather than reactive. Rhythm, voice, and motion fuse into a collective force that sustains teams through fatigue and pressure.

Arrive early to the stadium and the performances are likely already in full swing. Small clusters of supporters build into waves of sound that roll across concrete terraces. By kickoff, the match is already alive — not because the players have started a kickabout, but because the crowd has willed it into existence. Each chant overlaps with another, each drumbeat fills a gap in the air, and they create a layered atmosphere that pushes the game beyond tactics and into the realm of an ecstatic spirituality. Players often speak of “feeling carried” by the crowd, as though the energy in the stands reduces the weight of fatigue.

For the African superfan, support is a way of life. Travel, costume, coordination, and constant presence demand both time and resources. However, beyond the spectacle lies routine. They wake up early to prepare outfits, endure long road journeys when flights are out of reach, and squeeze into crowded shared accommodation when hotels are too expensive. The image seen on television — colorful, loud, effortless — often conceals a reality of sacrifice.

As one South African football journalist, who requested to remain anonymous, explained: “The ones who can afford [their tickets easily] cannot do what superfans do. Superfans must do everything to justify their tickets.” He made these remarks after observing the steady rise in the number of superfans in South Africa since their hosting of the 2010 World Cup. The imbalance is stark. Passion often resides with those least equipped to sustain it, forcing them into a constant negotiation between survival and support. In that sense, the superfan lives in two worlds at once: one of visibility and celebration, the other of uncertainty and personal cost.

This dual existence creates an unspoken pressure. The performance cannot slack off, because for many, presence at the stadium is about proving worth. Yet this devotion exists on a spectrum. For some, football remains purely an emotional outlet, a ritual of belonging repeated across tournaments and generations. For others, superfandom has evolved into something more complex: a platform for opportunity, and at times, survival. The lines between passion and profession are razor-thin, and the modern superfan is shaped by the demands to keep up appearances.

If the private lives of superfans reveal sacrifice, their public profile can bring opportunity or expose tension. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Michel Kuka Mboladinga, who dresses up as the country’s beloved first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, has been fully embraced. His rise has been rapid. His image is widely circulated in the media, and his presence has become embedded within the national team’s identity.

Congolese journalist Darius Tshibangu describes that transformation succinctly: “Since the [2025] AFCON, where he became a star, his status has changed. He now has a manager who handles requests. . . .  Today, he is one of the few fan leaders to have landed actual contracts.” What might appear elsewhere as commercialization is, in Congo, interpreted as recognition. “The government. . . .  always covers the travel expenses for the animators,” Tshibangu explains. “Barring any surprises, Lumumba and the others will be on the trip to the United States.”

The implications are clear: a recognizable superfan earns institutional backing, and an understanding grows among the public that a performance in the stands is just as much a part of the spectacle as the game itself. As football grows increasingly commercial, superfans like Mboladinga demonstrate the benefits of participation. Media exposure and sponsorship bring opportunities, offering financial pathways that did not previously exist.

If Congo’s reaction to a celebrity superfan reflects institutional endorsement, South Africa’s relationship with one of its most recognizable faces reveals superfandom’s frictions. At the center of recent controversies in the country stands Mama Joy Chauke. Recently, South African Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie decided to end travel benefits for fans of the national team, and a back-and-forth between the minister and Mama Joy broke out in public view. McKenzie suggested her husband should pay instead of the state; Mama Joy responded that he was “undermining” her family, and vowed to attend the competition regardless.

The same South African journalist, who witnessed the conflict, was sympathetic toward the minister’s position. He described Mama Joy as entitled and suggested that she was being used as a political pawn. He said: “South Africa doesn’t have a policy of paying for fans. . . .  the problem is that she is being used by certain people in football leadership.”

Visibility can be both an asset and a liability. And so as their profiles raise, the African superfan must navigate a paradoxical relationship with institutions. In the space between Lumumba’s embrace and Mama Joy’s confrontation lies the spectrum of what it means to be a superfan in Africa. On the one hand, the state formalizes passion, funds it, and exports it as national identity. On the other, visibility invites scrutiny, and support becomes something to justify rather than celebrate.

It raises a fundamental question: should fandom remain organic and self-sustained, or can it be structured, funded, and remain authentic? Across the continent, there is a growing skepticism toward high profile superfans. They are celebrated as cultural ambassadors, yet questioned as financial liabilities. Governments understand the symbolic return from their presence at international competitions. A single broadcast image — a painted face leading chants — can project a nation’s identity more powerfully than any official tourist campaign. It is soft power in its most organic form.

Yet, translating that value into policy is fraught. Funding superfans means making choices. It means justifying why public funds should support travel for a select group while broader populations face economic hardship. In some countries, this has led to structured systems to navigate these social tensions: registered supporter unions, official delegations, and capped sponsorship numbers. In others, it has triggered backlash, with citizens questioning whether the passion of fans should ever be institutionalized. At the heart of the debate lies a difficult question: can authenticity survive once it is funded?

Alternatives have emerged in Morocco and Algeria, where supporters’ groups are able to fund travel through a more independent model. There, groups of fans often fund journeys or raise money through informal networks and the local community. This autonomy offers flexibility, but also places the burden entirely on the public, rather than the state or federation.

If the debate over funding reveals fraught politics within Africa, the journey to this year’s World Cup exposes the harsh realities of intercontinental travel. For fans from many countries, the path to the tournament is riddled with systemic costs and barriers. Unlike previous tournaments, where proximity or loose entry requirements allowed for spontaneous travel, the US, Canada, and Mexico impose a far more difficult process. Visa applications to these countries require proof of financial stability, confirmed accommodation, and strong evidence of intent to return home. For independent supporters — many of whom operate within weaker economies — meeting these requirements can be as challenging as funding the journey itself. Additionally, the minimum expenses for a single supporter: flights, accommodation, match tickets, and internal travel far exceed what many can realistically afford. Multi-city scheduling across three host nations adds another layer of complexity, requiring careful coordination and additional transport costs. For organized supporter groups, the burden multiplies.

So, in this World Cup, it is diaspora networks that may prove decisive in rallying fans to support their teams. Large immigrant communities in both the US and Canada can be easily mobilized and stand in for fans who cannot make the journey. We’ve already seen as much from Congolese fans traveling from across North America to Guadalajara for that country’s intercontinental playoff in March. In Cape Verde’s case, long-established communities, such as the 70,000 Cape Verdeans living in Boston, could carry the nation’s presence without the need for large-scale travel from home.

For all its color and cohesion, African football fandom is not without its fractures. Just this past January, members of the Senegalese supporters group, Douzième Gaindé clashed with stadium security during an on-field argument over a penalty decision at the 2025 AFCON final. In the aftermath, 18 supporters were handed prison sentences. While some have since been released, the legal consequences remain poignant. Criminal records can complicate visa applications, placing future travel at risk.

Those moments of tension between supporters and security forces revealed a more volatile edge to African fan culture. Such moments complicate the image of the superfan as purely celebratory. They introduce a dimension often associated with ultra culture — where identity, territory, and emotion can collide. Yet the comparison between European ultras and African superfans remains imperfect. Across much of Africa, fan culture is less rigidly structured than in historical ultra environments. It is more fluid, more performative, and less defined by organized confrontation. When disorder occurs, it is often situational rather than systemic. Still, perception matters. As African fans prepare for the global stage, isolated incidents risk shaping broader narratives. The challenge lies in preserving the intensity and authenticity of support.

Due to the challenges of securing tickets to matches, or even arriving in North America, there is a growing possibility that the stands will feel more structured, less kinetic than Africans are accustomed to. And yet, absence is not inevitable. The question remains whether football, in its most polished and commercial form, is still built to receive these superfans. Because the African superfan represents something that cannot be manufactured. And if, on a summer day, that rhythm echoes through the streets, it will mean that despite cost, policy, and distance, something essential has endured — the part of football that refuses to be contained.

What makes the current age feel particularly unnerving, even desperate, is that people’s apolitical pleasures and pastimes are colonized to an unprecedented degree. Disillusioned, we’ve long come to accept that politics may be intractable. Most people now seek betterment, or simply respite, in private life. But what happens when those areas of life that would serve as retreats — for leisure, for finding meaning, for a little peace and quiet — become exceptionally loud? Our churches and temples, both sacred and profane, no longer provide escape from the world. Worse, they no longer feel like they belong to us.

So it is with football — and especially with club football, hit with a one-two punch of commercialization and politicization. As so much of life becomes flattened and homogenized, bought and sold, does international football not emerge as the only pure form left?

It’s a risible, even perverse notion: FIFA is beset by corruption, qualifiers are often tedious, and the big tournaments price out fans; the infinite expansion of the World Cup dilutes its quality. But at the end of the age of globalization, we might consider how the relationship between football, identification, and meaning-making, and the processes of deterritorialization are evolving — perhaps in ironic directions. Club football, once rooted and tied to place, has been set loose. Like Theseus’s ship, a football club might change its parts, but its identity remained relatively stable over time — a process that becomes harder to sustain when a club’s fans are drawn from anywhere, its revenue streams likewise.

These days, we football fans are beset by demands to behave the right way or to think the right things. Another sanctioned pro-forma anti-racism or anti-homophobia campaign? Whatever, you can brush it off. It’s good-hearted, but ultimately toothless. Or maybe you regard such initiatives more darkly: ideological campaigns by a technocratic elite desperate to remain relevant, or even to control what people think. In any case, that same messaging is being funneled to you at work and on public transport. It’s everywhere.

It isn’t only politics or hyperpolitics — that is, a politicization that is constant and everywhere but which gains no traction. There is the ceaseless commercialization of the game, which is making club football less competitive and more oligopolistic; it is turning players into robots and even transforming historic clubs in France or Spain into mere feeders for superclubs in England, or making a local Brazilian or German club into a franchise of a fast-moving consumer goods (fmcg) brand. Add to that all manner of bureaucratization and technocratic managerialism — video-assisted refereeing redresses small injustices while the authorities commit far greater outrages — and it’s no surprise many feel something ineffable has been lost. You might even refer to it as soul, if you don’t wince too much at the cliché.

The theorist Benjamin Studebaker refers to the four F’s of faith, fandom, family, and futurisms to describe the areas of life that act as escapes or enclaves from the hyperpolitical public sphere. But even these institutions are in the business of legitimation. Perhaps more than ever, they act as mediators for the ruling order. The authorities find they have little purchase with the populace. With football, they have a captive audience, one whose usual cynicism has been left at the gates — fans have abandoned themselves to romance and passion. It’s a level of libidinal investment the state can only dream of. It’s a great place for propaganda. But the more football is made to serve legitimation, the more fandom stops working as an enclave.

For most of football’s history, club football has been taken to be the real thing. The club was place-based, often rooted in a community, and by extension, supporters’ self-conception was interwoven with other identities. And these weren’t just off-the-peg individualistic badges; they were related to major social forces: religion, class, region, and political ideology. Moreover, the regularity of matches gave it a seamless integration into the rhythms of daily life.

In contrast, international football was the realm of pure spectacle: an occasional happening, a competition of all-star teams, often on neutral terrain. It was magic, but not lacking in ambivalences. You had to cheer for players who were your enemy for most of the year. And the nation was far too big a collectivity at times. It pasted over cleavages of class and locale. Even in small countries, the pool of national talent was vast relative to the catchment areas and transfer markets most clubs operated in. Indeed, it may have been this limited nature that made club football what it was.

Now, at the end of the age of globalization, club football at the top level is basically limitless: Global brands shop in a global market for players, managers. . . .  and fans. The nation, the ultimate modern social construction, now appears more place-bound, more limited, more real; and so with football. A national team manager can’t recruit players on the open market; he must work with what he’s given. A new owner can’t come in and change the key identifying symbols of the team. The players all speak the same language (mostly) and share a common experience of socialization (sort of). In today’s hypermodernity, where everything is deregulated, deinstitutionalized and globalized, we search in desperation for some fixity.

In the 2000s, an airy, cheery — some would say gormless — image of the nation was projected, but as economic and geopolitical conditions soured, the project became less plausible. Virulent, exclusionary nationalism returned to the scene at the same time as baseless nation-branding and sportswashing reached their apex — a fact that should not be seen as a paradox but as a necessary unity of opposites. It is a story that can be told through the World Cup itself, which has gone through its own dramatic process of attempting to represent the nation, albeit in contradictory ways.

Germany 2006 was a coming-out party for the host country: Flag-waving was back, without a whiff of sieg-heiling. The new postmodern Deutschland could speak its name without the weight of historical guilt — on condition that the nation had no determinate content, beyond tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and economic dynamism. Germany may have hegemonized Europe, but only in the guise of the post-national EU. As Wolfgang Streeck has long pointed out, European unity and harmony were a vehicle for big German exporters’ interests. But in the age of peak globalization, national interests were verboten, as were those of class. So German ruling-class interests were not pursued through the German nation but through the post-nation collectivity of the EU.

In 2010, South Africa likewise announced itself as something new and different. The rainbow nation had shed not just racism and apartheid but also the means by which that oppressive order was cast off: national-liberation struggle. So both racial and class politics were relegated to the past, even as deep inequality and developmental failures persisted.

By 2014, the global context had changed, and the commodities boom that lifted South Africa and Brazil both had ended. The lead-up to Brazil’s World Cup saw mass protests against inequality, corruption, and misdirected public spending. The subsequent years saw the national colors, previously universal and uncontested — and with a strong association with the Seleção — become the object of rancorous polarization. Anti-corruption protests swung to the right, with conservatives adopting the canary-yellow jersey — one which would soon after become the icon of the radical right under Bolsonaro.

Although Russia used its World Cup to detoxify its national image, presenting itself as open (despite sanctions) and friendly (despite the 2014 annexation of Crimea), the specter of a more assertive nationalism was always there. This was a revanchist power, shunned by the West, and for which liberal democracy was now just a series of hypocrisies and lies. In the eyes of sagacious Westerners, Russians were the worst thing: white people untroubled by colonial guilt. In reality, ordinary citizens had been shoved off the political stage, and the state swallowed the nation. Either way, dangerous stuff.

The apparent opposite was presented at Qatar’s World Cup. Along with other small Gulf states, this was a nation without a people, a contradiction in terms: credentialed and salaried labor is imported from the West, a mass of low-skilled workers is imported from South Asia, and a thin top layer of 10% of residents are actual Qatari nationals. While Qatar attempted to reframe criticism of human rights abuses as selective or neocolonial, the result was nevertheless a transparent exercise in legitimating a petro-hub and entrepôt as a member of the community of nations. It was the most explicit case of nation-branding through sport.

Nowhere in this postmodern perambulation do we encounter the nation understood in its much earlier conception: a self-determining body of citizens committed to building a collective life together. That would be far too demotic, even democratic, for the technocrats and demagogues who alternately run the show. As a consequence, attempts to rediscover the nation through football are confounded — as are attempts to rediscover a love for football through nationalism.

If for Benedict Anderson, the daily newspaper was central to the generation of national self-consciousness, stimulating the sense of a body of people existing at the same time in the same space, then it is not surprising that, in the age of hypermedia, the nation becomes much less determinate, less anchored. The nation is a free-for-all in which global branding initiatives meet their obverse: reactionary ethnic nationalism — an attempt at finding fixity in a liquefied world. Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 are part of the same whole.

Thus, we find that radical-conservative reactions to globalism do not escape the tendency toward placelessness. Much the opposite. Consider maga — it has become a franchise. So Brazil’s Bolsonaro family appeals to Trump to impose sanctions on their own country in the name of nationalism, or Orbán supporters in Hungary no longer sing their national anthem collectively, as they have traditionally done, but have it sung by a single performer, US style.

National football teams might have racist ultras insisting on ethnic purity, but how can a team represent you on the pitch if there is no longer even a pretense of a national style? Organized Germans, defensive Italians, brave English, creative Brazilians. . . .  these are just clichés of another age.

So is it all corroded, both football and nation, and with them, national football? Perhaps there is hope yet.

It may seem a shabby banality in the face of all the above, but the scarcity of an event may be its value. Rare are the moments in always-on, 24–7 capitalism when a collectivity can stop and regard itself. We lack modern rituals — and we lack recognition for the new rituals that have emerged. Recall that ritual’s relationship to time, as Byung-Chul Han argues, is that of home to place: Time becomes manageable and meaningful rather than a ceaseless stream of moments. Anderson argued the nation answered the key question of belonging by tying together time and place: “Why are we. . . .  here. . . .  now.” In a similar way, an earlier theorist of nationalism, Ernest Renan, called the nation a daily plebiscite — the ongoing assent or shared will to live together. If fragmented hypermedia impedes this process today, then the infrequent Big Event provides a little substitute.

Popular rituals interrupt the daily grind and provide a temporal home in which the people can come to see themselves, to recognize themselves. The euphoria which greeted the uprisings of the early 2010s, from Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square and beyond, was testament to the way such moments are treasured. Club football’s own daily plebiscite has become exhausting. The experience of being a football fan today is to be submitted to a barrage of legitimation stories. The World Cup, in contrast, can serve as a reminder of what is otherwise being lost, its rarity preserving ritual from total commodification.

Of course, football won’t rescue the nation. And the nation can’t rescue football. But a popular-democratic project of nation-building, if taken up once again, could yet salvage the last collectivity from mediatic spectacle, lest it be left to reactionary entrepreneurs and globalist marketeers alike.

In South Africa, we have granted sports the power to unite and divide us. Bafana Bafana’s historic win against South Korea has once again inspired the nation to chant “No DNA, just RSA!” — ostensibly asserting that citizenship, not ancestry, defines belonging in South Africa — a chant popular during major international tournament campaigns. As we leave the group stages for unknown territory, we are once again partaking in a “soft nationalism,” but this time it takes place amidst the context of hard nationalism. The same voices celebrating are also chanting that “foreigners must go.”

The prefix “South” adds a lot of baggage to “Africa.” This is a country that enacted a specific kind of colonialism, one that saw the nation as its own and not a colony of a larger empire. The apartheid government did not serve the interests of a foreign power; they were the foreign power, claiming the country as a homeland. Our history has given us a distinct national character, each “race” keenly adopting “South Africa,” but it means something different to every person who dons it. At the present moment, this means that a large part of the country is calling for the forced removal of foreigners in the name of the South African identity. There is a genuine concern that the poor Black South African has, that their lives are destined for destitution, that health care, jobs, and economic comfort are not “meant for them.” They can see it in crumbling institutions, in their own lives, and in their inability to get a leg up in the most unequal country in the world.

Thirty years of neoliberalism have not been kind to large parts of the country. This has led to a serious resurgence of right-wing politics. From political agents who wish to remove Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the post-apartheid policy framework aimed at redressing racial inequalities in business ownership and employment (which, if we are being honest, has not done its job), in favor of “free market” determinism, which would be an effective death sentence to progressive employment. To the renewed Afrophobia of March on March, an anti-migrant vigilante movement that has organized protests calling for the removal of undocumented foreigners from South Africa.

Blaming foreigners while evading genuine and difficult questions about the government, and capitalism and its failures, is easier, and it comes with the bonus of feeling like “you are a part of something bigger.” The power of giving a voice, even a misguided one, to the voiceless cannot be overstated here. For 30 years, South Africa has been great at sloganeering, and over that 30-year period, fewer and fewer people feel like those slogans meant something. March on March has given those who feel silent something to say, something to do, a tangible action — and that is a lot more than broken promises.

The face of Afrophobia as it sits now is the Zulu Man — a carefully crafted image of a proud South African fighting to “take back his country.” The Zulu ethno-linguistic group is the largest in South Africa; some anti-migrant organizing has drawn heavily on Zulu nationalist imagery and hostel-dweller networks in KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg. Tell me what you think the white supremacists, who still largely control the economy, are thinking when they see traditional attire being used to orchestrate violence against the marginalized. We have seen this play before in pre-1994 South Africa, where one group of marginalized peoples was mobilized against the other; it paints a convenient image: “See, they can’t even get along, how do we expect them to govern?” I do not condemn the Zulu man whose life is spent on the outskirts of society, in single-sex migrant worker hostels (built under apartheid to house Black workers near cities; many remain occupied and have historically been sites of political mobilization). He has genuine concerns for a better life. To suggest that Afrophobia is a “Zulu problem” is Afrophobic; to suggest that the carefully chosen poster men for March on March are somehow the be-all and end-all of Zulu identity is also Afrophobic. To ignore the influence of Zulu nationalism is also misguided. It is difficult territory: to rightfully address the ethno-nationalist dreams of some people who happen to be Zulu, while not falling into the thinking that Zulu people are “the bad ones.” To reiterate the point, this is the marginalized being mobilized against the marginalized, and those in power sit back and smile as they are left unscathed.

Back to soccer. As we unite under the banner of South Africa, what South Africa are we supporting? Are we uniting under a new nation that sees itself as separate from Africa, more South than African? When we hosted the 2010 World Cup, we were “the first African country” to do so. Now we are flirting with being the first Southern African country to cut itself off ideologically from the larger African story. We are reifying colonial borders and reproducing the logic of white supremacy. When a Bafana Bafana win is nation-building, we have to remain vigilant about the nation it is building towards.

It was June 25, 1957, just over three months after Ghana had gained independence from the British Empire. One of the empire’s crown jewels, Sir Stanley Matthews CBE, was ascending the gangway of his BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) flight at the Accra Airport when he suddenly stopped, turned, and waved with his right hand. He was diligently dressed in a suave suit, and his overcoat hung on his left arm — a sense of sartorial sophistication. He was wrapping up what he had called “the most memorable overseas tour of my life.” And it was an emotional one.

“Come back again, Stan!” chanted the loud crowd at the airport. He smiled. Hours before boarding the flight, he had told reporters that he had been “deeply touched” by the hospitality of Ghanaians.

Sir Stanley’s visit to Ghana was one of the most influential events not only in the history of sports in Ghana, but in the history of Ghana in general. Here was the world’s best footballer of that era — he had won the inaugural Ballon d’Or a year earlier — choosing to visit a three-month-old country to share his talent through teaching.

At the time, he had a successful 25-year playing career under his belt and was regarded as football’s pioneering global superstar. By all intents and purposes, he was arguably the most high-profile personality across any discipline to have ever visited Ghana at that point. The reigning “Monarch of Association Football” — as a newspaper ad called him — had visited a nascent nation at the heart of the West African coast. It was as special as it was fascinating, and would pave the way for later pilgrimages by global giants of the game such as Lev Yashin, Alfredo Di Stéfano, and Pelé in the ensuing years.

Sir Stanley had arrived on May 21, and, as the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s biggest newspaper, noted, he had a “terrific impact on the sport in this country” right from when his feet touched Ghanaian soil, his reverence reverberating raucously around the country. “No visiting sportsman has ever received the sort of reception accorded Matthews,” the paper reported.

He was given a “stately” six-mile drive from the Accra Airport to the Accra Community Center, where a reception was held in his honor. A few hours later, he was enstooled — installed in a traditional chieftaincy ceremony — as a Soccer Hene (King of Soccer) by Nii Tetteh Kpeshie, the Sempe Mantse (a traditional chief and patron of Hearts of Oak, the club that funded the legend’s trip to Ghana). Looking glad, he was clad in full traditional regalia — colorful kente over a white jumper — holding an ivory sword, with his famous feet resting on a pair of footballs. The stool he sat on would, 60 years later, be auctioned for £850.

The main brain behind Sir Stanley’s invitation to Ghana, though, was the man they called the “grey-haired soccer philosopher”: Henry Plange “HP” Nyemetei, the president of Hearts of Oak. HP Nyemetei and his Hearts crew put in a lot of heart, breaking their backs and challenging lack and luck to pluck up their courage. As the Daily Graphic noted, “a lot of sleepless nights, empty stomachs and tiring treks” went into planning the visit, which was, indeed, “a great, bold experiment.” Nyemetei said it was Hearts of Oak’s “privilege to introduce the new state of Ghana to one of the greatest sportsmen of all time.”

Sir Stanley was mobbed by fans everywhere he went, celebrated with appellations, showered with praise, and serenaded with music. He was proof that the kingdom of football knew no boundaries, just people and passion. He met all the people who mattered in Ghana: Governor-General Sir Arku Korsah; Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah; the Asantehene Otumfuor Agyemang Prempeh II (the king of the Ashanti people); the Okyehene Ofori Atta II (the king of the Akyem Abuakwa traditional area); the UK High Commissioner to Ghana Sir Ian Maclennan; and many more. The gatherings to honor him had many iterations: shindigs, soirees, sherry parties, and so on.

He played five exhibition matches across the country, featuring for Hearts of Oak against sides such as archrivals Asante Kotoko, Sekondi Hasaacas, and Cornerstones. Across these games, on relatively undulating and dusty pitches, his gentle yet genuine genius shone, even as a 42-year-old, conjuring ethereal moves such as “stylishly sedating” balls, as CK Gyamfi recalls in his autobiography The Black Star.

He “blazed” through defenses “like a wildfire set in a summer desert,” according to legendary sports writer Kofi Badu. For Badu, whenever the “magic of Matthews came to life”, it was “peerless and impeccable.” “What a man he is!” he simply ended one of his match reports. Not even the tropical humidity of Ghana could stop him — he had come in from cold Denmark — because he exerted himself, exhibiting fierce fitness that flabbergasted fans. Indeed, Sir Stanley measured up to all his monikers: the King of Wingers, the Wizard of the Dribble, the Soccer Saint, the King of Soccer — as 80,000 fans savored every bit of his mastery across Accra, Kumasi, and Sekondi.

The matches he played in offered players — both teammates and opponents — a rare opportunity to tap into greatness from close range, but it was the training sessions he organized in schools and parks that were more crucial. Sir Stanley took his time to organize workshops for grassroots footballers and school children about the rudiments of modern soccer, or what Ghanaians of that era obsessively called “scientific soccer.” He covered the craft and the culture; and professed the physical and the psychological. He spread knowledge in such a caring and contagious manner. No wonder CK Gyamfi noted that he was like “a walking encyclopedia of football.”

He was given full media privileges, too. Apart from a brilliant broadcast on Radio Ghana, Sir Stanley wrote a full center-spread column in the Daily Graphic detailing his observations of football in Ghana, commending positives and suggesting improvements. He emphasized what he said was his main “secret”: “The importance of 100 percent physical fitness.” “Some are lacking it, and as a consequence, the stamina to last the whole 90 minutes of the game is wanting. Skill and ability and enthusiasm count for nought if you are not in sound physical condition to put them into operation. So keep fit — proper!” He also entreated Ghanaian footballers to be bold and “call more for the ball”, as that “sense of anticipation is the knack that wins games.” And he advised Ghanaian footballers to normalize rolling passes low along the turf, to avoid unnecessarily hoofing the ball high.

Sir Stanley’s visit not only positioned a young Ghana in influential geopolitical circles, it also shook its football foundations internally, contributing significantly to the revolution that toppled the administration of long-time Ghanaian football chief Richard Akwei just months later. Ghanaian football fans developed an urgent craving for such progressive policies in the wake of his departure. Kofi Badu had observed in a column that Hearts’ “brave” attempt to pull off the Sir Stanley visit was an indictment on Akwei’s Ghana Amateur Football Association (GAFA). “They (Hearts) have shown that foresight which is lacking in our GAFA,” Badu wrote.

Ohene Djan, the 33-year-old who led the successful revolt against Akwei in September, and who would soon become a football colossus in his own right, stepped into power and borrowed the Sir Stanley visit blueprint from his friend and fellow Convention People’s Party (CPP) member HP Nyemetei: the ambitious invitation of top personalities and clubs into the country to “rub shoulders” with local footballers and other stakeholders.

As GAFA chairman, Djan hired three foreign coaches — George Ainsley, Andreas Sjoberg, and Josef Ember — for the national team, the first time since 1903 that Ghana had hired professional coaches. He brought in celebrated English referee Alf Bond to train Ghanaian referees into FIFA referees. There were many such Sir Stanley-esque schemes, and they worked to perfection, propelling Ghana’s football to continental power and global prominence.

Sir Stanley had predicted in his column that Ghana “in the not-too-distant future can become a force in international soccer. . . . I can confidently prophesy a great future for Ghana football.”

It took a few years, but by 1965, Ghana had become Africa’s first superstar football nation: three-time West African champions, ceremonial East African champions, two-time African champions, the first African nation to tour Eastern Europe, and the first Black African nation to qualify for the Olympic Games football tournament. More markedly, the Black Stars sent shock waves across the world of football by drawing three-all with the greatest club in the world, Real Madrid, in August 1962. They even beat Sir Stanley’s former club, Blackpool, five goals to one in May 1960.

And it all started with Sir Stanley, and the standard of studiousness he stirred among the sea of soccer stars he sighted in the state of Ghana.