Ever since the World Cup concluded with Spain’s emphatic triumph over universally loathed Argentina (at least it felt this way), it has no longer felt like everyone is looking in the same direction at the same time. For a month and a bit, football’s biggest stage gave us one of the last remaining experiences of shared, global time. Not global justice, not global equality — the tournament is in many ways a monument to their absence — but a crude, synchronized schedule. Games at set hours, short-lived solidarities, the impression, however false, that the world is briefly doing something together, undergoing a collective experience.

Once that all ends, you’re plunged back into a social temporality and news cycle that moves at lightning speed and adjusting back is disorienting. It didn’t help that I had to deal with a debilitating case of cyclosporiasis (in an ill-fated decision, I tried some Taco Bell for the first time the day before my return flight back to South Africa, and getting a food-borne illness felt like an appropriate parting gift from a United States in decline). In the weeks since the World Cup, I found myself in a kind of fog I at first attributed to being exhausted from a busy year coupled with bouts of illness, but which, as I return to relatively decent health, I recognize as a familiar feeling, one that has typified contemporary experience for as long as I can remember.

There’s a book by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman which I think is underrated, and does better at capturing the texture of our epoch than many other attempts (do we live in late capitalism, surveillance capitalism, the burnout society, post-modernity, etc etc.). It’s called Liquid Modernity, and Bauman’s straightforward argument is that the defining feature of contemporary society is no longer the construction of stable institutions, identities, and social relationships, but their constant dissolution. Where the “solid” phase of modernity sought to build enduring structures — stable careers, lifelong marriages, nation-states, political parties, class identities, and fixed moral frameworks — our present condition is “liquid”: forms no longer retain their shape for long enough to organize human life. The contradictory result of this is that even though in many important respects, individuals have unprecedented freedom (at least compared to any other point in human history), it’s coupled with chronic insecurity and the burden of constantly having to remake ourselves.

One of his most evocative concepts is the notion of pointillist time, which is “more prominent for its inconsistency and lack of cohesion than for its elements of continuity and consistency.” Time under liquid modernity is fragmented and disconnected, and rather than unfolding as a series of events with some relationship to each other, it is rather a series of “eternal instants.” It’s not hard work to see how this characterizes so much of algorithm-dominated society in general, and our media consumption in particular. If it wasn’t hard enough figuring out what producing any meaningful “content” takes in the attention economy, it was dismaying for me to recently learn that even new media like podcasts and video essays are themselves now being repurposed in a “clipping economy” where increasingly, circulation of short clips from longer pieces is becoming the main event rather than previews.

At Africa Is a Country, we are very proud of our World Cup Road Trip series. Three episodes are live — Episode 1 on the Cabo Verdean diaspora in New England, Episode 2 on the affinity between Algeria and Lawrence, Kansas, and Episode 3 on Toronto’s Ghanaian community — with further episodes from the road currently in post-production. Although the website and our weekly newsletters remain our bread and butter, like most outlets, we are experimenting with different ways of reaching audiences, and short-form video has been one of them. The newsletter in particular functions as our most reliable direct channel to readers as social platform referrals grow less dependable. The World Cup, however, gave us a powerful on-ramp: sport brought in readers who might not otherwise arrive at a piece on visa regimes or xenophobia, and the coverage was built to convert that interest into political understanding.

What has been challenging is that discovery is now heavily platform-dependent, and the same work travels very differently depending on where it lands: our road trip episodes have found nearly 10,000 views on Instagram while the identical material moves far more slowly on YouTube. And we’re a small team that only ever has the capacity to make something and release it into the world once, maybe twice. How much labor is involved in reproducing countless clips from one piece, and circulating it on an innumerable number of platforms? Whatever it is, we simply cannot do it.

In fact, we are behind on our production and release schedule, and as is normal to do, we worry about whether the material will be stale by the time we are ready to publish it. To be sure, timeliness is always an objective in journalism, and has been before the age of platform dominance. In fact, what we are dealing with now is tougher to pin down. Bauman’s concept of pointilist time captures, on the one hand, the way discrete events move differently under liquid modernity, and how our sense of when things are happening is transformed. But algorithmic time also organizes the field of perception, i.e, our sense of where things are happening, or more precisely, of what is happening. In other words, the hyper-personalization of what we see means it is increasingly difficult to be certain that we are seeing the same thing, and interpreting the same set of events.

Naming what’s happened to our sense of what needs a different word, and the nearest one I can find is the concept of anamorphosis. Hans Holbein’s 1533 double portrait The Ambassadors is the textbook case. Two French diplomats flank a shelf crowded with globes and instruments, and stretched across the floor between their feet is a long grey smear that reads, from where you’re standing to look at the men, as nothing at all — a flaw in the paint, maybe. Walk up close and look from a sharp angle, low down on the right, and the smear resolves into a human skull, rendered in as much detail as anything else in the frame. Both images are actually there on the same canvas. Neither is a distortion of the other. Stand in one place, and you see two wealthy men and their instruments; stand in the other, and the whole painting turns out to be about death, and you cannot hold both pictures in your eye at once. So, the feed isn’t handing everyone a blurred or partial version of one picture. It’s resolving the same underlying material into fully coherent, mutually exclusive pictures, depending on where — which feed, which platform, which slice of the personalization engine — you happen to be standing at.

Although the World Cup directed our attention to one shared happening, what one’s experience of the World Cup largely depended on was whether you were simultaneously experiencing it online, and if so, primarily through which platform, etc. For example, while Argentina’s seemingly unsportsmanlike conduct and perceptions of favoritism made them wildly unpopular online, that didn’t translate for most regular people I spoke to who still associated it with Maradona and the global South and couldn’t believe anyone in Africa could cheer for Spain. Since at least Qatar 2022, the World Cup has increasingly felt asynchronous on this dimension, consisting of several overlapping tournaments, each with its own villains, injuries, scandals, and moral weather.

Now, of course, every attempt to make sense of the world begins from the fact that each of us encounters it from our own irreducibly subjective position. Human experience is always an exercise in interpretation: the attempt to establish shared meaning across common or divergent experience. What feels distinctive about the present moment, however, is that we are losing not simply a shared sense of time, but a shared world. Politics has always depended on more than disagreement. It has depended on the possibility that we are, in some meaningful sense, disagreeing about the same reality — that our arguments begin from a common object, however differently we interpret it. What has become fragile is the achievement of that common world: not identical beliefs, but enough shared ground to know that we are talking about the same events, inhabiting the same present, looking at the same object from different sides. At least in the group stages, the World Cup felt like it briefly restored a condition that democracy, journalism, and ordinary social life all depend on, namely shared attention. But as the competition narrowed and the algorithm regained its grip, the World Cup itself increasingly dissolved into the endless circulation of content, re-entering the attention economy as just another stream of commodities competing for visibility.

Perhaps the World Cup has simply become too big a spectacle, one exceeding our capacity to engage with it meaningfully at the scale it’s now played at, and perhaps the future will warrant a return to “doing things at human scale.” Staying with football: it’s felt, in recent years, like women’s football has become popular partly for this reason. This isn’t to make light of the real disparities in investment and coverage that still shape the women’s game. But there’s a sense in which it still feels within reach — legible at something closer to human scale, not yet fully run through the same algorithmic churn the men’s tournament now is.

Which brings me, with some embarrassment, to WAFCON. Morocco has been hosting the tournament since late July, and we’re already two days away from the semifinals — the tournament’s own answer to the question of scale above. Smaller broadcast footprint, thinner commercial saturation, a fraction of the men’s tournament’s algorithmic weight. It would have been the perfect subject for the argument I’ve just spent several thousand words making.

We have not covered it properly. Contributing editor Maher Mezahi has been filing dispatches on his podcast and newsletter, but the rest of us have been largely silent, and that’s doesn’t reflect anything except an editorial oversight. I don’t want to paper over it with a joke about being like tired footballers at the end of a long season, true as that joke also happens to be (and if only we had as many resources at our disposal). The honest version is that a small team, mid-fog, still finishing a World Cup series that had already outrun its own schedule, let a second tournament pass it by — which is, if I hold myself to my own argument rather than just making it, exactly what this piece has been describing. Not a failure of will, but what happens when the volume of things worth attending to exceeds what we can hold.

So, I end with an apology, and an announcement. We’re going on our bi-annual publishing break this week, later than planned and more tired than usual, in no small part because of everything above. We’ll be back with something on WAFCON’s back end — the final is on the 16th — and whatever else the world has rearranged the calendar around by the time we’re attempted to rest. For now the fog wins this round. We’re stepping out of it on purpose, rather than being carried along by it, which is about the only kind of victory on offer.

What happened last Thursday in Ceuta was a border spectacle of surprising scale and scope. Tens of thousands of mainly young fellow Moroccans stormed the gates while others braved the water to enter the enclave. All the elements of the spectacle were there: from images of boisterous youngsters jockeying for entry, to a diplomatic slanging match, to border patrols scrambling to push migrants back to Morocco.

It sounds like a geopolitical déjà vu — almost the same border antics: scene, actors, protagonists, and victims staged in May 2021. In fact, what happened in Ceuta is the third episode of the border spectacle: the first staged in May 2021, the second in September 2024, and here we are watching the third — and perhaps not the last — episode, marking a shift in Morocco’s migration diplomacy to a more coercive approach.

There is no conspiracy theory behind the Ceuta border spectacle; there is only a geopolitical buildup to understand Morocco’s coercive migration diplomacy. The latter has shifted migration governance from policies, practices, and discourses to the direct use of its youth and other racialized African migrants in diplomatic sparring.

Here is the buildup: On December 10, 2020, the Trump administration recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. This historic moment led Morocco to garner further diplomatic recognition, especially from its traditional allies — not least Spain as a former colonizer. In January 2021, a diplomatic logjam between Morocco and Germany started to simmer following the latter’s criticism of Donald Trump’s proclamation to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. This diplomatic friction with Germany prompted Morocco to push the European Union.

Meanwhile, the possibility of meeting Morocco’s expectations, whether by the EU or its member states, proved far-fetched. The diplomatic spat between Morocco and Spain reached its nadir when the latter hosted Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, in April 2021 to seek medical treatment. In a tit-for-tat response, Morocco unleashed over 8,000 migrants, including around 3,000 minors. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the anti-migrant far-right Vox party in Spain, denounced the arrivals, stating Morocco was “launching minors like battering rams” against the Spanish borders.

Now, the same scenario is unfolding after Pedro Sánchez visited Algeria to parley with President Abdelmajid Tebboune over natural gas and Western Sahara.

In Europe, the border spectacle sparked a moral panic that feared the invasion of the southern flanks of Europe, raking up right-wing opprobrium over Sánchez’s progressive yet lax migration policies. Far from being an invasion, the border spectacle staged produced anti-migration fodder for far-right politicians.

The border spectacle has resurfaced the centuries-old colonization of Ceuta and Melilla.

The international public that redeems Sánchez as the proponent of the Palestinian cause and progressive migration reforms is bewildered by Ceuta’s tiny geography at the outer fringe of the African continent, wondering how Spain, and for that matter Europe, will be invaded while in Africa. Some historical context is urgent here to disentangle these “only land borders between Africa and EUrope.”

Depending on one’s geopolitical stance, Ceuta and Melilla are at once enclaves and exclaves. From the colonial standpoint of Spain and the European Union, they are seen as exclaves, embodying the external sovereign extension of Spain and, more recently, Europe. In most academic literature, however, the two cities are enclaves standing as the last remnants of European colonization on the African continent. For Moroccans, the two cities are occupied territories, whose recovery remains an unfinished national project of decolonization.

The dispute over Ceuta and Melilla has shaped a long history of sporadic tensions in the relationship between Morocco and Spain. Its historical roots extend back to the Reconquista (c. 718–1492), culminating in the fall of Al-Andalus, and ended with the expulsion of the Moors, between 718 and 1492, from the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa.

Spain extended its sovereignty beyond the Peninsula to vie for external territorial sovereignty in North Africa, seizing Melilla in 1497 and Ceuta — initially conquered by Portugal in 1415 and then ceded to Spain — in 1668. The two towns served as external bulwarks for the clash between the Ummah of Islam and Christendom. Well into the wake of decolonization, Morocco has never ceased reclaiming the two enclaves, invoking the principle of territorial integrity laid down in the Charter of the United Nations.

In 1991, Morocco and Spain signed a Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness and Cooperation. Yet, in 1995, to complete the political formation of its national sovereignty, Spain granted Ceuta and Melilla the status of Ciudades Autónomas (Autonomous Cities). This move was criticized by Morocco as a breach of the treaty and an insidious attempt to annex the two territories to its national dominion. To parry such criticism, at the end of 1996, Spain formally constructed barriers fencing Ceuta and Melilla, which was justified by Spain — by the appearance of West African migrants as a “new problem” at the external borders of Europe. In September 1997, the then Prime Minister of Morocco, Abdellatif Filali, reiterated this claim at the UN General Assembly, that “Moroccan towns under Spanish occupation” should follow the same resolution pursued by Hong Kong and Macao.

Spain’s accession to the Schengen Treaty in 1995 promptly activated the Europeanization of Ceuta and Melilla. In this sense, the borderwork in the two towns is no longer a national matter but a European one, which requires the joint efforts of the EU, Spain, and Morocco to combat irregular migration. The subsequent fortification of the two towns, the Euro-African frontier, is a prototype of “Fortress Europe” and border externalization. What follows the birth of this fortification of Ceuta and Melilla is a reenactment of colonial violence against racialized migrants.

The border spectacle of Ceuta bears witness to the longue durée of colonial violence and borders as its obdurate, historical residue. It also bespeaks the banality of colonial durabilities over such territorial splinters in the shadow of decolonization. This colonial history has, in turn, shaped how Europe views the mobility of Africans, deploying deficit and imperial frameworks of a ‘crisis,’ ‘problem,’ and ‘threat.’

On October 11, 1995, Policía Nacional repressed a group of black African migrants in Ceuta who were contained and refused relocation to mainland Spain. The event marked a turning point, staging the first ‘border spectacle’ of the Euro-African borders. What followed was unending processes of “bordering and re-bordering” the Moroccan-Spanish borders. In October 2005, exactly ten years later, 15 black African migrants fell dead at the fences around Ceuta and Melilla. Nationwide raids and arrests of migrants in forest camps around the two enclaves were carried out by the Moroccan authorities, dumping over 2,000 black African migrants in the remote desert borderland with Algeria. Almost another decade later, on February 6, 2014, another breaking point of migrant death claimed the lives of another 15 migrants in the Tarajal Massacre. Guardia Civil opened fire on black African migrants as they waded their way into Ceuta along Tarajal Beach. A new lawsuit was later filed against Spain by a Cameroonian survivor. On February 6 of every year, “commemorActions” and sit-ins are held all around the world denouncing migrant death and disappearance.

The most recent breaking point is the Melilla Massacre, which is, in large part, the subject matter and ethnographic groundwork of my thesis. The Melilla Massacre is a historic spectacle of migrant death, claiming the lives of at least 27 black migrants from East Africa. Dozens went missing, others were incarcerated, and survivors were dumped at the Algerian border or dispersed to different urban fringes within Morocco.

Tracing the genealogies of the EU’s border externalization within the longue durée of the colonial matrix allows us to see what happened in Ceuta beyond presentist accounts of migration diplomacy: it allows us to see through the enduring continuum of social death and containment that saps the resourceful subjectivities of Moroccan and African youth at large.

Far less concerned with deciphering the geopolitical palaver of the Ceuta crossings, Moroccan journalists, artists, activists, and intellectuals are resurfacing discussion over the broken social contract between the state and its citizens. The socio-economic malaise plaguing Moroccan youth is a legacy of systemic disinterest in the realities of Moroccans. It favors glamorous investments — as in stadiums for the 2030 World Cup — giving short shrift to basic public services such as health and education. Such legitimate demands were the slogans of the GenZ 212 protests, a grassroots movement born online and driven by young Moroccans, including some of those who stormed the Ceuta border. Many of the protesters were detained, while many chose the ‘backway’ to reach Europe on unseaworthy boats.

From the Moroccan border, the border spectacle of Ceuta is symbolic of an escape from a carceral, postcolonial deathworld — not an invasion or a Moroccan border regime that managed to outfox its Spanish counterpart. Beyond depictions of delinquency, Moroccan youth have proved to be agents of social, economic, and political change, escaping a political juggernaut that grinds down their youth and resourceful subjectivities.

Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish NGO that began counting border fatalities along the Atlantic route in 2015, counted 141 migrant deaths as of August 4. Many more are still missing. Embattled families of mafqudin (missing migrants) are in vertigo, still waiting at the border in hopes of finding their missing relatives. Border Resistance, a collective of migration activists, is monitoring the border violations in Ceuta: the illegal pushbacks, beatings, starvation, and search and identification for the mafqudin among young Moroccans, Sudanese, and Yemeni asylum seekers.

Crossing the borders involves a cultural rite of social death and, upon safe crossing, rebirth. It’s the kind of social death that one escapes from home to seek a new life beyond borders. In the passage, migrants exchange physical death for a new life beyond the Moroccan borders.

For Moroccan migrants, risking their lives along dangerous routes was an escape from the mandibles of social death. The risk promised rebirth and regeneration to individual and communal lives.

Many more Moroccans will continue to reach Ceuta and Europe, undeterred by the unending securitization of borders and the violent deaths and disappearances.

I read the draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values the way you read a letter from someone you used to trust. For pages, I was nodding, smiling even. Then I reached my own body on the page, and I understood what the document had done: it had stapled together two tenets of my life that I thought could complement each other, so that to keep one I would have to surrender the other. I always thought my Pan-Africanism gave context and legitimacy to my feminism. This charter disagrees with that.

I am a Pan-Africanist. I am also a feminist. The charter is built so those two cannot share a room.

Let me tell you about the part that got me. When the charter talks about food, it is right. Article 8 asks African states to protect indigenous seeds, to refuse uncontrolled genetically modified seed, to stop criminalizing the farmer-managed seed systems that have fed this continent for millennia, and to put real money — 10 percent of agricultural spending — behind them. When it talks about natural resources, it is right again: removing tariff and non-tariff barriers to intra-African trade to address instability and slow economic growth, no more shipping out raw and buying back finished. Article 9 names the debt trap and our dependence on selling unprocessed commodities. Even its complaint about how treaties get made — the late-night sessions, the documents dumped on delegations in languages and timeframes designed to exhaust them — describes something I have watched happen to African diplomats. On seeds, on minerals, on debt, on the right of Africa to decide for Africa, the charter says things I have spent my life saying.

And then it reaches for my womb, and the same word “sovereignty” turns into a leash.

Article 4 instructs governments to “identify and repeal” any legal instrument that, by its own narrow definition, “undermines the family,” and then names what must go: abortion rights, the legalization of prostitution, the “autonomous sexual rights of minors,” anything it files under “gender ideology,” the “LGBT agenda.” Article 7, while championing the preservation of African health and traditional healing knowledge, reaffirms there is “no international right to abortion” and tells states to reject every reference to sexual and reproductive health in every agreement they touch. Read plainly, that is an instruction to gut the Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s own instrument, which lets a woman end a pregnancy that came from rape or incest, or one that will kill her mentally, financially, or physically. The charter defines marriage as a man and a woman in every legal document, gender as male or female and nothing else. This is not the protection of the African family. It is the government of African bodies.

So here is my problem, and I am not going to pretend it away: I want seed sovereignty, data sovereignty, and the Maputo Protocol. The charter tells me I cannot have all three. I do not accept the premise.

It is worth saying who is holding the staple. A document that accuses sexual and reproductive rights of being a “stealth recolonization” was drafted alongside Family Watch International, an Arizona outfit the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a hate group, whose president trains African legislators to lobby at the UN. It was championed from a State House by a president who has built his late career on the export of anti-gay law. And in its own final article, the charter lists its inspiration: the Geneva Consensus Declaration, the Pompeo/Trump-era American project whose “no international right to abortion” line it copies almost word for word. This is a declaration that Cameroon, my country, along with Uganda, Senegal, Benin, and others, all signed. The thing telling me my health is a colony is itself the import. L’ironie du sort, as francophones would say.

20 governments adopted the charter in Accra; South Africa refused, saying the text could not be reconciled with its Bill of Rights or with the equal marriage rights it grants its citizens, and it was not the only state to abstain. The full list of who endorsed has not been published. The man who hosted and keynoted the conference, who chairs the Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Legislatures (COSPAL), the continental body now asked to adopt the charter, is the same Speaker who sent Ghana’s own anti-rights bill back for a tidier revote. When a text that claims to speak for the aspirations of African peoples cannot open its own guest list, you have learned something about whose will it is.

I don’t have the solution, and that much honesty is owed. But I know what I will not do, which is let women and queer Africans become the tax we pay for the continent’s dignity. Banning gain-of-function research and toxic pesticides has never required policing a queer African’s body. Owning our minerals has never required a woman to die of a pregnancy we had the law to end. These things should not be in tension. Someone needed them to be, so that I would trade one to win the other.

There is a specific kind of Nigerian newspaper headline I have been reading my whole life. It announces that a former governor, or a minister, or a director-general has been arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). There are charges. There are counts. The accused person arrives in court in a well-cut agbada, surrounded by lawyers whose fees alone constitute a moderate corruption offence, and they plead not guilty, and the judge grants bail, and the case is adjourned. Then it is adjourned again. Then the administration that appointed the EFCC chairman that filed the charges loses an election, and the new administration appoints a new chairman, and the case against the former governor slows to a pace that makes geological time look urgent.

I am a law graduate. I graduated from the University of Uyo last year. My dissertation was about why this keeps happening, and whether the legal architecture of Nigerian anticorruption enforcement is designed to produce accountability or to produce the performance of accountability. I concluded, after two years of reading statutes and case files and civil society audits, that it is mostly the latter.

The argument is not complicated. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was established in 2002 and has operated since then under a chairman appointed by whichever president is in power. That president’s attorney general, a cabinet minister removable by the same president, can take over or discontinue any EFCC prosecution at any stage before judgment, without providing a reason. Five EFCC chairmen have been removed or resigned under circumstances suggesting executive pressure since 2003. The current chairman was appointed by President Bola Tinubu. His predecessor was appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari. The one before that by President Goodluck Jonathan. Each administration has, with minor variation, used the agency to prosecute predecessors and protect allies.

The EFCC announces that it secured over 3,000 convictions between May 2023 and May 2024, a figure confirmed in Freedom House’s 2025 Nigeria country report. This number has been cited internationally, in Freedom House reports and donor assessments, as evidence that Nigeria’s anticorruption effort is producing results. What those 3,000 convictions actually consist of: plea bargains, minor internet fraud cases, and first-instance verdicts that are overturned on appeal. Human Rights Watch found that since the EFCC’s founding, the agency has secured only four convictions against nationally prominent political figures, out of more than 30 arraigned.

Four. Across two decades. In a country where the National Bureau of Statistics has estimated that corruption costs the economy over $18 billion annually.

I want to be honest about what it feels like to grow up inside this. You learn to read the prosecution announcements as political communication rather than law enforcement. When the EFCC arraigns a prominent All Progressives Congress (APC) figure, you note that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is probably gaining influence somewhere. When PDP members suddenly accumulate charges, you check the news for who won what election. The Afrobarometer survey from 2023 found that 76 percent of Nigerians believe the EFCC prosecutes based on political instructions rather than evidence. That is not cynicism. That is pattern recognition.

The formal legal problem is straightforward. The EFCC has no constitutional status. It exists by ordinary statute, which means the National Assembly that created it can amend or repeal it, and the executive whose chairman runs it can shape its priorities through appointment. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission is constitutionally grounded and requires a two-thirds Senate majority to remove its chairman. The EFCC’s wider mandate, larger budget, and higher public visibility make it the more powerful of the two agencies in practice. But that same power sits on weaker institutional ground, since the president alone controls who runs it and how long they stay. Power without independence is what makes an agency useful as a political instrument, and on that measure the EFCC is the more exposed of the two. Nigeria has, in other words, invested heavily in the institution that is easier to capture and less heavily in the institution that is harder to capture.

There is a reform bill in the House of Representatives that would require the president to nominate the EFCC chairman from a shortlist presented by an independent selection committee. It has been read twice and referred to committee. It will, in all probability, die there. The people who benefit from a capturable EFCC are often the same people sitting on the committees meant to reform it. Several members currently serving on anticorruption oversight committees have themselves been named in EFCC petitions or investigations that never proceeded to trial. A body cannot be expected to legislate away the leverage that protects its own members.

What I keep thinking about, sitting with this, is not the politicians. They are behaving rationally given the incentives. What I think about is the intern at a ministry somewhere who knows where a contract was inflated, who knows which official received the transfer, and who is deciding right now whether to report it. And the thing that should make that decision clear, a legal system that actually prosecutes the corrupt regardless of their political connections, is not available to them. The EFCC’s convictions count includes their cousin’s boyfriend who got arrested for Yahoo-Yahoo. It does not include the person who stole from the hospital where their mother couldn’t get treatment.

The substantive law against corruption is not the problem. Nigeria has had clear statutory prohibitions on financial crimes since 2002. What is the problem is the law that built the EFCC, which handed appointment and removal power over the agency’s leadership to the same office the agency is meant to hold accountable. That is not a flaw in implementation. That is a design choice written into the statute itself, and it guarantees that enforcement bends toward whoever currently controls the presidency.

The prosecution that matters never comes. The case that should terrify the corrupt official managing a stolen contract, that case gets adjourned, or quietly discontinued, or never filed. The 3,000 convictions get announced. And somewhere in Abuja, a very well-dressed man in a very good agbada files a motion for an extension of time, and the lawyers bill their hours, and the judge adjourns to a date not yet fixed, and the money stays where it went.

At first glance, the cramped quarters of Mafalala, the largest informal settlement in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, seem to leave barely enough room to play a pass, let alone carve out a football pitch. However, as you weave through the labyrinth of madeira-e-zinco (wood and tin) houses built by workers segregated to the city’s outskirts during the colonial era, you eventually emerge onto a field overseen by a mural of the great Eusébio, the “Phenomenon of Mafalala.” For players like Eusébio to make it to the world’s greatest stage, like in his case, a World Cup final with Portugal in 1966 (Mozambique was a colony of Portugal at the time) or back-to-back European Cups with Benfica in 1961 and 1962, the journey is never a one-man effort.

In Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin, readers are thrown into the shady business of youth African football recruitment. The novel recounts the same types of dealings that propelled players like Eusébio to the game’s pinnacle. The protagonist, Mark Wolfe, a frustrated Pittsburgh-based technical writer, is enmeshed in a resolute mission by his half-brother, Geoff, a desperate British soccer agent, to locate a young West African football prodigy, whom he believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

The narrative follows Mark’s high-stakes quest — which eventually involves a ruthless French talent scout named Lefebvre — and delivers a sharp, darkly comedic critique of modern capitalism and the exploitative, neo-colonial nature of global sports recruitment.

O’Neill deftly illustrates how deeply interwoven football is with the continent’s history and beyond. In a book talk at George Washington University (GWU) that we organized alongside Young Black Professionals in International Affairs (YBPIA), O’Neill dove deeper into the book’s themes. Godwin foregrounds the often-overlooked genesis of African players forging European legacies, the transatlantic nature and exploitative structures of football recruitment in Africa, and the sport’s remarkable capacity to tell human stories worldwide.

For decades, colonial connections, migration, and European recruitment networks have carried African talent across continents. At the 2026 World Cup, 73 players of African birth or descent featured for 12 non-African national teams, yet only around six confirmed African-born players represented European national teams. They are: Marc Guéhi (born in Côte d’Ivoire and representing England, Brice Samba (Republic of Congo and France), Amadou Onana (Senegal and Belgium) Guus Til Samfya (Zambia and The Netherlands), Breel Embolo and Yvon Mvogo (Cameroon and Switzerland).

The contrast shows how African mobility is reshaping modern football not only by migration from Africa but by generations born and raised in Europe whose identities continue to bridge both continents.

It is within this complex ecosystem of aspiration and exploitation that Geoff operates. He is feckless and his sole objective is to sniff out undiscovered football talent with the help of Lefebvre, an experienced, semi-retired French scout.

For the French soccer agent Lefebvre, players like Eusébio were the earliest examples of the “Drogba Phenomenon,” in which African or Afro-descendant footballing youngsters, especially those with an immigrant profile like Marcel Desailly, born in Ghana, or Patrick Vieira, born in Senegal, became highly desirable in the global football market for their strength, skill, and technical adaptability shaped by exposure to different footballing environments.

Even today, many of the stars in the 2026 World Cup display the same characteristics: Sadio Mané’s rise from the renowned Senegalese academy Génération Foot or Amad Diallo’s Italian-Ivorian climb to Manchester United. Notably, some top players are just one generation removed from the continent — for example, Lamine Yamal’s roots in Equatorial Guinea and Morocco or Kylian Mbappé’s in Cameroon and Algeria.

Throughout Godwin, O’Neill navigates the transatlantic nature of youth football recruitment in Africa, inviting readers to trace their own historical connections to the relentless pursuit of new African talent.

Godwin also hints at a form of “footballing brain drain” in which some of Africa’s finest talents only achieve full recognition after entering European systems, akin to a primary resource reaching full potential only after undergoing refinement abroad.

At the event at GWU this past May, O’Neill underscored to students the “distinctly neocolonial dimension to this business of finding raw African talent.” As an example, he noted that metaphors used to describe African footballers – from Eusébio being dubbed A Pérola Negra (“The Black Pearl”) to agents “striking gold in Africa”– evoke a longer history of extraction on the continent that continues to be reflected in the structure of the modern football industry.

For O’Neill, the universality of football made it the most accessible medium to unravel this chaotic interplay. Speaking to students at George Washington University in Washington, DC, O’Neill admitted, “I learned English, psychology, history, geography, business, all on the football field.” Godwin’s characters also share the same curriculum generated on the pitch, yet the narrative suggests that, despite this shared classroom, its lessons can be interpreted and embodied in starkly different ways.

Lefebvre, the agent, repeatedly waffles on about his short-lived career and the recruitment dynamics behind some of African football’s greats. However, as the search for Godwin intensifies, O’Neill recounts the evocation of Treasure Island–like colonial literature, particularly through Lefebvre’s often disoriented and outsider view of certain African societies. Some of Lefebvre’s most passionate spiels on African youth football are tarnished by his retrograde notions about race, gender, geography, and culture. In one instance, Lefebvre justifies his caution while searching for Godwin’s team due to a fear of being misled by what he describes as the “African concept of truth,” where people say what is most profitable rather than following the European expectations of a promise or contract.

Lefebvre’s French identity is important as it places him as a holdover agent of the colonial era, responsible for moving resources from the périphérie to the metropole–in this case tracking down the elusive Godwin to deliver him to the European market. Lefebvre shepherds Wolfe through the hinterlands of West Africa in a Land Cruiser on a self-described “expedition” for Godwin. Lefebvre’s reductive tropes, often made through the backward lens of corruption and exploitation, such as in his description of an “African concept of truth,” echo a “colonial gaze” that still lingers over the modern-day sports industry in many African countries, where profit-driven recruiters pursue talent by any means necessary, creating a dangerous and illusory pathway for up-and-comers.

The parallels in Godwin to actual events are explicit.

Take the story of Cheikh Touré, an 18-year-old Senegalese goalkeeper lured to Ghana with the promise of a professional football trial to get to a European club. It turned out to be a fraudulent scheme. After his family was unable to pay the ransom to release him, Touré was tragically killed by the traffickers in October 2025 in Kumasi.

In 2024, several reports recount the stories of Kenyan, Nigerian, and Ghanaian footballers flown to Russia under false pretenses, to be subsequently deployed to the front lines in Ukraine.

Against this backdrop, the stories shared throughout Godwin – from Eusébio’s rise to European football glory to the Drogba Phenomenon – reveal the longer history O’Neill asks readers to confront: the enduring global pursuit of African talent with all its promise and peril. As already discovered African stars captivate World Cup audiences, attention will inevitably shift to where the next, yet unidentified, “Godwin-like” phenom will be found.

In the heart of Ikoyi, Lagos, a fifteen-story concrete ghost haunts the skyline. The Old Federal Secretariat was once a nerve center of Nigerian power, functioning as the heart of Nigeria’s civil service. Since the federal capital was moved to Abuja in 1991, this complex has been left to rot. In a city defined by fervent construction and the relentless pursuit of newness, its stillness, frozen in time, is a provocation.

Nigeria’s independence in 1960 arrived with serious ambition. Gifted by the British to mark the young nation’s sovereignty, the 25-story Independence Building served as the Republic’s first federal secretariat, anchoring the administrative machinery of the new state. As the civil service swelled during the oil boom years, the government erected the Ikoyi Secretariat in 1976. This new structure was designed to monumentalize the nation’s soaring aspirations — an architectural declaration that a young republic had outgrown its colonial infancy and entered a new era of industrial sophistication.

The Independence Building was eventually appropriated by the military and renamed Defence House. Today, it stands as a shadow of its former glory. Following a devastating fire in 1993, the military command abandoned the charred remains, relocating to the new capital of Abuja. Left behind in Lagos, the old tower’s narrow apertures now watch over the public square below like hollow eyes, stripped of its utility and its national significance.

Down the road, this architecture of abandonment reaches its literal peak at NECOM House. Built as the tallest skyscraper in the country, this telecommunications tower was conceived to be the crown jewel of the Lagos financial district; today, it suffers the same slow rot that plagues the civic landscape. This pattern of neglect repeats across the city center. Lagos is now a museum of deferred promises, littered with monumental structures left underused, suspended in time, or surrendered to decay.

The vacuum left by the government’s silent withdrawal from these sites has inevitably invited squatting and illicit activity. When the state refuses to occupy and maintain its landmarks while failing to provide housing, resources, and safety, it creates the conditions it then criminalizes. What appears as squalor is state neglect made visible. These buildings become shelter for those the state has rendered invisible. In a twist of irony, these administrative monuments have been involuntarily democratized.

While state-owned monoliths sit idle for decades, the government exhibits a violent agility elsewhere, bulldozing lives and properties in informal settlements with little to no prior notice.

Makoko, a historic community of roughly 100,000 residents, is one of Lagos’s most storied waterfront settlements. Established on the lagoon by the Egun fishing people, it has evolved over generations into a complex urban ecosystem built entirely on stilts. In December 2025, armed demolition teams backed by state authorities entered this settlement under the pretext of enforcing a safety corridor beneath a high-tension power line. Demolitions started two days before Christmas.

Over 3,000 homes, schools, and clinics were bulldozed and burned, displacing about 10,000 people. Protesters and civil society organizations have alleged that the demolitions resulted in deaths, including infants and elderly residents.

The official justification followed a familiar script: environmental concerns, urban renewal, the language of progress. But beneath the bureaucratic vocabulary, what it produced was displacement, lives dissolved into the water. In this context, the long-term abandonment of these spaces reads as an intentional pattern of uneven urgency. The government grants itself unlimited leniency regarding its own monumental dereliction, while displaying a ruthless impatience for the expedient improvisations of the people it has abandoned.

Deracination has shaped Lagos’s socio-economic fabric for generations, and the map of the city can serve as a historical record of state-led displacement. Take Obalende, whose name translates to “the [British] king chased us here” — an etymology the historian K. Dike traced, in a 1997 Guardian essay, to the colonial army’s expansion into the area. Today, it is a bustling hub bordering Lagos Island, but its origins trace back to the colonial era, when the British crown displaced the local population in favor of expanding an army base. This is a foundational precedent of spatial injustice that outlived the empire. Instead of dismantling this colonial architecture of exclusion, the modern Nigerian state has embraced and optimized it, expressing its sovereign authority through the violence of forcible land clearance rather than the duty of housing its most vulnerable communities.

The message to the average Lagosian is clear: Space is scarce when it belongs to the poor, expendable when it belongs to the state, and available to those with enough clout to bend the city to their will. When there is corporate capital to secure or elite enclaves to engineer, the state magically rediscovers its capacity for urban planning. Ultimately, the rotting high-rises of the Marina and the demolished stilt-houses of Makoko are symptoms of the same institutional disease. They represent a state that has fundamentally abdicated its social contract, leaving behind a city that is simultaneously starved for public life and choked by avarice.

For those tasked with shaping the built environment, this landscape of sovereign rot poses a sharp ethical challenge. We are trained to obsess over the new, chasing the next “smart city.” But what does it mean to design for the future in a city where the most basic act of care — maintenance — has been undervalued by those meant to uphold it the most?

To answer this is to confront a notoriously wicked problem, an entangled crisis in which the professional domains of the architect, the policymaker, and the developer are all implicated. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes a sobering truth: “As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of [our] vision.” Lagos, and indeed much of Nigeria, suffers acutely from this exact starvation of perspective. On paper, the mechanics of urban revitalization are not rocket science. However, the unchecked greed permitted to fester across the country has corroded the foundations of every civic institution and shriveled the imagination of our city-makers.

When presented with decades of water-adapted vernacular literacy in Makoko, or the complex maritime history of Tarkwa Bay, the developer’s only legible response is demolition — flattening centuries of ecological resilience to install a yacht club or a generic “luxury” tower. This impoverished vision can only copy; it cannot synthesize. It views indigenous knowledge as a blight to be cleared and abandoned structures as dead weight, all while funding exclusive archipelagos reclaimed from the sea. Eko Atlantic stands as the ultimate expression of this hubris: a private enclave engineered for the few, rising from the ocean while the waterfront communities of the many are erased to make room for the supply chain of exclusivity.

By chasing the illusion of the “blank slate,” the architect becomes the aesthetic enforcement arm of this system, providing the glossy renders that legitimize spatial violence long before the bulldozers arrive. The policymaker completes the triangle. It is the state that issues the demolition orders, absorbs the legal challenges, and quietly steps aside for the developer. The FBT Coral Estate agreement, in which the Lagos State Government negotiated a 25 percent stake in the “luxury” development designed to replace Makoko, exemplifies this arrangement explicitly. Everything is transactional.

By trading the social contract for a real estate ledger, the state has rendered its own history meaningless and its people invisible. Lagos continues to rise, but it rises against itself.

The abandoned Secretariat and the state-sanctioned displacement are evidence of a system functioning exactly as those who benefit from it intend. “Smart city” rhetoric and urban renewal frameworks create the assumption of a state that has lost its way, merely requiring the right policy intervention to find its footing again. But a government that can mobilize armed demolition teams against impoverished communities two days before Christmas, while its own civic infrastructure crumbles unremarked across the city, has not lost its way. It has chosen one.

They came seeking solitude in a private family graveyard in our common neighborhood in Riruta, a suburb of Nairobi City, around mid-morning towards the end of September 2018. I was already there. My weakening eyesight could make out only images of two adults.

This is private land. They could be the owners of the land, I thought to myself.

I waved at them rapidly. They both waved back. I walked towards them.

“Oooh! So it’s you!” I exclaimed. These were not the owners of the land and the graveyard after all. It was Binyavanga Wainaina and his helper.

“You two know each other?” his helper asked.

“Of course!” I replied.

Binyavanga had changed a great deal since I had last seen him. The multiple strokes had severely incapacitated him. His speech came out in an agonizing slur. I tried to ease his discomfort by speaking more, compensating for his forced silence.

“Such vast private lands are uncommon in this city,” I observed. “In fact, they are abominable and unjustifiable in a metropolis like Nairobi bursting with deprived humanity.”

He nodded repeatedly in agreement.

There was a huge fig tree on the land. In African spirituality, the fig tree is sacred. Among the Agikuyu people, it is known as Mugumo. Our people once worshipped and offered sacrifices beneath Mugumo trees. We walked closer to it. Its enormous trunk was hollow, forming something like a passageway through the middle. I walked in and out of the trunk the way we used to do in our childhood among the giant podo trees along River Nanyuki. This particular Mugumo was immense, tall, wide, and commanding. Its huge branches spread outward like a canopy over a vast area.

“A Mugumo is never pruned,” one of the owners of that land had once told me casually. “Cutting it is sacrilegious and cursed.”

Such a sacred tree was best left alone, I thought to myself. It was an abode of ancestral spirits. But wait — as children, we had been warned never to walk seven times around a Mugumo. Boys, we were told, would turn into girls, and girls into boys. We did. Nothing happened. It was a myth, an old tale that could not contain the free and wandering spirits of our childhood. I had walked several times around this particular Mugumo in the neighborhood and I remained who I was. I felt only solace and solitude as I escaped into my inner self.

We held animated conversations beside the Mugumo for a long while, hardly noticing the passage of time. We spoke about literature, religion, politics, creative writing, African liberation, Mau Mau, Mwakenya, Kwani?, dreams, life, survival of artists, hope, and much more. Mwakenya was the underground socialist movement of the 1980s in Kenya whose members and supporters were brutally suppressed by the Moi–KANU dictatorship. Kwani? is the literary magazine Binyavanga co-founded in 2003 with his Caine Prize winnings, which became the crucible of a new generation of Kenyan and African writing.

Binyavanga barely spoke, his words still slurred, yet he nodded excitedly and often in agreement. His helper listened attentively. Meanwhile, I spoke endlessly, releasing words like a newly activated word processor.

*

I first met Binyavanga Wainaina in 2002 at a shopping mall in Nairobi during the Nairobi International Book Fair. He had just won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Literary excitement was palpable among the country’s literati. Fresh literary flowers had sprouted, blossoming with beauty and releasing a sweet fragrance, new expressions, new voices; a generation emerging from relative obscurity, as Frantz Fanon had prophesied, either to fulfill its mission or betray it.

Binyavanga was one of the key speakers at the opening ceremony of the book fair. He spoke eloquently about new and vibrant literary horizons and renewed hope in the country. Names such as Nameless, Kalamashaka, Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, some of the hip hop artists then dominating the musical airwaves, rolled effortlessly from his tongue like a staccato burst from a machine gun. In many ways, he himself was a literary machine gun.

“Why are we still trapped in old narratives about the past glory of African literature as if nothing new is happening?” he asked.

Why Are We So Blest? I recalled in the same breath the title of the novel by Ayi Kwei Armah.

Loud applause followed his speech, just as it was echoing across other literary and artistic spaces and sites in the country: Kenya National Theatre, Club Soundd, the GoDown Arts Centre, Sarakasi Dome, Kuona Trust, Kwani LitFest, a lot more.

We met again in 2004 at Jeevanjee Gardens in Nairobi during the Kenya Social Forum. He lingered at the back of the largely activist crowd. I thought he cut a somewhat forlorn figure.

“Another Kenya Is Possible” was the theme of the forum, attuned to the global call of the World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible.” The local and global processes of the World Social Forum sought to locate and connect people’s struggles for a just world. Politics, we argued, must secure livelihoods. We spoke of climate justice, not merely the language of climate change. We spoke about struggles for food sovereignty, not simply food security. The earth was being decimated by capitalist greed. Soulless corporations, placing profits before people’s welfare, were driving the world towards the brink of extinction. Our world was dying. Progressive forces everywhere needed urgently to coalesce.

Binyavanga at some point later on wrote a post on how hard he had tried to be socialist “as a person of good conscience.” He observed that to many people, “progressive” meant being a socialist. He wanted to be “progressive,” but also believed that the fall of the left globally was real and that the left was fatally flawed. He believed we are in the era of the perfection of capitalism and that capitalism was the best way out for what he considered to be Africa’s century.

I differed with him on his faith in capitalism. I believe capitalism is a mortal disaster for humankind, and that socialism remains the alternative.

But we agreed on the centrality of literature. Literature does not merely fuel struggle; it is itself a vehicle of people’s struggles for freedoms and liberation. That was why we were at the event of the Kenya Social Forum — to locate literature within progressive awakenings, away from the cacophony of tribal politics in the country and the wastelands of art for art’s sake.

We exchanged contacts.

“I will send you the manuscript of my novel,” I promised.

“Sawa!” he said excitedly.

He left shortly afterwards. I remained. The Kenya Social Forum would continue for three more days, and I would stay throughout to help coordinate the event. I was happy to witness sites and spaces of people’s struggles for emancipation taking shape and getting grounded. The arts are the high priests of people’s struggles. Literature is their bishop.

I truly wanted to share with Binyavanga the manuscript of my novel. I never did. My life, like his, was then like a flickering candle in the wind.

We walked to the private family graveyard near the Mugumo tree. Graves of several members of the family that owned the land were located there. Binyavanga stood transfixed before one grave in particular. It belonged to a senior colonial chief who had once ruled this area on behalf of the colonial regime. The tragedy of the chief’s betrayal and treachery had finally come to this: a grave covered by mounds of soil and concrete.

I tried to read his gaze in my mind. The chief’s true legacy, I thought, was one of servitude to colonial masters and betrayal of his own people. I nodded inwardly. Traitors who sold their souls in pursuit of hollow glory, passing comforts, and obscene wealth. The tragedy of colonial betrayal still haunts this country and many other neocolonial states. But death remains the great equalizer for us all.

Binyavanga kept his eyes fixed on the graves for a long while. I wondered whether his mind was wandering as deeply as mine. Our gazes seemed both psychic and spiritual. My thoughts admonished me: So this is what most lives are finally reduced to — skeletons beneath the pride of flesh, memorial plaques bearing dates of birth and death, reminders of the vanity of human existence.

“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” says the Preacher in the Bible. “It is like chasing after the wind.”

For most of us, the graveyard is the final destination. Death humbles life. Death should compel us to reflect continually on the meaning and purpose of our existence. In the end, the memory of our lives either fades like passing clouds or endures like seeds that nourish future generations. Such is karma.

The mortal remains of the colonial chief lay in that graveyard discarded and reviled by many. His memory and that of his kind in the betrayal and treachery to the people only helps to fuel people’s struggles for a just society. The generational wealth and privilege inherited from colonial treachery may have survived him, but they too shall one day pass away.

Soon.

I later invited him and his helper to our apartment nearby. He touched the books on the bookshelf as though they were living spirits. In a real sense, books are the abodes of their writers, spirits in themselves, words made flesh and memory. I pulled from the bookshelf several of his works, one after another: Discovering Home; How to Write About Africa; One Day I Will Write About This Place; Beyond River Yei.

His face lit up instantly. His eyes moved, mesmerized, from the books to the bookshelf and back again. I could see his joy, his calmness, his deep sense of comfort. His eyes seemed to say aloud: There lies my literary legacy.

We later walked to his apartment along the main road. We lived in a working-class suburb. Nearby was a sprawling slum.

“I like it here more than anywhere else I have lived,” he told me as we entered his apartment.

The living room was furnished with antique pieces that gave the space both a traditional and modern feel. His MacBook laptop appeared to be the most modern treasure in the room. He strained his eyes while reading and typing; his eyesight was weakening. So was mine. I can no longer see distant objects clearly without glasses. I was not sure whether he owned a pair of reading glasses.

He showed me his bedroom. It was a tidy mess. Books lay everywhere, exciting titles, mostly fiction and creative nonfiction. Some had been gifts from friends.

“Pick any you may want,” he told me.

I was tempted to take A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. But I did not. I thought I would pick it later. I did not even pick it up when we returned afterwards. Some books carry spirits better left to haunt their authors and owners.

We then headed for a rendezvous at Dagoretti Corner. We partook of lots of nyama choma and mutura, washed down with drinks and laughter wrapped in silence. Nyama choma is grilled meat, and mutura is a Kenyan sausage; both are staples of Nairobi’s social eating. We spoke nothing there of our pet talks on literature, African liberation, African spirituality, and such heavy topics, choosing instead to relish our food and drinks in measured quietness. Outside, along the main road beyond the restaurant, weary laboring masses trudged home from the daily drudgery of sustaining this unequal country and materialist society.

As evening reached its climax and darkness descended, we moved to Dagoz Artists Bar close by for a night of live music. The space was tiny and intimate. The artists performing on the main stage were as much part of the revelry as the audience itself. Anyone with a voice could burst into song, however coarse or unpolished. The main stage was within reach of everyone inside, part of the collective repertoire. Our table, like the others nearby, seemed almost an extension of the stage itself.

We bellowed out the words of our favorite songs alongside the performers, shouting ourselves hoarse in the attempt. The din of drunken voices and clashing sounds was an exercise in glorious discordance. Loud talk and shouting seemed the only acceptable means of communication there; quiet conversations were out of place. The cacophony of voices and sounds beat like a riot of sound, yet somehow it grounded our solitude and tethered our restless artistic spirits to a sense of order.

The music went on even after the session artists had left the stage. We could still hear it from outside as we departed singing along. We drove back with the rhythms and voices still drumming through our minds, soothing us into the calm of the night and into deep sleep.

*

Binyavanga returned another day to the private family graveyard, this time alone. From a distance, I saw him standing transfixed, staring at the grave of the colonial chief. I thought perhaps his spirituality was reawakening in ways he himself could no longer clearly express in his condition. He had once written about his spiritual Sangoma in South Africa who had advised him to return home and honor his rich ancestral lineage.

He called it African spirituality. I understood it, too, as a return to the roots of African civilization — back to narratives of African victories, not merely of conquest and defeat; back to multiple African narratives. Narratives of order, dignity, and peace before slavery and colonialism. Narratives that ask difficult questions: Why were we enslaved? Why were we colonized? Why do we continue allowing ourselves to be recolonized?

No wonder the Mugumo tree occupies such sacred importance in the spirituality of the Agikuyu people. It defies both time and territory. It is said that the Mugumo under which Dedan Kimathi worshipped in the forest while leading the Mau Mau war for independence in Kenya fell soon after his capture by colonial forces. Dedan Kimathi was the field marshal of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army popularly known as Mau Mau. He was captured in 1956 and executed by the British colonial regime in 1957. Indigenous trees are living connections to our spirituality, to our ways of being, to memory and identity.

Wangari Maathai came to mind, embracing a huge tree in her struggle for ecological justice. The graveyard, too, spoke of return, going back to the soil, forever nourishing Mother Earth.

“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” the priest at the Catholic church across the main road often intoned from the Bible at the beginning of the Lenten season.

African spirituality converges with the sanctity of the soil, replenishing our lives. Our existence moving endlessly in cycles of birth and death; birth and death again, the eternal rhythms of earthly life. Why trouble yourself? Why worry? I thought Binyavanga’s Sangoma would have rejoiced.

*

I walked back with Binyavanga to his apartment, somehow feeling revitalized. He too seemed renewed, especially in the way we both jovially greeted folks in our neighborhood, most of them only casual acquaintances. His generosity and capacity for love were legendary in many ways. The doors of his heart were wide open to anyone capable of being loved. “Could you be loved,” Bob Marley would sing of such spirits. Binyavanga’s helper could attest to this.

At some point, Binyavanga received funds from his family’s inheritance. I accompanied him to the office of his family’s lawyer in Westlands area in Nairobi to sign documents releasing the inheritance. He had mentioned that the lawyer’s office was near a Mugumo tree in Westlands. I had never imagined that such a sacred fig tree still existed within the city. I do not know whether it is still there today.

Later, I accompanied him and his helper to his bank in the Karen area of Nairobi. I believed he transferred a decent sum of the funds to some of his close friends and a lover. Once Binyavanga’s heart and mind settled on something he wanted, he became stubbornly resistant to caution or advice.

He seemed to have got a decent amount from the inheritance. He inquired about investments in land to settle among his close friends near Nairobi National Park. He dreamed of building there a beautiful villa attuned to his tastes, blending antique elegance with modern architecture. I was of little help in matters of land investment. I could neither advise him nor claim any experience of my own in such matters.

I was not able to accompany him and his helper later that evening for dinner and an outing at a top high-end hotel in the city. They bought lots of exquisite items at the hotel that night. In a rush to please his helper, Binyavanga bought him a pair of expensive leather boots late at night. They discovered the following day that the pair of boots were mismatched. He would often give his helper his ATM card to withdraw cash for him. Many times, I was worried that his generosity might someday be taken advantage of, and that the helper might disappear on him. I suspect that this eventually happened, when his helper switched off his phone and vanished from contact altogether. I have neither seen nor heard from him ever since.

*

We shared several wishes between us. Binyavanga spoke of his desire to learn the Dholuo language.

“That might be too late now,” I said.

“Nooo!” he replied, gesturing emphatically in disagreement with my incredulity. I noticed that his calmness and joy were beginning to fade, and I quickly corrected myself in jest.

“At least for me. I have almost given up the effort of learning another language. Another of my wishes is learning to play the guitar. Another is to swim without a floater.” He giggled.

There were many unfulfilled wishes within us. Binyavanga’s age and mine were already nearing the halfway mark toward the sunset of our lives.

But you have achieved more for African literature in such a short time. You have truly lived your life. I did not say these words aloud. I was speaking to myself. He might have mistaken them for flattery. He was often a pace-setter, bubbling with ideas and projects that others eventually fulfilled. I suppose that is how legacy and heritage are secured.

“Asante!” I told him.

He looked at me intensely, struggling to express himself.

“Thank you too,” he said, his slurred words carrying a deep inner turmoil.

I could feel his frustration at being unable to communicate effectively. It was uncharacteristic of the man who in the recent past had dazzled audiences with eloquent speeches. But I am a believer that better and brighter days are still ahead of us. I downloaded an online guidebook by the Stroke Association: Helping Someone with Communication Problems — Together We Can Conquer Stroke. I promised myself that in the days ahead I would read it carefully and learn how better to communicate with him. I never did. Another of my wishes quietly passed away.

*

I was away on work outside the city for about three weeks. Around the same time, Binyavanga had traveled to Rwanda for the burial of an uncle. When we both returned, we somehow failed to reconnect.

“He has traveled to the coast for a vacation,” his nurse told me.

He remained vibrant on social media throughout the trip. I followed him mostly on Facebook, where he posted photographs of himself and his companion strolling leisurely along the shores of the Indian Ocean, staying at one of the luxurious hotels on the Kenyan coast. The pictures showed his efforts to remain calm, joyful, and at peace with himself, living life as fully as he could despite his failing health.

I imagined the other escapades they might have engaged in at the coast. They would don safety gear before hopping onto a speedboat, floaters fastened reassuringly around them. The boat would surge into the deep sea, rising and plunging against the huge waves as they exclaimed in fear, awe, and excitement. Then a dolphin would suddenly leap out of the water in a graceful somersault. Another would follow, then another, until several dolphins were performing what seemed like a perfectly choreographed spectacle. Aware perhaps of the human gaze upon them, the creatures would intensify their display. Dolphins, it is said, are among the cleverest creatures in the sea. One would leap, then another, and another still, their performance lingering until the speedboats disappeared into the horizon.

They might also have witnessed another spectacle, this time closer to the shore. Snorkeling through the shallow waters, they would see countless small marine creatures crawling and drifting beneath the surface, dazzling in every imaginable color, shape, and pattern. The experience would have been immaculate, a refreshing bliss. We should crown such stories with a cold beer when we meet again, I wished.

But that wish, too, never came to pass. Shortly afterwards, his health deteriorated and he was hospitalized. I visited him at the hospital a few times. Access to him there remained largely a private family affair, limited to a handful of close friends. We did not see much of each other again.

I was later away in Johannesburg for a period of further studies.

“I love Johannesburg,” he had once told me during one of our conversations. “I would like to buy a house there. I love the vibe and spirit of that city, a city for free spirits.”

I often moved around in Johannesburg, or Joburg, as it is fondly called. I met friends he would have loved to meet. I saw and lived in houses and estates that would have suited his tastes. I wandered through art galleries and bookshops he would have lingered in for hours. I attended jazz sessions and absorbed the loves and contradictions of that vibrant city, perhaps much as he would have done himself. I listened to fiery discussions on African liberation politics, subjects he followed with keen interest. In more ways than I could imagine, Binyavanga accompanied my thoughts throughout my stay there.

*

Clues of the sad news first came through a missed call from Isaac, our mutual friend and one of Binyavanga’s closest companions. I called him back, but there was no answer.

I grew disturbed. Why would Isaac call so unusually early?

Shortly afterwards, I read the news. Binyavanga had passed away. He had been frail and ailing, but I had hoped he would prevail, as he had triumphed in so many other battles before. The literary world still looked forward to his boisterous spirit, his gregarious presence, and the boundless imagination that helped spark a literary renaissance in our country, across Africa, and within international literary circles. Death does not equalize such souls. His spirit had already triumphed.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” The priest at the Catholic church across the main road in our suburb often recited this line from the Bible for souls such as his.

*

From Johannesburg, I followed online the celebration of Binyavanga’s life at the Kenya National Theatre, where family, friends, and hordes of admirers gathered not in grief alone, but in affirmation of the immense spirit he had shared with the world.

“We must free our imaginations,” he had urged in one of his final videos. “Celebrate my life. Do not mourn me,” he had also declared boldly on Facebook.

Binyavanga was cremated in a private ceremony. At the time, I did not fully grasp the significance of that final act, but over the years, I have often found myself wondering: Would he have wanted his mortal remains laid to rest in a graveyard? When he would return to the private family graveyard in our shared neighborhood and stand there for long moments, transfixed by the graves before him, was he contemplating the physical form of legacy and remembrance? Would he have preferred a gravesite where his many admirers, friends, and fans would gather to pay their respects? Perhaps. Perhaps not. His family and those closest to him knew better.

What matters most is that his spirit endures, in memory, in literature, and in the enduring company of remarkable African writers who refuse oblivion. Though his body returned to ashes, his words continue to breathe among us.

Had he been buried, I might have proposed his epitaph, borrowed from the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci:

To write is to die a little less when I die, to leave the children I did not have, to make people think a little more.

*

I recently returned to our shared neighborhood. The private family graveyard is still there. The remains of the colonial chief still lies beneath his slab of concrete, his name and dates fixed into stone, reviled, unvisited, and largely forgotten, while Binyavanga, who has no grave at all. is visited every day by readers across the world who pull his books from their shelves, as I still pull them from mine. His resting place was never a graveyard. It was always language.

The Mugumo still stands, unpruned and sacred, its hollow trunk opening like a doorway between worlds, the living and the ancestral. Some spirits require no grave to mark where they rest. They live in stories, in words, and in the quiet defiance of memory.

Virginia Giuffre, Annie Farmer, Chauntae Davis, Jesse Michaels, and countless other women and girls were part of an international scandal that captured the public imagination in ways never seen before. And yet their names were barely mentioned. Earlier in the year, there was furious demand for the list of powerful men implicated in the Epstein files from all ends of the political spectrum. And the interest wasn’t just tied to the crimes themselves; it carried the hope that the exposure of the most visible and wealthy men in the world would lead to a reckoning akin to the #MeToo movement. What is implicit in this hope is that if there is accountability at the highest levels, then there would be a trickle-down effect that could assist in confronting the more quotidian and less publicized violence.

What the Epstein files made clear is that there is a distinction between society’s stated moral values and how those values are lived out.

However, that did not transpire. What did happen was the files turned into a spectacle. The anticipation for them, their release, their dissection, the jokes in between, the aftermath. And somewhere along the line, the victims were moved out of sight. Then people moved on. The focus shifted from the files to an ill-advised war against Iran, a green pool in the US capital, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The period between the end of the World Cup and the start of club European football presents an opportunity to reflect on the tournament and all the events and discussions that occurred. One of the conversations that briefly captured the footballing community was the allegations of sexual misconduct against several footballers. Thomas Partey and Achraf Hakimi are facing pending criminal trials, Ryan Mendes remains under active police investigation, while players such as Junya Ito, Kaishu Sano, Andreas Schjelderup, Thiago Almada, and Cristiano Ronaldo have all seen their cases reach their legal conclusions.

These stories did not offer new revelations. But an update on the status of Hakimi’s case, as well as Canada’s refusal to approve Partey’s visa application, summoned the ghosts that have long haunted football.

FIFA, national federations, coaches, teammates, and media deferred to legality, recruiting the criminal justice system as a kind of Big Other, the final arbiter of truth, despite the awareness of its shortcomings and limitations. This is most clearly demonstrated in how the courts are tasked with providing assurances and resolving ethical questions that exceed their mandate of due process. In the interim, innocence was not only presumed; it was asserted.

And while there is a subset of the public that abides by this logic, it does not fully capture the rest of the football ecosystem. Many supporters expressed genuine anger and were vehemently advocating for the removal of these players from their teams. But as soon as the whistle blew, that indignation was muffled. And 90 minutes later, there was discourse around tactics, ref calls, VAR, substitutions, etc.

It raises the question: if there is enough consensus, why isn’t there coordination? What is it about football that allows us to know and yet continue as though we did not?

And the most curious of all, what if outrage is part of the entertainment?

Any answer has to begin with understanding the power of images. Jacques Lacan argues that human beings understand themselves and the world through the symbolic order.

Football is an image-making factory. The fancy footwork, the immaculate touches, the bicycle kicks, and the extra-time winners aren’t just about sublime technique. They become repositories through which spectators organize their ideas, desires, and fears. It is through the moments of magic in which fans come to identify with clubs, countries, and versions of themselves.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord furthers this point: ours is an age that prefers the sign to the thing itself, the copy to the original, appearance to essence — one in which, as he puts it, “truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.”

So when the reality of rape accusations, FIFA’s corruption, capitalism, imperialism, racism, and labor exploitation threaten to rupture that “sacredness,” audiences respond with real moral outrage, but that rarely converts into sustained pressure. The viewer learns to live with the contradiction without allowing it to reorganize their participation. And this happens not necessarily to protect the players or FIFA per se, but to protect the enjoyment they produce.

That is how the story of Cape Verde became one of the underdog, of extraordinary heroics that transformed them into Africa’s footballing fairytale, and not one of a squad that fielded a player under investigation for rape.

That is how the story of Norway became one of history in the making, of Erling Haaland’s charisma and imaginary Viking boats rowing into the quarterfinals, and not one of a team that harbored a convicted sex offender.

That is how the story of Japan became one of model discipline and cleanliness in the stadium and in the locker room, and not the fact that they have two players accused of sexual assault.

This dynamic is not limited to sexual violence. Football has developed a remarkable capacity to move from one moral crisis to the next and absorb the scandals along the way. During this tournament, the focus shifted from the unfair treatment of the Iranian team to visa denials to the Balogun controversy and countless other flashpoints. The previous tournament revolved around Qatar’s labor exploitation, worker conditions, migrant deaths, and FIFA’s corruption. A similar pattern happens on a club level with incidents of racism, financial irregularities, and controversial sponsorships. Each issue, different in stakes and complexity, is treated the same. They command intense attention until something else happens.

But the issues themselves don’t disappear; they are temporarily suspended from collective consciousness until they get recycled again. Like the Epstein files, the condemnation they provoke becomes part of the spectacle itself. It is very predictable in its life cycle and its outcomes. Ultimately, the problems are not adequately addressed. It’s like a choreographed dance.

And when it comes to sexual crimes, audiences think of themselves as ambidextrous — that they are capable of taking the allegations seriously and enjoying the football, as if the two aren’t in conversation with one another. And unfortunately, spectacles of this nature have a tendency toward erasure. The victims are not only pushed to the background but they are almost rendered invisible. No names, no faces, and no specific stories. They are treated as placeholders and their lives are reduced to legal cases and another talking point.

MeToo was neither perfect nor immune from the dynamics of spectacle. It was introduced to the world through the experiences of famous, rich, white women, which overshadowed the grassroots work that the organization does on the ground. And because of the spectacle, it exists in the public imagination as an era and not a continuous movement that empowers victims to come forward with their stories. However, what distinguished it from a movement like Time’s Up is that it didn’t organize around what punishment perpetrators should receive; it dedicated attention to the agency and care of victims and survivors.

It did not hand over ethical responsibility to the courts, as it understood that courts are not designed to do that in the first place. Instead, moral duty was distributed across the larger social world. Sometimes convictions followed; oftentimes they did not. Some perpetrators lost their reputations while others lost their influence. Yet the movement’s ambitions never depended on those outcomes alone. It also created the conditions in which victims were no longer expected to remain invisible while institutions deliberated the fate of those who had harmed them.

The movement also offered pathways for restoration. After Megan Ganz publicly described the sexual harassment she experienced working for Dan Harmon as a writer for Community, the public discourse gave the two of them an opportunity to engage in dialogue, and Harmon responded with a sincere and rare apology to atone for his actions.

Returning to football, if the sport has ritualized outrage and the institutions can shrug it off, then the solution cannot be found in producing more outrage. Right now, discussions circulate around the idea of whether players should be allowed to play instead of considering why that has become the only point of inquiry.

The other instinctive response is often a boycott. But boycotting isn’t always the most practical or transformative solution. Sometimes it does the reverse of what it intends, and it can offer an easy way out. As mentioned earlier, football is entangled with so many emotional and psychic investments, and therefore boycotting as a political strategy will have the mammoth task of trying to get buy-in before it can even challenge institutions.

Placing steady pressure on FIFA and federations to develop a player policy is a worthy cause. However, it is also one that lends itself to institutional failure. It is a tough ask to demand that organizations properly adjudicate the conduct of their money-makers. It’s limping before it can be put to the test.

None of these interventions should be abandoned; they just cannot be exhaustive. Any solution should consider preventative measures and a different framework of engagement rather than being narrow and reactive. In fact, any intervention will have limitations. Football is deeply embedded within patriarchal structures, and eradicating the violence it produces ultimately requires a complete overhaul of gendered and racial hierarchies. That is not happening today, nor tomorrow, and it is unlikely that it will happen in this lifetime. But it doesn’t mean that reforms are meaningless or can’t produce measurable outcomes.

So the challenge is not to create a football free of contradiction but to interrupt the rituals that allow contradictions to become ordinary. That requires asking better questions.

How can football shift its attention toward victims without reducing them to spectacle?

What would collective action among the fans look like with this in mind?

And finally, what does accountability look like beyond waiting for FIFA or the criminal justice system to act?

In March, when Cassava Technologies announced the launch of an AI factory powered by NVIDIA in South Africa, the company described it as a turning point. African businesses would gain local access to high-performance computing. Data would remain within African borders. Developers would be able to build models for local languages and local problems.

The promise matters. African researchers and firms cannot participate meaningfully in artificial intelligence if they must rent every unit of computing power from servers abroad. But the most consequential infrastructure inside an AI factory may not be the graphics processor. It may be the electricity connection.

Artificial intelligence is exceptionally energy hungry. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity consumption by data centers to nearly double by 2030. The pressure is not evenly distributed. Data centers cluster in particular cities and industrial corridors, where their demand can collide with already constrained transmission systems.

South Africa shows how this collision is being managed. Data center operators are increasingly securing electricity through private renewable plants and wheeling arrangements, which allow power generated in one province to travel across the national network to a customer elsewhere. Teraco, a major operator, is developing a 120-megawatt solar plant in the Free State to supply its facilities in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Other operators have signed similar agreements.

This can look like responsible investment. Private procurement adds renewable generation, reduces dependence on coal, and helps large customers avoid drawing all their electricity from local distribution networks. South Africa’s electricity supply has also improved after years of blackouts. Yet the country still needs to expand and strengthen its transmission network. A private solar farm does not create a private route from the sun to a server. It still depends on substations, power lines, and grid capacity financed and governed as part of the national system.

The concern is not abstract. In May, community organizations challenged plans for two Equinix data centers in Cape Town, arguing that the applications did not provide enough information about electricity demand, water use, emissions, and backup power. The proposed facilities could require up to 160 megawatts combined. The dispute asks a basic democratic question: How should cities weigh private digital investment against competing claims on shared resources?

This is the grid inside the grid: a layer of firm, privately secured electricity built for facilities that cannot tolerate interruption, operating within a public system still struggling to expand transmission and connect new generation. The AI factory may be geographically located in South Africa, but its relationship to the surrounding economy can resemble an enclave. It receives dedicated power, imported equipment, sophisticated cooling, and backup generation. The wider public is promised future innovation, jobs, and growth.

The same tension is visible in Kenya. A proposed $1 billion data center involving Microsoft and the Emirati company G42 was presented as a geothermal-powered foundation for East Africa’s cloud and AI economy. By May 2026, negotiations had stalled over requests for guaranteed capacity payments, while the scale of the project’s power requirements remained under discussion. The episode revealed what investment announcements often conceal: Governments may be asked not only to host digital infrastructure but also to guarantee its market and reorganize scarce energy capacity around it.

None of this means African governments should reject data centers. Local computing capacity can reduce latency, support universities and startups, keep sensitive data closer to home, and create alternatives to total dependence on overseas cloud regions. The issue is not whether AI infrastructure should be built. It is whether public systems become stronger because it is built.

That requires more than celebratory language about sovereignty. Governments should disclose the electricity, water, land, tax, and guarantee arrangements attached to large data center projects. New power procurement should demonstrate that it adds generation rather than simply reserving existing transmission capacity. Contracts should require investment in shared grid infrastructure, meaningful local access to computing resources, and credible plans for skills and research partnerships. Backup diesel use and environmental impacts should be visible rather than buried in technical filings.

Sovereign AI cannot mean that data remain inside national borders while the infrastructure around them becomes inaccessible to the society hosting it. The real test is simpler: After the servers are switched on, is there more power, more capacity, and more public value than there was before?

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.