Sean Jacobs's Blog

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara���s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures���from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front. Thomas Sankara graffiti. Image credit E. Kokou via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Yesterday marked the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Sankara, who, on October 15, 1987, was killed alongside twelve of his comrades during a coup led by Blaise Compaor��. Sankara���s brief but transformative presidency (1983���1987) reoriented Burkina Faso���s political economy toward self-reliance, gender equality, ecological stewardship, and non-alignment in global affairs.

For more than three decades, Aziz Salmone Fall, a pan-African activist, political scientist, and coordinator of the International Campaign Justice for Sankara (ICJS), has worked with Sankara���s family, Burkinab�� activists, and international allies to demand truth and accountability. The long struggle has yielded historic breakthroughs: Compaor��, his former chief of staff, Gilbert Diend��r��, and former Burkinab�� army captain, Hyacinthe Kafando, were convicted of complicity in murder by a military court in Ouagadougou in April 2022. Significant questions remain regarding the enforcement of the verdict (each was sentenced to life imprisonment), the release of the French archives, and the larger fight against impunity.

In this conversation between Amber Murrey and Aziz Fall, Fall reflects on the enduring significance of Sankara���s revolutionary ideas and the ongoing movement for justice. They explore how the campaign navigates legal and diplomatic obstacles; how new regional dynamics such as Senegal���s political shift to the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States, shape ongoing political and economic struggles; and how a generation of African youth is being reinvigorated by Sankara���s vision of a sovereign, ecologically attuned, and socially just future.

Aziz envisions a renewed pan-African and anti-imperialist front grounded in what he calls the ���Great South:��� a collective of emancipatory forces reclaiming political and epistemic agency from the global periphery. Through his concepts of transinternationalism and a revived ���Bandung 2��� internationalism, he calls for a 21st-century alliance that transcends the nation-state, uniting peoples of the South and North in a shared struggle against imperialism and capitalist domination.

Amber Murrey

The campaign you coordinate has long demanded justice for the assassination of Thomas Sankara. What were some of the lessons you learned over these three decades of organization?��

Aziz Salmone Fall

Thank you, Amber, for this opportunity to reflect at this important historical moment. The first lesson is that when we organize ourselves with self-sacrifice, courage, and audacity, anything is possible. In the summer of 1997, a few months before the [administration���s claimed] 10-year statute of limitations expired, Sankara���s widow, Mariam Serme Sankara, courageously filed a complaint against X for forgery. Our lawyers Dieudonn�� Nkounkou from Montpellier and B��n��wend�� Sankara from Ouaga took up the case and assumed her defense. GRILA launched the ICJS international campaign Justice for Sankara in the form of an appeal against impunity. The appeal was endorsed by several organizations and prominent figures. I had the honor of coordinating this group of some 20 lawyers and, over the course of these decades, exhausting all remedies before the Burkinab�� courts, which were manipulated within la Fran��afrique, and we appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and obtained an international precedent against impunity in 2006.

Relentless campaigns to raise awareness of Sankarism and Pan-Africanism have borne fruit. Young people have taken up the cause. With the overthrow of the Compaor�� regime, a new administration has allowed a new trial to be organized. It opened on October 11, 2021, and has resulted in the conviction of those who murdered Sankara and his comrades.

The second lesson is that some consider this to be a Pyrrhic victory. I have a great moral responsibility in this matter and am uncomfortable with its outcome. Most of the families who agreed to allow me to exhume the bodies were disappointed to see that there was insufficient DNA evidence to identify them. It must be said that the previous regime had not protected the Sankara site, where liquids had been poured over his grave in an act of desecration. The state preferred to use laboratories of its own choosing rather than those we had recommended. And when it came to reburying the bodies, the Sankarist supporters were divided between those who (along with the majority of the families) believed that they should not be buried at the Council of Entente where they had been slaughtered, and those who, supported by the current regime, and other Sankarist supporters, believed that a memorial should be erected there: the Sankara Memorial. It was recently inaugurated and is now their final resting place. In order not to embarrass the families, I declined the state���s invitation to the inauguration and the medal that was to be awarded to me. I had proposed a vacant space between the Cuban Embassy and the Council of Entente as a compromise, but this proposal was not accepted.

The third lesson is that despite our struggles, the culture of impunity can persist. The chief orchestrator is still protected by Fran��afrique, which refuses to die, and the current authorities���who claim to be Sankarists���have yet to request his extradition.

Amber Murrey

Where do we stand today in terms of accountability and impunity, particularly concerning the conviction in absentia of Blaise Compaor��? What concrete steps will be taken next to ensure that the verdict is enforced?

Aziz Salmone Fall

It may be surprising that a person who has committed so many atrocities, who has murdered his close comrades and many other opponents, whose henchmen have threatened us with death, who enriched himself by plundering the sub-region and who, moreover, contributed to introducing terrorism there, can enjoy, in complete tranquillity, the nationality of C��te d���Ivoire, a country he helped to destabilise, and live there in luxury. We take this opportunity to reiterate our request to Burkina Faso to demand his extradition, to C��te d’Ivoire to respect the deserved sentence he has received, and to France to stop supporting him. Perhaps the current regime in Burkina Faso fears Compaor�����s capacity for harm if he were imprisoned in Ouagadougou, but that is just speculation on our part. For our part, while once again congratulating our courageous lawyers, this part of the trial has been resolved, and we have achieved our objective of ensuring that justice is heard, something that had been denied us for so many years. At the level of international law, following the deaths of human rights experts [Louis] Joinet and [Doudou] Guiss��, and despite their courageous efforts, we still do not have a binding convention on impunity.

Amber Murrey

Access to national and international archives is vital to establishing historical truth. What progress has been made in releasing key documents from France or other countries? What strategies are being used to overcome political and diplomatic obstacles to full declassification? Is your sense that the thin portfolio of archives released by the French during the trial is the end of that process?

Aziz Salmone Fall

We have spent decades requesting the declassification of secret and strategic documents. France has disclosed a batch of strategic documents, but these do not incriminate it. A third batch that was to be provided has been blocked by the French authorities. The rogatory commission that was to work on opening the international aspect of the trial, which was separated by the Burkina authorities, appears to still not have been set up [as of 2025]. There is a clear lack of willingness on both sides to finalize the resolution of this case. Our lawyers have unsuccessfully tried to get the authorities to take action. It is true that the situation of terrorist insecurity in the country and the region does not help matters. My reading of the documents and my assumptions clearly point to international sponsors, mainly French and American, and a few regional second-tier players.

Amber Murrey

The recent political changes in Senegal have generated hope, including the appointment of Ousmane Sonko as prime minister and the plans to phase out the presence of French military forces. How do you assess the prospects for progressive change under the new government, and what role could Senegal play in supporting justice initiatives, such as the campaign for justice for Sankara?

Aziz Salmone Fall

I have already had the pleasure of seeing the current prime minister give an interview at the beginning of his term, with a large poster of Sankara in the background, and he even attended the recent inauguration of the Sankara memorial. These are strong political signals. However, we did not receive any support or show of solidarity from his party during our campaign. It must be said that one of the characteristics of the AES and Senegalese regimes is that they are distinguished by their declarative and sometimes even active sovereignty, but they do not associate with revolutionaries. This may be a tactic in the face of imperialism, which is indeed powerful against young and fragile regimes. For the moment, we have a polite and distant relationship with all these regimes, which are not unaware of our pan-African sacrifices and struggles, which they themselves claim to support. In the case of Senegal, I proposed the pan-African platform Seen ��gal-e Seen ��galit��, a progressive, feminist, and ecological self-reliant social project. Seven parties have endorsed it and six candidates have chosen to draw on elements of it for their programs.

The regime has not endorsed it, but there is a certain influence, and it espouses an anti-neocolonial and anti-imperialist rhetoric. In practice, however, there will be no anti-capitalist break, but rather a pragmatic liberal management of the crisis, which we hope will be more patriotic than that of the former regime. But if there is already patriotic management of public funds and the settlement of impunity for financial and bloody crimes, that would already be a lot. We believe in a gradual break and will therefore continue in this vein, as we see no other options for Africa.

Amber Murrey

Young people across the Sahel and wider Africa are increasingly politically active in digital spaces and online communities. How does the Justice for Sankara Movement inspire and connect with this new generation to build pan-African alternatives to both external domination and authoritarian statecraft, for example, in Cameroon, Chad, and elsewhere?

Aziz Salmone Fall

We are convinced that our struggle against apartheid and for national liberation, followed by three decades of fighting against impunity and promoting Sankarism and Pan-Africanism, have helped to shape thousands of young people and generations of conscious Africans. At the same time, this politicisation is often superficial, as young people globally have been affected by three decades of depoliticisation caused by neoliberalism and the divestment of the state. I believe that those who have accompanied us in this struggle against autocracies, foreign bases, or pan-African development, and who have even supported it, are different from others in their pan-African consciousness. But it is a long and difficult struggle against a hostile world order and stubborn and perverse autocracies that have contributed to perpetuating ignorance, obscurantism, and all kinds of diversions to distract young people from their historical responsibility for transformation. But the contradictions and demands of life and survival are leading these young people to discover our struggles, which are identical to theirs, and the ancestors of the future, from Cabral to Ben Barka, from Lumumba to Fanon, who illuminate our struggles.

Amber Murrey

The formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger marks a shift in Sahel geopolitics and autonomy. From the standpoint of the region���s peoples and movements, what are the most exciting aspects of recent moves?

Aziz Salmone Fall

Undoubtedly, greater collective self-esteem. The simple fact that African countries are uniting in the face of adversity is progress. The fact that these are military juntas does not seem problematic to me; Sankara and his comrades were indeed soldiers with a certain social conscience. The sovereigntist stance and determination to fight the terrorist hydra, even if it means abandoning historical external support and favoring others, cannot be achieved at the expense of democracy or regional and pan-African dynamics. We need an open stance toward all peoples and all their components, and not just the military, which does not have a monopoly on politics. We must be confident and not suspicious. We must stand up against the tide of autocracy on the continent. In Tunisia, my comrade Khayam Turki has been accused of conspiracy and sentenced to two decades in prison with complete impunity; in Benin, my comrade Lehady Soglo is still convicted and in exile on unclear charges; our comrade Gbagbo in C��te d���Ivoire was previously rendered ineligible for major elections [this ineligibility was lifted in 2023]; Maurice Kamto in Cameroon has also been brutally sidelined [in the 12 October 2025 presidential elections]��� Libya, Congo, and Sudan are being carved up and preyed upon by profiteers, bandits, extractive industries, and more. These circumstances do not allow for the clarity and serenity needed to build Pan-Africanism. For example, the AES is falling out with Algeria and paradoxically turning to Morocco. What about the Sahara issue, or other West African trade routes? Our leaders must learn to disconnect to ensure better accumulation, consult each other more strategically, let our peoples flourish, and not adorn themselves with medals, honours and enrichment; and concern themselves with questioning the old model of development by opting for a balance in symbiosis with nature that satisfies the essential needs of those who are deprived, proposing strategies for full employment, redressing inequalities, particularly concerning the status of women, and educating for progressive knowledge… these are some of the signs we are waiting for in concrete terms.

Amber Murrey

As you know, this month marks the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Sankara. In his 1987 address to the OAU, Thomas Sankara warned that ���He who feeds you, controls you,��� and elsewhere cautioned that, ���It is natural to fear to be outside the norm, but the courage to refuse conformity is the beginning of freedom.��� In your view, what concrete forms of economic or diplomatic refusal allow African countries to assert autonomy, sovereignty, and justice in today���s international world order, with nested global racial hierarchies, and capitalist expansion?

Aziz Salmone Fall

Everywhere, the struggle to preserve equality or to increase inequality continues. The balance of power is political and, depending on the worldview and the period, gives rise to increasingly sophisticated superstructures to resolve issues of wealth, power, and meaning. The resulting institutions can be immutable for a long time, or they can be brutally overturned, creating new relationships of power and knowledge.

It is up to us, in this exceptional historic moment of redeployment of imperialism in the 21st century, to help complete the efforts of so many people, like Sankara, who have fought for our freedoms and our development. In the current state of disarray and expectation, and without nostalgia, a lucid response from the organic forces of the Great South is inexorably becoming aware of its anti-systemic potential. This presupposes recovering the state���s room for manoeuvre, rediscovering the organizing potential of peoples and the coherence of the convergence of transversal struggles beyond sovereignty against transnationals, war, and the rapacity of the market, and in defense of the equal status of women and the protection of the common good and the environment. This is not a time for nostalgia and mere commemoration, but for understanding that the non-aligned must now have the courage to align themselves against imperialism and reinvent a transinternationalism of peoples. If the latter accepts the leadership of BRICS, the industrial champions of the Great South, it rejects their sub-imperialist temptations and reaches out to the peoples of the core countries to fight barbarism.

I propose transinternationalism starting from the Great South first, so that once it has crystallised, and without sub-imperialism, it can irradiate the peoples of the North whose interests are not so opposed to ours, confronted as they are with the rigours of their uniformising economic, cultural, educational, and political standards and systems. Universality will only exist when other homeomorphic and endogenous equivalents have irrigated it, and when hegemony fades through fertile and reciprocal acculturation.

The Great South must take back the epistemic initiative and restore the sense to participate in the uninhibited construction and non-Eurocentric reconstitution of knowledge. All the peoples and nations that have suffered colonization and continue to suffer its after-effects must learn to work together to emerge from their condition. Whether through South-South cooperation at all levels, bilateral, multilateral, or simply as citizens.

We need to deconstruct the Eurocentrism embedded in our cognitive frames that are deeply enmeshed in our thoughts and practices of knowledges. By transnational, I mean the extra-state and national dimension, both infra- and supra-national, which incorporates progressive internationalisms, mainly those of workers and the jobless, ecologists and feminists. So we���re going beyond the first internationalism and adapting it to the 21st century, to its equivalents in different parts of the world, in order to achieve real universalism. Transinternationalism makes it possible to incorporate internationalism, which itself went beyond the national question by advocating workers’ solidarity, transcending it to deploy politically, socio-culturally, and psychologically a progressive rearguard and vanguard front of organic forces to meet the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.

We need to build a collective internationalist network of resistance to imperialism, starting by strengthening its axis in the most promising parts of its periphery. There is an urgent need for a political level, which exists only sporadically on an event-driven basis. This organized and diverse nebula must bring together, based on Bandung 2 internationalism, the fronts, parties, movements, and individuals likely to propose to the peoples, the alter-globalist network, as well as to the social formations and productive or unemployed forces of the world, an alternative project to capitalism. A project against the modernization of pauperization and technocratic depoliticization, a free, egalitarian, democratic, feminist, and solidarity-based project for the construction of a responsible universalist order without oppression for humans and nature alike. This must be done in a respectful, democratic, and united way, in the diversity of our obedience(s), with the prospect of rebuilding a world labor front conscious of the issue of the commons, the last non-commodified public spaces, and the importance of adopting a universal declaration for the common good of humanity.

The challenge of an anti-systemic response based on the spirit of Bandung should consider the feminist, ecological, and progressive challenge at the heart of any analysis aimed at democratically re-politicizing peoples with a view to an upsurge in the defense of peace, of the commons and an alternative to capitalism. The democratic re-politicization of our popular masses on the basis of dynamic balance and a stand against the militarization of the world requires the re-foundation of a tricontinental front to counter the military impetus of collective imperialism and move toward the equivalent of a 5th International. At the very least, it is important to recall the eight principles we set out in 2006, during the World Social Forum in the Bamako Appeal.

Amber Murrey

Thank you so much for your time.

Aziz Salmone Fall

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Ch��ri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it. Hommage aux anciens cr��ateurs, 2000. (A tribute to former creators). All images courtesy galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris. �� As credited.

Ch��ri Samba is the undisputed king of popular painting from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the last 45 years or so he has been depicting the everyday concerns of his countrymen and women, reflecting on everything from education, morality, sexuality, and corruption in his paintings, using himself as a subject to comment on the social and political realities in his country. These scenes are depicted in his trademark style of humor, in vivid color, and often accompanied with text in his native Lingala or French.

Born in 1956, Samba���s artworks first came to international attention in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the Earth) at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris. Since then, his artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Tate Modern in London; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris; the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Venice Biennale; Documenta; and other places. Riason Naidoo met up with Ch��ri Samba in Paris in 2020 at galerie Magnin-A in Paris.

Riason Naidoo

This painting is fun, J’aime le jeu de relais (I Like the Relay Game), 2018.

Ch��ri Samba

The relay game, yes. I like it because you don’t want old people to spend all the time in the positions they hold. They would still have to have the spirit of wanting to leave room for young people too. If we have to appropriate places from young people all the time, why then do young people study? Why have children if we do not allow time for them to move on in life as well? That���s why I like the relay game. Let children take the place that adults have previously occupied.

J’aime le jeu de relais, 2018. (I like the relay game) �� Florian Kleinefenn. Riason Naidoo

You say you were born an artist. Can you expand on that?��

Ch��ri Samba

When you come into the world, you don���t choose what you should be; it���s like, in a curious way, doing a job you didn���t choose. When I was a child, I saw myself drawing something in the sand; like everyone else, every child needs to play, to play in other skies. I had no materials. I used my fingers to scribble something in the sand, and little by little when I was in school I started to have some white paper with the ballpoint pens. With pencils, I was making drawings. I copied comics from the entertainment magazines that were all the rage at home in Kinshasa. I would keep them in notebooks; it was my hobby. My fellow students bought it. That���s why I said later I was born an artist. I didn���t choose it, it just happened.

Riason Naidoo

You���ve been in Kinshasa ever since you moved there from your village as a young man. What is so special about Kinshasa?

Ch��ri Samba

Kinshasa is the city to which I am drawn, but I was born in Kinto M���Vuila in lower Congo eighty kilometres from Kinshasa. We do not choose the place of birth. After dropping out of school, I preferred to go to Kinshasa because almost everyone wanted to live in the capital of the Congo. It is a desire. I changed my studio recently [after many years] from the corner of Avenues Birmanie and Cassa Boubou to 250 Avenue Commerciale, and that is where I am, until now.

Souvenir d’enfance, 2020. (Childhood memory)
 �� Florian Kleinefenn. Riason Naidoo

Who were the artists that inspired you in then Zaire?��

Ch��ri Samba

Frankly, I didn’t have a role model. At the beginning, it was as if I existed all alone in the world. It was just after several years [of being an artist] that I heard about others. I thought I had to try to see what these artists were about. We got together, we rubbed shoulders, but I wanted to be true to myself. As we are at the show of three artists [now in Paris], the other two being Bodys Isek Kingelez and Mok��; they were my colleagues, my friends. They came on stage before me, and I appreciated their work. I met them; they accepted me. Each one was different.

Riason Naidoo

What makes your work different from theirs?��

Ch��ri Samba

Isek Kingelez, he was a model maker, so that was a big difference between painting and models; Mok��, a painter. We can see very well that the processing of my images is not the same. I preferred to do a little realism ��� even if it could have a little flaw. There is another difference: I wanted to put some text in my paintings, because before I set out on this adventure, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t see a painting that bore text, and I almost suffered for it.

The people from the Academy of Fine Arts [in Kinshasa], the teachers from that school (who wanted to take care of my work, while I was not their student) said, ���But how can this artist afford to put texts, to write on his paintings? Maybe he doesn’t know how to make his images understood.��� I said, ���Let me do what I want to do.��� My desire is to hold the attention of people in front of my work so that they take time to contemplate my work. There are people who read and understand very quickly everything that is written. I read slowly, word by word; it takes time. I told myself that there might be others like me [who take time to read]; [the text] will delay people in front of my painting. This is what I wanted. This was not the case with my colleagues. That was the difference.

Riason Naidoo

I���ve read that you make up to three versions of the same painting. If that is true, it is very unusual in modern and contemporary art that relies on a unique painting.��

Ch��ri Samba

Sometimes they ask me, ���Why make the painting in several versions?��� Before Ch��ri Samba, there were also other painters who did paintings in a series. In my case, if I paint the picture several times, it���s because there are paintings that I don���t want to sell.

If I paint a subject, I would like everyone to see it so that it circulates all over the world. I, myself, would like to keep a copy so as not to take photos or make prints, as you say. Sometimes, I wanted to do it again for myself. It happened to me that a painting that I might reserve for myself ends up in someone else���s home. There is already an existence of this subject, which is already gone. I think to myself that it is not good that I repeat the same subject for someone else who is interested. But the person concerned tells me, ���No, I want that,��� and there are some who asked me for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth version of the painting, and I said to them ���No!��� In this case, I like to limit myself to three versions, so it was not me who chose, but it is the requests that I receive that resulted in the additional versions. I was surprised that there were back-and-forth requests, demands from so-called art connoisseurs who asked me to make another version of a painting for them. So, finally, I said to myself, in order for people not to miss the work, I would have to continue. It���s not my choice to reproduce all the time, but what should I do?

I���m talking about the painting, such as I Love Color, also the subject. I think a lot of people liked it, and it hurt me that it was only found at someone���s friends place while everyone wished to see it.

J’aime la couleur, 2010. (I like colour). Riason Naidoo

Could you describe for me the Art partout exhibition in Kinshasa in 1978 and the atmosphere around it?����

Ch��ri Samba

I think it���s one of the exhibitions that also shed a lot of light on the thought that if art did not exist only at a given point in the world, it did not exist. The idea was to show that there are artists everywhere in the world; that they are not only in the West, as we used to say in the past. And what was a little ambiguous is that we thought that where there are no galleries, museums, there are no artists, and it was a false discussion. Whether there are galleries or museums, artists are everywhere, and art is everywhere in the world; that was the idea behind the exhibition [that took place in the streets].

Riason Naidoo

What do you mean by ���paintings with no soul���? What are your thoughts on contemporary art you see in museums around the world when you visit?��

Ch��ri Samba

I was just saying that there are things you can easily understand and things you don���t. I compared a little the work dictated by the so-called connoisseurs in the fine arts schools and there, I said, there are works, which sometimes, the people for whom the works are intended had difficulty understanding the message. It���s not to say it was well done or that it was bad���no. The message is only for initiates, art connoisseurs, insiders.

If someone wants to challenge the conscience and wants to talk with these compatriots, why code the message? This is why I was saying I would like to paint in what I would call ���folk art.��� Of course, the word ���popular��� was also not very well understood, especially in the West. People thought ���popular��� was without thought. We pick things up without thinking. I said that ���popular��� is a painting that comes from art and goes toward the people, and the people are easily recognized there. So, there is this relationship between the art understood by the people and art that is intended for the initiated, while the world belongs to everyone. For me, you have to give the message to everyone unambiguously.

Merci, merci je suis dans la zone verte, 2020. (Thank you, thank you, I’m in the green zone)
�� Florian Kleinefenn.

 

Riason Naidoo

Is it true you wrote words in your paintings in Lingala to be invited abroad?��

Ch��ri Samba

Yes, it’s true, it���s not only in Lingala that I wrote, I also wrote in Kikongo, in Swahili, etc. I wanted to write the words from my country so that I would be known outside my country, then I could be invited to speak; that was the strategy.

Riason Naidoo

Did it work?

Ch��ri Samba

I don���t know if it worked, because sometimes it���s not just what I write that interests people, but what I present in pictures. This is what people see first.

Riason Naidoo

You first met Andr�� Magnin in 1987. Tell me about that meeting.

Ch��ri Samba

I saw a gentleman who arrived in my studio who introduced himself as Andr�� Magnin. He wanted to do for the very first time an exhibition, which was to bring together several artists from Africa, from all over the world, approximately 100 artists. I was chosen. He told me that I wasn’t going to do anything else. If I had a trip in mind, I must just forget about it ��� I just trusted Mr. Magnin, who was going to present my work at the exhibition, and it paid off. I did what he asked me to do, and we developed a mutual trust.

Riason Naidoo

And what about the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989? What was it like to be part of the exhibition? Could you describe the moment of going to Paris and participating at the Centre Pompidou?��

Ch��ri Samba

Magicians of the Earth was an exhibition that brought together several tendencies of artwork we were doing. There were already people who exhibited in museums, and there were others that we did not know, as if they were not artists ��� but Andr�� Magnin saw that this misunderstanding should not continue to exist. So, he said that he found many other artists more interesting. Why not include them in this exhibition? Like the word said, ���magicians,������people who presented incredible things but who were not recognized as artists. The exhibition pissed off a few artists, it has been said, but we will not talk about that. It was the artists at that time that Andr�� Magnin and his colleagues had found who really made the difference in that year.

Riason Naidoo

Are you a strategist and politician as well as an artist? I���m thinking of your inclusion of Europeans in your paintings, also of other artists such as Picasso, to broaden your audience.

Ch��ri Samba

It���s true, I���m an artist, what I say and what people seem to ignore. Whether we are in politics or not, we are in the water. Artists also help politicians to change their position. In my opinion, it is the artists who help the politicians to improve themselves. In my work, in my country, it has paid off; it helped to make sense of politics.

You know, our policies had instituted the system of learning only foreign languages, ​​and we ignore our languages ��� Everyone speaks English, German … We do not know our languages. When I was given an award by the Prince Claus Fund in 2005 in Amsterdam, it was for my satire and the recognition of the languages in my paintings. I spoke about it during my presentation and saw in the schools at home that language learning was initiated at the source. This is what I mean when I say that the artist helps the politician to improve himself. Whether we play politics or not, we are in it.

Quand il n’y avait plus rien d’autre que… L’Afrique restait une pens��e, 1997.
(When there was nothing left… Africa was a thought.) 
�� Ch��ri Samba Collection. Riason Naidoo

The universal themes in your paintings (the everyday, education, politics, sexuality, humor) are part of this strategy to reach more collectors or a wider audience?��

Ch��ri Samba

Yes, all these themes are universal. If I look at my recent painting On est tous pareils, (We Are All the Same), 2020, I think it���s universal. In��J���aime la couleur (I Love Color), 2010, I told people that we should turn our heads a bit like in the spiral to know everything around us, which is only color. Whereas there are people who ignore the notion of colors so there is only one color, black. I say that I am not black, even though I can dress in black. We were told, this is a conventional color, as if there are no other colors.

On est tous pareils, 2020. (We are all the same) 
�� Copitet Riason Naidoo

Why do you often depict yourself in your paintings?

Ch��ri Samba

First, I think it���s a joy in yourself to know how to achieve perfect things in their exactness. If I represent a rooster, a hen, we do not see a pigeon, so there is a pride to know how to succeed in things that can surprise others. It is this representation that makes me happy and not to annoy people unnecessarily. When you present the face of yourself, you eliminate the risks. I once presented on purpose a painting with the face of a stranger. A second gentleman, and everyone who saw the artwork, said that it was the second gentleman that I had captured in the painting���that I had titled Les Abyssales [meaning, someone who hid the dirty clothes under the mattress]���which was false. For that I had paid fines, and I said to myself that I don���t need this kind of bullshit again. I don’t represent animals, so if I have to present a face, then it would have to be my own face whether I succeed or not, but it should be me.

Riason Naidoo

How has the technique in your work evolved over all these years?��

Ch��ri Samba

At the time, I was able to do five or ten paintings in a week, and today when I see the paintings done several years ago, I cannot believe it. Without knowing it, I saw that the technique has changed a lot, not to say improved. My production is a lot less now. I finished a painting after a few breaks because I focus on doing small details, and this takes a lot of my time. In the past, I didn’t worry too much about depicting details, but now I do. I think that has changed a lot, in a good way.

Riason Naidoo

And for the themes?

Ch��ri Samba

I have suitcases full of ideas that I can take at any time, but it���s not so easy anymore, because I work a bit like a journalist. They work on a daily basis. I don’t have to resort to things that happened years ago because there are always new things happening. I have had a hard time dipping into my suitcase, and the suitcase fills up all the time. So, I take things that affect me from everyday life.

Riason Naidoo

I���ve read that Escher and Picasso are references in your work. Are there any African artists who inspire you, living or dead?

Ch��ri Samba

L��ger, Picasso, Magritte, or anyone else are not my references. I went into this painter���s adventure without any knowledge of other artists. It was during the time that I was in the profession that I heard about these artists, and my eyes did not prevent me from seeing what they were doing.

I saw their work ��� and saw that it wasn���t bad, that there were things that interested me also in their technique. To satisfy myself, to cheer myself up, I thought to myself what they did, I can do too. I might not be able to compete with them, but I thought I too can do this. At the beginning, I was talking about other paintings at the art fair; those did not impress me, these artists whose works cost millions. I will not mention the names, but it is as if it was my children���s work.

The artists you mentioned are not my models, but I appreciated their work after I got into art, into this art adventure. There are a lot of artists in my country who were not my role models, but whose work I admired, such as Pilipili Mulongoy, Albert Lubaki, Pierre Bodo. There are also young people such as JP Mika, the work he presents; I had the impression that things were moving.

There was a client who asked me, can you do something that moves? I said, but how can you do something that moves in painting, like something that gives you the chills? Don���t tell me the L��gers, the Picassos. They existed before me and did a good job that I admired, but that does not mean that they were my models. I am my own role model.

Le petit Kadogo, 2009 (Little Kadago).

You know, I had three bosses before I set out on my own, but they didn���t draw paintings like me. They were people who were writing [signboards]. I don���t even know if I can call them artists. And those gentlemen there, when I was doing a painting, when I was doing a portrait, if the customer refused, my bosses weren���t able to correct where I had gone wrong. We used to say that we couldn’t work well there, because we are on the main artery; there is too much noise from vehicles [on the road]. This is why we took the work home to work quietly. And when it came back, we could see the difference. That���s why I said I didn’t have a master. It was I who pushed myself.

The interview was conducted in French in Paris on September 11, 2020, at Galerie Magnin-A. Transcription in French by Eric Mercier. First published in New Frame (Johannesburg) in October 2020.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa���s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration. Woolworth's Clothing Store, Johannesburg. Image �� Paul Saad via Shutterstock.

My ghetto is not your inspiration.

��� Elliott ���Malice��� Thornton Jr. (���Community,��� from JID���s God Does Like Ugly)

Lekau Sehoana���s clothing business had been around for nearly half a decade���but its sudden popularity and the humble beginnings of its founder made it look like a miracle out of nowhere. Founded in 2019, after a series of other genuine attempts at entrepreneurship, Sehoana sold Drip to consumers as the township dream; it was what happens when the enduring legacies of colonialism���and apartheid���that continue to make townships a spatial reality in democratic South Africa aren���t a factor. That tagline���the township dream���could often be seen splashed in bright letters on the company���s fleet of vehicles and the billboards that came to be at the center of a controversy that will likely come to define the legacy of a man once thought to be South Africa���s most popular entrepreneur. The poster boy of the country���s neoliberal possibilities.

In 2022, during an interview with Sehoana, popular radio presenter and podcaster Sibusiso Leope remarked that the colorful billboards advertising Drip sneakers on Sandton���s M1 road were like ���an announcement of a new sheriff in town.��� A relatively new and black-managed business advertising in Sandton isn���t insignificant: Sandton is the largest and most visible concentration of South Africa���s symbols of inequality. In 2019 Time magazine put photographer Jonny Miller���s drone image of a leafy Sandton neighborhood against an Alexandra township defined by the congestion of informal settlement structures on its cover. The point? Illustrating the sharp inequality that now defines much of the country. It���s in the few kilometers that divide Alexandra township and Sandton City that the country���s contradictions are most vivid. For Sehoana, advertising in Sandton was more than the pronouncement of a business or product; to advertise in Sandton is to announce both flight and arrival���like many who found success in the continent���s richest square mile���he had defied the dispiriting conditions of the working-class neighborhood that raised him. But as he would come to find out, defying spatial colonialism as a young businessperson eager to prove himself was one thing���sustaining a business was another.

There was something joyous���even exciting���about watching someone who once described himself as ���a hoodrunk��� realize the height of his potential. That joy was rooted in the impossibility of starting a business and holding your own. Only 1 percent of South African start-ups are said to grow to become viable enterprises. Drip was an attempt to distill an ungenerous township experience into a symbol of resilience. Its success lent weight to a broader cultural argument by some contemporary post-apartheid designers���about decolonizing the aesthetic and language���that defines the value of a cultural brand. They argued that a vernacular term and the history that tints it���stitched on a pair of jeans���can come to carry as much cultural value as a foreign luxury brand, even as its target market, elites in the South African context, seeks to mimic a Western lifestyle. Though ���drip��� is not a classical vernacular or indigenous term, it relied on and advanced that argument more than any other local brand that shied away from the politics of decolonial aesthetics and language.

Like any country marching to the beat of neoliberal capitalism, South Africa places great importance on acumen and sees business as a logical answer to some of its socioeconomic problems. What followed Sehoana in the wake of Drip���s liquidation were all the arguments about what he should���ve done and not done. Sehoana himself was a neoliberal crusader, often speaking of not just building a business but setting up systems that would ensure that the business outlives him. He was acutely aware of both the stakes and technicalities of turning a start-up into a behemoth. But there���s no amount of business acumen���or policy literacy���that can compensate for a poor cultural argument.

���Clothing is so close to the body, audiences take massaging from brands personally. More so, in the South African context where we already have so many issues around exclusion, audiences are sensitive to messaging that echoes exclusion as it relates to class, gender, and race,��� says fashion writer and historian Khensani Mohlatlole when I ask whether a poor cultural reading of an audience or consumer base can be fatal to a business. Sehoana successfully packaged social fugitivity into a sneaker���but could not sell it at the market. As a result, Drip as a symbol of upward mobility came to be more important than Drip as ��� a decent product.

When he announced its liquidation, much of the discourse about Drip revolved around what everyone considered to be his obvious mistake: rapid expansion (at the peak of his business, Sehoana oversaw 18 retail stores across the country). But the most obvious mistake and inherent limit of Sehoana���s business was a lack of cultural buy-in. Many of the South African local clothing brands that have been successful in the post-apartheid era anchored their survival and success on courting or attaching to a cultural phenomenon. Mzwandile Nzimande and Sechaba Mogale exploited South Africa���s hip-hop scene to make their clothing brand Loxion Kulca synonymous with cool. On the cover art of their 2008 album Can���t Touch This members of the legendary South African kwaito group Trompies stand against a split background of tires, scrap metal, and an empty township street, a tribute to their respective working-class backgrounds. They wear Dickies��� iconic utility shirts that have come to be synonymous with certain aspects of Kwaito���s visual or aesthetic culture. It isn���t a sponsored image but speaks to the American clothing brand���s success in embedding itself with a South African cultural symbol which has ensured its success as a business. Dickies has never officially endorsed or sponsored Trompies but ask any South African which brand they associate with the group they���ll say Dickies. Or which group they associate with the brand, they���ll say South African kwaito group Trompies. It was the same reason American brand Reebok broke rank with international apparel brands��� unspoken boycott of kwaito, because despite its popularity and crossover appeal, it was essentially a critique of the exploitative conditions (���hase mo���state mo���) that attracted foreign brands to the country and offered kwaito star Kabelo Mabalane the country���s first sneaker (Bouga Luv) endorsement deal in 2005.

Sehoana joined with Southern Africa���s biggest pop star, Refiloe Phoolo, a.k.a. Cassper Nyovest, in what he called the most significant partnership ever created between a non-athlete personality and an athleisure brand rumored to be worth US$5 million. Sehoana compared the structure of the deal to that between Nike and basketball legend Michael Jordan, which made the brand synonymous with US sporting and popular culture. With that agreement, he hoped to mirror what Nike did with Jordan and Dickies did with kwaito. At the time of the signing Phoolo was still Southern Africa���s biggest star at least by the numbers. To date, he remains the only independent Southern African rapper���of his generation���to fill successive major venues, including stadiums, to capacity. But for all his cultural weight, Phoolo could neither carry nor save Drip. It wasn���t the first time a business agreement centered around a celebrity fails to transform the fortunes of a local business. In the late 2000s, South African telecommunications company Cell C, attempting to hold its own in a fiercely contested markett, decided to rope in Bonginkosi ���Zola��� Dlamini, then Southern Africa���s biggest pop star. For three years, Dlamini would be the face of the company and have a brand of products, as part of what was billed then as the first endorsement deal of its kind. But though popular, Dlamini���s cultural weight would have little bearing on the fortunes of the company. Sehoana seems to have been hatching his bets on the miracle of a business deal driven by the appeal of celebrity too. It might have worked, but his corporate expansion seemed to have been moving faster than he could make a cultural argument about why people should ditch their treasured Nikes and embrace an obscure label out of a South African township.

In the world���s most unequal country, everything comes down to appreciating the nuances of class and race, but aspirant capitalists like Sehoana, who rely on the allure of upward mobility as a unique selling point of their business, rarely anticipate resistance or their intentions being read critically. This is how Drip, a brand that claimed a working-class background as inspiration, ends up with billboards in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the continent, assuming it will be read as a triumph and attract new business. It is also how Phoolo, a millionaire pop star, becomes the face of Drip when it claims to want to appeal to working-class consumers. Of course, as a businessperson in a country where the face of corruption and failure is black, Sehoana was always going to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to scrub the stench of failure that comes with surviving structural issues.

The argument of a celebrity endorsement or marketing deal is that if enough elites embrace something, then ordinary people will uncritically embrace that same thing. Sehoana and Drip weren���t wrong to hatch their bet on Phoolo; he���s Southern Africa���s most significant cultural figure of the last decade. But if one listened closely, part of what went wrong in Phoolo���s partnership with Drip could be heard in his music. In the song ���Phumakim��� from his acclaimed 2015 debut album Tsholofelo Phoolo raps about being rich enough to transcend both the racial and class context of his upbringing. Phoolo was delivered to superstardom mainly by young black South Africans trying to escape and redefine the class context of their parents. So, it was easy to celebrate attaining wealth as a sufficient condition for social freedom, but as they���ve grown to become weary adults in the world���s most unequal country, it���s only natural that most would struggle to relate to materialism as a symbol of success. By the time Sehoana and Drip offered him a deal based on his celebrity status, the context of Phoolo���s fame was different. He was no longer the rapper who commanded the adoration of 20-year-olds who could be told to flock to Drip stores to purchase sneakers.

Phoolo���s partnership with Drip was part of a scorched-earth approach to their marketing campaign that made Drip popular even as the logical opium of the cool. But it comes undone when every cultural symbol Seohana deploys to hook the market misfires. A kit sponsorship of South African legendary football club Moroka Swallows, a collaboration with South Korean brand Fila, and another celebrity partnership with veteran house DJ Zinhle as the face of Drip���s signature perfume Finesse were all meant to inject the brand with cultural mileage. At best, those partnerships were an ode to a bygone era���Sehoana might have hoped that a bit of nostalgia and economic nationalism would endear Drip to a consumer base. But love and nostalgia are not tangible or even sustainable market goods.

At some point, Drip would have to qualify its claim as a business that is conscious of the realities of the township. Or a business that contends with the context of the environment it���s operating in or its market, in Drip���s case, the grit of township life. Sehoana sang praises to the township as an inspiration for Drip, but what seemed to have got lost in the liberal hymn of upward mobility is that townships are ultimately war zones. That people have made a life and community out of a township doesn���t alter the fabric of its reality: Poor policing and underfunded public health facilities mean death stalks every township corner. Overcrowded classrooms and a lack of recreational activities mean a disrupted childhood. Sehoana sold hope in a market saturated with hope dealers���when he should���ve been selling survival. Root of Fame (ROF), Phoolo���s signature sneaker and Drip���s most popular offering, is a case in point. ROF teased comfort but it���s quite clear from its design that a sewerage-spilling township street was not a factor in that process. The township of Sehoana���s imagination is not a place intentionally starved of resources to function effectively as a cheap labor camp but a portal of social possibilities. That might have been his most fatal mistake.

It���s not that Drip was above failure���life���s greatest teacher is often failure. In many cases, it���s even necessary���but Sehoana carried a different weight; the burden of culture. He was not allowed to fail in all the normal ways a person might fail. He was not a cultural immigrant. Unlike corporations, he didn���t have to exploit or harvest the intimacy and genius of the township to sell his product. More than anyone, he should���ve known the limits of his argument; one can only go so far with the narrative of triumph.

Making space for the ordinary

MADEYOULOOK���s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first. Screenshot of Dinokana via MADEYOULOOK website �� 2024.

MADEYOULOOK is an interdisciplinary collaboration formed by Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa. The two met while studying art at WITS University in Johannesburg, where they graduated in 2009. The work Sermon on the Train, a series of public readings on Johannesburg trains, dates back to that period. Fifteen years have passed since then, and they continue to meet weekly to exchange ideas and implement projects.

Like other black South African artists of their generation (they were both born in the late 1980s), they say the origin of their work was ���in response to the feeling that the university, and particularly the art school, did not consider our context.��� Over the years, their work has explored different languages���they often call it ���undisciplined������but has kept long-term research and collaborations as its methodology, and the everyday life practices of black people in South Africa as its focus. Their project, ���Quiet Ground,��� was selected by curator Portia Malatjie to represent South Africa at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024.

MADEYOULOOK���s ���Dinokana��� is a 20-minute, 8-channel sound installation that explores the cultural significance of rain and water in traditional South African life. The soundscape is experienced within a constructed environment, which alludes to Bokoni���s terraced hillsides, and where visitors can sit. The artwork takes as its point of departure the histories of the Bahurutse and Bakoni, and their cycles of displacement and return. It includes clippings of the resurrection plant, a symbol of healing and resilience linked to rain, traditional medicine, and regeneration. It is possible to see the work at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation until November 15 as part of the exhibition ���Structures��� curated by Stephen Hobbs, Rebecca Potterton, and Wolff Architects. The project is divided into three sections: Situatedness, Infrastructures, and Typologies. Together, the works examine the relationship between space and subjectivity through the lenses of translation, memory, heritage, and migration; investigate how architecture���both formal and informal���embodies power and ideology, contrasting ideological frameworks with iconography; and explore the sensorial and abstract dimensions of personal and collective practices and rituals in both urban and rural contexts. The exhibition features: Igshaan Adams (ZA); Kader Attia (DZ/ FR); Kamyar Bineshtarigh (IR/ZA); Jellel Gasteli (TN/FR); David Goldblatt (ZA); Kiluanji Kia Henda (AO); MADEYOULOOK (ZA); Matri-Archi(tecture) (ZA/CH); H��lio Oiticica (BR); Hajra Waheed (IN)

In Section 3: Typologies, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho from MADEYOULOOK present ���Landscapes of Repair,��� where they discuss their interest in everyday black practices in South Africa, and reflect on their understanding of what it means to have a relationship with nature. They speak about sixteen years of working collaboratively and highlight several of their projects. Molemo and Nare also share insights into the process behind their multimedia installation ���Dinokana,��� which was commissioned for the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 and can now be experienced in South Africa for the first time as part of the ���Structures��� exhibition.

In this conversation, conducted online in March 2024 as part of ���Southern Thought on a Northern Biennale��� project, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho discuss their interest in everyday black practices in South Africa.

Laura Burocco

How did you start working as a duo, and how would you describe your practice?

Molemo Moiloa

We met at university, and we shared a similar feeling. It just felt like there was a whole other art world beyond being at that university. It just didn’t connect with it at all. And so in a way, our initial way of working together was a very reactionary kind of thing,�� and very much engaged with public space as well. And that shifted over time. I think the thing that’s stayed cool from that period has been this idea of working with the everyday and thinking about sort of everyday black life as a kind of locus of thought and intellectual production. So that continues��� We both had jobs and, therefore, were able to just keep working independently. So we would meet every Thursday. We have done that pretty much for the last 15 years and made projects over very long periods of time. Usually, our work is very research-based, and it is very iterative, like a lot of our projects have many, many versions. And it has definitely informed the kind of way of working, in the sense that our work is very project-based. It���s often quite multi-modal ���like we’ll have a large discursive programme, we will have sort of exhibition practices, and then we will have writing practice, all related to certain ideas. And that���s because we���re more interested in the exploration of ideas than necessarily developing pictorial representations that go on walls.

Laura Burocco

When describing your works, reference is often made to ���practices of everyday life of black people in South Africa,��� but also the defamiliarization with this everyday life. Can you develop more?

Nare Mokgotho

I think some of the art comes out from the disquiet we had with our arts education. So, almost feeling like our lives, and black life in general, was kind of underrepresented in our education [���] and to have that feeling that what you���re speaking about doesn���t really constitute knowledge can be quite a damaging feeling. But also to have that legitimized by someone who���s nodding as you���re speaking and who has a similar kind of somatic and lip experience as you, and can interpret things that others may not be able to see, and begin to legitimize that as knowledge, I think, is again very powerful.

The way of working around defamiliarizing I think is to look at things that you see again and again and again in a slightly different way [���] And so what our practice has really been about is actually taking very familiar practices to us and relooking them and going actually, ���hang on, there���s so much more going on here than we ourselves actually even understand.���

Molemo Moiloa

An early text that also really informed our thinking is Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary. That text is kind of an early ���90s response to kind of moving away from the notion of the spectacular. Ndebele���s critique is that anti-apartheid artistic practices tended to be spectacularizing: they aimed to represent either oppression���thus needing to display the blood and gore of violence���or resistance���thus needing to heroize. As a result, art was always driven by spectacle. Because of the political pressure to resist through artistic practice, ordinary life was not allowed to be explored; artists did not have the luxury of engaging with the everyday or the mundane. This ���rediscovery of the ordinary��� therefore becomes an effort to reclaim the ordinary as a space of power, depth, and beauty.

I think this notion of defamiliarization is also deeply connected to that, to our strong interest in examining the minute details of everyday life and then diving very deeply into them. For example, taking something as simple as your grandmother���s garden as a starting point, and then going deeper and deeper into it to unpack questions about group areas act, forced removal, photographic archives of Black life, notions of pleasure, and so on.

Nare Mokgotho

Belonging here.

Laura Burocco

You were selected by the South African curator Portia Malatjie to represent South Africa at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, which opened on April 20 , 2024. Can you tell me about the work you presented in Venice, ���Quiet Ground���?

Molemo Moiloa

Our work speaks very specifically to the notions of questions of repair and how we kind of lean on histories of South African land relationships to think about how we create modes of belonging, and repair our relationships to home. And thinking very much about relationships to nature and indigenous knowledge systems, and kind of using oral histories to make those connections. In particular, water. So this work really engages with infrastructures of water from two particular histories that we���ve been looking at.

Nare Mokgotho

So the way we���re thinking about water is very much as connected to the land and not as something entirely different from it. So we have been looking at two historical sites. One of them is called Dinokana, an area in the northwest of South Africa, which historically was a water-rich area and quite green. The people of the area often grew surplus food. In the early 1900s, there were successful farmers to the point that they could sell some of their produce [���] The Bantustan [system] completely starved this area of the water, which they naturally had access to through two fountains by re-channelling them. So this village is now completely arid, whereas previously it had a close relationship to water.

The other site that we have been thinking through is an area in Mpumalanga which is the historical home of people called the Bokoni, who since about the 1800s have had quite a cycle of loss and removal and displacement from their land, but also have a history of returning to particular portions of their land, trying to begin to reconnect and repair the relationships to land.

So these are the two sides that we are kind of seeing as models for how we can think about repair, because our histories in South Africa of land have been very much about displacement. Even in the 1980s, there are still communities that are being displaced, but there are communities that continue to insist on their relationship with the land.

Molemo Moiloa

One of the things we resist in our work is the reductive way of treating South Africa���s history as the black-and-white image of apartheid. The cycles of violence and land dispossession we talk about are not purely colonial. And so these questions about cycles of reparations do not fit so easily into the simple black-and-white narratives in which South Africa can often find itself involved.

Laura Burocco

Can it be said that your work also refers to the relationship of Indigenous people with the land, or in some way, indigeneity?

Molemo Moiloa

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of side of repair is definitely much more the emphasis, and I don���t know if we talk about indigeneity, but definitely speak to notions of kind of indigenous knowledge systems. So, I���m thinking about where a politics of epistemic power emerges. And thinking also about how relationships to the land sort of span this spiritual, economic,�� technical, or scientific, and these kinds of crossings, and grade points, or undisciplined ways of approaching knowledge systems. And definitely kind of thinking about how we might reclaim some of these. So we���re looking through the sound archive in particular to unpack some of those complexities.. I think our work is not so concerned with what constitutes the Indigenous per say, and in part because one of the things we���re also resisting a bit in this work is that the work that we���ve done particularly around Bokoni, but in Dinokana as well, these cycles of violence and land dispossession are not purely colonial [���] And so those are kind of like internal displacements [���] they���re not the sort of black and white apartheid removal sort of image. And so these questions of cycles of repair don���t fit all that easily into simple narratives of black and white that South Africa can often find itself engaging in.

Laura Burocco

So the artwork is a sound installation���

Nare Mokgotho

So we really have worked in a very multi-modal way, but we���ve also worked in a way that���s very undisciplined. So, the core of our practice is actually driven by the exploration of the ideas, and however that is expressed for us really isn���t always a huge hang up [���] But sound has always been something that we have been interested in since 2012, but not so much when we started the ���Non-Monuments��� project, a kind of oral history, working with archives and going into sound archives. The sort of composed sound is something that is quite new, and somehow people now mistake us as sound artists, which we aren’t. We���re just undisciplined. We just move about where the ideas carry us. That���s where we go. So the ���Non Monuments��� was about people engaging with underrepresented histories, which were just captured in a sonic way.

Molemo Moiloa

We���re looking at Beti and Tswana songs because of the two places we���re working from. If you’re South African, you know the songs immediately. You can sing the songs you know, and you know what those songs mean. You know the politics of those songs. Immediately�� [���] And yeah, I think if you know those sounds, they also make you feel in a very particular kind of way.

Laura Burocco

A sound installation, with references to sound archives, that uses Bantu languages, with strong references for those familiar with South Africa.. How do you think ���the other��� can understand it [in Venice]?

Molemo Moiloa

I think, particularly with that work, we didn���t really need people to understand; we needed people to feel. And what we found is that people who wanted to feel, they felt.

Laura Burocco

What excited you and what concerned you about Venice?

Nare Mokgotho

I think what excites us is to do, again, a deep dive into the work we���ve started. This is something we���ve been doing for the past seven years, and the research we���ve been doing for that time has led to multiple projects in the ���Project Ejaradini��� and the Documenta work [���Mafolofolo���] to a film work that we did [���Menagano���]. And I think what excites us is to explore the potentials of sound, and then that sort of affective response that a lot of people had to our work. We want to explore that a bit further and see what the logical conclusion of that might be. It���s something I think we���ve been working on for the past 14 years,�� to try and get beauty and affection into conceptual work. And what happened with ���Mafolofolo,��� I think, was beautiful because of that, so I wanted to see again how much further we can push that.

Molemo Moiloa

I think in terms of a thing that concerns us [ ���] is that usually our work is not just an exhibition. Usually, we would enable more discursive engagement, and like we would often try to connect with the local context in some way, meet with people interested in similar themes, and run programs and engage with them. And for various reasons, that���s kind of not looking possible [���] It���s the nature of Venice. It���s, I suppose, very much exhibition. So that feels maybe a bit strange for how we usually work. It���s not a big concern; it���s just maybe a bit different. But the intention is very much for this work to come to South Africa and to be shown in South Africa. So I think in the South African context, there’ll be much more capacity for that.

Laura Burocco

Any expectations?

Nare Mokgotho

The expectation is to make it good and then bring it home. That’s what we’re most excited about. I think people think of us a lot of times as just exhibition artists doing large-scale installations, which is nice. It���s one part of our work. But there���s also this very discursive part of our work, which I think in South Africa we���re much more known for. And the work that travels doesn���t always get to be seen here because of the economics of things. We���ve been able to show like two major works, two major works in South Africa: ���Ejaradini,��� at Johannesburg Art Gallery [JAG], and ���Corner Loving��� at the Goethe project space.

Molemo Moiloa

We do work here a lot, but then it���s often the cheaper stuff that happens here. The work we do here [ South Africa] is experiential, discursive. Kind of convening work. But in terms of actually showing our work, work like the Documenta work, we wanted to bring it home, but we didn���t manage. We���ve done some listening sessions, but we���ve never brought the work back. And that���s purely because the South African scene is so defined by the commercial sector, and the only kind of work you get to see here is stuff that is commercially viable, which is not our case. It just means that it���s really difficult to show anything here that is pricey for us to make. Even just in terms of where you exhibit things, it���s quite challenging. There are not a lot of substantial exhibition spaces that you can show in. We did a work at the JAG and we did it ourselves. So yeah, I think it���s really important for us to finally be able to bring something back because all the work we make is for South African audiences.

We think about our work as sort of operating on many layers. So you can enter into the work at a sort of initial entry layer if you���re from another place and you don���t speak the language or whatever. And the more you know about the context, about the language, about the references, the more you have access to the multiple layers, and, inevitably, the deepest layer is a South African audience. And yet we don’t get to show our work yet. So I think it���s really an important thing for us.

Nare Mokgotho

To bring this back and have people listen to the work as intended would be very amazing.

Molemo Moiloa

Yeah. We���re learning some lessons from Documenta. We���re even building the islands in such a way that you can unpack it. It’s like IKEA furniture, so you can put it back in a box and bring it home!

Laura Burocco

It seems like an excellent way to use Venice���

���Dinokana��� will be exhibiting at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) until November 15, Tuesday to Friday, (9am–5pm. Admission to JCAF is free and by appointment only. Book here.

Cameroon’s last election

The outcome of the October 12 elections may make or break the resource-rich Central African nation. Yaounde, Cameroon, 2022. Image �� Noyan Yalcin via Shutterstock.

In July 2025, President Paul Biya made a simple post on X. ���I am a candidate for the ��� presidential election,��� he wrote, adding, ���Rest assured that my determination to serve you is commensurate with the serious challenges facing us��� The best is still to come.��� If his acolytes are to be believed, the impetus behind the 92-year-young Biya���s choice was merely a response to the people���s call���at least, from his loyal supporters. But what stood out most was the emphasis on the medium of the announcement itself: social media. The head of state���s camp painted Biya���s use of X as proof of his connection to young Cameroonians, who are the most active users of the platforms and make up about 60 percent of Cameroon���s�� population. It is an allegation steeped in irony, as for more than four decades of Biya���s rule, the country���s youth have been consistently sidelined, excluded from meaningful political participation and decision-making.

After more than four decades of Biya���s rule, Cameroon appears to be sliding backwards. Public infrastructure is crumbling, insecurity and corruption are on the rise, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, the government is deep in debt, and the threat of secession in English-speaking Cameroon continues to hang over the nation. Given the fragile state of affairs, Cameroonians have taken to calling the impending vote ���Cameroon���s last election,��� for many reasons���notable among them being that if the incumbent leader wins, Biya will be nearly 100 years old by the end of his eighth term.

Earlier this year, we had predicted that Biya���s victory was a foregone conclusion if he decided to run again for Cameroon���s top job, but a lot has changed on the ground. Two of Biya���s long-standing allies, former Minister of Employment and Vocational Training Issa Tchiroma Bakary and erstwhile Tourism and Leisure Minister Bello Bouba Maigari, shocked the country by resigning from his government. Resignations are not new under Biya, but the departure of these particular figures is significant���the timing, geography, and political bases they command allow for an otherwise unprecedented dialogue over the elderly head of state���s mandate. Coming from the predominantly Muslim northern regions of Cameroon���Adamawa, North, and Far North���with a large voter base making up about 32 percent of Cameroon���s registered voters, Issa Tchiroma and Maigari could significantly disrupt Biya���s usual landslide victories or even push him out of power.

The secretary general at the presidency of Cameroon, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, often seen as the de facto leader cum ���shadow president,��� earlier on turned the presidency into what looked like a campaign hub of his own. He received delegations from all walks of life: religious leaders, youth representatives, and political elites, who, in return, pledged their support for the incumbent. Biya, who remains largely absent from the scene of daily politicking, had ceded his signature authority to Ngoh Ngoh, a move that has stirred growing resentment among sections of the political elite, who accuse him of usurping power from the ���democratically elected president.���

���A country cannot exist in the service of one man,��� declared Issa Tchiroma, now a candidate in the upcoming elections. He now refers to the Biya government as ���broken.��� According to Biya���s one-time spin doctor, centralization has failed. In an unexpected twist of events, Tchiroma���who once linked federalism to secession when Anglophone Cameroonians asked for it���is now proposing the same system of government as the magic wand that will take Cameroon out of the woods. Addressing a crowd in his hometown, Tchiroma is heard urging his people to take their destinies into their own hands. ���We haven���t solved your old problems. But if we unite now, we can solve them for good,��� he said. ���It���s time to act. When the time comes, put in your envelope what will end our misery.���

Before joining the Biya government, both Tchiroma and Maigari were once its victims. Maigari served as Biya���s first prime minister from 1982 to 1983, shortly after Biya came to power. In 1984, however, he was forced into exile following accusations of involvement in a failed coup led by allies of former president Ahmadou Ahidjo, mostly from the north. He later returned and founded the National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP) in 1992. The party remained in alliance with Biya until 2025, when Maigari began showing interest in the presidency.

Tchiroma, unlike Maigari, did not manage to escape after the coup attempt. He was arrested and spent six years in prison. During his detention, he learned English���a skill that would later shape his political career. After his release, he joined Maigari���s UNDP but left in 2007 to form his own party, the Front for the Cameroon National Salvation(FNSC). Like the UNDP, his party maintained a marriage of convenience with the Biya regime until he, too, announced his intention to run for the country���s top job.

What makes Tchiroma and Maigari different from most of Biya���s former allies is that they have strong political foundations of their own. They are not members of the ruling party; instead, each leads a separate political party with genuine grassroots support, particularly in the north. For years now, they have been clamoring for power to ���come back home,��� having produced Cameroon���s first president���and the patience of these two northern powerbrokers appears to have worn thin.

But Tchiroma and Maigari are not the only ones seeking to end Biya���s 43-year rule over Cameroon. Ten other candidates have also been cleared by the elections body to take part. In total, a record 83 people submitted their candidacies for the presidency; only 13, including Biya, were approved. Missing from that list: Biya���s main challenger, Prof. Maurice Kamto, who finished second in the last election with over 14 percent of the vote. His dream of running again was cut short after the election body ELECAM rejected his candidacy through the African Movement for New Independence and Democracy (MANIDEM), a move that was widely considered by Cameroonians as a political maneuver by the ruling class designed to sideline Biya���s most formidable challenger.

Kamto is often called the ���Pope of Law��� in Cameroon. To his critics, the title mocks the ���all-knowing law professor��� who was outmaneuvered by the Biya regime. But his supporters highlight his key role in the landmark 2002 International Court of Justice ruling that granted Cameroon sovereignty over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, a territory also claimed by Nigeria. His international reputation as a lawyer and his courage to challenge the Biya regime, especially after the 2018 presidential election boosted his political profile; his earlier service in the Biya government also gave him insider knowledge of the system he now opposes. Kamto mobilized supporters to protest what he called a rigged election���a move that led to his arrest and nine months in detention on charges of insurrection and seemingly strengthened his credibility among many Cameroonians as a symbol of resistance. The candidate he endorses would gain a major advantage, leveraging both Kamto���s clout and the tribe���s significant financial support to become a frontrunner. Kamto has set strict conditions: He will only give his endorsement to a coalition that includes Tchiroma and Maigari. Otherwise, he has urged voters to ���follow their conscience.���

With the Pope of Law out of the race, the only real chance of defeating the incumbent now lies in a coalition���but the question of who would lead it hangs unresolved, and Cameroon���s long history of a fragmented opposition makes the dream of a united front seem unlikely. While opposition parties have been discussing this idea���two of the three candidates who originate from Anglophone Cameroon have already withdrawn to endorse Maigari���key opposition figures such as Maigari, Joshua Osih of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), and Cabral Libii, the young politician who came third in the last presidential elections, have vowed to never be part of any coalition. Despite Tchiroma and Maigari presenting themselves as insiders who are capable of sending Biya packing, Cameroonians remain skeptical, accusing them of enjoying the perks of Biya���s government for years and turning against him only now that it suits their ambitions.�� C��lestin Djamen, another opposition leader, described the two politicians as ���situationists, profiteers, and mercenaries of politics.���

The campaign promises have been swift and all-encompassing. Osih has pledged to resolve the Anglophone crisis within his first 100 days in office. Maigari promises to convene an inclusive national dialogue within six months of his presidency and to grant amnesty to all prisoners of conscience as part of national reconciliation. Cabral Libii also supports dialogue with Anglophone leaders, regardless of their stance, and has even suggested relocating the presidency to one of the English-speaking regions as a gesture of unity. Tchiroma, who once labeled protesting Anglophones as ���terrorists��� while serving as minister of communication, now attributes the crisis to Biya���s over-centralized system and believes federalism is the only lasting solution.

While opposition parties in Cameroon struggle to agree on a single candidate to face the ruling party, many of them share similar ideas on major national issues. All the candidates vow to fight corruption, the hallmark of Biya���s Cameroon, and to reform key institutions���Tchiroma plans to conduct a full state audit at the start of his term, while Maigari proposes reducing the presidential term from seven to five years, renewable once, lowering the voting age from 20 to 18, and guaranteeing judicial independence. Tchiroma, Osih, and Cabral Libii all propose a federal system of government to address the long-debated ���form of the state.��� Cabral Libii, however, suggests a model he calls community federalism���inspired partly by Ethiopia���s system, though he compares it to Belgium and South Africa. Maigari, on the other hand, says he would let Cameroonians themselves decide through a national consultation. Given the country���s growing dissatisfaction with decades of centralized rule, public sentiment currently leans toward federalism.

Looming over the highly sectarian voter base is the lingering question of the fraught Anglophone crisis. The Anglophone regions of Cameroon in the Northwest and Southwest, home to about 20 percent of the population, have been locked in a secessionist war with the central government for nearly nine years. Fighters seeking to create an independent state they call Ambazonia have vowed to disrupt the upcoming presidential elections. Ironically, this unrest works in favor of the ruling party, which can use its control of security forces to protect loyal voters and manage the few polling stations that will open in the conflict�� zones, which has been a failsafe modus operandi in past elections. Before the crisis, Anglophone Cameroon was the stronghold of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), but insecurity has since helped Biya���s Cameroon People���s Democratic Movement (CPDM) dominate politics in the area. For the opposition to win what is now Biya���s stronghold, the crisis must end; they simply don���t have the funds to motivate and protect supporters willing to risk voting.

Unfortunately for the opposition movement, coalitions alone will not suffice in restoring a long-entrenched lack of trust in Cameroon���s electing bodies. With members appointed directly by the president, it is hard for Cameroonians to lay their confidence on their impartiality, driving low voter turnout and increasingly daunting levels of�� voter apathy. While Cameroonians are genuinely hungry for change, turnout at the polls has always been disappointingly low compared to the number of people eligible to vote. In the 2018 presidential election, for example, about 6.6 million registered, but only around 3.5 million actually voted���out of a national population of nearly 27 million. The 2011 elections were no different: 7 million registered, but only 5 million showed up to vote. Part of the problem is trust���or the lack of it. The elections body inspires little confidence, engendering a self-fulfilling prophecy of minimal change in the country���s executive administration.

As October 12 draws nearer, the question lingers: Is this finally the twilight of Biya���s rule, or just another chapter in his endless reign? While Cameroon appears to be sliding backwards, a spectrum of challengers have arisen in the hopes of taking the country to its next era: Some promising X, and others promising Y. For Cameroon to have a chance of progressing past decades of business-as-usual melancholia, a coalition will need to come from this discord���one that seeks to address regional sectarianism, neocolonial neglect, and youthful discontent.

Armed with October

From Sudan to Toronto, a revolutionary poem echoes across time, showing how people���s movements confront militarism, mining, and imperial order with the enduring force of collective struggle. The first anniversary of the Sudanese Revolution in Khartoum, 2019. Image credit Wirestock Creators via Shutterstock.

Every translation is an act of migration���this one especially so. Rather than a literal translation of El-Mekki���s work, this is LINE/BREAK���s composite of and variation on pre-existing translations by Taghreed Elsanhouri, Adil Babikir, and Oswa Shafei. To all these writers, as to all this poem’s countless readers and singers, and to everyone who has recited it in crowds in the streets and everyone who has enacted it in ways both preserved and forgotten by time, we are indebted.

In November 2024, the Sudan Solidarity Collective and LINE/BREAK hosted an event in Toronto about Sudan���s resistance committees. The centerpiece of our gathering was Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim���s 1964 poem ���October Al Akhdar��� (���Green October���).

Like that event, this essay���a longer version of which first appeared in ArabLit���offers a collective reading of ���Green October.��� Below, we interweave LINE/BREAK���s translation of the poem with lessons from liberation struggles in Sudan.

*

October Al Akhdar

Green October

 

By Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim (Khartoum, 1964)

Trans. from the Arabic by Fathima Cader (Toronto, LINE/BREAK, 2024)**

 

�������� ������������ ��������

���� �������� ����������

������������ ����������

�������� ������������

����������������

���������� ����������

����������������

������������

�������� ������������

����������������

��������������

���� �������� ��������

���������� ����������

�������� �������� ���������� ������

���������� ����������

���������� ����������

�������� �������� ���������� ������

���������� ����������

���������� ������������

���� ������������

���������� ����������

������������ ������������

���������� ������������

������������

�������������� ������������

���� �������� ����������

����������

����������

����������

����������

�������� ���������� ����������

�������������� ������������

�������� ��������

���� ��������������

Your name, triumphant,

blossoms in people���s hearts,

announcing faith and good tidings.

In the forest,

and in the desert,

in our hands,

wrapped in a scarf,

glowed a torch

and a weapon.

So we armed ourselves

with October,

and we shall not retreat.

We shall pound upon stone,

until the stone bears for us

plants and greenery.

We shall stay the course of glory,

until time preserves for us

our names and our memory.

In your green name,

oh October,

the land sings.

The fields are on fire

with wheat and promise

and with hope,

and the land has flung

open its treasures,

calling,

in your name���

that the people

are victorious,

and the prison gates are crushed

and the shackles are lifted,

and they are a bride���s bracelets,

dangling from her wrist!

 

Two months before we gathered to study ���October Al Akhdar,��� El-Mekki died. Transnationalism was matter-of-course for 1960s revolutionaries, so perhaps he would have not been surprised that his call for a Green October had reached across six decades, from Khartoum to Toronto. Perhaps his ghost, still new to the afterlife, enjoyed hearing comrades translate his Arabic into Kutchi, Tamil, and Urdu.

We read El-Mekki���s poem together as a reverberation through time and place, across the interconnections of our oppressions and our resistances. From Tkaronto to Gaza, from Khartoum to the Dahieh, from the belly of the beast here on these borderlands to colonial outposts the world over, his verses reminded us that it is the duty of the artist to join the ranks of struggle.

���Green October��� insists on victory: fa satallahna bi oktober. The word is small, but the poem is clear: we are armed with October. The struggle is itself our weapon. From the individual reading it alone at home to the collective voice roaring it in protest on the street, these stanzas are firm: The prisons must be crushed, and from shackles we will carve love.

In your green name, ���� ������������, the people will be victorious.

Victory: In 1956, Sudan achieved independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule, but freedom remained out of reach for most people, because the British had left behind a political system that favored the Nubian and Arab elite in Sudan���s north and center. The economy was reliant on cash crops.

This tactic of using race/ethnicity to cover for class exploitation is widely familiar. Muzan Alneel explains how the postcolonial rise of the comprador bourgeoisie class throughout the Global South is partly a result of how often newly independent states ���prioritised abstract concepts like national pride and state sovereignty over people-centred goals such as self-governance and equitable resource distribution. These concepts were often used to mask the failure of post-colonial governments to improve the lives of the majority.���

Independence in Sudan was quickly followed by recurring waves of popular resistance and military coups.�� Eventually, in 1989, Omar al-Bashir commenced what would become the country���s longest dictatorship. Under the guise of Islamic rule, his regime followed instructions from the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and liberalized the economy and privatized the public sector.��Unemployment mounted. Drinking water, health care, and education became inaccessible.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) created the Janjaweed militia, recruiting especially from nomadic groups. This tactic was part of a general approach by successive Sudanese governments to inflame conflicts over resources between farmers and nomadic communities.

State violence against non-Arab communities intensified. Western media coverage of the subsequent 2003 genocide in Darfur was pronounced, but selective: It described the violence only in terms of race hatred. This approach concealed the genocide���s root causes, including the fact that international mining companies were benefitting from the genocide.

As farmer and union organizer Abdelraouf Omer observes, ���The state displaced millions of non-Arab Darfurian farmers in order to exploit the region���s gold and uranium. The international community intervened primarily to provide shelter and aid to displaced Darfurians, which ultimately cost less than the mineral wealth extracted by companies working with regime leaders.���

This is just one example of how genocides anywhere in the world���whether in Palestine or by Canada���are often framed in purely identitarian terms, even though their causes and purposes are typically material. This includes land theft, water restrictions, and manufactured famine. Mining, as we note below, remains a key vector of mass death in Sudan.

*

Eventually, the al-Bashir regime shifted Sudan���s economy to crude oil. But Sudan lost its oil revenues when South Sudan (where most of the oil was produced) achieved independence in 2011 (following resistance and a war over its co-optation as a ���quasi internal colony��� of Sudan).

Sudan then turned to gold. It is now one of Africa���s biggest exporters of gold. About 90 percent of Sudanese gold is smuggled into the UAE, who sells it internationally. This gold rush benefited only the elite. For everyone else, hunger worsened. Protests erupted in 2012.

The SAF responded by formalizing the Janjaweed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The SAF brought the RSF to the urban core, where the RSF massacred protesters in Khartoum in September 2013. Most of the martyrs were high school students, who had been instrumental in starting the protests.

Soon afterwards, the al-Bashir regime appointed the RSF as Sudan���s primary border control force. The Sudanese state then played a key role in coordinating the infamous ���Khartoum Process,��� an agreement whereby the European Union has paid African states ���4.5 billion to block African immigration to Europe. Sudan is a key transit point for people traveling across Africa to Europe. Despite recent attempts by the EU to publicly distance itself from the RSF, the RSF continues to congratulate itself on its ���advanced role … in protecting the European Union by preventing the flow of illegal migrants.���

*

Amid this state violence, resistance committees rose to prominence in 2013, leading to Bashir���s ousting in 2019. However, the path forward was rocky: Labor strikes by the public were met with massacres by the state. By force, the SAF instituted a Transitional Military Council, which included the RSF. International powers, like the UN, supported the military junta, but on the streets, the ���Three Nos��� slogan resounded: no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimization with the military.

Eventually, the council came to a power-sharing agreement with some civilian elite. But the SAF and RSF reneged on that agreement and launched a joint coup in 2021.

Meanwhile, the resistance committees remained so popular in their opposition to the military that for over a year, the military struggled to form a government.

In February 2023, 8,000 resistance committees across Sudan issued a Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People���s Powers. It denounced the local elite and declared that ���the totalitarian state model has proven time and time again that it has no alternatives for the rural communities other than famines, violence, and slow death.���

*

Weeks later, the SAF and RSF turned on each other, bringing about war in April 2023.

The SAF, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is reportedly supported by Egypt, Ukraine, Iran, and others. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti, is supported by the UAE and its provision of French arms.

Estimates from last year placed the war���s death toll as high as 150,000. This is likely an undercount, given the targeted destruction of hospitals and morgues. Outbreaks of preventable and treatable illnesses like dengue, malaria, and cholera exacerbate this death toll. Additionally, this is the world���s largest displacement crisis today, with over 14 million people displaced. Sudan was once renowned as the breadbasket of the Middle East, but its people are now suffering the worst famine the country has seen in 40 years.

Amid this ruination, Sudan announced record levels of gold production last year. It is because the war has been so lucrative that it has remained so protracted.

*

The people of Sudan have remained armed with October: The resistance committees run emergency response rooms that direct aid war-relief efforts across Sudan, including distributing food and medicine, coordinating burials, assisting evacuations, and more. Yusra Khogali, a Sudan Solidarity Collective member, explains that these rooms are ���filling the void of an absent international aid community and a civilian state.��� This demonstrates how elite bodies like the state, military, and international NGOs are incapable of creating real change���and are in fact aligned against it. True power is instead manifested through organized mass movements of regular people.

Indeed, despite the scale of their work, and the dangers they face, revolutionaries in Sudan have refused international co-optation. For example, in 2021, the UN mission in Sudan tried to persuade the resistance committees to join negotiations with the military council. Finally, the resistance committees agreed, on one condition: The meeting had to be live-streamed to the public.

The UN not only rejected this proposal, it canceled the meeting altogether. Alneel notes that the resistance committees��� ���success in exposing the nature of the UN mission and the process it promoted was … based on an understanding of the impact of public participation in the balance of power against the elite.���

*

For those of us in the Global North���including here in Toronto���our responsibilities and complicities are not abstract, they are material. Canada is currently accepting only 4,000 people from Sudan as government-assisted refugees, in contrast to the approximately 300,000 Ukrainians Canada has accepted. Quebec, meanwhile, has altogether banned its residents from applying to resettle relatives from Sudan, unless those relatives go to a different province.

In March 2025, hundreds of protestors gathered in the bitter cold outside the annual convention for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) in Toronto. This is the largest mining convention in the world and it attracted protestors from Treaty 6, the DRC Congo, Chile, and more.

At that protest, Elamin told the crowd about how, after the SAF and RSF staged their joint coup in 2021, the Canadian mining company Orca Gold signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the Sudanese regime to construct a large gold mine in northern Sudan.

���It is therefore our duty,��� she reminded us, ���as people living in proximity to the headquarters where this consortium of corporate murderers sit���comfortably plotting how to up their profits through war���to disrupt their business as usual.���

In heeding that call, we arm ourselves with October, knowing that the struggle is long, but victory is ours. ���� �������� �����������we shall not retreat.

The Sudan Solidarity Collective is a volunteer collective that was formed in response to the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023. Since then, the Collective has been supporting civilian-led groups and grassroots relief efforts in the country���s hardest-hit regions, where people are facing militarized violence, catastrophic famine, and the most extreme displacement crisis in the world:

Rethinking the boundaries of blackness

South Africa���s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion. Jordache Ellapen. Image via University of Toronto.

Jordache Ellapen���s Brown Photo Album work brought the analytic rigor of Tina Campt to the Indian South African family photo archive, and his latest book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness, takes the reader through a visual feast of artists, such as Sabelo Mlangeni, Kutti Collective, Lebohang Kganye and Sharlene Khan, who break with normativity���whether through gender performance or sexuality. His thinking about Afronormativity, which is a regulatory regime that limits the boundaries of authentic blackness, and the naming of Afro-Indian positionalities and identities animate Ellapen���s discussion of visual cultures. What emerges from the depths is indenture aesthetics: a way of seeing that centers the vulnerable, the feminine, and the feminized.

The following conversation between Ellapen and Youlendree Appasamy has been edited for length and clarity.

Youlendree Appasamy

Congrats on your book! When reading, I felt like your disruption of merchant, trader, passenger Indian narrative goes alongside your disruption of the default indentured male figure as well. You kind of did those two movements together, which I really appreciated because the scholarship and the historiography feels���it���s so difficult to be basing your work off of footnotes.

Jordache Ellapen

That���s so true, right? I felt like that disruption had to occur simultaneously because I was very conscious of the fact that I wanted to tell a kind of story of Indianness that did not fall back on the normative logics of sexuality, of race. I also mark that indenture aesthetics is different from indenture history. And this [book] is not a history of indenture. And I think that���s what I was trying to do with the book because one of the things���and you���re talking about the Guptas and this different class of Indians���and one of the things that I always kind of struggled with is that, and I only found the language later on, but within the South African imaginary, all Indians occupy the positionality of the merchant class. And I think that was a strategic construction by the colonial apartheid state, and that was how they managed the racial hierarchy. The Indian was positioned as a buffer community between the settler population and between local black African communities. And they used it as a way to manage black African anxieties around settler colonialism and white supremacy. All the evil, the dangers, the problems become kind of transferred onto this imagination of what the Indian is. To disrupt this, I had to make that critique of the merchant trader class in that we are not the same in terms of language, community, caste.

Youlendree Appasamy

I was thinking about the beautiful literature and creative works about enslavement and the feminine in and around the Cape. I���m thinking of people like Yvette Abrahams, Amie Soudien, Lebo Mashile and Gabeba Baderoon. And there���s a really beautiful academic world where people are working with the ghostly residues from the period of enslavement. I appreciate the insistence on not erasing the movement of enslaved people from South or Southeast Asia to what���s now known as Cape Town in your discussion on unfree and coercive labor in the country. I���d love to get more of your thoughts on the slavery-indentureship spectrum in South Africa.

Jordache Ellapen

The very histories of slavery and indentureship and indigenous forms of indentureship and African forms of indentureship in southern Africa are so significantly different that we need different frameworks to think about race, particularly blackness, than the Atlantic world offers us. Because even if you think about what slavery looked like in the Cape in the early years of slavery, it was people who were from South Asian countries that were enslaved and then it started shifting to people from Mozambique and other parts of East and West Africa but mixing with indigenous communities and indentured communities. Indigenous communities couldn���t be enslaved, but they could be indentured, and what a lot of the literature reveals of that era is that it was hard to make distinctions between enslaved, indentured, and other forms of indentured peoples, so the very categories of slavery and indentureship as one being associated with the contract and then one being associated with coercive labor falls apart. Even within the Americas, the notion of the contract doesn���t secure autonomy over one���s labor relations so the contract has been fetishized in literature of indenture, and it doesn���t exist within transatlantic slavery, but the distinction between the two is shaky. I think it���s in Coolie Woman [by Gauitra Bahadur] where she talks about how the same ships that enslaved Africans were used with for indentured laborers. Britain saw India as a replacement for Africa, and they saw Indian bodies as a replacement for African bodies. ��� I���m interested in the afterlife of indentureship, and indentureship is the afterlife for slavery.

Youlendree Appasamy

I t���s important to understand indenture and enslavement in southern Africa as part of the same matrix of oppression.��

Jordache Ellapen

And also the category Indian was part of the category Coloured until 1960, but we���ve kind of cleaved ourselves into the separate racial identities���oh, you know, we’ve been made to believe that we are so distinct, but it was violently policed in Cape Town and urban areas, whereas before the Glen Gray Act it was pretty porous.

Youlendree Appasamy

What scholars were you reading when writing this book? Keguro Macharia���s concept of ���rubbing��� from Frottage is beautifully carried throughout the text.

Jordache Ellapen

A lot of the [historical] work I���ve encountered on indentureship [has been from] Betty Govinden, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed, Surendra Bhana. Fatima Meer is very important to my work actually. Like Fatima, I am trained in black studies so I was always very interested in thinking about Indianness in South Africa as part of the black experience. I was interested in returning to Steve Biko���s work, because I think he offers us a kind of framework around rubbing around these different racial groups and thinking about blackness more capaciously, not just as a kind of identity formation or categories, because I feel like they actually function as sites of capture and containment. Although we know that the boundaries between these different racial categories have always been porous, but I was interested in what happens when we start thinking outside of these categories and what kinds of knowledge gets produced about Indianness or about blackness when we kind of release ourselves from these categories. That���s where I found Steve Biko���s work useful, even though he���s been heavily criticized for his gender and sexual politics. Thinking about vulnerability, I went back to Fatima Meer���s work and Shireen Hassim���s book on Fatima Meer, and also her work in relationship to Steve Biko, which is in conversation with Keguro Macharia, and then other person that���s really important in my work is actually Frantz Fanon.

Youlendree Appasamy

Fatima Meer gets it. Your book made me turn back to [her book] Portrait of Indian South Africans and particularly the section on Tin Town, now called Springfield Park, in Durban. I absolutely adore her approach to it, which is to have people���s words, dreams, turns of phrases in there verbatim. She gives you a sentence or two to stitch it together, and there are beautiful pictures by Ranjith Kally. But yeah, I mean, even the use of collage in that book is so groundbreaking. It���s so indicative of the black studies that she was involved in creating in South Africa.

Jordache Ellapen

One of the things her work, read in relation to Sharlene Khan artwork When the Moon Waxes Red, made me think about is how within the South African imaginary, Indian poverty is unimaginable. Meer has those thick sociological descriptions of those spaces, but she doesn���t just focus on it as a space of lack, poverty, and disenfranchisement, but she focuses on the everyday lived experiences. She focuses on the way they decorate their homes and the way they go to the movies and the way they create community. And there���s life, there���s love, there���s a livingness within these spaces, and we know that, right? My whole book questions the very notion of freedom and what black freedom means in post-apartheid South Africa. And to think about freedom in South Africa, we also have to trouble the very category ���black,��� because blackness is not homogenous, like Indianness, and blackness has significantly transformed in the post-apartheid period���who is black and who can claim blackness has transformed from the kind of anti-apartheid logics around black solidarity to the post-apartheid logics around the authentic national subject and how blackness becomes attached to a particular kind of nativism and heteronormativity. ��� And I was interested in those that fall outside of that normative idea of blackness and how we think about solidarity from the margins, from those that are excluded: the feminine, the feminized, the vulnerable, and how that allows us to think differently about nation, about community, about kin, and about race.

Youlendree Appasamy

You make a really strong case for the indentured class as complicating the black-white racial binary and, therefore, always and forever being queer. Tell me more.

Jordache Ellapen

I wanted to complicate the ways in which we understood or thought about Indian South African histories, because a lot of it is so straight it doesn���t leave space for anything else. The historical record may not show ABC��� [queerness during indentureship], but number one, we have an imagination, and number two, we need different kinds of histories, we need different kinds of queered experiences.

Youlendree Appasamy

In The Mercury newspaper there���s a line from the then editor about when indentured laborers first reached Port Natal that they were considered ���a very queer and oriental looking crowd,��� and I was like, ���Yes, oh, okay, fruity!��� There are many ways to understand the word queer, especially in 1860, but it���s a choice. That actually takes me to the chapter with Reshma Chhiba and FAKA. I love FAKA���s early work, I was there at the Sex exhibition at Stevenson in Braamfontein that you write about���oh my god���and at AfterSex, which was the after party in a basement somewhere in the CBD. I remember the performance so vividly���the sense of curiosity, confusion, disgust, arousal at watching their live art. It was also just such an interesting time in the art world in Joburg. I remember I just moved up and Stevenson had so many great shows, and you could tell there was this energy from #FeesMustFall and from students that was also feeding into art practices that were different, weird, anticolonial, pushing boundaries, just like rebellious. FAKA took that on in their own cunty ways. Something that I have been curious about is where the grotesque fits into this, right?

Jordache Ellapen

It���s like the carnivalesque subversion of everything, and you can trace the grotesque throughout the book���I think that could be a framework to actually think about some of these incursions that are happening. When you think about the grotesque, you think about the body, and I think that���s a chapter that takes us to the body in a different way, like Chhiba���s huge sculpture of a walk-in vagina or works of Kali���s gushing blood out of the head, and FAKA���s focus on the anal erotic, pleasure, and bodily fluids from semen to sweat to feces. Body as archive, the body is the site through which we need to decolonize. With FAKA���s work, I���m very interested in the body as a site of sex and pleasure, like there���s something pleasurable about their photography and live artwork, and it���s not that pleasure is disconnected from labor, but pleasure is routed through labor instead of leisure.

Youlendree Appasamy

I have so many questions about pleasure on the plantations and how many of our ancestors were sex workers. Listen, we can yap all day, but I need to get my cat���s supper!

Jordache Ellapen

It was so lovely, and I was nervous, but this was amazing. Thank you so much!

Indenture Aesthetics by Jordache Ellapen (2025) is available from Duke University Press.

Reading List: Olufemi Terry

What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power? Photo by Pieter van Noorden on Unsplash

My novel, Wilderness of Mirrors, follows Emil, a young medical student, to an austral metropolis very like Cape Town, where he���s to pursue the dubious errand of rescuing his drifting cousin. In Stadmutter, he meets three people who wrench him off the path he has mapped for himself. Tamsin, a historian of psychoanalysis, is coming to terms with a country where the standing of whites is both reduced and uncertain. German-Haitian Bolling uses his wealth to advance a reactionary and romantic anti-modernism that exerts a puzzling allure on Emil. The third, Braeem Shaka���Creole like Emil���is a wannabe revolutionary who has grasped that stoking resentment of the country���s Black majority offers an opening to power.

In my earliest conception, the novel was to form the third and final instalment of a Cape Town trilogy that began with JM Coetzee���s Disgrace and continued through K Sello Duiker���s Quiet Violence of Dreams. I have written elsewhere that I read Quiet Violence during the nights while working for a month in Acholiland, Uganda. Part of the inspiration of these novels lay in their depictions of Cape Town as protean, having no essence.

V.S. Naipaul���s Guerrillas influenced my wish to create a miasma of sullenness over Stadmutter, a localized mood of resistance to change and modernity, while exploring the links between geography, class, and political tension. On the first page of Guerrillas, Naipaul writes:

The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than color; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust from the bauxite loading station. After the market, where refrigerated trailers were unloading; after the rubbish dump burning in the remnant of mangrove swamp, with black carrion corbeaux squatting hunched on fence posts or hopping about on the ground; after the built-up hillsides; after the new housing estates, rows of unpainted boxes of concrete and corrugated iron already returning to the shantytowns that had been knocked down for this development; after the naked children playing in the red dust of the straight new avenues, the clothes hanging like rags from back yard lines; after this, the land cleared a little. And it was possible to see over what the city had spread: on one side, the swamp, drying out to a great plain; on the other side, a chain of hills, rising directly from the plain.

In Guerrillas, Naipaul refuses to romanticize his revolutionary firebrand: Jimmy Ahmed remains resolutely human, a product of his circumstances and limitations.

A remark attributed to the Trinidadian writer provides another frame for Cape Town real and imagined. ���All of this will revert���it will go back to bush,��� Naipaul reportedly told Paul Theroux of Uganda, and Africa more generally. Cape Town, by contrast, does not encroach, being mostly semi-desert and having little in the way of critters, with the implication that freeing man of the mission to contend with nature leads to nothing good.

Naipaul is not the only controversial writer to influence the book. Hovering behind Wilderness (as it does for so much writing about Africa) is Conrad���s Heart of Darkness, with its subtext of Africa as a void space that lures civilised man into direct contact with his id (going native).

In my novel, the German Haitian Bolling owes something to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, among the most transgressive works I���ve encountered.�� Holden, Cormac McCarthy strongly implies, is some sort of demiurge, intermediate between man and God.

Toward the end of the novel, McCarthy describes the apparition of Holden thus:

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

My admiration for Goncalo Tavares��� Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, translated from Portuguese, encouraged me to be fuzzy about geography and temporality in my own novel. And the novel was influential in another way: its protagonist���s musings on the tension between man and nature inject a distinctly philosophical, Romantic-inflected tone into the narrative.

The reader of Learning to Pray is continually enticed to revisit conventional wisdom (delusions?) concerning human mastery and dominion over the natural world:

Man tries to resist [disease], finding allies in���centuries of medical and technical development, while on the other hand there is illness, likewise strengthened by centuries of its own particular history, to which men have no access. Illnesses have not stayed still.

The protagonist displays a grudging, paranoid admiration for the natural world.�� ���There was a new light in the cities��� which had only increased the hatred that the most ancient elements in the world seemed always to have harbored for man.���

And it goes on in this vein:

Like illness, nature has its own past if not a history, its own rules and triumphs, and is enduringly at odds with humans��� own course. And nature���s permanence (Nature hasn���t even invented fire yet.), its impermeability to history was [its] major weapon. Meanwhile if materials and the ways of transforming them had���evolved human passions had nonetheless been immobilized.

Paul Theroux���s��Blinding Light, with its exploration of drug-induced blindness and altered perception, and Mohsin Hamid���s��Exit West, with its magical realist approach to displacement and migration, also shaped aspects of the narrative.

Wilderness of Mirrors (2025) by Olufemi Terry is available from Restless Books.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa���s energy future. Lake Albert, Uganda. A site for prospective oil drilling. Image �� Dennis Wegewijs via Shutterstock.

The second Africa Climate Summit (ACS-2) took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between September 8 and 10, and was ostensibly convened towards shaping the continent���s priorities and commitments ahead of COP30 in Bel��m, Brazil, later this year.�� Like the first edition, which was held in 2023, this forum was promoted as a critical space to champion homegrown solutions for ���adaptation��� and ���systems-level shifts.��� However, African civil society organizations (CSOs) raised concerns about the prominence of external actors, noting that ���African CSOs appear to be clustered largely around the pre-summit days or side events, rather than being woven into the central conversations.���

Ultimately, they were sounding the alarm that the omission of a diversity of African voices from the main fora reinforced perceptions of ACS-2 as being hijacked by those who ���define Africa���s problems and prescribe Africa���s solutions, while African people are left as witnesses rather than decision-makers.���

Without a doubt, this hijacking of the ACS-2 agenda undermines African priorities, redefining them to fit foreign interests, be it those of transnational corporations or international financial institutions���essentially neocolonialism.

One can argue that the difference between neocolonialism and colonialism is that the former gives you an illusion of sovereignty, but decisions are dictated to you from elsewhere. Nothing exemplifies this better than the activities of big oil companies in Africa.

Take the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project, for instance. This 1,443-kilometer pipeline linking Uganda���s oil fields to Tanzania���s port city of Tanga is touted as an initiative that will catalyze economic transformation in the region. Yet it continues to reflect classic neocolonial extraction patterns: land loss, displacement, and the unraveling of communities, while big oil and their affiliated politicians, both local and international, profit.

Together with many brave people, I have spent the past six years working with frontline communities in East Africa, challenging fossil fuel projects that jeopardize their livelihoods and undermine their right to a clean and healthy environment. This includes work with fisherfolk in Lamu opposing a proposed coal plant, forest communities evicted despite their conservation efforts, and now efforts towards the Stop EACOP project, which will and has paved the road for much harm.

The EACOP project is, certainly, a representation of the larger neocolonial model. Consider its ownership; this project is East African only in name���the real owner is the French oil giant TotalEnergies, which owns 62 percent of its shares.��But don���t take my word for it. A 2024 study by researchers Marcel Llavero-Pasquina and colleagues makes some bold assertions, including that TotalEnergies��� extraction deals are often intentionally made with undemocratic regimes, and backed by problematic French diplomacy. Their study concludes that ���one cannot understand TotalEnergies today without the political history of French colonialism.���

Today, communities in Uganda and Tanzania are left wondering how this project, which came with so many promises, has resulted in so much pain with no end. To paint the picture, in 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) conducted 90 interviews, including with 75 displaced families in the five districts of Uganda where the pipeline crosses, and found that households were now�� worse off than before.

In this same report, a 48-year-old woman supporting seven children, whose land was taken to pave way for the pipeline, shared that during the community���s first meeting with TotalEnergies, they were told that things were about to change for them and that they would no longer be poor. This report quotes her as saying: ���Now, with the oil project starting, we are landless and are the poorest in the country.���

It doesn���t get better. In 2024, a Ugandan court ordered that 80 households be evicted for the pipeline despite genuine concerns causing the delays, including issues related to compensation that was below market value, among others. What���s more, if TotalEnergies is expected to receive a ten-year income tax exemption and the project���s life cycle is 25 years, noting that oil is finite, the taxable profits the government could have earned in revenue during these first ten years will be lost, and during the post-tax exemption, the volume would be insufficient to generate any significant revenue in taxes.

If you also consider that TotalEnergies is expected to receive substantial tax holidays, you can understand that the frontline communities that have had their environment and sources of livelihood sacrificed in the name of national good suffer a double tragedy, because the national government is receiving minimal financial benefit. Meanwhile, the oil will flow out to international markets, TotalEnergies will make its profit, and communities in East Africa will be left dealing with disrupted livelihoods, deepened poverty, and accelerated climate impacts

Additionally, considering the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that global oil will peak in the 2030s, doesn���t this clearly indicate that EACOP will end up being a stranded asset for the two governments, Tanzania and Uganda, while the investors will have recouped their investment, leaving the host governments to deal with a disgruntled population that has already sacrificed too much for so little?

Fast-forward to 2025, and the case that affected communities have filed with the help of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) Uganda in December 2024, which was due for hearing on August 18, 2025, was not heard, because the case file was, supposedly, missing. This hearing would have been instrumental in stopping their planned eviction and demolition of their properties. Meanwhile, the case against them by the government, filed on August 14, 2025, was fast-tracked, and a hearing date for August 25 was scheduled in a record four days.

While the majority of unfortunate examples I���ve cited here focus on Uganda, project-affected people in Tanzania are facing similar challenges, as documented in a report titled Climate of Fear by Global Witness, which reveals similar promises of transformed lives, only to lead to further impoverishment.

These experiences demonstrate the neocolonial nature of this controversial project. This is not a ���development��� initiative as it is claimed; it is the same colonial extraction repackaged in contemporary investment language. The pipeline will transport oil in its crude form to the global market without addressing any local needs, leaving the host communities to deal with the environmental and social impacts, especially considering the project will emit 379 million tons CO2e (MtCO2e) for the full value chain during its life cycle, as has been documented by the Climate Accountability Institute.

In postcolonial Africa, fossil fuel extraction has thrived because of Big Oil���s ability to co-opt governments to make decisions against their citizens and due to weak institutions that cannot challenge them to ensure communities are not harmed. Reflecting this trend, the national environmental management authorities in Uganda and Tanzania have come under sharp focus as concerns grow over their role in ensuring proper environmental and social impact assessments for EACOP are conducted.

This explains why movements like the StopEACOP campaign emerge. Neocolonialism may continue rearing its ugly head, but African communities are refusing to take it lying down. As Hardy Merriman argues in We Need People Power to Address a World in Peril, when formal institutions fail to protect people and the planet, movements emerge as democracy���s last line of defense. The StopEACOP coalition is, therefore, a result of communities coming together to support one another, backed by international allies working to dismantle enduring and repackaged colonial forces. When communities along the pipeline route mobilize to stop EACOP, they fulfill the role that strong, independent institutions should play in ensuring that only projects meeting the threshold of a livable future are granted permits.

As a journalist, I have seen how media ���objectivity��� has undermined frontline voices and propped up a model prioritizing profits over people, the environment, and the climate.

The outcome of this reporting is a portrayal of community struggles as a mere perspective to be balanced against well-oiled���pun intended���PR statements. It is this false equivalence that undermines lived experiences (and while I���m on the subject of the media, it is worth mentioning that we have some outlets that are keen on highlighting people-centered narratives and publishing stories that otherwise get killed in most newsrooms).

With such dynamics in our institutions, whether within state environmental management organizations or the media, it is therefore not surprising that even events focused on Africa, like the ACS, lack autonomous African leadership. This underscores the need for African movements to occupy and reclaim these key spaces, and the imperative for all to remain vigilant about how energy conversations shape up, within the African Climate Summit and beyond, and ask questions such as: Energy for what and for whom?

When the victim isn’t perfect

Rungano Nyoni���s latest film challenges audiences to confront the collective complicity that sustains abuse. Still from On Becoming a Guinea Fowl �� 2024.

Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni���s sophomore feature On Becoming A Guinea Fowl is a surrealist look at the tensions between a dead family member and their living secrets. The film follows Shula (Susan Chardy) as she navigates the grand Bemba funeral of her uncle, Fred. As aunts, grandmothers, and cousins buzz around her and work themselves into a frenzy preparing for the ceremony, Shula and her irreverent cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisel) try to process some difficult truths about the deceased. Early in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, the pair happens upon Fred���s cold body in the middle of a road. The discovery doesn���t shock Shula, who was returning from a fancy dress party, or Nsansa, who drunkenly stumbles upon the scene moments later, because they are among a handful of people who don���t believe Fred���s death is a sorrowful occasion.

The notion of otherness typically exists within the context of dominant and subordinate groups, in which the imposing body stigmatizes a physical or ideological difference between itself and individuals who lack certain traits. Nyoni seems to be drawn to ���othered��� characters���the ostracized, the atypical. In her BAFTA-winning debut film, I Am Not a Witch (2017), the director���s lens observes a young girl cast out by her village on suspicion of being a sorceress. Shula, played by Maggie Mulubwa, is taken to a camp populated by elder witches forced to labor for a corrupt government official. She���s told she can���t escape and is subsequently paraded around the county and used as a glorified tourist attraction. I Am Not a Witch explores gender-based discrimination and otherness in non-familial communal spaces.

Nyoni expands and complicates these themes in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl by making women a part of both the dominant and othered groups and situating the dramatic action�� exclusively within a matriarchal familial space. Unlike I Am Not a Witch, where men were overtly complicit in the ostracizing, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl allows us to observe the formation of a ���them vs us��� dynamic devoid of overt patriarchal interjections from men���save for the critical, catalytic death of Uncle Fred. Shula, Nsansa, their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini), and Fred���s widow, Chichi (Norah Mwansa) share an unpleasant history with the deceased. Each has been sexually abused by Uncle Fred���some repeatedly and others with lasting physical consequences. While the aunties and mothers are aware, they do not believe his passing is the time to stir up past grievances.

This ���othering��� of characters is evident early on in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl through visual and narrative introductions of the characters. Shula, a prim and proper career woman, is not emotional or traditional enough for her family���s liking. When she finds solace from the evening���s whirlwind in a hotel room instead of her family house���where the funeral is being hosted ��� her aunties are quick to drag her back home, peeved by the ease with which she abandons customary rites for work. Nsansa, more liberal and relaxed compared to her conservative kin, is mostly ignored by the family. She is possibly perceived as a bad influence because of her drinking habits. Uncle Fred���s widow, Chichi, who is only referred to as ���the widow��� in conversation, is tagged a bad wife for not supporting her husband through his gambling problem, extramarital affairs, and alcoholism.

When we���re first introduced to Chichi, she���s concealed by tree branches and blanketed by the darkness of the night. Shula confronts her during this late hour, and Chichi reveals that she is banned by the aunties from using the indoor toilet. It���s not until the next scene that we finally see the widow clearly, dutifully submitting to tradition by crawling around the family house. Bupe, still a university student, is also concealed by the night���s darkness when introduced on screen. Shula arrives at her university dorm to fetch her for the funeral. ���I���m glad he���s dead,��� Bupe whispers, sprawled on her bed, head buried in a pillow. She collapses on the floor as she tries to get up. Then, a quick edit transports us to a moment in which the young woman lies in a hospital bed. When we finally see her full visage, it’s in a confessional video about Uncle Fred���s abuse.

The atmosphere in which we���re introduced to these women plays a significant role in how the audience eventually sees them as ���other.��� Before we came to know them intimately, the narrative coaxes us into profiling them based on family perception. During a wailing session, the aunties express their displeasure with Shula���s inability to cry dramatically. ���Why are you cold-hearted?��� one whispers to Shula. Later, these same women withhold food from Chichi and her children until Uncle Fred is laid to rest, reinforcing their belief that his widow doesn���t deserve basic hospitality. While Bupe���s mother shows concern, she is not willing to address the gravity of her daughter���s confession and later hospitalisation. She merely dismisses the events, perhaps as teenage tomfoolery.

By presenting these women as ���flawed������Shula as unfeeling, Bupe as only but a clueless child, Chichi as a defiant wife, and Nsansa as uncouth�����before revealing them as survivors, Nyoni forces audiences to confront their preconceptions about the profile of sexual abuse victims. How is the pursuit of justice impacted when incriminating odds are perceived to be self-induced by the victims? Do these biases affect victims��� right to call out their abuser? Does it make it harder for us to believe them?.

Out of our four women, Chichi plays another role in challenging the internalized biases of abuse victims. She interrogates the myth of the perfect victim. Here is a girl of 16 or 17 years old, a mother to six children, respectful, quiet, mindful of cultural traditions, and subservient to the fragility of patriarchy. And yet, she doesn���t receive support from Fred���s sisters: despite being a teenager and enduring her husband���s infidelity and violence, she isn���t spared from the dehumanizing widow rites.

Despite the judge and juror situation Nyoni elicits within the viewer, this othering of Shula, Nsansa, Bupe, and Chichi serves a greater purpose for them: a way to unite quietly. Many conversations between the four women take place in pantry closets, shadows, alleyways, and abandoned rooms. Tucking them away creates an atmosphere of vulnerability among characters. Nsansa opens up about being raped by Uncle Fred while she and Shula track down a coal seller late at night. Her laugh-laced, humorous retelling reveals her wit as a self-preserving tactic. It���s not until the final quarter of the film, with Shula and Nsansa cocooned in Shula���s car, that�� Shula’s encounters with Uncle Fred are laid bare. It is then that Shula realizes what she must do to protect them all.

With this revelation and sense of unity, the four women and other vulnerable family members approach the funeral ceremony the next day, clucking and screeching like guinea fowls. The final frame of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a clear portrait of this sense of how these women, despite being preyed upon and othered, band together to support one another.