Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 103

An ethnography for fad diets

Two tourists take a package trip to visit the Hadza people in Tanzania and are so jazzed with what they see, they make a podcast about it. What could go wrong? Image via Twitter.

Americans Anthony Gustin and Paul Saladino recently took a high-end tour to Tanzania, primarily to spend time with a group of Hadza people. The Hadzabe are a small ethnic group who live primarily in and around Tanzania���s Lake Eyasi. Over the past century or so, they have attracted significant attention from researchers and tourists alike due to their language (which employs phonemic click consonants and cannot be closely linked with any other), as well as the fact that a subset of their population practices hunter-gatherer subsistence (killing animals with bows and arrows and harvesting wild berries and tubers from the forests around them).

Gustin and Paladino spent five days hanging out with the Hadzabe, ticking off all of the boxes that would be offered to them as luxury tourists: gathering honey, spending time in a Hadza encampment, and tagging along on a forest walk during which Hadza hunters killed, cooked, and ate a baboon. In the evenings, the two would return to a well-appointed lodge on the shores of Lake Eyasi for a meal, the Internet, and soft beds. Elated with their good time, they immediately sought to share their privileged experience to their wide followings across social media. It is here that I came across Gustin and Saladino���s experiences with the Hadzabe, their prejudicial understandings of them, and the altogether unsavory uses to which they have been put.

I typically don���t engage in Hadza arguments on the Internet. They seem to occur with every Land Cruiser that leaves Lake Eyasi, and involve the Hadzabe being associated with all sorts of colorful claims ranging from their thoughts about life, to how they raise their children, to what���s going on in their digestive tracts. The reason why these ���fad ethnographies��� are continually inflicted upon the Hadzabe is complex, but, as my colleague Richard Griscom and I point out, one major reason is that much recent academic work on the Hadzabe hinges on their usefulness as proxies for paleolithic peoples. This conception of the Hadzabe as ���living fossils,��� having remained unchanged from time immemorial, has fed into the popular imagination, and is heavily featured in the way they are framed by tourism companies: a people in Rousseau���s ���state of nature,��� living timelessly in the Rift Valley.

In his discussion of the East African ���Khoisan,��� Matthew Knisley establishes that, when a people���s past is reconstructed as timeless, it effectively discourages investigation into their history and how they may have changed. I would take this a step further and suggest that such ���timeless��� peoples, having been denied their histories, make incredibly convenient targets upon which to project any manner of bias or belief. This is precisely what Gustin and Saladino are doing. What makes their case so particularly despicable is how it seeks to render the Hadza people ���others��� for these tourists��� own personal benefit.

Anthony Gustin and Paul Saladino are celebrity doctors: Gustin is a chiropractor and Saladino, known as the ���Carnivore MD,��� is a medical doctor. Both have considerable followings, celebrity connections, and, most importantly, lucrative business interests built around fad diets encouraging eating mainly animal products and minimizing carbohydrates. Gustin peddles a range of low-carb supplements and is coauthor of a popular book on the ketogenic diet. Saladino, meanwhile, is the author of a best-selling book on the carnivore diet and hawks his own range of meat- and organ-based pills, promising everything from better immune function to reinforced sexual health. It is unsurprising, then, that the Hadzabe���happy, healthy, and, according to them, living mainly on meat���are viewed by Gustin and Saladino as living proof that their prescribed lifestyle (and their associated products) work. Denied their history, the Hadza people are a Rorshach test. And to Gustin and Saladino, what they see is an opportunity for profit.

I am not a physician, nor am I particularly interested in the details of Gustin and Saladino���s nutritional arguments. With that said, over the course of the last several years, I have spent a considerable amount of time with the Hadza community: living and working with them in order to . I also care about how my Hadza friends and colleagues are represented to the wider world���especially in venues to which they may not have access. The way in which Gustin and Saladino portray the Hadzabe is one-dimensional, entirely self-serving, and potentially harmful. This is most evident in the two-hour long podcast episode they recorded about their trip.

In between jolly recollections of how good a time they had ���in Africa��� and periods of wide-mouthed awe at the beauty of Hadza lifeways, Gustin and Saladino do some considerable work to establish how ���natural��� and ���primitive��� the Hadzabe are. We are told that ���this tribe has been more-or-less unaffected in their way of life for the last 50,000 years,��� and that ���they don’t want to transition to a more civilized way of life.��� Saladino, for his part, repeatedly states that ���the Hadza are the closest thing we have to a time machine.���

After all of this talk, the Hadzabe have been rendered so intrinsically alien that Gustin and Saladino (both doctors, I will remind you) make some astounding statements. ���Infant mortality,��� says Saladino, ���is higher, as it is among other species. Chimpanzee, bonobo mortality, I believe, is higher. I think we just have to accept, though it���s a bit of an uncomfortable notion for me, that ���wild��� humans may have higher levels of mortality.���

Gustin agrees, telling listeners: ���Yeah, this is the truth that nobody likes to talk about . . . that it is normal for mammals to not have 100% of their infants survive into adulthood. And we���ve created an environment where our expectation of that [low infant mortality] is now normal, so when we���re confronted with anything that butts up against that, then . . . we can���t mentally grapple with it.��� He later adds, ���I don���t know if [the Hadzabe] would trade 100% success to live into adulthood to live a more Western lifestyle.���

To listeners, the message is: The Hadza people are apparently so irreconcilably different to us that the high rates of infant mortality shouldn���t be cause for outrage. In fact, it���s impossible for them to live their lives and have nearby, quality healthcare at the same time.

Later in the podcast, Saladino makes another telling comment. ���When I left the tribe,��� he says, ���they said [to me], ���When you come back, you���re welcome, but bring us ugali [a staple food made from maize meal].��� And in my mind I thought, ���I’m not going to bring you ugali. I’ll bring you more arrowheads!������

Here, the message is: The Hadzabe are deserving of our help insofar as they support our business interests (i.e., as long as they eat virtually only meat). If they request maize meal, I���ll leave them to the luck of the hunt instead.

Do no harm, indeed.

Before the episode reaches its end, Gustin and Saladino assure us that they are already working on ways to ensure the Hadza people will be hunting and gathering into the foreseeable future. This will be accomplished by ���creating some sort of fund ��� [to] protect their natural habitat,��� Gustin says. How will it be paid for, you may ask? More tourism, of course. After all, as had been mentioned earlier on, ���without tourism, [the Hadzabe] would���ve been wiped out completely by now.���

On the contrary���the toxic effects of unscrupulous tourism on the Hadzabe have been well-documented. In the same breath with which they offer aid, however, Gusin and Saladino raise the prospects for further commercialization, including a TV show and a baobab product. In fact, the webpage hosting their chat is only a couple of clicks away from each of their product lines; any exit from Lake Eyasi will be through the gift shop.

As I said before, I typically don���t engage in Hadza arguments on the Internet. No doubt, before the ink has dried on the sordid example of Gustin and Saladino, a new grifter will be rumbling up the Rift Valley escarpment with a new interpretation, entering into the longstanding tradition of representing the Hadzabe in whatever way they see fit, leaving the fallout to the Hadza people themselves to deal with. If there is one commonality in this forty year scam, it is this: again and again, the value of the Hadzabe has been directly related to how valuable they can be to outsiders���how they entertain us, how they can heal our diseases, even how much carbon their homeland can sequester. When, I wonder, will the Hadzabe simply be allowed to exist by virtue of them being human? Not as stand-ins for ancient humans, but as our contemporaries: full, complex, and coeval?

The answer lies in representation: dispensing with totalizing views of the timeless, click-speaking, hunter-gatherer, and allowing for other histories and realities which may serve the Hadza people better. This kind of representation lies beyond the intervention of outsiders (including me), and can only be created by Hadzabe themselves. The only representation is self-representation. Everything else is a fad.

How should we struggle?

Lawyerfication discourse in Ghana ignores the operation of power on the ground and conflates legality with justice. Images by Edem Robby Abbeyquaye.

There���s an oft-cited quote from African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass that comes to mind when I think about struggle: ���Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.��� Douglas continues, ���Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.��� In Ghana, as people resist authoritarian constitutionalism with words, positive action, or both, they are met with incredible opposition, sometimes violence.

One of these resistance movements is #FixTheCountry, a burgeoning nonpartisan group of young Ghanaians who initially mobilized online around the hashtag (created by influencer Kalyjay) to spotlight worsening socioeconomic conditions like dumsor (power cuts), unemployment, poor roads, and corruption. Its demands���including greater democratic accountability, long-term development plans, and similar calls���have set the agenda for mainstream media and garnered national attention; the government organized a press conference in response and held a meeting between top ministers and some supporters of the movement. #FixTheCountry supporters have been loud and unapologetic about their quest for democratic accountability through demonstrations, legal action, right to information requests, community organizing, and other means.

On August 4th of last year, the group organized one of the largest nonpartisan protests in Accra. The police, in typical fashion, secured a court injunction to stop the demonstration, which had been originally planned for May 9th. #FixTheCountry moved the protest online, launching #NameAndShame, a campaign inviting the public to share images of the problems in their community and call out their members of parliament. They also successfully made calls for a new constitution part of the national discourse. The movement also effectively challenged the police crackdown at the Supreme Court of Ghana, where the injunction against the demonstration was successfully quashed. #FixTheCountry has been ardently working to mobilize young people (in Ghana and the diaspora) to believe that change is possible and that there are democratic routes to attain this without fantasizing about so-called dictatorships, strongman governments, or a return to colonial rule���all arguments sometimes proffered by young people.

In response, the government has recruited state machinery to persecute and delegitimize the activism of this movement. A recent example is the ongoing political persecution of Oliver Barker-Vormawor, a prominent #FixtheCountry convener and doctoral student of law at the University of Cambridge. In January, Oliver had been part of a group that petitioned President Nana Akufo-Addo to remove the Electoral Commission���s chairperson, Jean Mensa, and her deputies, Dr. Bossman Eric Asare and Samuel Tettey. The commission had prevented residents from Santrokofi, Akpafu, Lolobi, and Likpe, located in an opposition stronghold, from voting in the 2020 elections. A year later, the districts still do not have representation in the hung parliament. The stalemate is perceived as an impediment to the government���s attempt to pass the unpopular Electronic Transfer Bill (E-levy), a regressive tax on electronic transactions like mobile money and e-banking. The bill is intended to be used as collateral for more loans for the already highly indebted country (the proposal is the latest brainchild of Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, cousin of the president and Wall Street veteran).

On February 9th, 2022, Oliver shared a post in reaction to an event some Ghanaians deemed insensitive: the presentation of an E-levy-themed birthday cake to Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu, leader of the ruling party in parliament. ���If this E-Levy passes after this cake bullshit,��� Oliver wrote, ���I will do the coup myself. Useless Army!��� Two days later, on February 11th, 2022, Oliver was arrested at Kotoka International Airport. For over 24 hours, his family members and lawyers could not find him. Then, following a police statement announcing his arrest, supporters of #FixtheCountry visited about 15 police stations trying to locate him. According to Oliver���s account, unidentified men with guns had abducted him around 5 p.m. at the airport when he had landed from the UK. He was then put in a military van and taken to an undisclosed location. There, he was harassed and intimidated after he refused to unlock his phone. Later, around 10 p.m., he was taken to a police station in Ashaiman where he was officially charged with a misdemeanor offense and detained. However, when he appeared in court on February 14th, 2022, he was unexpectedly charged with treason felony���without his lawyers��� prior knowledge. During the early days of his unjust detention, he went on a hunger strike protesting this abuse.

In response to these events, former Attorney General and First Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu has stated that the government has ���knowingly and intentionally turned the administration of justice into an inquisitorial and persecutorial system to intimidate and suppress the lawful political activity, personal liberty and right to equality before the law and non-discrimination of a citizen, Mr. Barker-Vormawor.��� These actions, he said, violated ���articles 3, 14, 17, and 291 of the 1992 Constitution.���

Over the course of Oliver���s arrest and detainment, the police had violated a constitutional injunction that requires ���citizens who are arrested, restricted, or detained to be brought before a court within forty-eight hours or be set at liberty.��� They deliberately sent him to a district court at Ashaiman that did not have the power to grant bail, and the judge placed him on remand for two weeks. After this, Oliver was sent back to the same court and placed on remand for another two weeks. Each of these court appearances was marked with the presence of several heavily armed police officers, ostensibly from the Formed Police Unit (which has received equipment and training from the US)���an obvious display of state power meant to intimidate political activism. At some point during police custody, Oliver fell sick and was hospitalized.

Oliver���s arrest and unlawful detention for over thirty days represents the height of government-sanctioned political intimidation against the #FixTheCountry movement. Some members of the ruling party, the National Patriotic Party (NPP), have characterized #FixTheCountry supporters as unruly and as agents of the opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The NPP and NDC duopoly has long dominated national politics, and their neoliberal perspectives, often amplified by mainstream media, shape how national problems���particularly the economy���are discussed. Another phenomenon prominent in elite media discourse is what I call the ���lawyerfication��� of national problems: perceiving everything through a narrow legalistic lens. In this approach, legal solutions are proffered while lawyers become foremost experts since every challenge is turned into a legal issue. These lawyers offer a narrow vision of democracy as a set of legal practices and institutions. Therefore, positive action���general strikes, civil disobedience, etc.���is made invisible. In other words, the people are made invisible. But we cannot limit how we struggle simply to a fight over legality. While there are no guaranteed victories for whichever democratic route we pursue, it is in and through the struggle that we come to see ourselves and others as makers of history.

As for Oliver���s persecution, it continues. He appeared before the district court in Ashaiman on March 15th, 2022, but the state prosecutors didn���t bother to show up; as a result, the judge, Eleanor Barnes Botwe, remanded him again for two weeks. The next day, however, he appeared again before the High Court in Tema, where he was granted bail at 2 million Ghanaian cedis (about 284,292 US dollars) with two sureties. In another brazen abuse of power, the crime officer whose job was to assist processes for his bail was nowhere to be found. Oliver thus spent another night in police custody before eventually being released the next day. The movement is using Oliver���s unlawful detention to spotlight the unjust criminal justice system and inhuman conditions in jails; in one action, they attempted to donate food and toiletries to Oliver���s former cellmates in Ashaiman police station, some who went without food sometimes because the state did not provide food for them. However, they were met with heavily armed police officers who prevented them from donating the items. These political abuses of judicial processes reveal how the lawyerfication discourse ignores the operation of power on the ground, conflating legality with justice.

Nairobi���s incendiary displacements

Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya's capital. Photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash.

Nairobi’s new JKIA-Westlands expressway, a legacy project of President Uhuru Kenyatta, is almost ready for use and has got many Kenyans talking. But the human costs of the project, not least the over 40,000 people evicted to make way for it, continue to be invisibilized by both the state and mainstream discourses, and work to justify the history of forced evictions in Nairobi, which are as old as the city itself. The following article is a part of our series of reposts from The Elephant. It is curated by editorial board member and author of this post, Wangui Kimari.

We keep asking each other ���we unaenda wapi?��� [Where are you going?] and even tho it isn���t funny we laugh about it and stare at each other in disbelief.

��� Minoo Kyaa, community activist

On November 15th, 2021, Minoo Kyaa, a community activist from Mukuru kwa Njenga, South Nairobi, tweeted the above quote. At the time, Minoo was living in a tent on the site of her former home, along with some 40,000 other forcibly evicted Mukuru residents. Their dwellings had been demolished to make way for a link road connecting the city���s industrial zone to a contentious new expressway, plunging them into a humanitarian crisis. A pet project of incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta���intended to be another symbol of his ���legacy������the seventeen-mile toll-road, dubbed ���Road for the Rich��� by critics, aims to facilitate speedier movement between Nairobi���s Jomo Kenyatta Airport and the Central Business District.

Last November, the authors of this article convened a meeting with activists and community representatives from across Nairobi to understand the causes and consequences of displacement in urban contexts. We wanted to get a clearer sense of the circumstances under which poor urban residents are regularly compelled to leave their homes. Four of those who attended, roughly a third of our participants, were and remain directly affected by events in Mukuru, which they recounted in disturbing detail, providing troubling insights into the conditions of extreme precarity under which Nairobi���s poorest residents are repeatedly forced to rebuild lives and livelihoods following forced evictions.

The first wave of displacement in Mukuru, they told us, began abruptly on October 10th, just two days after a public announcement that they should move to make way for the road. Some say they received notice only moments before the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) and the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) bulldozers appeared. Others were caught unaware: ���We only saw bulldozers, the General Service Unit [the paramilitary force known as ���GSU���] and men in blue [regular police officers],��� said Rukia, a Mukuru resident also living at the time on the site of her demolished home. She continued: ���[It was] like they were marching at Nyayo Stadium,��� in reference to the military parades these forces perform before dignitaries at the National Stadium during state functions���with forceful intent and an exactness in implementing an agenda.

Within a short time, heavy machinery razed to the ground residences, businesses, places of worship and schools under the watch of the police and the GSU. According to local residents and reports in the media, at least one person was killed by a police bullet during the protests that followed. There are reports of others being buried under the rubble as they sought to salvage their belongings, or dying of heartbreak.

Evicted households were offered neither compensation, nor alternative housing arrangements. Consequently, with nowhere to go, and in a bid to protect the spaces they had known as home for decades from land grabbing ���cartels��� and thieves, many found themselves encamped on the rubble of their former homes. Their temerity and resistance in the face of evictions and the looming private developers continues to inspire.

Who are these ���cartels,��� as locals refer to them? They are well-connected citizens with interests in property development that can, because of their likely links to the government, prompt land grabs in areas considered informal. Their association with the state, though difficult to prove, is evidenced in the continued role of the police during Mukuru evictions where they respond to demonstrators with teargas, water cannons, and live ammunition. During the most recent unrest, which was sparked by attempts to clear the area of residents and demarcate the space with beacons on December 27th, two residents were shot dead and scores of others were injured. Today, months after the first eviction in early October, many of the displaced remain homeless and are unable to re-establish livelihoods in Mukuru in the face of a formidable alliance of enemies: property developers backed by the police and the government.

None of this is unique. Of the fifteen activists and community representatives from across the city who participated in our November focus group���from Mathare to Mukuru, to Baba Dogo and Kayole���two thirds had faced the reality or the threat of development-induced displacement. Each case involved populations in informal housing settlements having to make way for concrete structures���roads such as the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport-Westlands expressway, or residential high-rise buildings.

And yet these ���formal��� evictions���in which official involvement is often signaled by the presence of bulldozers flanked by various police forces���are just part of the story. We also learned of fires that residents believe are intentionally started to clear slums. It is virtually impossible to prove that these conflagrations are started with the deliberate intention to grab land. However, there are good grounds for the perception that these fires serve as ���informal evictions.��� Crucially, they have occurred in locations where the poor reside on desirable land; where land-title arrangements are contested, and/or where proximity to the city attracts the construction of more lucrative housing than the shacks that once stood upon these sites. As one activist commented, ���In almost all places where there is a fire, a high-rise building will come up.���

Participants at our November meeting counted 14 episodes of displacement since the beginning of 2020, either through the construction of infrastructure or by the setting of fires. These took place in Shauri Moyo, Deep Sea, Kariobangi, Korogocho Market, Nyayo Village and Kisumu Ndogo, Baba Dogo, Njiru, Ruai, Gikomba, Viwandani, Mathare, Kibera and Kangemi. In total, these violent episodes involving either arson or demolition by bulldozers have deterritorialized, either permanently or temporarily, thousands of Nairobi residents over the last two years.

Despite their diverse causes and contexts, urban displacements share a common set of consequences. Above all, they greatly diminish the living conditions for already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty. While they do not take place across borders, those who are affected live and suffer in ways that are comparable to the plight of refugees. Evictions typically involve the demolition of property, arrests and fines, and often feature brutal violence of the kind described earlier���the expulsion of entire communities from their homes, a disruption of livelihoods, and loss and damage of personal effects, such as belongings and identity documents.

And, certainly, this impact is gendered. Women, habitual caregivers, have had to take care of children in situations of greater precarity than usual in Mukuru. In the absence of housing structures and a community that can protect each other, the threat of sexual and gender-based violence looms larger than before, as but one example of the gendered impacts of forced evictions.

The hardship experienced by those displaced in urban contexts is persistent, with many being forced to move on more than one occasion. In several of the aforementioned sites, evictions have occurred more than once within relatively short spans of time. For example, Dagoretti Centre was demolished several times by the City Council between 1971 to 1978. During that same period, Soko ya Mawe (1975), Mafik (1979) and the villages of Light Industries (1980) also faced evictions. Indeed, the history of displacement in Nairobi is as old as the city.

As early as 1902, four years into the emergence of Nairobi as a railway town, the ���Indian Bazaar��� was demolished for being ���unhygienic������a result of racialized projections that would lead these evictions to recur twice by 1907. Africans, whose very presence in the city was conditional upon their registration as workers, had to contend with the regular demolition of their dwellings, legalized by the 1922 Vagrancy Act.

During the emergency period, between 1952 and 1960, whole settlements in the Eastlands area, such as Mathare and Kariobangi, were flattened as they were perceived to harbor anti-colonial agitators and undesirable city dwellers. Fifty years since the colonial evictions, post-colonial urban governance continues to borrow from a similar toolbox: from Mji wa Huruma, to Muoroto to Kibagare settlements, thousands of Nairobi residents have been forced to make way to concrete: usually roads, buildings or housing for more prosperous citizens.

Today, over 60 percent of Nairobi���s population lives in its informal settlements, which make up just 5 percent of the city���s residential area. Many homes in these ���slums��� are built with corrugated iron sheets, and residents lack access to adequate sewage, electricity, or water systems, denied to those without the titles that would confer on them tenure rights to their dwellings. Over the years, justification for the violent displacement of the ���informal��� (we would say informalized) sector workers and residents has included concerns over tax evasion, trespassing, traffic congestion and food safety. Yet the highway that displaced Mukuru residents was equally informal: it did not feature in the 2014 Masterplan for Nairobi and nor was a strategic environmental assessment of its costs undertaken. It, however, continues to be defended by the government, including the National Environmental Management Agency (NEMA), as a viable means to ���decongest the city.��� Evidently, concerns with order, modern aesthetics and ���hygiene��� have always prevailed over the principles of equity and inclusion in the governance of Nairobi, and it is probably for these reasons that the Evictions and Resettlement Procedures Bill���introduced to Parliament in 2012���has not been passed.

Despite a legislative framework from which to draw upon, such as Article 40 of the 2010 Constitution that upholds the protection of property, the majority of our elected representatives do not prioritize the formulation of policies that protect those at risk from the inhumane consequences of urban displacements. Evictions have been widespread over decades, and, as we have noted above, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest they may be taking increasingly sinister forms, with fires being deployed to expel and intimidate those living in areas considered ���informal.���

If documents such as Kenya Vision 2030 are anything to go by, the present scenario, in which the poorest elements of urban society are being repeatedly displaced in violent, unjust and often illegal evictions, is likely to worsen. This development plan, which is used to justify an ever greater proliferation of concrete infrastructure, is frequently referred to by technocratic proponents of large-scale hypermodern architecture. And as the infrastructure it portends is materialized in order to realize Vision 2030 or presidential legacies, more communities will likely be forced to move. All of which underlines the need for an urgent response from civil society, which must scrutinize the role of the state, county governments, and private interests in inflicting incessant housing insecurity, and psychological and physical trauma on already marginalized communities.

Expensive shit

Protracted strikes in Nigeria���s higher public education sector lay bare nefarious efforts by the ruling class to entrench privatization. University of Lagos. Image credit Zouzou Wizman via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

In what has become a regular trademark in higher education in Nigeria, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has just extended its month-long�� action for another eight weeks. Since 1999 alone, the union, formed in 1978, has embarked on 16 strikes. Consistent with the reaction of any failed ruling class, subsequent Nigerian governments have consistently deployed propaganda to delegitimize both the ASUU strikes and the demands that have occasioned them. In doing so, it has consistently shown its hand; the Nigerian ruling class has long seen public higher education as a sworn enemy. If that had not been the case, how would one comprehend the regular contempt of the Nigerian state for successive agreements reached with ASUU?

In 2020, the Nigerian state under the leadership of Muhammadu Buhari, agreed to finally implement the 2009 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), after the union conditionally suspended its nine-month strike action. This agreement subsequently birthed the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MOA).

The contested issues that the MOA sought to resolve include the provision of funding for basic infrastructure in Nigerian universities, the renegotiation of academic staff salaries and allowances���which fall vastly below comparable standards, even in other African countries���and the deployment of a proprietary payment system, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), in place of the government���s proposed solution, known as the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS). But as observed by a growing segment of the Nigerian public and the majority of ASUU members, the 2020 MOA, on the side of the government, has amounted to a Memorandum of Inaction.

Despite increasing demands, the long history of state neglect and outright hostility suggests dim prospects for the required reinvigoration of public higher education in Nigeria. The successful privatization of the Nigerian state, which is a propellant of the crisis of the educational sector, was achieved due to the dominance of the forces of imperialism in the overall economy of the country. The infamous Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) of the 1980s, under the order of the partnership of the IMF/World Bank, set into motion the defunding of the educational sector. The National Universities Commission (NUC), which is mandated to regulate the overall activities of higher education, also came under the control of�� IMF/World Bank policies of privatization and concession. Since then, the NUC has had no qualms in endorsing the proliferation of defective, privately owned universities across the country.

It could not have come as a total shock therefore that while delivering a convocation lecture at Fountain University in 2017, Abubakar Rasheed, the Executive Secretary of the NUC,�� declared that the future of Nigerian higher education lies with the private universities, that the country ���needs more private universities.��� In 2019 alone, it was reported that NUC was processing the applications of 303 new private universities, and the following year, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, the Minister of State for Education, made it clear that the Nigerian state intends to concede the ownership of publicly owned schools���particularly those ���that are not doing well������to the private sector.

This proposal is not only laughable, but it also illuminates the absolute urge to repress the continuous existence of the public institutions and schools, at all costs. It is against this backdrop that the federal government has consistently ignored and failed to implement several rounds of agreements previously reached with ASUU. So, once again, in spite of the signed 2020 MOA, lecturers across public universities have returned to the barricades. Needless to say, the educational sector is in a state of decay in postcolonial Nigeria. The consequences of the insatiable chase of private profit and other forms of capitalist self-interest by the ruling class are evident in the sorry state of the sector. Since the self-serving interests of this class are in sharp variance with the aspirations of the ordinary people, the pursuit and acquisition of qualitative education for the latter has become ���expensive shit������as Fela Kuti put it. The crisis of the educational sector is symptomatic of the privatization of the Nigerian state���to ensure the steady accumulation of wealth for the ruling class.

The crisis of capitalist underdevelopment in postcolonial Nigeria is visible in the widening disparity between the ���haves��� and the ���have-nots.��� The ASUU will therefore have to tackle the ongoing attempts of the Nigerian ruling class to commercialize publicly owned institutions within the orbit of class struggle. A serious response to the predatory role of the Nigerian state must include the articulation of an alternative to the question of political power; the rank and file of students, their parents and the Nigerian masses as a whole, ultimately have the duty of actively participating in the overall struggles of ASUU to preclude the auctioning of public institutions. Should the Nigerian ruling class succeed in its nefarious attempts, the production and consumption of knowledge will not just be ���expensive shit,��� but also a rarity.

Fela Kuti’s nightmare

Protracted strikes in Nigeria���s higher public education sector lay bare nefarious efforts by the ruling class to entrench privatization. University of Lagos. Image credit Zouzou Wizman via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

In what has become a regular trademark in higher education in Nigeria, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has just extended its month-long�� action for another eight weeks. Since 1999 alone, the union, formed in 1978, has embarked on 16 strikes. Consistent with the reaction of any failed ruling class, subsequent Nigerian governments have consistently deployed propaganda to delegitimize both the ASUU strikes and the demands that have occasioned them. In doing so, it has consistently shown its hand; the Nigerian ruling class has long seen public higher education as a sworn enemy. If that had not been the case, how would one comprehend the regular contempt of the Nigerian state for successive agreements reached with ASUU?

In 2020, the Nigerian state under the leadership of Muhammadu Buhari, agreed to finally implement the 2009 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), after the union conditionally suspended its nine-month strike action. This agreement subsequently birthed the 2020 FGN/ASUU Memorandum of Action (MOA).

The contested issues that the MOA sought to resolve include the provision of funding for basic infrastructure in Nigerian universities, the renegotiation of academic staff salaries and allowances���which fall vastly below comparable standards, even in other African countries���and the deployment of a proprietary payment system, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), in place of the government���s proposed solution, known as the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS). But as observed by a growing segment of the Nigerian public and the majority of ASUU members, the 2020 MOA, on the side of the government, has amounted to a Memorandum of Inaction.

Despite increasing demands, the long history of state neglect and outright hostility suggests dim prospects for the required reinvigoration of public higher education in Nigeria. The successful privatization of the Nigerian state, which is a propellant of the crisis of the educational sector, was achieved due to the dominance of the forces of imperialism in the overall economy of the country. The infamous Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) of the 1980s, under the order of the partnership of the IMF/World Bank, set into motion the defunding of the educational sector. The National Universities Commission (NUC), which is mandated to regulate the overall activities of higher education, also came under the control of�� IMF/World Bank policies of privatization and concession. Since then, the NUC has had no qualms in endorsing the proliferation of defective, privately owned universities across the country.

It could not have come as a total shock therefore that while delivering a convocation lecture at Fountain University in 2017, Abubakar Rasheed, the Executive Secretary of the NUC,�� declared that the future of Nigerian higher education lies with the private universities, that the country ���needs more private universities.��� In 2019 alone, it was reported that NUC was processing the applications of 303 new private universities, and the following year, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, the Minister of State for Education, made it clear that the Nigerian state intends to concede the ownership of publicly owned schools���particularly those ���that are not doing well������to the private sector.

This proposal is not only laughable, but it also illuminates the absolute urge to repress the continuous existence of the public institutions and schools, at all costs. It is against this backdrop that the federal government has consistently ignored and failed to implement several rounds of agreements previously reached with ASUU. So, once again, in spite of the signed 2020 MOA, lecturers across public universities have returned to the barricades. Needless to say, the educational sector is in a state of decay in postcolonial Nigeria. The consequences of the insatiable chase of private profit and other forms of capitalist self-interest by the ruling class are evident in the sorry state of the sector. Since the self-serving interests of this class are in sharp variance with the aspirations of the ordinary people, the pursuit and acquisition of qualitative education for the latter has become ���expensive shit������as Fela Kuti put it. The crisis of the educational sector is symptomatic of the privatization of the Nigerian state���to ensure the steady accumulation of wealth for the ruling class.

The crisis of capitalist underdevelopment in postcolonial Nigeria is visible in the widening disparity between the ���haves��� and the ���have-nots.��� The ASUU will therefore have to tackle the ongoing attempts of the Nigerian ruling class to commercialize publicly owned institutions within the orbit of class struggle. A serious response to the predatory role of the Nigerian state must include the articulation of an alternative to the question of political power; the rank and file of students, their parents and the Nigerian masses as a whole, ultimately have the duty of actively participating in the overall struggles of ASUU to preclude the auctioning of public institutions. Should the Nigerian ruling class succeed in its nefarious attempts, the production and consumption of knowledge will not just be ���expensive shit,��� but also a rarity.

Egypt and the Afrocentrists: The latest round

Why did North Africans and Middle Easterners almost overnight go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in Africa and in African American cities? Giza. Image credit Catherine Poh Huay Tan via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Like relics from a bygone era, these figures with their colorful outfits and flamboyant theories still surface on university campuses, community centers, and social media. In Harlem, there is Leonard Jeffries, who taught Black Studies at the City University of New York before he was discharged for his rhetoric about ���ice people,��� ���sun people,��� and more recently ���sand people.��� Down the road at Columbia University, one can find Abdul Nanji, a piteous character, a tutor of Swahili language, who also spouts theories of Asian invasions of Africa. Further south in Philadelphia, Molefi Asante at Temple University holds forth on how the Islamic invasion of Africa destabilized the entire continent, though his more recent thesis is that it was a combination of Marxism and Islam that derailed ���The Black Movement.��� Asante made headlines in the early 1990s with his claims that Cleopatra was black (and not Greek Macedonian), and that the Greeks stole Egypt���s heritage. This argument would prompt Wellesley classics professor, Mary Lefkowitz, to publish her polemic Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth (1996), which would trigger more mudslinging and multiple lawsuits.

These were the culture wars of the early 1990s, as distant as Operation Desert Storm, or Public Enemy topping the charts. Today���s American youth are not particularly invested in North African antiquity or Cleopatra���s skin color. And yet a few weeks ago, Afrocentrism was trending, as were names and rhetoric last heard three decades ago. It was d��j�� vu, except now it was on Twitter with lots of DNA-talk.

The hashtag #stopafrocentricconference took off in late January. Amr el-Kady, a young Egyptian activist posted a thread, warning that ���something dangerous��� was going to happen in Aswan: a so-called ���Afrocentrist University��� was going to hold a conference in Upper Egypt, and the choice of Aswan was deliberate, because this movement exploits ethnic and cultural difference, and aims to ���polarize��� and separate Nubian youth from Egyptian society. El-Kady cautioned that the Afrocentric movement would use ���counterfeit��� history to destabilize the country, tear up its national fabric and create fitna (strife). He attached an ad for the ���One Africa: Returning to the Source Conference��� sponsored by the New York-based Akhet Tours and Hapi, to be held in Aswan in late February, in honor of Black History Month. The conference promised to bring together ���some of the world���s eminent scholars of African history��� who would ���unpack the historical connectivity and confluence of African people as they migrated throughout the continent.��� Soon Egyptian Twitter lit up with clips of Afrocentrists giving tours of the Pyramids and talking about Kemet (when Egypt was a ���black land���). A quote by organizer Solange Ashby went viral, ���What about the usurpation of African history in Egypt by the Arabs who only arrived in 642 CE?��� A young woman working for the Ministry of Tourism put out a video decrying the Afrocentrists��� attempts to steal ���our��� history. Another activist said Egyptians should join forces with the Amazigh people, Native Americans, and Polynesians who were also having their history appropriated by Afrocentrists.

Then a clip began circulating of Zaki Hawas, the controversial former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, talking about how Afrocentrists had protested his lecture at a museum in Philadelphia because he refused to perform DNA tests on mummies, and questioned the right of Black Americans (who are largely of West and Central African descent) to lay claim to civilizations in northeast Africa or the Nile Valley. Hawas has in the past referred to Afrocentrists, (and their more recent iterations, Hoteps, Kemetists, and Foundationalists) as ���Pyramidiots.��� Ironically, when US president Barack Obama visited Egypt in June 2009, Hawass was tasked with giving him a tour of the pyramids. Memorably, inside the Tomb of Qar, Obama would spot the hieroglyph of a pharaoh and exclaim, ���That looks like me! Look at those ears!��� Soon thereafter a conspiracy theory emerged claiming that Obama was a reincarnation of the pharaoh Akhenaton, (though as the Libyan and Syrian civil wars dragged on Islamists responded that Obama was the Dajjal (the Deceitful Messiah), rather than a cloned pharaoh. Hawass the Egyptologist has since argued that the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is Mentuhotep II.

By mid-February, the One Africa conference was canceled. More racial vitriol ensued as Egyptian activists claimed victory, and American observers saw the entire brouhaha as evidence of an abiding Arab racism. At the heart of this imbroglio is a sense on both sides of the Atlantic of dashed expectations and solidarity betrayed, that the sacrifices and comradeship of past decades had not been reciprocated. Grand expectations were forged in the early 1960s when a number of African American intellectuals, such as Malcolm X, Shirley Graham DuBois, Julian Mayfield, and Maya Angelou spent time in Cairo. They supported the Nasserist revolution, and saw themselves and Egypt, as part of a rising Africa and third world. W. E. B. Du Bois would famously write a poem: ���Beware, white world, that great black hand which Nasser���s power waves.��� Malcolm X would declare ���my heart is in Cairo,��� and describe how an encounter with a ���white��� Algerian revolutionary led him to redefine his understanding of Africa and black nationalism.

By the early 1970s, however, this Islam-friendly black nationalism was being challenged by an Afrocentrist movement that was staunchly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Islam, according to this narrative, had done as much damage, if not more to Africa, as Christianity had, and the Arabs were ���white invaders��� on African soil, akin to European settlers, who conquered the New World.�� In 1971 Chancellor Williams published The Destruction of African Civilization, which would emerge as one of the founding texts of the Afrocentrist movement. Williams described how since the time of pharaonic Egypt, Arabs had attempted to conquer Africa while Nubians and Ethiopians heroically resisted the white ���Arab-Asian��� effort to destroy the single black kingdom that originally extended from the shores of the Mediterranean to the source of the Nile. Molefi Asante would write, ���The Arabs, with their jihads, or holy wars, were thorough in their destruction of much of the ancient [Egyptian] culture,��� but fleeing Egyptian priests dispersed across the continent spreading Egyptian knowledge.

Scholars have exhaustively refuted these claims showing North Africans have always been multi-hued, and there is no evidence of a black North Africa obliterated by invaders. One prominent geographer writes, ���It was not that Arabs physically displaced Egyptians. Instead, the Egyptians were transformed by relatively small numbers of immigrants bringing in new ideas, which, when disseminated, created a wider ethnic identity.��� Another historian argues that both skeletal and ancient pictorial evidence ���show ancient Nubians as an African people fundamentally the same as modern ones��� and that the advent of the Arabs ���has had a powerful linguistic, religious and cultural impact but has ��� not had a great influence on the appearance of the people.��� Even Cheikh Anta Diop, the great Senegalese thinker, has called the belief that Arab invasions caused mass racial displacement into sub-Saharan Africa a ���figment of the imagination.���

Multiple scholars have covered these debates. More interesting for our purposes is why did Middle Easterners, almost overnight, go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in both Africa and American cities?�� Observers have noted that the decades-old Sudanese civil war drew African-American attention to anti-black racism in the Nile Valley. But the Sudanese conflict began in 1983���after the emergence of Afrocentrism���and the Afrocentrists have expressed little interest in state policy, or joining local coalitions to defend Nubian rights or counter anti-black racism. Others have noted that the increase of Middle Eastern grocers in American cities after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 created resentment, but Middle Eastern merchants have been peddling their wares in American cities since the 1930s (as the history of the Nation of Islam�� and W.D Fard attests.) Why did these immigrant grocers come to be seen as blood-sucking exploiters only in the early 1980s?

The shift in African-American opinion seems more likely linked to broader geopolitical shifts following the 1967 War. Starting in the mid-1950s, Egypt was clearly supporting the African- American struggle, offering scholarships to students in the segregated South, and providing diplomatic support in international institutions such as the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations. Similarly, Algeria offered diplomatic support and gave refuge to the Black Panthers. Through the 1960s, Cairo and Algiers supported liberation movements across the African continent. In the early 1970s, both Algeria and Egypt abandoned this position of support for black radical protest, as they joined the American camp in the Cold War (with Algeria expelling the Panthers in 1973 in exchange for a $1 billion natural gas agreement with the US). Ironically, in Egypt, the turn away from Africa happened under the leadership of Anwar Sadat, the Nubian president, who told American journalist Barbara Walters that he was tired of how the Soviet Union was treating Egypt like ���a central African country.���

Equally important to understanding this shift in opinion is the role of domestic lobbies in the US���in particular evangelical and Zionist groups, aided by a loose coalition of liberal and conservative activists, writers and state officials, who sought to separate the Black freedom movement from Africa, the Arab world, and the third world more broadly. Morocco has faced a movement similar to the Afrocentrists in the Moorish Science Temple, whose members claim to be the original Moroccans���yet Rabat has since the 1980s invited members of the group to Morocco for tours and conferences. Granted, in the US there are no interest groups invested in Moroccan history, as there are with Egypt.

These debates died down in recent decades. Black Lives Matter is more focused on domestic state violence and structural racism than foreign affairs. With the expansion of African migration to the US, the conversation about Africa has tended to be driven by the children of African immigrants and focused on specific countries rather than mythological attachments to the Nile Valley. Yet, these old culture wars still occasionally flare up, going global as happened last month. Progressive voices seem to have given way to parochial nativists on both sides. One thing this recent kerfuffle has also revealed is that the image of the African American has taken a battering in recent decades, with Muslims keenly aware of how both Condi Rice and Herman Cain, may evoke civil rights and Birmingham, but call for perniciously anti-Muslim policies. (Herman Cane was the Republican presidential candidate who was calling for a Muslim ban, long before Trump).

The solution, however, is not to cancel the One Africa Conference, or the Afrocentrists, but to understand the origins of this Afrocentrist movement and to engage in respectful dialogue.�� Afrocentrism must be understood as a response to a centuries-old, colonial Hegelian policy of dividing Africa into three parts: ���European Africa��� that lies north of the Sahara; Egypt, the land connected to Asia; and ���Africa proper,��� the land below the Sahara, which the German philosopher Hegel called ���the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.��� During the colonial era, this partition of Africa would be compounded by the ���Hamitic thesis,��� which held that anything worthwhile in ���interior Africa,��� any sign of civilization must have come from the Semites, Middle Eastern, or Berber, or European influence. (Thus when Hawass says ���the Ancient Egyptian civilization did not occur in Africa��� he may be using ���Africa��� as a byword for ���sub-Saharan Africa,��� a common enough short-hand as far south as Ethiopia, but his language and claims that ancient Egyptians were ���pure Egyptians��� evokes the anti-black, white supremacist language of Hegel).

Starting in the mid-19th century a number of African-American thinkers, such as Martin Delaney, would try to counter this white supremacist narrative, with what historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses has termed a ���vindicationist��� black nationalist historiography. Pharaonic Egypt would figure prominently in this black nationalist discourse. In fact, 19th century Egyptomania across the US was related to anxiety about race and slavery. W.E.B Du Bois��� The World in Africa, published in 1947, would offer a powerful counter to this Eurocentric mapping of Africa, by showing how Egypt and the Moorish empire were part of the continent���s history and composition.

Recent iterations of Afrocentrism have tended to focus on DNA, calling for DNA tests on mummies to show, once and for all, that the ancient Egyptians were black, and different from the country���s current inhabitants. This latter argument has long existed and been dismissed in Egypt. The recent controversy made headlines in part because currently Egypt, like other African states, is trying to have pharaonic artifacts returned from Western museums, and the Sisi regime has sought to manipulate the pharaonic past. As one Cairo-based Egyptologist wrote, in explaining her discomfort with the One Africa conference:

The alienation of modern Egyptians from their ancient heritage and posing them as “Arab invaders” (and occasionally a mix of Greeks and Persians in the case of Copts) is used as justification to deny Egyptians��� claims over a significant part of their cultural heritage. I have heard outright Egyptologists and museum curators in the West, in personal correspondences, panel discussions, conferences and on social media shut down discussion of repatriation of artifacts using these bogus claims about the “racial differences” between ancient and modern Egyptians or because Egyptians are Arab invaders ��� Some of this is good old Eurocentrism but a very significant portion of it is Afrocentrism.

This is all happening while Al-Sisi, like earlier Egyptian strongmen, is tapping the Pharaonic past to shore up popular support, and claiming a direct continuity between pharaonic Egypt and the modern Egypt state. The very regime that crushed sundry opposition movements placed a 90-ton Ramses II obelisk in Tahrir Square. In April 2021, the regime took 22 mummies from the Museum of Antiquities, and staged a nationally-televised procession called the ���Pharaohs Golden Parade.����� Sissi praised the parade: ���This majestic scene is evidence of the greatness of the Egyptian people; the guardians of this unique civilization extending deep into the depths of history.��� Historian Khaled Fahmy would, in a tweet, lament this ���racialization of history��� and its disturbing resemblance to mid-century European fascism���s mobilization of ancient history.

Egyptians are understandably wary of irredentist Western movements that try to redraw local histories and borders along racial lines (given US policy in Iraq and Sudan), and that call to reclaim or resettle their country, given the history of Palestine next door (and African-American settlement in Liberia). But dialogue with Afrocentrism can still be fruitful, if only to understand the struggles that forged this perspective. Leonard Jeffries of City College studied in Lausanne, Switzerland in the 1950s, before going on to receive a doctorate in political science from Columbia University under the direction of Immanuel Wallerstein, who became a founder of the influential Dar Salam School with Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and Egyptian scholar Samir Amin (the latter had left Cairo for the Tanzanian capital following Nasser’s death). Why did Jeffries turn away from European social liberalism, or Walter Rodney���s Third Worldist path to liberation, and opt for melanin theory? Likewise, Abdul Nanji sounds sadly unlettered when he rants about Asian and Semitic colonialism in East Africa, until you realize that he came of age as a Tanzanian of Indian descent at a time when Nyerere���s TANU-led regime was adopting indigenization policy and spewing anti-Asian rhetoric. Once he settled in Harlem, he had to pick sides. Likewise, James Small, who was slated to speak at the One Africa Conference, was the imam of Malcolm X���s Muslim Mosque Inc for decades and has spoken movingly of his struggles while living in Saudi Arabia.

One of the more fascinating scholars scheduled to speak at the Aswan conference is the 86-year old Congolese born linguist Th��ophile Obenga, professor emeritus at San Francisco State University, who worked closely with Cheikh Anta Diop. Both attended UNESCO���s historic 1974 summit on ���the peopling of ancient Egypt��� in Cairo. Obenga would go on to challenge the colonial mapping of African languages by observing that the similarities between ancient Egyptian (as preserved in Coptic) and various sub-Saharan languages were stronger than the links between Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian languages (the so-called Afro-Asiatic languages). He would go on to propose three major language families for Africa���Berber, Khoisan, and Negro-Egyptian. Obenga and Diop were deeply engaged in the work of decoloniality, trying to undo the epistemic categories and discursive arrangements inherited from colonialism. Countless North African scholars are trying to do the same. Since the uprisings of 2011, and renewed debates around national identity and official historiography in North Africa, there is growing interest in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop and Obenga.

Perhaps a One Africa conference can be held next year in Aswan, and the Afrocentrist elders can be invited to Aswan to meet with younger Egyptian scholars and activists in a conversation free of accusations of settlerism and blood purity. Maybe participants from across the continent can join, and engage in a conversation on the meaning of ancient Egypt, the Kingdom of Kongo, and Great Zimbabwe for pan-Africanism today. It is One Africa after all.

The war in Ukraine may seem far from Africa, but it is not

To compensate for its possible isolation by the West, Russia could turn its attention to Africa, making the continent the next center stage for imperialist struggles. The first Russia-Africa Summit held in Sochi, Russia 2019. Credit GCIS via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

The war in Ukraine may seem geographically distant, but in many respects, it is geopolitically close to Africa. The most immediate and tangible effects of the war were felt by the thousands of African students who had chosen Ukraine for their studies. Ukraine is a popular destination for African students; it has been estimated that over 15,000 students from various African countries were studying in several Ukrainian cities at the time of Putin���s invasion. The popularity of Ukrainian universities among these students can be traced back to Soviet legacies in Africa. During the Cold War, tens of thousands of African military and political personnel as well as technicians and civil engineers studied in Soviet universities. At the time, the Soviet Union and its allies had been active supporters of African national liberation movements fighting against European and American imperialism and colonial armies.

A few notable names are worth mentioning here, as their political careers grew out of Soviet training: Angola���s former president Jos�� Eduardo Dos Santos; Mozambique���s former president and military leader under the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), Armando Guebuza; or the fourth president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, who spent three months in Soviet military training and sustained very close ties with post-Soviet Russia until his resignation in 2018 (not long before his fall, Zuma signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia���s Rosatom to build a new nuclear facility, a project which was later suspended).

Apart from this historical legacy, Ukrainian universities were regarded as relatively affordable for students, and their advanced infrastructure���itself a legacy of the Soviet past���made them appealing not only to African youth but also to many others from the Global South. The very unfortunate events that we saw unfolding on the news were about the struggles of people fleeing Ukraine���among whom Africans and other non-Ukrainians faced racist discrimination at the border of Ukraine and at Kyiv���s and other cities��� train stations. Ukrainian authorities attempted to address this embarrassing issue with some success, while African governments, particularly those of Ghana and Nigeria, condemned the racist treatment of their nationals. They also offered help in returning these innocent students to their home countries, especially since many had fled to neighboring countries before they could return home.

Another important effect of the war that Africans immediately felt is burgeoning global inflation. Even though a few African countries may benefit from a temporary commodity boom, particularly oil-producing countries such as Nigeria and Algeria, the more general effects of global food supply chain disruptions and subsequent price hikes are certainly unwelcome for the majority. Africans primarily live in agricultural societies, but the majority of consumers actually depend on food imports, particularly wheat but also processed food, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs. Both Russia and Ukraine are among the world���s biggest grain exporters and the war is causing devastating damage to their supply system. Many African countries are particularly vulnerable in this respect; Egypt, for instance, is the world���s largest wheat importer, and 85% of its supply comes from Russia and Ukraine.

Serious disruptions in those supply chains can lead to violent political consequences; we need only remember how the Arab Spring in North Africa started in 2011 in response to uncontrollable prices for food and fuel. In fact, since the invasion, Egyptian authorities have already had to fix bread prices to avoid the escalation of social tensions. Even in countries like Nigeria, inflation in the domestic price system���from fuel to foodstuffs to services���could have serious long-term social and political consequences. Nigeria might arrive at an even bigger geopolitical crossroads as the war unfolds, as spiking oil and gas prices could easily turn the international landscape around, granting more exposure for large oil producers.

As many commentators have highlighted since the outbreak of the war, the Russian invasion has put an end to the international order as we knew it. The war itself, however, was triggered by the long-evolving demise of the post-World War II international system. Russia is not alone in its desire to change the balance of international forces, even if it comes at the expense of other nations; this is why any cooperation between Russia and China���military or economic���looks so threatening to the West. This is a period of new imperialism, with changing relations of power both internationally as well as in local contexts, fueled by fierce competition for resource extraction and the redivision of geopolitical spheres. This new imperialism is associated with a negative sum game in which nobody wins at the end���as seems to be the case with the war in Ukraine.

In the case of Africa, such new imperialism is often referred to as the ���new scramble,��� a reference to the classical period of imperialism in the late 19th century that led to the division of the continent by European colonial powers. Now, new powers like the BRICS countries���Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa���and smaller players like Turkey and Saudi Arabia are entering the game for the sake of resource appropriation. But while European and American corporate-military regimes have been seriously challenged in many countries, they have nevertheless mostly remained in place.

As in the late 19th century, repartition has not only been happening with maps on conference tables, but more so on battlefields where power structures are challenged and redefined directly by military and financial apparatuses. Ukraine is not the only battlefield today where great powers are testing each other���s capacities. Bloodshed occurred in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Russia has been an active powerbroker in almost all instances because of its own desire to change the international system.

Russia is not a recent entrant into the new scramble, but it reactivated its interest relatively recently with the early-2000s arrival of Vladimir Putin. This early reinstatement was rather symbolic and attempted to utilize the legacies of the Soviet past. Diplomatic relations between Russia and the West soured with the first attacks on Ukraine in 2014: the annexation of Crimea and Russian military support for East Ukrainian rebels. Russia faced a first round of Western sanctions, the ruble experienced a free fall, oil prices skyrocketed, and Russia was threatened with diplomatic isolation. Russia���s partners outside the transatlantic sphere gained more attention and prominence in its geopolitical efforts, not only to counterbalance its isolation but to gather allies for a reconfiguration of the international system. Russia and China have been working more closely together since then, and Russian diplomacy���following China���s activity in Africa���has also turned toward Africa with more vigorous offers of assistance designed in Russian-style investment packages that were and still are marketable among countries in the Global South.

One notable outcome of this business and diplomatic effort was the Russia-Africa Summit, convened by Vladimir Putin and cohosted by Egypt���s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the picturesque Black Sea resort of Sochi in late October 2019. Although no big project was announced in Sochi, it was a diplomatic success, as 43 heads of state or government representatives from the 54 African countries attended the event. In this and other moves, Russia has carefully avoided any interference with China���s involvement in the scramble, but it purposefully challenges Western activity in Africa and the Middle East, as in the Syrian and Libyan conflicts.

We can discern two important elements that make up Russia���s global aspirations in Africa. One is a military effort undertaken by Russia to seek some kind of a power reconfiguration in order to impose its own political alliances. This happens when there is a fragile local balance of forces that has been broken down by popular discontent or by military coups. This affects a large part of Francophone West and Central Africa, where France���s military and economic influence has been waning for a long time. (The withdrawal of French troops from the Sahel region, or the quest of West African countries to gain monetary independence from France, are illustrative examples.)

Russian paratroopers and private mercenaries backed by the Kremlin���such as the Wagner Group, led by a Putin ally from St. Petersburg nicknamed his ���chef������have already conducted extensive military operations in Mali after the military coup there, as well as in the Libyan and Central African Republic civil wars. In the last case, Russia even obtained an exemption from the UN a few years ago to sell military equipment despite the embargo. A domino effect is not entirely unlikely in the wider Sahel region including Chad, Niger, and Mauritania. But even Nigeria or Burkina Faso could potentially strengthen ties with Russia to fight back local insurgencies and exchange economic concessions. Russian companies are eager to win mining concessions, boost arms sales, and finance infrastructure projects���in short, to gain access to local resources. These efforts can be expected to intensify not only in the above-mentioned areas but elsewhere in Africa, especially if Western sanctions are forcing the Kremlin to seek alternative resources and outlets for its own trade. While old neocolonial systems are falling apart with the breakup of the international system, African countries are searching for capital and technological imports that are less dependent on those old institutional ties.

Another important element of these deals is not exclusively business related: Russia���s more general effort to reduce the effects of diplomatic isolation within the international community, particularly in the UN General Assembly. Russia needs this for its more immediate military adventures, which seem to be aimed at the restoration of Russian influence in the post-Soviet universe. For this reason, it is interesting to note that the UN General Assembly���s resolution denouncing Russian aggression in Ukraine was not signed by 25 African countries (from among the 47 absentees and those who did not participate in the vote). The popularity of Russia���s bid reveals the failure of the international and regional systems designed after World War II to effectively manage international diplomacy. Thus, despite Russia���s total isolation in the West, it has been able to successfully mobilize allies in Africa, which reflects the fact that Russia has gained some space in the scramble. On the other hand, the three non-permanent Security Council members, Gambia, Ghana and Kenya, expressed harsh critiques of Russia���s actions, instead choosing to join the old transatlantic alliance. Russia is therefore far from becoming a unifying force in Africa���in fact, it hopes to use these divisions for its own benefit.

Yet another important geopolitical purpose of Russian-designed investment packages���including debt relief, infrastructural projects funded by Russian credit, and arms sales and technological investments in fields of nuclear energy, military, and telecommunication���is related to Russia���s position in the global economy. Interestingly, due to the harsh financial sanctions it faces, Russia might need to temporarily reduce its otherwise relatively small capital investment in Africa (estimated at around 20 billion USD). But in its more traditional export areas, such as in extractive industries, Russian activity could increase. As a commodity exporter itself, Russia���s economy is not complementary to the economic structures of oil exporters in Africa but rather parallel to them. This may look as if Russian and African economies are competing in the world market, but it is far from the truth. Russia has long endeavored to gain a monopoly over European energy supply. If it had a monopoly, it would be much more difficult to impose sanctions on Russia and isolate it for what it does in its own sphere of influence.

Russian attempts to monopolize the European energy supply have been targeting the main alternative sources of energy���which, in the case of the EU, are to be found in North and West Africa. As I have mentioned above, these regions have already been turned into a kind of battlefield where Russian forces are either directly interfering with local politics, as they have in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, or actively trying to foster concessions with state-owned national energy giants in Algeria, Egypt, and Nigeria. The key target is not only the extraction industry but also transportation infrastructure, which always needs new investments. Russian companies did gain concessions in Egypt and Algeria, and they sustained a very friendly relationship with Gaddafi before his fall. Nigeria is a little more complicated because of its own aspirations in West Africa, but we nevertheless see a long history of Soviet and Russian efforts to strengthen ties with successive Nigerian governments.

One interesting historical moment in these attempts occurred at the peak of the Cold War, after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1960s introduced a dynamic between Western colonial powers, the Soviet Union, and China different from that we see today. In response to the Nigerian civil war also unfolding at this time, the Soviet Union actually sided with the US and UK in support of the Nigerian regime, while China and France supported the Igbo nationalist Biafran fighters. France, afraid of losing power in its colonial backyard, aimed to counteract the growing Nigerian and British-American influence in Francophone West Africa. In the meantime, China was trying to take over the role of the Soviet Union as the great ally of anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South. China���s rise to hegemony had just started at the time, leading to confrontation with the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union and China���s growing role in the international system, the confrontation turned into a fragile and complicated cooperation in which Russia has a more subordinate role. The war in Ukraine is in part a product of this, demonstrating how dependent Russia has become on China���s support.

The situation in Nigeria today is a mirror of these civil war dynamics. Russia���s more recent efforts have targeted plans for the Trans-Saharan pipeline, which aims to connect oil infrastructure in Algeria and Nigeria, creating a significant supply channel to Europe. This pipeline is more than likely to gain significance in the scramble, creating a new area of possible contestation among the great powers as both the EU and China try to get a stake in this vital project. As with the pipeline, Russia���s Rosatom has tried to sell nuclear packages to both Nigeria and Egypt with little success. If those countries ever invest more into their industrial capacities, Russia will certainly face China���s growing presence as a major investor in the region���s infrastructure. As we can see, these struggles are nothing new. But with the demise of the international system and Russia���s desperate attempt to compensate for the isolation caused by the war, combined with its aim to extend control over the European energy supply, this new scramble could easily turn Africa into the next center stage of imperialist struggles.

Cursed heirlooms

The legacy of soap operas and state of television in South Africa. Still from Jiva! via Netflix.

Two years ago, I wrote a review for Netflix���s flagship African series, Queen Sono, where I raised my concerns over the future of Netflix in South Africa. I assessed that Queen Sono valiantly attempted to spin the distinctly American genre of the spy-thriller into a South African setting which, as well-intentioned as it was, couldn���t overcome the expected inconsistencies with adapting the genre in a context far removed in space and time from its origin. Queen Sono���s flaws appeared to have reflected a wider trend that occurs mainly in our film and television, but rears its head in other cultural industries where South African art wrestles with its own identity under the influence of American cultural hegemony. The following years��� worth of South African Netflix originals haven���t proved my concerns wrong. Rather, they have illuminated an elephant in the room that I had missed when assessing Netflix���s incursion���namely, how soap operas dominate the South African television industry.

South Africa���s first soap opera of the democratic era, eGoli: City of Gold, debuted in 1992 and was soon followed by the more famous Generations, which was commissioned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the country���s public broadcaster. During the democratic transition, the SABC and private broadcaster M-Net sought to promote a positive and multi-racial South Africa, depicting Black South Africans as affluent, upwardly mobile and integrating professionally and socially with other races. ���Soapies��� of this era emulated a new South Africa, and what new South Africans could look like in it. Thus, soap operas, though often thought to be devoid of socio-political significance, operated as socio-cultural barometers for many South Africans. More recent interations of local soaps explore the lived experiences and hot-button issues affecting average South Africans, earning top viewership ratings across public and private service channels. Soaps become ubiquitous in social life, and audiences consequently develop para-social relationships to a soap���s characters and plot lines. The previous night���s episodes are hot topics of weekday conversations in many facets of South African life���from taxi ranks, school playgrounds to workplace lunchrooms. This baked-in viewership allows networks to sell expensive prime-time advertising, providing huge profit.

Not surprisingly, the number of soaps in South Africa has grown exponentially over the years. Today, four out of SABC���s five free-to-air channels host a slate of flagship soaps that air during primetime hours. Soap operas currently own the top 10 spots for the most watched television programs in the country. The bulk of viewer shares in South African television is reliant on the soap opera model. It���s hard to believe that the situation is purely coincidental. With the SABC exponentially bleeding money���due to the mismanagement of funds by everyone from network executives to independent production houses���they remain one of the most consistent avenues of revenue for the troubled broadcaster, and still a pillar on which the industry in South Africa is built.

When it comes to maximizing profits through content, Netflix is no stranger. After earning reverence from their original slate of relatively daring and critically acclaimed series��� (including House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things and Black Mirror), its more recent priorities appear to be about producing a torrent of content to support its platform. With more and more networks divorcing from Netflix to launch their own streaming platforms (Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max) and newer competitive players in the market (Apple TV, Amazon Prime), the rules of competition are to be driven less by the ���real art vs content to support a platform��� struggle, but rather one to provide as much content as possible���a change spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and Netflix playing catch-up with an increasing number of larger and more established networks like NBC and Disney that have built-in catalogs of beloved series and films to support their streaming platforms. With audiences having much more disposable time and less disposable income on their hands, as well as increasing competition in a market it once monopolized, Netflix appears to think viewers are less concerned about the quality of what they���re watching than the quantity of what they have to choose from.

South African filmmakers have developed a cozy relationship with Netflix, pitching and creating series with a company unmoored by local trends. For Netflix, the partnership helps to not only supplement its global content stream, but South Africa seems a perfect avenue because its own industry has prioritized the efficient maximization of content���an obvious segue to the streaming industry. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw the evolution of television into an increasingly auteur driven and dramatically compelling format. American television drew in Hollywood actors, writers and directors, their budgets grew, runtimes lengthened, and storytelling matured. The small screen began to feature nuanced, morally ambiguous and psychologically rich characters located within complex and carefully crafted stories. No longer the medium perceived as mindless, after-work entertainment, prestige dramas and high-concept comedies of the likes of Breaking Bad, Atlanta, Girls, The Sopranos and many others showed audiences, critics and producers alike that the small screen could stand in equal artistic regard to its big-screen companion. While there is a strong argument that some of the elements of what is colloquially referred to as ���Peak TV,��� owe their origins to the soap opera, the genre now finds itself playing among TV relics alongside 30-minute multi-cam sitcoms and family game shows.

Ultimately, the guiding framework and principles behind all soap operas are less concerned with meaningful, considered and dexterous writing, but rather with an effort to maintain and deliver on the broadcasting demands of the genre. These are concessions most viewers passively consent to for the convenience of daily episodes ad infinitum.

The dominance of any form of television can be problematic. Peak TV, for all its esteem, had a shelf life and its own set of harmful attributes and consequences. Unlike Peak TV, the soap opera genre has a particularly pernicious influence due to how its tropes and narrative conventions are idiosyncratically tied to its unique broadcasting demands. When it comes to adapting the soap opera tradition to other forms of television, especially the series form, it���s unwise, even destructive, to ditch the bathwater while keeping the baby. It is this struggle that has colored the South African Netflix shows. The omnipresence of soaps results in most, if not all filmmakers working in television owing a huge part of their career to the genre, and thus they struggle to break out of its very particular parameters.

Apart from budget, the most immediate difference between a series and soap, is that series have endings. Soaps are characteristically devoid of endings, therefore outside of a soap���s respective premise, it���s impossible to get a true grasp of the conceptual totality of a soap. Struggling to find a compelling way to end stories, align storylines along an arc, and to find balanced pacing is a recurring problem inSouth African Netflix originals.

Jiva!, for all its many charms, is a clear example. The series is a dance drama (a la the Step-Up series), which chronicles a young woman, Ntombi (Noxolo Dlamini), who works a dead-end job as a guide at the local waterpark, but risks it all to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer. Jiva! boasts a gamut of storylines throughout its eight-episode first season, yet only a handful of them feel engaging because most fail to cohere to the series��� central theme. Everything else falls into a predictable romance storyline once it escapes the space of the central dance competition.

Thematic incoherence appears in similar ways in Blood and Water, the second South African co-production to debut on Netflix after Queen Sono, which landed to global fanfare, occupying the global #1 spot upon its launch. Across the two seasons the show suffers from an acute identity crisis. At times, it yearns to be a gritty and suspenseful thriller, which writer Nosipho Dumisa-Ngoasheng, whose previous work features an adaption of Alfred Hitchcock���s Rear Window, is more than adept at handling. Yet, it also wants the careless disenchantment of a Gossip Girl, where teenagers are so fantastically removed from parents, or any indication of adolescence, or responsibility.

Blood and Water follows Puleng Khumalo (Ama Qamata), a teenage girl who enrolls at a prestigious private high school in Cape Town on suspicion that one of its students, Fikile Bele (Khosi Ngema), is her elder sister who was abducted from her parents shortly after birth. Throughout the first season, as Puleng���s attempts to prove Fikile is her sister grow increasingly dangerous and often bone-headed, the audience is reminded of the void that is her fractured family dynamic and why she���s desperately compelled to solve the mystery. The second season lacks the thematic grounding that gave the first season a sense of focus, and like Jiva!, struggles to maintain any compelling stories or action outside of the main storyline. The plot is paced awkwardly in the second season, its complimentary sub-plots routinely picked up, forgotten, chopped and changed, without much resolution. The addition of newer characters feels exciting, but towards the end of the season is inconsequential.

To be fair, bad writing is bad writing, whether or not said bad writing is situated in an industry overwhelmed by a singular mode of storytelling. The trading of storylines in this fashion harkens back to the soapie traditions of storytelling, where the multiplicity of tangential and unresolved plot lines are commonplace to support the week-day broadcast schedule. Storylines haven���t reached neat resolutions, and subplots, twists and characters are generated, dropped and picked up again at a dizzying pace. These characteristics would be at home in a soap opera setting, but in a season with an eight-10 episode run, it results in lack of focus and cohesion.

The nagging and overreaching influence of soaps obstructs South African shows from ever reaching the type of characterized and nuanced storytelling that made Squid Game, for example, a smashing success. Furthermore, the production of 260 episodes in a single year, is a gargantuan task for any production company. The tremendous workload has resulted in many workers in the South African film industry to complain about being overworked and underpaid. With more than a dozen soaps currently in production within a relatively small industry, one wonders if the framework is sustainable. What we need is more rigorous interrogation of the state of things, instead of a passive acceptance of the industry as current the state of things. If hit-shows like Is���thunzi, Tjovitjo, Hopeville or Yizo Yizo have shown us anything, it is that South Africans are capable of gravitating towards and supporting series television. Last year���s slate of South African Netflix series are a sign that the hegemony of soap operas is far from an isolated phenomenon; their influence is evidently constricting the creative imagination for what local television can look and feel like.

The intent is not to malign the storied history of soap operas and the vital role they play in the lives of millions of South Africans, but to demand, as producers and consumers of content, that the soap not be the sole genre on which the television industry is driven.

Countering the narrrative

Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, outside Rustenburg in the North West Province of South Africa August 15. The miners are calling for the minimum wage to be lifted from its current R4,000 a month to R12,500. The men are mostly Xhosa and Pondo speaking, and the strike was initiated by the drillers. Photograph �� Greg Marinovich.

Many people and entities use the media to further their aims���good, bad, or innocuous. Those with the most money and power tend to have the most access to and influence over the media. As such, there is an urgent need to counter mainstream and interest group-driven narratives. But if we are to reach and influence the general public, we need a vehicle that can drive hard messages into people���s hearts and minds. Enter film-centered social change.

������ is a film-centered social change strategy that has been gaining support and attention internationally, and there are a growing number of job opportunities for skilled impact producers and facilitators. It involves devising and implementing strategies that make use of facilitated film screenings supported by other interventions aimed at creating awareness, changing behavior, and influencing policy around issues including human rights, social justice, and climate change.

A majority of the easily accessible, documented impact case studies, resources, and frameworks were created in the Global North and���though they are useful and have benefited many filmmakers and impact producers in the Global South���the time is ripe to document and share examples from and best practices for impact work in the Global South. There are many examples of successful South African impact campaigns designed and helmed by organizations and individuals: some by activists or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), others by impact producers or the filmmakers themselves. But impact takes a village. Metaphorically, for sure, but in Africa and other parts of the Global South, quite often also literally.

One South African NGO, STEPS, has pioneered the work of using mobile cinema to reach under-resourced rural and semi-urban communities with facilitated screenings of films about the human rights and environmental issues affecting those communities. Founded in 2001 by Don Edkins and Ikka Vehkalahti, the organization is currently active in seven African countries. Its team partners with local civil society organizations to provide activists with films, resources, and training on how to use film to affect change. This model relies in large part on the work of individuals who live in or close to the communities where the films are screened. Elaine Maane, the Training Coordinator at STEPS, facilitates their training, coordinates their activities, and provides support on an ongoing basis. She travels around Africa to visit each partner annually (except 2020 and 2021) and fields questions and fosters cooperation via WhatsApp groups on a daily basis.

In South Africa, a lot of impact work has centered around extractive industries, especially how mining activities negatively affect surrounding communities. The film Miners Shot Down (2014), for example, revealed what had happened in August 2012 at Lonmin���s mine in Marikana, in the North West province of South Africa, when 34 striking mine workers were killed. Mainstream media, for the most part, followed the company, government, and police line and reported that police had acted in self-defense. But this independently produced film���directed by activist-filmmaker Rehad Desai���shows in brutal detail how police cornered the men and gunned them down, even as they were running away. The film���s impact campaign included screenings at over fifteen international film festivals, over a dozen television broadcasts worldwide, and over two hundred community screenings that were followed by discussions. The impact campaign was led by Anita Khanna and won a prestigious international impact award for the large, measurable change it made in public awareness about what had really happened in the Marikana massacre.

For impact films, reaching as many people as possible is almost always desirable. It can shift public perception, build active support for an issue, and lead to so much pressure on policymakers or perpetrators that they are forced to respond. Journalist Daneel Knoetze, for example, produced a film���A Killing in the Winelands (2019)���that served as part of a larger, long-term, multi-platform project to expose the lack of investigation and prosecution of crimes committed by South African police officers. The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) is the South African body responsible for investigating crimes committed by police officers. But they are not doing their job. Especially not when the victims are from rural areas, informal settlements, and poorer communities.�� The film was broadcast on current affairs show Checkpoint on eNews Channel Africa (eNCA) and premiered at special screenings in Cape Town and Johannesburg. This coincided with the publication of a series of pieces on the unfolding investigation in a large local newspaper, The Daily Maverick, and the launch of the Viewfinder website, a platform dedicated to ���accountability journalism���: reporting that empowers the public with knowledge about abuses of power that can enable them to demand redress and equity.

In a piece on the unfolding investigation published in The Daily Maverick in November 2019, Knoetze reported that ���IPID investigators and their managers had taken short-cuts on investigations in a bid to inflate performance statistics. Whistleblower reports suggested that the practice was systemic, widespread across South Africa, and had evolved over many years.��� Almost immediately after the release of this multipronged expos��, IPID acting executive director Victor Senna announced that the directorate would publish a report on the revealed inconsistencies. According to Anton Harbor, the convener of the judges for the 2019 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism���a South African prize which Daneel was shortlisted for���Daneel���s work ���was a multimedia offering, using video to humanize the story, and it had notable impact, in that it has already led to policy changes on how this reporting would happen in future.���

All the platforms used in this project���print publication, television broadcast, and website���worked together to reveal the facts to the public in order to put pressure on the government. But influencing policy wasn���t the only impact goal of this project. The eNCA screening of the film was particularly important for the goal of reaching the general public and informing affected communities and individuals of the importance of and process for reporting police crime. According to audience research commissioned by the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) in 2015, almost 50% of South Africans consumed entertainment predominantly via television broadcast (23.05% through free-to-air and 20.95% through pay TV). Though ripe for review considering how much local and international streaming has grown over the last few years, the NFVF findings are still significant, as Wi-Fi and mobile data are expensive in South Africa and reception is often poor in remote areas. This means that a television screening on a free-to-air broadcaster is particularly useful for a local impact campaign, and a film full of tension, murder, crime, conflict, and authentic emotion has the potential to reach, touch, and influence thousands, even millions of people.

But for certain impact goals, a target audience could be as small as one person: the person with the power to change a policy directly related to the issue. Murder in Paris (2021), for example, tells the story of the assassination in 1988 of Dulcie September, an anti-apartheid activist and the ANC representative to France. #JusticeForDulcie���a hashtag campaign to reopen the investigation into Dulcie���s murder���expresses one of the primary goals of the film���s ongoing impact campaign, which was designed by impact producer Miki Redelinghuys, director Enver Samuel, and Liezel Vermeulen. They partnered with the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) to mount a traveling exhibition dedicated to Dulcie���s life. When French President Emmanuel Macron was on a state visit to South Africa, NMF���s CEO took him on a tour of the exhibition. According to Samuel, ���he knew who Dulcie September was. He knew that she had been assassinated there, and he uttered���for us���the immortal words: ���We will look into it.��� The French lawyers,��� he added, ���are over the moon by this.���

As with case studies and academic publications, much of the impact training is currently driven by the Global North. Some offerings are free but generic, others are free but competitive and only open to filmmakers with films in production, and yet others are behind paywalls. Filmmakers in the Global South have benefited immensely from best practice models and tools shared by influential organizations like DocSociety through their Impact Field Guide, impact labs, and GoodPitch initiative. GoodPitch Local events, organized and hosted by filmmakers and organizations based in the region being served, have been increasing in popularity. GoodPitch Locals have been hosted in Kenya, Mexico, and Beirut, to name just a few global cities. Yet there is still a gap in resources and training specifically aimed at work for diverse audiences based in a variety of hard-to-reach locations���one that can only be filled by the Global South.

Sunshine Cinema, Africa���s first solar-powered cinema network, was founded in 2017 by filmmakers Sydelle Willow Smith and Rowan Pybus and aims to spark conversation through film while empowering unemployed youth through a comprehensive media training program. Sunshine Cinema and the University of Cape Town (UCT) Centre for Film and Media Studies (where I am a senior lecturer specializing in documentary film studies and film-centered social change strategy) recently co-created the ���Film Impact Screening Facilitator��� (or ���Impact Facilitator���) short course. Now in its second year, this six-month part-time UCT-certified course is offered 100% online but includes weekly synchronous (live) engagements and interaction with peers, mentors, and high-profile���predominantly African���industry guest speakers.

The course was designed with the aim of contributing to the creation and dissemination of knowledge from the Global South and���since applicants don���t have to meet university entry requirements and course fees are subsidized���to break down barriers to university entry. The course focus is squarely on impact facilitators: those who organize, market, and host impact film screenings; are often based in the communities they serve; and facilitate the conversations that are so critical to meaningful and measurable change.

Finding ways to catalyze open, constructive conversations about hard topics like injustice, conflict, trauma, climate change, and even public health has never been more important than now, when misinformation can be spread so quickly and widely via social���and even mainstream���media. The solution to this global problem is obviously not simple or singular. But one antidote is to bring people together in the same space (even if it���s virtual), to look each other in the eyes and talk it out. Seeing the right film at the right time can open audience members to new possibilities. It can make them think, feel, or act differently. It can even mobilize them to take action. Designing and implementing impact campaigns is an art and very hard work. And strategists, facilitators, and trainers in South Africa have been and continue to use film for change. It���s time to share our impact stories with each other���and the rest of the world.

An election about nothing

The leading political formations in Kenya's 2022 elections are born of each other, the result of many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness. William Ruto, who will most likely be the ruling party's candidate. Image credit the WTO via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

The 2022 Kenyan election is about nothing, argues John Githongo. Despite the high cost of political campaigns, the most expensive in the history of East and central Africa, the road to the 2022 election has not been a “contest of political ideas,” but, rather, is a reorganization of the political elite. Wangui Kimari curates this series of posts selected and republished here from The Elephant. The following article is from our series of reposts from The Elephant curated by editorial board member Wangui Kimari.

It would seem that Kenya is going into an election this August that���s largely about nothing. No big idea, no galvanizing issue. This hasn���t happened since the reintroduction of political pluralism in late 1991 and the elections that followed in 1992. That said, there are those who will be voting against either William S. Ruto or Raila A. Odinga come August. This group is committed and energized. It is seized by the election. Ironically, in the 2007 election Raila Odinga was the bogeyman of Kenyan politics���the man to fear, the master of chaos, etc. Today the very people who spewed that narrative are in wild reverse and the deputy president is the new bad guy in town. Unfortunately for him, Ruto has in the past seemed to embrace and project his darker side, to revel in the fear he engenders. As a bogeyman to the middle class, he has proven to be a good fit. That so many of his foes have met an untimely end adds to this dark myth.

Since 1992, and in 1997 and 2002 in particular, our elections have not lacked what some like to call ���the vision thing���. We were voting against Moi���s authoritarianism and the one-party state, yes, but we were also voting for political pluralism, a new constitution and devolution. We were voting for good governance, anti-corruption, human rights, transparency and all those other nice woolly things that have created the open society we enjoy today. In the meantime, a host of new governance arrangements have come into being. In 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta and William S. Ruto sought the vote under a new constitution promulgated in 2010 and went to the polls under the heavy cloud of the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments. The ���dynamic duo��� promised to spend money, to spend on everything for everyone. They did the same in 2017���no big idea, just spending���but this time round, the 2017 election failed dramatically after the Supreme Court annulled it, leading to a legitimacy deficit for the Jubilee government.

Prior to these two polls, there were clearly articulated political forces forged by Moi arrayed against the grand issues of the day and those who defined themselves for them���a mixture of the political opposition, media, civil society, the religious sector, etc. In 2022 this clarity is gone���emphatically so! The latter are in disarray while the former are resurgent.

As we head into the August polls what is striking is that, beyond the avowedly populist but ultimately hollow ���hustler��� narrative, there is as yet no other game in town in the contest of political ideas. There is no other big narrative. More importantly, there is no other compelling hopeful narrative. The chattering classes are appalled that so vacuous a narrative as the ���hustler��� and the ���wheelbarrow��� has gained enough traction with a wide section of, in particular, the youthful population. Indeed, for the first time in Kenya���s history, the sitting head of state apparently doesn���t command the electoral numbers in his own political backyard as a result of this trend. This could yet change but it has never been like this so late in the day. In the dark days of KANU, these inconveniences were fixed by simply rigging the polls. This habit has of course continued since the rigged polls of 2007.

The truth is that we are going into an election believing in nothing, standing for nothing. At best, we are searching. All the leading political formations are born of each other and birthed by many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness. At a slightly lower political level, those consumed by making money off the state, cutting deals, winning contracts and fiddling tenders can barely contain their excitement as August approaches and new snouts can dip into the trough.

Kenyans love their politics. They obsess about it. Or rather they used to.

An entire generation below 35 years of age has grown up that finds watching our political leaders on the seven o���clock news boring and, some even argue, detrimental to mental health. They catch the outrageous highlights on Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram. The thundering statements of ministers, the head of state and his deputy have been reduced to fleeting minutes of entertainment to be taken as seriously as a Nollywood thriller.

This transformation is not too much unlike others we are witnessing around the world as younger citizens lose faith in their leaders and institutions. Still, I was struck that, with 150 or so days to the next election, our major political formations have split into two behemoths���Azimio, led by Raila Odinga and President Kenyatta, and UDA, led by Deputy President Ruto. Despite this, polls show the number of undecideds and those refusing to respond regarding whom they���ll vote for in August hovering around 30 per cent. Experts I spoke to this week also find this figure curious. Despite the giant political split, that a third of voters remain ambivalent should, on the face of it, be sufficiently polarising to seize the minds of most Kenyans.

Before the landmark election of 2002, about four months to the polls, the number of undecideds was under 10 percent. In 2013, five months before the polls, the undecideds were around 3 percent. Days before the 2017 polls, the undecideds and those who said they were not sure who they would vote for were at 8 percent. The question is: Why does the number of undecideds remain high even though we effectively have a two-horse race going into the August 2022 poll? When I asked experts, they responded that a little probing by pollsters yielded responses from undecideds such as ���We���re waiting for their manifestos���, ���We���re waiting to learn more about their policies���, etc. Clearly, neither Azimio nor UDA has caught the imagination of the vast majority of Kenyans, allowing them making a clear decision. Either that or they don���t want to share their true views.

For our sins, we therefore find ourselves in a twilight zone of the kind Putin���s Grey Cardinal���Vladislav Surkov���manufactured for him. A situation where nothing was real or true and what seemed true could change. Where there was no difference between the opposition and the ruling party because Surkov funded both. Where public life was reduced to theater, reality could be manufactured and all politics had become ornate thespianism and make-believe. Kenya is not Russia. We have a freer media and an even more widely open social media. Surkov, however, created a system that seemed open, engaged in campaigns and held elections but where the outcome was predetermined. Too much freedom, he argued, was destabilizing, so he manufactured a fake Truman Show type of freedom that Russians, especially those who watched state-controlled TV, could participate in.

And so, in our version of political Vitimbi theater, we are confronted with confusing choices. Raila Odinga, the repository of progressive politics for the last four decades, has partnered with his former political arch-enemy and one-party progeny, Uhuru Kenyatta, to create the Azimio formation. It is rallied against Deputy President Ruto���s UDA party that hit the campaign trail in 2017 with a brilliant populist narrative of ���us versus them���, of ���hustlers versus dynasties���. The latter, however, lacks even the pretense of dealing with the major issues of the day. Indeed, UDA���s spokespersons have said that they don���t plan to deal with corruption at all! Raila Odinga has progressive pedigree���and here I admit I am subjective���and is clearly counting on both that and the trust of those who remember all he has struggled for to win the presidency. This is tempered by profound fears among progressives that our political victories���such as the constitution���are about to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, that the eating machine that has pushed our public debt to US$100 billion is the most organized formation of our political reality. The defining issues of yesteryear, such as the constitution, corruption, the very essentials of democracy, deepening poverty and the cost of living, are being handled far more gingerly by the political class this time round.

This political mishmash and the lack of clarity could in part explain the resounding lack of genuine excitement in our politics among Kenyans. Add to this the impact of COVID-19, the dramatic deepening of economic inequality, increases in the cost of living and poverty, and it���s understandable that Kenyans seem just tired with it all. The con has been exposed as a con, an empty debe making noises that are incoherent and sometimes amusing, as they say. Still, it does not help that we have entered the most expensive campaign in the history of East and Central Africa with no grand issues to define it. The 2017 election cost US$1 billion and was a washout, shredding the legitimacy of the political elite. Now we find ourselves in the curious twilight zone of Putin���s Gray Cardinal���a lot money being spent, a lot of campaigning underway. For what? What���s the big change being promised beyond a reorganization of the elite on the deckchairs of the Titanic? Kenyans are no longer being inspired with ideas but with things���we���ll build a stadium, a hospital, a road, a school, an airport, etc. And of course, the elite has these contracts ���under control���, as they say. But it seems we haven���t the faintest idea what will be taught in those schools and what kind of Kenyans they will produce. Where the roads lead to and why. The era of big ideas would seem to have been put on pause for now.