Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 11

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony���offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals. Kwame Brenya. Image courtesy Yaw Asare.

Due to economic challenges in Africa, many young people have resorted to leaving the continent in search of greener pastures. Some escape these challenges by studying overseas; others find labor opportunities and resort to using dangerous routes into Europe or the Americas or to neighboring states (like Ghanaians in Nigeria) or elsewhere in Africa (South Africa or North Africa, particularly Morocco and Tunisia). The latter are often halfway houses to a final destination in Europe or North America.

The story of one such migrant���s journey is the theme animating ���Four Days in Faso,��� a four-track EP by Ghanaian highlife singer, Kwame Brenya. The lyrics are partly autobiographical; Brenya tells us his story of his attempt to jakpa (escape) in a form reminiscent of Akan folklore���Ananses��m���accompanied by the sound of plaintive highlife guitar strings and drums. Four Days in Faso is Brenya���s third EP.

Brenya���s second EP utilized a similar folktale form. We learned of the misfortune of a man who left his village in search of his manhood or money, as the two are seen to reinforce each other. This time, Brenya brings us along with him on his misfortune as he seeks to leave the continent by way of Senegal; his failure and subsequent return to Ghana are laden with hurdles.

We do not just learn of his misfortune, but Four Days in Faso also gives the listener a grasp into the challenges faced by those living inside the borders of the West African regional integration organization, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). ECOWAS functions as a regional integration unit that allows for economic cooperation among West African member states and the free movement of people and goods within the region. Members of ECOWAS have the right���on paper at least���to move through its member states freely. However, anyone who has traveled across these borders will notice how restrictive and transactional traveling within ECOWAS states is.

In Four Days in Faso, Brenya tells of being denied a visa to Thailand while he was in Senegal. The singer is searching for greener pastures far away from the warmth of the land of Africa into distant lands whose promises are merely vague. He is denied the much-needed visa. Disappointed, Brenya (or the character he raps about) grudgingly decides to return to Ghana. However, Brenya had spent all his savings journeying from Ghana to Senegal. His journey to Senegal and his stay during the visa process also reveal to him the fallacy of Pan-Africanism: the ideology that brings us together as Black and African people. Manhandled by security operatives, Brenya is constantly reminded that he does not belong in each country he finds himself in. Pan-Africanism is unable to save him from the extortionary clutches of these security operatives as he is arrested simply for not providing a residence permit identity card from Senegal, despite showing his identity cards from Ghana. He had to cough up huge sums of money to free himself and procure for himself this identity card. Brenya sings:

Ei! West Africa | Ei! West Africa
S�� y��ny�� baako | So we are not one people
Ghana dehye�� ab��y�� ��h��ho�� w�� Senegal | A royal from Ghana has become a stranger in Senegal

The constant harassment and the expensive visa process, leaves our Brenya broke. In the end, he must sell his ���disappointed suit��� to afford some money to pay his fare for the bus journey back home, as a week���s journey now becomes eight months.

Kwame Brenya is not only hustled by security operatives. Colonial language differences also hustle him. Brenya travels from a country that uses English as its official language to a country that uses French for official purposes. He is singled out for not knowing French. It also causes him to miss his bus.

The effect of African countries adopting colonial borders is revealed when Brenya finds himself in a town known as Hamile. Half the town lies in Ghana, while the other half is in Burkina Faso. He stands in the half located in Burkina Faso, unable to cross into Ghana due to the cost of crossing the border into Ghana by motorbike. He decides to cross the border via an unapproved route and is accosted by a Ghanaian immigration officer who demands money from him.

Kwame Brenya. Image courtesy Yaw Asare.

Anyone who has crossed borders in Africa by land will attest to their frustration at border checkpoints. In 2016, I traveled to Mali, where I was extorted at almost every checkpoint due to my Ghanaian passport. Tired of this happening, I protested the extortion at the border of Mali as I was exiting the country. The immigration official took out a whip and threatened to use it on me should I protest further. My confiscated passport was only returned to me after making an illegal payment. I have also experienced this form of extortion at the borders of Togo, Benin, and Senegal.

Unfortunately, regional integration efforts have not effectively facilitated the free movement of people and goods within regional blocs. Brenya���s album highlights the challenges of movement within the ECOWAS region. A strong sense of pan-Africanism among the masses can only emerge if people and their goods can move freely across the continent. As ECOWAS faces growing skepticism from the transitional governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, Kwame Brenya���s new album prompts us to consider another layer of regional integration. It calls for a critical reassessment of this structure, lest it loses touch with the people it aims to serve.

The global gateway to nowhere

Europe���s flagship development plan promises investment and partnership���but delivers debt, displacement, and old colonial patterns dressed up in green. Edited ISS040 image of the Strait of Gibraltar. Image credit Stuart Rankin via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

European development aid has entered a new phase of the European Union���s neocolonialist agenda. Its ���Global Gateway��� plan is a wishlist for infrastructure projects to be launched across the world by European companies, backed by liberal reforms to pave the way. At its heart: Africa, where at least half of all investments are set to land.

The Global Gateway was introduced by the EU���s technocratic institutions in Brussels as a branding exercise for a new direction for European aid in the world, following the cracks the COVID-19 pandemic revealed in Europe���s supply chains. In effect, this plan has sought to secure access to raw materials as well as energy with a view to reducing reliance on China���s minerals and Russia’s gas. This has entailed challenging China���s global infrastructure investments known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the growing geopolitical influence of Russia.

The headline goal is apparently to mobilize ���300 billion in global investments between 2021 and 2027, with ���150 billion in the pipeline for Africa. But it did not take long for details to emerge showing that not only were there no new funds put forward by the EU, but the so-called billions are to be conjured up through the old toolbox of loans from multilateral development banks and EU member states. Projects from these loans are now rebranded as the Global Gateway. To encourage these investments, the European Union offers a ���53 billion budget of guarantees, a kind of insurance to be paid out to those banks if projects fail, which is a rather rare case. It budgets just ���18 billion in grants to support the roll-out of this initiative. But even this money will support European corporations.

This sum pales in comparison to the $1.17 trillion China has already invested in the BRI, almost four times the EU���s projected investments under the Global Gateway. On top of that, the European Court of Auditors has already questioned whether the EU can mobilize the claimed sums.

In other words, Europe claims to support global development without actually committing any new or meaningful financial resources for much-needed infrastructure investments in low-income countries. This reflects the ���billions to trillions��� charade of the World Bank and the G7, which seeks to draw in private investments into so-called development projects���often structured to create opportunities for corporate profits. To sell this offer to the rest of the world, the Global Gateway is promoted as a package of high-quality initiatives rooted in European ���values and principles.��� Moreover, as European nations slash already underfunded development budgets and instead military spending, migration management, and the ���competitiveness��� of their clean technologies, the Global Gateway is gaining increasing traction as a new tool for pursuing European geopolitical interests, disguised as development finance.

Much like European neoliberal trade agreements, which have had a dramatic impact on local jobs and industries, the Global Gateway promotes privatization and liberalization. In the energy sector, this means more opportunities for European enterprises to construct renewable energy projects, such as solar power plants, backed by European development funds to compete with much cheaper Chinese alternatives.

In reality, these funds intend to help siphon off resources to Europe. Many renewable energy and hydrogen projects are designed to serve as energy imports for Europe, more than delivering affordable renewable energy for local communities. All the while, the African continent is facing an energy shortage, with 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone having no access to electricity. This includes the construction of SouthH2 Corridor, a 3,300km hydrogen pipeline from North Africa to Germany and Italy. Promoted during Europe���s energy crisis in 2022 under the guise of ���energy security��� and backed by its fossil fuel companies, the Global Gateway���s flagship project will exploit African land, water, and labor to feed Europe���s energy greed.

The extractive pathways are also to be facilitated by 11 logistical corridors of little value to African regional trade routes, which will form the backbone of European extraction of raw minerals. A prominent example is the Lobito Corridor in the DRC, Zambia, and Angola. This project, supported by the G7���including, so far, the Trump administration���aims at facilitating the fast transport of underpriced raw minerals extracted by multinational companies from the regional mines, sites marked by exploitative labor conditions, displacement, rights violations, and environmental destruction. The joint venture granted a 30-year concession to modernize and operate the old colonial railway, making up the Lobito Corridor, which includes companies already implicated in multiple scandals, such as the multinational commodity trader, Trafigura, involved in large bribery schemes in Angola and Brazil, and a billion-dollar fraud in Mongolia.

Despite paying lip service to local added value, these new European investment projects are not designed to support local productive capacity, include African companies, transfer technology and know-how, or create quality jobs. For instance, international and Kenyan trade unions estimated that a Global Gateway-branded project planning a roll-out of the electrified bus rapid transport system in Nairobi risks affecting half of the around 70,000 people working in the current local transport system. At the same time, the project will likely ensure buyers for European-made electric buses financed by European ���development��� loans.

The Global Gateway does not spare the recipient countries from the debt amassed through these projects. By design, it often falls on official promoters���often African politicians and companies, who then subcontract European companies and their subsidiaries to build the project. At the same time, it can allow national payment obligations that arise in the form of public-private partnerships (PPPs)���a key tool of the Global Gateway���to be kept off the books, encouraging a project model that inflates costs for governments who face limited access to loans.

To put it bluntly, Global Gateway is about persuading countries in the Global South to take up loans for projects that they do not need, for supposed benefits that they will not have. All of this conveniently allows the European countries to perpetuate centuries-old strategies rooted in exploitation, as well as to avoid reforms around debt to trade justice that would genuinely free up resources for the Global South countries.

Clearly, Europe can���t compete with Chinese investments. Chinese discourse promotes a much more ambitious local added value component. For instance, in its China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035, released in 2021, China committed to helping develop ���Made in Africa��� brands and supporting the local manufacturing sector. In 2023, the Chinese government reported 25 Chinese-funded industrial parks in Africa. The EU���s Global Gateway communication, on the contrary, is all about supporting European companies. And while there are undoubtedly problems of due diligence standards, geopolitical influence, and debt in Chinese infrastructure investments���which could make European finance more attractive���risks begin to emerge in these EU projects, too. A Global Gateway raw materials partnership with Europe, concluded with Rwanda to source raw materials, is still in place, despite the UN accusations that Rwanda has been smuggling the minerals from the DRC, where it is also involved in an armed conflict. This puts in question Europe���s carefully constructed narrative of Global Gateway���s high standards, which it claims should distinguish it from the Chinese BRI.

Europe is facing the limits of its neoliberal economic model, manifesting itself as a crisis of energy or a greed for raw minerals to boost industrial production and competitiveness. But making Africa pay the price for European prosperity is akin to the old colonial model, including dragging the continent into its conflicts.

The simple truth is that global justice can���t be replaced by yet another blueprint for exploitation, disguised as development, and sold as debt. Instead of going to its own companies, European development finance should underwrite real risks, like crop failures from climate impacts, unavailability of affordable sustainable energy, or a lack of local productive capacity and new technologies, and not the fears of rich European shareholders chasing satisfactory returns.

Instead of deals made by handshakes with presidents, it���s time for a radical power shift away from European capitals towards the Global South, and centered on the demands of local actors like unions and civil society.

What Portugal forgets

In 'Tales of Oblivion,' Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory. Still from Tales of Oblivion via Mubi.

The writings of French philosopher Ernest Renan decisively contributed to our understanding of nationalism worldwide, and that forgetting is an essential part of any process of nation-formation. This is because the crystallization of a nation is hardly separable from violence, either in the form of revolution or anti-colonialism. What makes a nation, Renan famously argued, is the willingness to forget and move forward in forging national allegiances. Being together, in this regard, comes down to the capacity of a particular group with specific and demarcated national boundaries to forget the process through which they came about. Only through this can a territorially bound nation coexist peacefully.

Renan wrote this almost 150 years ago, and since then, so much has changed in the theory and practice of nationalism. However, it does not require a stretch of the imagination to see in Dulce Fernandes��� film a critique of such a view. It is not lightly, I suppose, that Fernandes called her new film Contos de Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion). She is no stranger to working with painful subjects, particularly those that involve memory, as in the case of the traumatic memories of the Cubans that fought in Angola, explored in Cartas de Angola (2011). Tales of Oblivion also focuses on memory or the kinds of memory that a particular nation, the Portuguese, in this instance, decided to forget, or not to honor, such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade��� specifically how the trade connected faraway places on the Atlantic coasts of Africa and the Americas, and also involved continental Portugal. So, this is the part of the history that the Portuguese nation would rather forget.

Fernandes exposes something deeper and more unsettling���how certain histories have been suppressed or silenced, and how they manifest in the myths that traverse Portuguese literature from Luiz de Cam��es to Fernando Pessoa and beyond. This literature has the sea as its major trope, celebrating the adventure and courage of the Portuguese character and how it was instrumental to the ���discovery��� of the New World. However, what is missing here is how this process has contributed to one of the most dramatic and consequential longue dur��e events in history, the Atlantic Slave Trade.

As such, silence and distortion are implicit in the sustained recreations of Portuguese mythology. Dulce���s film is not just about slavery or the slave trade, but also about the present day���how silence and the repression of the past are conducive to racism, or the negation of the extent to which race is central to the formation of Portugal.

What instigates such a reflective film is an excavation (to make way for a parking lot) in Lagos, a city in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. The excavations revealed that the location of the parking lot sat upon a 15th-century landfill, containing human skeletal remains. Those remains were subjected to tests, and it was determined that they belonged to Africans who might have been enslaved by Portugal and brought to the Lagos area. Since the burials of those remains can be dated to the time between 1420 and 1480, it is logical to assert that Portugal was the destination of the slave trade before the option to Brazil had been opened up.

One would expect such a discovery to prompt a reckoning in Portugal, in which the past would be seriously addressed and an alternative history perhaps explored. In the Soviet Union, Cambodia, or Guin��-Bissau, such discoveries prompted cataclysmic change. The fact that this was not the case in Lagos only shows the extent to which those parts of Portuguese history are still deeply repressed. Fernandes takes time to show the handling of the remains (including thousands of human bones) through oral statements of those involved in excavating, exhuming, and cataloguing them. The remains were removed, the parking lot construction continued, and a commemorative plaque was added to signal the site of such an important archeological discovery.

Fernandes���s motivation lies elsewhere, and as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that she is less interested in the discursive space opened up by such a discovery than in the historical ramifications of such archeological findings. Fernandes painstakingly reveals the names of many of the Africans enslaved in Portugal, and how they were transported in the caravels and galleons invested in such sea voyages. This is a piece of corrective history because Portugal has taken so much pride in its long maritime history���an Odyssey reproduced on public buildings and in metro stations, without reference to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Her interest, then, is in subtly showing the presence of black people in historical and present-day Portugal. A careful listener would detect hints of African accents in the background voices in the long sequences that show Pra��a do Com��rcio (Commerce Square) in Lisbon; or that Denise Viana, a Portuguese black woman, narrates the long sequences of the sea; or even the suggestion that there is a connection between slavery in continental Portugal and the implementation of the harsh labor laws in the late 19th century. This is how history can be claimed and how history can be retold otherwise.

Fernandes could have found a more realistic and documentary way to deal with the topic��� involving more experts and talking heads, for instance. However, she has chosen to present the work poetically and evocatively. The film comprises long sequences depicting records and historical references gleaned from various archival sources.

Fernandes���s poetic film disrupts the mythopoetic narrative of the Portuguese nation. The problem here is not only of historical proportions, but also in how forgetting the presence of marginalized groups in the past obviates their marginalization in the present. In this disjuncture lies also the root of racism in contemporary Portugal.

Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation

Web3 utopians promised a sovereign future for the African diaspora���but what they delivered was a networking club for elites, wrapped in crypto-libertarian hype and Afro-futurist aesthetics. San Francisco, October 2024. Image �� UVL via Shutterstock.

On September 13, 2022, the co-founder of Afropolitan, Chika Uwazie, rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, loudly announcing their presence on the bullish frontier of Web3 start-ups. To its advocates, Web3 refers to an imagined future for the internet in which control is wrested from the giant tech companies by online communities facilitated by blockchain technologies. Others see it as just a vague vision bandied around by crypto boosters, and another version of the wealth-stratified status quo masquerading as revolution.

Afropolitan sees boundless potential in the ideas of Web3. Directly inspired by venture capitalist turned ���crypto-philosopher��� Balaji Srinivasan���s book The Network State (2022), Afropolitan envisions “a digital nation” that will grow out of its global community of diasporans working in tech. Although this began on the web���with 500 NFT founder-passports���given time, it will move into the real world through sovereign ���Afro towns.��� Afropolitan���s manifesto claims that ���in the long term, we plan to build a more extensive network of charter cities, similar to Singapore and Hong Kong, governed by the Afropolitan Network.���

It has now been three years since Afropolitan launched its digital nation idea in May 2022. So, what have they been up to since then? Uwazie and her co-founder, Eche Emole, recently launched the Afropolitan podcast in which they discuss business and romance as a way of reminding listeners to sign up for two services they launched in late 2024, Legacy, a dating service ($49 a month), and Mentoring, a one-to-one mentoring service (a 60-minute call with Uwazie costs $1864). Their other offering is Afropass, an app for booking events, such as a meetup at a rooftop bar in Oakland, California, or an evening of Zanzibari fine dining in nearby Alameda.

This does not add up to anything resembling a nation-state. Afropolitan was founded in 2016 as a networking and events company for wealthy diasporans in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it is still that. The “digital nation” idea is a hook to gain buy-in from Web3-obsessed venture capitalists���Afropolitan received $2.1 million of seed funding in 2022, including investment from Srinivasan. The idea is also directed at paying users who are asked to imagine a world of black abundance and are treated to Afro-futurist imagery, some of it taken straight from Wakanda.

It is clear why the lofty ambitions of Afropolitan have failed to come to fruition. It is extremely difficult and expensive to copy the services offered by a state and to develop highly urbanized sovereign territories. Nations are more complex than rooftop parties. Uwazie and Emole might claim that they just need more time and more investment. Probably, they never really intended to do any of this stuff. Nevertheless, their idea strongly resonates with the ongoing project of enclave urbanism in Africa and across the world, from the construction of gated suburbs to new city projects.

Wealthy ���Afropolitans��� don���t need to escape to a digital nation. New elite-oriented cities in the mold of Dubai, from Nigeria���s Eko Atlantic City to Idris Elba���s ambitious plans for Sherbro Island City in Sierra Leone, which I have written about elsewhere, offer high-end real estate speculation opportunities and visions of life apart from overpopulated, cramped, and decaying African cities.

These special economic zones or charter cities, which provide safe landing zones for mobile foreign capital, have been proliferating across the African continent and the world in recent decades. In Crack-Up Capitalism (2023), the historian Quinn Slobodian describes this fragmentation of the world into deregulated zones and the process by which libertarian dreams of replicating Hong Kong or Singapore many times over have already become a reality.

In a 2024 podcast interview, Balaji Srinivasan reimagined a future San Francisco as a place of ���tech zionism.��� Essentially, this is an apartheid of the tech-affiliated, he terms ���grays,��� backed by the police, and an underclass of Democrat voters and leftists that he terms ���blues.��� He imagined a ���gray pride parade��� protected by hovering AI drones made by Anduril, a California defense technology company. In this horrific evocation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, transplanted to the Bay Area, Srinivasan reveals a broader global truth about enclave urbanism projects, from Afropolitan to Sherbro Island City. These projects imagine a future of segregation, deregulation, and division in which the wealthy sequester themselves, while the growing underclass is subdued by ever-worsening automated violence.

The Bay Area has produced an unlikely alignment between African diasporans���fearful of their place in the Trump 2.0 project���and far-right techno-libertarians with a direct line to the White House, around the need to create spaces outside of the current system of nation-states. That Afropolitan has remained little more than an expensive way to network should not make us complacent about the strange coalitions and deepening inequalities that shape our societies, from California to Africa.

After the digging, who remembers?

In the aftermath of the Stilfontein mining tragedy, South Africa must confront not just policy failure but a deeper amnesia: the erasure of women, memory, and indigenous ethics from its extractive economy. A group of people with mining equipment at the underground platinum mine in Johannesburg, 2022. Image �� Wirestock Creators via Shutterstock.

In the shadows of South Africa���s mining landscape, thousands of shafts lie abandoned���resembling derelict waiting rooms for tragedies yet to unfold. One such tragedy occured in Stilfontein, North West, in 2024. By January 2025, under the state���s Operation Vala Umgodi, around 80 bodies of artisanal miners had been retrieved from an unused shaft of the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine. The number of emaciated, disoriented survivors who surfaced from the shaft was countless.

The Stilfontein disaster has been widely critiqued across society, with near-universal condemnation of the state���s public policy failures. This article argues that those failures are not exceptional but symptomatic of a deeper systemic crisis: the government���s approach to mine rehabilitation, and its erasure of women from South Africa���s mining narrative.

Founded in 1949 as a residential nucleus for gold mine labor, Stilfontein epitomizes the rise, fall, and unresolved legacy of a mineral-dependent economy. It stands as both archive and graveyard���testament to the depraved ambitions of the colonial industrial project, and a haunting reminder of democratic South Africa���s unfinished liberation imperative.

At its peak, Stilfontein���s gold mines generated billions in revenue, propping up the apartheid state. Yet across the homelands of Southern Africa, children waited for fathers who had lost their names���and their way back home���in the dark bellies of mine tunnels.

In the first decade of democracy, the gold mining industry declined sharply. As reserves dwindled, and faced with rising operational costs and a transforming national economy, many companies shuttered their operations���abandoning mine sites and the communities that surrounded them. By 2022, the auditor-general counted approximately 6,000 abandoned, unrehabilitated mines across the country.

At many of these sites, workers remained. Some stayed to extract residual minerals, too ashamed to return home empty-handed. Others had built new families in mining towns. Some had nowhere else to go. In this vacuum, new artisanal mining communities emerged: AmaZama Zama���meaning ���to repeatedly try.���

Too often, AmaZama Zama is misused to refer only to the men directly involved in extraction. But artisanal mining, particularly in unrehabilitated sites, is never an isolated activity. It exists within broader communities that include men, women, and children���each playing interdependent roles to support and sustain small-scale operations. In many ways, AmaZama Zama communities are wounded extensions of precolonial mining practice.

Before the rise of the colonial mining complex in the mid-1800s, South Africa���s indigenous communities engaged in small-scale mining for iron, copper, and gold. These practices were rooted in a philosophy that dignified the miner and honored the earth. Rituals were performed before and after extraction. But in the wake of colonialism and industrial abandon, today���s small-scale mining communities are criminalized, their existence flattened into tropes of illegality and violence���raising, for many, the uncomfortable question of how much has changed between apartheid and the democratic era.

The state���s response to artisanal mining has followed two tracks: the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Policy (2022), which seeks to formalize the sector, and Operation Vala Umgodi (2023), which seeks to eliminate illegal operations. The latter is a multi-departmental enforcement effort that includes sealing shaft entrances, cutting off supply routes, and arresting miners. The operation has reportedly led to thousands of arrests, deportations, and the seizure of firearms, ammunition, cash, explosives, and minerals. With its mandate set to expire in May 2025, its long-term impact remains uncertain.

Legally, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) places the responsibility for mine rehabilitation on the mining rights holder, requiring them to set aside financial guarantees. Yet the ongoing proliferation of abandoned sites reveals the limits of this legal framework���and the absence of deeper cultural memory around what rehabilitation once meant.

As the Sanusi Credo Mutwa explained, for many African communities, the earth was never a resource to be exploited but a living being to be honored and restored:

For many centuries the black people of Africa have believed that the Earth was a woman, a living, merciful entity, a Great Mother who allowed us to dig deep into her sacred flesh in search of minerals that ensured our survival in this world��� after the people of Africa had dug a mine and worked that mine for several decades, when the mineral they had been digging for was exhausted, the African people used to undertake the great task of refilling that mine back again… This is why, when the prospectors of the last century arrived in many parts of South Africa, they found that nearly all the ancient mines that had been worked by black people had been sealed afterwards. It happens because of this belief that the Earth is a gigantic woman whose wounds have to be healed and whose skirts have to be arranged after each outrage by human beings.

To proceed according to Mutwa���s logic is to accept that among its greatest feats, colonialism erased the sociocultural and historical memory of its victims. Under colonial rule, land and other sacred natural resources were commodified, and industry���especially mining���was masculinized. In post-1994 South Africa, artisanal mining is still often framed through the trope of the violent, gun-wielding, shirtless Black man, endlessly engaged in tribal warfare underground. Mutwa locates this phenomenon not in political conflict, but in memory:

You���ve often heard that in the mines in many parts of South Africa terrible fights often break out between miners of different tribes. These fights are due to a deep-rooted feeling of guilt, not to tribal animosity. Because each Black miner who goes underground has deep within his mind a feeling that he is committing a sacrilege. He feels guilty of rape, of incest, because he, being a man, should really not be allowed to enter the biggest woman of all, which is earth. This is why in African tradition most of the mining was done by barren women, because only women should injure the greatest woman of all.

Despite this profound history, when women���s roles are acknowledged in mining discourse, they are often relegated to the margins���framed as support structures to male protagonists. In Stilfontein, this gendered marginalization was vividly evident. Operations at Shaft 11 resembled two distinct, gendered worlds.

The first world was feminine: a tree-lined road leading to the shaft, where women gathered under the canopy of towering trees. They prayed, cooked, waited, searched���creating a fragile thread of hope. Yet even when engaged by the media, their role in a vision of the earth as a divinely feminine Great Mother was left unexplored.

The second world was the shaft precinct itself: dusty or muddy, depending on the weather, surrounded by armed and anxious members of the South African Police Service. Its air was heavy with anticipated violence. At the entrance stood young men���visibly poor, malnourished, desperate-eyed���pulling in chorus on a long harness, patched together every few meters, each tear and repair a record of danger barely survived.

The gendered geography of Stilfontein is a shameful reminder of the memory loss inflicted during the colonial encounter. Yet at the same time, and perhaps as an act of liberation, it offers an opportunity for the democratic state to rethink its approach to mine rehabilitation. In a truly postcolonial South Africa, abandoned mines should not be tolerated. Nor should artisanal and small-scale mining continue to be criminalized. Women���s intuitive connection to land and community must be seen not as supplementary but central to any meaningful process of mine rehabilitation.

In May 2025, the South African Human Rights Commission will convene a national inquiry on artisanal and small-scale mining, mine rehabilitation, and Operation Vala Umgodi, among other related matters. In light of the systemic crisis rooted in unrehabilitated mines, this inquiry will dig deeper into the efficacy of the state���s legislative, policy, and programmatic responses. Central to this process will be assessing what tools are needed to deliver real liberation���liberation from the aftershocks of colonial violence still imprinted on the land, its people, and the environment.

The commission is inviting submissions from individuals and groups across public, private, academic, and civil society sectors. These may take the form of research, policy analysis, investigative reports, testimonies, proposals, poems, essays, or other expressions of knowledge. What is needed now is not only critique but collective reimagining. And perhaps, in that act of remembering, something like healing can begin.

Velvet rebellions

The oppositional sartorial lens of Congolese sapeurs exposes the limits and frailties of representation work in New York's Met Gala. Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, 2017. Image �� Vandelay Industries via Shutterstock.

In Brazzaville, they appear like apparitions. A plume of dust lifts as they walk���one in a double-breasted canary-yellow suit, another in crimson patent-leather shoes so bright they catch the sun like mirrors. Neckerchiefs whisper softly at their throats. They do not rush. They glide���deliberately, impossibly, like men with nowhere else to be and everything to prove. Children trail behind. Vendors pause mid-transaction. A boulevard transforms into a proscenium. This is not performance. This is La Sape.

La Soci��t�� des Ambianceurs et des Personnes ��l��gantes (La Sape). The Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. A name that might sound like a punchline���until you see the reverence with which these men treat their own presence. In a city where water runs intermittently and power outages punctuate the days, elegance has become a form of infrastructure. They dress, steadfastly, as though tomorrow is inevitable.

La Sape emerged in 1920s Brazzaville, capital of what is now the Republic of the Congo, rooted equally in satire and subversion. Congolese men, domestic workers to French colonizers, mimicked the tailored attire of their employers���not in tribute but in irony. Clothing became costumes of satire, reflecting and inverting colonial hierarchies. By the 1940s, Congolese intellectuals���the ��volu��s���embraced sapeur fashion, embedding it within their anticolonial critiques. By the 1960s, as independence arrived and regional economies wavered, Congolese migrants faced exclusion in Paris and London. La Sape provided refuge and identity, paralleling Harlem Renaissance dandyism, and blossoming further under Mobutu Sese Seko���s restrictive sartorial edicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And yet���when this year���s Met Gala turned its gaze toward Black dandyism, these men were curiously absent. There were tributes to zoot suits and Harlem Renaissance rebels. There were nods to Baldwin, Andr�� Leon Talley, and Dapper Dan���but La Sape, in all of its bold color, remained curiously absent. Why does this vivid African expression of dandyism remain banished from memory? What does it mean to canonize Black elegance in New York yet forget those who built runways from rubble?

The spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art���s Costume Institute ���Superfine: Tailoring Black Style��� offers a fitting backdrop to revisit La Sape���s legacy. The creative vision draws from scholar Monica L. Miller���s pivotal text Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, in which Miller describes Black dandyism as ���a strategy and a tool to rethink identity, to reimagine the self in a different context���to really push a boundary on who and what counts as human.��� Tyler Mitchell���s catalog editorial, honey-lit and sepia-soaked, previewed a celebration that felt both reverent and futuristic. Fashion critics already hail it as historic. Yet, within these powerful early glimpses, La Sape���a movement embodying dandyism not merely as homage but as defiance���felt noticeably absent. This omission does more than leave out a vibrant thread of style; it subtly reshapes our understanding of Black dandyism by narrowing it to Western and diasporic expressions. Without La Sape, we risk reinforcing a hierarchy of aesthetic legitimacy that sidelines African origins and innovations in favor of what is more legible to Western institutions.

As actress Ayo Edebiri remarked in Vogue and GQ���s collaboration editorial, ���There���s nothing more dandy than an African man dressed to the nines, really showing out, going to a party or a wedding.��� Her look, while not a direct reference to La Sape, paid homage to her Nigerian heritage through coral beads honoring the Edo tribe. Elsewhere, singer Tems wore an Ankara gown and Afrobeats icon Burna Boy donned an oxblood suit and cape���both designed by British Ghanaian designer Ozwald Boateng. Notably, Savannah James wore a custom pinstripe gown by Congolese designer Anifa Mvuemba of Hanifa, who has long used her platform to spotlight Congolese artistry and conflict���a take on the Harlem zoot suit, reimagined with a mermaid silhouette and midriff cutout. While these gestures nodded to African sartorial traditions, there was no flicker of Brazzaville, no echo of Kinshasa, and minimal mention of the sapeur, who has dressed like a sovereign for decades in a system that offered him no kingdom.

There is power in what we saw���refusals coded in velvet, declarations hidden in the drape of a sleeve. Jeremy O. Harris���s sharply tailored navy Balmain look, for instance, summoned the spirits of Frederick Douglass and Beau Brummell, merging political dignity with dandy lineage. But the power on display still passed through institutional filters: curated, citational, palatable. The dandyism we were shown leaned heavily on the diasporic afterlives of the West. It canonized what could be archived, and overlooked what has always lived outside the museum���on street corners, in the hunger of self-invention. That���s where La Sape lives.

It is that very oppositional lens that structures the sartorial ontology of a sapeur. The Congo crisis, which emerged from decolonial efforts and Mobutu Sese Seko���s ���authenticit����� campaign in reaction to that process, would only deepen La Sape���s radical edge. Mobutu banned Western dress and championed a state-sanctioned aesthetic meant to symbolize national pride. But sapeurs refused to trade their elegance for ideology. They donned their banned suits not in hidden corners, but defiantly, turning the street into a kind of catwalk of refusal. As historian Didier Gondola and others have written, the elegance of the sapeur was never simply about imitation; it was a strategic act of reappropriation. The clothing became a medium for contesting visibility and authority, a stage on which colonial hierarchy was undone thread by thread. Photographers like Tariq Zaidi and Aude Osnowycz distilled this defiance into image. Zaidi���s series Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo shows men emerging from daily labor not exhausted but resplendent. Osnowycz labels them ���dandy activists,��� dressing sharply despite societal disregard, their style both spectacle and structure. These visuals don���t just illustrate���they reinforce the core argument: La Sape is less about emulating power than performing a refusal so vivid it cannot be ignored.

La Sape, as scholar Dominic Thomas argues, cannot be fully understood outside the dynamic loop between Brazzaville, Kinshasa, and Paris. It is not only a local style but a transnational ritual, one that turns the journey���especially the symbolic return from France���into an act of sartorial initiation. The sapeur becomes a traveler and a translator, bridging two worlds not just with fabric but with flair. As Thomas notes, the act of dressing well in postcolonial spaces becomes symbolic warfare���a stylized duel between imposed identities and chosen ones, between being seen and being dismissed. In this context, mimicry becomes menace: The sapeur is not copying Europe���he is outdressing it, haunting its imperial legacy with every creased pant leg and silk pocket square. Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou describes the sapeur as someone determined to be unforgettable���composed in contradiction, a living poem assembled in silk, an elegance that disarms as it dazzles.

Today, African and diasporic designers are no longer on the fringes of fashion���they are shaping its very form. From Grace Wales Bonner���s cerebral tailoring (which was on peak display throughout the evening) to Kenneth Ize���s handwoven futurism, from Thebe Magugu���s archival storytelling to Imane Ayissi���s couture interventions���African fashion is not responding to global trends; it is setting them. A true celebration of La Sape would acknowledge this shift���but the archive has its biases, as do its curators.

Traditionally homosocial, La Sape���s gendered silhouette is now evolving. Women sapeuses and queer communities are now remaking the movement from within, not asking for entry, but redesigning the architecture. Brazzaville���s sapeuses, like Jocelyne Loubayi, Grace Bula, and Nathalie Biteni, queer the tradition���insisting elegance is genderless. Vice���s profile underscores their command: ���We are not copying men; we are reminding them elegance has no gender.��� These sapeuses mirror the legacy of Gladys Bentley, the Harlem blues singer who, in the 1920s, wore white tuxedos and top hats while pounding piano keys in speakeasies. Teyana Taylor also embodies this legacy today, as a master of gender play who juxtaposes the softness of feminine beauty with garments structured in the tradition of masculine tailoring.

Monica Miller���s work, too often flattened into a Harlem-centered study, underscores dandyism as global diasporic self-definition: Baldwin���s Parisian trench coat meets Accra���s kente-wrapped sneakers. Harlem and Africa have long been in conversation, each a regional wellspring of culture, resources, and style. That dialogue continues today������Little Senegal��� is woven into Harlem���s fabric just as surely as the tailors that give the neighborhood its signature flair.

Harlem style exemplifies this intersection of innovation and reconstruction, a world where you declare with each step that beauty, too, is sovereignty. Dapper Dan���s genius, for instance, lies not merely in wearing designer clothing but in tearing it apart and reassembling it into something unmistakably his own���a practice that forced major fashion houses to reckon with him. This ethos mirrors La Sape���s rejection of conformity and embrace of reinvention. Both use fashion as a radical language of transformation, defying exclusion not by assimilation but by aesthetic audacity.

Nearby the Met, Harlem sidewalks burst with Senegalese boubous and Nigerian gele crowns���visual sovereignty that museums can���t contain. Movements like #BlackOutEid have turned these celebrations into aesthetic declarations���asserting that to be Black, Muslim, and immaculately adorned is a refusal in itself. Dapper Dan may be Harlem royalty, but so is someone���s uncle from Dakar in cobalt silk. Just across the East River from the Met���where the tailoring of Blackness was on full curatorial display���Black and African migrants line up outside overcrowded shelters, the target of caustic rhetoric and policy failure. These textures of dissonant spectacle exist side by side; the city���s capability to exalt Black elegance in one zip code while surveilling Black arrival in another is not a contradiction, but a structure.

The contrast deepens when you follow the money. This year���s Met Gala raised a record-breaking $31 million���while there are reports that the museum itself supposedly receives $30 million in annual public funding from New York City. With a $6 billion endowment, the Met is not a scrappy arts organization���it���s an empire of cultural capital. And yet, that wealth is rarely channeled toward nurturing the next Andr�� Leon Talley, Dapper Dan, or James Baldwin. It stages Black style but does not always invest in the ecosystems that sustain it, leaving its creative embers to languish in the hopes of being celebrated in its sartorial afterlife.

This notion of correction���of repositioning the archive���is where a surprising resonance begins to emerge. Ballroom culture, born in the 1980s from the Black and Latinx queer and trans communities of Harlem and the Bronx, may seem distant from La Sape, but its logic is familiar. In abandoned halls and rented clubs, ballroom participants walked categories like Butch Queen Realness and Femme Queen Performance���not as pageantry, but as protest. They built houses, invented kinship, and styled themselves into existence. Watching the mainstream evolution of ballroom culture���the language, the movement, the visual vernacular���has made it newly legible as an echo to La Sape, both serving as mediums that subvert institutional beauty politics to their sartorial whims. Where the sapeur parades on the boulevard, the ballroom child walks the broken floor with equal poise. Both aesthetic forms insist on visibility. Both respond to social erasure by composing their own mythologies. La Sape is a protest in silk. Ballroom is a prayer stitched in sequins and sweat. They are not the same���but when the noise fades, the rhythm underneath is uncannily familiar. Neither, coincidentally enough, got their just due on the Met Gala floor, despite being prime fodder for the Afrofuturistic fantasies that tailoring can offer.

Zora Neale Hurston provides a framework for understanding this urgency. In her seminal 1934 essay ���Characteristics of Negro Expression,��� which inspired the critical framework behind ���Superfine,��� she writes: ���The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression.��� For Hurston, adornment was never superficial���it was foundational, signaling dignity, creativity, and self-respect. It manifested in language, gestures, and embellishments above all, as a refusal to remain invisible. La Sape doesn���t merely echo this idea; it elevates adornment into philosophy itself.

Guillaume Diop���s collaboration with Valentino and Gabonese stylist Kevin Lanoy perhaps offered the most compelling vision of a distinctly African interpretation of dandyism at the Met. The Senegalese model and ballet dancer���celebrated as the first Black principal dancer at the Paris Opera���wore a lush emerald silk boubou beneath a heavy, textured coat and flowing white trousers. The ensemble beautifully wove together the elegance of the Harlem Renaissance, the deconstructed ethos of Dapper Dan, the vibrant confidence of the sapeur, and an undeniably regal futurism, emphasizing how these diverse sartorial expressions are, at their core, part of the same ongoing conversation.

La Sape isn���t merely commerce but choreography, lineage and defiance stitched into form. It is not merely what we wear, but how we carry what history denied us. In Francophone Africa, La Sape has become more than an aesthetic. It is a visual code, a sartorial shorthand���a grammar of recognition and resistance through which elegance is articulated, debated, and made iconic. The rustle, the plume, the deep and low senteur���the atmospheric memory that follows a body committed to not disappearing.

More than aesthetic, La Sape is epistemological���it produces knowledge through gesture, silhouette, and subversion, small acts that challenge the archive itself. They say: We exist. We insist. And we arrive dressed for tomorrow���pushing, as Monica Miller reminds us, against the boundaries of who and what counts as human. La Sape resists museumification precisely because it lives to deconstruct and rebuild, thriving where curatorial logic falters; it is Hurston���s theory, sung into a new century.

For the sapeurs, the sapeuses, the ballroom children, the dandy prophets, and the musicians���those who stitched their power into seams and choruses long before institutions took note���the world is a mirror. But they no longer wait for its reflection. They are dancing past it. Striding through it. Sovereign in silk. And as the Met seeks to stage the future of Black style, it would do well to remember: Some have been dressing for that future all along.

South Africa’s American refugees

Cape Town���s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops���but behind the matcha lattes and ���social impact days��� lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality. Photo by Ethan Smith on Unsplash.

While US President Donald Trump has given Afrikaners refugee status in the United States on the false premise that they are victims of human rights abuses at the hands of the South African state, Americans live comfortably in Cape Town as ���digital nomads.���

The term digital nomad refers to people who work remotely while traveling and living abroad. Like the swallow, the digital nomad migrates to the southern hemisphere, to places like Cape Town, in search of summer. Digital nomads are modern, cosmopolitan individuals familiar with global travel and easily move between London, New York, Mexico City, and Berlin���thanks to their Euro-American passports. This phenomenon is yet another expression of the logic of global capitalism. The signifier ���digital nomad��� is merely an ideological expression designating an economic migrant distinguished by their level of social capital and class position.

Let���s imagine the typical existence of an American digital nomad in Cape Town. During the average day, they would take their phone and Zoom calls over coffee at the local roastery or a Bistro on the Atlantic Seaboard. After Pilates class, they grab a matcha and stroll on the Sea Point promenade, where they record and upload a TikTok video about how incredibly cheap Cape Town is: ���Only $3 for a matcha, Cape Town is so cheap!��� In the evening, they would explore what the city���s nightlife has to offer. At $1 to R19, the buying power of digital nomads who possess dollars and pounds significantly outweighs that of the average South African.

Cape Town is widely regarded as a leading destination for both tourists and digital nomads. The Central Business District (CBD), encompassing the city���s downtown core and adjacent areas, along with the Atlantic Seaboard���an affluent coastal region���features a diverse array of caf��s, restaurants, farmers markets, and natural landscapes, offering a quality of life and aesthetic appeal that is seldom paralleled globally. At the start of 2025, declared Cape Town the ���best city in the world.��� The article describes the allure of Cape Town I am accustomed to hearing when I visit home:

Where else in the world can you hang out with a colony of African penguins, taste some of the world���s finest wines, stroll along Blue Flag beaches, enjoy stunning views from atop one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, and sample some of the most eclectic nightlife and vibes in the world��� all in one day?

It is difficult to disagree with the description; however, what TimeOut does not tell its readers is the appalling conditions that the majority of the city���s people live in. Apartheid���s social engineering and urban planning in Cape Town continue to be a daily reality for the majority of its inhabitants, along with social ills that stem from decades of neglect by city, provincial, and national authorities. Recent statistics by the South African Police Services (SAPS) show that the Western Cape recorded the highest number of gang-related murders, with 270 people being killed from October to December 2024.

The economically rightwing party that governs Cape Town, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is uninterested in undoing Cape Town���s racial and class inequalities. Despite the recent social housing project completed in Pinelands, bordering Thornton, the multi-racial neighbouring suburb, there has not been the development of social housing in the inner city or on the Atlantic Seaboard. In fact, in 2016, after nearly 4,000 submissions of public support for the development of social housing, the City of Cape Town sold the Tafelberg Property (formerly the Tafelberg Remedial School) located in the upmarket coastal suburb of Sea Point to a private developer. The sale of the site was what led to the emergence of the social movement, Reclaim the City. After a court challenge in 2020, the Western Cape High Court set aside the sale of the property, citing that the provincial government and City of Cape Town did not meet their constitutional and legislative obligations to address spatial Apartheid in Cape Town. In January 2025, the City of Cape Town announced ���plans��� to develop a portion of the site into affordable and mixed-use housing. However, this is a minor concession in the grand scheme of things and does very little to materially transform the city.

Latest figures show that Cape Town has 25,816 Airbnb listings. This is more than any other global city. The ease with which properties can be rented means that many digital nomads use Airbnb to secure accommodation in the city. However, this knock-on effect is that many ordinary Capetonians can no longer afford to live in the inner city, exacerbating the already fraught housing crisis. In response to this and other multiple crises, the University of Cape Town collective Dismantling the Ivory Tower has likened digital nomads to modern colonizers in recent outrage on Instagram.

If anything, the digital nomad phenomenon and Cape Town���s housing crisis tell us something about capitalism. It demonstrates that capital is infinitely creative in finding new ways of remaking itself and generating value in the process. The housing crisis in Cape Town represents a larger trend in the development of capitalism in South Africa and elsewhere. If historical conquest and settler-colonialism account for capitalism���s original sin, then the aggressive intrusion of capital into Cape Town���s housing market signifies a continuation by other means. To be clear, the development of capitalism has not ended; it continues, mutates, and displaces whatever is in its path. Capitalism does not respect heritage and history, not least if they fall outside its logic and interests.

In ���selling��� Cape Town, which turns on discourses of ���tourism��� and ���foreign direct investment,��� new avenues for commodification are identified and exploited. Since capital cannot produce value by itself, it appropriates value through processes that are nothing short of violent. Such is the case in Cape Town today. South Africa���s coalition government, also known as the Government of National Unity���including the ANC, nominally committed to undoing South Africa���s racial legacies and a phalanx of rightwing parties, including the DA, working hard to stall that���encourages digital nomads to make South Africa their temporary home.

The Department of Home Affairs, the government department responsible for managing migration in South Africa, has introduced a new work visa called the ���Nomad Visa,��� designed to attract skilled foreign workers with an annual income of higher than R650,796 (about $34,000; which lands you roughly in the top 10% of all earners in South Africa). Including a short-term tax exemption, the Nomad Visa allows remote workers to live in and work in South Africa for up to three years.

Digital nomads lose little sleep over who they displace in the process of consumption and extraction. ���Nomad Week,��� a conference that aims to sell the idea of Cape Town to potential digital nomads, took place on March 9, 2025. At a measly $170 (just under 4,000 Rands) for a ticket, you can ���Join 300+ digital nomads from around the world for a week of inspiration, connection, and impact in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.��� Nomad Week boasted “visionary keynote speakers,” ���unconference sessions,��� ���outdoor adventures,��� ���vibrant social events,��� and a ���Social Impact Day.��� On their website, under the heading ���Social Impact Day���Let���s Give Back!��� we learn that the founder of Nomad Week is a white South African and that the people of South Africa are ���near & dear to her.��� A glance at their social media shows a mostly white world.

As a gesture of goodwill, I suppose, one of the ���activities��� includes donating food parcels to poor black children and donating some of their labor to painting an ���underprivileged school,��� which in South Africa, means black. Accompanying the description of the ���Social Impact Day��� is a stock photograph of a group of miscellaneous smiling African children. A classic NGO trope, the undifferentiated African child appeals to the perverse conscience of the digital nomad so that they can proudly claim that they did their part in ���giving back.���

The digital nomad phenomenon is but the latest stage in the development of the logic of capitalism in South Africa, and it is linked to international migration. For many of these digital nomads, the desire to leave global cities is driven by an economic reality that they can no longer afford to live a good life in those cities. There is, therefore, not much difference between the Zimbabwean service worker who migrates to South Africa to work low-wage jobs and the New Yorker who lives on the Atlantic Seaboard���except the state views the latter as ���more economically valuable��� than the former. And that the New Yorker is usually white. The basis on which both migrate is economic.

It is time to rethink how we view and talk about migrants and tourists. When does a tourist stop being a tourist? When do they become a migrant? The term digital nomad is misleading; their extractive economic engagement is secured by class, race, and social capital. It is also perhaps too early to compare the digital nomad to a modern coloniser. The digital nomad is purely a consumer class, while adding nothing of value to the economy or the country they inhabit (their whole schtick is working for some international company from the comfort of another country). Their consumption is contingent on their ability to be in the country, and as such, it is not sustainable in the long term.

Although not all digital nomads are alike���that is to say, the freelancer from S��o Paulo might be in a different economic position relative to someone from Europe or the US���they both constitute examples of the logic of how multiple crises play a role in migration. The digital nomad is an economic migrant who has been spat out of the circuit of global capitalism in search of a better, more affordable life where capital is less concentrated. As an economic migrant, it is more profitable for the digital nomad to live in a Global South city with a comparatively low standard of living while earning a salary (in dollars, pounds, or euros) that allows for a life of leisure.

Herein lies the rub: while the traditional economic migrant adds value to the local economy (in the form of selling labor power), the digital nomad merely lives and consumes. And in South Africa, migrant workers from other African countries are often subjected to xenophobic violence. There is nothing ���nomadic��� about the digital nomad, except that their frequent movements from one city to another are occasioned by the necessity to flout visa and tax regulations. At the end of the day, the digital nomad wants to live a good life, but at what cost? When the government creates special visa categories for people who do not contribute productively to the economy, we should be concerned.

The other route to the American dream

With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US���via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility. Darien Province of Panama, 2019. Image �� Gonzalo Bell via Shutterstock.

A growing number of Mauritanians���along with other West and Central African nationalities, such as Cameroonians, Congolese, Nigerians, and Senegalese���are illegally migrating to the United States using Latin American countries as their main gateway. Between January and April 2019, the Mexican police arrested 1,934 illegal African migrants, three times more than the previous year in the same period. In November 2023, 900 illegal Mauritanian migrants were detained in the US, pending expulsion.

Unemployment and poverty are the main drivers for Mauritanians attempting to migrate illegally, as is often the case for Africans. According to Mauritanian government figures, unemployment is estimated at 37 percent, and the average monthly income per capita is USD 138. Other factors include racism towards black Mauritanians and ongoing human rights violations, and the likelihood of persecution should they be forced to return. In 2021, a letter signed by 165 American non-governmental organizations called on former US President Joe Biden to grant an 18-month temporary protection status to Mauritanians on these grounds.

Although a minority among migrants, women are not immune to this wave of migration, as illustrated by the example of Souma Mint Mohamed Wely, a Mauritanian feminist activist who reached the US through the Mexican border wall. Videos on WhatsApp and TikTok showing Mauritanian migrants in Latin America���trying to cross into the US or already having reached the US���further incentivize young Mauritanians to achieve the American dream. For many of the viewers, watching their fellow citizens in the US relaying their personal success stories is an indication that anyone can complete a similar migration journey.

Reaching the US is, however, a very long journey for Mauritanians. From Nouakchott, Mauritanians can fly via Istanbul or Madrid to Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, Brazil, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and El Salvador without a visa. Once there, they can apply for a visa, which they may or may not get. When they arrive in Latin America, their onward journey is often organized by Arabic speakers.

Migrating illegally from Nouakchott to the US is also extremely expensive. The migrants pay different sums of money to different people throughout their journey, including bribes to police at borders. Altogether, it can cost between USD 6,000 and USD 8,000 per person. To finance this, many Mauritanians borrow money from friends and relatives. Some sell their cars, houses, or plots of land. In some cases, migrants are forced to work during their stay in Latin America to fund their onward journey.

The journey is also very dangerous. From Ecuador, for instance, the migrants must travel by car or bus through the vast forests of Venezuela, Panama, and Colombia to eventually reach Mexico, their penultimate destination. According to the International Organization for Migration, between January and July 2023, 4,100 African migrants crossed the Dari��n jungle from Colombia to Panama. But not all hazards are on land. In 2018, 25 African migrants were rescued by fishermen off the coast of Brazil after a 35-day, 3,000-kilometer-long journey across the Atlantic on a 12-meter-long catamaran.

Local bandits are another danger. In January 2023, three Mauritanians were kidnapped by a Mexican gang who demanded USD 8,000 for the release of each kidnapped person. In July 2023, 22 African migrants���19 Mauritanians and three Senegalese���were freed by Mexican police after being kidnapped at the Mexican-US border. However, some officers in the Mexican police are also believed to collude with gangs involved in kidnapping migrants.

While most want to reach the US, some African migrants try to settle in a Latin American country such as Brazil. Because of the country���s more flexible migration laws, 26,207 Africans applied for asylum in Brazil in 2018���almost twice the 2016 figures.

This migration route through Latin America to the US shows that Africans are prepared to take risks for a perceived better future for themselves and their families. And as long as their living conditions in Mauritania, Senegal, and elsewhere in Africa remain dire, this trend will probably continue. African governments are primarily responsible for addressing this situation. Tighter border controls are one part of the solution; more importantly, though, is improving socioeconomic conditions in migrants��� countries of origin to ensure a better future for them there. Governments can encourage local and foreign investors to invest in labor-productive projects that would provide jobs that pay a living wage.�� A crucial part of responding to the very complex challenges of irregular migration must also be sought at an international level with counterparts in transit and destination countries.

Many African migrants traveling to the US do so because they find it increasingly difficult and dangerous to travel to Europe. European governments should acknowledge that, due to their ageing populations and labor shortages, their economies require migrants, and they should open legal migration routes for young African migrants. In comparison, about 1 in 6 people in the United States is age 65 and over. The percentage of those age 65 and over remains, however, lower than Japan or European countries.

Given the growing trans-America trend, Latin American countries should also be better equipped to help African migrants. While most West African migrants aim to enter the US, closer cooperation between West African governments and Mexico would afford migrants more protection.

Asylum seeker centers could be established on the Mexico-US border to house West African migrants and even give them the opportunity to return home. Refugee centers could also be established within Latin American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which would allow African migrants to apply for asylum in those countries, instead of continuing on the hazardous journey to the US.

The politics of class from above

In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them���but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power. Samia Suluhu Hassan political ad in Stone Town, Zanzibar, 2024. Image �� Andy Soloman via Shutterstock.

A friend recently recalled���laughing as she did���her personal clash with the Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner, the most senior presidential appointee within Tanzania���s commercial capital. The friend in question resides in one of Dar���s (in)famous informal settlements, where she organizes with a co-op of wavujajasho���working people, or literally, ���those who sweat.���

She had been invited to an official meeting where the Regional Commissioner, as guest of honor, advertised a new government loan scheme to some 300 attendees, all hailing from low-income groups. Such meetings are common and often follow a set script. State officials celebrate a new government initiative to help wananchi, ordinary citizens, and wananchi are expected to respond favorably, clapping on cue.

This friend, though, upset the script. When given an opportunity to speak, she recalled past loan schemes, often unveiled ahead of elections. People were made to pay expensive administrative fees to banks yet never received any loans. It was, she said, the government and the banks who benefited from these initiatives, not the people.

Her words resonated powerfully, triggering a wave of applause, this time spontaneous. The Regional Commissioner quickly instructed journalists present not to report the incident; the stage-managed event must be brought back under control. Even if momentarily, though, the crowd had changed. It broke with its prescribed role and offered its own, autonomous response.

The friend���s story points to a more widespread���yet often overlooked���phenomenon. There is a growing interest in Africa���s urban middle classes and their political relevance. By contrast, the relevance���even the existence���of working-class subjects is more debated. Certainly, urban working-class identities are diverse and are further complicated by criss-crossing religious, ethnic, and gender cleavages.

But as explored in a recent article with my coauthor, Sabatho Nyamsenda, urban informal workers��� collective identities, self-expression, and group solidarities���their class formation���are a focus of political contestation, including top-down interventions. State actors���like the Dar Regional Commissioner in our friend���s story���seek to manipulate this class formation, variously uniting, dividing, and co-opting urban informal workers.

Why? The contrasting approaches of two Tanzanian presidents, John Pombe Magufuli (2015���2021) and Samia Suluhu Hassan (2021���present), help answer this question. Each adapted their approach to urban informal workers to reinforce their broader strategies of urban and national political dominance, as well as their preferred balance of inter-class relations.

Magufuli, the ���bulldozer��� president, centralized power at the elite level while making populist appeals to classes of urban poor. Following Magufuli���s death, Samia soon broke with her predecessor; she reintegrated excluded elite factions even as she oversaw widespread, violent evictions of informal workers from the streets. Only later, amidst fears of falling popularity, did her government moderate its approach.

What did this look like in more detail? We argue that, in a manner reminiscent of colonial efforts to control a then-emerging “urban mass,��� leaders today adapt approaches to regulating labor informality���especially workers��� access to urban space and their symbolic recognition���that then influence class formation.

Magufuli granted informal workers unprecedented access to urban space and appealed broadly to wanyonge���the poor, or literally, ���the hanged.��� Urban informal workers responded to their shared material conditions���open access to the street���and their official recognition by affirming a more encompassing collective identity, a shared ���we,��� and an appreciation for Magufuli. ���Truly, Magufuli looked after the weak,��� commented one moto-taxi driver, while another agreed, ���He helped the low down,��� adding, ���not high-class people.���

Samia���s government meanwhile���after the initial wave of evictions���has segmented urban space, recognizing certain ���respectable��� categories of workers while excluding others. This differentiating and co-opting strategy has encouraged ���micro-hierarchies��� among informal workers. Focusing again on moto-taxi drivers, some with access to formally recognized parking areas may now self-identify as ���transport officers,��� adopting a new, state-sanctioned label. These ���transport officers��� then distinguish themselves from drivers without official recognition who remain wahuni (hooligans) and occupy ���another level,��� presumably a lower level.

Far from irrelevant, then, class formation among urban informal workers remains a focus of top-down manipulation, a key aim being to reinforce incumbent leaders��� political dominance. These efforts are part of balancing inter-class interests and adapting legitimation strategies accordingly. Crucially, though, top-down class manipulation makes sense only as a response to bottom-up action and reaction���to urban protests, to fears of electoral retribution, to strikes, and the like.

An appreciation of the political relevance of class manipulation has important implications for how we think about democratic politics���or the lack thereof���across Africa���s rapidly expanding cities. Beyond our focus on Tanzania, a more authoritarian context, a survey of the wider literature suggests that regime type per se may not decisively impact informal workers��� experience of fluctuating state interventions���by turns repressive, by turns co-opting���nor parallel forms of class manipulation. Similar regulatory interventions recur in relatively democratic contexts as well as authoritarian ones. Moreover, both democratic and authoritarian incumbents appear to adapt their regulatory interventions to reinforce their political dominance.

There is also a danger that conventional measures of democracy versus authoritarianism, while not clearly explaining variation in the treatment of informal workers, actually obscure class-differentiated experiences of freedom and repression in the city. Tanzania offers an example of this. President Magufuli���s authoritarianism was rightly decried, both at home and abroad, albeit with little attention paid to the experience of informal workers. By contrast, many initially welcomed Samia as a would-be democratic reformer, again though, largely overlooking urban workers��� testimony of dispossession and loss of freedom, or her later divide-and-rule strategies.

There are various ways of accounting for this persistent oversight. The sociologist Lo��c Wacquant refers to a ���dictatorship over the poor��� and qualifies even established democracies as ���centaur states������humane to the affluent on top and beastly to the poor at the bottom. Yet where scholars distinguish cleanly between more democratic and authoritarian rule, there can be no ���centaurs���; indeed, such clean distinctions���which also tend to focus on national rather than subnational levels���do not encourage a study of how states stratify citizenship along the dimensions of race, class, and geography.

Top-down class manipulation is one important way that incumbent leaders may stratify citizenship. They balance interests across class even as they seek to manipulate class formation among informal workers; they variously unite, divide, and ultimately seek to constrain class as a basis for more autonomous claim-making, or ���popular��� democracy.

Amidst Africa���s rapid urbanization, class manipulation may become ever more relevant to strategies of both city- and national-level political dominance. It deserves our attention���not only to understand the exercise of political power, but also to capture contestation over working-class subjectivities, and to make visible class-differentiated experiences of the state, including where democratic regimes may conceal an authoritarian underbelly.

Green hydrogen, old colonialism

The EU���s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession. Wind turbine farm Tunisia. Image credit Dana Smillie for the World Bank via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Europe���s quest for access to more green hydrogen regained momentum on January 21, 2025, when a Joint Declaration of Intent (JDoI) was signed in Rome by representatives from Germany, Algeria, Italy, Austria, and Tunisia. The agreement concerns the Southern Hydrogen Corridor project, a proposed pipeline network for transporting gaseous hydrogen from North Africa to Europe. Spanning up to 4,000km, this mega-project has been described as one of ���the most important renewable energy projects of our time��� by Philib Nimmermann, Germany���s Secretary of State at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. One of the most revealing remarks in Nimmermann���s statement was: ���Today, we are strengthening this new bridge between North Africa and Europe through the Joint Declaration of Intent. This enables us to utilize North Africa���s immense potential for renewable energy.��� His words make the project���s underlying objective clear: securing access to North Africa���s abundant wind and solar energy along with its land and water while ensuring that profits and primary commodities flow to industrial centers in Europe.

Recently, more than 90 organizations worldwide signed a joint statement denouncing the South H2 Corridor as a new colonial project that exacerbates global inequalities and reinforces extractivist dynamics, benefiting Europe at the expense of local communities. This is not the first mega-project of its kind. The ELMED interconnection between Italy and Tunisia is another large-scale infrastructure project to export ���green electricity��� from North Africa to Europe. Tunisia, through its public institutions, has taken approximately ���390 million in loans to finance its share of the project, further deepening the country’s debt crisis. In 2023, data showed that the value of outstanding public debt continued to rise, reaching 79.8% of Tunisia���s GDP. Ironically, Tunisia’s internal energy crisis makes such export-driven projects highly questionable. The country faces a severe energy deficit: as of January 2024, the country relied on imports for 74% of its energy needs, and renewable energy sources accounted for barely 5% of the national energy mix. The export-oriented hydrogen projects won���t improve this situation because they will absorb renewable electricity capacities and, thereby, decelerate the domestic energy transition.

Investing in energy export infrastructure, especially through debt financing, is highly unwise when Tunisia itself struggles to meet its domestic energy needs. Moreover, these projects primarily benefit the private sector, particularly multinational corporations such as TotalEnergies and ACWA Power, which signed Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) last year to develop green hydrogen production. Through the Southern Hydrogen Corridor, these companies will export hydrogen to Europe, helping German and other European industries meet their decarbonization commitments while shifting the responsibility and burden of climate action onto countries in the South.

The rhetoric of a ���green transition��� promoted by European leaders only reinforces this extractive logic. ���Green baby green,��� were the words of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S��nchez in response to Trump���s push for greater investment in fossil fuels. Unlike the US approach, Spain and other EU countries are committed (so far) to the European Green Deal and the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Under this framework, the EU���s 2020 Hydrogen Strategy and the REPowerEU plan aim to promote renewable and low-carbon hydrogen, reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels and decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors.

The EU sees green hydrogen as a silver bullet for decarbonization. However, it can only produce half of its projected needs in 2030 and plans to import around 10 million tons of green hydrogen from other countries to meet the shortfall. This approach shifts the burden of decarbonization onto the Global South while locking exporting countries into carbon-intensive economic models. Instead of using renewables for domestic energy transitions, they are pressured to prioritize hydrogen exports.

This economic model perpetuates economic unequal exchange where profits, resources, and technological leadership remain concentrated in the Global North. Ironically, this reality is clearly acknowledged in a report by the German development agency GIZ, produced in collaboration with Tunisia���s Ministry of Energy, Industry, and Mines, and published on April 21, 2021. The report, on Tunisia���s ���Power-to-X��� opportunities, states: ���If green hydrogen is produced using imported technologies and exported as a raw material, with the further processing steps located in the recipient countries, this would create limited jobs and value in Tunisia.���

This is precisely what is happening today: profit-driven corporations are signing MoUs with the Tunisian government to establish green hydrogen production for export. This export-driven strategy, backed and funded by GIZ, forms the core of Tunisia���s national hydrogen strategy, which is further entrenching the country in an extractivist model rather than fostering a just energy transition. The Clean Industrial Deal, the EU���s strategy to decarbonize industry, support clean tech, and enhance competitiveness through circularity and lower energy costs, was published on February 26, 2025, and states: ���Every person, community, and business should benefit from the clean transition. The Clean Industrial Deal therefore commits to a just transition that delivers quality jobs and empowers people.���

However, this promise applies only to businesses and citizens of the North. For the rest of us in southern countries, the so-called transition locks our economies into the lowest tiers of the value chain, while imposing severe socio-ecological costs, particularly concerning land, water, and energy resources.

In an interview in June 2024, the Director General of TotalEnergies in Tunisia claimed that hydrogen production would rely on seawater desalination rather than exploiting the country���s already scarce freshwater resources. Yet, Tunisia has not mastered the desalination technology, which may create more dependencies, and if used at a large scale, may also come with significant environmental consequences. The brine byproduct from desalination threatens marine biodiversity and endangers the blue economy.

Green hydrogen itself may not be inherently problematic, but the way it is being introduced in many countries of the Global South reinforces a new colonial economic model, one that is based on accumulation by dispossession, where wealth and benefits are extracted while costs are externalized onto already vulnerable communities. While this extractive model unfolds on a national and international level, it is in places like Gabes that its social and ecological consequences are felt most acutely. In southern Tunisia, the first pilot project for producing green ammonia from green hydrogen is set to be implemented in Gabes, funded by a grant from Germany���s KFW Bank. Gabes, a coastal city with one of the largest industrial bases in Tunisia, has been a hub for fertilizer production since 1972. Currently, Tunisia imports 100% of its ammonia from Spain and Russia to support its phosphate-based fertilizer industry. Although local ammonia production may appear to reduce import dependency, this project remains experimental and is unlikely to significantly lessen Tunisia���s reliance on imported ammonia. The primary focus of Tunisia���s national hydrogen strategy continues to be the export of raw hydrogen, rather than addressing the country���s domestic industrial needs.

Nevertheless, ���greening��� a chemical industry that has caused an ecocide in Gabes raises many eyebrows. It also triggers concerns from the local population and environmentalists, who fear that these green hydrogen/ammonia project announcements may be the prelude to more environmental disasters.

For more than 50 years, Gabes has suffered from severe pollution caused by the Tunisian Chemical Group���s operations. Against this backdrop, the local population, civil society groups, and ultras movements strongly oppose any new projects linked to the chemical industry. On December 2, 2024, an event titled ���Gabes: A Hub for Green Hydrogen Production and Its Derivatives��� was attended by high-ranking officials, the French ambassador, and representatives from French corporations TotalEnergies and Hydrogen France. In response, local ultras groups staged protests the following day, blocking roads to express their rejection of the announced project. Their stance was clear: Gabes has endured decades of environmental degradation and suffering, and they refuse to go through the same cycle again, even in the name of so-called ���sustainability.���The Gabes green hydrogen project is closely tied to the continuing operations of the Tunisian Chemical Group, which contradicts the 2017 government decision to dismantle and relocate the industry away from the city. The Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Industry has pushed forward with this plan without consulting the local community or allowing any public debate on the matter. In response, local civil society organizations issued a statement and circulated a petition directed at the President, to which there has been no response. Additionally, movements like the Stop Pollution Movement, which has been leading the counter-hegemonic narrative in the city over the past year, issued a statement on March 6, 2025 denouncing the unjust measures taken by the Ministry of Mines, Energy, and Industry. These include the removal of phosphogypsum from the hazardous materials list and the refusal to halt the implementation of a green ammonia plant in the city. All of this exerted pressure on parliamentary deputies representing Gabes, who then applied pressure on the Minister by questioning her during a parliamentary session on March 12, 2025.

On April 24 of this year, marking the International Day Against Imperialism and Colonialism, militants from the Stop Pollution Movement and the Working Group for Energy Democracy organized a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Mines, Energy, and Industry in Tunisia. The protest brought together members of the General Union of Tunisian Students, trade unionists, progressive groups, leftist political parties, and climate justice activists. They denounced the export-oriented green hydrogen project, the commodification and privatization of the energy sector, and the way the energy transition has been hijacked by multinational corporations, resulting in land grabbing and threatening Tunisia���s energy sovereignty. Notably, this year���s protest attracted a larger turnout than last year���s action in front of the GIZ energy cluster, reflecting the organizers��� intensified mobilization to confront and expose energy colonialism and imperialism on this symbolic day.

If Tunisia���s current path locks it deeper into dependency, what alternative future might we imagine? In contrast to the current trajectory of export-oriented hydrogen strategies, we should strive to fulfill the vision of Cheikh Anta Diop, the renowned Senegalese historian and Pan African political thinker, who offered a radically different path rooted in sovereignty, solidarity, and scientific leadership. Rather than positioning Africa as a site of cheap resource extraction for Europe���s energy transition, his call remains urgent today: to build African green industries that prioritize local needs, foster regional integration, and share innovation on equal terms, not as raw commodities but as contributions to a just and decolonial energy future.

There is an urgent need to develop and push for energy sovereignty, as well as to open a serious discussion about the energy question in Tunisia and across other African countries. This includes the necessity of building sovereign and democratic alternative pathways, rooted in the struggle for public ownership and energy justice.

Trade unions and progressive forces must play a central role in advocating for a real green industrialization in the Global South, which challenges the imperial powers scrambling to exploit our resources for their interests, while trapping us in an infernal cycle of economic, financial, and technological dependency.

At the local level, we must support grassroots resistance and amplify debates around critical issues, such as the legalised land grabs carried out by multinational corporations. It is essential to forge strong connections between trade unions and the climate/environmental justice movement to build a united front. For the climate justice movement in the Global North, there is a pressing responsibility to go beyond techno-optimism and market-based fixes. The focus must shift toward meaningful internationalist climate action that confronts imperialism (sometimes disguised under a green cloak) and dismantles the dynamics of neocolonialism.