Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 12
May 11, 2025
Trump tariffs and US Imperialism
Newsapaper stand in Nottinghamshire, UK April 2025. Image �� Steve Travelguide via Shutterstock. On April 2, 2025, Donald Trump declared a ���Day of Liberation��� and slapped massive tariffs on most countries���excluding Russia but including a 50% tariff on Lesotho. The standard Left argument is that Trump���s tariffs represent capital���s warfare against the working class in response to the crisis of global capitalism. Of course, there���s some validity to that view, but it tends to operate at an excessively high level of abstraction.
More immediately, it doesn���t explain the ferocious backlash to tariffs from multiple fractions of capital, both within and beyond the Trump coalition. After the tariff tsunami, Elon Musk called Trump���s economic advisor Peter Navarro ���a moron and dumber than a sack of bricks.��� Meanwhile, liberal mainstream media outlets screamed bloody murder, portraying Trump not only as dumb but deranged. The frenzy only intensified when the stock market meltdown carried over into the bond market, which, as financial orthodoxy tells us, isn���t supposed to happen.
Trump responded by postponing most of the tariffs for 90 days, even as he ramped up the trade war with China. In just over a week, Wall Street went ballistic, the dollar rapidly devalued, Trump���s approval ratings tanked, and much of the Republican Party���and key fractions of capital���went into panic mode, even as they remained terrified of crossing him. These dynamics remain ongoing.
Trump���s tariffs are not merely erratic protectionist gestures. Rather, they form part of a blunt and confused arsenal aimed at dismantling post-Second World War US imperialism and replacing it with a brutal new form of nationalist global domination���one stripped of the trappings of ���soft power��� such as USAID. This multi-sided project emerges from factions within the New MAGA Coalition, and takes different���and often contradictory���forms.
Understanding these contradictions in their specificity is essential, not just for critique but for posing questions about new possibilities for organizing and alliance-building���not only in South Africa, but working towards a concrete internationalism, a topic to which we���ll return later.
The new MAGA coalitionSo, what is this New MAGA Coalition behind Trump 2.0? First, it includes fractions of capital that extend well beyond those who underwrote Trump 1.0���most notably Elon Musk and the South African ���PayPal mafia,��� along with the tech broligarchy so grotesquely on display at the inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other billionaires.
It also encompasses elements of the petty bourgeoisie and working class that go beyond Trump���s earlier mostly white cross-class base, as the late Mike Davis described in Catalyst in 2017. Most notably, sizable Latino communities in some US regions have come to identify with MAGA���vividly documented by Paola Ramos in her recent book on the Latino far right. Another notable addition in 2024: disaffected, mainly young Black men who joined the MAGA coalition.
What knits this awkward coalition together is a powerful anti-woke sentiment and a ferocious opposition to liberal DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives that proliferated after the nationwide Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020. David Walsh describes ���woke��� as a ���catch-all specter that could variously connote the ravages of state planning, the anarchism of street protests, or the godlessness of modern secular society���not an empty vessel, exactly, but a foil and common enemy against which a political coalition of often diametrically opposed interests could congeal,��� as he writes in Boston Review.
Also traveling under the anti-woke banner is unfiltered racism, patriarchy, and vicious heteronormativity���especially targeting trans people���all of which underscore the limits of elitist liberalism, as discussed on The Dig. These brutalities are now wrapped in a (mostly white) Christian Nationalist package that stretches back to Trump 1.0, but is being significantly re-elaborated in Trump 2.0.
What also distinguishes Trump 2.0 is its rooting in a far more coordinated and organized project of dismantling and privatizing the state, one that���s been in formation for several years. Its blueprint is a 920-page document titled ���Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,��� published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. It has come to be known as Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.
During the campaign, Trump denied having read it (probably true), but the steaming pile of executive orders he gleefully signed post-inauguration came straight out of it and continues to do so. Unlike Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0 has determined and coherent operatives behind it. They���re driving the juggernaut of destruction���most notably Russell Vought, head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget���despite the clown-car nature of most of Trump���s cabinet. Even if Musk were to depart for Mars brandishing his chainsaw, the scaffolding of Project 2025 appears firmly in place, at least on the surface.
But look a little closer and you���ll find that this scaffolding had a fatal weakness from the start. Scroll down to Chapter 26 on Trade, and two sharply opposed visions emerge.
In the section on ���Fair Trade,��� Navarro���Trump���s key pro-tariff advisor in both administrations���concludes that ���America gets fleeced every day in the global marketplace, both by a predatory Communist China and by an institutionally unfair and nonreciprocal WTO.��� Focusing on the large trade deficit by which the US imports significantly more than it exports, he asks: ���Might America even lose a broader hot war because it sent its defense industrial base abroad on the wings of a persistent trade deficit?��� The answer, for Navarro, is clear: tariffs are imperative to ���restore American greatness, both economically and militarily,��� by bringing manufacturing back home.
In the opposing section, ���The Case for Free Trade,��� Kent Lassman presents the classic conservative argument against protectionism. Declaring that ���American manufacturing is currently at an all-time high,��� he slams tariffs as a lose-lose-lose scenario: the tariff raiser loses access to affordable goods, the target country loses export markets, and retaliatory tariffs punish the instigator yet again. He also warns of the hidden costs of tariff dodging. For Lassman, recent departures from free trade have damaged the US economy and ���weakened alliances that are necessary to contain threats from Russia and China.��� He calls for reaffirming ���openness, dynamism, and free trade��� as the pillars of continued US dominance into the next century.
These splits and contradictions have carried over into the tariff wars erupting within the MAGA coalition itself. There are now two distinct pro-tariff projects, both aimed at reconfiguring US imperialism. One is the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The other is a far more radical vision pursued by Steve Bannon and the wide array of popular forces he continues to mobilize.
Before unpacking these competing projects and their wider implications, it���s important to sketch briefly the key contours of US imperialism. The main pillars of American global power are a specific configuration of finance capital���with the US dollar as global reserve currency���backed by overwhelming military force.
Because key commodities such as oil and gold are priced in US dollars, all countries must hold dollars. Small open economies like South Africa operate at a distinct disadvantage. Meanwhile, the US can accumulate massive debt by issuing Treasury Bonds���a privilege no other country enjoys. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has spent over $30 trillion more than it has taken in.
China has played a key role in underwriting this system, using export earnings to purchase US debt, thereby lowering the cost of borrowing. At the same time, shrinking employment, stagnant wages, and rising inequality since the 1980s pushed much of the US population into a frenzy of consumption and spiraling personal debt. This dynamic relies on large trade deficits���precisely what significant factions of the MAGA coalition see as the greatest threat to American power.
Back in 2019, historian Adam Tooze asked, ���Is this the end of the American Century?��� His answer: not quite. Financial and military power remained intact. But what had collapsed was any claim that American democracy could serve as a political model. What we were facing, he wrote, was ���a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.��� When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he sought to resuscitate the liberal international order���an order whose cruel hypocrisies are now starkly exposed in US support for Israel���s war on Gaza, as Adam Hanieh has brilliantly analyzed. Trump 2.0, through its tariffs and trade wars, is in effect attacking the financial pillar of US global power with a sledgehammer���even if this is not quite what some of his pro-tariff advisors intended.
Tariffing the end of empire?Unlike Navarro and others who see the trade deficit as the central existential threat to the US, the authors of the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord are primarily concerned with what they regard as the gross overvaluation of the dollar. Their aim, per a New York Times report, is to use:
tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. This devaluation, the theory goes, would make U.S. exports more competitive, put pressure on China, and increase manufacturing in the United States.
In addition to Treasury Secretary Bessent, a key figure is Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in March 2025. Just after the 2024 election, Miran published ���A User���s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.��� In dense, economistic language that Trump has almost certainly never read, the 41-page document lays out the justifications and strategies for devaluing the dollar using threats of tariffs and defense pact withdrawals���country by country.
In short, Bessent and Miran envisage tariffs as part of a coercive negotiation strategy: to pressure countries into raising their currency values relative to the dollar, and to relocate key industries to the US. These include sectors deemed vital to national security, such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and military equipment. While the ���User���s Guide��� insists the dollar must remain the dominant currency, it also acknowledges growing efforts to find alternatives,�� such as the Chinese renminbi or a potential BRICS currency. Though such efforts are deemed doomed to fail, Miran asserts, ���alternative reserve assets like gold or cryptocurrencies will likely benefit.���
The Mar-a-Lago Accord, when read alongside the ���User���s Guide,��� affirms the substantial advantages of the US���s reserve currency status���cheap borrowing and global power projection among them. But it argues that the costs are now outweighing the benefits. ���As the economic burdens on America grow with global GDP outpacing American GDP,��� Miran writes, ���America finds it more difficult to underwrite global security, because the current account deficit grows and our ability to produce equipment becomes hollowed out.��� Hence, the push for policies that ���recapture some of the benefit our reserve provision conveys to trading partners and connect this economic burden sharing with defense burden sharing.���
Even so, the ���User���s Guide��� issues a sharp warning against disruption and volatility: ���There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America���s benefit, but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.���
Naturally, the preposterous tariffs that Trump unveiled on April 2 (reputedly dreamed up by Navarro) run directly counter to these cautious recommendations���leaving Bessent and Miran to bluster about the President���s ���extraordinary negotiating skills.��� As the markets melted down and Trump threatened to sack the chair of the Federal Reserve while ramping up attacks on China, Bessent increasingly found himself in the awkward position of having to leash the rampaging orange bulldog.
In the ensuing economic, political, and military chaos, the technocratic pipe dream of an orderly reconfiguration of US imperial power has imploded, leaving the remains of the Mar-a-Lago Accord scattered across the manicured grounds of the White House. What persists, however, is a hard core of MAGA support for a far more radical popular project: one aimed at dismantling US imperialism as we���ve known it.
Nationalist-populist opposition to US EmpireIn a striking profile from October 2024, James Pogue shows how Stephen Bannon ���has turned his immensely influential War Room show ��� into a cross between a daily troop muster and a policy training school, which he uses to tutor millions of ���peasants,��� as he likes to phrase his target demographic, on how this global power structure actually functions.���
He quotes Bannon insisting, ���To be serious, you���ve got to be anti-imperial.��� People are waking up, he claims: ���Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious. A working-class audience can understand that something���s not right with the system, but they can���t put their finger on it.��� Calling his listeners ���the army of the awakened,��� Bannon has made it his mission to lay it all bare, Pogue reports.
Before unpacking the substance of this anti-imperialism, some context matters. Bannon is not best understood as a singular ���great man��� but as a figurehead within a global network of right-wing Christian nationalist forces, rooted in the US and deeply embedded in the MAGA bloc. He���s also closely allied with Peter Navarro���both were jailed in 2024 for contempt after refusing to testify in the January 6 congressional inquiry. While Navarro maintains Trump���s ear despite mockery from parts of MAGA, Bannon is far more articulate and intellectually potent, and actively shapes the movement���s populist base.
In an article from 2020, I outlined how Bannon was instrumental in constructing the popular forces that helped propel Trump���s 2016 victory. First, he hijacked the anti-Obama Tea Party from the Koch brothers and delivered it to Trump. Second, he played a major role in stoking backlash to bipartisan immigration reform efforts in 2013���linking xenophobia to anti-trade sentiment and mobilizing it before these issues had fully entered the political mainstream. In a 2017 interview, Bannon recalled saying:
I said, look, trade is number 100 on the list of issues, nobody ever talks about it, and immigration is like two or three, but if we ran a campaign that really focused on the economic issues in this country and really got people to understand how trade is so important, and immigration are inextricably linked… we could really set this thing on fire.
Trump, he claims, became the mouthpiece for these ideas by ���[deploying] a very plain-spoken vernacular.���
Third, Bannon seized control of key media outlets���including Breitbart News, massively funded by the Mercer family���which he used to destroy enemies both inside and outside the GOP, while pushing his conservative, anti-globalist, traditionalist nationalism. By the 2016 election, Breitbart had far outstripped Fox News, dominating the right-wing media ecosystem. Today, Bannon reportedly believes he wields more power through War Room than he ever did as Trump���s campaign architect or White House strategist.
The ���anti-imperial common sense��� Bannon communicates to his ���peasant��� audience includes���but far exceeds���Navarro���s tariffs, which he supports. It also goes well beyond the Mar-a-Lago Accord. Rather than merely twisting global systems of finance and military power in America���s favor, Bannon and his fellow hyper-nationalists seek to obliterate altogether the post-1980s form of US imperialism.
What exactly does this anti-imperialism consist of? It has a solid���and glittering���material base. Bannon���s worldview is reportedly detailed in a multi-volume report titled The End of the Dollar Empire, available only via the Birch Gold Group, a firm that offers not just a gold-backed ETF but actual physical gold. Downloading the report requires entanglement with Birch Gold, so I passed. But listening to War Room podcasts, one can���t miss the constant exhortations to secure your IRA with Birch Gold in anticipation of a dollar collapse.
Bannon isn���t focused on trade deficits or dollar valuation alone. He���s obsessed with the entire dollar-based global order. As Pogue notes, it creates a perverse military incentive: ���It lets us finance huge expenditures on hypercomplex weapons and allows us to toss off hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine���s and Israel���s wars������even as it hollows out America���s ability to manufacture basic war mat��riel. Biden���s attempt to weaponize the dollar during the Ukraine war failed to crush the ruble, and raised a new alarm: that others might now see it���s possible to abandon the dollar entirely.
Pogue also interviews Samuel Finlay of the IM-1776 project, whose views align with Bannon���s. Finlay emphasizes ���rootedness��� and ���tradition,��� which he connects to a hatred of global capital and resistance to the military-industrial complex���a position that directly contradicts decades of Republican orthodoxy. People like Finlay, Pogue writes, have come to the same ���awakening��� Bannon is fomenting: that the system has betrayed those who believed in and served it���leaving them with NAFTA, fentanyl, and an elite that views their values as backward and dangerous.
War Room weaves these insights into a broader narrative. Disaffected veterans and others are fed a critique of ���the lords of Wall Street��� and ���the apartheid state of Silicon Valley.��� The message: elites own everything and have sold out to the Chinese Communist Party���thus funding the very forces attacking America. According to Bannon, we are now in a ���Time of War,��� one that dwarfs debates over trade, inflation, or price hikes.
So, how do the wild gyrations of post���Liberation Day fit into the Bannon-Navarro worldview? From their perspective, the unraveling of the ���Dollar Empire��� since April 2 looks like progress. As Pogue notes, Bannon and fellow populists across the West have come to embrace a multipolar world modeled on Russia���s strategic vision���one that displaces the American-led order Bannon believes has ravaged the US. On an April 25 episode of War Room Battleground, Bannon claimed that we are ���moving toward a new geopolitics of blocs.���
Yet the very Americans Bannon sees as crushed by the Dollar Empire are also most exposed to its chaotic dismantling. First, prices for the cheap imports that sustain the US economy���and low-income Americans in particular���are spiking. Second, as the dollar declines as reserve currency, government spending will be slashed. And who bears that burden? Early signs include proposals to gut Medicaid to help fund tax breaks for the rich. Third, rising automation will sharply undermine promises that reindustrialization will yield secure, high-wage jobs and revive devastated regions.
In short, the idea that a protectionist, isolationist, national capitalism���mashing up xenophobia, anti-globalism, Christian nationalism, and anti-elite rage���can deliver liberation is just as much of a pipedream as the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
Which brings me back to the central claim: understanding Trump���s tariffs as blunt weapons aimed at either reconfiguring or shattering US empire matters deeply for the Left, both in the US and globally. What we need is not nostalgia for the collapsing liberal order, nor Kamala-style ���politics of joy��� in the face of atrocities in Gaza. Instead, we need what Stefan Kipfer calls ���concrete internationalism.��� He develops the analysis with reference to current conditions in Canada, but with much broader transnational relevance. Distinguishing between nationalism and national-popular democratic projects, he insists that ���left national-popular projects can offer alternatives to nationalism only if they are components within larger internationalist strategies��� that reject the tendency of all nationalisms ���to demote emancipatory social questions of class, gender, and race.��� In South Africa, we are, of course, sharply aware of these dangers.
Trump���s tariff debacle and the ensuing meltdown have exposed the fragilities of the liberal international order, the absurdities and devastations of global capitalist dynamics, and the dangers of resurgent nationalisms and forms of fascism. Grappling with the limits and contradictions of a Bannonite ���anti-imperial common sense��� can help, I hope, to make space not only for protest and resistance, but also for envisaging and building toward a very different project of concrete socialist internationalism.
Revised version of a presentation to the Zabalaza for Socialism Conference on Coming to Terms with Trumpism: What Should the Global South Do? April 13, 2025.
May 9, 2025
Cinema against silence
Still from Furu. All images �� Fatou Ciss��. On November 7, 2024, elegantly dressed guests filled Magic Cin��ma (formerly Babemba) in Bamako, Mali, for the highly anticipated premiere of Furu, the debut narrative feature by Fatou Ciss��. Ciss��, a rising star of Malian cinema, first captured international attention with her 2022 documentary Hommage d���une fille �� son p��re, a moving tribute to her late father, the legendary filmmaker Souleymane Ciss��. It was met with acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the classics section.
In Furu, a bold tragicomedy, Ciss�� tackles the pervasive issue of forced marriage in Mali. Through the intertwined stories of two women, the director explores the tensions between tradition and modernity. Since the mid-twentieth century, marriage customs in African societies have undergone gradual and far-reaching transformations; however, furu ye wajibi ye (���marriage is an obligation���) remains a deeply rooted belief. Furu reveals how this enduring sense of duty takes a heavy toll on young men and women across both rural and urban Mali.
Drawing on real stories experienced by women she knows, Ciss�� weaves a fictional narrative that shines a light on the lived struggles of Malian women. With Furu, she not only fights for their rights but also extends her father���s legacy by engaging with his seminal works���in particular, Den Muso, the elder Ciss�����s 1975 film which exposed social injustices faced by women in Malian society. Both films follow young girls caught in the grip of a patriarchal society who, instead of receiving support, are punished by their communities���in the name of tradition and in service to maintaining the social order.
During the evening screening of Furu, the audience���especially young women���responded with enthusiasm. They laughed, applauded, and audibly supported the film���s protagonists, Tou and Ami, as they navigated moments of tension, irony, and defiance. Ciss�� weaves humor into key scenes, particularly in the dynamic between Ami and her mother and grandmother, all involved in the generational craft of producing traditional Malian bogolan fabrics. Their spirited exchanges highlight generational divides with warmth and wit. Similarly, the interactions between Tou and her much older husband���whom she was forced to marry by her father to protect the family���s honor after Tou became pregnant out of wedlock���are portrayed with a touch of irony. These lighter moments offer brief respite from the film���s heavy themes and allow viewers to connect more deeply with the young women at its center. At the end of the film, as the credits rolled, a 27-year-old male friend who had recently been forced into marriage by his family confided to me that he was deeply moved. He spoke of the injustice faced by young people like himself, deprived of opportunities���such as education and career development���because of family decisions to arrange marriages for economic gain.
Two weeks after the premiere, I met Ciss�� at the office of her production company, Sis�� Filmu, in Bamako to discuss Furu, her inspirations, the challenges of making her first narrative feature film, and what it means to carry forward the legacy of her father���who would pass away just four months later. Like Ciss�����s debut, Furu is headed to the Croisette: The feature will be screened at the Pavillon Afriques after it premieres tonight in New York at the African Film Festival.
Fatou Ciss��. Sasha Artamanova How did you come up with the idea to make a film about forced marriage? Why did you think it was relevant?
Fatou Ciss��Mariage forc�� [forced marriage] is a subject that concerns nearly all young girls in Bamako. Marriage is an obligation. If you���re not married, it���s seen as blasphemy���even I went through it when I was young. It���s unfortunate to say, but that���s the reality. Women are still treated like slaves who must always be submissive, especially by their mothers and the older women who went through the same problems and internalized them. They can���t break free. They believe it���s good for the rest of us.
Sasha ArtamanovaThey insist on arranging marriages?
Fatou Ciss��They insist, so it continues. They believe by virtue of that your children will be blessed, will be protected or become rich. That���s the mentality people have here, and it���s tragic. So, Furu was really made to trigger that red button. Elders���especially grandmothers and mothers���should be protecting us from the fathers. But if they themselves side with the fathers, then the young girl���she���s lost. She no longer knows what to do.
I heard a story about a woman who no longer wanted to stay with her husband, because he kept beating her. She went to seek refuge with her parents. Her parents told her, ���No, you���re married now, so you don���t belong here anymore. It���s over. Your place is with your husband. Go back to him.��� The woman chose death. She threw herself into the water with her baby strapped to her back. She chose to die with her child rather than return to her husband���all because her parents, even though they knew what she was going through, insisted she go back to the marriage.
There are lines in my film that are taken directly from real life. There are gestures, actions that truly happened. Everything in my film is rooted in reality and shaped through fiction. Because for me, above all, my goal is to convey a message through real events.
Still from Furu. Sasha Artamanova This is your first narrative feature film. What was the process of making it like?
Fatou Ciss��The writing was very difficult because I had never written a feature film before. I didn���t know how I was going to go about it. I would write, and I would tell myself, ���My God, how am I going to manage this?��� I had the ideas, but I didn���t know how to structure them. So I wrote and wrote��� I went to show it to Souleymane, and he said to me, ���You���re bringing me something I don���t understand at all.��� That really threw me off. I said, ���But what did you read? What did you understand?��� He said, ���Well, yes, I read the content, but I couldn���t follow it. Because it���s two stories.���
Usually, people go with one story, but my film includes the stories of two single women that intertwine. So honestly, the writing took me a long time. Once that was done, the next step was to work with the director of photography I had contacted in France, but he dropped out at the last minute because of the situation here in Mali. He suggested we film in a village in Dakar, and I said, ���No ��� Dakar isn���t Bamako. It���s not Mali. I can���t do that. I also don���t have the means to take my team over there or to recruit new people on-site.��� I was doing this out of my own pocket and with help from my family. It���s not like I had a big producer behind me to fund everything.
I asked another colleague, Hachim Mohamed, to be my director of photography, and he said yes, although he had never done it before. So he was new. I was new. And the second camera operator���it was also his first time working on a feature film
Then came the casting, which was complicated. I did a first round of casting���it didn���t work. I had to do a second casting. And, luckily for me, during that first casting, there was the lead actress I had selected. For her, too, it was the first time in front of a camera. She had no experience at all. As for the male characters���Dra, Palme, and Chaka���they were played by professional actors. But all the other members of the cast were amateurs���even the villagers. What surprised me most in the village was that they were more connected to the subject than people in Bamako. That���s what really struck me. Because these are realities they experience firsthand,when I gave them a line, they delivered it naturally. I couldn���t believe it. I said, ���This is perfect. Are you used to doing this or what?��� But no���it���s just a subject they know. They are living it, that���s all. It was beautiful.
Choosing the village itself was difficult too. I went to Koulikoro and to different villages in Kolokani. I didn���t find what I was looking for. Then someone told me about Siby, and I visited five villages there before arriving at the one where we did the filming���Mankandjiana. When I got to Mankandjiana, it was love at first sight. I said to myself, this is where I���m going to film. It���s very peaceful and beautiful.
Still from Furu. Sasha Artamanova So how did Souleymane react to Furu? Was it different from how he had perceived the script?
Fatou Ciss��In the end, when he saw the footage, he was surprised. He said, ���I knew you could express yourself better through images than through writing.��� So when it comes to writing, I���m zero. But the images���he liked them. He did not expect to see those kinds of images in my work. I think he was impressed when he saw the film. That already meant something, because he is so demanding when it comes to images. He is Mr. Perfectionist. Unfortunately, we can���t all be like him. So we do what we can and move forward���that���s all.
He was pleased, and that already means a lot to me. It makes me happy to see him pleased, because he deserves it. He really suffered in this country. He went through a lot, and I hope his work won���t end up being lost. I just hope there will be good people who can help us with the archiving of his works, because we���ve been fighting for them to be properly preserved. It���s something that truly belongs to the nation.
Sasha ArtamanovaIt���s clear that growing up with Souleymane must have been a major source of inspiration for you. Are there any other sources of inspiration for you?
Fatou Ciss��Of course. There���s my uncle, Gaston Kabor��. I really like his films, and Semb��ne Ousmane too. I discovered some of Semb��ne���s films at FESPACO [Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso], and I was amazed to see how he managed to create his films despite having practically nothing. Nowadays, we have the means; with digital technology, it���s so much easier. Even with a phone, you can easily make a film. You just need a good script to make an excellent film. But back then, they were struggling with their equipment. It���s incredible.
Then there���s Salif Traor��, a great Malian director���a very talented one���and my aunt, Fatoumata Coulibaly, who is both an actress and a director. She also fights hard for women���s rights. So yes, there are many people who inspire me���especially their determination and their struggle. I tell myself, sure, we still haven���t fully grasped cinema in Mali, but that���s no reason not to do it. It���s not a reason not to try. People even tend to say that filmmakers are crazy���that they have nothing���but that���s normal. You have to be a little crazy to move forward. I believe that images can do a lot���and they do a lot. That���s a reality. It���s a powerful weapon, and we���ll try to follow in the footsteps of our father. Even if we don���t quite make it, we���ll try. It���s better to try than not to try at all. At least they���ll be able to say, ���Ah, she tried.��� That already means something.
Still from Furu. Sasha Artamanova During the screening I noticed that the audience, especially young women, reacted very enthusiastically to what was going on the screen. What did you think about this reaction?
Fatou Ciss��I don���t really know how to put this. As they say, once you make a film, it no longer belongs to you. The way you watched the film and the way I would present it to you���it will never be the same. The audience watched it and interpreted it based on their own perspective, their own understanding. It���s true that many were impressed, that many really appreciated it, and that many laughed a lot. And it���s true that there was a lightness in the film. I just hope they understood the message.
Sasha ArtamanovaDo you already have the next project in mind?
Fatou Ciss��Not yet. I���m thinking it over. But there will be something���that���s for sure. I believe there���s nothing more powerful than the image to convey a message. You don���t even need words. With the image alone, you can get the message across. Maybe, next time, I might try that.
Furu will have its international premiere tonight, May 9th, at 6pm during the New York African Film Festival.
May 8, 2025
The end of US empire is not the end of the world
Car burning during protest in Washington DC during May of 2020. Image �� Eric Lee via Shutterstock. There is no doubt that the world has entered a new era of multipolarity. While the United States remains powerful, it is increasingly counterbalanced by a China-led global order. This isn���t just about alternative trade routes, supply chains, or state-backed investments in the developing world. It also reflects the emergence of a global coalition between the structurally marginalized in the West and the postcolonial South.
Together, these overlapping groups form what is now called the Global South. Unlike the Third World project of the mid-20th century, which emerged from anticolonial struggles and sought to navigate a shifting Cold War order, the Global South project that began taking shape in the early 1990s confronts a different pressure: neoliberal restructuring. In this sense, the Global South is not a coherent geographic or class-based formation, but a shifting space of struggle���where elements of the North appear in the South, and vice versa.
This is why moments like Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Black Lives Matter (2013) resonated beyond US borders. Occupy challenged neoliberal economic organization; BLM took aim at America���s racial regime. Both revealed a fracture in the West that spoke to the experiences of the global majority. And while a China-led order is far from utopian, it gestures toward a more pluralistic political terrain���where multiple configurations of democracy and capitalism coexist, and no single power dictates the terms of modernity.
This, precisely, is what makes it so threatening to the West. The dominance of the US has been about not only material power but maintaining a definition of humanity grounded in whiteness. The West���s current configuration of democracy and capitalism is entangled with this racial vision. As the American philosopher Lewis Gordon reminds us, ���a true, new beginning stimulates anxiety because it appears, at least at the level of identity, as suicide.���
We are seeing this anxiety take form: Existential fractures in the transatlantic alliance, resurgent white nationalism, and a frantic attempt to reassert control through trade wars and isolationist policies. Recall how the British historian Arnold Toynbee once put it, ���Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.���
From Obama to Biden, and especially under Trump, the US has struggled to manage its decline. Trump���s approach, however, is more unilateral and maximalist: He has abandoned traditional alliances in an effort to reimpose American hegemony through economic coercion. But this is no longer possible. The United States cannot continue to play both global leader and imperial overlord. Its postwar architecture of international governance���designed to stabilize the world while preserving US dominance���has exhausted its financial and moral legitimacy.
Yet the West���s strategic imagination remains locked in a binary worldview. For the US, multipolarity has always signaled danger. In 2010, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that multipolarity meant ���rivalry, competing interests, and���at its worst���competing values.���
This helps explain the ongoing anxiety about BRICS. In Western analysis, BRICS is framed as a geopolitical bloc, a threat to the liberal international order. But that view risks missing something more interesting: that BRICS is a transitional formation, a forerunner of a multipolar world that may, eventually, render such blocs obsolete.
Even so, the transition is far from smooth. In February 2025, The Washington Post ran a headline declaring, ���Trump Revives Monroe Doctrine in U.S. Relations with Western Hemisphere.��� In this framework, multipolarity is not an opportunity but a threat to be managed through spheres of influence and containment.
But containment will not work. The world has already outgrown the US vision of liberal order. The empire is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions���unable to offer peace, prosperity, or even ideological coherence. The Global South, in contrast, offers the outline of a different vision: one free of empire, more open to pluralism, and capable of naming corporate and state violence as forms of domination.
Still, we should not be naive. Multipolarity is not automatically emancipatory. It can reproduce the same hierarchies under different banners. The Global South, if it is to be more than a rhetorical device, must hold new powers to account���rejecting both Western imperialism and new forms of authoritarian capitalism.
We must contend with a sobering reality: The US may be willing to destroy the world before it surrenders its imperial self-image. This suicidal impulse���visible in its economic warfare and cultural nihilism���should not be underestimated. If empire cannot imagine a future in which it does not lead, it may instead choose to make that future unlivable for everyone else.
We are entering a new terrain of struggle, not a utopia. And that terrain demands clarity, coordination, and vision. If the US empire is willing to end the world before it ends itself, then our challenge is not only to survive its decline but to shape what comes next.
That task will not fall to states alone. African governments, through institutions like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), must move with speed. If they are to shape multipolarity, they must build new regional institutions, assert economic sovereignty, and humanise Africans, not just as an anti-Western posture, but as a constructive project rooted in the context Africa finds itself in. Multipolarity will not be given. It must be made.
This will require struggle���not only against imperial holdovers, but against our own inertia. The end of the US empire is not the end of the world. But what kind of world emerges next will depend on what we are prepared to fight for.
May 7, 2025
Re-writing the rules of Tunisian rap
Tunisian rap, like its Western counterpart, remains deeply marked by sexism. Despite the growing visibility of women artists, many segments of society continue to resist their presence in the scene. Early Tunisian rap, often associated with criminality, drugs, and sex, was branded as vulgar and deemed unsuitable for women. Male rappers��� casual use of sexual slurs further entrenched these prejudices, while women who dared to enter the genre faced additional stigma���branded as either ���masculine��� or morally suspect.
This gendered hostility is deeply rooted in the narratives constructed by male rappers themselves. While some men have supported their female colleagues and collaborated with them, many portray women through a rigid dichotomy: either virtuous or promiscuous, madonna or whore. Obscene language often serves to degrade ���fallen��� women who transgress patriarchal norms, even as rappers express reverence and gratitude toward mothers and sisters. In contrast to Western rap, where maternal figures are often peripheral, the mother holds a sacred place in Tunisian hip hop, celebrated as a symbol of sacrifice and virtue. This sharp division between respectable and unrespectable women reinforces toxic masculinity and helps sustain a cultural environment hostile to female rappers like Lully Snake.
Pioneering artists such as Sabrina, Medusa, Queen Nesrine, Nesrine Mokdad (a.k.a. Anonymous), FBK, and Altaf have all encountered fierce misogynistic opposition. Lully Snake stands out for the particular path she has carved across two patriarchal musical worlds. Reflecting on her long and difficult journey, she often underscores the contempt directed toward women who rap���especially those unafraid to use ���bad words.���
While sexism pervades Tunisia���s rap scene as a whole, Lully Snake���s experience is distinct: She navigates not only rap but also mahraganat, a street genre born in the slums of Cairo in 2008. Like rap, mahraganat is a masculine sphere, dominated by self-taught young men from lower-class backgrounds whose songs, laden with insults, sexual innuendo, and drug references, are often accused of degrading public morals. Long viewed by elites as vulgar and corrupting, mahraganat artists have been policed not only for their gender but also for their class background, facing accusations of undermining moral respectability. In this context, women���s entry into mahraganat compounds the perceived threat: not only challenging gender boundaries but transgressing deeply entrenched social hierarchies. Egyptian women began performing it publicly only in 2017, and even today, female rappers venturing into mahraganat remain rare.
It is within this doubly charged terrain that Lully Snake emerged, becoming the first Tunisian female rapper to operate at the intersection of rap and mahraganat. This synthesis is evident in her debut song ���Zabatna Kida,��� released in 2024, which boldly blends Tunisian rap���s cadence with the festive, boisterous beats of mahraganat. The song���s success emboldened her to pursue this hybrid style further, culminating in subsequent tracks like ���Biid Alia��� and ���Hannah Montana,��� both released in 2025. Through this musical fusion, Lully Snake pioneered a novel sound that aligns Maghrebi hip hop culture with Egyptian mahraganat, in both rhythm and language. Her multilingual approach���effortlessly moving between Tunisian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, and Moroccan Arabic���defies rigid linguistic hierarchies and enacts a form of creative solidarity across borders. By refusing to limit herself to a single dialect or tradition, she opens her music to a broader Arab and African world, offering a vision of identity as fluid, plural, and insurgent.
Lully Snake���s�� innovative fusion of rap and mahraganat is not confined to her sound alone but also displayed visually through her fashion and performance. In the video for ���Zabatna Kida,��� she juxtaposes Egyptian traditional bangles and a headscarf with a snapback hat and golden rap chain, blending two cultural aesthetics into a single style. Here, snapbacks and bling���emblems of rap fashion���coexist with the jewelry and loose veils typical of mahraganat street weddings. The sonic marriage between an Arabian Nights���style background music and a rap rhythm is mirrored by her performance, as she combines the sensual arm movements of belly dance with the assertive hand gestures of rap. Despite the video���s orientalist decor, the rawness of her hand gestures and the truck setting from which she raps stave off the danger of self-orientalization.
This strategy is further developed in ���Biid Alia.��� Although the video unfolds within the gilded fantasy of a One Thousand and One Nights palace, the narrative refuses easy exoticism. Instead of reproducing the figure of the submissive North African woman, Lully Snake flips the script: She appears dressed as Scheherazade, but armed with a dagger, threatening her lover and asserting her capacity for vengeance. While her costume and some gestures flirt with self-exoticization, her lyrical posture resists objectification. In ���Biid Alia,��� she chastises an unfaithful partner, proclaiming her indifference to the breakup and warning him of retribution. Far from perpetuating the clich�� of the hypersexual North African male patriarch presiding over a passive harem, Lully Snake���s defiant tone challenges both local misogyny and Western stereotypes about Maghrebi women.
Through her innovative blend of Tunisian rap and Egyptian mahraganat, Lully Snake opens a new space of cultural and political expression. Her performances expose and contest the sexism embedded in Tunisia���s music industry, while also subverting the lingering orientalist fantasies that deny North African women their agency. Across her growing body of work, she emerges not as a victim, but as a fiercely independent artist determined to shape her own narrative. In doing so, she models a broader cultural refusal���an insistence that creativity, identity, and resistance need not fit the inherited scripts of nation, genre, or gender. Lully Snake���s emergence signals not only a feminist breakthrough but a new experimentalism in Tunisian and Maghrebi popular culture: one that is at once rebellious, syncretic, and defiantly alive.
May 6, 2025
Sanctions as civilizational warfare
Tehran, Iran. Photo by hosein charbaghi on Unsplash. In today���s multipolar world, economic sanctions have become a primary tool of American foreign policy. While they are typically framed as nonviolent targeted mechanisms for influencing ���rogue��� regimes, a deeper inspection suggests that sanctions operate as instruments of civilizational warfare���seeking not only to alter policy but to dismantle the cultural coherence and sovereign legitimacy of states in the Global South.
What is ���civilizational warfare?��� By this, we mean a campaign that attacks a nation���s identity, social fabric, and place in the world order. It is a strategic and ideological tool in US foreign policy. Sanctions are wielded to declare that a targeted country is outside the bounds of the ���civilized��� international community and must be brought to heel���or broken. Unlike conventional military action, this method uses banks, trade embargoes, and diplomatic isolation as weapons. The aim is to erode not just a government���s capabilities but a society���s confidence, memory, and dignity as an independent civilization. This logic is disturbingly familiar from the colonial playbook: imperial powers often imposed blockades or withheld resources to ���discipline��� populations they deemed inferior. In modern form, economic coercion has replaced gunboats, yet the underlying goal remains the same���to force a sovereign people into submission by undermining their very civilization.
Iran���s experience under the ���maximum pressure��� campaign is emblematic. Since the US unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal in 2018, successive sanctions have crippled not just Iran���s economy but its access to scientific collaboration, cultural exchange, and even life-saving medicines. As Richard Nephew, the architect of these sanctions, wrote: ���An effective sanction is one that inflicts pain���strategically and sustainably.��� The aim is not limited to regime behavior change, but includes the slow erosion of the state���s internal equilibrium and civilizational continuity. Indeed, Iran���s rich cultural and scientific life became a target; when even cancer medications and academic journals are cut off, it feels like an assault on Iran���s very identity and resilience as a nation.
Venezuela presents a parallel case. US and EU sanctions have deepened the country���s humanitarian crisis, curbing its ability to import food and medical supplies and worsening hyperinflation. The United Nations special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, noted in her 2021 and 2023 reports that these sanctions had ���exacerbated pre-existing calamities��� and violated the Venezuelan people���s right to health and development. This is not diplomacy���it is siege by economic means. The Venezuelan economy, once buoyed by vast oil reserves, has been asphyxiated, contributing to mass migration and the collapse of social programs. In effect, an entire society is being strangled to undermine a political project that Washington opposes.
In Syria, the US Caesar Act of 2019 intensified collective suffering by targeting key sectors essential to postwar reconstruction. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported in 2023 that the sanctions ���continue to undermine civilian infrastructure and obstruct humanitarian operations.��� By paralyzing Syria���s recovery process, the sanctions prolong instability and misery well beyond the end of open conflict. Rebuilding schools, hospitals, and homes becomes nearly impossible when any transaction could violate sanctions. For Syrian civilians���many already traumatized by a decade of war���this economic asphyxiation ensures the hardship continues in peace time. It is a grim extension of war by other means, hindering a proud nation from healing and rebuilding its life.
Zimbabwe���s experience adds another dimension to this global pattern. After Zimbabwe���s government reclaimed white-owned farms in a bold land reform around 2000, the US and EU imposed sanctions ostensibly targeting the political elite of President Robert Mugabe���s regime. In reality, these measures plunged Zimbabwe���s economy into a tailspin���industries in cities like Bulawayo shut down, hospitals and schools ran short of basic supplies, and the national currency collapsed. For over two decades, ordinary Zimbabweans have borne the brunt of these sanctions, which regional African leaders have decried as ���illegal��� and a violation of the basic human rights of ordinary people. This was punishment beyond a policy dispute: It sent a message that defying Western economic interests���in this case, upsetting colonial-era land ownership patterns���would result in crippling isolation. As with Iran or Venezuela, the sanctions in Zimbabwe undermined the country���s ability to sustain its civilizational gains (from education to infrastructure) after independence, effectively waging an economic war to negate its postcolonial sovereignty.
Taken together, these cases reveal a strategic logic: Sanctions are not neutral instruments. They are neocolonial in function and intent. Instead of deploying troops, powerful nations deploy spreadsheets���weaponizing access to global finance, trade, and institutional legitimacy. The goal is not just containment of the targeted state, but the re-engineering of that nation���s trajectory in a way that aligns with Western preferences. In essence, the sanctioning power arrogates to itself the right to decide how these societies should evolve. Whether the stated justification is nuclear nonproliferation, ���democracy promotion,��� or human rights, the common denominator is an attempt to either remake the targeted society in the West���s image or grind it down through isolation.
Such measures also erode international norms. Most of these unilateral sanctions lack UN Security Council approval and violate principles enshrined in international law, including nonintervention and sovereign equality. Even European officials have grown uneasy with the overreach. In a speech to the European Parliament in February 2023, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned that ���sanctions without precision become ethically indefensible.��� Meanwhile, leaders in the Global South openly reject the legitimacy of this coercion. The Southern African Development Community has condemned the sanctions on Zimbabwe as ���illegal��� and called for their immediate and unconditional removal, noting that they violate the basic rights of Zimbabweans. At the United Nations, year after year, an overwhelming majority of member states vote to condemn the US embargo against Cuba���183 countries did so in one resolution���calling it a ���cruel and illegal��� siege. Such global dissent highlights how far unilateral sanctions stray from the multilateral principles that ostensibly govern the world order. A system in which a powerful nation can economically besiege another at will is a recipe for cynicism and mistrust in international relations.
Most troublingly, sanctions disproportionately harm ordinary people. A 2022 report by Human Rights Watch noted that US sanctions had significantly impeded access to insulin and cancer treatment in Iran. In Venezuela, child malnutrition rates soared in part due to the financial blockades preventing food imports. Syria���s families, too, have faced fuel shortages and aid bottlenecks due to sanctions, even in the wake of natural disasters. This collateral damage is not accidental���it is structurally embedded. The architects of sanctions understand that by crippling a nation���s economy, they inevitably inflict suffering on its civilians. In fact, they bank on that suffering to foment unrest or weaken the population���s support for their leaders. It is society���s most vulnerable���children, the sick, the elderly���who pay the price for these grand geopolitical maneuvers.
If war is politics by other means, then sanctions are warfare by subtler yet equally destructive means. They target memory, identity, dignity���components of what might be called a nation���s civilizational infrastructure. Over time, the academic knowledge eroded, the cultural exchanges foregone, and the lives lost to medicine shortages all chip away at the heritage and cohesion that define a society. Sanctions punish not just policy but presence���sending the signal that a people���s very existence as a sovereign culture is intolerable unless it conforms. And for the Global South, they represent the persistence of a long colonial logic: that sovereignty is negotiable and dignity conditional. The rhetoric may have shifted from the overt racism of colonial times to the technocratic language of ���rules-based order,��� but the underlying power dynamic���who gets to live with dignity and who is made to suffer���remains uncomfortably similar.
As new powers emerge and the world moves toward a more pluralistic order, it is essential to question the moral and strategic legitimacy of sanctions. A system that normalizes collective punishment under the guise of diplomacy is one that deepens global inequality and delegitimizes global governance itself. The notion that one civilization can bludgeon another into compliance belongs to a bygone era. In the 21st century, such economic warfare does not stabilize the world���it only fans the flames of resentment and resistance. The time has come to dismantle this civilizational siege warfare, before it cripples the very international order its proponents claim to defend.
May 5, 2025
Paul Biya, the last Kaiser
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde meets with President Paul Biya at the Presidential Palace in Yaounde, Cameroon, 2016. IMF Staff Photo by Stephen Jaffe via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To understand Paul Biya���s seemingly interminable tenure, one must first understand Cameroon, its neighbors, and Biya himself. Despite over four decades in office, he remains an enigmatic figure to many Cameroonians, including his own ministers���an observer who is rarely observed. His speeches are highly scripted, his protocols rigid, and he rarely grants interviews; the last interview he had with a local journalist was in 2002. He addresses the nation only thrice a year, leaving Cameroonians to catch brief glimpses of their leader during National Day celebrations or as he departs for one of his frequent trips abroad���a habit that has earned him the rightful nickname of ���absentee landlord.��� As Fareed Zakaria observed about the late Queen Elizabeth II, Paul Biya is simply boring���however, unlike the queen, who ���remained boring for the sake of Britain,��� Biya���s perceived dullness serves only his own interests.
The Central African subregion, which includes Cameroon, has a long history of creating a cozy environment for��sit-tight leaders. Take Equatorial Guinea���s��Teodoro Obiang, who has been in power since��1979 and is the longest serving head of state in the world today. While Denis Sassou Nguesso��of Congo-Brazzaville had his first stint as president from��1979 to 1992, returned to power in 1997, and has remained the Congolese head of state ever since. Chad and Gabon were in the same situation until fairly recent changes of leadership: Idriss D��by remained in power for 30 years, while Omar Bongo and his son, Ali Bongo, remained the Gabonese heads of state for 41 and 14 years, respectively.
Biya has been described as the Lion Man, Jesus Christ, the Sphinx, father of the nation, an enigma, the Maradona of Cameroon���s politics���yet none of these descriptions seem to fully capture who he truly is. Unlike other long-serving African leaders, like Paul Kagame or Yoweri Museveni, who engage with the public and occasionally share lighthearted moments, Biya maintains an aloof, elitist persona. His prolonged rule is facilitated by Cameroon���s inherent complexities���the nation���s diverse ethnic and linguistic makeup, encompassing over 250 groups, hinders unified opposition. Political allies exploit these divisions, fueling tribal sentiments, while religious and colonial legacies contribute to this fragmentation. The predominantly Muslim north is often at odds with the Christian south, while lingering differences between the Anglophone and Francophone regions���stemming from colonial divisions���further complicate a unified stand against the long-serving leader.
It is near impossible to overstate the scope of authority held by Cameroon���s current president. Cameroonian writer George Ngwane���a victim of Biya and his entourage���s unchecked powers himself for daring to criticize the establishment���referred to the leader as ���Father Christmas.��� ���With the nod of his head, the stroke of his pen and the state of his mind,��� Ngwane writes, ���He can, at best, miraculously turn five loaves of bread and two fishes into a mammoth feast���or at worst vindictively abandon any regional potential oasis into a desert.��� While the compelling description falls short of capturing the full range of Biya���s powers, the captivating prose compellingly approximates the near-biblical authority he wields in the country���s political landscape.
Biya���s ascent to the presidency was a stark departure from the expectations of his family, who raised him in a small village in southern Cameroon���s Congo Basin rainforest. Initially destined for priesthood, he instead pursued law and political science at the University of Paris, swiftly climbing through Cameroon���s bureaucratic hierarchy upon his return. Rather than shepherding a congregation, the Lion Man has become a dominant political figure, securing repeated, often contested, electoral victories for 42 years with relative ease. While you might wonder how the 92-year-old leader has accomplished this feat, the answer lies in the events that have shaped him, with keen observations from his past enabling him to outmaneuver or neutralize challengers.
When a young Biya served in Ahmadou Ahidjo���s government, he was perceived as a humble, meticulous, level-headed, and seemingly unambitious young man���qualities that set him apart from others who openly coveted their master���s throne. These traits charmed Ahidjo���Cameroon���s first president since the country gained independence in 1960���earning Biya his full trust. However, as Brutus famously remarked in Shakespeare���s��Julius Caesar, ���lowliness is young ambition���s ladder.��� Beneath Biya���s humility and silence lay his true nature, which only Ahidjo���s wife, Germaine, seemed to recognize, suspicious of his quiet demeanor.
Time eventually proved Germaine right. Ahidjo, who had ruled since Cameroon���s independence in 1960, was by every account a dictator���a benevolent one, credited with Cameroon���s economic growth and low corruption. Biya, his loyal prime minister for seven years, became president in 1982 after Ahidjo���s unexpected resignation. It is alleged that the president was tricked by a French medical doctor to resign on health grounds.
Biya���s tenure initially inspired hope, but his rule quickly devolved into a disappointing reign marked by high corruption. After relinquishing his position as head of state, Ahidjo remained chair of the then ruling Cameroon National Union party, attempting to exert influence from behind the scenes. Biya resisted this interference, leading to two coup attempts in 1983 and 1984 by Ahidjo loyalists to retake the throne, both of which Biya swiftly suppressed. ���The victory is complete,��� Biya declared after the failed 1984 coup. Ahidjo had fled the country in 1983, sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal (the sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment). The former head of state died of a heart attack a few years after. To this day, his body remains interred in Senegal after his death in 1989, with his wife by his side; his remains are not welcome in Biya���s Cameroon. Alas, Ahidjo was repaid in kind by his own student in a brutal manner of poetic justice, as during his own reign of terror in Cameroon before excommunication, political opponents also faced brutal repression, with many executed and others forced into exile.
Biya famously rewards loyalty; some of his closest allies are those who helped him avert the two coup attempts. As one journalist aptly explains, Biya���s regime is a ���gerontological oligarchy: government of the elderly exclusively for the elderly.��� Over the years, he consolidated power by strategically filling government and military positions with his own ethnic group, effectively suppressing potential dissent. As Chairman of the Higher Judiciary Council, Grand Master of the National Orders, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, ministers are required to put his name first to get anything done. The phrase ���high instructions from the president of the Republic��� is prominently featured on almost every official document; woe betide those who dare to defy them.
Following the attempted coups of 1983 and 1984, the challenges for Biya were far from over; as years have progressed, so have moments when the nation has united against him. The so-called third wave of democratization in Africa came knocking in the ���90s, and after initially resisting the momentum, Biya reluctantly expressed his desire to be remembered as the man who brought democracy to Cameroon, resulting in the country���s first multiparty elections in 1992. Biya emerged as the winner with barely 40 percent of the votes; his main challenger, John Fru Ndi (who founded the Social Democratic Front party in 1990 under immense challenges by the Biya administration, resulting in six people being killed by law enforcement at the launch) was widely believed to have won, and the Supreme Court judge who declared the election results admitted that his hands ���were tied.��� Street riots ensued after the elections, but were eventually quashed: The main protagonist, Fru Ndi, was placed under house arrest, while other leaders of the SDF party and supporters were arrested and detained.
Since 1992, Biya has put in place mechanisms to completely divide opposing political parties; there are now about 300 political parties in Cameroon, with some believed to be secretly funded by his government. Biya appoints and dismisses members of the body that manages Cameroonian elections in Cameroon at will, some of whom are former members of his ruling party. He continues to test the limits of his sovereign mandate: In April 2008, his party scrapped presidential term limits after violently suppressing riots over rising prices in February of the same year. No one dared challenge him, and he went ahead to win the 2011 and 2018 presidential elections with over 70 percent of the vote.
One of the most important cogs in Biya���s wheel is his wife, Chantal Biya. Always dressed to the nines, Chantal offsets Biya���s aloof demeanor with her cheerful public engagements. Her humanitarian activities through her eponymous foundation have not only helped to give her a good public image but also helped shore up the reputation of her husband. Similarly, Biya has also used football as a means of securing and maintaining his political authority. The Cameroonian national team���s historic performance in the 1990 World Cup, where they became the first African team to reach the quarterfinals, lent Biya massive political leverage.��Often referred to as the ���number one supporter��� of the national football team, Biya frequently draws comparisons between Cameroonians and the Indomitable Lions (as the team is affectionately called) in his speeches. For Cameroonians, football is akin to India���s cricket���a match on the pitch is one of the premier moments when the spirit of the nation seems unified.
While the Lion Man���s political strategy has worked remarkably well for him and his inner circle, it has done little to foster development or transform the lives of ordinary Cameroonians. Embezzlement of public funds and corruption have become the hallmark of Cameroon, with the country being ranked as the most corrupt nation in the world consecutively in 1998 and 1999 by Transparency International. As much as 23 percent of Cameroon���s citizens still live below the international poverty line despite the country���s status as a leading exporter of timber, cocoa, crude oil, and rare earth elements. Despite these riches, Biya and his ministers frequently turn to Bretton Woods Institutions, cap in hand, to borrow funds in an ostensible effort to salvage Cameroon���s struggling economy; much of the money obtained from these institutions is often assumed to end up in the private bank accounts of top government officials. Take the 1994 World Cup: Cameroonians contributed up to F.CFA 1 billion (USD 1,654,445) for the national team���s World Cup dreams in the USA. The government, pleading financial strain, claimed they couldn���t foot the bill���the minister tasked with delivering the funds, however, claimed in a TV interview that ���the money went missing in the air somewhere between Paris and New York,��� never to be seen again.
Nothing happened to the minister���and in the decade since the fiasco, Biya created the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC). In 2023 alone, however, this body reported that Cameroon lost about F.CFA 114 billion (USD 188,606,761) in corruption. According to observers, the commission exists less to fight corruption as it does to go after Biya���s political opponents. Alain Mebe Ngo���o, Cameroon���s former influential defense minister, was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison for embezzling F.CFA 23.8 billion (approximately USD 40 million). A former prime minister, interior minister, and several other high-ranking government officials are also serving lengthy prison sentences for corruption and embezzlement of public funds. Some of those imprisoned claim their jailing is politically motivated, underscoring a political climate where Biya has no permanent friends. But embezzlement of public funds and corruption still thrive in Cameroon, with French journalist Fanny Pigeaud putting the blame on Biya in her book: ���Because Paul Biya is also corrupt, he cannot put an end to corruption.���
For every cloud, Biya always focuses on the silver lining. When Boko Haram began attacking Cameroon���s northern border with Nigeria in 2014, Biya sensed an opportunity to further cement his powers over the country, passing an anti-terrorism law; in practice, the law is focused more on cracking down on dissent and muzzling the media than on effectively combating terrorism itself. Similarly, hours after the coup ousted Gabon���s Ali Bongo, Biya made changes to the military hierarchy, including forced retirements��and��sudden promotions��of military officers, seemingly to prevent any future power grabs.
In 2001, the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), an elite and heavily armed unit of Cameroon���s military, was established under his leadership to combat armed groups and gangs operating on the nation���s borders. Although initially credited with disrupting these groups, the BIR has become increasingly controversial due to widespread allegations of human rights abuses. After the 2008 violent riots in Cameroon, Biya used the opportunity to introduce the BIR in Cameroon���s cities. Critics contend that this elite force now acts as a personal militia for Biya, drawing parallels to late Fran��ois ���Papa Doc��� Duvalier���s notorious Tonton Macoute. A particularly striking incident in 2018, where the BIR executed two women and their infants in northern Cameroon, brought international condemnation.
Despite this, Biya���s diplomatic dealings with world powers have also helped preserve his reign. He has managed to avoid aligning himself with any one side in their geopolitical power struggles, maintaining friendly relations with Russia, the US, China, Britain, and France alike; in return, they have turned a blind eye to his transgressions, despite several of these countries claiming to have a moral authority to enforce a rules-based international order. When tensions flared with Nigeria over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, Biya strategically chose the path of international law. This decision resulted in a favorable ruling from the International Court of Justice, with Nigeria eventually ceding the disputed territory.
As the years progress, so does speculation over his mortality. Discussions about Biya���s health are strictly prohibited, as the topic is considered off-limits for public discourse. In 2004, Biya was rumored to be dead; when he reappeared in public, he declared that ���those who wish him dead should wait for the next twenty years.��� True to his word, he went missing from the public eye for about six weeks again in 2024, fueling speculation about his death. Upon his return in October, a mammoth crowd���likened by one of his supporters to the welcome Jesus Christ received���greeted him at the airport. These recent events, however staged, have sparked discussions like never before about the future of Cameroon after the 92-year-old leader. While he has proven that he is above everyone in Cameroon politically, his age looks like the spoiler of the fun game he���s been playing for the past 42 years. The big question remains: Who will succeed him?
The outlook for Cameroon after Biya appears bleak: The Muslim north, which sees Cameroon���s presidency as their birthright, having produced the country���s first president, believes it is their turn to lead again, while Biya���s ethnic allies are determined to maintain power at all costs. The economically powerful yet marginalized Bamil��k�� ethnic group also seeks to rule Cameroon after Biya. His constitutional successor, the president of the Senate, is 91 years old. Another movement has emerged advocating for Frank Biya, the eldest son of Paul Biya, to become the president of Cameroon after him. Such is the state of democracy in the Central African subregion: father-to-son succession has occurred in Gabon and Chad, and Cameroon may follow this playbook
Additionally, the minority Anglophone Cameroonians, who have been engaged in a secessionist struggle since 2017, feel it is their time to govern. For almost nine years, the English-speaking regions of Cameroon have been embroiled in an armed conflict, with Anglophone rebels striving to establish a state they call Ambazonia, separate from the current Cameroonian polity. This armed struggle has shaken the foundations of Cameroon in unprecedented ways. In one of the few times Biya spoke off script, he addressed this crisis during the Paris Peace Summit in 2019. It was a gaffe: After outlining the history of Cameroon, he made a candid admission that hinted at the underlying causes of the conflict. ���We tried assimilating their system into the majority Francophone system,��� he confessed, ���but because of identity differences, it failed.���
Not only��is Biya a political juggernaut, he is��the state; his power flows top-down, akin to Vladimir Putin���s power vertical. Some of the people who once championed the ���Biya must go��� movement have long gone���to the world beyond or to prison cells���while Biya shines bright like the northern star. Whenever he appears publicly, the political capital of Cameroon, Yaound��, empties into silence, with no vehicles on the streets���and despite his advanced years, there have been frantic calls from supporters of Biya���s party, the Cameroon People���s Democratic Movement (CPDM), for him to stand as their candidate in the 2025 presidential elections, referring to him as their ���natural candidate.���
In a recent speech, Biya hinted at another presidential run as a nonagenarian: ���I have heard your calls and encouragements,��� he said, ���and I remain dedicated to serving our beloved nation.��� In a leaked diplomatic cable from 2009, however, influential elites from the Muslim north declared that Cameroon���s three northern regions ���will support Biya for as long as he wants to be president ��� but would not accept a successor who is either another Beti/Bulu [Biya���s ethnicity] or a member of the economically powerful Bamil��k�� ethnic group.��� The infighting that remains within the ruling party and its fragile institutions ominously complicate the political landscape of the country���s tenuous and fractured future.
Should Biya choose to accept his party���s requests, his victory may be a foregone conclusion. But while the crisis may not arrive until his deathbed, we have finally found the limits of the Lion Man���s all-encompassing rule���and the depth and scope of these divisions spell doom for Cameroon.
May 2, 2025
Pan Africanism under elite capture
Image via Kelis on Instagram. In The Wretched of the Earth, anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon warned that Africa���s postcolonial bourgeoisie would co-opt the symbols of Black liberation to advance their own narrow agendas, ultimately failing to break both the psychological and material chains of colonialism. Fanon���s prophecy has proven true: African political leaders not only have seized power to replicate colonial structures of oppression through extractive capitalism and corruption, but also found willing collaborators among the African diasporic elite, distorting pan-Africanist ideals for personal gain.
There is a longstanding legacy of celebrity being used as soft power in cultural warfare to sanitize and exploit Africa, ultimately manipulating the postcolonial divide. As noted by author Frances Stonor Saunders, the US government recognized the role of music and the arts as a covert strategy to win hearts and minds, resulting in a ���cultural Cold War.��� This took place in1960, referred to as the ���Year of Africa��� against the backdrop of 16 African nations gaining independence, as African leaders such as Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah became global icons of postcolonial freedom. Fearing a united African front, as well as the perceived growing threat of communism, the CIA deployed musicians like Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone as ���jazz ambassadors��� of goodwill and freedom to counter the Soviet���s message highlighting the racism in America.
This stirred an ethical dilemma for Black American artists, who were tasked with presenting a false image of racial harmony in the US which didn���t reflect their lived experience or moral standings under Jim Crow racism. Armstrong initially refused to participate in the state-sponsored musical tours of Africa until legal progress was made on civil rights. The jazz ambassadors��� contradictions between being civil rights activists while playing a role in continental Africans��� plight was shown brilliantly in the critically acclaimed documentary Soundtrack to Coup d���Etat. Though these events didn���t happen in succession, the film���s timeline brilliantly links events such as Armstrong���s visit to Congo just as Lumumba was placed under house arrest and the CIA invaded Congo. This provides both a striking and useful analysis of how these musicians potentially provided a smoke screen for the CIA���s foreign interference, leading to Lumumba���s assassination.
These celebrity-backed private-public partnerships have recently been reignited by Ghana���s Year of Return in 2019, a government-led initiative positioning Ghana as a premier destination for African Americans and the African diaspora to reconnect with their ancestral roots after four centuries of separation due to chattel slavery. In 2019, tourism in Ghana accounted for 10.3 percent of the GDP, a significant increase from 3 percent in 2016. Soon, the Ghanaian government began welcoming high-profile celebrities such as Chance the Rapper and Meek Mill as unofficial ambassadors, promoting ���experience-based tourism��� through festivals and restored historical sites.
Kenya does not have a documented dedicated tourism strategy targeting the diaspora in the same fashion as Ghana, who launched a dedicated diaspora affairs unit under the oversight of former President Nana Akufo-Addo. In 2021, however, Naomi Campbell���who has frequently associated with infamously corrupt members of the global elite such as and former Liberian president Charles Taylor���was controversially appointed Kenya���s tourism ambassador at a time when the sector was struggling due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Campbell is far from the exception in recent controversial investments from celebrities throughout Southern and East Africa: British actor Idris Elba, who has advocated for building Africa���s film industry, was allegedly awarded over 80 acres of land in Zanzibar by the Tanzanian government to construct modern film studios, during a political context where political freedom is critically absent for Tanzanians, especially those arrested on petty pretenses such as using ���strong words��� when simply criticizing President Suluhu Hassan. Moreover, John Legend also chose to perform at the Global Citizen festival in Kigali, despite the Rwandan government���s involvement in the M23 rebel takeover in Congo. By contrast, Tems canceled her headline show in Kigali around a similar time, as she recognized it would be insensitive to Congolese people.
In defence of his decision, Legend said the following, ���I don’t believe that we should punish the people of Rwanda and punish the people of other countries when we disagree with their leaders.��� While it is certainly true that not all Rwandans support their government���s political choices, cultural boycotts have proven to be highly significant in holding oppressive regimes accountable, such as the boycott that led to the apartheid South African government���s exclusion from the Olympics. Congolese people���s need for solidarity at a time when Rwanda���s role in the conflict is still invisibilized is markedly more urgent than the Rwandese people���s desire for a glamorous multimillion-dollar concert. Given the context, these high-profile moves reinforce the perception that their governments prioritize wealthy outsiders over their own citizens, an all-too-familiar pattern reminiscent of gentrification.
American singer and farmer Kelis is the latest celebrity to venture into East Africa, purportedly under the guise of sustainability. She often markets her videos on her instagram account through short-form reels wearing no makeup and casual clothing, coupled by hashtags like #SupportBlackFarmers and #FarmLife, presenting herself as a relatable ���girl next door��� type of favorite lifestyle influencer. The artist and businesswoman recently expanded her entrepreneurial efforts after purchasing land in Kenya with the stated intention to establish a large-scale commercial farm surrounded by wildlife. To honor this announcement, she took to social media once again, branding herself a ���pioneer,��� and wearing a T-shirt labeled ���Original Farm Owner��� to emphasize this persona. On cue, this provoked mixed reactions, particularly among Kenyans concerned about farming close to endangered wildlife and disrupting natural ecosystems. While a minority of people welcomed Kelis using her platform to showcase Kenya in a positive light���arguing that she should be crowned as the new tourism ambassador for the country���amongst detractors, Kelis was quickly labeled a neocolonizer. Speculation began to spread that the land she acquired was reservation land, given its proximity to wildlife, and that she likely leveraged government connections to secure the purchase.
Though the exact whereabouts of Kelis���s farm are unknown, it���s most likely situated around Naivasha, a town named after its freshwater lake, originally inhabited by the Maasai tribe until it became a significant area for colonial development in the late 19th century. At present, the remnants of settler colonialism persist, as the area is now characterized by vast floriculture farms owned by white settlers. In response to these criticisms, Kelis clarified that the land was privately owned and purchased from a previous landowner, not from a wildlife reserve.
This defense misses the fundamental issue. Regardless of whether the land was legally available, the concern remains that these celebrity acquisitions reinforce existing patterns of wealth accumulation and land concentration. Kelis���s actions are perceived as emblematic of a broader lack of solidarity from diasporic Africans and the greater Black diaspora, who, in their pursuit of economic opportunity and connection to the African continent, risk becoming the ���new wave of gentrifiers.��� As Kelis continues to promote her farming enterprise, large-scale farming in Kenya remains largely reserved for white settlers and the Kenyan elite, while indigenous farmers in Kenya are disproportionately impacted by droughts and flooding, resulting in the loss of arable land for livestock and family. Moreover, Lake Naivasha���s water levels have been declining, with floriculture being the major contributor. How sustainable is Kelis���s new business venture when this land and resources could be maximized to achieve food security in a nation where more than 13 million lack secure access to food?
Beyond the material consequences, these celebrities also aid African governments to craft a progressive, aspirational image that conceals deep-seated class inequalities and the dire material conditions of ordinary Africans. In this distinctively diasporic African imagination, Kenya and other African nations become idyllic homelands, fertile lands of possibility, sanctuaries from the racial injustices of the West, and places where lost ancestral connections can be miraculously restored. ���Rwanda! It feels a Utopia like #wakanda truly stunning! So lush and Beautiful! The people here <3,��� said Kelis in the caption of one of her other Instagram reels, captured on a hill overlooking vast farmlands. She expresses fascination with the young children ���helping and carrying stuff������not taking into account the implication of young children carrying firewood passing by who were unknowingly featured in the video like props.
The reel feels reminiscent of a scene from a modern Out of Africa remake, bringing to mind Black feminist historian Jade Bentil���s coinage ���Wakandification��� to capture this ���process through which Africa *as a product* is reimagined to serve the interests of representation, nation, and capital.����� This romanticized Africa is depicted as pure and unspoiled, populated more by wildlife than by people, perpetuating a colonial-era narrative that erases the lived realities of African citizens. It is the Africa of book covers���the Africa of bold colors and baobab trees, devoid of the humanity that lives alongside the vegetation.
On one hand, it is understandable that diasporic Africans, after centuries of dispossession and racism, are drawn to the aspirations of returning to the African continent. Long before 2019, African Americans have relocated back to Africa, drawn and inspired by these nations��� liberation movements, including prominent academics such as Maya Angelou and W. E. B. Du Bois, who made Ghana their home under the invitation of Nkrumah, while members of the Black Panther Party sought refuge in Tanzania, influenced by Nyerere���s embrace of pan-Africanism under his Ujamaa framework. Even then at the height of the pan-Africanist movement, however, there were noted tensions between these expats and indigenous Africans, as noted in Saidiya Hartman���s Lose Your Mother, where she notes how Ghanaians resented expats for occupying land and ���presuming to know what was best for Africa.���
These diasporic frictions have persisted to present day, as some African Americans have made direct attempts to claim African citizenship. While the bulk of the efforts have taken place in Ghana, one US citizen who has lived in Kenya since 2008 petitioned for recognition as a Kenyan citizen, citing ancestral rights. While most African Americans who are descended from enslaved people trace their lineage to West Africa, his choice of Kenya as his ancestral home was informed by the Abuja Proclamation, a pan-African declaration sponsored by the African Union in 1993. This proclamation calls upon all African states ���to grant entrance as of right to all persons of African descent and right to obtain residence in those African states if there is no disqualifying element on Africans claiming the right to return to his ancestral home������an idyllic goal that has yet to be sustainably implemented in reality beyond catering to elite classes of the Black diaspora
As the push for economic growth continues, African nations such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda, where tourism is central to GDP, are likely to begin marketing themselves as relocation destinations for the Black diaspora. While African Americans may not have explicit ancestral ties to East Africa, the region���s infrastructure and perceived stability may attract more returnees. It would not be surprising to see these nations adopt policies similar to South Africa���s ���digital nomad��� visas to facilitate long-term diaspora migration.
Given the circumstances, it is easy to direct anger towards the incoming communities of Black expats, who seem to be reaping the benefits of this current incentivized hierarchy. Most of these newcomers, however, are also victims of the neoliberal structures of class exploitation that disenfranchise Black communities across the globe, particularly in America. The real culprits remain the African political and economic elite and the Western powers, former colonizers, and financial institutions who shape their self-interest and continue to amass capital at the expense of genuine racial solidarity, distorting radical unifying principles through the sanitizing process of elite capture.
In the case of Kenya, the cost of living remains at an all-time high following the country���s�� #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests against neoliberalism and poor governance, with Kenya���s debt-to-GDP ratio projected to reach 70 percent. Meanwhile, the Kenyan government remains mired in scandals, from selling fake fertilizer to farmers, to a defunct Social Health Authority (SHA) system leading to a public health crisis. Even more concerning, Kenya���s current administration seems to be deepening economic ties with oppressive regimes, recently hosting Sudan���s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the same military group responsible for war crimes in one of the most devastating civil wars in recent history, allowing them to charter meetings aimed at forming a parallel government in Sudan. In retaliation, Sudan banned all Kenyan produce imports, disrupting Kenya���s tea trade and further destabilizing the economy. Describing Kenya as a ���paradise��� of any kind, farmland or otherwise, requires a willful ignorance of the circumstances that Kenyans are fighting to survive in.
What history warns us is that the pivotal issue lies at the feet of economic mismanagement and lack of structural economic reforms to uplift local African societies. For instance, Nigeria���s Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ���77) was a billion-dollar celebration of Black pride, but failed to deliver lasting economic benefits for Nigerians, with massive shanty towns surrounding the display and famed Nigerian artist Fela Kuti declining to participate, calling the event a propaganda exercise. As Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah pointed out in a 1985 essay ���The Festival Syndrome,��� such festivals risk becoming ���wasteful demonstrations of intellectual bankruptcy��� rather than vehicles for meaningful change. As African countries continue to find ways to participate in the global community and diaspora, Africa���s resources must be used to address pressing issues like famine, poverty, and economic inequity that persists within its borders.
Kwame Nkrumah understood the importance of cultural exchange and its practical benefits. ���You must not be content with the accumulation of knowledge about the arts,��� he declared at the opening of the University of Ghana���s Institute of African Studies in 1963. ���Your research must stimulate creative activity; it must contribute to the development of the arts in Ghana and in other parts of Africa.��� Tourism and long-term diaspora migration do not need to be inherently exploitative;�� they could be a dialogue in service of national needs and true local development. This could mean skills training for locals, fostering job creation and economic sustainability.
Moreover, diasporic public figures genuinely interested in engaging with the continent should not only seek to develop profit making opportunities that burnish their own reputations, but also make a point to support local grassroots initiatives as opposed to enabling the celebrity-washing practices of corrupt governments. Initiatives like which builds community through political education, provides a model for ethical engagement���the Chicago rapper and avowed anticapitalist does not center herself with her platform but rather is currently partnering with local African bookstores in places like Nairobi, Accra, and Lagos to host a book club tour.
The question is not whether the African diaspora has a place on the continent���they always have. As the writer Shamira Ibrahim succinctly puts it, the Black diaspora does not deserve to be turned into ���shields for administrative neglect.��� Rather, it is about ensuring that their return does not reproduce the same exploitative dynamics that colonialism and neoliberalism have long upheld. True pan-Africanism must be built on mutual solidarity, land equity, and economic justice, not on elite-driven spectacles that serve the privileged few.
May 1, 2025
An undignified democracy
Photo by Marc St on Unsplash. Thirty-one years after the fall of administrative apartheid, South Africa stands at an uneasy juncture between the promise of a rights-based democracy and the lived reality of widespread inequality, bureaucratic inertia, and eroded public trust. The 1996 Constitution enshrined administrative justice���the right to lawful, reasonable, and procedurally fair decisions by public bodies���and elevated human dignity as a foundational value. Yet for millions of Black South Africans, daily encounters with government services betray these ideals. Former President Thabo Mbeki once praised the ���patience��� of the poor as a political asset, but that very patience, rooted in hope and resilience, has too often been exploited to delay or deny substantive justice.
South Africa���s democracy has, in many respects, become undignified: Its administrative systems routinely fail the vulnerable, asking citizens to wait endlessly for rights guaranteed on paper, while a political elite and a small new class of beneficiaries feast on state resources with impunity. Understanding this reality requires tracing the meanings of administrative justice, dignity, and patience, before turning to the ways South Africans have historically rebelled against political betrayal. It is also necessary to consider the failure of political parties to deliver accountability, the administrative dysfunction that deepens inequality, and the emblematic cases���housing, TRC reparations, military veterans, and land restitution���that expose the cracks in the constitutional promise. Finally, this essay reflects on how white privilege, amplified by groups like AfriForum and international actors during and after the Trump administration, compounds domestic frustrations and fuels an alarming decline in electoral participation.
At the center of the constitutional order stands the ideal of administrative justice. Every exercise of public power must be lawful, reasonable, and procedurally fair, protected by mechanisms like the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act of 2000. As legal scholar Cora Hoexter has argued, administrative law is a vital check on state authority, ensuring that decisions affecting rights are made transparently and accountably. Internationally, administrative justice is recognized as a core pillar of human rights���a necessary safeguard when bureaucrats exceed their mandates or violate due process.
Tied closely to this structure is the constitutional commitment to human dignity. Drawing from Kantian ethics and rooted in South African jurisprudence, dignity is not merely one right among others, but the lodestar by which all rights are interpreted. Justice Laurie Ackermann emphasized its centrality. Beyond the legal canon, Black Consciousness thinkers like Steve Biko and decolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon insisted that dignity was not an abstract flourish, but the very precondition for liberation. Biko sought to ���pump back life into [the black man���s] empty shell… to infuse him with pride and dignity,��� while Fanon argued that true political freedom demanded the restoration of self-worth stolen by colonial domination.
If dignity represented the hope of the post-apartheid project, patience was its currency. Mbeki celebrated the patience of the poor as a sign of political maturity, a willingness to endure temporary hardship for the sake of a democratic future. But others warned that patience could easily harden into resignation. Robert Sobukwe cautioned against gradualism, warning that ���the longer we wait, the deeper the injury.��� Biko, too, recognized that passive endurance ultimately served the interests of the oppressor. In a country where promises have so often gone unmet, patience is a double-edged virtue: a sign of resilience but also a symptom of a democracy that demands too much suffering from those who have already borne too much.
Yet patience has never meant passivity. Although South Africans have not mounted a single unified revolution since 1994, dissent has flared through episodic, localized uprisings. Several factors help explain this pattern. The ethos of reconciliation promoted by Nelson Mandela and the restorative approach of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission encouraged faith in gradual reform over radical upheaval. Decades of colonial and apartheid rule fostered a culture of compliance and deference, reinforced by appeals from church and traditional leaders to wait for better days. Memories of township violence in the 1980s, along with global examples of civil conflict, instilled a deep wariness of societal collapse. And with no unified revolutionary movement to anchor post-apartheid grievances, protests often remained fragmented and issue-specific. The coercive power of the state and the exhaustion of repeated, fruitless demonstrations further tempered the appetite for mass confrontation.
Nonetheless, South Africans have rebelled in significant ways. Since 2004, thousands of service delivery protests have erupted annually, with communities blocking roads and clashing with police over failures in water, electricity, and sanitation. Karl Von Holdt���s landmark study The Smoke That Calls captured how poor townships resorted to incendiary protest as a desperate means of being heard by an indifferent state. University students nationwide mounted a powerful challenge during the #FeesMustFall movement of 2015 and 2016, shutting down campuses and storming Parliament to demand an end to fee increases. In 2012, the Marikana miners��� strike for a living wage ended in a police massacre that galvanized national outrage over labor exploitation and state violence. More recently, movements like #TotalShutdown saw thousands of women mobilizing against gender-based violence, while the July 2021 unrest���a volatile mix of political factionalism and opportunistic looting���turned parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng into scenes of near-insurrection, with over 300 fatalities.
These fragmented rebellions reveal both the depth of popular frustration and the persistent difficulty of translating sporadic unrest into sustained, systemic transformation. Since 1994, the dominance of the African National Congress (ANC) has fundamentally shaped South Africa���s political landscape. During the era of the Government of National Unity, the ANC pursued a cautious balancing act between reconciliation and economic policy, replacing the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) with the more neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy by 1996. This shift sidelined hopes for radical redistribution and sowed the seeds of future disillusionment.
Corruption quickly took root. The 1999 arms deal, the Nkandla scandal in which President Jacob Zuma���s homestead was upgraded at a public cost of R246 million, and the sprawling state capture era between 2009 and 2018 illustrated the ANC���s steady slide into patronage and graft. Judicial commissions���Seriti on the arms deal, Zondo on state capture���painstakingly documented wrongdoing but resulted in few prosecutions, fueling what has come to be known as ���commission fatigue��� and deepening public cynicism.
The opposition, for its part, has failed to offer a credible alternative. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has struggled to expand meaningfully beyond its traditional white and Coloured voter base, while the Inkatha Freedom Party remains regionally confined. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have animated national debates with demands for land expropriation and nationalization, but remain trapped within the legislature���capable of making noise but unable to deliver real change from the opposition benches. Coalition governments in major metros have frequently collapsed into infighting, reinforcing perceptions of political ineptitude across the board.
The growing accountability deficit follows a predictable script. When corruption scandals erupt, the government announces a commission of inquiry. Years pass in hearings. Reports are delivered, often voluminous and damning. But tangible consequences remain elusive. Powerful individuals exploit procedural delays, flee the country, or rely on political interventions to escape justice. Even mass protests are often met not with serious reform but with police repression or performative apologies that ultimately beat back dissent without addressing its root causes. The result is a democracy rich in forms���regular elections, a vibrant media, a robust constitution���but hollowed out at its core. The rituals of accountability endure, but the substance has withered. Impunity, rather than consequence, defines the South African political landscape.
Beyond the failures of politicians, the collapse of administrative justice is most sharply felt in the everyday experience of the civil service. It has become routine for ministers to be publicly surprised by crises they are meant to oversee, convening emergency meetings to ask, bewilderedly, ���What is happening?��� Political patronage, particularly through cadre deployment, has steadily eroded technical expertise in key departments, leaving many leaders ill-equipped to manage the portfolios they are charged with stewarding.
The adoption of New Public Management tools���key performance indicators, outcomes-based planning, strategic frameworks���has entrenched a tick-box culture, increasingly divorced from substantive service delivery. Success is measured by paperwork rather than impact; when targets are not met, they are simply revised, not achieved. Meanwhile, in a bid to prevent arbitrariness through rigid procedures, bureaucracy has become risk-averse to the point of paralysis. Citizens must navigate labyrinthine processes merely to register a business, obtain an identity document, or apply for a social grant, in blatant breach of the Batho Pele (���People First���) principles that once sought to guide public service transformation.
Demoralized by political interference and the impossible demands of managerialist targets, skilled professionals have exited the public sector in droves. Auditor-general reports show that over 70 percent of municipalities now rely on external consultants for core financial functions���a telling sign of the hollowing out of state capacity.
Such dysfunction directly assaults human dignity. Elderly pensioners are forced to queue for hours only to be told ���system offline.��� Families languish for decades on housing lists. Small business owners remain trapped in bureaucratic limbo. For many citizens, the face of the state is not the president in Pretoria, but a disinterested clerk behind a glass barrier���an experience that epitomizes an undignified democracy.
In the realm of housing, the promises of the post-apartheid state have fallen painfully short. Adequate housing is a constitutional right, yet over 1.2 million applications languish unprocessed in Gauteng alone, some dating back to 1996. In March 2025, elderly Soweto residents���some now in their sixties���marched on the mayor���s office after nearly thirty years of waiting. Allegations of bribery, queue-jumping, and the corrupt allocation of houses to politically connected individuals compound the backlog, turning a promise of dignity into a source of shame and deepening social strife. Many displaced families resort to living in informal settlements or self-built shacks, only to face violent evictions. Such actions often ignite protests, and sometimes fuel xenophobic scapegoating when locals blame ���foreigners��� for corrupt allocations.
A similar betrayal characterizes the fate of those who sought reparations through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Between 1996 and 1998, the TRC promised pensions, housing, health care, and other forms of redress to over 22,000 victims in exchange for truth-telling. In practice, most victims received only a one-off R30,000 grant in 2001, and as of 2022, nearly R1.9 billion in the President���s Fund remains unspent. Elderly and often ailing, many continue to petition outside the Constitutional Court for medical benefits and community rehabilitation. Criminal prosecutions of apartheid-era perpetrators who had been denied amnesty were handed to the National Prosecuting Authority, yet most cases have languished for decades. The message is devastatingly clear: ���We forgave in the name of the nation, but the nation forgot us.���
Military veterans, too, have been left behind. Fighters from uMkhonto weSizwe and the Azanian People���s Liberation Army, once promised recognition and support under the Military Veterans Act, now live in poverty and face homelessness. In October 2021, ex-combatants, many of them in their seventies, held the minister of defence hostage to demand unpaid pensions and housing, leading to the arrest of 53 veterans. Former MK soldier Lesley Kgogo, camping outside ANC headquarters, captured the bitter irony: ���I liberated the country… Now I am nothing to my own government.��� Bureaucratic excuses about verifying identities or funding constraints ring hollow when measured against the state���s moral failure to honor its promises.
The unfinished business of land restitution completes this bleak picture. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were confined to just 13 percent of the country���s territory. Although the Restitution of Land Rights Act offered compensation or the return of land for claims lodged before 1998, progress has been dismal. Only about 10 percent of commercial farmland has been redistributed, far below the 30 percent target set for 2014. In Cape Town, District Six remains an enduring emblem of broken promises: Of 2,760 claimant families, only 108 had keys to rebuilt homes by 2020, with full restitution projected to take decades and billions of rands. Rural claimants, lacking support to develop land, often opted for meager cash settlements, undermining the project of land reform altogether. Meanwhile, land occupations by movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo and EFF-led encampments testify to a growing impatience���and a rising risk of renewed conflict���if restitution continues to stall.
Yet even as millions languish in precarious conditions, white privilege remains largely intact. Despite the ideals of the democratic transition, white South Africans���roughly 8 percent of the population���continue to own over 70 percent of farmland and dominate the country���s high-income sectors. Many have insulated themselves from the failures of the post-apartheid state by retreating into private security enclaves, gated estates, and elite private schools, effectively distancing themselves from the consequences of governance collapse.
Groups like AfriForum have been particularly adept at internationalizing narratives of white victimhood. In 2018, AfriForum successfully lobbied the Trump administration to investigate supposed ���farm seizures��� and ���large-scale killings of farmers��� in South Africa. Donald Trump���s now-infamous tweet directing the State Department to look into farm attacks���and later, speculative offers to resettle white South Africans under a potential second Trump presidency���illustrate how fringe narratives can gain geopolitical traction. Meanwhile, the genuine struggles of Black South Africans���families waiting decades for housing, veterans sleeping on sidewalks, students facing police brutality���receive scant international attention. This inversion of global empathy deepens domestic frustration, feeding the perception that justice depends not on moral right but on who controls the louder megaphone abroad.
These dynamics have fueled a dangerous democratic fatigue. Voter turnout has declined steeply, from 86.9 percent in the 1994 elections to just 59 percent in the 2024 general election���representing only 41 percent of eligible adults when accounting for non-registration. Local elections in 2021 saw turnout plunge even lower, to 45.9 percent. Youth participation has collapsed: Fewer than 20 percent of 18-to-35-year-olds registered to vote in 2021. Disillusioned by corruption, broken promises, and stagnant living conditions, many South Africans increasingly choose apathy over a vote they believe unlikely to yield meaningful change. As participation dwindles, the democratic mandate of elected bodies weakens, further eroding their incentive to deliver on the constitutional promise of administrative justice.
South Africa���s democracy stands at a perilous crossroads. The legal architecture of administrative justice and dignity remains among the world���s most progressive, yet for millions of citizens, the everyday experience is one of alienation, indignity, and unfulfilled constitutional promises. The virtues of patience and reconciliation���once crucial to a peaceful transition���have been weaponized into tools of complacency, allowing political and bureaucratic elites to defer accountability and betray the vulnerable.
Episodic rebellions remind us of the people���s latent power, but without sustained, systemic challenge, the status quo largely endures. Transforming an undignified democracy into one worthy of its constitutional promise demands not only technical reforms in governance but a deeper moral and political reawakening. Real accountability must be restored. Corrupt officials must be prosecuted swiftly, and commission recommendations implemented with urgency and transparency. A responsive administration must be rebuilt by reprofessionalizing the civil service, strengthening technical expertise, and reinvigorating the Batho Pele principles that prioritize the lived experiences of citizens.
Tangible justice must also be made visible. Delivering housing, disbursing TRC reparations, honoring veterans��� benefits, and accelerating land restitution are urgent steps toward rebuilding public trust. Economic inclusion must be pursued, not only through redistribution but by supporting emerging entrepreneurs, land reform beneficiaries, and investing seriously in youth skills development. At the same time, civic engagement must be deepened, barriers to participation must be lowered, and protest must be valued not as a threat but as a vital feedback mechanism for a democracy struggling to renew itself.
Only by aligning constitutional promises with substantive, visible outcomes���where an ordinary grandmother can say, ���My rights are respected, and my voice matters������can South Africa honor its past sacrifices and restore its moral authority. The next decades will demand impatience from citizens and responsiveness from leaders. If that challenge is met, administrative justice will�� be no longer a legal abstraction but a lived, daily reality for all.
April 29, 2025
As aid ends, empire endures
Residents of Agege community gather at an NGO event in Lagos, January 2024. Image �� Tolu Owoeye via Shutterstock. In recent months, Western governments have been loudly rethinking their aid strategies. The US announced a dramatic reduction in foreign assistance, claiming that the ���foreign aid industry��� destabilizes world peace by promoting values ���inverse to harmonious and stable relations.��� Meanwhile, the UK government slashed its aid budget, citing the need to prioritize defense spending. Germany, the world���s second-largest aid donor, has also signaled reductions in its aid spending following its recent elections. These moves have sparked debate about what these cuts mean for African countries. Some commentators frame them as wake-up calls, urging African governments to become self-reliant and finally build sovereign systems without leaning on Western donors.
However, calls for sovereignty cannot be separated from the history of aid and the role of NGOs on the continent. This is not just a moment of budget cuts. It���s a moment that demands a deeper reckoning with how aid and development have functioned as tools of control���how they hollowed out the African state and replaced political struggle with donor-led projects. Aid is more than a line item in a budget���it is a system of power. These cuts, rather than a break from the past, expose the deeper structures of dependency that have long defined African engagement with Western development models.
The idea that foreign aid is about support or solidarity has always been a carefully constructed illusion. Back in 2002, Firoze Manji and Carl O���Coill, in their article Missionary Positions: NGOs and Development in Africa, called out NGOs as ���the missionary arm of neoliberalism������not neutral helpers, but key players in a system that restructured African states under the banner of reform. Their work is still relevant today. What they laid bare was how, especially in the wake of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), introduced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the 1980s, SAPs slashed public spending and privatized state functions, gutting local infrastructure and leaving a vacuum that NGOs quickly moved to fill. Non-governmental organizations became the main interface between African people and their governments, except that the state had been replaced by development agencies and international donors.
Importantly, Manji and O���Coill also show that the rise of NGOs was not just a story of soft power���it was a continuation of colonial control by other means. As African countries gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, former colonial powers didn���t disappear; they rebranded. The overt racial hierarchies of empire gave way to a new language of ���development.��� NGOs emerged at this moment, filling the vacuum left by retreating colonial administrations. The discourse of development replaced the language of civilizing missions, but the dynamics of domination and paternalism remained. Under the guise of helping, NGOs continued to manage African populations and territories, only now with the moral authority of humanitarianism.
Non-governmental organizations in Africa, mostly backed by foreign donors, offered schools, clinics, food programs, and even roads. But, as Manji and O���Coill show, this wasn���t a neutral or benevolent intervention. The NGOs replaced the political with the technical. They reframed poverty as a problem of skills and resources, not as the outcome of global inequalities or failed economic models. Development, once a political project of liberation and redistribution, became a managerial task outsourced to foreign-funded organizations.
This shift was not only institutional but also linguistic. As Manji and O���Coill highlight, the very language of development was transformed. Buzzwords like ���empowerment,��� ���capacity-building,��� and ���participation��� were stripped of political content and repackaged as apolitical tools of governance. The discourse no longer spoke of justice or structural inequality���it spoke instead of efficiency, best practices, and deliverables. In doing so, development became something done to people, rather than something done with or by them. This helped legitimize NGOs as neutral actors, even as they worked within���and helped reproduce���structures of global inequality.
USAID played a key role in institutionalizing this model. It has long been one of the largest funders of NGOs across Africa. Unlike direct support to governments, which comes with expectations of transparency and political engagement, channeling money through NGOs gave donors like the US and UK more control, fewer complications, and less public scrutiny. It allowed them to shape development priorities and implementation while bypassing state institutions altogether.
This logic persists today. Even as political relationships between Washington or London and countries such as Uganda, Kenya, or Ethiopia become strained, the NGO infrastructure funded by their aid programs remains intact. In Uganda, for example, USAID has funded hundreds of initiatives in education, agriculture, and health. Although some of these efforts have delivered services, they are also emblematic of a development model that sidelines governments and treats African publics as recipients, not agents.
This is why the current moment feels both urgent and misleading. Yes, African states must build independent systems. But the real issue isn���t just the loss of money, it���s the legacy that money has left behind. For decades, foreign aid has helped shift accountability away from elected governments and toward foreign donors. It depoliticized poverty and institutionalized dependency, all while claiming to promote development.
What emerges, then, is not a model of sovereignty but of structural dependency. Manji and O���Coill describe NGOs as ���instruments of pacification��� rather than mobilization. Far from empowering people to demand justice or transformation, they defuse dissent, redirect energy into professionalized service delivery, and ultimately protect the very global systems that created underdevelopment in the first place. The withdrawal of USAID or UK aid does not undo this reality; it simply reveals it more starkly. What, then, is to be done? This moment invites not just critique, but a strategy. As aid recedes, the urgent question is not how to replace it, but how to move beyond it. Sovereignty cannot mean swapping Western donors for private investors or new geopolitical patrons. It must mean rebuilding public institutions, confronting the neoliberal wreckage of the SAP era, and rejecting the NGO-ization of the state. But that vision won���t materialize automatically. It will require political struggle���inside African states, across civil society, and in global fora. If aid helped depoliticize development, moving beyond it means re-politicizing it again.
The NGO model outlasted the aid flows that created it. It lives on in the clinics, schools, and community programs scattered across African countries���often doing necessary work, but always within limits defined by donors. Manji and O���Coill warned us not to mistake this for liberation. As aid budgets shrink, the work ahead is not just to survive the cuts, but also to refuse the system that made them matter so much in the first place.
April 28, 2025
Art is a place for rehearsal
���We are what you don���t want to see,��� by M���barek Bouhchichi, 2023. Displayed at the 35th S��o Paulo Biennial. �� Levi Fanan. To do history is what M���barek Bouhchichi remains committed to as an artist from Akka. The construction of history must respect the subjective narration of its storyteller. This conversation is a continuation, a (re)negotiation, and a repositioning of Blackness. M���barek begins from where there has been silence, representational erasure, and the denial of one���s identity. In a 2020 published conversation, M���barek illustrated at length the dynamics by which Black Moroccans have been invisibilized and the whitewashing of Europe���s southern ���border.��� This time, we spoke about repositioning blackness as a territory of belonging: how to think of the diasporic in a multidimensional localized emergence of conviviality and of being human. For M���barek, artistic expression, the gaze, and correspondence beyond the mundane offer pathways for connections, epistemic ruptures, and a remapping of history.
Amina SoulimaniM���barek, it���s wonderful to catch up again. I am in Cape Town, and you are in Brazil at the moment, right? The last time we spoke we were both in Morocco.
M���barek BouhchichiYes and I was lucky to go directly to the Goi��s region, where a black community, known as Quilombo Kalungas, lives. I was among them, and I saw history before encountering what could come across as fake, standardized, or fabricated images. I arrived in a beautiful forest where people adopted me. I found myself among families where I felt proud to say ���I am black.���
It���s a particular consciousness with a background of struggle���one that continues to be driven by a consciousness that marries indigenous knowledge, medicinal plants, the environment, and an assimilation to it. I didn���t feel like there was a difference between humans and plants, because of a shared and expressed imaginary. One depends on the other and supports its becoming with an essence of healing and observation. Together, they grow, simultaneously. It���s an alternative that embodies pride���one that I didn���t see in the Moroccan South or other parts of Morocco. To think of this nuance is delicate. A person that I can meet in Morocco, with the same skin pigmentation that I���ve seen here in Quilombo, would never accept to be qualified as Black.
I am at a residency in Goi��nia launched by Dalton Paula who opened his home to welcome 25 black artists. It���s a place that feels like an urban extension of Quilombo���a refuge that exists outside of the occidental dictionary. It may be qualified as an escape, but it���s not. It���s a legitimized communal gathering.
Amina SoulimaniHow are you experiencing the space there? And what are you working on?
M���barek BouhchichiYou know, it���s the first time that I am in a country where I am not asked about where I am from. It���s a particular transparency. You are Brazilian by default. The ethnic landscape is so diverse. You are not asked about your origins until you speak up to say that you don���t speak Portuguese.
What I am suggesting as artwork, as part of the residency, is inspired by Dave The Potter, a black American slave in South Carolina. He was a poet who made art despite harsh conditions of slavery, and he engraved his art with verses from his poems. It fascinated me because I was also engaged in acts of materializing poetry in relation to M���barek Ben Zida (1925-1973).
The earth is a voice. The earth is a body: both a linking element and an agent of separation. I wondered about the possibility of multiplying voices. The project is called ���We are what you don���t want to see.��� I reunited multiple verses of poetry from Dave the Potter, M���barek Ben Zida, Abderrahman El Majdoub, Concei����o Evaristo, Lu��s Gama, and other Black Brazilian poets including contemporary ones. I worked on them collectively as stanzas in conversation.
Originally they (poets) were part of communities that were engaged in oral history. Through writing, they enabled a prolonged act of archiving ancestral practices of tattooing and scarification. It matters to see the world as a flowing river and to stop dividing it horizontally and vertically in the geopolitical logics of North/South/East/West. We must believe in the fragility of the curved line, and of the oblique line, which profoundly resembles our own fragility(ies). We must accept that there existed unbound mediums of circulation and that despite our singularities, we remain similar. For instance, there is a misconception about the immobility of the earth. Did you know that earth/soil travels? In ports of South America or Africa, there is earth from other continents. Upon the delivery of merchandise across oceans, cargo-filled boats, if returning empty, are filled up with earth/soil, which is later poured into ports.
Pottery, as a process, embodies fragility from the initial conception of a body until the end. It demands significant attention, even when thinking through the logistics of transporting it. It���s a process in which there is a constant presence of elements: for instance, the air is used for drying purposes, and the earth needs it to breathe. For it to come together, water is poured, and fire as well. These are essential elements for life, and they make up civilization. Somehow, they are a bridge for everything that we do with our hands.
Amina SoulimaniI resonate with the idea of fluidity. How do you perceive this flow, especially in earth movements, should we be thinking of triangularities of movement or lean on a fluidity that has no form when thinking through race, identity, and processes of becoming?
M���barek BouhchichiAccording to Djibril Diop, the destiny of young Africans is a form of circulation between a colonial library, an Arab-Muslim library, and a postcolonial one. We belong to populations that know how to draw fluid forms that are not shaped through a particular rationality. It���s not perfect. It���s democratic because it���s not rooted in exclusion. If we ask people to draw circles without a drawing compass, they will all be different and beautiful, yet they are all circles. But if we ask them to draw squares, that will be complicated. Two different logics. I believe I adhere to fluidity up until triangularity. I don���t know how we can materialize triangularity.
Yet a line is a separation: a marcation. A straight line is rigid, d��re���(laughs)
I am interested in forms of circulations that are extensions of culturally charged corporealities that can have resonances. It���s like physics: there is an alchemy that takes place in encounters, a collage, vas-et-viens, exchanges of what an idea is, and what space entails. We must seek opportunities that enable us to engage with our practices differently. If I had first gone to S��o Paulo, I would not have been able to dig. I would have probably spent my time in libraries and bookstores exploring a history that not everybody was involved in writing. In Quilombo, there is a history in motion, it���s transmitted and is being practiced. It���s a history that is lived.
Amina SoulimaniOn the idea of a history that is practiced, upon your return to Morocco from Brazil, how do you see yourself practicing history? This might be a futurist-like question, maybe you���ve thought about it already?
M���barek BouhchichiI did think of the comment, the how. The only solution for me is to reactivate forms. I don���t want to duplicate models, but to depart from what is available in my village and reactivate it. I want to work with the idea of a common space in the ways in which it was practiced in the past; in its governance, and horizontal organizing.
In May 2023, I was in the north of Morocco with Omar Berrada in a residency on migration. I realized that I am actually interested in history. I am not an anthropologist, but I am attuned to the idea of cannibalizing history, the present, and the future. I went back to some villages like �������� �������������� ���Khandaq Errihane in the Rif where there are black communities. I think they represent forms of marronage, which doesn���t even exist in Moroccan history or episteme. When interviewing the older generation, I discovered that theirs was a recent marronage, starting in the early 1960s. They went up to the mountains, agreed with another tribe to share the forest, and created their own village. Up until today, they are all related and are cousins to one another. They kept it close. It���s the idea of Quilombo.
We rarely speak of these forms of emancipation in Morocco or possibilities for community. They are still fighting to have a school and working infrastructure. They only started having access to electricity five or six years ago while their former ���masters��� who live down the mountains have had it for decades. You can���t find the village easily���it���s hidden because it���s also related to the nature of their economic activity which revolves around cannabis farming.
Marronage exists in Morocco, though we may not talk about it. For instance, Zawayas are also an example of safe zones, and this opens up an expansive landscape of exploration for me.
Amina SoulimaniI had a conversation with the South African artist, Russel Hlongwane, whose thinking around indigeneity involves a particular (yet gentle) resistance to using diasporic discourse or language to explain where he comes from. In some ways, a positioning against linguistic hegemony in relation to the earth, and in the context he grew up in, drawing on Zulu heritage whilst working toward a greater Nguni context. M���barek, I���ve come to understand that this is an experience you also encountered and trespassed.
In this new frontier, where do you position the discourse of Black and African diaspora in rethinking indigeneity?
M���barek BouhchichiI might respond alternatively. I see two spheres: there is us, and there is ���art.��� The latter works as an extension of colonialism. It���s used by taking models, a way of thinking, and a vocabulary to mark boundaries between a civilized and a ���non-civilized.��� We are all in this sphere, and there are fights to be led. We must have the strength to transverse vertically or horizontally this burden that colors our bodies and roots. When you say ���art��� to communities, you impose your idea of a legitimate form. You stop them from everything they are doing to a state of ���this is how it should be.��� This positioning of re-inventing is necessary instead of unequal and asymmetric collaborations.
I recently appreciated how Abdoulaye Konat��, Director of l���Institut National des Arts de Bamako invited the musician Toumani Diabat�� and other artisans to teach. Toumani doesn���t have a PhD and neither do the artisans. You see, it���s easy to denaturalise one���s self but this is the historical consciousness that we need today: we need to conjugate and multiply various forms of resistance. We should not create fake images of what we are not.
This interview was conducted in September 2023, a conversation that flowed in both Arabic and French.
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