Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 13
April 25, 2025
Kenya’s vibe shift
Protesters outside the Nation Centre on Kimathi Street in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 20, 2024. Image �� Simon Libz via Shutterstock. Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the new chair of the African Union Commission, has a Kenyan fandom. Breathlessly referred to by his local stans as ���Djibouti Man��� or ���Djibouti Guy,��� sounding like something out of ���80s or ���90s Black Atlantic pop culture, the enamorment doesn���t stem so much from his skill as a foreign minister, diplomatic elegance, or prowess with languages, shifting as he does between Arabic, English, and French like a YouTube polyglot guru. No���it���s because he was up against and defeated 80-year-old Raila Odinga, Kenya���s long-time opposition leader, who was contesting the AUC chair seat as a last-gasp effort at a political consolation prize, following a fifth presidential loss in 2022.
The mood in Kenya on February 15 felt like a referendum, with celebrations breaking out in some areas���my boondock hometown among them���when Odinga lost. And it wasn���t just rubes who were in a festive mood. The weeks preceding the AUC elections had been characterized by social media campaigns to reach out to African foreign ministries, asking them to pick Youssouf and #RejectRailaOdinga, the political conman, perennial loser, and betrayer of Gen Z. #RailaMustFALL. And fall he did. While the role played by these efforts to sublimate Kenyan vendettas onto the continental stage is debatable, the defeat was nonetheless received in many quarters as Odinga���s divine comeuppance for his collaboration with the William Ruto regime. A perfid Ruto proxy had fallen; a catharsis and symbolic chipping away at the edifice of the president, in the absence of any veritable possibility that he could actually leave office.
The exaltation didn���t last too long, as it just so happens that to every vibe shift that has occurred since the June 2024, out-of-left-field, anti-tax uprising, there has been an equal atavism. Odinga won���t miss the continental sinecure all that much, despite the jet-setting campaigns costing the country an arm and a leg. In March 2025, he and Ruto solemnized their de facto political union, which dates back to July 2024, when Odinga dashed to prop up the very same president he had been trying to oust a year earlier. Odinga���s Orange Democratic Movement party has now been allocated 50 percent of government spots in a fortified ���broad-based government.���
To the uninitiated, this consolidated pact is an extended betrayal, an insatiable octogenarian seeking even more power, when he should have sat back and let popular pressure get a wobbling Ruto out way back in July 2024. But the ingenues are actually just coming face to face with the arcana, cabalism, and racket ethics that undergird Kenyan politics. Wins���electoral, in the courts, on the streets, even in Addis Ababa���do not actually matter to an establishment that only handles matters how it knows best, through elite cohesion or, better yet, elite cohabitation.
Considering his starring role in the most controversial episodes of the Ruto regime���to wit, colluding with the president to impeach ex-DP Rigathi Gachagua and promoting the contentious, multibillion-dollar Adani deals���Odinga has come to be viewed as toxic enabler number one. But he is far from alone in propping up Ruto. Following a handshake photo-op, several loyalists of ex-president Uhuru Kenyatta were appointed to government posts in December 2024, officially burying the hatchet between the best friends���turned���enemies. In a country that has caught the protest bug, having both Odinga and Kenyatta conciliated isn���t merely the political class regrouping. On the one hand, it���s the attenuation of Odinga���s urban, poor, and working-class base, which forms the critical mass during protests and for whom Baba���s word is final. On the other, it���s a gesture to capital, with multibillionaire Kenyatta���s multimillionaire stalwarts now occupying the critical trade, communications, and agriculture dockets. This is a tacit signal to the capitalist class that their investments are as safe as those of the Kenyatta business empire, which had faced niggling difficulties as hostilities with Ruto raged.
Despite being helmed by a government of elite cohabitation, the country is not especially at ease. Two consecutive years of social unrest met by gratuitous, deadly state force, a raft of malfunctioning policies, abductions, and renewed ethnic balkanization are eating away at the social contract. Nowadays, seemingly anodyne government directives turn into full-blown controversies, such as the nationwide cattle vaccination campaign that spawned a kerfuffle of Bill Gates���inflected conspiracy theories and crass jousting from even the president himself. The most reviled head of state in decades, William Samoei arap Ruto is seen as Daniel Toroitich arap Moi���s epigone seeking to atavize the country to the doldrums of anti-democracy. ���Ruto Must Go��� echoes everywhere, even at Kenyan pop star Bien-Aim�� Baraza���s concert ��� in London.
The atavists are taking none of this lying down. Never to be left behind by a trend, stalwart allies of the president���such as Kimani Ichung���wah, the gadfly majority leader in the National Assembly known for his verbal sallies���are now declaring that ���Ruto Must Go ON.��� When several young X users were abducted in late December after posting ���offensive��� images of the president (one was an AI depiction of Ruto dead in a coffin), members of Ruto���s UDA party and pro-Ruto ODM fusionists emerged in full force to infantilize the young adult abductees, downplaying their political agency by calling on parents to police their children���s social media activity. Some went as far as claiming that the abductions were staged.
Beyond anti-democratic apologia, the rhetoric adopted by some of these sycophants is not anodyne, bringing back some noxious memories and, to some, a feeling that a Damocles sword of ethnic strife once more hangs over the country. The run-up to the ill-fated December 2007 elections was characterized by many dog-whistles, one of whose premises is making a comeback in 2025. Claiming to oppose Mwai Kibaki and his exclusionary, chauvinistic inner circle known as the ���Mount Kenya Mafia,��� some ODM supporters in 2007 used the epithet ���41 tribes against 1��� to rally against Kibaki and the Kikuyu community at large. The first act of the 2007���2008 carnage was the premeditated slaughter and displacement of the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley by blood-and-soil militias. Ruto, then an ODM stalwart, faced charges at the ICC for allegedly masterminding the violence, charges that were eventually dropped, following mysterious witness retractions. From 2023, Gachagua and his bitterly controversial statements about ethnic ���shareholding��� (he was accused by several members of the National Assembly of withholding flood relief money to their constituencies, because they ���didn���t have shares���) have once again come to embody this so-called Kikuyu entitlement. It has elicited a revanchist response from ethnic-baiting politicians and social media bomb-throwers, whose coded posts and statements in public about ���isolating the mountain��� hail what they see as Ruto���s efforts to equally share the national cake and discipline the majoritarian excesses of Kenya���s largest ethnic group.
The politics of redistributive development are, of course, something Ruto picked up from Odinga, whose platform of devolution in the aughts was seen to champion the marginalized in Kenya���s northern, western, coastal, and informal urban peripheries. Ruto���s pivot, though partially desperate as he seeks to shed the taxman tag, builds on the support he had already siphoned from Odinga in these peripheral constituencies in 2022. Today, with the consolidation of the broad-based government, the AUC-campaign-era fear that ODM itself might be carted off to the tent of the prodigal old boy has fully materialized. Ruto���s inroads are now fracturing the party���s diverse coalition, with ODM���s Luo core seen to be privileged in transactions with him. An ideological schism is also underway, with a traditionalist faction deeming Ruto���s antidemocratic habits, weakness on federalism, and incoherent economic policies as antithetical to the party���s social democracy.
This faction is rapidly becoming outcast. It faces an ascendant Ruto fusionist wing, which is composed of ethnic bigots titillated by the anti-Kikuyu mood, careerists, and crony capitalists relishing the opportunity to gorge themselves at the state table of accumulation that Gachagua���s traps and shareholding gospel had tried to keep them from.
The discontent and disarray that the Ruto regime hath wrought has unsurprisingly made maneuvers for 2027 start in earnest. Human rights activist���turned���senator Okiya Omtatah Okoiti has already put an exploratory presidential secretariat in place, which includes Hanifa Adan, a young journalist and activist widely seen as influential in the Gen Z movement. Omtatah is a favorite of the civil society and Gen Z crowd, protesting against abductions and maintaining a purdah from the pornocracy. He is also largely unknown beyond online-centric, political-junkie crowds.
In the political mainstream, something of an anti-Ruto popular front has now been formed, casting itself as a vehicle for liberation. It consists of, among others, Martha Karua, a one-time justice minister and Odinga���s 2022 running mate, who has renamed her party ���People���s Liberation Party���; fellow veteran Kalonzo Musyoka; Fred Matiang���i, a former minister who was the chief enforcer of iron-fisted policies under Uhuru Kenyatta; and Gachagua. The frontrunner of this bunch is widely seen to be the 70-year-old Musyoka, a long-time Odinga ally and current leader of the rump Azimio opposition. A foreign minister in the aughts, mild-mannered lawyer Musyoka has ever been in the shadow of Odinga, perceived as preponderant and imperious. In 2007, he ran a spoiler presidential campaign after falling out with Odinga, under the auspices of a party named���wait for it���ODM-Kenya, being appointed vice-president by Kibaki as violence engulfed the country. Today, helming an outfit that has since been renamed Wiper Democratic Movement, Musyoka���s ethnicity and complicated allyship with Odinga are seen to confer him some neutrality in Kenya���s charged and polarized identity politics.
He hails from the Kamba, a Bantu group whose heartland is the sprawling savannahs east of Nairobi. The Kamba are closely related to the Kikuyu, their aspirational mountain cousins, who are considered Kenya���s indigenous capitalists par excellence. The savannahs of the Kamba heartland have now been christened ���Mount Kenya South��� by Musyoka���s new allies from the Gachagua faction, with the community gaining admission into a pan-Bantu confederation called the Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru Association (GEMA). Though Odinga had pledged in 2023 to return the favor and support Musyoka for the presidency in 2027, things are now in limbo, with gadfly fusionists calling for Odinga to ���hand over��� his Luo electorate to Ruto. It���s a prospect that excites an ethno-essentialist fringe, who are keen to offer a retort to the pan-Bantu gambit. They hail a Kalenjin-Luo alliance as the great Nilotic reunion, reviving the fraternity of the Bahr el Ghazal urheimat a millennium ago.
With atavistic pan-Bantu, pan-Nilotic pandering in the air, you���re probably wondering: What on earth is going on in Kenya? Additionally, the events of 2007���2008 are being relitigated as a result of the Gachagua impeachment, which broke the elite ethnic pact that had maintained a certain omert�� around the issue. Is the country nosediving towards a nadir of national cohesion, presided over by demiurge Ruto, the ultimate kakistocrat, tribalist, and autocrat whom everybody wants out? Amazingly, not quite. This state of affairs didn���t start with Ruto. The ���Must Go��� suffix itself was alive and well in the era of his predecessor, when youths were gunned down for shouting it in western counties during protests. Ruto is, in short, by no means excrescent to the Kenyan body politic. Perhaps what makes him come off as so aggravating is the fact that he is actually its very avatar, a pastiche of the rogues��� gallery of presidents that preceded him.
It���s no wonder that Kenya today concurrently feels like d��j�� vu of the ���80s and ���90s Moi era, with Ruto���s assorted, tribeless, partyless band of sycophants insulting, threatening, and belittling Kenyans every other day, just like Moi���s rainbow troupe of jesters used to troll the nation. It feels like a throwback to the Kibaki era, with noxious and laughable efforts to form blood-and-soil pan-Bantu, pan-Nilotic coalitions, two junk categories in a heterogeneous nation. Fundamentally, there is no decoupling Ruto from Uhuru Kenyatta and his own antidemocratic, ethnic-baiting klepto-kakistocracy, under which Ruto wasn���t simply deputy president but indeed co-principal for the first five years, after they had come together in extremis to escape charges at the ICC by clinching the highest offices in the land.
Kibaki, Uhuru, and Ruto are all Moi���s epigones, having all, when it benefited them, displayed staunch loyalty to the late Big Man. When it comes to extralegal actions, abductions were rife in the previous two administrations; they were just happening to expendables from the marginalized peripheries���namely, coastal Muslims and Cushitic speakers from northern Kenya accused of ���being Al-Shabaab.��� What distinguishes Ruto���s regime is his exploitation of marginality, and his mastery of the tics of the country���s man-made ethnic pathology. Specifically, the tics of the 56-year-old Kikuyu-Luo political blood feud, Kenya���s sinister, shadow two-party system. This feud is now manifesting through proxies in form of the nascent realignments, with its esoterica having been at play in Ruto���s election, and in the Gachagua impeachment.
Kibaki and Kenyatta only ever turned to their gargantuan Mount Kenya backyard, with Kenyatta even being crowned something of a tribal boy-king. Ruto, as evidenced by his pivot to love-bombing the peripheries with development goodies, and removing discriminatory ID vetting in northern Kenya, simply serves up the Kool-Aid at different times to a revolving set with dexterity. The Gachagua impeachment epitomizes this; let the ex-DP run riot declaring his vision of the country as some apartheid entity, then jettison him with the help of the factions targeted with the exclusion, who now rationalize abductions because they think the X posters are on Gachagua���s payroll.
On the ethnic-baiting front, today���s Kikuyu entitlement boogeyman is just the flip side of what can only be described as the Orange Scare of class and ethnic contempt that Kenyatta���s 2017 Cambridge Analytica���assisted campaign sold. Itself a rehashing of the dog-whistles from Kibaki���s 2007 campaign, Uhuru���s evoked the specter of hordes of unwashed, uncircumcised Luo racaille from the slums bringing pandemonium upon the nation, deporting entire ethnic groups and refusing to pay rent in the event of an Odinga presidency. In a miniature, memory-holed version of 2007���2008, a conservative estimate of 150 lives were lost in the electoral aftermath, hundreds more ruined.
This moment, then, isn���t simply the shell-shock vibe shift of June 25 being countered by an atavism. It���s the same old thing���it���s d��j�� vu in the most literal sense of the term. Yet the chaos that has characterized Ruto���s rule seems to indicate that the chickens might be coming home to roost. If Ruto really is the prelude to the third Kenyan dispensation, what does the next tome in the saga hold?
The last 43 years of this 62-year-old saga might as well be subtitled The Adventures Of Raila Odinga, after the picaresque personage who has alternately haunted and gallivanted with four of the country���s five presidents. Today, with him as the newly minted co-principal, the barely two-month-old AUC defeat feels like a relic. Odinga, whom Ruto���s jubilant operatives had boasted of sending to doze in his ancestral Bondo village in 2022, is now the avuncular foil to the victorious but ultimately resented head of state.
Before the consolidation of the Ruto pact, old friends and foes alike in the popular front had been angling for Odinga���s support, with Gachagua even putting down the gambit of delivering the Mount Kenya vote to Odinga in 2027. Branded a betrayal by Musyoka, the pact has, for many, irrevocably drawn the battle lines between Ruto and Raila on one side, with the popular front and Gen Z on the other.
Refueled by the consolidated pact, the war of narratives regarding Odinga���s impact on the 2024 uprising continues to rage. Did the 80-year-old, god-king of the Luos, commander of street legions and heckler parliamentarians that believe Baba is always right, steal the revolution of the tribeless, leaderless, partyless, 20-year-olds, who achieved���in their maiden outing no less���the concrete results that have eluded him during his self-centered, senescent, and quixotic efforts in 2023, and before? Or is he being scapegoated, as his fan army contend, for the failures of a rudderless, ahistorical, protean movement that has been appropriated by even the Gachagua faction, whose crash course in activism began the moment he was impeached? Who provided the critical mass in 2024: Raila���s protest-hardened street troops, or self-proclaimed Gen Zs? As a matter of fact, what is ���Gen Z��� anyway���an age group, a social media crowd, a social class of downwardly mobile yuppies, a vibe, all the above, or anything that just isn���t tied to Odinga?
These debates say something more depressing altogether about Kenya���s existence in the liminal spaces of illiberal democracy. While the opposition is not devoid of depth, it sure has been devoid of alternatives. Despite high pedigree, its other luminaries lack Odinga���s pathos as the country���s longest-serving political prisoner, his ability to mobilize the streets, and the cultic gravitas he has acquired from giving up struggles for electoral justice to put an end to bloodshed. This clout has made him a heavyweight candidate who contests election result after election result, eventually putting out the embers of civil strife with one capitulatory handshake after another. Instead of real political power, he is merely deeply entwined with whoever is president, making him the sole opposition interlocutor. Frolicking in this exclusive liminal space, Odinga is part and parcel of what is holding Kenya back. Yet, his cynical moves within the pornocracy���s racket system have taken up outsized attention, to the point of creating analytical lacunae that could help make more sense of the anti-tax uprising.
If mass action is to come back stronger, there has to be some trenchant analysis of broader dynamics that contributed to the 2024 mobilization dying down. The uprising���s heterogeneity, and consequent inchoate nature, are consistent with what some sociopolitical theorists have branded ���non-movements������the complex, global protest waves of our age that register symbolic wins and peter out. The personal attacks and explosive accusations that have now ensued between some current and former luminaries of the mobilization also locate it in the tradition of mass, internet-driven movements that have melted down in the public glare.
The scleroses of class and ethnic pathology are also at play in the inability of some Raila faithful and Gen Zs to see eye to eye. A most unlikely source illuminates the absurdity of these disconnects. In a TV interview, Kindiki Kithure, the current DP, who was interior minister during both police crackdowns, had to remind his memory-holing interlocutors of the lives lost in 2023; it isn���t simply that Kithure knows his body count. He recognizes the protest waves as related, something even journalists seem not to.
The last time Raila Odinga wasn���t on the Kenyan ballot, it is widely acknowledged that his iconic 2002 ���Kibaki Tosha!��� (Kibaki is the man) endorsement energized the masses and helped propel his future nemesis to the presidency. In those halcyon years, the breakout stars of the Gen Z uprising were mere tots or unborn. Today, young activists like Hanifa Adan, Morara Kebaso, and Kasmuel McOure, alongside many others who have emerged in recent months, have brought the deportment, idioms, worldview, and aspirations of the youth to the forefront of Kenya���s stale, dinosauric political culture, energizing a huge, historically apathetic constituency that finally sees itself represented. But youth participation in politics is not a panacea. They are as vulnerable to the copious ethnic bait being thrown around as any other demographic, if not more. Young people are, after all, the ones who are most easily weaponized to participate in political violence. It���s time to demystify this demographic; they are neither a progressive monolith, nor an inscrutable alien species. They are simply a large part of the population in a country experiencing a youth boom. While Kenya is not a gerontocracy (many MPs from Ruto���s UDA party and Kenya First coalition are millennials, with a sprinkling of zillenials), it���s abundantly clear from the infantilization of twenty-somethings during the abductions debacle that young people, despite their numerical majority, are a minorized constituency, and it is high time they took on a more proportional role in politics.
And what better role than to provide the critical mass that removes an extremely unpopular president at the ballot box? The psychosis that has beset Ruto���s sycophants, with some now threatening us with ballot-stuffing, extending his mandate beyond 2032, and one MP, Farah Maalim, using unprintable pornographic terminology to deride the Must Go movement, shows that they are well aware of this fact.
Elections are, of course, won through broad church coalitions, not the consensus on social media echo chambers. The newfangled opposition finally has that long-awaited alternance, allowing it to win new constituencies that Odinga could never make inroads into. Though it bumbles at times with ham-fisted parries of Ruto���s salvos, the popular front is nevertheless building up its grit, waging its liberatory crusade on all fronts, be it taking up the abductees��� cause in court, or Karua going across the border to represent Kizza Besigye after he was kidnapped by Ugandan agents on Kenyan soil. Baggage notwithstanding, Gachagua remains the front���s crown jewel. He brings not only the pathos of wounded ethnic pride, but also the insider perspectives that allow him to make the explosive allegation that Ruto is in business with RSF warlord Hemedti. With hints that ODM outcasts, Omtatah, and Gen Z luminaries are gravitating towards the popular front���s orbit, a broad church coalition might finally materialize, enriching the complexion of the opposition coalition, which for now looks like a GEMA and Friends affair.
Come 2027, flying the flag of the popular front will be either Karua or Musyoka, the Kibaki epigones; or Fred Matiang���i and fast-rising freshman governor George Natembeya, the iron-fisted Uhuru epigones. The popular front candidate could very well clinch the top seat in a landslide, forestalling any attempts at electoral fraud, just like 72-year-old compromise candidate Kibaki did. Though Kibaki had sustained serious injuries in a car accident mere weeks before the election, this could not impede him from roundly defeating Moi���s boyish, hand-picked KANU successor, Uhuru Kenyatta, who at the time was supported by an equally boyish William Ruto. In 2002, their youth stood no chance against the OG tribeless, ageless, limitless movement, Kibaki���s national rainbow coalition, what with his campaign being soundtracked, as it was, by the thunderous ���Who Can Bwogo Me? (Unbwogable),��� a novelty hip-hop song and ode to swaggering Luo masculinity. The neologism encapsulated the zeitgeist, with Kenyans caring less about the unintelligible Dholuo lyrics, which they nonetheless sang along to in gibberish. It was more about the liberatory fervor���the tectonic vibe shift���that ensued when the declamatory, earworm chorus swept in.
The end of the Ruto racket might usher in some euphoric months, years, or even a decade reminiscent of Kibaki���s golden first term, when the yoke of the Moi dictatorship came off. We might experience vastly improved service delivery, instead of the odium of state violence and political chicanery that we have witnessed over the last two years.
Yet the question remains: With radioactive characters wielding influence within the popular front, would any meaningful steps be taken to start attenuating the pathogens of negative ethnicity, kleptocracy, state terror, and marginalization? Would the Kenyan state cease operating like a violent occupying power in its coastal, northern, western, and internal informal peripheries?
Or will the clouds of sectarianism eventually gather uninhibited over the idyll, like they did after the 2005 referendum? Aided by new media, ethnic stereotypes have, in some cases, coarsened into something uglier altogether, resembling a crypto-casteism. This turning of the tide was visible by 2007, when Luo masculinity was once again being spoken of in bold tones, but the tune had gone from goofy to ominous. Kibaki���s PNU took to declaring that they were not man enough to lead a nation. Revenge slaughter of Luos and other ���opposition��� communities quickly followed the anti-Kikuyu massacres, constituting the second act of the pogroms. Uhuru Kenyatta, by then metamorphosed into Kibaki���s right-hand man, was slapped with charges by the ICC for his alleged role therein, charges that were also eventually dropped, after mysterious witness retractions.
Back in the present, Ruto���s capacity as incumbent to keep the racket going remains intact. His political expiration has, after all, been predicted several times before: during his ICC tribulations, following his break-up with Uhuru, and after the anti-tax uprising. Today, his redistributive pivot has found fertile ground. The step to remove discriminatory ID vetting in northern Kenya will also enfranchise new voters, though not a swarm of imported illegals, as tribeless southern Kenyans believe. As the popular front claims the moral high ground by reading out Ruto���s variegated rap sheet, it���s worth recalling that many Kenyans did not care for such pearl-clutching in 2022, when they said that the only thing he had stolen was their hearts.
In the end, the 2027 election will not be the Bantu versus Nilotes showdown that agitprop purveyors online are prepping for. Neither will it be the periphery versus the center. For the most part, it will be just another Kenyan election, in which traditional allegiance to ethnic kingpins, old feuds, new rancors, and emerging affinities will once more play a large role. Nonetheless, Odinga���s retirement is remaking regional coalitions, and Ruto���s sheer unpopularity will also lead to issues-based voting. Finally, there���s the residual impact of the anti-tax uprising, whose freak nature altered the national psyche. For now, the pristine vistas of a new frontier in Kenyan civic life remain half mirage. But in the same way that #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo were preceded by incremental awakenings, the anti-tax uprising has planted seeds of its own. Kenyans of all stripes might now rise up periodically, rattling the pornocracy and causing the same characters to lurch between opposition and ruling factions. But the biological and adoptive children of new and old political dynasties will also scramble to protect their interests, and the narcissism of small differences borne of the ethnic pathology will be there to dampen solidarity amongst the hoi polloi. In such a state of affairs, there can be no veritable third liberation. Only a third dispensation, in which the system propagates itself through elite cohabitation.
April 24, 2025
Zambia’s quiet diplomacy
Porters at Sakania border post between Zambia and the DRC. All photos �� Kang-Chun Cheng. They are between 12 and 18 years old, and crowd the vehicle even before we���ve lurched to a stop. ���They think you���re trying to cross [into the Congo], and are competing to carry your luggage across,��� explains Michael, our Zambian guide.
A certain frenetic energy circulates throughout most porous transnational boundaries, diffusing that feeling of endless movement. That���s certainly the case here at the Sakania border post, straddling a southeastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia���s Copperbelt Province. Mostly Zambian and Congolese, these adolescents have a far better shot at making money here than begging in the city or working a menial job. One trip across the border can bring 50 to 100 kwacha (USD1,74-3,47)���about the same amount that many informal laborers make in a day doing back-breaking work at an artisanal mine.
The DRC is the world���s leading cobalt source and second second-largest copper producer globally. Its southern neighbor, Zambia, shares the same stretch of the African Copperbelt and is the second biggest copper producer on the continent. Its prolific nickel, manganese, diamond, and cobalt reserves are key to luxury markets and the green energy transition alike.
���The story of Zambia is the story of copper,��� according to Grieve Chelwa, a Zambian economist. ���It���s a very emotive thing for us���constituting 75% of foreign exchange earnings.���
As Rwanda-backed M23 rebels continue advancing across the DRC, overtaking Goma, then Bukavu, Zambia remains attentive to its volatile neighbor���s developments, says Jacques Mukena, a researcher at Ebuteli Institute in Kinshasa specializing in critical mineral governance. Zambia���s border with southeastern DRC is not far from the contested, mineral-rich Katanga province, widely considered a root cause of the Congo���s resource curse and perpetual bloodshed. For years, there has been coverage of human rights abuses and the DRC���s paralysis stemming from the violence of resource extraction.
Although mining is the backbone of both Zambian and Congolese economies, it may not be the main driver of conflict, argues Fred Bauma, a human rights activist at the Ebuteli Institute. ���Passer la fronti��re (French for ���cross the border���) is a natural source of tension,��� he says. ���Another potential source is growing population pressures from Katanga onto Zambia, from poverty, the lack of resources.���
Down the street from the Kasumbalesa border post.This cautious approach may appear as reticence, but is, in fact, a highly strategic move: Zambia gets credit for being non-confrontational and sympathetic to the plight of its volatile neighbor. This admirable restraint is illustrated through its cautious, unassuming foreign decisions that prioritize depoliticization of regional entanglements. It���s an approach that allows Zambia to benefit from largely uninterrupted business flows. For decades, Zambia has chosen to be a quiet, attentive mediator, stepping in to quell flare-ups in places such as the Central African Republic. The presence of Zambian peacekeepers is requested throughout Africa.
This pragmatism was born out of the nation���s undesirable geopolitical location. ���We���re a landlocked country, with eight neighbors. We don���t have access to the sea���if we did, that would likely make us think very differently,��� says Chelwa. ���It���s hard to import [goods] if there���s conflict around us.��� For instance, when South Africa cut off diplomatic relations with Zambia in the 1960s due to the former���s apartheid-forward agenda, crude oil had to be airlifted into Zambia.
It was around this time when Kenneth Kaunda, the first Zambian president, pushed for the construction of the Tanzam oil pipeline (Tanzania-Zambia Crude Oil Pipeline), connecting the Tanzanian port city of Dar es Salaam to Ndola in the heart of Zambia���s Copperbelt. During this period when African nations were also liberating themselves from colonial rule, the desire for economic autonomy was stronger than ever. For Zambia in particular, this required a cautious approach: not overtly flouting its sovereignty to Western powers with their fading hegemony, or its African neighbors struggling through their own growing pains.
The adobe orange-coloured clay-slicked road to Sakania, made extra slippery with a recent cloudburst, is jam-packed with lorries. Crowded bumper to bumper for upward of four kilometers, the drivers have come to terms with the inevitable wait. Some step out to stretch their legs and purchase groundnuts and soft drinks from itinerant vendors stepping carefully through the mud; one browses on an e-reader, his legs resting on the dashboard. The vast majority of trucks appear to be ferrying mining equipment or mining-related goods. This road serves as an umbilical cord connecting two of the world���s most important mining regions: Kolwezi in DRC���s Katanga Province and Luanshya in Zambia���s Copperbelt.
A vendor selling snacks and drinks to lorry drivers stuck in the perpetual traffic jam by the Sakania border point, a road connecting vital mining regions for both Zambia and the DRC.The porter boys share anecdotal accounts of perceived changes on their home turf. ���Since the M23 attacks, things haven���t gotten that much more chaotic, since we���re quite far from eastern Congo,��� one says. ���Just a bit more people.��������People here believe in local lore,��� explains Michael. ���There might be a bit of petty crime, but those beliefs keep the calm.���
This wasn���t always the case. Chelwa, the economist, spent time in the capital city of Lusaka during his childhood, and he recalls the spate of aggravated crimes linked to refugee influxes, mainly from Angola, the DRC, and Zimbabwe, as a result of the First Congo War that nearly engulfed Katanga, bordering Zambia, in the 1990s. ���They [the crimes] weren���t necessarily because of the refugees,��� he says. ���Likely connections to all these [Congolese] rebel movements, the flow of arms from the Congo, which contributed to the chaos. Zambia has always tried to make sure instability doesn���t spill over while welcoming refugees.���
Katanga is currently more stable. As such, Zambia has also enjoyed a higher degree of security. As apparent from the unbroken queue of trucks traversing the Copperbelt, a sense of normalcy prevails as long as the business bottom line remains unscathed.
���The Congo is an expansive country, almost a tenth of the United States,��� says Chelwa. ���It���s huge and disconnected.��� Even the bloody M23 attacks, which have killed at least 7,000 people since January, can feel worlds apart from Kinshasa, DRC���s capital���2,643 kilometers to the west, as Chelwa notes:
It���s a matter of scale���eastern Congo is just too far. It���s more of a problem for East Africa since it���s in their backyard. If the violence were to happen in Katanga, historically a flashpoint for Congolese politics in the 1960s, there would be very different reactions. The center of gravity shifted because of Kagame���s expansionist tendencies.
���What���s clear is the DRC doesn���t have many [trade] alternatives,��� says Mukena. ���The Kasumbalesa corridor is essential to the DRC, which is heavily dependent on natural resource exports.��� This truth is reflected in Zambia���s economy: in 2023, Zambia exported goods worth $1.6 billion to the DRC, while Congolese exports to Zambia totaled only $180 million.
Zambian exports to the DRC range from sugar and baked goods to delivery trucks, while DRC exports are largely restricted to raw minerals, highlighting how crucial the DRC is to Zambia���s economy, Mukena notes. Mutual recognition of the DRC���s limited export corridors, a reality amplified by protracted conflicts, allows Zambia a certain structural leverage in the relationship.
A porter at Sakania. The plot thickens when individuals trickling into Zambia hold political importance. For instance, Pastor Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, a former electoral chief in the DRC, was arrested late last year at his home in Lusaka last year, notwithstanding his refugee status under UNHCR protocols. He was handed over to the DRC anti-terrorism services for unknown reasons and sentenced to three years in prison.��In 2021, Mulunda had already been convicted in the Congolese economic hub of Lubumbashi for ���undermining state security��� and agitating for secession, hence his move to Zambia. His family and supporters believe his recent arrest was a targeted move by DRC President Felix Tshisekedi.
Zambia is one of the few countries on the continent without a history of war. To maintain such a track record, extreme neutrality has been requisite���letting its eight neighbors sort out their own issues but serving as a haven for refugees escaping conflict in its neighboring countries. This is a reputation the government will go to great lengths to preserve.��For instance, the Lusaka Manifesto of 1969, drafted by Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda, then the respective Tanzania and Zambia leaders, rejected racism and called for black majority rule in African nations. Yet, the document retained a conciliatory approach toward South Africa, accepting its nationhood despite its apartheid policies. This reluctance to get embroiled in armed struggles stemmed from a fear of both South African military attacks and economic consequences.
Although a copper giant in its own right, Zambia remains southern Africa���s manufacturing and value addition hub, DRC the nation of raw extraction, Zimbabwe the financial hub, and South Africa the point of exportation, with its ports and sea access. To this day, foreigners exporting minerals from the DRC come to Zambia first, and clear goods first in Zambia before completing payments.
Informal markets near the Kasumbalesa border post.Chelwa argues that Zambia���s stance in the Kaunda era was not necessarily neutrality, but non-alignment���a big ���third world����� project. In the post-Cold War era, it was more about not aligning with the West or East, but trying to carve a path for ourselves, he posits. ���Zambia was never neutral���neutrality is more like Switzerland, closing their eyes to human rights abuses.���
Even before the M23 attacks this past January, Zambia was hosting at least 60,000 Congolese refugees, according to the UNHCR. Despite this recent escalation in eastern Congo���s near-chronic violence, business is business. In Chembe, for instance���a cobalt, tungsten, mining border region in Zambia where the industry has surged over recent years���the flow of Congolese remains unbroken.
More than 100,000 Congolese have fled into neighboring countries since the beginning of 2025, nearly 70,000 to Burundi and 31,500 to Uganda; both countries are expecting further surges in new arrivals. Yet, Zambia has only registered 909 Congolese refugees. ���This likely has to do with the distances and immediately available crossing routes,��� says Duniya Aslam Khan, the communications officer for UNHCR���s Southern Africa bureau.
Security officers at Sakania border crossing.UNHCR is cash-strapped at the moment, like most humanitarian organizations. Its Zambian operation received only 47% of the required budget last year, and a mere 11% of the required funding for 2025. They do not receive funding from USAID, says Khan. But, UNHCR, will feel the impact of the current US administration���s ���pause and review��� policies concerning the allocation of funds to foreign assistance programs. ���We have to do a lot now, with a lot less,��� says Khan. ���People���s needs haven���t changed���the situation continues becoming more dire with each spike in conflict that displaces entire communities.���
There���s a sense of solidarity that we may be in this situation later on,��� says Carolein Jacobs, an anthropological researcher at Leiden University specializing in the DRC���s internal displacement. Before this most recent spate of M23 attacks, cross-border movements were commonplace. With the insecurity of having more than 130 different armed groups roving across the country, and the Congolese government���s corruption and lack of control, it made sense for Congolese to seek business in places of stronger stability, across borders.
Connections established from this long history of transboundary trade have helped Congolese refugees in places where they flee. The destination is always linked to what there is to get, says Jacobs. By going to relatively familiar places, refugees may find more support through host communities that offer them shelter, in comparison to underfunded refugee camps.
Zambia has an unusually progressive approach to working with refugees, with three ���settlements��� structured per its 2024 National Refugee Policy, and reflecting UNHCR���s holistic mission of incorporating refugees into national systems. “If refugees are economically independent and self-sufficient, this ultimately benefits host countries and economies,” Khan explains. The Zambian government has come to think beyond limiting refugees to settlements, embracing the economic hubs that develop from their presence. Zambia recognizes the unique position it is in, amid so many volatile neighbors. Khan continues:
Which is how they decided to bring in developmental actors, have them be part of the solution. For decades, refugees from not just DRC, but also Burundi, Angola, and Rwanda have claimed Zambia as a safe haven����� You cannot just push them back���push them back to where? The reality is that if these people have to stay until the situation back home is conducive to their return, you might have to wait a while.
Vendors by Sakania border post, where transboundary trade is a cornerstone of daily life.Registration is for the benefit of the host country, Khan continues, which then allows for integration into work and the local economy. ���Whatever money or goods are generated, that circulates in host countries.��� For Zambia, a low-income country, this can be played to its benefit.
Hedged in by protracted, low-grade instability���with the distinct possibility of spill-over at any given moment���for decades, Zambia has chosen the path of caution. Former president Kaunda built the nation on a bedrock of strategic consideration, open-minded in the interpretation of what it meant to be Zambia. He understood that strict policing of its borders would be impossible, an approach that his predecessors have continued to cultivate. At a time when other countries are descending into extreme nationalism, this remains a delicate line to tread.
Zambia refrains from speaking out or responding too strongly to actions it may not condone, but has its back against the wall, reluctant to bring too much attention to itself. Qatar has been hosting the recent rounds of peace talks between Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame (Rwanda is known to back M23 rebels, despite Kagame���s ongoing denial of the facts), to de-escalate eastern Congo���s hottest conflict in decades. This was a missed opportunity for Zambia to step forward and arbitrate these talks, but once again, Zambia chose to let others take the lead, unwilling to be in the center of attention.
April 23, 2025
The un-African mechanisms of queer repression
Protesters take to the streets in Cape Town over Uganda's anti-lgbtq legislation in 2023. Image �� Christopher37 via Shutterstock. Early in March, Ghanaian lawmakers reintroduced an anti-queer bill titled the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill. The Ghanaian parliament had passed the bill last year, but it was not signed into law by former President Nana Akufo Addo, whose party was later swept out of power in the general elections held last December. Same-sex relations are already criminalized in Ghana, but the bill seeks to impose harsher sentences for queer Ghanaians and anyone else who engages in the ���willful promotion, sponsorship or support��� of LGBTQ+ activities.
The bill is one of several that have been introduced across Africa in recent years. Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda have all seen similar bills proposed in their national parliaments in the past few years, with that of Uganda being signed into law in 2023. As in Ghana, homosexuality is already criminalized in these countries, underscoring that these bills serve a political purpose that goes beyond just the legislative.
The COVID-19 pandemic widened class inequalities across the globe. In West Africa, the number of people unable to meet their basic food needs rose to 25 million in 2021, a 34 percent year-on-year increase. Despite this, African governments have continued to enact neoliberal reforms at the behest of IMF and World Bank policymakers while cracking down on dissent. Particularly, youth-led protest movements have mobilized to force a change in government policy, if not a change in government itself.
It is in the context of these crises of political legitimacy that these anti-queer bills are being deployed to gin up a moral panic capable of realigning the African masses behind governments that they know don���t represent their interests. By painting queerness as a moral threat to the well-being of African society at large, Africa���s ruling elites coalesce conservative political, religious, and cultural organizations behind the state, and through them, mobilize political legitimacy for unpopular regimes, even as they continue to enact widely unpopular economic policies.
In her article ���Postcolonial Discourses of Queer Activism and Class in Africa,��� Kenyan feminist and political theorist Lyn Ossome describes how Africa���s ruling elites use state power to ���isolate a minority elite class, identified by sexual orientation, which they falsely identify with global forces of oppression.��� To achieve this end, gender and sexual diversity is framed as a foreign import introduced to African societies through Western political and cultural influence. Queerness, they argue, is alien to our African way of life, and efforts towards securing the rights and well-being of queer Africans are never a result of African queer agency, but rather, evidence of ���sexual colonization��� by the West.
This argument is bolstered by several factors, not least the coercive nature of Western foreign policy. The conditioning of development aid to force legal changes, along with the threat of Western sanctions, sidelines local queer resistance and focuses the West as an arbiter of the rights of African people. In addition to this, due to our colonial history and the impacts of globalization on queer politics on the continent, discourse on African queerness is constrained by the use of Western terms that don���t easily translate to the indigenous conceptions of queerness that existed pre-colonization. It is easier to dehumanize and criminalize queer Africans when these foreign terms take up all the oxygen in our public discourse about queerness. This is not to say that the language used to litigate queer rights is the main problem, but rather that it reinforces the otherness of queer Africans in the African public imagination. For instance, terms like ���gay��� and ���queer��� are not only foreign to every language local to Nigeria but also not interchangeable with local terms that describe gender and sexual variance, such as yan dauda.
Sexual and gender diversity has always been a known feature of African societies. Just as the efforts to stamp it out during colonization are well documented. But this fact is largely ignored by the fundamentalist forces here who receive financial backing from US evangelical groups that have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into pushing anti-queer attitudes and laws in Africa. Ironically, it is also the repressive state structures set up during the colonial era to crush African resistance to colonialism that are now being instrumentalized to oppress queer Africans.
Before colonial contact, African attitudes towards sexual and gender diversity ranged from disapproval to deification, but very few societies, if any, had the carceral infrastructure which the state now wields as a tool of cultural preservation. Institutions such as the police and the prison system that facilitate the state���s violence against queer Africans are the same ones deployed to crush political dissent. While it is not possible to understand African societies in essentialist terms such ���African��� vs. ���un-African,��� we can nevertheless look at the nature of queer repression on the continent, and ask, ���Would it be possible to minoritize, other, and oppress queer Africans without relying on the same tools that facilitated and facilitate the subjugation of the Africa people?��� The answer to that question is no.
April 22, 2025
Africa and the AI race
Image �� Tint Media via Shutterstock. On the Gates Foundation website, Ghanaian programmer Darlington Akogo talks about his mission to reduce the number of deaths in the West African nation, where there���s one doctor per 10,000 patients. His start-up, minoHealth AI Labs, helps doctors in Accra���s Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, the largest in West Africa, accelerate medical results. He aims to create an open-source ���digital doctor��� to widen access to medical care to the country���s 35 million people.��Despite getting approval from the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority, Akogo���s startup relies on funding from foreign partners, such as the Gates Foundation, while the government of Ghana grapples with rising inflation and budget cuts.
Akogo���s enterprise is one of the 2,400 African companies applying AI solutions in tech, agriculture, language, climate, and many more, in a bid to catch up with the Fourth Industrial Revolution already in full swing in the US and China. But in a continent where only 5% of the people capable of driving this revolution have access to computational power for research and innovation, Africa���s path to AI success is littered with a plethora of challenges.
Recently, more than 1000 AI enthusiasts from more than 95 countries converged on Kigali for the first-ever Global AI Summit on Africa. Organized by the World Economic Forum, which estimates the continent will get a miserly $2.9 trillion from the $19.9 trillion AI will generate by 2030, keynote speakers included Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his Togolese counterpart Faure Gnassingb��. Kagame called for investment and commitment. ���Our strategy should be to go back to the drawing board and build a stronger foundation for connectivity,��� he urged delegates at the summit. ���Africa cannot afford to be left behind, once again, playing catch-up.���
Since 2022, when OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT and marked the turning point for AI, ushering in global adoption that has led to groundbreaking innovation and giant investments, there have been concerns that Africa will be left behind. Since the onset of industrialization in the 1800s, Africa has been playing catch-up due to myriad barriers, many of them intentionally imposed and maintained through colonial and post-colonial administration. In the advent of AI, Africa is still to get up to speed.
Following the two-day summit, attendees committed to a $60 billion fund, almost the size of all goods and services produced by Uganda, Africa���s 13th-largest economy, in 2024. The fund will be deployed to boost AI architecture, support African start-ups and machine learners, and encourage AI research domestication, the declaration document said.
Strive Masiyiwa���the Zimbabwean entrepreneur and head of Cassava Technologies, a company behind the continent���s first AI factory���told delegates his company will receive the first 3,000 units of the technology in May. The units will be mounted in Cassava���s data center in South Africa in June. Deployments of 7,000 more units will be made in Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, and Egypt.
Artificial Intelligence happens when large datasets are collected, computed, and trained by using step-by-step processes (algorithms) aimed at solving problems or performing tasks. This requires graphic processing units (GPUs) that can perform quadrillions of calculations and functions within seconds. Nvidia, the American chipmaker, produces 85% of the GPUs that do the work. Alex Tsado, co-founder of Alliance4AI, an organization that rallies African AI engineers, told CNN that innovators��� access to the supercomputers will turbocharge computing power on the continent. Computer scientists will be encouraged to collect more data because they will be able to transform it, and there will be broad machine learning programs, he said.
Cassava Technologies might be paying up to $40,000 per Nvidia GPU to acquire some of��its most potent AI-propelling hardware. That amount is almost 20 times the average yearly African household income, according to a World Bank report in 2023.
Although Google and Microsoft remain the biggest AI players in Africa, with data centers in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa (Google has committed to $1 billion for digital infrastructure), tailoring technology to meet African needs remains a big challenge. For instance, Google, which holds more than 96% of the search engine market equity in Africa, only provides translation to 60 out of the more than 2,000 languages spoken by the continent���s 1.5 billion inhabitants. To a greater degree, there have been concerns about data mined by these giant companies following a 2018 Facebook data breach, and most of the servers are housed in the US, creating jurisdictional problems for African regulatory bodies.
���When you don���t build the solutions that you use in AI��� there���s a high risk that (they) can harm you,��� Tsado said, in an interview with Impact Newswire. The Nigerian worked on Nvidia���s product team, where he led cloud computing projects for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. But he left in 2020. The company���s AI models at that time failed to recognize minority groups.��Tsado believes Africans ought to design their own models. He hypothesized some AI discrepancies in the US:�� ���They build AI tools to become like the HR (Human Resources), to select people for jobs, (the tools) won���t (select) women (for)jobs in engineering, or (the AI models would) think that black people were (not) smart enough to get those kinds of jobs.���
To develop minoHealth AI Labs��� medical AI models, Akogo used data from Ghana, the US, and Vietnam. He crunched them from three races in three continents to prove the system���s reliability. This is similar to OpenAI, which harnessed texts and languages from different parts of the world to launch ChatGPT. Computing large datasets requires high-speed internet. Africa���s internet penetration rate stands at 43%. Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria have the lion’s share. This means that most regions face the risk of missing out.
Take, for example, the Central African Republic (CAR). It has an abysmal 7.1% penetration and yet joined the AI pledge in Kigali.�� It must drastically improve its satellite and optic-fiber networks to catch up. Despite the significant challenges CAR faces, from low connectivity to an electricity grid that a privileged 14.3% of Central Africans have access to, President Faustin-Archange Touad��ra���s incessant belief that digital currency will usher in economic prosperity to the country is intriguing. He started a memecoin in February; its value plunged to 95% before it could mature. This was nearly three years after he had initiated bitcoin, becoming the second nation after El Salvador to make the currency a legal tender. In the bitcoin assessment document, seen by this reporter, the team proposed energy and connectivity improvements that CAR, it would appear, did not adhere to.
The CAR���s case provides an overview of how African leaders believed digitization, and now AI, would miraculously boost their economies without structural reforms. The economist and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, in his book The Great Escape, lays down the marker for national development: ���Economic growth requires investment in things���more machines, more basic facilities like highways or broadband���and in people, who need more and better education.��� Deaton argues that an investment in research and development drives innovation. He further states that the people leading the innovation should not be subjected to expropriation, skewed judicial systems, and arbitrary taxes, all hallmarks of most African states.
The need for the basic facilities Deaton urges is reflected in Aliko Dangote���s struggle to build a $20 billion mega oil refinery in Nigeria. He established his own energy infrastructure to power construction, built a port to import the components he needed, and erected a heavy-duty vehicle plant that provided trucks to carry equipment. ���In Africa, there is no infrastructure,��� Dangote said, claiming it was easier to build such a project in Asia or the Middle East.
At the Global AI Summit, Masiyiwa said his other company, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, had laid down 120 kilometers of optic fiber, spanning Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt. A chunk of workers at Cassava Technologies have been focusing on AI for the past seven years, he said. The speculation is that GPU acquisitions from Nvidia would help boost internet services provision.
AI���s huge potential, like the internet, will pose a test to African governments during elections and political unrest. ���It will be a dangerous place if we involve Artificial Intelligence too much in our politics,��� Kagame warned at the conference. Last year, protests and conflicts caused 15 African countries, including Kenya, Chad, Comoros, and Ethiopia, to either shut down or disrupt the internet. The practice has been a mainstay for the past decade in most African nations, including Gnassingb�����s Togo, which discontinued services when Togolese protesters stood up against a constitutional reform that extended his stay in power.
The summit did not detail where the $60 billion fund will come from. However, like the 2001 Abuja Declaration, when African states pledged to spend 15% of their budgets to elevate healthcare (recent data shows that only South Africa and Cabo Verde are living up to expectations), funding for the AI-for-good initiative might just rest in the hands of powerful multinationals. Black Rock, Microsoft, and the Abu Dhabi-funded investment firm MGX have already agreed to pool their resources in a $100 billion global AI investment fund. Though it mainly focuses on establishing data centers and energy infrastructure in the US, this could extend to Africa, in what many critics see as the West���s entrenchment of digital colonialism.
April 21, 2025
The business of empowering women
Scenes from the Commemoration of International Women's Day in Abuja, Nigeria. Image credit Lady Eguche for UN Women Nigeria via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Nigeria, Africa���s largest democracy by population, is the lowest-ranked country in sub-Saharan Africa for women���s representation in parliament. Yet, in a perverse celebration of International Women���s Day, the 109-member Senate suspended one of only four female senators after she accused the Senate president of sexual harassment.
The response of the Senate and public reaction to Senator Natasha Akpoti Uduaghan���s accusation highlight multiple challenges for women���s political participation in Nigeria, but the situation also calls into question the global industry for funding and programming for ���women���s political leadership��� and commitments to Sustainable Development Goal 5. In 2021, UN Women launched Generation Equality, with six actions, including feminist movements and leadership, raising over $50 billion in commitments.
Despite being part of that multimillion-dollar industry, I have doubts about the tactics for increasing women���s political participation and representation. In Love Does Not Win Elections, where I document my experience contesting the primaries for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2014, I point out that the small number of women who win elections owe their wins more to the men they cohabit with or are related to than they do to women���s votes or civil-society-funded capacity-building workshops. Senator Uduaghan���s path to the Senate and her battle to stay in office expose more inconsistencies.
First, nothing in the CSO-funded playbook prepares women for the chicanery and abuses of power that frequently happen during election campaigns: closing airports, impromptu public holidays to thwart courts sitting���these are the kinds of obstacles candidates face in Nigerian elections. On the eve of the 2023 senatorial elections, the roads leading to Senator Uduaghan���s constituencies in Kogi State were dug up. Without money, she could not have responded in the way she did: by hiring a fleet of graders to level the roads. Nor could she have rented a helicopter, as she did a few weeks ago, to thwart the Kogi State governor���s attempt to prevent her from visiting her constituencies in Kogi Central during Eid.
This raises the second incongruence: Contesting elections is expensive, and women get no direct funding for their campaigns or for navigating the courts even as election petitions increased by 56 percent between 2019 and 2023, because, as someone put it, ���citizens can vote, but winners are decided in the courtroom ������
Where do funds go? Short answer: salaries, consultancy fees, workshops, conferences, and advocacy visits. If accountability makes it difficult to imagine donor funds being disbursed to female politicians, then surely funding the defense of their elections through litigation or financial support when they come under attack is not unreasonable.
Third, the toxic pragmatism of some organizations working to increase women���s political representation makes it harder to build democratic values in a country still struggling with the concept. In 2021, UN Women commended then Governor of Kogi State Yahaya Bello for allocating 21 vice-chair and council speaker positions in the local government elections to women. While on the face of it this was affirmative action in practice, one has to question the legitimacy of elections where the governor���s party won 100 percent of the seats and why the women were not the chairpersons. When Senator Uduaghan campaigned against Bello in 2019 as the only female gubernatorial candidate, she was physically and verbally attacked, her campaign office was razed, and INEC removed her party logo from the result sheets in a bid to disqualify her on a technicality. It was during this violent election period that Salome Abuh, a female politician, was burned to death in her home in Kogi. Bello���s cynical champion-of-women veneer is just another example in the history of autocrats using women���s political access as proof of democratic values, as in the case of Rwanda���s Paul Kagame. While hundreds of CSOs have rallied around Senator Uduaghan in the past month, the well-funded agencies and philanthropies who tout women���s political participation have been mute even during the bogus process to recall her.
Finally, the fact that the few women who have been elected since Nigeria���s return to civil rule in 1999 largely fade into obscurity when they leave office and are not engaged in any social causes, not even as advocates for women���s political representation, is telling.
If the cut in USAID funding for gender equity and democratic practice was not enough reason to review programs for increasing women���s political participation, then Senator Uduaghan���s case is. There is already too little financial commitment to women���s political representation���UN Women���s allocation in 2022 was 1.8 percent of United Nations revenue���but we must question if what is available is being put to effective use in Nigeria.
April 18, 2025
Will the future of food be genome edited?
Tea farm Nandi Hills, Kenya. Image �� Jen Watson via Shutterstock. In October 2024, Dr. Qu Dongyu, the General Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) took the stage at the World Food Prize to deliver the keynote address. Dr. Qu���s talk revolved around the question of what ���the future hold[s] for agrifood systems and food culture.��� Key to this future, he suggested, was the ���genetic revolution,��� and specifically genome editing; a collection of technologies that allow scientists to alter genetic code through direct intervention. This ability, he suggested, would have sweeping effects for food and farming systems:
Gene-editing technology accelerates the breeding process significantly[, and it] might do more than just improve crop yields; they could also bring people and cultures closer together. By preserving and enhancing the unique traits of local and indigenous foods, gene editing can help protect our diverse food heritage. These innovations ensure that traditional crops, long embedded in local food cultures, can thrive in a changing, stressed world. Gene editing, in this way, becomes a bridge between the past and the future, connecting food cultures and fostering shared resilience in the face of global challenges.
As scholars of food and agriculture, we, too, believe in the power of food in bringing people together. We also believe that food heritage, systems, and knowledge should be valued and protected.
But whether genome editing is a technology to usher in this sort of future is a complex matter. We recently published an open-access special issue on genome editing and the future of food in Elementa. The issue���s collection of articles���whose authors hail from academic, research, and policy institutions���explores how these issues play out on the African continent. Africa is not only home to emergent genome editing applications but is also a place where many are calling for greater investment in genome editing systems.
As scientists, officials, and farmers begin to engage and make decisions around genome editing initiatives, it is important, as Dr. Dongyu stated, to think about safeguarding ���the unique traits of local and indigenous foods,��� and discuss whether genome editing will be one tool to do so.
Currently, there are no genome-edited crops for commercial sale on the continent (and very few available elsewhere in the world). Instead, this relatively nascent technology is being used to address biotic and abiotic stresses like disease and drought in a range of crops, from cassava to cocoa. These initiatives are mostly global collaborations taking place in just a handful of African countries. For example, scientists at Kenyatta University and Addis Ababa University have partnered with Corteva Agriscience to develop sorghum resistant to a parasitic weed, Striga. In Uganda, researchers at the National Crops Resources Institute are collaborating with the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (USA) and Corteva to develop virus-resistant cassava.
To see these early projects focus on both staple and commodity crops is encouraging. With that said, in the early days of genetic modification���the predecessor of genome editing���there was similar excitement that the technology would be applied to locally relevant crops. As time went on, however, large corporations captured much of the technology through exclusive patents and focused on developing commodity crops they could sell at scale.
As a result, a majority of genetically modified crops available for commercial use are commodity crops such as corn, cotton, soy, and canola, and are bred to be either pest-resistant, herbicide-tolerant, or both. While these crops are grown at scale by farmers in some parts of the world, they are largely out of reach and simply not appropriate for most of the world���s smallholder farmers.
What���s more, public research and extension institutions have historically been underfunded, which has seriously impeded research on local crop varieties and traits. This has hindered the ability of countries to build local seed industries and left researchers under-resourced, hindering their ability to access the latest plant breeding innovations.
In an attempt to make this technology accessible to both farmers and scientists on the African continent, some funders have forged public-private partnerships to develop genetically modified, as well as biofortified, crops for smallholders. As some of the papers in our special issue point to, these efforts have had checkered outcomes. Part of the issue is a simple one: farmers are a diverse group with diverse needs. Breeding varieties and traits that farmers find beneficial is both essential and difficult. Farming systems on the continent are equally diverse and complex, considerations which have not always been taken into account with efforts to genetically engineer crops. Another issue relates to the arrangements in which breeding initiatives take place: such projects comprise a range of actors with different motives and power relations, which tend to crowd out the voices of the farmers themselves.
These complexities have stymied the uptake of genetically engineered crops across the continent, despite massive investment in their development. Given this precedent, many hope that genome editing will offer an alternative path, one that allows the technology to be taken up by farmers, scientists, and researchers working within local institutions, who are best equipped to identify and work on local and indigenous foods.
Although genome editing initiatives on the continent are so far housed within public institutions, most of them have been either funded by external donors and/or in partnership with corporate entities. Take the ���Striga-smart��� sorghum project, for example. This is a public-private partnership between universities in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Corteva, and funded through the US Agency for International Development. Like genetic medication, genome editing is increasingly being captured by patents. This has meant that scientists and researchers interested in using the technology must access it through licensing agreements with entities like Corteva. The details of these agreements aren���t often made public, so it���s difficult to know exactly what they entail. But it is reasonable to assume the patent holder (in this case, Corteva) has set the agreement to benefit their proprietary technology.
Power dynamics���expressed through licensing agreements and funding, for example���are essential components for understanding how genome editing is unfolding on the continent. This is especially poignant in the current moment, where one of the technology���s biggest funders on the continent, the US government, has suspended the majority of its international funding. We cannot divorce technologies such as genome editing from larger political and economic structures that shape global food systems. These are likely to shape the future of agrifood systems more than genome editing���s technical capacities. .
Rather than heralding genome editing as a savior that could serve as a ���bridge between the past and the present,��� we might look instead to the people and plants who already hold generational knowledge and successfully embed resilience within African food systems. This could mean, as one of our papers suggests, adopting the responsible research and innovation model and inviting farmers to be equal collaborators within genome editing initiatives. It might also mean, as another paper proposes, decolonizing agricultural development by centering diverse ���ways of knowing and being,��� shifting funds toward local practices and knowledge systems, and building farmer-led research initiatives.
Examples of the latter abound. In Malawi, for example, Soils, Food and Healthy Communities engages in farmer-led research on issues ranging from soil health to seed security. In Kenya, the Kenyan Peasant League is advocating for seed law to be revised to include farmers��� rights to produce, save, and exchange seed. And in Ghana, the Centre for No-Till Agriculture provides training and educational programs on agroecology and conservation practices.
This work is already ���[bridging] the past and the future, connecting food cultures and fostering shared resilience in the face of global challenges.��� It���s time that global institutions acknowledge and support this work, alongside their advocacy of genome editing. Doing so may allow different bridges and futures to emerge, opening possibilities for retooling food systems that center the resilience of the communities themselves.
April 17, 2025
After the uprising
A man stands in what is left of a building razed down by gunmen in Mamfe, South West region of Cameroon on November 6, 2023. Image �� Colince Tanda Takam. Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe still vividly remembers one random act of kindness during his 44-day lonely stay at the dreaded State Defence Secretariat detention facility in Cameroon���s political capital, Yaound��, in 2018: the gift of a Bible. A rare, unexpected gift which helped him weather the ill treatment inflicted on him. ���The Bible became my sole companion in the cell���it strengthened my faith and spirit and made me even stronger,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe tells Africa Is a Country. ���This is the best gift I have ever received in my entire life.���
On October 1, 2017, following a government crackdown on protesters, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe declared the independence of Ambazonia���a catch-all term for Cameroon���s English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions, known during the colonial era as the British Southern Cameroons.
In November 2016, lawyers from the two regions protested the government���s decision to appoint Francophone magistrates in Anglophone courts, despite lacking training in British common law. Teachers followed suit, calling sit-in protests in response to the appointment of French speakers in Anglophone schools who lacked the ability to communicate in English. The declaration of Ambazonian independence triggered deadly clashes between Cameroon government military forces and Anglophone armed separatists that resulted in widespread atrocities against the civilian population. Three months after that declaration, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe was arrested at Nera Hotel in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, alongside 10 of his team members, and later extradited to Cameroon, despite claims that they were refugees and asylum seekers.
Mancho Bibixy Tse is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence for organizing a coffin revolution in Cameroon. Image �� Mancho Bibixy Tse.In August 2019, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his aides were charged with over nine felony counts related to terrorism and secession and sentenced to life imprisonment with a fine of F.CFA 273 billion (approximately $428 million) after a 19-hour long trial at the Yaound�� Military Court. They were then transferred to the Yaound�� Principal Prison. Sisiku Ayuk Tabe recalls a ���sham��� trial that violated every ���smidgen of fairness.��� ���Although civilians, we were court-martialed before a heavily militarized tribunal, prosecuted by a panel of judges we had recused for being clearly biased against us,��� he says. Their lawyers protested by staging a walkout. But this walkout, and their clients��� request for an adjournment for another counsel to be constituted, was ignored by the judges. ���They were evidently mandated to conclude the case on that day,��� recalls Sisiku Ayuk Tabe. ���One of us even collapsed and laid placid on a bench throughout the hearing. But the judges went ahead and pronounced life sentences on us all, with heavy fines. How can you send people to life imprisonment in a court session without lawyers for their defence, and in a language they don���t understand?���
Today, the men remain in jail despite a UN human rights council call and three judgments from the federal high court of Abuja demanding their release. Years of grievances at perceived discrimination coalesced into Sisiku Ayuk Tabe���s 2017 declaration of Ambazonian independence, resulting in a military crackdown in Cameroon���s two Anglophone regions. After nine years of fighting, Cameroon is still stuck in a festering conflict, unable to quell the tension and violence between its French- and English-speaking people. More than 6,000 people have died at the hands of separatist and government forces according to the International Crisis Group (although Ambazonian leadership puts the figure at well over 50,000), while at least a million others have been rendered homeless.
Graves now litter most homes in Cameroon���s Anglophone regions in a festering conflict that has lasted nine years. Image �� Nalova Akua.The roots of the conflict trace back more than 100 years. Initially annexed by the Germans in 1884, the territory was later divided and ruled as separate entities by the French and the British in the aftermath of the defeat of the Germans in World War I. After independence was achieved in 1960���1961, the two territories formed a federal state, with the French-speaking section constituting about 80 percent and the English-speaking section constituting about 20 percent, both in territory and population. However, the federal structure that guaranteed the rights of the minority Anglophone section was dissolved in 1972 following a controversial referendum. ���The federal arrangement ensured that each state (East Cameroon and West Cameroon) maintained its linguistic, legal, educational and cultural systems and values,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe points out. ���French Cameroon achieved its independence on the 1st of January 1960 and the British Southern Cameroons were supposed to achieve theirs on the 1st of October 1961.���
Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his aides are not the only high-profile separatists to be arrested in the course of the conflict. Last September, Norwegian police arrested a 52-year-old German national of Cameroonian origin, Dr. Lucas Ayaba Cho. The leader of the Ambazonia Governing Council (AGovC), a separatist group involved in the ongoing conflict, is alleged to have coordinated the group���s armed wing, the Ambazonia Defence Forces (ADF), remotely from Norway. Although the exact nature of the accusations against him remains unclear, initial police reports indicate that Ayaba Cho is being held on charges of incitement of crimes against humanity in Anglophone Cameroon. His counsel said Ayaba Cho denies all guilt and that the court had misunderstood events in Cameroon.
His detention has been repeatedly extended, most recently in March 2025. In 2023, nearly half a dozen other Anglophone Cameroonians were sentenced in the US for transporting and smuggling firearms and ammunition from the US to assist separatists fighting against the government of Cameroon.
Five and a half feet tall and smooth shaven, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe was immaculately dressed in a white dashiki and leather clog-toe sandals, with a golden chain and wristwatch, when we visited him at the Yaound�� Principal Prison in late February. With the easy charm of a seasoned salesman and the swaggering self-assurance of a politician, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe is eager to tell every visitor that the quest to restore the independence of the ���homeland��� is rooted in history, geography, culture, and international law.
According to him, the future Ambazonian nation (currently harboring approximately 8 million people), will be 23rd in Africa in terms of population and bigger than the Netherlands, Belgium, or Switzerland in both territory and population. Sisiku Ayuk Tabe likens their prison experience to a ���furnace������citing the poor quality food and bedding���but maintains that neither torture nor death can deter them from the pursuit of the ���noble goal��� which is the liberation of Ambazonia.
The streets of Bamenda are eerily quiet and empty on Mondays offering a haunting view owing to separatist-imposed ghost towns. Image �� Nalova Akua.���We are resolute and ready to fight with the last muscle,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says. ���We are in a storm, yet smiling because Christ is in it with us���you cannot defeat a people in their land. It is a divine fight.��� Questioned whether he���s willing to trade Ambazonian independence for his release from prison, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says that would amount to ���treason.��� ���Doing so will betray those who have paid the ultimate price,��� he says, ���and those who will come after us to be trapped in the vicious cycle of assimilation and enslavement.��� He calls on Cameroon President Paul Biya to do the right thing: Release everyone detained as a result of the conflict and begin negotiations to solve it.
���The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UN-HRC-WGAD) in its Communication 59/2022 of October 14, 2022, ruled in our favor,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says. ���Article 45 of Cameroon���s Constitution stresses the importance of international instruments and an obligation to respect them.��� Referencing a declaration made by an Anglophone lawmaker in parliament, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe also likens the two English-speaking regions that make up the future Ambazonia to ���two undissolvable cubes of sugar��� and the Republic of Cameroon, a sea. The two ���can’t blend��� and so would be forced to be separate nations, like Singapore and Malaysia, he says.
���We are more and more resolute in our conviction such that we have gained tremendous and uncedable grounds in our struggle for self-determination,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says. ���No military in the world has ever defeated a determined and resolute people fighting for an ideology. Paul Biya has a choice���and a personal choice, at that���to make: whether Cameroon, which he has ruled for almost half a century, [should] coexist peacefully with Ambazonia as neighboring countries just like USA and Canada, or be hostile neighbors like Israel and Palestine.���
But some observers believe the violent and criminal behavior of people claiming to be Ambazonia freedom fighters has defeated the genuine purpose of the liberation struggle. An independent Ambazonia, according to many analysts, remains a dream. A distant dream. ���It���s true that the group of agitating Anglophones are fighting for human rights, but it is even truer that the methods [used] have become unpopular and have disgraced the Anglophones: killing their own people, kidnappings, terrorism tactics, boycotting education, etc., have made sound-minded Anglophones withdraw from the struggle,��� says Wilson Tamfuh, professor of public and international law at the University of Dschang and president of the Cameroon branch of the International Law Association. ���It���s not only unpopular now, it���s also unnecessary. For if a tribunal were to be created to try those guilty of crimes committed between 2016���2025, the major leaders would not be spared.���
An undated photo showing members of Anglophone separatist fighters during reconnaissance training in an undisclosed location. Image �� Chris Anu.Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, however, distances his team from criminal actions carried out by Ambazonia freedom fighters, stating, ���Wrong is wrong and no one should commit crimes in the name of the struggle.��� To him, if there is no enemy within, ���the enemy outside can do us no harm.���
Professor Tamfuh notes that past declarations claiming to uphold the rights and identity of the Anglophone community in Cameroon have yielded no dividends, describing it as a history littered with dissatisfaction. ���Grumbling and complaints, for the most part unheeded, could be a deception for the Anglophones to waste their lives fighting instead of forging ahead with a fruitful destiny,��� he asserts. ���Another way of claiming your rights is to be more resourceful than the one oppressing you, especially in areas where the oppressor cannot reach you. Some African Americans have become great in the midst of color discrimination in foreign countries where their forefathers were transported as slaves.���
The political scientist further laments that the current unrest has meant the ���erosion��� of the spiritual and moral values that epitomized the strength of the Anglophone community in Cameroon. He cites the case of Anglophones who took loans and built houses but have since escaped from their houses to the cities and others who have abandoned their farms, the mainstay of their economy. ���The Anglophones are more weakened than before: Strong marriages, which used to be one of the cultural strengths of Anglophones, have been broken. Anglophone girls have become sex workers in Francophone major towns and regions,��� says Tamfuh. ���Thousands are refugees, internally displaced and suffering in the bushes. Chiefs and great economic operators and school proprietors have moved to the Francophone major cities, carrying their wealth and investments with them, to benefit the Francophone population.���
The Yaound�� Central Prison, pictured on December 26, 2024, currently hosts close to 5,000 inmates, about 300 of whom are detained in connection to the civil war in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions. Image �� Nalova Akua.Tamfuh fears for the future ���obliteration��� of the pure Anglophone identity in the Cameroonian nation. ���There will be more intermarriages between the Anglophones and Francophones, more Anglophones expressing themselves principally in the French language and a deeper integration of the two populations into one,��� he says. ���If the Ambazonian struggle were to be considered a vehicle, it has missed its way into the bush. The vehicle should be brought back from the bush, repaired, and given a redirection on a sound path.���
Rebecca Tinsley, a UK journalist and activist who has been following the conflict from the onset, agrees, stating that violence in the current impasse benefits neither the Cameroon government nor the Anglophone separatist fighters. The greatest loser, Tinsley says, are civilians���children denied education and businesses grounded and extorted by both sides. ���The stalemate can be broken if Cameroonians unite to reject the corrupt and inefficient government in Yaound��,��� Tinsley says. ���The Anglophone dream should be for peace and prosperity, but the road to that dream might go through genuine federalism and devolution in the short term, rather than independence. The people should shape that journey, not the men with guns on either side.���
Members of Cameroon’s defense and security forces profile road users in Bamenda on August 13, 2024. Image �� Nalova Akua.Today, tit-for-tat killings occur on a near-daily basis in Cameroon���s Anglophone regions. On Monday, March 17, suspected separatist fighters opened fire on a taxi in Buea, capital of the Southwest region, killing two civilians. Earlier the same day, Cameroonian soldiers raided a separatist hideout in Baba I in the Northwest, killing three fighters and rescuing six civilians who were held hostage. A similar raid on February 23 left six separatist fighters dead.
Dr. Elvis Mbwoge, senior lecturer of political science and public administration at the University of Buea, says the Cameroonian security forces have succeeded in cautiously capping the operations of Anglophone separatist militias. ���It is also very clear it is the secessionists that are tired, weary, and worn out, who wish for a way out,��� Dr. Mbwoge says. He argues that the so-called Ambazonia struggle has taken Cameroon back some 50 years.
���More than 7,000 lives are lost and more than half a million people displaced, all [due] to the recklessness of the power-mongering secessionist leaders who preferred to manipulate the minds of innocent youths to fight against the state while they themselves sought refuge abroad as they declared their so-called independence,��� he says. Criticisms like these���coupled with disagreements and power tussle within the Ambazonia leadership���have become the hallmarks of the nine-year Anglophone liberation struggle in Cameroon.
But Sisiku Ayuk Tabe contends that this was to be expected. He insists that anyone who is against the Ambazonia liberation struggle is ignorant of history, geography, and international law governing the independence of the two former UN protectorates. Citing the Bible story of Daniel, Gideon, and the Hebrews, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says that almost all past liberation struggles have had similar challenges and even more. While upset that the enemy has used ���various tactics��� to discredit the liberation struggle, he claims that the resolve and quest for independence among his people remain unchanged.
���Through the few opportunities for negotiations that have presented themselves, the supposed disagreements and internal wranglings you are referring to have quickly melted away and we have presented ourselves as one people,��� Sisiku Ayuk Tabe says. ���The differences you are insinuating are only a genuine attempt to forge a true Ambazonian democracy, pillared on diversity of opinions about the process and procedure to our freedom but solidly coalesced around a unity of purpose���that is, the liberation and sovereignty of our people���and once there, we���ll resolve our differences as family and build a strong democracy with a vibrant economy and solid judiciary like we had before our unfortunate annexation by French Cameroon in 1961.��� His views are echoed by Chris Anu, Houston-based leader of a faction of the Interim Government of Ambazonia, who claims Ambazonian resilience has thwarted the Cameroon government���s military muscle. ���We will not settle for anything other than a free and independent Southern Cameroons, Ambazonia,��� Anu says. ���Cameroon did not expect the war to linger on for nine years. In fact, if they knew what they know now, they would never have declared war. I don���t know when the war will end, but I can say that Ambazonia will not lose.���
But achieving Ambazonian independence undoubtedly requires respected international friends to support it. Tinsley believes the ���violent��� and ���criminal behavior��� of the separatist fighters have simply scared off such credible foreign backers. ���France, which has leverage, is terrified of losing yet another client state in Africa, and the Yaound�� regime disregards even the Vatican���s criticism,��� she says. ���The African Union is afraid of causing offense, America has lost interest in Africa, and Russia and China favor the regime so they can take Africa���s wealth.��� Tinsley cites three main reasons why the international community has remained silent on the conflict in Cameroon: First, the violence of Anglophone separatist fighters means that outside observers see no good guys in the struggle. Second, Anglophone civil society movements do themselves no favors by trying to relitigate the 1961 plebiscite. ���The international community has no appetite for that discussion so it is better to tell the world about the current human rights abuses and corruption of the Yaound�� regime, which flirts with Putin,��� Tinsley says. And third, Gaza is a ���fashionable issue��� among ignorant Westerners. ���They don���t care about Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo either, by the way,��� says Tinsley. ���What a shame the African Union is silent about Cameroon. Where is the Black African anger about atrocities suffered by the Anglophone people?���
Members of the Cameroon soldiers patrol Bamenda, capital of the English-speaking North West region on August 13, 2024. Image �� Nalova Akua.In the face of this loud silence and conspiracy of the international community, Tinsley suggests that Francophones and Anglophones in Cameroon must find a ���common cause��� in demanding a road map leading to a pluralist, democratic government that is transparent and accountable to all citizens. This, she explains, requires politicians and armed groups to ���put their egos and greed to one side,��� and to find the courage ���to reject the current frozen impasse.���
Dr. Mbwoge feels that the Ambazonia struggle is over and that the two regions are currently experiencing the last phase of this struggle, which, he notes, has been infiltrated by ���selfish criminals and rogue security forces��� who do not want the conflict to end. ���The government of Cameroon operates on the school of thought that Cameroon���s problems should be accorded Cameroonian solutions,��� Mbwoge says. ���Thanks to the efforts of the entire nation coming together during the Major National Dialogue initiated by President Paul Biya, their multiple proposals���including the special status, decentralization, and reconstruction���currently [being] implemented, have played a crucial role in ending this crisis and bringing back normalcy within the the two regions.���
Professor Tamfuh, for his part, thinks that both sides must humbly pave the way for a ceasefire. According to him, ���grumbling and complaining��� from one generation to another only help waste the precious lives of Anglophone youths. ���We have seen grumblings about Nigerian treatment (1950���1959), grumblings about federalism (1962���1971); grumblings about unitary state (1972���2014), and now grumblings about [secession] (2014���present)���an era with the worst casualties. God hates grumbling and complaining. He loves people who have faith to move forward,��� he says. Like Tinsley, Tamfuh proposes three key ways through which the conflict can be solved. The first is for Ambazonians to disband themselves, withdraw, and change their methods. The second is for the UN, which created the current state of union, to bring back the third option of complete independence as a separate state, which was ignored during the 1961 plebiscite.
���It was done in the case of Ethiopia and Eritrea and the recent case of Sudan and Southern Sudan. With strong leaders like Donald Trump who go beyond their reach to solve democratic problems in other states, don���t be surprised [if] this direction is adopted,��� Tamfuh says. The third and last possible solution would be for the Cameroonian government to explore fresh peace overtures, such as opening a dialogue with the separatist leaders or reviewing the federalism option. ���Don���t forget that internal divisions will play a lot on government positions,��� Tamfuh says. ���For example, it is doubtful if a federalism between the Francophone states on the one side and the Northwest and Southwest on the other is going to be a viable solution. Many leaders on both sides and many parts of the population have voiced an unwillingness for the [English-speaking] Northwest and Southwest regions to be a state together.���
April 16, 2025
Beyond national liberation
President Cyril Ramaphosa with former President Thabo Mbeki and Mr Mkhuleko Hlengwa (MP) in Midrand, 2018. Image via Government of South Africa on Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0. South Africa���s swerve from liberation to bungling kleptocracy is not unique���the United States is in the throes of an analogous meltdown���but the speed and extent of that unraveling continue to both perplex and prefigure thinking about the prospects for recovery.�� The latest book by Vishwas Satgar, one of South Africa���s leading figures on the left, is a trove for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the country���s hobbled efforts to step free of its past and a beacon for seeing past the gloom. Ranging from declarative newspaper articles to clear-headed essays, A Love Letter to the Many gathers three decades of writing and reflection into a hefty, impassioned volume which, in confronting defeat, also establishes grounds for hope.
The first of the book���s four sections covers South Africa���s path from poster child for national liberation���and reconciliation���to what Satgar labels ���a shallow and corrupt market democracy��� with an anemic neoliberal economy, ongoing endemic poverty among black South Africans, and widening income inequality. Within less than a generation, the great expectations of the 1990s became dim memories, eclipsed by brash freebooters claiming to be conducting radical change. ���An unliveable society was turned into an unviable society,��� Satgar writes.
Insistent that ���South Africa did not have to end up where it is���, he traces the spurned opportunities, misjudgments, and capitulations that led to the detour. He starts with the important reminder that ���South Africa, compared to most places in the world, had the conditions to navigate neoliberalisation differently.��� For much of the 1990s, there was an activated mass resistance movement, a powerful global solidarity network, international institutions keen to side with an African success story after the horrors of structural adjustment, and an internal capitalist class in disarray.
How, then, did ostensible working-class-led hegemony dissolve so quickly and emphatically? It���s a complex story, which Satgar unspools with analysis that draws also on his experiences in the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party.
The machinations of incumbent elites featured strongly, but the defeats also had other origins. Satgar���s analysis draws productively on Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci���s concept of ���passive revolution��� (in which mass politics is subdued and co-opted to permit a restructuring of the capitalist class) to chronicle the steady neutering of South Africa���s organized left. There were efforts to regroup and resist, including thwarted attempts to undo the sclerotic tactics and practices of the South African Communist Party, but they failed. Satgar convincingly shows how African nationalism was deployed to defeat working-class left alternatives, only to then degenerate into a ���criminalised politics.���
This downcast analysis risks obscuring significant achievements���including the avoidance of all-out civil war in the 1990s, the value of the constitutional guardrails and judicial powers added in that period, and the (admittedly faint) rudiments of a welfare state that were introduced. But it is indisputable that much of the material deprivation and inequality that typified apartheid South Africa continued to be reproduced. Poverty stayed entrenched among black Africans, with the unemployment rate among African youth topping 60%. Income and wealth inequality widened, and vast wealth continued to be extracted by a small, increasingly multiracial elite.
For Satgar, the transition of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) from a progressive national liberation movement to a vehicle for ���parasitic accumulation��� cannot be reduced to moral failings or the avarice of individuals. The decline was the outcome of a class project overseen by the ANC, which he terms an ���Afro-neoliberal mode of transformation.���
Leaving the economy in the hands of white elites was obviously untenable, but the ANC also lacked the appetite for a more directive approach. This was clear when, in 1996, it adopted a macroeconomic policy that imposed a set of pliant adjustments that cramped the state���s role and exposed the economy directly to the discipline of financial markets. Rather than marshal the country���s major corporations to support a coherent developmental effort, the ANC allowed them to adjust and extend their growth strategies abroad. The policy was advertised as an economic stabilization measure. But tucked into it was the misplaced hope that conglomerate restructuring would leave room and opportunities for the emergence of a black capitalist class.
Instead, the economy remained dominated by massive cross-holding corporations. Only two entry points for substantial enrichment existed for newcomers: via economic affirmative action (black economic empowerment ventures brokered by the ruling party) or through snagging procurement and service contracts with the state. Access to both those channels required fealty to the ANC. This fertilized criss-crossing networks of patronage, which, in turn, enabled political rivals to build and consolidate power, all inside the broad tent of the ANC.
Soon, Nelson Mandela���s successor as President, Thabo Mbeki, faced a challenge from one such rival. By the early 2000s, Jacob Zuma, a former ANC intelligence chief, had consolidated a powerful, chauvinist support base and was trumpeting the need for more radical change. Satgar shows how the Communist Party (and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), rather than shift towards mass organizing, hitched themselves to Zuma���s populist bandwagon���a fateful blunder.
The Zuma era unleashed rampant plundering of the state and metastasizing corruption that took the country to the brink of being a failed state. Media coverage focused on the pillaging but tended to miss the deeper objective, which entailed rapidly growing a transactional black capitalist class under the pretext of ���economic liberation.��� Though brazenly dysfunctional, this project became so thoroughly lodged in the ANC that it lasted almost a decade, to 2018.
Entire state structures were turned into fiefdoms for doling out patronage and bagging wealth. Public agencies and local municipalities sank beneath mountains of debt, and basic services collapsed. Eventually, with the state incapable of keeping the lights on for more than a few hours a day, the wheels came off Zuma���s ���radical economic transformation��� swindle. Corruption scandals, brave judicial decisions, worker resistance, community struggles, and rollicking feuds inside the ANC laid bare its crisis of legitimacy. Cyril Ramaphosa, a trade union leader turned billionaire, was tasked with the ���reset.���
History might in retrospect seem to move on tracks, but, as Satgar repeatedly notes, there are always forks in the path traveled. Within given constraints, contending social and political forces make choices. Sometimes the ability to enact those decisions attaches to the legitimacy and authority of an individual, as Satgar reminds us when he pays tribute to the former Communist Party leader and ANC guerrilla commander, Chris Hani.
Aside from Mandela, no South African in the early 1990s commanded the charismatic political authority of Hani, and none personified the rare combination of revolutionary politics and humanism as he did. Young, blisteringly smart, and committed to a renewed and transformative socialist project in South Africa, he was already being touted as Mandela���s successor. He cared little for the Stalinist reflexes of many of his Party comrades, saw inequality and redistribution, not ���just��� poverty, as South Africa���s fundamental challenge, and he commanded mass support. A far-right gunman killed him in a Johannesburg suburb in April 1993. Hani���s death, Satgar writes, ���inaugurated the neutralisation of the national liberation movement left.���
A radical understanding of non-racialism lay at the heart of Hani���s political idealism, which Satgar innovatively develops by linking a revitalized understanding of non-racialism to the quest for a just transition that can avert climate catastrophe. For Satgar, the radical tradition of non-racialism requires more than tolerance and inclusion: it is a ���deeply political humanism��� that is ���foremost about solidarity and unity,��� and it implies a foundational commitment to anti-capitalism and democratic practice. The desiccated understandings of nonracialism that survive in South Africa contain no such ambition.
It is to Satgar’s great credit that, in writing ���against the grain of defeat,��� as he puts it, he turns such baneful critiques into a basis for reimagining a more just South Africa and for outlining a set of principles and a left politics that can bring it about. Shifting the current trajectory, he writes, requires a reckoning not just with ���the exclusionary rationalities of national liberation politics��� but with the prospect that the accumulating shocks of climate change, combined with socio-ecological collapse, ���could push the country into an irreversible process of decline.���
Some of the strongest essays are gathered in the book���s final sections, which draw together an analysis of Afro-neoliberalism, the unfolding climate catastrophe, the state���s ongoing alliance with fossil fuel capitalism, and fledgling efforts���many involving Satgar himself���to build a mass politics of solidarity for climate justice. Outlined in them, for example, are building blocks for a democratic ���ecosocialism,��� such as the proposed Climate Justice Charter, which Satgar has helped refine and promote. It positions the worsening realities of hunger, water stress, drought, and the climate crisis as a basis for building a new mass politics for transformation.
Several key themes dominate: one is a sustained critique of economic ���productivism��� in a world of finite resources and in delicate ecological balance; another is a rejection of the hope that conventional top-down command politics and technocratic innovation offer an escape from catastrophe.
Satgar makes the case for embarking on multifaceted processes of bottom-up change that privilege the commons, co-operatives, self-management, food sovereignty, socially controlled public utilities, and more; as well as for a ���solidarity economy��� that can safeguard both human and non-human life in all its richness. The aim is to establish systemic alternatives through decentered actions that revive working-class and popular power from below, and that scale up from the local. He reminds us that similar, vibrant forms of resistance tipped the scales for the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s���but were then corralled and demobilized by a liberation organization steeped in traditions of democratic centralism. The unhappy outcomes argue against repeating such strategies.
The book brims with rich reflection and guidance, distilled from wide reading and sustained engagement. In combining sharp analysis with steely idealism, Satgar stays alert to the constraints facing transformative struggles, the many ways in which neoliberal ideology has embedded in local political traditions and ���commonsense,��� and the mixed record of counter-hegemonic challenges in recent decades. The hopefulness is not untethered from realism. What shines through is a deep commitment to a radical humanism, couched in the knowledge that the struggle for human emancipation is ultimately tied up with our ability to repair what Karl Marx saw as our ���metabolic relationship��� with the non-human world.
A Love Letter to the Many���Arguments for Transformative Left Politics in South Africa: Selected Writings, by Vishwas Satgar (2024), is available from Jacana Media.
April 15, 2025
A powerful storytelling tradition
Mvet at the Museum of Music of Barcelona. Image credit Sguastevi via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. Leer en espa��ol aqu��.
Nearly illiterate and suffering from leprosy, Ey�� Moan Ndong (1928���2000) learned to play the mvet, an ancestral string instrument made from cane tube. It was one meter or slightly more in length and usually had up to three calabashes as sound boxes. While he was admitted for 12 years in the Mikomeseng leprosy settlement, his mvet sessions for the sick and their caregivers became famous. The Spanish colonial authorities did not have a bad opinion of him, but they also did not take him seriously. To them, he seemed to be merely a folkloric clown. After leaving the leprosy settlement, the bard would travel to villages and perform at funerals. It provided a sense of dignity to have him as a performer. Ey�� Moan Ndong barely spoke Spanish. He composed verses in the Fang language, usually at night, as one more of the rituals in the House of the Word, where the Fang���the majority ethnic group in Equatorial Guinea���ate, rested, played akong (a board game), made baskets with melongo, debated issues that affected the community, and listened to their bards. Ey�� Moan Ndong called himself ���the people���s entertainer.���
His art with the mvet began with a song, often humorous. Then Ey�� Moan Ndong went on to tell stories of the Ekang, the first immortal inhabitants of the Earth. He interspersed songs (also an autobiographical poem, the Onvaga) in his tales, which could last all night. This depended on the response of the audience, who accompanied the performance with bamboo drumsticks to mark the rhythm, and metal bells or bottles to make the harmony. Famous for knowing countless epic poems by memory, Ey�� Moan Ndong was also great at improvisation. He is the last great performer of this tradition.
I owe being able to read five epic poems by Ey�� Moan Ndong to transcripts published by Dr. Ram��n Sales Encinas and the translator Domingo El�� Mb��, which I discovered thanks to the book Sobre la ��pica fang by Jorge Abeso. I have tackled a sixth epic in a bilingual edition (Fang/Spanish) made by Professor Juli��n Bibang, published in the book ��rase una vez el pa��s del son del tambor y de las tumbas. There is a seventh (El leopardo al acecho del mundo) transcribed by Ver��nica ��engono in her doctoral thesis, still unpublished. And even now there are non-transcribed recordings circulating (Ngara Bikie��, about an android) as well as unpublished transcripts (El accidente de circulaci��n entre Nnang Ond�� y Ekie�� Ndong El��) of more epic poems.
I spoke with Professor Alberto Montaner, who directs the doctoral thesis on Ey�� Moan Ndong by researcher Filiberto Abeso Micha Monayong. In his opinion, ���the plot of Fang epic poems is somewhat surreal, but they should be understood from a deeply magical world view.��� In the Western epic there is nothing comparable. Although the Fang bard shows parallels with the Greek aoidos, medieval troubadours, and even with The Storyteller by Vargas Llosa, their epics are more reminiscent of fairy tales. A summary of some plots will suffice to confirm this.
From the great beyond, a mother sends her son to a river from which you can pull out fish that are wrapped and cooked with hot sauce, salt, and onion (El extra��o regalo venido del otro mundo). Accused of killing his first cousin, Akoma Mba is taken by an angel to a divine court (Akoma Mba ante el tribunal de Dios). Several Ekang groups try to defeat and capture a giant cannibal in order to take it to old Ayomongang, who wants to eat it (Mbuandong, el antrop��fago). A young man visits his mother���s hometown for the first time and finds the inhabitants there terrorized by a monster (Mond�� Messeng).
The giant can be seen as a Fang image of Homer���s Cyclops (The Odyssey). The hand that writes the summons for Akoma Mba is reminiscent of Belshazzar���s feast (the Book of Daniel). Nevertheless, the similarities with the Western tradition are minimal. In fact, the most striking and original aspect of Ey�� Moan Ndong is his retro-futuristic style (long before Wakanda). On the one hand, the bard dates back to a mythical past of immortal beings who use amulets, cast spells, and make use of a large variety of magical animals: In Akoma Mba���, an elephant takes care of all the agricultural and domestic tasks (cutting firewood, pulling weeds, cooking vegetables, etc.); in Mbuandong ��� a goat defecates an edible fat that feeds an entire village.
On the other hand, one would expect to find a primitive lifestyle in the mythical land of Engong. But the immortal Ekang have many technological gadgets: phones, cars, trucks ��� and flying saucers! In fact, the ���Mivul����� takes on the role ships have in the Greek epic, allowing the characters to move quickly from one place to another (for example, to hunt down Mbuandong, the giant cannibal). Ey�� Moan Ndong moves smoothly from a magic mirror (Eyom Ndong, el buscaproblemas) to glasses that let you see things kilometers away (Mbuandong, el antrop��fago), a gadget not even James Bond has. The first mechanism refers to the fairy-tale genre, already mentioned; the second, to science fiction.
Therefore, the art of the mvet is hybrid, not only for the elements it combines (story, song, music, dance, theater) but also for the literary genres it shares. In this sense, Ey�� Moan Ndong believed that variety was the key to holding the attention of his audience, which in Equatorial Guinea was large. In fact, his work remains popular not only in his own country but also among the Fang populations in Gabon and Cameroon. And it deserves to cross more borders.
Given its importance and universality, it is essential to preserve the legacy of Ey�� Moan Ndong. We cannot recover the lost epic poems, but it would be wise to translate, annotate, and publish the non-transcribed recordings in bilingual editions (Fang/Spanish). Their study should also be encouraged. It is enough to consult literature on the mvet to verify that almost everything comes from French-speaking Africa. Let���s follow their example and promote the exegesis of these epic works also in Spanish. Likewise, it is also a priority to encourage teaching of the mvet. There are schools dedicated to this instrument in Gabon and Cameroon, but not in Equatorial Guinea. Encouraging that it be learned would help conserve the tradition and inspire new talents.
Since I discovered him, I have spoken about Ey�� Moan Ndong with the same admiration and respect I use when I refer to Homer or Vargas Llosa. And it is not necessary to have previous knowledge of Fang or the mvet to enjoy him. For those who want to read him in Spanish (splendidly annotated), the five epic poems edited by Ram��n Sales Encinas and Domingo El�� Mb�� are difficult to find in bookstores but are available online: El extra��o regalo venido del otro mundo, Akoma Mba ante el tribunal de Dios, Mbuandong el antrop��fago, Eyom Ndong, el buscaproblemas and Mond�� Messeng.
Una tradici��n literaria poderosa
Foumban, Cameroon. Cr��dito de imagen Jasmine Halki CC BY 2.0. Read in English here.
Pr��cticamente analfabeto y afectado por la lepra, Ey�� Moan Ndong (1928-2000) aprendi�� a tocar el nvet, un instrumento ancestral de tubo de ca��a de un metro o poco m��s de largo, que sol��a llevar hasta tres calabazas como cajas de resonancia. Ingresado doce a��os en la leproser��a de Micomeseng, sus sesiones de nvet para enfermos y cuidadores fueron c��lebres. Las autoridades coloniales espa��olas nunca lo vieron con malos ojos, pero tampoco lo tomaron en serio, pues les parec��a un payaso folcl��rico. Tras abandonar la leproser��a, el bardo recorrer��a pueblos actuando en funerales. Daba dignidad tenerlo como int��rprete. Ey�� Moan Ndong apenas chapurreaba el espa��ol. Trovaba en lengua fang, generalmente de noche, como uno m��s de los actos rituales en la casa de la palabra, donde los fang ���la etnia mayoritaria en Guinea Ecuatorial��� com��an, descansaban, jugaban al akong (un juego de mesa), hac��an cester��a con melongo, debat��an cuestiones que afectaran a la comunidad y escuchaban a sus bardos. Ey�� Moan Ndong se llamaba a s�� mismo ���el animador de pueblos���.
Su arte del nvet comenzaba con una canci��n, a veces humor��stica. Luego Ey�� Moan Ndong pasaba a narrar las historias de los Ekang, los primeros habitantes inmortales de la Tierra. Intercalaba canciones (tambi��n un poema autobiogr��fico, el Onvaga) en sus relatos, que pod��an durar toda la noche, seg��n la respuesta del p��blico, que acompa��aba la actuaci��n con baquetas de bamb�� para marcar el ritmo y cascabeles met��licos o botellas con las que hacer contrapunto. Conocido por saberse de memoria incontables epopeyas, Ey�� Moan Ndong tambi��n era un gran improvisador. Es el ��ltimo gran int��rprete de esta tradici��n.
Debo la lectura de cinco epopeyas de Ey�� Moan Ndong a las transcripciones publicadas por el m��dico Ram��n Sales Encinas y el traductor Domingo El�� Mb��, que descubr�� gracias al ensayo de Jorge Abeso Sobre la ��pica fang. Abordo una sexta epopeya en una edici��n biling��e (fang/espa��ol) a cargo del profesor Juli��n Bibang, publicada en el libro ��rase una vez el pa��s del son del tambor y de las tumbas. Hay una s��ptima (El leopardo al acecho del mundo) transcrita por Ver��nica ��engono en su tesis doctoral, todav��a in��dita. Y a��n circulan grabaciones no transcritas (Ngara Bikie��, sobre un androide), as�� como transcripciones no publicadas (El accidente de circulaci��n entre Nnang Ond�� y Ekie�� Ndong El��) de m��s epopeyas.
Consulto al catedr��tico Alberto Montaner, quien dirige la tesis doctoral sobre Ey�� Moan Ndong del investigador Filiberto Micha Monayong. A su juicio, ���el argumento de las epopeyas fang es un tanto surrealista, pero hay que entenderlo desde una cosmovisi��n profundamente m��gica���. En la ��pica occidental no hay nada comparable. Si bien el bardo fang presenta paralelismos con los aedos griegos, los juglares medievales e incluso con El hablador de Vargas Llosa, sus epopeyas recuerdan m��s al cuento maravilloso. Bastar�� un resumen de algunos argumentos para comprobarlo.
Desde el m��s all��, una madre manda a su hijo a un r��o del que se puede extraer pescado cocinado en envueltos con picante, sal y cebolla (El extra��o regalo venido del otro mundo). Acusado de haber matado a un primo hermano, Akoma Mba es llevado por un ��ngel a un tribunal divino (Akoma Mba ante el tribunal de Dios). Varios grupos Ekang tratan de derrotar y capturar a un gigante can��bal para poder llev��rselo al viejo Ayomongang, que quiere com��rselo (Mbuandong, el antrop��fago). Un joven visita por primera vez el pueblo natal de su madre y all�� encuentra a los habitantes aterrorizados por un monstruo (Mond�� Messeng).
El gigante podr��a verse como un trasunto fang del c��clope hom��rico (La odisea). La mano que escribe la citaci��n judicial de Akoma Mba recuerda al fest��n de Baltasar (El libro de Daniel). Ahora bien, las similitudes con las letras occidentales son m��nimas. De hecho, lo m��s llamativo y original de Ey�� Moan Ndong es su estilo retrofuturista (mucho antes de Wakanda). Por un lado, el bardo se remonta a un pasado m��tico de seres inmortales que usan amuletos, lanzan hechizos y se sirven de gran variedad de animales m��gicos: en Akoma Mba���, un elefante se encarga de todas las tareas agr��colas y dom��sticas (cortar le��a, arrancar malas hierbas, cocinar verduras���); en Mbuandong���, una cabra defeca grasa comestible de la que se alimenta todo un pueblo.
Por otro lado, uno esperar��a encontrar un estilo de vida primigenio en la m��tica tierra de Engong. Pero los inmortales Ekang tienen muchos artilugios tecnol��gicos: tel��fonos, coches, camiones��� ��y platillos volantes! En efecto, el ���Mivul����� cumple la funci��n de los barcos en la ��pica griega, pues permite que los personajes se desplacen r��pidamente de un lugar a otro (por ejemplo, a la caza de Mbuandong, el gigante can��bal). Ey�� Moan Ndong pasa sin problemas del espejo m��gico (Eyom Ndong, el buscaproblemas) a unas gafas que permiten ver a kil��metros de distancia (Mbuandong, el antrop��fago), un gadget que ni James Bond. El primer artefacto remite al g��nero del cuento maravilloso, ya mencionado; el segundo, a la ciencia ficci��n.
Por tanto, el arte del nvet es h��brido no solo por los elementos que combina (cuento, canci��n, m��sica, danza, teatro), sino tambi��n por los g��neros literarios de los que participa. En este sentido, Ey�� Moan Ndong cre��a que la variedad era clave para mantener la atenci��n de su p��blico, que en Guinea Ecuatorial fue numeroso. De hecho, su obra sigue siendo popular no solo en su pa��s, sino tambi��n entre las poblaciones fang de Gab��n y Camer��n. Y merecer��a cruzar m��s fronteras.
Dada su importancia y universalidad, es fundamental preservar el legado de Ey�� Moan Ndong. No podemos recuperar las epopeyas perdidas, pero convendr��a traducir, anotar y publicar en ediciones biling��es (fang/espa��ol) las grabaciones no transcritas. Asimismo, debe fomentarse su estudio. Basta consultar la bibliograf��a sobre el nvet para comprobar que casi toda proviene del ��frica franc��fona. Sigamos su ejemplo y promovamos la ex��gesis de estas epopeyas tambi��n en espa��ol. Asimismo, es prioritario impulsar la ense��anza del nvet. En Gab��n y Camer��n existen escuelas dedicadas a este instrumento, pero no en Guinea Ecuatorial. Fomentar su aprendizaje contribuir��a a preservar la tradici��n y a inspirar nuevos talentos.
Desde que lo descubr��, hablo de Ey�� Moan Ndong con el mismo respeto admirativo con el que me refiero a Homero o Vargas Llosa. Y no es necesario tener conocimientos previos de fang o del nvet para disfrutarlo. Para quienes quieran leerlo en espa��ol (espl��ndidamente anotado), las cinco epopeyas editadas por Ram��n Sales Encinas y Domingo El�� Mb�� son dif��ciles de encontrar en librer��as, pero est��n disponibles en l��nea: El extra��o regalo venido del otro mundo, Akoma Mba ante el tribunal de Dios, Mbuandong el antrop��fago, Eyom Ndong, el buscaproblemas y Mond�� Messeng. ~
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