Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 14

In search of Saadia

Who was Saadia, and why has she been forgotten? A search for one woman���s story opens up bigger questions about race, migration, belonging, and the gaps history leaves behind. Tunis, 2021 �� Shreya Parikh.

In the many stories I���ve heard about Bou Saadia���whose name translates to ���father of Saadia������he is described as a figure who haunts the medina of Tunis, having gone mad in search of his daughter. He goes from door to door, humming and dancing ���like the Africans do,��� scaring the children on the streets with his black skin, leather clothes covered with cowrie shells, and brusque bodily movements.

According to folklore, Bou Saadia came ���all the way from Africa������the faraway other in the Tunisian imagination���to search for Saadia, who was sold into slavery. No one knows exactly when this mythical figure originated and whether his and Saadia���s stories are based on any recorded historical people. Until 1841, enslaved black women and men were sold in the Souk El Berka in Tunis, where there are shops selling gold jewelry today.

In all the versions of the story I���ve heard, Bou Saadia never finds Saadia. So he continues, to this day, to appear in the street performances during Ramadan, dancing to the rhythms of drums and shekashek, often as a part of mystical rituals known as stambeli. Can we ever bring closure to these strands of stories that are omnipresent in urban legends, in family gossip, and in the novels that circulate all over Tunisia?

The 1846 abolition of slavery by Ahmed Bey, then governor of Tunisia, is often constructed in popular discourse as the ���end��� of slavery. Many Tunisians I meet proudly tell me that ���racism��� ended in Tunisia ���two years earlier than in France,��� where slavery was abolished in 1848. In these conversations, racism, anti-blackness, and slavery are often conflated into one. Slowly, I came to realize that in the Tunisian vernacular language, where many terms to denote blackness are derived from Arabic words for servitude, there is no way to talk about blackness without (indirectly) talking about slavery.

In the region that makes up modern Tunisia, the practice of slavery continued until the early 20th century. While we may know little about the folkloric Saadia herself, the shelves of the National Archives in Tunis abound with traces of enslaved women brought to Tunisia from the Lake Chad region over the 19th century. Many of these women, like Khadija bent Fatma, were forced to work as domestic workers even after the re-abolition of slavery in 1890 under the French colonial rule.

Today, this ���domestic��� nature of black women���s historical servitude is often used to challenge the validity of the term ���slavery��� to name their condition, since slavery has come to be associated, in global imaginations, with the body-breaking exploitation of enslaved people on the plantations of the Americas. Another challenge is the slavery versus post-slavery binary: Does slavery end and become ���post-slavery������that is, a servitude status (and period) assumed to be less dehumanizing than the one preceding it���after the legal abolition of slavery? Or is post-slavery about the degree of servitude rather than the legal act of abolition? If so, and in the absence of testimonies like Saadia���s and Khadija���s, how do we measure this degree of servitude and linked dehumanization that these women underwent? And do we indeed need this measure in order to consider their pain worthy of recognition?

The presence of the traces of the black (ex-)enslaved women and men in the archives���often in colonial administrative documents���does not necessarily imply that the black families in Tunisia who descended from ex-enslaved individuals know the story of their ancestors. One key reason is the taboo linked to slavery. As black Tunisian scholar and activist Maha Abdelhamid has pointed out, family members who may know of the history of enslavement of their ancestors often hide this information, implying that it has been lost over generations.

It was Saadia Mosbah, a black Tunisian activist in her 60s, who brought my attention to the mythical Saadia during one of our earliest conversations in 2020. Mosbah noted that black women are often given auspicious names that bring blessings to their families. Saadia means ���happiness������the kind that brings contentment and joy. While Mosbah had most likely received her name from her family, was that also true for the mythical Saadia? Or had her enslavers (re)named her Saadia, hoping to make her enforced presence a blessing?

Over the years of fighting anti-blackness in Tunisia, Mosbah has herself become a living archive of the stories of suffering and humiliation faced by those racialized as black. Our conversations were often filled with these strands of stories. One way to find closure for the mythical Saadia could be to weave these strands together, extending a myth through pieces of the real.

Maybe, like Mosbah���s ancestors, Saadia had been brought to Tunisia from Mali. And maybe she was sold into slavery in Gab��s, in the south of Tunisia, explaining why Bou Saadia never found her in Tunis. And maybe, after fighting for her manumission, she was forced to inherit her ex-enslaver���s family name and, finding herself without a source of subsistence, worked as a bonded laborer in the homes and the farms of the ex-enslaving family. (One may pause here to ask: Did Saadia���s enslavement end with her manumission?)

Maybe Saadia���s children and grandchildren inherited this bonded servitude and its vicious poverty. And maybe the first great-granddaughter who was sent to school after Tunisia became an independent country ran away from her class when her teacher humiliated her in front of other students, calling her out as the source of the stink in the class, naming her with all the insults that marked her as black, inferior, and ���slave.���

Maybe Saadia���s great-great-granddaughter was the one who fell in love with a passport-less man from Senegal who worked in a local ceramic factory. Maybe, while everyone was celebrating the 2011 revolution that ended the authoritarian rule of then President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the police arrested and deported this Senegalese man for being an illegal migrant. Maybe this would be the last time that his daughter would see him.

Through the work of black activists like Mosbah, we have learned about the links between historical slavery and contemporary hatred for black migrants. Historically, the stigma of blackness justified a more humiliating treatment for the enslaved black individuals compared to their non-black enslaved peers. Today, in Tunisia, the stigma of blackness justifies a more humiliating treatment of the black migrants compared to their non-black migrant peers, be they Syrian or Italian.

Since Tunisian President Kais Saied���s statement against sub-Saharan migrants in February 2023, state and societal violence against Tunisia���s black migrant population has escalated. In the months following the statement, Saadia Mosbah���one of the key figures campaigning for the rights of these black migrants���became a target of virulent online hatred that called for ridding Tunisia of its black population.

Based on unfounded accusations circulating on social media, Mosbah was arrested on May 6, 2024. As I write these words, she remains in prison. In the meantime, the Tunisian state continues to extend its violent control over the lives of black migrants, arresting and deporting them into the desertic borders with Algeria or selling them to trafficking networks in Libya. As I write these words, it is probable that many black migrant women are living the fate of the mythical Saadia, forced into servitude in locations unknown to their families.

The list of those arrested or forced into exile for showing solidarity with black migrants has grown since the arrest of Mosbah. Despite political threats, many Tunisians and non-Tunisians continue to show solidarity with the black migrants, often organizing material, legal, and medical aid through secure networks. In spite of pending investigations and continued state surveillance, many black Tunisian activists still live and work in Tunisia, calling out the venomous anti-blackness that harms lives, often fatally. Maybe among these brave faces is a descendant of our long-forgotten Saadia, calling for the rights of those like her father, whom she has not seen since his deportation to Senegal, and fighting for the liberation of her ancestor���s namesake.

Binti, revisited

More than two decades after its release, Lady Jaydee���s debut album still resonates���offering a window into Tanzanian pop, gender politics, and the sound of a generation coming into its own. Judith Wambura. Image credit Jordan K. Mwaisaka via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.

When I was little, I had a very clear image of what it meant to be a grown woman. I imagined owning my own apartment, driving my own car, the ability to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and an unlimited supply of midriff blouses. This was the epitome of what being a grown, free woman meant to me. So, when I saw Lady Jaydee on the CD cover of her sophomore album, Binti, clad in a black two-piece that showed off her belly button, it immediately resonated with me.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the career of Tanzanian singer-songwriter Judith Wambura, popularly known as Lady Jaydee. In her 2001 debut album, Machozi, she began carving a lane for herself, building a discography almost exclusively about love and romantic relationships. But the release of her second album in 2003 would firmly situate her as Bongo Flava���s leading lady for years to come.

Binti, as its title suggests, is an ode to young Tanzanian women. The 11-track project of just under 52 minutes, is a compilation of lyrical content that cautioned, encouraged, and confided in an audience of young women working through the growing pains of romantic experiences with men.

Binti���s release coincided with an era of negotiation of sorts when it came to conceptions of womanhood and gender in Tanzania. The early 2000s saw women taking up more space in public spheres, as evidenced by the rise of women in the labour market. There were also more women stars in the art industries, including Jaydee���s peer Rehema Chalamila, popularly known as Ray C, who would release her album Mapenzi Yangu in the same year. The influx of women into public spheres seemed to be a subtle rejection of traditional gender roles that situated them within the private sphere of the home as wives and caretakers. Instead, women, particularly those in urban centres, started pushing against heteronormative boundaries.

Culture productions that acted as a mirror for young people in urban centres reflected this shift in dynamics; newspapers, music and film started to demonstrate the growing tension in romantic relationships between men and women. ���Agony Aunt������figures emerged in newspapers to offer advice to women who had had enough of romantic betrayal or dissatisfaction in their love lives. More films started to portray women���albeit imperfectly���with the romantic agency to start and end relationships as they pleased. And in music, particularly in Bongo Flava, women were publicly declaring their frustration with men through their art.

Jaydee���s Binti joined this chorus of women. The album opener Usiusemee Moyo is a warning to women against feeling too certain of their partner���s intentions, and offers a firm wakeup call to those making excuses for romantic mistreatment as she sings: ���Angeujali moyo wako, asingekuumiza huyo��� (If he cared about your heart, he would not hurt you). In Siri Yangu (My Secret), the listener becomes her confidant as she sings about her own heartache at the hands of past partners. In line with the song title the singer-songwriter refuses to carry the shame of heartbreak and instead makes public emotions often considered to belong in the private sphere.

In the album���s namesake, Binti, she sings, ���Binti amka acha sikitika/ binti amka jikaze anza mwendo,��� (Young woman wake up, stop being sad/ young woman wake up, brace yourself and move forward). Jaydee uses lexical repetition, a technique common in Swahili poetry, such that the track mimics a chant. She encourages women to work toward building a life beyond depending on men: ���kama uko shule vitabu ni juhudi ongeza/ kama mwajiriwa hakikisha cheo umepanda���(if you are in school, increase your effort/ if you are employed, make sure you rise up the ranks).

Siwema, arguably the most successful song on the album, has all the aforementioned themes but instead of addressing women, she directs her lyrics to her love interest. She scornfully confronts him for mistreating her and sardonically declares that his good looks no longer phase her: ���kwahiyo nielewe brother/ sibabaishwi na sura, napenda tabia njema��� (Understand me brother, I���m not rattled by looks, I like good behaviour). She is authoritative and audacious in her tone. A pair of adlibs towards the end of the song, ���usifikiri mimi limbukeni sana��� (don���t think I am very na��ve) and ���ukaniona mimi sugamami wako��� (you thought I was your sugar mummy), hint at the man���s financial dependency as one of a list of infractions.

The closing track, Wanaume kama Mabinti, is a collaboration with rapper turned politician Hamis Mwinjuma, formerly known as Mwana FA. It is a five-minute chiding, framing men���s inability to financially provide and subsequently depend on their partners as not only a failure, but also, womanly. The third verse of Wanaume kama Mabinti is especially illuminating. Jaydee sings; ���hawatoi hata senti, ���yao kulipa bill/ ikifika zamu yao huenda msalani��� (they don���t contribute a cent to the bill/ when it���s their turn they go to the toilet). A few lines later she mocks; ���shoga zangu ebu leteni magauni tuwavishe/ hijabu tuwafunge na vimini, vitopu tuwaazime��� (my friends bring dresses to dress them in/ let���s tie hijabs on them and lend them mini-skirts and tops). The verse reveals that there are consequences for deviating from the gender norm i.e. not being a financially independent man. In the case of the song, the consequence is ridicule.

In her book Borderlands: The New Mestiza/La Frontera, Mexican writer Gloria Anzald��a suggests that while men make up what constitutes gender roles, it is women who transmit these roles. They do so by consistently and continuously performing womanhood following�� the rules set by men such that they become engrained and remain intact. If we use this framework to think about Lady Jaydee���s Binti, we see that there was a clear push and pull between women and gender norms in the early 2000s. While clearly frustrated by men���s treatment of them, women in urban centres were not interested in shifting the gender norms that maintained this imbalanced power dynamic. Some norms, like men being financially independent, were far too essentialist to manhood. Being mocked as ���womanly��� is saying the quiet part out loud: that financial dependency is essential to womanhood.

Ironically,�� the song was met with mostly agreement from audiences and fellow artists alike. Singer-songwriter Bushoke released Mume Bwege, a lament of being mistreated by a woman. Bushoke raises concerns about the woman���s infidelity and her abusive temperament, as well as having to perform household chores. He protests, ���Mwenzenu naosha vyombo, mwenzenu napiga deki/ Mzee mzima napika, jamani nafua nguo.��� (I wash dishes, I mop the floor/ A grown man like me, I cook and wash clothes). The shame in the tone turns the song into a confession. Mume Bwege reinforces the idea that household labour is women���s responsibility and that men should feel ashamed at having to do it. It follows the same logic as Lady Jaydee���s Wanaume kama Mabinti.

By forging her own path in the male-dominated Bongo Flava scene Lady Jaydee was challenging the status quo. However, she was often criticized for straying too far from Tanzanian norms and values. In his paper ���Music and the Regulatory Regimes of Gender and Sexuality in Tanzania,��� Imani Sanga discusses an article released in 2004 in the independent tabloid newspaper Ijumaa, titled ���Lady Jaydee, Ray C kufungiwa kupiga mziki.��� The article suggested that the National Arts Council of Tanzania (BASATA) would ban the two women artists from performing their music as their on-stage style of dress was deemed ���half-naked.��� Sanga reminds us that the term ���half-naked��� is gendered; ������most often in Tanzania when a woman puts on a miniskirt or a blouse that does not cover the whole of her stomach she is considered to be ���half naked.��� This concept is not used when a man, for example, puts on only shorts or takes off his shirt during rap and hip-hop music performance (which is normally the case).���

Lady Jaydee, posing on her CD cover in that black two-piece with her midriff and belly button exposed, was already pushing against gender roles. This norm was (and still is) maintained through state policing of public bodily expression including style of dress. But despite her experiencing the consequence of challenging Tanzanian gender norms, she would go on to use the same language to chide men who did not strictly adhere to their traditionally assigned roles.

Art productions like music, which serve as a cultural mirror of sorts, can play the role of challenging or maintaining the rules we live by. Lady Jaydee exposed the tension that women felt between attitudinal changes around gender on one hand, and the deeply entrenched ideas of what was considered inherent to gender on the other. Binti acted as a mirror, reflecting a key point of contention: despite the desire for a more dignified dynamic between men and women, many young Tanzanians view certain gender norms in a far too essentialist manner to be subverted. Despite the discomfort, Binti reveals that many women were not interested in challenging the heteronormative dynamics that were at the root of their frustration.

Tariffs, Trump, and the Global South

Trump���s trade war is framed as a battle with China���but its fallout is exposing just how little power African economies have in a rigged global system. Southampton, Hampshire, UK, 2019. Image �� Amani A via Shutterstock.

As of April 9, 2025, US President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on higher tariffs for over 75 countries, reducing them to a baseline 10% rate, while excluding China, which now faces a sharply increased tariff of 125%. This pause, set to expire on July 4, 2025, offers a temporary reprieve for many nations, allowing for negotiations and potentially stabilizing global markets, although the long-term implications and outcomes remain uncertain.

���Liberation Day��� was how US President Donald Trump described it as he gleefully waved a bill introducing sweeping tariffs against his country���s global trading partners. ���Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,��� he added, characterizing himself as America���s solemn defender. ���But it is not going to happen anymore.��� Despite widespread attempts to explain to Trump that it is American consumers who will have to absorb the cost of these new measures, the President has resolutely pressed ahead. One EU official said it is more an ���inflation day��� than a ���liberation day.��� Trump���s goal is ostensibly to restore manufacturing to the US, but as pointed out by the celebrated South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, you need a strategy to build an industry, not just punitive taxes for companies that want to sell things in your market. In just a few days, the tariffs have triggered instability in global stocks and sent the dollar plunging.

The measure has been met with widespread criticism from both friends and foes alike, neither of whom has been spared. David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, suggested that Trump���s policy has taken the US back a century. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, described the tariffs as ���brutal and unfounded.��� Beijing, which exports a large number of goods to the US and faces a 104% tariff, warned that there would be no winners in a trade war and called on the US to stop ���unilateral bullying.���

Even the world���s most important financial papers haven���t spared Trump. The Financial Times called it an ���astonishing act of self-harm,��� while the Wall Street Journal said the only real winner would be China���s leader, Xi Jinping, describing the tariffs as a ���strategic gift.���

In Africa, the picture is somewhat more complex. Most countries have been hit with the lower end of the tariff spectrum, facing a 10% levy, but the highest have been borne by Lesotho (50%), Madagascar (47%), Mauritius (40%), and Botswana (38%). The measures also imperil the US���s existing preferential trade arrangements with select African countries through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which allows them to export goods to the US market on favorable terms. However, energy imports and key commodities have been exempted, which are Africa���s main contributions to the global economy. Agriculture has been more mixed.

Theoretically, that should shield these countries from the impact of these measures, but it isn���t that clear, argues Aboulaye Ndiaye, a professor at New York University, Stern School of Business. Ndiaye, a former US Federal Reserve economist, speaks to Geeska about the impact he expects the tariffs will have, what African countries can do to mitigate them, and why we need to rekindle more organic trade routes that can help support intra-African trade.

Faisal Ali

When I went through the list of tariffs on Africa, I wondered whether it would have any impact on the continent, given that the US introduced exemptions on a long list of metals, oil, and gas���Africa���s primary exports. Libya, for example, got 31% but only really exports oil. Are we being too complacent if we say that the impact on African trade, for the most part, is somewhat exaggerated at this stage?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

That is a great question. So, if we look at it by looking at each country and say their primary exports are not affected, so that the practical impact is limited, that would definitely be a risky view. So, yes, it is likely that the immediate impact might not be that large in many places, but there will be secondary impacts because we face the world, and it will respond and retaliate, as we���re in a global trade war now. We know, for example, that stock markets are affected, and when capital gets scarce, Africa is one of the places where people pull the trigger first. There are also large oil exporters, like Angola, Nigeria, and Algeria, who rely a lot on oil, so the drop in global oil prices will have an impact on their businesses and budgets. But even this will help others who are energy importers���like Kenya and even Senegal.

As Africans, we need to think about how we will align and what our responses will be.

Faisal Ali

Trump is basically complaining that the US has a negative trade balance with many countries around the world, which is one of the things he believes these tariffs will remedy. This means most of us sell more stuff to Americans than we buy and he thinks that is linked to the punitive tariffs many countries have on American goods. Will this help the US rebalance its trade with its African partners?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

It���s like me going to my barber with whom I have a negative trade balance because I basically import a service from him. And if, someday, I wanted to have a positive trade balance, I would add a tax on him cutting my hair and try to begin cutting his. That logic basically doesn���t make sense. So, the bottom line is we need to think about the long-term impact here. And I don���t mean a few months, but over the course of years. We shouldn���t take too drastic measures then, but we do need to seek alternatives.

Faisal Ali

Most African countries also carry out the majority of their trade with China today, not the US. I think there are a handful of exceptions where the US is the main trade partner. But how much will that dampen the impact of these tariffs in your view across the continent?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

It will dampen the impact because it means they���ve diversified their trade partners, but they need to go further. Some commentators are now thinking about how we will do more trade among ourselves���among Africans, I mean���and increase intra-African trade. But we need to negotiate more bilateral trade agreements, country-specific ones, inside and outside Africa to help explore more alternatives. This includes the US, so they need to pick up the phone.

Faisal Ali

Two countries have managed to avoid the tariffs altogether. Those being Somalia and Burkina Faso. Why were they able to dodge this bullet?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

Well, do you know which other country managed to dodge this? Russia. Most people got at least 10%. So, I think part of it is that these countries don���t have that large a trade volume with the US.

Faisal Ali

Lesotho was flagged as a country facing a huge challenge because of Trump’s measure. They face a 50% tariff on a sector that accounts for around 20% of their trade. The country’s trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile, has said he’s worried about job loss and factory closures. How should other cases like Lesotho, of which there aren’t many, deal with this problem?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

For Lesotho 50% is huge. Factory closures are a major concern. But let me give an example from the first Trump term, where there was a trade war. Many Chinese companies just took their machines and factories from China, unscrewed everything, moved their equipment to Vietnam, where there were lower tariffs, and continued exporting to the US. Right? So, there are alternatives for these companies, they can shift their production. Lesotho, and countries like it, can also consider third countries where they might reroute their production.

Overall, the major concern for me is the cumulative impact of these tariffs and their repercussions at a time when the US has also cut foreign aid to African countries. The budgets of these countries are quite strained, and it is difficult for them to raise money through private markets. These are the vulnerabilities, cumulatively, that are currently the most challenging.

Faisal Ali

Intra-African trade has long been a challenge across the continent. Almost all countries, with a few exceptions of those that export to South Africa, have extra-continental trade partners. Some efforts have been made in this regard, such as a continent-wide free trade area and regional free trade blocs like the East African Community. Why haven���t these efforts moved forward more quickly and altered the trade structure for African economies?

Abdoulaye Ndiaye

As you���ve pointed out, there have been some ambitious initiatives. You have the East African bloc, the West African bloc, and the Southern African bloc, and they all have their own trade agreements. And now, you have the African Continental Free Trade Area. But, unfortunately, these are all paper tigers. They don���t contribute much. There are still many barriers to trade. The infrastructure that facilitates it isn���t well developed, there are cumbersome customs procedures, regulations are not consistent, and finally, there is still considerable political resistance to further integration.

We need a better understanding of history over its long dur��e to solve some of these issues, instead of just thinking about ourselves in terms of colonization or post-colonization. If we look at the trade agreements that make the most sense for African countries they are not the ones that have been constructed over the last 60 years in the postcolonial period. Rather, you would see more natural links. For example, me having this conversation with you, I���m from Senegal and you���re from Somalia���the link is closer than you think. Take Saudi Arabia, which is an important trade partner for your country; that path is also a well-travelled one for West Africans, like Mansa Musa, the most famous, who went from Mali to Hajj. There were many trans-Saharan and trans-Sahelian trade routes.

I don���t know if you���ve seen the film Io Capitano, which depicts this. It���s a movie about migration but it isn���t just a film showing people leaving Africa and arriving in Europe, it also shows the path. They go from Dakar in Senegal, passing through Mali, Niger, N���Djamena and end up in Libya where they face many difficulties. So all these parts of the world have become embroiled in terrorism and conflict, but if you look at the longer history, this path was one that was rich with trade and exchange, which was organic trade, that has been well-documented by historians. The point I���m making here is that if we apply the economic concept of persistence, which considers how existing patterns tend to become endogenous, these blocs we now have are not really grounded in these longer, more persistent patterns, these trade paths that have existed for years. People have traded gold, salt, and other things from the shores of Senegal along these migration routes, north to the Mediterranean and across the Sahel to the Red Sea.

The geographies where African affinities and trade patterns lie are different from these blocs we���ve established based on language and other considerations. These longer historical trade paths need more infrastructure and other things to support them and we need to re-think that.

Journey through the afterlives of a colonized Africa

In a hauntingly sincere recollection of her childhood and evolution into��the ���Most Dangerous woman in Africa,��� Andr��e Blouin reintroduces herself while taking readers alongside an intimate ���Africa Tour.' L��opoldville/Kinshasa 1960. Image credit Mary Gillham via The Mary Gillham Archive Project on Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Most of us will never know the dangers of boarding a 1960s commercial airplane from L��opoldville to Rome with a secret document���an article that would change the future of an entire country���s independence���tucked in the rolls of a chignon bun. Such a task could only have been assigned to someone once called the ���Most Dangerous Woman in Africa,��� ���The Black Pasionaria,��� or ���the Woman Behind Lumumba.���

In My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, recently republished by Verso Books, Andr��e Blouin, the activist and former chief of protocol in Patrice Lumumba���s government, reintroduces herself to the world on her terms while taking readers on an intimate ���Africa Tour.��� Originally published in 1983, Blouin���s autobiography is a hauntingly sincere recollection of her childhood and how she became a key figure within the pan-African decolonial movement. It offers an intensely intimate look into politics, defying the dominant male prism that has long defined the independence era���s historical record.

Childhood sets the stage for all coming-of-age stories. In his famous play Incendies, Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad aptly describes childhood as ���un couteau plant�� dans la gorge��� (a knife stuck in the throat). The life of Andr��e Blouin is no exception: Her autobiography contains all the elements of a true coming-of-age story, in which her own growing pains are entangled with those of the movements that awakened her. This framing not only reminds us of the stripped innocence that shaped generations of young African women affected by racial segregation and patriarchy under colonial rule in French Equatorial Africa, it also underscores how politicized the process of learning is.

Throughout My Country, Africa, Blouin vividly recounts her early life and punctuates these recollections with political observations from her future self. For Blouin, what can now be clearly described as childhood trauma was a consistent feature of her life from inception. She traces the pain���s origins through a tender yet critical engagement with the evolution of her parents��� relationship throughout the book. Her father was a 40-year-old white French man, then an agent of an import-export company whom her mother, the daughter of a powerful chief in the Kouango region of the Oubangui-Chari colony (now Central African Republic), married at the tender age of 13. Blouin explores their separation, remarriages, and enduring affection throughout My Country, Africa. Their relationship provides a unique map of the racial, gendered, and class stratification that governed parental claim during an era in which her father had the absolute legal authority to send Blouin to an orphanage for mixed-race girls.

Blouin���s childhood exposes the cruel contradictions that underpinned French colonial institutions in 1920s Congo-Brazzaville, applying a particular emphasis to the abusive nuns in the St. Joseph of Cluny Convent whose missionary mandate included running an orphanage for m��tisses or ���girls of mixed blood.��� This is where Blouin would grow up from the age of three, against her mother���s will: an environment beset by physically abusive humiliation and starvation at the hands of the nuns, no formal education beyond sewing or Catholic indoctrination, and omnipresent reminders of the impure shame embedded in what she and all the mixed-race girls represented. ���The nuns hid Africa from us,��� Blouin writes with fervor.���They refused it and forbade it, almost as if it were something shameful. And the French they taught us was only enough to eke out a living as a seamstress for white ladies. We had no real access either to Africa or to France.���

Introspective details on how this particular wave of history played out in private are often absent from political accounts, eclipsing the reality of the internal gender dynamics and colorism that existed around and within movement-building circles. As she maps her maturing evolution with love, Blouin lays bare the inner turmoil and painful contradictions that inhabited her as a mixed-race woman whose intimate relationships were governed by harsh social rules, both formal and informal. Blouin unpacks her romances with lovers and husbands���such as Roger Surreys, the Belgian aristocrat and former director of the Belgian Kasai company, Charles Greutz, a French businessman, and mining engineer Andr�� Blouin���with the urgency of a confessional. Each of these personal encounters coincided with a stage in her political coming of age, tying her discovery of her beloved Africa with her blooming sexual identity.

By Blouin���s accounting, she had no choice but to make the tensions, nuances, and difficult compromises of love a part of her analytical framework, starting by reckoning with the generational patterns and attitudinal differences between her and her mother���s views on relationships as having been ���entirely shaped by the usages of colonialism.��� Her intimate contact with white partners throughout the years offered her proximity, protection, and insight into the inner workings of the colonial system; direct access to which very few African women at the time were permitted. The instructive potential of these relationships becomes clear when bravely confronting one���s suffering, as Blouin���s existence as a colonial fantasy demanded. Ultimately, the same racial and sexual politics that bled into both her parents and her own relationships followed Blouin into her organizing career later down the line, where she was often described and shamed by the international press as a ���courtesan of all the African chiefs of state.���

Blouin cannot tell her story without tangentially making observations about�� ���her country, Africa��� interwoven throughout the first sections of the book, with an earnestness and fervor akin to Maryse Cond�����s famed memoir, What Is Africa to Me? Contrary to the nationalist air at the dawn of independence, between a childhood and adulthood split in Brazzaville, Bangui, with travels in between, the world Blouin discovered outside of the orphanage and the terms on which she sought reconnection with it was inherently borderless, tied to her relationship with her mother, yet unfamiliar enough for curiosity. This does not mean it was free from the semi-essentialist gaze in engaging explicitly with Africa as a unitary entity���moments such as her journey down the Congo River with the Belgian director of the Kasai mines evoke a reductive description of Africanness that her work seeks to shed. Her descriptions of the continent are often made through the lens of racial segregation, landscapes, and cultural attitudes and practices, with a few exceptions in the first part of the book (see VY Mudimbe).

The editing and translation of this published version of My Country, Africa by Jean MacKellar has been criticized by Blouin herself, who sought legal action against her for its distortive framing, a nuance echoed by her daughter in the book���s epilogue. As with any coming-of-age story, Blouin���s political mind becomes sharper as she grows and develops a heightened awareness of the historical events occurring abroad, the world order shifting in the background of her own evolution.

Blouin���s transnational exposure to the challenges and successes of bubbling independence movements, without the nationalist or ethnic anchors in her political aspirations, provided her with a birds-eye view unlike many male revolutionaries, whose complicated legacies are often glossed over by their savior status of sainthood. This is at the heart of the second half of the book���beginning in 1958 Guinea and her involvement in the campaign against President De Gaulle���s referendum, through Madagascar, and back to Brazzaville, Oubangui Chari, the Congo, and later Algeria. Amid growing fears of her political engagement from France, multiple assassination attempts, and expulsions, she chronicles her role in promoting political pan-African solidarity while advising the movement leaders shaping the trajectories of their respective countries��� independence. This included fraternizing with certain leaders in opposition to the RDA(Rassemblement D��mocratique Africain, or African Democratic Rally Party), such as the newly elected President of the Central African Republic, Barth��lemy Boganda, despite criticism from her family and others.

Blouin���s politicized anger would find refuge years later following her move with husband Andr�� to Siguiri, Guinea, coinciding with the rise of the RDA co-founded by Guinean leader S��kou Tour��, whom she readily credits for her ���second birth.��� Her career would come full circle after overhearing the Lingala of Antoine Gizenga and Pierre Mulele, members of the Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA) under the Belgian Congo and comrades of Patrice Lumumba.

She was asked to organize the Feminine Movement for African solidarity and politicize the women of Congo during the PSA and MNCs (Congolese National Movement) fight for the country���s independence where she mobilized more than 4,000 women as the Congo crisis loomed. She believed deeply in African women���s inseparable liberation from the continent���s political future, and her initiatives in 1959 Congo marked the first time in history that the political condition of Congolese women was acknowledged. Blouin was later credited with writing part of Lumumba���s independence speech, organized broadcasts on ���African moral rearmament,��� and tirelessly sacrificed while organizing treacherous journeys for the movement across the country.

As she relays intimate details of exchanges between her, Gizenga, Mulele, and Lumumba as the danger of Belgian tactics and political betrayal grew more imminent, Blouin empathetically yet soberly criticizes the frequency of Lumumba���s travels, his naivet�� in the company he kept close, and the tactical softness of his early policies which were clearly leading the country towards an inevitable catastrophe. Despite the damage and pain caused by the colonial system in her life���s journey, the most consistent feature of her political assessment is that the ���mutilated will of the people��� and selfishness of the continent���s elites have been ���our worst enemies��� in the project of establishing sustainable statehood and that this susceptibility may have been lowered if independence was won in the crucible of war:

I see now how ill prepared, morally we were for our new responsibilities��� We often abandoned ourselves to selfish, short-term prizes.�� We have not yet learned the long term, day-to-day faith and application needed in the slow task of building responsible citizenry.

The political lessons to be drawn from Blouin���s life and career are far-reaching and hold painful contemporary resonance, particularly in Congo. The current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo���s Eastern city of Goma overtaken by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels will be remembered as yet another dark chapter of the country���s history. This time it features the ongoing complicity of�� Western leaders in shredding any remnants of international law, Rwandese state government and allies, and the Congolese political elite���s consistent abdication of responsibility to protect its citizens now under the ���leadership��� of President Felix Tshisikedi.

This moral rearmament will not come about in the DRC by recycling reductionist clich��s as the go-to African poster child for global extractive industry or imperialist criticism. These lessons were harshly learned by Blouin as she came of age and suffered the disillusionment of the epochs��� pitfalls. They remain critical lessons, and their human costs will continue to pile up without a commitment to truth-telling and self-interrogation of our collective personal wounds.

As Amilcar Cabral argues, independence is but a trust-building exercise with stages of scrutiny by a population to ���win material benefits��� that must be continuously earned to exist, and whose ambition cannot be outsourced in perpetuity. In Blouin���s model for the future, she sketches out hope for a people-centered African development model, rooted in autonomy and optimization of human capital.

One can only hope that her vision ultimately becomes a reality.

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andr��e Blouin (2025), is available from Verso Books.

Why the far right needs violence

Javier Milei rose to power promising freedom���but his government is unleashing economic violence, criminalizing dissent, and testing the limits of Argentina���s democracy. Police repressing protesters in front of the congress in Buenos Aires, 2017. Image �� Fabricio Nicolas Fischer via Shutterstock.

Argentina���s President Javier Milei has declared war���not just on the political ���caste,��� but on the very institutions that safeguard public welfare. In just over a year, he has slashed pensions, gutted university budgets, and deployed an anti-protest protocol that legalizes brute force. Despite his campaign promise to wield his economic ���chainsaw��� against the political ���caste,��� the hardest-hit sector has been ���piss-soaked” pensioners (in the President���s own words), accounting for 30.6% of the total budgetary cuts. Far from hiding, Milei embraces a sheer spectacle of repression and cruelty. His version of neoliberalism is unapologetically violent.

And he���s not alone. From Milei���s frantic use of metaphors to Trump���s advertisement of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, a transnational far-right is testing just how much violence the public will tolerate in the name of market ���freedom.��� Across contexts, these leaders promote a model of governance that handcuffs the state of its redistributive functions while clearing the field for the AI-crypto-corporatism to operate freely���at times even promoting its use as an official state policy.

What binds these figures is not just a socially conservative ideology, but also a shared style. The performance of strength, the disdain for complexity, and the scapegoating of selected minorities, constitutes a shift, as labeled by Gareth Watkins, toward ���postmodern conservatism”:

The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement (…)���if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.

The abandonment of rationality and its replacement with personal attributions are trademarks of a new form of governance that needs, in turn, to discard checks and balances altogether. This form of governance departs from the soft-spoken language of the 1990s technocracy. Today, it is highly ideologized, distilled of personal mythologies, loud, theatrical, and punitive.

When Milei brags about conducting ���the largest fiscal adjustment in human history,��� he is doing more than announcing policy. He is advertising a new Darwinistic political morality: pain is proof of courage, collapse is a prerequisite for a messianic rebirth, and those left behind are simply unfit for the times.

Austerity is no longer an economic necessity but a moral imperative: To talk about budgets today is to dive into the core of the social contract. The nation is merely another dependent variable in a game where corporate power has a first-mover advantage.

Argentina���s healthcare system makes a good example: One of the first decisions by the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist was to deregulate the private healthcare system, which automatically skyrocketed their prices up to 235% in 2024. At the same time, the state-run healthcare system began limiting access to free medication for retirees and closing specialized services, such as AIDS programs and functioning public hospitals.

Cruelty comes as no surprise from a president who openly declared that ���it is wonderful when companies go bankrupt,��� inviting Argentine enterprises to ���adapt��� to his radical economic liberalization agenda or ���perish.��� Milei was referring to the competition between national businesses and US companies that, in his words, ���deliver better goods at a lower price.��� It���s a narrative that pits the weak against the strong���where the weak are not only expected to be eliminated but are seen as deserving of it. There is no acknowledgment of the structural inequalities and precarities that place Argentine companies at a disadvantage���nor of the broader benefits that come from strengthening domestic production, such as job creation, economic stimulation, and strategic development for the country as a whole.

Similarly delusive, by the time Trump gave his inaugural speech claiming that ���the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,��� he was receiving the best socioeconomic inheritance of any elected president since George W. Bush came to power in 2001. The US economy has surpassed other major economies in the post-pandemic period, outpacing pre-pandemic growth forecasts even amid surging prices and aggressive interest rate hikes.

Even so, Trump may be hitting the nail on some shared notion; that American democratic institutions are at an all-time low in terms of credibility. As Aziz Rana puts it, they have:

Allowed Trump to gain office in 2016 without winning the popular vote and then to reconstruct the Supreme Court along lines that were wildly out of step with public opinion. When Trump tried to overturn the election result in 2020, the existing institutions made it exceedingly difficult to impose any sanctions on him, whether through impeachment, prosecution or removal from future ballots.

Around the world, institutions built on informal norms and elite consensus are proving incapable of resisting leaders who don���t pretend to follow etiquette, and in turn expose how susceptible the institutional scaffolding was. After all, how much of stability depended, in fact, on consensus of elites?

In Argentina, this looks like Milei���s sweeping use of executive decrees, including a constitutionally dubious new debt agreement with the IMF. It looks like the criminalization of protest, the attempt to weaken collective bargaining rights, and the targeting of public education. When students and workers protest, they are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. The state does not attempt to conceal violence, rather broadcasts it.

In the US, Trump���s targeting of universities and activists signals a broader ambition: to check the vital signs of democratic institutions. The case of Mahmoud Khalil���a Palestinian activist and green card holder detained without charge has raised several alarms. Many see his case as a test run for suppressing political dissent, especially on university campuses. While Khalil���s detention is being legally contested, it has already signaled that critique of US foreign policy may carry personal risk, particularly among student activists. The irony that this crackdown on speech violates the First Amendment once invoked by conservatives to defend hate speech is irrelevant to a right-wing bloc that no longer bothers with consistency. In Argentina and the US, what is being tested is not just how far these governments can go, but also how elastic the rule of law can become in service of power.

Regardless, any demand for accountability falls on deaf ears as these leaders exercise boundless authority over media, and restrict and criminalize dissent. This infrastructure of repression is not incidental but foundational to corporate governance that treats dissent as an obstacle to market logic.

���Everything that can be privatized will be privatized��� might as well be the global hit of the moment���echoing from Javier Milei���s Casa Rosada to Elon Musk���s declarations near the White House. But the goal isn���t really to shrink the state, it is to genuflect the whole of collective life to market logic.

What remains to be seen is whether the spectacle of strength will continue to seduce those who first brought these figures to power. For now, the message has been made clear: Winner takes all.

The bones beneath our feet

A powerful new documentary follows Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi���s personal and political journey to recover her father���s remains���and to reckon with Kenya���s unfinished struggle for land, justice, and historical memory. Still from Our Land Our Freedom �� 2024.

The legacies of the past are always our present, and the histories that we are not able to confront continue to play out. This is certainly true in Kenya, where the unfinished business of the Mau Mau war and the injustices of British colonial rule endure.

In Our Land, Our Freedom, Kenyan directors Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu follow Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi as she traces the legacies of her family���s history and confronts the current political injustices that spring from Kenya���s painful colonial past. Filmed over almost a decade, the documentary follows Wanjugu, daughter of famed Kenyan independence fighters Dedan and Mukami Kimathi, as she searches for the remains of her father, who was executed by the British colonial administration in 1957���six years before Kenya gained independence. At its best, Our Land, Our Freedom is a deeply moving portrait of one woman���s tireless struggle to honor the legacy of her father.

As the film���s title suggests, land is central to the narration of this story and to the history of the Mau Mau. Without a doubt, this question is echoed in Kenya���s sociopolitical present. As Wanjugu Kimathi puts it in the film: ���To us, land is a matter of life and death.��� Certainly, land was central to the Mau Mau campaign for independence, whose slogan ithaka na wiathi translates as ���land and freedom,��� or more conceptually as ���self-mastery through land.��� To the Kikuyu people, who made up the vast majority of the Mau Mau movement, land was the way of life; the organizing principle that connected members of the community to each other and to the ancestors. And through all the changes of the last six decades, land alienation is still the central issue that galvanizes Mau Mau veterans.

In the film, Wanjugu visits Kieni, a former colonial village where families were forcibly moved by the colonial regime in the 1950s, as part of the brutal British counterinsurgency efforts. Unable to gain title deeds or to buy land in the post-independence resettlement programs, these families have been living in Kieni as squatters for almost seventy years. They are certainly not the only ones; the patchy post-independence land resettlement programs did find land for tens of thousands, but left many waiting. And even those who did receive land were often unsatisfied with their lot. As a consequence, land poverty was, depressingly, both a cause and a result of the Mau Mau war, since veterans like those at Kieni have been left in the same villagized and alienated manner that caused them to take up arms in the first place. Meanwhile, the political class in Kenya owns vast amounts of land and wealth and sees calls for redistribution as a threat.

Our Land, Our Freedom makes an important link between the plight of Mau Mau veterans in places like Kieni and other struggles for land justice, in particular the Kakuzi land case. Wanjugu���s attempts to ���link struggles��� with communities in Murang���a evicted by the British-owned Kakuzi company highlights the broader question of squatters and land alienation in Kenya, and its roots in colonialism. Ongoing struggles to get justice for human rights violations and the related historical theft of land speak to the reality that the Mau Mau plight is one of a constellation of historical injustices that persist in contemporary Kenya.

In the same month that Our Land, Our Freedom was released, another Kenyan film, The Battle for Laikipia, premiered. This film documents the ongoing tension between white settler ranchers and Samburu pastoralists in Laikipia County. In both films the message is clear: Political independence and justice are not the same thing, and many communities in Kenya are still suffering from the legacies of colonial land grabbing and violence; historical injustices continue to reemerge from their shallow graves, but find little support from Kenya���s political class.

Our Land, Our Freedom���s protagonist, Wanjugu Kimathi, will not be deterred by the political disregard of these justice movements. In 2017, she registered the Dedan Kimathi Foundation, essentially a veterans organization that functions as a land buying co-operative, mobilizing landless people to purchase land collectively. The foundation is a powerful representation both of�� Kimathi���s strength as an organizer and of the power of community organizing to effect material change in the face of political dismissal. By 2018, the Dedan Kimathi Foundation had a resettlement site in Rumuruti, and Wanjugu makes the prudent point that in uniting and resettling these veterans, she has done what four political regimes have failed to do. However, this project is incomplete and shrouded in questions about how the funds have been used, complicating an otherwise neat narrative of a popular hero righting the wrongs of the colonial past. The Dedan Kimathi Foundation has evolved into an environmental organization, with a focus on planting trees.

Midway through the film, Wanjugu finally visits Kamiti Maximum Security Prison to search for Dedan Kimathi���s burial site. Accompanied by a former detainee at Kamiti who thinks he might be able to find the grave using a hand-drawn map, Wanjugu finds that her hope turns to frustration as they end up walking in circles. It would be almost farcical if it wasn���t so tragic, and it directly parallels Mukami and Wanjugu���s visit in 2003 with the same mission in mind. On this occasion, they went with eleven people who showed them twelve different spots, none of which yielded the precious remains of their kin. It is evident here that the search for Dedan Kimathi���s remains is of deep personal significance to the Kimathi family, and has taken on wider political life. However, perhaps it is not just about the literal remains; it is about honoring the legacy of Kenya���s struggle and the immense personal and political costs that Mau Mau fighters have borne.

It is not only Kimathi���s remains that are left in unmarked mass graves; in the opening sequence of the film, Wanjugu Kimathi visits a mass grave in Ndeiya, Kiambu County, the site of a colonial detention camp during the Mau Mau war. They dig a few feet below the ground and find a human skull in a shallow mass grave; this is one of scores of�� mass grave sites across Kenya, where the bodies of Mau Mau fighters and others killed during the war were unceremoniously buried in large unmarked pits. As Wanjugu takes in the horror and violence represented in this mass grave she says, ���I���m seeing as if this is my father, Dedan Kimathi,��� before placing the skull back to be reburied in the shallow grave.

What are we to do with the unidentified bodies that lie in these mass graves? For the past sixty years, the Kenyan government has opted out of taking responsibility for what is, undoubtedly, a deeply sensitive question. What the film conveys very clearly is the link between the neglect of these sites and the Kenyan government���s disregard for the plight of Mau Mau veterans: the lack of care for both the living and the dead. However, it falls short of considering how these anonymous human remains might ask us to reflect on the mass victims of violence, and the related perils of hero worship in the case of a popular uprising. Certainly, it was ordinary people who fought and died in the Mau Mau war, and their remains are surely owed the same care and reverence as those of Dedan Kimathi or any other leader of the movement.

The release of the film was politically timely. It was launched in the wake of the Gen Z protests, where a new wave of young Kenyans took to the streets to protest the injustices of the Kenyan political class. With these popular uprisings of 2024, it is clear that 60 years after independence Kenya is still trying to make sense of her past and her future; we are still negotiating what freedom should look like.

There were boos and jeers during the Nairobi premiere of the film when President William Ruto appeared on screen; here he was giving a speech at Mukami Kimathi���s state funeral in 2023. In this scene, Ruto makes still unfulfilled promises to assure title deeds for people squatting in former colonial villages, and to find Dedan Kimathi���s remains and give him a hero���s burial. Even in death, the Kimathi family are eclipsed by the political leaders who would appropriate their grief for their personal political campaigns.

Such public performances clearly do not fool ordinary Kenyans. Instead, they illustrate that politicians understand the importance of this negotiation with the past and feel, at the very least, a duty to pay lip service to it. Our Land, Our Freedom sends a message to that political class who wants to pacify uprisings with empty promises; it demonstrates that Mau Mau veterans will not just quietly fade away and that a new generation will continue the struggle for justice that their parents and grandparents began.

Wanjugu Kimathi insists that hers is not a political project; but how could it not be? The film documents how her activities attract the attention of people in high places and captures her having several dramatic phone calls with a national intelligence agent who warns her to stay out of politics and to leave the matter of Dedan Kimathi���s remains to the government. What���s more, Wanjugu was briefly arrested in 2018, and it is clear that her work is politically dangerous. As though speaking to this, in a voiceover she asks, ���Is Kimathi a threat in life and in death?���

Above all, Our Land, Our Freedom is a portrait of Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi, the woman and the activist. Wanjugu is a complicated figure, and, in some ways, the perfect protagonist for such a complex history. Always elegantly dressed and energetic, she commands the screen with her powerful declarations about justice. Born to Dedan Kimathi���s wife Mukami Kimathi in 1972, 15 years after Dedan Kimathi���s execution in 1957, Wanjugu claims to have no connection to her biological father, and she and her mother see her as the daughter of Dedan. While some have questioned this as a kind of fraud, Evelyn���s spiritual connection to Kimathi appears profound and genuine. ���I was born in a freedom fighter’s family,��� she narrates. For her, it is this identity, above all else, that drives her.

Some families find ways to move on from pain and grief through activism, and it is touching to see how Evelyn���s work is spurred on by a deep connection to her parents. The film���s biggest strength is in its intimate portrayal of Wanjugu and the Kimathi family: the tender moments between Evelyn and her mother, Mukami, and with her husband and children milking her cows and tending to the crops at her family���s rural home in Kinangop. These scenes show Wanjugu not only as the tireless champion of the downtrodden Mau Mau survivors but also as a loving daughter fighting to uphold her parents��� legacy and build something better for her own children.

The film spans almost a decade, and the narrative arc forms as it is being filmed. This makes for an exciting, though sometimes chaotic, documentary narrative. At times, the film feels as if it���s trying to do too much, and the stretch weakens what is, perhaps, its biggest strength: an intimate portrait rather than a universal one. It might have been a more digestible film had it resisted the urge to incorporate all the threads of Wanjugu���s work. But perhaps this is part of the point Nanji and Kimundu are trying to make; that this is a complex history and a political reality that does not fit neatly into a single narrative. Ultimately, Our Land, Our Freedom is a timely film with a strong message of justice that is hard to ignore.

What comes after liberation?

In this wide-ranging conversation, the freedom fighter and former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs reflects on law, liberation, and the unfinished work of building a just South Africa. Joseph Nkatlo, Albie Sachs and Mary Butcher giving the closed fists with upraised thumb salute at a Defiance Campaign meeting at the Drill Hall in Cape Town on 12 April 1952. Photo: National Library of South Africa. All images courtesy of Albie Sachs.��

Born on January 30, 1935, in Johannesburg to Solomon Sachs and Rachel Ginsberg, Albert ���Albie��� Sachs turned 90 in January. Albie moved to Cape Town with his mother and his younger brother when he was three years old. Advanced for his age at school, he skipped two grades and as a result enrolled for his first year of university when he was only 15. His parents were deeply involved in the Garment Workers Union of South Africa, and at a young age he was determined to follow his own path, wherever it led. The rest, as they say, is history.

Graduating with a law degree from UCT, he started practicing as a lawyer at the age of 21. Sachs was in attendance with 2,000 others in 1955 at the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, when the Freedom Charter was adopted. He was arrested in 1963 in Cape Town under the 90-day Detention Without Trial law, and after 90 days, on the pretext of being released, and after being given his clothes and belongings, was rearrested for a further 78 days, thus serving a continuous 168 days in solitary confinement without trial. He wrote about this experience in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966). He was arrested again three years later in 1966, when he was subjected to sleep deprivation torture. South African Security Branch officers had received training in interrogation techniques in foreign countries, including in France, which was known for having used torture extensively during the Algerian War of Independence. Following this, he was allowed to leave South Africa on the condition that he could never return.

Portrait of Albie the young advocate ��� c.1957. Photographer unknown.

Sachs was reunited in England with Stephanie Kemp���a South African anti-apartheid activist who had been arrested and imprisoned at Pretoria Central Prison for blowing up pylons���and whom he married in 1966. They raised two sons, Alan and Michael and divorced in 1980. He obtained a doctorate in law from the University of Sussex in 1970 and lectured at the University of Southampton from 1970 to 1977. Sachs moved to Mozambique in 1977 following the country���s independence from Portugal in 1975. He learnt Portuguese, taking up a post as law professor at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and later as Director of Research in the Ministry of Justice. Sachs became deeply involved in the art and culture of the country. He maintained strong connections with Mozambique���s leading artists Malangatana Valente Ngwenya and Alberto Mabungulane Chissano and acquired art by numerous local artists during his 11 years in the Southern African country. Sachs donated his Mozambican art collection to the University of Western Cape – Robben Island Mayibuye Archives.

Albie meeting Stephanie Kemp upon her arrival by boat in Southampton, UK – September 1966. Photographer unknown.

African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo called on Sachs to draft the organization���s code of conduct���particularly denouncing torture and advocating just procedures within the organisation���which was adopted by the party in Kabwe, Zambia, in 1985. Victim of a targeted car bomb attack in Maputo in 1988 by the South African Security Forces, Sachs lost his right arm and the sight of his left eye. A passerby was killed in the assassination attempt. Sachs was transferred to London to recover.

Albie presenting the ANC Code of Conduct, which he describes as the most important legal document written in his life, at the African National Congress Consultative Conference in Kabwe, Zambia – June 1985. ANC Photographer.Albie getting into the same car that was used in the car bomb assassination attempt – Photo: Sol Carvalho.Albie interviewed in hospital after the bomb ��� 1988. Photographer unknown.

In 1989 he wrote a paper entitled ���Preparing Ourselves for Freedom��� presented at the ANC conference in Lusaka, which created a huge debate in South Africa among artists and cultural workers. Following Nelson Mandela���s release from prison in 1990 and the unbanning of the ANC and other parties, Sachs returned home to South Africa and was elected on the ANC���s National Executive Committee. He was very involved in the negotiations towards a new political solution and continued working on a draft of the new constitution. In 1994 President Nelson Mandela appointed him a judge at the Constitutional Court.

Albie at the University of Durban Westville in 1991 at the first general meeting at the ANC on home soil. Also pictured are Chris Hani shaking hands with Cheryl Carolus, Jacob Zuma on left and Walter Sisulu on the right. ANC Photographer.

The former judge is the author of numerous landmark judgments and several non-fiction books. He is the recipient of several international honorary awards, including from the countries of South Africa, France, Portugal, and Brazil, to mention a few. He holds 27 honorary doctorates from many prestigious universities, among them Princeton, Columbia, Cambridge, Dundee, Aberdeen, London, Sussex, Southampton, and locally from the universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, the Witwatersrand and the Free State.

Riason Naidoo interviewed Albie Sachs in his home in Cape Town.

Riason Naidoo

You are quoted as saying that you were surrounded by art and culture as a child. What was it like growing up in your home?

Albie Sachs

My mom, Ray Sachs then���she was Ray Ginsberg before and became Ray Edwards later���separated from my dad in Johannesburg, and she brought my little brother and I to Cape Town. She was Moses Kotane���s typist. I grew up hearing my mom saying, ���Tidy up, tidy up. Uncle Moses is coming.��� Uncle Moses being the general secretary of the South African Communist Party. She met Cissie Gool, who invited us to come and stay with them; Gool was living with Sam Kahn in a bungalow in Glen Beach. My childhood was spent in Clifton, where houses there, in those days, were a little grander than shacks, flimsier than houses.

Albie with his mother and younger brother Johnny at Clifton beach in Cape Town, c.1937. Photographer unknown.

The Communist Party attracted a number of cultural figures. It was big on culture with a capital C. Gregoire Boonzaier, the painter, was a close friend of my mom. The little hanging space we had in the house would have a Boonzaier painting. The image I had of an artist was of a robust, fun-loving person, full of laughter. He was full of stories. Boonzaier had a blue Chevrolet car with a dicky seat at the back, which could open up, and my brother and I would sit in that seat while he was driving around. That was also where he would put his paintings when he was traveling through the Karoo. He became a commercial traveler of his own paintings. He would say, ���A house without a painting is a house without a soul.���

The other figure of influence from my early childhood was Uys Krige, the Afrikaans poet. He lived in Clifton 4 and was married to actress Lydia Lindeque. I remember being told he was a poet. I didn���t understand what a poet was back then. Like Boonzaier, he was also an Afrikaner rebel who had been to Spain, which in those days was a battleground between fascism and democracy.

Some years later I���m at the University of Cape Town. I���m not politically active. I���m making my own way. The theme of modern art puzzled me, and I became fascinated by contemporary art. In my first year of university I would hitchhike from campus down into town to the Groote Kerk Gebou. They had an Afrikaans-owned bookshop called ID Booksellers with beautiful art books. I would sit down and work my way through these art books. Totally astonished at first���the odd colors, the meaningless shapes, the terms and movements slowly started making sense. Very focused on France, it was always in a context of conflict. The avant-garde artists were fighting the galleries. They were fighting the formal artists. There was a sense of rebellion in modern art, which appealed to the rebel in me. I was ready for rebellion.

In my second year at university my mother told me that Uys Krige would give a lecture and that maybe I would be interested in attending. He spoke about Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, being executed by firing squad at 5 p.m. Then he read the Pablo Neruda poem ���At Five in the Afternoon,��� and he walked up and down the stage reciting at five in the afternoon. He spoke for about two hours non-stop. The poem reached right into me. It did something very important. It connected the dreaminess, the longing, the soulfulness with public events, with action, with the world. The interior and exterior, the drama and emotion, of internal dreams and imagination, and the passions of struggles and fights for freedom got connected through that lecture. A few weeks later I was volunteering for the 1952 Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign.

Albie at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, as police enter the gathering ��� June 1955. Photo: Eli Weinberg Collection, Robben Island Museum Archives. Riason Naidoo

You write in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966) that while in solitary confinement in 1963 you whistled many pieces of music and resistance songs���Beethoven���s Fifth Symphony, ���La Marseillaise,��� ���We Will Follow Luthuli,��� ���The Red Flag,��� ���Let���s Twist Again,��� ���Goin��� Home��� from Anton��n Dvo����k���s New World Symphony, Miriam Makeba songs, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong tunes, ���Goodnight, Irene������to pass the time and keep you sane. Could you reflect on how the memories of songs impacted on you in those times?

Albie Sachs

Prison is filled with sound, ugly sound. Doors slamming, commands being issued, drunks screaming and banging. A kind of a tattoo that would go on. I���m singing these songs to myself. I���m working my way through the alphabet. This I remember. [Albie sings.]

Always���I���ll be loving you, always.
I���ll be living here always,
Year after year always,
In this little cell that I know well,
I���ll be living swell always, always.

I���m amused that Irving Berlin���s love song to his wife is keeping the heart of a would-be revolutionary in a Cape Town prison alive. [He continues.]

I���ll be staying in always,
Keeping up my chin always,
Not for but an hour,
Not for but a week,
Not for 90 days, but always.

I sing that song quite often when I���m touring, especially if there are judges in the audience. I don���t think they���ve ever heard a judge make a presentation singing. The whistling was fantastic because suddenly there was somebody whistling back. The person didn���t recognize the ANC songs. The person didn���t recognize ���The Red Flag.��� The first melody that we had in common was the ���Goin��� Home��� theme. After being released some months later, I met Dorothy Adams, and she belonged to another political group led by Neville Alexander. So there we were. Different political cultures, both involved in anti-apartheid resistance, both detained without trial, both having the hardest experience of our lives. My whistling of the ���Goin��� Home��� theme has come back into my life. It now appears on the landing page of a website on my life and work being developed by George Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney (n��e Alamuddin), with Clooney���s drawing of an award figure���which he and Amal call The Albie given to persons who fight against the odds for justice���animated on the opening page.

Albie hugs Dorothy Adams at a benefit performance of ���The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs��� at the Young Vic in London ��� late 1988. Photographer unknown. Riason Naidoo

While incarcerated you were later given access to literature. You write, ���There is no doubt about what kind of books I want. I want to read novels, books alive with people, people who talk, mingle with each other and undergo all the normal emotions of life. I want to escape, but escape into the world of reality.��� What is the power of fiction for you, and what does it tell us about life in general? Is there a connection?

Albie Sachs

I���ve always loved reading since I was very young. There were some memorable books by a left-wing writer called Geoffrey Trease: one called Bows Against the Barons; another, Call to Arms, was set in Latin America���of revolutionaries fighting against a despotic government. These were books geared to the imagination of someone living in an atypical home in South Africa. Some of my mother���s close friends were Cissie Gool and Pauline Podbury. Gool was a fiery speaker and city councilor, daughter of the famous Abdullah Abdurahman political family. Podbury was married to H. A. Naidoo from Durban, and they were both in the trade-union movement. My mother had many strong women friends. I didn���t have a chance. I became a feminist, if not from birth, from early childhood. That was my milieu.

I discovered French literature, Balzac, Guy de Maupassant. My imagination was stirred by French and then Russian literature, especially Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Tolstoy���s War and Peace was an obligatory read during a gap year in London when I was 20. At a later stage, Italian literature. German writer Thomas Mann���s The Magic Mountain was influential too. I read three or four novels by the Spanish writer P��rez Gald��s.

I enjoyed Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. It had something extra. I liked reading about the world in a town called X, Russian names, French names. It was part and parcel of transporting me to another world. The idea of reading South African fiction did not appeal to me. A big transition moment for me was reading The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer. It had that quality of transporting me into another universe. I have to thank Nadine for opening me up to South African imagination and literature.

Another big breakthrough was Ng��g�� wa Thiong���o. I read most of his novels. I met Micere Mugo in Nairobi, and later when she was in exile, who was a professor of English literature and part of that generation of rebels. Alex La Guma was a huge hero for me as a writer. We worked in the resistance in Cape Town together. The book of his I like the most is The Stone Country, about the Roeland Street Prison, where he was locked up, and I where was locked up too.

A big cultural influence in my early years was film. I belonged to the film society in Cape Town. I saw lots of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Italian post-WWII Neo Realism and Surrealist works.

Riason Naidoo

Some of the authors you refer to in your jail diary are Durrell, Henry James, Proust, George Eliot, Racine, Melville, Moss Hart, Mary Renault, Jan Rabie, Venter, C. P. Snow and Lampedusa. Who are some of your current favorite authors?

Albie Sachs

During my time in jail the court ordered that I have books. Later on that was rescinded again by the top court in the country banning literature for prisoners. After my release I was so worried about being caught without reading matter that when I traveled I would take a whole lot of books with me. I thought I must not be caught without a book again. The books I read now are thrillers. I judge my holidays by the number of thrillers I read by the likes of Jo Nesbo, et al., and especially those set in Nordic countries, France, Italy or Japan.

Riason Naidoo

You made a book, Images of a Revolution (1983), of mural art in Mozambique (and a documentary too). What did you appreciate about that project?

Albie Sachs

I picked up a huge amount of information in 11 years in England. I had marvelous friends and immersed myself in all sorts of cultural activities in the UK. ​​I saw the whole Ring Cycle by Wagner, and read Proust���s Remembrance of Things Past but I learnt far more in Mozambique. I was 11 years in Mozambique too, and it was intensely experiential. It is an African country that emerged from armed struggle, revolution, transformation, and civil war. I had intense personal emotions of love, revolution, war, death, and near death. It was a different kind of experience for me from years living before and after in South Africa and in exile. When it came to culture, it was part and parcel of the revolutionary struggle. All leaders of Frelimo wrote poetry, even Samora Machel. A lot of it very beautiful poetry. The poets were asking the questions, not just the great political writers. Jorge Rebelo wrote a poem in Portuguese, ���When Bullets Begin to Flower��� (1972), and one of the stanzas opens with:

It is not enough that our cause is pure and just,
purity and justice must exist inside of ourselves.

It is 1976. I had been teaching in Dar es Salaam during the long summer break. The plane descends to Maputo. I see it written in Portuguese, ���Liberated Zone of Humanity.��� There are murals everywhere; the revolution was on the walls. Exiles from Chile, including an architect, were working with the Mozambican artist Malangatana. It was very beautiful landscaped art. The documentary I made is called The Deeper Image.

Albie in front of Maputo mural ���A Cry of Happiness��� – c.1985. Photo: Moira Fojaz.Albie with Abdullah Ibrahim, his then-wife Sathima Bea Benjamin, and Mozambican Minister of Culture Luis Bernardo Honwana; in the cinema foyer at one of Abdullah Ibrahim���s performances which coincided with the assassination of Ruth First, in Maputo – 1982. Photographer unknown.Concert poster illustration by Joa��o Craveirinha, titled ���Ode to Abdullah Ibrahim��� ��� 1982. Photo: Vanessa Cowling. Riason Naidoo

In The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990), you write, ���I used to argue that culture was an instrument of the struggle, that the artists should be committed, et cetera, but now I see culture as something much deeper, more profound, an expression of what we are and what we are becoming, and the artist as someone naturally engaged with life, including struggle������ Did your years in Mozambique articulate a more nuanced notion of culture, a need for beauty, contradictions, ambiguity?

Albie Sachs

I���m in New York, and I���m invited to speak at the House of Culture in Stockholm. Eventually I���ve flown all across the Atlantic, and finally I���m only given five minutes to speak. Speakers before me were all saying the same thing, ���Art is a weapon of the struggle.��� So, I thought, I���ve got five minutes; I am going to make two points. The first thing I say is, ���We don’t want your solidarity criticism. We want real criticism.��� There is stunned silence. Even though I don���t believe in censorship, I said, ���I believe we should ban the statement ���Art is a Weapon of the Struggle��� for five years.��� Conservatives thought, Albie has seen the light at last. What I meant is that art is much more profound. We need to see the good in the bad, the bad in the good. As revolutionaries do we never make love? At night when you go to bed do you discuss the role of the white working class?

Riason Naidoo

This leads to your paper ���Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,��� presented at the ANC conference in 1989, in which you argued for a move away from the slogan ���Culture is a Weapon of the Struggle.���

Albie Sachs

The big advantage of being blown up and surviving is that, okay, so I���m going to be called bourgeois, so what! It removed the fear of criticism for me, of being seen to be out of line. Who cares? I can say it now. Barbara Masekela was there, and she was the head of the ANC���s Department of Culture, and she said, ���Albie, we are having a conference in Lusaka, and you must be there to say these things.��� I had great fun writing it. I couldn���t go, but I gave my paper to Gillian Slovo. A few months later I was in New York, and I went to the ANC offices there, and somebody told me that my paper tore the conference apart. I was absolutely thrilled to bits. That���s what Barbara wanted, and she sent excerpts of ���Preparing Ourselves for Freedom��� to The Weekly Mail, as it was called back then. It was very much in the spirit of the debates we had in Mozambique. For example, when one of the leaders asked Comrade Sergio, ���What do you think of the slogan ���Black is beautiful���?��� His response was, ���Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful.���

Riason Naidoo

You have noted that at even the tiniest meeting in Maputo there would be a cloth on the table and a jam tin with a pot-plant, not to speak of songs. Mozambique left a deep impression on you in terms of culture and beauty.

Albie Sachs

Beauty for me came before and after. In my younger days, when I looked down from Table Mountain and saw Cape Town, I hated beauty. Part of coming back home and helping with writing the constitution meant being involved in transformation and change, and that meant that I could start loving beauty again.

Albie standing on Maclear Beacon, highest point on Table Mountain, c.1946. Photographer unknown.

 

Riason Naidoo

In Soft Vengeance, you write of your dream of being a part-time lawyer while making films and organizing cultural festivals: ���a giant carnival through the streets of Cape Town, a jazz jamboree in Ellis Park.��� Did you ever get the opportunity to fulfill that dream?

Albie Sachs

It was March 1994, and elections were coming. I did two things that are significant. I shared a platform electioneering with Allan Boesak, and he was an amazing speaker, while I hated saying, ���We are the best, vote for us.��� Second, I repeated my run done after my release from prison in 1963, from the Cape Town Police Station to Clifton Beach. I was given an espresso by Giovanni���s deli en route, and when I got to Clifton, Basil ���Manenberg��� Coetzee played his saxophone as I jumped into the sea. I needed that, the music, the run. I needed that personal signifier rather than canvassing. I felt uneasy with the electioneering. We were going to have elections, with Mandela as president. And we were wondering who was going to be Minister of Justice? I thought, I���ve spent my life fighting for freedom, not now waiting for the phone to ring. This was undermining me. It was spoiling everything. I decided that I���m stepping out of politics. I resigned from the ANC. Not because I was dissatisfied but because it was mission accomplished! I decided that I am also getting out of law. The only project in law that could interest me was being on the Constitutional Court. Stepping away from partisan politics turned out to be a hugely good step. I���m not anti-political. I believe we need political parties. We need leadership, but politics was not for me. Refraining from accepting political office retained for me a sense of the purity of my life���s endeavor. Being on the court and protecting the values of our wonderful constitution meant that I could continue my life���s journey of fighting for protecting values without the compromises, the pressures, the temptations you get when you���re leading the political life.

Albie repeats his run from Caledon Square Police Station to Clifton Beach in 1994, 30 years after his release from his first 90-day detention in solitary confinement, and shortly before South Africa���s first democratic elections. Basil Manenberg Coetzee plays the saxophone as Albie passes. Photographer unknown.

Quitting politics also kept me available for artistic endeavor in a new field entirely,��architecture. We were going to get a new court building. My architect friend from the struggle days, Jack Barnett, suggested a competition, which was eventually won by two young architects from Durban and a town planner from Johannesburg, completely reconfiguring the Palace of Justice into being a warm, friendly, open building and filling it with art. I encouraged the court to have a choir, based on my experience in Mozambique, where every institution had a choir. I started the Constitutional Court Art Collection (CCAC) with the princely sum of R10,000 given to us. These all came spontaneously. I had fifteen years of fantastically creative law surrounded by fantastically creative art.

Judge Albie Sachs at the Constitutional Court of South Africa with law clerks (left to right) Farzana Bardat, Deepak Gupta and Zanele Majola in front of a Skotnes-Budaza artwork. Photographer unknown. Riason Naidoo

Were you involved in the design of the Constitutional Hill Court?

Albie Sachs

I was on the jury that selected the design, and I was very involved in the brief and the composition of the jury. It included Isaac Mogase, the mayor of Johannesburg, Geoffrey Bawa from Sri Lanka, and Charles Correa from India and MIT. We wanted something of a Global South sense of space and place and community. Thenjiwe Mtintso, Chair of the Commission for Gender Equality, became the most important figure on our jury. She said, ���My mother is terrified of modern buildings.��� She pointed and said, ���That is the one I want, a building that is smiling and saying, Welcome, Mama!��� and that is the one that won the competition for the new court building.

The cost of care

In Africa���s migration economy, women���s labor fuels households abroad while their own needs are sidelined at home. What does freedom look like when care itself becomes a form of exile? A domestic worker with child in South Africa. Image credit Alice Morrison via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.

A recent New Yorker cover, ���A Mother���s Work: A Glimpse into the Lives of New York���s Caretakers,��� sparked heated discussion on social media for its striking portrayal of migrant women���s realities. The image depicts two women of color caring for white children on a playground. One woman, cradling a baby, shows her colleague a photo of a young graduate on her phone, likely her own child, celebrating a milestone she could not witness. This poignant illustration lays bare the invisible labor at the heart of the global care economy. In these care chains, women from low-income countries leave their families behind to provide care and comfort to wealthier households, while their own children are often raised by relatives or hired caregivers back home. Behind every remittance sent across borders lies the sacrifices these women make, which keep families both near and far afloat.

While gendered labor has been structured around care of the upper-class family structure since chattel slavery and colonialism, in the postindustrial era and subsequent capitalist boom of society, the decline in publicly funded social services and the privatization of care have reshaped household responsibilities, shifting caregiving from a public good to a market-driven service. While second-wave feminism in the 1960s fought for women���s rights in the workplace, such as the right to equal pay, mainstream feminism often centered the struggles of middle-class white women���those discouraged from working outside the home���while overlooking the realities of women of color and migrant women. Black women, in particular, never left the workforce of maternal care in the afterlife of slavery, continuing to work multiple jobs, including domestic labor, to support themselves and their families, without paid leave and affordable childcare.

In response to these exclusions, socialist feminist economists examined the link between the gendered division of labor and neoliberalism, birthing critical concepts such as commodification and care, social reproduction (which studies the trading of care as a marketable good), and gender-segregated labor markets within and across countries as a result of these analyses. In many countries, throughout the Global North and recently the Middle East, the difficulties of middle-class women combining work and caring responsibilities have not resulted in men���s increased care responsibilities. Instead, this crisis of caring has led to a growing demand for low-cost domestic and care workers, many of whom are migrant women from poorer countries, and oftentimes contributes to a distinctly racialized social hierarchy. This system of interconnected caregiving across borders has been dubbed by feminist economists as ���the global care chain��� as a framework to analyze this extractive system of the gendered division of labor.

Under a global capitalist system, care work���ranging from jobs in private homes to social care institutions such as care homes and hospitals���is often viewed as an extension of femininity rather than a skilled profession. This devaluation is reinforced by the historical exclusion of domestic workers from labor rights movements. For instance, in the United States, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act guaranteed workers the right to unionize but explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers, sectors dominated by Black women, leaving them without collective bargaining rights.

This exploitative structure continues to shape the realities of migrant women who are preferred to their non-migrant counterparts as they work for longer hours for significantly lower wages, subsequently experiencing double discrimination as both migrants and women. Domestic workers lack the same legal protections as other workers, including minimum wage guarantees. Their residency is tied to their employers, granting bosses unchecked power. Many migrant women in the Middle East report verbal and physical abuse, sexual violence, starvation, and in extreme cases, murder. Though supposedly reformed in 2021, recent events in Lebanon have shown that little has changed.

Among the exodus of migrant workers stranded in Lebanon during Israel���s bombing, one thing stood out: The majority were not only women but also overwhelmingly workers from Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, neglected under the government-endorsed kafala migration system, widely condemned as modern-day slavery. Numerous videos on social media show these women pleading for help, trapped in a conflict zone, abandoned by their employers, and excluded from shelters due to racism. Their plight is not anecdotal; it is a reality that African labor migration has increasingly taken on a female face, while migration remains highly dangerous.

Statistics show that women make up nearly half of African migration figures, reaching 49 percent, and in some regions, such as East Africa, surpassing male migration. Women make up the majority of the returnees from the Middle East, as 78 percent of women from the 30,000 nationals repatriated to Africa in the last nine years. These trends raise urgent questions about the structural forces driving the feminization of labor migration from Africa and the unique and specific vulnerabilities that women migrants face, such as abuse and maltreatment.

Given the documented mass exploitation, a close read of push-pull theories of migration is critical in understanding the structural factors influencing why African women are increasingly migrating abroad. While the care economy in destination countries pulls women in, the lack of economic opportunities at home���such as unemployment, poor governance, and security-related issues���push them out. In Ethiopia, for example, women face limited formal employment opportunities, high unemployment rates, and gendered labor markets; these system barriers reflect why women���s domestic labor force participation (57 percent) is significantly lower than men���s (81 percent). Pull factors such as better wages, health care, and education opportunities for their children make migration an attractive, albeit risky, option. This is why some choice-constrained domestic workers in Lebanon opt to stay even if provided with the means to leave���the better quality of life, including access to free health care and education, that the state offers their children in comparison to their home countries ultimately outweighs the significant human rights abuses inherent in remaining.

Despite the increasing feminization of migration, there remains a critical lack of nuanced and gender-sensitive knowledge, research, and policies related to women migrants. This has resulted in women migrants being characterized in harmful binaries. On the one hand, these women are ���heroes,��� reliable remittance senders, empowering themselves through financial independence, lifting their families out of poverty, and fueling domestic economies. For instance, Ethiopian domestic workers generate billions in remittances annually, making labor migration a key source of foreign revenue. Governments, eager to capitalize on migrant remittances, aggressively pursue bilateral agreements with European and Middle Eastern states, often without proper protections for workers. One Ethiopian domestic worker put it bluntly: ���We are like oil to our government.��� This myopic framing, enabled by state forces, masks the daily precarity these women endure under exploitative migration governance systems.

On the other hand, migrant women are reduced to powerless ���victims,��� seen as passive subjects in need of state intervention to protect them from trafficking and exploitation. While it is true that women migrants face high risks, this narrative erases their agency. Migration choices are highly gendered���African women are more likely to move to the Middle East, while men predominantly migrate within Africa. Instead of recognizing migrant women as individuals with rights, states impose restrictive policies under the guise of protection, forcing them toward irregular and more dangerous migration routes, increasing their vulnerability to trafficking and abuse.

In April 2023, Ethiopia signed a bilateral agreement with Lebanon to regulate employment and prevent trafficking, lifting a decade-long ban on labor migration. Similarly, trade union federations from Kenya and Lebanon signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen recruitment agency regulations. But what good are these agreements when migrant workers remain excluded from domestic labor laws and treated as second-class citizens?

Understanding these dynamics is crucial to recognizing why policies and interventions meant to protect or empower women migrants consistently fail. The recent stranding of migrant workers in Lebanon, abandoned by both their host and home countries, exposes the limitations of legal frameworks, human rights mechanisms, and international agreements in ensuring migrant women���s safety. Ultimately, it wasn���t the international community or institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), backed by millions in funding, that rescued these women when their governments failed. It was grassroots organizers, supported by public donations, who brought them home safely.

While short-term solutions like disaggregating migration data by sex and improving monitoring and enforcement may help, there needs to be a radical shift in investment in domestic opportunities. If governments focus on investing in poverty alleviation, public education, and basic income, many women would not be forced to seek work abroad. Instead, countries like Ethiopia and Kenya treat labor migration as a bandage for unemployment, directly marketing it to women, as the case of an Ethiopian woman who was told by the government that migrating was a ���quicker path to success in life than school.��� Hence, the structures driving unemployment in the first place, including poor governance and poverty, remain in place.

This is why there is a clear need for a gendered analysis of migration. Not just to highlight the unique vulnerabilities migrant women face but to expose the hidden sacrifices behind their labor, which sustains families across continents while their own families endure their absence. As long as states treat labor migration as an easy fix for unemployment, women will continue to fill gaps in the global economy while suffering its worst abuses. The question is not just how to make migration safer for women but how to create a world where they no longer feel forced to leave at all.

The memory keepers

A new documentary follows two women���s mission to decolonize Nairobi���s libraries, revealing how good intentions collide with bureaucracy, donor politics, and the ghosts of colonialism. Still from How To Build a Library �� 2025.

Nairobi is the capital of hustle. Hatch a scheme, find an angle, work a connection, don���t stop until you make something, anything, happen. Blame���or give credit to���a poisonous colonial legacy, broken state, and limping economy for making hustle the pulsing energy that courses through the city.

Hustle is the mindset that drives equally a street hawker peddling floor mops to earn the shillings to scrape by for another day as it does the daughters of Kenya���s political elite trying to rehabilitate a downtown colonial-legacy public library. How to Build a Library, a documentary that premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, follows two women, publisher Angela Wachuka and author Wanjiru ���Shiro��� Koinange, on just such an undertaking.

Located on Banda Street in Nairobi���s Central Business District, McMillan Library was opened in 1931 serving whites only until 1958. Oversight (such as it has been) was handed over to the Nairobi City Council in 1962 in the lead-up to the country���s independence.

Outside and inside, the library is a time capsule of British rule that has hardly been updated since its founding. Its neoclassical architecture, including stone columns and recumbent lions guarding its entrance, clearly marks it as an alien implant in Nairobi���s city center. Strewn throughout the deteriorating interior are the detritus of colonialism���s material culture: oil portraits of white men, a tatty old lion-skin rug, and a pair of gigantic elephant tusks.

McMillan and its smaller, satellite libraries, Kaloleni and Makadara, are visible reminders of the persistence of the toxic colonial enterprise. But the state of neglect Wachuka and Koinange find them in is a product of Kenyan indifference since, what they call ���decades of our own institutions��� failure.���

When the film���s cameras started to roll in 2017, the library���s collection of 400,000 objects was not fully cataloged, including parts of the library���s original and yet-to-be-modernized book inventory, rare archival photographs, and binders of newspaper issues from the colonial to independence period.

Wachuka and Koinange describe the effort to transform Nairobi���s libraries into contemporary, decolonized, community-centered urban institutions as their ���life���s mission.��� To realize this mission, they get their hustle on and begin swimming in the murky waters of local bureaucracy. McMillan chief librarian, Joseph Ananda, poses the question that sets up the entire film���s premise: ���They���re strangers to the county government, and I���m an insider. Do these ladies know what they���re getting into?���

Co-directors and Nairobi residents Chris King and Maia Lekow trail Wachuka and Koinange as they and the organization they founded, Book Bunk, make progress���launching the digital catalog, filling the library shelves with books by African authors, and creating welcoming spaces for children to do homework.

They also stumble along the way. In one scene, an enthusiastic Koinange tries to prompt a group of McMillan workers assembled around a large table to offer input on Book Bunk���s efforts. She���s met with blank faces and dead silence. In another scene, staff members in the break room complain about the restoration efforts (���They have come to assist us,��� one says, ���but they don���t know���) and the interns who fail to show proper respect by greeting them. The so-called weapons of the weak���foot-dragging, dissimulation, and disparagement���are wielded deftly in defense of the status quo.

A debate over the replacement of the Dewey Decimal system symbolizes the clash between new and accustomed ways of managing the library. Negotiations to renew a memorandum of understanding with the county government that would enable the Book Bunk to continue its restoration effort drag on. The subtly savvy Ananda reminds Wachuka and Koinange to expect decision-makers considering their proposals to ask after their own self-interest first, ���What is there to be gained?���

Throughout the film we watch Wachuka and Koinange cajoling mid-tier county officials over canap��s, flattering the county governor with a guest of honor role at their annual gala, and hosting a site visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla. Wachuka and Koinange express discomfort at entertaining the embodiment of colonial rule that their project is geared toward dismantling, but they can���t turn down the fly-by royal viewing of a library. Especially since the British Council has provided significant funding for the project.

Lekow and King���s low-key observational style uses these small moments to reveal the realpolitik of good intentions running head-on into rent-seeking, bureaucratic inertia, and incentives at cross purposes. The approach of filming longitudinally is well suited to capturing the ceaseless slog of wheedling and wooing local officials, donors, and staff to the cause. The attention to all these micro-dynamics makes How to Build a Library an honest, fine-grained portrayal of modern, urban Kenya. From the same virtues also spring its limitations.

Character-driven documentary films depend on the choice of protagonists to carry the story. Wachuka and Koinange are clearly formidable in real life, but on screen they read as estimable, rather than captivating, personalities. That���s a shame because their A Palace for the People podcast is exceptional, thrumming with charm and a sense of real rapport between them. It is also surprising because Lekow and King���s previous documentary, The Letter, about an elderly woman facing accusations of witchcraft, combined nuanced analysis of fissures in Kenyan society while delivering a powerful, emotional punch.

If the protagonists��� journeys don���t provide an emotional narrative arc, then we���re relying on a story whose dramatic tension hinges on the signing of an MOU. The emotional payoff from watching fundraising events and negotiating paperwork with the local government authority ends up being pretty muted. Hustling for donations doesn���t particularly lend itself to cinematic treatment.

Furthermore, How to Build a Library fails to mine an obvious source of both narrative and historical tension. An honest reckoning with the past requires calling out how not only colonialism perpetuated itself, including through its public institutions, but also how the inheritors of the reins of power stuck to these patterns. The film should have been exquisitely placed to press on this point through the prism of Koinange���s family history: her grandfather served as a close advisor to independence leader and first president Jomo Kenyatta.

Wachuka and Koinange do credit scholar Joyce Nyairo with her observation about a deliberate ���institutionalization of amnesia������inherited from the colonial state���that is at the heart of the construction of the Kenyan nation. For the most part, however, the film follows the protagonists��� lead in avoiding examining the role of post-independence leaders in promoting this regime of silence.

The intertwining of Koinange���s lineage and Kenya���s nation-building history is not mentioned, nor is the intriguing irony that her quest to liberate Nairobi���s libraries from their pasts means in part facing up to hers. The documentary misses an opportunity to explore Kenyan leadership���s contribution to the erasure of public memory and to acknowledge that decolonizing alone doesn���t address some important dimensions of how power continues to be reproduced across generations.

A more explicit engagement with the contradictions of decolonization would have made How to Build a Library a stronger film and possibly also helped the filmmakers find the narrative hooks to transmute the abstract concepts of decolonizing institutions and reclaiming colonial-era public spaces, and some of the drier details of change management, into a more gripping tale.

This doesn���t detract from Lekow and King���s nuanced snapshot of modern-day Nairobi, and their attention, as the film���s name suggests, to the intricacies of the process. That they were committed to shooting for almost a decade and scored a premiere slot at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival (less than two percent of submitted feature films were accepted this year) marks them as uber-hustlers in their own right.

Moreover, the hustle continues for Wachuka and Koinange beyond the rolling of the film���s credits, not least to complete the step that would signal McMillan Library���s transformation into a truly contemporary institution serving the people���and one that is asked about regularly in the film: ���When is the caf�� going to open?���

Making films against amnesia

The director of the Oscar-nominated film 'Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat' reflects on imperial violence, corporate warfare, and how cinema can disrupt the official record���and help us remember differently.

Still from Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat �� 2024.

Johan Grimonprez is the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat, a film whose main theme is the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. The film takes place against a much larger historical backdrop that includes the Cold War, the independence of a number African and Asian countries and their entry into the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, American imperialism, and, most importantly, the export of jazz music played by prominent African American musicians as a strategy of spreading American imperialism abroad.

Grimonprez spoke to Zahra Moloo about the archival depth of the film, the complicity of institutions like the UN, and how music���both jazz and Congolese rumba���became a site of ideological struggle during the Cold War.

Zahra Moloo

Thank you, Johan, for speaking to me about this incredible, sweeping documentary. I���d like to start off by asking, where did your journey into making this film begin?

Johan Gimonprez

I can trace it back to the research for the previous film, Shadow World, where we dissected the global arms industry, together with Andrew Feinstein, who published a book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. We interviewed several characters for the film, including Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for The New York Times, who lost his job because he was speaking out against the invasion of Iraq under Bush. He talked about a template within politics, ���the corporatocracy,��� that basically we are undergoing a corporate coup d���etat in slow motion. War has been privatized, and it���s the lobby industry���s revolving door that dictates foreign policy.

After finishing this film, I wanted to dig into the backyard of my own country, Belgium, and a black page out of the history of my country is in relation to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was a Belgian colony and in the beginning was the private property of the king. I began digging into that story and stumbled onto the fact that the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was very much traceable to that corporatocracy, where the Belgian mining industry in cahoots with the CIA in 1960 was responsible for the overthrow of his democratically elected government and his subsequent assassination.

Then there was also the figure of Nikita Khrushchev, who figured in a previous film Double Take, where he functions as a Hitchcock doppelg��nger. As a kid of the ���60s, a TV-generation kid, you know, I was born in Belgium, jammed between East and West. At the time, the ideological divide between communism and capitalism divided the world. The figure of Nikita Khrushchev figured prominently in that previous film, and I had always known about the slamming of the shoe at the United Nations, but what I did not realize is that it had to do with the history of my country, with the Belgian Congo, and that Nikita Khrushchev was, in essence, calling for the resignation of the then secretary-general of the UN, Dag Hammarskj��ld, for his dealing with the Congo crisis. And Hammarskj��ld was banding together with the king, with the monarchy, and the Union Mini��re mining industry to overthrow Patrice Lumumba.

Zahra Moloo

What was striking to me about this documentary is the depth of research and the rich content of the archive. You have excerpts from books by Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, Conor Cruise O���Brien who was Ireland���s permanent representative to the UN and was also in Katanga, audio memoirs from Nikita Khrushchev. You have passages from Frantz Fanon, telegrams from the Belgians about the plot to assassinate Lumumba. The film archive is also very rich: interviews with Lumumbist rebels like L��onie Abo, interviews with British intelligence, mercenaries, with the CIA. How was the process of finding this material���both the text and images? Was any of this material difficult to get a hold of?

Johan Gimonprez

Well, with documentary most of the historical actors or the things that we feature in the film or the archive, the writing happens in the editing. As you go along, you construct a film with the archives and try to combine and layer several elements. This took four or five years of research, and the editing was four years. But then there are things that you stumble upon that you didn���t even know existed.�� For example, there was William Burden, the president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the CEO of Lockheed, advisor to the Pentagon, and he had stakes in the mining industry in eastern Congo. Then he was appointed the US ambassador to Brussels just prior to Congo becoming independent, and on top of that, he was a secret CIA agent and befriended Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. In his audio memoirs, which we sourced from the Department of Diplomatic Studies at Columbia University, he literally says, ���Belgium is toying with the idea of assassinating Lumumba, and I think it wouldn���t be a bad idea either.��� This is coming from a US ambassador, even president of the MOMA for that matter. And he says ���Patrice Lumumba was such a damn nuisance, it was pretty obvious to go for a political assassination.��� I fell from my chair when I heard his words. This is firsthand audio, documentation that was never meant to be released, but it was part of study material for the Diplomatic Studies Department, where being a secret agent is apparently a part of that.

We had to redirect the film and place this material fairly prominently in the middle of the film when the whole shift changes. The film leads up from the nonaligned countries, to the pre-1960s, then to the 15th UN General Assembly, where 16 African countries become independent. A whole wind of independence is blowing over the continent, and the African and Afro-Asian bloc gains the majority vote in the UN and against the backdrop of that, you have the West and Belgium deciding to deal with this wind of freedom by a neocolonial grab���in essence, trying to keep a hold of the reaches of the continent of Africa.

But the archive consists of much more. I often allude to Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, who wrote a history of the Congo and says, ���If we want to rewrite a history of our country, maybe we should call for decolonization of the archives as well.��� To source the history of the Congo, you have to go to Brussels, for the images you have to go to the African Museum or even Belgian television. Then another big component is the home movies that we were able to source from Sergei Krushchev, who filmed his father, Nikita Khrushchev, and the home movies of In Koli Jean Bofane, who was reading from his book Congo Inc. When we were trying to get the story of Andr��e Blouin, her memoirs were hard to find. We got in touch with her daughter Eve Blouin, who generously agreed that we could use the memoirs. She sent us an undeveloped roll of film, and when we developed it, we saw Andr��e with Eve Blouin herself as a two-year-old kid in Leopoldville while Andr��e was working for Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the independent Congo. It���s the very moment where, about a couple of weeks later, Andr��e was exiled and Eve Blouin was held at ransom in Leopoldville. Here you feel the heartbeat of history with those home movies; you have firsthand images of characters involved with that history. Those intimate images are in contradiction and juxtaposition with the bigger global political events that were happening at that time.

Zahra Moloo

One of the central themes of the film is the strategic use of jazz and Black American jazz musicians as a weapon in the arsenal of American imperialism. At the same time, Black Americans were being subjected to segregation in the US. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Dizzy Gillespie were used as emissaries of the US in Africa and Asia. ��Dizzy does a tour of the Middle East���which kicks off in honor of the Shah in Iran in 1956. He says, ���I would be a better emissary than Kissinger.��� Later on, Louis Armstrong goes to the DRC, to play in front of thousands of people, but this concert is actually a smokescreen while Lumumba���s assassination is being planned by CIA agents. Can you talk more about the use of jazz as a strategy of American imperialism, and why did some musicians go along with it? We get a sense that they had some idea of what was going on for instance in the case of Dizzy Gillespie.

Johan Gimonprez

It���s very schizophrenic, because they were used as tools to propagate and defend democracy while at home they were not allowed to vote, they were second-rate citizens. As Dizzy says, ���I didn’t go over there to sugarcoat segregation back home.��� Louis Armstrong in 1956 was sent out, and it is Edward Murrow who films him, and later on becomes the director of the United States Information Agency, which was sponsored by the US State Department and using soft power as a way to defend democracy. On another level you could talk about Hollywood in a similar way, how it seduced the rest of the world. Heiner M��ller at one point in East Berlin said, ���The most powerful message we got from the West was actually the commercials.��� It was not strong power; it was soft power. It was the seduction element.

In 1956, when Edward Murrow accompanies Louis Armstrong to Ghana, it is amazing, because while he���s a second-rate citizen back home, he���s celebrated by an audience of 100,000 Ghanaians in Accra. And wherever he went, even if he was being used as a tool, he was also outspoken. At one point during the Africa tour, he refused to play for an apartheid audience in South Africa. To contextualize it a bit, there was this huge shift in the United Nations with the influx of all the independent countries, the Afro-Asian bloc. Nikita Krushchev was proposing a decolonization vote, while the United States was sending arm twisters into the UNGA to buy up African votes and also sending jazz ambassadors to win the hearts and minds of people in Africa. Louis Armstrong was one of them.

But these jazz ambassadors were not always in the know. Louis Armstrong was sent to Katanga, which was seceding from the Congo with the financial aid of Union Mini��re that paid billions to prop up Mo��se Tshombe���s government. It was not ratified internationally, so it was illegal to even send US ambassadors, but it was the Katanga lobby and the CEO of Union Mini��re who pushed for Louis Armstrong to be sent to Katanga. And when he arrived, he was lodged at Mo��se Tshombe���s presidential villa and was having dinner with Larry Devlin, the head of the CIA, and also Ambassador Timberlake, who was the US ambassador to the Congo, and Belgian advisors, amongst them Harold Charles Lyndon, who was the minister of African affairs. And here is Louis Armstrong facing Larry Devlin, but not knowing that he���s the head of the CIA in the Congo, because he was undercover as an agricultural advisor. Seated around that dinner table, in November 1960, Armstrong grilled Mo��se Tshombe and said, ���Hey, you���re in bed with big money.��� We found an audio interview with Trummy Young, who was a trombonist for the All Stars that accompanied Louis Armstrong to Katanga, and he said, ���We felt all of this was not quite right.��� So they were in the know, but they were not in the know about just how insidious it was that Armstrong was actually having dinner with the very person plotting the murder of Patrice Lumumba, together with the Belgians.

Zahra Moloo

Your film also includes Congolese rumba music as part of the soundtrack ���some of the iconic bands at the time, Franco Luambo, and TPOK Jazz, and Joseph Kabasele. Those relations were schizophrenic as well. For instance, Franco Luambo, possibly the most famous Congolese musician of all time, had this song ���Lumumba h��ro national.��� But he also sang for and received a lot of support from Mobutu. Can you tell me more about the relationship between Congolese musicians and politics? Did it mirror the relation between American jazz musicians and politics?

Johan Gimonprez

The film dissects the jazz ambassadors and how they were used as a propaganda tool, but there is also the role of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach and their album We Insist!�� that was broadcast on Belgian television. It is Abbey Lincoln, together with the Women���s Writers Coalition in Harlem, writer Maya Angelou, and the playwright Rosa Guy who called for a protest at the United Nations Security Council when Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador [to the UN] under Kennedy, announces that Patrice Lumumba was murdered with two of his colleagues. They literally crash the Security Council, stand up, and scream. So there is also another element to the music and jazz, how jazz was inspired by that freedom movement to become part of the Civil Rights Movement. All of that is not separate. For example, one track from the We Insist!, ���Tears for Johannesburg,��� was inspired by African women tearing up their apartheid passport in South Africa, which became a protest that was smashed down in Sharpeville, where women were killed.

So there���s a back and forth between how the liberation and independence movements on the continent were inspiring the Civil Rights Movement, but also inspiring jazz. So it���s not just that music is being used as an instrument, but also music becomes a tool of rebellion to speak out. Even if it���s a scream at the very end of the film, it���s a scream of resilience, of not agreeing with the state of the world.

With rumba it was similar. There is also a back and forth between what was going on with fourth, fifth, sixth generations of Congolese, who during the transatlantic passage made it to Cuba, and the music in Cuba, inspired by Congolese heritage���conga, rumba, chacha���made it back to Leopoldville. There was a trade where musicians were working on the ships and were going back and forth between Havana and Leopoldville, and that inspired rumba in the Congo.

And the rumba was also very much inspiring how they lived and what was going on, sometimes in subdued terms. You know, the first rumba track featured in the film, ���Sooner or Later, the World Will Change��� by Adou Elenga, was very much a protest song banned by the Belgian colonialists, and Adou Elenga was put in prison. So there���s a connection between the politics and how one stands in the world. If you���re a suppressed, colonized country, you cannot not but give expression to your emotions. During the independence movement, when Patrice Lumumba was not yet prime minister, he hired Rock-a-Mambo as a way to raise consciousness and talk about independence, going from bar to bar in the Cit��. which was the native neighborhood of Leopoldville. In 1960, when the round table was organized in Brussels to talk about independence, the Belgians were thinking, We���re going to give independence in a couple of decades. But unanimously, all the political Congolese parties were arguing that independence should be given much more rapidly. There was a call to release Patrice Lumumba, and when he arrived around the 25th of January 1960, he was accompanied by Joseph Kabasele, Docteur Nico, and African Jazz, and when towards the end of the month of January they claimed independence, it was celebrated by those musicians, and it���s in the Plaza Hotel, where they were lodged, that they composed ���Independence Cha Cha,��� and that anthem mentions all the political parties, in a way reflecting a unanimous solidarity. ���Independence Cha Cha��� became very popular all across the continent of Africa as an independence call for all the other countries.��It became the name for the Liberation Party in Rhodesia that subsequently became Zimbabwe. It became a political anthem for the call for independence.

Zahra Moloo

One of the striking revelations of this film is the role of the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskj��ld. So far, what we hear about Hammarskj��ld, the main narrative, is about his efforts to preside over the first UN peacekeeping forces in Egypt and Congo and about how he was killed in a plane crash in 1961, and findings that this happened with the support of the CIA.

In your film, we see Lumumba asking for help from the UN against the Belgian occupation of Katanga. The Belgians plead with Hammarskj��ld not to intervene in Katanga, and he actually flies there to meet Mo��se Tshombe. In the film we hear that ���the downfall of Lumumba was inscribed in that event.��� You also reveal how Hammarskj��ld says to the US ambassador to the UN that ���Lumumba must be broken.��� To what extent is Hammarskj��ld and the UN responsible for Lumumba���s assassination?

Johan Gimonprez

It���s a crucial question. At the very end of the film, we have a statement about his murder. We have a series of names: Kwame Nkrumah overthrown in 1966, Malcolm X shot in Harlem 1965, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, overthrown in 1964 and written out of Soviet history, and then we had Dag Hammarskj��ld killed in mid-September 1961. We didn���t dig into why precisely, but I thought it was important that all these people were subsequently victims of that neocolonial grab towards the Global South. Of course, the only one who survived was Andr��e Blouin, who, after two more death threats, was exiled from the Congo by way of Switzerland.

But to come back to the story of Dag Hammarskj��ld. I had hoped in the film to sketch more of an ambivalent character arc. He���s a person who is suffering, and you can read it in his face. I really think he had his back against the wall and was navigating all these forces. In the General Assembly, the Global South community was pushing for a United Nations force against the colonial powers. That���s also interesting. Dag Hammarskj��ld was siding with the Global South. You know, the UN Congo Mission was the biggest mission ever, and if that would fail���because in the film they all ask this question, ���What if the Congo Mission fails?������and it did actually, because Lumumba was killed. But he had his back against the wall. And the United Kingdom and the United States were both threatening to withdraw their funding.

An important source for the film was Ludo De Witte���s book The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, published in 1999. He was able to gather a lot of evidence in United Nations cables and cables within Belgium that pointed to the fact that, indeed, Dag Hammarskjold was complicit and involved in the downfall of Lumumba, as was the Belgian monarchy. In Belgium it was really shocking, because the book was published 1999 and there was a parliamentary commission in 2004, which had a half-baked conclusion saying, yes, the monarchy knew about the murder. That is why the film ends with that statement on its own, the singular statement that actually the Belgian government was complicit in murder, because that���s still not been concluded in Belgium.��They are still arguing, ���Should we say, ���We have regret���? Or should we say, ���I am sorry���?��� That is about reparation as well, because if you say sorry, you actually admit that there was a crime and that there should be consequences.

Zahra Moloo

The archive is incredibly rich in the evocation of that time period of the mid and late 1950s, for instance the Bandung Conference, where you have all these figures from across the Third World standing up to imperialism and demanding independence. Abdel Nasser, Nkrumah, Sukarno, Krishna Menon, the Indian ambassador to the UN. Some of the most memorable moments are Khrushchev���s visit to the US, but more so his outspokenness against colonialism and bringing this resolution on granting independence to colonized countries, in 1960.�� What did you want people to take away from uncovering this moment in history: Is this archive a reminder of what could be possible? A taking of inspiration from that, or is it more like what Thomas Kanza, Congo���s ambassador to the UN, called ���an independence rotten at the roots,��� a tragic ending to something that could have been?

Johan Gimonprez

While researching that period I saw a whole sense of solidarity. At the beginning, all the political parties in the Congo were unanimously agreeing. But three months later, there was an economic roundtable where Mobutu was being called in by Larry Devlin, and he was already being groomed to become a CIA asset. This was pre-independence, so the machinations were already there. If you look into that period in history, there is unanimity and solidarity. Sukarno invites all the leaders to the 1955 Bandung Conference. The Arab countries are there, the Latin American countries are there, the African countries are there. It was the biggest gathering of countries where they were trying to come up with an alternative to the ideological divide between East and West, and they called for decolonization.

It���s very much similar leaders that make it to the 15th General Assembly, when Nikita Khrushchev in September 1960���and this is a precedent as well���was calling for all the world leaders to join him to talk about demilitarization and decolonization.��When Khrushchev arrives in 1959, he is the very first Soviet leader after the Communist Revolution of 1917 who visits the United States and talks about demilitarization, and then 10 days after visiting the United States, he goes to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution in Maoist China. He refuses Mao to have the nuclear bomb and recalls all the nuclear scientists from China. In essence, you know, the United States had an unlikely ally in Nikita Khrushchev. There���s a lot to the history of Nikita Khrushchev, which is not to say he���s a saint. There is a reference to Hungary when he arrives at the United Nations, when they���re calling him a fat red rat. But he did set a precedent in inviting all these nonaligned leaders to the 15th General Assembly, including Fidel Castro, who gave his first marathon speech, which is still the longest speech in human history. There was Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, S��kou Tour��, Abdel Nasser. The big absentee is Patrice Lumumba, but there is a unanimity amongst these leaders in the General Assembly, where they are siding with Patrice Lumumba, including Castro.��The Congo crisis is the big discussion in that 15th General Assembly. There was a sense of hope with the influx of African countries, the Global South becoming the majority at the United Nations. But all of that was threatening for the West. So there was that sense of hope and there was also a shift happening, and Belgium was crucial in using Patrice Lumumba���s murder and assassination as ground zero for how the West would deal with this sense of hope and solidarity.

But I don���t want to be pessimistic. Today there are still things moving. I just came back from Havana and the Patria colloquium with 500 journalists from Latin America.��There are also huge shifts happening in Africa with Niger and Mali, when they threw out the French and the Americans, and there is a sense of trying to establish sovereign countries from a Global South perspective, where they want to take decision making into their own hands.

Zahra Moloo

The struggle still continues in 2025. I want to talk about the style of the film. Some of the images are very haunting. For instance, you have a recurring image of an elephant; an elephant on a boat being held by a white woman speeding across the water; an elephant being lifted onto a crane, and then later dropped. Then you have other references, like this clip from Ren�� Magritte and his painting The Treachery of Images, where it says, ���This is not a pipe.��� And later, during the coup d���etat against Lumumba, Mobutu says, ���This is not a coup d���etat.��� What were you trying to do with the choice of images in the film, and images as allegory?

Johan Gimonprez

Well, ���this is not a pipe, this is not a coup��� is so Belgian. Belgium is full of schizophrenia. We have two languages, but we don���t have a national language, and this whole thing of being a subtitled country, for instance, you go to the supermarket, you buy a bottle of milk, it���s always subtitled in two languages, and you feel that sense of displacement. It���s so much part of how irony or jokes can contain contradictions, and ���this is not a pipe��� is a typical belgicism, where you suddenly get a subtitled version of something, but it causes alienation. ���This is not a coup��� you can read between the lines. You have Allen Dulles constantly saying something, but for the most part, he���s denying something, but by denying������This is not what it is������he is saying what it is. It���s this irony of denial that exposes what���s really going on. The very last time he���s in the film, he says, ���We might have made a mistake. We were actually exaggerating the communist threat.��� He finally says something that is more accurate. But this way of holding contradictions is, for me, interesting, and maybe politics is also a part of that. When they say ���weapons of mass destruction��� in more contemporary times���it���s in denial that things are revealed, in these contradictions. Truth is maybe closer to contradictions.

Zahra Moloo

What about the elephant?

Johan Gimonprez

This is the poetic third space, the cinematic space, that is opened up. And if you research a body of archive, sometimes things offer themselves. This elephant came back again and again. In S��kou Tour�����s Guinea, the elephant was a national symbol. The elephant in the water is this underwaterness of certain things that are about to emerge or the displacement of an elephant in the zoo or hanging in the air. It���s all these things that can embody what the symbol stands for. There is an acoustic biologist, Katy Payne, who studies elephant behavior, and she was listening to the deep sounds that the feet of elephants make, that you cannot actually hear with human ears, but you can record them with infrasound or ultrasound. She says that every hour or so, they all stand and stretch their ears and listen to where they���re going to head next. It was such a peculiar image, but for me it���s what sometimes history gives. Sometimes you listen, and it takes you to places that you would never have thought it could take you. It���s like what novelists say about their characters���you set them up in a context, but the characters are pushed into making certain choices, and then suddenly it is the characters that are writing the book. It���s the characters who take you on a journey, and for me, very often the film itself is a challenge, where it takes me to places that I would never have thought I would venture. If you listen to history, that���s what it gives and, for me, that is what the elephant is.

Zahra Moloo

A large part of the film explores Congo���s resources���uranium in the building of the atomic bomb, but also coltan, tin, and so on. You have images of Tesla vehicles, and Apple advertisements. The relationships between the pillaging of minerals and the history of war and intervention in the DRC is well known. Today Congo is still in crisis, with Rwanda-backed M23 having taken Goma and large areas of the east. To what extent do we need to go beyond looking at minerals and resources, and consider other elements as part of the explanation for Congo���s brutal history?

Johan Gimonprez

To me the whole corporatocracy is the engine. Of course, it includes the whole rift between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and that genocide that crossed over to the Congo. A lot of the refugees made it to the Congo and that has created a more complex situation. That is part of it. But then the rift between the Hutus and the Tutsis dates back to the Belgians, who also caused a rift as a divide-and-conquer strategy to get at the riches and the conflict minerals. Ludo De Witte again wrote an interesting book and gave an analysis of how the whole rift between Tutsis and Hutus was artificial. It���s the same as what happened in Katanga between the Balubas and then what was happening to the south with President Tshombe and the subsequent genocide in Katanga. The colonial military force also caused rifts between identities���they would send�� people from other parts of the country when revolts were happening. They would not send the people from that area; they would send rival groups. So in the army, identities and cultures were set against one another, and that���s part of what���s going on in eastern Congo. Indeed the Tesla and the iPhone images are followed by the statistics of raped women. And if you look at the map from the film City of Joy, which is about the rape of women in eastern Congo, there is a direct correlation between the rape women and the mining sites. I think the occupation of eastern Congo would not happen���and I say ���occupation,��� which is literally the same as the occupation of Gaza or what���s going on now with the bombing of Yemen, it���s also an occupation of rival groups against one another, or Ethiopia or Sudan.

If eastern Congo did not have what they call a ���geological scandal of resources,��� it would be left alone. The European Union recently approved weapons again to Kagame, and there were troops embedded with the M23, and it���s a private militia involved with other private militia involved in the rape of women. I was with Zap Mama, who reads the voice of Andr��e Blouin in the film, and she was texting Denis Mukwege, and she got a message back to say that it���s unclear what will happen with Panzi Hospital, because M23 also occupied Bukavu, where Panzi Hospital is located. So that is why the iPhone commercial is in the film. It is literally a wake-up call: The lithium and the coltan that is sourced for green energy or green technology goes back to child labor and women being raped.

Zahra Moloo

How is the film being received in Africa since its release, and are there plans for it to be seen more widely on the continent?

Johan Gimonprez

On April 9, it will be shown at the Andr��e Blouin Center in Kinshasa, and it���s been shown in some festivals in Kinshasa, where it was pirated. There���s Maliyamungu Muhande, a Congolese filmmaker whose uncle was killed in eastern Congo just a month ago���she wrote an article in The Nation called ���Soundtrack to a Complicit Silence.��� She took it to South Africa, and it has been showing on the continent as well. It was released recently in Nairobi, and it has a distributor in Kenya. There is a Moroccan distributor who distributes on the continent. It was shown in El Gouna Festival in Egypt, where we won the prize with the film. Vijay Prashad announced the Andr��e Blouin Prize for journalism. The whole story of Andr��e Blouin is being rewritten back into history. It had a way to find redemption where the memoirs of Andr��e Blouin have been published by Eve Blouin and released a month and a half ago by Verso.

The film was just now shown at the Patria Colloquium in Havana, and it was very well received. We had a meeting at the Film Institute in Havana, and they don���t even have electricity, the generator is broken. We went to the Casa de las Am��ricas, but I couldn���t even go to the toilet, because they don���t have water.�� You see that what���s going on in Cuba is, in a sense, still a result of this whole Global South politics, but it had a huge echo there. What was a little bit of a homecoming for me was the film was shown at the Maysles Center in Harlem on 125th Street, one block from Hotel Theresa, and that was organized by the Friends of the Congo.

But at the same time, you know the film was part of the Oscar nominations. so it also reached a big audience. I invited Zap Mama and Marie Daulne, and we wrote a statement for the extraction economy to be held accountable for what���s going on in eastern Congo. On the bottom of her shoes, she had written ���Free Congo,��� and once she opened her dress, it also said ���Free Congo,��� so if we had won the Oscar, we would have gone on stage as well, just as No Other Land made a very important political statement about what���s going on in Gaza and the West Bank, Zap Mama would have made a call.