Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 16

Why I���m done talking to straight people about homophobia

Homophobia doesn���t start with violence���it begins with silence, erasure, and everyday destruction. But straight people only seem to notice when it���s too late. Johannesburg Pride. Image �� hakanyalicn via Shutterstock.

On the afternoon of January 26, 2011, a few hours after David Kato was on a call with his friend Julien Pepe Onziema, his phone went off. At 1 pm on the same day, witnesses said, a man entered Kato���s house and struck him with a hammer twice on the head before fleeing in a vehicle. Kato, a prominent gay rights activist in Uganda, died on his way to a hospital in Kampala, Uganda.

News of Kato���s murder was received with both dismay and shock. ���David Kato’s death is a tragic loss to the human rights community,��� Maria Burnett, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch said. Hillary Clinton, the then US secretary of state, in her statement called it ���a reminder of the heroic generosity of the people who advocate for and defend human rights on behalf of the rest of us���and the sacrifices they make.���

Shortly after the murder, Sydney Nsubuga, then 22, was arrested and charged. In November of the same year, Nsubuga was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Nsubuga���s sentencing was welcomed around the globe by human rights defenders. The celebrated activist Peter Tatchell called it ���justice served��� adding that ���It sends a signal that sometimes in Uganda, LGBT people get justice. Of course, many times they don���t.���

Queer life in Uganda and much of Africa is dire. Kato���s murder was not an isolated act of homophobia. It was not an aberration. It was a consequence. A culmination. A final step in a process of destruction that began long before the hammer came down on his skull. Indeed, Kato���s murder could be described as the final solution for queer existence in a society that is deeply heteronormative.

Three months before his murder, on October 2, 2010, the Ugandan tabloid newspaper, Rolling Stone, published photographs of Kato and 99 others under the headline ���100 Pictures of Uganda���s top homos leak.��� The article accused them and the larger Ugandan queer community of ���recruiting��� young kids and brainwashing them into bisexual orientation and called for their execution. ���Hang them,��� it declared while publishing details of where they lived.

Kato fought back. He, alongside three others, took the publication to court, seeking an injunction against further incitement of violence. There were no urgent press conferences from straight people who had the power to end the publication and call out public violence against queer Ugandans. There were no statements of outrage. No global calls to action���not even from the African Union that ought to protect the rights of citizens on the continent. Except for a few invitations to conferences and residencies, the world did not notice Kato until he was dead. They seemingly never saw the slow erosion of his humanity but only the final, brutal act.

More than a decade after Kato���s murder, on February 15 this year, Muhsin Hendrix, a South African gay Imam, was murdered on his way, it is speculated, to officiate a same-sex marriage. Nearly three decades after Hendrix came out in 1996, and in a brazen act that proves the patience of homophobes, the 57-year-old was gunned down in Bethelsdorp, a suburb of Gqeberha, a city on South Africa���s southern coast.

In a similar response to those issued after Kato���s murder, the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development said it was ���saddened��� by Hendrick���s murder and pledged to ���track and monitor that justice is dispensed��� if his death was indeed confirmed as a hate crime.��

The Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) of South Africa issued its statement calling the murder ���shocking��� and expressed ���deep concern��� about it. It added that while the MJC had consistently maintained that Muhsin���s position was incompatible with Islamic teachings, it unequivocally condemned his murder and any acts of violence targeting members of the LGBTQ community or any other community.

The statement by the MJC South Africa comes just three years after it issued a Fatwa against same-sex marriage. In 2022, according to the South African media Mambaonline, the MJC issued the religious ruling stating that Islamic laws unequivocally prohibited same-sex actions and, by extension, same-sex marriages. It asserted, in a statement that pointed directly to Muhsin���s more than two-decade crusade on queer religious inclusion, that any Muslim in a same-sex relationship or engaging in same-sex sexuality should take themselves out of the fold of Islam.��

The murder of Hendrix was no isolated event, nor was the response. Like Kato before him, he had for some time been a target of homophobic vitriol. After 2022, Muhsin and his family issued a statement sharing concerns for his safety. Neither the MJC nor the South African government took enough caution and action to protect him. Like Kato, his death was met with carefully worded statements of sorrow from one institution that had issued public statements against him and another that had not acted to protect him.

For too long, the world has understood homophobia only in its most grotesque manifestations���murder, imprisonment, and public violence. Straight people have only acknowledged homophobia when it spills blood or fills prison cells. But queer people know better. The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge���s gavel ��� It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure.

This is what straight people do not see. They do not see the quiet, grinding destruction of queer people long before they are murdered. They do not see the exhaustion of carrying an identity that is always at risk of being debated, isolated, criminalized, or erased.��

I spent most of my life shaped by heteronormativity���by othering, by isolation. I began coming out at 20. By then I had already spent two decades being told, in every way possible, that my existence was unnatural, an abomination. Somehow, I made it into adulthood and became resistant to the world that had shaped me. That resistance was only short-lived. Adulthood came with the realization that my escape from the erasure and isolation of queer childhood was only the beginning. In adulthood, the law was there to ensure I did not exist in the public sphere. Some queer people do not even get this far. They do not get to 20. They do not get to come out. They fall off the radar. They commit suicide. Statistics show that LGBTQ+ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about four times the rate for all adolescents. If they make it past the societal childhood destruction, they exist in the shadows, meeting men and women in dark alleys and clubs where they can never be seen. That is how the Down Low (DL) exists. That is how so many queer people are made���destroyed until their very existence is only in the shadows.��

Heteronormativity���the very idea that heterosexuality is the normal sexuality and therefore should inform and shape the world that queer people exist in is a destructive institution. And straight people will always find, without provocation, ways to justify this destruction. During his inauguration, US President Donald Trump declared that America would only recognize two genders: male and female. A few days later, in a break from existing policy, which included intersex as a third gender, Kenyan President William Ruto echoed the same sentiments: ������ Boys should remain boys, men should remain men, girls should remain girls, and women should remain women.���

To date, a total of 64 countries criminalize homosexuality and even more are regressing into the dark ages. They declare queer existence unhealthy, unfathomable, a thing that children ought to be protected from���as if gay people only exist as adults, as if they had no childhood. As if I did not exist.

I was seven years old when I first felt something I did not have the words for. There was a boy in my class, a Bajun boy with the darkest skin I had ever seen, a round face and pointed nose, and a talent for football. I spent time watching him play football, mesmerized by his existence. He fascinated me. I did not know why. There was no language for it���no television character, no radio program, no family member to explain it to me. There was only the feeling.��

At eight or nine, I finally heard the words. My Christian Religious Education (CRE) teacher declared it with authority: ���Homosexuality is an abomination, a sin that cannot be forgiven.���

I sat there, silent, something inside me collapsing. The first language of my existence became my first destruction. From then on, I was sad and silent. In high school, my English teacher described me as shy. ���He is the most shy student I have,��� my teacher once told my guardian.

My experience of childhood is not isolated. The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina had a similar experience. At five, he knew he was different. By seven, he understood that difference more clearly. In his strikingly personal essay “I am Homosexual, Mum” he wrote of a moment when a boy shook his hand, and the overwhelming feeling that followed sent him running to the bathroom to cry: ���Then I am crying alone in the toilet because the repetition of this feeling has made me suddenly ripped apart and lonely.���

Queer childhood is defined by this loneliness. By this ripping. By silence. By the slow erasure of self. By the giving of language that demonizes you. By the weight of a world that does not see you, except as something to be corrected, hidden, or punished.

Perhaps, if Kato had been my teacher, my experience would have been different. Perhaps I would not have had to endure years of internal war, of self-hate carefully planted and cultivated by school, church, and society. Perhaps I would have had an example to follow, a hand to hold. But Kato is dead. And now, when I speak of the destruction that is caused by institutionalized homophobia, straight people do not listen. They do not believe it is worth talking about it until the destruction is final���until there is a body. And then, in their performative sadness, they can issue their statements from whatever capitals. ���It is horrifying.��� ���We are saddened.��� ���We are shocked.���

Two years ago, I lost my friend and former partner to murder. On Twitter, I posted that society, the straight heteronormative world, was to blame for his death. Like clockwork, my words were met with defensiveness and deniability. ���You are killing each other and accusing the rest of normal us.��� one comment read.

For two or three days, I thought of how to respond, whether I should be angry or horrified by the lack of understanding. As more comments streamed in, I looked back at them and deleted each of them. I had no words, no need to explain. I sat back and cried.

Today I am 28 and I am exhausted. Exhausted from speaking to straight people who refuse to understand. Exhausted from explaining that homophobia is not just about the final act of violence���it is the entire system that makes that violence possible. Exhausted from knowing that, as a queer person who is a citizen of a country with antigay law, if I am imprisoned or killed tomorrow, that will be the moment straight people from all over the world finally issue statements. These statements will be issued as if I did not exist before my final breath.

This is why I am no longer talking to straight people about homophobia. They do not see the insidious, commonplace destruction. They do not see the years of silence, of fear, of being taught to despise yourself before you even have the words to understand who you are. They do not see the exhaustion of surviving in a world that insists your existence is a debate. They only see us when it is too late.

But I am still here.

Like every queer adult, I am a legend of survival.

The Visa farce

The South African government���s rush to clear visa applications has led to mass rejections, bureaucratic chaos, and an overloaded appeals system���leaving thousands in limbo.

O.R. Tambo international arrivals terminal. Image �� Colin M. Thompson via Shutterstock.

On December 12, 2024, the new South African Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Leon��Schreiber, decided to throw a Christmas party. Sporting a Santa hat and surrounded by trees and tinsel, he danced his cares away with the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) team responsible for processing visa applications. This farcical display was��captured on Twitter, where Schreiber announced that ���we have processed an incredible 261,845 applications and will hit 94% backlog eradication by year-end.��� This claim was still pinned atop the Minister���s Twitter profile in late January this year.��

This online announcement was met with a rapturous reception in some circles. Many people were quick to offer their congratulations, and to endorse the Minister���s further claim that there had been a ���year��of inspiring progress at Home Affairs… under the GNU in action!��� ��

I’d love to live in a new and better world where Home Affairs actually works, but I am here to report that Schreiber is more interested in papering over problems than fixing them. The Minister did not create these problems (looking at both ANC cadres and white supremacists here), but he is now pretending that he has transformed one of the worst-performing areas of his portfolio in only six months.��

The rot at Home Affairs is deep, yet a 36-year-old white academic with no previous governing experience is apparently turning things around at the speed of light. Whenever something sounds too good to be true, it is always a good idea to check the fine print. And once we look closer it becomes clear Home Affairs hasn���t ended the visa backlog. Instead, it has transferred a large portion of the backlog to the appeals system by rejecting applicants indiscriminately. Some people have finally got their visas after months and even years of waiting, but far too many mistakes have been made. There are real downsides to turning the DHA visa processing backlog into a speed run. Getting applications out the door quickly has become more important than ensuring they are correctly and fairly decided.��

This is where I call bullshit. I have a specific understanding of the term in mind, which comes from a famous 2005 book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt:

The bullshitter … is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.��He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

This is the new Minister of Home Affairs. Schreiber has been making bold claims about visa backlogs, but these claims are bullshit. Schreiber���s figure of 94% backlog eradication is not a real measure of progress, but a Santa-themed public relations stunt.

In his celebratory Tweet, the Minister observed that ���our team is working so fast that we are struggling to keep up with printing and issuing outcomes.��� This sounds great if you aren’t paying attention, but if the DHA visa backlog team is ���working so fast��� that the printer can’t keep up, then how much time and effort are they putting into ensuring they get things right?����

Let���s imagine two different scenarios. In the first scenario, Home Affairs staff worked at light speed processing visa applications, yet they still managed to ensure that this increased speed did not��affect the overall quality of their work product. This would be worth throwing a Christmas party over. In the second scenario, Home Affairs staff worked at light speed, yet this speed was only possible because they decided that the easiest course of action was to reject large numbers of visa applications without bothering to carefully read or evaluate them. In this scenario, the very same party becomes a cruel joke. Everyone is still dancing, yet huge numbers of visa applicants end up having a shitty Christmas because they and/or their loved ones have been incorrectly rejected. Clearing the visa backlog isn’t worthy of celebration if you cleared the backlog via indiscriminate rejections.

Most people think that visa applications involve people who are waiting to enter South Africa. So applicants are assumed to be sitting at home for news that they can finally make a trip. This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but large numbers of applicants are already living in South Africa. They need visas so they can study a new course at university, or to ensure that their children born in South Africa also have visas, or so they can continue working in their existing positions. These are frequently people holding professional jobs, such as engineers, teachers, and medics. Being incorrectly rejected hits hard when you are living in South Africa. You get a letter saying that you have to leave the country within 10 working days or lodge an appeal.

A broken system, a cruel joke

Schreiber���s Tweet about processing 94% of applications also declared that ���only mopping up and appeals��� remained outstanding. This sounds great in theory, but there are currently fundamental problems with the appeals system. Schreiber knows about these problems, but he is hoping that no one else mentions them.��

Rejected visa applications tend to be appealed by people already living in South Africa They have lives, homes, and families that they are unable to leave at 10 days��� notice, so they put on a brave face, pay even more money, and run the Home Affairs gauntlet one more time to lodge their appeals (and then wait months praying that they don���t get rejected again).��

Everyone who appeals is required to submit their paperwork within 10 working days. This in turn requires that applicants can book appointments at the VFS offices where their appeals have to be formally lodged.����By late 2024 many more people were trying to appeal than the VFS system could handle within the statutory 10-day window. Schreiber was fully aware that this was happening because in late November, two weeks before his public Christmas party, he quietly issued a directive that relaxed the conditions under which people could submit their appeals.��

This directive is entitled ���Temporary Concession Relating to Applications for Appeal or Review ������ It is dated November 28, 2024, but it doesn���t appear to be listed on the DHA website (the link above goes to the website of a law firm based in Cape Town). And it most definitely hasn���t been Tweeted out by Schreiber or his crack PR team. On November 28, the Minister was instead Tweeting about technology as a ���force multiplier.���

Schreiber���s directive on appeals notes that ���It has come to the attention of the Department of Home Affairs (the “Department”) that appellants … have been experiencing problems with getting booking slots to submit their applications timeously.��� Let me translate this into simpler English: people who were trying to appeal rejections were physically unable to lodge their appeals on time because there were no bookings available at VFS offices due to the massive volume of people who were trying to lodge their appeals.��

Schreiber���s solution to this problem, which he almost certainly created by prioritizing speed over everything else, has been to temporarily relax the 10-day window for appeals submission. Imagine being rejected incorrectly, and then frantically trying to find an available VFS slot to book a time to appeal and then finding nothing available within 10 days. Rejected visa applicants with immigration lawyers got the memo, since Schreiber���s directive was circulated behind the scenes, but applicants without lawyers were left in the dark. The Minister could have informed applicants that they could now submit their appeals until March 2025 as long as they paid for a booking, but he decided not to share this essential information publicly because this information would make him look bad.��

This is what is colloquially known as an asshole move.��

So here is the real story behind the visa backlog ���success story.��� Schreiber effectively broke the appeals system by overloading it with people who were indiscriminately rejected by Home Affairs. He wasn���t able to ramp up capacity to handle the higher volume of appeals that were coming from rejected visa applicants who were already based in South Africa (who wants to work extra with Christmas coming up?), so he instead decided to quietly punt his self-created appeals backlog to the New Year. People still had to pay for VFS bookings, but actual booking slots became so hard to get (unless you can bribe someone at VFS, so slots open up at short notice) that the actual process of lodging appeals got pushed back to January��� or February��� or even March 2025. Everyone involved in processing visas and appeals got to have their holidays without the hassle of having to think about all the traumatized people who had been rejected and were now scrambling to lodge appeals.

Surviving Home Affairs

I write this piece as a veteran of the Home Affairs application process over many years. This is why I am writing under the name of Josef K, the main character of Kafka���s famous book on bureaucracy as pathology. My Home Affairs ordeal may not be over, so I���d like to avoid being on their radar when/if applications for visas or other documentation come up in the future��

I’ve been incorrectly rejected by Home Affairs more than once. I know how the appeal system works because I���ve had to appeal. So, I also know just how stressful that 10-day appeal period can become. I have friends who have been rejected and have also appealed. We share notes about things that might help get visa applications over the line.. I���ve been asked if I want to join class action lawsuits to compel DHA to process visa applications that have been stuck in limbo for years. Lawyers make a fortune off Home Affairs, yet they earn their money by battling insanity every day. I know of cases where parents have applied for visas for their young children, and one child has been given a visa while another child, with exactly the same circumstances, has been rejected.��

This is why the trial of Josef K comes to mind. Josef runs afoul of the state for unspecified reasons and increasingly struggles under the weight of the insane and unknowable procedures associated with his case (before finally being executed, but I���d prefer not to dwell on that). Josef���s trial speaks to the pathologies of DHA and its private VFS partner. I know what it feels like to wait month after month wondering if my application has finally been processed, and then the strain that follows when news finally comes that your outcome is ready. Every step in this process is traumatic. I’ve sat in lines at VFS offices waiting for my number to be called, watching as people ahead in the line discover their fate. There is a sealed envelope that contains either a visa or a rejection letter, and you don’t know which until it gets opened. VFS offices are places of acute sadness and stress. Everyone who is waiting in line to learn their fate knows that the process can be a crapshoot. Home Affairs doesn’t correctly or consistently apply its legal regulations, so there is always a chance that your application might be rejected no matter how strong your case might be.

I’ve had to appeal rejections several times, and on every occasion, my appeal has included using a yellow highlighter to draw attention to key passages within applicable legislation and hoping that the official who gets my appeal will read and apply the relevant legal criteria. An appeal to Home Affairs does not involve worrying that you don’t meet their criteria, but instead worrying that the person looking at the appeal doesn���t understand the criteria. So far, all of my appeals have been successful, but they are also hugely frustrating and traumatic.��

The Minister is well aware that visa applications are a massive problem. He has been making speech after speech about visas since he took up his portfolio in June 2024. In September 2024 he issued a press release which was entitled ���Home Affairs delivers on GNU mandate with cutting-edge visa reform to combat corruption and create jobs��� (you can definitely find this one on the DHA website). This press release cited research from the Reserve Bank and the International Food Policy Research that found that ���an enhanced Visa regime can create seven new jobs for every additional skilled worker attracted into the economy.��� Nearly any economist will tell you that skilled migration is a net positive for the receiving country, so this isn���t exactly new information, yet the Minister has also gravely underestimated the scale of the bureaucratic challenge he is facing.��You are not going to attract skilled migrants if Home Affairs officials keep hitting the reject button over and over again for no good reason.��

The top management of DHA may have changed, but the vast majority of staff have not. These are people who cut their teeth in a department marked by cruelty, corruption, impunity, and incompetence. Schreiber naively tasked his staff with the speedy resolution of the backlog, and they quite predictably responded to his instruction by rejecting people wholesale. The Minister could have come clean and publicly tried to resolve this mess, but he has stuck his fingers in his ears pretending it doesn���t exist.��

We are all in this together

None of these issues with Home Affairs are new. People living in South Africa don’t agree on much these days, but pretty much everyone agrees that DHA has been a catastrophic mess for years. Their systems are antiques come to life, and they routinely break down. Indifference and incompetence are so common that people report the rare occasions when things worked out as they were supposed to as landmark events (gather ���round dear friends for the fantastical story of how getting a birth certificate for my newborn baby was fast and straightforward). Spending four to five hours in line at a DHA office and finally getting what you came for is a victory against the odds. For many years the South African news platform Daily Maverick has organized their DHA reporting under the heading “Hell Affairs.”

If Home Affairs staff are rejecting visa applicants wholesale without following legal criteria then there need to be consequences for getting things wrong. The most depressing feature of Home Affairs is the near-total lack of accountability when things go wrong��� and wrong ��� and wrong yet again. And this isn���t just visas. For years now DHA has been wilfully ignoring court orders. In 2023 it emerged that ���More than a quarter of a million children under the age of 15 are undocumented in South Africa as the Department of Home Affairs has yet to issue them with birth certificates.���

Everyone living in or visiting South Africa needs Home Affairs to work as it is supposed to. This is one thing that should bring us all together irrespective of other differences. Fixing visa applications requires competent staff and professional and accountable systems. Fixing the system for issuing birth certificates requires the same thing. Having administrative systems that don���t constantly break down benefits everyone who is applying for essential documentation; visas and passports, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses etc. Having sufficient administrative capacity and systems to actually process applications both quickly and fairly would be worth throwing a party over.��

Bullshiting on Twitter about ���fixing��� the Home Affairs backlog is not going to cut it.��

Racism, rejection and the limits of solidarity

South Africans attempting to work, travel, or study overseas routinely face horrendous bureaucratic challenges which once again bring Josef K���s trials to mind. A South African citizen seeking to travel to Canada as a short-term visitor can expect to wait 326 days for their visa to be processed (while Canadians can visit South Africa with no visa requirement). And many countries in the North are just as good as Home Affairs at rejecting applicants wholesale. South Africans can spend thousands on flight bookings, and more on visa applications, and get rejected. In 2018 it was reported that the Canadian government had rejected a staggering 600,000 visa applications, and there is ample evidence to suggest that things have gotten worse and not better in recent years.��

This isn���t just South Africa, but the African continent as a whole. In one famous example from 2017, an annual African trade summit held in Los Angeles featured no African delegates since at least 60 delegates from the continent had been denied visas. A 2019 Royal Society report on African visa applications to the United Kingdom calculated that the UK rejects visa applications from Africans at twice their global average, with racist algorithms determining that it is ���too risky��� for many African applicants to travel to the UK for even short trips. The Royal Society report found that the UK Home Office was behaving in very similar ways to the South African Department of Home Affairs, with African applicants to the UK experiencing ���irrational decisions that overlooked some of the information provided with a visa application, divergent decisions taken in effectively identical cases, and different decisions taken when an identical re-application was made.���

So wholesale visa rejections are not a uniquely South African problem, but a global condition. This has come to be increasingly described as ���visa apartheid,��� with African citizens being subject to especially onerous conditions for the usual racist reasons.

In December 2024, the journal Nature published an article by Gilbert Nakweya on ���how visa rejections are stalling Africa’s health research.��� This piece included numerous examples of African scientists who couldn���t attend conferences in Canada and Germany ���due to visa delays and denials���. One Kenyan medical expert, Marie-Claire Wangari, recounted how she and other colleagues had been repeatedly rejected for meetings in Montenegro and Finland.��

There is absolutely no doubt that these rejections are fundamentally unjust. However, this is not the end of the article. As Nakweya goes on to observe ���While visa denials for Africans are common in the Global North, they also happen in Africa.�����

Visas for Nigerians were recently a major source of political controversy in South Africa. In early December 2024, there was yet another call for a #NationalShutdown targeting President Cyril Ramphosa, who was falsely accused of ���opening the borders��� to Nigerians by Operation Dudula, their xenophobic fellow travelers, and ���Guptabots.��� These allegations were easily debunked, since they had their origins in minor technical changes in how Nigerian visas were being processed, but they are still emblematic of the current state of politics in South Africa, which a xenophobic race to the bottom has marked.��

Migrants and travelers are routinely divided into ���good��� and ���bad��� categories. ���Good��� migrants are said to follow the rules, which usually include applying through the ���front door��� for visas. The figure of the ���good��� migrant is frequently used as a cudgel to attack ���bad��� migrants, who are negatively defined as deviant and threatening rule-breakers. However, the recent history of racism and xenophobia has demonstrated that having a valid visa does not provide protection against exclusion and violence. When President Donald Trump made his infamous remarks about how Haitians were ���eating the dogs,��� it didn���t matter that the Haitians in question had valid visas to work in Ohio. In theory, they should have been treated as ���good��� migrants who followed the rules, but the racist and xenophobic tide is now so strong that many Americans have lost patience with these kinds of legal distinctions. Adherents to racist conspiracy theories regarding the ���Great Replacement��� do not care whether non-white migrant ���invaders��� have traveled either legally or illegally.

This is equally true of South Africans. People who want to #PutSouthAfricaFirst are not going to be upset that Home Affairs has been rejecting visa applications indiscriminately. They will instead treat this as yet another opportunity to register their distress that even more ���Kwere Kwere��� haven���t been rejected, dehumanized, deported or even destroyed. In recent months the South African government oversaw the horrifying and avoidable deaths of informal miners at Stilfontein, yet most South Africans remain indifferent to the bonds of solidarity, particularly in cases where undocumented African migrants are involved.��

The fight for a just system

On January 15 this year, Minister Schreiber was yet again celebrating on Twitter. This time he was trumpeting his apparent contribution to the improved ranking of South Africa on the Henley ���Passport Power��� Index, where he proudly announced that the ���Green Mamba has broken into the top 50 for the first time in a decade, improving from 53rd in the world in 2024 to 48th in 2025.��� Unlike the ongoing problems with the appeals system and VFS bookings, this news was also deemed important enough for an official media statement.��

Passport power attempts to calculate how easy it is for passport holders to travel internationally. This minor jump in a private corporate index doesn���t feel particularly noteworthy, but it is still worth briefly reflecting upon the underlying logic beyond ���passport power���. Crucially, the ���power��� of the South African passport is not dependent on how the South African government treats people seeking to enter its territory but is instead a much more limited measure of how easily South Africans can travel to other countries.��

I���d like to think that passport fairness is a much more attractive measure than passport power. Shifting the focus to fairness means thinking about both 1) whether the restrictions imposed upon people seeking to travel are just and reasonable, and 2) whether the criteria used to assess visa applications have been correctly and consistently applied.��

Getting visa applications processed quickly is undoubtedly useful, but the most important measure of any migration system should be whether or not it deals with applicants fairly. This isn���t going to be easy, but it is the only way to build back in solidarity.��

FIFA’s double standards

While FIFA swiftly banned Russia from competition, it continues to delay action on Israel���revealing the politics behind football���s so-called neutrality.

Israel football team supporter at the 2023 Euros. Image �� Seba Tataru via Shutterstock.

In the background of a brutal genocide, Palestine���s national team has achieved historic success. Last January, the team advanced to the knockout stages of the Asian Cup before narrowly losing to eventual champions Qatar. Al-Fida���i also advanced to the latter stages of the Asian World Cup qualification and has a chance of securing a maiden World Cup appearance in 2026.��

The squad is loaded with stars. Wessam Abou Ali is the best striker that Egypt���s Al-Ahly have had in a generation. Oday Dabbagh has blazed a trail for Palestinian talent in Europe, scoring goals in the Portuguese and Belgian top flights. The players��� success is even more remarkable given the death toll in Gaza.

Mention of Palestine and FIFA���s silence over Gaza stands in stark contrast to what transpired in the aftermath of Russia���s invasion of Ukraine. Russia was suspended from UEFA and FIFA less than a week after the invasion. When that action was taken, many wondered why Israel was not sanctioned in the same manner for illegally occupying Palestine and parts of Lebanon and Syria.��

After the events of October 7, 2023, demands that Israel be kicked out of football grew louder. At the UEFA Congress in February 2024, UEFA Secretary General Theodore Theodoridis doubled down, rejecting any comparison with Russia���s invasion of Ukraine and stating that they were ���two completely different situations.���

For its part, FIFA did its utmost to avoid taking a position. In February 2024, The West Asian Football Federation (WAFF), in tandem with the Palestine Football Association (PFA), decided to launch an appeal for sanctions to be passed on Israel. This was due to be discussed at the FIFA Congress in Bangkok last May.��

In Bangkok, FIFA President Gianni Infantino told the 211-member delegation in his address that ���football can only do so much,��� a stark departure from his usual projection of power, and promised that the FIFA Council would ���study the matter��� and take a decision on July 20.��

When that deadline arrived, FIFA falsely claimed that both parties asked for more time to submit evidence and provided a new deadline of August 31. This allowed Israel���s U23 team to compete at the Paris Olympics. When the August deadline passed, FIFA stated that it had received the independent legal assessment and that ���this assessment will be sent to the FIFA Council to review in order that the subject can be discussed at its next meeting, which will take place in October.��� On October 3, FIFA finally took a decision to ���investigate.���

With four expired deadlines in the ledge the message is clear. FIFA would rather not deal with this problem. This is not the first time the PFA has filed complaints against Israel in the halls of FIFA. Its initial attempt to suspend Israel started over a decade ago in the aftermath of the 2014 war on Gaza, which left over 2,000 dead���the majority of whom were civilians���and destroyed 30 sporting installations.��

The campaign to kick Israel out of FIFA has its origins within the grassroots boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign organized to try and stop UEFA from staging the 2013 U21 European Championships in Israel. While the campaign was unsuccessful, it did manage to create enough of a stir that UEFA decided not to select Jerusalem as a Euro 2020 host city.��

The publicity generated by the campaign also caught the interest of PFA President Jibril Rajoub, who began to co-opt its messaging.��

Rajoub, who was head of the Palestinian Authority���s Preventive Security and briefly served as Yasser Arafat���s national security adviser, took control of the PFA in 2007. It was something of an unceremonious exile from the political spotlight, but the general (who has since been promoted to field marshal) figured out how to use his platform to his advantage. The 71-year-old Rajoub is one of a dozen candidates angling to succeed the 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority.��

The PFA���s first attempt to kick Israel out of FIFA represented their best chance at success. Decisions on suspension used to be taken by the FIFA Congress, and a suspension could have been achieved in 2015 with a three-quarters majority vote. After succeeding in bringing the measure to a vote, Rajoub withdrew the motion (a watered-down amended version passed 165���18). ���Palestine has not withdrawn its application completely, but merely suspended it,��� Rajoub said at the conclusion of the 2015 FIFA Congress.��

A few years later, Palestine narrowed down its demands and tried to appeal to FIFA to get settlement clubs banned from playing in the Israeli league. This would have followed the precedent set by Crimean clubs, who were barred from playing in the Russian Football pyramid in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation of the peninsula.

FIFA hemmed and hawed for years, sent FIFA anti-racism advisor Tokyo Sexwale to investigate, and then decided they would not intervene. Rajoub and the PFA appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and lost���and were required to pay FIFA���s legal fees as a result.

After three failed bids, the pursuit of an Israel ban is hampered by issues of personnel and tactics.����

Rajoub and the PFA apparatus are ineffective messengers who are not skilled enough to lobby their peers. In fact, ahead of last year���s FIFA Congress in Bangkok, Rajoub was a late arrival, foregoing important face time with stakeholders to travel to Dublin to watch Palestine take on Bohemian FC���s women���s team in an exhibition match.��

Tactically, Palestine is using ideas and strategies from the 1960s and 1970s, when the CAF and the AFC were successful in banning South Africa, Rhodesia, and Israel from football competition.��

In that era, newly independent nations were united by their shared anticolonial experience. That unity was the driver that delivered several gains for the African continent, including more representation at World Cups and increased revenue sharing.��

Inspired by the success of the CAF, Kuwaiti FA President Ahmed Al-Sadoun launched a plan to boot Israel from the Asian Football Confederation. To do so, he increased the membership of Arab teams in the organization from two���Lebanon and Kuwait���to nine. Al-Sadoun then used this bloc to convince the Asian Football Confederation to move the 1972 Asian Cup finals from Israel to Thailand. Two years later in Kuala Lumpur, Al-Sadoun was successful in freezing Israel���s membership, because it was judged that football was no longer being nurtured in the territories under its jurisdiction. The vote passed 17���13 with six abstentions.

In 1978, Yugoslavia put forth a proposal for Israel to join UEFA. In an attempt to find support, Israel lobbied several Asian nations in Bangkok to vote in favor. Al-Sadoun���s successor, the late Fahad Al-Ahmed, interceded, flying from the FIFA Congress in Buenos Aires to Bangkok to counter Israel���s efforts, which led to the motion failing days later. Israel would remain unattached to a confederation until 1994 as a result of Kuwait���s efforts.

Half a century later, these types of actions are less likely to take place inside the halls of FIFA, because the organization has changed. Until the late 1970s, FIFA was an amateur organization whose revenues came nearly exclusively from ticketing. Decision-making was more democratic and decided by the Congress in a one nation���one vote system. Today, FIFA rakes in mountains of cash from commercial sponsorships and merchandising. Power has become concentrated at the top, with the FIFA Council, appointed by the FIFA president, deciding on matters of importance.��

Gianni Infantino, like his predecessor, has been keen to keep politics out of the game. With football yielding untold cultural and commercial power, it pays to keep the status quo. Any act of subversion that goes against the established political order risks upsetting commercial and state sponsors, which in turn hurts FIFA���s top brass.

Commercialization of the game has, however, given more power to players and fans, and it is with those stakeholders that supporters of Palestine should engage. During the second half of the Champions League playoff encounter between Celtic and Bayern Munich, fans unfurled a banner demanding UEFA and FIFA ���Show Israel the Red Card��� and held up red placards. The campaign caught on in the rest of Europe with fans in Ireland, Spain, France, and Morocco taking up the message the following weekend.��

Not a single municipality in Belgium agreed to host the Israeli team in September���s UEFA Nations League encounter, and the match was moved to neutral territory. In cities that decided to host the Israeli national team or Israeli clubs, the hooliganism of its fans in Amsterdam and Paris led to serious doubts over how to stage future matches without causing an undue burden on the taxpayer.��

Finally, many forget that the powers that be did not initially want to ban Russia from international football. Gianni Infantino first floated an idea inspired by the IOC���that Russia would be allowed to compete in World Cup qualification in unmarked jerseys, hosting games on neutral territory without raising their flag or playing their anthem.��

Robert Lewandowski, Poland���s captain, was the first to refuse to play against Russia. He convinced his teammates, along with the captains of Czechia and Sweden, to back him. The adamant position of the players forced FIFA to backtrack less than a week after its initial IOC-style decision. The players continued to stand firm, vowing to withdraw from World Cup qualification even if a Russian appeal to CAS proved successful.��

Israel has been drawn in Group I for 2026 World Cup qualification alongside Norway, who have been a thorn in the side of FIFA on the issue of human rights. Last month, Norwegian champions Bod��/Glimt donated all ticket revenue from their Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv to Gaza.��

���It was important for us to conduct the match in a way that respected everyone���s right to express themselves, while ensuring the safety of players, supporters and the rest of the city,��� The club said in a statement. ���We will donate all the ordinary ticket revenues from the home game against Maccabi Tel Aviv to the Red Cross and earmark aid work in the Gaza Strip. This amounts to NOK 735,000���and is donated by all of us.���

These actions follow generally supportive statements by NFF President Lise Klaveness, who directly referenced Gaza following the World Cup draw:�� ���None of us can be indifferent to the disproportionate attacks that Israel has subjected the civilian population in Gaza to over time.���

While Norway���s sporting authorities have stopped short of declaring a boycott, there seems to be a window for their players to be approached as torchbearers of the cause. If the PFA were smart they would change tack and try to influence the likes of Erling Haaland, Martin ��degaard, and Alexander S��rloth, as opposed to Gianni Infantino and his entourage of old men in navy suits.

New route for old exploitation

A US-backed infrastructure project in the DRC is framed as development, but history suggests it���s just another pipeline for foreign powers to profit from Congo���s riches.

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash.

Few relationships are as fraught with complexity and moral ambiguity as those between the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Recently, former US President Joe Biden visited Angola to push the Lobito Corridor infrastructure project, which will ship minerals from the DRC out to the world. It���s a slick, modern initiative. Yet it is also a reminder of a much darker history of exploitation that stretches back more than a century.

The Lobito Corridor is all about minerals like cobalt and copper���essential for electric cars and smartphones, but at a cost. The idea is to make it easier for the DRC���s resources to reach global markets, with the US backing the project to counter China���s growing influence in Africa. Yet dig a little deeper, and it���s hard not to see shades of the same old story. Despite being framed as a development initiative, the Lobito Corridor risks perpetuating Congo���s resource curse, where its wealth serves foreign powers rather than its own people.

To comprehend these contemporary issues, one must journey back to the Berlin Conference of 1884���85, European powers and the US legitimized Leopold���s International Association of the Congo as government of the newly created Congo Free State.

Under Leopold���s brutal regime, the Congolese endured mutilation, rape, and murder for profit from ivory and rubber���an estimated 10 million Congolese died. The notorious Force Publique enforced rubber quotas with brutal punishments���floggings, mutilations, execution. Women were taken as hostages, children kidnapped, and the unproductive had their hands severed, which became a macabre currency to prove punishment.��

American missionaries and activists, notably George Washington Williams, were among the first to decry these atrocities. Williams���s Open Letter to Leopold in 1890 was a scathing indictment, detailing the abuses and calling for intervention.��

Yet his appeal was met with silence until the rise of a transatlantic reform movement. Through the formation of the American and British Congo Reform Associations in 1904, activists such as author Mark Twain, British journalist E. D. Morel, and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, galvanized public opinion and pressured the US and British governments to act. Morel, in horror, declared, ���I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers, with a King for a croniman.��� In 1908, the Congo Free State was annexed by the Belgian government, though still under colonial rule.

To combat this activism, Henry Wellington Wack, one of Leopold���s American operatives, attempted to co-opt American capital to neutralize opposition. Financier J.P. Morgan met with Leopold, while industry magnates Thomas Fortune Ryan and John D. Rockefeller Jr. gathered in Brussels. By 1906, Ryan and Daniel Guggenheim���s American Congo Company secured a 99-year lease to exploit rubber over 4,000 square miles, with an option for 2,000 more. Not content with merely exploiting the surface, American financiers orchestrated the creation of the Soci��t�� internationale foresti��re et mini��re du Congo, or Formini��re, securing a monopoly on mining activities across a district encompassing half the Congo Free State. In true kleptocratic fashion, Leopold and his Belgian cronies ensured they received substantial cuts from every concession and option.��

These business dealings were exposed in William Randolph Hearst���s New York American in 1906, revealing a cabal of American financiers: Ryan, James D. Stillman, Edward B. Aldrich, the Guggenheims, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. They had transformed into de facto overseers of Leopold���s empire, masking raw greed under the guise of civilization and commerce.

Today, Congo���s natural wealth continues to attract morally dubious figures. Enter Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose ���opaque��� mining deals siphoned over $1.36 billion from Congo���s coffers, according to the US Treasury. Though sanctioned, his case reflects a deeper pattern���one where foreign powers sanitize corruption without addressing structural exploitation.

Which brings us to the Lobito Corridor, a project promising regional prosperity while conveniently redirecting Africa���s resources into global supply chains. On paper, it���s a practical rail and port network linking the DRC and Zambia to Angola���s coast. In reality, it echoes the past���another chapter in the long tradition of Congo���s riches benefiting foreign powers.

The role of the US is framed as a counter to China���s influence in Africa, and will likely create jobs and boost trade. However, it is also a case of plus ��a change, plus c���est la m��me chose���a century on, the story of Congo���s exploitation is still the same.��

Biden���s visit marked the first by a US president to Africa since 2015, yet uncertainty looms over Donald Trump���s second term. Would flagship projects like the Lobito Corridor survive, or would an America First agenda deprioritize Africa?

Without listening to Congolese voices and addressing entrenched inequalities, the Lobito Corridor risks becoming just another gilded pipeline of exploitation, tracing its origins back to the blood-soaked jungles of the Congo Free State���and the ambitions of a Belgian king and American business interests.

The forgotten women of slave revolts

Rebecca Hall���s "Wake" uncovers the hidden history of African women warriors and their role in resisting the transatlantic slave trade.

Screenshot from Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

In her graphic novel Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, scholar and activist Rebecca Hall shifts the narrative of the transatlantic slave trade, highlighting the power of women during these times. Hall argues that the truth about women-led resistance to the slave trade has been hidden at the whims of the patriarchy. Examining the patriarchy not just in Western culture but all over the world, one finds similarities across cultures: Men are seen as the protectors, the carriers of strength, and, when necessary, the fighters. Women, meanwhile, are viewed as the nurturers, and although they are not always directly called so, they are often considered weaker than men. Hall maintains that the true history is filled with women warriors who had significant roles during slave revolts and in African tribes.

For example, Hall writes about the Agojie of the Dahomey, renowned female warriors who were elite soldiers in a highly militarized society. According to Hall, these women were intelligent, aware of the dangers of war and the sacrifices required, and wielded power. Hall writes, ���In Dahomey, the Agojie were trained from a young age to wield weapons and lead in battle���a role that combined both physical strength and political acumen.��� The Agojie fought for independence against Europeans who sought to conquer tribes. Uniquely, these warriors fought not only for their community members but also for those from neighboring tribes, as they knew that European slavery brought harm to all Africans. The Agojie were integral to the decision-making process and the strength of the ancient African kingdom. Their leadership and intelligence made them equipped for prominent political roles.

While in recent years there has been more representation of the role of female warriors in African society���for example, in movies such as The Woman King, which depicts this all-female military protecting the African kingdom of Dahomey���previously, this history had been hidden from mainstream narratives about Africa, as Western societies sought to suppress the true strength and capabilities of African nations and tribes. European and other Western nations have frequently pushed the notion that before slavery Africans belonged to primitive communities and needed European strength to guide them to a better way of life. Conversely, Africans lived in complex societies led by warriors, kings, and queens.��

Hall shows how women continued to appear in powerful positions in African society. In these roles, they made important historical contributions and possibly attained skills that could have influenced their involvement in slave revolts. Hall acknowledges that slave revolts were more common than traditionally acknowledged, oftentimes spontaneous.��

While the agency of Black individuals has been continuously downplayed in studies on slave revolts, the impact of women in particular is further ignored in dominant narratives. Women oftentimes led the charge in rebellions on slave ships. They were often underestimated by their oppressors, being placed near the weaponry, as male slave traders didn���t fear resistance from women and children on board. Despite this, women chose strength above all. Hall notes a powerful observation���one that is often ignored in studies of African slavery. There are so many differences between slave revolts that, many times, historians fail to notice similarities. But one pattern was clear to Hall: Revolts were more likely to occur when women were on the ship and had the capability to act in revolt. Women were the fighters.

Women oftentimes were subjected to harsher realities on slave ships, including sexual violence and other forms of abuse, making their desire for freedom even stronger. Their need to think not only of their survival but the survival of their children or their community led to organizing and taking the initiative, emphasizing these women���s mindsets not just as slaves but as individuals, mothers, and daughters.��

The history that Hall uncovers highlights the links between patriarchy and racism. She combines critical race theory, feminist thought, and the limited research done on the Atlantic slave trade. Her research goes against the understanding that Africans not only sold themselves but also accepted the atrocities that came from European and Western colonization. However, while Hall���s novel does a great job bringing together research, history, and stories that are too often untold, the setup of the novel���mainly filled with pictures, without much text���sometimes limits her ability to go in depth into the research she conducted. While she���s able to detail her personal feelings and experiences, her analysis as a historian fails to come through fully and her critique of women not being given a voice feels incomplete, leaving readers hungry for more.

With movies such as The Woman King or Black Panther that depict Africans as warriors and wielders of strength, we must continue to ask ourselves whether this modern retelling of history is done by those profiting from the stories and voices of Black people or if it is done in a way to finally tell the untold stories of African and African diasporic people. With political leaders continuing to crack down on marginalized education, such as critical race theory, and the true atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade, stories like these become more important than ever to detail the true strength of the survivors.

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and illustrated by Hugo Mart��nez (2021), is available from Simon & Schuster.

An Afro-Brazilian Christmas in Lagos

In the heart of Lagos lies a vibrant neighborhood known as Popo Aguda, or the Brazilian

Is there an alternative in Germany?

As the far right surges and the center crumbles, can Germany���s left offer something different���or will reactionary forces set the agenda? Reichstag building, German parliament. Image �� Piotr Piatrouski via Shutterstock.

Germany���s recent elections marked a turning point in the country���s political landscape. While the center-right CDU has reclaimed power, the far-right Alternative f��r Deutschland (AfD) has achieved its strongest result yet, consolidating its influence, particularly in former East Germany. The left, long in decline, has shown signs of revival, but faces an uphill battle in a political landscape increasingly defined by economic stagnation, right-wing populism, and geopolitical uncertainty.

As Europe���s largest economy and political anchor, Germany���s trajectory will have consequences far beyond its borders. The AfD���s surge reflects broader patterns across Europe, where the far right has capitalized on economic discontent, migration anxieties, and the failures of centrist parties to offer meaningful alternatives. At the same time, Die Linke���s unexpected resurgence suggests that, despite years of decline, there remains space for a left-wing alternative���if it can navigate the contradictions of the moment.

The stakes are high. Germany remains in economic stagnation, with its vaunted industrial model under strain from global competition, energy crises, and domestic policy gridlock. Politically, tensions within the ruling class are sharpening, particularly over how to balance austerity with the need for public investment, and how to position Germany amid shifting geopolitical fault lines���from the war in Ukraine to growing transatlantic uncertainty with the return of Trump. Meanwhile, the establishment consensus around unconditional support for Israel is facing its first real cracks, as shifting public sentiment challenges Germany���s rigid political orthodoxy on the issue.

In this conversation, Africa Is a Country editor William Shoki speaks with Loren Balhorn, editor-in-chief of Jacobin���s German-language edition, to unpack the election results, the economic and political dynamics fueling the rise of the far right, and the challenges facing Germany���s left-wing forces, particularly Die Linke. They discuss how migration has become a central flashpoint, why the AfD has been so successful in positioning itself as the only real opposition, and whether Die Linke���s unexpected electoral rebound offers a road map for the left.

William Shoki

The February 23 election produced some interesting results. The CDU has returned to power, while the far-right AfD secured its best-ever election result. How should we interpret this shift? Is it part of a broader rightward turn in European politics, or are domestic factors driving this change?

Loren Balhorn

Well, there���s definitely a European context to this shift. That much is obvious. Whether we���re talking about France, Italy, or even Spain and Portugal���though they might be a bit behind the trend���there���s been a general strengthening of far-right parties across Western and Eastern Europe for the better part of a decade. In many ways, Germany had been lagging behind.

In the last election, four years ago, the AfD got around 10 percent of the vote, whereas parties like the National Rally in France were already nearing 20 percent. So, in a sense, Germany was slow to catch up. You could see Sunday���s election as a kind of normalization or ���Europeanization��� of German politics.

At the same time, there are clearly specific domestic factors at play. If we look at where the AfD performed best, it was particularly strong in former East Germany, where the party got well over 40 percent. If you look at a map of electoral districts, the borders of former East Germany are still clearly visible���almost every constituency there voted for the AfD, whereas that wasn���t the case anywhere in western Germany.

This reflects a broader pattern: In many deindustrialized regions across Europe and North America, we���ve seen a similar drift towards right-wing populism. Think of the Rust Belt in the US turning to Trump, or deindustrialized parts of the UK backing Brexit and Boris Johnson. There���s definitely a correlation.

But even in wealthier parts of Germany, the AfD made gains. Germany, overall, is a wealthy country, but if you look at a state like Baden-W��rttemberg���one of the richest in the country���the AfD still managed to get around 20 percent. So, while the rightward drift is particularly concentrated in East Germany, it���s not exclusive to it.

A combination of factors explains this: deindustrialization, a general sense of disenfranchisement and alienation, and the absence of what sociologist Steffen Mau calls the ���pro-political space.��� This is partly due to the abrupt collapse of the East German state in 1989���1990. Almost overnight, the entire system was dismantled and replaced with West German institutions. That left much looser social ties, both within communities and between individuals and the state, compared to West Germany. I think this explains a significant part of why the far right has found such fertile ground in that region.

William Shoki

And what is it about the AfD���s messaging and campaigning that resonates in East Germany, given these conditions? Why does the weakness of civil society make it vulnerable to populist, reactionary rhetoric? One might assume that, because the East was formerly communist, there would have been stronger intermediary institutions���like the party structures of the GDR. How does what you���re describing play out?

Loren Balhorn

That���s a great question, and there are a few layers to it.

On the surface, one of the contradictions in East German political attitudes is that there is widespread, genuine nostalgia for some parts of life under state socialism���the job security, the feelings of social solidarity between colleagues and neighbors, etc.��

At the same time, this sense of solidarity coexists with strong support for the AfD. That seems paradoxical, but it makes more sense when you consider the psychological and social impact of reunification.

Once again, Steffen Mau, whom I interviewed for Jacobin a few years ago, has written extensively about this. He argues that the transition of 1989���1990 was traumatic for many East Germans. People took to the streets demanding democracy, freedom of speech, and reforms to the socialist system. But very quickly, those demands were swept up into reunification���something that, while it did have majority support, was extremely abrupt. Overnight, the institutions that structured daily life in East Germany disappeared and were replaced with Western ones.

Mau describes this as something like an open wound���a deep rupture that has prevented many East Germans from fully identifying with the post-reunification democratic state. It also meant that fewer mediating institutions���like trade unions, civic associations, and political parties���took root in the East.

In the 1990s, the PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], the successor to East Germany���s ruling party, still had hundreds of thousands of members. It consistently won 15 to 30 percent of the vote in East German states and maintained a lively political culture. There were community festivals and local gatherings that, while not always explicitly political, served as outlets for popular frustration.

Voting for the ex-communists was, for many, a way to protest reunification���s social and economic consequences without supporting the far right. I don���t think East Germany has necessarily become more racist in the past 15 to 20 years. But many of the people who used to vote for the ex-communists now vote for the AfD. Perhaps their views on race and migration were never particularly progressive, but they nevertheless voted for a progressive party to express their frustration.

Over time, however, the AfD has successfully presented itself as the only real alternative to the political establishment. German politics tends to be very polite, middle-class, and���frankly���quite boring. The AfD, more than any other party, excels at using irony, sarcasm, and provocation. Sometimes, they even employ self-deprecating humor. But their main strength is in mocking the political elite and channeling public anger in ways that no other party dares to.

This perception of the AfD as the ultimate outsider has only been reinforced by the other parties��� strategy of cordoning them off. The so-called firewall���the consensus that the AfD must never be allowed to govern���has, in some ways, backfired. It has reinforced their image as the only real opposition.

And obviously, there is the polarization around migration. Beyond Germany, we see this dynamic everywhere. In the US, in South Africa���right-wing forces have successfully cemented the idea that migration is a zero-sum game, that every new migrant takes something away from native citizens. This narrative, whether true or not, has become dominant across European politics. And while the AfD was one of the first to push it, their position has now been echoed by the center right, the center left, and even figures who straddle the line between both, like Sahra Wagenknecht.

William Shoki

There���s a lot to unpack in what you just said, but I���ll start with this: Setting aside the AfD���s rhetorical strategy���which, as you���ve described, involves irreverently pushing back against the polite etiquette of the German political establishment���why has migration become such a dominant flashpoint?

You���ve already teased out some reasons, but one thing that stands out is that the region of Germany with the highest levels of anti-migrant sentiment also has comparatively lower migration rates. Maybe this is an unfair question���because this is the puzzle���but why has migration become the container for broader social anxieties in Germany? Of course, this is an international trend, so there may be little that highlights a distinctly German cause. But if you could, try to parse out why this issue has become so polarizing there.

Loren Balhorn

Well, first, I should say I���m not an expert on migration policy, so there are certainly others who could give a more detailed answer, but I think we need to go back to 2015. That was the moment when over a million refugees���primarily, but not exclusively, from Syria���entered Germany in a short period of time. For a brief moment, maybe six months or so, there was a near society-wide consensus that these people should be welcomed and accommodated. Even right-wing tabloids were running front-page stories about volunteers helping out at train stations and raising money for refugees.

But that mood started to shift. One major turning point���at least in the mainstream media narrative���was New Year���s Eve 2015���2016 in Cologne. There was a mass sexual harassment incident, largely blamed on North African immigrants. But if we look at the issue through a materialist lens, the deeper issue is that Germany in 2015 had already been experiencing austerity for over a decade. It started with labor market reforms in the early 2000s, and in 2009, the government passed a debt brake amendment to the constitution, limiting federal debt to around 0.35 percent of GDP.

For years, working-class people had been told there was no money for public services. Their local swimming pools were closing. The roofs of primary schools were caving in. Train stations were deteriorating. And then, suddenly, a million refugees arrived in Germany, and the federal government���s message was: ���We have the money to take them in.���

Now, how much the government actually spent on refugees and to what extent that money would have otherwise been spent on public services is another question. But the perception was that resources were being made available for them, while the ���native��� working class had been told, for years, that there was no money for them. This was especially pronounced in East Germany, where���despite massive infrastructure investments since 1989���1990���most towns have been steadily losing population for decades. Not just a little���millions of people have left since reunification. Many small and mid-sized cities feel depressing and desolate, and then, almost overnight, they see large groups of refugees being housed there.

Of course, we know that refugees are not being given luxurious apartments or thousands of euros in handouts���that���s a right-wing myth. But myths gain power when people feel abandoned. If you���ve spent 15 years being told there���s no money for you, and then you suddenly see an influx of government spending on refugees, it breeds resentment. That���s the root of the backlash. And opportunistically, the Christian Democrats���and increasingly even the Social Democrats���have used migration as a distraction from austerity. Instead of addressing the economic issues directly, they co-opt the far right���s argument: ���Yes, the problem is migration. Too many asylum seekers. That���s why we don���t have money for X, Y, and Z.���

Once that narrative takes hold���once it becomes political common sense���it gets amplified over and over. Every violent incident involving a migrant is blown out of proportion, reinforcing the idea that migration poses a threat to ���native��� Germans.

William Shoki

Where is the left in all of this? Starting with their electoral performance, Die Linke defied expectations. They secured close to 9 percent of the vote, broadened their appeal, particularly among young and first-time voters, and���I can���t remember the exact figures���added somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 new members in the months leading up to the election. Die Linke has historically taken a fairly progressive stance on migration. So what explains their sudden success? Is there a broader lesson to draw from their performance that could be internalized by the left in Germany and beyond, or are there more immediate and proximate factors that have influenced their resurgence?

Loren Balhorn

Well, whenever a party on the left does well, everyone interprets its victory as confirmation of their own theory or approach. We���re seeing the same thing now with Die Linke. That a party polling at 3 percent just two months ago has now jumped to 8 percent is impressive, but the notion that they suddenly have all the answers for the left is a bit over the top. A lot of their success was due to a favorable political conjuncture and, frankly, quite a lot of luck.

If you compare the campaign Die Linke ran this time to, for example, the European elections last year, when they got just 2.7 percent, the difference is striking. This time, their campaign was far more focused and class-based. In German, you might call it ���class-political������it was centered on material demands. Drawing inspiration from the Workers��� Party of Belgium, the party began conducting door-to-door surveys in the neighborhoods and constituencies where they had historically been strongest to identify the key concerns of their voters and potential voters. They zeroed in on two main issues: skyrocketing rents and the cost-of-living crisis.

Germany is a country where over half the population lives in rented accommodations, meaning that the last decade of drastic rent increases has hit working-class people especially hard���more so, I would argue, than in many other European countries where homeownership rates are higher. By narrowing their message to a few material concerns that resonated not only with their core voter base but also with broader segments of the population, Die Linke was able to reach voters more effectively and push themselves over the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. In past campaigns, they presented more of a laundry list of concerns���defending the right to asylum, showing solidarity with Ukraine, advocating for more funding for education and transportation���often to the detriment of a core message or narrative. If we look at the exit polls, it���s clear that a large portion of Die Linke���s votes came from former Green and Social Democrat voters. This shift had a lot to do with developments in the last three or four weeks before the election. Friedrich Merz, Germany���s next chancellor, took another hard right turn on migration and even accepted votes from the far right to pass a motion restricting migration. That sent a shockwave through civil society and clearly motivated about a million people to vote for Die Linke instead of the center-left parties they would usually support.

But that voter base is not stable. A lot of those people voted for Die Linke not because they have deep loyalty to the party, but to send a message to the moderate parties they typically support. They wanted to make it clear that they reject their capitulation to the right on migration and are concerned about the rise of the far right.��

Still, beggars can���t be choosers. An 8.8 percent result for a party that was essentially on its deathbed three months ago is obviously a positive development and something to build on. But a sober look at the results suggests that while Die Linke ran a strong campaign and had a good ground game, they were also lucky to be operating in a particularly favorable political moment that may not be repeated in the future. The question now is what they can do between now and 2029 to consolidate and systematically expand their voter base.

The same goes for the approximately 50,000 people who have joined the party in the past few months. These new members are overwhelmingly young, urban, and university-educated. Interestingly, a majority of them are women, which suggests there is a gendered dimension to the recent surge in support. There���s nothing wrong with living in a city, being under 30, and having a university degree, but there is a clear overrepresentation of a certain demographic in terms of who is joining the party right now. The real question is whether Die Linke can integrate these new members, train them up, and send them into communities to build the party from the ground up. Or will this influx of members push the party toward becoming something more like the Greens���an upper-middle-class, liberal-left party that primarily does politics for its own affluent voting base?

I don���t think there���s any immediate danger of that happening in the next couple of years, but across the industrialized world���whether we���re looking at Germany, the UK, or the United States���the left increasingly consists of middle-class, educated people. If we ever want to win, we need to re-anchor ourselves in the broader working class. Die Linke is still very far from achieving that, but there is more conversation within the party about how to do it than there was five or ten years ago. That seems to have changed.

William Shoki

To begin answering the question you posed, what might the party do to start the long slog of translating these electoral gains into a long-term party-building strategy that re-anchors it in a working-class constituency and working-class organizations, not least the German labor movement? And as part of this, does that involve embracing more of what you described as making the AfD more successful? I���ve seen one prominent example of this in a New York Times article about Heidi Reichinnek, who is the parliamentary co-leader of Die Linke and described as a firebrand���someone who is feisty, very popular on TikTok, and has a strong presence on social media generally. So is part of the answer to this question that Die Linke should do more of what the AfD does, at least rhetorically���not in terms of embracing anti-migrant sentiment, but adopting a political style that is more abrasive and antagonistic? What might that look like?

Loren Balhorn

For the last few years, whenever German mainstream media talked about politicians on social media, it was usually about the AfD and its runaway success on TikTok and Instagram. Six months ago, if you looked at a list of the top ten politicians in Germany with the most TikTok followers, probably seven out of ten would have been far-right figures. But in the last few months, something has clearly changed���I don���t know who they fired or hired in their social media department, but the party���s online campaign has become much more aggressive and irreverent.

That said, I think we need to be really careful with narratives that focus too much on social media. Social media is particularly useful for reaching young people and will continue to be an important outreach tool, but we have had social media for twenty years now, and for twenty years, bourgeois journalists have been telling us that social media is transforming politics. We also have twenty years of evidence showing that social media alone is not enough to transform society.

Going forward, the experience of door-to-door campaigning and conducting neighborhood surveys to identify what concerns the party���s base���then responding to those concerns���will be far more important than any TikTok strategy. That kind of approach is what could give Die Linke a real future. In my Jacobin article a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Die Linke performed very well in elections in the late 2000s and early 2010s because they were able to ride the wave of social frustration with austerity and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, there was no far-right competitor, so Die Linke was really the only protest party, attracting votes both from classical left-wing milieus and from a diffuse protest vote. Many of those voters may have held some right-wing views, but they still agreed with Die Linke enough to support them. That gave the party a parliamentary presence that bore no real relation to its actual organizational strength or its rootedness in communities, particularly in its traditional heartlands in the East.

By 2010, for example, most of Die Linke���s members were already retirees, and the party was facing what was referred to at the time as its ���biological problem������it was literally dying out in many of the places where it had been strongest over the previous two decades. For the next ten years or so, parliamentary politics dominated the party. There was still party life outside of parliament, and there were efforts to implement more of a community-organizing strategy, but overall, the rhythms and routines of parliamentary life dictated how the party did politics.��

Going forward, it will be vital for the party and the parliamentary group to work as one. That means enforcing discipline within the parliamentary group and subordinating parliamentarians to the party leadership. Enforcing some kind of discipline on the parliamentary group would be an important step in recalibrating the party���s approach to politics so that it pursues an overarching strategy that integrates parliamentary work with organizing in the workplace and on the streets.

Some important foundations for this kind of orientation were laid in the last few months, but there is by no means consensus within the party. There are still different wings, with some eager to work with the Greens and the Social Democrats as soon as the opportunity arises, while others are committed to a more oppositional line. The key question is whether a base-building approach can become the dominant one. If it does, there is plenty of space for a socialist political formation to grow in Germany. There are millions of people who struggle to pay their rent, who struggle to make ends meet, and who, at this point, often see only the AfD as an alternative. Relating to those people and bringing them into a socialist political project will be crucial.

This is especially true given the economic turbulence on the horizon. Whether it���s the crisis in the automobile industry or a potential trade war with the United States, Germany���s economy is already in recession and has been for two years. The situation will likely get worse before it gets better. Whether Die Linke can put forward a progressive response to these problems, as opposed to allowing reactionary, racist, and xenophobic forces to set the agenda, will be critical for the future of German and even European politics.

William Shoki

What might that look like, this initiative of putting forward a progressive rather than a reactionary answer? The political landscape, as we���ve been discussing, has drifted rightward, where racist, anti-migrant rhetoric is now the new common sense���not only peddled by the AfD but also embraced by the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, who are almost certain to form a coalition government. What should Die Linke���s stance on this be?

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which you described earlier as a split from Die Linke, was an attempt to appeal to disillusioned ���native��� German working-class voters who were pivoting right by combining left-wing economic positions with conservative stances on social and cultural issues. But the BSW failed to cross the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament, and most readings of this result conclude that they underperformed, thus discrediting this kind of nationalist-populist strategy. So I���m interested in knowing, on the one hand, how Die Linke should orient itself toward this rightward shift in the political landscape and, on the other, whether there���s a lesson to be drawn from the BSW���s attempt to outflank the right by embracing some of its talking points.

Loren Balhorn

The BSW���s failure to make 5 percent is important to note, but they got 4.97 percent, so they missed the mark by just a fraction. I wouldn���t completely count the party out. That said, it���s clear that their attempt to win back voters from the far right by moving rightward on migration didn���t really work. They took around 60,000 votes from the AfD, which is barely a dent.

Their underperformance had more to do with the fact that they joined two regional governments last fall following their strong performance in state elections. For voters looking for a protest party, BSW quickly began to seem like just another establishment force. Another major factor was that the war in Ukraine was simply not a dominant issue in the election debate in the months leading up to the vote. Just yesterday, we saw a public spat between Zelensky and Trump, followed this morning by European politicians saying that, no matter what the United States does, Europe will continue sending weapons to Ukraine. If something like that had happened two or three weeks before the election, BSW might have gotten 6 or 7 percent, because they stand out, along with the AfD and to some extent Die Linke, as one of the few parties clearly and loudly opposing arms shipments to Ukraine. A significant minority of the German electorate agrees with that position.

The main lesson to draw from BSW���s failure is not necessarily about migration. We can conclude that their strategy of moving right on migration didn���t work, but their decision to join governments so quickly was far more damaging. The takeaway for Die Linke should be to avoid making that mistake. Just because you have a strong election result doesn���t mean you have the social weight or organized base to carry out an aggressive reform program. If you join a coalition too soon, you���ll be outmaneuvered by the larger parties and end up disappointing a significant portion of your base.

On the broader question of how to approach migration and racism, I think the German left made a mistake in the 2010s by uncritically adopting the outlook of left-liberal NGOs. For a while, Die Linke almost appeared to celebrate migration as an inherently positive thing. That message doesn���t necessarily resonate with people who are worried about whether they have enough money at the end of the month, whether they can afford their rent, or whether they will have a job if the car industry collapses���whether they are from a migrant background themselves or not. These are people with day-to-day, bread-and-butter concerns, and a liberal, multiculturalist message that simply says, ���Migration is great, open the borders,��� doesn���t speak to them. It might resonate with part of society and part of Die Linke���s electorate, but it also divides the party���s potential base.

Rather than emphasizing divisive issues like migration, the left should focus on issues that unite���housing, wages, infrastructure investment. These are all areas where you can build a coalition that includes people who may otherwise be well into the right-wing camp on certain social issues. That doesn���t mean making concessions to the right on migration, but it does mean being mindful of how you talk about it. Our response should be framed in both class and human rights terms. The hundreds of thousands of people who have moved to Germany in the last ten years and have integrated into the labor market and society are colleagues, neighbors, and classmates. We won���t let them be deported.

We should build a narrative that includes all of these people without focusing on them in a way that makes migration itself the core issue. Migration is neither inherently good nor bad. It simply is. We also shouldn���t ignore the fact that migration has negative effects on the countries migrants are leaving. Whether we���re looking at Southeastern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, any region that experiences large-scale emigration���especially of young, educated, working-age people���suffers serious consequences. The left should have a balanced view of migration, recognizing that everyone should have the right to live and work where they choose while embedding that position in a broader narrative focused on economic justice and class solidarity rather than cultural or identity politics.

William Shoki

As Die Linke enters this fraught and uncertain political period, at least in the immediate term, how might it navigate the challenges ahead? You���ve flagged the imminent, perhaps already underway, turbulence resulting from Germany���s stagnant economy. But beyond that, there are all sorts of geopolitical and security questions Germany is confronting���not least Trump���s aggressive foreign policy posture, which is alienating Europe and stoking some anti-American sentiment, alongside growing desires from European elites to distance themselves from the United States. There���s also the question of Ukraine, the question of Israel-Palestine. Germany is entering a very complex economic and geopolitical context. What might we see in the short and medium term? What can we expect from a Merz government, and what might the terrain look like?

Loren Balhorn

The political shifts are already beginning. I mentioned the debt brake earlier. At this point, I wouldn���t say there is consensus, but there is agreement���even deep within centrist circles, whether in the media, politics, or among mainstream neoliberal economists���that the debt brake has become a real structural impediment to pulling Germany out of recession. There is widespread recognition among large parts of the political class that Germany needs to either eliminate or at least reform the debt brake, perhaps by passing some kind of temporary exemption.

Because this is a constitutional issue, it would require a two-thirds majority in parliament. It could, in theory, be done with AfD votes, but since no one wants to be seen working with the far right, they need Die Linke���s votes instead. Friedrich Merz, however, is going to try to link the vote on the debt brake to a vote for another massive expansion of defense spending.

Friedrich Merz created facts on the ground the other day by cutting a deal with the SPD to exempt military spending from the debt brake, allowing him to spend hundreds of billions on armaments without starting a fight. Nevertheless, there continues to be widespread pressure on Die Linke to ���modernize��� its ���dogmatic��� anti-war positions and embrace a massive boost in arms spending, not least from the party���s own right wing.

Obviously, Russia started the war in Ukraine���there���s no denying that. But if the left joins the rest of the mainstream parties in boosting defense spending and escalating tensions with Russia, especially at a time when the transatlantic alliance is facing serious internal strain, I see no reason why our voting base would bother to vote for us again in four years. We would become, on key issues affecting Europe���s future, indistinguishable from the Greens.

That will be Die Linke���s first major challenge: to not become like the Greens. There are certainly different views within the party on this, particularly on how to vote on weapons for Ukraine, which remains a divisive issue both among Die Linke���s electorate and within parts of the membership. If we get pulled into some kind of grand coalition, even just for the sake of reforming the debt brake���perhaps to fund new bridges or renovate schools, which are obviously important���while breaking with our anti-militarist principles, I think the party will quickly become electorally irrelevant once again.

William Shoki

Right. And on the question of Israel in the German political landscape, there is a sort of informal ban on criticism of Israel. Most political parties in Germany, while not necessarily offering unconditional support, tend to steer away from being too harsh������they���re Zionist by default. Maybe the only outspoken criticism has come from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. I���m wondering, as Trump floats the idea of mass resettlement and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and consensus in Israel for displacement and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank intensifies, might that lead to shifts in Germany���s position? Or is German support for the State of Israel pretty ironclad?

Loren Balhorn

Across most of the political establishment, that support is ironclad. There are, of course, historical reasons for this: Germany bears responsibility for the industrialized murder of six million Jews. But beyond that, there are also foreign policy considerations. Germany has strategic interests in the region in much the same way that the United States does.

What will be interesting to observe is how this plays out within Die Linke. The party made a strategic decision to remain fairly quiet on what is happening in Gaza in order to avoid controversy prior to the election. Strategically, it may have been the correct choice, but morally, I think it is extremely problematic. Party representatives tend to point out that, on paper, Die Linke has a fairly strong position. It opposes weapons sales to Israel and supports the recognition of the State of Palestine. But in practice, its parliamentary leaders have made no attempt to introduce any motions on these issues.

This is largely because, in the old parliamentary group, there were about five MPs who, quite frankly, held positions on Israel that would place them firmly on the center right in any other country. Most of those MPs have now retired. So, it is possible that Die Linke could become more vocal on Gaza, especially if mass ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip escalates further or if the full extent of Israel���s actions becomes a more prominent part of public discourse in Germany. There is a huge fear within the party that talking about issues like Gaza and Ukraine will split the electorate and make it more difficult to stay in parliament. That might be true for Ukraine, which is perhaps a trickier issue, but I don���t think it holds for Gaza. If you look at polling, the majority of German citizens oppose Israel���s conduct in Gaza and oppose sending weapons to Israel. Yet no party in parliament, aside from the BSW, vocally criticizes Israel or calls for an end to weapons shipments.

Frankly, I think it was a mistake for Die Linke not to campaign on this issue, at least to some extent, because it was an opportunity to stand out as a voice of moral clarity in a German political establishment that has made itself openly complicit in what has been the most televised genocide in human history. Just a few weeks ago, Olaf Scholz outright denied that there was a genocide happening in Gaza and refused to even entertain the question, calling it an obviously false premise. The entire German political establishment has blood on its hands. Something like a third of the weapons used by the IDF come from Germany. By remaining silent, or at least very quiet, on this issue, I think Die Linke made a strategic mistake. I hope they will correct it in the coming months, because the situation in Gaza is certainly not going to improve.

William Shoki

As a final question, we���ve talked a lot about the left���s road to rebuilding, but I���m curious about your prognosis for the trajectory of the AfD. They���re experiencing a surge, gaining ground, and seem ascendant. Many are envisioning a world where they become a dominant force in the near future. But how close are we actually to a scenario where they become a governing force in Germany? On the one hand, as you���ve described, they���ve perfected an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy that positions them as an anti-establishment, oppositional force. On the other hand, their economic program is fairly vague and has many hallmarks of neoliberal orthodoxy. Could these contradictions begin to play out in the near future, or do you think they are genuinely on a path to power, possibly by 2029 or even sooner?

Loren Balhorn

I do think it is only a matter of time before the AfD joins a government. It will probably start at the state level. In the eastern states, when you have a party winning over a third of the vote���as they did in Saxony, where they got nearly 40 percent on Sunday���you can���t keep them out of government forever. No matter how revolting one might find the party, if that many people vote for it, it becomes very difficult to justify excluding them indefinitely.

At some point in the next few years, we���ll likely see state governments either led by the AfD or at least tolerated by them, perhaps with the Christian Democrats still in leadership but increasingly reliant on AfD support. We have a couple of years to breathe, since we just had elections in most of East Germany, but sooner or later, this will happen. Whether we see an AfD-led federal government in 2029 is harder to say���probably not. But looking at most of our European neighbors, it seems to be only a matter of time before the AfD enters government in some form.

The key question is what happens once they do. Will joining government demystify them and reveal them for what they really are���namely, harsh neoliberals? We can look to Trump in the US as an example. His assault on American institutions is really hurting a lot of his own supporters. The question is whether that translates into declining support and popularity. I���m a bit more agnostic on that because, if we look at figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, it seems that many people are willing to vote against their own material interests for the sake of anti-migrant, anti-foreigner sentiment. For a certain segment of the electorate, seeing images of migrants being deported is more satisfying than securing higher wages or a stronger welfare state.

At least part of the AfD���s base is ideologically committed. They���re not necessarily dyed-in-the-wool fascists, nor do they have particularly strong or well-defined political ideas, but they are emotionally invested in the party���s project in a way that isn���t purely rational or based on material interests. This makes it difficult to predict whether a turn toward economic neoliberalism would actually hurt their support.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Trump���s base in the coming months. The AfD wouldn���t engage in quite the same spectacle as Trump, but if they were to implement their economic program, it would be even more damaging than what the Christian Democrats are planning for the next few years. That could at least create an opening for the fragmentation of their base. The real question, though, is whether a left force will be positioned to take advantage of that moment���whether it can reach those voters and offer an alternative explanation for the crisis, as well as a compelling path forward.

Right now, the left is still very far from being in that position. Getting 8 percent in an election and recruiting 50,000 members���most of them in just the last few months���is a strong foundation, but Die Linke needs to make up for ten wasted years in just four. That would be a difficult task even for the most talented political leaders and organizers.

Enter the Povo

Mozambique���s disputed elections triggered a deadly uprising, as citizens resisted Frelimo���s rule and exposed the cracks in neoliberal policies.

Woman voters stand on line at a rural polling station in Catembe on the second day of the 1994 elections in Mozambique. Image credit Pernaca Sudhakaran for UN Photo via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Since the announcement of Mozambique’s general election results in late October 2024, where the electoral commission declared the ruling party, Frelimo, the outright victor in the presidential, national, and provincial elections, the country is witnessing an unparalleled social revolt concentrated in its urban areas. In the two months immediately following the announcement of the results, more than 100 people were killed. With the ongoing revolt and repression this figure had climbed to an estimated 278. The upturn in protest is happening in a wider economic context in which the country���s economic growth has been stagnant since 2016 despite the recent exploitation of natural resources.

The steep rise in the death toll is a result of increased police repression against a largely unarmed populace that has refused to accept the imposition of the modified election results announced by the government-appointed Constitutional Council, the apex court of the country, at the end of December. The judges declared that, indeed, irregularities had occurred and went on to decrease the ruling party���s margins of victory but still declared Frelimo the overall winner without providing any substantive evidence as to how they calculated their voting figures.

A potted history of Mozambique���s ruling party is required to help fully grasp why the country is unraveling, creating an uprising of discontent.����

Frelimo began its life in 1962 as a nationalist movement dominated by the urban African elite in the capital, Maputo, in the south of the country, which shares a long and entwined history with the people and economy of South Africa. Mozambique���s geography becomes important because it contains one of the largest coastlines on the continent, stretching a full 2,700km. With an economically weak colonizing power, the central and northern parts of the country became a zone of intense extraction. The high degree of naked oppression and exploitation undermined its policy of assimilation, designed to co-opt the local black elite. They instead looked to the wave of anti-colonial revolutions occurring across the world.

It proved impossible for the Portuguese colony to maintain a firm grip on the entire country. Armed resistance to colonial conquest first emerged from the Makonde peasants in the Cabo Delgado region and was only completed in 1921. The geographical terrain lent itself to the prosecution of guerilla warfare during the 1960s, allowing Frelimo to create liberated zones with the support of the Mozambique African National Union. The turning point was the Carnation Revolution initiated by Portuguese soldiers against its own dictatorship in 1974. This led to the rapid collapse of the colony as the settlers fled. Frelimo soon declared a ceasefire. Rather than winning power militarily or politically through mass support at home, it was handed to them. This was the context of what locals have dubbed ���the first war.�����

Independence occurred at the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR and was formally declared in 1975 following negotiations between Frelimo and Portugal. Angola, another former colony, soon fell under similar circumstances. It spurred on the confidence of all those who sought an end to the brutal racism of settler colonialism and the cherished goal of national self-determination.��

Mozambique���s most southerly and economically developed region borders South Africa and is deeply integrated into the regional capitalist system. An economy dominated by its militarily aggressive apartheid neighbor wasted no time in destabilizing the country. Consequently, Mozambique had very little choice but to join the Russian economic orbit, where continued military support for its army was traded for political influence. Unsurprisingly, in 1977, Frelimo the movement transformed itself into a political party declaring itself ���Marxist Leninist��� and a one-party state. Aware that isolation would doom the nationalist project, it provided bases for the neighboring liberation movements to train combatants. We all sang the Miriam Makeba song, “Mozambique, Aluta Continua.”

Our solidarity of yesteryear has been replaced by the reintegration of Mozambique into the regional economy but very much on the terms set by South Africa, And in doing so has seen no real break from the extractivist past�� but rather a continuity with the colonial order.������

South African and Rhodesian military offensives against its neighbor were supported by America. Renamo emerged from the internal frictions following Frelimo���s alignment with Russian communism, aided significantly by its aggressors. Renamo was able to muster local political support in the densely populated north-central part of the country due to Frelimo���s policy that curtailed the power of the rural chiefs in favor of a party led by urban-based intellectuals. A deeply impoverished peasantry fostered recruitment into the armed sections of Renamo.��

A civil war ensued, dubbed ���the second war,��� which led to the loss of more than one million lives, a high percentage lost in the Cabo Delgado region. Conventional wisdom viewed the conflict as a proxy war. But it also had deep internal roots that were simultaneously social, political, and linguistic. The Macua and Makonde in the north, the Sena and Shona groups in the central parts of the country, and the Shangaan in the south all experienced power and benefits from independence differently. Only the educated African elite had a command of Portuguese, entrenching the divide. Rural Southern African culture and religion did not sit well with the imposition of autocratic control accompanied by a program of ideological conversion.��

The emergence of multi-party democracy in 1992, and the reintegration of the south of the country into the Southern African economy buoyed the emergence of a new and powerful economic elite. The 1990s saw investment limited to the South of the country and added to the notion that the Shangaans (FRELIMO) are only interested in looking after themselves. Renamo did spectacularly well in the first elections held in 1994 and there is a strong likelihood it won the 1999 elections. The refusal of international observers to view the final tabulation process raised deep suspicions regarding the official outcome.

The negotiation process to a multi-party democracy ensured the electoral process remained fully and legally under the Frelimo-controlled election commission, membership of which was determined by the party share of the vote. With no in-built transparency of the final tabulation process, elections have been marred by fraud for 25 years. Joseph Hanlon, a respected senior academic and analyst who has reported on the country for more than four decades, recently penned a comprehensive report on the history of electoral fraud committed by Frelimo.��

A culture of impunity developed alongside a rapid transition away from a state-driven economy to a free market economy. The World Bank and the IMF made support conditional on speedy structural economic reform in exchange for state loans in the early 1990s. Growth remained consistent for the first decade, but given the weakness of state institutions, a free-for-all for those with political connections was created: the return of the Wild West, a new context where leading journalists like Carlos Cardoso could be gunned down in broad daylight for his investigative reporting into economic crime.

The accumulation of wealth by the new elite was not something that could be hidden. Rather, it was flaunted. At the same time state subsidies to keep transport and food cheaper were gradually being eroded, creating the first waves of street protests by 2010. Around this time some of the largest deposits of coal and gas in the world were discovered in the country.��Corporations were soon queuing up to get in on the act within an��overly intimate relationship between government��and big business, what David Harvey has titled an era of��Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction.��A cauldron of dissent was in the making, opening new avenues of struggle.��

Negative proof can be found in the civil war in Cabo Delgado region that began in 2017, and which followed the exploitation of one of the world���s largest offshore gas deposits. Its roots began with unresolved conflicts over local timber, graphite, and diamond resources. These represented local grievances in many instances and resulted in state-led repression. The region’s ���third war��� was a result of many interlocking local and international factors that have recently been studied. The establishment of the gas extraction industry in the far north of the country followed the same pattern as coal mining in the Zambezi.

Community claims to the resources are ignored. The only beneficiaries are the politically connected elites who receive the crumbs left on the table by the international corporations. The local populace is left to watch as their agricultural and fishing livelihoods are adversely affected. A perceived social exclusion from job opportunities is seen by many in academia as the primary driver.�� The Islamists were handed the fertile soil to root their support among the disaffected, particularly among the large youth cohort. Their Islamist view that the natural resources should belong to the people also clearly resonated and led to a large military presence of Rwandan, Ugandan, and French soldiers to quell the ongoing insurgency, once it became clear that local military were not able to contain the revolt. Presently, only the Rwandan military remains, its presence financed by the EU.��������

The initial response of the state to local grievances around gas extraction was highly repressive and provided a tighter coherence to the resistance that was emerging. Perhaps the government���s tyrannical response is best understood in the context of the huge loans secretly signed and sealed by the government on the premise that the country���s recently discovered resource base would allow the country to repay the loans.��

The ���hidden debt��� is known as the tuna bonds scandal, where 2.5 billion US Dollars was loaned in 2012 -2014 from international banks to pay for naval expenditure. It was hidden from parliament and only discovered in 2016. It forced the country to default on its sovereign debt owed to the IMF and World Bank that year, plunging the country into an economic crisis, devaluing its local currency and is estimated to have cost the country a staggering USD11 billion, or an entire year of the country���s GDP, pushing a further two million people into poverty.��

A rentier state and class have become openly visible. Shorn of its former radicalism, Frelimo is embroiled in one corruption scandal after another, and until recently, no party or oppositional movement was willing to organize itself against the imposition of this new form of class power. But the increasing disaffection of the ���Povo��� has been most clearly expressed in the urban municipalities, where oppositional political forces have emerged to challenge the hold of Frelimo. However, its�� continued control of the electoral commission has ensured that the provinces and its capital Maputo would stay in its hands, much to the chagrin of Venancio Mondlane, the present-day leader of the opposition. Hanlon���s report states that Renamo was the clear winner in Maputo in the 2023 election and as such Venancio Mondlane should have been made the Mayor.

The municipal elections in 2023 were, in many ways, a turning point when it came to openly brazen fraud. According to Joseph Hanlon:

There was much more central orchestration with little attempt to keep it secret. In the registration, obvious night time registration and busing in outsiders in municipal buses, as well as the WhatsApp group in Beira, look like flaunting power. The Frelimo control of polling station staff with even a book of all polling station staff in Matola, was intentionally provocative. Again, there were no restrictions on the press, CIP or the CIP Eleic��o��es – this was the publicity Frelimo wanted. And the final and most public step was the CNE and CC, ensuring Renamo did not win Maputo and Matola, despite the overwhelming evidence that they had the most votes. Whereas 1999 had been hidden, this was very public.��

The 2024 national elections followed suit. Blatant rigging from above and on the ground by those with vested interests in holding office led to calls for a recount. The Optimist Party for Development (Podemos), a center-left group running for the first time, came second and officially obtained 25% of the vote.��

Elvino Dias, a highly respected lawyer acting on behalf of the organization���s presidential candidate, Venancio Mondlane, claimed he had possession of the original election tabulations and that victory belonged to Mondlane. A week later, Dias was gunned down in death squad fashion. A similar fate met a senior leader of the new party. Police statements brushed aside the killing of the latter as a conjugal dispute.

Mondlane fled the country for his safety. The streets erupted following his Facebook call for a phased general strike. Outrage led to spontaneous anger being expressed at state institutions. Frelimo party offices and police stations were specifically targeted. Mondlane���s militant call for protest action galvanized people from across society, leading to numerous internet shutdowns. His anti-corruption and ���take the country back��� messaging clearly captured the imagination of the disaffected, and particularly the youth. The average median age of Mozambicans is 18.��

The 50-year-old Mondlane, a university-qualified engineer, first courted popularity through his prosperity-based evangelical preaching. He has praised Brazil���s Bolsonaro, met with Portugal���s far-right Chega, whose autocratic rule was overthrown by the 1974 Carnation Revolution, and welcomed Trump���s victory as a protection of American morals and family values. He launched his political career through the MDM, a centre-right splinter from Renamo.

In 2023, he decided to run for the Presidential elections. In need of a political home, negotiations with Podemos, in need of their own presidential candidate, began. This led him to become the Podemos presidential candidate. This occurred despite his open embrace of neoliberalism and the party���s commitment to democratic socialism. A classic marriage of convenience was born. The deal between the two that has recently come to light provides exclusive influence for Mondlane over who gets selected to enter parliament.����

To date, the protest movement for democracy has seen hundreds killed, thousands injured and arrested. Mondlane returned to Mozambique in early January and multi-party talks have begun. He clearly hopes to extract further concessions from the regime. Constrictions clearly exist regarding the development of an opposition capable of challenging the electoral autocracy of Frelimo and the repressive machinery of the state. But constraints can also be the progenitor of innovation. Unleashed by a charismatic militant right-wing preacher, the entry of country masses into the arena has begun. The regime will be hard-pressed to get them to return. The power to repress should not be equated with the power to rule.��

Mondlane recently called for the suspension of strike action and has issued a series of demands that called for amnesty for those arrested and detained and free medical support for those injured. Initially, he did not rule out accepting an offer to join the government if his conditions were met, but since backtracked and stated he would not join the government if invited to do so. This has led to the call for low-key protests, which have seen the arterial roads into Maputo, the capital, blocked following the reintroduction of toll fees. The strategy is designed to keep his support mobilized for the first 100 days of the new Presidential rule of Daniel Chapo, the Frelimo candidate, and is based on 30 measures that are part of what he calls a ���Decree,��� which involves people���s courts following an ���eye for eye��� approach to justice to stem the wave of extra-judicial killings launched by the police.������

Whether the embryonic movement can be harnessed by its progressive activists to move beyond a Mondlane leadership riddled with contradictions remains to be seen. Unless the movement squarely confronts the class power the neoliberal agenda of the IMF and World Bank has restored, it will quickly lose momentum. History teaches us that clarity and political coherence are essential for any democratic oppositional movement that can confront that power.

The mustache that swung an election

In mid-October, an anonymous social media account called ���Missie Moustass��� released 107 wiretapped recordings exposing alleged

Mining, murder, and the machinery of exploitation

The massacre of artisanal miners in Stilfontein exposes the South African state���s violent allegiance to corporate interests and a long legacy of extraction and dispossession.

Police officers and volunteer rescuers stand by the opening of a mineshaft where miners are trapped in Stilfontein, South Africa, Nov. 15, 2024. Image �� Denis Farrell for AP Photo.

The Stilfontein Massacre, echoing the cracking rifles that killed 34 miners at Marikana, has again laid bare the murderous means the South African government is prepared to deploy in defense of private business interests and corporations. Artisanal miners, referred to as ���illegal��� miners by the state, are marginalized people struggling to improve their living conditions. They exist in parallel and in resistance to the dispossession and exploitation of industrial large-scale mining, which can be traced back to the colonial era. The narrative that artisanal miners are an economic drain on the country is constructed to dehumanize them. Like eight million others, they are informally employed in precarious working conditions due to high levels of unemployment, the state���s failure to address basic socio-economic issues, and the compulsion to work or die under capitalism. Stilfontein, like Marikana, is a manifestation of state collusion with corporate mining interests. The strategies of violence deployed by the state vary from direct, structural, and narrative violence to the violence of inaction. But they are part of one legacy of colonial extortion, driven to control and extract labor and resources.

Every year, in early February, the Mining Indaba takes place in Cape Town, South Africa. It is the largest meeting of mining-related interests on the African continent, populated by influential mining capitalists, lobbyists, and politicians. President Ramaphosa, Gwede Mantashe, the minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, and 42 other ministers from as many as 29 African nations participate in the conference. The African political elite discuss among themselves how to best advance the interests of gargantuan mining corporations.��

To attend the mining Indaba, one must a) register as a company or the representative of a company and b) Pay a registration fee of ��2,515 (approximately R60,000). This is not an Indaba organized to consider the needs and concerns of all stakeholders. It is rather, an opportunity for Capital to network and purchase the time, influence, and complicity of political elites.��

The Indaba reflects the stark alienation between business and political interests and the needs and concerns of affected communities. The prioritization of the former over the latter results in deadly outcomes. It is against this background of dispossession and collusion, propped up by state-sanctioned violence, that we witnessed the deaths of 87 artisanal miners at Stilfontein.��

Since December 2023, the South African government has used its violent apparatuses to address the ���60 billion rand cost��� that informal mining supposedly causes to the economy. In an attempt to ���crack down��� on informal and artisanal mining in South Africa, the Department of Minerals and Petroleum Resources mobilized the police to lead Operation Vala Umgodi (plug the hole). This involves police waiting outside the entrances of abandoned mines where ���illegal��� mining operations were occurring. The Stilfontein case, at the abandoned Buffelsfontein Gold mine (about 160km southwest of Johannesburg), exposed the brutality of Operation Vala Umgodi. The state used the violence of enforced starvation, thirst, and inaction through their delayed rescue operations, to address the threat informal sector mining poses to elite accumulation.��

Operation Vala Umgodi was intended to sever supply lines into the mines, to force the miners underground out, and to arrest them. In August 2024, the police laid siege to the Stilfontein mine, preventing food and water from entering the mine; at the same time, they dismantled the pulley systems for entering and exiting from some of the shafts. While many miners emerged from other parts of the mine, a large number of miners were stuck in tunnels surrounding shaft 11���a smooth concrete well descending 2km into the ground���without any safe passage out and with dwindling food and water supplies. The police and government claimed that miners didn���t want to be arrested, but community members began to raise concerns that there was no way for many of them to exit.��

By November, the miner���s food and water supply had run out, and the situation was dire. In mid-November MACUA (Mining Affected Communities United in Action) with Lawyers for Human Rights took the matter to court and the court ruled that the police should allow food and humanitarian aid into the mine. Initially, the police continued to prevent this from happening, but, after being charged with contempt of court, slow trickles of food and supplies from the local community-led rescue efforts were allowed into the mine.��

The supplies were woefully insufficient. Finally, in an urgent application heard at the High Court, a state-led rescue operation began in January 2025. Months after the miners��� family members had alerted authorities of the need for rescue efforts. Up until that point the only attempts to bring miners safely to the surface had been an under-resourced effort led by the community. The operation quickly unveiled the tragedy of the event. Videos began to circulate of emaciated miners trapped in tunnels filled with bodies. When the operation concluded, there were 246 miners retrieved from the depths of the mine, and 87 bodies of miners who had been killed by the state���s actions. There are still miners who remain unaccounted for, their bodies and stories likely lost underground in the maze of dark and damp tunnels.

Narrative violence as a tool of the state

The state has consistently portrayed artisanal miners as criminals, seeking to dehumanize them. By promoting fear and misunderstanding the state mobilizes public support for Operation Vala Umgodi. The same ���Swart Gevaar��� propaganda that sought to justify Apartheid is applied in a subtle variation to justify the government���s treatment, particularly its immigration policy concerning African migrant labor. The Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshaveni, when asked whether the state would undertake rescue operations or provide food for the trapped miners at Stilfontein, replied, ���We are not sending help to criminals, we are going to smoke them out. They will come out. They did not go down there in the best interests of the republic, so we cannot help them.�����

Similarly, Gwede Mantashe threatened MACUA for ���preaching tolerance for criminality��� because the group was highlighting and contesting the human rights violations taking place at Stilfontein and, more exactly, for mobilizing its own rescue operations. The South African Police Service’s (SAPS) refusal to comply with the High Court decision compelling them to provide all necessary emergency disaster relief to the miners underground at Stilfontein reiterates the state’s cruelty and contempt toward artisanal miners.��

The state has additionally propagandized that many of the miners are immigrants from neighboring countries, hoping to manipulate Afrophobic sentiments to distract from its failings���a typical tactic of South African politicians. The state���s rhetoric and narrative violence fail to acknowledge the socioeconomic drivers pushing people into artisanal mining. For these people, artisanal mining is a way of reasserting one���s agency and innovating in the face of a desperate situation. The state prefers to mislead the public into believing artisanal mining is caused by gangsterism and greed. They dehumanize migrants, overlooking the crucial historical and ongoing contributions of migrant labor to the South African economy.��This is compounded by the structural violence of bureaucracy that limits access to artisanal mining permits and the legal documentation of migrant laborers.

Despite the atrocities at Marikana and Stilfontein, public attention and discussion of such incidents remains limited. The precarity of life in South Africa means that the general public is preoccupied with trying to survive intersecting socio-economic and climate crises, and rarely participates actively in governance or challenges state violence. The state and its actions are treated both with distrust and disinterest, while the private sector and NGOs are relied on to provide services that previously would have been public. Exploitation and violence are normalized as common individual experiences, separate from politically sanctioned systems of oppression. This disengagement gives further power to the elite to accumulate more wealth and in turn more power.��

Operation Vala Umgodi continues in South Africa despite the publicity around Stilfontein. In December 2024, around 150 artisanal miners were rescued in Sabie, Mpumalanga, and three deaths occurred. The rescued miners are awaiting trial. It is difficult to imagine they will be tried fairly. Media coverage of Operation Vala Umgodi, and of Stillfontein specifically, has been inconsistent. Occasionally, miners have been described as victims with calls made for their quick rescue. For the most part, unfortunately, the media coverage has perpetuated stereotypes of artisanal miners as criminals who must pay for their crimes, even if it costs them their lives.��

Stilfontein is not an isolated incident

The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources does not hold mining companies accountable to legislation to properly close and rehabilitate mining sites. According to an Auditor General of South Africa report (2022), there are more than 6,000 abandoned mines in South Africa. Rehabilitation and retraining of retrenched miners are legal requirements for mine closure procedures under the Mineral Petrol Resource Development Act (MPRDA) of 2002. The Act stipulates that mining companies are required to rehabilitate the land and provide alternative job training when a mine closes. Instead, mining companies ruthlessly extract resources and then disappear without proper rehabilitation and retraining, leaving communities to bear the economic and environmental brunt of the abandoned mines. Historically, these companies have often been headquartered in the Global North, but increasingly they are also locally owned by the new emerging elite with political ties. The new elite reproduces the same systems of colonial raw resource extraction for the benefit of the former colonial centers of power.

In the 1980s, the mining industry generated 21% of South Africa���s GDP. Today it accounts for just�� 8%. South African mineral resources have been declining for decades, reducing the profitability of large-scale industrial mining.��In this context, small-scale artisanal mining has been raised as a potentially more sustainable and equitable form of mineral resource extraction. The MPRDA acknowledges artisanal miners but places onerous licensing requirements on them to possess the ���financial resources and technical abilities to conduct the proposed mining operation optimally.��� These requirements are the same as those applied to corporate mining giants, and thus structurally discriminate against artisanal miners, who cannot access credit or raise the capital required to consult specialists.

The state���s unwillingness to make artisanal mining accessible and regulated has meant that the informal mining sector is an amalgamation of artisanal miners and criminal syndicates that exploit and violently coerce miners. Most crucially, these syndicates feed the informally mined minerals into regular supply chains; this would not be possible without the complicity of financial institutions, legitimate mineral exporters, and government bureaucrats. Indicating deep collusion with the mainstream mining sector. For a privileged minority, ���illegal��� mining is an incredibly lucrative business. Yet, those who actually carry out the precarious work of artisanal, small-scale mining have very little to gain. Miners, who often stay underground for six or more months at a time, report having to pay R100 for a bottle of water and steep commissions for their ore to be surfaced. Syndicate leaders, bulk buyers, front export companies, and international buyers control the process and reap the true profits.��

Organizations such as MACUA, Benchmarks Foundation, and the National Association for Artisanal Miners, have pushed for the legalization of artisanal mining to enable permits for small-scale operations to be more accessible. The state has delayed progress on this. By preventing the regulation of artisanal mining, the government is imposing violence and gangsterism onto the informal mining sector. In a space where billions of rand are on the table, criminal syndicates, who are well-resourced and motivated, step in and compete over who can exercise the most violence on each other and the miners. Without enforceable contracts and the rule of law, violence, and coercion are the only ways of regulating business.��

The story of Artisanal Miners, sometimes referred to as ���Zama-Zamas,����� rises out of deep-seated socio-economic problems that cannot be divorced from the history of the mining industry that has alienated and commodified the black body. The fact that a large number of miners at Stilfontein were from Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana, and Zimbabwe cannot be understood outside of the historical context of resource extraction in Southern Africa. The migrant labor system was manufactured and developed during the colonial period. It continues to be an integral part of the South African economy.

But the issue of artisanal mining is not a South African problem alone. In a Southern African context, where poverty and youth unemployment abound, the compulsion to survive under the capitalist mode of production drives people to normalize situations of extreme exploitation. While socio-economic issues are not dealt with, there will always be people who are forced to migrate and work in high-risk conditions. Compounding this, developments within the region cause people to migrate in search of work and peace. Since the highly contested October legislative and presidential elections in Mozambique, there have been more than 600 deaths attributed to the uprising. Already in November 2024, it was estimated that the unrest had caused 360 million euros in damages and the loss of 12,000 jobs. Simultaneously, more than 700,000 people have been displaced since 2017, by the violent contestation over Cabo Delgado and its offshore oil and gas resources, between local insurgents and militaries mobilized to protect multi-national fossil fuel corporations. In Lesotho, political instability, including army involvement,�� has been an ongoing feature of attempts to establish a functional democracy over the past decades. Simultaneously, increasing climate-induced water scarcity across Southern Africa drives migration. The El Ni��o droughts in Zimbabwe have caused maize production to plummet 72% from the 2024 harvest. Considering these, it should come as no surprise that people are in search of better opportunities. The systems of colonialism and Apartheid still function, as desperation continues to drive black migrant labor underground.

Artisanal mining as resistance to elite accumulation

Many Artisanal miners see their involvement in the sector as resistance to the historic exploitation of colonial extraction. Small-scale artisanal mining becomes a path to literally take the minerals of this continent into their own hands; it has the potential to radically reform the mining sector. With adequate support and regulation, it could be less environmentally destructive, more sustainable, and more equitably distribute the wealth generated within the mining sector. That being said, it is a threat to the colonially established systems of large-scale extractive industry. This threat is met by the state���s mobilization of different forms of violence. The mining and political elite, who historically control the sector, use it to accumulate disproportionate wealth and consolidate power, to amass more wealth. The fixation on artisanal miners as criminals in the state���s narrative obfuscates the socio-economic conditions that push people into this precarity. It protects the established systems of elite accumulation within the mining sector from having to change and distracts from the state’s corruption and mismanagement. It allows for the impacts of deepening inequality to fall on the shoulders of the laboring classes. The police can focus on arresting people who are trying to take back their agency in increasingly dire economic situations, while those who are truly responsible for plundering resources and abandoning mines are not held to account.

The massacre at Stilfontein stresses the urgency to legalize artisanal mining in South Africa.�� More broadly, it reveals the urgent need to challenge how wealth and political power interplay and accumulate. Unless challenged, the state will continue to normalize the dehumanization and use of violence against those who seek to assert agency against elite interests. The logic that defines the mining sector is largely inherited from Apartheid, there must be a radical overhaul of this system and the productive relations in the country. The media must divorce itself from business moguls and lobbyists in order to better inform the general population, without manipulating people to serve their donors’ interests. There must be wider mobilization and discussion for people to understand how their struggles connect across class, race, gender, and nationality.��

Stilfontein was not the first time the South African government chose to prioritize economic interests over black lives. If we do not take notice and resist, it will not be the last.