Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 17
February 27, 2025
The fight for justice in Kenya’s narrative
Performance of The Bullet and the Flag. Image �� Onesmus Karanja and Cynthia Muthogi. On September 8, 2024, a play titled The Bullet and the Flag was performed at the NG-CDF hall in Githurai 44 in Nairobi. Written by Njoki and directed by Moses Ngwiri, this play highlights political injustices in Kenya, delving into the critical situation in our country. However, the issues addressed in the play went beyond the recent Gen Z revolution, despite our initial expectations. Although not well documented in our historical textbooks, history has shown how poor leadership unravels���abductions, murderers, fear, and the silencing of dissent become tools of control This play is deeply connected to Kenya���s history, showing that the challenges we face today are rooted in the legacies of colonialism that continue to impact the nation.
Watching the play, one might reflect on Kenyans��� freedom to use art to convey their frustrations to those in authority. Nonetheless, we assert that this represents a two-step-forward and five-step-backward progression relative to the era of our parents and the preceding generation of our grandparents. Not only do our pleas fall on deaf ears, but those who valiantly advocate on our behalf consistently lose their lives.
Are we really free to express our discontent to the president of this nation? The play examines the subject of neocolonialism, wherein we remain under the dominion of those we believed we had overcome 64 years ago. In meetings where Wanjiru and Otieno ought to speak about their vision of democratic leadership, the subject has instead been conferred to John and Jane, who lack comprehension of the actual issues afflicting the local Mwananchi.
Given Kenya���s deteriorating education, health, and economic systems, at what point does the exercise of democracy become imperative? How far must a nation descend until its grievances are acknowledged? Although we have yet to discover a definitive answer, mediums such as theater, music, poetry, and film serve as powerful tools that Kenyan youth have persistently utilized to express their dissatisfaction with the subpar leadership imposed upon them. The saying states that discussing an issue is a significant step towards its resolution; with The Bullet and the Flag, writer Njoki endeavors to use her passion and art as a means for affected Kenyans to speak about their anger and disappointments.
Set in both 2024 and the early postcolonial period, the play shows the struggles that our country has been going through since independence. Although there were celebrations amid our successful overthrow of the white colonial masters, this was short-lived soon after our leaders took office and started portraying the same dreadful forms of leadership. In the play, this is described as replacing white colonialism with black colonialists, as it is today. The lead actor, Nick Muita Nyingi, artistically and confidently shows the challenges faced by Kenyans, particularly the younger generation, while also conveying the anguish of parents who have lost their children in this conflict.
In an interview, director Moses Ngwiri discusses how the Kenyan youths, as portrayed in the play by lead actor Nick and supporting actress Elizabeth Njoki, should continue encouraging one another to understand their civic rights, civic education, the constitution, and their respective roles in the nation, illustrating the significant role of art in activism within our country. The drama serves as a reflection of the current state of our nation, encapsulated in the Swahili adage, ���Usanii ni kioo cha jamii��� (Art is a mirror of society).
The struggle continues; we remain determined to advocate for the fallen soldiers who valiantly sacrificed their lives for better leadership. Although they may not appear in our textbooks, we will encounter them in songs, spoken word performances, theatrical revivals, and the inexplicable influence of film and photography���the power of a thousand words. Art is a permanent instrument that strives to remind us of our national dignity. If it is used effectively and spread widely, beyond urban areas to smaller towns, significant transformation will be unavoidable, making the approach of divide and conquer ineffective. Subjects we are unable to address personally due to governmental constraints can be expressed freely and artistically on stage or through the screens of our smartphones.
February 26, 2025
Macron needs to shut up more
Macron in Brussels, 2018. Image �� Alexandros Michailidis via Shutterstock. In early January, the beleaguered president of France, Emmanuel Macron, told French ambassadors at a conference that none of the countries in the Sahel region would be sovereign today ���if the French army had not deployed in the region��� to support their fight against jihadists. ���I think someone forgot to say thank you. It does not matter, it will come with time,��� he added. ���Ingratitude, I am well placed to know, is a disease not transmissible to man.���
Macron���s remark was blasted by several African officials, including Chad���s president, Mahamat Idriss D��by Itno, who said he thought Macron was in the ���wrong era.��� Senegal���s outspoken prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, also objected in a post on social media. He said that France didn���t have the legitimacy or capacity to ensure the sovereignty of African states, and added that France had often ���contributed to destabilizing certain African countries such as Libya, with disastrous consequences noted for the stability and security of the Sahel.��� Burkina Faso���s military leader, Ibrahim Traore, said France should pray for his country���s ancestors, as without having plundered them during the colonial era it wouldn���t enjoy the global standing that it does today. Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a German-Malian former MEP for the Green party, asked whether France should be thanking Africans ���who gave their blood for Europe��� in WWII.
Eric Orlander, host of the popular China-Global South Project podcast, gasped when he played the soundbite in a recent installment of his program. ���Oh my goodness,��� Orlander reacted as he put Macron���s comments to his guests. Ovigwe Eguegu, an analyst at the Development Reimagined think tank who participated in the conversation, fact-checked the president. He explained that Malians, for example, were very positive about France���s intervention in 2013 and gave a warm welcome to then-president Francois Hollande, waving French flags and shouting ���Vive la France���. Eguegu also added that from each French-led regional military initiative to the next, whether Operation Serval, Barkhane, or G5 Sahel, ���what you���d find is a consistent decline in the security situation.��� Macron said thanks would ���come with time,��� but time has joined his adversaries. Every year that passes only adds fuel to the fire of growing disdain for his administration.��
Orlander���s guests asked the simple question: what caused the instability in the Sahel? Did the Libyan government overthrow itself and then allow arms and newly redundant militants to flow into the Sahel? France was a key contributor to a problem it claimed to be solving with its post-2013 interventions, and as the ledger of French sins grows longer, more voices across the continent are joining in calling out Macron, either for tone-deafness or for deliberate or mistaken attempts to gerrymander the historical record.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the best course of action when you unnecessarily cause offense is an apology���and while that might not solve the problem entirely, it would likely set things moving along a path toward a more desirable outcome. When it comes to matters of African diplomacy, however, France and its leaders consistently seem to run afoul of these expectations, instead adopting a subtly paternalistic attitude tinged with scorn and condescension. After suggesting Paris��� African security partners should be more grateful to France for deploying its army to their countries, Macron���s special envoy to the continent, Jean-Marie Bockel, has doubled down on his tactless remarks.
���France cannot always be in repentance or mea culpa,��� said Bockel. When pressed on whether he understood why some African leaders took offense, Bockel told Jeune Afrique that he did not want to ���fan any flames.��� Not only did the longstanding politician and diplomat not understand why they were mad, but it felt clear that had he been pressed further, he would have confessed his view that not only should France stop repenting, but that it deserves gratitude.
This is far from an isolated incident with Macron though. It is the latest outburst in a long series of foul-mouthed and crude exchanges with people and leaders across the Global South leaving you wondering when Macron was ever in a posture of ���repentance or mea culpa,��� as Bockel suggested he was. Sure, he said that French colonization of Algeria was a ���crime against humanity,��� but that is simply to acknowledge reality. The Algerian government estimates that more than five million people lost their lives because of it. It is hardly a noble concession to state a fact.��
Emmanuel Macron also went off script during a visit to the French-ruled Indian Ocean island of Mayotte following Cyclone Chido, a ruinous storm that devastated it. At the time, the official death toll stood at 31, with Mayotte lacking crucial supplies such as medicine and water. Macron was responding to a crowd of angry Mahorais who blasted the president for his feeble response to the disaster, which he thought was a good opportunity to remind them how lucky they were to be a part of France, otherwise, they���d be in ���10,000 times deeper in shit.��� The ���10,000 times��� deeper shit Macron was probably subtly referring to is the rest of the Comoros archipelago, which declared independence from France in 1975 without Mayotte. France does plenty for Mayotte, he implied, despite the fact that basic issues, such as the shortage of usable water on the island, has led to water cuts in the capital. This has prompted a campaign by politicians and activists under the slogan ���Mayotte a soif��� (Mayotte is thirsty).��
Macron has often sought to deflect responsibility from himself and France more broadly for the problems in formerly French-controlled parts of Africa, playing down the legacy of colonial rule by asking questions about what (didn���t) happen after independence, which is why these countries, as Macron once put it himself, are having ���civilizational problems.��� France, he believes, isn���t really responsible for any of these issues and, if anything, is contributing to solving them.
During a trip in 2023 to the continent, Macron made a similar blunder when he lost his composure in a visit intended to outline a vision for a new partnership between France and its African allies on a four-country tour, including Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He had made a promising start. ���The days of la Fran��afrique are well and truly over,��� Macron said in Libreville, Gabon���s capital. The tone of his statement implied remorse. But it wasn���t long before he reverted to factory settings.��
Whilst in the DRC, on his first-ever visit to the country, Macron offered his own unsolicited diagnosis of the ongoing insecurity in parts of its territory. ���Since 1994, and it is not France���s fault, I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, you have not been able to restore the sovereignty���neither military, nor security, nor administrative���of your country,��� he told F��lix Tshisekedi. ���Build a solid army, establish security around the state (…), impose transitional justice so that you don���t have war criminals still in charge or on the ground,��� Macron publicly suggested, sounding more like a teacher speaking to an incompetent pupil than a national leader engaging his peer.��
In another incident during his visit to the DRC, President F��lix Tshisekedi had to check Macron, telling him that he often took a ���paternalistic tone, as if you were always absolutely right.��� Cheikh Fall, a Senegalese activist, described the incident as full of ���contempt,��� and Abdennour Toumi, an Algerian researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (Orsam) think tank in T��rkiye, said that the entire visit had been a ���total failure���. Macron went to Africa to change France���s image; instead he helped make it worse and got told off.��
Unlike in the past Macron doesn���t have the good fortune of being able to hide behind the quietism of African leaders eager not to stir the boat due to excessive diffidence. People across Africa continue to find various ways to make clear they don���t share this view of France���s function as the savior of an inherently doomed people, despite Macron���s insistence to the contrary. Macky Sall was ousted by Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who came to power in Dakar on a tsunami of anti-French sentiment. In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the emerging military regimes have adopted a resolutely anti-French geopolitical posture, exploring alliances with non-western powers and even the Africa Corps, a leaner and rebranded version of Wagner. And in Chad and Ivory Coast, France has seen the last of its military footprint on the continent, except Djibouti, given an eviction notice. As France packs up to leave West Africa, today there is more al-Qaida, more displacement, and more instability. What���s there not to be thankful for?����
The L��opold S��dar Senghors and Hamani Dioris of West and Central Africa have given way to Bassirou Diomaye Fayes and Ibrahim Traor��s. And it���s spreading. These younger leaders can hear their publics��� better and tune themselves into their frequencies which has allowed for a gap to emerge between France and the political imaginations of many Africans. ���It used to be that when Paris coughed, Dakar sneezed!��� a close friend of Ousmane Sonko, the Senegalese prime minister, told Le Monde as France grappled with the prospect of prolonged political instability following Macron���s election call last summer. ���The new generation no longer sees Paris as the metronome of our lives.���
The near-total collapse in France���s soft power is a consequence of France attempting to shed the image of an arrogant former colonial power without actually altering its beliefs or the nature of its engagements with African countries, which is partly why these incidents continue to occur.��
When a change in rhetoric on colonization and other issues from France didn���t suffice for African audiences, Macron reverted to saying what he truly thinks. The great irony is that if Macron were ever genuinely in a state of ���repentance��� for France���s colonial crimes, things might well improve. But even without such contrition, France���s reputation wouldn���t necessarily nosedive on autopilot. Macron, however, seems determined to accelerate the decline with his loose-lipped and overly opinionated remarks. He would do better if he kept his private views to himself, as every time he speaks on the African continent, he seems to be taking a joyride on what remains of his country���s tattered reputation in the region.
February 25, 2025
Is AFCON a major tournament?
Mohamed Salah before receiving his silver medal after the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations final between Senegal and Egypt at the Paul Biya 'Olembe' Stadium, Yaounde, Cameroon 06 February 2022. (Photo by Ayman Aref/NurPhoto). Is the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) a major tournament?��
That question sparked a heated debate following comments made by former Liverpool defender and current TV pundit Jamie Carragher.
On Sunday evening, after Mohamed Salah���s stellar performance against Manchester City���where he scored and assisted in Liverpool���s 2���0 win���Carragher questioned Salah���s chances of winning the Ballon d���Or. Despite Salah���s unprecedented statistical run���25 goals and 16 assists this Premier League season with still a third of the season to go���Carragher suggested that Salah is at a disadvantage because he represents Egypt, implying that even winning AFCON wouldn���t significantly boost his Ballon d���Or credentials.
���I think the problem is he���s with Egypt, and he���s probably not playing in a major tournament or one he has a great chance of winning. It���s either the Champions League or a major tournament,��� Carragher stated.
His co-pundits, Micah Richards and Daniel Sturridge, quickly countered, insisting that AFCON is a major tournament. but Carragher seemed to laugh off their statements as if it was the most ridiculous thing he���d heard all year.��
Unsurprisingly, African social media erupted in reaction to Carragher���s comments and disposition. Football fans were quick to condemn Carragher���s remarks as disrespectful and dismissive of AFCON���s significance. Prominent voices, including former Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand and beIN Sports presenter Mohammed Saadoun Al-Kuwari also pushed back, with the latter saying, ���I like [Carragher] as a player, but I completely disagree���AFCON is big for African players.���
Even after the backlash, Carragher stood by his stance. While he admitted his wording was ���clumsy,��� he maintained that AFCON doesn���t hold the same weight as other continental tournaments in the eyes of global football, which, he argued, is why African players often struggle for individual recognition.
So, what should we make of all this?
To be honest, my first reaction was indifference. Carragher isn���t an African football expert, nor is he an authority like respected journalists Mark Gleeson, Frank Simon, or Michael Oti Adjei. Expecting him to fully grasp AFCON���s importance is like expecting my North American palate to have a refined taste for atti��k�� or ugali���just because I am not partial to them doesn���t mean that they are not world-class dishes.
However, what did concern me was the sheer scale of outrage. It hinted at a certain insecurity within African football circles. Many defenders of AFCON pointed to the tournament���s growing viewership and the world-class talent it showcases as proof of its importance. And while these arguments hold weight, they somewhat miss the point.
AFCON isn���t ���major��� because of broadcast numbers or star power���it���s major because it���s . That���s not just a sappy slogan���the stable foundation for the long-term future of any event can be established only if the people who host, compete in, and consume the event love it.��
Last year, Salah himself said, ���I can assure you that [AFCON] is the trophy that I want to win most.��� We don���t need the validation of Jamie Carragher or any other European football pundit to understand that AFCON is a major tournament that is an essential component in an African footballer���s career.
The true danger in Carragher���s comments is not his belief that since Salah is ���with Egypt, he���s probably not playing in a major tournament.” It���s that Carragher���s Eurocentric opinions, broadcast on major networks like Sky Sports and CBS, spur a catch-22 that shapes perceptions that influence material decisions, such as transfer fees, salaries, and global award considerations like the Ballon d���Or.��
It is no secret that African players tend to be undervalued in world football, part of that is due to concrete explanations, such as their missing time during the Africa Cup of Nations. Some of it is due to subpar or lesser-connected player representation. But a lot of it is due to the widespread disrespect of African football accomplishments, and that may be remedied only when media spaces are a little more inclusive and a little less Eurocentric.
Until then, let���s focus on what truly matters���celebrating Mohamed Salah���s historic run toward becoming Africa���s second-ever Ballon d���Or winner and enjoying our 2025 Africa Cup of Nations in December.
February 24, 2025
Beats, borders, and the struggle for freedom
Coco EM at Manifesto Fest in Rome, Italy. Photo credit: Clearmount X Visioni Parallele. Over the last three years, Emma Mbeke Nzioka, a.k.a. Coco Em, has performed on some of the world���s biggest stages. Following her own experience being denied visas and transit through Europe, the Kenyan artist has been challenging unfair travel restrictions for African creative workers via her advocacy organization: Pass Pass.
Justin Doucet caught up with the pan-African DJ and producer as she wrestles with our present apocalyptic political moment.
Justin DoucetI wanted to start out by asking you to introduce yourself. What do you think people who aren���t familiar with you should know?
Coco EmI���m a DJ and producer based in Nairobi, Kenya. I���m also a filmmaker. I���m passionate about African culture and politics. And I make a mean chicken biryani, haha.
Justin DoucetYou���re one of the most prominent women in the Kenyan music scene. Seven years after becoming known internationally, do you feel there���s more room for non-male DJs in Nairobi? And have the alarming rates of femicide in Kenya had an impact on women���s participation in nightlife?
Coco EmTo answer the first question���yes. Being in the spotlight has kind of allowed me to advocate for the inclusion of more women in DJing, music production, and different spheres of the music industry in Nairobi. There���s recently been more inclusive training opportunities, more interest, and more safe spaces to nurture talent. There are now femme collectives and events that didn���t exist back when I started Sim Sima in 2020. Sirens, Wana Wake, and the Whine Down are great platforms where women can be themselves and express themselves. Strictly Silk made a comeback recently. They have always championed safe spaces for women and non-male identifying artists to perform.
Sim Sima.I think it���s interesting to make that connection with the rates of femicide. While there���s more representation of women in my industry and there���s more women pushing through to claim that space for themselves and for their sisters, the number of femicides in Kenya reached an all-time high in 2024. And these issues are not only gendered; they are also exacerbated by political factors, including poverty, trauma, and the decline of the Kenyan economy. All of these factors make women even more vulnerable to gendered violence, whether it stems from domestic abuse or rejecting a catcall.
Obviously, because of these alarming rates of femicide, many women don���t feel safe or free when they go out. You have to be looking out for one another, otherwise you���re taking the risk of being abused after a party or being attacked in the streets, even in a ridesharing service like Uber or Bolt. With all that said, there���s positive changes in our industry. For example, Strictly Silk makes a point of organizing with Uber drivers so that their attendees get home safe, and there���s a sense of traceability and accountability. But there���s no government support or funding for nightlife organizations like this, and that means they often have to choose between the safety of their audience and generating a profit with their events.
Justin DoucetLast year you traveled to a dozen cities for your third European tour. What was it like performing on some of the biggest stages in the world while Kenya was erupting in nationwide protests?
Coco Em
Mambo Zuri Fundraiser. Photo credit: Justin DoucetOn June 25, which was one of the largest days of demonstration, we had just touched down in the United Kingdom. There was definitely some irony to me finding myself in the land of our former colonial masters on that day���it was like a bad joke. The images I was seeing on my phone looked apocalyptic, and I felt like I was on a different planet than the people around me. It was hard for me to get in the zone and enjoy my performances, especially at Glastonbury Festival, one of the biggest festivals in Europe.��
I felt like I wanted to teleport myself into the streets of the CBD [Nairobi���s central business district]; express my own feelings of rage and frustration. Getting the constant updates brought back memories of being in those same streets for Saba Saba Day demonstrations in previous years, when the mobilizations were so much smaller. I also felt a sense of pride in the Kenyan people rising up and speaking out, so I really wanted to fly back home for this historic moment. Again, the irony was that even as a successful touring DJ, playing one of the biggest festivals and being on my third European tour, I had paid so much for flights and visas that I couldn���t afford to move freely.��
Seeing how people turned out in massive numbers was still super inspiring, so we did what we could and supported from where we were. We shared information online to help people who were on the streets and offered bus fare to people who were stranded in town after the protests. We linked up with the diasporic Kenyan community through Mambo Zuri, and we organized a Saba Saba fundraiser event with them in Dalston, London. We sent the proceeds of the night to a fund for those who were injured and the families of those who were killed by the police during the protests. Even from abroad, it felt good to be in solidarity.
Justin DoucetYour sets tend to be an eclectic pan-African blend of kuduro, baile funk, amapiano, and Black techno. You���ve said you���ve been influenced by the music you grew up with���Congolese music and Kwaito. Do you also stay up to date with political events unfolding across the continent, or are you more interested in pan-African culture?
Coco EmI���m a pan-Africanist, so I try to be as up to date as I can by following a few different activists and online media sources. Social media has made a lot of political information more available and visible, and it���s often created a feeling online of shared struggle, like we���re ���one nation,��� or like ���Africa is a country,��� lol. The mass protests of last year; from Nigerians denouncing the cost of living and bad governance, to anti-corruption protests in Uganda, to the Maandamano uprising against the recent tax hike in Kenya [and] even the Sahel region, which has now banded together for self-governance and announced a common passport for its member states; seeing all this makes me feel a spirit of unity and of shared goals with my fellow Africans. At the same time, I feel disgust with the current leaders who are capitalizing on this to further their political agendas. Many of them are pulling political stunts while ignoring the fundamental demands of the movements and ignoring the factors that affect the quality of life of their citizens. Gen-Z risked their lives, they were harassed, abused, intimidated, and abducted. A lot of this has influenced my recent music; I think that���s part of why it remains quite dark. I���ve been feeling very removed from my reality, especially with daily updates on the genocides in Palestine and Sudan.
Coco Em at Manifesto Fest in Rome, Italy. Photo credit: Clearmount X Visioni Parallele. Justin Doucet On your last album, Kilumi, songs like ���Land (Black) First��� dealt with historic and ongoing injustices. Your most recent single, ���Kwa Raha Zangu,��� took an introspective path towards the topic of liberation and empowerment. What can you tell us about your next releases and where your inspiration is taking you?
Coco Em���Land (Black) First��� was produced by me, but the lyrics were written by my friend Sisian, a talented singer-songwriter who also holds these topics close to her heart. I���ve been struggling to make music, so I���ve had to sit with myself as an artist and find the language to articulate what���s important to me. I���m still on that journey, and what���s coming out now is glimpses of topics that I want to delve further into, perhaps when I develop more as a songwriter. I do have releases coming out this year; [they are] speaking on my challenges with visas and travel restrictions, speaking on bad governance and misleadership. A lot of it deals with this idea of a ���cute apocalypse.��� We���re currently living through multiple highly mediatized natural disasters, genocides, displacement of peoples, and increasing inequality. All of this is in your face, every day, constantly being updated. But as an artist, there���s this disconnected expectation that we should keep entertaining, smiling, and being cute! For example, I have to drop a video tonight to announce my next show, and I feel like an apocalypse is happening. And the expectation is like, ���OK, but make it cute.��� You know?
There was a time where I was much less aware of politics, and now I feel hyperaware. A lot of my material now is about interrogating myself and these events. I learn a lot every day, and as I get further into my political bag, I���d like to make music that actually forces people to reflect, without making them feel too depressed. I want to inspire people so that they can question their own role in this whole apparatus.��
Justin DoucetTell us about your new platform.
Coco EmI���m currently in the pre-launching phase of Pass Pass, an advocacy organization, which is led by African creatives and creatives in the diaspora. The goal of Pass Pass is to challenge unfair travel restrictions for African cultural workers and provide them with information and resources to help them through the lengthy, complex, and expensive visa processes they face. We aim to track the visa requirements imposed on us, but, looking inwards, we also want to track the requirements African countries often impose on each other���s citizens. We want to inform people about the lifting of visa requirements, like Ghana has done this year for all African passport holders, recognizing that freedom of movement brings exchange, collaboration, and mutual benefit. We believe that African communities cannot fully thrive economically or culturally within the artificial borders that were demarcated by colonialists, so we want to encourage intra-African travel as much as we want to facilitate movement beyond the continent.��
Pass Pass at the Amsterdam Dance Event.
The gig economy’s false promise
Data center. Image �� Caureem via Shutterstock. In a small corner of Lagos, Peter, a 29-year-old ride-hailing driver, checks his app for new fares. The ping comes through. Another trip. But after commissions, fuel costs, and maintenance, how much does he really take home? Some weeks, it barely covers his rent. And yet, on paper, he is the face of Africa���s rising gig economy���the entrepreneur, the hustler, the self-made worker.
Across Africa���s urban centers���Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi���the streets hum with motorbikes, ride-hailing cars, and app-based delivery workers, all chasing what has been marketed as a new wave of economic empowerment. Proponents of the gig economy tell a seductive story: By lowering barriers to entry, technology has liberated workers, offering them flexible schedules and a pathway to financial independence. But scratch beneath the surface, and another reality emerges���one in which gig workers are caught in a system as exploitative as the colonial-era labor structures that once defined the continent.
Consider the much-lauded ride-hailing sector. Championing flexible hours and easy onboarding, these platforms initially appear to liberate workers from the joblessness that afflicts so many young people across Africa. Yet listen to the drivers themselves, and you���ll hear a consistent refrain: fluctuating commissions, price surges that benefit the platform but not the worker, and no safety nets if they fall ill or their cars break down.
For many, this isn���t the independence they were promised���it���s a digital twist on indentured labor. In much the same way that colonial mining companies trapped workers in debt cycles through company-owned housing and provisions, today���s ride-hailing giants encourage drivers to take out car or motorbike loans, only for many to realize they will never break even. Platforms set the terms, dictating rates and slashing driver earnings at will. If a driver dares to protest? The algorithm can deactivate them overnight���no severance, no recourse, no explanation.
It is telling that in the last few years, Uber and Bolt drivers in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have staged repeated strikes, demanding better pay and formal recognition as employees. Their struggle mirrors a growing global reckoning with gig work; but with fewer protections in place, African gig workers face an even steeper uphill battle.
The extractive nature of Africa���s gig economy is not new���it is simply a digital mutation of a long-standing economic pattern. During the colonial era, European industries built wealth by outsourcing the most grueling, dangerous labor to African workers���whether in gold mines, rubber plantations, or railway construction. Today, platform capitalism functions much the same way, except the ���mine��� is now the internet, and the resource being extracted is data and digital labor.
Take remote gig platforms like Upwork or Remotasks, which connect African workers to data-tagging and transcription jobs. On the surface, these platforms promise global opportunity. In reality, they encourage a brutal race to the bottom, where workers must outbid one another for pennies. AI datasets are built on the backs of thousands of Africans performing repetitive digital piecework, their efforts uncredited, their earnings barely enough to scrape by.
When Kenyan content moderators for Facebook (now Meta) attempted to unionize���led by Daniel Motaung, a whistleblower who exposed the trauma of filtering violent content���they faced legal threats, job losses, and corporate indifference. A historical echo: When mineworkers in South Africa sought fair pay decades ago, they were met with similar retaliation. The medium has changed, but the fundamental exploitation remains the same.
Compounding the problem is the glorification of the ���hustle,��� the idea that gig work is a stepping stone to prosperity. Governments, eager to avoid addressing systemic unemployment, actively promote gig platforms as a solution, masking the reality that these are not sustainable career paths.
Ride-hailing drivers are not ���entrepreneurs��� in any meaningful sense���they are gig workers operating within a system they do not control. Yet the mythology persists, celebrated by tech firms and investors keen to frame their platforms as engines of progress. Meanwhile, local influencers and media narratives reinforce the idea that gig work is a noble pursuit, a way to ���rise above��� through sheer effort.
But who truly benefits when thousands of African workers are forced into a life of algorithmic servitude, where an app determines their next meal?
Despite the bleak picture, one thing is clear���gig workers are not passive victims. Across Africa, informal collectives, WhatsApp groups, and grassroots movements are pushing back against digital exploitation. But the experience of gig work is not the same for all workers. Women, for instance, face unique challenges that are rarely discussed in the celebratory rhetoric around platform-based work.
The gig economy is often hailed as an equalizer���offering women a flexible alternative to traditional employment. But in reality, it replicates the��same gender inequalities found in the formal economy. While men dominate ride-hailing and delivery services, women are��overrepresented in lower-paying digital piecework, such as data annotation, content moderation, and home-based micro-jobs. These jobs, though marketed as remote and flexible, often require relentless availability and offer��no safety nets for maternity leave, health care, or caregiving responsibilities.
And then there is the question of��safety. Unlike male gig workers, women who attempt to enter physically demanding gig sectors���such as ride-hailing���are met with additional risks.��Sexual harassment from passengers, unfair deactivation from platforms, and safety concerns at night��often push women out of these jobs altogether. Even within remote gig work, online harassment remains a threat, with female freelancers reporting being��offered lower pay than their male counterparts or having their work dismissed by clients.
Despite these injustices, African gig workers���both men and women���continue to resist.��In Nigeria, digital freelancers have begun sharing blacklists of exploitative employers, a self-made safety net in an industry that offers no formal protections. In Kenya, Uber and Bolt drivers have mobilized against commission cuts, staging walkouts and protests that have forced companies to temporarily revise fares. These protests have led to significant actions, including Uber reducing its commission from 25 percent to 18 percent in response to driver demands. In South Africa, foreign-born delivery drivers have formed informal unions, using collective power to demand better wages and resist police harassment. These unions not only advocate for better conditions but also serve as essential support networks, allowing workers to share vital information and fundraise for medical expenses���critical safeguards in an industry that provides none.
Africa���s gig economy is at a crossroads. It can either become a digital sweatshop���extracting labor and offering little in return���or a model for ethical, worker-driven innovation. But this requires urgent action: First, governments must step in���implementing enforceable minimum wages, health protections, and clear legal pathways for worker grievances. Second, platforms must be held accountable���big tech cannot continue profiting off African labor while offloading all risks onto workers. And third, gig workers must be recognized as workers���not ���partners,��� not ���micro-entrepreneurs,��� but employees with rights. Until these changes happen, the narrative of the gig economy as a tool of empowerment is nothing more than an illusion.
Africa���s story of labor exploitation did not begin with the gig economy, and it won���t end with it either. We are witnessing a digital rearticulation of the same forces that have historically shaped the continent���s economic structures���where foreign investment is prioritized over fair wages, and technology serves as a cover for worker exploitation.
But in this reconfiguration, there is also space for resistance. A driver in Lagos can rally colleagues on WhatsApp. A Kenyan freelancer can warn others about exploitative contracts. A South African delivery worker can push back against illegal deportations. These small acts of defiance are part of a larger fight���one that will determine whether Africa���s digital economy is built on empowerment or exploitation.
The next time you order a ride, a meal, or a remote task from an African worker, ask yourself: Who really profits? Because if we continue down this road unchecked, the answer will be the same as it was centuries ago���not the workers.
February 20, 2025
Caught at the border
US-Mexico border at Ciudad Ju��rez March, 2024. Image credit David Peinado Romero via Shutterstock. On day one of Donald Trump’s second term as president, newspapers published what will undoubtedly become an infamous photo of a Colombian woman falling to her knees in grief as her asylum appointment was abruptly canceled. As Trump���s executive order halted all asylum possibilities and shuttered the popular CBP One application, which allowed migrants from all over the world like her to make their appointments to apply for asylum or reunite family members, she and thousands of others are left in limbo, effectively creating ���prison cities��� at the southern and northern Mexican borders.
During his first term as president, Trump installed the Migrant Protection Protocols (familiarly known as ���Remain in Mexico���), which requires most asylum seekers arriving to the US border via Mexican territory to stay in Mexico while their case is considered, and Title 42 which allowed the US government to expulse migrants without an asylum screening on the basis of a COVID-19 loophole. President Biden did away with MPP in 2022 and Title 42 in 2023. In a critique of these policies, Isa��n Mandujano notes that ���Mexico is left to do the dirty work for the US��� and migrants waiting in Mexico at both the northern and southern borders are vulnerable to cartel violence and feminicide or sexual assault toward women. ���Remain in Mexico���’ is now reinstated with Trump, despite the new Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum noting that ���Mexico did not accept to receive migrants soliciting asylum in the United States��� but that the country would provide humanitarian assistance, which will undoubtedly test Mexican border patrol and military services.����
As an American specializing in African Studies and working in Mexico, I had originally never thought my field of studies would become so close to home. My fieldwork always took me to Senegal and the Sahel region, or to engage with Senegalese migrants in Italy and Spain. However, I received a call in 2022 from a center in Mexico City for unaccompanied migrant minors asking for help interpreting for a young Senegalese migrant who only spoke Wolof. He had made the journey to Mexico hoping to try his chances at the US border. He had been traveling with a group from Senegal, via Morocco and El Salvador when he was detained at the airport in Mexico City by immigration authorities. He was then sent to the center and refused to eat or cooperate. He was confused and frustrated as to why he was detained. He, along with a 13-year-old boy from The Gambia, and a Mauritania boy who had just turned 17, were considered at risk of being taken advantage of by traffickers on their way to the US border. They all faced the same options: be sent back home; the opportunity to ask for asylum in Mexico; or be reunited with a family member by registering through the CBP One application and waiting for their appointment in the detention center. None of them wanted the first or the second option. We located the Senegalese boy���s father and an uncle in the US. However, it wasn���t until his adult brother left Senegal and made the same journey through El Salvador to Mexico City to help release him from the center that they could make their way to the border.��
The Mauritanian boy arrived in Mexico in a very different way. He decided to migrate because his mother had recently died, his father was old and unable to work, and many of his cousins had already migrated to the US. He hoped to join them. He told me that he went by plane from the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott to Morocco where he flew to Turkey, Colombia, then El Salvador, and on to Nicaragua. From Nicaragua, he traveled by bus, boat, and walking through Honduras, again to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. He was detained in Mexico City and was taken to the center. Returning to Mauritania was not an option. Having cousins in the US, the center worked with immigration to find a way to transfer him to a holding center across the border waiting for authorization to be reunited with his cousin. After a year in Mexico���where he learned Spanish���he was transferred and has now settled in Columbus, Ohio. ����
The statistics for the number of African nationals coming to Mexico and seeking entry into the US have exploded in the last 10 years, ���exacerbating the crisis at the Mexico-U.S border as they join legions of migrants from Central and South America.��� As Europe has tightened its borders, many Africans have sought new and often dangerous migration routes to enter US soil, as the three boys from the Sahel had done. US migration statistics show that in 2020, the number of migrants entering via the border who were from beyond Mexico and Central America, often called ���extra-continentals,��� which include Africans, was 12%. By 2023, they made up 51%. Between 2007 and 2018, the number of African nationals traveling to and through Mexico went from 460 to almost 3,000. During this time, the majority of people arriving from the continent came from Somalia, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo fleeing conflict. Beginning in 2015, more people came from Senegal, Guinea Conakry, and by 2019 before the pandemic, there were 7,065 African migrants in Mexico. By 2021, after the borders reopened in Costa Rica and Panama, there were 5,084 Africans coming through Central America to Mexico. An AP News article shows that in 2022 there were 6,672 African migrants in Mexico, numbers that soared to 59,834 in 2023. And the Mexican government���s year-end figures for undocumented migrants from the continent in 2024 were 46,288.��
During the first Trump administration, Mexico was turned into a space of processing migrants, liminality, fear, and dispossession of rights. In 2019, Trump threatened Mexico with tariffs, and in reaction Mexico discontinued travel visas for migrants entering Mexico from Guatemala to pass through Mexican territory and wait at the US border. Many of these migrants, as a result, established communities in southern border towns such as Tapachula, even creating an African and African Migrant Assembly that protested rights violations by the National Guard. Similar to 2019, Trump has threatened 25% tariffs on Mexican imported goods, and in an effort to delay the economic impact, President Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 National Guard troops, this time to the northern border to deal with cartel violence, the flow of fentanyl, and the migrant situation. However, as Santiago Aguirre, the director of the Center for Human Rights, notes, just as they saw in 2019, putting the National Guard in charge of policing the border creates issues of physical abuse and excessive force in addition to the fact that civil society is stretched thin and migrants are left without a governing body serving as a monitor to potential military abuses. Ray and Flores argue in a study considering the public health implications for undocumented African migrants in Mexico that they face a double vulnerability due to language difficulties, racial discrimination, dangerous routes, and the lack of documentation. The absence of consulates in most African countries is also a barrier for migrants to have access to legal aid.
I recently spoke with workers at the center where the boys I met were housed. They informed me they had several young migrants who had their CBP One appointments canceled and that the center was unsure what to do with them. Now that their options have been reduced even further, the Mexican government has a potentially enormous problem on its hands. Is Mexico becoming an unintended destination for African migrants rather than just a transit country?�� How will the Mexican government and society respond? As Miranda notes, in 2021, with just 2,034 African migrants detained, the lack of personnel and resources meant the system for refugees collapsed. Now that their numbers are much greater, and their possibilities to reach US soil have been cut off, what will their fates be? And what implications do they have for Mexican society?
February 19, 2025
Chad’s latest marshal
General Mahamat Idriss in Kigali, 2022. Image credit Paul Kagame via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. In 2020, former Chad president Idriss D��by Itno was conferred Marshal of Chad by the country���s national assembly. The parliament bestowed him the highest military honor of the land for ���service rendered to the nation and the numerous military victories won��� especially for leading troops to eliminate Islamic attacks in the Lake Chad Basin. A year later, he died from wounds sustained on the battlefield. His son, General Mahamat Idriss D��by was quickly positioned as president of a military council set up to oversee the country���s transition. Mahamat legitimized his rule when he claimed victory in the May 2024 contested presidential election, having led a military government for three years. In December last year the National Transition Council elevated him to the rank of marshal, making him the only second person to receive the designation after his father. At 40, there are concerns if Mahamat���s ambition to have a protracted and iron-fist rule like his father, who reigned for 30 years, will end there.
In classic Chadian tradition, the National Transition Council said Mahamat was raised to the level of a marshal for serving the nation and leading it to battles. The ���battles��� reference the operation ���Haskanite��� in October, which sought to edge out Boko Haram militants in Lake Chad. Members of the terrorist group killed 40 Chadian soldiers in the Lake Chad Basin, which is also communally used by Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. In military fatigue, he is seen commanding government troops and giving updates on the counteroffensive. D��by ruled Chad for 30 years before he was made marshal. His son had only been in the job for three years before assuming the title.
As former head of the presidential guard who led UN peace-keeping missions to northern Mali during his father���s reign, Mahamat���s rise to power fosters Chad���s troubled history of military leaders and their brutal politics. When pioneer president Fran��ois Tombalbaye was toppled and killed by angry soldiers in 1975, the military officer who took charge, Felix Malloum, relinquished power to rebel leader Goukouni Oueddei after ruling for four years. Oueddei���s pro-Libya policies led to a coup d’��tat by his own defense minister Hiss��ne Habr��. Under a one-party system and support from the US and France, Habr�����s tenure was marked by political elimination, torture, and crimes against humanity until D��by marched in unopposed with Libyan-backed forces to overthrow him in 1991.��
Under D��by, there was hope for democracy when he introduced multi-party politics in 1992. But after he won the country���s first election in 1996, he asserted his power and went on to be re-elected for five more terms until his death. Muammar Gaddafi���s fall from power in Libya in 2011 rendered Chad���s northern border vulnerable to attacks from rebel groups like the Front for Change and Concord in Chad, FACT. Since 2016, the Libya-based insurgents have been waging war to overthrow the government in N���Djamena. The group calls the establishment a monarchy, claiming the 2016 and 2021 elections, which extended late D��by���s rule, were fraudulent. It says it wants to establish democracy and free the Chadian people. Mahamat had a taste of FACT���s attacks in the north when the militants attempted to march on the capital, days after his father succumbed to injuries while leading troops to suppress the same group.
Post-D��by events exposed how repressive the government could be. At least 73 demonstrators were killed in October 2022 when they demanded a return to civilian leadership. Opposition leader Yaya Dillo, cousin of Mahamat, who was a long-time challenger of his father, was killed in February��2024 when government forces thundered his party headquarters. Dillo was considered a top challenger to his cousin in the May election. When former Prime Minister Succ��s Masra ran and lost the May polls, he resigned as head of government. Masra was roped into the transition government four months before the elections to appease the opposition. Unlike the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, which ensures its West African members adhere to democracy and human rights, the regional blocs���including the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS)��� that Chad is a member of, are largely economy and integration-driven. CEMAC members, including Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, whose leaders have been in power for more than four decades, barely interfere in political affairs in one another���s countries. Having regional communities that hold leaders to account explains why military leaders in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have broken off from ECOWAS to create their own alliance, further ushering uncertainty in the Sahel.
Geopolitically, Chad is considered a stabilizing force in the Sahel region despite the country���s protracted leadership and violent political transitions. It sits at the heart of Africa more than twice the size of Cameroon, it borders in the south and is more square kilometers larger than the continent���s most populated country Nigeria, which shares a western border. It shares strategic boundaries with Libya, where FACT militants regroup to launch attacks; Central African Republic (CAR), which tussles with rebels for governance; and Sudan, where there is a long-drawn-out civil war. It is still considered a partner of the US and the West���s fight against terrorism in the Sahel though former colonial power and long-standing ally France withdrew its troops on N���djamena���s order. There is a concern that the vacuum left by France, which used Chad as one of its bases for Operation Barkhane to wipe out Islamist groups in the Sahel, could be filled by Russia. Russia���s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Chad in June 2024 following Mahamat���s meeting with President Vladimir Putin in January of the same year. Chad said Lavrov���s trip focused on counterterrorism, military, economy, and diplomacy. The visit was part of Russia���s Africa tour where its top diplomats and officials made trips to Libya, Guinea, and Niger. With Russia increasingly present in the Sahel, Chad is likely to tilt to Moscow with Mahamat driving the policy shift.����
Despite the marshal title, Mahamat has yet to consolidate and unite Chad���s ruling elite and its people. In early January 2025, gunshots reverberated near the presidential palace. Soon after, the country���s Foreign Minister Abderaman Koulamallah said in a Facebook live post that soldiers were defending President Mahamat from an attack from a group of armed men. The Minister later confirmed that 18 attackers were killed. He said they had gotten drunk and came from N���djamena, and were not terrorists. The fact that the attempt on Mahamat���s life came from his fiefdom and reportedly staged by his own people, reminds Chadians and the world the country has not left its violent past.
Chad’s latest marshall
General Mahamat Idriss in Kigali, 2022. Image credit Paul Kagame via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. In 2020, former Chad president Idriss D��by Itno was conferred Marshal of Chad by the country���s national assembly. The parliament bestowed him the highest military honor of the land for ���service rendered to the nation and the numerous military victories won��� especially for leading troops to eliminate Islamic attacks in the Lake Chad Basin. A year later, he died from wounds sustained on the battlefield. His son, General Mahamat Idriss D��by was quickly positioned as president of a military council set up to oversee the country���s transition. Mahamat legitimized his rule when he claimed victory in the May 2024 contested presidential election, having led a military government for three years. In December last year the National Transition Council elevated him to the rank of marshal, making him the only second person to receive the designation after his father. At 40, there are concerns if Mahamat���s ambition to have a protracted and iron-fist rule like his father, who reigned for 30 years, will end there.
In classic Chadian tradition, the National Transition Council said Mahamat was raised to the level of a marshal for serving the nation and leading it to battles. The ���battles��� reference the operation ���Haskanite��� in October, which sought to edge out Boko Haram militants in Lake Chad. Members of the terrorist group killed 40 Chadian soldiers in the Lake Chad Basin, which is also communally used by Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. In military fatigue, he is seen commanding government troops and giving updates on the counteroffensive. D��by ruled Chad for 30 years before he was made marshal. His son had only been in the job for three years before assuming the title.
As former head of the presidential guard who led UN peace-keeping missions to northern Mali during his father���s reign, Mahamat���s rise to power fosters Chad���s troubled history of military leaders and their brutal politics. When pioneer president Fran��ois Tombalbaye was toppled and killed by angry soldiers in 1975, the military officer who took charge, Felix Malloum, relinquished power to rebel leader Goukouni Oueddei after ruling for four years. Oueddei���s pro-Libya policies led to a coup d’��tat by his own defense minister Hiss��ne Habr��. Under a one-party system and support from the US and France, Habr�����s tenure was marked by political elimination, torture, and crimes against humanity until D��by marched in unopposed with Libyan-backed forces to overthrow him in 1991.��
Under D��by, there was hope for democracy when he introduced multi-party politics in 1992. But after he won the country���s first election in 1996, he asserted his power and went on to be re-elected for five more terms until his death. Muammar Gaddafi���s fall from power in Libya in 2011 rendered Chad���s northern border vulnerable to attacks from rebel groups like the Front for Change and Concord in Chad, FACT. Since 2016, the Libya-based insurgents have been waging war to overthrow the government in N���Djamena. The group calls the establishment a monarchy, claiming the 2016 and 2021 elections, which extended late D��by���s rule, were fraudulent. It says it wants to establish democracy and free the Chadian people. Mahamat had a taste of FACT���s attacks in the north when the militants attempted to march on the capital, days after his father succumbed to injuries while leading troops to suppress the same group.
Post-D��by events exposed how repressive the government could be. At least 73 demonstrators were killed in October 2022 when they demanded a return to civilian leadership. Opposition leader Yaya Dillo, cousin of Mahamat, who was a long-time challenger of his father, was killed in February��2024 when government forces thundered his party headquarters. Dillo was considered a top challenger to his cousin in the May election. When former Prime Minister Succ��s Masra ran and lost the May polls, he resigned as head of government. Masra was roped into the transition government four months before the elections to appease the opposition. Unlike the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, which ensures its West African members adhere to democracy and human rights, the regional blocs���including the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS)��� that Chad is a member of, are largely economy and integration-driven. CEMAC members, including Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, whose leaders have been in power for more than four decades, barely interfere in political affairs in one another���s countries. Having regional communities that hold leaders to account explains why military leaders in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have broken off from ECOWAS to create their own alliance, further ushering uncertainty in the Sahel.
Geopolitically, Chad is considered a stabilizing force in the Sahel region despite the country���s protracted leadership and violent political transitions. It sits at the heart of Africa more than twice the size of Cameroon, it borders in the south and is more square kilometers larger than the continent���s most populated country Nigeria, which shares a western border. It shares strategic boundaries with Libya, where FACT militants regroup to launch attacks; central African Republic (CAR), which tussles with rebels for governance; and Sudan, where there is a long-drawn-out civil war. It is still considered a partner of the US and the West���s fight against terrorism in the Sahel though former colonial power and long-standing ally France withdrew its troops on N���djamena���s order. There is a concern that the vacuum left by France, which used Chad as one of its bases for Operation Barkhane to wipe out Islamist groups in the Sahel, could be filled by Russia. Russia���s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Chad in June 2024 following Mahamat���s meeting with President Vladimir Putin in January of the same year. Chad said Lavrov���s trip focused on counterterrorism, military, economy, and diplomacy. The visit was part of Russia���s Africa tour where its top diplomats and officials made trips to Libya, Guinea, and Niger. With Russia increasingly present in the Sahel, Chad is likely to tilt to Moscow with Mahamat driving the policy shift.����
Despite the marshal title, Mahamat has yet to consolidate and unite Chad���s ruling elite and its people. In early January 2025, gunshots reverberated near the presidential palace. Soon after, the country���s Foreign Minister Abderaman Koulamallah said in a Facebook live post that soldiers were defending President Mahamat from an attack from a group of armed men. The Minister later confirmed that 18 attackers were killed. He said they had gotten drunk and came from N���djamena, and were not terrorists. The fact that the attempt on Mahamat���s life came from his fiefdom and reportedly staged by his own people, reminds Chadians and the world the country has not left its violent past.
February 18, 2025
Elon Musk’s South African fantasy
Vineyard in the Western Cape. Image credit Chadolfski via Shutterstock. Elon Musk is reconnecting with his country of birth. In recent weeks, he has rustled up a global right-wing panic over South Africa���s land ownership laws and affirmative action policies, culminating in Donald Trump issuing an executive order ending US financial assistance to South Africa and welcoming ethnic Afrikaners, who are supposedly ���victims of unjust racial discrimination,��� to resettle in America. Musk���s claims have found traction with right-wing Afrikaner nationalist groups at home, who have spent years stoking paranoia that white South Africans are an embattled minority facing persecution.����
This whole debacle is absurd and divorced from reality. First, the impugned law ���the Expropriation Act���signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in late January, does not give the state carte blanche to seize property without compensation. It only allows for the possibility of ���nil compensation��� in specific and limited circumstances, particularly when land is expropriated in the public interest. This may apply to unused land, properties without development plans or profit, or properties posing a community risk.��
The Expropriation Act aims to rectify historical injustices in South Africa���s land ownership by replacing outdated apartheid-era laws with a framework that prioritizes public interest over private privilege. Rooted in constitutional principles, it moves away from the ���willing seller, willing buyer��� model, which historically protected white landowners, and instead ensures expropriation occurs with just and equitable compensation (rather than market-driven valuations). Contrary to claims that it allows land seizures without payment, the act follows a long-standing global legal tradition permitting states to expropriate property for public benefit.
To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical of the policy. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption and political capture have hindered South Africa���s land reform policies, making them slow, mismanaged, and largely ineffective. The government���s inability to process claims efficiently, coupled with widespread mismanagement and graft, has led to delays, disputes, and land deals that often benefit politically connected elites rather than the landless poor. Even when land is redistributed, a lack of post-settlement support���such as financial assistance, infrastructure, and technical training���has left many new black landowners unable to sustain agricultural production. As a result, land reform has failed to meaningfully redress historical dispossession, instead serving as a vehicle for elite enrichment while the majority of black South Africans remain landless and economically marginalized.
Advocates of expropriation without compensation often frame it as a working-class struggle, but in reality, its discourse has been driven by middle-class and elite voices, particularly within the ANC and the EFF, rather than foregrounding the landless poor. Although two-thirds of the South African population broadly support land reform in principle, it is a national priority for fewer than five percent of South African adults, while access to formal jobs and basic services dominate concerns.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical populist party founded in 2013 by Julius Malema, has been one of the loudest voices pushing for land expropriation, using fiery rhetoric about ���taking back the land��� to mobilize downwardly-mobile youth, unemployed South Africans, and the disillusioned black middle class. While the EFF frames itself as a movement for the dispossessed, its leadership���which it is increasingly losing to rival political parties���consists of former ANC Youth League members and black professionals who operate within South Africa���s political mainstreams. Its ideological commitments are often contradictory���prioritizing racial antagonism over class struggle, lacking deep engagement with working-class movements (most glaringly with organized labor), and operating within a highly centralized leadership structure that limits internal democracy.
The power of ���the land question��� comes not from any serious plan to��support smallholder farmers or provide well-located urban housing and secure land tenure (which is what grassroots land justice movements campaign for) but from its historical resonance as the ultimate marker of dispossession.��The ANC, feeling electoral pressure from the EFF, adopted expropriation without compensation into its platform, not because it felt that doing so made sense as a well-thought-out policy, but as a political concession to a growing nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile, the real issues���how to democratize land ownership and prevent beyond elite capture, ensure urban land reform, and provide infrastructure for land recipients���remain overshadowed by political spectacle. In the end, expropriation without compensation has functioned less as a tool for redistribution and more as a symbolic project for reclaiming black sovereignty within a post-apartheid state that still feels to many South Africans to be constrained by white economic dominance.
Yet this is not why the right is up in arms. Instead, the global right���and Musk in particular���have seized on land reform as a vehicle for their broader ideological agenda: stoking fears of white victimhood, discrediting post-apartheid South Africa as a failed state, and reinforcing the narrative that diversity policies inevitably lead to chaos and decline. The outcry has little to do with the real challenges of land reform and everything to do with advancing a political project that portrays any attempt at redress as an attack on white property rights.
This same reactionary impulse is evident in the contrived histrionics over Julius Malema���s singing of ���Kill the Boer.��� The chant, which dates back to the anti-apartheid struggle, has been a subject of legal battles and political controversy. Yet, there is no evidence linking it to orchestrated violence against white farmers (meanwhile, South African courts have repeatedly ruled that the chant, while provocative, is not literal incitement to violence). But for Musk and his allies������supposed free speech absolutists������the song serves as a useful prop in their narrative of white persecution. Some have even gone as far as alleging ���white genocide,��� which, even for the Anti-Defamation League, is a step too far.��
Musk and his affiliates��� outrage is less about the song���s lyrics, history, or context,�� and more about reinforcing the idea that black political power in South Africa is inherently threatening. Ironically, this only plays into Malema���s hands���his politics thrive on provocation, and every pearl-clutching reaction from the global right bolsters his image as an uncompromising opponent of white capital. The more the global right froths at the mouth, the more Malema can present himself as the figure who unsettles the right people, keeping his populist credentials intact. It is a mutually reinforcing spectacle���one that ultimately does little to advance the material interests of landless South Africans.
The hysteria surrounding South Africa���s land reform policies is, in part, fueled by the specter of ���Zimbabwefication.��� The global right has long used Zimbabwe���s land seizures of the early 2000s as a cautionary tale of what happens when black-majority governments challenge white property ownership. The narrative goes that Zimbabwe���s economic collapse was a direct result of land expropriation rather than a combination of mismanagement, corruption, and structural economic constraints. This crude analogy ignores fundamental differences: unlike Zimbabwe���s forced land seizures, South Africa���s Expropriation Act remains bound by constitutional provisions ensuring fairness and public interest. More importantly, the comparison assumes that black-led governments cannot administer land reform responsibly, reinforcing a racist paternalism that undergirds much of the right���s critique.
The same ideological project is at work in the outcry over South Africa���s affirmative action policies. While it is true that employment and shareholding equity laws have been inconsistently applied and, at times, weaponized for cronyism, the broader claim that white South Africans are being systematically excluded from the economy is baseless. White South Africans continue to occupy the most lucrative positions in business, control the majority of private wealth, and benefit from generational economic advantages that decades of slow-moving transformation have failed to undo. Affirmative action, far from dismantling this entrenched inequality, has mainly served to cultivate a small black elite while leaving the structural dynamics of racialized wealth accumulation intact. But this is not what inflames Musk and his allies. Their real concern is not fairness or economic justice���it is the preservation of white economic dominance.
The irony is that some white South Africans, particularly those who reject the reactionary preoccupations of the right, remain trapped in self-defeating melancholia. Many claim to support ���non-racialism��� in principle but have not fully reconciled with the reality that true non-racialism requires dismantling the economic privileges they still enjoy. The Democratic Alliance, for example, who govern precariously in a coalition with the ANC, oppose ���race-based��� policies but stop short of advocating for more precise markers of disadvantage.��
Instead, the DA has mastered the art of triangulation���publicly distancing itself from the global right while occasionally pandering to its anxieties. It sees itself as a liberal, meritocratic center, defending individual opportunity against both the ANC���s corruption and the EFF���s racial populism. Yet its version of meritocracy remains blind to structural inequalities, treating racial redress as a form of ���racial nationalism��� rather than a necessary response to historical dispossession. The party selectively engages with right-wing grievances���criticizing affirmative action, land reform, and the de-commodification of healthcare in ways that subtly affirm white fears���while simultaneously rejecting the overt racial nationalism of Musk���s panic or the Afrikaner lobby groups. But this strategy of appeasement and evasion only deepens its crisis, leaving it caught between a core electorate uneasy with change and a broader public that sees it as lacking a meaningful vision for redistribution.
Genuine progress demands more than nostalgia for a mythical, depoliticized ���rainbow nation��� consensus���it requires an acknowledgment that economic justice is not a zero-sum game. The challenge for progressives, then, is to frame redistribution as a punitive project targeting white South Africans, but as a universalist one that benefits the working class across racial lines (including those racially classified as ���Coloured��� and ���Indian.���).
Even among those white South Africans who claim to see themselves as victims, few are actually willing to emigrate (for their part, the most prominent Afrikaner lobby group in South Africa, AfriForum, has said that the price of leaving would be ���too high��� and have walked back some of their earlier claims about the extent of land seizures). The Trump administration���s offer of ���resettlement��� for ethnic Afrikaners is pure political theater���South Africans, even those disillusioned with the country���s direction, are unlikely to trade in their relatively comfortable lives for an uncertain future in the US.��
The imagined exodus of white South Africans fleeing ���oppression��� to build a new life abroad is an old fantasy, one that has circulated since the end of apartheid, but remains largely unrealized. The simple reason is that, despite the challenges, South Africa still offers a higher quality of life for many white citizens than the precarious existence they would face as economic migrants in the US or Europe. Their sense of victimhood, then, is not rooted in material dispossession but in a psychological discomfort with a country in which their hegemony is no longer unchallenged.
At the heart of the right���s panic is an unspoken truth: South Africa is a black country. This is obvious in its political leadership, its cultural life, and its everyday social reality. The state, the media, and the arts are overwhelmingly shaped by black South Africans, even as economic power remains disproportionately white. That economic imbalance, however, is not static. It is changing, and over time, it will inevitably transform. A society where the vast majority of people���81 percent of the population, and 91 percent if we count Coloreds and Indians���are black cannot remain indefinitely structured by the economic privileges of a small white minority (already, it is intra-racial, rather than inter-racial, inequality that contributes more to total inequality). Whether by gradual reform or sudden rupture, economic power will shift. White South Africans must accept this (or frankly, take up Trump���s offer). But so too must black South Africans, many of whom still define their political outlook in relation to whiteness, as though the country���s trajectory will always be determined by racial contestation rather than by internal class and ideological divisions.
The reality is that South Africa���s future will be shaped less by struggles between black and white than by the conflicts and contradictions within the black majority itself. As black South Africans continue to ascend in business, finance, and industry, the divisions between them���between the working class and the elite, the urban and the rural, and the different political and ethnocultural constituencies���will become more decisive than racial cleavages. In some ways, this is already happening: the ANC���s internal fractures, the EFF���s tensions with its base, and the rise of the MK Party���a Zulu-nationalist bloc led by former president Jacob Zuma���all point to a shifting political terrain where black South Africans are increasingly divided by class interests and political ideology rather than simply by a shared history of racial oppression.
This is not to say that race is irrelevant���far from it. The structures of apartheid-era dispossession still loom large over South African life. But the fundamental question of the next decades will not be whether black South Africans can claim political and economic power (they will), but how that power is distributed, who benefits from it, and whether it will be deployed in the interests of the majority or captured by a new elite. This is the conversation that must take center stage, rather than the tired distractions of white grievance politics or racial theatrics from political actors who thrive on polarization.
Musk���s intervention, then, is not just a distortion of South Africa���s realities, it is a symptom of a broader political malaise. His claims about land reform and affirmative action do not emerge in isolation but are part of an international right-wing strategy to undermine racial justice efforts, delegitimize post-colonial states, and recast white populations as besieged minorities. That this narrative has gained traction among reactionary movements worldwide speaks less to the actual state of South Africa than to the broader anxieties of a global elite struggling to maintain its privilege in an era of political and economic instability.
Yet, if Musk and his allies are eager to use South Africa as a battleground in their culture wars, it is also because they sense an opportunity: a government that has failed to deliver meaningful economic transformation, an opposition too fragmented and opportunistic to challenge the status quo, and a political discourse still ensnared in identity-driven polarization rather than substantive debates about economic justice.��
If there is a way forward, it cannot be through reactive defensiveness or liberal appeals to a bygone era of rainbow nationalism. Nor can it be through the kind of cynical racial scapegoating that has turned economic policy into a spectacle of symbolic posturing. The challenge is to articulate a vision of justice that is rooted not in elite capture or racial grievance, but in genuine material transformation���one that reclaims land reform and economic redistribution as projects of mass uplift rather than elite consolidation.
This means reviving a class-based politics that does not allow figures like Musk to set the terms of debate. It means recognizing that economic justice in South Africa will not be achieved through nationalist posturing but through concrete policies that benefit everyone. And it means refusing the false binaries that define so much of the current discourse���between race and class, between redress and economic growth, between historical justice and a viable future.
Musk���s opportunistic intervention will come to nothing, just as Trump���s latest political stunt will fade from the news cycle. The deeper challenge is whether South Africa���s Left can rise to the occasion, reject the distractions, and build an economic program that speaks to the majority. Because until then, the country will remain vulnerable to those who see it not as a place to be transformed, but as a stage for their own ideological battles.
February 17, 2025
Trump’s fake refugees
Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, Public Domain. Amidst the slew of executive orders issued by US President Donald Trump���ranging from reinstating plastic straws, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and proclaiming that only two genders exist���one, in particular, reverberated around braais, brandies-and-cokes, and bakkies from Brackenfell to Benoni: the executive order ���Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,��� which included the policy that the ���United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa��� and that the ���United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.���
The reaction to the announcement that Afrikaners���historically beneficiaries of the policy of apartheid, which included the most egregious state-sponsored dispossession and disenfranchisement���would now themselves be branded as refugees, ranged from ridicule to enthusiasm. Among Trump���s considerable support base among conservative Afrikaners, there was a smug elation following what they read as a recognition of their complaints that they were being threatened, marginalized, and at risk of losing their land. These complaints had particularly been fanned and promoted in recent years by the Afrikaner rights group AfriForum, who had been pushing a white genocide narrative for many years. Representatives of AfriForum had visited Washington, where they met Republican officials, appeared on conservative media outlets like The Tucker Carlson Show, and also extended their roadshows to conservative think tanks and conferences in Europe, like CPAC in Hungary. Here, they painted a dire picture of a South Africa where white farmers are under constant attack, on the verge of losing their ancestral land, and unfairly targeted by a corrupt and totalitarian government that discriminates against them in a type of reverse apartheid. Their deft communication strategy found sympathetic ears among US conservatives, and with Trump���s reelection, this campaign finally paid off. The White House���s justifications for the executive order read almost like an AfriForum press release and it is clear that AfriForum���s white victimhood discourse heavily influenced the Trump administration���s rhetoric and rationale.��
Within South Africa���outside of the conservative minority of Trump supporters���the executive order met with responses ranging from ridicule to disgust. The government, political parties, and civil society groups have condemned it as a misrepresentation of South African policies and social realities. Faced with the strong backlash, AfriForum rejected Trump���s offer and said they remain committed to the country, but blamed the ANC government for the White House���s animosity.����
But the executive order to fast-track refugee status to Afrikaners is anything but a humanitarian gesture from the White House. Instead, it aligns with the US president���s ideological playbook and political needs. Domestically, he has long thrived on stoking fears of ���invasion��� or cultural displacement���usually targeting immigrants of color. It is doubtful that Trump really knows or cares that much about South African farmers in particular. It is instead a cynical move to energize his right-wing base with a racialized narrative: casting himself as the defender of embattled white people against a supposedly vengeful black majority. This allows Trump to appeal to nativist conservatives who normally disdain refugee admissions but will make an exception when the refugees in question are white and Christian. South Africa is providing him with a convenient case study to support his talking points about the dangers of ���woke��� policies and the need to protect Western civilization. By offering sanctuary to Afrikaners, Trump signals that his America will serve as a haven for those who look and think like his core voters, even as it slams the door on others.��
Geopolitically, the executive order plays into Trump���s nationalistic ideology and supports his objectives of isolating adversaries. The order juxtaposes a purported defense of a white South African minority with a reaffirmation of the US���s support for Israel. It condemns South Africa���s ���aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.��� Trump clearly wants to be seen as punishing South Africa for bringing a case against Israel. In this regard, Afrikaner farmers are used as pawns in a much bigger geopolitical game. The irony of creating a fake class of refugees at the same time as suggesting that Gazans become refugees in neighboring countries because Israel, with the support of the US, turned the Gaza strip into a ���demolition site��� would not have escaped South Africans demanding justice for Palestinians.��
Trump���s executive order, the campaign building up to it, and the response it elicited is, perhaps, first and foremost, a��media event.��The daily signing of a stack of leather-bound orders piled on the Resolute desk in the White House, is staged for the media to transmit the semiotic weight of power, determination and clarity of purpose. But Trump is no friend of the news media. On his own Truth Social platform, Trump referred to what he deems ���a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn���t want to so much as mention.��� This invocation of the ���radical left media��� is another signal to his base���his hostility to the press is well-known. During his previous campaign he repeatedly criticized the so-called fake news media and attacked journalists. By labeling the media as ���radical��� and ���left��� it makes it easy for him to delegitimize media criticism among his base, which has been primed to reject anything that is ���left��� or ���woke.���
In South Africa, the media have also played a significant role in setting the agenda around farm murders and amplifying AfriForum���s campaigns. Even if support for the movement varies across outlets���most positive, of course, in the media outlet Maroela Media, established by Afriforum and its umbrella body Solidariteit���the movement has routinely been referred to as a ���civil rights organization��� instead of an Afrikaner-rights organization, and its statements and campaigns enjoyed widespread media coverage. Farm murders also attract coverage from a media that tends to attach more significance to white deaths than black ones. Afrikaans media, in particular, have, over many years, contributed to a victim narrative, constructing their readers as a people under siege. The organization is also very adept at using social media. Although they now deny having influenced the US president, AfriForum seems to have forgotten how they bragged on social media about their attempts to ���garner support and lobby against racist theft��� since 2018.��
Related to media coverage is the issue of disinformation. The South African government has expressed concern about what it termed Trump���s ���campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.��� Not only has not a single piece of land been expropriated without compensation by the democratic government since 1994, but the act has not yet come into operation and will be subject to the Constitution. Ironically, in pointing out the misinformation, the ANC is now forced to admit the pace of land reform has been very slow. The idea that white Afrikaners are particularly singled out for violent crime is also false, even though it is a prevailing narrative in emotive arguments about a purported white genocide, including posts on X by Trump���s sidekick, the billionaire Elon Musk, whose white, privileged upbringing seems to keep informing his view of the country of his birth. Farm killings���violent and abhorrent as they may be���should be seen against the background of a massive crime problem in the country. Just last year, 27,000 people were killed, amounting to 45 people per 100,000. But statistics show that the murder crisis is even more acute for the country���s black majority, where homicides are more frequent but attract far less media coverage. Research indicates that while white South Africans make up around 8 percent of the population, they account for less than 2 percent of murder victims. None of these statistics resonate in Musk���s cheap shots at controversial politicians like Julius Malema, whose heated, theatrical rhetorical style is not that far removed from Trump���s own populist genre.
It has to be said, though, that although right-wing Afrikaner groups have been most vocal and visible in their attempts to push the white victimhood narratives, these ideas and attitudes are also present in some form in broader mainstream discourses, whether in formal politics (disillusionment among white voters has long been providing the Democratic Alliance with political capital, and they have already launched legal action against the Expropriation Bill) or the social class dynamics of suburban elites. It should also be noted that the majority of Afrikaans speakers are not white, and although AfriForum has attempted to co-opt ���Coloured��� communities, they do not share identical political attitudes.
If Trump had hoped for the executive order to extract subservience and attrition from South Africa, the response, by and large, has been the opposite. There is no question that US sanctions and discontinuation of aid will have a severe impact on the country���s economy and increase the misery of especially the poor black majority. If anything, this will damage US soft power in South Africa and lead South Africa to pursue its own strategic interests to a larger extent within the BRICS group of countries, and in particular China, which is already its largest trade partner. There has already been a decline in the positive perception of the US among South Africans, as Afrobarometer surveys have shown. The move may also have continent-wide resonance. The US can no longer rest on its laurels in the increasingly contested global media space on the continent, where it is competing with strategic narratives from China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and other foreign powers seeking to influence public opinion. Already, studies show that anti-US, anti-imperialist, and possibly anti-West messaging resonates with a significant number of Angolans, Ethiopians, South Africans, and Zambians and that these attitudes are a strong predictor of support for Chinese and Russian narratives.
Trump���s executive order aimed at punishing South Africa may, therefore, in the long run, turn out to have more negative consequences for the US than having to welcome to its shores a group of white refugees with a victimhood complex.
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