Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 2

When the victim isn’t perfect

Rungano Nyoni���s latest film challenges audiences to confront the collective complicity that sustains abuse. Still from On Becoming a Guinea Fowl �� 2024.

Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni���s sophomore feature On Becoming A Guinea Fowl is a surrealist look at the tensions between a dead family member and their living secrets. The film follows Shula (Susan Chardy) as she navigates the grand Bemba funeral of her uncle, Fred. As aunts, grandmothers, and cousins buzz around her and work themselves into a frenzy preparing for the ceremony, Shula and her irreverent cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisel) try to process some difficult truths about the deceased. Early in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, the pair happens upon Fred���s cold body in the middle of a road. The discovery doesn���t shock Shula, who was returning from a fancy dress party, or Nsansa, who drunkenly stumbles upon the scene moments later, because they are among a handful of people who don���t believe Fred���s death is a sorrowful occasion.

The notion of otherness typically exists within the context of dominant and subordinate groups, in which the imposing body stigmatizes a physical or ideological difference between itself and individuals who lack certain traits. Nyoni seems to be drawn to ���othered��� characters���the ostracized, the atypical. In her BAFTA-winning debut film, I Am Not a Witch (2017), the director���s lens observes a young girl cast out by her village on suspicion of being a sorceress. Shula, played by Maggie Mulubwa, is taken to a camp populated by elder witches forced to labor for a corrupt government official. She���s told she can���t escape and is subsequently paraded around the county and used as a glorified tourist attraction. I Am Not a Witch explores gender-based discrimination and otherness in non-familial communal spaces.

Nyoni expands and complicates these themes in On Becoming A Guinea Fowl by making women a part of both the dominant and othered groups and situating the dramatic action�� exclusively within a matriarchal familial space. Unlike I Am Not a Witch, where men were overtly complicit in the ostracizing, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl allows us to observe the formation of a ���them vs us��� dynamic devoid of overt patriarchal interjections from men���save for the critical, catalytic death of Uncle Fred. Shula, Nsansa, their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini), and Fred���s widow, Chichi (Norah Mwansa) share an unpleasant history with the deceased. Each has been sexually abused by Uncle Fred���some repeatedly and others with lasting physical consequences. While the aunties and mothers are aware, they do not believe his passing is the time to stir up past grievances.

This ���othering��� of characters is evident early on in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl through visual and narrative introductions of the characters. Shula, a prim and proper career woman, is not emotional or traditional enough for her family���s liking. When she finds solace from the evening���s whirlwind in a hotel room instead of her family house���where the funeral is being hosted ��� her aunties are quick to drag her back home, peeved by the ease with which she abandons customary rites for work. Nsansa, more liberal and relaxed compared to her conservative kin, is mostly ignored by the family. She is possibly perceived as a bad influence because of her drinking habits. Uncle Fred���s widow, Chichi, who is only referred to as ���the widow��� in conversation, is tagged a bad wife for not supporting her husband through his gambling problem, extramarital affairs, and alcoholism.

When we���re first introduced to Chichi, she���s concealed by tree branches and blanketed by the darkness of the night. Shula confronts her during this late hour, and Chichi reveals that she is banned by the aunties from using the indoor toilet. It���s not until the next scene that we finally see the widow clearly, dutifully submitting to tradition by crawling around the family house. Bupe, still a university student, is also concealed by the night���s darkness when introduced on screen. Shula arrives at her university dorm to fetch her for the funeral. ���I���m glad he���s dead,��� Bupe whispers, sprawled on her bed, head buried in a pillow. She collapses on the floor as she tries to get up. Then, a quick edit transports us to a moment in which the young woman lies in a hospital bed. When we finally see her full visage, it’s in a confessional video about Uncle Fred���s abuse.

The atmosphere in which we���re introduced to these women plays a significant role in how the audience eventually sees them as ���other.��� Before we came to know them intimately, the narrative coaxes us into profiling them based on family perception. During a wailing session, the aunties express their displeasure with Shula���s inability to cry dramatically. ���Why are you cold-hearted?��� one whispers to Shula. Later, these same women withhold food from Chichi and her children until Uncle Fred is laid to rest, reinforcing their belief that his widow doesn���t deserve basic hospitality. While Bupe���s mother shows concern, she is not willing to address the gravity of her daughter���s confession and later hospitalisation. She merely dismisses the events, perhaps as teenage tomfoolery.

By presenting these women as ���flawed������Shula as unfeeling, Bupe as only but a clueless child, Chichi as a defiant wife, and Nsansa as uncouth�����before revealing them as survivors, Nyoni forces audiences to confront their preconceptions about the profile of sexual abuse victims. How is the pursuit of justice impacted when incriminating odds are perceived to be self-induced by the victims? Do these biases affect victims��� right to call out their abuser? Does it make it harder for us to believe them?.

Out of our four women, Chichi plays another role in challenging the internalized biases of abuse victims. She interrogates the myth of the perfect victim. Here is a girl of 16 or 17 years old, a mother to six children, respectful, quiet, mindful of cultural traditions, and subservient to the fragility of patriarchy. And yet, she doesn���t receive support from Fred���s sisters: despite being a teenager and enduring her husband���s infidelity and violence, she isn���t spared from the dehumanizing widow rites.

Despite the judge and juror situation Nyoni elicits within the viewer, this othering of Shula, Nsansa, Bupe, and Chichi serves a greater purpose for them: a way to unite quietly. Many conversations between the four women take place in pantry closets, shadows, alleyways, and abandoned rooms. Tucking them away creates an atmosphere of vulnerability among characters. Nsansa opens up about being raped by Uncle Fred while she and Shula track down a coal seller late at night. Her laugh-laced, humorous retelling reveals her wit as a self-preserving tactic. It���s not until the final quarter of the film, with Shula and Nsansa cocooned in Shula���s car, that�� Shula’s encounters with Uncle Fred are laid bare. It is then that Shula realizes what she must do to protect them all.

With this revelation and sense of unity, the four women and other vulnerable family members approach the funeral ceremony the next day, clucking and screeching like guinea fowls. The final frame of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a clear portrait of this sense of how these women, despite being preyed upon and othered, band together to support one another.

The mourning of a man, the mirror of a nation

Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home. Charlie Kirk speaking at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference. Image via Charlie Kirk on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Two weeks ago, few South Africans could have picked Charlie Kirk out of a lineup. He was not ours. His face did not beam from our pulpits, nor did it dominate most of our social media algorithms. To most South Africans, he was an unfamiliar name stitched to a tired lie about ���white genocide,��� one of those imported paranoias that make the rounds on US cable news. And yet, when Kirk was shot down in Utah, our timelines trembled with recognition. The concentrated conversations about Kirk were because of the US���s ability to consume the world with its own domestic affairs. Strikingly, many locals who were unfamiliar with Kirk himself were nevertheless fluent in the worldview he championed.

This paradox, an obscure man sparking outsized debate, speaks to the global cultural reach of American evangelical media and ideology. Even without knowing Kirk, South Africans recognized the contours of his message, because elements of it were already entrenched in local religious and political discourse. The blend of Christian nationalism, conservative ���family values,��� and combative culture war rhetoric he espoused has long had resonance here, in part because South Africa has grappled with its own versions of that ideology for decades. Christian nationalism has deep roots in South African history, dating back to the Afrikaner nationalists’ use of Calvinist theology to justify apartheid. More recently, local evangelical and Pentecostal churches have absorbed many of the same teachings and political talking points that energize the American religious right. By the time of Kirk���s sudden demise, the ideological groundwork that made his stances familiar had been laid by years of transnational evangelical exchange. South Africans didn���t need to know Kirk as a personality to find his ideas recognizable; they had already heard similar themes in Sunday sermons, social media feeds, and WhatsApp prayer groups.

The surprise is not that South Africans mourned a stranger; it is how natural it felt to some to drape his memory in reverence. A man barely known to us became a topic of mourning and debate. And yet, what we were really grappling with was not Kirk the man but Kirk the symbol. The immediate reactions to Kirk���s death from some South African public figures illustrate this dynamic. Television personality Rorisang Thandekiso took to Instagram to praise Kirk���s ���boldness to stand for [his] convictions��� and lament that ���you [Kirk] died because someone didn���t like your view or opinion. No one should have to die.��� Talk radio host Clement Manyathela devoted airtime to commend his ���bravery��� for his passion for God, and he ���loved Jesus, and he didn���t compromise on that.��� They both acknowledged that they didn���t share all his views, except those that were related to his religious fervor. Former radio DJs Gareth Cliff and Euphonik joined in, and the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), a small but vocal conservative political party, issued a formal statement mourning Kirk as ���a fearless advocate for Christian values and free speech.���

This outpouring of grief suggests that Kirk was a household name in South Africa. He wasn���t. What it reveals instead is how deeply the ideology he championed, a blend of Christian nationalism, patriarchal gender essentialism, and anti-LBGTQ+ rhetoric thinly veiled in religious conviction and devotion, has permeated South African religious and political discourse through American evangelical influence. In their eulogies, we see how US Christian nationalist ideas can circulate abroad in disaggregated form: detached from their original context, distilled into universal-sounding values that ring familiar to Christian believers across the globe.

How did Euro-American evangelical culture penetrate so deeply that a person in South Africa, or Kenya, might weep for an American racist provocateur they���d barely heard of a year ago? The answer lies in decades of indoctrination and cultural exchange that have made the concerns of the American Christian right into a global evangelical preoccupation. To understand why Kirk���s message rang so familiar in South Africa, we must trace the deep roots of evangelical exchange between the US and this country. The story begins in the twilight of apartheid, when the regime searched desperately for allies as the world condemned it. Segments of the American religious right found in South Africa a frontier for their own battles. Prominent televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, aired a series of reports on his Christian Broadcasting Network lauding the Afrikaner government���s ���struggle��� against the African National Congress. His 700 Club broadcasts defended the apartheid regime at a time when even mainstream churches worldwide were condemning apartheid. American evangelical broadcasters didn���t just cheer from afar; they actively set up shop in South Africa. In 1985, Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), struck deals with the apartheid government to beam Christian TV across the country. The TBN was granted licenses to broadcast on apartheid���s terms, even building stations in ���bantustans��� such as Ciskei to skirt international sanctions and embed American-style televangelism into South African living rooms.

This mattered. American evangelicals were laying ideological infrastructure that would outlive apartheid itself. When the regime finally fell in 1994, that infrastructure did not dissolve; rather, it blossomed in the fertile soil of a liberalized media environment. The late James Dobson���s Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful US evangelical ministries, established a division in South Africa that broadcast his teachings on parenting and marriage to a broad audience. On the surface, these lessons appeared wholesome to many, apolitical even. But embedded within them were the same culture war themes that animated US conservatives: mistreatment of children, opposition to abortion, hostility to feminism, and suspicion of LGBTQ+ people. The message was clear: family values were political values. The US religious right provided a template, and by the time South Africa transitioned into democracy, it had already seeped into the bloodstream of our religious culture. It also provided a template for political organizing. In 1993, on the cusp of democracy, South Africa saw the launch of the ACDP���a party explicitly modeled on Christian moral principles in politics. The ACDP���s platform of opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and ���anti-family��� laws closely mirrored that of US Christian conservatives. This was no coincidence. Figures such as Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, the political party���s founder, moved in transnational evangelical circles, and others followed.

If apartheid laid the groundwork, the democratic era gave the American-inspired evangelical project new oxygen. The fall of the system created an ironic opening: while political freedom expanded, so too did the reach of foreign ideological currents. Into that space stepped a generation of South African culture war entrepreneurs who studied, trained, and borrowed directly from the US religious right. Errol Naidoo is perhaps the most emblematic figure. A former ACDP communications director, Naidoo established the Family Policy Institute (FPI) in the 2000s. According to his own lore, he spent six months in Washington DC training with the Family Research Council, a flagship US religious right organization that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010.

What Naidoo brought back was not simply rhetoric but an entire playbook: how to lobby against abortion, how to frame Comprehensive Sexuality Education as a threat to children, and how to cloak anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy in the language of parental rights. It was a politics of fear dressed in the garb of family protection. Yet in South Africa, Naidoo���s message carries the weight of moral authority for many believers. Additionally, Naidoo has close ties to the founder of Family Watch International���s which is also designated as a hate group. In Power and Faith: How evangelical churches are quietly shaping our democracy, I recall how, in September 2022, Naidoo and others convened the first Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Africa Summit at the University of South Africa (UNISA). The event drew backing from Slater���s outfit, Family Policy Institute, the Film and Publication Board, and even the university���s own Bureau of Market Research. With institutional sponsorship from the country���s oldest university and formal recognition by its senior leadership, the agenda was granted a veneer of credibility and authority. Watching the summit recordings later, I was alarmed, not only by the ideas being platformed, but also by the promotion of such an event: were these institutions unaware of the stakes, or are they complicit in ushering anti-rights politics into the South African mainstream?

An American-inspired evangelical ecosystem is alive in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, propagating through media and politics the same blend of Christian nationalism and conservative social values championed by Kirk and his allies. The shape of our culture wars looks too familiar because it is, in many ways, imported wholesale. Campaigns to block Comprehensive Sexuality Education, roll back reproductive rights, and oppose LGBTQ+ equality bear the fingerprints of US and European conservative movements. CitizenGO, a Spain-based platform with links to the US, has run petitions in South Africa to ���reject harmful sex education,��� often recycling fear-based claims about children as young as nine being ���sexualised��� in classrooms. These petitions are marketed as grassroots African initiatives but are in fact part of a coordinated global strategy, with CitizenGO���s Africa office based in Nairobi. At the same time, groups such as Freedom of Religion South Africa (FOR SA) have taken their cues directly from US evangelical radicals. Their legal submissions and public campaigns reproduce almost verbatim the arguments of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the most powerful anti-LGBTQ+ legal groups in the world. The ADF has fought high-profile US court cases defending bakers who refused gay couples and lobbying to curtail trans rights. Representatives of the ADF appeared before the South African Parliament in 2023 to testify against proposed hate crimes legislation, announcing their involvement as though our legislature was just another stop on their global tour. Earlier this year, FOR SA mounted a public campaign against a new Early Childhood Education gender toolkit, accusing the education department of smuggling ���transgender ideology��� into classrooms���borrowing directly from ADF���s arguments in American courtrooms. This is how Kirk���s message had already arrived before he did. By the time South Africans read his obituaries, the ideas he espoused had long since been translated, localized, and circulated under familiar banners: family, faith, tradition.

If there is one arena where the marriage of US and South African evangelical activism is most tangible, it is the fight over abortion. South Africa legalized abortion with the 1996 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, a law hailed as among the most liberal in the world. But as early as 1993, before the legislation was even passed, anti-abortion groups were already mobilizing. Across the country, dozens of so-called ���crisis pregnancy centres���, which rebranded into ���pregnancy help organizations,��� operate in the shadows of our healthcare system. They present themselves as neutral non-profits, but their mission is singular: to discourage women from terminating pregnancies. Once inside, women are met with a barrage of misinformation and emotional manipulation. I saw this firsthand during an undercover visit to a Pretoria-based organization in 2018. Pamphlets in the waiting area warned, falsely, that abortions cause breast cancer and infertility. Behind closed doors, training manuals instruct staff to gently but firmly shame women, delay appointments long enough that the legal window might pass, and press adoption or continuing the pregnancy at all costs. Today, over 50 of these organizations exist across South Africa and are rapidly spreading to neighbouring countries. They are funded, in part, by US-based anti-abortion association Heartbeat International, whose messages are laden with Christian right-wing views.

This pattern extends beyond sexuality education and abortion into the unjustly contested terrain of gender identity. In mid-2025, former DA leader Helen Zille began amplifying British and American ���gender-critical��� talking points, warning that trans women threatened the rights of ���real��� women. Almost immediately, a small group calling itself First Do No Harm Southern Africa (FDNHSA) issued a statement thanking her for her ���courage,��� insisting that sex ���cannot be changed.��� FDNHSA presents itself as an evidence-based medical network, but its public statements lift extensively from the much-debunked Cass Review in the UK and a handful of Scandinavian studies, the same citations US and UK anti-trans activists deploy. Their rhetoric claims that Europe is abandoning trans healthcare and that South Africa should follow, which illustrates how foreign ideology launders itself into our national conversation under the guise of local expertise. The effect is subtle but devastating. What begins as a controversy elsewhere migrates into South African discourse as if it were native to our political soil. By the time it reaches the masses, it has been stripped of its foreignness. The strategy works because it appeals to pre-existing anxieties: the sanctity of the nuclear family, the baseless fear of cultural erosion, the suspicion that liberal and progressive democracy is a foreign imposition.

The story of Charlie Kirk in South Africa is, in truth, not a story about Charlie Kirk at all. It is about how the world���s most powerful empire can take the death of a man who barely mattered here and turn it into a mirror in which we see ourselves. It is about how grief, admiration, and outrage can be stirred not by familiarity with the man but by fluency in the language he spoke, because that language has been whispered to us for decades. What stands out is not that some South Africans joined the chorus but how seamlessly they did so. To speak Kirk���s gospel was not to adopt something foreign but to affirm something already stitched into the seams of our own fabric. He became a cipher, an empty vessel into which people poured their own faith and conviction.

So, we return to Kirk. Not as a man whose name we should have known, but as a figure who reminds us of the architecture already standing in our midst. Charlie Kirk was never ours. And yet, in the silence of pulpits and the echoes of prayer groups, he somehow always was.

Who pays for Africa’s food future?

A new movement is challenging the financial stranglehold of agribusiness and foreign lenders, arguing that Africa���s future lies not in extractive monocultures but in agroecology, sovereignty, and collective resistance. Participants at the agroecology forum pose for a photo while showcasing key publications. Image �� Onesmus Karanja.

In March 2025, more than 100 participants, including farmers, activists, researchers, and policymakers, gathered at the Manzoni Lodge in Nairobi for a three-day forum hosted by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). They came from across the continent to share experiences and build strategies for a fairer food system that prioritizes equity, environmental sustainability, and economic viability throughout the entire food supply chain.

The clear message was that corporations and foreign banks must not dictate the future of Africa���s food system. As Anne Maina of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA Kenya) put it, ���Africa���s future is agroecological, and we will not allow destructive industrial agriculture to dictate our destiny.���

Africa���s current agricultural crisis didn���t happen overnight. It���s rooted in colonial farming systems that prioritized crops���mainly, cotton, coffee, tobacco, and tea���for export rather than feeding local people. After independence, many African countries faced pressure from international lenders such as the World Bank and the IMF to adopt new economic policies. Structural Adjustment Programs forced governments to privatize land, remove support for small farmers, and open their markets to foreign goods. As a result, local food systems collapsed under the weight of imported agricultural products and large-scale industrial monoculture farming. As the regional director for World Neighbors East Africa, Chris Macoloo put it, there is a loss of autonomy in African agricultural policymaking:

One is the fact that the food policy and agricultural policy in Africa is formulated in Washington DC, in London, and in Paris. And once they formulate these policies, then they provide funds to implement the policies, and therefore they dictate the kind of agriculture that the countries in Africa can actually produce.

This extractive system didn���t just continue; it evolved. Today, large financial institutions like the African Development Bank (AfDB) and private investors are promoting a new version of industrial farming that benefits big corporations. For example, the AfDB���s massive $61billion agricultural plan seeks to transform more than 25 million hectares of land into export-oriented agribusiness zones across 40 African countries that outline pathways to improving food security and productivity. If realized, this will displace more than 11 million smallholder farmers.

At the same time, agroecology, a holistic, fairer, and more sustainable approach rooted in African traditions and biodiversity, has been dismissed as irrelevant or ���too small.��� A good example is when agroecology was sidelined in the Post-Malabo and Kampala Declaration process of shaping the next 10 years of the CADAAP strategy. However, it has unquestionable support from African governments.

Philanthropic actors such as AGRA and the Gates Foundation continue to support industrial models promoting genetically modified seeds and highly polluting synthetic chemicals in the name of development. African activists are now asking the Gates Foundation for reparations for the damage caused. As Macoloo highlighted: ���Agribusiness is basically just agriculture as a business… exploiting our fertile soils to grow things… not for our economy, not for our own benefit but to benefit their own people… almost like slavery.���

The problems created by industrial agriculture are growing fast. Soils are losing nutrients, water sources are polluted, and biodiversity is shrinking. In Kenya alone, the Route to Food Report shows that 76% of pesticides used are classified as highly hazardous, with many banned in Europe. These chemicals don���t just affect nature; they poison communities and contribute to rising cases of cancer and other non-communicable diseases.

Land grabbing is another primary concern. More than 30 million hectares of land have already been taken by private agribusinesses and foreign investors, forcing out local farmers and pastoralists in countries such as Senegal and Tanzania. The phenomenon is driven by direct foreign investment, government incentives, and global food and biofuel demands. These land deals, often shrouded in opaque contracts and executed without meaningful consultation with local communities, routinely violate customary land rights. Large-scale sugarcane and rice projects in Tanzania have displaced pastoralist Maasai communities and smallholder farmers. At the same time, the Senegal River Valley has become a leasing hotspot, triggering water shortages and local conflict. Notable examples include the controversial 20,000-hectare Senhuile-S��n��thanol lease in Senegal, which displaced 37 villages, and the sugarcane-driven evictions in Tanzania���s Kilombero Valley, where land deemed ���idle��� by the government was transferred to foreign investors, often without adequate consultation or compensation for local communities who had settled and cultivated these lands.

These processes have severely disrupted subsistence farming, particularly harming pastoralists and women, who often lose access to communal lands first. GRAIN and Land Matrix report that more than 40% of all documented global land grabs occur in Africa. Many are framed as developmental but primarily serve export-oriented agribusiness rather than food security, with the 30 million hectare figure reflecting confirmed rather than speculative acquisitions.

Trade agreements such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have the potential to reshape African agriculture, but they also raise serious concerns about exacerbating existing inequalities in food systems. Critics argue that AfCFTA could enable multinational corporations to patent seeds, undermining traditional seed systems, which millions of African smallholders rely on.

Under expanded intellectual property protections aligned with international agreements like UPOV 1991, seed varieties, often bred and passed down through generations, can be claimed by companies, limiting farmers��� rights to save, share, or reuse seeds. Without legal safeguards to protect community rights, the AfCFTA framework risks turning African agriculture into a corporate-driven model that marginalizes smallholders and erodes traditional ecological knowledge. Experts and organizations such as GRAIN, Oxfam, and bilaterals.org warn that seed diversity and local food systems could be severely compromised unless trade integration efforts include robust protections for farmers��� rights.

Despite being sidelined, agroecology empowers communities to take control of their food systems. It���s proving to be a powerful and practical solution based on local knowledge that works harmoniously with nature. For example, in Kenya���s Muranga County, the new agroecology policy supports agroecology by subsidizing organic inputs and building local markets. The Seed Savers Network has set up over 100 community seed banks in Kenya to protect disappearing indigenous seed varieties.

Agroecology isn���t just about farming. It improves the health of people and ecosystems, supports local economies, strengthens communities, and helps African countries adapt to climate change. Yet it still receives only a tiny fraction of funding. Between 2016 and 2018, just 2.7% of EU support to agriculture in Africa went toward agroecological approaches, according to the CIDSE Finance for Agroecology Report.

As Michel Pimbert from Coventry University said during the Manzoni gathering, ���The money is there, what���s needed is political will.���Agroecology has proven its worth. It���s time the funding matched its potential. Money is at the heart of this food systems issue. Agricultural funding supports industrial agriculture. One speaker in the gathering said, ���We have realized that organizations and donors and even governments tend to fund industrial agriculture at the expense of agroecology.��� Development Finance Institutions, such as the AfDB and British International Investment, channel billions into private equity funds that back supermarket chains and agribusiness companies. These investments rarely reach small farmers and often work against their interests. It is not about missing opportunities; it���s about injustice.

Oxfam International reports that in 2022, 722 major global corporations earned more than $1 trillion in windfall profits. If just a portion of this wealth were taxed and redirected, it could often fund sustainable agriculture across Africa.

Participants at the Manzoni AFSA forum didn���t just complain, they called for action. They demanded debt cancellation, taxes on speculative financial trading and billionaire wealth, and reparations for slavery and colonization. They also proposed the creation of African-led financial institutions; public banks, community savings groups, an agroecology Fund for Africa, and participatory budgets that serve people rather than profit.

As AFSA���s General Coordinator, Million Belay Ali warned, ���Our policies are being shaped by those who control the money.��� Changing that means shifting who holds the power.

The Nairobi forum didn���t end with talk. It launched a bold continent-wide campaign. Participants devised a straightforward strategy to challenge harmful funding systems and build a financial foundation for agroecology. Their plan includes advocating for defunding industrial agriculture by calling for cutting support to Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), banning dangerous pesticides, and redirecting subsidies toward agroecological practices. It also calls for creating new African-led systems, community banks, participatory finance models, and grassroots-led advocacy efforts. Youth, women, and smallholder farmers are central to this movement. Social media, education, litigation, and strategic storytelling are all part of the campaign���s tools.

A symbolic moment from the gathering captured the stakes: participants imagined industrial agriculture as a multiheaded monster, a hydra of land grabs and a serpent of financial control. Their message was simple but powerful: only collective resistance can bring the monster down.

The fight ahead is challenging, but the momentum is real. AFSA and its allies are building a campaign to shift funding, reshape policies, and reclaim the continent���s food future. They are publishing new research, organizing national dialogues, and mobilizing youth and women to lead the way.

One speaker said, ���The fight is brutal, but the vision is clear. When we unite, even giants fall���. As the mock headlines from the event declared, ���Africa Declares Agroecology the Future��� and ���AGRA Defeated,��� the message is loud and clear: the time to reclaim financial power is now.

Back on track

A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid���s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice. Coal train in South Africa. Image credit David Gubler via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The train moves through landscapes stitched with violence, carrying bodies and destinies alike��� where to every birth its blood flows on tracks of both exile and homecoming.

��� Mongane Wally Serote

Trains loom large in the narrative of Black South Africans, alien artifacts, metallic centipedes of colonial extraction that carry the weight of colonialism, dislodgment, resilience, and aspiration. In South African cultural production, they function as metaphors and lived realities that intersect with themes of spatial justice, economic migration, and political struggle.

Whether it is in Stimela���s songs about labor featuring Ray Phiri���s musical narratives, or Busi Mhlongo’s explorations of urbanization with railway metaphors, trains are evoked as sonic carriers of displacement, worker solidarity, and the aspiration for healing and reunion���embedding collective memory and resistance within cultural expression.

Hugh Masekela’s iconic song, Stimela (Coal Train), vividly captures the historical role of trains as instruments of exploitation during colonial and Apartheid South Africa:

There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi, There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe, There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique, ��� Bringing with them strange men with a strange language ��� To work on contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg.

European colonial powers built railways in Africa mainly to extract and export valuable resources���minerals, timber, and agricultural products���from the interior to coastal ports linked to global markets. In the gospel of development (and the romantic memories of unreconstructed supremacist settlers), trains are always good news. Heavy steel meets mobility, turning ���unclaimed��� and wasted land productive. In South Africa, railway lines connected the mineral-rich interior, notably Johannesburg’s goldfields and Kimberley’s diamond mines, to the coastal ports of Durban and Cape Town.

Trains have never been just a means of transporting goods and people. More than simple tools, trains embody ideology and metaphor; they are as much political and social constructs as they are industrial devices. They carry power, memory, and myth. Beneath the romanticism of trains lies an uglier story���one of extraction, erasure, and infrastructural betrayal.

Where settler states like the US built railways to consolidate national space and craft a mythology of internal expansion (however violent), colonial powers in Africa laid tracks without such fiction. Railways were designed to sever, not stitch. From the Congo to Kenya to the former Transvaal, lines ran from resource-rich areas to ports, bypassing indigenous economies, languages, and ecologies.

It was never about nation-building. Colonial and apartheid rail networks were acts of spatial violence that reinforced and entrenched racial segregation and social hierarchies. Built to connect mines with markets, they bypassed communities considered irrelevant to the extractive economy, creating a ���dual economy��� where development clustered along rail corridors serving white settlers. At the same time, Black nations were confined to marginalized homelands and segregated urban areas with poor infrastructure access.

In Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, trains signify the political and physical mobility essential to resistance against apartheid. They evoke the ruptures in segregated landscapes caused by racialized spatial engineering, but also the possibility of re-connection and social transformation. Trains are metaphors for dislocation, labor migration, and collective political momentum���the very forces that structured apartheid���s geography and continue to shape South Africa���s uneven terrain.

In 2025, something unusual is happening across Africa. Morocco swiftly moves passengers from Tangier to Casablanca at 320 km/h, and Egypt develops Chinese-financed networks across the desert. At the same time, South Africa, with greater financial and industrial capacity than either, remains stuck in the legacy of its colonial infrastructure and routes.

A South African high-speed rail (HSR) corridor, linking Johannesburg and Cape Town via Kimberley and Bloemfontein, could become a test case for spatial rectification if its design incorporated building a green industrial spine.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are about trains. These memories are more pleasant than those commonly associated with Black South Africa and, ironically, highlight a positive aspect of living in a totalitarian police state; it was safe for a nine-year-old to travel alone to Vereeniging, a town 50km from Soweto, where I lived.

My mother’s older sister lived in Sharpeville, a township outside Vereeniging. My mother grew up in Sharpeville after her family was forcibly removed from Topville, or ���Top Location,��� as they called it. Sharpeville was ���officially��� constructed to replace Topville due to ���overcrowding��� and ���illnesses like pneumonia.��� But in my family’s telling, the real illness was the apartheid state���s obsession with containment, its refusal to allow Black life to flourish on its own terms. The Topville of their stories was not a slum or a health hazard. It was a place built through self-organization, kinship networks, and quiet defiance, a community shaped by Sunday church services and backyard economies. The removals from Topville began in 1958. The Sharpeville Massacre, which was crucial in changing the course and nature of resistance to apartheid settler colonialism, occurred two years later.

The train I took from Orlando Stadium in Soweto wove through the segregated layout of apartheid. It arrived in Orlando from Johannesburg, dropping off Black workers who then had to navigate the sprawling area of Soweto. From there, it headed to the ���Indian��� suburb of Lenasia (Lenz), then passed through a series of small white-only towns such as Lawley, Grassmere, Leeuhof, and Duncanville, before reaching Vereeniging.

I remember Vereeniging and its surrounding white suburbs, particularly Three Rivers, as a Stepford-like community of implausible physical and metaphysical whiteness. It was more than just the stern-looking residents. More than anywhere else I had ever been in South Africa, Vereeniging embodied apartheid and its supremacist hierarchy. Vereeniging was an ordered, ethno-Gilead without the costumes���it was as a god with a chosen race envisioned the world.

Vereeniging is part of the Vaal Triangle, the metaphorical heart of industrial South Africa, where the apartheid government created and nurtured its ambitions for industrial independence. The establishment of Sasol and Iscor���two iconic symbols of the apartheid industrial complex���transformed this region into the center of a coal-based manufacturing value chain that made South Africa both the continent’s most industrialized country and one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. The first railway to Vereeniging arrived in 1892, connecting the Cape and Johannesburg via Bloemfontein, an essential infrastructure development that channeled imported goods, mining equipment, and labor into the interior mining areas, enabling efficient resource extraction and industrial activities. The old trains carried more than freight; they carried the smell of coal, the sting of iron in the air, and the unspoken knowledge that the line served somewhere else’s wealth.

The first Cape-Johannesburg line was a carbon artery. Coal-fired steam locomotives hauled machinery, chemicals, and migrant labor north to the goldfields, and sent bullion, diamonds, and manufactured goods south to the ports. Every kilometer was built to feed an energy-and carbon-intensive economy: from the collieries of Vereeniging to the blast furnaces of Iscor, the line linked extraction to combustion, and combustion to export. The smoke was not only in the air; it was embedded in the economic logic, in the way value moved out and left little behind.

The main rail corridor from Cape Town to Johannesburg still passes through landscapes marked as much by absence as by presence. Under apartheid, those absences were often by design. Passenger services on trunk lines seldom stopped in or near Black townships, while branch lines were oriented toward mines, grain silos, and white-owned farming towns. Where stations did exist in Black settlements, they were typically under-serviced, freight-only, or deliberately under-invested, reinforcing patterns of exclusion documented in transport planning archives from the 1960s and 1970s.

A HSR line could follow that same path but run on a different fuel and a different idea. Powered by renewable energy, wind from the Cape coast, solar from the Karoo, it could transport people and goods without the plume of coal dust trailing behind. Its stations could anchor new industries in green manufacturing, agro-processing, and clean logistics. But changing the power source is not the same as changing the power relations. A sleek, solar-powered train can still move inequality at high speed. Whether this new line becomes a green spine for shared prosperity or just a cleaner engine for old patterns will depend on who it stops for, and who it speeds past.

Today, many of the gaps remain. Between the Cape Winelands and the Vaal Triangle lie dozens of intermediate towns, De Aar, Beaufort West, Hanover, Colesberg, Springfontein���whose rail-dependent economies have contracted sharply since the 1980s. In De Aar, once the country’s largest marshalling yard, railway employment fell from more than 3,000 jobs in the early 1980s to under 400 by the late 2000s. Beaufort West���s railway depot closed in the 1990s, leaving road freight and tourism as the main employers. Farm mechanization has reduced seasonal labor demand across the Karoo, while the diversion of high-value freight from rail to the N1 and N12 highways has hollowed out sidings and goods sheds along the route.

In the periurban zones of Bloemfontein, Kimberley, and the Vaal, informal settlements now extend along service roads and railway verges without access to affordable, reliable passenger trains. Small towns such as Brandfort and Luckhoff have experienced population stagnation or decline, functioning mainly as commuter dormitories for nearby cities or as welfare-dependent service points. These settlements were once the labor reservoirs, freight hubs, and seasonal markets that supported the colonial and apartheid economies. Currently, they are situated mainly outside the post-1994 growth hubs, bypassed by both national logistics corridors and metropolitan development plans.

A future HSR network could change this trajectory, but the outcome is not predetermined. International evidence varies: in France and Spain, intermediate HSR stations have stimulated regional manufacturing and logistics hubs when paired with targeted investment; in Morocco, the Tangier���Casablanca line has so far brought benefits mainly to its terminal cities. In South Africa, a Cape-Johannesburg HSR could either link these towns into the country���s economic framework or reinforce their marginality by passing through at 300km/h.

If integrated into a green industrialization strategy, the line could serve as a hub for agro-processing in the Karoo, renewable-energy manufacturing in the Northern Cape, and climate-resilient housing developments around selected station towns. Each stop could act as a node within a clean-energy logistics network, connecting solar farms, wind corridors, and regional food markets to the rest of the country.

Even green corridors can become extractive if they move energy, labor, and goods outward without fostering prosperity along their path. Whether this shift turns into a story of renewal or repetition depends on the maps we draw now���maps that determine who is included in the journey and who remains left off the timetable.

Done well, the line would do more than shorten journeys between two cities. It could bind together the fractured body of South Africa���stitching its skipped-over towns into a shared future of economic life and social vitality. Done poorly, it could harden the very exclusions it has the power to undo.

In a country where geography is biography, and memory is place-based, mobility has always been political. Apartheid criminalized Black movement. Democracy promised freedom of movement, but delivered dangerous taxis, slow buses, and long waits. Phaswane Mpe���s Welcome to Our Hillbrow explores the ambivalence of train imagery in the postapartheid urban milieu, where trains represent flux and identity disruption. Here, railways narrate the complex rhythms of migration and urban instability, signalling both connection and rupture within evolving community landscapes.

For South Africa, where apartheid carved enduring fault lines of spatial exclusion, high-speed rail is not just about faster trains; it is about redrawing the very geography of apartheid and colonialism and reimagining the nation-state as modernized indigenous communities.

South Africa is not ideal for HSR because it is vast. It is ideal for HSR because it is broken. Not in some abstract developmental sense. But in the most literal, cartographic sense, the country’s geography is fractured, deliberately. Colonialism structured its provinces and cities to be apart. Apartheid engineered its cities and neighborhoods, its peoples to be separate. Apart from the land, separate from each other, disconnected from power. Colonialism and apartheid were not just racial regimes; they were spatial projects. They redrew space to institutionalize separation, then laid the tracks and paved the roads to enforce it. What this left behind is not just distance, but discontinuity. A landscape full of skipped-over towns, labor-sending zones, and ghost lines of movement that never made sense to begin with.

The long-haul road from Johannesburg to Cape Town is not just long because the country is large. It is long because everything in between was made invisible. So when we talk about HSR, when we imagine sleek trains threading Gauteng to the Cape in five hours instead of fifteen, we are talking about an opportunity to rewrite the logic of extractive settler colonialism and apartheid ethno-capitalism. However, this will only happen if we actively engage with what is almost certainly an inevitability and act to counter dysfunctional elite design and capture.

In To Every Birth Its Blood, trains carry both the possibility of connection and the violence of dislocation. In South Africa, HSR can become a reckoning in motion, a way of the patchwork kilt of a new, genuine nation rather than the disoriented Frankenstein monster that settler colonialism and apartheid engineering tried to stitch together. But only if it is built with memory and intent. Because infrastructure, even with the best aspirations, is never neutral. It can build, but it can also dislocate. It can integrate, but it can also dispossess.

Suppose South Africa���s HSR moonshot is to be more than a technocratic fantasy or an elite vanity project. In that case, it must be yoked to a democratic vision: one that centers spatial justice, builds local capability, resists accumulation without redistribution, and honors the land’s precolonial past as much as its post-carbon future.

This is not about speed. It is about direction.

The poetics of protest

From rooftop beginnings to open mics that echo on the streets, Kenya���s newest literary collective shows how art can archive struggle and energize dissent. The team at the Qwani x Africa Is a Country Poetry for Protests event. Image �� Onesmus Karanja.

To situate the conception of Qwani, as with all other Literary collectives in Kenya, demands that we understand what Carey Baraka said in his 2019 article, ���The Kenyan Literary Hustle.��� In a conversation he was having with a fellow Enkare Review founder, the fellow said, ���In a few years, a new group of kids will come up and decide that the lit scene in Kenya does not work, and gatekeepers be gatekeeping and that we need new names, and they will start something new.���

That was in 2016. Fast forward to October 2022, and a group of eight 20-year-old kids is seated at the rooftop of an apartment building in Parklands, staring out at the sunset. Vindicating the Enkare Review founder as a clairvoyant, the eight kids whine about how the lit scene in Kenya does not work, how gatekeepers are gatekeeping, and decide that they will start something new.

Having only written in their personal blogs, the kids decide to come together and call out to any other young writer at the time who was struggling to break through into the literary scene. Together, they start a literary collective���Qwani���as homage to Kwani?, the older collective that succeeded in making a significant mark on Kenhttps://www.qwani.co.ke/ya���s literary scene.

Their first product���Qwani 01���was launched on April 1, 2023, and with it, they introduced 37 new writers to the scene. The book was a collection of short stories, poems, essays, art/music/ film reviews, scripts, and even pieces written in Sheng (the local lingo).

In Kwani? fashion, the program of the launch contained poetry readings as well as musical performances from other young artists who had volunteered to perform. It was quite a felicitous moment, attended by an audience of 400 people at the Alliance Fran��aise Multimedia Library in the Nairobi Central Business District.

At the end of the day, we thought our work was done. However, two weeks later, several attendees sent positive feedback about the session and asked when the next event would be held. This wasn���t something we had anticipated, but we decided to offer the people what they wanted.

On the last Friday of that month, we hosted an Open Mic at Alliance Fran��aise Multimedia Library, inviting interested poets, spoken word artists, and even musicians to showcase their craft. Despite it being a rainy day, at least 200 young people turned up to the event, and we had such awe-inspiring performances. We held another session the following month, and it went equally well. By then, we realized we could, or rather should, build a community around this. In addition to publishing literary works, we added Open Mics to our main ventures. With the Alliance Fran��aise Multimedia Library offering us their space, we began hosting events every month.

To begin, we had no thematic limits, and so we attracted all kinds of poets and spoken word artists, especially those just starting out and looking to showcase their work. Just like that, it became a cultural hangout, where artists could meet and share ideas as they listened to one another. The additional benefit was that we did not restrict attendance to artists only; everyone was invited to indulge in the performances. Over time, even the performers grew with regard to their craft, and we began seeing prize-worthy work. Even veteran performers such as Dorphanage and Ngartia began attending our shows, much to our surprise!

Soon enough, we adopted themes for each month���s Open Mic. In June this year we marked the anniversary of the June 2024 protests with a poetry session, ���Poetry for Protests.��� In this session, the participants performed pieces addressing the state���s poor governance, wanton corruption, as well as police brutality.

Hosted in collaboration with and as the launch event of the Africa Is a Country Festival in Nairobi, this was our most impactful session. In addition to the performances, we organized a panel discussion featuring Oyamo Richard (writer, poet, spoken-word artist, and co-founder of Rafinki), Seise Bagbo (performing artist and educator), Clifton Gachagua (author of Madman at Kilifi and Cartographer of Water), Dorphanage (the 34th Slam Africa champion), and Ngartia (storyteller and co-founder of Too Early for Birds, a theater production that focuses on telling Kenya���s history).

In the panel discussion, the panelists spoke about the role that poetry holds in protests. This came two days before the June 25 protests, and notwithstanding the potential threat that came with hosting a politically-charged event at this time, we went ahead with it. And it definitely invigorated many people in the audience to take to the streets to fight for our country.

The panelists reminded us that art is the simplest yet the most unwavering form of conveying our emotions. Artists play a very crucial role in uniting the people through their messages, as well as communicating the society���s mood. We were reminded of the role that Eric Wainaina���s song Daima played in uniting Kenyans in 2002. Or the role that Kwani?���s anthologies played in documenting stories from the 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence. Or the role that Pawa254 plays in protest exhibitions.

The biggest project we had been working on around the protests was the third issue of our anthology���Qwani 03���which was themed ���Maandamano.��� For this issue, we had called upon writers, comic artists, and even visual artists to submit pieces focusing on last year���s protests.

The book featured more than 45 pieces, among them essays on how best to organize and mobilize protests, poems relaying the mood of the people, non-fictional pieces narrating individual experiences during the protests, music reviews on songs and albums that defined the protests, a photo gallery of images taken during the protests, and even comic art. The plan was to release it in June this year, during the ���Maandamano Anniversary @ 1��� celebrations.

However, the security risk posed by this book was very high because the proposed launch date coincided with a period when many abductions were happening. Therefore, we have shelved the book, and hopefully we will release it in the future. It will serve as an archive, informing future generations of the events of June 2024. That, clearly, is the duty of artists.

Nepal’s Gen Z reckoning

On the AIAC podcast, we speak with Feyzi Ismail about Nepal���s Gen Z uprising that toppled the ruling establishment. Protest in Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal on September 10th, 2025. Image �� Sathyam_19 via Shutterstock.com

In September 2025, Nepal experienced one of the most significant waves of political unrest in its recent history. Led largely by Gen Z protesters, the movement brought down the governing coalition and forced a national reckoning with the failures of a political class that had long promised transformation but delivered little. Coming nearly two decades after the end of the Maoist civil war and the abolition of the monarchy, the uprising was not just about corruption or unemployment���it was about a deeper sense of betrayal. What had happened to the revolution?

In this episode, editor William Shoki speaks to Feyzi Ismail, a political scientist and longtime observer of Nepalese politics, about what the uprising revealed���and what might come next. Together, they trace the longue dur��e of struggle in Nepal, from the armed insurgency and the resulting fragile peace, to the rise and demobilization of the Maoists, to today���s fractured political landscape. What does the Gen Z rebellion tell us about the future of left politics in Nepal? What kind of economic or geopolitical program could emerge from this moment? And is it possible to imagine a new political formation rising from the ashes of disillusionment?

Listen to the show and read a transcript below, and subscribe on your favorite platform.

https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/3cf85099-80ec-4aa3-9be8-805d40134bf6.mp3 William Shoki

Feyzi, thank you very much for coming onto the Africa Is a Country podcast.

Feyzi Ismail

Thanks for inviting me���it���s a pleasure, absolutely.

William Shoki

It���s interesting to be having this conversation with you now. Just last week, I spoke with Sungu Oyoo, a Kenyan socialist who is running for president there, and we discussed Kenya���s own Gen Z uprisings, which took place last year and this year. Having that conversation against the backdrop of what was happening in Nepal was striking. So I wanted to start by asking you���especially for listeners who might not have been paying close attention, given how overwhelming the news cycle is these days���if you could walk us through what happened over those two days in Nepal. We saw an inspired movement of young people bring down an entire political establishment. In the international press, familiar terms were used���like in Kenya, this too was described as a Gen Z revolution. The ostensible trigger was a social media ban, but the protests quickly expanded to take on a range of other demands. Could you set the scene for us? What were the immediate triggers, and what deeper context produced the uprising?

Feyzi Ismail

Yes, as you say, the trigger���or at least the pretext���was the social media ban. The Nepal government had announced the banning of 26 social media sites���so, the familiar ones: Facebook, Instagram, even WhatsApp. That was the spark, and that���s how it���s been portrayed in much of the media. The government gave these corporations a week to register locally, and of course most of them didn���t. So the government was about to institute the ban when the protests broke out���and very quickly, within days, they reversed course. I would call it an uprising. I wouldn���t go so far as to call it a revolution, but it was certainly an uprising.

Of course, you have to look at the context in which this is taking place. I think what���s clear���even in the mainstream press���is that it wasn���t just about social media. This movement was coming off the back of decades of anger and resentment toward the political elite and the mainstream political parties. That includes the three main ones: the Nepali Congress; the UML, or Unified Marxist-Leninist Party; and the Maoists, the Communist Party of Nepal. The anger was particularly directed at KP Oli, who was the prime minister and came from the UML. His leadership style was extremely authoritarian. Under his rule, dissent was routinely cracked down on, corruption flourished, and he himself was widely implicated. The gap between rich and poor widened significantly���Nepal saw its first billionaire just over a decade ago, while life for the vast majority of people hasn���t really improved.

Nepal is, of course, famously dependent on remittances. It���s one of the top remittance-receiving countries as a share of GDP. That inflow has kept people surviving, but it hasn���t led to transformative change in people���s lives. Remittances are used largely for daily survival. Some families have managed to buy land and so on, but the vast majority remain deeply dependent on this system. Meanwhile, there���s a jobs crisis. There hasn���t been any serious outlet for people���no sense that things are improving, or that the future looks more promising. So I think all of that anger and resentment exploded���and yes, it was among young people, especially in urban centers.

William Shoki

And does that explain, demographically, why this was a Gen Z���driven protest? In the piece you co-wrote with Fraser Sugden for Africa Is a Country , you highlight how Nepal witnessed the growth of a higher-education sector that���s produced a large number of graduates who aren���t being absorbed into the job market. Is it fair to say there���s now a class of downwardly mobile young people���economically starved, politically disillusioned���who are confronting an elite that seems completely indifferent to their reality? I���d love for you to describe that demographic a bit more, and explain why they were the ones to lead this moment.

And then secondly���why the social media ban? What exactly was the government trying to achieve? I didn���t realize, until you said it, that these companies were given just a week to register. But even so, that���s an incredibly short time frame. What was driving the government���s desire to crack down, and were they really so surprised at the backlash? It���s strange that they thought they could get away with it.

Feyzi Ismail

Yes���first, on remittances and the investment in education���I think that���s a crucial part of what���s going on. What we say in the article is that there���s a kind of desperation���a search for a way out of the experience of work, particularly agricultural work. Many families don���t want their children to continue farming, and young people themselves often don���t see a future in it, at least in terms of stable livelihoods. So there���s been a huge investment in education, and a lot of remittances are channeled into that. You have many young people from rural areas moving to cities���not just Kathmandu but also district headquarters���to study. Nepal has a young population, and the growth of educational institutions reflects that demographic. A much smaller group, of course, goes abroad. But the general sentiment is that if we invest in education, our children will have better lives���and of course, that���s a universal hope, not unique to Nepal. In some cases, this investment pays off, but structurally there���s a deep jobs crisis. There simply isn���t enough employment to absorb the growing ranks of educated young people.

A lot of this is rooted in the decimation of domestic industry and the failure to develop what was possible. Like many countries, Nepal underwent neoliberal economic reforms beginning in the early 1990s���privatization, liberalization, and so on. Much of its industry was sold off, primarily to Indian capital, and wasn���t allowed to grow. Nepal once had a relatively well-developed garment sector, as well as jute, rubber, and other industries. More could have been done, but because of trade arrangements and economic policy choices, that potential was never realized. As a result, there���s been a serious structural failure to create jobs at scale.

In 2024 alone, about 870,000 people left the country for work. Most families have at least one member working abroad���often not even in Kathmandu, but directly from the village to India, the Gulf, or elsewhere. This kind of migration is incredibly common. And it���s not just that people are going abroad���they���re doing some of the worst jobs, under very harsh conditions. The government has largely facilitated this process. It provides passports and oversees the bare minimum, but there���s not nearly enough regulation to protect migrant workers from exploitation by middlemen and recruitment agencies. It���s a system that enables people to leave but doesn���t create the conditions for them to stay. There hasn���t been any concerted effort to develop the domestic labor market or expand industrial employment.

To be clear, some things have changed over the past 20 to 30 years. Nepal is now a service economy, and there���s been some growth in small businesses and entrepreneurship. But this isn���t the result of proactive government policy. The welfare state is extremely basic, and there���s been no serious effort to address the structural crisis of employment. So what you see is a government deeply disconnected from the reality facing most people.

The decision to ban social media is emblematic of that disconnect. It reflects a profound misreading of how people live, communicate, and participate in political and cultural life. The idea that you could just ban major platforms���Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok���and expect no backlash is baffling. It���s not even clear why they gave companies just a week to register. Maybe it was an attempt to flex their muscle, to show the state still had authority. But it backfired, massively. KP Oli himself was particularly arrogant and authoritarian. He mocked the Gen Z activists, suggesting they should be focused on their studies instead of wasting time online. He failed to see that it was he who would end up eating his words.

William Shoki

I want to ask you now about Nepal���s recent political history, because I think for an outsider looking at the political landscape, it���s quite confounding. KP Oli himself comes from the Communist Party of Nepal���the Unified Marxist-Leninist formation. The People���s Socialist Party was part of his Fourth Oli Cabinet. And then there���s the Maoist Communist Party, which led the ten-year insurgency between 1996 and 2006���a movement that ended the constitutional monarchy and helped establish the republic.

Given this history���of a mass grassroots uprising against monarchy in 1990, followed by a decade-long insurgency animated by the desire to end inequalities based on class, caste, gender, and ethnicity���you���d think that when the Maoists came to power in 2008, they would have had a clear mandate to transform Nepali society. One would expect they���d pursue an economic program aimed at building an industrial base, a self-sustaining economy, and a just social order. But what you���ve described instead is something very different: an economy hollowed out by neoliberalism, austerity, and liberalization. In a way, it mirrors the path many countries have taken over the past two decades.

Part of me can understand how that happened. The Maoists came to power in 2008, right when the global financial crisis hit. So perhaps the structural conditions weren���t favorable. But could you talk us through how we got here? How did a movement that was so deeply rooted in popular mobilization and committed to ending elite rule end up producing a system where once again people are forced to rise up���this time against elites who were themselves part of that earlier revolutionary generation? What happened to that mandate?

Feyzi Ismail

So, what happened in 1990 was a mass movement���I would call it a revolution. The party-less Panchayat system, an authoritarian political system, was abolished after several hundred thousand people took to the streets demanding change. This was part of a broader global wave in the early 1990s, not unique to Nepal, that ushered in or restored democratic systems in many places. But very soon after that, the Maoists recognized that the promises of democratic transition were not transforming people���s lives in meaningful ways���socially, politically, and especially economically. So they launched what they called the People���s War.

Maoism has a long history in Nepal. The first Communist Party was established in 1949���1950, following in the footsteps of comrades in India. Organizing had already begun even earlier, dating back to the 1930s. The Maoists were the first political force to go deep into rural areas, to speak to people directly, to introduce ideas of rights and human dignity���human rights in the broadest sense. They built an organizational vehicle that people could actually join, fight with, and use to demand those rights from a government that was, by and large, disconnected from the majority of the population. Politics was mostly happening in Kathmandu. Rural areas, although they had some local governance structures and received some state resources, were not politically integrated in a substantive way. So there was a huge gap between what people expected from the democratic movement of 1990 and what was actually delivered. The Maoists capitalized on that disillusionment���and they became hugely popular.

They fought a ten-year civil war. And while some mainstream narratives claim that ordinary people were caught between the state army and Maoist insurgents���as if both sides were equivalent���that doesn���t really capture what the Maoists were trying to do. Their project had mass support. Now, they ultimately failed to realize that project, and I think a lot of that has to do with Indian influence at the state level. India, of course, has its own Maoist insurgency and is fiercely opposed to such movements. After 9/11, the Nepalese government used the global ���war on terror��� discourse to frame the Maoists as terrorists. They secured international support, including weapons and funding, to fight the insurgency���much of it facilitated by India.

Militarily, it ended in a kind of stalemate. The Nepalese army was heavily armed and better equipped, but it couldn���t defeat the Maoists. At the same time, the Maoists couldn���t achieve a military victory either. The real defeat came politically. Some sections of the Maoist leadership began looking for a negotiated exit. In 2006, a peace deal was brokered in Delhi, and that was essentially the beginning of the end���though you could argue the turning point came even earlier, when they entered peace talks.

Strategically and theoretically, the Maoist leadership made a profound miscalculation. They concluded that Nepal needed to develop a capitalist economy first, and that socialism could only come later. This line of thinking���that the working class is too small, the unions too weak, the people not ready���isn���t unique to Nepal. But it led them to compromise. Despite still being the most popular party in 2008, when the Constituent Assembly elections were held and the king was forced to abdicate, the Maoists had lost their revolutionary edge. There was no longer a mass movement. No serious space for popular expression. They held a general strike in 2010���that was really the last significant mobilization. After that, things fell apart.

Young people in particular began to lose faith���not just in the Maoists, but in politics more generally. The Maoists had held so much promise, but they squandered it. They got caught up in the elite politicking of Kathmandu. The leadership became just as corrupt as the parties they once opposed. So while the Communist Party still holds a certain symbolic appeal���Nepal is a very left-leaning society, and people vote for communist parties because they associate them with justice and concern for the poor���that trust has been profoundly eroded. People feel utterly betrayed.

I think there���s now a generalized disillusionment across the country. The dynamics are, of course, different between rural and urban areas, but that sense of distrust is widespread. People don���t know who to believe anymore, and that���s largely due to the collapse of the Maoist project. There are still many left-wing parties���probably too many, in fact���operating outside of parliament. But the challenge for them is enormous: How do you build trust again? These parties often have no funding, and organizing requires resources. So the question is: How do we reconnect with a population that���s so disenchanted?

At the same time, I think the mainstream parties are in trouble. This really does feel like a political rupture. I don���t think people want to see any of the current elite in power again. There are six or seven major figures who���ve just been rotating positions for the last 25���30 years. I don���t think they���ll be able to simply return to business as usual. This feels like a new political reality.

William Shoki

What do you think makes this moment feel so decisive? One thing that���s long surprised me about Nepali politics is how resilient the ruling parties have been. You���ve said that you don���t think they���ll be able to reassert control again���that we���ve entered a new political paradigm where the public is so thoroughly disillusioned with the existing leadership that there���s no way back. But on the other hand, there���s a vacuum. And I wonder whether, unless that vacuum is quickly filled by the kinds of extra-parliamentary movements and formations you���ve mentioned, it might pave the way for other forces���still cut from the same elite cloth���to swoop in and stabilize the moment through counterrevolutionary rhetoric, talking in the language of order, discipline, and normalcy. That���s something we���ve seen happen in other contexts.

Already, we���re seeing debates about the violence. Not the violence by the security forces against protesters, but the reverse���by protesters who burned down a few buildings or stormed homes. And I���ve noticed how some people are starting to distance themselves from those actions. I���m not on the ground, so I don���t know how much of that is authentic or how much of it might be part of a broader strategy to delegitimize the protests. But I���m curious to hear what you make of this moment: Are we really witnessing a break so deep that the political establishment can���t recover?

Feyzi Ismail

It���s complex. There is a vacuum now, yes���but at the same time, the state has responded in the way most states do: by sending in the army to restore order and return things to ���normal��� as quickly as possible. The first thing Sushila Karki did���she���s the former chief justice who has now been appointed interim prime minister���was to promise to repair the damaged buildings and prepare the country for elections. That makes sense, and it���s necessary at one level. But it raises a deeper question: What���s actually going to change? Who is going to run in those elections scheduled for March? Will the elections even happen? I don���t think the old leaders can make a return���Oli���s resignation was deeply humiliating, and during the demonstrations, people held placards with the faces of all the major political leaders. They were all tarred with the same brush.

That said, the political ties these parties have built over decades won���t simply vanish. These are deep-rooted patronage networks. And of course, we can���t ignore international influences. China, for instance, might intervene and try to broker some sort of unity among the communist factions. You could imagine a scenario where new leaders are brought in under familiar party banners, especially if there are no viable alternatives that people recognize or trust. It���s still very difficult to see a truly radical break emerging. But the space is certainly there for alternative parties and leaders to rise���and many people are hoping that this will happen.

We also need to distinguish between the Gen Z protesters and those who were involved in more violent actions, like burning down buildings. I don���t think they were the same people. It���s hard to know exactly who the arsonists were���perhaps some were linked to the Rastriya Swatantra Party, the National Independence Party���but it���s speculative. It certainly wasn���t the young women in school uniforms or the young men planning the protests online who were storming the homes of politicians. So there may have been an element of provocation or even infiltration. It���s unclear.

What is clearer is the role of external powers. People talk a lot about Indian influence���and it���s definitely there���but the US is also very powerful in Nepal. China, too. Oli was famously pro-China and facilitated major investments from them. But now, under the interim government, three of the most important ministries���finance, home, and energy���are all led by people with links to U.S. support. That suggests this may be a kind of correction, a geopolitical recalibration after a decade or more of strong Chinese presence.

Of course, Delhi is watching all of this closely. Nepal is not the only place where we���ve seen youth-led uprisings in the region. Bangladesh last year, Sri Lanka the year before that. India doesn���t want something similar to happen on its own soil. The inequality exists. The conditions are there. And with social media, young people see everything. That���s part of what makes this moment so combustible���the same internet spaces where ordinary people share their struggles are also filled with images of politicians flaunting their wealth, their lifestyles, their impunity. It generates disgust, anger, and a visceral sense of betrayal, especially when the promises of democracy and development haven���t been fulfilled.

People are suffering���there���s a jobs crisis, there���s mass migration into the most exploitative labor sectors, there���s rural stagnation. The 2015 earthquake, the unmet promises of the constitution, the devastation of COVID���all of that is still part of the backdrop. And while many of these patterns echo what we���ve seen elsewhere, Nepal���s history and conditions are unique. What���s driving this moment is real and widespread rage, particularly among a young generation that has invested everything in the idea of a better future���only to be met with betrayal. That anger is both the engine of protest and the terrain on which external and domestic actors are now maneuvering.

William Shoki

I want to touch on two things you���ve just raised���though maybe let���s take them one at a time. First, I want to focus on what you���ve described as the onslaught against working people that���s occurred not only in Nepal but globally over the past two or three decades. We���re talking about a situation in which the majority of the population is immiserated���pushed out, frustrated, cut off from opportunity���and then, crucially, they go online. They scroll through social media and see the children of elites flaunting obscene levels of wealth. And it breeds a deep anger, a resentment that simmers until it finally explodes.

So I want to ask you about the role played by the digital in all of this. Social media now has an outsized influence on the way political mobilizations unfold in the 21st century. What does that look like in the Nepalese context? What���s the nature of social media consumption in Nepal���and do you see it giving rise to new forms of politicization? In the absence of traditional political vehicles and parties, has social media become a kind of substitute infrastructure for political expression? Or would that be overstating its role?

And at the same time, are there tensions or contradictions that come with that digital sphere���especially in terms of unevenness? I���m thinking here in particular about the rural-urban dynamic in Nepal, which I���d love to hear more about. The character of these protests seemed largely urban-centered. Do you think that reflects how social media is used and who has access to it? If not, how have people in rural Nepal been responding to this moment? Are they in the conversation, or are they still largely left out of it?

Feyzi Ismail

Something like three-quarters of the population in Nepal has a mobile phone, and just over half have access to the internet. So a significant portion of the population is connected to these digital spaces. That said, yes���it���s been primarily an urban movement, not just in Kathmandu but in other urban centers as well. Still, I haven���t seen any strong evidence that the rural population feels excluded from what happened. If anything, I think they probably support it���because it was a clear blow against the political elite, which they absolutely deserved. Rural communities have been enduring the same neglect and hardship for years.

In many rural areas, the young men have already left for work abroad. There���s a phenomenon people refer to as the feminization of agriculture���women are now doing much of the labor men used to do. They manage households, they work the fields, often with less help than before. In some places, people are returning to older, cooperative labor practices���like bartering work between households. But in general, a lot of agricultural land is simply being left fallow. There���s reforestation in areas where farming has been abandoned. So rural life is hard, and it���s mostly older people, women, and children who remain. That creates its own forms of social tension and loss.

Many rural residents do feel left behind. They don���t want to leave their homes���but they���re being forced to migrate, often into exploitative and dangerous labor abroad. Most migrants don���t want to go. They want jobs at home. So there���s a deep resentment that after 35 years of democracy, a decade of this new constitution, and over a decade of being a republic, life still hasn���t changed in any fundamental way. Yes, there have been improvements. But even seasonal migration doesn���t transform household incomes, and long-term migration, while more significant, still doesn���t radically improve the lives of most families.

So there���s a sense of shared anger. People may not miss Oli���s rule���certainly, I don���t think anyone���s lamenting his departure���but the bigger feeling is: Finally, something has shifted. A space has opened. One thing we haven���t mentioned yet is the pro-monarchy movement, which had been gaining some traction, particularly since 2023. I think this Gen Z uprising has undercut that momentum somewhat, which is a good thing. The monarchy isn���t widely seen as a viable future, and this protest moment likely reinforced that rejection.

Of course, urban and rural dynamics remain different. But this wasn���t just an urban tantrum���it was a blow to the elite from a frustrated population more broadly. I think older generations, even in urban areas, resonate with that feeling. While it���s youth-led, I don���t think it���s purely a youth movement in the sense that young people alone have a vision or plan for what comes next. The movement is largely leaderless. It lacks structure. That���s part of what makes it so dynamic, but it could also become a problem���especially in terms of transparency, internal democracy, or articulating a clear vehicle through which people���s demands can be channeled.

So yes, people have been politicized. Social media has played a role in that. But social media alone isn���t politics. It can���t replace political parties. Under capitalism, that remains the system we have. Voting still matters. So Gen Z activists���and others���will have to figure out how to relate to parliamentary politics. Do they support a new force in Parliament? Can they become one? That���s part of the short- and medium-term challenge.

But we also need extra-parliamentary forces���especially on the left���to ensure this energy isn���t hijacked by right-wing populism or the remnants of the monarchy. There���s always a danger that resentment is redirected into hatred, division, and violence���along lines of ethnicity or other identities. So the goal should be to connect this generalized politicization���the awareness of inequality, the recognition that life isn���t getting better for most people���with new political formations that can express that anger constructively.

The real question is: How do we put this all together into a mass political vehicle that reflects people���s actual concerns, and how do we connect that with Parliament?

William Shoki

Do you think there���s anyone in Nepal���any formations or individuals���who are exploring that question in inventive and productive ways? Not just looking ahead to the parliamentary contest in March 2026, but thinking more strategically about how to maintain extra-parliamentary pressure in the medium term? How does this movement avoid the risks of co-optation and demobilization that face so many movements once they reach a peak?

You mentioned that the movement is leaderless and structureless���arguably the archetypal form of political organization today. Do you think that makes it more vulnerable? Or is it also a source of strength? How do you imagine this moment bridging the short-term risks of fragmentation with the longer-term horizon of building something durable and expansive?

And is any of that already visible in the demands people are making on the streets? A lot of what���s been said publicly has spoken to the big issues���inequality, corruption, elite impunity. But have there also been articulations of a more specific political vision? And if so, what do you think that vision looks like?

Feyzi Ismail

I don���t see any single political formation right now that���s advancing a comprehensive national vision for what needs to happen in Nepal. That���s not to say they don���t exist���there are left parties out there, some of them with very good ideas. But the issue is unity. None of them have a strong enough national presence to command widespread attention, and even if they do have good ideas, they���re still very small, fragmented, and extra-parliamentary. That makes it hard to be visible, to be trusted, to be believed when you say you have a vision for the country.

Some of these parties are involved in broader movements���for example, campaigns against loan-sharking and exploitative microcredit. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are trapped in usurious lending schemes they can���t pay back. There was a major march to the capital in recent years, with people coming from rural areas���especially from the southern plains���to demand that the government regulate or eliminate these predatory practices. Some of the smaller left parties have been quite vocal in those efforts. But again, unity is difficult when you���re small, when resources are limited, and when trust is lacking between different formations. Without adequate funding, they can���t campaign widely, can���t travel to every district, can���t build a mass presence.

Still, I don���t think the challenge is insurmountable. One way to break through is through mass campaigns. Corruption is an obvious starting point. But the critique can���t stop there. If all people demand is an end to corruption, there���s a risk that change is interpreted narrowly���just replacing some leaders with others within the same political framework. That���s what some of the liberal intelligentsia might prefer: new faces, same system. But that���s not enough.

There are efforts underway to strengthen coalitions, to build toward unity. But the March 2026 elections will be an important test. It���ll show us to what extent the old guard can reorganize and reassert themselves. I suspect most of the same leaders won���t return���but the parties themselves may survive, even if under new leadership. The deeper question is whether the political vision has changed. Because what Nepal needs, at the very least, is a genuine social democratic program���strong welfare policies backed by real political will. And from there, I���d say even more radical change is needed: structural transformation of the economic system and political order.

There are plenty of anti-corruption laws and bodies already in place in Nepal. They���re just not implemented. That���s the problem. And then there���s the question of the constitution, which has been a major political fault line for decades. In many ways, the 2007 interim constitution was more progressive than the 2015 version, which was rushed through after the earthquake. It was almost opportunistic���people were reeling, and the elite took advantage of that moment to push through a more conservative document.

The restructuring of the state into a federal republic was supposed to make resources more accessible at the local level. But in practice, that hasn���t happened. Local governments don���t have real autonomy or capacity. So the promises of federalism, like the promises of the new constitution, remain unfulfilled. It���s been ten years. That kind of broken promise���especially in a place where people have waited so long for change���is fertile ground for anger. Something like this Gen Z uprising was bound to happen, regardless of the specific trigger.

Yes, the new government must investigate corruption. Yes, they must protect freedom of expression and respond to the demands of the Gen Z movement. But we also need radical change, urgently. The question is: Who will provide the leadership for that? What kind of political formation will take it forward?

It���s a process. I never expect these things to happen overnight. And I know there are people on the left working day in and day out to build unity, to draft a real vision, to prepare to contest elections. They���re not sitting on their hands. But we don���t know yet how far they���ll get.

At the same time, we shouldn���t dismiss the Gen Z movement just because it���s leaderless or lacks formal structure. That���s part of its context, part of what gives it its strength. Still, if the left can reach out to the movement, and if the movement itself commits to democratic transparency���to creating structure, to electing accountable leaders���then I think something genuinely new could emerge. Something that breaks with the past.

William Shoki

It���s fascinating. The Nepali landscape���despite its unique characteristics���sounds so familiar to many postcolonial contexts. I���m interested in the composition of the extra-parliamentary left. Who does it include? And how does it distinguish itself from the official left represented in Parliament? I mean, those parties are nominally ���left������many have words like communist, Marxist-Leninist, or Maoist in their names���but they���ve long since shed any meaningful leftist credentials while in power.

How does the extra-parliamentary left claim the mantle of being genuinely left? And is part of why they���ve struggled to make inroads with the general population that the language of ���left��� and ���right��� doesn���t really resonate anymore���at least not with young people? Maybe in the 20th century that spectrum had meaning, but today���s youth seem less concerned with ideology and more concerned with trust: If you say you���re going to do something, will you follow through? That���s what matters. And in many places���Nepal included���leftist parties in power over the past few decades have failed to live up to their promises, whether those promises came out of anticolonial, national liberation, or anti-monarchy struggles.

Feyzi Ismail

It���s a very good question. And it���s quite challenging to follow the splits and mergers in Nepal���s left landscape���there are about a dozen or more extra-parliamentary left parties. Some are splits from the Maoists, formed by people who disagreed with what they see as a capitulation���the decision to enter mainstream parliamentary politics. Others critique Maoism itself and want to forge a different path. Some of these groups don���t even call themselves communist, but they are undeniably left-wing.

Often these parties have particular bases or associations���with Dalits, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups. But I think among at least a section of them, there���s a real recognition that things haven���t gone as they���d hoped. They believe what happened with the Maoists wasn���t just about entering parliament. It was a betrayal of class struggle. A betrayal of revolutionary politics. These parties genuinely want to do things differently. And part of that means reconnecting with the mass of the population around the issues that matter most to them���loan-sharking, migration, gender inequality. Issues rooted in people���s everyday experiences.

Now, I really hope they move toward unity. Because one of the biggest challenges is sectarianism. These parties don���t always agree on seemingly small points���and I don���t want to downplay that, because to them, those disagreements are significant. That���s why they organize separately. But the reality is that this moment���right now���is an opportunity. The Gen Z movement proved it���s possible to oust political elites quickly. People have seen that. And there���s real urgency: It���s been over a decade since the republic was declared, more than 15 years since the Maoists��� last real show of force in 2010, and the public is fed up.

This moment shouldn���t be wasted. It���s essential that these parties take seriously the role of trade unions, the role of the working class���not just the peasantry. They must treat the working class not just as a category but as a political force, capable of withholding labor and demanding change. That means taking Marxist politics seriously again���not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that is attuned to the present.

We can���t afford the idea that socialism is some far-off dream, and what we need right now is to build capitalism first. That idea is outdated. And yet, that���s what some leaders are still saying in the press���that the ideas of abolishing private property or the dictatorship of the proletariat are irrelevant now. But I���d argue the opposite. What Nepal needs is unity on the extra-parliamentary left that can eventually express itself within Parliament. Not because Parliament is the solution, but because that terrain can���t be ceded either.

That requires learning from the Maoist experience���both practically and theoretically. There���s a lot to revisit and clarify, organizationally too. And people are thinking on that level���it���s just a question of whether unity can be built, whether the public���s trust can be won.

The past two weeks have shown that the political space is open. Many things could happen. If the left doesn���t step in, then the right will, or the status quo will reassert itself under new forms. That���s inevitable. So it���s absolutely essential that the left respond, and I think the conditions are ripe. People aren���t just asking for social media access and freedom of expression���although those matter. They want something more. They want a different kind of economy, and they want institutions that can actually deliver on the promises they���ve heard so many times before���but never seen fulfilled.

William Shoki

What would it look like, programmatically, to give real expression to that popular desire for change? If, let���s say, some unified left-wing formation were able to contest elections next year���or at least organize itself sufficiently to exert serious extra-parliamentary pressure���what would that actually entail? On the one hand, as you���ve already said, the traditional ���stageist theory��� of socialist transformation���the idea that you must first go through a period of capitalist development before any kind of revolution���is by now thoroughly discredited. That idea has mostly served as a kind of license for ostensibly socialist or social democratic parties to keep indefinitely postponing the serious question of how to transition beyond capitalism.

But on the other hand, we���re clearly not in a revolutionary situation. And I���d be curious to hear more about why you���ve been calling this moment an uprising, but not a revolution���what are the stakes of that distinction? Because, as you���ve pointed out, even the economic interventions that are on the table���however progressive���are still largely social democratic in character, and would necessarily take place within the constraints of capitalist conditions. And these are extraordinarily unfavorable conditions: stagnant growth, rising inequality, deepening ecological crisis, intensifying geopolitical instability.

Which brings me to the geopolitical question. What role are outside powers playing here���primarily China, India, and the United States? Where are their interests aligned, and where do they diverge? I imagine there���s some alignment, for instance, between India and the US at various junctures. So what kind of tactical flexibility would be required of a left administration? Would it mean adopting a formally nonaligned position? Could it mean developing warmer ties with China? Or maybe something else entirely?

To put it simply: If, on the off chance, a genuinely left administration comes to power���one that sincerely wants to respond to popular demands���what would that look like, programmatically? On the economy, on geopolitics, on social issues? How does such a government govern, given the constraints?

Feyzi Ismail

It���s a bit of a million-dollar question. Why don���t I call it a revolution? Mainly because what happened in 1990 and 2006 were complete restructurings of the state. In 1990, Nepal transitioned from the Panchayat system to a democratic constitutional monarchy. Then in 2006, it abolished a 240-year-old monarchy altogether, moving from monarchy to republic. That was a real, substantive transformation in the form of the state. What we saw this time was the dismissal of a prime minister. That���s not to say it couldn���t develop into a revolution���and I hope it does, eventually���but right now it was a change of government, not of state form.

Nepal faces a very specific, objective difficulty: It has two major powers, India and China, right on its borders, and they are in tension with one another. Geographically, Nepal is divided by the Himalayas���Everest literally separates it from China���while to the south, it shares an open border with India. Historically, ethnically, linguistically, Nepal has been closer to India. But China has increasingly asserted influence���investing heavily through the Belt and Road Initiative, which Nepal joined in 2017. So Nepal has to play an extremely difficult balancing act. I don���t underestimate that, and I certainly don���t underestimate the challenges that any government���especially a left government���would face in that geopolitical context.

Economically, Nepal remains one of the world���s least developed countries, and yes, it needs funds. But there are internal possibilities too. I remember very clearly when the Maoist government came to power in 2011���three years into the republic. Baburam Bhattarai was the finance minister, and for the first time, he managed to collect taxes in a serious way. Elite families, who had never paid their fair share, were suddenly shocked to find they actually had to comply. That moment showed that it was possible to generate internal revenue and begin redistributing resources. It���s true the funds weren���t always spent the way they should have been, but the broader point is that fiscal policy is a tool. A government that���s ideologically committed���willing to tackle corruption, implement a progressive taxation system, and prioritize redistribution���can do something meaningful.

There���s no inherent reason Nepal can���t industrialize. If industry existed here in the 1970s and 1980s, it can exist now. A few decades ago, Nepal was a rice-exporting country; now it imports rice. That speaks to broader issues���land use, agricultural labor shortages���but they���re not unsolvable. You can invest in mechanization. You can redistribute land. These aren���t even radical ideas; they���re just smart social democratic policies. This isn���t unique to Nepal. In many parts of the world, just implementing basic redistributive and developmental measures would be a massive step forward.

And of course, addressing the jobs crisis is essential. Industry and agriculture are both part of that. But there���s also a broader reconstruction and development agenda���roads, electrification, infrastructure. There���s no shortage of work to be done. The key is to make sure that donor money, if it comes, is accepted on Nepal���s terms. Any support has to be aligned with a national plan. And that plan should reflect the priorities of the people, not the logic of the market.

In this sense, economic sovereignty is inseparable from political strategy. I would even argue���just as I���ve argued for nationalization in the UK���that targeted public investment can work extremely well. If you invest wisely, in sectors that matter, you can build capacity. That, in turn, allows you to stabilize geopolitically. Neither India nor China may like such a direction, but they might tolerate it if a left administration has deep popular legitimacy. That���s why maintaining a connection to the mass of the population is so important. One of the most important interfaces for that connection is the mass movement itself���movements that give voice to people���s desires and concerns. The moment a left government becomes disconnected from those movements, it risks doing things that people don���t understand or support. That���s what breeds resentment and anger.

It���s not that difficult to not be corrupt. It���s not impossible to implement at least some of these reforms. I���m not underestimating the challenges���Nepal���s terrain, its history, the geopolitical pressure���but the task is not insurmountable. What���s required is a very strong and ideologically committed political force, one that stays rooted in the people and is willing to govern on that basis. If that exists, it becomes possible to begin building something different.

William Shoki

Feyzi, I think that���s a great note for us to end on. Thank you very much.

Feyzi Ismail

Pleasure. Thanks a lot.

William Shoki

Thank you very much to Feyzi, and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We���ve been discussing Nepal with Feyzi Ismail, who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include the politics of protest, labor, the climate crisis, and anti-imperialism. She is also active in the British antiwar and trade union movements. If you haven���t already, check out her piece on Africa Is a Country , which frames much of what we discussed today. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and we���ll be back next week with another conversation on current affairs from a pan-African and left perspective. My name is William Shoki. Until next time���goodbye.

Feyzi Ismail

The sound of revolt

On his third album, Afro-Portuguese artist Sc��ru Fitch��du fuses ancestral wisdom with urban revolt, turning memory and militancy into a soundtrack for resistance. Sc��ru Fitch��du. Image �� Rita Carmo.

Lee em portugu��s aqui.

���What strength is that?��� asked S��rgio Godinho, one of the most important Portuguese singer-songwriters, in 1972, when Portugal was still submerged in the long night of fascism���dragging out the agony of its colonial system, condemning people to an unjust war, and spreading the carnage in massacres like the one that took place that year in Wiriyamu, Mozambique. Those were harsh times, marked by a ���dormensia ku korrenti��� (dormancy with chains), as Sc��ru Fitch��du would later write and sing in Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu (2023), his second album, where he reworked and re-signified the poetics of the guerilla and African liberation movements, placing them in the cold concrete thickets of the contemporary city.

More than 50 years have passed since that distant 1972, though the frictions of that memory remain alive in the present. After all, as we���ve recently witnessed in Portugal, where the racist far-right political party Chega had 22.5 percent in the 2025 elections, the serpent���s egg was never properly incinerated���there it is today, transformed into a hydra with 50 furious heads, ready to crush anyone who dares to resist. There they sit, all of them���sons and grandsons of fascists, colonialists, and repackaged terrorist bombers���now comfortably nestled in the honorable seats of Parliament.

By historical coincidence, Sc��ru Fitch��du���s third album, Griots i Riots, was released the morning after the 2025 election, a day of hangover and shock for those who grew up believing that fascism belonged to the past tense���that places of repression like Tarrafal, or the political violence of the militias in the street, would remain matters of memory, not future threats looming on the horizon. That historical coincidence, as we said, made this album all the more urgent, a symptom of its own time. Urgent, because it���s impossible to hear the unrelenting shout of ���Kema palasio kema��� without picturing the pigs who would roast beautifully in that redemptive fire. And symptomatic of our time because to the fifty pigs named in the track ���Resistensia,��� the album���s final piece, we now need to add at least eight more���and, perhaps, sharpen the blades, load the spit a little heavier, and throw some extra fuel into the blaze.

���What strength is that?��� Let���s return to S��rgio Godinho���s question. What strength do we ���carry in our arms,��� one that ���demands only obedience���? What force puts us at ���ease with others but at odds with ourselves���? These days, we look around lost, downcast, already tasting blood in our mouths. And still, this music���this immanent fury���cuts through the daze, offering not a manifesto of ready-made ideas, but a concrete possibility: to give rage a sense of collective power.

That possibility emerges from the meeting of griots���whose patient wisdom crosses time and space���and riots, urgent responses to immediate violence, a right to self-defense for those who, to borrow again from the last album���s words, refuse to live as a ���bakan kontenti tristi i filiss koitadu / ku se sina la dentu borsu i ku korda na piskoss ben marradu��� (content, dumb, sad and happy fool / playing with fate in your pocket and a tight rope around the neck).

Griots i Riots picks up exactly where Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu left off. In ���Treinament,��� the final track of that record, it spoke of waking up once again with a purpose������like a dog with clenched teeth and a sore jaw, red eyes waiting for night to fall.��� It called for a ���prepared militancy��� like a root growing strong, turning to weapons and theory with a precise dilemma: ���liberation or death.��� Not coincidentally, those are also the first words heard on Griots i Riots, wrapped in the crystalline sound of a kora played by Mbye Ebrima, then immediately disrupted by the distorted low-end frequencies that define Sc��ru Fitch��du���s sonic world.

Guided by this political mantra, the album is built upon the tension between theory and practice, word and action, body and orality, the city and self-interrogation���conceiving of revolution not as a distant utopia but as a concrete, daily possibility. Not something that will come from palaces, vanguard leaders, or expert commissions, but from the praxis of lived experience, rooted in committed communities.

Knowing there is no revolutionary theory without revolutionary practice, Griots i Riots confronts the hard time of reality with the slow time of ancestral wisdom; it challenges the anesthetized apathy of political and cultural intervention by conjuring a dissension that opens cracks toward another future. This confrontation between times and tensions���between memory and urgency, between word and action���is not just a poetic or political gesture. It���s also the compositional principle structuring the album, shaping its rhythm and breath. We hear it right away in ���Griot i Riot,��� the intro, where ancestral wisdom, carried by the kora, is layered over and gradually contaminated by sonic grime���punctuated by background screams and urgent vocalizations.

Once the blueprint is set, the strategy follows. ���Idukasan i saud,��� a fast-paced shout of popular revolt that reworks poetic lines from S��rgio Godinho���s �� Queima Roupa (1974), is followed by ���Kel karta di alfuria���,��� a bass-heavy, reflective track about the traps of false liberations lost in the bourgeois entanglements of the Big House. ���Funda na poss,��� a visceral blow against pop culture���s submissive posture, is succeeded by ���Du ta morr��,��� an austere and slow meditation on death and grief. The accelerated precision of ���Kema palasio kema��� clashes with the poetic delivery and harmonized distortion of ���S��mia Kodj��������a track with Conan Osiris, where a fado-tinged voice has never sounded so richly defiled. ���Prekariadu,��� a battle cry against the suffocating precarity of lives in the urban jungle, gives way to ���Caoberdiano Barela,��� a moving reinterpretation of Princezito���s classic, reminding us that this is a long story still unfolding. Finally, ���Resistensia��� closes the album, ensuring we don���t forget the clear identification of the targets: the pigs that squeal, the wolves that howl, the sheep that let their guard down.

By his third record, Sc��ru Fitch��du has lost neither the searing, rough dissent of Un Kuza Runhu (2020) nor the poetic, ethical, and sonic density of Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu. In Griots i Riots, we hear the same insubordination, the original impulse, the same grime meant to disrupt the management of a rotten peace. But we also hear an artist who is increasingly a dense and sagacious poet, seeking to expand and master his own language, without ever yielding to the cynical reason of our times. Above all, a creator who writes about his time and his people, attuned to their latent anger, invested in the search for new answers born from everyday struggle. A creator whose music becomes the soundtrack of those who refuse to live in chains, yet who allows himself to explore���in both sound and content���deeper reflections on the human condition, the possibilities of agency, the consciousness of death, and the potential for what���s to come: an ongoing attempt to answer S��rgio Godinho���s question: What strength is this that we carry in our arms? Let us keep asking���and keep fighting. On this side of the barricade, no one will die on their knees.

O som da revolta

No seu terceiro ��lbum, o artista afro-portugu��s Sc��ru Fitch��du funde a sabedoria ancestral com a revolta urbana, transformando mem��ria e milit��ncia em uma trilha sonora para a resist��ncia.
Sc��ru Fitch��du. Im��gem �� Vera Palminha

Read in English here.

“Que for��a �� essa?” perguntou S��rgio Godinho, um dos mais importantes cantores e compositores portugueses, em 1972, quando Portugal ainda estava submerso na longa noite do fascismo ��� arrastando a agonia de seu sistema colonial, condenando pessoas a uma guerra injusta e espalhando a carnificina em massacres como o que ocorreu naquele ano em Wiryamu, Mo��ambique. Aqueles eram tempos dif��ceis, marcados por uma “dormensia ku korrenti”, como Sc��ru Fitch��du viria a escrever e cantar mais tarde em Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu (2023), seu ��lbum posterior, onde ele retrabalhou e ressignificou a po��tica da guerrilha e dos movimentos de liberta����o africanos, colocando-os nas frias e concretas matas da cidade contempor��nea.

Mais de cinquenta anos se passaram desde aquele distante 1972, embora as fric����es dessa mem��ria permane��am vivas no presente. Afinal, como testemunhamos recentemente em Portugal, onde o partido pol��tico racista de extrema-direita Chega teve 22,5% nas elei����es recentes (2025), o ovo da serpente nunca foi devidamente incinerado ��� l�� est�� ele hoje, transformado em uma hidra com cinquenta cabe��as furiosas, prontas para esmagar qualquer um que ouse resistir. L�� est��o eles, todos eles ��� filhos e netos de fascistas, colonialistas e terroristas reempacotados ��� agora confortavelmente aninhados nos assentos honrosos do Parlamento.

Por coincid��ncia hist��rica, o terceiro ��lbum de Sc��ru Fitch��du, Griots i Riots, foi lan��ado na manh�� seguinte ��s elei����es mais recentes (2025), um dia de ressaca e choque para aqueles que cresceram acreditando que o fascismo pertencia ao passado ��� que lugares de repress��o como Tarrafal, ou a viol��ncia pol��tica das mil��cias na rua, permaneceriam como quest��es de mem��ria, n��o amea��as futuras que pairam no horizonte. Essa coincid��ncia hist��rica, como dissemos, tornou este ��lbum ainda mais urgente, um sintoma de seu pr��prio tempo. Urgente, porque �� imposs��vel ouvir o grito implac��vel de “Kema palasio kema” sem imaginar os porcos que assariam lindamente naquele fogo redentor. E sintom��tico de nosso tempo porque aos cinquenta porcos nomeados na faixa ‘Resistensia,’ a pe��a final do ��lbum, agora precisamos adicionar pelo menos mais oito ��� e, talvez, afiar as l��minas, carregar o espeto um pouco mais pesado, e jogar um pouco mais de combust��vel na fogueira.

“Que for��a �� essa?” Voltemos �� pergunta de S��rgio Godinho. Que for��a “carregamos nos bra��os”, uma que “exige apenas obedi��ncia”? Que for��a nos coloca “�� vontade com os outros, mas em desacordo com n��s mesmos”? Nos dias de hoje, olhamos em volta perdidos, cabisbaixos, j�� sentindo o gosto de sangue na boca. E ainda assim, esta m��sica ��� esta f��ria imanente ��� corta o torpor, oferecendo n��o um manifesto de ideias prontas, mas uma possibilidade concreta: dar �� raiva um sentido de poder coletivo.

Essa possibilidade emerge do encontro de griots ��� cuja sabedoria paciente atravessa o tempo e o espa��o ��� e riots (revoltas), respostas urgentes �� viol��ncia imediata, um direito �� autodefesa para aqueles que, para pegar emprestado novamente as palavras do ��ltimo ��lbum, se recusam a viver como um “bakan kontenti tristi i filiss koitadu / ku se sina la dentu borsu i ku korda na piskoss ben marradu”.

Griots i Riots retoma exatamente de onde Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu parou. Em “Treinament,” a faixa final do ��lbum, fala sobre acordar mais uma vez com um prop��sito ��� “como um c��o com dentes cerrados e mand��bula dolorida, olhos vermelhos esperando a noite cair”. Convocava uma “milit��ncia preparada” como uma raiz crescendo forte, voltando-se para armas e teoria com um dilema preciso: “liberta����o ou morte.” N��o por coincid��ncia, essas s��o tamb��m as primeiras palavras ouvidas em Griots i Riots, envoltas no som cristalino de uma kora tocada por Mbye Ebrima, ent��o imediatamente perturbadas pelas frequ��ncias graves distorcidas que definem o mundo sonoro de Sc��ru Fitch��du.

Guiado por este mantra pol��tico, o ��lbum �� constru��do sobre a tens��o entre teoria e pr��tica, palavra e a����o, corpo e oralidade, a cidade e a auto-interroga����o ��� concebendo a revolu����o n��o como uma utopia distante, mas como uma possibilidade concreta e di��ria. N��o algo que vir�� de pal��cios, l��deres de vanguarda ou comiss��es de especialistas, mas da pr��xis da experi��ncia vivida, enraizada em comunidades comprometidas.

Sabendo que n��o h�� teoria revolucion��ria sem pr��tica revolucion��ria, Griots i Riots confronta o tempo dif��cil da realidade com o tempo lento da sabedoria ancestral; desafia a apatia anestesiada da interven����o pol��tica e cultural ao conjurar uma dissens��o que abre rachaduras em dire����o a outro futuro. Este confronto entre tempos e tens��es ��� entre mem��ria e urg��ncia, entre palavra e a����o ��� n��o �� apenas um gesto po��tico ou pol��tico. �� tamb��m o princ��pio composicional que estrutura o ��lbum, moldando seu ritmo e f��lego. N��s o ouvimos de imediato em “Griot i Riot,” a introdu����o, onde a sabedoria ancestral, carregada pela kora, �� sobreposta e gradualmente contaminada pela sujeira sonora ��� pontuada por gritos de fundo e vocaliza����es urgentes.

Uma vez que o plano �� estabelecido, a estrat��gia segue. “Idukasan i saud,” um grito acelerado de revolta popular que retrabalha linhas po��ticas de �� Queima Roupa de S��rgio Godinho (1974), �� seguido por “Kel karta di alfuria…,” uma faixa pesada de baixo, reflexiva, sobre as armadilhas das falsas liberta����es perdidas nos emaranhados burgueses da Casa Grande. “Funda na poss,” um golpe visceral contra a postura submissa da cultura pop, �� sucedida por “Du ta morr��,” uma medita����o austera e lenta sobre a morte e o luto. A precis��o acelerada de “Kema palasio kema” choca-se com a entrega po��tica e a distor����o harmonizada de “S��mia Kodj��”��� uma faixa com Conan Os��ris, onde uma voz com toques de fado nunca soou t��o ricamente profanada. “Prekariadu,” um grito de batalha contra a precariedade sufocante das vidas na selva urbana, d�� lugar a “Caoberdiano Barela,” uma reinterpreta����o comovente do cl��ssico de Princezito, lembrando-nos de que esta �� uma longa hist��ria que ainda se desenrola. Finalmente, “Resistensia” fecha o ��lbum, garantindo que n��o nos esque��amos da clara identifica����o dos alvos: os porcos que grunhem, os lobos que uivam, as ovelhas que baixam a guarda.

Em seu terceiro disco, Sc��ru Fitch��du n��o perdeu nem a dissens��o ��spera e incisiva de Un Kuza Runhu (2020), nem a densidade po��tica, ��tica e sonora de Nez txada sk��ru dentu skina na braku fundu. Em Griots i Riots, ouvimos a mesma insubordina����o, o impulso original, a mesma sujeira destinada a perturbar a gest��o de uma paz podre. Mas tamb��m ouvimos um artista que �� cada vez mais um poeta denso e sagaz, buscando expandir e dominar sua pr��pria linguagem, sem jamais ceder �� raz��o c��nica de nossos tempos. Acima de tudo, um criador que escreve sobre seu tempo e seu povo, sintonizado com sua raiva latente, investido na busca por novas respostas nascidas da luta cotidiana. Um criador cuja m��sica se torna a trilha sonora daqueles que se recusam a viver acorrentados, mas que se permite explorar ��� tanto em som quanto em conte��do ��� reflex��es mais profundas sobre a condi����o humana, as possibilidades de ag��ncia, a consci��ncia da morte e o potencial do que est�� por vir: uma tentativa cont��nua de responder �� pergunta de S��rgio Godinho ��� Que for��a �� essa que carregamos nos bra��os? Continuemos a perguntar ��� e a lutar. Deste lado da barricada, ningu��m morrer�� de joelhos.

Biya forever

As Cameroon nears its presidential elections, a disintegrated opposition paves the way for the world���s oldest leader to claim a fresh mandate. Yaounde. Photo by Ariel Nathan ADA MBITA on Unsplash

For ordinary Cameroonians, it was not the kind of news they���d anticipated from their head of state about the country���s upcoming October 12 elections. President Paul Biya had clocked 92 and was the oldest leader in the world. He���d disappeared for 42 days, fomenting beliefs he was in ill health and could no longer rule the bilingual nation. But Biya defied all odds.�������I am a candidate for the 12 October 2025 presidential election,��� the nonagenarian president wrote on X, effectively rolling out the red carpet for a half-century rule over Cameroon. Biya ended the July 13 post with the phrase ���The best is still to come,��� leaving Cameroonians fuming. ���The best is yet to come after 40 years?��� wrote a commenter. ���Pure madness.���

The social media bashing has continued since then, but it hasn���t stopped the president���rarely seen these days���from sending out daily, carefully crafted messages on Facebook and X, schooling Cameroonians on unity, good governance, and peace. Meanwhile, his all-powerful secretary general, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, has been hosting political and religious leaders in the presidential palace in Yaound�� on his behalf, drawing reproach from critics who say the president has turned the state house into campaign headquarters.�� ���[This] is because they have access to the state purse, and they feel they can use it to their advantage,��� said Tilarious Atia, a Cameroonian doctor specializing in comparative politics.

Having barred 2018 runner-up Maurice Kamto from contesting this year���s elections, and left with a fractured opposition, Biya���s enormous state overreach���whether legal or illegal���will earn him an unassailable victory. Last month, the country���s Constitutional Council maintained Elections Cameroon���s (ELECAM) rejection of 71 candidates, including Kamto, leaving Biya with 11 challengers in the poll. The challengers: Cameroon Party for National Reconciliation president Cabral Libii, who came third in the 2018 poll; Joshua Osih, who succeeded late former Social Democratic Front (SDF) opposition leader John Fru Ndi; lawyer and anti-corruption crusader Akere Muna; and Issa Tchiroma Bakary and Bello Bouba Maigari, two former Biya allies who broke away from the government to rival the president���s 43-year rule.

Bakary and Maigari, who head the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon (FNSC) and National Union for Democracy and Progress (NUDP) parties, respectively, had been crucial in helping Biya���s Cameroon People���s Democratic Movement (CPDM) secure votes in their native Muslim-dominated northern regions (Adamawa, North, and Far North), which has 40 percent of the country���s electorate. ���I had decided to accompany him until the end of his career,��� Tchiroma told Brut, speaking of Biya. ���Unfortunately, he is inaccessible; he is invisible.��� Tchiroma said Biya���s ruling the country by proxy, while Maigari, who served as Biya���s first prime minister in 1982, has accused his government of corruption, poor governance, and sectarianism.

Osih and Muna, both contestants of the previous elections, have promised reforms. Osih wants to decentralize power by ushering in federalism, and Muna wants to make Cameroon corruption-free; he believes it will clean the country���s global reputation. Libii, who came third out of the nine contestants in the 2018 elections, aged 38 at that time, is campaigning on improved infrastructure and better conditions for young people.

The only time Biya felt challenged in an election was in 1992 when he got 40 percent of the votes, beating Fru Ndi by 4 percent more, though the opposition leader contested the outcome. Fru Ndi, a multiparty politics crusader, received support from several opposition parties under the banner Union for Change, still there was a divide among them. The late Adamou Ndam Njoya and Jean-Jacques Ekindi ran independently when factions of their parties endorsed Fru Ndi. Ndam Njoya and Ekindi amassed almost 4 percent of the votes, which could���ve been enough to nudge Fru Ndi to parity with or victory over Biya.

This year, there have been frantic attempts to put forward a united opposition front, but the question of who should lead it and differences in ideologies have been stumbling blocks.�� ���Issa Tchiroma thinks he���s the best, Bello Bouba thinks it���s time for him to be president, [and] Joshua thinks the SDF has been doing the work since 1992 and they are better placed [to win],��� Atia said. A small portion of opposition parties, mainly in Littoral region, have backed Tchiroma, though Kamto called on all parties to rally behind one candidate. ��Because there���s no opposition party that���s represented in all the 360 administrative units of the country like the CPDM, according to Atia, Biya won���t break a sweat to win in a single-round electoral system that requires a party to get the highest votes. If two-thirds of the votes go to the splintered opposition parties, then Biya secures one-third of them and gets the highest, he would be declared the winner.

There could be a major coalition before the elections, just like in 2018 when Muna backed Kamto a few days before the poll, but Atia thinks it will miss the boat as ELECAM has already printed ballot papers for the candidates and will not withdraw any if a candidate backs out to support another. ���The electoral code is very clear, that were you [a candidate] to step aside, you have to announce such intentions before the ballot papers are printed,��� he said. Atia said displaying the ballot paper of an endorser candidate during elections will likely cause confusion for voters in remote areas, who are not aware of such a change.

The inability to present a unified opposition is part of the deep-seated ethnic and linguistic divides that plague Cameroon. First, it inherited English and French from colonialism, which means minority English-speakers feel marginalized by the French-speaking majority���the differences birthed a brutal separatist war. Second, ethnic tensions have led to power struggles among the Bamilekes, Bulu-Beti, and the northern regions. The Bamilekes, an ethnic group that occupies mostly western Cameroon, came into prominence in the 1960s and ���70s when they waged a guerrilla war against the government over ties with former colonial power France. Since then, they���ve amassed economic power, running most of the country���s industrial sector. Kamto, who is from the group, faced prejudiced attacks during and after the 2018 election from primarily Bulu-Beti factions.

���I think that the obsession, the instrumentalized anti-Bamileke fixation has become a technology that can explain much more the eviction of Professor Kamto,��� Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian and political theorist told Radio France Internationale (RFI) when the Constitutional Council upheld Kamto could not contest this year���s elections.�� For the Bulu-Beti, Biya���s (their son���s) ascension to power in 1982 has meant they are the hereditary rulers of Cameroon. They wield enormous political power, and they are part of the Cameroonians who think the presidency shouldn���t return to a northerner as the first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, a northerner, dominated power for more than two decades before picking Biya as a successor.

But the northerners are queuing in. At least two leaked diplomatic talks parallel Tchiroma���s decision to ���accompany��� Biya ���until the end of his career.��� In 2009, the late former Minister Amadou Ali stated that the three northern regions would support Biya as much as he wanted, but would not welcome a successor from the Bulu-Beti or the economically viable Bamilekes.

Cameroon is a unitary state with overwhelming presidential powers. So when political scientist David Easton famously described politics as ���the authoritative allocation of values��� in the mid-20th century (meaning a comprehensive distribution of resources, rights, and benefits by a government), Biya understood this, but designed Cameroon���s political architecture in his own image.

He expands his cabinet, appointing state functionaries and ministers in nearly every district of the country, according to Atia. In return, these appointees either sympathize with his party or become militants. ���If you are appointed minister of education today,��� Atia said, ���whether you are of the CPDM or not, it is inferred that you will protect the [ruling] party���s interest.��� That���s how many civil servants including teachers who are looking to move up the ladder within government find themselves supporting the party.

Recently, the CPDM published a list, which one of its militants, Patrick Rifoe, dubbed ���l���arm��e du pr��sident,��� (the president���s army). It contains the names of hundreds of militants, state officials, ministers, directors of state corporations, and some prominent figures in sports, such as former Marseille goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell, who heads a body that manages Cameroon���s sports infrastructure, and football icon Samuel Eto���o, who now runs the country���s football federation. These people will crisscross the country, campaigning for 92-year-old Biya during the elections, who���ll likely remain in the presidential palace or in his village Mvomeka���a (where he spends much of his private time these days) and wait for the results.

As in the past, people who crusade and win votes for the president during elections are rewarded handsomely with government appointments and favors, Atia said. This shifts any focus, if at all there���s any, to remove him from power. ���Biya���s position is spared; nobody is interested in Biya���s position,��� he said. ���Everybody is interested in having something.���

Just as in 2018, Biya is poised for a landslide victory on October 12. There might be pockets of protests, but not as many as the previous election, when Kamto supporters protested after the opposition leader said he���d won the election. But the problems that have haunted Biya���s protracted rule will continue: the long, drawn-out Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon���s English-speaking regions, years of underdevelopment engineered by corruption and syphoning of state funds, and now a battle for succession.

Worn out by the crisis, with no end in sight, the solution for the Northwest and Southwest regions��� youth: flee abroad. They are among 60,000 Anglophone Cameroonians seeking refuge in different countries, ever since the separatist war started, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. Atia said there are about one million voters in the regions; however, with a fresh round of separate-imposed ghost towns, in defiance of the election, most voters will feel insecure to go out and vote, except CPDM militants who might receive protection from law enforcement to vote their party. In that way, according to Atia, the CPDM will likely claim most of the votes there.

To measure Cameroon���s underdevelopment under Biya, one has to compare its GDP with C��te d���Ivoire, a country that shares almost the same population size and shared almost the same economic output in the 1970s. C��te d���Ivoire���s GDP gap over Cameroon jumped from $7 billion in 2010 to more than $30 billion in 2023, putting the country at $86 billion against $51 billion for the latter. While increasing value added per industrial worker and manufacturing are responsible for the Ivorian economic boom, Cameroon���s has plummeted. ���I believe that everything stopped [working] in Cameroon since the beginning of the `90s,��� Mbembe told RFI.

It���s unclear whether the power brokers in Yaound�� will prepare any transition plan after the election. But Tchiroma���s allegation that Biya is distant from his ministers, that the president has not met his ministers for the past 14 years, only strengthens speculation about his waning power. So, these days, it���s his secretary general or ���vice dieu��� (vice god) as he���s called in government circles, who���s been running most affairs at the palace and instructing ministers. Ngoh Ngoh now exercises the power with little or no opposition from other political rivals, after jailing a member of a rival group for the brutal killing of journalist Martinez Zogo.

From Cornell to conscience

Hounded out of the United States for his pro-Palestine activism, Momodou Taal insists that the struggle is global, drawing strength from Malcolm X, faith, and solidarity across borders. Image �� Momodou Taal.

As Israel���s genocide in Gaza continues, pro-Palestinian activism is being ramped up. Last year, encampments across campuses in some of the most esteemed universities in the US were a major centre of this activism, unleashing new momentum into the global outrage against Israel���s genocidal military actions in the enclave. As 2025 marks the centenary of Malcolm X���s birth, I caught up with activist Momodou Taal again to reflect on his activism and his recent forced departure from the US.

It almost seems like poetic justice that I speak to Taal from the UK during the centenary birthday month of this activist���s hero, Malcolm X. However, much has happened to him since, in light of the tumultuous politics that have gripped the US since Trump became president for the second time. Around this time,�� one hundred days of Trump���s second presidential tenure had just passed, with far-ranging negative implications for the global order, as well as at home in the US. Few expected that a fresh wave of pro-Palestinian student activism in the new academic year would be reignited with greater intensity and met with greater violence from law enforcement. But in the wake of the presidential election campaigns, it was clear that the issue of Gaza, and Palestine as a whole, was simply not going to go away. Taal was thrust into worldwide media attention as a result.

The last time that we spoke for the piece ���From Cairo to Cornell���, he was a student at Cornell University, on a PhD programme in Africana studies. Today, he is finishing off his degree programme from the UK, which he was happy to disclose, after often repeating in many previous interviews that he couldn���t tell people where he was located. I ask him to reveal in one word, the experiences of the last twelve months. He says, ���unreal.���

Weirdly, people would be mistaken that I look for trouble. I like peace. I say this half-jokingly, but it���s not like I am a virtuous person. Allah has shaped my heart in a particular way so that certain things move me. But if it were up to me, I would be reading my books, eating my good food, and travelling, but I can���t help myself. Because when you are going through something like that, and I haven���t said this to anybody, when I self-deported, I went through the border to Canada, but I remember tweeting because I was safe across the border. I found it was one of the top stories [on Twitter], which was an unreal experience, and everyone was messaging me. I was in hiding for two-and-a-half weeks. It was so surreal because I haven���t changed as a person, but the world���s reaction to me has changed.

The first pro���Palestine student encampment at Cornell was established on April���25,���2024, when the university���s Coalition for Mutual Liberation (CML) created a ���Liberated Zone��� of tents. The demonstration occurred a week after the majority of student voters approved a ceasefire and divestment referendum, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. It followed the establishment of encampments at several other institutions, including Harvard and Columbia Universities. In the aftermath of this,�� Cornell temporarily suspended Taal.

I left Cairo for the new semester thinking that I was going to go back to Cornell, teach my class, prepare for my exams and get on with my PhD and progress. If you look at the chain of events, you can take it back to October 7. The catalyst for this most recent embattled antagonism with the [US] government was the September 18 protests, when I got suspended.

The September 18 protests Taal is referring to are the disruptions of a career fair by more than 100 pro-Palestinian protesters at Cornell University. According to The Ithaca Voice, they were demanding that the university cut trade and professional ties with weapons manufacturers, two of which were represented at the fair at the Statler Hotel on the premises. Taal and three other students were suspended and were made persona non grata for three years.

I was at the protest for five minutes, and I wasn���t violent or did anything like that. And from then on, Cornell was going to be the first university to deport a student effectively. From that moment, the quality of my university experience significantly decreased, because I was banned from campus. It���s a strange irony in that I am protesting apartheid and was subjected to forms of apartheid. They drew up where I could be on campus.

Despite the pressure during this time, his love for teaching hadn���t waned. At this point in the conversation, he oscillates to how his hero, Malcolm X, shaped how he approached his lectures, which made him a standout academic at the university. He says Malcolm was able to break down complex ideas in an accessible way. One class that he brings up is a writing development seminar for freshmen students, called “What is Blackness?”, which expands myopic readings of Blackness to a global lens. Until today, he has had students reach out to him about the impact that class had on them, with some citing that he was their only Black teacher. This sense of transformation is what inspired them to write to the university in his defence.

More than 10,000 people petitioned to demand Taal���s reinstatement following the September 18 protests. The petition was released by the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine.

They leveraged my enrollment and my visa against the encampment. Then they had me under some conditions, and I awaited an investigation that never happened. They had said this was my third violation, the first was holding a megaphone, the second one was being involved in the encampments, and the third one was me at the Statler Hotel.�� I think Cornell put a target on my back���And when Trump said on the campaign trail that he would find [what he described as] ���Hamas��� supporters and deport them, I knew my time in the US was coming to an end. I knew if they were coming after international students, I was going to be on the list. But up until the decision I decided to leave, I never put myself first. Hand on heart.

Taal tells me that he was not living at his house in January this year and went ���underground��� to evade arrest and deportation. This was before Trump entered the White House. But he explains that he felt he faced one of two options: be taken by ICE agents or challenge detention and deportation through preemption. He decided to do the latter, filing a lawsuit in March to prevent the deportation of protesters. It was denied by a judge.

Alhamdulillah, I was not locked up. I don���t think I am too good to be locked up. It was a conversation that I had with my lawyer. I had videos prepared in the event I was locked up. I was expecting a long-drawn battle to end up in the Supreme Court. I didn���t think they would send the FBI and ICE and cancel my visa. And this is before I���ve seen the judge. I didn���t think they would get me for supporting material terrorism,�� and that���s not what we anticipated. We thought it was going to be an immigration or freedom of speech case. And they fight so dirty. They attempted to subpoena my social media accounts, which I won against in a lower court.

When we read or learn about the latter part of Malcolm X���s life, we see that he stayed the course, despite the pressures he faced from the Nation of Islam, in particular. I wanted to know what helped Taal to do the same in light of his embattlement with the US government. The experience took a toll on him mentally and physically, but his Islamic faith carried him through.

Malcolm teaches us that your life is not for you. I remember listening to the Quran and Malcolm’s speeches, and the stories of Jonah and the Whale, and I am having conversations with Allah to make it easy for me and to make a way out for me.��� People and activists were telling me to leave, even after days of hiding. They���re telling me: “What are you still doing here? What do you have to prove?”

On April 1, Taal posted on X to say that he decided to leave on his own terms, and that he ���lost faith that I could walk the streets without being abducted.��� CNN reported that US government officials said that his student visa was revoked due to his involvement in ���disruptive protests,��� disregarding his university���s policies and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.

Taal says something to me that he hasn���t told any media outlets yet: he abruptly left the US and travelled to Cuba. ���Yeah, no one knows that part,��� he laughs. ���You can publish that. It was dope. I met with activists out there. I met an Afro-Cuban who fought in the Angolan liberation struggle, who told me, ���Momodou, you are safe out here.������

He tells me that this was a full-circle moment:

Being in Cuba, it felt so fitting and poetic, because being in America, you never doubt or waver, but sometimes you can ask, “Am I doing the right thing?” But here (in Cuba), you are reminded that there is a global struggle against oppression, and this is the epicentre of it. I met a guy out here who said Palestine is not even a question (of support), and that though Cubans struggle because of the US-led blockade, at least we are free.

Cuba was one of only two non-Muslim countries that voted against the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, while the majority of Latin American countries followed the US position.

In conclusion, I ask Taal about the launch of his book, The Malcolm Effect Revisited;

It feels like divine providence. I���ve made Malcolm my muse, my north star, and there are so many lessons that may become manifest in my life. They say to be careful what you supplicate for. I���ve asked Allah to have the same maqam (station) as Malcolm, and maybe this is why I���m going through what I���m going through.