Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 3

When food becomes poison

In Nigeria, the drive to cut corners has turned food and drink into vectors of illness, sacrificing health and heritage at the altar of profit. Pounded yam with Egusi Soup. Image �� Primestock Photography via Shutterstock.

Nigeria possesses one of the richest culinary traditions in the world. From the layered spice of pepper soup to the smoky char of suya, from egusi and efo riro to the ever-controversial jollof, the range and depth of Nigerian food is unmatched. It is a heritage that should have positioned the country as a global food capital, much as Italy, India, or Thailand have built international prestige through cuisine. Instead, Nigeria has become a cautionary tale. The act of eating, the most basic of human functions, has been transformed into a gamble where every meal carries the risk of adulteration, contamination, or outright poisoning.

Across the country, restaurants, roadside vendors, and nightclub owners appear locked in a perverse competition. The prize is not who can deliver the best taste or healthiest fare, but who can maximize profit by cutting the most corners. Palm oil is dyed with industrial chemicals to create the illusion of vibrancy. Fruits are forced to ripen with calcium carbide, a toxic substance that has no place near human consumption. Cooking oils are recycled endlessly, breaking down into harmful compounds long before they reach the plate. The nightlife economy takes this further with counterfeit cognacs, whiskeys, and gins, bottled to mimic global brands and poured confidently at club tables. Consumers believe they are drinking Martell or Jameson; in truth, they ingest cocktails of ethanol, methanol, and coloring agents that can cause liver failure, blindness, or death.

These practices are not occasional. They are systemic. The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) periodically announces seizures that reveal the scale of the crisis. In November 2024, officials uncovered a ���2 billion counterfeit alcohol packaging syndicate in Lagos. Days later, another raid at Balogun Market exposed massive stockpiles of fake spirits. By December, ���180 million worth of counterfeit liquor was seized in Oke Arin. In May 2025, ���114 million in fake alcohol was intercepted in Lagos, followed by ���1 billion worth of expired chemicals and flavorants in July. These figures, staggering as they are, represent only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. For every seizure publicized, countless bottles, barrels, and crates slip through into restaurants, markets, and clubs.

The culture of adulteration extends beyond Nigeria���s borders, carried by restaurants serving diasporic communities. Too often, a visit to one of these establishments ends with days of diarrhea or stomach cramps. What should have been a source of pride, the global spread of Nigerian cuisine, is instead becoming an export of negligence. Within these communities, the risks have even been normalized into dark humor: ���Authentic��� Nigerian food, it is said, comes with the guarantee of an upset stomach.

Regulators bear much of the blame. NAFDAC���s periodic raids, while important, are reactive. They treat symptoms rather than causes. The Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON), charged with ensuring that goods meet basic safety requirements, is effectively invisible. These agencies project the image of enforcement but display little capacity for sustained prevention. Their failures allow counterfeit markets like Balogun, Aba, and Oke Arin to operate openly, as if manufacturing adulterated goods was a legitimate sector of the economy.

The consequences are devastating. Public health is being systematically undermined by everyday consumption. The economic costs, from hospitalizations, lost productivity, and premature deaths, are immense but rarely calculated. The reputational damage to Nigerian cuisine is equally severe. The country that has successfully projected Afrobeats as a disciplined, world-class cultural export cannot say the same for its food. The contradiction is glaring: While Burna Boy fills stadiums and Wizkid tops charts, Nigerian restaurants serve dishes laced with expired seasonings and counterfeit oils. One arm of culture soars, the other collapses.

This is more than a health issue. It is a betrayal of heritage. Nigerian food is not simply sustenance. It is identity, history, and memory carried in taste. To adulterate it is to reduce culture to commodity, to transform pride into pathology. The indifference of regulators and the complicity of business owners amount to a collective abdication of responsibility.

It is no longer enough to applaud occasional seizures or to romanticize consumer resilience. Eating in Nigeria should not be an act of courage. Dining in a Nigerian restaurant abroad should not be a gamble with one���s health. What is required is systemic reform: regulators that enforce rules consistently, businesses held to real standards, and consumers who refuse to accept mediocrity as their fate.

Nigeria has everything it needs to lead with its cuisine. It has history, diversity, and a global diaspora eager to share in its food culture. What it lacks is accountability, the assurance that what is called food is not poison and that what is sold as drink will not blind.

Anything less than urgent, sweeping change is not only a public health emergency. It is an insult to the very idea of Nigeria.

Nepal’s new reality

The youth-led uprising in Nepal has toppled the old guard, but its endurance depends on whether anger at corruption and inequality can be translated into lasting political change. Buildings set fire in protest, Kathmandu, Nepal on September 10th, 2025. Image �� Sathyam_19 via Shutterstock.com

The protests in Nepal this week were unprecedented. In just 48 hours, a disparate movement of largely young people throughout major towns and cities brought down the entire political establishment that had dominated Nepalese politics since the 2006 revolution. The Gen Z movement was confronted by a brutal police crackdown, and the death toll from the unrest now stands at over 70.

As Prime Minister KP Oli resigned, the second day saw widespread rioting and arson by infiltrators. Government buildings across the country were attacked, most notably the Supreme Court and Singha Durbar complex that houses parliament and most of the main ministries. Homes of political leaders and businesses were also torched.

Political unrest of this kind is not new to Nepal. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) led a decade-long civil war, garnering popular support amongst the urban working class and the peasantry, which were emerging from two centuries of feudalism, unequal trade regimes, and associated economic stagnation. The war ended in 2006, overthrowing the 240-year-old monarchy. The Maoists then entered mainstream politics with the promise of a new constitution, but through a series of political blunders and popular disillusionment with broken promises, Nepal���s old guard���the mainstream political parties that had dominated politics before the civil war���rapidly regained their support base, bolstered by the powerful patronage relations they had developed over the decades at the grassroots.

The centrist Nepali Congress and the nominally “communist” Unified Marxist-Leninist or UML, which had already shed most of its leftist credentials, came out on top during the 2013 elections and led the drafting of the new constitution, watering down many of the more progressive elements from the interim document. The Maoists were reduced to a third party.

A further round of popular unrest was unleashed in 2015, in the weeks leading up to the new constitution being promulgated. Disillusionment was high amongst Nepal���s indigenous groups, who make up over a third of the population, and most notably amongst the Madhesi community, who are the dominant group in Nepal���s southern plains. They were seeking greater regional autonomy and representation in the constitution. That movement was also met by a brutal police crackdown, resonating disturbingly with this week���s events in Kathmandu.

Rising to power during this period of unrest was none other than UML���s KP Oli. He capitalized on the unrest in the plains and subsequent Indian intervention by framing himself as a nationalist strongman, determined to push through the new constitution at any cost, largely at the expense of Nepal���s minorities. While the lowlands burned, there were celebrations over the new constitution amongst some segments in Kathmandu.

The events of 2015 saw not only the effective dissolution of the indigenous and Madhesi movements in Nepal, but the end of any genuine leftist alternative. The remnants of the Maoist party, having undergone several splits, joined ranks in a string of coalition governments with either the Nepali Congress or UML, and became very much part of the establishment. These three parties went on to dominate the political scene for the next decade.

All of this changed this week. While some media outlets claimed that youth were out on the streets to protest a proposed ban on social media outlets such as X, Facebook, and WhatsApp, this was just one of many triggers. What the protests most palpably expressed was anger and disgust at the corruption, impunity, and wealth amassed by this political elite.

While Nepal has many unique characteristics���most notably its relative historic isolation from the global economy���the political unrest this week is part of a much larger global phenomenon in low- and middle-income economies across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Nepal, like many parts of the region, has undergone rapid political and economic change. Three decades of neoliberalism have failed the poor and working classes, and growing integration into international markets has brought with it rising inequalities, surging costs of living, rural monetization, and with that, a spiraling demand for cash.

This has hit the poorest particularly hard, as in most import-dependent countries. In some parts of the country, this change has been rapid, starting when roads were pushed deeper into the hills after the end of the war in 2006. Across rural South and Southeast Asia, agriculture is becoming increasingly unviable to support a family, and the younger generation, integrated into globalized cultural flows and aware of the struggles of the older generation, has a dwindling interest in rural life.

When much of Western Europe underwent this transition away from subsistence agriculture, a process marked by state and landlord violence and dispossession throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, the peasantry was rapidly integrated into an expanding urban working class, and over time, a smaller segment graduated into skilled or professional trades. This same transition is occurring in China to some extent, although it is more drawn out. However, in the low- and middle-income economies of Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia, the macroeconomic context is significantly different.

Many of these economies have been distorted by imperialism and unequal trade regimes. There is no industrial sector with the capacity to absorb the vast labor force who see limited prospects on the land, and what industry there was has been sold off and privatized. Nevertheless, with an increasingly multipolar global economy, there are rising opportunities for labor not at home but overseas.

Within this context, a unique politico-economic equilibrium has been reached over the last two decades in particular. Unlike in Europe, capitalist agriculture has not taken off, and the peasantry remains more or less intact, despite limited prospects. Many families remain in agriculture while simultaneously participating in migrant labor, with often young men (and some women) working in higher-income economies. Whether the migration circuit is Nepal, Bangladesh, or the Philippines to the Gulf states, Cambodia to Thailand, or Kyrgyzstan to Russia, the underlying economic processes are similar. They represent a dual livelihood strategy���remittances provide the cash that households need, while agriculture provides food to those who remain, and offers some security if things go wrong.

Across the region, the transition out of agriculture has been accompanied by the dramatic expansion in higher education and an increasingly skilled youth. In rural areas, the older generation, desperate for their children to escape the endless cycle of subsistence farming and difficult labor overseas, has invested heavily in education for the young. In Nepal, families are investing remittances in education���not only in higher-fee private schools, which are particularly widespread in South Asia, but also most notably in further education. With education comes the prospect of work in the burgeoning service sector���the one area seeing major growth in post-1990s Nepal���or the prospect of migrating to more ���lucrative��� destinations such as Europe, Australia, South Korea, or Japan.

As quality educational facilities are limited in rural areas, the last two decades have witnessed a new wave of rural to urban migration, driven heavily by the education economy. There has been a huge migration to urban centres in Nepal���not just to Kathmandu, but second-tier cities such as Pokhara, Biratnagar, Itahari, and even smaller yet rapidly growing district headquarters.

Much of this migration is by the middle and upper-middle peasantry���those who have some land and assets, and the ability to take loans with collateral, or purchase a small plot for a house in the town. In many cases, these migrants retain some links to home���for example, grandparents managing the farm���and often have family members already overseas, with remittances funding the college or school fees. They join more established urban youth whose parents left agriculture a generation or two ago, and together, they share middle-class aspirations.

However, the growth of the higher-education sector and the rise in education levels have far surpassed the expansion of high-paying professional jobs. The capacity for a neoliberal, service-oriented, and import-based economy like Nepal to absorb its rapidly growing educated youth is highly constrained. Meanwhile, access to the most coveted jobs in the service sector is often out of reach to those lacking political connections, caste networks, or the capacity to afford more exclusive private education.

Many of the new urban youth are becoming part of a vast army of ���educated unemployed������the presence of which is one of the biggest political and policy dilemmas of the 21st century, not just in Nepal, but across the world. This burgeoning demographic is a potent political force. Instant internet and social media access have not only created a digital community for youth, both rich and poor alike, but young people are also increasingly politically aware.

The influencer culture, which has been a phenomenon of the post-2010s smartphone era, has raised awareness of gross inequalities, most notably in the emerging capitalist elite of many lower-income countries. This elite has amassed wealth through capitalist investment, rent-seeking, and corruption. With this, there is growing disgust and resentment towards so-called nepo babies. In Asia, particularly the Philippines, this term has also been applied politically to refer to the offspring of well-connected political or business families, displaying their families��� ill-gotten wealth on social media.

Critique of Nepal���s own nepo babies has been a crucial element of the Gen Z movement, as urban youth have found themselves in the same digital spaces as politically connected influencers, flaunting lifestyles that starkly contrast with the everyday experiences of most young people. It is against this context that simmering anger has been growing amongst vast swathes of urban youth globally. Anger against corruption, lack of opportunities, and wasted investments in education were major factors in driving the youth-led uprisings across the region, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and, most recently, Nepal.��In Nepal, one of the most peripheral countries in the region in economic terms, there is particular rage against the sheer scale of corruption and the failed promises of the postwar political settlement.

There are important political questions for Nepal. Evidence from other regions that experienced mass youth movements shows that the ruling classes are often quick to reestablish authority. Nepal has been here before, in 2006 and in 2015. There is also a larger question about who decides the country���s political future. Many of the youth-led movements have been urban, rather than rural, which presents political dilemmas when considering the demographics of many low- and middle-income countries. Though it is rapidly urbanizing, approximately three-quarters of Nepal���s population still live in rural areas, two-thirds of which are integrated into the farming-remittance livelihood cycle.

The civil war unfolded within a rural economy shaped by a different political reality than today. Remittances have released the pressure valve that drove many young people into the Maoist movement. However, the deeper structural causes of livelihood insecurity in both rural and urban areas remain unaddressed, two decades after the war ended. These include extreme inequalities in the distribution of land and assets, often structured by caste and ethnicity, the decimation of once vibrant cottage industries, a spiral of indebtedness, and a dearth of employment opportunities. Migration has also fragmented rural social organization, undermining potential peasant mobilization.

Meanwhile, the established political parties have reasserted their authority in rural areas, mediating the distribution of limited state resources and infiltrating both state and non-state institutions. Now, elections may well see discredited leaders or parties of the past being reelected. In Nepal and across the region, it is imperative that new progressive political forces do not shy away from contesting power, but more importantly, remain connected to the movements that express the concerns of the poor and working classes.

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya's radical left. Image �� William Shoki, 2025.

On June 25, 2024, Kenya entered a new political era. Sparked by opposition to the Finance Bill���a package of regressive taxes pushed by President William Ruto���s government���the protests that began in Nairobi quickly spread nationwide, escalating into a mass rebellion against austerity, elite impunity, and the hollowing out of democratic life. Dozens were killed, hundreds detained or disappeared. What followed was not simply a policy defeat for the state, but a profound crisis of legitimacy.

For weeks, the streets became a site of generational reckoning. Disillusioned with formal politics and disconnected from traditional civil society, a new political subjectivity emerged���youth-led, digitally coordinated, ideologically inchoate but morally resolute. Even after the Finance Bill was withdrawn, the protests continued. By June 2025, they had reignited in response to the death of Albert Omondi Ojwang in police custody, now squarely targeting state violence and the wider political order. The demands had shifted: no longer just focused on reform, but on complete rupture. Still, if the movement has posed powerful questions, there remains the matter of answers: What comes next? How do we sustain this moment? Who is building a politics for the long term?

In this episode of the Africa Is a Country podcast, editor William Shoki is joined by Sungu Oyoo, a longtime activist, writer, and community organizer based in Nairobi���and a 2027 presidential candidate in Kenya���s presidential elections. Sungu is the national spokesperson of Kongamano La Mapinduzi (���Congress of the Revolution���), a socialist formation that emerged out of years of student and community organizing. He is also a founding member of the Kenya Left Alliance, a broad coalition of progressive organizations that is trying to turn the country���s popular discontent into a durable, anti-capitalist political force.

In this conversation, they discuss Sungu���s personal path to politics, the failure of Kenya���s elite-led independence project, the broken promises of the 2010 constitution, and why the post-2022 period has been marked by such sharp disillusionment. They also talk through the class composition of the recent protests, the limits of ���Gen Z��� as a political category, and what it means to build a left electoral project without falling into the traps of clientelism or cynicism.

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

https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/4afdb16f-0707-406b-aee8-0cd0881b134b.mp3 William Shoki

��So, Sungu, thank you very much for coming onto the AIAC podcast. It���s a pleasure to have you.

Sungu Oyoo

Thank you, William. It���s been long overdue, and I know we���ve really tried to arrange for this conversation. I���m glad it���s finally happening.

William Shoki

Me too. I feel incredibly honored to be speaking to a candidate for the 2027 Kenyan presidential elections, and I want to get into why you decided to run. But before I do that, I think it���s important to ground our conversation by asking you to tell us who exactly you are. Alongside some other figures, you���ve emerged as the face of a new kind of politics in Kenya���one grounded in movement experience, anti-capitalist political commitments, and a refusal of elite brokerage and co-optation. But you, as an individual, were active long before the Finance Bill protests. So I���m interested in finding out: Who is Sungu, and how did you come to the position you���re in now?

Sungu Oyoo

My name is Sungu Oyoo. I���m a Kenyan writer, activist, and community organizer���and by extension, a Pan-Africanist. I���m a member of Mwamko, the Pan-African popular pedagogy collective, which I co-founded with other comrades a few years ago. But more relevant to this discussion, I���m a member of Kongamano La Mapinduzi, which translates to Congress of the Revolution. It���s a political movement here in Kenya, and I currently serve as its national spokesperson. Kongamano itself emerged as a culmination���or perhaps a renewal���born out of our experiences organizing within the student movement and social movements more broadly. At some point, we did our analysis and realized that many of the problems we were experiencing in our communities were, at root, political���and therefore required political solutions. That is how we embarked on a process to form Kongamano La Mapinduzi, which is today part of the Kenya Left Alliance, the broader coalition bringing together all progressive forces. And as you mentioned, I���m also running for president in the 2027 elections.

William Shoki

And could you tell us about what politicized you? How did you come to get involved in organizing and left politics in Kenya?

Sungu Oyoo

I think I was first politicized as a student, through the student movement. At that time, our organizing was mostly around immediate issues and concerns within what I���d call the geography of the school. But after school, once I became immersed in social movements and began to better understand Kenyan society���its structures and how it functions���I saw more clearly that people aren���t necessarily poor because they aren���t working hard. Rather, the system is designed in such a way that it keeps people in those conditions. That realization deepened my politicization. I met some comrades who introduced me to left politics, and I went through a period of great confusion, trying to figure out���at a higher, ideological level���how we arrive at real solutions to the challenges we see in society. What ultimately made the most sense to me were the ideas and proposals coming from the left. So that���s the short version of how I got politicized and found myself in left politics.

William Shoki

And do you think, for you, that journey���especially compared to what���s happening now in 2024 and 2025���was different? Because this has been a moment of political awakening for many young Kenyans, coming out of a very specific event: Ruto���s failed attempt to pass the full Finance Bill, and the reaction it provoked. Was there, for you, a similarly Damascene moment���a kind of political ���aha��� where, in the midst of all the confusion we���ve all experienced, everything suddenly fell into place and you felt like you understood Kenyan politics and the broader structures that shape people���s lives? Or was it more of a slow burn���an accumulation of experiences, ongoing reflection, and gradually arriving at political conclusions?

Sungu Oyoo

I think it was both. On the one hand, there was a prolonged period of learning���of trying to understand society and build up my analysis over time. But there were also moments of particular significance. For example, in 2013 I was part of a movement called Kenyans for Tax Justice. We were essentially making the same demands that today���s youth have been making since 2024. We were advocating for progressive tax policies and for exempting basic commodities from taxation. We were able to push back against the system for a while and link up with other organized groups like the Unga Revolution. We conducted political education in different settlements across Nairobi and campaigned against a bill before Parliament at the time���the Value Added Tax Bill of 2013. That bill would have imposed taxes on bread, milk, sugar, disability mobility aids, books, and many other basic commodities. We managed to push back.

At the time, I thought we had won. I relaxed and went back to my normal life. But the following year, Parliament passed the same bill again. That���s when I realized our struggle is a continuous one. Even when we extract concessions from power, we can���t afford to retreat. We have to keep pushing���not just to defend those gains, but to achieve even greater ones. We must remain eternally vigilant. Organizing, I came to understand, is an eternal process.

William Shoki

After that experience, what grabbed you���what made you decide to devote your time and energy to continued organizing? Maybe you could also set the scene a bit for us. Because if I���m thinking about 2013, it���s three years after the adoption of Kenya���s new constitution in 2010. That moment was supposed to signal a political paradigm shift: a move toward accountable governance and increased agency for Kenyan citizens���at least on paper. Especially given the decades before, when Kenya���s political regimes weren���t characterized by democratic openness, the 2010 constitution promised something new. So would it be fair to say that this was a time of optimism in Kenya���s political history? Of course, there���s the trauma of the 2007 election violence, followed by the new constitution in 2010���but then a sense that a new republic of sorts was being drawn. Would you describe it as an optimistic time? And did you, in that context, experience a kind of dissonance between the official narrative and your own experience as someone doing organizing on the ground?

Sungu Oyoo

I think it probably was one of the most optimistic periods in Kenya���s political history. The struggle for a new constitution had been ongoing for decades, and finally reaching a point where genuinely progressive clauses had been passed���guaranteeing basic needs like the right to food, housing, water, a strong bill of rights, and establishing independent commissions that were supposed to serve as checks on executive power���many Kenyans were hopeful. But one of the most unfortunate things, as Kenya���s former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga often says, is that we birthed a new constitution���we birthed a baby���and then handed it over to child traffickers to raise. Many of the politicians who inherited the responsibility of implementing the new constitution had no interest in its progressive provisions.

Look at William Ruto. He is now the president of Kenya, having sworn to uphold this constitution���but he was a leader of the ���No��� campaign back in 2010. He argued that the constitution was flawed and pushed to retain the old order. That���s why, in the years following 2010, we���ve seen the systematic erosion of the constitution by the political elite���through illegal acts of Parliament aimed at watering it down, by openly disobeying its provisions, and by doing everything possible to subvert it. They were never interested in full implementation. So yes, 2010 was a high point, a really promising moment. But within a few years, most Kenyans could already see that things weren���t turning out the way we had hoped.

For me, the key realization was that struggle is a protracted process. It���s not like flipping a light switch���where once the struggle is ���won,��� everything is immediately illuminated. Just because we achieved a progressive document didn���t mean its implementation was guaranteed. That realization���that we would have to stay vigilant and keep organizing to fight for implementation���is one of the things that pulled me deeper into the work.

William Shoki

I really like what you said about struggle being this protracted fight���it���s not just the flick of a switch. Turning to the current conjuncture in Kenya: I think a lot of people look at the protests of last year and see them as having emerged suddenly, almost out of nowhere. But I wonder if you could trouble that interpretation. What do you think last year���s protests���carrying over into this year���tell us about the failure of Kenya���s post-2010 democratic project? And where were the signs of this mass discontent building? Because I imagine people like yourself were paying close attention to developments on the ground that might have escaped the detection of outside onlookers���myself included���or even Kenya���s political elite.

Sungu Oyoo

I think the starting point is to look at what exactly Kenya is. Kenya started off as a business���through the Imperial British East Africa Company���and in many ways, it has remained a business. The Kenyan state neither sees nor listens to the majority of its citizens. Kenya is a neocolonial state, as I���m sure you know, and the neocolonial state is created in the image of the colonial state. Every day, it subjects our people to poverty, to humiliation, to death���whether through police bullets, through inadequate health care, or through failures in any number of systems. Often you���ll hear people say, ���The system is not working,��� but I would argue the opposite: The system is working exactly as it was designed to. It just wasn���t designed to work for the people.

After independence in 1963, many fundamental questions remained unresolved���questions of land, national identity, and cohesion. Even post-2010, with the new constitution, there was a short period where things seemed to be working. But after 2013, the economy slowly but steadily took a nosedive. Unemployment rose. Public institutions were eroded. By 2022, youth unemployment had hit 67 percent. And when you have such staggering levels of joblessness among young people, and the only response politicians can offer is empty rhetoric���promises that ���we will do this, we will do that,��� but without anything concrete���then you���re looking at an explosive situation. Homelessness in Nairobi had surged. The cost of basic commodities continued to rise over the past decade.

That���s how Ruto came to power in 2022���on the backs of the working class. He campaigned using the so-called hustler narrative, claiming to speak for and be one of them. But by 2023, his government increased the cost of university education fourfold in public universities, claiming it could no longer afford to subsidize education. In 2024, we witnessed large-scale demolitions of settlements across Nairobi. Between 400,000 and 500,000 people were rendered homeless in just a few months. The government justified this by saying people had settled along riverbanks and needed to move to protect the rivers. But the truth is, these people didn���t settle near rivers by choice. They were forced to live there because the state failed to provide housing. These demolitions created a massive wave of displacement, especially in Nairobi and other urban centers.

So you had all of this happening at once: youth unemployment, evictions, a crumbling health-care system, and public universities in crisis. It was a confluence of crises. Then, in 2024, the Finance Bill was introduced, and in public discourse Kenyans were clear: Reject the bill. The state came back and said, no, not reject���just amend. But the people insisted: Reject. Because the bill proposed to increase taxes that would fall on working people, while exempting the rich���for instance, through things like helicopter spare parts. People said: If you pass this bill, we will die. And when the state refused to listen, the movement strategically escalated. It moved from rejecting the Finance Bill to saying: Ruto must go.

One thing that must be made clear is that Kenyan youth were not just talking about Ruto the individual. They were talking about Ruto as a symbol, and about the broader system that surrounds and enables him���the institutions that carry out economic violence against ordinary people. That���s why, for the first time in a long while, we saw protests raising demands around the IMF, around the World Bank, around Kenya���s debt crisis. There were demands about police brutality. But ���Ruto Must Go��� became the rallying cry that unified them all. And while protests against the Finance Bill and budget have happened in years past, they were smaller. What changed in 2024 was the sheer level of public anger and discontent. Anyone who had been studying the political landscape in Kenya over the last several years could see this explosion coming���and I think we���re still in the thick of it.

William Shoki

I do want to talk more about the protests themselves, but I���m also curious to hear your broader theoretical perspective on how Kenya���s political economy has evolved���or maybe stayed the same���since independence. As you���ve described, Kenya has never really had a substantive economic vision. Whether it���s Harambee, Nyayo, Vision 2030, or Ruto���s ���green growth��� agenda, no regime has seriously attempted a radical economic reimagining. If anything, the Kenyan state has been the East African economy most associated with being ���open for business.��� And postcolonial elites have consistently prioritized foreign investment and external validation over building real economic sovereignty. How did that logic come to define Kenya���s political economy? Why have successive governments looked outward rather than caring for their own people? It strikes me as untenable. Surely, if these elites are self-interested, they must at some point recognize that this is a powder keg. So I���d like to hear more about what has sustained the stability of this system���and what, in this moment, is finally causing that legitimacy to come apart.

Sungu Oyoo

That���s a really important question. As you mentioned, the state has never truly acted in the interests of the Kenyan people. For over sixty years, the Kenyan state has remained a neocolonial formation, modeled in the image of the colonial state. Our war for national liberation was led by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army���the Mau Mau. And, as their name suggests, they were fighting for two things: land and freedom. But what we got in 1963 was independence, not liberation. The Mau Mau had taken up arms because Kenya was a settler colony���land had been seized from the people by force. But during the independence negotiations at Lancaster House, the Mau Mau were not invited. It was the moderates from the dominant political parties, and a few radicals, who were included. And one of the key decisions taken at Lancaster was that Kenya, this newly independent state, would buy back land from departing British settlers���the very same land those settlers had stolen at gunpoint.

That���s how the so-called Million Acre Scheme came about. Under this scheme, the new Kenyan state would purchase one million acres from the settlers using a loan of ��2 million, sourced from West Germany, the British government, and the World Bank. That���s how we began our journey as a sovereign nation���with a massive debt to repay for land that had been violently stolen from us. Kenya only finished paying back that debt sometime in the 1980s. Think about what those resources could have done���resources that should have gone toward education, health care, housing. But even worse, once the land was purchased, the vast majority of it ended up in the hands of the ruling class. Those who had actually fought for liberation���those who had been dispossessed���were left out once again.

This is why I hesitate to use the term ���informal settlements��� when describing places like Kibera. That label implies that the people living there are somehow themselves informal or illegitimate. But human beings cannot be informal. These are simply settlements. And many of the people who live in them today are descendants of those who went to the forests to fight colonialism. So we can already see that post-independence Kenya was built on a logic of dispossession. It was built on the logic of poverty for the majority. That���s why, by 1975, a politician named J. M. Kariuki could describe Kenya as ���a land of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.��� And today, that formula could be updated: maybe 50 billionaires, 50 million beggars. The inequality has only deepened.

In Nairobi, over 80 percent of the population lives on just 6 percent of the city���s land. They are crammed into settlements, while a small elite enjoy dignified, spacious lives. When Jomo Kenyatta took power in 1963, he said the state would fight maradhi, ujinga, and umaskini���disease, ignorance, and poverty. But if you look at the manifestos of major political parties in the most recent election, 60 years later, they���re still promising to fight disease, ignorance, and poverty. That tells you something. It tells you that in terms of the material conditions of ordinary people, very little has changed in six decades.

Of course, many things have happened in the intervening years. But fundamentally, the structures of economic domination remain intact. Land is still controlled by foreign concerns. The Nairobi Stock Exchange is still largely in the hands of British and European companies. Mining rights are dominated by foreign corporations. Fishing rights along the coast are not controlled by local enterprises. And in recent years, we���ve seen an aggressive return to privatization���more and more public entities being sold off.

What happened last year, in my view, was a leap in the collective consciousness. At an instinctive level, people already knew they were oppressed���that something was deeply wrong. But in 2024, many began to reach a more rational understanding of that oppression. They could see the institutions involved. They could identify the comprador class���the local elite acting on behalf of foreign masters across the ocean, in Europe and America. People began making those linkages and formulating demands with more clarity. I���m not sure if I���ve fully answered your question, but I hope that gives a sense of how we���ve arrived at this moment.

William Shoki

That���s a brilliant answer���thank you for that. I think it gives us a nice segue to return to the present and talk about this moment of heightened collective consciousness you���ve been describing. Over the last two years, Kenya has experienced an explosion of protests. And I suppose the question many are now asking is: What next? Before we get into what you and others are doing to help change the status quo, I want to stay with this leap in collective consciousness you mentioned earlier.

Of course, we can���t paint the movement with one clean brush���reality is messy. But you���ve talked about how the protests have crystallized a set of demands. While ���Ruto Must Go��� remains the flagship rallying cry, we���ve seen people speak forcefully about bread-and-butter issues like housing, health care, and police brutality. My question is whether that now carries an explicitly anti-capitalist character���or not quite. And related to that, I���d like to hear how you���d characterize two things: first, the political orientation of the people participating in the protests; and second, their class character.

Because, to be honest, I was guilty of this myself: Looking at it from abroad, and especially through the international media, the protests were reduced to a so-called ���Gen Z revolt.��� You���d hear that it was a media-savvy generation, good at branding protests and deploying hashtags. I filtered it, initially, through the lens of other Gen Z or youth uprisings on the continent and globally. So in my mind, I assumed it was primarily made up of downwardly mobile, university-educated youth and young professionals���people raised to believe that education was a ticket to middle-class security, only to find themselves excluded from the economy. That was my archetypal reading. But when I actually came to Nairobi, I saw that this was not the case. So could you talk us through these dynamics? How would you summarize the orientation of the protests at this juncture���and how would you describe their class and demographic character?

Sungu Oyoo

I think one of the first things to say is that yes, the majority of those on the streets were Gen Zs���both last year and this year. But they weren���t the only generation present. Millennials were also out in large numbers. And one area where I have to give Gen Zs a lot of credit is in their capacity for mobilization. They were able to bring people onto the streets who wouldn���t normally show up���including their parents. They presented these economic issues���housing, unemployment, health care���as affecting everyone. For a long time, it was mostly people from social movements or other organized groups who came out to protest. But Gen Z managed to expand the base. That���s significant.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there was a deliberate attempt���by the state and by sections of the media���to frame the protests narrowly around age. To say it was ���just��� a Gen Z revolt. But Gen Z is not a political category���it���s an age category. Framing the movement this way flattens its political complexity and erases the diversity of people involved. That said, I still want to emphasize that Gen Zs made an immense contribution. The new strategies and tactics they brought into the broader progressive movement���especially in how to organize and mobilize���deserve recognition.

In terms of class character, the people on the streets were overwhelmingly those who have been excluded from economic participation: the working class, the unemployed, people from poor and neglected neighborhoods in Nairobi and other parts of the country. But there was also a surprising presence from the middle class���people who, for a long time, have not been part of mass protests in significant numbers. I think that���s because they, too, realized how precarious their position had become. Their lives were no longer secure. When you���re one paycheck away from poverty, when you can���t afford decent health care, when a single illness like cancer can bankrupt your entire household���that���s when you begin to understand that you���re not exempt from the struggle.

So yes, there was a real shift in class consciousness. The middle class began analyzing their situation and concluded that they, too, needed to be part of a broader fight for a better Kenya. But the vast majority of protestors were still unemployed youth and the working poor. They were in the streets because of the material conditions they live under. Housing is either poor or nonexistent. Food prices are rising. Youth unemployment remains over 60 percent, with no social relief in sight. These young people were, in essence, fighting for the creation of new worlds���worlds of love, of joy, of laughter. They were demanding a life that the current system has denied them, even the basic dignity of dreaming.

That���s why we saw a shift within the ruling class as well. When they saw this force from below organizing and mobilizing, they came together overnight. The opposition, led by Raila Odinga, entered into an arrangement with Ruto���s government. Key opposition leaders were given ministerial appointments. It was a realignment driven by class interest. The ruling class recognized that its collective position was under threat, and so they acted in concert to protect their privileges. What the opposition did, in my view, was a deep betrayal of the people���s march toward history. They essentially danced on the graves of those martyred by the state.

William Shoki

So where does that leave the movement, organizationally? You���ve described this leap in collective consciousness���this explosion of popular energy, the readiness for and effectiveness at mobilization. But now we come to the question of how to give that enthusiasm sustained expression. I want to pivot here to the Kenya Left Alliance. As you said earlier, it���s a coalition of various progressive groups, stitched together in this moment of ferment. So what is the Kenya Left Alliance���s strategic proposition and orientation to this moment?

I mean, beyond thinking about 2027 as an election to contest, and beyond saying no to austerity, no to corruption, no to elite capture���what is being offered affirmatively? I really appreciated your earlier description of ���worlds of dignity, joy, love.��� But what, concretely, is the offer being made to the Kenyan people that you see as necessary in this moment?

Sungu Oyoo

I think, at the most fundamental level, the Kenya Left Alliance is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and Pan-Africanist. That shapes both its worldview and its organizing practices���including how it engages in solidarity work and grassroots action. For us, 2027 is just a moment. The project is much larger. The Kenya Left Alliance was born from the recognition that, while there are many progressive organizations in Kenya, individually they���re all relatively small. None of them, on their own, can shake the system at a structural level. But when these groups come together���and when the people join them, like we���ve seen in the streets���then the system begins to shift.

That���s what necessitated the creation of a broader umbrella: to unite these organizations around a shared minimum program. Because at the end of the day, oppressed people have never won without organization. We can have protests, we can have spontaneous uprisings���but without organization and a long-term strategy, whether to capture political power or bring about deep social transformation, it becomes nearly impossible to sustain gains. That���s why the Kenya Left Alliance was formed.

The groups that make up the alliance have agreed on a draft minimum program���a unifying document that outlines our common priorities. First, we have to address the most urgent social and economic issues: employment, housing, food sovereignty. Take the example of seeds. Right now in Kenya, it���s illegal to share indigenous seeds. Companies like Monsanto have successfully lobbied Parliament to pass laws that criminalize this. So our sovereignty is under attack at the most basic level. The right to grow and share food has been taken away.

So our unity is built around addressing these fundamental needs. But beyond that, we are also concerned with broader questions of national sovereignty. Kenya currently hosts at least three foreign military bases���American, British, and others. There���s the issue of debt, which has become unmanageable. There���s the land question. Article 68 of the Kenyan Constitution mandates Parliament to set a ceiling on land ownership���so no one person can own more than a certain amount of land. But Parliament has refused to pass this legislation for over a decade. If we implemented that ceiling and carried out land reform, we could begin to solve the housing crisis. We could produce more food. We could shift the structure of our society.

So for us, the core of the project is the restoration of dignity for the Kenyan people. That begins with education, health care, housing, clean drinking water. Imagine���a country like Kenya, sixty years after independence, and people are still dying from malaria. Our public hospitals barely function. So the starting point is not lofty abstractions���it���s the urgent, material needs of ordinary people.

That���s the orientation of the Kenyan left. And the Kenya Left Alliance continues to organize. Every day, new progressive groups are joining and strengthening the coalition. We believe that by 2027, we will be in a formidable position to contest for political power. And we���ll do so under the three guiding principles inscribed in our logo: land, food, and freedom.

William Shoki

Some people���especially those on the left, but even more broadly in society���tend to be skeptical of elections, particularly in moments when the political system has lost its legitimacy. They might argue that participating in elections simply legitimizes a rigged system, or that you risk losing movements to the ballot box. Their view might be: Nothing good comes from elections, so why invest all this energy and effort into them when we could be organizing in other ways? What���s your response to that kind of argument?

Sungu Oyoo

I don���t think they���re completely wrong. Whether or not to engage in elections depends on the analysis we do and the tactics we choose to pursue our strategic goals. Strategically, we���re working toward building a more dignified society���and in our context, we see elections as a tactic, one of the many possible pathways to get there. At the same time, we���re fully aware of the limitations of electoral processes. Kenya today is a country where the dominant political parties don���t really offer political leadership���they offer ethnic wallets. What I mean is that many so-called leaders use their ethnic bases as bargaining chips to secure elite interests. So the challenge is: How do we create a new kind of politics that is organized around ideas? How do we create vehicles through which we can test and implement those ideas in real time?

Yes, we���re organizing. But there are also municipalities in this country where progressive forces could take control and make minimal but meaningful gains for the people. That���s not enough, of course, but it���s a start. There are towns where people don���t have access to drinking water. You can���t tell them to wait ten years for the revolution to arrive���dust can kill you in two weeks. So for me, what we���re trying to do in this moment must be understood in context.

Let me give you an example. In the last general election in 2022, Kenya had just over 20 million registered voters. William Ruto won with around 6.2 million votes, defeating Raila Odinga by less than 200,000 votes. Both candidates had slightly over 6 million votes. But over 8 million registered voters didn���t show up to vote. That���s massive. And this wasn���t always the case. In previous elections, Kenya���s voter turnout has been extremely high���sometimes even hitting 80 percent. But in 2022, turnout dropped significantly. And those who didn���t vote weren���t simply apathetic. Their refusal to vote was, in itself, a political statement. They were saying: We know the system is rigged. We know this so-called multiparty democracy does not yield democratic outcomes. And so they opted out.

Within the Kenya Left Alliance, we���re asking: How do we organize and mobilize those people���the ones who didn���t vote? How do we also reach those who did vote for the dominant parties, but might be open to supporting a progressive agenda? Based on our analysis, we believe that in this particular historical moment, choosing not to participate in elections would be a serious mistake.

We���ve learned from history. In the 1980s, underground organizers���groups like Mwakenya���decided not to participate in elections. During the 1992 elections and others, they lent their best organizers to other parties and formations. But those organizers couldn���t create real change, because they entered those parties as individuals, not as part of a coherent, organized front. Their movements had taken the position of staying out of the electoral process altogether, and so the individuals had no institutional backing, no political instrument of their own.

That���s why, today, we believe we must come together to build our own political instrument���an organization that can engage the electoral terrain not as a shortcut to power, but as one tactic among many. A way to win some basic improvements in people���s lives. But the most important thing to remember is that elections are only a tactic. They are not the strategy.

William Shoki

A recurring question in public debate���especially when a political formation is proposing bold social and economic reforms���is, of course: How will you pay for it? In Kenya, that question arises in a context where public debt is high, the tax base is narrow, and ordinary citizens already bear a heavy burden through consumption taxes. And this is not unique to Kenya. Around the world, whenever someone even suggests expanding access to public services, the immediate reaction from across the social spectrum is resistance: that it���s fiscally irresponsible, that it���ll raise taxes on working people, that it���ll drive away investors.

And the bigger risk is that capital will fight tooth and nail to prevent these reforms���threatening to withhold investment or exit the country altogether. So as we approach a period of heightened political debate, I want to ask: How are you preparing to face these questions? What do you say to someone who���s disengaged from the political system, someone with low trust in leaders, who hears what���given the current reality���might sound like grand proposals? Someone who says: ���Look, if the state can���t even provide basic services today, what makes you think your alliance would do any better if you were in power?���

Sungu Oyoo

The truth is, the state���s failure to provide basic services is not because it lacks resources���it���s because it lacks the political will. The state has made public projects into vehicles for theft. Take the Office of the Auditor General, which is an independent state institution that audits government spending. A few years ago, they reported that roughly KES 2 billion are lost to corruption every single day. That���s close to 16 million USD. Daily. That���s money that just disappears. And when then President Uhuru Kenyatta was asked about it, he shrugged and said, ���Mnataka nifanye nini?���What do you want me to do?���

So the first step, honestly, is just to stop the theft. Think about how much money KES 2 billion a day amounts to over the course of a year. That alone could fund major improvements in education, health, water infrastructure. Before we even talk about radically transforming the economy, just stemming the daily looting would be a huge step forward. Yes, there are cartels and bureaucrats embedded in the system who would resist such efforts���but that���s another conversation. Beyond corruption, there���s also massive waste.

Let me give you a current example: The president recently traveled abroad���he passed through Addis and then continued on to the US. He took a private jet that cost more than $30,000 an hour. Every hour he���s out of the country, taxpayers are paying that amount for the jet alone���not including all the other expenses. And mind you, Kenya already has a presidential plane. That���s the kind of blatant, unnecessary spending we���re talking about.

So again, before we even get to big structural changes, just addressing corruption and reducing waste would free up significant public funds. And we have to remember: What people are asking for is not extravagant. They���re asking for education, for health care, for clean drinking water. No one���s demanding a holiday in the Bahamas. It���s not like someone���s going to show up at the Ministry and say, ���Give me a plane ticket to the Bahamas, I demand it in the name of the revolution.��� These are basic human needs.

William Shoki

Though maybe one day���when we have full socialism���that might be a possibility.

Sungu Oyoo

Haha���maybe one day! We���ll have to go to the Bahamas to extend Pan-African solidarity to our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean.

William Shoki

Exactly.

Sungu Oyoo

But that���s all I���ll say on that for now.

William Shoki

Thanks for that. As we begin to wrap up, I want to ask about how you���ll be measuring success. So, 2027 arrives, and it���s the Kenya Left Alliance���s first time contesting national elections. What are your ambitions? As far as I���m aware, you���re running candidates across the board. Are you hoping to amass as many seats as possible? Or have you set your sights on something else? If KLA doesn���t win a majority, what does success look like? Is it about shifting public discourse, building new institutions, expanding your base, or broadening the political imagination���as you mentioned earlier? In your view, what is the most important metric of success for the Kenya Left Alliance?

Sungu Oyoo

Yes, we will be contesting every seat���from president to MCA, which is the Member of County Assembly, similar to a councilor. Personally, I���ll be contesting the presidency under the banner of the Kenya Left Alliance. One of our primary objectives is to engage in a different kind of politics���not necessarily a new kind, but one that has been pushed to the margins. It still exists in other parts of the world, but here in Kenya, it���s been suppressed by the intense monetization of politics. Today, if you don���t have money and resources, it���s almost impossible to compete. So we���re trying to reintroduce ideas into politics.

In the Arusha Declaration, Julius Nyerere said that when he asked his ministers how to solve some of the country���s most pressing social issues, they answered, ���We need more money.��� And he replied, ���But we are a poor country. A poor person does not use money as their weapon. If we have chosen money to be our weapon, then we have chosen the wrong weapon for our struggle.��� That insight resonates deeply with us. We���re going into this electoral process with a firm commitment to anchor it in progressive ideas. This isn���t just a contest for votes���it���s a broader political process.

First, it���s a process for consolidating the forces of the left in Kenya. Second, it���s a way to deepen political education, building on the work that many progressive organizations have already been doing. And third, it���s a moment to test our ideas and assess our collective strength as progressive forces. In that sense, this election will be a defining moment for the Kenyan left. Of course, our goal is to win. But even if we don���t, we aim to use the opportunity to prefigure what is possible���to show, in municipalities or counties or other institutions where the Kenya Left may gain control, that change is not only necessary, but doable.

Right now, politics in Kenya is treated like rocket science. Just getting malaria medicine is made to seem as complex as nuclear engineering. We want to break that myth. We want to establish liberated territories���spaces where we can implement real, tangible reforms and provide concrete examples of a better society. If we can do that, we believe it will push people in other areas to begin making new demands of their own, and to reimagine what is politically possible.

William Shoki

Thank you very much. Amen. And thank you for coming onto this podcast and sharing your time with us. I���ve been speaking with Sungu Oyoo, a Kenyan activist with a long-standing commitment to people���s struggles, who will be contesting in the 2027 presidential elections under the banner of the Kenya Left Alliance. He���s coming for Ruto���s job. It was a real pleasure to talk to you, Sungu.

Sungu Oyoo

It was a pleasure to be on the podcast, Shoki. Hopefully we���ll have a chance for another conversation in the future.

William Shoki

Absolutely. This is only the beginning. And to our listeners: Remember to subscribe to the Africa Is a Country podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for more conversations on African and global politics and culture from a left perspective. Until next time, I���m William Shoki. Goodbye.

Sungu Oyoo

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines. Edited ISS044 image of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea's coast. Credit Stuart Rankin via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

Our reliance on maps and borders as the primary frame for thinking about Palestine and for imagining solutions narrows what we believe the true meaning of liberation can be. In the history of mapping this land, maps have never been neutral; they have been instruments of dispossession and part of a global history of colonialism. To see Palestine only through the lens of cartography is to remain bound by the very logic that is designed to contain us, and to an ever-shrinking Palestine.

Two points follow. The first is at the level of space: mapping renders the land into an object of control from above, something to be divided, surveilled, and possessed. The second is at the level of power: the production of space as sovereign territory installs a relation of domination, one in which sovereignty is not collective self-determination, but a hierarchy of rulers and ruled. The very grammar of sovereignty traps us in the paradigm of obedience and domination, rendering us unable to imagine ourselves as creative actors beyond being victims who are acted upon, or as protestors who act against.

Believing in liberation otherwise is to step outside the borders altogether, not only the borders drawn around Palestine, but those imposed by nation-states and imperial orders everywhere. It is to see the Palestinian struggle not as an isolated question of territory, but as part of a wider confrontation with colonialism, racial capitalism, and Western imperialism. Our liberation must be unbound from the cartographic imagination that fragments the world into sovereignties and instead connect to struggles that envision life beyond dispossession altogether. A free Palestine, then, is not only a redrawn map; it is new forms of relation that no longer reduce us to rulers and ruled, limit us to victims or resistors, but imagine us as communities that create, live, and determine life together.

If Gaza today is the most brutal expression of containment, it is because the Strip is the map taken to its logical extreme. Two million people, hemmed in behind walls and watchtowers, rendered as a population to be managed rather than as a people who belong. Since 2008, Israeli officials have literally calculated the daily caloric intake allowed for Gaza���s residents, reducing life to numbers and spreadsheets. Food itself becomes a weapon.

This is not only a local tragedy; it is a global logic. The partitioning of life into enclaves and territories, the sealing off of populations, the calculation of who may live and who must die are the operations of colonial mapping across the world.

Africa carries the deepest scars of this logic. The Berlin Conference of 1884 divided a living continent with rulers and ink, transforming histories of belonging into abstract lines of possession. Communities were split apart, nations were forced into existence, and sovereignties were fabricated for empire. The violence did not end with independence because the borders themselves remained in place, and with them, the economic dependency, extraction, and militarized policing that colonialism required.

To connect Palestine with Africa is not metaphorical; it is recognition. Gaza and the continent share the same cartographic wound: the conversion of land into an object of imperial ownership, and of people into populations to be controlled. The border, whether as a wall in Rafah or as a line across Africa, is not simply a marker of separation. It is a weapon that organizes dispossession and forces movement to install domination.

Liberation, then, cannot be limited to the redrawing of maps or the recognition of sovereignties. It must mean dismantling the entire order that made borders the condition of political life. A free Palestine, like a free Africa, must refuse the colonial cartography that sought to erase them and instead build relations that are uncontainable: relations of belonging, creation, and collective determination.

This is the difference between the indigenous relation to land and the colonial one. The indigenous person says: I belong to the land. The colonizer insists: the land belongs to me. This is the fundamental difference. To forcibly remove a people from their land is to sever that belonging and to attempt to make life unlivable until they depart.

Although the critique of sovereignty and borders is essential, it does not mean ignoring the immediate and material needs of people living under siege. For Palestinians in Gaza, the struggle for survival���for food under the manmade famine by Israel, for water, for freedom of movement, for medical care and safety���is not abstract. These demands for tangible political rights are urgent, and they are a form of resistance in themselves. But we must not confuse the tools of survival with the full vision of liberation. In fact, imagining a life beyond containment is not a luxury; it is a necessity born from the conditions of siege.

The deeper critique of colonial borders strengthens, rather than undermines, the demand for dignity and justice in the present.

Beyond multipolarity

The SCO summit in Beijing revealed cracks in Western dominance���but whether they become openings for justice depends on African agency, not new patrons. General Secretary Xi Jinping and world leaders attending the 2025 China Victory Day Parade in Beijing. Image credit The Kremlin via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0.

The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Beijing, accompanied by a military parade and ambitious economic discussions, drew global attention. In much of the international commentary, the event was portrayed as further evidence of the US���s decline and China���s inexorable rise. Across the Middle East and Global South, many voices repeated this binary narrative: Washington losing primacy, Beijing preparing to take its place. For Africa, however, this framing is unsatisfactory. It risks reducing the continent to a spectator in a drama staged by others. The real significance of the SCO summit lies in what it tells us about multipolarity, about the cracks in Western dominance, and about the opportunities and dangers these cracks create for African agency.

Africa���s relationship with global financial institutions has long been one of asymmetry. The IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that dismantled social protections, privatized public goods, and left countries more vulnerable to global shocks. Dollar dependence tethered African economies to the policy decisions of the US Federal Reserve, exposing them to sudden capital flight and currency crises. In this context, the SCO���s discussions of new financial mechanisms���a potential development bank, greater use of local currencies, and coordination with BRICS initiatives���take on more than technical importance. They are symbols of possibility, suggesting that alternatives to Western-dominated finance may finally be emerging.

History, however, offers reasons for caution. External powers have long presented themselves as partners while entrenching new forms of dependence. China���s Belt and Road projects, for example, have brought much-needed infrastructure to parts of Africa but have also sparked debates about debt sustainability and transparency. Russia���s security engagements on the continent have raised questions about sovereignty and accountability. Multipolarity, if understood only as the replacement of one patron with another, risks repeating old mistakes under new banners. The critical issue is whether African states can approach these emerging institutions not as passive recipients but as active negotiators, shaping terms in line with local needs and priorities.

South Africa���s membership in BRICS underscores this dilemma. Pretoria occupies a dual position: embedded in Africa yet connected to the institutional experiments of the non-Western world. This duality is a strength if used wisely. South Africa can channel African concerns into BRICS and, through BRICS, into SCO-related initiatives. It can advocate for infrastructure financing that reduces inequality rather than deepens it, and for financial mechanisms that provide stability rather than impose austerity. Yet South Africa has also been criticized for aligning more with elite interests than with popular demands. The question is whether it will use its position to advance continental agency or to consolidate its own narrow influence.

The SCO summit also highlights the philosophical stakes of the current moment. Political scientist Amitav Acharya has argued that the future world order will not be unipolar but an ���archipelago of powers.��� For Africa, this metaphor is crucial. It means the continent is not condemned to choose between Washington and Beijing, but can instead navigate among multiple poles, forging diversified partnerships. At the same time, an archipelago is fragmented; without coordination, African states risk being played off against one another, courted piecemeal rather than collectively. Multipolarity rewards unity. A continent that speaks with one voice can demand better terms, while a divided continent will find itself bargaining from weakness.

Concrete examples illustrate the stakes. When Zambia defaulted on its debt, the negotiations were prolonged and painful, involving Western creditors and Chinese lenders alike. The process revealed both the potential and the limits of multipolar finance: Multiple creditors provided leverage, but lack of coordination prolonged suffering. Similarly, Kenya���s engagement with Chinese infrastructure financing brought new highways and rail lines, but also intensified debates about dependency and sovereignty. These cases show that multipolarity is neither a panacea nor a disaster by itself. Its value depends on the strategies and choices of African actors.

The SCO���s emphasis on local currencies and alternative financial mechanisms resonates deeply in Africa, where the dollar���s dominance has often been experienced as a form of coercion. The ability to trade or borrow without exposure to US sanctions would represent a step toward sovereignty. Yet it also raises questions: Will new institutions prioritize human development, or will they simply reproduce the logic of extraction under different management? Multipolarity opens the space for justice but does not guarantee it. The burden of turning possibility into reality lies with African agency.

Civil society has a role here too. Discussions of multipolarity are often confined to elites, yet the consequences of economic choices are borne by ordinary people. If multipolar institutions are to become tools of justice rather than new instruments of dependency, their design must be contested, debated, and shaped from below as well as above. Activists, unions, and social movements in Africa can push governments to demand fairer terms, greater transparency, and accountability in engagements with both Western and non-Western partners. Without such pressure, multipolarity may merely empower new elites while leaving structural inequalities untouched.

The SCO summit in Beijing was heavy with symbolism: missiles rolling past spectators, leaders shaking hands, declarations of solidarity echoing across the stage. But the symbolism that matters most for Africa is subtler. It is the recognition that the financial and political order is no longer monolithic. The cracks in Western hegemony create opportunities. Whether those opportunities lead to emancipation or renewed subjugation depends on Africa���s capacity to act collectively and strategically.

The choice before the continent is stark. One path leads to another cycle of dependency, with African states swapping one creditor for another, one patron for another. The other path leads to a more assertive Africa, one that treats multipolarity not as a slogan but as a space of struggle, where it can advance its own priorities. The SCO summit is a reminder that history is not predetermined. The future will be written not only in Beijing or Washington but in Pretoria, Lagos, Nairobi, and beyond. Multipolarity is not liberation, but it may be the opening through which liberation can be pursued if Africa insists on writing its own script.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming. Photo by Peter Mitchell on Unsplash.

These days, as you wind through Salasala in Dar es Salaam���s northern suburbs, you can buy gas canisters from the shiny red Oryx franchise shop, branded dog food from the supermarket, or malt whisky from the imported liquor store. When I first visited the area with my friend Alex 13 years ago, we had stopped to pick up a few cartons of imported South African juice at a small concrete box of a grocery store, it���s standard, limited wares stacked on shelves that lined the shop and surrounded the vendor, who sat behind a glass-fronted cabinet displaying stacks of eggs in cardboard boxes. Alex had constructed his shop close to the house he had built as an investment to provide extra income. The store was nestled among a string of identical shops selling identical items, and he passed it every day on his way to and from work in the city. But by 2025, the line of small shops was no longer there. Someone else had bought the land and the existing structures had been demolished to make way for larger investments: a bakery, a bar, and a petrol station. Alex had taken the opportunity to shift his investment to a series of ���frames��� (concrete shops for rent) in strategic locations on the city���s new frontier, now five to ten kilometers north of Salasala. He had just bought a plot of land near one of his frames where he intended to build a house. He wasn���t upset about moving. There was more space further out of the city, he said, and Salasala was only going to become a more congested and less pleasant place to live. ���It will be like uswahilini,��� he said, ���the road will be right outside your window!���

In Tanzania, uswahilini is a popular term that refers to densely built neighborhoods characterized by small homes and poor public services. The term originates from the era of German and then British urban planning that organized the colonial city into three zones that were effectively divided between racial groups. The zones became known in Swahili as uzunguni, uhindini, and uswahilini (the place of the European, Indian, and African, respectively). They were characterized by the different qualities of permitted building materials, the dimensions and uses of built structures, the size and layout of plots and streets, and the provision of public services. Although the city has long outgrown this model, the colonial framing remains a pervasive cultural trope. It is not uncommon to hear people refer to expensive planned neighborhoods as uzunguni, or to unserviced neighborhoods containing closely packed housing as uswahilini. For some, uswahilini is a mark of pride and belonging; Tanzania���s musicians have used it as a cultural location from which to critique the city���s long-term abandonment of its residents. For the middle classes, uswahilini is the foil for their more aspirational���though still informal���residential neighborhoods and is to be guarded against, even if this means building again in a new location.

The coloniality of space���the insistence that urban space is divided, and that some residents deserve to live in better-serviced and -laid-out neighbourhoods based on class (and in the colonial period, race)���continues to reverberate through the built environment of Tanzania���s largest city. Although Dar es Salaam���s population has grown rapidly in the postcolonial period, from around 150,000 at independence to 5.5 million by 2022, the spatial afterlives of colonialism continue to shape the city���s development and residents��� experience of urban space. The coloniality of space is evident in the land-tenure regime that has persisted since the colonial period, in which secure tenure is enjoyed by the minority; in the lack of investment in the city���s housing stock that has forced the majority of the city���s population to construct their own houses; and in ideas about what, and who, makes good urban space and who deserves to live where. The coloniality of spaces produces an aesthetic politics that serves to legitimize historically embedded unequal access to land, services, and housing.

Kinondoni District, Dar es Salaam. Image �� Claire Mercer, 2025.

Frantz Fanon and Ng��g�� Wa Thiong���o remind us of how the colonial framing of the city was experienced by the colonized. For Fanon, the racialized bifurcation of the colonial city���powerfully described in The Wretched of the Earth (1963)���was key to the psychological trauma inflicted by colonialism and racism. In his description the European enclave was characterized by the colonized as a space of order, modernity, and physical luxury. The space of the colonized���the native town���was described as the negative opposite of the colonizer���s, characterized by congestion and the lack of embodied comforts, ���starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light.��� Writing about postcolonial Kenya two decades later, Ng��g�� wa Thiong���o insisted in Decolonising the Mind that the traces of colonialism remained scattered across contemporary African landscapes, cultures, and what he termed ���the mental universe of the colonised.��� Fanon and Ng��g�� show us that colonial alienation entailed both the reordering of material space and was also experienced psychologically in the struggle in, and for control over, the urban landscape. In Dar es Salaam today, land use, urban planning, and housing all bear the imprint of the city���s colonial past and produce stark inequalities in the built environment, particularly between the middle classes and the urban poor.

The city of Dar es Salaam has expanded into its rural hinterland over the past few decades. People have bought and sold ever-smaller plots of land in the informal land market, but their investments are mostly insecure: between 70 and 80 percent of the city���s land is occupied without land titles in what the government refers to as ���informal settlements��� or ���unplanned areas.��� This insecure, informal land market is the hallmark of the coloniality of space, traceable to a land-tenure regime fundamentally unaltered since the colonial period. German and British colonial governments alienated all land in the territory, vested it in the governors of the German imperial government and then the British colonial government, and restricted statutory rights to land to Europeans in the cities and on the plantations. ���Natives��� were allocated customary rights only, administered by native authorities outside the towns. As the city has extended into these rural areas in the postcolonial period, the government has struggled to keep up. The city���s periphery has become a frontier zone: Officially designated as a ���planning area��� in which no further informal development should take place, in practice the availability of cheap land governed by ���quasi-customary��� tenure practices, in which local leaders and neighbors recognize claims to land, has enabled thousands of people to find a piece of land. But the middle classes��� and elites��� zeal for urban land has driven up demand and, with it, prices. Poorer urban residents are pushed further out for affordable land. Quasi-customary modalities of accessing and securing land struggle as rogue land brokers and conflicts over plots have filled the local courts. A national program to survey all land parcels has been underway since 2013. The program could deliver security to the thousands of urbanites who have built their homes on insecure peripheral land, but to date, the government has insisted that state recognition must be paid for by urbanites themselves. While many in the middle class can afford to secure their land, prices are simply too high for the majority.

The provision of housing also bears the imprint of the coloniality of space. There has never been adequate housing available for citizens to rent or buy in the city. The British colonial government refused to countenance that Africans would become legitimate urban dwellers. It belatedly provided a few hundred housing units for rent to government workers in the 1940s and 1950s. The postcolonial government did not do much better. In the 1960s, it provided some finance for self-build housing and fewer than 10,000 units for sale or rent to civil servants. These were replaced from the 1970s by sites and services schemes that laid out planned neighborhoods with statutory leasehold titles and (eventually) urban services such as tarmacked roads. They were quickly monopolized by government officials. Since the early 2000s, government efforts to provide housing in the city have been limited to similar schemes that have planted small oases of planned, serviced neighborhoods in the wider, insecure city. Demand and prices are high, and plots are difficult to get. Everyone else has been left to their own devices.

While elite consumption of land and housing in the city is widely remarked upon���President Samia Suluhu Hassan is said to have a prime plot in one of the new planning schemes on the edge of the city���the middle classes have quietly taken advantage of the coloniality of urban space by investing in land and housing. Hidden in plain sight on the city���s suburban frontier, the middle classes are nevertheless anxious that uswahilini will catch up with them. And so those that have the means repeat the cycle of buying a plot and building a house, pushing the city���s frontier further outwards. In the process they construct urban space that works for them.

The anticolonial roots of Kenya’s student strikes

From the colonial classroom to today���s exam halls, student strikes in Kenya are less outbursts than acts of political imagination���insisting that schools live up to their promise of justice and transformation. High school students in Shianda, Kenya, 2021. Image �� Margus Vilbas via Shutterstock.

In mid-July of this year, students at Tambach Boys High School, a secondary school located in the West Kenyan county of Elgeyo-Marakwet, went on strike. After breaking a series of classroom and dorm windows, students left campus and peacefully marched 12 kilometers, up the thousand-meter escarpment of the Kerio Valley, to the county���s capital town of Iten where they registered protests over what they described as poor academic preparation for their upcoming national exams.

School officials responded by closing the campus and calling on parents to urge students to cease their public complaints. Their admonishments did little to quell discontent. Across western and central Kenya during the second half of July, students rose to express similar complaints. Coming on the heels of the June 25 and Saba Saba protests (both of which were met with deadly government responses), students in both large and small towns���from Kijabe to Iten to Eldoret to Lieten���carried out similar actions, voicing dissatisfaction over a range of issues, from substandard academic preparation to sexual abuse by teachers to poor food.

While many in Kenya dismiss student protests and strikes such as these as the ���petty��� work of �����mobs��� and unserious students, student protest in Kenya is rooted in anticolonial struggle and discontent driven by aspirations of educational attainment and humane treatment.

Student strikes in what is now Kenya have a long history, beginning soon after the expansion of colonial schooling in the region. As early as 1910 and 1912, after roughly a decade of uneven mission school expansion from the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria, students at schools in the West Kenyan towns of Maseno and Mumias used strikes to call for more rigorous academic training in place of the rudimentary instruction promoted by mission educators. In the mid-1920s, in what historian Derek Peterson has referred to as the ���school garden crisis,��� students and community members in Nyeri uprooted crops planted on mission school grounds and boycotted classes to register frustration over land disputes. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, according to the autobiographies of prominent anticolonial leaders and thinkers such as Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga, Moody Awori, and Ng��g�� wa Thiong���o, students at St. Mary���s High School in Yala, Mangu High School near Thika, and Alliance High School in Kikuyu carried out strikes and protests demanding better food and more humane disciplinary policies. Even on the eve of independence, in 1962, students at the newly founded St. Patrick���s High School in the small town of Iten refused to eat and boycotted their coursework because, in the words of one participant, they ���demanded to be given��� better curriculum than what the school was offering.���

Both then and now, such actions reveal something important about the way Kenyans understand school. They are rooted in a deep and searing hope among many Kenyans that schools, despite their flaws, hold the potential to provide an avenue for individual success and social transformation. Despite the oppressive roots of Kenya���s contemporary education system, belief in the promise of schools goes back to the colonial era as well. Though accessible to a tiny minority of Africans, colonial schools were often adopted and adapted as spaces of community-building, social mobility, and anticolonial activity. Following independence, parents and students used schools to challenge Kenyan elites and international education organizations. Local communities built hundreds of ���Harambee schools��� (often against great odds), with the hope that schools would help them reap the benefits of uhuru (Kiswahili for freedom). A few pursued university degrees in the US, Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Such faith still exists today, as I witnessed recently at Ngesumin Girls Secondary School in Kericho, where on July 11 of this year, hundreds of students, community members, and school officials took part in a day-long sherehe (Kiswahili for celebration)���complete with music, speeches, and gift giving���to recognize the matriculation of 26 graduates to Kenyan universities, the largest number in the school���s history.

Despite such hope, the overwhelming result of schooling in today���s Kenya, as was the case during the colonial era, is the reproduction of social inequalities and the strengthening of class divisions. The foundational structure of Kenyan education, sitting as it does on a series of high-stakes national tests and admission into a hierarchical system of prestigious national boarding schools and less prestigious county and subcounty schools, guarantees that the nation���s top educational institutions are reserved largely for the sons and daughters of elites, leaving the bulk of the nation���s youth struggling with poorly financed facilities and overburdened educators.

Though some may see breaking windows, boycotting classes, and marching through town as ineffective ways of promoting change, these moments of struggle demonstrate both the contested reality of the country���s schooling past and the potential for an alternative path forward. Rooted in the history of Kenyan schools is a profound paradox, pitting a deep respect for the liberatory power of education against intense frustration and anger over the barriers that exist in pursuit of that liberation.

While there certainly are inspiring examples in Kenyan history of the power of schools and education to transform people���s lives, the history of the nation���s student strikes demonstrates that, for over a century, Kenyan students have been deeply aware of the unfair, punitive, rigged, and unresponsive nature of their schools. The spate of student protests in Kenyan schools in mid-July are just the most recent attempt on the part of the nation���s youth to express their belief that something is deeply amiss within Kenyan education. If the nation���s schools are to be transformed to benefit a broader range of wananchi (Kiswahili for citizens), Kenya���s elders and elites would do well to listen.

The price of plugging in

Floating power plants from Turkey promise to solve blackouts in the Global South. But easy fixes come with political risks. MV Karadeniz Powership Do��an Bey, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Image credit Adrian Turner via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

When the lights go out in Freetown, Havana, or Rio, salvation can appear on the horizon���though not in the form of future power plants or renewable grids, but as retrofitted ships humming with electricity. These Turkish-owned ���Karpowerships��� promise to promptly end blackouts. But their convenience and glowing decks belie the complications that come when a nation���s lifeline is precariously tethered to a foreign ship.

In the last two decades, Karpowership (whose parent company is Karadeniz Holding) has emerged as the global leader in building and operating a fleet of powerships which turn heavy fuel oils (HFOs) or liquefied natural gas (LNG) into quickly deployable power across four continents. While the concept of powerships have existed since the 20th century, what makes Karpowership different is its technological modularity and successfully scaled commercialization.

Some commentators have argued that the presence of Karpowership in Africa entrenches dependency and encourages further underinvestment in national energy. The reality is more complicated. Karpowership���s increased presence around the world opens new questions about its installation in fragile or weak states. Karpowership���s value must be based on how a country employs it in its wider development agenda, which involves a host country���s energy mix and political circumstances. Energy policymakers need to be careful in how they procure and handle this tool.

Karpowerships offer a tantalizing, albeit temporary, technological contingent to a nation���s grid. In supplying temporary power, Karpowerships provide for citizens��� basic electricity needs without being embedded into extant networks (besides cables connecting to nearby substations) and without occupying large tracts of land. Contracts can also be negotiated and customized to suit the needs of client states. While some have argued the contracts are exploitative in their take-or-pay provisions, as a private power producer, Karpowership faces political exposure should an incoming administration change the terms of a previously finalized agreement; it is not unexpected that they seek financial assurances beforehand.

Yet many risks undermine the proposed benefits. In addition to charges of alleged corruption, employing Karpowership invariably results in negative ecological impacts from HFOs. Environmental regulation may be especially vulnerable���national-level negotiations may ignore local stakeholders��� concerns, where they might otherwise be considered in traditional power-plant projects involving land use. If the alternative to Karpowerships is intermittent blackouts, then one would have to argue that decentralized pollution from individuals coping with diesel generators does not outweigh the impact from the powership���s emissions. States also face ethical and moral dilemmas when power is cut off in the event of negotiation stalemates or nonpayment. Others have pointed out Karadeniz Holding���s incentive to expand planned contractual timelines in Ghana due to financial and political interests.

To understand why many states in fact utilize temporary infrastructure services, Karpowership���s intermediary value proposition must be framed against the plural complexities and uncertain timescales of ongoing alternative energy transitions in the Global South. A recent study sheds light on several African countries��� approach to Karpowership. The authors argue that temporary contracting of powerships forms one dimension of a multipronged energy transition. Securing financing and establishing new renewable generation projects have long-term time horizons with extensive negotiations, raising the question of solutions for the intermediate term. This, they highlight, is where Karpowership stands out as a power configuration.

For policymakers in Sierra Leone and Gambia, the alternative risks of not providing electricity in the short term overrode the costs of contracting the powership. Whether one argues that electricity in urban settings is a human right or that prolonged outages often lead to social unrest threatening incumbent power, it is clear why policymakers prioritize interim power. Liza Cirolia, Charlotte Ray, and Rifquah Hendricks also incisively discuss energy regulator concerns with maintaining the fiscal integrity of the network. Rolling outages over a long enough period might convince elites to move away from the centralized grid, threatening its long-term coherence with fragmentation. Karpowership as a decentralized technology can act as a short-term buffer, politically deferring any downsides from blackouts while other synchronous plans are implemented.

Other countries��� use of Karpowership will vary based on different national energy mixes, as well as economic and geopolitical contexts. Cuba���s reliance on multiple Karpowerships amidst power shortages forms a portion of its energy mix as it pursues projects to stabilize the national energy grid, including the planned construction of 55 Chinese solar-power parks. Brazil has taken a joint venture approach for LNG and gas projects, while Syria contracts with the firm to recover after civil-war damage to the grid.

How then can states prudently approach Karpowership procurement? They must be careful to resist extending the service indefinitely, even amidst setbacks in national energy goals and renewable infrastructure projects, which rarely progress linearly. It is imperative that state planners carefully perform financial models to assess projected grid development with Karpowership���s usage and associated benefits (e.g., maintained productivity and subsequently earned tax revenue), compared with counterfactual scenarios utilizing other energy sources. The cost per kWh compared to other power sources and public finance management are integral in this process.

As Karpowerships continue to grow globally and seek new market share, we need to be aware of their impact on states��� development agenda and how subscription model infrastructure may erode state sovereignty. This becomes especially important as new innovations in seaborne infrastructure present similar conundrums for states, including offshore data centers in the context of global tech infrastructure and floating desalination plants to aid water shortages.

Karpowership���s motto, ���the power of friendship,��� rings true���strategic partnerships can create immense value. But not all friendships are permanent, nor are they worth sustaining to begin with. Policymakers must put in the work to determine whether Karpowership is the kind of friend they need.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance. Photo by Alan Alves on Unsplash.

Upon arriving at Heathrow from Lusaka in June, I was met with semi-aggressive cross-questions about my visa and passport from a fellow Muslim hijabi immigration officer. I wondered where her parents and grandparents had traveled from, wanting to return the interrogation and confront her with the irony of our interaction in a country that doesn���t really belong to either of us.

My experience at Heathrow is echoed, if not narrated scene for scene, in Sarnath Banerjee���s work at the KW Berlin. He states that at border control, you are often met with someone who looks like you���a brown or black Other. A ���friendly native,��� an ���informer,��� or better yet, a Djinn.

Djinns are invisible beings that live among us. They see us, but we cannot see them. They exist in our homes, commutes, cities, and streets. The Djinn in Sarnath���s comic-book style story is a police informer, because after all, ���the best way to control a native is by using another.��� In the context of the biennale, Sarnath���s character of the Djinn takes shape as the fugitive, the migrant, the deviant, the fox.

Sarnath Banerjee, Critical Imagination Deficit, 2025, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025. �� Sarnath Banerjee; image: Sana Ginwalla

Nothing about my experience at Heathrow was postcolonial. Or perhaps that is the reality of postcoloniality: the empire now runs on internalised suspicion. We watch ourselves for them. But indeed, as Sarnath puts it: ���nobody wakes up feeling postcolonial in Delhi.��� I argue that we cannot talk about ���decolonization��� and ���post-colonialism��� when colonization continues to be exercised, yet it is hardly taught in educational, bureaucratic, or immigration systems. How can we talk about decolonization when countries like Palestine, Sudan, or Congo are currently experiencing a form of it? Why does our framework of history continually center the word ���colonial���? Does it not give it too much power?

The concept of this thing, unseen, invisible, and feared by the oppressor, continued to resonate through the biennale, especially in the works from Zambia. Out of around 10 artists exhibiting from Africa, three were from my home country of Zambia. In hearing the wailing women from sculptures whose forms borrow from drums, baskets, or stools, Anawana Haloba���s Looking for Mukamusaba ��� An Experimental Opera presented intergenerational conversations weighted with eerie tension. The transtemporality of matriarchal voices such as Alice Lenshina, Mukamusaba, and Lucy Sichone resound through echoing forms punctuated with textures of copper, horns, and wood. Calling from a threshold we cannot reach, these women who have been wrongly written, repressed, or silenced in Zambian history wail in anger and grief. Devoid of visibility, their existence is recovered in an honorable oral ode.

Installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025; image: Eberle & Eisfeld. Front: Anawana Haloba, Looking for Mukamusaba ��� An Experimental Opera, 2024/25. �� Anawana Haloba; Sammlung Hartwig Art Foundation; Back (from left to right): Iris Yingzen, Garden of Hope, 2025. �� Iris Yingzen; Han Bing and Kashmiri Cabbage Walker, Walking the Cabbage in Berlin, 2025. �� Han Bing & Kashmiri Cabbage Walker.

Both Isaac Kalambata and Bwanga ���Benny Blow��� Kapumpa reckon with the threshold between tangible and unseen in Zambian traditional beliefs. Practicing traditional healing meant being outcast due to legal and educational interruptions by colonial and religious ideologies. ���Benny Blow��� modernizes the traditional healer or Ng���aka as ���Dr. Bwanga,��� who offers advice via a telephone booth. His take on digital divinity and relationship to the ���algorithm��� offers a futuristic imagination of how to cure 21st-century ailments. Doctor Bwanga���s space reads like a confession booth with a thatched roof and transparent window. But he���s not there. Maybe an algorithm, maybe a fox, maybe a witch.

Bwanga ���Benny Blow��� Kapumpa, Doctor Bwanga in Berlin, 2025, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025. �� Bwanga ���Benny Blow��� Kapumpa; image: Eike Walkenhorst.

While ���witch��� might read as evil, Kalambata redeems the term, making visible how the colonial campaign silenced traditional healers in the name of capitalism. His bark cloth works weave text from the 1914 Witchcraft Act to discuss how land occupation disrupted access to healing plants, denying vital ingredients to those who needed them.

This tension between erasure and presence is held tightly in Salik Ansari���s Altar of Absences, which focuses on demolition as state violence. He doesn���t show victims or devastation, but instead paints the machinery of destruction on jagged forms resembling shrapnel. These works jut out like wreckage archives. The aerial image of Gaza, filmed during Jordan���s food-aid drop in August 2025, whispers in the same breath.

Salik Ansari, Altars of Absences, 2025, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, Former Courthouse Lehrter Stra��e, 2025. �� Salik Ansari; Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai; image: Raisa Galofr

Grupa Spomenik insists genocide is fully speakable but critiques how contemporary forensic science quantifies victims into depersonalized ���identified missing persons��� devoid of political agency.�� The Biennale���s cry crescendos with Sawangwongse Yawnghwe���s red-tinted Joker���s Headquarters, which presents evidence quantifying weapons of mass destruction, exposing militaries and nations complicit in arms funding genocides.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Joker���s Headquarters. Gesamtkunstwerk as a Practical Joke (C���est le Premier Vol de L���Aigle) [It���s the eagle���s first flight], 2025, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025. �� Sawangwongse Yawnghwe; image: Diana Pfammatter; Eike WalkenhorstI went to the Biennale as both an act of national service and personal inquiry. The countries my family calls home���India, Burma, and Zambia���were all represented, and I felt compelled to hear voices entangled with that ancestry now speaking on a global stage. While I work closely with artists in Zambia, my ties to India and Burma are shaped within domesticity. In Berlin, I encountered art shaped by the same forces that displaced my family: military crackdowns in the 1960s, 2007, and 2021. It was a jarring reminder of how little I really know, and how migration, displacement, and the aftermath of genocide leave traces we inherit without always understanding.

What might be read as silence or invisibility in this biennale actually feels like a loud scream trapped in a jar. Allyship and solidarity of artists outside Western art consciousness have been pulled together to acknowledge the plight of Palestine.

Sarnath Banerjee warned against making a ���cemetery of dead words.��� I worry I���ve done that. What can writing do when Gaza continues to be erased? When solidarity feels like a whisper sealed in a jar? But maybe that whisper matters. Maybe it will crescendo���awakening the Djinn to cross the threshold and finally crack it open.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump���s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic. Image credit Jonathan Ort �� 2025.

Robert Goldsborough, a Maryland lawmaker, rose one Friday early in 1826 to clinch what he fancied a good deal for his state. Goldsborough informed his fellow legislators that a private entity had ���incurred an expense in a late deportation of 150 free people of color to the African settlement in Liberia.��� Given that ���twenty of those free people of colour were from the state of Maryland,��� he directed the state���s treasury to reimburse the cost of their removal.

The recipient: the American Colonization Society (ACS). It was the ACS, composed of prominent white men, that founded Liberia as a colony where the US could send its free Black populace. The self-styled colonization movement encompassed both abolitionists and enslavers. Many were ministers zealous to evangelize and ���redeem��� Africa. While the ACS disavowed any official position on slavery, its members insisted that free Black people had no place in their body politic.

Flash forward two centuries: Donald Trump is using mass deportation to plunge the US into a tin-pot fascist police state. Jamelle Bouie has likened the horrors we now witness daily���masked agents abducting Black and brown people from restaurants and courthouses, street corners and schools���to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The comparison is right, but the roots of this catastrophic moment reach even farther back. Mass deportation follows the anti-Black blueprint that white colonizationists had laid a generation before.

To be sure, Black emigrants, born both enslaved and free, came to Liberia seeking liberation. Many settlers embraced the proposition of returning to their ancestral homeland. Liberia���s motto remains ���The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.��� But if Liberia promised escape from slavery and racism, the promise would be betrayed.

Though the ACS claimed no one would leave against their will, the choice was burdened. The ubiquity of American racism made emigration plausible in the first place. Some enslavers forced families to purchase their freedom on the condition that they sail for Africa. Many Black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass foremost among them, denounced the ACS. Long before Kristi Noem would dangle a poisoned offer of cash to incentivize ���self-deportation,��� colonizationists manufactured the illusion of Black people���s consent.

The colonization movement enveloped Washington, counting legislators, judges, and presidents among its ranks. Those powerbrokers advanced ACS interests from public office. Then President James Monroe, an enslaver and ardent colonizationist, became the namesake for Liberia���s capital, Monrovia, by securing funds for the fledgling colony. Long before contractors would build a concentration camp in the Everglades, the ACS used federal patronage for its eliminationist ends.

Goldsborough noted that of the 150 emigrants who had arrived in Liberia, 20 ���were from the state of Maryland.��� The remark admitted that the newest Liberians had spent their lives in his state. Goldsborough nevertheless urged their removal. Long before the White House would berate journalists for recognizing that Kilmar ��brego Garc��a is a ���Maryland man,��� the ACS avowed that only white settlers could call the US their own.

The ACS seized a stretch of African coastline, making no effort to bring emigrants where their ancestors had been enslaved. After the trade of enslaved Africans was outlawed, American warships took to patrolling the Atlantic. Upon intercepting slave ships, the navy ���returned��� the captives aboard to Liberia���though most had been shackled along the Congo Basin. The term ���Congo��� now signifies all those who came, no matter their birthplace, to Liberia. The settlers would, in turn, establish Liberia as Africa’s first Black republic, a paradox in that the new nation colonized the land and oppressed its indigenous peoples.

Today���s White House is disappearing detainees to ���third countries,��� a euphemism for nations where they have never set foot���and often face grave danger. Most notorious is El Salvador, whose right-wing dictator Nayib Bukele boasts a hideous pact with Trump. But the pair���s homegrown gulags are only one thread in an unfolding global plot.

Most countries facing pressure to take American detainees are African. In June, the US Supreme Court authorized the expulsion of eight detainees, who had endured months inside a shipping container in Djibouti, to South Sudan. Flights to Eswatini and Rwanda have followed. The White House is eyeing Liberia���alongside Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda���for similar designs. (Honduras and Palau are also under duress.)

True to the infamous slur that Trump uttered in his first term, one African nation deserves ���the worst of the worst��� as much as any other. While governments might ask favors for holding detainees, the gutting of USAID has deprived many, particularly Liberia, of leverage. What���s more, a travel ban now targets much of Africa���Afrikaner ���refugees��� exempted, of course. Little surprise that Trump was bewildered when Liberian President Joseph Boakai recently addressed him in English. The White House, to quote Swazi activists, takes the continent for ���a dumping ground.���

The US has no monopoly on perpetuating the global color line. Trump���s tactics resemble Australia���s removal of migrants to Papua New Guinea and Nauru. The United Kingdom still champions mass deportation, even after its misbegotten scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That is to say nothing of Israel���s reported efforts to remove those who survive its genocide in Gaza to South Sudan���a chilling echo of the Nazi ���Madagascar Plan.���

Rarely, however, is it grasped stateside that mass deportation is neocolonial���much less that colonial implicates the US two centuries ago. Goldsborough and his ilk deemed free Black people an intolerable problem. They saw in Africa their salvation���the means, Norfolk colonizationists had declared weeks before Goldsborough spoke, of ���putting away the whole of this black and menacing evil, gradually, safely, and most happily, from our land.���

The continent likewise seals the promise that returned Trump to power: deliver America from the migrant hordes that are ���poisoning the blood of our country.��� Venezuelan or Afghan or Haitian or Liberian���anyone who imperils the nation���s whiteness can be sent ���back��� to Africa.

���We do not mean to go to Liberia,��� Douglass proclaimed in 1849. ���Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost.��� His words were prophetic.

Two hundred years after the ACS came into being, Liberia endures as a sovereign republic, a diverse nation that represents freedom in all its complexity. Black America has gone nowhere. The colonizationist fantasy, to rule Liberia and to make America white, failed. So must its latter-day heir.