Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 4

The demise of curiosity

In an era when AI delivers the answer before the question is even asked, the sanctity of wonder is slipping away, and soon the act of asking might vanish entirely. Photo by Craig Sybert on Unsplash.

As long as I can recall, I used to roam as a child with curiosity dripping from my mind; it used to be a thrill to unravel things as I slowly reached their core. Now, the world answers before the question has even bloomed. We are witnessing the gradual erosion of curiosity, and yet people remain inert in the face of this dire problem.

Nowadays, with the omnipresence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), people are constantly fed ready-made information, dissuading any need for independent thinking. The serendipity once found in plunging into books or clicking on obscure hyperlinks in Wikipedia pages or blogs is dissolving. This absence emerged after people stopped researching for their essays, school papers, or simple knowledge for mere convenience and time-saving, which causes a lack of nuance. While it is time-saving, researching something can also educate you on the topic and introduce you to new information about miscellaneous aspects���information you will not find by solely reading summaries or AI overviews. AI in search engines should be disregarded, as most of the information it generates is speculative at best and entirely erroneous at worst.

This dilemma is also evident in education, as students these days tend to care solely about their academic evaluation. Grades have outrivaled curiosity as thinkers are being raised to cease to think for the sake of wonder, only for the sake of passing. In the past, learning for university students was all about devouring knowledge, not just for exams, but also for the sake of curiosity and intellectual interest. Whereas the hunger for knowledge nowadays has dulled; students focus on searching quickly for keywords, underlining what will be in the exam, and ignoring what does not provide a grade.

A recent study conducted by the MIT Media Lab, covered by Time magazine, found that students who utilized AI to write their essays showed the lowest brain activity because they did not go through the meticulous process of thinking and questioning; they skipped over the effort and struggle that gradually constructs understanding. Those same students had more trouble retaining information from their essays and recalling it later. The idle process of copying and pasting without putting in real thought and engagement strips away the joyous uncertainty of wonder, which leads to a decrease in emotional investment when the answer is delivered before curiosity has even sprouted. In fact, this instant gratification is gradually prevailing over a multidimensional��understanding of things; it reinforces the seeking of immediate interpretations and shallow thinking, rather than embracing ambiguity and complexity. As a result, students��� potential begins to freeze; they get used to avoiding thought, and over time, this reliance on AI will negatively impact their ability to question, reason, and analyze. If students stop using their cognitive abilities and neglect critical thinking, they risk becoming intellectually subservient.

The decline of curiosity does not merely affect education or individual improvement; it alters the way people engage with power. In a world engulfed by AI-generated summaries, political discourses are often consumed without scrutiny; as a matter of fact, the inclination to question is vanquished by convenience. Critical inquiry, once a tool for democratic engagement, is now outweighed by the rapid pace of digital consumption. This results in a diminishment of curiosity and dissent; people stop questioning political agendas, policies, and how politics and information are presented. What emerges is a subdued public that is bereft of the ability to think critically, more susceptible to manipulation, and easier to control. This calls for immediate action, or we risk succumbing to the belief that everything that the higher power presents is inherently right and becoming indoctrinated and subservient to the information we consume.

In relation to this point, Grok���a generative AI chatbot that is available on the X app, should be critiqued, specifically in the context of political leverage. In the essay ���Has Grok lost its mind and mind-melded with its owner?��� author Gary Marcus sheds light on how Grok sometimes reflects Elon Musk���s personal political biases more than mainstream factual opinions. One of the most crystalline signs that Grok is biased is how it once repeated the erroneous answer of the far-right conspiracy theory of ���white genocide��� in South Africa, which is a racist narrative that has been debunked. While that precise fiasco response was ultimately fixed, the very presence of that response, even fleetingly, should make people wary, planting an urge to start questioning everything that they encounter. Indeed, subtle manipulation can seep in under the guise of an AI assistant while reinforcing a particular (in this case) Musk���s ideological perspective. In other words, the information that is taken from AI is deliberately curated by AI creators and developers.

Take, for example, the blue comments on TikTok, in which precise words or phrases related to the video are highlighted in blue and linked to search results. This simple accessibility and intentional design help users to obtain their information immediately from the same app, but often in the shape of instant, imprecise answers. Conversely, this feature mars the ability of one to wonder and investigate things deeply. Since most of the information that is available on TikTok is inaccurate, it limits the capacity of the human brain for questions. This lack of curiosity, in this case, is due to people being inundated with futile information; thus, they perhaps consider actual researching and learning as an overwhelming punishment and have also become more hostile to new knowledge.

Ultimately, common sense these days is not so common, since curiosity is fading under the weight of convenience. Being unable to read critically or do simple research is rooted in the inability to retain a thought for no longer than the length of a TikTok video or an Instagram reel, and that should elicit a feeling of fear for our future. However, it is not too late to instruct from the start all over again on the importance of curiosity and how to enjoy the process of wonder.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza���s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated���and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root. Africa Is a Country Festival conference session featuring Joe Kobuthi of The Elephant. Image credit Onesmus Karanja for AIAC.

This is now the fourth On Safari written under the shadow of genocide. Each time, Gaza has framed the horizon of our bi-annual publishing break���its destruction deepening, its images growing sharper and somehow harder to hold. We live in a moment where atrocity is not hidden but hyper-visible, live-streamed, endlessly shared. Still, with each passing month, the world seems to believe it less.

Earlier this August, BILD, Germany���s highest-circulation tabloid, published an article accusing Gaza-based photojournalist Anas Zayed Fteiha of staging scenes of Palestinian suffering to support ���Hamas propaganda.��� The piece offers no proof. It speculates and insinuates. It critiques not the content of Fteiha���s images but their composition: too aesthetic, too perfectly lit, too focused on children, on mothers, on chaos. It fixates on his affiliations, his Instagram posts, the tone of a painting he once shared. In place of evidence, it presents atmosphere. The reader is not asked to reason, but to doubt���to see grief, and suspect performance (In a grimmer register, while I was finalizing this piece to go to press, news broke that Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza���s most prominent journalists and a reporter for Al Jazeera Arabic, had been assassinated in an Israeli airstrike along with four of his colleagues near Al-Shifa hospital. Israel claims al-Sharif was a senior Hamas operative, but offered no verifiable evidence beyond images it said were recovered from his phone.)

This is how genocide denial functions now. It rarely arrives as a blunt denial of death, but rather cloaked in concern for truth, in the language of skepticism, media literacy, and even professional ethics. It does not claim that Palestinians aren���t dying. It simply asks, ���how do we know they���re dying like this?��� It casts doubt on the camera, the angle, and the sequence. It suggests that even if the suffering is real, the image has already ruined it���by being legible, by being replicated, by being seen too many times.

What unsettles me is not just the cynicism of this attack, but its plausibility. That an article so conjectural, so evasive, so obviously enlisted in a project of erasure, could nonetheless shape the public mood, could cause even liberal readers to hesitate, to hedge, to ask: ���well, how do we know?��� And behind that question, something deeper: a growing disorientation, a fragmentation of our most basic political faculties���not only our capacity to discern what is true, but our sense that truth matters at all.

This is not simply a media problem. It is a crisis of subjectivity. A slow unravelling of our ability to perceive clearly, feel coherently, or act collectively in a world saturated by images, algorithms, and engineered doubt. This disorientation is not incidental to moments like this, but is their background condition. What we are seeing is not only a political struggle over Gaza and how it is understood, but a deeper transformation in how reality itself is mediated and experienced.

Something is breaking, and not just in the information we receive, but in the way we receive it. The disruption is not limited to facts or even trust. It extends deeper, into the terrain of perception itself. What we are living through is a corrosion of the cognitive and emotional capacities that political life depends on: the ability to pay sustained attention, to orient oneself within a shared reality, to hold complexity without collapse, to remember with clarity, and to feel in ways that match the weight of events.

Of course, disinformation is not new. Nor is propaganda, or paranoia. But, something about the current configuration feels more invasive. The tools at play no longer simply distort the content of thought; they now rewire its form. They bypass interpretation and operate instead on sensation; on mood, confusion, anticipation, and dread.

Digital platforms, especially those governed by algorithms optimized for engagement, have transformed the conditions under which we form and hold beliefs. They no longer simply present information to us, but structure our experience of the world, isolating us into feedback loops and fragmenting our sense of continuity. It is not that we do not see enough. It is that we see too much, too quickly, dwelling inside a kind of engineered disorientation. The feeds are endless and emotionally charged: the more extreme the content, the more visible it becomes.

This saturation does not always result in belief or disbelief. More often, it produces something quieter: a background hum of uncertainty, an erosion of confidence, a sense that the ground is no longer firm beneath our feet. We do not stop caring, but simply begin to feel less sure that we know how to care rightly, or what caring even looks like in this context. Whatever fragile, elite consensus on Gaza seemed to be building in recent months now feels stalled, even as famine deepens and Israel���s plans to expand its assault and take over Gaza City solidify. The moral urgency that briefly gathered in parts of the public has thinned, its energy dissipating as a new round of disciplinary backlash enters the stream���Britain arresting hundreds for supporting a Palestine solidarity group banned under political pretext; France halting Gaza evacuations after a Palestinian student was accused of an antisemitic post���even as both governments gesture toward recognizing a Palestinian state This is not unique to Gaza. The same pattern recurs elsewhere���in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example���where crises flare into visibility only to be absorbed into the churn and met with repression, their persistence stripped of political traction.

The recent proliferation of large language models only intensifies this condition. It���s no coincidence that AI, in its most widespread forms, now operates as a kind of hallucination machine. Large language models do not know what they���re saying. They simulate coherence by mimicking tone, drawing from probabilistic patterns in vast datasets. Their output is neither truth nor lie, but a fluent fog. And we���already attuned to fragmented context, suspicious of authority, primed for doubt���inhale it. The danger is not that we believe everything they say, but that we begin to lose confidence in our own perception and begin to internalize the confusion. That the fog settles inside us.

The writer L.M. Sacasas describes this as a form of ���psychic enclosure.��� That which was once shared���public attention, a common world, a stable interiority���has been sectioned off, parceled out, and rendered profitable. Our senses no longer reach out and return with clarity, since we no longer encounter the world directly. Our senses are increasingly filtered through systems designed to predict and shape our reactions.

Yet there are still experiences that cut through that enclosure, intense, raw, and unfiltered, impossible to scroll past or half-attend. In May, my daughter was born. Her arrival reorganized my world in ways that remain difficult to describe. Time changed its texture. The hours stretched and compressed around feedings, naps, and the endless work of keeping her safe. Even now, she teaches me that presence is not a metaphor. It is a daily obligation, a physical and emotional demand. You must show up, wholly, again and again. Not because children are innocent abstractions of the future, but because they are here, now, and they need you.

She has taught me something that I once knew in theory, but had never truly practiced: how to pay attention. Not the focused discipline of work, nor the distracted awareness that flickers between notifications, but the kind Simone Weil describes as the ���rarest and purest form of generosity.��� For Weil, attention is not about effort or strain. It is a kind of suspended openness, a willingness to be with what is there���not to grasp it, not to interpret it immediately, but simply to receive it in its fullness. Waiting, watching, and listening.

To care for a newborn is to live inside this form of attention. You must attune yourself to rhythms that are not your own and to signs that are not always legible (I have been around babies for good stretches of my life, but never this up close. I did not anticipate the weird and amusing world of their creaturely gestures, reflexes, and cues). There is no shortcut, no multitasking, no way to rush through the moment. You are asked to be present, wholly and repeatedly. This attention is exhausting, yes���but it is also, somehow, anchoring and expansive.

I won���t pretend to be the most attentive father in the world. At one in the morning, when my daughter has finally closed her eyes and I���m bouncing on the yoga ball for twenty minutes to make sure she stays asleep after transfer, I will���more often than not���end up scrolling on my phone. It���s a compromise: I get to zone out while keeping up the rhythm she finds reassuring. But in those moments, even in the half-light, I���m aware of the dissonance. One hand on my daughter���s back, the other thumbing through the feed. Her body breathing softly against mine while my eyes dart past war, sarcasm, celebrity gossip, famine, outrage, slopaganda, football transfer news, climate catastrophe, and death.

What she demands from me, and what I am so often unable to give, is precisely what the phone takes away: sustained attention, unbroken presence. This, too, is part of the contradiction. That the very device I turn to when I am tired or overwhelmed is the same one that is constantly reconditioning my nervous system to be less available to her, less responsive to the world.

If attention is a form of generosity, then we might say that it is also a form of freedom, because to attend is to choose how to spend one���s time, how to orient one���s being in the world. And in that sense, what we���re witnessing is not simply a cultural crisis, but a political and economic one. Under contemporary capitalism, time is not our own. It is exploited, monetized, fragmented, and sold back to us in the form of endless distraction. What we call attention is now subject to extraction by platforms, by algorithms, and by a media infrastructure that thrives on volatility and speed.

So when we say we can���t hold on to what we���ve seen, that it slips away from us, it is not only because the content is overwhelming. It is because the conditions of our lives no longer make room for sustained relation���to others, to events, to ourselves. The enclosure of attention is part of a larger enclosure: of psychic space, of emotional time, of the common world in which freedom might still mean something. We are haunted not just by the horror we see, but by the feeling that we are unable to respond to it in any meaningful way. That our very capacities���for solidarity, for memory, for judgment���are being quietly eroded.

In that sense, the crisis of attention is not ancillary to the genocide in Gaza. It is one of its conditions. What enables mass death is not only the West���s impunity and the enabling structures of empire. It is also the slow hollowing out of the foundations of moral and political engagement: the ability to remember clearly, to assess soberly, to commit over time, and to act with care. These do not disappear because people stop caring. Many care deeply���urgently, viscerally���but the conditions of digital life scatter that care, fracture it across a thousand stimuli, and make it difficult to carry anything through.

People are not passive. They have marched, organized, spoken out, and refused the enforced silence. But even amid that resistance, there is a heavy background sense of helplessness���a sense that what is happening exceeds our grasp, or repeats too quickly for us to interrupt it. The disorientation produced by digital life does not float above the world���it coexists with its material grind. With hunger and debt. With surveillance and repression. With the impossibility of rest. These are not separate but mutually reinforcing, locking people in a state of perpetual reaction, too breathless to sustain response. The contemporary right understands this better than most. Its politics are not only indifferent to the fraying of our cognitive and emotional resources, they depend on it. In the nihilism of the postmodern right, truth is a disposable commodity, reality is infinitely fungible, and cruelty is a form of entertainment. AI slop, deepfake propaganda, and algorithmically amplified harassment are not aberrations; they are tools for degrading the social capacities that collective politics requires. The more our sense of the common world is scattered, the easier it is to erode solidarity, and the harder it becomes to mount any sustained opposition to the violence they champion.

That is what makes Gaza feel so chillingly emblematic. Not only as an instance of settler-colonial and imperial violence, but as a preview of a world where atrocity is livestreamed and normalized; where witness and voyeur blur; where people know too much, too quickly, and still feel unable to act. As Colombian president Gustavo Petro put it, Gaza is a rehearsal of the future���not only in its violence and propaganda war, but in the deeper transformation of human subjectivity it reveals. One in which suffering is made ambient, part of the feed, part of the noise. The question is no longer whether people saw. It���s whether the world we live in still allows them to hold on to what they saw long enough, to make sense of it, to stay with it, to respond. And by respond, I do not mean a fleeting emotional reaction, or the temporary alibi of a shared post. I mean something more enduring: the work of understanding what made the violence possible; of placing oneself in relation to it; of allowing the encounter to change how one sees, what one values, what one is prepared to risk.

That kind of response���moral, political, sustained���requires capacities that are increasingly under siege. Not just memory and judgment, but time, focus, and long-term organization (which requires a sense of the future, a belief in political possibility). These are the casualties of digital life, but also of the broader political economy in which that life unfolds. When people are made to feel exhausted, precarious, and isolated, when their days are stretched thin by the rising cost of living and their nights shattered by doomscrolling, it becomes harder to carry anything through.

In December, I wrote that ���there is no neutral ground��� in the current media landscape, and that for a publication like ours, the question is not simply what we publish, but how���and on what terms. Over the past year, this has become more than an observation; it has become a guiding principle. At Africa Is a Country, we are working toward a theory of the media landscape���not as an abstract exercise, but as a way of mapping the terrain in which we operate, clarifying both our political responsibilities and the conditions under which our work can matter.

That is the context for the choices we made this year. We produced our first print edition: a carefully designed special issue reflecting on the ���long decade��� of global mass protest from 2008 to 2024. We hosted our first in person Africa Is a Country Festival in Nairobi, in partnership with NBO LitFest, Ukombozi Library, Qwani, and Revolutionary Papers, bringing together writers, artists, and activists for a week of collaborative programming. We screened our first feature-length documentary, After Oil, in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Amadiba, using each screening as an occasion for public discussion. None of these projects are efficient in the capitalist sense. They are slow to make, expensive to produce, and difficult to scale. But this was the point in taking them on. Each was a deliberate refusal of the churn, a wager that time and sustained attention are not just desirable, but politically necessary.

The crisis of attention is not separate from the crises we cover. It is one of their conditions. The same systems that accelerate war, repression, and dispossession also corrode the forms of shared life that make political meaning possible. They fragment thought, scatter care, and erode the traits on which social solidarity depends. This is what some have called ���social atrophy���: the steady loss of the skills, habits, and desires that sustain our ability to act together. Our work so far this year���the print edition, the Africa Is a Country Festival���has been an attempt, partial and imperfect, to resist that corrosion. Not by retreating into nostalgia for a vanished public sphere, but by helping to build a counterpublic and the infrastructure it needs: spaces and formats that can hold attention, nourish social life, and make it possible to think and act in common, even under conditions designed to pull us apart.

We do not do this work because we are nostalgic for a golden age of intellectual life. We do it because the conditions under which meaning becomes possible are being hollowed out by digital capitalism and the broader political economy of immiseration. Repairing those conditions is long-term work. It cannot be done alone, and it is not ours to do alone. It is participatory by design���rooted in the contributions of our editors, contributors, partners, and readers, and inseparable from the wider networks of thinkers, artists, and activists who share this commitment. And, it begins from a simple conviction: that the capacity for rigorous thought, deep attention, and imaginative vision is not the preserve of an educated elite, but a living resource in ordinary people. Our task is to help create the spaces, tools, and relationships that can draw out and connect those capacities, so that the work of making shared meaning and the work of making freedom can be undertaken together.

So we pause in August, as we always do, not as a retreat, but as part of this strategy. Rest is part of the infrastructure of sustained political and intellectual work. When we return in September, it will be with the same commitment: to create the time, space, and relationships in which it is still possible to think, argue, and imagine together���and to hold our attention, long enough, where it matters.

Political musical chairs

A new opposition coalition in Nigeria claims to speak for the people, but its architects are from the same old political class seeking another shot at power. Abuja. Photo by Sage David on Unsplash.

As Nigeria approaches the general electoral season (the next one slated for 2027), career politicians have begun their shady and secret moves in the intense contest for presidential power. A recent political event, which took place on July 2nd at the Umar Musa Yar���adua center in Abuja, can be understood in this context. Here, diverse career politicians and ex-members of government gathered together to announce a new coalition platform under the African Democratic Congress (ADC) with the main intent of ousting the current ruling All Progressive Congress (APC). Present at this gathering were seasoned political nomads skilled in the act of crisscrossing political parties in their ultimate bid for access to state power. The list includes Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El-Rufai, David Mark, and Rauf Aregbesola.

Judging by the statements that were made by key political actors at the public unveiling of the coalition, one might be misled into thinking that this coalition is in solidarity with the struggles of the Nigerian people. At the public unveiling, the ADC coalition politicians declared their intent, among other things to include preventing Nigeria from descending into a one-party state and a creeping civilian dictatorship; and also made lamentations about how under Tinubu���s government, Nigerians are ���wallowing in abject poverty, hunger and insecurity, without any meaningful government effort to address the situation.��� The coalition went as far as declaring itself for all Nigerian people. The newly unveiled chairman speaking on the purpose of the coalition said, ���Here, the North shall hold hands with the South, the youth shall stand equally with elders, women with men, the farmer with the technocrat���not for the triumph of one party, but for the triumph of Nigeria.���

What was the political process that made the ADC coalition come into being? Understanding this will let us know if, really, this is a coalition for the people. The outgoing chairman of the ADC revealed that the coalition-building effort began 18 months ago and involved over 12 National Executive Committee (NEC) meetings and consultations with stakeholders, including former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, as well as other political leaders.�� Already, it���s clear how this coalition is not a pro-people coalition, as pronounced by its participants. It is clear that this is a coalition of stakeholders and past prominent members of the indigenous ruling class.

The majority of the Nigerian people, on whose behalf the coalition declared its mission, were indeed disregarded in the critical process of forming the coalition. The majority of workers’ unions, opposition groups, and political organizations in the country, which have been active in political education and mobilization of the Nigerian people against the neoliberal policies of the current Tinubu-led APC government, were not invited to form part of this coalition.

Examining the recent major popular mobilizations against the significant levels of hunger and hardship that have been imposed by the current government on the majority of the Nigerian people, we see the concrete absence of the coalition in these processes.

When, in June 2024, the NLC and TUC mobilized the majority of unions in Nigeria to demand a substantial increase in the minimum wage given the sharp decline in the standard of living (resulting from the astronomical increase in fuel prices and electricity tariffs, the subsidy removal and currency devaluation policies of the present APC government), the current politicians under the ADC coalition provided no concrete support to back these demands. Despite the two-day nationwide strike mobilized by the unions, which shut down large and critical sectors of the economy, the NLC and TUC eventually accepted a far lower offer than their initial minimum living wage demands without any concrete support from the ADC coalition, which was declared on behalf of the people.

Again, as the majority of Nigerians mobilized for the #EndBadGovernance protests in August 2024, the best some of the politicians involved in the ADC coalition could do was to tweet their support for the movement. The #EndBadGovernance movement was announced months in advance and garnered widespread support from Nigerians due to the popular demands being made. Still, the ADC coalition politicians deemed this people-based movement unworthy of building a structure to drive it and further push popular demands and pushbacks against the hardship policies of the Tinubu-led government.

In many other mobilizations from people-based, worker-based, and community-based organizations against the repressive policies and hardship inflicted by he current government in the past few years, the newly formed ADC coalition and the forces driving and sustaining it have been noticeably absent.

The concrete evidence on the ground therefore shows the ADC coalition to be a special-purpose platform geared towards the selfish and group interest of the so-called stakeholders and prominent politicians involved in the process leading to its formation. The politicians in the ADC coalition only do the bare minimum of offering support via their social media handles for the popular struggles and mobilizations of the Nigerian people but are willing to go as far as building an organized coalition platform, with all the concrete support and effort which that entails, for the for the main goal of winning presidential power.

The irony in all of this is that the ADC is simply following the APC���s playbook. In 2013, certain factions of the disenfranchised but influential political class (including some of the now ADC members) engaged in party mergers and alignments to form the APC in order to unseat a popular incumbent. The painful consequences of that political coalition are still being suffered by the majority of Nigerians today. One can then confidently conclude from the reality on the ground that the newly formed ADC coalition is not representative, owned, or controlled by the majority of the Nigerian people.

Despite its dubious origins and ambitions, it would be foolhardy to rule out the ADC���s prospects in the next presidential election. The control of significant resources by key political figures in the ADC coalition (mainly accumulated and multiplied during their stints in public office), the well-oiled propaganda machine surrounding political personalities in the ADC coalition, and their lasting influence in the communities and grassroots (through their well-funded organized political structures) are some of the key factors which gives the coalition a good chance of defeating the APC government.

Worse still, the low level of political education in Nigeria and the lack of a concrete, people-led organized political coalition also makes it likely that significant number of Nigerians���who are justifiably grieving and groaning under the anti-people policies of the present government���will fall into the well laid out trap of accepting the repackaged ADC coalition as a viable alternative for the development of Nigeria. Unless a genuine, people-led political option emerges, Nigeria will keep cycling through the same elite-driven failures in new disguises.

What do we want?

In her latest novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the contradictions of women���s desires, while leaving her own narrative blind spots exposed. Photo by Kamal Sadiq Adam on Unsplash.

A few months into the year my friend O. texts me: ���2025 has been hard for men and love,” after we���d both been rejected by men who wanted little more than to sleep with us. Had our temporary male lovers been characters in Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie���s latest book, they would have been cast as ���thieves of time,�����a phrase that Zikora, a Nigerian American lawyer and one of the four protagonists in the novel, invents for her past lovers. One guy secretly married someone else while still sleeping with her. Another man���in a jaw-dropping move of male immaturity���loved her until she became pregnant. He never called back, not even when she sent him a photo of their newborn. While reading Dream Count, I texted my close female friends���some were single, a handful were in love, but each of them carried emotional baggage that made them relate to Zikora���s sense of betrayal. But often, in the midst of heartbreak, we forget to ask: Who is betraying whom? Are we not betraying ourselves by wasting time with someone whose desires do not match ours?

��The women in Dream Count ask each other the same question after every breakup: What do you really want? It���s a question that has been entertaining popular culture and theory for so long���from Sex and the City to Lauren Berlant���s Cruel Optimism���that it might be time for us to reconsider the premise of the question, rather than attempt to answer it. Two challenges face us at the outset. First, can we talk about a generalizable ���we��� of female desire (insofar as women, like all gender categories, is a socially constructed group whose socialization has nonetheless had material consequences)? A key sensation of reading Adichie���s work is the ability to recognize oneself in it. Her stories emerge from particular experiences��and yet they are filled with humorous observations that speak to a near universality. It is this capacity of hers that made Half of a Yellow Sun not only a novel about women���s suffering during the Biafra war, but also a broader story about how we behave and relate to one another. Like her previous novels, Dream Count offers insight that most cisgender straight women may relate to through their own suffering. Yet others may feel excluded from the narrative, or from Adichie herself, who has been accused of expressing transphobic sentiments.

The second challenge that emerges from Dream Count is that, even if we can come closer to knowing what ���we��� want, can we be sure that our desire won���t hurt us? As the critic Gillian Rose once asked in her book Love Work: ���Is feminism able to credit that it may be better, sometimes, not to get what you want?��� Dream Count addresses this question indirectly by demonstrating how women sometimes act in bad faith towards themselves and each other in the pursuit of a heteronormative script of happiness. ���Chia, this man is a catch,��� a friend tells Chiamaka, a travel writer who, in the first part of Dream Count, dumps the one ���good guy��� she finds. ���There isn���t anything better out there,��� the friend assures her. He is stable and generous in his love for her, but they have little to talk about outside the bedroom. After the breakup, the friend scolds Chiamaka and accuses her of lacking gratitude. She promotes an idea that love is scarce, and that time even scarcer, which conditions us to be happy for what we���ve got. Chiamaka challenges this idea by dreaming of more.��

We meet Chiamaka at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, alone in her too-big house in Maryland. She is used to traveling lavishly around the globe and writing about her observations. Forced into stillness and reflection, she begins to write a ���dream count,��� as she calls it, listing her past loves. This game structures the novel���s plot and allows Adichie to construct some memorable portrayals of contemporary masculinity. For example, Chiamaka describes Luuk, a white Dutch man she dated, as ���a talker who didn���t need a listener.��� His self-centered chatter bored her, yet despite his shortcomings (his family was racist), she stayed with him for a year. She ���happily��� faked orgasms with him because at least he tried. This is in contrast to her previous lover, an Black American academic, whose ego pushes her own needs to the very margins of their relationship. Just leave him already! I scream at the pages. The professor-boyfriend eventually breaks up with her after she orders a mimosa in Paris, a drink he finds beneath his cultural tastes. Afterwards, she wonders how she wasted years of her life being belittled by this man.

After Beyonc�� sampled Adichie���s TED Talk on ���Flawless,��� the author responded to her newfound stardom with a clarification. She did not claim Beyonc�����s type of feminism because ���it is the kind�� that gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men ��� did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?��� But in Dream Count, Adichie leaves these questions of ���ideology��� aside to give space for, as she describes in her author���s note, ���human complexity.��� Yet men have little to say in this novel. Their complexity is delivered through the perspective of women who are smarter, prettier, more caring, and often wealthier than them. Despite their status, these women put up with a lot of hurt from those men and taking revenge on men���s emotional and physical violence drives the story. When women do talk back to the men, whether by mocking male sexuality on blogs or suing rapists in court, it is mostly motivated by what the man did and speculates about why he did it (���was he cursed?��� they wonder about Zikora���s runaway; ���was it a trauma-response?��� Adichie suggests in her own reading). These women continue to brood over what ���he��� really wants, and what he will do next to get it.

As she lists her failed relationships, it becomes clear that Chiamaka yearns to be ���truly known.��� It is not enough to be loved by someone���that person must also understand her inner thoughts and desires. That this might be an impossible task is one of the key lessons of Adichie���s novel.

���If you live your life and die without one person fully knowing you, then have you ever lived?��� ponders Chia.

���Well, I know you fully,��� Omelogor, Chiamaka���s tough-mouthed cousin, replies.

���It has to be romantic.���

���Why?���

���It just has to be.���

���Your thesis is falling apart,��� Omelogor concludes, triumphantly; ���you���re not looking to be known on principle.���

Omelogor does not fall for the romanticism of a dream count, nor does she have a desire to be known. She castrates men in bed and in business. ���You want somebody to study you and cram you like a textbook?��� she asks her cousin. Omelogor���s approach to dating is seemingly driven by lust rather than longing���at least on the surface of things. As we read on, we begin to speculate that her ���two weeks��� affairs are her coping mechanism for a deeper lack.

As a banker who secretly steals from rich men to give to struggling women, Omelogor is the novel���s only expressed feminist. She is also its only queer character. Omelogor is taken with Hauwa, a married but bisexually adventurous woman whom she befriends in Abuja. Hauwa makes Omelogor blush with a shame that she did not know to inhabit, in stark contrast to the series of Big Men whom she humiliates in bed and who leave nothing unsaid. A suggestive plot unfolds between the two women, but is never explored, leaving us to wonder what could have been. Is Omelogor not betraying herself by refusing to explore her desire for this woman? It is unclear whether Adichie chooses to keep Omelogor in the closet to emphasize how limited we are in knowing and achieving our desires, or whether it demonstrates, rather, Adichie���s own limitations in advancing a queer plot.

Not that queer desire saves us from the riddle of love. A woman can fall in love with another woman and still not want the same thing. ���But the key difference between straight culture and queer culture in this regard,��� writes Jane Ward in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, ���is that the latter does not attribute these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and inescapable gender binary.��� Whereas queer relations leave a certain power dynamic up to play and do not attribute destructive behaviors to already-given gender positions, straight people are scripted into these structural positions, relationally and in bed, where male ejaculation often signals an inevitable end to the party. Not exploring this difference is perhaps where Adichie���s straight-sex gaze becomes a narrative obstacle.

Omelogor worries about straight people, and especially about straight men. She leaves her corrupt banking job to pursue a master���s thesis about pornography, which she considers the root of the problem of toxic masculinity. On her blog, ���For Men Only,��� Omelogor tells straight men that their relationship to sex is twisted because they learned sex from pornography and transferred it ready-made to their intimate relations. It is a male gay friend who first introduces her to porn, which she has (to his and our surprise) never watched on her own. She watches now with disgust and detachment as women moan from being choked and slapped.

Omelogor is right to question the representation of female desire in straight porn, directed as it is for the male gaze. But the problem with her thesis is that women watch porn too. When women watch straight porn, and assuming we have done so for as long as men have, do we not learn just as much about sex from it as men do? Are women somehow better equipped to distinguish between fantasy and desire, such that we can be aroused by a porn scene but know not to imitate it in our own sex lives? After all, ���love and hate converge in erotic desire,��� as Anne Carson has observed. Sometimes, we want what hurts, but do we ever desire what consistently hurts us?

While we continue to wonder about what the women in Dream Count really want, their aunts prescribe desires onto them. ���I am praying for you,��� an aunt tells Chiamaka. As she ages, her family lowers their expectations of whom she should marry. By her mid-thirties, ���a Christian was fine, of any denomination; a Nigerian of any ethnicity; or an African; or just a Black man; or, well, a man.��� When Chiamaka enters her forties, the edges of their demand dissolve further; ���marriage had become secondary. Have a child, by whatever means.���

In the same vein, Omelogor receives a call from a distant aunt, demanding her to adopt a child. She politely rejects the request, but her words are lost on this aunt who pushes on with a hurtful claim that Omelogor���s life is empty. Her judgment lingers and soon enough, Omelogor begins to browse on adoption sites for something that she did not want or need, had not even considered, prior to this unsolicited phone call. I recognize this patriarchal manipulation of female desire in my own family dynamic, where being in a relationship���any relationship at all, even if unhappy���seems preferable to being single and childless.

Adichie wrote Dream Count after her mother died in 2021, and much like the aunt figure, the dominant mother looms over every daughter in the novel. She shapes the daughter���s desires and the daughter either mimics her maternal affection or yearns for it. When Zikora gives birth, her mother sits like a statue by her hospital bed, observing her daughter scream in pain without reaching out to offer consoling touch or words of care. It is tempting in this scene to draw a straight line between Zikora���s acute insecurity in her relationships and her seemingly abject mother. Yet Adichie is wiser than that and twists the perspective, making Zikora, and us, recognize her mother in the weeks that follow her childbirth as the only consistent presence in her life. ���I���m not going anywhere,��� her mother assures her at one point.

In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, the writer Jacqueline Rose argues that we blame the mother for conflicts in our lives, large and small, and at the same time burden our mothers with the responsibility to solve this conflict. But in another mother-daughter relationship, between Binta and Kadiatou, it is the daughter who seems burdened by the mother and has little space to develop her own character. Their relationship appears underexplored compared to the other characters; perhaps because it unfolds from a story we already know, rather than from Adichie���s imagination. Kadiatou is Chiamaka���s beloved house maid and Adichie���s fictionalized version of the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo, whom the French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped in New York in 2011. Diallo was slut-shamed by the media and during the criminal investigations, which never delivered her justice. In writing this story, Adichie declares in her opening note, the novelist is ���righting the wrongs of the past��� and performing ���a gesture of returned dignity.��� How does this address the central thesis about women���s desires?

Whereas Omelogor, Zikora, and Chiamaka all contradict themselves and make dubious decisions, Kadiatou is presented as an angel whose desires are pure and simple. As a result, her character is less known to us than the other women. Adichie considers Kadiatou���s character a ���symbol��� of women facing injustice, and of course she is that, but a novel needs complex anti-heroes, not symbols to hang on the wall.

If Adichie���s mother had been alive to read Kadiatou���s story, Adichie reckons that she would have recognized ���a fellow woman��� in it, just as we as readers recognize ourselves across the different characters. Yet Kadiatou is marked out from this female chorus of mutual dreaming. Her chapter serves a narrative purpose in gluing together the other women around her cause, but in so doing it marks a contrast to their stories���hers is not part of the dream count. Why is that? Is Adichie suggesting that class conditions allow us to dream in certain ways and not in others?

���You must dream of something,��� Zikora challenges Kadiatou, who then allows herself to dream a little, yet her dreams remain rational and material. She wants to start a small business and see her daughter thrive. Her achievable dreams are so unlike Chiamaka���s repeated yearning to be ���fully known��� through a closeness that never seems to materialize. This distinction also suggests that Chiamuka can���t have what she wants, because she doesn���t know herself. But then again, who does?

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025), is available from Knopf.

The limits of France’s racial memory

The French narrative of the Enlightenment still struggles to contend with the country���s racialized hierarchy in its cultural artifacts.
Young Parisians in Marche Dauphine. Image credit Jorge Royan via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

In France, the word noir can feel like a provocation. Meant to describe Blackness in polite terms, it is more typically whispered in hushed tones with blushing cheeks���or altogether replaced with the English term black delivered in a heavy French accent, as if the foreign word might soften its political charge. Race is something to be hinted at, not spoken out loud. And yet, when it was announced in 2020 that Agatha Christie���s classic mystery Les Dix Petits N��gres would finally be retitled Ils ��taient dix (���They were ten���), the backlash was swift and loud. Suddenly, n��gre���France���s equivalent to the n-word���became a hill to die on. Newspapers decried censorship, commentators bemoaned the loss of literary tradition, readers raged against the virus of political correctness. France, where race is supposedly invisible, had no problem defending a racial slur in the name of art. The event revealed a telling contradiction: Noir is too political to say, but n��gre is too cultural to erase. In a country that prides itself on being colorblind, Blackness is somehow both hyper-visible and illegible.

Noir has long been treated with heavy discomfort in France, seen as a word with racist connotations by white French individuals, imbued with relics of a colonial past that France would prefer to forget. France has therefore kept its Black history under wraps, claiming a universal history to be claimed by its Black population that sidelines racially charged events. Under the guise of unconditional belonging, France���s Black diaspora has been absorbed and invisibilized within the broader French identity. French history is Black history. And yet, for all of its inclusivity and benevolent blindness to difference, Black history has never been at the forefront of French history. Events critical to France���s African diasporic subjects such as the Haitian Revolution are relegated to the status of minor historical moments. Antillean history and figures, such as Toussaint L���Ouverture, the Nardal sisters or Frantz Fanon, remain forever overshadowed by Napol��on, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo. In Paris, Blackness is curated rather than confronted.

Recent events suggest that the tide is perhaps finally shifting, moving Blackness from a largely invisible conversation that is relegated to the margins to center stage. This spring, the Centre Pompidou debuted the first exhibition solely dedicated to Black artists in Paris������Paris Noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950-2000.��� And on the 100th anniversary of his birth, a biopic on the life of anticolonial scholar Frantz Fanon premiered in France, finally bringing his work to the limelight.

The opening of this collection and movie brought with it hope that France was finally ready to start seeing and speaking race���instead of being relegated to a cumbersome word to be spoken through uncomfortable giggles, Noir now features in the title of a major museum exhibition.

On an unassuming white wall, the exhibition begins with a description of the project. The dozen people swarming the wall are a hint of the bustling crowd of visitors populating the entirety of the space. Pushing my way to the front, key terms like ���Black condition,��� ���Black consciousness,��� ���N��gritude,��� ���slavery and colonization,��� ���Black Atlantic,��� ���civil rights,��� ���equality,��� look back at me. On the opposite wall, a timeline of the Black condition in France and abroad between 1944 and 1999 written in red, green, and yellow to hammer in the exhibition���s African diasporic scope. Africa is ever-present, the colors seem to say.

Occupying nearly an entire floor, Paris Noir is overwhelming, crammed with seemingly every piece of art created by a Black person who lived in or visited Paris between 1944 and 2000 that the Pompidou���s curatorial team could find. The goal of the exhibition was to meditate on what the experience of Blackness in Paris brought to art, however, the message is muffled.The exhibition features thirteen sections with hordes of visitors strolling through them. 150 Black artists with different mediums, inspirations, and backgrounds are featured, creating a cacophony of stories that make tracking a cohesive story of race in France an impossibility in a single run through of the exhibition. Over the course of three hours, I and hundreds of others shuffle along from painting to painting; jumping from whichever painting has the least viewers to whichever sculpture has the smallest audience feels like the surest strategy to preserve sanity.The crowd is diverse: a young artsy Black couple, a typical French bourgeois family with their elderly grandmother, a guided tour full of Americans, an enthusiastic British woman exclaiming ���It���s amazing��� at every painting, an Antillean family searching for artists from the Caribbean to show to their children… France���s diversity, rarely obvious in cultural spaces like museums that remain heavily segregated, is for once clearly reflected. The thematics and their wealth of material, however, do not feel coherent���rather, they read as a way for the exhibition to hit all the key words it presents in its first descriptive panel. Walking through ���Pan-African Paris,��� ���Afro-Atlantic Surrealism,��� ���Back to Africa,��� and ���A New Black Paris Map,��� Blackness remains somehow illegible.

To those with a trained eye or inexhaustible patience, the story of Paris Noir does quietly emerge. The subject matters and compositions hint at the story of resistance and anti-colonialism that the exhibition���s subtitle promises. However, on the grand scale, Blackness is present but not truly meditated upon. The title���s promise of ���anti-colonial resistance��� is lost to the idealistic, abstract, or apolitical artistic visions of the selected 150 Black artists. The art and artists featured all feel non-threatening to the accepted French memory of race: apart from a video of an interview of Angela Davis and a mention of James Baldwin���s 1963 march for Civil Rights in Paris, the art and creators of Paris Noir are curated to confirm French benevolence and cultural superiority. One section on the ���Rites and Memories of Slavery��� mentions the duty of memory and the refusal to forget this somber history. Yet, in the few pieces it presents, France���s role in slavery is barely meditated upon. Colorblind France ironically positions itself as a role model of this duty of memory, but stops short of considering its role in the trade that made Black artists feel the need to reflect on the tragedy through their work.

Focusing on the migration to Paris of Black individuals places the racist impetus on the countries the artists migrated from. It leads the audience to question what made these artists feel the need to seek out Paris? What situations abroad constrained them to the extent of migrating, sometimes across the world? Prioritizing these questions makes it easy for the Centre Pompidou to avoid reflecting on France���s own biases, an agenda furthered by the selected time frame.

The American dominance that prevails throughout the galleries is perhaps the exhibition���s clearest through-line and truest reflection of racial hierarchization in France. African Americans are, and have long been, at the top of the Black ladder, as the myth of Jos��phine Baker and her Pantheonization reminds us. Chatting with fellow visitors at the exit, one jokingly told me: ���It felt like an exhibition about the conquest of Paris by African Americans.��� The over-representation of African Americans in Paris Noir reinforces the deeply entrenched racial hierarchy that places Black Americans at the top of the pyramid in France, an acceptable Other because of their glamourous exoticism. It also, more importantly for France���s self-image, further entrenches the story of race it has long chosen to tell: Paris as a safe haven of creativity free from segregation, welcoming to all. One piece of the puzzle remains curiously absent from the contextual brief: France���s own positionality in relation to Blackness.

Ambling through the exhibition���s 400 artworks, the silence remains, creating an uncomfortable void where France���s self-reflections could, and should, have been. The exhibition considers 1950-2000 to be a key moment in artistic circulation and anti-colonial resistance, citing the likes of the N��gritude movement and Aim�� C��saire, but while this range may mark the beginning of more visible independence movements, it misses both their inception and the beginning of the circulation of Black art and artists in Paris. Beginning in 1950 allows the Centre Pompidou to avoid questioning France���s uncomfortable chapters in relation to Black art. Starting at an earlier period, the Pompidou would have had to consider the 1931 Colonial Exposition, which drew millions of visitors to admire staged colonized people as ethnographic spectacles. It would also have required acknowledging the pillaging expeditions through West and Central Africa in the 1930s that filled French museums with looted artefacts, many of which remain unrestituted today. And it would have meant reckoning with the Othering and exoticization of Black performers in spaces like the Revue N��gre where Jos��phine Baker���s banana skirt became a symbol of France���s colonial gaze. To start before 1950 would be to admit that Black presence in French culture did not begin with resistance, but with spectacularization and that the postwar rise of Black artistry in Paris was not simply a celebration of creativity, but a reclamation of subjecthood after generations of dehumanizing display.

N��gritude and the currents of thoughts that led to it existed long before 1950, just like Paris as a haven for Black cultural expression was already well established in the interwar period. Jos��phine Baker rose to fame in the mid-1920s after her d��but in La Revue N��gre. Louis Armstrong performed his unique, improvisational jazz in Paris in 1934.�� The African American colony of Montmartre, a pillar of Parisian cultural life, flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s with artists, musicians, and writers seeking refuge from segregation. And African Americans were not the only ones meditating, curating, creating. The Martinican Nardal Sisters��� Salon, active in the late 1920s and 1930s, fostered intellectual, literary and cultural circulations, laying the groundwork for the N��gritude movement. Paris Noir discusses La Revue Noire, but what of La Revue du Monde Noir, published in 1931-32 by the Clamart Salon participants? Why not include these earlier moments of Black artistic circulation?

The 1950s seem to be the moment of the hour, both in art and film, as exemplified by the controversial movie Fanon and its extremely limited distribution. Both Paris Noir and Fanon choose the decade to begin their stories, eclipsing an adequate interrogation of the decades of dominance and turmoil that shaped the times in favor of the final rush towards African independence. The result are two projects with glaring omissions in framing: while Paris Noir makes Blackness in this period visible but politically inert, Fanon is politically sharp, accusatory even, but eclipses Blackness.

Covering the psychiatrist���s time in Algeria, one thing is clear leaving the movie theater: the movie has a villain, and that villain is France. Where Paris Noir promises to cover anti-colonial resistance and the progressive decolonization of pan-African and transatlantic spaces, the movie Fanon truly does���the film criticizes France���s lengthy history of colonialism, yet conveniently stops short of reckoning with Frantz Fanon���s own Blackness in depth. Blackness in France is only elevated when it entertains or flatters, not when it indicts.

Fanon, born in Martinique, was a French subject. And yet, he remains largely unclaimed in France���s national narrative; his story lingers in the shadows of the myths of Jos��phine Baker and James Baldwin that cast Paris as a liberated, artistic refuge. Fanon���s story, by contrast, dismantles that myth. It demands confrontation that France is not yet ready to face. And so, his film must be buried in the smallest screening rooms while Beauford Delaney���s vibrant yellow portrait of James Baldwin takes center stage in one of Paris Noir���s crowded galleries.

While Fanon is hailed as a leading decolonial scholar in universities across the world, he is surprisingly (or not) a little-known figure in France, and far from a household name. Victim of an apparent boycott from the major French cinema groups, the movie was only distributed in 70 cinemas across France, some of which only featured the movie once a week. A movie about one of France���s foremost decolonial figures is oddly barely accessible. Of the reviews the biopic has amassed, several describe the revolutionary psychiatrist as a ���new figure��� of anticolonialism; a striking reminder of the lack of visibility decolonial narratives and figures have in France.

Despite the lack of distribution and being screened in what appears to be one of the smallest of the 37 rooms of Paris��� largest movie theater, there are nearly no empty seats. The boycott seems to have been unable to stop the movie from being a success, with over 100,000 tickets recorded sold a mere week after its release in theaters. Is Fanon���s limited distribution simply symptomatic of the under-representation of Black cinema or does it tell a darker truth about France���s racial and colonial imaginary and memory?

Walking through Paris Noir���s thirteen crowded sections and seeing Fanon in one of the smallest screening rooms of Paris��� largest movie theater makes one thing clear: Despite certain Black stories being promoted and brought to light, Blackness remains largely illegible to the French imaginary and Black histories essentially refused. From the lack of distribution the movie received, it appears that France, self-proclaimed land of liberty, equality, fraternity, of Enlightenment, of Universalism, is still not ready to hear the story of a man who made it his life���s mission to deconstruct these false narratives. Fanon is not an isolated case. Several movies on various facets of colonial history have not been able to find financing or distribution. Only Black movies that bring laughter, like Jean-Pascal Zadi���s Tout Simplement Noir (Simply Black), or Qu���est-ce qu���on a fait au Bon Dieu? (Serial (Bad) Weddings), or that confirm the racialized status quo, like the 2019 movie Les Mis��rables, are permissible for the mainstream.

Fanon is, by French standards, an extremely subversive film. It uses the scholar���s thoughts to expose the cruel realities of living as a subject under colonization and opens the door for a conversation on lingering colonial consequences in our postcolonial societies. However, just like in Paris Noir, Blackness gets lost. Fanon is presented, rightfully so, as a voice of Algerian resistance in his biopic, but at the detriment of his Antillean identity, which is left largely unexamined. Even in a movie about a Black radical, Blackness is not centered; colonialism is, a cleverly executed sleight-of-hand that allows the film to evade contending with racialized hierarchies.

Veiled as a biopic on Fanon���s experience writing Les Damn��s de la Terre (published in English as The Wretched of the Earth), the movie uses his story to retell the Algerian war from the perspective of the colonized. While a necessary topic to tackle as former colonies continue to contend with extracting from the French metropole in present day, Fanon���s Blackness is rendered secondary to his political utility despite the character experiencing racism routinely in the movie. The word ���n��gre��� is hurled at him repeatedly, yet the interiority of the Black experience is not meditated upon. Most closely translatable to the n-word in American English despite its phonetic resonance with Negro, n��gre still lingers in everyday expressions like travailler comme un n��gre (���to work like an n-word) and in legacy product names like t��te de n��gre pastries. Even literary works, such as the original title of Agatha Christie���s Ten Little Indians bore the word without scrutiny until 2020. Recognized by some as a slur and by many as merely a relic of French linguistic heritage, n��gre remains a buzzword in contemporary debates around ���wokeness��� and political correctness. Its uneasy persistence exemplifies France���s discomfort with reckoning with its racial history, or even with naming race directly. And that discomfort persists even in Fanon. Despite its revolutionary subject, France���s discomfort with Blackness prevails even in a cinematic ode to decolonization.

The paradox is that while Black stories are now the subjects of exhibitions and movies in France, Blackness remains illegible. Paris Noir exhibits Blackness without politics; Fanon enacts politics without Blackness. The exhibition removes the political charge from Black art, simply presenting it as art made by Black people despite the section titles hinting at struggle and resistance. Fanon foregrounds a figure deeply entrenched in decolonial politics who sought to dismantle the systems that made representation necessary in the first place, while declining to reckon with that contradiction.

Neither Paris Noir nor Fanon is about the Black condition. Both, however, are symptomatic of France���s lingering discomfort with race and simultaneous realization of their need to begin addressing it. Fanon���s limited distribution and Paris Noir���s lack of self-reflection are two faces of the same fear: coming face to face with the racial and colonial structures that still shape the country. As historian Fran��oise Verg��s says, ���those who control the narrative, control History.���Aesthetic, American, depoliticized Blackness is today welcome on the grand stage. But what would it look like for unruly, local, politically assertive Blackness to be centered? For France to take seriously not just the presence of Black bodies but the histories, demands, and critiques they carry with them?

The issue is no longer visibility for Black stories, but control. Blackness can be seen, but who defines what of it is seen and if it will ever be heard. This is not just a matter of institutional curation, but of national memory. Until France is willing to center the uncomfortable, the local, and the radical, it will continue to curate around its past rather than confront it. By burying Fanon in the smallest cinema rooms and by overwhelming viewers with hundreds of Black artists in Paris Noir, France remains the Enlightened master of its story as a liberated and liberating country��� and Blackness, in all its complexity, remains on display but never quite legible.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine���s 'Djamila, the Algerian' reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers���and still can. Still from Djamila, The Algerian, 1958.

In April, American indie darling A24 released Warfare, a drama based around the personal experiences of its co-director Ray Mendoza during the Western invasion of Iraq. The pro-military film follows a platoon of Navy SEALS as they attempt to fight their way out of certain death after being trapped by ���insurgents��� in an occupied household. The cast is composed of the most conventionally attractive group of male actors Hollywood can find, all of them seemingly and hilariously oblivious to the morally bankrupt propaganda piece they are taking part in. The film received wide applause among mainstream critics, many of whom praised the ���highly objective��� ode to the ���real life heroes.���

To make things worse, Warfare disguises all context of the soldiers��� presence from its target Gen-Z audience. The film, which takes place during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, provides no answers about why American soldiers are in Iraq. It is propelled by the glut of gunfire, as if the excitement of violence will deceive an audience too young to remember the horrors of this particular war. Divorced from its historical moment, Warfare is a Disneyland roller coaster onto which frothing war hawks can jump. Of course, this is nothing new for imperialist cinema. Western cultural production often seeks to establish itself as the sole current of humanity���s story, while manufacturing justifications for genocide and occupation.

If we are to contest this language of filmmaking, it is vital to not only criticize its form but to also appreciate its historical negations at the hands of anticolonial filmmakers. One of the first inceptions in building an oppositional cinema came from Egypt, wherein former president Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to build a Pan-Arab vision of anticolonialism in 1952. The movies of this era, dubbed the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema, allow us to understand the historic roots of anti-imperialist imagery and to connect the struggles of the past to the present.

Of the many projects produced during this time, few highlight the hypocrisy of imperialist cinema like Youssef Chahine���s Djamila, The Algerian (1958), a movie based on the capture of female National Liberation Front (FLN) fighter Djamila Bouhired, her subsequent torture by France, and the international outrage that followed her trial. The film contests the Islamophobic narratives of the imperial core and counters the racist depiction of Arab social history that reduces the role of women to figures in need of white saviorism while raising colonialism as some kind of feminist project. Pulling together the strands of Hollywood film language, Chahine parodies the false logic of the colonizing powers. As many of his films continue to be restored and screened around the world, Djamila, the Algerian remains largely unrecognized and unpreserved. It is often derided as overly mechanical or highly propagandized, but this reading fails to recognize Chahine���s skill in utilizing the cinematic history lorded over colonized nations by imperialism.

Movies arrived early in Egypt, coming only a week after the world���s first ever screening in Paris by the Lumiere Brothers in 1896. Despite a strong conglomeration of theaters and studios, most of the films shown in Cairo and beyond were glorified reshoots of Western stories. ���Instead of inviting Egyptian authors to produce original scenarios or adapting Egyptian literature to the screen,” writes film scholar Ella Schochat in Critical Arts:

Films, plays or novels such as Waterloo Bridge, Camilla, Pygmalion, Le Miserables and others appeared on Egyptian screens, usually under new titles: Waterloo Bridge became Daima fi Qalbi (Always in My Heart), Pygmalion became Baia al Tufah (The Apple Vendor).

By reproducing the visual vernacular of the West, colonial forces set the stage for a popular culture constricted by European epistemologies. The myths of Western nations, their historical figures and languages, became the primary sources through which Egyptian intellectual life was required to traverse. Not only this, but most films fell into intense Orientalist caricatures of their audience, regularly depicting rape, sex mania, and murder as keystones of the Arab world. This period would be referred to by later Egyptian filmmakers and intellectuals as ���Opium Cinema,��� and heavily paralleled imperialist film epochs such as the fascist productions of Italy���s ���telefoni bianchi��� era or US ���assembly line cinema.���

���There was nothing but that,��� Chahine said of this period of American remakes in a 1996 interview with Cahiers du Cin��ma. ���Some went almost as far as to copy take for take in certain films. They became Arab-speaking American films. But that worked and brought a lot of money. I wanted to make my own films, not just American-inspired remakes.���

Chahine began his career around the rise of Nasser���s government in 1952, when filmmakers were able to operate outside of this Western cultural design. Recognizing the importance of art and culture in spreading his pan-Arab vision, Nasser created multiple fronts of dissemination, including the famous ���Sawt-al-Arab��� (Voice of the Arabs), as well as the Organization of Consolidation of Cinema. The government organization, while heavily censoring films that did not fall in Nasser���s political line of nation-building, was relatively progressive in its politics and countered the stranglehold of Western films that had flooded Cairo before the Free Officers Movement. The influx of domestic funding saw the number of productions soar, from 382 films produced from 1942 to 1952 to 513 films produced between 1952 and 1962. Of the many productions, a multitude were created to express pan-Arab solidarity with anticolonial revolutions such as those in Yemen and Algeria.

Djamila, The Algerian, released in 1958 and starring Egyptian star Magda al-Sabahi as the titular character, was born from these historical conditions. It was the first film to cover the armed struggle in Algeria and was quickly banned by France. Despite falling under its own fascist occupation a few years prior, France gleefully reestablished its colonial holdings in the post-World War II era and inflicted their own oppressive rule over the colonized. The Vichy government ordered the mass depopulation of rural areas, wherein almost two million Algerians were placed in concentration camps in an effort to pacify resistance. This was greatly at odds with the narrative of European enlightenment, which supposedly valued human rights and equality, As the anticolonial writer and political activist Walter Rodney wrote in his seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, ���When the French Revolution was made in the name of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ it did not extend to the black Africans who were enslaved by France in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.���

Chahine shapes Djamila around this contradiction by using the language of European and American filmmaking to highlight the twisted logics of the occupying forces. His primary critique of French cultural hypocrisy lies in the representation of Djamila as Joan of Arc, both a historical figure of French nationalist mythos but also of European film history. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is widely viewed as a cinematic breakthrough for its use of the close-up shot. Prior to Dreyer���s Joan of Arc, cameras were usually placed in theatrical wide shots wherein viewers are positioned like audiences watching a stage play. While Dreyer was certainly not the first to use the close-up, he revolutionized the medium through shooting almost the entirety of his silent historical drama from this intimate angle. This humanist approach���which emphasized the tragedy of Joan���s martyrdom���created a new language that directors could use to provoke emotional responses from their audiences.

Movie poster for Djamila, The Algerian.

In the midst of the Hundred Year War, Joan was executed for heresy for her role in the struggle against English forces, as well as representing opposition to 15th-century gender roles. The obvious parallels between Joan and the real-life Djamila were not lost on the international public, who invoked the comparison many times throughout the protest for Djamila���s release. Although it is simple (and possibly reductive) to draw these similarities, Chahine pulls not from historical likeness but from cinematic comparisons. He recreates Joan���s trial���one of the most well-known scenes from Dreyer���s silent film���in Djamila to highlight the hypocrisy of the colonial court that has imprisoned the Algerian militant. The set for the trial is stripped to bare white walls, just as in Joan of Arc. The roles of the pompous judges who shouted down at Joan are now filled by the colonial officers deriding Djamila, who has her head shaved to match Joan���s (despite pictures from the real trial showing her full head of hair). We move to close-ups constantly on the judges’ faces, distorted by the high contrast lighting and sneering expressions that exactly parallel those of Joan���s judicial harassment. Djamila acts as the analogue to Joan, a national figure who combats the occupation of a foreign entity.

By reimagining the trial, Chahine calls into question the veracity of colonial powers in announcing any kind of moral claim over the colonized. How can a country assert any kind of authority on ethics when it betrays every stated code? The trial acts as a mirror to the French occupation, which is unwilling to recognize the irony of its situation despite the persistent espousal of anti-authoritarianism. ���Because they are ���left��� and ���antifascist��� at home, the French consider they are entitled to lead other peoples, to give lessons in democracy, even by dint of bombs,��� Frantz Fanon wrote in a scathing short essay on colonial hypocrisy of French leftists, ���It thus calls, on our part, for more vigilance and severity.��� Chahine takes a similar approach in critique, displaying through intertextual evidence the cracks in the myth of so-called liberal democratic ideals.

In depicting acts of resistance and rejecting portrayals of Algerian people as helpless victims, Chahine is a forebear of anticolonial cinema. ���For the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism,��� wrote the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha in his famous essay ���The Aesthetics of Hunger.��� This primitivism manifests in the form of perpetual victimhood���another form of dehumanization from which the colonized are painted as a population unable to establish their own sovereignty. Chahine sought to depict the violence of the colonized as a vital piece of the decolonial narrative.

Of the many depictions of violence in the film, the shootout in the caf�� is the clearest manifestation of the film���s break with colonial linguistics. Djamila���s FLN comrade, Youssef (Ahmed Mazar), has infiltrated the ranks of the French military. The film has shown over the course of the last hour of its run-time injustice upon injustice visited upon the Algerian cast, with many attempts to strike back ending in failure. However, as Youssef watches the French soldiers crowd the cafeteria, he takes aim and begins to fire on the crowd of military men.

Having worked at 20th Century Fox during his time studying in the US, Chahine was acutely aware of the tendencies and practices of American cinema that continue to this day. Violence, usually reserved for John Wayne massacring a faceless crowd of white men masquerading as Native Americans, is reversed in the scene as the French colonizers are mowed down in a cathartic act of revolution. This is an inflection point of cinema, wherein the hegemonic use of technology is upturned and the language shot back across the globe. Just as the FLN forces steal French guns and uniforms from under the nose of their oppressors, Chahine has taken the visual vernacular of Western film and twisted it back on itself.

A self-described socialist, Chahine threw himself at odds with the strictly nationalist rhetoric popular across the region and always lent support to those on the periphery of society. Djamila was banned in Algeria for its celebration of women fighters in the socially conservative era of post-independence, but became a huge inspiration for Gillo Pontecorvo���s Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo���s film even features a near remake of Djamila���s milk bar bombing scene.

With the widespread praise of movies like Warfare, it is clear that there still exists a dichotomy between the oppressed and oppressor, wherein the propaganda of liberation is denigrated and domination is celebrated as a necessary facet of life. As Fanon remarked, thoughtful vigilance and critique are vital in the interrogation of all the forms imperialist reproduction might take. In the case of Djamila, the film asks that we question the language of image-making and how content encourages audiences to regurgitate colonial ideology. How often will American media celebrate the murder of millions of Arab peoples, but still demand that the masses condemn Hamas for struggling against Zionist genocide? On the grounds of questions like these, imperialism asks humanity to internalize racist contradictions as natural fact.

The democratization of film through digital camera technology and the internet as a distribution center has meant that in looking for the current negations of films like Warfare, we should not confine ourselves to the cinema halls. Rather, the fighters of anti-colonialism have emerged as both combatants and directors of new forms of militant filmmaking. The most striking parallel to Djamila might be a propaganda montage of Houthi aircraft to the theme of Top Gun���s ���Danger Zone.��� Despite starving its people for over a decade, the American public was hardly aware of Yemen until the Houthis sank the first ship into the Red Sea in December 2023. But Yemeni people are not only aware of American imperialism, they live under its cultural logic.

By appreciating films such as Djamila, long cast away by the official canon of global cinema, we can understand the current media landscape of resistance fighters as not just another form of propaganda, but a declaration of humanity in the face of colonial hegemony.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

The reopening of a border between Eritrea and Tigray masks a deeper realignment. As old foes unite against Ethiopia���s government, the risk of renewed war grows. 40th Anniversary of the Tigrayan People���s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Mekelle (Ethiopia), 18 February 2015. Image credit Paul Kagame via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

After five years of closure local activists and community leaders reopened a border post to Eritrea, in the town of Zalambessa. This seemingly positive development from Ethiopia���s Tigray region might seem like a hopeful sign at first glance, but tells only part of the story. The Tigray People���s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Eritrea have improved relations through a makeshift alliance with the aim of facing Ethiopia in a potential military escalation. Previously, the 2020-2022 Tigray war saw the Ethiopian federal government and Eritrean regime fighting against the TPLF. So, this new and unthinkable Eritrea-TPLF alliance should raise concerns about what lies ahead.

The relationship between the TPLF and Eritrea���s leadership has experienced numerous fluctuations, tracing back to their origins as liberation movements in the 1970s and 1980s. The TPLF and Eritrean People���s Liberation Front (EPLF) initially supported each other in overthrowing the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia and achieving Eritrea���s independence. After victory in 1991, the group���s leaders assumed state power and initially maintained an amicable relationship. However, the tide turned in 1998 when a two-year border war erupted, transforming the TPLF-Eritrea relationship into one of enmity.

After 25 years of continuous hostilities and open conflict between the Eritrean regime and the TPLF, the inconceivable has happened over the past months. After power struggles in Tigray, the Eritrean regime has positioned itself as an ally to a TPLF faction, led by its chairperson, Debretsion Gebremichael. The TPLF���s once unified leadership has fractured and is split between Debretsion and Getachew Reda, who served as the head of the federally backed Tigray Interim Administration, a postwar apparatus, until March 2025. Getachew was subsequently appointed as advisor in the federal government and registered a new political party approved by the national election board. Meanwhile, the TPLF is being denied its status as a political party by Ethiopian authorities.

Amidst these developments in Tigray, Eritrea successfully inserted itself into the showdown as TPLF���s unlikely ally, embracing the logic of ���the enemy of my enemy is my friend.��� This strategy is not new for Eritrea���s leadership. It also informed Eritrea���s 2018 peace deal with Ethiopia���s then newly appointed prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali, which ended the hostile political relationship between the two countries. Prior to the deal, any rapprochement and even cordial relations between the two states were completely off the table.

The peace deal quickly took a darker turn, revealing the Ethiopia-Eritrea friendship pact as a ruthless war coalition in the Tigray war. A feud erupted between Tigray���s regional administration, under the TPLF, and Ethiopia���s federal government. The government in Addis Ababa deemed the 2020 regional election in Tigray illegal. This political standoff rapidly escalated into military confrontation, eventually spiraling into a full-scale war that lasted two years. During the conflict, Eritrean forces joined the Ethiopian military in coordinated operations against the TPLF and Tigrayan civilians. A June 2025 investigation by The Sentry details the systematic looting by Eritrean forces in addition to widespread atrocities and grave human rights violations against civilians in Tigray.

The postwar constellation of actors has created a series of unintended ripple effects in the region. The 2022 Pretoria Agreement ended the war between Ethiopia���s federal government and the TPLF but was limited. It excluded the Eritrean regime, fighting alongside Ethiopia, as a party to the conflict, even though their soldiers remained in contested areas of Tigray long after the war���s end. Ethiopia���s federal government has been emboldened by the agreement, which hastened the downfall of the TPLF, a party that had long wielded influence on the federal level. Consequently, Ethiopia���s expansionist ambitions have been reignited. They have demanded sea access as their natural right, which has fueled regional tensions with Somalia and Eritrea. While escalation with Somalia was averted in late 2024 through mediation by Turkey, observers have warned that war between Ethiopia and Eritrea alongside the TPLF might be impending.

The situation in 2025 has striking similarities to early 2020, albeit with new relationship dynamics, and now with the opportunity to avert violent escalation. Leaders in Asmara, Addis Ababa, or Mekelle are not keen to launch another war. They all have thinly stretched resources, and Ethiopia must manage various violent flash points, including in the Amhara and Oromia regions undermining its assertive rhetoric on sea access. In February 2025, Eritrea had ordered a nationwide mobilization; however, little information about the current state of the Eritrean army, which is largely composed of conscripts, is available. The TPLF���s stronghold in Tigray is challenged and lacks the unity and strength it exhibited during the Tigray war.

A cascade of escalatory statements and unexpected events can quickly tip the uneasy equilibrium towards military confrontation, especially considering the upcoming 2026 federal elections in Ethiopia. It will be crucial to continue monitoring the statements and behaviors of senior officials from all sides. The power struggle in Tigray and Eritrea���s rapprochement with its former enemy serve as early warning signs. They demand preventative diplomatic measures to de-escalate and to avoid military confrontation with Ethiopia. Diplomatic engagement with Ethiopia and Eritrea by mediators (such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia) with interests in the region���s stability is required to defuse tensions. Both countries have�� been previously engaged as brokers: Turkey in the 2024 Somalia-Ethiopia tensions and Saudi Arabia in the 2018 peace deal between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The new US focus on ���dealmaking��� might serve as a model for them and can incentivize these potential mediators to secure their economic interests by promoting mediation.

Should these efforts fail, and tensions escalate into boots on the ground, coercive measures should be pursued. For instance, new US and EU sanctions can target Ethiopian and Eritrean senior leadership. Similarly, there could be further efforts to curb Eritrea���s informal financial networks by investigating financial flows in the diaspora and pursuing prosecution for illegal actions. Eritrea is likely to exploit international attention and resources being increasingly diverted from the Horn of Africa by Europe and the US. Eritrea���s leadership has previously used such attention vacuums, notably in the aftermath of 9/11, when it arrested leading political opponents and consolidated its totalitarian grip.

Ethiopia today might be labeled as a post-conflict context; yet its recent history serves as a cautionary tale, revealing how quickly so-called peace can unravel. Eritrea, a pariah state and a daunting diplomatic challenge, remains a dangerous spoiler in the region. The Horn of Africa is already on the verge of collapse, therefore diplomatic de-escalation and sanctions to curb expansionist ambition and spoilers are crucial.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker���s 'The Quiet Violence of Dreams' still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon���s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever. Amazon offices under construction in Cape Town. Image �� Hulisani Matodzi via Shutterstock.com

How do you politicize a place that refuses to be moved? South African authors���in both fiction and nonfiction������have long wrestled with the unique contradictions inherent in modern-day Cape Town, a city with a strong tradition of using narrative as a tool of resistance. K. Sello Duiker���s heralded novel of the South African canon, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, originally published in 2001, continues to find relevancy decades after its publication through his indictments of Cape Town���s parallel realities, flashing a lens into working-class and queer life. For a story based in a city whose wealth and beauty dominate the public narrative, The Quiet Violence of Dreams contends with the places and people for whom beauty comes at an expense.

While superficial readings of the book consider it wrapped up in the hangover of unfulfilled Rainbow Nation promises of post-apartheid, it eschews such trappings to emphasize the condition of humanity that is unrelentingly dispossessed. Duiker���s primary narrator, Tshepo, navigates Cape Town with candor and discontent. Tshepo finds reprieve in the neighborhood of Observatory, colloquially called Obz or Obs, along with his friend Mmabatho, who works in theater and the arts. The two spend their evenings in restaurants like Ganesh and A Touch of Madness, two neighborhood staples known for their youth culture, liberal politics, and bohemian style. Tshepo grapples with unrelenting violence in his personal life, mental health deliberations, and the demands of the city, from spending time in Valkenburg, a mental health hospital that still operates in Observatory today, to working in the upscale queer sex work scene.

The Obs of The Quiet Violence of Dreams is reflected as a liberal place with semi-affordable housing and student digs, bars, and nightlight that was less formal and more communal (and where many conversations happened over a bottle of�� Black Label beer). Duiker���s Obs and the Obs of today are recognizable in some ways���Valkenburg still operates, as does the Observatory. Ganesh is still open, though in February of this year, it came under new management (and new menus and prices) while A Touch of Madness shuttered in 2024.What is considered petty crime still persists, as do all the factors that create it.

Observatory���s history of progressive intermixing that was disallowed by apartheid, however, does not render it exempt from being a gentrifying force in the city and its southern suburbs. It is a history inherent in the neighborhood���s etymology���Observatory gets its name in the 1820s from the British when they both took control of the Cape and established the Royal Observatory, a pertinent site of astrological and scientific research. Most recently, in early 2024, Amazon broke ground in Observatory, establishing their sprawling African headquarters, alongside a new mall, two accommodation apartment blocks selling for R1.2 million per studio apartment, and a First Nations Heritage Centre honoring the people whose land was taken and built upon.

The land now known as Observatory was first stewarded by the Indigenous people of South Africa, some of which include Khoi, San, and the KhoiKhoi. The stewardship of the land, which was largely wetlands, was ideal for cattle raising as well as nomadic and symbiotic means of living. As Indigenous communities continue to reckon with the afterlives of the area���s violent colonial history as one of the primary sites of division, imposition, and land theft, the infinite possibilities of fiction writing introduces new prisms to engage with these very contemporary struggles.

What is often excluded from Cape Town���s narrative is its history as a slave colony���the architecture of enslavement is still observable in places like the Iziko Slave Lodge, the Castle of Good Hope, and a barely visible memorial to a slave auction block on Spin Street, nestled inconspicuously between Parliament and a KFC.�� In the record of the Royal Observatory, a British astronomical establishment meant to guide ships entering the Cape built in 1820, the neighborhood is described with speculation: ���Before Colonial times, the Observatory site was probably summer pasture used by the indigenous Khoisan for their cattle.��� The Royal Observatory still operates today, now as the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Obs and in another location, Sutherland, conducting astronomical research and being home to the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere.

Observatory was one of the first places where Free Burghers, usually Germans and French who came with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on work contracts, were given land to become stock farmers and hold dominion over land and enslaved people, courtesy of Jan van Riebeeck and the VOC in its settlement in the Cape in 1652. The Khoi and San have a long history of resisting colonial domination���most notably in 1510, when the Goringhaicona��clan defeated Portuguese settlers on the banks of the Liesbeek, where Amazon now stands. This early act of defiance challenges the idea that resistance began only in 1652 with the arrival of the Dutch. While state-aligned bodies like the National Khoi and San Council face criticism for co-option, grassroots groups such as the Khoi and San Active Awareness Group, !Khwa ttu, Ndifuna Ukwazi, and Reclaim the City continue to contest land injustice and preserve Indigenous traditions.

The colonial history of Observatory doesn���t just live in archives or contested heritage claims���it���s legible in today���s property market. Even in Tshepo���s time, Observatory was already under pressure from gentrification, driven by demand for student housing and an expanding service economy. In 2025, that process has escalated. A one-bedroom apartment now rents for upwards of R15,000 (about $830) per month���more than twice the average monthly income in Cape Town, which sits around R6,000 (about $330). Amazon���s arrival, with its adjacent mall and the construction of a new highway to support increased traffic, has only deepened this transformation. The result is a spatial logic that echoes colonial land dispossession: Land is carved up and repurposed to serve accumulation, not community.

In the resistance to the Amazon HQ, a coalition of people and organizations came together under the Liesbeek Action Campaign. The campaign saw the participation of Obs residents, The Observatory Civic Association, housing and land justice groups, and importantly, Indigenous groups, including the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous Traditional Council (GKKITC), who sought to resist development on the basis that Observatory is unceded heritage land, upon which Amazon should not be built.

While the campaign made serious legal gains and interdicts for development, the Liesbeek Leisure Property Trust (LLPT) ultimately won with both the support of the DA-run city.�� This group���some say���emerged after Amazon allegedly co-opted elements of the resistance, turning former critics into supporters in exchange for a First Nations Heritage Centre on the campus.

In this perceived capture of resistance efforts, the authority of indigeneity itself is dissolved into a battle of narratives. But where Observatory continues to exclude is observable on its stretch of the main road, where an informal occupation, Singabalapha (translated from isiXhosa meaning ���we belong here���) has been in place for six years. Initially housed in a disused retirement home, the group was evicted by interdict, forcing them and their belongings onto a patch of grass beside a local supermarket chain.The occupation has grown beyond the number of people who were originally evicted, and after some years, tents turned into structures turned into organizing committees. The encampment has become a microcosm of resistance���insisting on central presence in a city that routinely pushes the poor to the periphery.

More than twenty years after The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Cape Town remains a city of sharp contradictions: incoherent in its planning, alienating in its racial and spatial divides, and violently stratified. In 2025, Time Out magazine ���a title that sits uneasily alongside its deepening inequality. Into this paradox steps Amazon, a corporation known for union busting, strike suppression, and high worker turnover. Around the world, ���Amazon towns������built on tax breaks and promises of investment���have undermined local businesses and transformed communities into logistical nodes. In Cape Town, the company���s arrival is already reshaping the urban fabric, intensifying surveillance and insecurity, and exacerbating familiar divides along lines of class and race. While no outcome is inevitable, the history of tech-driven development across the continent gives reason for concern: labor exploitation, ecological harm, and the erosion of public life.

What becomes of the Amazon development once it reaches a full operating capacity, alongside the new housing development, is a story yet to be told. However, fiction offers a trap door to the demand for precision in the analysis of race that is both infuriating and also possesses no clear answers given its absurdity and pseudoscience foundations. Where theory and ideology dominate, fiction is less considered as a liberatory avenue and nourishing source material. In this way, fiction like Duiker���s includes the contours of Black South African life, but can offload precision onto more amorphous characterizations of the darkness of Cape Town and its reprieves.

Take the way sex work is documented throughout the novel ��� in The Quiet Violence of Dreams, sex work provides Tsepho�� with some financial mobility and camaraderie amongst his colleagues. He visits and frequents gay clubs and defines and redefines his own definitions of desire, lust, and connection. We are simultaneously introduced to more voices and narrators, Tshepo���s colleagues. Duiker pays a great deal of attention and care to this line of work, and all the musings and perspectives of the various therapists. We learn of their negotiations as professionals dealing with sensitivity, vulnerability, domination, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. Sebastian, a fellow Steamy Windows therapist, incisively describes the worlds they all navigate, ���Perhaps it is no coincidence that I have ended up doing this kind of work. Where else can a girl with style and wit go? There are never any vacancies for us. So we create our own world and live in a parallel reality.���

Duiker���s attention to the interiority of each character���s life and thought processes renders immense intimacy for the reader; we can understand where a character is coming from rather than simply following them around through the novel. This delicacy is necessitated given South Africa���s complex and ominous relationship to race and separation. The characters talk about living in parallel to straight people and white people, but there is another reality within the book, and that is about the madness that animates the landscape of Cape Town.

Ernest Cole, celebrated South African photographer, documented some of the most significant moments of apartheid in the ���60s, described South Africa as ���a country of signs.��� Everything has been overly dictated and backed with physical and mental violence. As such, the humanity that is altered by this kind of imposed violence is what takes center stage for Duiker, highlighting both the desire to know one another and the surrender that the process of learning even just one other person is the work of a lifetime.

How do you learn life���s lessons and its magic and your own place in it when one has to be so deeply governed by the legacy of race and apartheid? Duiker���s characters try out these questions while walking around Cape Town, smoking, drinking, working in the theater or the massage and sex work parlor. They put one foot in front of the other as one does when constructing a life while suppressing the immense violence going on underneath your feet. While Tshepo is in Cape Town putting one foot in front of the other, the parallel reality is that of Cape Town and its incongruency with life itself���the city is a manufactured paradise for indignity and wealth to run rampant.

There is palpable tension between Duiker���s characters because of what has happened to them, and their histories, and current status in South Africa, particularly Cape Town. Sometimes the tension is generative and curious, and at other times, the tension is punitive and violent. These moments of collision between characters illuminate the more personal consequences of the artifice of ���progress��� and justice. And while this relational tension continues to shape-shift in the contemporary moment, in the contemporary Observatory, what seems to persist is the need for redefining one���s personal freedoms, one���s personal dignity, in the face of being subjected to the violent dreams of a nation-state.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe���s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South���and asked who gets to imagine the future. Nidaa Badwan (Palestine), One hundred days of solitude, 2014. Photo. Courtesy: the artist and the French Institute in Jerusalem.

Born in Dakar in 1967, N���Gon�� Fall completed her studies in Paris, first at Ecole sup��rieure d���arts graphiques (ESAG), graduating in 1986, and then architecture at the ��cole Sp��ciale d’Architecture, where she presented her dissertation in 1993. While working as an architect, she became aware of Revue Noire magazine, and it was not long thereafter that she was working with the Revue Noire team (1994-2001), eventually taking over as editor. Her legacy project was the Anthology of African art: the twentieth century (2001), departing the publication house ���with grandeur.��� Fall was a cultural policy consultant for the foundations of Rockefeller, Prince Claus, Mondrian, the European Union, the ACP-EU Group, and the government of Senegal. She gave lectures at Senghor University in Alexandria, Egypt, at Abdou Moumouni University in Niger, and worked with the Nubuke Foundation in Ghana. General Commissioner of the Africa2020 Season, Fall led a project focusing on innovation in the arts, sciences, and entrepreneurship, and dedicated to the entire African continent that took place in France in 2021. The focus of this interview is on Fall’s career as a pioneering African woman curator since the 1990s, when there were very few black women’s voices in the field. One exhibition in particular, When Things Fall Apart: Critical Voices on the Radars (2016), curated at the Trapholt Museum in Denmark, caught my attention.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Things fall apart, (detail). Installation
150 African masks, 20 school books, 12 plastic balls and chain, 100 wood piles,
41 drift wood pieces, 800 African brushes. 10 x 6 x 2,6m (L x W x H). Courtesy: the artist, Bildrecht Wien and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Riason Naidoo

How did you get into curating?����

N���Gon�� Fall

I was working with Revue Noire. We were publishing, but we were also ourselves discovering and sharing those discoveries. For us, it was an obvious step after publishing and having all these artists in the magazine; we said we can do more. We were a partner of the Dak���art Biennale in 1996 and decided to do an exhibition at the same time, which was the magazine issue on African artists and AIDS (published in 1995). We did a multimedia exhibition which we presented in the OFF of the Dak���art. That is how I started. We were also at the Bamako Encounters Photo Biennale that started the year before in 1994, with an exhibition of African photographers. So, we learnt curating from the ground up. What was really interesting about curating was that you were reaching out to an audience that might not read a magazine��� I didn���t find the exhibitions that were happening in Paris in the 1990s interesting. I started paying attention to the Anglophone countries, looking at what was happening in London and the United States. At this time, curators were starting to be stars, people like Hans Ulrich Obrist. These discourses were so different from what museum curators were doing and saying in France. Voila! I got the connection with what these curators were doing. Anytime I was travelling outside of France, I was visiting exhibitions there. My training at the architecture school assisted because the emphasis was on creativity and concept. So with curating, I learnt on the job, and like anything, the more you do the better you get at it.

When I was a teenager in Dakar, I was living in the same neighborhood of Laboratoire Agit’Art in downtown Dakar. I was in that same cultural environment without being conscious of the impact of the artists, filmmakers, poets, etc. around me. I thought that this was completely normal to be surrounded by creative people. It was only when I was older that I realized that I was very, very lucky! I think all of these factors, where you grow up, the people around you, those that impact you, who contribute to who you are today. That was when I realized that curating is something that is impactful, powerful, and that I love doing.

Arahmaiani Feisal. Do not prevent the fertility of the mind, 1997-2014. Photography & 250 wingless maxi feminine napkins, 12 fluorescent lights, withe stool, glass vial with red liquid, withe tulle fabric. 3,6 m x 3 m. Courtesy: the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art Gallery New York. Riason Naidoo

What were some of the other exhibitions that you were involved in with Revue Noire ?

N���Gon�� Fall

The first one was the Bamako Encounters Photo Biennale (1994), then the Anthology of African Photography (1998) publication which was combined with a century of African photographs���400 photographs���that was first presented in Paris at Maison Europ��enne de la Photographie (1998), which became a touring exhibition that went to Berlin, London, New York, Washington DC, Bologna, S��o Paulo, Bamako and Cape Town. That���s how I first landed in Cape Town in December 1998, when the exhibition was presented at the South African National Gallery.

Riason Naidoo

What have been your curatorial highlights?��

N���Gon�� Fall

Two projects are close to my heart for different reasons. One is called Contact Zone (2007). Samuel Sidibe, the director of the le Mus��e national du Mali (National Museum of Mali), commissioned me to do an exhibition to inaugurate the new building for contemporary exhibitions. I was thinking that people like myself we lack infrastructure on our continent. Our work was mainly in the West. Suddenly, you have an opportunity in this 700m2 building in Africa. I had to share this opportunity with my colleagues.

I called my partner in crime Bisi Silva, who had moved back to Lagos. Our meeting was obvious. I was a French-speaking West African based in Paris; she was an English-speaking West African based in London. It was the son of photographer J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere���who was one of the photographers I worked with in Lagos for Revue Noire���who introduced us. I am French speaking but I speak English; Bisi was English speaking, but she spoke French. That���s how we met in the late 1990s, and we made a promise that we would look after each other and be the best badasses in the world and fight all the possible fights together, and start mentoring young people.

I also invited Rachida Triki from Tunisia to work with me. The three of us drove Samuel crazy! I handled the catalogue process���edited, designed, and printed in Dakar���and had it delivered to Bamako. Bisi and I always talked about doing more projects together, but in retrospect, it was the only one we managed to do.

The other is When things Fall Apart: Critical voices on the radars because of the issues that I raised in that exhibition. I started working on it in 2015. Brexit was a hot topic in Europe; there was another wave of xenophobia in South Africa; you had the presidential campaign in the U.S. with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I felt that everything was collapsing in the world. I was talking to Pascale Marthine Tayou, who at that time was working on a solo show at the Serpentine gallery, who asked me to write an essay for his catalogue. I suggested to him to let���s rather have a conversation since we had known each other since 1994 and he participated in the show I curated in Dakar in 1996; I had squatted in his place, etc. We go back a long time! I was telling him about the commission for an exhibition in Denmark and that I was thinking about the title Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. When I was growing up in Senegal, we read these books in school, all African writers translated into French; it was the time of Senghor. Pascale started laughing, and he said that he had just done a massive installation, which was called Things Fall Apart���10 meters long���and offered it to me for the exhibition, if I so wished.

I had also wanted to visit Southeast Asia to collaborate with some artists in Vietnam and Indonesia, and other artists in Central America, Palestine, and Africa. I curated that exhibition as if I was writing a novel: the first part on human rights, and the last part that ends on a more positive note on empathy. There were artists that I wanted to work with for a long time, artists that inspire me. There were a variety of works in the show, some very direct and some subtler. The exhibition ran for nine months, and we did reading clubs, where people read the novel in Danish and came to the museum to discuss. Actually, we invited the Danish to read an African classic novel and asked them to apply it to their own context.

Riason Naidoo

Your catalogue text can be interpreted as quite a pessimistic view of the world.��

N���Gon�� Fall

A bit dramatic? That was my mindset in 2015/ 2016. But it ends with empathy, so more positively, to say there is a way out. I love writing, and for me there is no frontier between curating and writing. I was really lucky with this project to have the luxury of almost two years to go deep into the issues and then to come out with my own book.

Riason Naidoo

In your text, you mention that Okonkwo���s tragic destiny���the chief protagonist in Achebe���s novel Things Fall Apart ���is that he is unable to adapt to the changes taking place in society. Could this interpretation also not be the difference between assimilation and self-rule in the French and English colonies, respectively?

N���Gon�� Fall

I think there are different ways to respond. You can say I surrender. Or you can say I surrender, but I kill a couple of thousand people before I surrender. You have different ways of resisting. If you do not take ownership of the weapons your enemy is using, there is no way out; so it depends on what is your methodology, what is your strategy? Being a black African Senegalese curator invited to do a project in a small town in Denmark���where people did not even know there were black African curators in Africa���that was my motivation! When I arrived there, it was seen that they were giving me an opportunity, but actually I educated them about Africa. So in a way, I colonised them. So that is what I mean when I say strategy. So I knew Okonkwo���s fate would end badly; he was too rigid. You know, when I was with Revue Noire, people were saying that there was no contemporary art in Africa, and now the same people want to tell me who Pascale Marthine Tayou is and who Barth��l��my Toguo is.

Th��i Tu���n Nguy���n, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas. 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy: the artist. Riason Naidoo

You worked exclusively with socially engaged artists from the Global South. What was the logic behind this?����

N���Gon�� Fall

These artists stand for something. ���If you don���t stand for something, you will fall for anything.��� In Senegal, we felt a bit disconnected from the struggles of other Africans, in Angola, in South Africa, etc. My father was preparing for an independent Senegal, so we were always talking politics; we had an awareness that is in the DNA of my family. I was impressed by an artist like Tiffany Chung from Vietnam, who combines the poetic with the dramatic and has a strong concept along with the visual. It���s true that I was attracted by artists dealing with social, political, and economic issues because there are so many issues that we need to deal with on the [African] continent. So with my curating, my strategy was to colonise Denmark with African culture. What is the strategy? What do we Africans have to say to inspire other people, other cultures?

Riason Naidoo

What made you reach out beyond contemporary African art in this exhibition?

N���Gon�� Fall

Because the opportunity was there! Generally speaking, when you are an African curator, people only call you to do an African art show. That���s how it worked in the early 1990s and 2000s. I���m not sure if it has changed. In Denmark, I had carte blanche. The exhibition was part of a festival called Artists in Society, which is very broad. It was an opportunity to work with these different artists, whom I eventually included in the show. I expanded my African family to the Global South family. The other interesting fact is that the novel by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, has been translated into more than 50 languages. So when I reached out to the Vietnamese, they told me that it was the only African novel that they had ever read because it was the only one available in Vietnam. So all the artists from the different countries around the world read the novel for this exhibition.

Babirye Leilah, Safe here, (undated). 30 x 65 cm. Courtesy: the artist. Riason Naidoo

Is When Things Fall Apart an African response to the exhibition The Divine Comedy���Heaven, Hell, Purgatory by Contemporary African Artists curated by Simon Njami in 2014? Is there any relationship to this exhibition?����

N���Gon�� Fall

There is absolutely no relationship at all. When I am thinking about an exhibition, I am not thinking about what other curators are doing or not doing. It���s more about what is in my mind at the time, what I am thinking about. My conversation with Tayou was confirmation that the novel is going to be the entry point. I had not seen The Divine Comedy exhibition. At the same time as I was busy with When Things Fall Apart, I was also a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington, drafting a new African women artist program, and they gave me a copy of the Divine Comedy catalogue. I didn���t open it; I still haven���t read it yet! I don���t position myself in response to other curators. That���s nonsense!

Riason Naidoo

I was just wondering because I know that Njami was criticized for being too Eurocentric in his reference with the Divine Comedy show.����

N���Gon�� Fall

I am not Simon, and unlike Simon, I grew up in Dakar, and 90 percent of my time I have spent in the streets of Dakar speaking Wolof. I became Western-based when I came to do my studies in Paris in the mid-1980s. Even at Revue Noire, I was the one sent to these crazy countries that nobody wanted to go to. Eritrea was still at war; Angola was just coming out of the war. When you are young, you don���t think of the danger; it is only in retrospect that you realise the risks you took. I never think of myself as being part of the African diaspora. I���m a Senegalese. Voila! Sometimes I���m based in Europe, sometimes I���m based in the [African] continent, and sometimes I���m based in South Korea for three months. I���m a gypsy, but a Senegalese gypsy! It is true that my references are African. It is extremely important for me to share that African experience, African knowledge with the rest of the world. Others have their references, which are fine, but I have my references that others don���t know about. My role as a curator and as a writer would be to give access to that knowledge, so that while I am curating and writing, you can learn from the African experience. So Eurocentrism is the last thing you can accuse me of. It���s not going to happen! I was raised in a Pan-African mindset in my family, and I strongly believe in the power of African cultures. I can also be very Parisian, very New York, very Brussels; I adapt. Unlike Okonkwo, you adapt to your context, but you never forget who you are.

Riason Naidoo

At the time you started curating in the 1990s with Revue Noire , were there any other women from the African continent also curating?

N���Gon�� Fall

Bisi Silva! Bisi had graduated from the Royal College in London and was working as an independent curator in the United Kingdom. That���s why it was obvious that we had to meet. In 2001/02, she decided to move to Lagos and to continue her work there…

���When Things Fall Apart: critical voices on the radars��� was shown at the Trapholt Museum, Denmark, from February 11-October 23, 2016. Participating artists were Nidaa Badwan, Rehema Chachage, Tiffany Chung, Arahmaiani Feisal, Regina Jos�� Galindo, Milumbe Haimbe, Wambui Kamiru, Dinh Q. L��, Babirye Leilah, Zen Marie, Th��i Tu���n Nguy���n and Pascale Marthine Tayou.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari���s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

President Muhammadu Buhari during a visit to the Lekki Deep Seaport. Lagos, Nigeria, January 21, 2023. �� Oluwafemi Dawodu via Shutterstock.com

The Yoruba say, ���Do not speak ill of the dead.��� The Yoruba say that during the reign of King Lagbaja, there was bounty; birds chirped, rats hissed, and humans spoke.��In the time of President Muhammadu Buhari, my friends and I left Nigeria. It was two terms, two election cycles, and eight years of pestilence. Two years short of a decade, it was too long a time for a failing state to be rudderless.

In 2011, I voted Mallam Nuhu Ribadu for president. My polling booth was at Moremi High School on the outskirts of Road Seven, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. I was a final-year medical student, tired of being a student but enthused about voting for the first time. My friends who had taken four-year courses at the university were already in Lagos, counting money. I was writing poems, discussing Afrobeats at the New Buka every night, thinking about a near future where I would be addressed as a doctor. Ribadu lost to President Goodluck Jonathan.

The following year, the post-election violence sanctioned by perennial election loser but strong contender Rtd. General Muhammadu Buhari hit home when I served in Anambra State. I understood, in real time, what being a youth corps member meant. Ostensibly, you were a disposable human shield. A symbol of Nigeria dispersed into far-flung places where you are reduced to your paramilitary khakis, to one word: corper. This was why more than 800 people died needlessly in that post-election violence, many of them young, educated Nigerians doing their youth service. Their bright future was extinguished on bloodied ballot papers.

When President Jonathan fired all resident doctors in Nigeria during an industrial action in 2014, I was affected. I stayed away from the hospital grounds so that I would not be served the sack letter. What baffled me was our expendability. Resident doctors are the armed forces of a country���s health sector. Sacking that entire workforce was not only laughable; it should have been a parable of the sower on my impressionable mind, but trust a fast city like Lagos. It was bubbling like a pepper soup broth, slow-cooking surf and turf. I was distracted by the city���s seductive nightlife. Everywhere was effervescent with oil profits. Lagos was flush with cash. Afropolitan returnees who knew how to have a good time had been lured into town.

When Jonathan was up for reelection in 2015, I was partial to President Buhari���s campaign. Perhaps it was the vulnerability of a retired general���s tears. Or his tenacity, showing up every election cycle with renewed vim, requesting our mandate. It was not a rose-tinted decision. His appalling human rights record was clear. His anti-corruption stance was the lure. At the time, it did not seem like a simplistic solution: an anti-corruption czar in power, blocking leakages so that the economy floats. Little did we know. The first inkling was his inaugural speech. Next was his reluctance to set up his Cabinet. He quickly earned the nickname Baba Go Slow, whilst the Nigerian economy moonwalked into the abyss.

My friends began to leave Nigeria. I was initially reluctant to renege on my patriotism, but the longer I stayed within the porous civil service, the more apparent the rot revealed itself. Corruption had become an intangible heritage closely yoked to Nigerian culture. No institution, including religious, was exempt.�� People aspire to every form of leadership to enrich themselves. Becoming a politician seemed like a twisted act of self-determination, where you used your position to amass personal material gains.

And to quote Fela, ���Inside this no head no tail/same water no light still dey.��� The Afropolitans fled with their foreign accents and passports. I began to contemplate my options, and in September 2019, I quit Nigeria. It was no longer a difficult decision to make; it was the pragmatic next step.

I suppose it will be difficult to talk about Buhari without mentioning the EndSARS massacre. Nigerian youth were killed and then disappeared. The government hid its state-sanctioned violence. Those who thought the old general was a democrat had elected to forget his brutal human rights record. Again, the bottom line for me was how the Nigerian youth was expendable, a bag of bones that can be torched, torn, and disappeared.

The Yoruba say, ���Do not speak ill of the dead.��� The Yoruba say that during the reign of King Lagbaja, there was bounty; birds chirped, rats hissed, and humans spoke.�� In the time of President Muhammadu Buhari, my friends and I left Nigeria. This, of course, complicates how we receive the news of his passing. To be generous, his legacy was that he propulsively pursued his lifelong ambition to be president. He serviced it with the blood of Nigerians through several election cycles, and when he finally got our mandate, he installed his feet on a stool and picked his teeth.

The counterargument is: What is eight years in the lifespan of a country? Eight years in the life of a man is enough time to complete a family. Enough time to drift from shining star to empty husk. Enough time to lose faith in one���s own country. My friends and I entered the workforce shortly before Buhari���s presidency. Now we are dispersed across the world, being productive for foreign nations, and we are grappling daily with what it means to be a migrant in a world where migrants are scapegoats. Our parents also endured the albatross of military rule, particularly 20 months of General Buhari���s rule in the mid-���80s. A time when military might was deployed excessively to instill discipline, while the Nigerian economy fell off the cliff.

In our handling of time, we must think of the baby boomers and how they have centered themselves in our world. We must think of their stronghold, particularly on the nation-state of Nigeria. We are still under their watch as I write, these strong men with vaunted histories and a presence that stretches time like fictional superheroes. In the main, President Buhari was one of them. He will be remembered as a patriot, sent forth as a national hero. I suppose he, at least, deserves his rest.