Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 8

The Politics of the Football Terrace

In Algeria, football stadiums have long been sites of protest, expression, and resistance. As public space shrinks and surveillance rises,
their political future hangs in the balance. Young members of the Verde Corazon ultra during a match of their club RCR, Relizane, Algeria, 2016.(Photo by Fethi Sahraoui)

I remember February 22, 2019, with vivid clarity���the day the Hirak anti-government movement erupted in Algeria. There was a collective intuition among Algerians that something was brewing. It was a Friday, a day that naturally lends itself to protest across North Africa as people get together to carry out weekly prayers. More importantly, in the weeks leading up to that day, scattered protests began to pop up across the country. Tensions were high over the news that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika���then 81 years old and visibly debilitated by multiple strokes���intended to run for a fifth consecutive term.

Describing the atmosphere in Algiers as ���tense��� on that morning of February 22 is too simple. It doesn���t account for the accompanying tangible feelings of hope and fear in the air. In a country where formal political expression is tightly circumscribed, moments like these���when people reclaim public space en masse���become more than just protest. They become fleeting openings in an otherwise closed system, sites where the political becomes possible again. The excitement stemmed from the simple idea of stepping out onto the street, blending in with the masses, and freely voicing an opinion out loud���an opportunity that only comes once a generation in Algeria and almost always has macro-level repercussions on the country���s political future.

Yet, history also loomed large. The violent crackdowns on the 1988 October Riots and the 2001 Black Spring, which left hundreds dead, were sharp reminders of the risks involved. An eerie silence gripped the city immediately after Friday prayers. Fifteen minutes later, chanting erupted from the working-class neighborhoods of the Casbah and Bab El Oued. By mid-afternoon, tens of thousands of protestors had flooded downtown Algiers, completely overwhelming a flimsy attempt by police to contain the demonstration.

The floating feeling of emancipation was undeniable. Algerians from all walks of life had reclaimed the streets. Police checkpoints were thoroughly engulfed by the crowd, allowing free movement. The ever-present plainclothes officers who usually stopped public filming were nowhere to be found. Protestors could finally express themselves openly. But with newfound freedom came uncertainty. ���What now?!���

Amid the euphoria, most understood the moment���s importance. The eyes and ears of the state were on them and this was the time to voice demands. Disjointed and incoherent slogans emerged: chants against rigged elections or corruption, or tactical instructions like the warning to remain peaceful in order to prevent a government crackdown. By evening exhaustion set in, but elation remained. It was clear that something historic was unfolding. Protestors vowed to return the following Friday, and from then the Hirak movement persisted every week until the COVID-19 pandemic brought public gatherings to a halt.

Although the Hirak was a generational event for many, for Algeria���s football fans February 22, 2019 felt all too familiar. This familiarity wasn���t incidental. For years, Algeria���s terraces have served as a kind of political training ground���a place where the protest rituals are rehearsed weekly, long before they erupt into the street. Breaking through police cordons, creating captivating visual displays, and chanting nonstop were weekly rituals. Over the following months, by exporting stadium behavior to the street, football supporters would play an inextricable role in shaping how the general public expressed their demands.

MC Algiers vs Orlando Pirates

These days, six years after the Hirak was stamped out, the only place in Algeria where tens of thousands still gather each week is not in protest, but at a football match.

On April 1, I took a cab to the Stade 5 Juillet to watch Mouloudia of Algiers play Orlando Pirates in the caf Champions League. Mouloudia of Algiers are Algeria���s most popular club. They���re the oldest, founded in 1921, and they are the richest, owned by Sonatrach, the national oil and gas conglomerate. In many ways, MCA is representative of all clubs in Algeria and their supporters are representative of all Algerian fans.

Of course I cared about the result, but every time I���m in the stadium I am drawn in more by the chance to be an amateur sociologist; to sit, watch, and take the temperature of the everyday Algerian football fan. The first thing that hits you is how much the stadium resembles the makeup of working-class areas in Algeria���s cities: it���s overwhelmingly populated by young men. Elderly men are scarce, children rarely come alone, and women are virtually absent. Domestic football, shaped by a mix of violence and social norms, has become the male-only domain of youth.

The parallels between stadium and street don���t stop there. Like everyday life in the city, match day involves a whole lot of waiting. In Algiers, if you have business to handle, you learn to arrive early���sometimes hours early. The same logic applies to football. I got to the stadium four hours before kickoff and bought a ticket from a scalper, one of the stadium���s many informal marketeers. Economists estimate that between 20% and 40% of Algeria���s economy operates in the informal sector.

Buying a ticket is always straightforward; getting inside the stadium is the real mission. To an outsider the entrances might resemble conflict zones. Armored vehicles funnel the crowd into snaking queues. Security forces bark at people to hold ids and tickets high above their heads. A series of patdowns follow. Only after all that do you step inside, exhale���realizing you���ve left one of Algeria���s most repressive ceremonies behind, and are entering one of Algeria���s few truly free zones ahead.

Once inside the Stade 5 Juillet, you immediately notice how the stands are organized by neighborhood. Flags representing nearly every corner of Algiers hang from the railings of the stadium���s entrance tunnels. Bloc 17 belongs to fans from Cheraga; Bloc 18 to those from El Madania. The stadium is a microcosm of the city.

Minutes later, two young men start collecting donations for someone in distress. ���Brothers, Mouloudia, help your brother out���his daughter is sick and needs urgent care.��� Nine out of ten supporters reach into their pockets and toss coins into the young, unfortunate father���s plastic bag. I can���t help but think that the football supporters are just as charitable as the mosque-goers at Eid prayers the day before. In so many ways, the stadium reflects the society outside its walls���or maybe it���s the other way around. I���ll return to that idea. However, where the parallel is clearest is in the freedom of expression, whether on the terraces or during political demonstrations. On the terraces, just as in the street, the security apparatus is overwhelmed, and tens of thousands can express themselves freely, even if the state is always watching.

This is why scholars like Mahfoud Amara have long seen the terraces as a true measure of the Algerian street���s pulse. Since football first arrived on Algeria���s Mediterranean shores in the early 1900s, fans have instinctively known how to use the game as a political tool. And yet, there���s always been an ambiguity about what kind of political space the terrace is. Is it where new forms of political awareness take shape���where people learn to move, chant, and act together? Or is it just a tolerated pressure valve, a space that releases steam but leaves the structure intact? The Algerian stadium embodies both possibilities simultaneously: a space of real expression, but not necessarily of real transformation.

The politics of the terrace

In Sport et Politique en Alg��rie, political scientist Youcef Fates traces the roots of artistic expression in Algerian football culture back to the colonial period. At a time when native Algerians were denied the right to assemble freely, sports clubs became a means of uniting around shared ideals and identities. Through chants, artwork, and choreographed displays, Algerian supporters earned a global reputation for their expressiveness.

For instance, in the 1940s it wasn���t uncommon for Algerian supporters in the terraces to sing ���Min Djibalina��� (���From Our Mountains���)���a patriotic song penned by Algerian scouts that called for Algerian independence. Even in post-independence Algeria, the messages delivered in stadiums carried significant social and political weight. A powerful example is the 1977 Algerian Cup final between JS Kabylie and NA Hussein Dey. JS Kabylie supporters were mostly Kabyle���a branch of the Amazigh indigenous to North Africa���and they did not hesitate to use the occasion to voice their displeasure.

That day, President Houari Boumediene was in attendance. He was not a popular figure among Kabyle fans due to his staunch Arabization policies, which suppressed Amazigh language and culture by declaring Arabic the sole official language of Algeria. The JSK fans seized the moment to voice their discontent. They boldly chanted ���Anwa wigui? Imazighen! (Who are we? Amazigh!)��� and booed the national anthem. Open defiance like this was virtually unheard of in 1970s Algeria and was certainly never broadcast on state television.

Boumediene responded swiftly. Over the next few months, he instituted a sporting reform that rebranded every football club in the country. JS Kabylie lost its ethnic identifier and was renamed JE Tizi Ouzou after the club���s home city, but the attempt to erase what happened in that match failed. That moment of protest became a precursor to the Berber Spring of the 1980s���a landmark movement for Amazigh cultural and linguistic rights.

In the early 2000s, the influence of the ���ultra��� movement in Italy began shaping North African fan groups. Mark Doidge presents a thorough definition of ultra groups:

The term has been adapted to refer to all hard-core football fans that demonstrate an unwavering support of their team��� This support is highly ritualistic and is characterized by the extensive displays of flags and banners, igniting of flares, and chanting of songs.

The North African ultra movement first took hold in Tunisia where Esperance de Tunis supporters formed ���L���Emkachkhines.��� Morocco followed in 2005 with Raja Casablanca���s ���Green Boys,��� and by 2007 Algeria and Egypt saw their own ultras emerge������Ultras Verde Leone��� for MC Algiers and ���Ultras Ahlawy��� for Al Ahly.

What sets North African ultras apart is the presence of dedicated musical groups affiliated with nearly every group, especially in Algeria. These groups compose and record tribute songs to their football clubs celebrating their histories and victories. However, the lyrics frequently go beyond football, touching on everyday struggles and veering into overtly political themes.

For example, in the 2010s, as Algerian President Bouteflika���s public appearances became increasingly rare, the Dey Boys of NA Hussein Dey released a provocative track ahead of the 2016 Algerian Cup final with the line: ���The president in a wheelchair; [he���s] a puppet holding on to power.��� A year later, Ouled El Bahdja���Algeria���s most notorious football musical group���dropped the song ���Qilouna��� (���Leave us be���) amid news that the government was considering shale gas fracking in the Sahara. The track criticized government corruption with the lyric: ���The people don���t hear what���s happening in the Sahara.��� Then in 2018, following the seizure of 701 kilograms of cocaine at the port of Oran (an incident ultimately tied to associates of ministers, mayors, governors, and even national police chief Abdelghani Hamel), Moh Milano released ���Y���en a marre,��� declaring: ���The state is wild, (importing) hash and cocaine.��� Y���en a Marre���which means ���we���re fed up������was also the name of a collective of Senegalese rappers and journalists who helped galvanize a mass youth movement against political stagnation in 2011. Whether or not Moh Milano���s track was referencing them, the resonance is striking. From Dakar to Algiers, music has become a vessel for political fatigue���and the possibility of its rupture.

Beyond music, fans communicate through choreographed visual displays���tifos���that often carry political messages. Their visual impact and shareability make them a powerful tool: once raised, they���re instantly clipped and posted online, quickly racking up tens of thousands of views. The Algerian government is acutely aware of their influence. To preempt potential controversy, and in exchange for early stadium access to prepare them, authorities require fan groups to submit their tifos for approval. Due to this vetting process, many tifos echo Algeria���s official foreign policy. Since October 7, 2023, for instance, Palestinian solidarity messages have become widespread. In November 2023, Mouloudia Club of Algiers unfurled a tifo of a freedom fighter and a Palestinian flag with the slogan, ���The revolutionary Mouloudia is at your service, land of revolutionaries.��� This choreography was applauded by all factions of Algerian society including some members of the government.

Yet, despite these controls, unsanctioned messages sometimes make it through, particularly in lower-tier leagues. In 2018, second-division side AS Ain Mlila displayed a provocative banner with Saudi King Salman and U.S. President Trump, captioned: ���Two sides of the same coin.��� The Saudi government protested vehemently, and Algeria was forced to issue an official apology.

The criticisms voiced by football supporters inside Algerian stadiums, whether aimed at domestic politics or international affairs, were never unique; you could hear the same grievances echoed in the streets. But what gives the stadium its unique power is how it amplifies those critiques through artistic expression. Songs and choreographies don���t just express discontent���they elevate it, stylize it, make it memorable and shareable. Nowhere was this more clear than during the Hirak protests of 2019 when the chants, rhythms, and defiant spirit of the terraces spilled into the public squares, energizing a nationwide movement.

When the chants spilled out

During the Hirak demonstrations, football supporters naturally gravitated toward one another, carrying with them the atmosphere of the terraces. On the steps of Barberousse Secondary School, fans of rival clubs stood side by side, chanting, setting off flares, and moving in rhythm. Their energy and coordination were contagious, transforming the protests into a powerful and unified spectacle.

One song in particular, ���La Casa Del Mouradia��� by usm Algiers��� fan collective Ouled El Bahdja, became the unofficial anthem of the Hirak. Written from a football supporter���s point of view, the song delivered a scathing critique of Bouteflika���s four-term presidency:

It is fajr (dawn) and I cannot sleep, / I am slowly getting high, / Who are the causes, who can I blame (for my problems),
We are sick of this life we are living. / In the first (term) we can say they tricked us with ���reconciliation,��� / In the second (term) it became clear that this was La Casa Del Mouradia,/ In the third (term) the country suffered because of personal interests, / In the fourth (term) the puppet died and our issue persists.

Seeing protestors of all backgrounds sing stadium chants���many laced with vulgarity���was surreal, but powerful. Other football songs, like usm El Harrach���s ���Chkoun Sbabna��� (���Who is to blame?���), also gained traction:

And if they say ���You want to wreak havoc,��� / It has been a long time since havoc has been unleashed, / You have sold Algiers and split it up, / You have bought all the villas in Paris. / Who is the cause (of our problems)? / The government, they are the cause,
The cause of our misery, / Algeria has worn us down.

Soolking, an Algerian hip-hop star, further amplified stadium anthems when he adapted Ouled El Bahdja���s ���Ultima Verba��� into the song ���Libert����� (���Freedom���), racking up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube and resonating with protests worldwide.

Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, / The stand is singing / And we are your obstacle, O government, And our fire will not be extinguished.

The Hirak protests would only cease after the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic and assembling in close proximity, even outdoors, was deemed a health risk. Like in many countries, the Algerian government used the pandemic to pass repressive legislation and crack down on protests, imprisoning hundreds of ���prisoners of opinion��� and effectively sealing off access to the street. In the view of many, the Hirak failed to topple Algeria���s entrenched military-civilian establishment, largely due to its lack of centralized leadership. Protestors were wary of figureheads, fearing co-optation or suppression. Although the government repeatedly called for dialogue and invited the movement to organize itself, deep mistrust and ideological diversity made such coordination unworkable. Ultimately, the horizontal nature of the Hirak, coupled with an unprecedented global health crisis, ensured the regime remained intact.

The last stand?

Since the repression of the Hirak protests, which coincided with the beginning of Abdelmadjid Tebboune���s first mandate, the Algerian government has quickly erected several state-of-the-art stadiums. In Oran, the Miloud Hadefi Stadium was built to host the 2022 Mediterranean Games. In January 2023, the Nelson Mandela Stadium was built adjacent to the Algiers International Airport. 2024 saw two stadiums inaugurated���the Ali La Pointe Stadium in a southern suburb of Algiers and the Hocine Ait Ahmed Stadium in Tizi Ouzou.

These developments signal more than just sporting ambition���they reflect a calculated transformation of the stadium experience. For the first time, fans are required to purchase tickets online. Ostensibly introduced to streamline access, this system has often produced the opposite effect. QR codes frequently malfunction, and with only a handful of open turnstiles, fans are forced to wait in even longer queues. Perhaps the most glaring difference is that authorities now have the names and contact details of everyone sitting in a given section.

This digital shift fits into a familiar pattern. Under Margaret Thatcher, the U.K. pioneered a model of stadium reform built around surveillance and control. After the Heysel disaster, her government increased police presence, intensified stop-and-search practices, and introduced mandatory membership cards for fans provoking widespread backlash.

These tactics did little to curb violence, and arguably worsened conditions contributing to tragedies like Hillsborough in 1989. It wasn���t policing but the commercialization of the Premier League that eventually changed English stadiums, ushering in all-seater venues, higher ticket prices, and a more affluent fanbase which diluted the intensity of British football culture.

Algeria���s trajectory seems to be following a similar blueprint with digital ticketing being just the beginning. If prices rise, as expected, working-class fans could be priced out and replaced by wealthier families and tourists. This shift within the stadium has already taken hold for national team matches. And, although it hasn���t yet affected the domestic league, such a shift would result in a more diverse, but sanitized, subdued, and apolitical audience there as well. All of this unfolds against Algeria���s increasingly precarious economic situation, as its hydrocarbon-based rentier economy has lost its ability to distribute benefits like it once did. If the state���s capacity to subsidize consent weakens, the transformation of the stadium space may not only reflect class exclusion, but may also deepen the potential for wider unrest.

There is, however, another possibility. If, as history suggests, the stadium and the street influence one another, then a bottom-up reimagining of stadium culture is within reach. During the Hirak, feminist groups claimed public space and became a constant presence in weekly protests. Should they and other grassroots movements see the stadium as a viable platform for gathering, organizing, and resisting, the very character of Algerian stadiums could evolve once more. Whether or not this is possible is a question worth asking���and a challenge worth taking up in a political climate that has suffocated all but the loyal vassals of the Algerian political system.

For, of all the political failures of the Hirak, the movement succeeded in at least confirming one evergreen truth: for now, Algerian stadiums remain a mirror of the nation���s political soul. It is where voices rise in defiance, where grievances take artistic form. Where, if you wait patiently enough, the next great Algerian political movement will incubate. Or perhaps it is simply where politics is held���suspended, unsettled, not yet extinguished. The terrace sits on the edge of something: maybe a beginning, maybe an end. That uncertainty is what gives it life. When coins clink into a plastic bag for a sick child, when a forbidden chant goes up from the bloc, when the crowd sings what cannot be said elsewhere���that is where you feel it. Not power, maybe, but the pulse.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: After Rhodes Fell

A decade after a bucket of excrement triggered the largest post-apartheid student movement, Fallism���s legacy gestures toward a future where the social utility of universities remains uncertain, but the frustrations of South Africa���s youth are poised to erupt. Illustration by Gaurab Thakali

At the beginning of every year, South Africa eagerly awaits the results of secondary school final exams (locally known as Matrics) from all over the country. It���s an occasion that receives wall-to-wall coverage typical of a national election. Around the start of testing in October, broadcasters descend on schools interviewing teachers, principals, and parents to give a status report on the exam readiness of learners. As papers are marked through the festive season, educational experts weigh in on the state of the national schooling system and estimate the pass rate. When results are finally published in January, the coverage becomes a full-blown spectacle. Viewers are inundated by live results, statistical analysis, humdrum interviews with government officials, and sentimental features celebrating top-performing students with backgrounds ranging from underserved public to well-resourced private schools. For most of the public, Matric exams are the test of a lifetime, a measure of hard work and preparation with the ultimate reward being a university-entrance pass.

In a country whose fractured past has made it difficult to forge a national identity with shared customs, the annual fanfare over Matric results has become one of South Africa���s few rituals. Yet, this spectacle also touches on a deeper belief: that education remains the last great equalizer in a society defined by racialized class disparity. Although the idea of education as a pathway to upward mobility still holds in many parts of the world, particularly in the Global South, after the fall of apartheid in 1994, it became deeply enmeshed with the democratic promises of the ANC government. Enshrined as a fundamental right in the constitution, access to education���in this case tertiary education���was meant to be the cornerstone of the post-apartheid dream. However, much like the illusion of a ���miracle democracy��� held together by a mighty Rainbow Nation, it buckled under the pressure to reform a racially divided, unequal country in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Since the advent of democracy, Matric students have been trained to believe that earning a university degree will give them an advantage in an increasingly cutthroat economy. But, what is the value of that promise when it is consistently undermined by rising tuition fees, historical debt, a defective student aid system, and the very real threat of financial exclusion? Ultimately, the prohibitive cost of higher education exposed a hypocrisy so profound that it felt like a betrayal for the generation born into freedom. As a result, successive groups of young South Africans have protested against a system and a government that has failed to make higher education accessible. Some thinkers have rightly pointed out that demonstrations against tuition fees did not begin with the Fallist movement in 2015. In an opinion piece for the Daily Maverick in 2019, Asemahle Gwala, the former deputy chairperson of the South African Students Congress (SASCO) at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU), wrote that the #FeesMustFall movement caused a division ���between the suppressed voices from historically black universities who have been inhaling tear gas since the turn of the century and the newly minted revolutionaries with vast media coverage.���

It���s true that Fallism, as it came to be known, had long been percolating on the campuses of historically black institutions and former technikons (now universities of technology and TVETs). Students at the Durban University of Technology, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Fort Hare, and the University of Zululand were vocal about the exorbitant cost of tertiary education���clashing with police and private security who responded with brute force. Despite the validity of their demands, their plight was either ignored or dismissed by the media���a staggering contrast to the coverage of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall. One could argue that the media and political class were far more invested in the fees protests at historically white institutions like the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and Rhodes University (RU) because they are the de facto finishing schools for the professional-managerial class.

The Fallist movement was heralded as the Born Free generation���s feisty entry into revolutionary politics. Parallels were drawn between the students of Fallism and the students of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 (or June 16), who took a stand against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. However, that comparison is a glib one. Though the June 16 generation was calling for the overhaul of Bantu Education, they were ultimately rejecting a system that had relegated them to being cheap labor for white capital. The Fallists, on the other hand, were calling on the ANC government to fulfill the promises of 1994.

This raises one of the Fallist movement���s quieter contradictions. While it was celebrated for challenging the mythology of the Rainbow Nation, it was, at its core, seeking to be included in it. It may have excoriated the anc for failing to deliver an equal and free South Africa for all, but the Fallists did not offer an alternative to that vision. In fact, they didn���t believe it was their responsibility. Consequently, the influence of Fallism has largely been confined to the outposts of the academy; in media, business, and the nonprofit sector, while leaving little lasting impact elsewhere. Even in formal political spaces, former Fallists have yet to make an impact proportionate to the radical hopes that were, perhaps too generously, projected onto them. Maybe this is because Fallism wasn���t so much a rejection of the 1994 dispensation, but a desperate attempt to grab its few remaining crumbs.

When former president Nelson Mandela established the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) in 1995, its mandate was to develop a policy framework to address the deep structural inequities within South Africa���s higher education sector. Like the broader project of building a democratic republic with a new flag, constitution, legal system, and national identity, it was an ambitious undertaking. The nche wasn���t just tasked with reimagining universities. It had to create a unified and integrated system that would encompass universities, technical and vocational colleges, as well as other tertiary institutions. Most crucially, it needed to align this system with the inclusive vision of the anc���s 1955 Freedom Charter, which called for the doors of learning and culture to be opened to all South Africans.

But, by the 1990s the global tide had turned. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had successfully exported neoliberal policies around the globe, destabilizing economies through their doctrine of austerity, privatization, and deregulation. In this unipolar world order, nations were pressured to conform or risk economic and political marginalization. To survive the cuts to government spending, the university was transformed into a business. No longer was it seen as a public good dedicated to justice, curiosity, and knowledge production in the Platonic tradition. Instead, it was responsible for producing a workforce for an increasingly exploitative labor market. As Linda Rimondi writes in her article ���Neoliberalism and the Role of the University,��� the university became a finishing school for ���competitive, self-interested, and self-reliant individuals for whom the greatest goods [were] freedom and consumption.���

Nonetheless, the nche forged ahead with its mission to redefine the university in post-apartheid South Africa. In December 1996, it produced the Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation, laying the groundwork for the Higher Education Act of 1997. The Green Paper proposed measures to redress racial, economic, cultural, and geographic inequalities in higher education and introduce financial support mechanisms for students from poor and working-class backgrounds���the most important being the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). It also emphasized the need for academic quality that met international standards, all while being grounded in southern African and African contexts. Yet, as Driekie Hay and Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela observe in Higher Education in South Africa, most institutions largely remained tethered to their ideological roots. White English-medium universities continued to operate within an Anglo-Saxon academic framework; white Afrikaans institutions largely upheld Dutch and German philosophical and theological models; and historically Black universities worked to dismantle the bureaucratic and curricular legacies inherited from Afrikaans institutions.

The Green Paper also emphasized the need to ���socialize a new generation [of students] with the requisite cultural values and communication competencies to become citizens of an international and global community.��� Tellingly, this line is a microcosm of the anc���s internal struggle to reconcile the egalitarian ideals of the Freedom Charter with the demands of neoliberal policies, particularly in its adoption of the contentious Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) plan. The anc���s pivot to neoliberalism essentially failed to generate the economic growth needed to attract sustained foreign direct investment or reduce poverty. As unemployment and inequality soared, higher education���especially a university degree���came to represent a first-class ticket out of racialized poverty. Yet, South African universities remained untransformed ideologically. They upheld a fee structure that excluded the majority of the population, clung to curricula rooted in colonialism, and lionized figures responsible for the oppression of black South Africans. While the unaffordability of the university reflected broader trends in higher education, it became a potent symbol of post-apartheid failure in South Africa. It���s in this climate���of a university reshaped by market logic and hollowed of its egalitarian promise���that the conditions for Fallism were set.

In March 2015, when political science student Chumani Maxwele catapulted a bucket of feces at the bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes at uct, it set the tone for almost half a decade of student activism in South Africa. By mid-October that same year, students at Wits University downed their pens and took to the streets to protest a proposed 10���12% tuition hike for the following academic year, igniting what would become two years of #FeesMustFall protests. The movement spread rapidly across university campuses in the country. Students disrupted classes, negotiated with university management, and braved stun grenades and rubber bullets fired by police and private security. The protests culminated in a march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where they delivered a list of demands to the government. Later, then-president Jacob Zuma responded by announcing a zero-percent fee increase for that year, a decision that was treated as a victory, albeit prematurely. Two years and several corruption scandals later, Zuma declared that he would fund free higher education in the country���a promise that, to the surprise of no one, never came to fruition.

Like the hashtag movements of the late 2000s and 2010s, such as #OccupyWallStreet, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, Fallism had a digital presence that made it unique within South African movement history. Social media allowed students to provide real-time updates, countering the potential for fabricated stories to be pushed by mainstream media outlets. Before the public became aware of Big Tech���s surveillance and disinformation practices, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook served as informal classrooms where people could engage with postcolonial theory, Black Consciousness, Marxism, Afro-pessimism, black feminism, womanism, and queer theory. The digital terrain also helped students learn from one another, adopting a range of tactics that included occupying buildings, removing colonial and apartheid statues and effigies, shutting down lectures, and turning university halls and rooms into spaces for collective study.

By embracing a more lateral approach to leadership, Fallism was able to avoid the pitfalls that often accompany movements centered around a singular, typically male, charismatic figure. This rejection of hierarchy not only shielded the movement from personality cults but also encouraged the inclusion of identities that had been sidelined in the retelling of liberation history. However, this openness came with vulnerabilities. The confluence of different political perspectives, not to mention the strong allegiances to the main political parties on campus, raised tensions between Fallists. While some leftist mass movements have been able to encompass a range of ideologies, the absence of a common enemy created confusion around the aims and goals of Fallism. This allowed for misinterpretation to flourish, particularly in the heat of online discourse. These gaps also left Fallism exposed to opportunists who co-opted the movement to bolster their revolutionary bonafides. Moreover, the style of ���mimetic politics,��� as Vishwas Satgar wrote in a 2016 article for The Conversation, resulted in actions taken without consideration for their long-term impact, the well-being of students, or the necessary safeguards to prevent activists from burning out.

There is no denying that #FeesMustFall ultimately influenced subsequent revisions to nsfas, which had long been criticized for its outdated system, delayed payments, and mismanagement. Initially, eligible students received funding in the form of loans that accrued interest, a requirement that was ill-suited to the stagnant growth of the South African economy, as a 2019 World Bank report observes. In 2018, nsfas replaced student loans with student grants based on a means test of a household income of R350,000 (about USD19,243) or less. Additionally, the ���Missing-Middle Loan Scheme��� was rolled out for students whose household income was between R350,000 and R600,000.

Globally, several protests drew from #RhodesMustFall. During the summer of the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in 2020, statues of colonialists, confederate generals, and slave owners were defaced and toppled across the U.S. and Europe. These acts of resistance marked a Western reckoning with the legacy of slavery, empire, racial injustice, and colonialism. The surge of unrest owes some debt to the precedent set by Fallists, who brought their campuses to a standstill in 2015. In many ways, the energy and tactics of those student-led protests rippled outward, inspiring people to demand not only the removal of statues but also the dismantling of the systems they represented.

Perhaps the most impactful aspect of Fallism���s legacy emerged during the #EndOutsourcing and #OutsourcingMustFall campaigns at UCT and Wits. When South African universities began to outsource former employees as part of a neoliberal wave of privatizing aspects of the public sector in the late 1990s, many service workers were laid off, only for them to be rehired through private companies with a lower salary and zero benefits. A host of union-busting tactics neutered the influence of unions and prevented workers from organizing among themselves. In 2011, the Wits Workers��� Solidarity Committee, a coalition of academic staff, workers, and some students, released a damning report on the outsourcing of catering, cleaning, and electrical services, but it never managed to shift any policy at the university.

While strong student and worker alliances had existed at both uct and Wits during the anti-apartheid struggle, the organizing around the outsourcing of workers emerged as a powerful example of the potential of class consciousness within student movements. In May 2015, Wits students protested with dismissed workers of MJL Electrical after they claimed that they were owed money by the university. About a week before the official start of #FeesMustFall movement, the October 6 Movement, a coalition of workers, students, and academic staff from Wits and the University of Johannesburg (UJ), staged a demonstration of nearly 2,000 people to protest against outsourcing. Later that month, uct students marched alongside workers to force their institution to employ workers. These acts of worker-student solidarity prompted both institutions to suspend outsourcing, however dubiously, reviving worker-student solidarity on both campuses. Despite these victories, #EndOutsourcing and #OutsourcingMustFall were largely overshadowed in the media by the more representational narratives of the Fallist movement���a telling reflection of how class and labor struggles are often deprioritized in South African public discourse.

For all their rebelliousness, the Fallists who entered politics were absorbed into the monotony of constituent politicking, abandoning any pretense of shaking up the old guard. Nompendulo Mkhatshwa, the former student activist famously photographed leading a #FeesMustFall protest in an ANC head wrap, became the unspoken youth representative among seasoned MPs for the ruling party, later securing a gig as the spokesperson for the Ministry in the Presidency for Women, Youth, and Persons with Disabilities. Naledi Chirwa, Vuyani Pambo, and Peter Keetse brought their zeal to the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff), an opposition party comprising political stuntmen whose leader, Julius Malema, created the party in his juvenile firebrand image. Even more recent political parties like rise Mzansi and former president Jacob Zuma���s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party have added Fallists like Irfaan Mangera and the controversial Bonginkosi Khanyile to their mix.

There is some irony to this. At the height of Fallism, a common epithet among campus freedom fighters was to call Nelson Mandela a ���sellout.��� They preferred to audit the revolutionary credentials of dead historical figures than the leaders whose parties they were card-carrying members of. But that same sellout, together with Oliver Tambo, Anton Lambede, Ashby Mda, and Walter Sisulu, managed to create the anc Youth League as a direct challenge to the tame leadership of the anc. The Fallists, by contrast, seemed to treat the fulfillment of their own ambitions as a major win for the movement.

A cynical reading of this development would suggest that this group was happy to leverage the trauma of comrades who had been beaten, imprisoned, and tear-gassed off of campus for personal career advancement. But that would presume the Fallist generation was uniquely calculating when it came to their professional futures. In reality, the career-plotting Fallists were behaving in accordance with the value system upheld by the prestigious universities with which they were at loggerheads. Instead of exceptionalizing the resume-building mores of the Fallists, we might concede that the university doesn���t lend itself to the work necessary for radical action. As long as it remains a site of elite formation, it will continue to churn out careeristic graduates regardless of their politics.

Similarly, Fallism became a springboard for identity and media profiteering within the cultural sphere. This trend mirrored the rise of digital social movements in the 2010s, particularly in the U.S. with the rise of figures like DeRay McKesson and Ibram X Kendi, who positioned themselves as the faces and voices of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2014 and 2020, respectively. As people increasingly turned to social media to understand the dynamics of social movements, a number of individuals���some of whom weren���t proximate to any Fallist protests���used these platforms to cultivate social capital as revolutionary intellectuals. These ���thinkfluencers,��� as Tsogo Kupa described them in a 2020 review of the film The People vs The People, became emblematic of the liberal identitarian tendencies of Fallism.

According to Kupa, thinkfluencers were predominantly upwardly mobile black South Africans who ���viewed public activism as primarily operating through public speeches, lectures, panel discussions, and books or editorials as tools for liberating the imagination of the country.��� One of the more famous examples is Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, whose rise as a thought leader at the height of Fallism embodied the shift to media-savvy intellectualism. Having been part of the #RhodesMustFall collective during his time at the University of Oxford, Mpofu-Walsh leveraged the anti-apartheid credentials of his father, Dali Mpofu, to position himself as an eloquent intermediary between two generations of South Africans. This nepotistic credibility, combined with an easy-going charm, enabled Mpofu-Walsh to pivot to different careers within media���the latest of which is a current affairs podcast called the Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh Xperience (SMWX).

Usually, popular movements inspire novels, poems, albums, films, and plays that capture the spirit of the times. However, Fallist thinkfluencers repackaged the existential angst and disillusionment of the post-apartheid generation, turning the Born Free generational marker into a niche commodity. All in all, Fallist thinkfluencers seemed more adept at speaking on a subject immune to criticism: their lived experience. Today, Fallism lingers more as a cultural reference than a political force���a symbol of a moment whose energy has largely dissipated.

As a new generation of Matric students prepare for their final exams, higher education remains out of reach for the majority of South Africans. Despite its shortcomings, the Fallist movement prompted South Africa to reflect, albeit momentarily, on the role of higher education in the democratic era. It revealed the cracks within an already faulty system, calling on the government to intervene on behalf of the generation whose liberation it secured.

If Fallism should be understood not as a rejection of the 1994 settlement, but as its final appeal, then it was a last effort to claim the inclusion that had long been deferred. It demanded that the anc deliver on its commitments to redress, access, and dignity, and when the state fell short, it launched a confrontation still shaped by the belief that those goals remained within reach. Far from transcending the university as a ladder to inclusion, Fallism remained animated by its logic. Its rage came not from disillusionment with the university���s promise, but from the conviction that the promise had been broken. But, today that belief is faltering. Graduate unemployment is at record highs. Dropout rates remain high, and graduation rates remain low. The university is losing its material utility while its symbolic prestige lives on borrowed time. Capitalism, too, no longer disguises its exclusions with the language of merit or mobility. The political question now is no longer how to transform the university���but what to imagine when the university no longer matters.

Wahbie Long has argued that South Africa���s future doesn���t belong to the middle class���black or white���but to the structurally excluded, for whom the promise of access was never more than a fantasy. If that���s right, then the next political rupture won���t start in a seminar room, nor will it arrive hashtagged. It will begin at the edges���beyond the university, beyond the dream of Rainbowism���with demands that haven���t yet been named.

Where Things Went Left, Where Things Went South

After neoliberalism, how two continents diverged. (Wikimedia Commons) Caracazo Protests, Venezuela

These massive protests against economic austerity measures, triggered by a rise in public transport fares in 1989, are often seen as the first major episode of anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America. Years of economic mismanagement, including reliance on oil revenues and failure to diversify the economy, left Venezuela vulnerable to external shocks. The decline in oil prices in the 1980s and the implementation of austerity policies further strained the economy. High inflation rates eroded purchasing power, making it increasingly difficult for ordinary Venezuelans to afford basic necessities. as the cost of living surged.

Anti-SAPs Protests, Africa

While protests against IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs emerged in the mid-1980s, they seemed to reach a crescendo with a so-called ���spring��� of Anti-Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) protests erupting across Africa in 1989 and the early 1990s. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank mandated austerity policies that cut public spending, reduced subsidies, and led to higher unemployment. In Nigeria, Zambia, Benin Republic, Kenya, C��te d���Ivoire, and elsewhere student activists, labor unions, and community organizations mobilized en masse, demanding an end to these detrimental policies and advocating for a restoration of public subsidies and economic reforms that prioritized social welfare and local development.

Zapatista Uprising, Mexico

In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) launched an armed uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and neoliberal policies. The Zapatistas foregrounded indigenous rights, advocating for autonomy, land reform, and cultural recognition, which resonated with marginalized communities across Latin America. The uprising galvanized a broader movement, inspiring various grassroots and ���autonomous��� organizations movements throughout the region to mobilize against neoliberalism.

The ANC���s GEAR Strategy, South Africa

In 1996, South Africa���s African National Congress (ANC) introduced the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy to enhance South Africa���s integration into the global economy. Leonard Gentle, the director of the Inter-national Labour and Research Information group, remarked that: GEAR marked a crucial turning point in South Africa���s economic policy after apartheid, marking a transition from a form of ���Keynesian racial capitalism, in which the state secured the conditions necessary for accumulation for the capitalist class as a whole based on cheap black labour power, cheap energy, and regulated capitals, to a neoliberal state attempting to open up new arenas for commodification.���

Hugo Ch��vez���s Election, Venezuela

Hugo Ch��vez wins the presidency, promoting a revolutionary agenda and Bolivarian socialism. Ch��vez focused on social justice, anti-imperialism, and the redistribution of wealth. While Ch��vez���s policies faced criticism and were riven with contradictions���especially in relation to their ultimately doomed dependence on high oil prices���his legacy influenced subsequent leaders in countries like Bolivia (Evo Morales), Ecuador (Rafael Correa), and Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega), who adopted similar leftist agendas.

���Choice-less��� Electoral Democracy, Nigeria

The return to electoral democracy in 1999 and the administrations of Obasanjo, Yar���adua, and Jonathan (1999���2015) witnessed a revival of the neoliberal economic reform agenda punctuated only by a short-lived slowing down of privatization under Yar���adua. This period also saw a moderate improvement in the civic space, and fifteen years (1999���2014) of steady, if (highly exclusionary) GDP growth, brought about by the same global commodity boom which benefited Latin America���s initial pink tide states. As a rough metric, Nigeria���s GDP per capita witnessed a fivefold increase from $500 in 1999 to $2,500 in 2013.

Economic Crisis, Argentina

Protests against the government���s policies during the economic crisis included mass demonstrations and the infamous ���cacerolazo��� (pot-banging). The government implemented a fixed exchange rate policy, pegging the Argentine peso to the U.S. dollar. This policy initially stabilized the economy but ultimately led to overvaluation and loss of competitiveness. A banking crisis ensued as people rushed to withdraw their savings. In the aftermath of the crisis, N��stor Kirchner was elected president in 2003, representing a shift towards leftist governance. His administration implemented policies focused on social welfare, human rights, and economic recovery.

Lula da Silva���s election, Brazil

In 2002, Luiz In��cio ���Lula��� da Silva, a former metalworker and trade union leader, was elected president of Brazil on the ticket of the Workers��� Party (PT). While Lula initially moderated some of his economic proposals to reassure financial markets, his administration expanded social welfare programs like Bolsa Fam��lia, increased the minimum wage, and strengthened public health and education systems. Lula���s rise to power was rooted in decades of organizing by Brazil���s trade unions and social movements, including the Landless Workers��� Movement (MST), which had built autonomous systems of political education and alternative economic practice based on ���extra-legal��� occupations of unproductive rural lands.

The Economist���s ���Africa Rising��� Cover, Africa

The ���Africa rising��� narrative emerged in the early 2000s as a response to the continent���s largely positive GDP growth trajectory. It was inspired by several countries, notably Ethiopia, which experienced rapid economic growth through state-led initiatives; Rwanda, which showcased impressive recovery and development post-genocide; and Ghana, which benefitted from political stability and increased foreign investment. This narrative was popularized by various media outlets, including a landmark cover story in The Economist in 2011. The narrative tended to downplay spiraling poverty and inequality, instead celebrating the liberalization of African economies, the lifting of trade barriers and a moderate rise in foreign investment.

Struggle and archive

The formerly exiled ANC activist and later judge Albie Sachs is archiving his life, including a new film that forms part of a larger project of legacy-making.
Albie Sachs and Koyo Kouoh, in a still from Albie: A Strange Alchemy.

It is generally understood that, over the post-war 20th century, the leading figures in South Africa���s liberation struggle were Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and Winnie Mandela. Surrounding this core group was a broader network of activists who sustained the African National Congress (ANC)���s extensive exile operations. Within this broader circle was a small number of white South Africans who openly aligned themselves with the struggle against apartheid���including its armed resistance���and who submitted to Black leadership and lived elsewhere on the continent. Among them were Ruth First, Slovo���s wife, and Albie Sachs, a lawyer and writer.

Though Sachs had long been publicly associated with the ANC���fronting several of its media campaigns in the UK during the late 1960s and 1970s���he rose to greater prominence in 1988 when he was severely injured in a car bombing in Mozambique. At the time, he was working as a law professor in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, when the apartheid regime sent state terrorists to assassinate Indres Naidoo, an ANC representative based in the city. The operatives planted a bomb in Naidoo���s car, unaware that Sachs had borrowed it that day. Sachs survived the explosion, but lost an arm and the sight in one eye.

Rather than intimidating him, the attack only deepened Sachs���s commitment to the liberation movement. In the years that followed, he became more involved in ANC work. After the unbanning of the ANC and Nelson Mandela���s release from prison, Sachs returned to South Africa. Following the historic 1994 elections that brought the ANC to power, he was appointed a judge on the country���s new Constitutional Court. Now 90 and living in retirement in Cape Town, Sachs has spent recent years reflecting on his life.

Part of this reflection involves legacy making and archiving.

Sachs is no stranger to self-archiving. He has written numerous books: The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Stephanie on Trial, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, and The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. He was also the subject of at least one other documentary film in 2014. That, along with archival footage, including BBC dramatizations of his writings, used in the documentary film Albie: A Strange Alchemy, suggests a man who has long worked to shape his legacy.

The result is a series of media outcomes under the broad title, ���The Albie Collection,��� which Sachs conceived with his wife, architect Vanessa September. Specifically, the ���collection��� consists of an online archive, an exhibition at the Zeitz MOCAA Museum in Cape Town titled ���Spring is Rebellious: Resistance, Liberation, and Humanist Transformation in the Art and Life of Albie Sachs��� (on from July 24, 2025 to May 31, 2026), and�� Albie: A Strange Alchemy, which premieres this month at the Encounters Documentary Film Festival in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The film, which mainly concerns us here, is worth unpacking. It resists a linear approach and unfolds not as a straight chronology but as a series of collisions, exiles, and transformations. It presents a collage of vignettes, comprising fragments of memory, intimate interviews, archival footage, and moments of personal and political reflection.

We see Sachs reflect on his political activism���his arrests, solitary confinement, and the 1988 car bombing. But more than these grand narratives of heroism, Albie: A Strange Alchemy is focused on his inner life: his relationships, his reckonings, his doubts, and his affections.

For that approach, we should thank editor Khalid Shamis and director Sara de Gouveia.

Albie Sachs and Dumile Feni were in London in the late 1960s. The film features a segment about their friendship.

Sachs��� beginnings are both particular and emblematic. As the ���Albie Collection��� details, Sachs is the grandson of Lithuanian Jewish refugees who fled antisemitism for South Africa. His father, Solly Sachs, was a key figure in the emergence of modern trade unionism in the country. Although he grew up in privileged, white Cape Town���on the Atlantic Seaboard and attending local elite schools���his upbringing was politically infused.

From a young age, Albie���s sense of racial equality was not abstract���it was embedded in the fabric of his everyday life. His mother, Ray, worked as a typist for Moses Kotane, the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, and, like his father, welcomed black African political figures into their home with deep respect and warmth. ���We���d be told to tidy up because Uncle Moses was coming,��� Sachs recalls, ���and it wasn���t Moses Cohen or Moses Kantor. It was Moses Kotane.���

He was named after Albert Nzula, a Black communist and trade unionist who died before Albie���s birth. After his parents divorced, Sachs��� mother briefly moved with him and his brother into the home of Cissie Gool, daughter of the early coloured leader Abdullah Abdurahman, who founded the African Political Organization, which predates the African National Congress by a few years. This chapter of his experience stands out as an exception to the broader pattern of separation between whites and Blacks under apartheid and, to a depressing extent, still these days.

One of Sachs��� earliest adult memories is being arrested. ���Some people remember their first kiss. I remember the first time I went to jail.��� After multiple arrests, police harassment, and periods of detention, including solitary confinement, in the late 1960s, he fled South Africa with fellow activist Stephanie Kemp, whom he had been defending in court against charges of sabotage for bombing electric pylons.

The pair settled in London, married, and raised their sons, Alan and Michael, while sustaining his involvement in the exiled anti-apartheid movement, including the sports boycott. After a while, the marriage broke down, and Sachs, leaving his family in the UK, relocated to Maputo in the late 1970s to take up a post as a law professor in Mozambique, which had just won its independence. It was there that Sachs immersed himself not only in ANC organizational work (then overseen by Jacob Zuma), but also in the Mozambican arts and intellectual scene. He became a patron of artists, such as the renowned Mozambican artist Malangatana, and cultivated a distinct Southern African sensibility.

The Mozambican years are a chapter of his life often overshadowed by the 1988 bombing, but the film���s vivid portrayal of this period, including his relationship with artists and his role in helping to organize a memorable concert featuring Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima Benjamin, is where the film truly shines.

In Mozambique, Sachs appears to expand his politics of non-racialism (which many white leftists profess but do not practice), absorb new influences, and deepen his conviction in the power of art and storytelling. As he would say later about marrying his two passions, the law and the arts: ���Judges are the great storytellers of our age.���

One sequence captures this best. In 1982, Ibrahim and Benjamin, then living in New York, traveled to Maputo to perform a concert celebrating Mozambican independence. They arrived a few days after a letter bomb sent by South African state terrorists had killed Ruth First. She was a journalist, researcher, and a leading member of the ANC. First, who was white and Jewish, was also close to Tambo.

Speakers at a memorial for Ruth First at Eduardo Mondlane University in August 1980. Seated are Albie Sachs, Jacob Zuma, unidentified speaker, Moses Mabhida, unidentified speaker, university president Fernando Ganhao, Joe Slovo, and two other unidentified speakers.

The film captures the energy, sadness, and defiant mood of the concert, but also adds some personal details. Before the concert, the Mozambican artist Jo��o Craveirinha designed a striking concert poster featuring different depictions of Ibrahim, accompanied by a piano and a rifle. The way Sachs tells it, Ibrahim reportedly declined to keep the image, citing religious prohibitions on likenesses, which is how Sachs came to acquire the artwork, which is still in his possession.

Ibrahim opened the concert by honoring First and reading two poems: ���Fighting Back��� by Bridget O���Laughlin, who had survived the attack on First, and ���The Boers Are Not Our Teachers.��� Shamis edits some of the poetry and the music into the film from a recording of the concert. It is here where you feel the sense that resistance was not just political; it was sonic, poetic, and collective. By the way, it led me to search for the original recording, which is online. It is an extraordinary historical document: one hour or so of Ibrahim���s playing���including his songs ���Tula Dubula��� and ���Hit and Run,��� which, unusually for Ibrahim, have lyrics and openly call for armed struggle���and at least two songs sung by Sathima, who was an incredible vocalist. Her first song was addressed directly to members of the ANC and Frelimo, the governing party in Mozambique, as well as the ANC���s hosts, and the second, her signature song, the mournful, longing ���Africa.���

The film also devotes considerable time to Sachs���s life after the end of apartheid. Following the unbanning of the ANC and the return of exiles, Sachs met Vanessa and later resigned from the ANC to become a judge on South Africa���s new Constitutional Court. De Gouveia and Shamis include scenes depicting some of the legal debates from cases heard by Sachs and his colleagues. This is helpful as it shows the extent of Sachs���s contribution to institutionalizing the post-apartheid legal order. The film also highlights Sachs���s role in curating the Court���s art collection, which contributes to the institution���s uniquely welcoming ethos, setting it apart from similar institutions around the world.

Albie: A Strange Alchemy could easily have been pure hagiography (it is executive produced by Albie and Vanessa), and at times it has that feeling, but the film includes some candid conversations between Sachs and his sons: Alan, who visited him post-bombing in Maputo in 1988 and later became an artist; Michael, an economist who worked in the post-apartheid government and who offers the film���s only critical voice about compromises of that era; and Oliver, his youngest, whom he had with Vanessa, in 2006, when Albie was 71 years old. These scenes feel like a kind of living testament���unresolved, tender, and searching.

Vanessa September, Albie Sachs, and their dog on Clifton Beach in Cape Town.

Some of those close to him but who have passed also get a chance to speak, if only momentarily. Kemp passed away in 2023, and we only hear her briefly, via a recording, reflecting on their time in London. Their relationship left a lasting impression on Sachs. Similarly, Koyo Kouoh, the chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA, who was close to Albie and Vanessa and who passed away this year, also appears in the film. In what is likely one of the last images of Kouoh on camera, we see her alongside Sachs, collaborating on the planning of ���Spring is Rebellious.��� Originally from Cameroon and raised in Switzerland, Kouoh offers one of the film���s most profound reflections on what the next stage of South Africa���s nation-building project should embody: a country that, at its best, is welcoming, whose identity is continually evolving, and that belongs to all who live in it, regardless of where they come from.

���People who are filled with love and generosity meet,��� she says. ���And when they meet, they form a connection. I think that it���s spiritual somewhere, you know. Those people find each other wherever they move around in the sphere.���

The film also suggests that the bombing that maimed Sachs was not just a tragedy but also an inflection point. After the end of apartheid, one of the white South African state terrorists responsible for planning it, Henri van der Westhuizen, requested to meet Sachs. ���When he saw my [maimed] arm, it shook him,��� Sachs recounts. They spoke, but Sachs refused to shake his hand, instead urging him to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Years later, they met again at a party. Van der Westhuizen told him he had confessed. ���Only your eyes can tell me it���s true,��� Sachs said. This time, they shook hands. ���It���s not forgiveness. It���s transcendence,��� Sachs reflects. ���The triumph of values. That���s been my journey. It still is.��� Sachs refers to this approach as ���soft vengeance.���

For Sachs, soft vengeance amounts to a form of justice achieved through the practice of democracy, equality, and the rule of law; essentially rejecting retaliation in favor of fulfilling the ideals denied by past violence.

One senses that Sachs can afford to be forgiving and that he realizes it���he won the post-apartheid ending so many others were denied. He married Vanessa, who is from Cape Town���s townships. He was blessed with another child. He became a judge. He lives in Clifton, a sought-after part of the Cape Town coast. His life and art are being celebrated in the country���s most dynamic museum. This has not been the case for many others.

As someone who believes Sachs��� generation of freedom fighters deserves their due, there is no resentment in these observations���only reflection. The South African project remains unfinished. Stories like Sachs���s not only testify to the hard-won gains of the past but also confront us with the urgent, unfinished work still ahead to achieve justice, dignity, and equality for all.

A barren sowing

Donato Ndongo���s latest collection of short stories portrays African exile and diaspora in Spain and France. Photo by Mario Soriano on Unsplash

Donato Ndongo is the most prominent literary voice from Equatorial Guinea. Born in Niefang in 1950, he has spent almost his entire adult life exiled in Spain. His first novel, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Shadows of Your Black Memory [1987]), has become essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Spanish colonialism in the country. His second novel, Los poderes de la tempestad (The Powers of the Tempest [1997]), examines the effects of Francisco Mac��as���s dictatorial regime (1968���1979), the first government after independence, on Equatorial Guinea. His third and fourth novels, El metro (The Metro [2007]) and ��Qu�� mat�� al joven Abdoulaye Ciss��? (What Killed Young Abdoulaye Ciss��? [2023]), focus on African migration towards Spain.

��Qu�� mat�� al joven Abdoulaye Ciss��? was initially conceived as a short story to be included in the book La siembra est��ril (A Barren Sowing [2025]). In the end, Ndongo published it as a standalone novel, leaving La siembra est��ril as a collection of four stories: ���Mikue,��� ���Premonici��n��� (���Premonition���), ���La siembra est��ril��� (���A Barren Sowing���) and ���Regreso a Mengong��� (���Return to Mengong���). The final piece, which engages with both the diaspora and the return to Africa, resonates with the themes present in Ndongo���s two most recent novels. ���Premonici��n��� and ���La siembra est��ril,��� which focus on the Equatorial Guinean generation exiled in Spain in the 1970s, are in dialogue with his Mac��as novel. ���Mikue��� reflects its author���s interest in women as a literary subject.

At just about 370 words, ���Mikue��� is more of a micro-story than a short story. Written in lyrical prose, it features a woman turning fifty. Long gone are the innocence and dreams of her youth. She has endured the challenges of life���orphaned at an early age, several of her own children die���alongside the burdens of patriarchal tradition, which allows men to make the key decisions in women���s lives. As the story opens, the protagonist approaches old age in solitude. In a collection of short stories with such a brief opening piece, one might expect ���Mikue��� to serve as a kind of prologue. If that were the case here, its connection to the rest of the book is subtle, elliptical. And yet, perhaps this woman���s life is the first instance of sowing a barren land evoked by the book���s title.

Set in 1979, ���Premonici��n��� recounts another kind of sowing: that of the Equatorial Guinean exiles in Spain at the end of the Mac��as regime. News arrives that the dictator has been overthrown in a coup, but there is widespread confusion about its consequences. The protagonist, Aurelio Ateb��, is eager to contribute to the changes needed to make Equatorial Guinea a viable country. Still, he doubts whether the new strongman will bring freedom and democracy. The story captures the hopes and uncertainties of a lost Equatorial Guinean generation, caught between the rejection of their homeland���Mac��as��� regime had aggressively persecuted intellectuals���and the racism they faced in Spain during the late Franco and early post-Franco years.

���La siembra est��ril��� returns to the character of Aurelio Ateb�� and introduces his friend Anan��as Esono, another fictional Equatorial Guinean exile in Spain. The character of Esono is one of the book���s highlights. Ndongo offers a rich intellectual portrait (complete with readings and ideological affinities) of a postcolonial African Marxist in the 1970s. The portrayal of this idealist���s disillusionment as he watches socialist regimes such as the USSR, Cuba, China, and North Korea offer support to Mac��as is devastating. The same can be said about the scenes in which he pleads in vain with Cuban and Chinese diplomats, hoping to sway their governments��� positions. The story���s ending���describing the exiled Equatorial Guinean intellectuals who rush to return to serve the new strongman���is both sobering and revealing. For readers interested in the challenges faced by postcolonial African nations, this is the story that offers the most insight.

Ndongo���s Pan-Africanist vision emerges in ���Regreso a Mengong,��� the story that closes the book. After twenty-one years in France, Thibaut returns to Cameroon, eager to reintegrate into his native country and to hear the ancestral stories of his homeland after a long silence. Thibaut flies on a plane but, simultaneously, recalls the reasons he left Cameroon, his two decades in France, his marriage and children, and the interactions and frustrations both in his European life and in Africa. The protagonist is carried away by his memories, inhabiting three or four different temporal and spatial planes while in the air. At 84 pages, ���Regreso a Mengong��� is more of a novella than a short story, with a structure that reflects Ndongo���s storytelling style, reminiscent of Fang oral traditions. Like the mbom nvet (troubadour), Ndongo does not simply recount events in linear order, but conveys the motives, thoughts, and memories of his characters. The result is a multilayered narrative of intricately interwoven planes.

Elat Ayong (“Union of the Tribes”) by Leandro Mbom��o, National Library of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo. Photograph by the author.

None of these stories quite attain the brilliance of Ndongo���s first three novels, which represent the pinnacle of contemporary African literature in the Spanish language. Yet they remain the work of a highly skilled craftsman whose style is as rich and polished as ever. Compared to his novels, La siembra est��ril offers a less subjective and more sociological and political perspective on the postcolonial debacle in Equatorial Guinea and other African countries. That perspective alone makes the book worth reading. Besides, the central metaphor running through La siembra est��ril is highly relevant in the broader Pan-African context today, given the emigration forced upon so many young Africans. At the same time, in the case of Equatorial Guinea, the soil is particularly barren, as the efforts of Ndongo���s fictional exiled intellectuals fail in the aftermath of Mac��as���s fall from power.

One of the intellectuals who returned to the country in 1979 was Leandro Mbom��o (1938���2012), a well-known Equatorial Guinean sculptor. Ndongo dedicates this book to Mbom��o���s memory: ���Sembrador en tierra bald��a, no fue profeta en su tierra��� (���Sower on a waste land, he was not a prophet in his homeland���). Read predominantly abroad, where his oeuvre is garnering growing recognition, Ndongo is even less of a prophet in his homeland than Mbom��o. The sculptor���s masterpiece Elat Ayong (Union of the Tribes) now welcomes visitors to the National Library of Equatorial Guinea, an institution that, tellingly, does not hold a single one of Ndongo���s books.

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans���one from the south, the other from the north���set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land? Photo by Sweder Breet on Unsplash

On a warm April afternoon in 2024, Keith Boyd, 57, strolled through Cairo���s Zamalek district with the South African and Egyptian flags knotted across his shoulders. The late sun cast a dull gold sheen over the Nile as curious onlookers and journalists gathered beneath the iconic Cairo Tower and raised their phones and cameras to capture the moment. Boyd had spent the past 270 days walking more than 10,000 kilometers���starting in Cape Town and crossing South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, most of Ethiopia, Sudan, and finally Egypt.

He was on the verge of completing the fastest Cape-to-Cairo journey on foot. However,�� a 500-kilometer gap in northern Ethiopia, which he skipped due to the ongoing conflict in the Amhara region (Northern Ethiopia), still stood between him and the official world record.

That same afternoon, nearly 4,000 kilometres to the south, Khadija Mansour crunched across the icy ridge near Mount Kilimanjaro���s summit. The 29-year-old Egyptian vlogger laughed into her camera; her breath was visible in the thin wind. Reaching Africa���s highest point marked the midpoint of her hitchhiking journey from Cairo to Cape Town. Both adventurers began their journeys in 2023, each driven by different motivations. Boyd, who grew up under apartheid in South Africa, believes that misunderstanding and discrimination thrive when people are kept apart.

���When I was nine years old, I was told that Black people can���t see colors,��� he recalled. ���And because we were separated���even in schools���I didn���t have Black friends I could ask if that was actually true.��� Now a socioeconomic activist, Boyd argues that such divisions still persist today. Some are physical, like the national borders that cut across the continent. Others are structural���poverty, inequality���that also ���restrict the movement of people.��� ���For me, the Cape-to-Cairo trip was a tangible way to highlight both the shared struggles and the deep connections among African people,��� he said. ���And to tell that story through a book and a documentary.��� Boyd also founded a nonprofit organization, Rainbow Leaders, which aims to tackle poverty in Africa by encouraging youth participation in elections. His Cape-to-Cairo trip, he said, was a way to bring that vision to life. ���If I could take this old body and break a 26-year-old world record for the toughest footrace on the planet,��� he said, ���then surely you can vote.���

For Mansour, the idea for the journey first took root in 2021 during a trip to Ethiopia���her first time traveling further south on the continent. ���A friend was heading to Addis Ababa and asked if I wanted to come along. Luckily, I said yes,��� she recalled. Getting a visa back then was easy. ���Probably because tensions between Cairo and Addis weren���t high at the time,��� she added. They planned to stay for a month, but Mansour ended up extending her trip. ���Once I arrived, I didn���t want to leave. I loved the country, the people, the culture.��� She hitchhiked from Addis to the Ogaden region in the southeast and back. The experience, she said, brought to life the anthropology diploma she had earned just before the COVID-19 pandemic at the Institute of African Research and Studies, Cairo University. ���Ethiopia taught me more than any classroom ever could.��� Back in Cairo, she began thinking about hitchhiking from Cairo to Mount Kilimanjaro. But the more she reflected, the more she felt drawn to something bigger���the full length of the historical Cairo���to���Cape Town route.

A complex legacy

For more than 150 years, the idea of a route connecting Cape Town to Cairo has fascinated imperialists, explorers, Pan-Africanists, and dreamers alike. The first formal proposal came in 1874 from English journalist Edwin Arnold, who imagined a corridor of railways and river transport linking the continent. Much of Africa���s interior was unmapped at the time, and European colonial control had not yet penetrated far beyond the coasts. Arnold also cosponsored the expedition of H. M. Stanley to trace the source of the Nile and chart the Congo River���an effort that would later help lay the groundwork for King Leopold���s brutal colonization of the Congo.

However, the idea only gained real momentum with arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, who played a central role in securing large parts of southern Africa for the British Empire. Rhodes envisioned a railway and telegraph line stretching from Cape Town to Cairo���imperial arteries for what he believed to be the natural domination of the ���superior��� Anglo-Saxon race. In the preface to Ewart Grogan���s book From the Cape to Cairo, which recounts one of the earliest documented overland journeys across the continent, Rhodes laid bare his economic ambitions:

Everyone supposes that the railway is being built with the only object that a human being may be able to get in at Cairo and get out at Cape Town. This is, of course, ridiculous. The object is to cut Africa through the centre, and the railway will pick up trade all along the route.

Though Rhodes managed to push rail lines northward from southern Africa and southward from Egypt, his grand vision of a continuous British-controlled route was never realized. He died of heart failure in 1902, and his body was carried by train to what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he was buried. In the following decade, many European travelers retraced Grogan���s path, assisted by the administrative privileges their colonial status afforded. For Africans, however, movement across these same lands was tightly restricted. The new colonial borders, along with ���native pass laws,��� severely limited the mobility of the indigenous population within their territories.

As independence movements swept the continent in the mid-20th century, African leaders faced a difficult choice. Meeting in Cairo in 1964, the newly formed Organisation of African Unity (OAU) opted to maintain colonial borders to avoid the territorial disputes and conflicts that redrawing them might provoke.

But the dream of a transcontinental Cape to Cairo route didn���t disappear. In the 1970s, the OAU and the UN Economic Commission for Africa revived the Cape-to-Cairo concept, proposing a new highway following the old colonial blueprint, with hopes of connecting Africans, not dividing them. Yet the route remains incomplete. And in a bitter twist, it is often still easier for a European to travel along it than for many Africans.

Africans also do not enjoy the same degree of freedom of movement within their continent. For Khadija Mansour, most of the borders between Cairo and Cape Town were closed without a visa���her route was almost entirely ���red.��� ���I spent weeks just trying to sort out visas,��� she said. ���Researching requirements, booking embassy appointments���it took a lot of time before I could even start.��� There were a few exceptions. Sudan, for instance, didn���t require a visa, but only for Egyptian women, a rare exemption she could use. For Ethiopia, the second country on her route, she could apply for an online visa. Other embassies offered a workaround: ���They told me, if you can show a flight ticket or proof you���ve already begun the trip, they could give a visa valid for a longer period,��� she explained. ���But I was hitchhiking,��� Khadija said. ���I didn���t have flight bookings or a fixed schedule. I couldn���t guarantee when I���d reach each country. So I just started the trip and planned to apply for the rest of the visas on the road.��� Egypt ranks near the bottom of the Africa Visa Openness Index. Most African nationals need a visa to enter the country, and Egyptians face similar restrictions when traveling across the continent.

Keith Boyd���s experience was different. Heading north from Cape Town, he encountered few barriers���at least until Kenya. ���The first stretch was smooth,��� he said. ���Not as easy as moving across Europe, but still, South Africa to Kenya, I didn���t need a single visa in advance.��� This uneven access is rooted in the 1991 Abuja Treaty, which laid the groundwork for Africa���s regional integration. It tasked regional blocs with easing movement within their regions first, leaving cross-regional mobility for later stages. Some, like the Southern African Development Community (SADC), have made considerable progress. South African passport holders like Boyd benefit from relatively open travel across much of Southern Africa.

In contrast, North Africa has lagged. Regional cooperation remains weak, and blocs like the Arab Maghreb Union are largely inactive. For Egyptians like Mansour, moving west across neighboring countries is difficult, while heading south means navigating fragmented and poorly coordinated visa regimes. In 2018, the African Union introduced the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons to bridge these gaps. But with few countries���especially along the Cape-to-Cairo route���willing to ratify it, the protocol remains little more than a promise on paper.

A detour in the route

By January 2023, Mansour had begun her journey, reaching Abu Simbel in southern Egypt by mid-month. She wandered through a magnificent UNESCO World Heritage Site, a rock-hewn temple complex built by Pharaoh Ramesses II in the 13th century BCE. From there, she boarded a ferry across Lake Nasser, the vast artificial lake created after President Gamal Abdel Nasser built the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s to control the Nile���s flow. The same Nile corridor had once carried Ramesses II and earlier pharaohs south into Nubia, for both conquest and trade. Today, Egypt is leading a modern initiative���the VICMED project���to establish a continuous navigation route from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean. Backed by the African Development Bank, the plan envisions seamless river transport along the Nile. But for now, it remains largely ink on paper.

After disembarking from the ferry, Mansour stood by the roadside, hoping to catch a ride for the final stretch to the border crossing at Wadi Halfa. On the Egyptian side, border officers pulled her aside for a brief interrogation. ���When you���re hitchhiking, people have questions,��� she said. ���Why are you crossing by land if you���re just visiting? Why not fly if you���re a tourist?��� They were clearly suspicious��� It became clear that even when your paperwork is in order, crossing borders isn���t easy.��� Because the Egypt���Sudan crossing operates on limited hours, Mansour spent the night at a nearby mosque, waiting for the post to reopen. The next morning���March 6���she was finally allowed to enter Sudan. On the Sudanese side, she faced no issues.

Mansour spent the next month exploring Northern Sudan, tracing the ruins of the ancient Kushite Kingdom���temples, pyramids, and forgotten stone carvings scattered across the desert. By April 13, she finally reached the capital, Khartoum. ���I met up with friends who were also traveling across the continent on different routes,��� she said. ���It was Ramadan, and we were planning how to spend the Eid with our Sudanese friends.��� But on the morning of April 15, her trip and personal safety were thrown into uncertainty. Civil war had erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). ���I was staying with a Sudanese family,��� she recalled. ���I woke up to the sound of the TV blaring. Everyone was watching the news, anxious. It felt like Egypt during the 2011 revolution���everyone glued to the screen, trying to understand what was happening.���

In the days that followed, the situation in Khartoum rapidly deteriorated. Electricity was cut, and internet access became limited. Mansour stayed indoors with her host family, not leaving the house for over a week. ���After about two weeks, I finally ventured out to meet my friends,��� she said. ���What I saw was far worse than what we���d seen on TV���checkpoints, smoke, empty streets. It felt like the city was collapsing.��� Many of her fellow travelers had made up their minds: It was time to evacuate. ���But me and one other friend decided to keep going toward Ethiopia,��� she said. ���I came this far, and I am not ready to give up yet.��� But as she made her way southeast to Wad Madani, following the Blue Nile en route to Ethiopia, Mansour still hadn���t received the Ethiopian visa she had applied for. She knew it would be a gamble.

Before reaching the Gallabat���Metema border crossing between Sudan and Ethiopia, Mansour contacted the Egyptian embassy in Addis Ababa, which issued her a security clearance to help facilitate her entry into Ethiopia. At the Sudanese side of the border, the officers were cooperative, but still cautious. ���One of them told me, ���They won���t let you in without a visa���and if that happens, we probably can���t bring you back here. You���ll be stuck between borders,������ she said. She vividly remembers the scene at the border: ���Large banners from the UN and international migration agencies, and hundreds of Eritreans, Sudanese, and Syrians���who had already fled the war in their country, only to be displaced again by Sudan���s conflict. And then there was me,��� she said, ��� a girl trying to hitchhike across the continent. It was clear that many others had far greater reasons to cross than I did.��� Mansour wasn���t allowed to enter Ethiopia. She was stuck at the border post for nearly ten days, waiting in limbo. It wasn���t until late May that coordination between the Egyptian embassy in Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian government finally cleared her passage. Once inside, she resumed her journey. Over the next two months, she hitchhiked across Ethiopia, eventually climbing Ras Dashen, the highest peak in the country.

While Mansour pushed deeper into East Africa, Keith Boyd was preparing to begin his own journey. His original plan was to travel southbound���from Cairo to Cape Town���but the war in Sudan forced a change. Instead, he decided to start at home, in South Africa, and head north. ���In addition to contacting embassies, we had to pack all the necessary equipment for the trip��� camping gear, fridges for medicines, security clearances for the support vehicles, and emergency lights visible from afar,��� he said.

The start of the journey was smooth. Boyd covered around 50 kilometers on foot each day, steadily moving north. After two months, he paused to leap off the Victoria Falls Bridge, which straddles the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. The bridge is a relic of Rhodes��� Cape-to-Cairo railway scheme. Rhodes, who never actually visited the Falls, is said to have instructed engineers to ���build the bridge across the Zambezi where the trains, as they pass, will catch the spray of the Falls.���

���We only spent three to four hours at each border crossing���up until Ethiopia,��� Boyd said. ���Most of that time was just for vehicle checks.��� As an entrepreneur, Boyd knows firsthand that moving goods and vehicles across African borders is often much harder than moving people. ���A few years ago, we had a fleet of vehicles in Zambia and we needed to move them across the border into Lubumbashi in the DRC,��� he said. ���But they wouldn���t let the vehicles through without providing any reasons.��� Harmonizing customs regulations and border procedures to ease the movement of goods and vehicles is one of the core objectives of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)���a flagship initiative of the African Union.

The AfCFTA, which entered into force in 2019, is one of the largest free-trade areas in the world by number of participating countries. It aims to boost intra-African trade by reducing tariffs and non-tariff barriers. All countries along the Cape-to-Cairo corridor have ratified the agreement, except for Sudan.�� In contrast, ratification of the Free Movement of Persons (FMP) Protocol has been sluggish���almost none of the countries along the Cape-to-Cairo route have ratified it. Experts argue that without free movement, the AfCFTA���s full potential can���t be realized. The protocol is crucial for creating a continent-wide labor market and addressing persistent skill mismatches across regions. Maureen Achieng, the permanent representative of IGAD to the African Union, says the AfCFTA and the Free Movement Protocol are ���two wheels of the same vehicle. If one of those wheels doesn���t move properly, the vehicle won���t run smoothly.���

At the Kenya���Ethiopia border, Boyd hit a major snag���his support vehicles weren���t allowed to cross. ���For a vehicle to move across borders, it needs a kind of passport called a carnet de passage,��� he explained. ���In the six countries we���d passed so far, our carnet was accepted���except in Ethiopia.��� Ethiopian authorities offered him two options: either lodge a $20,000 deposit for the two vehicles or hire a local company to guarantee that the vehicles would leave the country on time. ���We went with the second option,��� Boyd said. ���But it was so expensive that we eventually decided to complete the rest of the trip with one vehicle.���

Finalizing the paperwork to bring the support vehicles into Ethiopia was taking too long, so Boyd decided to keep running, hoping the vehicles would catch up in a few days.

���It was really inconvenient,��� he said. ���Most of what I needed���my running shoes, protein, basic food, medical supplies���was in those vehicles. I had to pack everything I could into one large bag and just keep going.��� He added, ���Once you cross the equator, it feels like hitting an invisible line. You���re still in Africa, but it becomes far more challenging and restrictive.���

Meanwhile, on Mansour���s side, things were finally starting to ease. Worried her Ethiopian visa would expire before reaching Kenya, she applied for a Djibouti visa instead. ���And magically, I got it in one day,��� she said. Mansour took a train across the border into Djibouti, then applied for a Somaliland visa from there���which she also received quickly. But things got complicated again for Mansour when she tried to rejoin her route toward Kenya by crossing into Somalia. ���We were detained for two weeks after entering Somalia,��� she said. ���Authorities were investigating and verifying our identities.��� Eventually, Mansour was released���but her plans were disrupted once more. She wasn���t allowed to continue overland into Kenya. ���They told me, ���We can���t guarantee your safety.��� So for the first time on my trip, I had to take a plane.��� In Kenya, she headed northeast of Nairobi to climb Mount Kenya���the second-highest peak on the continent.

Meanwhile, Boyd���s support vehicle finally caught up with him a week later. But the relief was short-lived. After crossing the Blue Nile Bridge into Ethiopia���s Amhara region, Boyd was kidnapped and robbed. He managed to escape and contact the South African embassy in Addis Ababa, which then coordinated with the federal government to dispatch a military escort for the final 600-kilometer stretch to the Sudanese border. ���But after just 100 kilometers, the colonel leading the escort told us it was too dangerous to continue,��� Boyd said. ���By that point, our Sudanese visas were close to expiring, so we decided to fly near the border, finish the Sudan and Egypt segments of the trip, and then return later to complete the final 500-kilometer stretch.���

Security concerns remain a major reason many African countries hesitate to ratify the Free Movement Protocol. Today, the continent is home to more than 100 border disputes and at least 58 potential secessionist regions across 29 countries. Still, the protocol accounts for such concerns, allowing member states to maintain their own national regulations and border procedures. To further address these issues, the African Union is working with Interpol to develop an ICT-based movement-control system and information-sharing interface. Additionally, the AU has established AFRIPOL���a continental police-coordination body launched in 2015 to strengthen cooperation between law enforcement agencies.

Crossing the Sahara

Boyd crossed into Sudan without issues and kept moving eastward to avoid the main conflict zones. ���The war in Sudan is more conventional���there���s a clear red zone and blue zone. As long as you stay in one and avoid the front lines, you���re probably okay,��� he said. To steer clear of clashes near Khartoum, he zigzagged across the country, eventually reaching the Argeen border crossing with Egypt. ���The temperature in the Nubian Desert hit 48��C. I had to drink about 1.5 liters of water every hour to avoid heatstroke.���

While the Sudanese side let him through without incident, the Egyptian authorities were more skeptical ���They couldn���t understand why someone would enter the country on foot. We were held from 9 p.m. until morning, with officers waking us up throughout the night for more questions,��� Boyd said. ���By sunrise, they finally let us in.��� From there, he followed the Nile northward, reaching Cairo in mid-April 2024. In Cairo, Boyd began preparing to return to Ethiopia to complete the final 500-kilometer stretch of his journey, which was crucial for securing the Guinness World Record for the fastest Cape-to-Cairo trek on foot. ���We did everything we could���contacted embassies, the Ethiopian government, even the African Union���asking for safe passage,��� he said. After nearly a month of coordination and waiting, Boyd returned to Ethiopia. With the help of locals, whom he described as ���heroes,��� he managed to cover the last stretch. ���Without them, it wouldn���t have been possible,��� he added. In late July 2024, the Guinness World Records officially confirmed that Boyd had set the fastest time for walking from Cape Town to Cairo, beating the previous record by 17 days.

Meanwhile, Mansour took another detour, crossing into Uganda to climb Mount Stanley���the third-highest peak in Africa. Boyd is now working on a book and documentary chronicling his journey, likely to be the first by an African traveler along this historic route. ���I don���t have one fixed idea of borders,��� Boyd said. ���They can divide, but they can also unite. What matters is making sure they do the latter.��� He adds that he���s no idealist: ���A borderless Africa is a big dream���and it���ll take many building blocks. But if young people keep laying them down, we���ll get there.���

A recent survey across 36�� African countries showed that most people support freedom of movement. And there are signs of progress: Countries like Rwanda, Ghana, Benin, the Gambia, and Seychelles have lifted visa requirements for all African passport holders. ���I���ve met so many fearless African travelers along the way,��� Mansour said. ���For me, a truly borderless Africa would open the door to more stories, deeper connections, and endless roads to hitch and peaks to climb.���

This article was created as part of the Move Africa project, commissioned by the African Union Commission and supported by Africa No Filter (ANF) with funding from the Deutsche Gesellschaft f��r Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIZ, the African Union, or ANF.

De-dollarization from below?

As global powers debate alternatives to the dollar, Nigerian traders, Chinese exporters, and everyday crypto users are already reshaping the rules of currency exchange, as the hosts of the Nigerian Scam find out in the latest episode of the AIAC podcast. Public domain image credit Stuart Price for AU/UN IST photo on Flickr.

Discussions about ongoing attempts to move beyond the US dollar as the hegemonic currency of world trade often focus on the official policies of nation-states. Frequently referenced in such debates, for instance, are attempts by central banks to issue digital currencies, the recently mooted BRICS currency, and various measures taken by countries in the Global South to hold larger shares of their foreign reserves in currencies other than the dollar.

But what is often missing from these conversations are the perspectives and practical considerations of citizens who interact with multiple currencies by necessity or by choice���whether through trade, remittances, or other forms of cross-border exchange. To what extent is de-dollarization already a practical outcome of increasing Africa-China trade? Are Igbo importers of Chinese-made goods at the vanguard of a multi-currency fluency which nation-states will ultimately have to adopt?

The Nigerian Scam explores these issues on the most recent Africa Is a Country podcast through a conversation with Dr. Jing Jing Liu, focused on her recently published study ���Decentering the Dollar in Africa���China Trade: How Nigerian Entrepreneurs Navigate Currency Swaps and Digital Currencies in an Era of USD Hegemony and RMB Internationalization.���

Listen to the show, read Jing Jing���s recent paper, and subscribe on your favorite platform.

https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/a53b2146-f527-4c79-8a59-4e90120cf1d0.mp3 Emeka Ugwu

Good afternoon, or good evening, or good morning to you, the listeners, wherever you���re listening from���whichever applies. In today���s episode, we���ll be talking to a friend of the show, someone who really is interested in the African���China trade���or maybe I should even say the Nigerian���China trade, more specifically.

Today���s guest is an academic. But maybe I shouldn���t say that she is an academic. She is���it���s just that she does her work in such fun ways while discussing very serious issues. This person is known to us as Dr. Jing Jing Liu, whose research examines African���China engagement through the lives of everyday Nigerian and Chinese traders���mainly in China, but sometimes in Nigeria. She recently published a very fun paper that we hope to engage with over the course of this episode.

In my usual manner, I���ll leave her to introduce herself properly, because I don���t think I can do a better job than she can. So yes, Jing Jing, would you do us the honors?

Jing Jing Liu

Sure. Thank you for having me on the show. I always enjoy listening to it, and it���s been really wonderful to engage with the group and with the podcast in numerous ways.

I think that was a wonderful introduction. Not much more needs to be said, other than my name. I���m an academic���an assistant professor of anthropology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. My research originally focused on African traders, specifically Nigerian traders exporting goods from the city of Yiwu in China. That was for my PhD.

More recently, my research has shifted to Nigerian and Chinese traders in Lagos, Nigeria. As research often goes, I���ve become increasingly interested in money���perhaps more than the material commodities. But of course, money is a commodity too. I���m now more interested in the money side of things: how payments are made in RMB, in dollars, in cryptocurrency.

Emeka Ugwu

Thank you for that brief introduction, which doesn���t quite do justice to the enormity of the work you do in the African���China trade space. But to set the ball rolling���I don���t think money is something we���ve really discussed on the podcast, so this is refreshing in quite a number of ways. One reason I find this so interesting is that I���m curious. I���ll be speaking for most of our listeners���or some at least���when I ask, on their behalf: How did you get into this area of research? What was the underlying import, or what is the underlying impulse, behind your research?

Specifically, what did you find intriguing about Nigerian traders as they navigate policies like currency swaps and digital currency?

Jing Jing Liu

Yeah, that���s a great question. I always appreciate questions that ask how I got interested in this. I���d say there are two formative moments. The first was when I was in Yiwu, China, accompanying Nigerian traders���mostly Igbo traders���in the markets. Sometimes I acted as a translator, sometimes just as a companion or researcher. They would frequently talk about exchange rates: naira to USD, naira to RMB, RMB to USD. And they���d say these numbers so quickly, in this dizzying fashion���I could never keep up. It was such an astounding experience.

All the traders I talked to were like this. I���d go home and try to write down the numbers they told me, and I couldn���t make sense of them. It seemed to be a kind of mental habit among the traders I was working with. Eventually, I began to understand more: what the exchange rate was, why it was important. This was in the summer of 2016, when the exchange rate had just changed dramatically���it had doubled from about 150 to over 300. So it was a moment of major upheaval, and that���s why there was such a panic. Exchange rates were suddenly everywhere in the conversation.

I watched people bring wads of US dollars to individuals parked outside hotels, exchanging them for RMB so they could go to the market and pay for goods. It struck me how complicated this process was���more difficult than it needed to be. As I learned more and engaged more deeply, I realized that people were trying to facilitate direct currency exchange. There were intermediaries and agents in both Nigeria and China who held both naira and RMB accounts. They were doing trade���export���but also acting as currency brokers.

That was my first real encounter with the importance of money���not just money itself, but currency���and I realized this was something that wasn���t often discussed in the Africa���China literature. Those discussions are usually very high level. No one talks about currency pairings. For Nigerians, the trade often works through the US dollar. If you���re coming from a francophone country, you���re working through the euro, and so on. I found that compelling.

The second moment���one I talk about in my paper���s introduction���was more recent, in June 2023. It brought everything full circle. I was in Lagos, doing fieldwork, and like any academic, I���d proposed a budget. My university or a funding body had given me a set amount of money, and I thought it would carry me through the research period.

Then I got to Lagos. It was a new government. They���d just announced the removal of long-standing fuel subsidies and were going to unify the exchange rates. Suddenly, chaos. Hiring a driver, taking a taxi���everything doubled in price overnight. The money I brought wasn���t enough. I was stuck. I didn���t have a Nigerian bank account, and I was trying to figure out how to move money from my Canadian account to someone in Nigeria.

I reached out to a friend, a trader I���d met in China, whom I was staying with. I asked if I could transfer US dollars or Canadian dollars into his account. I assumed he must have a US domiciliary account���a DOM account. He laughed and said, ���Why would I have that? I haven���t had a DOM account in eight years. I closed it when Buhari became president.��� That shocked me. This is someone who runs a big shop at Trade Fair���he���s a major player. And yet he doesn���t transact in US dollars? That moment sent me down a path���trying to understand how people actually manage trade and money exchange without relying on the US dollar. That���s what led to my thinking around de-dollarization.

De-dollarization includes, of course, government efforts���things like currency swaps, or the digital currencies issued by Nigeria and China. But it also includes the everyday transactions. I wanted to show that it���s not just a binary: dollar versus renminbi, or US hegemony versus RMB internationalization. What I see developing among Nigerians is a kind of multicurrency fluency. And if you live in Nigeria, you kind of have to adopt this fluency. You deal with dollars, you deal with RMB, you deal with cryptocurrency���because you have to. It���s not a political statement, like, ���I won���t use the dollar anymore.��� That���s not the attitude. And it wouldn���t help to say, ���From now on I���ll only use RMB.��� That doesn���t make sense, because you have account closures, government crackdowns���things shift constantly. So people have to be savvy. They use whatever resources are available. That���s the reality.

Emeka Ugwu

That brings me to my next question���especially since you were talking about de-dollarization, which is where you left off. When I was reading through your paper���well, I haven���t done a deep dive yet, but just scanning through���I noticed that in your introduction, you ask: ���If the USD is the de facto currency of international trade, how are Igbo Nigerian traders���mostly of Igbo extraction���importing Chinese goods without it?���

Even though your focus is more on the how, I���m also interested in the why. That���s basically my question. And I���m hoping that, again for the benefit of our listeners, you can speak to that���if it makes sense to you?

Jing Jing Liu

You mean in terms of why the RMB is being used to facilitate importation?

Emeka Ugwu

Yes. So why the RMB? And why digital currencies, as opposed to the US dollar, in this move toward de-dollarization? Not just why, but also how���how it���s being used, especially in places like Alaba International Market and Trade Fair, which you mentioned. And���this is something I���ve asked you privately���do you have a sense of whether RMB is also being used in really big international markets, like Onitsha Main Market?

Jing Jing Liu

Sure. I think the ���why,��� as anyone in Nigeria probably knows from experience���and certainly during the month and a half I was there���is that exchanging money can be incredibly difficult. There���s often a shortage of dollars. If you need to make a large transaction and go to the bank, they might only give you a fraction of what you actually need. That makes completing your trade���settling your suppliers���very difficult.

There���s also the volatility in the exchange rate between the US dollar and the naira, which causes huge headaches for traders. And that���s before you even consider the differences between the official rate and the unofficial rate, which���at least before the recent rate unification���could be significant.

So I���d say that���s a big part of the ���why.��� It���s just difficult to get the money you need, in the amount you need, at the time you need it. And there���s very little urgency shown to small-time traders who are just trying to keep their businesses afloat. Also, for traders who are just starting out, opening a domiciliary account isn���t the first step. It comes with fees they might not want to pay, and even then, actually securing the amount of money they need can still be a problem.

Now, regarding the RMB: Again, this isn���t de-dollarization in the sense of a full rejection of the dollar. One of the reasons why the Naira���RMB exchange might be more stable than the Naira���USD is because the RMB is, more or less, pegged to the dollar. That peg depends on China���s own capital controls and its ability to manage its currency. But it creates a kind of indirect stability that makes RMB trade a bit more desirable for Nigerian traders.

Then there���s another level of stability through USDT���Tether���and other stablecoins that are also pegged to the US dollar. Using those gives traders more predictability and speed. There���s no cap on how much stablecoin you can buy in a day or even in an hour. You just need to find the right sources���whether through exchanges (like Binance, which used to operate in Nigeria), or over-the-counter (OTC) suppliers, or friends and family members who are doing peer-to-peer exchanges. Some of these folks even do a bit of arbitrage���buying and selling crypto and stablecoins, and making small commissions on top. So it���s not just about formal financial systems; it���s also about networks of trust, convenience, and speed.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah, actually, if I could jump in there���because that really connects to the direction I was going. You pointed out that we can���t exactly call this ���de-dollarization��� in a strict sense. But it does seem like we���re witnessing an evolution in the nature of US dollar hegemony. You don���t seem to join the camp of those who either celebrate or mourn the supposed end of dollar dominance. But it���s clear that we���re in a slightly more multipolar moment���both geopolitically and in terms of the currencies people are relying on. In the paper, you briefly trace the trajectory of the US dollar���s role in global trade. I wonder if you could summarize that for us. Things didn���t always seem this complicated in terms of which currencies were involved in international trade. So maybe you could give us a bit of a history���just briefly���and also speak to whether you think US dollar hegemony is actually being challenged today.

Jing Jing Liu

That���s a great question, and I want to start with the present. Because what���s happening geopolitically right now supports the thesis of multipolarity, and of de-dollarization���not in a strict sense, as you said, but in a meaningful one. There���s less confidence in US Treasury markets, less confidence in the dollar, and in the broader system of US monetary hegemony. Interestingly, you now have people pining for that era of dollar dominance���because what���s replacing it is a kind of insular US posture, one the country is actively choosing as part of its political direction.

That opens up an interesting space. Some people are saying this is the perfect moment for the RMB to become more internationalized, maybe even take on that hegemonic role. Others are saying the euro could rise to the occasion. But in both cases, I don���t think there���s much appetite for these currencies���or for the institutions behind them���to step into that hegemonic space. That���s what���s fascinating. A year ago, or even a few months ago, this was hypothetical: ���What if the US loses its monetary dominance?��� Now we���re in a ���what now?��� moment. And what we���re seeing is that neither the EU nor China actually wants to become that kind of player.

What China seems to be doing instead is emphasizing bilateralization rather than internationalization. That���s been their approach all along���making individual currency swap arrangements with other countries. They love their currency swaps. And this is partly in response to the restrictions the US can impose on dollar-denominated transactions. That���s a major vulnerability for countries trying to avoid the geopolitical risks of relying on the dollar. So we���re now seeing what happens when the ���what if��� becomes a lived reality. And that���s going to be very interesting to watch in the coming months���or even weeks.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah. It���s like we���ve shifted from a yearly to a minute-by-minute timescale.

Jing Jing Liu

Exactly! And it���s such an interesting moment to be living in. I���ll come back to your question about the history of dollar hegemony, but I want to mention something else first���because it was one of those moments where something you wrote in a paper suddenly happens in real life. In the paper, I mention that China and Nigeria are the only two populous countries with a blockchain-enabled digital currency. There are some smaller countries with them too���like the Bahamas with the SandDollar���but not on the same scale.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I came across news from a group called the Nigeria���China Strategic Partnership. They claim that Nigeria will soon sign a deal on a digital RMB with China to enable direct conversion from naira to Chinese currency. Interesting, right? This group says they���ve secured over $30 billion in investment commitments and expressions of interest. And in private conversations with people closer to the government���and to money���I���ve heard there���s real interest in creating greater convertibility between the naira and RMB. The thinking is: This trade is already happening. There are hundreds of thousands of Nigerians going to China, and Chinese traders coming to Nigeria, all the time. So why not make it easier with a direct, bilateral conversion? And only two countries that already have this kind of digital infrastructure could realistically start implementing those kinds of policies���digital bilateral swaps.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Quite an interesting development. I want to come back to that later���we���re going to ask you to look into the crystal ball for our last question and reflect on the future. But before we get there, let���s return to the past a bit. You���ve already pointed to how things are shifting now, but what would you mark as some of the major turning points���before this current moment���that helped occasion this shift in US dollar hegemony toward what we might call a moment of currency multipolarity? I���m thinking especially of the Trump administration���s policies and other events that may have accelerated the change.

Jing Jing Liu

Yeah, I think that���s a great question. One key turning point was US sanctions���sanctions against Russia, against Iran. These were a wake-up call to the rest of the world about how easily the dollar can be weaponized against those who rely on it.

Because the dollar accounts for the majority of international transactions, being cut off from it is a big deal. If you���re sanctioned and can no longer use dollar-denominated channels to process payments, it can completely freeze your economy. That pushed countries like Russia and China to begin building their own alternatives���payment and settlement systems outside of SWIFT, outside of dollar-clearing networks. Then there���s the rise of decentralized cryptocurrency, which introduced the idea that you could bypass all government oversight if you moved money through these alternative paths. That���s been particularly important for countries with strict capital controls���like China���which want to know how much money is leaving, how it���s leaving, and where it���s going.

That desire for control is also why they���ve created their own digital currencies. It lets them retain oversight in a parallel way. And no policy, so far, has been able to keep pace with the development and use of cryptocurrencies. I don���t want to romanticize crypto. It���s not just being used for remittances or payments that do good in the world. There are environmental consequences. It���s used for financial fraud, illicit trade���all of that.

Sa���eed��Husaini

One or two scams have emerged, yeah.

Jing Jing Liu

Just one or two! People had too much time during COVID. Everyone found some coin to jump into. But seriously, all of that���plus the emergence of new regional blocs and trade partnerships���is reshaping the monetary landscape. You asked me to predict the future. I think we���ll see more digital forms of these currency swaps, and more regional consortiums for settlements���whether it���s BRICS, Belt and Road countries, or other regional groups.

For Southeast Asia, why not trade in yuan? For Nigeria and China���major trade partners���why not sign bilateral agreements? And China, while it���s probably the most prolific user of currency swap agreements, isn���t alone. These arrangements are appealing for lots of reasons. They don���t look like a frontal attack on the dollar. It���s more of an oblique move. ���We���re just doing this as well.��� And the outcome may be de-dollarization, even if that���s not explicitly the goal.

We���re already seeing greater diversity in reserve currencies. Even the Canadian dollar is being introduced as a reserve currency. The RMB too. The US dollar still dominates, but its share of global reserves has fallen from around 70���80 percent to about 60 percent. So there���s a slow move away from the dollar���but not a dramatic rupture. Nobody wants to create a huge disruption in the system. Tariffs, for example, are already a major shock. And every economy wants to maintain order, not instability.

That���s why, historically, the Bretton Woods Agreement was introduced in 1944. It was a response to shocks���to currency instability, to global disorder. The international community declared the US dollar the reserve currency, backed by gold. That worked until 1971, when the gold standard was dropped and the dollar became a floating currency. That���s when it arguably gained a second, more expansive form of hegemony.

I mention this in the paper, but China���s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a report in 2023 titled US Hegemony and Its Perils. It outlines the many dimensions of US dominance���not just the dollar, but military power, technological supremacy, cultural influence. All of these support dollar hegemony, and all of them are being questioned now. We���re seeing new alliances form or reawaken. From where I���m based in Canada, for example, there���s been a noticeable uptick in engagement with the EU and with Mexico���conversations that bypass the US. As the US retreats in some areas, it leaves a vacuum. And in that space, countries are realizing they have to form new partnerships, new agreements���conversations they maybe hadn���t had before because the US was always present, always involved. Now they have to make new friends, in a way.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah���and you have to have different currencies in your basket. It���s almost like the multicurrency fluency of Igbo traders is something nation-states are now having to catch up with.

Jing Jing Liu

Completely. Yeah.

Sa���eed��Husaini

On that point about the formal, official dimension of things, I want to shift to the Nigerian element of this. You note that Nigeria announced a currency swap agreement in 2018, pledging to denominate a larger share of its foreign reserves in RMB. That agreement was renewed in 2021. But you also suggest that the policy hasn���t quite met its objectives. It���s fallen short of its aspirations. And you cite commentators like human rights lawyer Femi Falana���one of Emeka���s favorite people���who argue that the World Bank and IMF are colluding with the Nigerian Central Bank to frustrate the policy. That raises two questions for me. First, to what extent has the RMB swap actually been implemented in Nigeria? And second, how seriously do you take this idea of collusion���or, more broadly, the suggestion that international financial institutions aligned with the US are actively frustrating these types of swaps in Nigeria or elsewhere?

Jing Jing Liu

Great question. Honestly, I don���t even think collusion is necessary���the system is already set up to frustrate those efforts. There���s no need to conspire. The structure itself does the work. Even if you secure RMB through a swap line, you still have to pay other fees in US dollars. And then there are the contradictions. Around the same time Nigeria was signing this swap deal, China was also implementing policies that encouraged its exporters to invoice in dollars���to bring more US dollars into China, because of declining foreign investment and reserves.

So on the one hand, there���s a swap agreement with Nigeria. On the other hand, there are incentives inside China���like tax rebates���for exporters to stick with the dollar. My friend���s wife, who���s Chinese, was grappling with this. They had always invoiced in RMB, with direct RMB���naira transactions. They had accounts on both sides and were moving into money exchange because they had the capital to do so. But suddenly there was this extra incentive to switch to the dollar���an incentive that directly contradicted the purpose of the swap.

That���s why I don���t think there���s a deliberate campaign to undermine the policy. The contradictions are already embedded in the system. And on the Nigerian side, just think about how hard it is for many people to access dollars through their banks. The same problems apply to accessing RMB. So in terms of implementation, I���d say the swap exists more on paper than in practice for many traders. If you have clout or influence, maybe it���s easier. But if you���re just starting out���or even if you���re established but moving $10,000 to $20,000 in volume���you���ll still run into difficulties. I did read that the swap was renewed again in December 2024, just a few months ago. Given current conditions, maybe there���ll be improvements in how it���s implemented.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That���s interesting. So the frustrations are already baked into the system���bureaucratic, logistical, financial. Even accessing any currency at official rates is difficult. That���s a fair point. One our esteemed friend of the show Mr. Falana might need to consider too.

But you���ve already started to lean into where we wanted to go next���maybe our penultimate question���which is about the future. You���ve mentioned the BRICS currency idea, and the rise of central bank digital currencies. So I suppose the overarching question is: What do you think is the future of de-dollarization? I���m curious how you see it playing out both at the official level���among governments and institutions���and also at the level of everyday citizens and traders. I know it���s a fast-changing landscape, so we won���t hold you to your predictions or make you pay a penalty if they don���t come true. But what trends do you see pointing toward the future of de-dollarization? Might governments eventually formalize some of the informal practices you���ve described in the Nigeria���China context?

Jing Jing Liu

Yes���well, big questions you���re asking here. If I���m right, please replay what I said. If I���m wrong���

Sa���eed��Husaini

We���ll cut it out here.

Jing Jing Liu

So, I���ve written about RMB internationalization, but honestly, looking at what���s been happening���how no one has rushed forward to take up the mantle of the next hegemonic currency���I think what we���ll see in the next few years is more bilateral agreements and regional arrangements. And I think that is the direction of de-dollarization.

Not one country taking over���willingly or unwillingly���but a process that emerges from the accumulation of these smaller arrangements: BRICS currencies, currency swaps, regional trade agreements. Even though I���ve said Nigeria and China are the only populous countries with digital currencies in place right now, most countries are developing their own. Once more of those systems are up and running, swaps will be easier, bilateralism will expand.

And as more people gain the kind of multicurrency fluency that I talk about���similar to what Igbo traders developed out of necessity���I think that will become part of the new world order. It won���t just be traders citing dollar���RMB or naira���RMB rates; we���ll all have a greater familiarity with the value of our currencies on an international stage.

As an anthropologist, I tend to stay in the middle of these debates. But on the question of whether informal channels will be made formal���I don���t think so, not entirely. Informal systems rely on the formal, and vice versa. It���s not an either-or. Why are naira���RMB trades a little more stable? Because of China���s capital controls and the RMB���s peg to the US dollar. Or take stablecoins���they���re pegged to the dollar too. So traders are constantly navigating formal systems, leveraging their constraints for practical ends. These informal practices���like peer-to-peer crypto exchanges or under-the-table currency swaps���aren���t going to be formalized in a neat way. They���ll continue to piggyback on official infrastructure. It���s always going to be about workarounds, and also about working within the system, linking the informal and the formal.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Right. Excellent. So if de-dollarization is going to happen���or continue���it���s more like death by a thousand cuts, including some self-inflicted ones, rather than a sudden overnight collapse.

Jing Jing Liu

Exactly. I think that���s a great analogy. For decades now, economists and political scientists have been asking: What���s the next apex currency? Who���s going to replace the dollar? They���ve always put forward one country or another. But that���s not what���s happened. So clearly something in the model has to change. And I think we are seeing those changes now���but not in the form of one currency replacing another. We���re moving toward a more diversified basket.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That makes sense.

Emeka Ugwu

Well, that���s really a lot to take in

Sa���eed��Husaini

���especially if you���re trying to take it in for investment advice.

Emeka Ugwu

Exactly. I���m here listening to all of this, and thinking of my trader brothers. You know where my allegiance lies.

Sa���eed��Husaini

No, I don���t know where your allegiance lies.

Emeka Ugwu

I���ll tell you. Don���t worry.

Yeah���Jing Jing mentioned those traders moving $10,000, $20,000���maybe $100,000. Maybe it���s just one container here and there, not in bales, but small-volume importers going to China. I���m thinking about what this imagined future might mean for them. I���m familiar with the kinds of documentation required for those trades. There���s the guy who opens a Form M at the start of the year with millions of dollars, and then there���s the guy moving $10K, $20K, $30K, trying to hustle something through.

So two things. First, building on what Jing Jing said about workarounds and working between systems: What would it mean if, instead of having to go through the central bank and open documentation for trade that you maybe only need to do intermittently, you could just access something simpler? And second���maybe unrelated���but what about the dichotomy of currencies within China itself? The RMB, and then the yuan? What role does that play in all of this? How does it relate to capital controls? And how might it shape the future of trade facilitation?

Jing Jing Liu

It���s hard to speak outside of the current moment���especially given the implementation of pretty substantial tariffs on China. China���s going to have to reroute its products. And on the point about visas: Yes, that���s definitely an issue.

But maybe now, with a surplus of goods and manufacturing slowing down���especially in places like Yiwu, which is a central manufacturing hub���it will become easier to get visas. Maybe they���ll be encouraging people to come, to stimulate exports to new partners. That���s the only way forward: You need other countries to absorb your goods.

Manufacturing still remains a critical component of the Chinese economy. They���ve built extensive logistics networks that work to facilitate this. I was just listening to a podcast about how, in the last few years, due to rising labor costs, some factories started moving production to Vietnam and Cambodia. But now many are moving back���because manufacturing has become more technologically advanced and less labor intensive. Labor costs are going down, but not because of wages���because fewer people are needed. And none of those other countries can match the scale or efficiency of China���s logistics infrastructure.

So manufacturing is staying, and the government wants to maintain productivity���because that���s part of its promise to its citizens, its national development strategy. But to do that, it needs recipients for those goods. So I think you���ll see more goods entering markets like Nigeria. Whether that���s good or bad is a broader conversation. But trade will likely increase.

The Chinese government always finds ways to get those goods to their final destinations. That could mean cheaper shipping, or loosening visa restrictions to allow more buyers in. There���s always a way to open the tap. And just as easily, a way to close it. But I think we���re in a moment of opening.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That���s interesting. This has been such a rich conversation���you���ve challenged a lot of our preconceived ideas, some of our heroes as well. And you���ve done the difficult work of trying to sketch how things might unfold. We���re really grateful for the time and thought you���ve brought to this.

Now, I know we said that was the final question, but here���s one last, final-final one: What���s next for your research? Will you be pursuing more projects like this?

Jing Jing Liu

Thanks for that. Yes���I���m currently working on another paper, still connected to this theme, but focused on cryptocurrency. The argument is somewhat similar, but this time from the perspective of everyday Nigerians���not traders, but regular citizens.

I���m developing this idea that cryptocurrency is acting as a kind of temporal custodian for people���a way of safeguarding the future. It���s about denominating savings in crypto as a hedge, a way of resisting economic erosion.

I���m trying to link this to the political project of maintaining the middle class. There���s a fear that worsening economic conditions���the loss of income, purchasing power, educational opportunity���amounts to an assault on the middle class. And the middle class has historically played a role in challenging government policy, in sustaining some semblance of democracy.

So if people can���t maintain that class identity, can���t reproduce those conditions of life, then we���re witnessing a deeper erosion. For some, crypto becomes a way to preserve that collectivity. It���s not always a direct, instrumental calculation���it���s abstract, even ideological. But there���s a belief that if you keep your savings in naira, the government can always reach it. That idea really took off around the #EndSARS protests, though it was present before.

People saw how Bitcoin allowed them to bypass government regulation, and that shaped how they understood its potential. That���s what I���m exploring in this new paper.

I���m also working on another project, this one on Nigerian migration���particularly student migration. I���ve been looking at students going not just to China but more so to Canada. And recently, Canada has slashed its immigration quotas, which will massively impact Nigeria���s education industry. Most students were initially going to the UK, but then policy changes there pushed them toward Canada. Now the US and Canada are both becoming less open. So we���re seeing new migration patterns���and that���s another area I���m tracking closely.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Fascinating. We���d love to have you back on the show to talk more about that. It���s all incredibly relevant to the kinds of themes we���re interested in and to global developments more broadly.

Jing Jing Liu

I���d love that. It also gives me motivation to finish the work!

Sa���eed��Husaini

I hear that. Motivation is always needed���I can relate. Thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jing Jing Liu

Thank you for having me. I really enjoy your podcast���so thank you.

Emeka Ugwu

And sorry for dragging you up for this.

Jing Jing Liu

It���s all good! And for listeners, I���m always up at 6 a.m., no problem. I���ve already run a mile and started my day.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Wow, okay���if you’re serious, that���s impressive.

Jing Jing Liu

No, I’m not������ I was just trying to impress your listeners.

Sa���eed��Husaini

I���m sure our listeners are already impressed. If you���re bold enough to send us your digital wallet address, we���ll see what we can do about compensating for the time you spent with us.

Jing Jing Liu

Haha. No worries at all. Thank you again!

Sa���eed��Husaini

Take care.

Jing Jing Liu

You too. Bye!

De-dollarization from bellow?

As global powers debate alternatives to the dollar, Nigerian traders, Chinese exporters, and everyday crypto users are already reshaping the rules of currency exchange, as the hosts of the Nigerian Scam find out in the latest episode of the AIAC podcast. Public domain image credit Stuart Price for AU/UN IST photo on Flickr.

Discussions about ongoing attempts to move beyond the US dollar as the hegemonic currency of world trade often focus on the official policies of nation-states. Frequently referenced in such debates, for instance, are attempts by central banks to issue digital currencies, the recently mooted BRICS currency, and various measures taken by countries in the Global South to hold larger shares of their foreign reserves in currencies other than the dollar.

But what is often missing from these conversations are the perspectives and practical considerations of citizens who interact with multiple currencies by necessity or by choice���whether through trade, remittances, or other forms of cross-border exchange. To what extent is de-dollarization already a practical outcome of increasing Africa-China trade? Are Igbo importers of Chinese-made goods at the vanguard of a multi-currency fluency which nation-states will ultimately have to adopt?

The Nigerian Scam explores these issues on the most recent Africa Is a Country podcast through a conversation with Dr. Jing Jing Liu, focused on her recently published study ���Decentering the Dollar in Africa���China Trade: How Nigerian Entrepreneurs Navigate Currency Swaps and Digital Currencies in an Era of USD Hegemony and RMB Internationalization.���

Listen to the show, read Jing Jing���s recent paper, and subscribe on your favorite platform.

https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/a53b2146-f527-4c79-8a59-4e90120cf1d0.mp3 Emeka Ugwu

Good afternoon, or good evening, or good morning to you, the listeners, wherever you���re listening from���whichever applies. In today���s episode, we���ll be talking to a friend of the show, someone who really is interested in the African���China trade���or maybe I should even say the Nigerian���China trade, more specifically.

Today���s guest is an academic. But maybe I shouldn���t say that she is an academic. She is���it���s just that she does her work in such fun ways while discussing very serious issues. This person is known to us as Dr. Jing Jing Liu, whose research examines African���China engagement through the lives of everyday Nigerian and Chinese traders���mainly in China, but sometimes in Nigeria. She recently published a very fun paper that we hope to engage with over the course of this episode.

In my usual manner, I���ll leave her to introduce herself properly, because I don���t think I can do a better job than she can. So yes, Jing Jing, would you do us the honors?

Jing Jing Liu

Yeah, that���s a great question. I always appreciate questions that ask how I got interested in this. I���d say there are two formative moments. The first was when I was in Yiwu, China, accompanying Nigerian traders���mostly Igbo traders���in the markets. Sometimes I acted as a translator, sometimes just as a companion or researcher. They would frequently talk about exchange rates: naira to USD, naira to RMB, RMB to USD. And they���d say these numbers so quickly, in this dizzying fashion���I could never keep up. It was such an astounding experience.

All the traders I talked to were like this. I���d go home and try to write down the numbers they told me, and I couldn���t make sense of them. It seemed to be a kind of mental habit among the traders I was working with. Eventually, I began to understand more: what the exchange rate was, why it was important. This was in the summer of 2016, when the exchange rate had just changed dramatically���it had doubled from about 150 to over 300. So it was a moment of major upheaval, and that���s why there was such a panic. Exchange rates were suddenly everywhere in the conversation.

I watched people bring wads of US dollars to individuals parked outside hotels, exchanging them for RMB so they could go to the market and pay for goods. It struck me how complicated this process was���more difficult than it needed to be. As I learned more and engaged more deeply, I realized that people were trying to facilitate direct currency exchange. There were intermediaries and agents in both Nigeria and China who held both naira and RMB accounts. They were doing trade���export���but also acting as currency brokers.

That was my first real encounter with the importance of money���not just money itself, but currency���and I realized this was something that wasn���t often discussed in the Africa���China literature. Those discussions are usually very high level. No one talks about currency pairings. For Nigerians, the trade often works through the US dollar. If you���re coming from a francophone country, you���re working through the euro, and so on. I found that compelling.

The second moment���one I talk about in my paper���s introduction���was more recent, in June 2023. It brought everything full circle. I was in Lagos, doing fieldwork, and like any academic, I���d proposed a budget. My university or a funding body had given me a set amount of money, and I thought it would carry me through the research period.

Then I got to Lagos. It was a new government. They���d just announced the removal of long-standing fuel subsidies and were going to unify the exchange rates. Suddenly, chaos. Hiring a driver, taking a taxi���everything doubled in price overnight. The money I brought wasn���t enough. I was stuck. I didn���t have a Nigerian bank account, and I was trying to figure out how to move money from my Canadian account to someone in Nigeria.

I reached out to a friend, a trader I���d met in China, whom I was staying with. I asked if I could transfer US dollars or Canadian dollars into his account. I assumed he must have a US domiciliary account���a DOM account. He laughed and said, ���Why would I have that? I haven���t had a DOM account in eight years. I closed it when Buhari became president.��� That shocked me. This is someone who runs a big shop at Trade Fair���he���s a major player. And yet he doesn���t transact in US dollars? That moment sent me down a path���trying to understand how people actually manage trade and money exchange without relying on the US dollar. That���s what led to my thinking around de-dollarization.

De-dollarization includes, of course, government efforts���things like currency swaps, or the digital currencies issued by Nigeria and China. But it also includes the everyday transactions. I wanted to show that it���s not just a binary: dollar versus renminbi, or US hegemony versus RMB internationalization. What I see developing among Nigerians is a kind of multicurrency fluency. And if you live in Nigeria, you kind of have to adopt this fluency. You deal with dollars, you deal with RMB, you deal with cryptocurrency���because you have to. It���s not a political statement, like, ���I won���t use the dollar anymore.��� That���s not the attitude. And it wouldn���t help to say, ���From now on I���ll only use RMB.��� That doesn���t make sense, because you have account closures, government crackdowns���things shift constantly. So people have to be savvy. They use whatever resources are available. That���s the reality.

Emeka Ugwu

That brings me to my next question���especially since you were talking about de-dollarization, which is where you left off. When I was reading through your paper���well, I haven���t done a deep dive yet, but just scanning through���I noticed that in your introduction, you ask: ���If the USD is the de facto currency of international trade, how are Igbo Nigerian traders���mostly of Igbo extraction���importing Chinese goods without it?���

Even though your focus is more on the how, I���m also interested in the why. That���s basically my question. And I���m hoping that, again for the benefit of our listeners, you can speak to that���if it makes sense to you?

Jing Jing Liu

You mean in terms of why the RMB is being used to facilitate importation?

Emeka Ugwu

Yes. So why the RMB? And why digital currencies, as opposed to the US dollar, in this move toward de-dollarization? Not just why, but also how���how it���s being used, especially in places like Alaba International Market and Trade Fair, which you mentioned. And���this is something I���ve asked you privately���do you have a sense of whether RMB is also being used in really big international markets, like Onitsha Main Market?

Jing Jing Liu

Sure. I think the ���why,��� as anyone in Nigeria probably knows from experience���and certainly during the month and a half I was there���is that exchanging money can be incredibly difficult. There���s often a shortage of dollars. If you need to make a large transaction and go to the bank, they might only give you a fraction of what you actually need. That makes completing your trade���settling your suppliers���very difficult.

There���s also the volatility in the exchange rate between the US dollar and the naira, which causes huge headaches for traders. And that���s before you even consider the differences between the official rate and the unofficial rate, which���at least before the recent rate unification���could be significant.

So I���d say that���s a big part of the ���why.��� It���s just difficult to get the money you need, in the amount you need, at the time you need it. And there���s very little urgency shown to small-time traders who are just trying to keep their businesses afloat. Also, for traders who are just starting out, opening a domiciliary account isn���t the first step. It comes with fees they might not want to pay, and even then, actually securing the amount of money they need can still be a problem.

Now, regarding the RMB: Again, this isn���t de-dollarization in the sense of a full rejection of the dollar. One of the reasons why the Naira���RMB exchange might be more stable than the Naira���USD is because the RMB is, more or less, pegged to the dollar. That peg depends on China���s own capital controls and its ability to manage its currency. But it creates a kind of indirect stability that makes RMB trade a bit more desirable for Nigerian traders.

Then there���s another level of stability through USDT���Tether���and other stablecoins that are also pegged to the US dollar. Using those gives traders more predictability and speed. There���s no cap on how much stablecoin you can buy in a day or even in an hour. You just need to find the right sources���whether through exchanges (like Binance, which used to operate in Nigeria), or over-the-counter (OTC) suppliers, or friends and family members who are doing peer-to-peer exchanges. Some of these folks even do a bit of arbitrage���buying and selling crypto and stablecoins, and making small commissions on top. So it���s not just about formal financial systems; it���s also about networks of trust, convenience, and speed.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah, actually, if I could jump in there���because that really connects to the direction I was going. You pointed out that we can���t exactly call this ���de-dollarization��� in a strict sense. But it does seem like we���re witnessing an evolution in the nature of US dollar hegemony. You don���t seem to join the camp of those who either celebrate or mourn the supposed end of dollar dominance. But it���s clear that we���re in a slightly more multipolar moment���both geopolitically and in terms of the currencies people are relying on. In the paper, you briefly trace the trajectory of the US dollar���s role in global trade. I wonder if you could summarize that for us. Things didn���t always seem this complicated in terms of which currencies were involved in international trade. So maybe you could give us a bit of a history���just briefly���and also speak to whether you think US dollar hegemony is actually being challenged today.

Jing Jing Liu

That���s a great question, and I want to start with the present. Because what���s happening geopolitically right now supports the thesis of multipolarity, and of de-dollarization���not in a strict sense, as you said, but in a meaningful one. There���s less confidence in US Treasury markets, less confidence in the dollar, and in the broader system of US monetary hegemony. Interestingly, you now have people pining for that era of dollar dominance���because what���s replacing it is a kind of insular US posture, one the country is actively choosing as part of its political direction.

That opens up an interesting space. Some people are saying this is the perfect moment for the RMB to become more internationalized, maybe even take on that hegemonic role. Others are saying the euro could rise to the occasion. But in both cases, I don���t think there���s much appetite for these currencies���or for the institutions behind them���to step into that hegemonic space. That���s what���s fascinating. A year ago, or even a few months ago, this was hypothetical: ���What if the US loses its monetary dominance?��� Now we���re in a ���what now?��� moment. And what we���re seeing is that neither the EU nor China actually wants to become that kind of player.

What China seems to be doing instead is emphasizing bilateralization rather than internationalization. That���s been their approach all along���making individual currency swap arrangements with other countries. They love their currency swaps. And this is partly in response to the restrictions the US can impose on dollar-denominated transactions. That���s a major vulnerability for countries trying to avoid the geopolitical risks of relying on the dollar. So we���re now seeing what happens when the ���what if��� becomes a lived reality. And that���s going to be very interesting to watch in the coming months���or even weeks.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah. It���s like we���ve shifted from a yearly to a minute-by-minute timescale.

Jing Jing Liu

Exactly! And it���s such an interesting moment to be living in. I���ll come back to your question about the history of dollar hegemony, but I want to mention something else first���because it was one of those moments where something you wrote in a paper suddenly happens in real life. In the paper, I mention that China and Nigeria are the only two populous countries with a blockchain-enabled digital currency. There are some smaller countries with them too���like the Bahamas with the SandDollar���but not on the same scale.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I came across news from a group called the Nigeria���China Strategic Partnership. They claim that Nigeria will soon sign a deal on a digital RMB with China to enable direct conversion from naira to Chinese currency. Interesting, right? This group says they���ve secured over $30 billion in investment commitments and expressions of interest. And in private conversations with people closer to the government���and to money���I���ve heard there���s real interest in creating greater convertibility between the naira and RMB. The thinking is: This trade is already happening. There are hundreds of thousands of Nigerians going to China, and Chinese traders coming to Nigeria, all the time. So why not make it easier with a direct, bilateral conversion? And only two countries that already have this kind of digital infrastructure could realistically start implementing those kinds of policies���digital bilateral swaps.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Quite an interesting development. I want to come back to that later���we���re going to ask you to look into the crystal ball for our last question and reflect on the future. But before we get there, let���s return to the past a bit. You���ve already pointed to how things are shifting now, but what would you mark as some of the major turning points���before this current moment���that helped occasion this shift in US dollar hegemony toward what we might call a moment of currency multipolarity? I���m thinking especially of the Trump administration���s policies and other events that may have accelerated the change.

Jing Jing Liu

Yeah, I think that���s a great question. One key turning point was US sanctions���sanctions against Russia, against Iran. These were a wake-up call to the rest of the world about how easily the dollar can be weaponized against those who rely on it.

Because the dollar accounts for the majority of international transactions, being cut off from it is a big deal. If you���re sanctioned and can no longer use dollar-denominated channels to process payments, it can completely freeze your economy. That pushed countries like Russia and China to begin building their own alternatives���payment and settlement systems outside of SWIFT, outside of dollar-clearing networks. Then there���s the rise of decentralized cryptocurrency, which introduced the idea that you could bypass all government oversight if you moved money through these alternative paths. That���s been particularly important for countries with strict capital controls���like China���which want to know how much money is leaving, how it���s leaving, and where it���s going.

That desire for control is also why they���ve created their own digital currencies. It lets them retain oversight in a parallel way. And no policy, so far, has been able to keep pace with the development and use of cryptocurrencies. I don���t want to romanticize crypto. It���s not just being used for remittances or payments that do good in the world. There are environmental consequences. It���s used for financial fraud, illicit trade���all of that.

Sa���eed��Husaini

One or two scams have emerged, yeah.

Jing Jing Liu

Just one or two! People had too much time during COVID. Everyone found some coin to jump into. But seriously, all of that���plus the emergence of new regional blocs and trade partnerships���is reshaping the monetary landscape. You asked me to predict the future. I think we���ll see more digital forms of these currency swaps, and more regional consortiums for settlements���whether it���s BRICS, Belt and Road countries, or other regional groups.

For Southeast Asia, why not trade in yuan? For Nigeria and China���major trade partners���why not sign bilateral agreements? And China, while it���s probably the most prolific user of currency swap agreements, isn���t alone. These arrangements are appealing for lots of reasons. They don���t look like a frontal attack on the dollar. It���s more of an oblique move. ���We���re just doing this as well.��� And the outcome may be de-dollarization, even if that���s not explicitly the goal.

We���re already seeing greater diversity in reserve currencies. Even the Canadian dollar is being introduced as a reserve currency. The RMB too. The US dollar still dominates, but its share of global reserves has fallen from around 70���80 percent to about 60 percent. So there���s a slow move away from the dollar���but not a dramatic rupture. Nobody wants to create a huge disruption in the system. Tariffs, for example, are already a major shock. And every economy wants to maintain order, not instability.

That���s why, historically, the Bretton Woods Agreement was introduced in 1944. It was a response to shocks���to currency instability, to global disorder. The international community declared the US dollar the reserve currency, backed by gold. That worked until 1971, when the gold standard was dropped and the dollar became a floating currency. That���s when it arguably gained a second, more expansive form of hegemony.

I mention this in the paper, but China���s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a report in 2023 titled US Hegemony and Its Perils. It outlines the many dimensions of US dominance���not just the dollar, but military power, technological supremacy, cultural influence. All of these support dollar hegemony, and all of them are being questioned now. We���re seeing new alliances form or reawaken. From where I���m based in Canada, for example, there���s been a noticeable uptick in engagement with the EU and with Mexico���conversations that bypass the US. As the US retreats in some areas, it leaves a vacuum. And in that space, countries are realizing they have to form new partnerships, new agreements���conversations they maybe hadn���t had before because the US was always present, always involved. Now they have to make new friends, in a way.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Yeah���and you have to have different currencies in your basket. It���s almost like the multicurrency fluency of Igbo traders is something nation-states are now having to catch up with.

Jing Jing Liu

Completely. Yeah.

Sa���eed��Husaini

On that point about the formal, official dimension of things, I want to shift to the Nigerian element of this. You note that Nigeria announced a currency swap agreement in 2018, pledging to denominate a larger share of its foreign reserves in RMB. That agreement was renewed in 2021. But you also suggest that the policy hasn���t quite met its objectives. It���s fallen short of its aspirations. And you cite commentators like human rights lawyer Femi Falana���one of Emeka���s favorite people���who argue that the World Bank and IMF are colluding with the Nigerian Central Bank to frustrate the policy. That raises two questions for me. First, to what extent has the RMB swap actually been implemented in Nigeria? And second, how seriously do you take this idea of collusion���or, more broadly, the suggestion that international financial institutions aligned with the US are actively frustrating these types of swaps in Nigeria or elsewhere?

Jing Jing Liu

Great question. Honestly, I don���t even think collusion is necessary���the system is already set up to frustrate those efforts. There���s no need to conspire. The structure itself does the work. Even if you secure RMB through a swap line, you still have to pay other fees in US dollars. And then there are the contradictions. Around the same time Nigeria was signing this swap deal, China was also implementing policies that encouraged its exporters to invoice in dollars���to bring more US dollars into China, because of declining foreign investment and reserves.

So on the one hand, there���s a swap agreement with Nigeria. On the other hand, there are incentives inside China���like tax rebates���for exporters to stick with the dollar. My friend���s wife, who���s Chinese, was grappling with this. They had always invoiced in RMB, with direct RMB���naira transactions. They had accounts on both sides and were moving into money exchange because they had the capital to do so. But suddenly there was this extra incentive to switch to the dollar���an incentive that directly contradicted the purpose of the swap.

That���s why I don���t think there���s a deliberate campaign to undermine the policy. The contradictions are already embedded in the system. And on the Nigerian side, just think about how hard it is for many people to access dollars through their banks. The same problems apply to accessing RMB. So in terms of implementation, I���d say the swap exists more on paper than in practice for many traders. If you have clout or influence, maybe it���s easier. But if you���re just starting out���or even if you���re established but moving $10,000 to $20,000 in volume���you���ll still run into difficulties. I did read that the swap was renewed again in December 2024, just a few months ago. Given current conditions, maybe there���ll be improvements in how it���s implemented.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That���s interesting. So the frustrations are already baked into the system���bureaucratic, logistical, financial. Even accessing any currency at official rates is difficult. That���s a fair point. One our esteemed friend of the show Mr. Falana might need to consider too.

But you���ve already started to lean into where we wanted to go next���maybe our penultimate question���which is about the future. You���ve mentioned the BRICS currency idea, and the rise of central bank digital currencies. So I suppose the overarching question is: What do you think is the future of de-dollarization? I���m curious how you see it playing out both at the official level���among governments and institutions���and also at the level of everyday citizens and traders. I know it���s a fast-changing landscape, so we won���t hold you to your predictions or make you pay a penalty if they don���t come true. But what trends do you see pointing toward the future of de-dollarization? Might governments eventually formalize some of the informal practices you���ve described in the Nigeria���China context?

Jing Jing Liu

Yes���well, big questions you���re asking here. If I���m right, please replay what I said. If I���m wrong���

Sa���eed��Husaini

We���ll cut it out here.

Jing Jing Liu

So, I���ve written about RMB internationalization, but honestly, looking at what���s been happening���how no one has rushed forward to take up the mantle of the next hegemonic currency���I think what we���ll see in the next few years is more bilateral agreements and regional arrangements. And I think that is the direction of de-dollarization.

Not one country taking over���willingly or unwillingly���but a process that emerges from the accumulation of these smaller arrangements: BRICS currencies, currency swaps, regional trade agreements. Even though I���ve said Nigeria and China are the only populous countries with digital currencies in place right now, most countries are developing their own. Once more of those systems are up and running, swaps will be easier, bilateralism will expand.

And as more people gain the kind of multicurrency fluency that I talk about���similar to what Igbo traders developed out of necessity���I think that will become part of the new world order. It won���t just be traders citing dollar���RMB or naira���RMB rates; we���ll all have a greater familiarity with the value of our currencies on an international stage.

As an anthropologist, I tend to stay in the middle of these debates. But on the question of whether informal channels will be made formal���I don���t think so, not entirely. Informal systems rely on the formal, and vice versa. It���s not an either-or. Why are naira���RMB trades a little more stable? Because of China���s capital controls and the RMB���s peg to the US dollar. Or take stablecoins���they���re pegged to the dollar too. So traders are constantly navigating formal systems, leveraging their constraints for practical ends. These informal practices���like peer-to-peer crypto exchanges or under-the-table currency swaps���aren���t going to be formalized in a neat way. They���ll continue to piggyback on official infrastructure. It���s always going to be about workarounds, and also about working within the system, linking the informal and the formal.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Right. Excellent. So if de-dollarization is going to happen���or continue���it���s more like death by a thousand cuts, including some self-inflicted ones, rather than a sudden overnight collapse.

Jing Jing Liu

Exactly. I think that���s a great analogy. For decades now, economists and political scientists have been asking: What���s the next apex currency? Who���s going to replace the dollar? They���ve always put forward one country or another. But that���s not what���s happened. So clearly something in the model has to change. And I think we are seeing those changes now���but not in the form of one currency replacing another. We���re moving toward a more diversified basket.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That makes sense.

Emeka Ugwu

Well, that���s really a lot to take in

Sa���eed��Husaini

���especially if you���re trying to take it in for investment advice.

Emeka Ugwu

Exactly. I���m here listening to all of this, and thinking of my trader brothers. You know where my allegiance lies.

Sa���eed��Husaini

No, I don���t know where your allegiance lies.

Emeka Ugwu

I���ll tell you. Don���t worry.

Yeah���Jing Jing mentioned those traders moving $10,000, $20,000���maybe $100,000. Maybe it���s just one container here and there, not in bales, but small-volume importers going to China. I���m thinking about what this imagined future might mean for them. I���m familiar with the kinds of documentation required for those trades. There���s the guy who opens a Form M at the start of the year with millions of dollars, and then there���s the guy moving $10K, $20K, $30K, trying to hustle something through.

So two things. First, building on what Jing Jing said about workarounds and working between systems: What would it mean if, instead of having to go through the central bank and open documentation for trade that you maybe only need to do intermittently, you could just access something simpler? And second���maybe unrelated���but what about the dichotomy of currencies within China itself? The RMB, and then the yuan? What role does that play in all of this? How does it relate to capital controls? And how might it shape the future of trade facilitation?

Jing Jing Liu

It���s hard to speak outside of the current moment���especially given the implementation of pretty substantial tariffs on China. China���s going to have to reroute its products. And on the point about visas: Yes, that���s definitely an issue.

But maybe now, with a surplus of goods and manufacturing slowing down���especially in places like Yiwu, which is a central manufacturing hub���it will become easier to get visas. Maybe they���ll be encouraging people to come, to stimulate exports to new partners. That���s the only way forward: You need other countries to absorb your goods.

Manufacturing still remains a critical component of the Chinese economy. They���ve built extensive logistics networks that work to facilitate this. I was just listening to a podcast about how, in the last few years, due to rising labor costs, some factories started moving production to Vietnam and Cambodia. But now many are moving back���because manufacturing has become more technologically advanced and less labor intensive. Labor costs are going down, but not because of wages���because fewer people are needed. And none of those other countries can match the scale or efficiency of China���s logistics infrastructure.

So manufacturing is staying, and the government wants to maintain productivity���because that���s part of its promise to its citizens, its national development strategy. But to do that, it needs recipients for those goods. So I think you���ll see more goods entering markets like Nigeria. Whether that���s good or bad is a broader conversation. But trade will likely increase.

The Chinese government always finds ways to get those goods to their final destinations. That could mean cheaper shipping, or loosening visa restrictions to allow more buyers in. There���s always a way to open the tap. And just as easily, a way to close it. But I think we���re in a moment of opening.

Sa���eed��Husaini

That���s interesting. This has been such a rich conversation���you���ve challenged a lot of our preconceived ideas, some of our heroes as well. And you���ve done the difficult work of trying to sketch how things might unfold. We���re really grateful for the time and thought you���ve brought to this.

Now, I know we said that was the final question, but here���s one last, final-final one: What���s next for your research? Will you be pursuing more projects like this?

Jing Jing Liu

Thanks for that. Yes���I���m currently working on another paper, still connected to this theme, but focused on cryptocurrency. The argument is somewhat similar, but this time from the perspective of everyday Nigerians���not traders, but regular citizens.

I���m developing this idea that cryptocurrency is acting as a kind of temporal custodian for people���a way of safeguarding the future. It���s about denominating savings in crypto as a hedge, a way of resisting economic erosion.

I���m trying to link this to the political project of maintaining the middle class. There���s a fear that worsening economic conditions���the loss of income, purchasing power, educational opportunity���amounts to an assault on the middle class. And the middle class has historically played a role in challenging government policy, in sustaining some semblance of democracy.

So if people can���t maintain that class identity, can���t reproduce those conditions of life, then we���re witnessing a deeper erosion. For some, crypto becomes a way to preserve that collectivity. It���s not always a direct, instrumental calculation���it���s abstract, even ideological. But there���s a belief that if you keep your savings in naira, the government can always reach it. That idea really took off around the #EndSARS protests, though it was present before.

People saw how Bitcoin allowed them to bypass government regulation, and that shaped how they understood its potential. That���s what I���m exploring in this new paper.

I���m also working on another project, this one on Nigerian migration���particularly student migration. I���ve been looking at students going not just to China but more so to Canada. And recently, Canada has slashed its immigration quotas, which will massively impact Nigeria���s education industry. Most students were initially going to the UK, but then policy changes there pushed them toward Canada. Now the US and Canada are both becoming less open. So we���re seeing new migration patterns���and that���s another area I���m tracking closely.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Fascinating. We���d love to have you back on the show to talk more about that. It���s all incredibly relevant to the kinds of themes we���re interested in and to global developments more broadly.

Jing Jing Liu

I���d love that. It also gives me motivation to finish the work!

Sa���eed��Husaini

I hear that. Motivation is always needed���I can relate. Thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jing Jing Liu

Thank you for having me. I really enjoy your podcast���so thank you.

Emeka Ugwu

And sorry for dragging you up for this.

Jing Jing Liu

It���s all good! And for listeners, I���m always up at 6 a.m., no problem. I���ve already run a mile and started my day.

Sa���eed��Husaini

Wow, okay���if you’re serious, that���s impressive.

Jing Jing Liu

No, I’m not������ I was just trying to impress your listeners.

Sa���eed��Husaini

I���m sure our listeners are already impressed. If you���re bold enough to send us your digital wallet address, we���ll see what we can do about compensating for the time you spent with us.

Jing Jing Liu

Haha. No worries at all. Thank you again!

Sa���eed��Husaini

Take care.

Jing Jing Liu

You too. Bye!

Everyday Iranians

Between Israeli bombs and state repression, ordinary Iranians are once again denied control over their own future. Photo by Arman Taherian on Unsplash

���It���s been over 30 years the Islamic Republic is telling us that Israel will bomb us,��� Mona says through tears of exhaustion and anger, ���and now that it is happening, we find out that not a single bunker has been built for us, not a single emergency plan designed, while everything continues to be more and more expensive! It���s as if no one cares for Iranians��� lives, including our own government!��� The night before, Mona���my best friend back home, whose name I���ve anonymized���had driven for over four hours through heavy traffic to get out of Tehran and reach a small village right outside the city, where she and her partner think the bombings will be less intense. On the highway in the opposite direction towards Tehran: not a single vehicle. Since the Israeli defense minister���s warning to evacuate the capital city, almost everyone is trying to leave.

When Israel started carrying out a series of airstrikes on June 13 in ���Operation Rising Lion,��� its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed it was to dismantle Iran���s nuclear program. In a message to the ���proud people of Iran��� following the attacks, Netanyahu, as usual, says much more:

As we achieve our objective [to thwart the Islamic regime���s nuclear and ballistic missile threat], we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom ��� The regime does not know what hit them, or what will hit them ��� It has never been weaker. This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.

Posted on the Israeli prime minister���s official YouTube page, comments for ���Uncle Benjamin��� on ���Making Iran Great Again��� count in the thousands. ���Bibi, we love you from Iran, and we love Israel,��� reads a post by an account named DavinBritain.

It is not typical for a foreign leader to address himself to the people of another country, especially one he considers to be the archenemy of his own country, to call, essentially, for a coup d�����tat, while leveraging a former domestic protest movement, Woman, Life, Freedom, that started in September 2022 following the death while in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini.

But in Iran, control over Iranian narratives is constant, both from the authoritarian government, which is fixated on restricting its citizens��� speech, freedom of assembly, and opinion���lately evidenced by the strict legal actions and repressive response to the 2022 protests���as well as from foreign actors, who meddle with Iran���s domestic affairs with the goal of controlling the country���s narrative and, with that, its future.

Foreign-backed campaigns to destabilize the ruling regime in Iran, which has been in power since 1979, following the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, are nothing new. Netanyahu has been presenting to Western audiences its existential fight to stop Iran���s nuclear-enrichment program since at least 1992, paving the way to Israel���s overt intention to topple the Islamic Republic in Iran.

In the 2002 US congressional hearing that led up to the invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu, then foreign minister of Israel, was already sharing his obsession: ���Of course we would like to see a regime change���at least, I would���in Iran, just like I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It���s not a question of whether Iraq���s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out. It���s not a question of whether you���d like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. Iran has ��� 250,000 satellite dishes. It has internet use.���

Today, when you turn on a TV in any Iranian city, foreign-based Persian-speaking media, which sometimes even report from critical military sites like the Israeli Iron Dome, are omnipresent, shedding severe doubt on the independence of the Iranian narratives these outlets frame.

In 2022, when Iranians, and more specifically Iranian women, took to the streets, their courageous defiance secured important���although fragile���gains within Iranian society. Mona, for example, has been defying the compulsory hijab laws every day since her release from prison in 2023 for joining the protests. Many other brave Iranian women like Mona decided to walk the streets of the country with no hijab, claiming their right to bodily autonomy.

Without foreign interference, Iranians��� fight for change in Iran has been underway, challenging Netanyahu���s statement that he is here to ���free Iran.���

The manipulation of the narrative has spread from TV screens, or ���satellite dishes,��� to social media. Just a month before Israel began its attacks in Iran, many Iranians using VPNs to access social media apps like Instagram saw pop-up memes of Ayatollah Khamenei���Iran���s ���supreme leader������shattering into pieces, along with the message ���The Islamic Republic of Iran is in its weakest phase���; the clip closes with shackled hands breaking free and the words ���the free generation.���

Today, the official Israeli Defense Force���s social media account, which started in 2019 ��and counts millions of followers, curates IDF officials expressing themselves in fluent Farsi on past and ongoing military operations in Iran. The account even celebrates Iranian New Year, Noruz, and commemorates the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, as well as occasionally reposting messages from Reza Pahlavi, the Los Angeles���based son of the ousted King Pahlavi, a staunch supporter of Israel.����It is on this account that the IDF explained in Farsi that ���the actions underway in Tehran are the same as the actions Israel took in Gaza and Lebanon.���

As Mona alluded to, it is as if Iranians are continuously being held back from their own agency in the struggle for change and peace. Whether towards a freer society or a devastating war, who is centering what the millions of Monas in Iran want?

At the time of publishing this piece, because of a complete internet blackout, the writer has not heard from Mona or other close friends and family in Tehran.

The road to Rafah

The ���Sumud��� convoy from Tunis to Gaza is reviving the radical promise of pan-African solidarity and reclaiming an anticolonial tactic lost to history. Tunisians protesting the detainment of the Sumud Convoy in Libya. Image �� Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via AP.

On June 9, 2025, a convoy of dozens of buses and hundreds of cars carrying several thousand volunteers departed from the Tunisian capital city of Tunis on a more than 2,500km journey to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Palestine. Dubbed the ���Sumud��� Convoy for its message of steadfastness and resilience, the convoy has been organized by a coordinating committee of Tunisian trade unions and civil society groups. It is comprised of volunteers from across the Maghreb as well as Global North solidarity delegations who will join the convoy in Cairo for the final leg of the Global March to Gaza. Host to a team of medical professionals and carrying a symbolic quantity of food and medical supplies, the convoy aims to break Israel’s lethal siege on Gaza, where the occupation forces ongoing genocide and blockade of even humanitarian assistance has killed at least 54,000 Palestinian men, women, and children in the past 21 months and left all of the territory’s two million people at dire risk of starvation.

As the Sumud Convoy makes its eastward journey across the Maghreb, photographers embedded with the delegation have captured an outpouring of popular solidarity, from streets lined with residents handing out food and water to donations of fuel from petrol station owners. But while the convoy���s most immediate precedents are the numerous humanitarian flotillas that have sailed to Gaza in the past 15 years in efforts to lift Israel’s 18-year blockade of the Palestinian territory (including most recently the Madleen, whose 12-member international crew was taken captive by the Israeli Defense Forces in international waters last week), the Sumud Convoy’s border-crossing itinerary also reinvigorates the transnational convoy as a forgotten tactic of pan-African and global anticolonial solidarity.

On December 6, 1959, the 18 members of the Sahara Protest Team began the 3,500km journey from Accra in newly independent Ghana to the oasis town of Reggane in French colonial Algeria. In parallel to its brutal efforts to repress anticolonial nationalist forces during the Algerian War of Independence, the French government had also announced its intention earlier that year to begin utilizing the predominantly Amazigh region of the Algerian Sahara as a testing site for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Ghana���s then-prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, theorized the tests as a paradigmatic instance of an emergent “nuclear imperialism,” in which the Cold War-driven militarization of colonial powers threatened the exercise of self-determination by African peoples across the continent. The convoy���s direct action unfolded as a complement to efforts by Asian and African states to prevent the tests in the United Nations General Assembly.

Organized by the Ghana Council for Nuclear Disarmament, the majority-Ghanaian protest team also included activists from Nigeria and Basutoland (Lesotho), the US Black Civil Rights organizers Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland, and anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid activists from Britain and France. The crowds that lined the first leg of the convoy���s journey from Accra to Kumasi, the American pacifist A. Muste recalled, ���shout[ed] ���Freedom!��� and ���Sahara Team!��� as the huge truck and Land Rovers rolled by.��� As important as the destination itself, the Protest Team’s planned route from independent Ghana through the French colonies of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Soudan (Mali), and finally into the Algerian Sahara traversed the political boundaries that marked the continent���s incomplete decolonization.

In this sense, the Egyptian government���s ongoing detention and deportation of convoy participants and refusal to grant the convoy permission for passage through the country have their antecedents in the repression faced by the Protest Team. Detained by French colonial police and paramilitary forces upon crossing the border into Upper Volta late in 1959, Protest Team members made several attempts to continue onward, but were repeatedly detained and deported back to Ghana before being forced to abandon their efforts in January of 1960. Just as French colonial officials��� efforts to block the Protest Team’s movement itself came to dramatize the persistence of colonial rule on the continent, so too has the Egyptian government’s efforts to contain the convoy refocused attention on the delicate balance the regime attempts to walk between widespread popular support for Palestinian liberation and its long-running interest in preserving its position as an ally of Western interests in the region.

In the face of the repression encountered in the Protest Team’s first attempt, organizers argued that further resistance to nuclear imperialism required the convoy���s tactics to be carried out not solely by a team of seasoned activists, but on a mass scale. Nkrumah himself articulated the most ambitious version of this vision at the 1960 Positive Action Conference when he called for “a mass non-violent attempt to proceed toward the [nuclear] testing area��� that brought together Africans from across the continent. ���It would not matter,��� he continued, ���if not a single person ever reached the site, for the effect of hundreds of people from every corner of Africa and from outside it crossing the artificial barriers that divide Africa to risk imprisonment and arrest, would be a protest that the people of France […] and the world could not ignore.���

In the moment, Nkrumah’s speculative call to stage such a display of continental peoplehood faltered in the face of growing skepticism about the efficacy of nonviolent resistance that crystallized in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre and the intransigence of French violence in colonial Algeria. But today as we witness the transnational mass action of the thousands of people who have joined the Sumud Convoy under the banner of a Maghrebi or pan-Arab solidarity, we might detect both a popular rebuke of the neocolonial relations that continue to constrain the solidarity of postcolonial national elites with Palestine as well as the contours of a resurgent imaginary of continental peoplehood.