Arts, Culture + Society – The Conversation

Afcon drama: what went wrong and what went right at the continent’s biggest football cup in Morocco

2026-01-27T14:28:58Z

The 35th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, hosted by Morocco, produced thrills and several story lines, some good and others not so good. It ended in a victory for Senegal – their second Afcon championship. While the 1-0 victory over Morocco was deserved, the championship game ended on a sour note as fans invaded the field and the winning country abandoned the game for 16 minutes.

I’m a sports communications scholar and an author of multiple books on football as it relates to Africa.

The top four positives of the tournament were:

quality matches played on impeccable surfaces
expanded media coverage
increased global interest
higher attendance figures.

On the downside, however, we had the Senegalese team walkout during the final, bad refereeing decisions, especially in games involving Morocco, and ticketing challenges.

This 2026 Afcon provided examples of quality pitches and marketing that future hosts should learn from. However, providing better security around the field and better trained match officials are lessons that CAF (the Confederation of African Football) must learn from this tournament.

What went well

The infrastructure at Afcon showed Morocco’s readiness to host the World Cup later in the year. On six stadiums alone, the country spent US$1.4 billion. As much as US$10 billion was spent on allied public infrastructure for transport. The matches were of high quality on excellent surfaces.

The fans who watched the spectacular football on the field were transported by a high-speed rail system and seamless other transportation means.

The quality of the surfaces may have contributed to the fact that there were fewer surprises or upsets. All four teams that reached the semi-final stage – Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and Senegal – were top ranked in their groups.

Eventually, the championship game was contested by the two top ranked African teams. The game was outstanding as the well-known names produced memorable football throughout the tournament.

Expanded media coverage

The decision to expand to additional markets led to expanded media coverage in China, Brazil and key European markets. With several well-known players from European clubs participating, a global audience was assured. Teams like Real Madrid, PSG, Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Liverpool had players participating.

Beyond those were recent world renowned players such as Sadio Mane, Riyad Mahrez and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Those names were certain to attract media audiences across the world.

Viewership rose overall, with remarkable increases in Europe. France recorded 3.4 million viewers and the UK had 1.7 million viewers.

Increased global interest

CAF announced a 90% increase in revenue. This year’s revenue was US$192.6 million (US$114 million profit) compared to US$105.6 million and US$72 million profit in the previous Afcon. This shows the steady rise from just nine partners in the 2021 tournament to 17 in the 2023 tournament and 23 in this one. Greater media reach resulted in commercial interest.

Attendance figures have also risen remarkably. Figures announced at the end of the competition showed 1.34 million attended the games. The number of attendees in 2023 in Côte d'Ivoire was 1.1 million.

This clearly shows increased interest in the tournament. Morocco’s proximity to Europe was also a critical factor. More attendees travelled from the continent and elsewhere.

The prizes awarded to teams at the tournament also set records, with Senegal taking home US$11.6 million. Teams eliminated at the group stage received US$1.3 million each.

Errors

Angry scenes: The championship game was marred by a Senegalese walkout following protest over a penalty kick awarded to Morocco during the extra time. The game was delayed for 16 minutes. Senegal was angered by the cancellation of its goal late in regulation time. Its protest over the penalty awarded to Morocco lasted until one of its famous faces, Sadio Mane, asked his teammates to continue the game.

By then angry Senegalese fans had torn seats in the stands and multiple fights broke out. In the end, Morocco could not convert the penalty award and Senegal scored a memorable goal to emerge winner.

Umpiring questions: Throughout the tournament, Morocco appeared to be favoured by several refereeing decisions and non-decisions. CAF should consider match official exchange programmes with other confederations as a way of improving officiating. This would not only help Afcon but expose officials to other continental events.

Also of concern, Moroccan ball boys were seen seizing the goalkeepers’ towels for opposing teams in both Nigeria v Morocco and Senegal v Morocco.

Ticketing challenges: There were ticketing challenges also. While tickets were sold out, several stadiums during the group games were deserted. This may be attributed to hiccups where secondary sellers may have bought more tickets than they could re-sell. Nonetheless, an average 21,167 attended each game. Media attendance also rose during the tournament. Reports indicated over 3,800 journalists covered the event from Morocco.

Looking ahead

The competition demonstrated Morocco’s readiness to host World Cup games in 2030. Morocco, along with Spain and Portugal, will host the games, featuring 48 teams. All six cities used for the 2025 Afcon will host the world in 2030. Portugal will have only two host cities and Spain will provide nine venues.

It will be difficult for the host nations for the 2027 Afcon to match Morocco’s accomplishment.

The three hosts for 2027 – Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – should at least measure up to what Côte d'Ivoire accomplished hosting the 2023 event.

They can look to improve the ticketing system, at the least. Further improving security around stadiums and educating the ball boys would help in protecting visiting teams.

But the on-field disturbances should not take away from this tournament’s numerous accomplishments off the field and the available facilities.

Chuka Onwumechili does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

AI can make the dead talk – why this doesn’t comfort us

2026-01-18T05:57:15Z

For as long as humans have buried their dead, they’ve dreamed of keeping them close. The ancient Fayum portraits – those stunningly lifelike images wrapped in Egyptian mummies – captured faces meant to remain present even after life had left the body.

Effigies across cultures served the same purpose: to make the absent present, to keep the dead around in some form.

But these attempts shared a fundamental limitation. They were vivid, yet they could not respond. The dead remained dead.

Across time, another idea emerged: the active dead. Ghosts who slipped back into the world to settle unfinished business, like spirits bound to old houses. Whenever they did speak, however, they needed a human medium – a living body to lend them voice and presence.

Media evolved to amplify this ancient longing to summon what is absent. Photography, film, audio recordings, holograms. Each technique added new layers of detail and new modes of calling the past into the present.

Now, generative AI promises something unprecedented: interactive resurrection.

It offers an entity that converses, answers and adapts. A dead celebrity digitally forced to perform songs that never belonged to them. A woman murdered in a domestic-violence case reanimated to “speak” about her own death. Online profiles resurrecting victims of tragedy, “reliving” their trauma through narration framed as warning or education.

We are researchers who have spent many years studying the intersection of memory, nostalgia and technology. We particularly focus on how people make meaning and remember, and how accessible technologies shape these processes.

In a recent paper, we examined how generative AI is used to reanimate the dead across everyday contexts. The easy circulation of these digital ghosts raises urgent questions: who authorises these afterlives, who speaks through them, and who decides how the dead are put to work?

What gives these audiovisual ghosts their force is not only technological spectacle, but the sadness they reveal. The dead are turned into performers for purposes they never consented to, whether entertainment, consolation or political messaging.

This display of AI’s power also exposes how easily loss, memory and absence can be adapted to achieve various goals.

And this is where a quieter emotion enters: melancholy. By this we mean the unease that arises when something appears alive and responsive, yet lacks agency of its own.

These AI figures move and speak, but they remain puppets, animated at the direction of someone else’s will. They remind us that what looks like presence is ultimately a carefully staged performance.

They are brought back to life to serve, not to live. These resurrected figures do not comfort. They trouble us into awareness, inviting a deeper contemplation of what it means to live under the shadow of mortality.

What ‘resurrection’ looks like

In our study, we collected more than 70 cases of AI-powered resurrections. They are especially common on video-heavy platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

Given their current proliferation, the first thing we did was to compare all cases and look for similarities in their purposes and application. We also noted the data and AI tools used, as well as the people or institutions employing them.

A prominent use of generative AI involves the digital resurrection of iconic figures whose commercial, cultural and symbolic value often intensifies after death. These include:

Whitney Houston – resurrected to perform both her own songs and those of others, circulating online as a malleable relic of the past.
Queen Elizabeth II – brought back as a rap sis from the hood to perform with a swagger drawn from Black urban culture. This transformation illustrates how nationally significant figures, once held at an ivory-tower distance, become a form of public property after death.

These algorithmic afterlives reduce the dead to entertainment assets, summoned on command, stripped of context, and remade according to contemporary whims. But AI resurrection also moves along a darker register.

A woman who was raped and murdered in Tanzania has reappeared in AI-generated videos, where she is made to warn others not to travel alone, transforming her death into a cautionary message.
A woman is summoned through AI to relive the most tragic day of her life, digitally reanimated to tell the story of how her husband killed her, embedding a warning about domestic violence.

Here, AI ghosts function as admonitions – reminders of injustice, war and unresolved collective wounds. In this process, grief becomes content and trauma a teaching device. AI does not merely revive the deceased. It rewrites and redistributes them according to the needs of the living.

While such interventions may initially astonish, their ethical weight lies in the asymmetry they expose – where those unable to refuse are summoned to serve purposes to which they never consented. And it is always marked by a triangle of sadness: the tragedy itself, its resurrection and the forceful reliving of the tragedy.

The melancholy

We suggest thinking in terms of two distinct registers of melancholy to locate where our unease resides and to show how readily that feeling can disarm us.

The first register concerns the melancholy attached to the dead. In this mode, resurrected celebrities or victims are summoned back to entertain, instruct or re-enact the very traumas that marked their deaths. The fascination of seeing them perform on demand dulls our capacity to register the exploitation involved, and the unease, cringe, and sadness embedded in these performances.

The second register is the melancholy attached to us, the living revivalists. Here, the unease emerges not from exploitation but from confrontation. In gazing at these digital spectres, we are reminded of the inevitability of death, even as life appears extended on our screens. However sophisticated these systems may be, they cannot re-present the fullness of a person. Instead, they quietly re-inscribe the gap between the living and the deceased.

Death is inevitable. AI resurrections will not spare us from mourning; instead, they deepen our encounter with the inescapable reality of a world shaped by those who are no longer here.

Even more troubling is the spectacular power of technology itself. As with every new medium, the enchantment of technological “performance” captivates us, diverting attention from harder structural questions about data, labour, ownership and profit, and about who is brought back, how and for whose benefit.

Unease, not empathy

The closer a resurrection gets to looking and sounding human, the more clearly we notice what is missing. This effect is captured by the concept known as the uncanny valley, first introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It describes how nearly-but-not-quite-human figures tend to evoke unease rather than empathy in viewers.

This is not solely a matter of technical defects in resurrections, imperfections may be reduced with better models and higher-resolution data. What remains is a deeper threshold, an anthropological constant that separates the living from the dead. It is the same boundary that cultures and spiritual traditions have grappled with for millennia. Technology, in its boldness, tries again. And like its predecessors, it fails.

The melancholy of AI lies precisely here: in its ambition to collapse the distance between presence and absence, and in its inability to do so.

The dead don’t return. They only shimmer through our machines, appearing briefly as flickers that register our longing, and just as clearly, the limits of what technology can’t repair.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Street food in Mombasa: how city life shaped the modern meal

2026-01-02T07:13:39Z

Chapati can be made on the street and paired with meat and vegetables. Ssemmanda Will/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

As Kenya’s cities grew, more and more people left their rural homes and subsistence farming systems to go to urban settlements like Mombasa to find work. In the city, meals were paid for with cash, a major transformation in Kenya’s food systems.

A new book called Preparing the Modern Meal is an urban history that explores these processes. We asked historian Devin Smart about his study.

What’s the colonial history of Mombasa?

At the turn of the 20th century, the British were expanding their empire throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including the parts of east Africa that would become Kenya.

They built a railway that connected the port town of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with the newly established Protectorate of Uganda in the interior. This created the foundations of the colonial economy and drove urbanisation.

While Nairobi grew in the Kenyan highlands, Mombasa became the most important port in east Africa. The city grew fast as people came to work at the railway, docks and in other parts of the urban economy.

After independence in 1963, cities like Mombasa carried on growing rapidly and more and more people started working in the informal sector, which included making and selling street food.

How did rural people get their food?

During the early 1900s, the cuisines of east Africa’s agrarian (farming) societies were mostly vegetarian. Much of the food people ate was grown in their own fields, though there were also regional markets.

These communities grew lots of staple crops like sorghum, millet, maize, bananas, cassava, and sweet potatoes. They also had legumes, greens, and dairy products as regular parts of their meals.

These ingredients were prepared into a variety of dishes, like the Kikuyu staple irio, a mash of bananas with maize kernels and legumes added to it. The Kamba often ate isio, a combination of beans and maize kernels, while the Luo who lived along the shores of Lake Victoria regularly included a dish called kuon as part of their cuisine. It’s a thick porridge of boiled milled grain (often millet), eaten with fish or vegetables to add contrasting flavours and textures.

In these communities, the daily meal was also defined by seasonal variety. Food changed depending on what was being harvested or what stores of ingredients were dwindling. These were also gendered food systems, with women doing much of the farming work and nearly all the cooking.

In my book, I consider the dramatic changes in how east Africans came by their food when they left these rural food systems for the city.

How was food organised in the city?

In Mombasa, they entered a food system organised around commercial exchange. My study is about Kenya, but the story it reflects is one that’s unfolded on a global scale. The shift from subsistence to commodified food systems, from growing your own to buying it from others, has been one of the central features of the modern world.

By the 1930s, most people in Mombasa bought nearly all their food with cash, visiting small dried-goods grocers, fresh-produce vendors, and working-class eateries. In this urban food system, the seasonal variety of rural cuisines was increasingly replaced by the regularity of commercial supply chains.

Pilau, beans and chapati. Teddykip/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

This was especially the case with staple grains. In the countryside, people ate a variety of grains, but in Mombasa maize meal and wheat became daily staples eaten year-round, transforming east African foodways.

Migration also changed domestic labour in the kitchen. Many migrant men now lived in homes without women, which meant they had to prepare their own food, often for significant periods of their lives.

However, the idea that cooking was the work of women proved enduring. When women joined these households in the city, they again prepared the family’s meals.

How did street food emerge?

By the 1930s, Mombasa had a fast-growing working class. The majority of the town’s workers spent their days in the industrial district, around the railway and port. Many also had to commute a considerable distance to work.

With the long working day of urban capitalism, returning home for a filling lunch wasn’t practical, which created strong demand for affordable prepared food at midday. As this was happening, many in the city also struggled to find consistent jobs and turned to informal trades like street food to earn a living.

This convergence of supply and demand led to the rapid growth of the street food industry around the 1950s, with people opening eateries in makeshift structures outside the gates to the port and in nearby alleyways, parks, and other open spaces.

What kind of food was served?

At these working-class food spots, a popular dish was chapati, an east African version of the South Asian flatbread. People could complement it with beans, meat, or fried fish, along with githeri, a mixture of maize kernels and beans (similar to isio).

In later decades, ugali, the ubiquitous Kenyan staple made from maize meal, became more common at street food eateries, as did Swahili versions of Indian Ocean dishes like pilau (aromatic rice with meat) and biryani (rice with meat braised in a spice-infused tomato sauce).

How were street food vendors policed?

The business model that made street food work in Mombasa’s economy also brought these vendors into regular conflict with the city’s administration. Street food vendors kept overheads and thus prices low because they avoided rents and licensing fees by squatting on open land in makeshift structures.

But, in an era of urban development and modernisation, many officials desired a different kind of city, one without this kind of informal land use and architecture. Authorities began campaigns to remove these businesses from Mombasa’s landscape, arresting vendors and demolishing their structures.

This also created a tension, though, because the city’s workers, including those at the port and railway who ran the most important transportation choke point in east Africa’s regional economy, needed affordable meals at lunch.

Given that informal trade had become essential to Mombasa’s economy, there were limits on how far these campaigns could be pushed. However, arrests and demolitions did still occur, and sometimes on a dramatic, city-wide scale, which made street food a precarious way to earn a living in Kenya’s port town.

For example, in 2001, the Kenyan government launched a massive demolition campaign to clear informal business structures from city sidewalks, parks and open spaces.

After the demolitions, many rebuilt and reopened their street food businesses, but in less visible parts of town and on side streets rather than main roads. Today, these eateries remain an essential part of Mombasa’s economy and food system.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

I hope that readers will see how food history helps us understand the ways that capitalism transformed the modern world.

The regional focus of the book is east Africa, but it explores themes relevant to the history of capitalism more generally, including the gendered division of household labour, the commercialisation of everyday needs and wants, and the political and economic struggles of working-class communities to find space for themselves in modern cities.

The research for this book was supported with funding from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and West Virginia University.

Kenya’s ‘night running’: how a rural ritual with links to witchcraft became an urban staple

2025-12-31T10:38:56Z

In parts of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, it is not uncommon to hear of individuals who run naked at night. They cause trouble and instil fear in the neighbourhood. They throw stones on rooftops, make animal noises, bang on windows and doors, and chase night travellers.

In Kenya, the practice is called night running, or night dancing in parts of Tanzania and Uganda. It is claimed to be a form of spiritual possession in the communities where it is rampant.

Night runners are largely left to their own devices, but there is a sense of stigma attached to the practice.

I am a cultural studies researcher and wanted to explore how night running is seen in popular culture through fictionalised print media narratives or other appropriations. I set out to study the concept of night running as practised in rural communities in western Kenya, as well as its adoption in cities.

I conducted interviews with informants from Kisumu and Vihiga counties in western Kenya to examine the ritual and its marginal taboo position. The ritual exists on the margins because it’s a practice deemed unacceptable in public. I also examined Kenyan newspaper archives between 1990 and 2020 to trace the transformation of public discourse around night running. These articles and letters to the editor acted as a repository of understanding by Kenyans from different regions about night running.

I found that in the 1990s, newspapers reporting on night running largely exposed the ritual and its perceived links to witchcraft. Most of the reports captured the violence meted out on suspected night runners, or reflected on cases of night runners causing havoc.

These references to either night running or witchcraft appeared as hard news and in letters to the editor. They illustrated heightened stigma. In one letter to the editor published on 20 February 1993 in Kenya’s oldest newspaper, The Standard, a reader observes

the decision to burn alive the wizards and witchcrafts as reported by the daily newspapers in Kisii district was an action long overdue … I find it difficult to condone their action and say that was a job well done. Wizards have done worse and have retarded developments.

In the post-2000 period, a column titled The Night Runner in The Standard offered a direct modification of the idea of night running. The columnist, Tony Mochama, assumed the persona of a night runner as an alter ego to document his night adventures in the capital, Nairobi. Each week, the column documented different activities, from watching soccer matches to attending parties and official events.

The column co-opted the public’s memory regarding the ritual figure of the night runner. Mochama invoked the night runner as his lens for seeing Nairobi by night. This column, therefore, offered a collective re-imagination. Readers were asked to re-imagine night running as a strategy of seeing, travelling and documenting the city of Nairobi by night.

I found that the inference in the column was that the night is a significant time-space that carries extensive activity and culture. The column presented the night runner as someone who disrupts the logical and accepted order of how to operate at night.

For instance, instead of taking the night as the time of rest, the contemporary night runner works, travels the city and explores its leisure zones.

By describing a night runner as someone who moves against the grain, Mochama turned night running into a metaphor for life in the city after dark. This view enabled his audience to look beyond the stigmatised ritual and imagine its usefulness as a signal for different forms of nightlife.

The contradictions

My study found that Mochama’s articles and others within the popular culture section of newspapers created space for forays into fictional and surreal tales of night running.

These narratives explored the ritual form of night running as defined by the veil of darkness – but also its contradictions in an over-illuminated city space.

The night runner, therefore, captures the anxieties of cityness embodied in the tensions of non-belonging, especially regarding social norms. This is in relation to subjects that exist outside acceptable social norms that dictate the night as a time of rest and sleep. The narratives also raised the complexities of taboo and family in the city, where boundaries are blurred because of the freedoms of urban life.

In Mochoma’s column, readers laugh at the antics of this night runner, who is an extrapolation of a rural ritual into the city. But they are also forced to recognise the uneasy kinship ties unveiled in urban living. The night runner, in this form, is seen to overcome the unknowability of the city and instead forces an introspective inquiry into human beings as creatures with secret and uncanny habits.

The popular night runner is thus a subject that has “four eyes”. This is defined by anthropologists Filip de Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart as a person with a heightened sense of sight to see beyond the obvious, to see the shadows, the supernatural that is part of the nocturnal city.

The urban night runner sees the underbelly of the city in the invisible networks that thrive in dingy bars and backstreets. Here, prostitutes, street families and the police create uneasy alliances. In this regard, to night run in the city is to run the night, to rule over the city and its moods.

This reimagination created space for alternative ideas of night running that are less taboo. Mochama’s column, which ran from 2006 to 2012, indicates a sustained national audience for these forms of night running narratives.

Why it matters

My study found that night running as understood in modern times is a duality: the ritual of persons running naked at night and causing havoc, and a symbol of navigating the nocturnal city against the grain.

The rise in popular imaginaries of night running has enabled a public re-contemplation that has perhaps removed stigma from the taboo act. This is seen in the way people playfully use the term to reference night time activities, such as working or leisure. And in the way columnists inject humour and imagination into its references in their narratives.

These competing narratives on night running operate side by side in the public milieu through the media: the earlier ritual practice, the fictionalised narratives, and the co-opted modern appropriations.

It is no wonder that a supposed group of night runners in Homa Bay, another county in western Kenya, publicly demanded that the government allow for the registration and recognition of their union in 2023. And earlier in 2019, the BBC ran a documentary, Meet the Night Runners.

Maureen Amimo is an Andrew Mellon African Urbanities postdoctoral fellow at Makerere University and teaches African literature at Maasai Mara University, Kenya.

Apongo was a rebel leader in Jamaica – a diary entry sheds light on his west African origins

2025-12-26T08:55:57Z

For over three centuries, between 1526 and 1866, at least 10.5 million Africans were forcibly trafficked to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. Over half of them (with known places of departure) left from a 3,000km stretch of the west African coast between what are today Senegal and Gabon.

Scholars trying to uncover the lives of these diasporic Africans are forced to work with historical records produced by their European and American enslavers. These writers mostly ignored Africans’ individual identities. They gave them western names and wrote about them as products belonging to a set of supposedly distinct “ethnic” brands.

Now, however, the curious biography of an 18th-century Jamaican rebel confounds this inherited language. The rebel in question is Apongo, also known as Wager. His biography is a 134-word handwritten passage in the diary of an 18th-century enslaver named Thomas Thistlewood.

As a historian of the Atlantic World in the 1700s, I use the life stories and archives of British enslavers to better understand these times.

My recent study uses Thistlewood’s biography of Apongo as a window into the origins of enslaved west Africans, particularly those from what are today the nations of Ghana and Benin.

Apongo’s story offers an opportunity to better understand the complexities of west African identity and to put a more human face on those enslaved.

Who was Apongo, aka Wager?

Like many enslaved Africans, Apongo had two names. Unfortunately, neither of them completely unlocks his backstory. “Apongo” is probably the rendering of his African name into English script according to how it sounded to his enslavers’ ears. “Wager” is a name Apongo was given by his white “master”. It had nothing to do with his African origins. In fact, it was the name of his enslaver’s ship.

Thistlewood was an English migrant to Jamaica who thought of himself as a gentleman scholar. According to one of his diary entries, Apongo led an extraordinary life defined by twists of fate. He was the prince of a west African state that paid tribute to a larger kingdom called “Dorme”. After subjugating the peoples around him, the king of Dorme seems to have sent Apongo on a diplomatic mission to Cape Coast Castle in what is today Ghana. At the time it was the headquarters of Great Britain’s trading operations on the African coast.

While there, Apongo was apparently surprised, enslaved, and trafficked to Jamaica. At the time, Jamaica was the British Empire’s most profitable colony. This was due to its sugar plantation complex based on racial slavery.

Once in Jamaica, Apongo reunited with the governor he had visited at Cape Coast. He tried to obtain his freedom but, after failing for a number of years, led and died in an uprising called Tacky’s Revolt.

Unfolding over 18 months from 1760 and named after another one of its leaders, Tacky’s Revolt left 60 Whites and over 500 Blacks dead. Another 500 Blacks were deported from the island. It was arguably the largest slave insurrection in the British Empire before the 19th century.

The mystery in the diary

To appreciate why Thistlewood’s diary entry is so valuable, we must know something about the lack of biographical information on enslaved Africans. Almost all came from societies with oral rather than literary traditions. They were then almost universally prohibited from learning to read and write by their European and American “masters”.

Enslavers almost never recorded enslaved people’s birth names. Instead, they gave them numbers for the transatlantic passage and westernised names after they arrived. Rather than recording the specific places they came from, they lumped them together into groups based on broad zones of provenance. For example, the British tended to call Africans who came from today’s Ghana “Coromatees”. Those from today’s Republic of Benin were known as “Popo”. So, despite being just one paragraph long, Thistlewood’s diary entry on Apongo is among the most detailed biographical sketches historians have of a diasporic African in the 1700s.

But it also contains a mystery. The word Thistlewood used to describe Apongo’s origins, “Dorme” or perhaps “Dome”, is unfamiliar. Since 1989, when historian Douglas Hall first wrote about Apongo, scholars have assumed it was a reference to Dahomey. This was a militarised west African kingdom in the southern part of today’s Benin.

Yet scholars never defended that assumption. Recently, it was called into question by historian Vincent Brown in Tacky’s Revolt, the first book-length study of the slave uprising Apongo helped lead. Enslaved people from what is today Ghana have a well-documented history of leading slave revolts in the Americas, particularly in British Jamaica. Brown suggested that it made more sense if “Dorme” referred to an unidentified state in that region.

Now, in my study, I have built on this work to make two related arguments. Uncovering three contemporary texts that use variant spellings of the word “Dorme” to refer to Dahomey, I argue that Thistlewood’s term was, indeed, a contemporary word for “Dahomey” in 18th-century Jamaica and that Dahomey was almost certainly the kingdom he had in mind. Moreover, I demonstrate that it was both possible and reasonable for a diplomatic mission to have taken place between Dahomey and Cape Coast in Apongo’s time. In fact, such a mission actually did take place in 1779, when King Kpengla of Dahomey sent one of his linguists to Cape Coast as an emissary.

But none of this resolves the central question. The evidence of “Coromantee” involvement in Tacky’s Revolt and other Jamaican slave rebellions – including the presence of Ghanaian names among rebels and the statements of historians at the time – is overwhelming. Additionally, although Africans from Dahomey made the trip to Cape Coast Castle during the 18th century, visitors from states in today’s Ghana were certainly much more common.

Ultimately, to argue that Apongo had origins in Dahomey, one must explain how a subject of that kingdom came to be a general in a rebellion largely characterised by Ghanaian leadership.

A question of origins

What are we to make of Apongo’s origins? One answer is that Thistlewood was wrong. Apongo was “Coromantee” and we should think of him as Ghanaian. Thistlewood merely associated him with Dahomey because that was the militarised African kingdom best known to Europeans at the time.

Another possibility is that Thistlewood was correct. Apongo was “Popo” and so we should write about him as Beninese. Thistlewood simply relayed a fact of Apongo’s life and was unconcerned with questions that now preoccupy us, such as how Apongo came to lead a rebellion that appears characterised by “Coromantee” leadership.

A third answer is that Apongo’s identity was more complex than this inherited “ethnic” language allows. Perhaps he was someone who traversed and was fluent in the cultural and political worlds of both Ghana and Benin. If that’s the case, then perhaps his story reminds us that at least these two adjacent regions were not as distinct as early-modern writers claimed and later colonial and national borders supposed.

The search for Apongo is just a small part of historians’ larger, ongoing, and collaborative work to recreate the lives of Africans taken in the transatlantic slave trade.

While asking these questions requires us to work with sources written by enslavers, we do so in the hope that we can ultimately see beyond them. Our reward is better understanding how Africans’ forgotten perspectives shaped the history of our world.

Devin Leigh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Looted African belongings must be returned: is it repatriation or restitution? The words we use matter

2025-12-25T08:48:19Z

Museums and universities around the world hold vast collections of cultural artefacts, artworks, objectified belongings and even ancestral remains. Many were not freely given but taken during colonial times, through force, manipulation, theft or violence. For decades, they have sat in storerooms and display cases, classified into categories like anthropology, natural history or ethnology, separated from the people and communities to whom they once belonged.

In recent years, there has been growing recognition that these collections carry painful legacies.

Calls for their return have become part of a global conversation about decolonisation, justice and healing. In 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron produced a report which called for a new ethics of humanity, setting off a new willingness to return African artworks and material culture. But African calls for restitution were made at least five decades earlier following former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mobutu Sese Seko’s address to the UN.

In all these engagements, two words are often used: repatriation and restitution.

At first glance they may seem to mean the same thing, and both involve the return of something. But as South African scholars, working in the fields of history, museum studies and human biology, we argue that the difference between these terms is not just semantic. The choice of word reflects deeper politics of justice, recognition and repair.

In our recent article we explained how we see this difference, and why the work of restitution restores people’s power over their future, and gives them a sense of agency. We argue that, for its part, repatriation has come to represent something less concerned with community restoration and has more to do with an administrative and logistical exercise.

We argue that, unlike repatriation, restitution speaks directly to justice.

Repatriation: the language of return

The word repatriation comes from the Latin patria, meaning “fatherland”. Traditionally, it refers to the return of a person or their remains to their country of origin. Governments often use this term for the logistical and legal transfer of people, artworks, or ancestral remains across national borders.

In countries that were settled by colonisers, like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, repatriation has become the dominant language. This is partly due to specific laws and frameworks. In the US, for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums to return human remains and cultural items to Indigenous communities in a proactive manner.

In New Zealand, the national museum Te Papa plays a central role in repatriating Māori and Moriori ancestral remains from overseas institutions before returning them to local communities. In Australia, the choice of repatriation by activists, communities and scholars also sought strategically to draw a connection with the return of the remains of fallen soldiers.

In these contexts, repatriation is often framed as a process of giving back. States or museums take the lead, and communities receive.

Some Indigenous scholars and activists have challenged this framing, pointing out its patriarchal and statist overtones. They have introduced the concept of “rematriation”, signalling a return to “Mother Earth” rooted in Indigenous feminist perspectives, spirituality and community balance.

In South Africa, too, the term repatriation has been used, especially when the state arranged for the return of remains from abroad, as in the case of the return of Sarah Baartman from France.

Baartman was a 19th century Khoe (Indigenous South African) woman put on display in freak shows in Europe. Her body was later dissected by scientists within the realm of racial science and made to enter the systems of collecting and exhibition at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. After being turned into an international symbol of the oppression of black women, Baartman also became a focus of claims for return made by Khoe and other activists and social movements in South Africa.

Repatriation has also been used for the return of the remains of ex-combatants and other patriots.

But unease began to grow. Was this language adequate for the deep work of justice and healing that communities were calling for? Or was it more concerned with national prestige than with community restoration?

Restitution: politics of justice beyond the transaction

Restitution is about returning something to its rightful owner, not simply as a transfer of property, but as an act of recognition, repair and healing.

Restitution is not just an event, like handing over an artefact in a ceremony. It is a process, time-consuming, emotional, and often painful. It involves research into how items were acquired, conversations with descendant communities, and decisions about how to care for or honour what has been returned. It recognises that the belongings taken were not just curiosities or objects, but were tied to community, and to language, ceremony and identity.

In many cases, ancestral remains were classified and objectified as human remains and specimens, stripping them of their humanity. Restitution, by contrast, restores them as ancestors with dignity and agency.

Restitutionary work: healing and reconnection

Our research uses the phrase “restitutionary work” to describe the labour involved. This work goes far beyond diplomacy, logistics and transport. It includes:

Acknowledgment of injustice: Recognising that items were wrongly taken, whether through violence, coercion, or theft.
De-objectification: Treating ancestral remains and cultural belongings not as human remains and museum objects but as ancestors or cultural treasures.
Community involvement: Ensuring that descendant groups and local communities decide what happens after return, in conversation with museums and national governments.
Healing processes: Creating spaces for mourning, ceremony and closure.
New futures: Seeing restitution not just as recovering the past but as opening pathways for cultural renewal and social justice.

For example, South Africa’s land restitution programme has shown that restitution is not simply about restoring what once was. It is about creating conditions for justice today and possibilities for tomorrow.

Similarly, cultural restitution is less about putting things “back where they came from” and more about empowering communities to reconnect with their heritage in ways that matter today.

Why words matter

The distinction between repatriation and restitution is not academic nitpicking. Words shape power. If return is framed as repatriation, the emphasis is often on the giver, the returner, in the form of the state or museum, granting something back. If it is framed as restitution, the emphasis shifts to the claimant, to the community asserting rights and demanding justice.

Restitution is not about recovering a lost past. That past cannot be restored exactly as it was. Instead, it is about creating new futures built on justice, dignity and respect. For communities around the world still living with the legacies of colonial dispossession, that distinction matters deeply.

Victoria Gibbon receives funding from the South African National Research Foundation. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and not necessarily attributed to the NRF.

Ciraj Rassool receives funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, and has previously received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors.

When kids move overseas: why visits are so rare for South Africa’s emigrant families

2025-12-23T06:37:56Z

More than one million South Africans, about 1.6% of the country’s population of 63 million, currently live overseas. Emigration is never a solitary event or a purely economic decision. When one person leaves, an entire network of relationships is reshaped. This means that parents, grandparents, siblings and friends are left behind, making it challenging to maintain close bonds across continents.

Despite vast geographical distances and the challenges of differing time zones, the enduring parent–child bond motivates families to seek meaningful ways to stay connected. Among the most powerful of these are transnational visits. For those who can travel, these visits serve as an emotional and relational lifeline: they allow parents to step into their adult children’s newly formed worlds, observe their daily routines, and build or maintain bonds with grandchildren born or raised abroad.

Although families stay connected through technology, parents emphasise that virtual contact cannot replace the desire for in-person connection. Yet this longing is often unmet. For many families, visiting is a deeply felt desire rather than a realistic possibility.

In a recent research paper I examined barriers to transnational visits from South African parents to their emigrant children. It intentionally centres on the experiences of parents travelling abroad, rather than on return visits to South Africa.

In total, 37 participants took part. They were South African citizens from a range of racial, cultural and religious backgrounds. They were between 50 and 85 years old. They were fluent in English and were parents of adult child(ren) who had emigrated and lived abroad for at least one year.

Most participants were women. Their children had emigrated to a range of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US. This aligns with global trends of South African emigration to English-speaking, economically developed countries.

The research uncovered the intertwined financial, emotional, physical, relational, and bureaucratic complexities that shape whether, how, and how often these visits take place.

Why visits matter

For transnational families, visits allow parents and children to revive and nurture attachments. They complement virtual interactions, video calls, instant messages and social media.

For parents, visiting their children’s homes bridges the gap between imagined spaces created through video calls and the lived realities of those environments. These experiences foster deeper emotional connections, enabling families to share closeness, engage in mutual care, and observe unspoken cues such as body language and tone, elements foundational to sustaining relationships.

Despite their importance, the rarity of transnational visits emerged clearly from participants’ narratives. While a small number of parents in the study were able to visit annually or every couple of years, this was the exception rather than the norm. For most, visits were rare events.

Although nearly all parents longed to visit more frequently, the majority had visited only once and several had never visited at all. Those who had visited spoke about long gaps between visits and the uncertainty of when or whether a next visit would ever be possible. This absence amplifies the loneliness experienced and leaves parents feeling increasingly “out of sync” with their children’s lives, at times even “irrelevant”.

Three main challenges

Parents consistently expressed a desire to visit more often. Yet this longing was constrained by the realities of their circumstances. Three major challenges emerged across the qualitative interviews.

Financial constraints: This was the most significant barrier, often preventing parents from realising their desire to visit their emigrant children. Air travel from South Africa to destinations such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US is expensive. The South African rand’s weak exchange rate against strong currencies turns even modest flights into luxury purchases.

Retirees living on fixed incomes often find themselves caught between safeguarding their financial stability and meeting the deep emotional need to reconnect with their children and grandchildren.

It is terribly expensive. If I now had to, I would scratch the money out from somewhere and I can afford it, but I need to look after myself as well. Even if you have money, you don’t spend your money on something that is really absurd, like the price of air tickets at this stage is completely absurd.

Hidden expenses can also make visits even more challenging. Visa application fees, compulsory health insurance and medical examinations quickly add up.

Logistical strain: The geographical distance between South Africa and the popular emigration destinations such as Australia, the United States and New Zealand presents significant obstacles. For many elderly parents, long-haul travel is physically and mentally demanding.

As one participant shared:

The trip to America … there’s a lot of jet lag, and it’s not an easy trip to make. You know, if your kids are in Europe or England, there’s no time delay, no jet lag or anything like that.

Chronic illnesses, mobility limitations and fatigue make these journeys even more challenging. For some parents, the physical toll makes travel unmanageable or medically inadvisible.

Practical considerations, especially how long to stay, long enough to make the trip worthwhile but not too long to disrupt routines, add another layer of complexity. These decisions make planning a visit both logistically and emotionally taxing.

The emotional weight of saying goodbye: Every visit carries an inevitable ending. With no certainty about when, or if, the next visit will happen, each departure feels like a potential final farewell, especially for older parents. The joy of togetherness becomes tinged with the dread of parting, a heaviness that grows as the end of the visit approaches. For many, the farewell at the end of a visit is one of the most emotionally difficult moments.

As a grandmother describes:

And then a big factor is the sadness with the goodbye and for weeks after that you still struggle and can’t get back on track properly. For me, it gets more intense every time.

Some parents avoid visiting altogether because the emotional cost of departure outweighs the joy of being together.

Longing for presence

Many transnational parents must face the reality that limited financial, physical, or emotional resources will restrict the number of visits they can undertake in their lifetime. While digital communication helps families stay connected across borders, parents emphasised that virtual contact cannot recreate the intimacy that grows from in-person visits: the shared routines, playful moments and physical closeness.

Visits matter because they offer what digital technologies cannot fully provide: presence.

Sulette Ferreira does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Revolutionary rap: Nigerian star Falz has kept protest music alive

2025-12-19T08:35:44Z

Nigerian rapper, actor and social media star Falz released his sixth studio album, The Feast, in 2025.

Few Nigerian popular musicians have shown as much versatility and staying power as the man behind the #ElloBae and #WehDoneSir social media trends. For over a decade now, Falz has been marrying musical skills and social activism with digital savvy and comedy.

His rise to global prominence was solidified with his 2018 song This is Nigeria. But it began in 2014 with Marry Me off his debut album Wazup Guy.

As a young artist known for his video skits, he created an online challenge ahead of releasing the song Ello Bae (Hello Babe). In it he tries to romance a woman who appreciates him and his ambition, but is looking for a man with money. It remains a common hashtag when TikTokers post about love and money.

In 2017 he released Wehdone Sir (Well Done, Sir), a witty takedown of people with fake glamour lifestyles. #WehDoneSir is still used on social media to satirise pretentious individuals.

Falz would become known for his unique blend of hip-hop and Afropop, but what really made him stand out was his skill at infusing humour into his socially conscious, often revolutionary, songs.

It’s often argued that Falz is a natural heir to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. He was the Nigerian music legend and activist who helped create the Afrobeat movement (a precursor to today’s Afrobeats).

Like Fela, Falz packs his music with playfulness and satire while also stirring public consciousness with activist lyrics. Both call for action against the oppressive political class. In 2020, when young Nigerians took to the streets to demand an end to police corruption, Fela and Falz were both part of the inventory of #EndSARS protest songs.

As a scholar of Nigerian hip-hop, I have published papers on Fela and Falz and how they have shaped protest music that responds to social challenges in Nigeria.

So, who is Falz, and how has he spread his message – and come to be the political voice of his generation, as Fela was to his?

Who is Falz?

Falz (real name Folarin Falana) was born in 1990 in Mushin, Lagos. He is the son of a respected human rights lawyer and activist father, Femi Falana, and lawyer mother, Funmi Falana. In fact, his father was Fela’s lawyer, defending him against charges brought by the state.

Falz also qualified as a lawyer, but chose instead to pursue his interests in music and acting. These multiple skills feed into his productions on diverse levels. Beyond his songs, he is also very active on Instagram and Tik-Tok, where he establishes trends, especially around his songs and films.

His character in Ello Bae, for instance, struggles with English, using big formal words in unexpected ways, finding comedy in his faux Yoruba inflections. It would be a trademark of the #ElloBaeChallenge and would enjoy renewed public attention when Falz was cast in the TV series Jenifa’s Diary playing a similar character.

In 2016, Falz won best new international act at the BET Awards in the US. Numerous other awards would follow. His albums have received commercial and critical success. His roles in movies have further solidified his status as a multitalented entertainer.

Activism

Falz does not shy away from living the talk. He took part in the 2020 #EndSARS protests and his work repeatedly tries to steer the government towards addressing socio-economic challenges.

Soon after the protests, he released Moral Instruction. On the album, the track Johnny depicts the everyday experiences of Nigerians. This is Nigeria, a localised version of US rapper Childish Gambino’s This is America, depicts Nigeria as a country struggling with corruption, lawlessness and social injustice. A stark contrast to its potential. The video reflects a breakdown in law and order, corrupt officials, and the struggles of young people facing limited opportunities and resorting to crime.

Falz has used his platform as a celebrity and his background as a lawyer to call for social justice and for young people to make a difference.

Fela and Falz

There have been a number of pretend heirs to Fela’s throne of musical consciousness. Many of these have either not lived up to the hype or have fizzled out.

However, many popular Nigerian artists leverage Fela’s ethos through sampling his beats and lyrics. This is evident in Falz’s musicography too.

My study on the lyrical and thematic connections between Fela and Falz songs compares a number of tracks. Fela’s No Agreement and Falz’s Talk, for example, both draw attention to social inequality and systemic challenges in Nigeria.

Fela’s song was produced in the context of a military regime while Falz’s was within a democratic dispensation. But both speak of a crisis of leadership in Nigeria, as is the case in many postcolonial societies. What particularly links Fela and Falz is that both are unrelenting in their revolutionary struggles and determination to ensure an equitable Nigerian society.

Religious leaders are not spared criticism. Echoing Fela’s Coffin for Head of State (1980), Falz’s Amen (2019) points to the deceptive practices and complicity of religious leaders in poor political leadership and endemic poverty. Both critique the double standards that have become normal in the country.

Falz’s Follow Follow (2019) addresses current realities in Nigerian society – a lack of personal conviction and independent thought and the mindless following of social media trends. Integrating lyrics from Fela’s Zombie (1976), the song is about asserting one’s identity. It also rehashes Fela’s Follow Follow, mocking those who allow themselves to be led blindly by others.

To make sure his advocacy resonates, Falz co-opts his listeners through a call-and-response strategy. A phrase is sung and the next phrase answers it. This way, along with catchy lyrics, the audience become active participants.

This also echoes the traditional Yoruba chant-and-refrain rendition used by musicians, poets and bards to engage their audience. Its possible nod to the indigenous is also at the heart of his faux Yoruba accent, a style that downplays his prestigious upbringing and connects him to ordinary people, much like Pidgin did for Fela.

But echoes of Fela don’t in any way take away from the creative force of Falz’s work. Rather they reinforce his critique of how the postcolonial Nigerian state has failed to live up to its promise.

Into the future

While Fela was unrepentantly anticolonial, Falz is sublimely hybridised. His mixture of talents and views creates a pulsating pan-African consciousness that’s able to exist in a global contemporary world view.

His lyrics and videography are aimed at the masses – especially young people – who have the most to gain from positive social change. In this way Falz can be said to represent a generational conscience. He uses his empowering songs to motivate his fans to take their destinies in their own hands.

Paul Onanuga does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Marriage and migration: what happens when men return to the family home in Botswana

2025-12-18T08:19:20Z

The history of labour migration in Botswana can be linked to the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa in the late 19th century. South Africa needed cheap labour, and men from neighbouring territories were pulled into the workforce as unskilled or semi-skilled workers in mines, factories, kitchens and farms.

Mine recruitment agencies like the Native Recruiting Corporation and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association began expanding recruitment networks in Botswana in the 1930s.

Men in Botswana – a British protectorate and largely rural economy at the time – were open to labour migration for several reasons. They had to pay taxes to the colonial administration, and for that they needed cash. Some needed to pay traditional bride price in cattle, acquire ploughs for agricultural production, or educate their children. Drought pushed some farmers to look for other work.

So men were forced leave their families and migrate to work in South Africa or Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe). They would return home only about once a year. This left women as primary caregivers in their families, in a society with a patriarchal culture, where men are normally in charge. As a Tswana phrase puts it: “Mosadi ke ngwana wa monna – A woman is a man’s child.”

Families experienced a variety of challenges and changes as a result, and their responses to the circumstances varied. Previous studies have examined the effects of men’s absence, but there hasn’t been much historical research on the impact on women and families of their return. As a women’s historian I was interested in this aspect.

I interviewed 33 rural women in Botswana’s north-east and central disricts whose husbands had been away between 1970 and 2015 to ask them how this had affected them. From what they told me, it became apparent that most marriages did not work out for the best.

Their stories and perspectives add to what’s known about the economic and social impact of labour migration in the southern African region.

Labour migration and the disruption of families

Previous research has found that labour migration damaged families in the countries that provided workers. The tightly knit cooperative, social and economic unit became economically dependent on migrants’ income. Although it improved people’s lives economically, labour migration separated husbands and wives for long periods.

In Tswana society, marriage is typically seen as a husband and wife living together to raise children and make decisions. However, for women married to migrant workers, the situation was quite different. They spent much time apart; they only spent time together when the husband came home to visit, was on leave, or was between jobs.

It also shifted women’s social and economic status – and traditional gender roles. Even though the absent husband retained power over strategic family decisions, male migration improved the position of women, who became, in practice, heads of the house.

However, miners returned home when retired, retrenched or injured. Many also came back to Botswana following Botswana’s independence in 1966 and the discovery of diamonds in the country in 1967.

According to national censuses, the number of people living abroad decreased from 45,735 in 1971 to 38,606 in 1991 and 28,210 in 2001.

As these miners returned home, they removed their wives from critical aspects of running the household and reclaimed their roles as heads of families.

The return of husbands

My research aimed to analyse the redistribution of responsibilities and power dynamics between husbands and wives when migrants returned to Botswana.

The interviews with women revealed a range of outcomes. Three cases illustrate them. (I have changed the names to protect identities.)

Conflict

According to Julia Keneetswe, her husband’s return and attempt to reassert authority caused conflicts. Keneetswe provided a brief background of her marriage and the type of parent her husband was when he was working in the mines. She claimed that her husband’s contract was terminated because of violence. She stated that after his return, he was a violent man who nearly killed her.

Keneetswe said:

My husband was already at the mines when we got married. He would not come home even for the Christmas holidays or support the children. Since he came home after being fired for fighting with a colleague at the mine, there hasn’t been any peace. This man is extremely violent … He is also a useless drunkard, but I can’t leave him because where will I go, so I will just stay here and mind my own business while he takes care of his.

It is important to highlight that most women did not simply sit back and wait for their husbands to return; instead, they empowered themselves in various ways.

Independence

For example, Mary Mojadi had progressed to become head of department at the primary school where she was teaching. As a result of the differences they had when her husband returned, she opted to leave the marriage since she was not only educated and aware of her rights but also was financially stable and had the means to start a new life by herself.

Similarly, Kelebogile Sejo told me she had been on the village development committee for several years, a position that garnered her respect in the community. Although she was not the one who initiated the divorce, she did not oppose it because she had proved to herself over the years that she could build a life for herself and her children without depending on her husband.

Reunion

Not all reunions ended in fights and divorce. Beta Mojela’s experience was different. She said that when her husband left for the mines, she was left with nothing but uncultivated land. She took it upon herself to start a horticultural business, which became successful. When her husband retired, he returned home to an up-and-running business, and they continued working together to grow the business.

Conclusion

My research looked at labour migration from Botswana through a feminist lens. It noted that migration was a challenge to the patriarchal nature of Tswana society – the belief that men ought to be the head of the family.

Some women who had spent significant time without husbands failed to adjust to life in the shadow of their husbands when they returned. Miscommunication and a lack of compromise led to conflicts in some marriages. But there were cases in which the couples reunited.

The return of husbands did not have the same results or reception for different families. Nonetheless, these circumstances allowed some women to evolve as heads of families and become more independent.

Unaludo Sechele received funding from American Council of Learned Societies- African Humanities Program. She is affiliated with University of the Free State- International Studies Group.

The price of going home: Christmas boxes and the final return from South Africa to Zimbabwe

2025-12-15T08:58:15Z

Each December, long-distance buses, minibus taxis and private cars stream northwards from South Africa as Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second biggest city, prepares for its annual ritual: the seasonal homecoming of “injiva” – migrants returning for Christmas.

The old industrial city, where businesses have declined and shops and restaurants struggle to survive, fills temporarily with cars with South African number plates and people dressed in trendy clothes signalling urban South African lifestyles. Trailers are loaded with remittances known as “Christmas boxes” containing cooking oil, soap and other groceries. A jumping castle is erected in the park, and popular music merges with laughter in the restaurants.

These are historically rooted signs of achievement and success earned abroad. They are a refashioned form of the festive season of colonial-era injivas: men from the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe who worked in South African mines and farms, returning home typically once a year with gifts.

Yet, it is common knowledge that this performance is often hard-earned, and injivas – both women and men – struggle to meet these expectations. The real-life migration experiences include economic and legal uncertainties and discrimination in the labour market, low wages and difficulty in sending remittances home.

Amid the festive return lies a quieter and more solemn south-north movement – that of Zimbabwean migrants who have passed away and are taking their final journey home. Contrasting with the festivities surrounding Christmas visits, the coffin-shaped trailers along the A6 highway from the Beitbridge border post to Bulawayo are a reminder that migration’s promise of prosperity comes with risk and loss.

This homecoming, which I studied for my PhD in anthropology and have described in a recent paper, is shaped by bureaucracy, cost and intergenerational care.

The study reveals how a life-sustaining web of care is maintained. It contributes to anthropological discussions on migration, kinship, the state, documentary practices, law and development.

The moral duty and economic headache of return

The migration pattern between Zimbabwe and South Africa has its roots in colonial-era labour migration and has intensified since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s economic collapse, marked by hyperinflation, political violence and mass unemployment, drove millions to seek economic opportunities and protection in South Africa.

Estimating the number of Zimbabweans in South Africa is difficult due to the largely unregulated nature of this mobility, but figures generally range between one million and three million.

Although deceased migrants, documented or not, can be buried in South African soil, bringing a body home is a vital act in Zimbabwe, as in many other African contexts. It is to restore the deceased to the lineage and to enable the spirit to be mourned and settled so it will protect younger generations. Failing to do so risks spiritual and social disorder. The respectful return in death, like the festive Christmas return of the able-bodied injivas, reinforces ties between generations.

Despite the religious and cultural importance of burial at home, repatriating a body from South Africa poses economic challenges to a family. It’s not only a moral duty but also a financial burden. So, in principle, only those whose death has been unforeseen return in coffins. Those who can will return home before they die to save the cost of repatriation.

Families make extraordinary efforts to make repatriation possible. Relatives collect and borrow money, and reach out to kin across borders. Burial societies mobilise payments from their members to collect the funds for embalming, transportation, paperwork and funerals. These obligations reveal the importance of the ancestral continuity being an economic matter, and sustenance of family welfare continuing after death.

Formal and informal burial societies

Since the 1990s, Bulawayo’s once-thriving industries have largely collapsed, leaving its old mills and factories deserted or refunctioning as spaces for religious congregations, education and garages. Amid these modest ventures, funeral services stand out in the city’s otherwise melancholic landscape.

As Zimbabwe’s economic and political instability pushes many to seek livelihoods in South Africa, the funeral industry has expanded. The Beitbridge border, crossing the Limpopo River between Zimbabwe and South Africa, has long organised the movement of labour and remittances, governing also the return of bodies.

Indeed, funeral parlours and burial societies date back to the colonial era when injured and dead migrants had to be sent home. Today, carrying prosperous names such as Doves, Kings & Queens and African Pride, funeral parlours function as key institutions in managing transnational death.

Besides these licensed funeral services, people belong to informal money pooling societies that mobilise money collectively to cover the cost of death. While some collect steady monthly deposits, others gather money ad hoc during emergencies.

These societies blur boundaries between formal and informal systems. Many “undocumented” migrants, who cannot have bank accounts, participate through friends or relatives with legal status, contributing to pooled funds tracked via mobile communication apps and bank transfer receipts. Societies sustain solidarity networks, and transparent contributions signal both moral and financial responsibility, shaping participants’ social standing.

Bureaucracies of transnational death

Between the death and the burial, numerous legal and bureaucratic steps must be completed, from obtaining death certificates and health clearances to coordinating with South African and Zimbabwean authorities.

Often, identity documents from Zimbabwe need to be collected to prove that the deceased is a Zimbabwean national. When the deceased has not revealed their identity to the South African authorities and remains “undocumented”, or has two legal identities, the disparity needs to be explained in affidavits.

These administrative steps are not simply procedural; they are part of the politics of death. The paperwork that allows a body to move, such as a stamp, a signature, or an affidavit, is both a form of recognition and a reminder of inequality. While some deaths can move across borders with relative ease, others become delayed or trapped in institutional procedures.

Bureaucracy is a space where care, legality and belonging intertwine. State officials may draw not only on formal guidelines but also their cultural logics of care. They are central in navigating the legal and bureaucratic challenges. Immigration officers might be sympathetic and share the cultural understanding of the importance of returning home respectably.

The homecoming of the dead mirrors, in reverse, the December journeys of the living. Both are seasonal movements that bind families across generations, space and time. The same routes that carried migrants south in search of work now carry their bodies northward, accompanied by papers, payments and prayers.

In the end, the bureaucracies that regulate transnational death are not merely state procedures, but central to how families remake connection, dignity and belonging under precarious conditions.

This research was supported by funding from the Academy of Finland. The author is currently supported by the Kone Foundation.

Family time: how to survive – and even thrive – over the holidays

2025-12-11T13:48:50Z

Photo by Any Lane, Pexels, CC BY

At the end of the year, many families reunite to enjoy time together. These times can be happy, yet sometimes they reveal tensions, unsatisfied needs and difficult relationships. The reality is that being together does not necessarily mean you are connected. Families can be both joyful and anguished or distressed at the same time.

These contradictions are brought into focus during festive periods. They show just how strong the ties of a family are, and remind us that family life is not just a social structure but a continuous practice of connecting and caring.

In our work at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of Children, Families and Society at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, we pose what seems on the surface a very simple question: what do families do to not only survive, but thrive together?

We find repeated themes in our research: families thrive (or do well) when trust is fostered, when care is given and when all members feel they belong.

Family cohesion enables individuals to feel safe and connected. It is not about being perfect or agreeing always, but being able to trust and get along with each other.

We’ve found that more unified families can:

communicate openly
adapt to change
support each other in the trials of life.

These virtues are not something to be assumed. An example is trust, which is not automatic. It is constructed gradually, by respecting each other, the consistency of a present caregiver, the fairness of shared tasks, the assurance that a person’s voice is heard.

In cases where trust breaks down, families tend to say that they feel uncertain, or even unsafe, in their own homes. Yet when trust is strong, it creates the invisible thread which helps families to survive change.

Our studies show that disagreement can coexist with closeness, provided families have ways to repair relationships after tension. One parent in our research said it best:

We fight, we cry, but we still sit together for supper.

That small act of sitting together is part of the work of care that holds families intact.

South African families

South African families and households are diverse in their structures: nuclear, single-parent, multigenerational, child-headed or based on emotional connection and choice. That’s the result of cultural richness as well as the heritage of apartheid, which disturbed traditional family life through forced migration, labour relations and systemic marginalisation.

In our qualitative research in urban communities, families mixed both traditional values and contemporary realities. Grandmothers are usually key figures in caregiving and young people contribute meaningfully to family and household life. But families face significant pressures. Many struggle to meet basic needs, like shelter and food, as well as intangible needs like love, respect and understanding. Family cohesion may be eroded when these needs are not met.

Unmet needs also reflect what we call “bad care”. By that we mean not getting care, or getting inadequate care.

The impact of bad care on people is among the most interesting things that we discovered during our research. It occurs when care-giving responsibilities are not shared equally, when intangible needs are not met or when family members can’t talk to each other. The consequences of unmet intangible needs are usually quite powerful.

For example, a grandmother may make sure her grandchildren are fed, dressed and safe every day. But if her desire for love, connection, or relaxation is not met, she may feel like no one cares about her or that she is being taken for granted. As one grandmother described it, being “the glue” that kept the family together meant her personal needs for rest, emotional support, or simply being cared for were overlooked.

Some families expect their younger members (daughters in particular) to take care of other people, even if they are not prepared or haven’t consented. In our study, one interviewee said that since the death of her grandmother, she was supposed to be the one who would keep the family together though she did not consider herself ready. Her personal needs such as being heard, respected and given space to grieve were placed on hold.

A care-giver who feels as though no one is noticing or supporting them might end up feeling depressed, angry, or burned out. They might not ask for help, for fear of being judged or rejected. One woman said she never talked to her family about her concerns since they “have their own problems” and “don’t want to listen”. This silence, which can be caused by pride, fear, or a lack of trust, can hurt relationships and make people feel even more alone.

Bad care also refers to being given care that is not responsive to all the needs of a family member. Families who only consider aspects like food, shelter and money might lose sight of emotional and spiritual needs. And as those are not fulfilled, the emotional fabric of the family starts to fall apart.

During the holidays, these family behaviours tend to get worse. Being back under one roof brings out disparities in money, values, or hopes. Adult children come home with fresh experiences, parents remember the sacrifices they made, and grandparents hope their traditions will live on.

Care becomes the language that connects people of all ages in this mix. It can be said in words, like when people talk, laugh, or say they’re sorry. It often happens softly, like when people share a meal made with love, offer to help, or take a moment to listen.

Care is not seasonal. It is every day and intentional. The family is not a luxury; it is the pillar of wellbeing. Once the decorations are packed away and the noise fades, what remains are the relationships we have tended.

Nicolette V Roman receives funding from National Research Foundation (NRF), Social Sciences Research Council - African Peace Network.

Early shoppers: how African consumers set global trade trends in the 1800s

2025-12-10T13:19:23Z

A dynamic new “consumer class” emerging from Africa is attracting international attention. With the prospect of rising incomes and a young population, international consulting firms see the continent as the next frontier for consumer goods. Global entrepreneurs even warn of the increasing savviness of African buyers.

But the influence of African consumers on global markets is far from a new thing. In the 1800s, the continent’s consumer demand called the tune for European factories.

We’re a team of economic and social historians, anthropologists, and African studies specialists. Our research project investigates the roots of these dynamics.

Focusing on the African demand for goods like arms, beads and cloth, our research calls into question the Eurocentric idea that Africa was just a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials before the “Scramble for Africa” by colonial powers.

Instead, in the 1800s, the continent was a key driver of industrial production, compelling manufacturers to tailor their goods to African preferences.

This challenges the conventional view of globalisation as a flow of goods and ideas from dominant economies to so-called peripheral regions. In fact globalisation has always been a connected process – one in which African consumers, though often overlooked, played a decisive role in shaping global markets.

Arms

Analysis of the arms trade takes us to the Congo River estuary in the late precolonial era. Before the late 1800s and colonialism, this region was free of direct European political control.

The illegal slave trade lasted at least until the mid-1850s, when the export of legitimate goods finally began to gather momentum. From roughly the 1850s, one of the products most consistently favoured by consumers in the Congo estuary was the so-called “trade gun”.

These rugged, muzzle-loading muskets were deemed outdated by European manufacturers and traders. In the Congo estuary these firearms remained in high demand.

Trade guns could be flintlocks (using a flint to ignite gunpowder) or percussion guns (using a small, explosive cap to ignite it). Flintlocks were more popular because flintstones were more readily available in Africa.

Moreover, smoothbore muzzle-loaders, commonly made from “soft” wrought iron rather than “hard” steel, were not only cheaper but also a more accessible technology than rifles for African consumers. Although flintlocks were sometimes not effective for big-game hunting, they had substantial military value.

Understanding the role of these weapons in African history, however, requires looking beyond just their function. Imported firearms were also commonly given symbolic meanings shaped by local norms and power structures.

For example, among Kikongo speakers in the lower Congo, gunfire was used as a sign of rejoicing during celebrations and funerals. Noise was believed to drive away bad spirits and aid passage into the spirit world.

Although the gun trade in the lower Congo is not always easy to quantify, it is documented, for example, that the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels Vennootschap imported an annual average of about 24,000 guns between 1884 and 1888. The majority of these were discarded French percussion guns that had been modified into flintlocks in Liège.

The development of the arms trade in the lower Congo also mirrors broader changes within the European firearms industry. African consumer demand was not just driven by European industrial output, but was rather an active force that shaped and sustained global economic integration throughout the 1800s.

Beads

Venetian glass bead producers were well aware that their specialised industry depended on demand from Africa and Asia. It is almost impossible to find out exactly how many glass beads were poured into the African continent in the 19th century. Glass beads went through many different hands (in many different ports) before they reached the shores of Africa, and the available information on Venetian production is not consistent.

Historians have shown that, during the 1800s, beads produced in Venice were a key commodity exchanged for ivory along the east African caravan routes connecting the Swahili coast to the Great Lakes. These routes were established by Arab traders and Nyamwezi traders (from today’s Tanzania) on expeditions financed by Gujarati merchants from India.

As demand for ivory grew in European and American markets, these traders began penetrating deeper into the continent to discover new sources of elephant tusks and rhino horns. They established new market centres in the process.

A Venetian bead book displayed available products. © British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

Glass beads were portable and relatively cheap. This made them especially suitable as a form of money in everyday transactions. Beads had a major importance in securing food for caravan porters. Bringing the wrong type of beads could spell disaster for an expedition. This required an updated knowledge of the kinds of beads that were more in demand along specific routes.

Through the caravan leaders, information was gathered by European agents in major commercial hubs such as Zanzibar. This was mailed or telegraphed to their companies’ headquarters, allowing producers to respond to demand as promptly as possible.

Today, sample cards displaying the most requested kinds of glass beads, preserved in European and American museums, are the most tangible product of this information chain.

Cloth

African demand also influenced technological innovation. On the coast of east Africa and in Sudan, people eagerly imported millions of yards of American unbleached cotton cloth. This helped build the fortunes of US industries – so much so that “merikani” (from “American”) became a general term for this product – and, later, of Indian manufacturers.

Its spread, however, was limited by transport costs. Ethiopian markets were supplied mainly by local production, with a robust tradition of cotton spinning and weaving. The cloth was distinctively white and soft – praised by travellers as comparable to the finest European textiles. In Ethiopia, the only clear technological advantage enjoyed by western producers was dyes, especially after the introduction of synthetic colours in the 1870s.

A shamma, a typical Ethiopian shawl, of local white cotton cloth with dyes obtained from abroad. © British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

Ethiopian weavers eagerly sought coloured yarn from Europe and India to pair with their own white cloth. This demand stimulated the spread of new dying technology abroad. The situation changed significantly after the unification of Ethiopia under Menelik II, whose reign brought stability and infrastructure development.

Coarse, unbleached cotton became widely available even in the interior, offering a cheap and easily washable option for ordinary people: 12 million square yards from the US were imported in 1905-1906 alone. Meanwhile, Ethiopian elites continued to favour local cotton but complemented it with imported accessories like felt hats and umbrellas. Coloured cloth, once a luxury, became a popular consumer good.

The big picture

The story of how arms, glass beads and cloth were commercialised in Africa and how production and distribution had to adapt to the continent’s needs provides a more nuanced picture of how global trade as we know it took shape.

Our research emphasises that globalisation was not ignited in the global north, but depended on consumers located far from the centres of production.

We discussed these topics in an online seminar series now available on YouTube.

The research on which this article is based was financed by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Missione 4 Componente 1 CUP J53D23000530006

The history of the Zambezi River is a tale of culture, conquest and commerce

2025-12-10T13:19:04Z

The Zambezi is Africa’s fourth longest river, flowing through six countries: Angola, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, where it becomes the largest river to flow into the Indian Ocean.

The entire length of the river is referred to as the Zambezi Valley region and it carries with it a rich history of movement, conquest and commerce.

Great Britain colonised Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe; Germany colonised Namibia. The beginning and the end of the Zambezi, in Angola and Mozambique, were Portuguese colonies.

Malyn Newitt is a historian of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and has written numerous books on the subject, and one on the Zambezi in particular. We asked him about this history.

When and how did the Portuguese encounter the Zambezi?

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish permanent relations with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. After the explorer Vasco da Gama’s successful return voyage from Europe to India (1497-1499) the Portuguese heard about the gold trade being carried on in the ports of the Zambezi River. By the middle of the 1500s they were trading there, from their bases on the coast of modern Mozambique. From Sofala and Mozambique Island, they sent agents to the gold trading fairs inland.

The Zambezi is the dark blue line. MellonDor, CC BY-SA

Between 1569 and 1575 a Portuguese military expedition tried to conquer the gold producing regions of what became known as Mashonaland (today part of Zimbabwe). This failed, but permanent settlements were made in the Zambezi valley from which Portuguese control was gradually extended over the river up to the Cahora Bassa gorge in modern Mozambique.

Portuguese adventurers, with their locally recruited private armies, began to control large semi-feudal land holdings known as prazos. These reached their greatest extent in the mid-1600s.

Africa’s river basins. GRID-Arendal, CC BY-NC-SA

During the 1700s and early 1800s the area of Portuguese control was limited to the Zambezi valley. Here the elite of Afro-Portuguese prazo holders traded gold and slaves.

The first half of the 1800s saw drought, the migrations of the Nguni (spurred by Zulu-led wars in southern Africa) and the continuing slave trade. During these disturbed conditions, Afro-Portuguese warlords raised private armies and extended their control up the river. They went as far as Kariba (on the border between modern Zambia and Zimbabwe) and through much of the escarpment country north and south of the river.

This eventually brought them into conflict with Britain, whose agents were expanding their activities from South Africa. It resulted in an 1891 agreement which drew the frontiers in and around the Zambezi valley which still exist today.

Who are the people who live along the river?

The people who have inhabited the length of the Zambezi valley have often been generically referred to as Tonga. For the most part they’ve organised their lives in small, lineage-based settlements. Their economy is based on crop growing and occupations relating to trade and navigation on the river.

Because of the lack of any centralised political organisation, the valley communities were often dominated by the powerful kingdoms on the north and south of the river. This might involve raiding and enslavement or simply paying tribute to the kings. On the upper reaches of the river in Zambia, populations became subject to the large Barotse kingdom in the 1800s.

The Zambezi where Zambia and Zimbabwe meet. Diego Delso, CC BY-SA

On the lower river many of the people came under the overlordship of prazos. They worked as carriers, artisans, boatmen and soldiers. Because of the extensive gold and ivory trade, a fine tradition of goldsmith work developed and men became skilled elephant hunters.

Throughout history, valley communities have often been loosely organised around spirit shrines with mediums. These are very influential in providing stability and direction for people’s lives.

How did the Portuguese understand these cultures?

For 400 years the Portuguese controlled the lower reaches of the Zambezi, in Mozambique. They wrote many accounts of the people of the region which show a complex interaction. Portugal’s administration and system of land law controlled matters at the apex of society, but could not control African culture.

An old Portuguese map of the region. Discott, CC BY-NC-SA

The Portuguese were few in number and intermarried to some extent with the local population. This produced a hybrid Afro-Portuguese society in which everyday life was carried on according to African traditional practice. Agriculture, transport, artisan crafts, mining and warfare reflected local traditions.

Although the Portuguese tried to introduce Christianity, it failed to attract many people away from the spirit cults. It became diluted with local religious ideas.

The Portuguese built square, European-style houses in the river ports and on the estates along the river. But most of the population retained the traditional African hut design. Afro-Portuguese were often literate but literacy did not penetrate far and the Portuguese language never replaced the local languages.

How did silver play a role in all this?

Late in the 1500s the Portuguese became obsessed with the idea that there were silver mines in Africa comparable to those discovered by the Spanish in the New World. Considerable effort was made to locate these mines in Angola and in the Zambezi valley.

Military expeditions were dispatched and skilled miners were sent from Europe to test the ores that had allegedly been discovered. Attempts to find the mines throughout the 1600s helped to sustain Portuguese interest in the Zambezi settlements. No silver was ever discovered – not surprisingly, as there is no silver in southern Africa.

Can you bring us up to today? What impact has development had on the river?

Until the 1900s the Zambezi defied most attempts at development. The river was difficult to navigate – too shallow in the dry season, too dangerous during the floods. These fluctuations determine the pattern of migrations and agricultural production.

Moreover, as the river passed through a series of gorges which blocked navigation it was only on its upper reaches, beyond the Victoria Falls, on the borders of Zimbabwe and Zambia, that it was able to act as a major highway.

And the river constituted a major obstacle to any contact between people north and south of it. The first bridge was only built in 1905, to carry the railway from South Africa to the copper belt. In the 1930s, British engineers built a second rail bridge across the lower Zambezi. But the first road bridge was only built in 1934, at Chirundu at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. This at last linked the areas north and south of the river.

Meanwhile the floods of the Zambezi came to be contained by the building of the Kariba Dam (opened in 1959) and the Cahora Bassa Dam (1974). As a result much of the Zambezi below the Victoria Falls has altered drastically and been turned into a succession of large inland seas.

The Victoria Falls. Diego Delso, CC BY-NC-SA

Large sectors of the population have been forcibly removed and the floods no longer keep sea water from invading the delta. Meanwhile water extraction for irrigation, and increasingly frequent droughts, have endangered the river’s very existence.

The Zambezi has become an example of what happens when the natural resources of a great river have been thoughtlessly over-exploited.

Malyn Newitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Pops Mohamed mixed old and new to reinvent South African music

2025-12-05T05:27:42Z

Ismail Mohamed-Jan – better known by South African jazz fans as Pops Mohamed – has passed away at the age of 75. His life in music represented a struggle against narrow, oppressive definitions – of race, instrumental appropriateness and musical genre.

A few days before his death, a remastered version of his 2006 album Kalamazoo, Vol. 5 (A Dedication to Sipho Gumede) had been released on digital platforms ahead of an official launch.

Mohamed was born on 10 December 1949 in the working-class gold-mining town of Benoni in South Africa. By his mid-teens, the Group Areas Act – which divided urban areas into racially segregated zones during apartheid – had forced his family to move to Reiger Park (then called Stertonville).

The suburb was allocated to residents of mixed heritage: Mohamed’s father had Indian and Portuguese ancestry; his mother, Xhosa and Khoisan forebears.

Influences

Significantly for his musical development, Reiger Park was a stone’s throw from the Black residential area of Vosloorus and the remnants of the historic informal settlement of Kalamazoo, where people of all racial classifications had lived side by side. He told me in a radio interview about travelling in the area with his father:

I used to witness migrant workers from the East Rand Property Mines coming with traditional instruments to the shebeens (taverns) and playing their mbiras (thumb pianos) and their mouth bows … and at the same time you’d have jazz musicians playing Count Basie stuff on an old out-of-tune piano … and these traditional guys would be joining in, jamming on their instruments.

At home, Mohamed’s family played music from LM Radio – which defied apartheid by broadcasting from Mozambique – and Springbok Radio – the first commercial station in South Africa, owned by the state (“I got attracted to Cliff Richard and the Shadows”).

As he became more interested in music, but still at high school, he’d take trips to central Johannesburg, to Dorkay House and the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, both famous as cultural centres for Black artists and thinkers. There he found his first guitar teacher, whose name he remembered as Gilbert Strauss. He heard legends like saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi rehearsing.

His first teenage band was Les Valiants (The Valiants). And by the early 1970s he was with The Dynamics, influenced by the assertive Soweto Soul sound of groups such as The Cannibals and The Beaters (later Harari).

Partly to pay school fees and partly out of a sense of adventure, those teenage bands sometimes played in white clubs, enduring the bureaucracy of special permits and sometimes playing behind a curtain while white men mimed out front. Apartheid laws prohibited venues from allowing racial mixing.

Something musically very interesting, he suggested, was emerging at that time from “how we copied the Americans and couldn’t get it quite right”. He was teaching himself to play a Yamaha keyboard with a ‘disco’ pre-set, falling in love with the sounds of Timmy Thomas and Marvin Gaye. “But then I was also influenced by Kippie Moeketsi and those melodies”.

Challenging boundaries

Introduced by As-Shams label founder Rashid Vally to reedman Basil Manenberg Coetzee, and together with an old Dorkay House friend, bassist Sipho Gumede, that eclectic mix went down on record as the first album by the band Black Disco, which produced the popular hit Dark Clouds.

Mohamed wasn’t yet confident to call himself a jazzman, but:

Sipho and Basil told me: just play what your heart is telling you. They were my mentors.

The success of Dark Clouds led to a second album, this time with drummer Peter Morake, called Black Discovery/Night Express – until the officious white minority apartheid censors blue-pencilled the first two words.

And after that the Black Disco band, with shifting personnel, was very much in demand at more upmarket clubs in the coloured townships.

Already the music was challenging boundaries:

We were bridging between a Jo’burg and a Cape Town feel – but still keeping the funk alive … But it was always very important for us not to stay inside the classification.

He explained:

The regime divided us – people classified coloured (mixed race) had identity documents; Black people had the dompas (pass book). We didn’t accept that separation. Black Disco was our way of saying: we are with you.

With work precarious and earnings uncertain, Mohamed played across genres and in multiple bands. Playing pop covers with his band Children’s Society did not satisfy him, but it provided some income. And he scored an even more substantial hit with them in 1975 with the original song I’m A Married Man.

It had been Black Disco that established the politics of his music. And in the shadow of the anti-apartheid 1976 Soweto uprising, with drummer Monty Weber, he established the project Movement in the City – a name he said was code for fighting the system.

Traditional sounds

He began exploring traditional instruments too, fearing that this heritage would be taken away.

So he mastered various mouth-bows and whistles, berimbau, didgeridoo, a range of percussion and the Senegambian kora, a stringed instrument with a long neck. On the kora, his style was unique, combining West African motifs, South African idioms and his personal, plaintive, tuneful melodies. It became his favourite instrument, “telling me more about what’s happening in myself … about who I am”.

Mohamed had a prolific and diverse recording career from that time on, producing more than 20 albums. Five of them, titled Kalamazoo, revisited Khoisan and African jazz tunes. He established a close relationship with individual Indigenous Khoisan musicians, healers and their communities, taking frequent trips to visit and play music with them in the Kalahari Desert.

With former Earth Wind and Fire trumpeter Bruce Cassidy he recorded the duo set Timeless. He also toured Europe with the London Sound Collective and voice artist Zena Edwards. Sampling, he said to me, was “a nice way of educating young people about traditional sounds”.

He established a partnership with steelpan player and multi-instrumentalist Dave Reynolds: “We’re both committed to a South African musical identity,” Reynolds says, “and we both play instruments that we weren’t born to – Trinidadian pans and Senegambian kora – but were rather called to.”

Mohamed’s final video.

In late 2021, Mohamed was hospitalised, and his convalescence left him struggling to work for a period. He continued working. His most recent release, Kalamazoo 5, used digital remastering to extend the sound palette of earlier work.

It showed how, never content to stay within anybody else’s boxes, he held on to his mission of “taking the old and mixing it with the new. We’re not destroying the music: we’re giving it a way to live on.” Through his recordings, it will.

Gwen Ansell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

God in Nigeria: the country’s novelists help us understand the complexity of Christianity

2025-12-04T14:34:55Z

From conflict to prosperity, Nigerian novels trace a history of how Christianity has changed after colonialism. Luis Quintero/Pexels

In African literature, Christianity has usually been shown as a foreign religion brought to the continent by European missionaries and colonisers. But in the past few decades, Nigeria’s writers have dealt with it in a far more complex way as Christianity is rooted in, and transformed by, local realities, ranging from conflict to prosperity.

A new open source book by a scholar of African religion, Adriaan van Klinken, sets out to understand these changes through the eyes of Nigeria’s fiction writers. We asked him five questions.

What made you decide to use fiction to understand religion?

What fiction and religion have in common is that both are works of human imagination and meaning-making. I became interested in literary writing as a commentary on religion. As the late Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, put it:

The novel, like the myth and the parable, gives a view of society from its contemplation of social life, reflecting it, mirror-like, but also reflecting upon it.

In the book I ask a two-fold question. How do the novels of today’s writers represent religion as a central part of African social life? But also, how do they reflect on religion, critiquing and reimagining it?

I chose Nigeria because the country has become the continent’s major centre of both literary production and Christian growth. (According to researchers, Nigeria’s Christian population grew by 25% to 93 million from 2010 to 2020. The country is projected to have the third largest Christian population in the world by 2060.)

When I started reviewing novels by contemporary Nigerian writers, I discovered that, in many texts, Christianity is a central theme in one way or another.

So, how is Christianity being written about?

The Nigerian classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published in 1958. It’s about the changes and tensions in traditional Igbo society because of colonisation. Christianity is described as a newly arriving religion. At first it has little traction but thanks to its links to colonial institutions, it gradually grows its influence, causing division in society.

This critical take on Christianity by Achebe and other African writers of his generation has been well documented.

But both African literature and African Christianity have developed. The writers I discuss were born after independence and engage with Christianity in the postcolonial period.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel Purple Hibiscus signals a transition. In it a teenage Igbo girl, Kambili, grows up in a family dominated by a fanatically religious father.

By contrasting how faith is experienced in two Catholic families, Adichie explores the complexity of Nigerian Catholicism and its transformation from a European missionary product into something locally rooted. Towards the end, Kambili has an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a Nigerian landscape. It’s an empowering religious experience for her.

Adichie invokes Christian imagery and symbols in a story about gender issues. Other writers have done something similar in stories about issues of sexuality (Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees) and ecology (Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman). Dominant forms of Christianity are critiqued in these novels for their links to colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia, and environmental destruction. But Christian traditions are also creatively reinterpreted.

Nigerian-born sociologist Wale Adebanwi argues that African literary writers are social thinkers. I expand this to argue they’re religious thinkers, too. They think about and with religion, precisely because religion – not only Christianity, but also Islam and indigenous religions – is part of the fabric of society that shapes their own identities.

What can we learn about Christianity and conflict?

In one chapter I focus on the Biafran War (1967–1970). This tragic episode in Nigerian history is still a source of national trauma, especially among the mainly Christian Igbo people in the east. Although far from simply a religious conflict between Christians and Muslims, the civil war shows how religion is enmeshed with other major divisions in Nigerian life. Like ethnicity, economic resources, political power.

The war and its aftermaths are a big theme in Nigerian literature. I discuss two novellas – Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. They don’t mention the war by name but can be seen as a commentary on it.

Both tell of the traumatising impact of brutal violence through the eyes of child soldiers. Both draw on Christian objects, texts, and symbols while processing postwar memory and the complex question of forgiveness. Avoiding simple answers, the books suggest Christianity might offer resources for a much-needed path of healing and reconciliation.

Another chapter is about Christian-Muslim relations. This is important given Nigeria’s religious demographics (both Christian and Muslim populations are growing fast, with Muslims in a slight majority). But also because of the history of tensions and conflicts between Christians and Muslims. This has (geo)political significance (just see US president Donald Trump’s threat of military intervention over alleged “Christian persecution” in Nigeria).

Uwem Akpan’s Luxurious Hearses (2008), E.E. Sule’s Sterile Sky (2012) and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (2018) are all set in the Muslim-dominated north.

They all complicate simplistic views and offer nuanced insight into inter-religious relations in a time of escalating tensions between Christians and Muslims. Written by authors from Christian backgrounds, they interrogate the tendency among some Nigerian Christians to see Muslims as the enemy. They also suggest that Christian radicalisation is part of the problem.

By including Muslim characters who protect Christians, and other examples of Christians and Muslims living together harmoniously, these novels promote an everyday practice of neighbourliness.

How do writers discuss Pentecostalism?

Nigeria, and Lagos in particular, has been described as the Pentecostal capital of the world. Pentecostalism is a fast-growing form of Christianity. It emphasises the experience of the holy spirit, energetic worship, divine healing, and a gospel of prosperity. Nigeria (and Africa more generally) has become a major centre of Pentecostalism. As such it’s become a prominent theme in Nigerian literature.

By and large, it’s not favourably depicted. The satirical novel Foreign Gods, Inc by Okey Ndibe (2014) is a case in point. Through the character of Pastor Uka, it explores how hypocricy, exploitation and deception could accompany the prosperity gospel. It suggests Pentecostalism could be continuing the colonial project, with its hostility towards indigenous religions.

For my part I agree, but argue that the depiction of Pentecostalism in Nigerian fiction is somewhat one-sided. It fails to consider the diversity and possibilities within this movement.

Pentecostalism also gives hope to impoverished communities. It empowers people socially and economically. It creates local and global networks, and even builds new cities.

What do you hope readers will take away?

Of course, I hope people will go and read these novels (as well as many others I couldn’t include). Then they too can experience the fascinating life-worlds in them that religion is such an intricate part of.

Good literature is able to avoid simplistic accounts of religion and social life, because by including a diverse range of characters, viewpoints and events it adds nuance and complexity to the conversation.

Debates about whether Christianity has been good or bad for Africa, and Nigeria in particular, can probably never be settled, because so much depends on context and perspective. Nigeria’s writers offer just that.

Adriaan van Klinken does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

High-rise living in Nairobi’s Pipeline estate is stressful – how men and women cope

2025-11-23T02:41:40Z

Within sight of Kenya’s main international airport in Nairobi’s east, Pipeline residential estate stands out like a sore thumb. Composed almost entirely of tightly packed high-rise tenement flats, the estate has been described by the media as an urban planning nightmare. They point to its garbage problem, its waterlogged and frequently impassable streets, and the effect of dense living conditions on children’s health.

Pipeline’s transformation started roughly two decades ago. High-rise apartment blocks were a response to demand for low-cost rental housing in the rapidly urbanising capital. Individual private developers gradually converted the area, roughly 2km², into a dense, high-rise residential district. On average each block of flats hosts 200 or 300 tenants.

Pipeline is an example of how private sector developers can contribute to solving Nairobi’s housing crisis. But it’s also an example of how unregulated and poorly planned housing construction can have a negative impact on the social, economic and psychological well-being of households.

Pipeline is not the only tenement district in Nairobi. But it is one of the densest neighbourhoods in the city of over 4 million. The quality of buildings varies, but there are similarities:

rental flats mainly comprise single rooms with shared ablutions
unit design gives little attention to lighting, air circulation, or open space
tenants are forced into unfavourable rental relationships, where delays or default in payments can lead to water or electricity cuts.

The flats in Pipeline are almost exclusively inhabited by rural-urban migrants. They are attracted here by cheap accommodation and the promise of modernity. The flats have running water, tiled floors, individual electric meters and formal rental agreements.

We are researchers who study urban development, urban migration, and urban communities. Our fieldwork research sought to understand how the physical and social spaces created in neighbourhoods like Pipeline shape the experience of stress and pressure among men and women. We also looked at the strategies they apply to cope or reduce social, economic and romantic pressure.

Pipeline is a marked improvement from the options provided in Nairobi’s traditional informal settlements. Still, most basic services in the area are intermittent, or privatised. This is because the unplanned densification has outpaced the capacity of public infrastructure and services. This forces residents to pay for education, health, water, recreation and other services.

Many of these tenants are unemployed, or employed in low-wage industrial work, precarious gig work, or domestic work.

We found that men and women experience and try to cope with stress in diverse ways. Both men and women located the cause of their distress within their marital home. But the meanings and reactions to that stress diverged sharply in the migrant household.

We found that migrant men tend to experience stress in the form of pressure and migrant women in the form of tiredness.

Previous evidence points to the different ways in which stress is experienced based on biological differences between men and women. However, we propose that the tight coupling between men and pressure and between women and tiredness is the result of the expectation that men will be breadwinners. This drives men towards action and prevents women from expressing a will towards action.

Fieldwork and findings

We discovered our shared interest in studying Nairobi’s high-rise estates during a workshop on urban Nairobi.

Mario had carried out longitudinal ethnographic work with rural–urban migrants in Pipeline. His two-year-long fieldwork mostly took place in near-exclusively male spaces, such as gyms, barber shops and bars. Roughly 50 in-depth qualitative interviews revealed how men navigated urban lives that were increasingly defined by stress, pressure and exhaustion.

Miriam’s research focused on how Nairobi’s privately developed low-cost tenement precincts created environments of everyday urban dysfunction.

After the first meeting, we concluded that it would be beneficial to get a deeper understanding of women’s experiences of stress. This would help us to understand men’s and women’s experiences of stress and pressure. It would also enable us to compare how these different groups managed and coped with stress.

We designed a semi-structured questionnaire and conducted interviews with a dozen female residents. The interviewees spanned single and married women, members of a financial self-help group (chama), female neighbours who usually spent time together on balconies, a sex worker, and an entrepreneur who owned a hair salon.

Comparing the two sets of interviews provides ethnographic support for our hypothesis, which is that men and women tend to experience different types of stress: masculine “pressure” and feminine “tiredness”.

Masculine pressure is defined as an experience that provokes action. The pressure is intrinsically attached to the cause of stress and driven by the hope that overcoming it will promise social validation linked to the male provider model.

The male interviewees tended to engage in outward-oriented strategies to overcome this pressure. These include social drinking, extramarital affairs, or violent reaffirmations of gender identity. In this way, the form and design of Pipeline offered plentiful avenues for commercialised, stress-reducing activities.

In contrast, feminine tiredness emerged as an experience that inhibited action. Female respondents were constrained from aggressive responses, lest they risk being branded immoral or losing vital male financial support.

Married women, or single parents, found themselves largely confined to the small apartments. Their inward-oriented coping strategies were sometimes identified as “doing nothing” or watching TV, or performing household tasks. This passive endurance of stress was also seen as a means to “persevere” (Kiswahili: kuvumulia). In some cases, women used intermediate semi-private spaces, such as balconies, chamas or church, to connect with neighbours.

Taken together, these responses and expectations structure the modes by which male and female migrants react to or attempt to mitigate or relieve stress. This stress is not only caused by poverty but by expectations of middle-class success, ideals of romantic family life and economic progression.

Conclusions

As yet, there are no policies or programmes that seek to reverse the complex challenges created through neighbourhoods like Pipeline. Kenya’s national affordable housing programme is focused on home-ownership solutions. However, with over 90% of the city’s population renting their dwellings, and 87% renting from private individuals, Nairobi needs a better solution for rental housing.

This could be through redevelopment and area-based upgrading, expansion of basic social and community services, incentives for private developers to incrementally upgrade their housing stock, rental and tenant protection legislation, and support for sustainable, communal, and cooperative housing alternatives spearheaded by citizens themselves.

Mario Schmidt received funding from the German Research Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He currently works for Busara, Nairobi (Kenya).

Miriam Maina undertook this research as part of her Postdoctoral research work at the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) in the University of Manchester. The ACRC is a a six-year investment by FCDO to fund new, operationally-relevant research to address intractable development challenges in African cities.

South Africans are flourishing more than you might expect – here’s why

2025-11-20T14:24:24Z

A celebration at the Twelve Apostles Church in Christ International. Faith helps South Africans flourish, according to a global survey. GCIS/Flickr, CC BY-ND

South Africa is often portrayed in the media as a country struggling with inequality, corruption, crime, infrastructure collapse and public health challenges. But this isn’t the whole story.

When South Africans are asked to describe their own lives, they often reveal signs that they are flourishing in vital ways. According to the Global Flourishing Study, many South Africans are in fact showing resolve by striving to move forward from the country’s difficult past and maintaining hope for a better future.

Human flourishing is sometimes used to describe an ideal state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the environments and communities they’re part of. The global study was launched in 2021 to better understand human flourishing around the world.

Over 200,000 people in 22 countries from Argentina to Japan participated in the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study. They completed a survey about their background, upbringing, health, well-being, and other areas of life.

Recently, we analysed the data from 2,561 South Africans in the study to drill deeper. We explored how they are doing across nearly 70 health, well-being and related outcomes. The analysis offers the first comprehensive overview of flourishing in South Africa.

So, what does flourishing look like in South Africa right now?

Contrary to a gloomy view of the country, adult South Africans are flourishing in many ways that mirror the broader world. The country even has some notable strengths it could capitalise on. There are also lingering struggles that may be hindering flourishing in South Africa.

These findings show that some flourishing is still possible amid adversity. Insights from South Africa could offer clues about how to support the well-being of people living in places that are going through significant social and structural challenges.

What South Africa has in common with others

Part of our analysis compared South Africa’s average for each indicator of flourishing to the average across all other countries in the study.

For example, consider the question, “In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?” (rated on a scale from 0-10, with 0 being extremely unhappy and 10 being extremely happy). The average response was 6.95 in South Africa and 7.00 across the other countries. This suggests average happiness in South Africa is about the same as in the other countries, taken together.

The findings were similar for more than 30 of the main outcomes, including sense of purpose, social belonging, depression, gratitude, and general health.

Despite deep-seated societal problems, many South Africans report experiences of well-being that are not very different from the rest of the world. This doesn’t mean that the country’s social and structural challenges should be minimised or overlooked. However, it does show that many people can still experience high levels of well-being in circumstances of material fragility and deprivation.

It raises questions for South African leaders, policymakers and citizens to reflect on. For example, what might the flourishing of South Africans look like if these social-structural constraints were loosened or lifted?

South Africa’s strengths

The findings also suggest that South Africans have several strengths. Compared with the combined averages of the other countries, South Africans reported lower pain and suffering, greater inner peace, hope and forgiveness of others, and greater religious or spiritual engagement. On many of these, South Africa was ranked among the top five countries.

This shines a light on the enormous potential for flourishing in South Africa. For instance, many South Africans say they have the capacity to reckon with wounds from the oppressive system of racial segregation that shaped society for decades (through forgiveness).

South Africans tend to stay grounded amid the challenges of daily life (through inner peace), which puts them in a position to transcend adversities. And they generally hold onto the possibility of a brighter future despite enduring social-structural vulnerabilities (through hope).

Perhaps the most inspiring of these findings is forgiveness. This is a strength that appears to have been cultivated through South Africa’s protracted reckoning with the legacy of apartheid. It may reflect a general societal commitment to pursuing peace and healing over discord and bitterness.

Faith may be a foundational source for the strengths seen in South Africa. For many South Africans, religion or spirituality is something they lean on to navigate the struggles they face in one of the most unequal societies in the world.

The challenges

Like many countries in the Global Flourishing Study, South Africa has clear opportunities to strengthen and expand the conditions that support human flourishing.

South Africans also tended to report lower well-being on several outcomes. These included satisfaction with life, meaning in life, place satisfaction, social trust, experiences of discrimination, charitable giving, and several socioeconomic factors such as employment and financial well-being.

These point to actionable areas that government, civil society, and private sector leaders can prioritise to improve flourishing in the country. Special attention should be directed toward supporting vulnerable groups that the analysis showed are struggling in many aspects of flourishing, including women, divorced people, and those with lower levels of education.

What this all means

The concept of flourishing invites South Africa to envision the highest ideals for its people and the kind of society those ideals might sustain. This does not mean that everyone will agree on what those ideals are, or how best to achieve them.

But the language of flourishing offers a way to unite different sectors and stakeholders around a shared goal: harnessing South Africa’s strengths while addressing challenges that hold back deeper forms of human flourishing in the country.

Richard G. Cowden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ciara’s Beninese citizenship: marketing ploys can’t heal the past

2025-11-20T14:24:13Z

African American singer Ciara received citizenship from the Republic of Benin in 2025 as a descendant of enslaved Africans. The images of her ceremony at Ouidah’s slave route memorial site, “Door of No Return”, were broadcast worldwide. Surrounded by drummers and dignitaries, she held a new Beninese passport aloft, a gesture hailed as both homecoming and healing.

As a historian of Africa, the African diaspora and Ghana, I see Ciara’s citizenship as part of a broader, complex story about how African states are reengaging with their diasporas. These are the global communities of people whose ancestors were displaced through slavery, migration and colonialism.

Several African countries have offered national identity to these descendants.

For many in the global African diaspora, Ciara’s ceremony felt like justice finally taking physical form. It was a symbolic reversal of forced displacement, affirming that descendants of the enslaved can now return as citizens rather than commodities. But behind the symbolism lies a deeper set of questions about power, inequality, and the politics of belonging.

At stake is whether Africa’s experiment with citizenship based on ancestry – what might be called citizenship diplomacy – represents genuine repair for past injustices or a ploy by governments to rebrand themselves.

A new wave of diaspora citizenship

Benin enacted a new law in 2024 which offers nationality to adults who can prove they descend from people enslaved and shipped from African shores. Proof may include DNA testing, genealogical documentation, or oral testimony. Recipients must finalise the process in person within three years.

The initiative follows similar efforts elsewhere. Ghana’s “Year of Return” in 2019 granted citizenship to dozens of African Americans; Sierra Leone has extended passports to descendants using DNA verification. Rwanda and The Gambia have launched programmes to attract “repatriates”.

These policies share a powerful moral ambition: to repair the rupture of slavery and reconnect global Africans with the continent.

Yet as Africa transforms its history into diplomacy, its diplomacy runs the risk of being less about genuine reuniting and more about using identity as a marketing strategy – selling the idea of “returning home” to improve an African nation’s global image.

This tension gives rise to four key issues revealed in my research: unequal access, genealogical governance, heritage commodification, and domestic inequality.

The unequal path to return

The first tension is access. DNA tests and ancestral research are expensive. The documentation required to verify lineage privileges those with resources, education and digital literacy. Celebrities can easily navigate this process; millions of others cannot.

In fact, those whose family histories were most violently erased are least able to prove descent.

These programmes are often promoted as open arms to the world’s Black descendants. However, they rely on technologies and bureaucracies rooted in western data regimes.

As scholars have shown, genetic ancestry databases are overwhelmingly managed by companies in the United States and Europe. These companies market and sell DNA while claiming to restore identity. The proof of African belonging is, once again, mediated by foreign tools and global capital.

Genealogy as governance

This reliance on genetics and archives revives colonial ways of classifying identity. European empires once defined African subjects through blood, “tribe” and lineage. Today, the state risks reinstating similar categories.

To decide who “counts” as African, governments are outsourcing moral authority to laboratories and paperwork. Instead, they could focus on community-based verification. This uses local historical societies, oral historians and cultural institutions that recognise shared heritage without reducing it to data.

The bureaucracy of belonging threatens to eclipse the politics of solidarity.

From memory to marketing

Another layer of complexity is economic. Governments market these citizenship programmes as engines of tourism, philanthropy and investment. Ghana’s Year of Return generated millions of dollars in tourism revenue, prompting other states to follow suit.

But when heritage becomes an industry, memory risks turning into merchandise. The descendants of the enslaved become consumers of identity rather than coauthors of the continent’s future.

There is nothing wrong with diaspora investment or travel. However, reparation should not be measured in flight packages and photo opportunities.

Inequality on the ground

Citizenship by ancestry can also create new inequalities within African societies. Returnees with foreign capital might purchase prime land, establish gated enclaves, or get privileges unavailable to locals.

In Ghana, tensions have surfaced between diaspora residents and citizens over property rights and cultural authority.

If unaddressed, these disparities could reproduce the very economic divides that colonialism imposed.

Citizenship as reparation must not translate into citizenship as entitlement. The moral gesture of inclusion loses meaning when it mirrors the social exclusions of global wealth.

Confronting historical complicity

Benin deserves recognition for acknowledging its historical role in the Atlantic slave trade, when the Kingdom of Dahomey captured and sold captives to European traders. The current government has invested in memorial tourism and educational projects around Ouidah’s slave route sites.

But recognition is only the first step. Apology without transformation leaves history unhealed. A citizenship programme can value memory only if it also builds institutions that dismantle the legacies of exploitation.

These national programmes expose a broader governance gap. The African Union (AU) officially designates the diaspora as Africa’s “sixth region”, yet there is no unified policy guiding diaspora citizenship. Each nation improvises its own standards, often shaped by domestic politics or diplomatic ambitions.

The absence of coordination creates a patchwork of eligibility rules and inconsistent rights. In some states, new citizens can vote or own property; in others, their status remains largely symbolic.

A continental framework could establish shared legal, ethical and economic principles for diaspora citizenship. Coordination would protect migrants from exploitation, prevent nationality shopping, and turn symbolic gestures into coherent policy.

Beyond ancestry: towards agency

The most profound shift must be philosophical. The descendants of the enslaved do not simply seek to return to Africa. They seek to return with Africa, to participate in a collective rethinking of freedom, belonging and justice.

Drawing from my research on diaspora reconstruction and transatlantic history, I argue that reconnecting should not be a sentimental pilgrimage. It should be a political partnership. Governments can collaborate with diaspora communities to build archives and fund educational exchanges. They can also invest in cultural institutions that preserve collective histories.

In that sense, citizenship as reparation can succeed only when it becomes citizenship as responsibility. That is, a mutual pact to build societies more equitable than the world that slavery and colonialism created.

Homecoming is an unfinished conversation. It is one that begins each time the continent and its diasporas meet not as strangers or symbols, but as partners in building the world that history denied them.

Kwasi Konadu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

We studied the walking habits of young men in Cape Town and London – and debunked a myth

2025-11-13T13:47:29Z

Being mobile means people can get access to opportunities and take part in economic and social life. Mobility, in all its forms, is critical for cities to thrive.

Recent studies highlight what most African city dwellers already know: walking is the main way of getting around, and essential for daily life. This is true for people who live in low-income neighbourhoods across the world. When people lack money for taxi, bus or train fares, walking becomes the only option even if the distances are great.

Yet, most African cities and many low-income neighbourhoods globally lack spaces for walking that are safe and appropriate.

While researchers place a lot of emphasis on road traffic, public transport and infrastructure, little attention has been paid to the importance of walking as a daily mobility strategy for low-income communities.

Even less is known about the walking experiences of young men. There often seems to be an assumption they are free to travel wherever and whenever they choose, that they’re invulnerable. But what are the realities they face on the street, and what we can learn from them?

We’re a team of human geographers and anthropologists working in collaboration with an international non-governmental organisation and a group of 12 peer researchers who are walkers: six from Cape Town and six from London. Our study aimed to learn more about the experiences of men like this, aged 18-35, in low-income urban neighbourhoods in South Africa and the UK.

We wanted to better understand issues of access and opportunity for communities that rely on walking. We also wanted to explore the potential of community-based research for improving lives.

Our findings revealed what expected cultural and gender norms often mask: young men in these communities often walk with great fear and trepidation.

The study

Our focus on young men was influenced by findings from an earlier study of young women in Cape Town. That study emphasised the particular concerns women have for the safety of their male counterparts who had to walk back home after accompanying the women to transit points.

We not only set out to foreground the walking experiences of young men; we also wanted to do research differently and with maximum potential impact for those involved. Peer research provides living knowledge, and also a chance to make meaningful change in transforming policy and practice. Peer researchers are, after all, experts in their own lives.

Through a five-day workshop we trained peer researchers in research methods, ethics and data collection. We gained an understanding of their communities through shared mapping exercises. The young men then set out to collect data independently, using mobility diaries. Each of them also interviewed at least 10 other young men in their community.

Although their specific neighbourhoods aren’t named for ethical reasons, the study areas were two township neigbhourhoods in Cape Town and various boroughs in the east end of London. They were strikingly similar when it came to a sense of everyday dangers from high rates of crime, violence and deprivation.

What we found

Young men in our study helped to undermine this myth of male invulnerability. They revealed how fear shapes their daily walking experiences and has an impact on their lives. As one participant said:

I’ve been a victim of crime: at that time I felt useless, weak and vulnerable.

More than this, their stories revealed how they use various tactics and strategies to stay safe. They walk with trusted others. They pay attention to their appearance and avoid displaying things like mobile phones and jewellery. They adjust their routes depending on the weather, darkness and the presence of criminal gangs.

As one participant put it:

I walk in the afternoon to the bus (to get to a job in a distant neighbourhood). It takes 10 minutes. It’s not safe … If I see criminals I pretend I’m tying my shoelace.

Other peer researchers confirmed that even the simple act of appearing to tie a shoelace allows you to survey the street while not looking scared and protecting masculine dignity. If it looks dangerous, they said, you can pretend you’ve forgotten something and run back the way you’ve come.

Our findings illustrate the complexity of daily walks. While mediating danger on the streets and navigating the precarities of urban life, our peer researchers also reflected on the pleasures of walking. They sometimes found joy and relief in walking:

I get to breathe fresh air instead of just sitting in the house … thinking about being unemployed and stuff. I get to see people and be healed.

Encountering the city on foot has benefits for physical and mental health.

Why this matters

Safe, reliable mobility is essential for lives and livelihoods in the city. Our study identified ways that community stakeholders can support safe walking and therefore help with access to economic and social opportunities.

Lifting the veil on men’s vulnerabilities allows community members and policy makers to understand the challenges across the gender spectrum.

But our research also matters because of how we went about it. The potential for change comes in the form of ongoing stakeholder engagement. Findings from the research were presented by the peer researchers themselves to community stakeholders and local government officials, people who have the capacity to improve infrastructure and safety.

Sam Clark and Caroline Barber from Transaid UK and Bulelani Maskiti, an independent South African researcher, contributed to this article.

Bradley Rink receives funding from Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF)

Gina Porter receives funding from Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF)

Darker Shade of Pale: why I wrote a book about my grandfather and how it changed my view of him

2025-11-13T13:46:47Z

Deborah Posel, the founding director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, an interdisciplinary research institute in the humanities and social sciences in South Africa, has published a new book, Darker Shade of Pale: Shtetl to Colony. Using a combination of personal memoir and historical inquiry, it retraces the early 20th century migration of Jewish people from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa through one man’s life.

The book uncovers the hidden story of global migration at the turn of the 20th century from the Jewish territories of the Russian Empire, The Pale of Settlement, to the British colony of South Africa. It follows the author’s grandfather, Maurice Posel, whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others, using the intimacy of a single story to illuminate a much broader set of issues.

Leslie Swartz, a psychology scholar and the editor-in-chief of the South African Journal of Science, talks to Posel about the book.

Leslie Swartz: A key feature for me is the vibrance and joy with which the book, though often dealing with painful issues, is written. I was interested to know how you came to write the book.

Deborah Posel: I had been working for years on a book – entitled Racial Material – on the politics of race and consumption. I had tons of material for the book, and I had absolutely loved researching it, including spending a year in the British Library. During that year, I was not looking for material on Jews, but Jews and Jewish issues kept crossing my page. I took note, but moved on.

I got back to South Africa, intending to write this hefty book. I began as did the COVID-19 lockdown. I started writing the first chapter of Racial Material as all our lives changed – in theory, an entirely free and unfettered time to write, but it was an unexpectedly joyless process.

At that moment, the conventions of academic writing were entirely alienating: nailing everything down in copious detail, reading all the available literature to find out what every single person had said about something in order to be able to make an argument, making sure that I had painstakingly chased after everything that could possibly be relevant, and very cautiously claiming only what this accumulation of evidence would tolerate. No doubt not every academic writes like that, but my academic writing is risk averse. I can and do make bold claims but only on the strength of this kind of effort.

Leslie Swartz: Which, may I say, distinguishes you from many social scientists in South Africa. This is part of why I love your work.

Deborah Posel: The other thing that I do when I write academically is that I make an argument – that’s at the core of academic writing, in my mind – and I sustain an argument that ties everything tightly together.

So I hauled myself through the first chapter but couldn’t face doing it again for the second one. I then decided to embrace the spirit of lockdown: do whatever you feel like doing, these are not normal times; here is an interregnum, so break out, cut loose. That’s when and how I started writing the Darker Shade of Pale book, having no clue where I was going, having no plan, no structure – a 180 degrees different approach from the way I would tackle academic writing.

The second big change for me was I wanted to write in a much more fluid way, more lyrically, more speculatively, more imaginatively, in ways that I thought would be inappropriate in academic writing. I started exploring literary devices that I probably would not use if I was writing what I would call an academic book.

Locked down and locked in, I broke out of my old way of writing. It was joyful. But it was also difficult, with new challenges. I now had two voices: as an historian, but also as a granddaughter. Initially I wasn’t sure how to speak in unison. Also, I had so little material about my grandfather’s life that I would call evidence – no letters, no diaries, very few people alive who could remember him, few photos. I decided early on that I didn’t want to fictionalise and make things up.

I wanted to create a narrative, however patchy and porous, that I knew to be reasonably accurate. That gave me my space. In fact, it required me to produce a story with gaps and shadows. Which is very explicit in the text. I make it clear that I’m giving my take on the possibilities that presented themselves to me.

I tried as far as possible to substantiate them, but I gave myself much more freedom to interpret and imagine. And along with that, writing about my grandfather‘s life became more emotional for me than would have been appropriate in an academic text. In this book, my feelings, though not the central concern, were current and live.

Leslie Swartz: I am glad that you “cut loose”. I view Darker Shade of Pale first and foremost as a cracking good read – a book I have earmarked to give to family members who are not academics but who are interested in migration, families, racial politics, marginalisation. For me it is also scholarly, painstakingly researched, important for any scholar of race and racialisation to read as well. In what way do you think it offers an understanding specifically of Jewish issues?

Deborah Posel: When I started writing this book I was so ignorant about Jewish history. I often asked myself: why, as a Jewish scholar of South Africa, had I paid absolutely no attention to Jews? Why had my intellectual peers also not done so? I had never considered questions about how you write Jews into South African history.

So I had a steep learning curve too, reading as much as I could find, and spending lots of time in South African archives, to produce a social history intertwined with my grandfather’s story. I tried to make sense of him, and his individual Jewishness, as made and unmade by his wider society.

It started with life in the shtetl (the name for a small town with a predominantly Jewish population in eastern Europe). I deliberately started there because most migration stories start when people get off the ship, as day one of the new life. But what did they come with? What was the headspace? What were the psyches that landed, and how well equipped or not were they psychologically to cope?

And I must say that I found the world of the shtetl staggeringly unexpected. Even the smallest shtetl was status-obsessed; failure was deeply shameful, even there.

The people who hadn’t made it in the shtetl were among those who left and tried to start new lives, another chance to make something of themselves. My great-grandfather was one of them, and he failed again. A shameful trajectory. It gave me an entirely different perspective on my grandfather, and his ill-fated son, unlikely, given his life in the shtetl, to realise the hopes and ambitions of his emigration. I had judged him all too readily and ignorantly. I started to feel sorry for him, which no doubt seeped into the writing.

Leslie: For me, the emotions have seeped into the writing and that is why this book is so good – disciplined and emotional at the same time. And an important read, I think, in world, Jewish and South African history.

Culture as a sustainable development goal? It’s starting to become a reality

2025-11-09T04:13:31Z

Eight global millennium development goals were established in 2000 by member states of the United Nations (UN) and endorsed by other multilateral organisations. They ranged from eliminating hunger to empowering women, and from reducing child mortality to environmental sustainability.

The millennium development goals were not fully achieved by 2015, so 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) were devised to be reached by 2030. The longer list responded mostly to growing climate threats and urbanisation and included aspects of wellbeing and healthy living.

The focus now is on developing the next agenda after 2030. There is a growing drive to include culture as a goal. Nowhere was the bid more pronounced than at the recent global cultural policy meeting called Mondiacult, held every three years by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).

Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse is a scholar of cultural development. We asked him why a culture SDG matters.

Why should culture be an SDG in its own right?

Since 1982, several of these meetings have emphasised the link between culture and sustainable development. Now there’s a call for it to be a standalone SDG in the post-2030 development agenda.

A strong argument is made in the Unesco global report on cultural policies, released in Barcelona during Mondiacult in September 2025. According to this report, 93% of responding member states affirm that culture is a central point in their national sustainable development plans. This is an increase from 88% four years ago.

The document reports also that cultural and creative industries account for 3.39% of the global gross domestic product (a measure of the health of an economy) and 3.55% of jobs. That makes it comparable to the automotive sector. Cultural tourism generates US$741.3 billion in 250 cities each year.

Given this, there’s a broad consensus that culture is one of the keys to sustainable economic development. But it goes deeper.

Unesco defines culture as:

A set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterise a society or social group including not only arts and letters, but modes of life, value systems, traditions and beliefs.

From this definition, culture is a human right. The final declaration of Mondiacult 2025 recognises it as such, alongside other human rights. Indeed, many countries’ constitutions and other international conventions, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, recognise this.

If the 17 SDGs (like education, gender equality and healthy living) are related to human rights, why should culture, which is also a human right, not be an SDG?

To get there, the Mondiacult declaration reinforces that culture needs to be emphasised and endorsed in the 2030 development agenda.

The Culture Committee of the United Cities and Local Governments organisation campaigned for culture to be included in the post-2015 development agenda. (Since its 2004 Agenda 21 for Culture initiative, the organisation has worked to include culture in local and regional development.)

In 2022, a network of leading global cultural organisations began an advocacy campaign for culture to be a dedicated SDG. The #Culture2030Goal campaign’s draft zero has five focus areas:

adequate attention to culture at the highest level of government
recognise connections between culture and other policy areas
the culture sector must feel a sense of engagement in and ownership of the goal
mobilise power of culture for all other goals
achievement of all goals through a cultural lens.

The campaign formulated culture as an SDG as follows:

Ensure cultural sustainability for the wellbeing of all.

Sustainability is culture’s capacity to endure over time and also speaks to new thinking about sustainability for a healthier future for the world.

What difference would it make if it was an SDG?

A standalone SDG would recognise culture as a global public good that all countries should protect.

This would draw attention to culture as an area of intervention. Justin O'Connor, a professor of cultural economy, writes in the Cultural Policy Forum that:

A specific goal is needed to better coordinate culture’s contribution to each and every goal, and to make it mandatory for governments and agencies to pay attention to it, and hopefully direct resources to it.

So, it would also encourage governments to take culture into account in their national economic development agendas.

What are the obstacles?

There are two main constraints in the path to culture becoming an SDG: the understanding of its role for development; and the capacity of policymakers to give it the necessary space.

Mondiacult 2022 recommended including culture in the UN’s 2024 Summit of the Future and that was successful. In fact, Action 11 of the summit’s final document Pact for the Future includes culture. However, it is associated with sport, and is not considered a stand-alone issue.

Against this backdrop, the ambition of having culture as an SDG still has a way to go. There is no set timeline. It all depends on how negotiations evolve among multiple UN stakeholders (international agencies and member states) in the preparation process for the post-2030 agenda.

Although South Africa is leading the 2025 G20 meetings, where culture is firmly on the agenda, Africa can still play a far stronger mobilising role among the world’s leaders, to convince them to come on board.

Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

African poetry is celebrated in a groundbreaking publishing project

2025-11-06T14:54:10Z

For 10 years, Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes and his friend the Nigerian writer Chris Abani have sifted through piles of manuscripts looking for Africa’s new poetic talent. Since 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund has been assembling a formidable archive of writing through the New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series.

A chapbook – a small publication usually under 40 pages – is an accessible and honoured format for poets to publish focused selections of their work. In this series, each chapbook features an emerging African poet, and is presented as part of a beautifully designed box set of 10 or more chapbooks. Besides the poetry itself, each box set also showcases the work of a commissioned African visual artist. The artists include Sokari Douglas Camp, Victor Ehikhamenor, Ficre Ghebreyesus and Aida Muluneh, among others.

This ever-growing archive has now published over 100 poets, and offers a window into the diversity of African poetic expression today.

Marking the project’s 10th anniversary is a new anthology called Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry, edited by Jordanian writer Siwar Masannat. It collects Dawes and Abani’s rich introductions to each box set and has a foreword by Masannat. In it, readers learn about the impact of the series, offering a layered and necessary account of how these chapbooks have transformed the visibility of African poets over the past decade.

My work as a scholar of African literature focuses on recovering overlooked histories and interrogating the spaces in which literature is made and circulated.

This new anthology matters because it documents not just poems, but a cultural movement that redefines what an African literary archive can be, and why poetry remains central to that conversation.

Decidedly diasporic

While the series places Africa at the centre of its imagination, its focus is largely diasporic, shaped by Africans living outside the continent. The majority of the poets live in the US or the UK. Poets based on the continent form a minority and are scattered geographically.

The editors acknowledge this imbalance, attributing it to “better access to workshops and craft education” available to diaspora poets. The result is an archive arguably shaped less by the immediacies of the continent and more by the diaspora’s sensibilities and infrastructures.

Nigeria, more than any of the 25-odd countries included in the chapbooks, shapes the aesthetics of the series. This reflects both the density of the country’s literary networks and the curatorial choices of the editors. They rely heavily on personal connections and prize pools to spot new and emerging talents.

A recurring feature of the poets in the series is the “hyphenated African”: Somali-American, Ghanaian-British, Ethiopian-German, Sierra Leonean-American. Some were born in countries outside Africa or migrated as toddlers. Their Africanness is claimed through memory, nostalgia, heritage, or family history, rather than geography.

The editors assert that all the poets “self-identify as Africans in the full and complicated way that Africanness is best defined”. This also underscores how the project expands the category of African poetry. In fact, the transcontinental profile of these writers shows how African poetry today cannot be read solely through a nationalist lens. The hybridity of identity and place becomes central. Many poets occupy in-between spaces – culturally, geographically, linguistically and emotionally.

Still, the series impresses on many other levels. Particularly in its commitment to highlighting the continent’s plural and localised poetics, and in its rare, long-term investment in the future of African poetry.

Gender

The series has been notably attentive to gender parity. Women poets like Warsan Shire, Safia Elhillo, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Momtaza Mehri, Tsitsi Jaji and Vuyelwa Maluleke, among others, form a significant portion of the archive.

This signals an important feminist turn in African poetics. The chapbook form becomes a space where African women’s voices are nurtured and given international circulation, countering historical silences. The poets here highlight a generational continuity of feminist expression.

Intergenerational

The birth years of poets in the series range from 1963 to 2007, showcasing a vibrant intergenerational dialogue. The older poets often engage in socio-political critique informed by post-independence transitions. Millennial and Gen Z poets frequently explore themes of identity, queerness, internet culture, displacement and decoloniality with linguistic experimentation and digital fluency.

Ghanaian poet Tryphena Yeboah, in her chapbook, A Mouthful of Home, exemplifies this:

I TELL MY MOTHER I WANT A BODY THAT

EXPANDS

Into a map. She wants to know where I’ll travel to. I say

“myself”.

The act of travel becomes a metaphor for self-mapping that captures how younger African poets reimagine movement, belonging and home as internal, affective geographies.

In contrast, South African poet Ashley Makue, in her chapbook, i know how to fix myself, offers a more visceral expression of embodied trauma and inherited violence:

my mother is a war zone

they don’t tell her that

these men that pee in her

and leave with gunpowder in their chests

Living archive

The New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series has been an extraordinary intervention in the history of African poetry. It has foregrounded a generation, opened an aesthetic safe space, and created a beautiful, living archive.

Dawes and Abani introduce each of the box sets with two introductions – what they call “simultaneous conversations” – and they often debate identity, the style of the poetry, circulation, and other issues.

This is more than an impressive catalogue; it is a breathing archive of African poetic consciousness, one that resists static definitions. It captures the fluidity of identity, the urgency of voice, and the diverse shaping of African poetry today.

What it tells us: that African poetry is thriving, diverse and globally mobile. What it does not tell us: how poets working entirely from the continent might imagine and enact African poetics differently.

But by foregrounding new and emerging voices, the Africa Poetry Book Fund affirms that poets remain vital chroniclers of the African experience, articulating emotion, history and imagination in ways that other forms of writing often cannot.

They don’t just do this through publications, but running prizes, supporting African poetry libraries and maintaining a digital archive.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The comedy economy: Nigeria’s online video skits are making millions

2025-11-06T14:54:01Z

Short comedy videos circulating on social media have created a booming industry in Nigeria in the past few years. The country’s comedy creators put their skits out on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to reach a massive audience.

As these online comedians gain followers they make their money from advertising, by endorsing brands as influencers, and through collaborations. In Nigeria the industry is popularly called the skit economy.

This phenomenon represents more than a major new entertainment trend. It highlights the ingenuity of young Nigerians in using technology to create livelihoods and influence culture. In the process, they contribute to national economic growth.

The skit industry has joined the likes of Nollywood film, Afrobeats music and local fashion to put the country on the entertainment map globally.

The rise of the industry is chronicled in the 2024 book Skit Economy: How Nigeria’s Comedy Skit-Makers Are Redefining Africa’s Digital Content Landscape, by entrepreneurship scholar and polling guru Bell Ihua. His work is supported by findings from the Africa Polling Institute.

As he explains:

The Nigerian entertainment industry is undoubtedly creating job opportunities and contributing to the country’s diversification from oil … The industry is rated as the second most significant employer of youths in Nigeria after agriculture, employing over one million people.

According to his book, skit-making is estimated to be Nigeria’s third largest entertainment industry sector, with a net worth of over US$31 million.

As a marketing scholar focusing on the cultural and creative industries and digital entrepreneurship who has had the privilege of interviewing Ihua, I’d like to share my thoughts about his book.

What becomes clear as you read it is that social media platforms have not only amplified the reach and impact of skits. Online platforms have allowed creators to reach global audiences while preserving the culture, language and stories unique to their communities. Skit creators prove the potential of comedy as a medium for both entertainment and cultural diplomacy.

However, as the industry grows, argues Ihua, the skit economy must navigate new challenges related to representation and ethics.

What’s in the book

The book’s eight chapters cover Africa’s digital content landscape, taking into account the continent’s youth bulge and the evolution of social media and content creation.

Ihua then explores Nigeria’s booming cultural and creative industries before homing in on comedy skit-making in chapter 4. It attempts to classify various types of digital content creation in Nigeria and outline the trends in online videos before embarking on an in-depth national study on comedy skit-making in chapter 7. He then considers implications for public policy and future research in the field.

What makes the book so compelling is that it recognises skit-making as an ecosystem on its own terms. It then defines what that ecosystem looks like in Nigeria. In the process Ihua makes it clear why books like this matter.

They are a call for taking entertainment seriously and investing future research in it. Social media and digital technology have reconfigured an unsung economic sector that’s capable of including the bulging youth population in the national conversation. This is despite limited institutional support.

What’s driving the boom

Ihua traces its boom to COVID-19 lockdowns that began in Nigeria in 2020:

They provided a source of laughter and relief to many Nigerians, as most people found it safer to stay at home and get entertained with skits.

Today, writes Ihua, two-thirds of Nigerians watch comedy skits frequently. According to his study they serve as stress relief and social commentary.

With 63% of Nigerians under 25 and high social media uptake, skit-making taps into abundant creative energy and mobile-first audiences.

Value

The Skit-Economy highlights how skit comedians create direct and indirect jobs (editors, social media managers, brand consultants). They generate income through endorsements, platform monetisation (the revenue they get from advertising on a space like YouTube), and various partnerships and collaborations.

Their cultural value is not just measured in their global influence. Skits reflect everyday Nigerian realities with humour and satire, influencing local public opinion and reinforcing national identity.

As prominent Nigerian entrepreneur and cultural worker Obi Asika notes in the book’s foreword:

Their success … stems from a combination of talent, creativity, innovation, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a deep understanding of their audience’s preferences and cultural nuances.

Challenges

However, Ihua identifies a number of challenges facing the industry.

Financial rewards are unequal. Only top creators earn sustainably. For many skit-makers revenue is unstable.

Working from Nigeria means dealing with infrastructure deficits. Electricity supply is unreliable, the internet is expensive and there is limited access to digital production tools.

Nigerian skit-makers also operate in a climate where there are weak intellectual property protections. Piracy and unauthorised reuse undermine earnings.

The job can be an ethical minefield. Pranks can be harmful. They can perpetuate stereotypes and be insensitive to minorities.

These challenges are enhanced by a policy vacuum. There is little government recognition or support for digital creatives in Nigeria.

An African future?

For Ihua, skit-making is a good example of how new digital industries can aid in absorbing Africa’s growing youth workforce. With adequate support, skit-making can help provide dignified livelihoods.

So, for Ihua these creators are not merely entertainers. They’re also job creators, cultural ambassadors, and catalysts of digital transformation.

For Africa broadly, the rise of skit-making underscores the continent’s potential to innovate in ways that are uniquely aligned with its youthful demographics and digital future.

Nigeria’s skit economy offers a blueprint for the continent. Already, skit-making is spreading to other countries, like Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. The lines are blurring between stand-up or TV comedians and skit makers.

If nurtured with the right infrastructure, policy, and industry support, the skit economy could evolve from an informal hustle into a structured pillar of Africa’s creative economy. This could further solidify the continent’s role in the global cultural imagination.

Nnamdi O. Madichie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Luxury tourism is a risky strategy for African economies – new study of Botswana, Mauritius, Rwanda

2025-10-28T13:39:57Z

Mauritius led the luxury tourism trend in Africa with all-inclusive resorts. Heritage Awali/yourgolftravel.com, CC BY-NC-ND

How successful is luxury tourism in Africa? What happens if it fails to produce higher tourism revenues: can it be reversed? And does it depend on what kind of government is in place?

Pritish Behuria is a scholar of the political economy of development who has conducted a study in Botswana, Mauritius and Rwanda to find answers to questions like this. We asked him about his findings.

What is luxury tourism and how prevalent is it in Africa?

Luxury tourism aims to attract high-spending tourists to stay at premium resorts and lodges or visit exclusive attractions. It’s a strategy that’s being adopted widely by governments around the world and also in African countries.

It’s been promoted by multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations, as well as environmental and conservation organisations.

The logic underlying luxury tourism is that if fewer, high-spending tourists visit, this will result in less environmental impact. It’s often labelled as a “high-value, low-impact” approach.

However, studies have shown that luxury tourism does not lead to reduced environmental impact. Luxury tourists are more likely to use private jets. Private jets are more carbon intense than economy class travel. Supporters of luxury tourism also ignore that it reinforces economic inequalities, commercialises nature and restricts land access for indigenous populations.

In some ways, of course, the motives of African countries seem understandable. They remain starved of much-needed foreign exchange in the face of rising trade deficits. The allure of luxury tourism seems almost impossible to resist.

How did you go about your study?

I have been studying the political economy of Rwanda for nearly 15 years. The government there made tourism a central part of its national vision.

Over the years, many government officials and tourism stakeholders highlighted the challenges of luxury tourism strategies. Even so, there remains a single-mindedness to prioritise luxury tourism.

I found that, in Rwanda, luxury tourism resulted in a reliance on foreign-owned hotels and foreign travel agents, exposing potential leakages in tourism revenues. Crucially, tourism was not creating enough employment. There was also a skills lag in the sector. Employees were not being trained quickly enough to meet the surge of investments in hotels.

So I decided to investigate the effects of luxury tourism in other African countries. I wanted to know who benefits and how it is being reversed in countries that are turning away from it.

I interviewed government officials, hotel owners and other private sector representatives, aviation officials, consultants and journalists in all three countries. Added to this was a thorough review of economic data, industry reports and grey literature (including newspaper articles).

What are your take-aways from Mauritius?

Mauritius was the first of the three countries to explicitly adopt a luxury tourism strategy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the government began to encourage European visitors to the island’s “sun-sand-sea” attractions. Large domestic business houses became lead investors, building luxury hotels and buying coastal land.

Over the years, tourism has provided significant revenues for the Mauritian economy. By 2019, the economy was earning over US$2 billion from the sector (before dropping during the COVID pandemic).

However, tourism has also been symbolic of the inequality that has characterised Mauritius’ growth. The all-inclusive resort model – where luxury hotels take care of all of a visitor’s food and travel needs themselves – has meant that the money being spent by tourists doesn’t always enter the local economy. A large share of profits remains outside the country or with large hotels.

After the pandemic, the Mauritian government took steps to loosen its focus on luxury tourism. It opened its air space to attract a broader range of tourists and re-started direct flights to Asia. There’s growing agreement within government that the opening up of tourism will go some way towards sustaining revenues and employment in the sector. Especially as some other key sectors (like offshore finance) may face an uncertain future.

And from Botswana?

Botswana followed Mauritius by formally adopting a luxury tourism strategy in 1990. Its focus was on its wilderness areas (the Okavango Delta) and wildlife safari lodges. For decades, there were criticisms from scholars about the inequalities in the sector.

Most lodges and hotels were foreign owned. Most travel agencies that booked all-inclusive trips operated outside Botswana. There were very few domestic linkages. Very little domestic agricultural or industrial production was used within the sector.

Guides take tourists across Botswana’s Okavango delta in boats. Diego Delso/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

However, I found that the direction of tourism policies had also become increasingly political. Certain politicians were aligned with conservation organisations and foreign investors in prioritising luxury tourism. Former president Ian Khama, for example, banned trophy hunting on ethical grounds in 2014. He pushed photographic tourism, where travellers visit destinations mainly to take photos. But critics allege he and his allies benefited from the push for photographic tourism.

Photographic tourism is closely linked with the problematic promotion of “unspoilt” wilderness areas that conform to foreign ideas about the “myth of wild Africa”.

President Mokgweetsi Masisi reversed the hunting ban once he took power. He argued it had adverse effects on rural communities and increased human-wildlife conflict. He believed that regulated hunting could be a tool for better wildlife management and could produce more benefits for communities.

Since the latter 2010s, Botswana’s government has loosened the emphasis on luxury tourism and tried to diversify tourism offerings. It has relaxed visa regulations for Asian countries, for example, to allow a wider range of tourists to visit more easily.

What about Rwanda?

Of the three cases, Rwanda was the most recent to adopt a luxury tourism strategy. However, it has remained the most committed to this strategy. Rwanda’s model is centred on mountain gorilla trekking and premium wildlife experiences. It’s augmented by Rwanda’s attempt to become a hub for business and sports tourism through high-profile conferences and events.

Gorillas are a key attraction for luxury tourists in Rwanda. Gatete Pacifique/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Rwanda invited global hotel brands (like the Hyatt and Marriott) to build hotels and invested heavily in the country’s “nation brand” through sponsoring sports teams. The “luxury” element is managed through maintaining a high price to visit the country’s main tourist attraction: mountain gorillas. Rwanda is one of the few countries where mountain gorillas live.

After the pandemic, the government lowered prices to visit mountain gorillas but has also regularly stated its commitment to luxury tourism.

What did you learn by comparing the three?

I wanted to know why some countries reverse luxury tourism strategies once they fail while others don’t.

It is quite clear that luxury tourism strategies will always have disadvantages. As this study shows, luxury tourism repeatedly benefits only very few actors (often foreign investors or foreign-owned entities) and does not create sufficient employment or provide wider benefits for domestic populations. My research shows that the political pressure faced by democratic governments (like Botswana and Mauritius) forced them to loosen their luxury tourism strategies. This was not the case in more authoritarian Rwanda.

Rwanda’s position goes against a lot of recent literature on African political economy, which argues that parties with a stronger hold on power would be able to deliver better development outcomes.

While that may be case in some sectors, the findings of this study suggest that weaker political parties may actually be more responsive to changing policies that are creating inequality than countries with stronger political parties in power.

Pritish Behuria is a recipient of the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 2024-2025 (MFSS24/240043).

African languages for AI: the project that’s gathering a huge new dataset

2025-10-16T16:33:41Z

The African Next Voices project has started out with sites in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Iuliia Anisimova/iStock

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Siri or Google Assistant are developed by the global north and trained in English, Chinese or European languages. In comparison, African languages are largely missing from the internet.

A team of African computer scientists, linguists, language specialists and others have been working on precisely this problem for two years already. The African Next Voices project, primarily funded by the Gates Foundation (with other funding from Meta) and involving a network of African universities and organisations, recently released what’s thought to be the largest dataset of African languages for AI so far. We asked them about their project, with sites in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

Why is language so important to AI?

Language is how we interact, ask for help, and hold meaning in community. We use it to organise complex thoughts and share ideas. It’s the medium we use to tell an AI what we want – and to judge whether it understood us.

We are seeing an upsurge of applications that rely on AI, from education to health to agriculture. These models are trained from large volumes of (mostly) linguistic (language) data. These are called large language models or LLMs but are found in only a few of the world’s languages.

Languages also carry culture, values and local wisdom. If AI doesn’t speak our languages, it can’t reliably understand our intent, and we can’t trust or verify its answers. In short: without language, AI can’t communicate with us – and we can’t communicate with it. Building AI in our languages is therefore the only way for AI to work for people.

If we limit whose language gets modelled, we risk missing out on the majority of human cultures, history and knowledge.

Why are African languages missing and what are the consequences for AI?

The development of language is intertwined with the histories of people. Many of those who experienced colonialism and empire have seen their own languages being marginalised and not developed to the same extent as colonial languages. African languages are not as often recorded, including on the internet.

So there isn’t enough high-quality, digitised text and speech to train and evaluate robust AI models. That scarcity is the result of decades of policy choices that privilege colonial languages in schools, media and government.

Language data is just one of the things that’s missing. Do we have dictionaries, terminologies, glossaries? Basic tools are few and many other issues raise the cost of building datasets. These include African language keyboards, fonts, spell-checkers, tokenisers (which break text into smaller pieces so a language model can understand it), orthographic variation (differences in how words are spelled across regions), tone marking and rich dialect diversity.

The result is AI that performs poorly and sometimes unsafely: mistranslations, poor transcription, and systems that barely understand African languages.

In practice this denies many Africans access – in their own languages – to global news, educational materials, healthcare information, and the productivity gains AI can deliver.

When a language isn’t in the data, its speakers aren’t in the product, and AI cannot be safe, useful or fair for them. They end up missing the necessary language technology tools that could support service delivery. This marginalises millions of people and increases the technology divide.

What is your project doing about it – and how?

Our main objective is to collect speech data for automatic speech recognition (ASR). ASR is an important tool for languages that are largely spoken. This technology converts spoken language into written text.

The bigger ambition of our project is to explore how data for ASR is collected and how much of it is needed to create ASR tools. We aim to share our experiences across different geographic regions.

The data we collect is diverse by design: spontaneous and read speech; in various domains – everyday conversations, healthcare, financial inclusion and agriculture. We are collecting data from people of diverse ages, gender and educational backgrounds.

Every recording is collected with informed consent, fair compensation and clear data-rights terms. We transcribe with language-specific guidelines and a large range of other technical checks.

In Kenya, through Maseno Centre for Applied AI, we are collecting voice data for five languages. We’re capturing the three main language groups Nilotic (Dholuo, Maasai and Kalenjin) as well as Cushitic (Somali) and Bantu (Kikuyu).

Through Data Science Nigeria, we are collecting speech in five widely spoken languages – Bambara, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba. (RobotsMali partnered with us to collect Bambara.) The dataset aims to accurately reflect authentic language use within these communities.

In South Africa, working through the Data Science for Social Impact lab and its collaborators, we have been recording seven South African languages. The aim is to reflect the country’s rich linguistic diversity: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Setswana, isiNdebele and Tshivenda.

Importantly, this work does not happen in isolation. We are building on the momentum and ideas from the Masakhane Research Foundation network, Lelapa AI, Mozilla Common Voice, EqualyzAI, and many other organisations and individuals who have been pioneering African language models, data and tooling.

Each project strengthens the others, and together they form a growing ecosystem committed to making African languages visible and usable in the age of AI.

How can this be put to use?

The data and models will be useful for captioning local-language media; voice assistants for agriculture and health; call-centre and support in the languages. The data will also be archived for cultural preservation.

Larger, balanced, publicly available African language datasets will allow us to connect text and speech resources. Models will not just be experimental, but useful in chatbots, education tools and local service delivery. The opportunity is there to go beyond datasets into ecosystems of tools (spell-checkers, dictionaries, translation systems, summarisation engines) that make African languages a living presence in digital spaces.

In short, we are pairing ethically collected, high-quality speech at scale with models. The aim is for people to be able to speak naturally, be understood accurately, and access AI in the languages they live their lives in.

What happens next for the project?

This project only collected voice data for certain languages. What of the remaining languages? What of other tools like machine translation or grammar checkers?

We will continue to work on multiple languages, ensuring that we build data and models that reflect how Africans use their languages. We prioritise building smaller language models that are both energy efficient and accurate for the African context.

The challenge now is integration: making these pieces work together so that African languages are not just represented in isolated demos, but in real-world platforms.

One of the lessons from this project, and others like it, is that collecting data is only step one. What matters is making sure that the data is benchmarked, reusable, and linked to communities of practice. For us, the “next” is to ensure that the ASR benchmarks we build can connect with other ongoing African efforts.

We also need to ensure sustainability: that students, researchers, and innovators have continued access to compute (computer resources and processing power), training materials and licensing frameworks (Like Nwulite Obodo Open Data License (NOODL) or Esethu Framework). The long-term vision is to enable choice: so that a farmer, a teacher, or a local business can use AI in isiZulu, Hausa, or Kikuyu, not just in English or French.

If we succeed, built-in AI in African languages won’t just be catching up. It will be setting new standards for inclusive, responsible AI worldwide.

Vukosi Marivate is a Co-Founder of Lelapa AI. DSFSI is funded by the Gates Foundation, Meta, Google.org, ABSA (for the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science). Vukosi is a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba and Masakhane Research Foundation. Vukosi is a board member of the Partnership on AI and the Council for Higher Education in South Africa.

Ife Adebara is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of EqualyzAI. She receives funding from Gates Foundation, Lacuna and the University of British Columbia and she is affiliated with Data Science Nigeria.

Lilian Wanzare receives funding from Gates Foundation. she is affiliated with Maseno University and Utavu AI Foundation. .