Sean Jacobs's Blog

They came seeking solitude in a private family graveyard in our common neighborhood in Riruta, a suburb of Nairobi City, around mid-morning towards the end of September 2018. I was already there. My weakening eyesight could make out only images of two adults.

This is private land. They could be the owners of the land, I thought to myself.

I waved at them rapidly. They both waved back. I walked towards them.

���Oooh! So it���s you!��� I exclaimed. These were not the owners of the land and the graveyard after all. It was Binyavanga Wainaina and his helper.

���You two know each other?��� his helper asked.

���Of course!��� I replied.

Binyavanga had changed a great deal since I had last seen him. The multiple strokes had severely incapacitated him. His speech came out in an agonizing slur. I tried to ease his discomfort by speaking more, compensating for his forced silence.

���Such vast private lands are uncommon in this city,��� I observed. ���In fact, they are abominable and unjustifiable in a metropolis like Nairobi bursting with deprived humanity.���

He nodded repeatedly in agreement.

There was a huge fig tree on the land. In African spirituality, the fig tree is sacred. Among the Agikuyu people, it is known as Mugumo. Our people once worshipped and offered sacrifices beneath Mugumo trees. We walked closer to it. Its enormous trunk was hollow, forming something like a passageway through the middle. I walked in and out of the trunk the way we used to do in our childhood among the giant podo trees along River Nanyuki. This particular Mugumo was immense, tall, wide, and commanding. Its huge branches spread outward like a canopy over a vast area.

���A Mugumo is never pruned,��� one of the owners of that land had once told me casually. ���Cutting it is sacrilegious and cursed.���

Such a sacred tree was best left alone, I thought to myself. It was an abode of ancestral spirits. But wait����� as children, we had been warned never to walk seven times around a Mugumo. Boys, we were told, would turn into girls, and girls into boys. We did. Nothing happened. It was a myth, an old tale that could not contain the free and wandering spirits of our childhood. I had walked several times around this particular Mugumo in the neighborhood and I remained who I was. I felt only solace and solitude as I escaped into my inner self.

We held animated conversations beside the Mugumo for a long while, hardly noticing the passage of time. We spoke about literature, religion, politics, creative writing, African liberation, Mau Mau, Mwakenya, Kwani?, dreams, life, survival of artists, hope, and much more. Mwakenya was the underground socialist movement of the 1980s in Kenya whose members and supporters were brutally suppressed by the Moi���KANU dictatorship. Kwani? is the literary magazine Binyavanga co-founded in 2003 with his Caine Prize winnings, which became the crucible of a new generation of Kenyan and African writing.

Binyavanga barely spoke, his words still slurred, yet he nodded excitedly and often in agreement. His helper listened attentively. Meanwhile, I spoke endlessly, releasing words like a newly activated word processor.

*

I first met Binyavanga Wainaina in 2002 at a shopping mall in Nairobi during the Nairobi International Book Fair. He had just won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Literary excitement was palpable among the country���s literati. Fresh literary flowers had sprouted, blossoming with beauty and releasing a sweet fragrance, new expressions, new voices; a generation emerging from relative obscurity, as Frantz Fanon had prophesied, either to fulfill its mission or betray it.

Binyavanga was one of the key speakers at the opening ceremony of the book fair. He spoke eloquently about new and vibrant literary horizons and renewed hope in the country. Names such as Nameless, Kalamashaka, Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, some of the hip hop artists then dominating the musical airwaves, rolled effortlessly from his tongue like a staccato burst from a machine gun. In many ways, he himself was a literary machine gun.

���Why are we still trapped in old narratives about the past glory of African literature as if nothing new is happening?��� he asked.

Why Are We So Blest? I recalled in the same breath the title of the novel by Ayi Kwei Armah.

Loud applause followed his speech, just as it was echoing across other literary and artistic spaces and sites in the country: Kenya National Theatre, Club Soundd, the GoDown Arts Centre, Sarakasi Dome, Kuona Trust, Kwani LitFest, a lot more.

We met again in 2004 at Jeevanjee Gardens in Nairobi during the Kenya Social Forum. He lingered at the back of the largely activist crowd. I thought he cut a somewhat forlorn figure.

���Another Kenya Is Possible��� was the theme of the forum, attuned to the global call of the World Social Forum: ���Another World Is Possible.��� The local and global processes of the World Social Forum sought to locate and connect people���s struggles for a just world. Politics, we argued, must secure livelihoods. We spoke of climate justice, not merely the language of climate change. We spoke about struggles for food sovereignty, not simply food security. The earth was being decimated by capitalist greed. Soulless corporations, placing profits before people���s welfare, were driving the world towards the brink of extinction. Our world was dying. Progressive forces everywhere needed urgently to coalesce.

Binyavanga at some point later on wrote a post on how hard he had tried to be socialist ���as a person of good conscience.��� He observed that to many people, ���progressive��� meant being a socialist. He wanted to be ���progressive,��� but also believed that the fall of the left globally was real and that the left was fatally flawed. He believed we are in the era of the perfection of capitalism and that capitalism was the best way out for what he considered to be Africa���s century.

I differed with him on his faith in capitalism. I believe capitalism is a mortal disaster for humankind, and that socialism remains the alternative.

But we agreed on the centrality of literature. Literature does not merely fuel struggle; it is itself a vehicle of people���s struggles for freedoms and liberation. That was why we were at the event of the Kenya Social Forum����� to locate literature within progressive awakenings, away from the cacophony of tribal politics in the country and the wastelands of art for art���s sake.

We exchanged contacts.

���I will send you the manuscript of my novel,��� I promised.

���Sawa!��� he said excitedly.

He left shortly afterwards. I remained. The Kenya Social Forum would continue for three more days, and I would stay throughout to help coordinate the event. I was happy to witness sites and spaces of people���s struggles for emancipation taking shape and getting grounded. The arts are the high priests of people���s struggles. Literature is their bishop.

I truly wanted to share with Binyavanga the manuscript of my novel. I never did. My life, like his, was then like a flickering candle in the wind.

We walked to the private family graveyard near the Mugumo tree. Graves of several members of the family that owned the land were located there. Binyavanga stood transfixed before one grave in particular. It belonged to a senior colonial chief who had once ruled this area on behalf of the colonial regime. The tragedy of the chief���s betrayal and treachery had finally come to this: a grave covered by mounds of soil and concrete.

I tried to read his gaze in my mind. The chief���s true legacy, I thought, was one of servitude to colonial masters and betrayal of his own people. I nodded inwardly. Traitors who sold their souls in pursuit of hollow glory, passing comforts, and obscene wealth. The tragedy of colonial betrayal still haunts this country and many other neocolonial states. But death remains the great equalizer for us all.

Binyavanga kept his eyes fixed on the graves for a long while. I wondered whether his mind was wandering as deeply as mine. Our gazes seemed both psychic and spiritual. My thoughts admonished me: So this is what most lives are finally reduced to����� skeletons beneath the pride of flesh, memorial plaques bearing dates of birth and death, reminders of the vanity of human existence.

���Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,��� says the Preacher in the Bible. ���It is like chasing after the wind.���

For most of us, the graveyard is the final destination. Death humbles life. Death should compel us to reflect continually on the meaning and purpose of our existence. In the end, the memory of our lives either fades like passing clouds or endures like seeds that nourish future generations. Such is karma.

The mortal remains of the colonial chief lay in that graveyard discarded and reviled by many. His memory and that of his kind in the betrayal and treachery to the people only helps to fuel people���s struggles for a just society. The generational wealth and privilege inherited from colonial treachery may have survived him, but they too shall one day pass away.

Soon.

I later invited him and his helper to our apartment nearby. He touched the books on the bookshelf as though they were living spirits. In a real sense, books are the abodes of their writers, spirits in themselves, words made flesh and memory. I pulled from the bookshelf several of his works, one after another: Discovering Home; How to Write About Africa; One Day I Will Write About This Place; Beyond River Yei.

His face lit up instantly. His eyes moved, mesmerized, from the books to the bookshelf and back again. I could see his joy, his calmness, his deep sense of comfort. His eyes seemed to say aloud: There lies my literary legacy.

We later walked to his apartment along the main road. We lived in a working-class suburb. Nearby was a sprawling slum.

���I like it here more than anywhere else I have lived,��� he told me as we entered his apartment.

The living room was furnished with antique pieces that gave the space both a traditional and modern feel. His MacBook laptop appeared to be the most modern treasure in the room. He strained his eyes while reading and typing; his eyesight was weakening. So was mine. I can no longer see distant objects clearly without glasses. I was not sure whether he owned a pair of reading glasses.

He showed me his bedroom. It was a tidy mess. Books lay everywhere, exciting titles, mostly fiction and creative nonfiction. Some had been gifts from friends.

���Pick any you may want,��� he told me.

I was tempted to take A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. But I did not. I thought I would pick it later. I did not even pick it up when we returned afterwards. Some books carry spirits better left to haunt their authors and owners.

We then headed for a rendezvous at Dagoretti Corner. We partook of lots of nyama choma and mutura, washed down with drinks and laughter wrapped in silence. Nyama choma is grilled meat, and mutura is a Kenyan sausage; both are staples of Nairobi���s social eating. We spoke nothing there of our pet talks on literature, African liberation, African spirituality, and such heavy topics, choosing instead to relish our food and drinks in measured quietness. Outside, along the main road beyond the restaurant, weary laboring masses trudged home from the daily drudgery of sustaining this unequal country and materialist society.

As evening reached its climax and darkness descended, we moved to Dagoz Artists Bar close by for a night of live music. The space was tiny and intimate. The artists performing on the main stage were as much part of the revelry as the audience itself. Anyone with a voice could burst into song, however coarse or unpolished. The main stage was within reach of everyone inside, part of the collective repertoire. Our table, like the others nearby, seemed almost an extension of the stage itself.

We bellowed out the words of our favorite songs alongside the performers, shouting ourselves hoarse in the attempt. The din of drunken voices and clashing sounds was an exercise in glorious discordance. Loud talk and shouting seemed the only acceptable means of communication there; quiet conversations were out of place. The cacophony of voices and sounds beat like a riot of sound, yet somehow it grounded our solitude and tethered our restless artistic spirits to a sense of order.

The music went on even after the session artists had left the stage. We could still hear it from outside as we departed singing along. We drove back with the rhythms and voices still drumming through our minds, soothing us into the calm of the night and into deep sleep.

*

Binyavanga returned another day to the private family graveyard, this time alone. From a distance, I saw him standing transfixed, staring at the grave of the colonial chief. I thought perhaps his spirituality was reawakening in ways he himself could no longer clearly express in his condition. He had once written about his spiritual Sangoma in South Africa who had advised him to return home and honor his rich ancestral lineage.

He called it African spirituality. I understood it, too, as a return to the roots of African civilization����� back to narratives of African victories, not merely of conquest and defeat; back to multiple African narratives. Narratives of order, dignity, and peace before slavery and colonialism. Narratives that ask difficult questions: Why were we enslaved? Why were we colonized? Why do we continue allowing ourselves to be recolonized?

No wonder the Mugumo tree occupies such sacred importance in the spirituality of the Agikuyu people. It defies both time and territory. It is said that the Mugumo under which Dedan Kimathi worshipped in the forest while leading the Mau Mau war for independence in Kenya fell soon after his capture by colonial forces. Dedan Kimathi was the field marshal of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army popularly known as Mau Mau. He was captured in 1956 and executed by the British colonial regime in 1957. Indigenous trees are living connections to our spirituality, to our ways of being, to memory and identity.

Wangari Maathai came to mind, embracing a huge tree in her struggle for ecological justice. The graveyard, too, spoke of return, going back to the soil, forever nourishing Mother Earth.

���For dust you are, and to dust you shall return,��� the priest at the Catholic church across the main road often intoned from the Bible at the beginning of the Lenten season.

African spirituality converges with the sanctity of the soil, replenishing our lives. Our existence moving endlessly in cycles of birth and death; birth and death again, the eternal rhythms of earthly life. Why trouble yourself? Why worry? I thought Binyavanga���s Sangoma would have rejoiced.

*

I walked back with Binyavanga to his apartment, somehow feeling revitalized. He too seemed renewed, especially in the way we both jovially greeted folks in our neighborhood, most of them only casual acquaintances. His generosity and capacity for love were legendary in many ways. The doors of his heart were wide open to anyone capable of being loved. ���Could you be loved,��� Bob Marley would sing of such spirits. Binyavanga���s helper could attest to this.

At some point, Binyavanga received funds from his family���s inheritance. I accompanied him to the office of his family���s lawyer in Westlands area in Nairobi to sign documents releasing the inheritance. He had mentioned that the lawyer���s office was near a Mugumo tree in Westlands. I had never imagined that such a sacred fig tree still existed within the city. I do not know whether it is still there today.

Later, I accompanied him and his helper to his bank in the Karen area of Nairobi. I believed he transferred a decent sum of the funds to some of his close friends and a lover. Once Binyavanga���s heart and mind settled on something he wanted, he became stubbornly resistant to caution or advice.

He seemed to have got a decent amount from the inheritance. He inquired about investments in land to settle among his close friends near Nairobi National Park. He dreamed of building there a beautiful villa attuned to his tastes, blending antique elegance with modern architecture. I was of little help in matters of land investment. I could neither advise him nor claim any experience of my own in such matters.

I was not able to accompany him and his helper later that evening for dinner and an outing at a top high-end hotel in the city. They bought lots of exquisite items at the hotel that night. In a rush to please his helper, Binyavanga bought him a pair of expensive leather boots late at night. They discovered the following day that the pair of boots were mismatched. He would often give his helper his ATM card to withdraw cash for him. Many times, I was worried that his generosity might someday be taken advantage of, and that the helper might disappear on him. I suspect that this eventually happened, when his helper switched off his phone and vanished from contact altogether. I have neither seen nor heard from him ever since.

*

We shared several wishes between us. Binyavanga spoke of his desire to learn the Dholuo language.

���That might be too late now,��� I said.

���Nooo!��� he replied, gesturing emphatically in disagreement with my incredulity. I noticed that his calmness and joy were beginning to fade, and I quickly corrected myself in jest.

���At least for me. I have almost given up the effort of learning another language. Another of my wishes is learning to play the guitar. Another is to swim without a floater.��� He giggled.

There were many unfulfilled wishes within us. Binyavanga���s age and mine were already nearing the halfway mark toward the sunset of our lives.

But you have achieved more for African literature in such a short time. You have truly lived your life. I did not say these words aloud. I was speaking to myself. He might have mistaken them for flattery. He was often a pace-setter, bubbling with ideas and projects that others eventually fulfilled. I suppose that is how legacy and heritage are secured.

���Asante!��� I told him.

He looked at me intensely, struggling to express himself.

���Thank you too,��� he said, his slurred words carrying a deep inner turmoil.

I could feel his frustration at being unable to communicate effectively. It was uncharacteristic of the man who in the recent past had dazzled audiences with eloquent speeches. But I am a believer that better and brighter days are still ahead of us. I downloaded an online guidebook by the Stroke Association: Helping Someone with Communication Problems����� Together We Can Conquer Stroke. I promised myself that in the days ahead I would read it carefully and learn how better to communicate with him. I never did. Another of my wishes quietly passed away.

*

I was away on work outside the city for about three weeks. Around the same time, Binyavanga had traveled to Rwanda for the burial of an uncle. When we both returned, we somehow failed to reconnect.

���He has traveled to the coast for a vacation,��� his nurse told me.

He remained vibrant on social media throughout the trip. I followed him mostly on Facebook, where he posted photographs of himself and his companion strolling leisurely along the shores of the Indian Ocean, staying at one of the luxurious hotels on the Kenyan coast. The pictures showed his efforts to remain calm, joyful, and at peace with himself, living life as fully as he could despite his failing health.

I imagined the other escapades they might have engaged in at the coast. They would don safety gear before hopping onto a speedboat, floaters fastened reassuringly around them. The boat would surge into the deep sea, rising and plunging against the huge waves as they exclaimed in fear, awe, and excitement. Then a dolphin would suddenly leap out of the water in a graceful somersault. Another would follow, then another, until several dolphins were performing what seemed like a perfectly choreographed spectacle. Aware perhaps of the human gaze upon them, the creatures would intensify their display. Dolphins, it is said, are among the cleverest creatures in the sea. One would leap, then another, and another still, their performance lingering until the speedboats disappeared into the horizon.

They might also have witnessed another spectacle, this time closer to the shore. Snorkeling through the shallow waters, they would see countless small marine creatures crawling and drifting beneath the surface, dazzling in every imaginable color, shape, and pattern. The experience would have been immaculate, a refreshing bliss. We should crown such stories with a cold beer when we meet again, I wished.

But that wish, too, never came to pass. Shortly afterwards, his health deteriorated and he was hospitalized. I visited him at the hospital a few times. Access to him there remained largely a private family affair, limited to a handful of close friends. We did not see much of each other again.

I was later away in Johannesburg for a period of further studies.

���I love Johannesburg,��� he had once told me during one of our conversations. ���I would like to buy a house there. I love the vibe and spirit of that city, a city for free spirits.���

I often moved around in Johannesburg, or Joburg, as it is fondly called. I met friends he would have loved to meet. I saw and lived in houses and estates that would have suited his tastes. I wandered through art galleries and bookshops he would have lingered in for hours. I attended jazz sessions and absorbed the loves and contradictions of that vibrant city, perhaps much as he would have done himself. I listened to fiery discussions on African liberation politics, subjects he followed with keen interest. In more ways than I could imagine, Binyavanga accompanied my thoughts throughout my stay there.

*

Clues of the sad news first came through a missed call from Isaac, our mutual friend and one of Binyavanga���s closest companions. I called him back, but there was no answer.

I grew disturbed. Why would Isaac call so unusually early?

Shortly afterwards, I read the news. Binyavanga had passed away. He had been frail and ailing, but I had hoped he would prevail, as he had triumphed in so many other battles before. The literary world still looked forward to his boisterous spirit, his gregarious presence, and the boundless imagination that helped spark a literary renaissance in our country, across Africa, and within international literary circles. Death does not equalize such souls. His spirit had already triumphed.

���I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.��� The priest at the Catholic church across the main road in our suburb often recited this line from the Bible for souls such as his.

*

From Johannesburg, I followed online the celebration of Binyavanga���s life at the Kenya National Theatre, where family, friends, and hordes of admirers gathered not in grief alone, but in affirmation of the immense spirit he had shared with the world.

���We must free our imaginations,��� he had urged in one of his final videos. ���Celebrate my life. Do not mourn me,��� he had also declared boldly on Facebook.

Binyavanga was cremated in a private ceremony. At the time, I did not fully grasp the significance of that final act, but over the years, I have often found myself wondering: Would he have wanted his mortal remains laid to rest in a graveyard? When he would return to the private family graveyard in our shared neighborhood and stand there for long moments, transfixed by the graves before him, was he contemplating the physical form of legacy and remembrance? Would he have preferred a gravesite where his many admirers, friends, and fans would gather to pay their respects? Perhaps. Perhaps not. His family and those closest to him knew better.

What matters most is that his spirit endures, in memory, in literature, and in the enduring company of remarkable African writers who refuse oblivion. Though his body returned to ashes, his words continue to breathe among us.

Had he been buried, I might have proposed his epitaph, borrowed from the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci:

To write is to die a little less when I die, to leave the children I did not have, to make people think a little more.

*

I recently returned to our shared neighborhood. The private family graveyard is still there. The remains of the colonial chief still lies beneath his slab of concrete, his name and dates fixed into stone, reviled, unvisited, and largely forgotten, while Binyavanga, who has no grave at all. is visited every day by readers across the world who pull his books from their shelves, as I still pull them from mine. His resting place was never a graveyard. It was always language.

The Mugumo still stands, unpruned and sacred, its hollow trunk opening like a doorway between worlds, the living and the ancestral. Some spirits require no grave to mark where they rest. They live in stories, in words, and in the quiet defiance of memory.

Virginia Giuffre, Annie Farmer, Chauntae Davis, Jesse Michaels, and countless other women and girls were part of an international scandal that captured the public imagination in ways never seen before. And yet their names were barely mentioned. Earlier in the year, there was furious demand for the list of powerful men implicated in the Epstein files from all ends of the political spectrum. And the interest wasn���t just tied to the crimes themselves; it carried the hope that the exposure of the most visible and wealthy men in the world would lead to a reckoning akin to the #MeToo movement. What is implicit in this hope is that if there is accountability at the highest levels, then there would be a trickle-down effect that could assist in confronting the more quotidian and less publicized violence.

What the Epstein files made clear is that there is a distinction between society���s stated moral values and how those values are lived out.

However, that did not transpire. What did happen was the files turned into a spectacle. The anticipation for them, their release, their dissection, the jokes in between, the aftermath. And somewhere along the line, the victims were moved out of sight. Then people moved on. The focus shifted from the files to an ill-advised war against Iran, a green pool in the US capital, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The period between the end of the World Cup and the start of club European football presents an opportunity to reflect on the tournament and all the events and discussions that occurred. One of the conversations that briefly captured the footballing community was the allegations of sexual misconduct against several footballers. Thomas Partey and Achraf Hakimi are facing pending criminal trials, Ryan Mendes remains under active police investigation, while players such as Junya Ito, Kaishu Sano, Andreas Schjelderup, Thiago Almada, and Cristiano Ronaldo have all seen their cases reach their legal conclusions.

These stories did not offer new revelations. But an update on the status of Hakimi���s case, as well as Canada���s refusal to approve Partey���s visa application, summoned the ghosts that have long haunted football.

FIFA, national federations, coaches, teammates, and media deferred to legality, recruiting the criminal justice system as a kind of Big Other, the final arbiter of truth, despite the awareness of its shortcomings and limitations. This is most clearly demonstrated in how the courts are tasked with providing assurances and resolving ethical questions that exceed their mandate of due process. In the interim, innocence was not only presumed; it was asserted.

And while there is a subset of the public that abides by this logic, it does not fully capture the rest of the football ecosystem. Many supporters expressed genuine anger and were vehemently advocating for the removal of these players from their teams. But as soon as the whistle blew, that indignation was muffled. And 90 minutes later, there was discourse around tactics, ref calls, VAR, substitutions, etc.

It raises the question: if there is enough consensus, why isn���t there coordination? What is it about football that allows us to know and yet continue as though we did not?

And the most curious of all, what if outrage is part of the entertainment?

Any answer has to begin with understanding the power of images. Jacques Lacan argues that human beings understand themselves and the world through the symbolic order.

Football is an image-making factory. The fancy footwork, the immaculate touches, the bicycle kicks, and the extra-time winners aren���t just about sublime technique. They become repositories through which spectators organize their ideas, desires, and fears. It is through the moments of magic in which fans come to identify with clubs, countries, and versions of themselves.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord furthers this point: ours is an age that prefers the sign to the thing itself, the copy to the original, appearance to essence����� one in which, as he puts it, ���truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.���

So when the reality of rape accusations, FIFA���s corruption, capitalism, imperialism, racism, and labor exploitation threaten to rupture that ���sacredness,��� audiences respond with real moral outrage, but that rarely converts into sustained pressure. The viewer learns to live with the contradiction without allowing it to reorganize their participation. And this happens not necessarily to protect the players or FIFA per se, but to protect the enjoyment they produce.

That is how the story of Cape Verde became one of the underdog, of extraordinary heroics that transformed them into Africa���s footballing fairytale, and not one of a squad that fielded a player under investigation for rape.

That is how the story of Norway became one of history in the making, of Erling Haaland���s charisma and imaginary Viking boats rowing into the quarterfinals, and not one of a team that harbored a convicted sex offender.

That is how the story of Japan became one of model discipline and cleanliness in the stadium and in the locker room, and not the fact that they have two players accused of sexual assault.

This dynamic is not limited to sexual violence. Football has developed a remarkable capacity to move from one moral crisis to the next and absorb the scandals along the way. During this tournament, the focus shifted from the unfair treatment of the Iranian team to visa denials to the Balogun controversy and countless other flashpoints. The previous tournament revolved around Qatar���s labor exploitation, worker conditions, migrant deaths, and FIFA���s corruption. A similar pattern happens on a club level with incidents of racism, financial irregularities, and controversial sponsorships. Each issue, different in stakes and complexity, is treated the same. They command intense attention until something else happens.

But the issues themselves don���t disappear; they are temporarily suspended from collective consciousness until they get recycled again. Like the Epstein files, the condemnation they provoke becomes part of the spectacle itself. It is very predictable in its life cycle and its outcomes. Ultimately, the problems are not adequately addressed. It���s like a choreographed dance.

And when it comes to sexual crimes, audiences think of themselves as ambidextrous����� that they are capable of taking the allegations seriously and enjoying the football, as if the two aren���t in conversation with one another. And unfortunately, spectacles of this nature have a tendency toward erasure. The victims are not only pushed to the background but they are almost rendered invisible. No names, no faces, and no specific stories. They are treated as placeholders and their lives are reduced to legal cases and another talking point.

MeToo was neither perfect nor immune from the dynamics of spectacle. It was introduced to the world through the experiences of famous, rich, white women, which overshadowed the grassroots work that the organization does on the ground. And because of the spectacle, it exists in the public imagination as an era and not a continuous movement that empowers victims to come forward with their stories. However, what distinguished it from a movement like Time���s Up is that it didn���t organize around what punishment perpetrators should receive; it dedicated attention to the agency and care of victims and survivors.

It did not hand over ethical responsibility to the courts, as it understood that courts are not designed to do that in the first place. Instead, moral duty was distributed across the larger social world. Sometimes convictions followed; oftentimes they did not. Some perpetrators lost their reputations while others lost their influence. Yet the movement���s ambitions never depended on those outcomes alone. It also created the conditions in which victims were no longer expected to remain invisible while institutions deliberated the fate of those who had harmed them.

The movement also offered pathways for restoration. After Megan Ganz publicly described the sexual harassment she experienced working for Dan Harmon as a writer for Community, the public discourse gave the two of them an opportunity to engage in dialogue, and Harmon responded with a sincere and rare apology to atone for his actions.

Returning to football, if the sport has ritualized outrage and the institutions can shrug it off, then the solution cannot be found in producing more outrage. Right now, discussions circulate around the idea of whether players should be allowed to play instead of considering why that has become the only point of inquiry.

The other instinctive response is often a boycott. But boycotting isn���t always the most practical or transformative solution. Sometimes it does the reverse of what it intends, and it can offer an easy way out. As mentioned earlier, football is entangled with so many emotional and psychic investments, and therefore boycotting as a political strategy will have the mammoth task of trying to get buy-in before it can even challenge institutions.

Placing steady pressure on FIFA and federations to develop a player policy is a worthy cause. However, it is also one that lends itself to institutional failure. It is a tough ask to demand that organizations properly adjudicate the conduct of their money-makers. It���s limping before it can be put to the test.

None of these interventions should be abandoned; they just cannot be exhaustive. Any solution should consider preventative measures and a different framework of engagement rather than being narrow and reactive. In fact, any intervention will have limitations. Football is deeply embedded within patriarchal structures, and eradicating the violence it produces ultimately requires a complete overhaul of gendered and racial hierarchies. That is not happening today, nor tomorrow, and it is unlikely that it will happen in this lifetime. But it doesn���t mean that reforms are meaningless or can���t produce measurable outcomes.

So the challenge is not to create a football free of contradiction but to interrupt the rituals that allow contradictions to become ordinary. That requires asking better questions.

How can football shift its attention toward victims without reducing them to spectacle?

What would collective action among the fans look like with this in mind?

And finally, what does accountability look like beyond waiting for FIFA or the criminal justice system to act?

In March, when Cassava Technologies announced the launch of an AI factory powered by NVIDIA in South Africa, the company described it as a turning point. African businesses would gain local access to high-performance computing. Data would remain within African borders. Developers would be able to build models for local languages and local problems.

The promise matters. African researchers and firms cannot participate meaningfully in artificial intelligence if they must rent every unit of computing power from servers abroad. But the most consequential infrastructure inside an AI factory may not be the graphics processor. It may be the electricity connection.

Artificial intelligence is exceptionally energy hungry. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity consumption by data centers to nearly double by 2030. The pressure is not evenly distributed. Data centers cluster in particular cities and industrial corridors, where their demand can collide with already constrained transmission systems.

South Africa shows how this collision is being managed. Data center operators are increasingly securing electricity through private renewable plants and wheeling arrangements, which allow power generated in one province to travel across the national network to a customer elsewhere. Teraco, a major operator, is developing a 120-megawatt solar plant in the Free State to supply its facilities in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Other operators have signed similar agreements.

This can look like responsible investment. Private procurement adds renewable generation, reduces dependence on coal, and helps large customers avoid drawing all their electricity from local distribution networks. South Africa���s electricity supply has also improved after years of blackouts. Yet the country still needs to expand and strengthen its transmission network. A private solar farm does not create a private route from the sun to a server. It still depends on substations, power lines, and grid capacity financed and governed as part of the national system.

The concern is not abstract. In May, community organizations challenged plans for two Equinix data centers in Cape Town, arguing that the applications did not provide enough information about electricity demand, water use, emissions, and backup power. The proposed facilities could require up to 160 megawatts combined. The dispute asks a basic democratic question: How should cities weigh private digital investment against competing claims on shared resources?

This is the grid inside the grid: a layer of firm, privately secured electricity built for facilities that cannot tolerate interruption, operating within a public system still struggling to expand transmission and connect new generation. The AI factory may be geographically located in South Africa, but its relationship to the surrounding economy can resemble an enclave. It receives dedicated power, imported equipment, sophisticated cooling, and backup generation. The wider public is promised future innovation, jobs, and growth.

The same tension is visible in Kenya. A proposed $1 billion data center involving Microsoft and the Emirati company G42 was presented as a geothermal-powered foundation for East Africa���s cloud and AI economy. By May 2026, negotiations had stalled over requests for guaranteed capacity payments, while the scale of the project���s power requirements remained under discussion. The episode revealed what investment announcements often conceal: Governments may be asked not only to host digital infrastructure but also to guarantee its market and reorganize scarce energy capacity around it.

None of this means African governments should reject data centers. Local computing capacity can reduce latency, support universities and startups, keep sensitive data closer to home, and create alternatives to total dependence on overseas cloud regions. The issue is not whether AI infrastructure should be built. It is whether public systems become stronger because it is built.

That requires more than celebratory language about sovereignty. Governments should disclose the electricity, water, land, tax, and guarantee arrangements attached to large data center projects. New power procurement should demonstrate that it adds generation rather than simply reserving existing transmission capacity. Contracts should require investment in shared grid infrastructure, meaningful local access to computing resources, and credible plans for skills and research partnerships. Backup diesel use and environmental impacts should be visible rather than buried in technical filings.

Sovereign AI cannot mean that data remain inside national borders while the infrastructure around them becomes inaccessible to the society hosting it. The real test is simpler: After the servers are switched on, is there more power, more capacity, and more public value than there was before?

Nelson Mandela, the first democratic president of South Africa (1994���1999), secured a catalytic and at times confounding place in world history. He was neither an enthralling orator, an imposing Great Man, nor a formidable intellectual. Yet his birthday, July 18, has been marked by the United Nations as ���Nelson Mandela International Day.��� He is the only former head of state in contemporary times to enjoy such transnational iconic status. Here, I claim that his unique place in history can be explained by how closely he resembles a philosopher king.

The ���philosopher king��� or ���philosopher ruler��� is a western philosophy concept that originates in the following claim by Greek philosopher Socrates, found in his mentee Plato���s book The Republic: ���The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.���

South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More adds that a philosopher is not only a scholar of the subject, but also ���an individual who has the capacity to make an original contribution to the development of philosophical thought and to the world of ideas irrespective of his [her] training in the discipline.���

Although the concept referred to state rule by the monarchy or aristocracy when The Republic was written (between 380 and 375 BCE), in contemporary democratic politics the term is not used literally. It has come to refer to heads of state such as presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors, as well as the remaining monarchs. It simultaneously captures the Janusian contradiction of an ideal form of rational and ethical leadership (the philosophical element) and a caution of autocratic leadership (the king, ruler, or political element).

Africa���s first post-independence heads of state, also referred to as ���Africa���s Founding Fathers,��� were conferred this mantle because they were not only political leaders but also thought leaders. Political scholar Vusi Gumede asserts that a ���thought leader is someone who possesses the right kind of knowledge needed to challenge an existing paradigm in order to advance new thinking and to inspire others as well.��� They challenged Western imperialist and colonial paradigms.

Despite their flaws, Africa���s Founding Fathers became beacons of inspiration for their people during the euphoric era of independence and decolonization. Collectively, as Africa���s philosopher kings, they formulated or promoted theories and concepts, delivered eloquent speeches, and wrote influential works pertaining to African communalism, African nationalism, African socialism, Afrocentrism, N��gritude, Nkrumaism, Consciencism, and Ujamaa.

South Africa is a unique outlier in this landscape. After the colonial settlement of the Dutch from the 17th century����� predating the European Scramble for Africa (1880���1914)����� together with Britain���s colonial stake in the late 19th century, the country endured a further four decades of white minority, Afrikaner nationalist, and apartheid (separate development) rule. Thus, South Africa���s liberation was only realized in 1994.

Hence, Mandela became the last 20th-century post-independence leader on the continent to assume office. The delayed independence of South Africa provided Mandela with a unique vantage point to observe the successes and failures of other African leaders over four decades. Mandela read and studied widely throughout his 27-year prison term. He had the opportunity to contemplate, in solitude and together with fellow imprisoned comrades, the state of a nation and continent in crisis. Those reflections, the letters he wrote, and the meetings he held while still in prison refined his philosophy and politics.

His brand of philosophical leadership can be distinguished from that of his African (and global) peers by the absence of ideological purism and the presence of ideological pragmatism. This is his original and philosophical contribution to the world of ideas. Whereas purism leaves no room for the dialectical tensions inherent in human existence, pragmatism navigates gray areas, straddles contradictions, embraces paradoxes, and facilitates synthesis of equal and competing interests.

Arguably, this cultivated in him a range of ideal attributes that the philosopher king should possess:

For they are lovers of the knowledge of the eternal and of all truth; they are haters of falsehood; their meaner desires are absorbed in the interests of knowledge; they are spectators of all time and all existence.��.��.��.�� Also they are of a social, gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance. They learn and remember easily; they have harmonious, well-regulated minds; truth flows to them sweetly by nature.

Socrates acknowledges that it would be very rare to find someone who possesses all these qualities. I suggest that Mandela came remarkably close.

He was born into the Xhosa Thembu aristocracy and was destined to succeed his father as a chief but instead traded that role to pursue becoming a lawyer. He later became a leader of ethnic groups beyond his own as the nation���s ���Madiba�������� his family clan name. Those who met him speak of how he exuded nobility����� Socrates���s ���social, gracious disposition.��� At the same time, he was ���equally free from cowardice and arrogance,��� as he was both assertive and humble. Giving up his inherited chieftaincy and stepping down after one presidential term distinguished him from African peers who aspired to lifelong presidential power.

As he rose the political leadership ladder, he straddled several ideological positions and tensions. At once, he promoted the African nationalism and socialism that undergirded much of postcolonial Africa and his party, the African National Congress (ANC). He subscribed to communism as a secret member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He became a patron of the multiracial United Democratic Front (UDF) while an inmate of Pollsmoor Prison in 1983. Ultimately, he presided over the architecture of the new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), which is acclaimed as a beacon of liberal democracy. Holding all these ideologies cultivated his proficiency in political, social, cultural, and ethical pluralism.

He initially advocated nonviolence when he joined the ANC in the 1940s, then changed his strategy as a founding commander-in-chief of the ANC���s Umkhonto we Sizwe paramilitary wing in the 1960s. During the transition to democracy, he subsequently pivoted definitively to nonviolence. The ability to entertain the continuum of violence from pacifism to radicalism inculcated his discernment of when violence serves a greater purpose and when it is merely gratuitous.

Once he was released from prison, he modeled the surmounting of ���meaner desires��� such as retribution by championing forgiveness and reconciliation. He became a leader who mediated between victims and villains to bring about a synthesis greater than the interests of either side.

Even though he is sometimes accused of abandoning the more substantive and economic claims of the Freedom Charter of 1955 when he became president, his moral compass was firmly trained on the charter���s preamble: ���South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.��� The values of nonracialism and multiculturalism drove his proactive engagement with stakeholders of all races, ethnicities, religions, identities, and interests.

Affectionately known as , he displayed the kind of unconditional love that a ���father��� strives to have toward ���children��� of diverging personalities, different capacities, and competing interests. An apt demonstration of his cultural pluralism was his embrace of rugby (a sport historically dominated by the white minority as players and fans) when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and his successful support of the bid to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup in football (a sport dominated by the black majority).

As a revolutionary activist, he made the terrorist lists of many countries, only to be awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize����� none of the other African philosopher kings had this privilege. He went on to become a consummate statesman who received more than 250 honors for his life���s work. His name became shorthand for ���moral leadership.���

Haig Patapan, in his book Modern Philosopher Kings: Wisdom and Power in Politics (2023), argues that ���democracy appears as the most formidable obstacle to all modern attempts to secure philosopher kings.��� Yet paradoxically, there is a need for ���noble attempts to civilize power and to empower wisdom.��� We should bear in mind, though, that while ���politics is open to wisdom and philosophy, there are also powerful elements within it resistant to such a union.���

Mandela���s ideological pragmatism intuitively and strategically located the sweet spot where democracy and aristocracy, wisdom and power, philosophy and politics meet.

Nigeria���s political system is becoming more concentrated around the presidency, with weakening institutional and electoral competition since 1999. The 2027 elections may become the first real test of this new order. If current trends continue, it could also become the most dangerous.

The primary issue in this case is actually Nigerians��� imagination of what politics could be or should be. For much of the electorate, politics has come to mean little more than voting for or against executive candidates every four years, whether federal or state, while legislatures and parties have become comparatively weak sites of democratic accountability, as such day-to-day governance remains distant and unaccountable.

This has coincided with a gradual and continuous concentration of power inside one ruling party. As of May 2026, the All Progressives Congress (APC) controls the overwhelming majority of the state governors in Nigeria. Opposition governors continue to defect into the ruling party, often less out of ideological conviction and more for political survival and proximity to federal power. The old multiparty equilibrium of the Fourth Republic is continuously waning.

The country���s recent electoral history reinforces this pattern. Muhammadu Buhari���s 2015 victory was driven by a widespread belief that he represented moral rescue: an incorruptible figure capable of restoring order to a decaying state. This messianic framing elevated a single individual as the solution to systemic failure rather than strengthening the institutions meant to address it. Bola Tinubu���s rise in the 2023 electoral cycle reflected a different logic but produced the same outcome. His ���emi lokan��� (���it is my turn���) declaration framed the presidency as political entitlement owed after years of elite bargaining within the ruling party.

We are increasingly seeing similar patterns emerge around both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi. Around Atiku lingers the language of ���his turn,��� a belief that decades of political persistence and repeated presidential attempts have earned him the right to finally occupy the presidency. Around Obi has emerged an intensely emotional movement in which supporters often frame him as a moral corrective to the Nigerian state itself. Across personalist divides, presidential politics consistently produce the same presidential imagination: the belief that national redemption lies in one man capturing Abuja.

This expectation persists even though Nigeria already functions politically in a more fragmented way. Voting patterns in recent elections reveal strong regional concentrations of support. Peter Obi maintains significant influence in the South East and parts of the South South. Rabiu Kwankwaso commands a loyal base in the North West, particularly Kano. Atiku Abubakar remains politically relevant in the North East. Political loyalty, voting behavior, and mobilization are deeply shaped by regional dynamics, even when expressed through national elections. Yet these regional political realities are forced into a single presidential contest that rewards total national victory.

The cost of participating in this system reinforces its exclusivity. The ruling APC set the price of its 2027 presidential nomination form at 100 million naira. This figure is significantly higher than the total legal earnings of a Nigerian president over a four-year term. It is also far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. With record inflation since the assumption of Bola Tinubu���s presidency and the severe collapse of working-class purchasing power, proximity to the federal government appears to many political actors as the only reliable route to financial security and influence.

Yet while politics becomes more expensive at the top, economic conditions continue deteriorating for ordinary Nigerians. The August 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests emerged from widespread anger over worsening living conditions after the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira. Policies designed to attract foreign investment instead intensified inflation and deepened hardship for millions already struggling to survive. Across the country, many Nigerians increasingly experience the state as an extraction site for the political class, who remain trapped within personality cults.

Within this context, the National Assembly has increasingly lost independence, operating largely in alignment with executive priorities. The APC dominates both federal and most state structures, leading to weakened legislative oversight and defections. The result is a system that is structurally concentrated and not fully democratic.

A more regionally representative political structure could potentially reduce some of these distortions. Regional politics would require less money, shorter campaign distances, deeper familiarity with local realities, and stronger governance credibility among represented populations. Politicians would be forced to maintain proximity to the people they claim to represent rather than disappear into distant federal power structures. Such a shift would not automatically eliminate corruption or political powerhouses, but it could weaken the dangerous overconcentration of political and economic power currently attached to the presidency and federal institutions.

If Bola Tinubu completes eight years in office while the opposition remains fragmented around presidential ambition, Nigeria could drift toward an effectively dominant-party system with little meaningful resistance at the federal level. The cycle would simply repeat itself in another election cycle: opposition figures exhausting themselves pursuing the presidency while gradually losing regional organizational strength.

Obi, Kwankwaso, and Atiku need to focus less obsessively on capturing federal power and more on consolidating genuine regional representation that could collectively form a formidable counterweight to whoever occupies the presidency. There would be a need to abandon the current obsession with presidential messianism for a politics that is more rooted in accountable political blocs with direct responsibility to their constituencies. Politicians would no longer campaign as national saviors promising miraculous transformation from Abuja. They would instead be compelled to negotiate, govern, and deliver within regions where their legitimacy is strongest.

Until political power is decentralized in practice, not just constitutionally, elections will continue to revolve around presidential capture rather than governance. Right now, presidential candidates are often too far removed from the people they claim to represent. Campaigns revolve around personality cults and messianic expectations rather than durable political accountability. The presidency turns every major politician into someone pursuing personal access to total power rather than someone building long-term democratic institutions. The future of Nigerian democracy lies not in endlessly fighting over Abuja but in weakening Abuja itself.

This would require a radical rethinking of Nigerian political culture: stronger regional autonomy, deeper local accountability, and reduced federal concentration. It would also require citizens to stop treating national elections as moments of emotional salvation. No president is coming to rescue Nigeria. As long as federal power remains the ultimate prize, politics will continue rewarding patronage networks, political dynasties, and financial gatekeeping over competence or ideas.

Over the month of April, multiple headlines announced a ���decline in marriages��� and an ���increase in divorces,��� proclaiming with alarm that the institution of marriage was in crisis, that Tunisian women had become too fixated on their careers to care for families, that there were fewer childbirths and more abortions, and that the falling fertility rates may no longer replace the aging Tunisian population.

Since then, these ���crises��� have become a site of intense political debates. Asma Jabri, the minister of Family, Women, Children and the Elderly, called for the state to urgently implement a strategic plan to help Tunisians ���prepare for their married life.��� For her, improving ���positive communication��� between the husband and the wife was all that was needed to preserve the institution of marriage and magically bring the fertility rates up; the weight of rising living costs, stagnating incomes, and growing unemployment were secondary in Jabri���s explanation of the demographic shifts.

As I scroll through discussions over these ���crises��� on Facebook, I wonder if the ghost that haunts the Tunisian mind is not only the fear of a shrinking population but also the society���s ���colonization��� by sub-Saharan migrants, threatening to make Tunisia black. Since the pandemic in 2020, the belief that Tunisia was becoming ���African�������� as black migrants are ironically called across North Africa����� has seeped into conversations across caf��s, WhatsApp groups, and social media. Sitting next to me in a caf�� in Tunis back in 2022, Riadh, a Tunisian man in his 70s, told me with fear that ���in about 20years, the Tunisian population will be majority black since the Africans are arriving in mass and the Tunisians are suffering from a crisis of values.��� Like him, many Tunisians I spoke with said that all the good Tunisian men were migrating to Europe, that the black sub-Saharan men were luring away all the good Tunisian women so that they could multiply into black children, that black women and men were too sexual and too fertile, and that a million of them were already colonizing Tunisia.

This empirically empty logic was later espoused by Tunisian President Kais Saied in 2023, describing the black migration as ���a criminal arrangement that has been prepared since the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.��� And these ideas continue to circulate, in spite of evidence that this migrant population has never exceeded 50,000.

The demand for dignity����� a revolutionary call that filled Tunisia���s streets in 2011����� has been desecrated by the governing elite to mean the preservation of state sovereignty and purity, as scholar Nadia Marzouki has noted. And what is emerging over the last three years is that sovereignty has become synonymous with reproducing racially pure Tunisians����� Arab and Muslim rather than African, as President Saied himself put it. The political intent to annihilate the black migrant population, be it by expelling them into the desert lands in Algeria and Libya or drowning them in the sea, is also the one that is coercing Tunisian women to stay in their marriages, however violent they may be, with the hope that this would lead to more childbirths. And the duty of preserving Tunisia���s sovereignty has fallen onto the bodies of women: on Tunisian women to act as reproductive citizens, and on black migrant women to control their excess sexuality.

This obsession with racial dynamics of reproduction is neither new nor confined to black migrants alone, as many black Tunisian citizens often told me. Starting from their childhood, black Tunisians����� who make up between 10 and 15 percent of the total population����� are socialized into the racial lines that separate who they can love and marry, with racial endogamy being the norm. Marriages between black and non-black Tunisians lead to fantasies about the skin-color of the future children, with non-black families often praying that their ���family blood doesn���t turn into black savages.��� In the case of black migrants, endogamy is not only expected but it is hoped that they do not reproduce at all and that they disappear without any trace.

The moment reproduction becomes a question of sovereignty, any state control over women���s bodies becomes morally justified. In Tunisia, political rhetoric calling for this control is already growing; while Jabri suggests schooling women in family values to coerce them into childbirth, parliamentarian Fatima el-Masdi has called for the state implementation of a ���radical solution��� whereby birth control will be forced onto black migrant women.

The increasingly explicit project of racial purity opens the possibility of state-sanctioned reproductive control, with policies that have dangerous historical precedents. For example, el-Masdi���s suggestions can be used to justify forced sterilization of black migrant women, similar to those carried out by the Nazi German regime on women they considered racially inferior or biologically flawed. In addition, calls for coercing childbirth among Tunisian women can justify the dismantling of family-planning services, including legal access to abortion and contraception that Tunisian feminists have fought for since the country���s independence.

Trends towards these alarming prospects are already visible in Tunisia. For example, in 2013, parliamentarian Najiba Berioul proposed to criminalize abortion, employing Islamic pro-life arguments similar to those found among Christian conservatives in the United States. And while the 1973 law guaranteeing access to abortion remains in place today, medical staff often pressure women to continue unwanted pregnancies. In parallel, the state has sought to control migrant reproduction by making it difficult for pregnant migrants to access medical care in spite of the universal right to health care enshrined in the Tunisian law. These difficulties include racially discriminatory behavior from medical staff, language barriers, as well as the fear of getting deported. Often, these black women give birth in makeshift migrant camps without any medical assistance.

While the conceptual fluidity between individual dignity and national sovereignty has derailed the democratization project towards racial nationalism, this fluidity may paradoxically serve as ���an enduring resource for democratic revival,��� in the words of Marzouki. Today, the deadly border infrastructure that Tunisia is expanding in the name of sovereignty kills not only black migrants but also Tunisians who dare to imagine their own freedom of movement. This shared human condition can itself become a site to claim collective dignity, as the ���kulna muhajirun��� (���we are all migrants���) banner that led the march against racism on June 20, 2026, already demonstrates.

Property investment and xenophobia are two extremes of spatial apartheid in South Africa. Where do we draw the border? Two recent developments proved that the question of who belongs where is still being settled. On June 30 in Durban, the March and March movement told a crowd of more than 5,000 that it would return to the streets every Thursday for six months, until every undocumented migrant among them was gone. On July 2, the Constitutional Court found that the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government had, for a decade, failed their constitutional duty to create affordable housing within the city.

In 2016, the Western Cape government sold a disused remedial school on Sea Point���s Main Road to a private Jewish day school for R135 million, setting off a decade of housing activism demanding social housing on the site. Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla, delivering a unanimous judgment this July, explained that a city���s architecture tells the story of its soul, and that Cape Town���s still tells one of division, of spatial apartheid. Location, she said, is not a peripheral consideration in housing policy but integral to it.

The displacement and alienation of black people in South Africa predates democracy and apartheid, was structural to the development of modern South Africa, and will not end with a court order. Sea Point���s property prices now sit at roughly one and a half times the citywide median, up from 1.2 times a decade ago. A quarter of the suburb���s apartments are no longer homes but Airbnb listings, which have grown by nearly 200 percent since 2022. But the renter priced out does not disappear. Many end up in the peripheral settlements and townships that apartheid planning built at the city���s edge to distance white areas and central business districts from the black population.

These peripheries host long-established black African and coloured communities, and absorb whoever the inner city prices out, citizen and migrant alike. They are not exclusively black spaces, and they are not the only destination for the displaced, but they remain the most under-resourced part of the city: fewer clinics, thinner policing, underserviced water and electricity, and schools starved of the resources that the ones across the highway receive.

The anthropologist Kenneth Tafira describes this kind of enforced proximity as ���coerced co-habitation,��� a growing population living side by side because they have nowhere else to stay, placing pressure on already under-resourced areas. It is precisely this arrangement, not any inherent hostility between neighbors, that makes friction between the excluded citizen and the excluded migrant so combustible. The Constitution���s promise of dignity is not evenly distributed, and Cape Town���s funding and resources show who it reaches. The province markets itself as a gateway for the foreign capital that displaces the locals.

Spatial apartheid, displacement, and xenophobia in South Africa are recurring historical events. The researcher William Mpofu argues that ���what is termed xenophobia is actually racism�������� the same colonial logic that once sorted black South Africans from settlers now sorts citizens from black migrants.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the same colonial logic of who is permitted to occupy space operates by inversion. Where Cape Town���s property market prices the poor out of the center to make room for wealth, March and March organizes to push the foreign poor out of the country altogether, chanting the slogan: Mabahambe, they must go. Its organizers have met with the Democratic Alliance, ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance, the Inkatha Freedom Party, and the uMkhonto weSizwe party, and its founder has thanked ANC figures, including Gauteng���s premier, from the stage. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni observed that ���nationalism is nativist in character,��� and each party, in its own dialect, has found something in this movement worth affirming about belonging.

Responses to migration are, as the political scientist Audie Klotz argues, ���intricately linked to the demarcation of borders��� drawn under colonial rule and inherited, almost unquestioned, by the democracy that replaced it. The barriers to being declared a ���legal��� and ���documented��� foreigner are language (consider the difference between being called an expat and an immigrant), money, location, and origin. Documentation is a privilege built on the histories of war, dispossession, and dislocation that produce the undocumented in the first place. South Africans know this all too well����� and yet find themselves marching into a repeated history.

Sea Point and Durban sit at different extremes of the same reality: spatial apartheid. One displaces the local and houses the foreigner. The other displaces the foreigner and alienates the local. Both rest on a history that the country never unlearned: deciding which body has earned the right to stay. And this raises the question: can Africans belong in South Africa? And can South Africa belong to Africa?

In the boardrooms of Addis Ababa and the tech hubs of Nairobi, a new worldmaking project is underway. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the central arenas where African states negotiate their position in an unequal global order. To speak of ���AI in Africa��� is not simply to describe the arrival of a technology, but to encounter a set of competing discursive frames through which political desires, developmental ambitions, ethical claims, and governance priorities are translated into technical agendas. As national strategies and regional protocols are rolled out, what comes into view is a struggle over how Africa is imagined within this machine age, and what kinds of futures that imagination makes thinkable.

These frames are not simply different ways of describing a new technology. They are competing scripts for what Africa is, what AI is for, and who ought to shape its future. Some cast the continent as a site of leapfrogging and renewal; others as a zone of exposure, extraction, sovereignty, moral repair, or improvised adaptation. Each brings some actors and possibilities into focus while pushing others to the margins. That is why the issue is not only what AI means for Africa, but what pictures of Africa are being called into view through AI discourse.

The first terrain is shaped by promise and protection. One of the most pervasive registers is promissory. In the African renaissance 2.0 frame, visible in the AU Continental AI Strategy, AI appears as a leapfrogging device through which Africa can bypass the chokepoint of traditional industrialization and enter prosperity through technical modernization. Here, the ethical subject is the developmental state or planner charged with delivering growth, inclusion, and renewal. What comes into view is capacity, competitiveness, and beneficial transformation. What recedes from view are the historical and political-economic conditions that make acceleration so attractive in the first place: debt, infrastructural dependence, uneven ownership, and the possibility that AI may deepen rather than overcome inherited asymmetries.

Running alongside this is a protective register. In this vulnerability frame, Africa is not late but exposed to surveillance, bias, exclusion, and systems introduced into settings where safeguards are weak and redress is limited. As the CIVICUS report on AI surveillance in Africa suggests, the issue is not only future risk but already existing forms of technologically mediated harm. The ethical subject here is the harm-bearing population����� the data subject, precarious worker, surveilled citizen, and linguistically marginal user most likely to absorb the costs of badly governed AI. This frame is ethically indispensable because it foregrounds rights, harm, and institutional fragility, including the uneven but growing architecture of data protection on the continent. Its limit, however, is that it can cast Africa chiefly as a site to be protected rather than one from which technological futures are actively contested and shaped.

A second terrain is shaped by structure and sovereignty. Alongside these promissory and protective registers sits a more structural critique. In the anti-colonial frame, AI appears as a socio-technical order built through unequal material relations: not only data extraction, but also mineral supply chains, outsourced labor, environmental degradation, foreign-owned infrastructures, and asymmetrical control over the institutions that govern digital life. From this perspective, Africa is not outside the AI order looking in; it is already deeply inserted into it, though often on subordinated terms. The ethical subject is the dispossessed worker, community, or polity whose labor, resources, and data are drawn into AI systems while ownership and value are captured elsewhere. What becomes visible is the political economy of AI����� an approach that makes it harder to sustain the comforting idea that Africa���s main problem is simply one of readiness or delayed entry. But the frame has limits. In foregrounding dispossession, it can flatten internal differentiation, externalize agency too completely, and become so totalizing that the uneven realities of negotiation and strategic inhabitation recede from view.

The sovereignty frame shifts the question from extraction to control: AI is cast as a problem of authority over infrastructure, procurement, standards, and rulemaking, a concern visible in South Africa���s National Data and Cloud Computing Policy. Its appeal lies in insisting that African states must govern technological systems in the public interest rather than merely consume them on external terms; the ethical subject is the sovereign polity, imagined above all as the state charged with authoring technological futures on its own terms. But sovereignty should not be romanticized. Declaring authority is not the same as possessing material control, especially where states remain dependent on foreign cloud infrastructures, imported models, consultants, and opaque procurement chains. Equally, this frame can too quickly presume the state to be the vehicle of emancipation.

A third terrain is shaped by ethics and language. Beneath these macro-struggles lie cultural and ethical frames. In the Ubuntu frame, Africa appears as a moral resource: a source of relational vocabularies of dignity, community, interdependence, and solidarity that unsettle liberal individualism in mainstream AI ethics. At its strongest, this frame asks what kind of human subject AI presupposes and produces. Its ethical subject is the person-in-community, understood less as an isolated rights-bearer than as a being constituted through relations of community, solidarity, and mutual recognition. At its weakest, it risks remaining symbolically reparative and romantic rather than politically disruptive: a moral vocabulary that pluralizes AI ethics without redistributing authority over infrastructure, capital, or standards.

The linguistic justice frame relocates the issue to language, depicting Africa as linguistically marginalized. Initiatives such as Lelapa and Masakhane insist that language is not a neutral interface but a site through which recognition and opportunity are distributed in digital life. An AI system that cannot adequately process Yoruba, Wolof, or Zulu does more than inconvenience its speakers; it helps reproduce a hierarchy in which some languages, and the worlds they carry, are made computationally peripheral. The ethical subject here is the speaker, the language community, and the knower whose access to digital life is mediated through systems not built with them in mind. Yet linguistic inclusion alone does not resolve ownership, infrastructure, or power. An AI that speaks African languages can still be embedded in extractive or externally governed systems.

A final terrain is shaped by markets and adaptation. The market pragmatist frame, visible in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Protocol on Digital Trade, casts Africa as a jurisdictional space to be made legible to capital����� a continent whose frictions must be reduced so that innovation, trade, and platform expansion can move more easily across borders through harmonization, regulatory alignment, and investment readiness. Here, the ethical subject is the investor, firm, regulator, and entrepreneurial ecosystem said to require clear rules and scalable markets. What becomes visible is efficiency, interoperability, and growth. What recedes from view is the fact that harmonization is never merely technical. It can distribute advantage, privileging certain actors over others, and can also displace questions of labor and ownership while eclipsing democratic accountability behind the smoother language of market access.

The frugal innovator frame����� the jua kali of tech����� foregrounds small-scale, improvised solutions that work offline, on cheap devices, and in low-resource settings. Lelapa AI���s InkubaLM is the sharpest contemporary example. This frame���s appeal lies in refusing the assumption that meaningful technical work must begin from abundance. Africa appears as inventive under pressure, capable of repurposing constraints into forms of practical intelligence. The ethical subject is the builder, bricoleur, local entrepreneur, and community improviser who makes systems work where industrial-scale infrastructures are absent. What becomes apparent is creativity, resilience, and situated responsiveness. But it can also romanticize necessity, making scarcity look like authenticity rather than a political condition to be transformed. It can overstate what ingenuity can compensate for and understate the need for public investment, industrial policy, and durable institutional support.

In the end, what matters about these eight frames is not whether any one of them finally tells the truth about Africa and AI. It is that each organizes moral and political attention differently����� foregrounding development while muting dependency, naming extraction and harm while narrowing agency, valorizing language and ethics without redistributing material authority. As a constellation of concerns, they reveal less a single African AI trajectory than a struggle over what Africa is imagined and allowed to be in technological modernity.

That is why AI in Africa is not just about chips, code, or competitiveness. It is about who gets to architect the future, under what terms, and in whose interests. The stakes are not simply adoption or regulation, but the representational politics through which certain subjects, institutions, and futures become thinkable while others fall from view.

Yet these frames do not only describe Africa; they help make it where they are taken up. This is the worldmaking with which we began. What a frame brings into view becomes what institutions are built to serve, and what it lets recede goes ignored. Nor do the frames work alone. They overlap and prop one another up: sovereignty talk can leverage the anti-colonial critique, market pragmatism needs the renaissance���s promissory optimism, and the frugal innovator���s ingenuity is enlisted to soften the very scarcity it works within. The future, then, will not be settled by one script defeating the others, but by which come to dominate the mixture����� and whose interests that mixture ends up serving����� as it hardens into the continent���s legal, institutional, and material infrastructure. Whether this moment marks a structural shift or the repetition of old patterns turns on that.

In the run-up to its theatrical release, Christopher Nolan���s The Odyssey became embroiled in online polemics after Elon Musk attacked the movie���s supposed ���woke��� casting. Yet beyond this contrived spectacle lies a far more important criticism to be made of the filmmakers: their decision to shoot part of the movie in Africa���s last colony, Western Sahara. Enjoying generous subsidies from the Moroccan state, they lent legitimacy to its illegal occupation regime.

As Nolan and his crew filmed along the coast around the port city of Dakhla last summer, an open letter condemning the move was signed by prominent figures in world cinema, including Javier Bardem, Pedro Almod��var, and Paul Laverty. ���Mr. Nolan filmed there without the consent of the Sahrawi people,��� it read, in reference to the majority nationality in Western Sahara. ���The only consent he received came from the occupying force: Morocco.���

In particular, Oscar-winning actor Bardem did not hold back. As he posted the letter on his Instagram account, he added: ���For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city.���

Covering an area the size of Britain, Western Sahara is designated as a ���non-self-governing territory��� by the United Nations and remains on its official list of territories still awaiting decolonization. Retained by Francisco Franco���s Spain even as other European colonies won their freedom, it did not gain independence even after the dictator���s demise in 1975. Instead, neighboring Morocco and Mauritania invaded����� with at least 40 percent of the Sahrawi population at the time fleeing to neighboring Algeria to escape the Moroccan air force���s bombing campaign. Half a century later, 173,000 Sahrawis still remain in Algerian refugee camps. The native Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation are subject to what Freedom House categorizes as among the least free political systems on the planet.

The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco���s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco���s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew���s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump���s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.

For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla���s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country���s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

If the construction of the vast defensive berm in the 1980s was Morocco���s attempt to entrench its military control over Western Sahara, the transformation of Dakhla into a tourist destination and green energy hub in recent years aims to consolidate the occupation as an irreversible economic reality. From the Moroccan leadership���s perspective, Sahrawi independence will look increasingly unrealistic if it can develop the territory in conjunction with international investors. It is also incentivizing Moroccan settlers to move to the territory with generous subsidies and jobs.

The clearest expression of this strategy is Morocco���s Atlantic Initiative, which looks to provide landlocked countries in the Sahel region with maritime access to the Atlantic via a new ���1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028). Positioning the occupied city as a key logistics hub for northwestern Africa, the project aims to further integrate Western Sahara into regional trade networks.

Tourism is also key to normalizing Moroccan control, with Dakhla in particular recast as an international destination for kitesurfing and ecotourism. On a 2022 visit, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were photographed at one of the growing number of high-end hotels on Dakhla peninsula, as well as on the sweeping Atlantic coastline that would later attract the film crew shooting The Odyssey. The couple���s holiday photo shoot offered a vision of luxury resorts and leisure in which the military occupation and indigenous Sahrawi population were erased from view.

Airline Ryanair���s announcement in 2024 that it was opening new direct routes connecting Spain with Dakhla and the Sahrawi capital El Aai��n marked a further expansion of this model of occupation tourism����� even as the European Commission informed airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would not be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement. At the same time, international journalists, trade unionists, and human rights defenders have looked to break the Moroccan media blockade by boarding these low-cost flights over the last 18 months, only to be detained at the airport or arrested when they made contact with local Sahrawi activists. Footage from last year even showed a left-wing delegation from the European Parliament being physically blocked from disembarking a Ryanair flight by Moroccan security forces.

The Odyssey���s subsidized production forms part of this same effort to establish Dakhla as an international����� but firmly Moroccan����� destination while limiting scrutiny of the occupation itself. Yet as news of the Dakhla shoot emerged last summer, Sahrawi filmmakers, journalists, and activists took to social media to contrast the free rein afforded to Nolan���s Hollywood production with the systematic repression they faced in trying to document the Moroccan state���s human rights violations, or simply in exercising creative freedom.

���I grew up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and today, as a Sahrawi filmmaker from the occupied city of Dakhla, I cannot freely enter my homeland to tell my own stories,��� director Brahim Chagaf posted as part of the online campaign organized by The Western Sahara International Film Festival. ���That is the great contradiction behind this landscape: while a few privileged people like Nolan can turn it into a movie, others are still waiting for the day when we can simply return to it.���

Campaigner Ghalia Djimi���s message was even starker: ���Mr Nolan: I am a human rights defender. Morocco disappeared me for 3 years and 7 months in a secret prison in occupied El Aai��n.���

Her experience is far from exceptional. In its latest 2024 report, human rights NGO CODESA catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces that year. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of 18 student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.

As The Odyssey opens at the global box office, one of the Gdeim Izik prisoners, Ena��ma Asfari, is currently in the fourth week of an indefinite hunger strike. In calling for his immediate release last month, Frontline Defenders said it was ���concerned about reports describing medical neglect, reprisals and other forms of ill-treatment against Sahrawi human rights defenders in prison.���

���When Christopher Nolan steps on the red carpet on his way to the premiere���s screening, he will also be stepping on International Law,��� insisted Mar��a Carri��n, executive director of The Western Sahara International Film Festival, last month. ���We ask the public to treat this film as they would a movie made in occupied Ukraine with [Vladimir] Putin���s permits, or in the illegal settlements in Palestine with [Benjamin] Netanyahu���s blessing.���

A series of rulings from the European Union���s highest court back this claim. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly found that Western Sahara is a territory with a ���separate and distinct��� status to Morocco and that legally its resources cannot be exploited without the consent of the Sahrawi people. Those judgments concern specific EU-Moroccan trade agreements, which the EU has tried to revive despite successive rulings from its own courts that they contravened international law. But the rulings raise broader questions about the responsibilities of international companies operating in the occupied territory, including film studios.

Given his back catalog, Nolan���s brilliance as a writer and director is unquestionable. Yet with The Odyssey, he and Universal Pictures have set a dangerous precedent as they pioneered a new form of filmmaking for our Trumpian age: occupation cinema. A country subject to a brutal colonization and a system of effective apartheid is not a legitimate backdrop for either international tourism or a Hollywood blockbuster.

It���s a cozy Thursday evening in Nairobi, and important conversations are about to begin. I ask my sound engineer, ���Are you ready to record?��� She signals yes. Deep breath in. Hold the mic close.

���Welcome to Hadithi Hangout Chapter.��.��.��.�����

This is just one of the many conversations recorded and archived across Africa every single week. But why do we do it? Every single day, African creatives produce live performances, radio shows, DJ mixes, panel discussions, and cultural conversations. But where do these moments go after all is said and done?

Our continent has a long tradition of preserving and sharing knowledge through oral literature����� songs, proverbs, and legends. During the colonial era, foreign researchers, institutions and labels recorded African musical heritage and took them away. Today, many of these sound recordings remain caged in museums abroad or locked behind academic paywalls, accessible only to researchers and those who can afford them.

To access the 14,000 recordings held by the African Music Archive, for example, you still need to travel to Mainz, Germany. Meanwhile, the International Library of African Music (ILAM), founded in South Africa in 1954 by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, has only recently begun digitizing parts of its vast collection and making them available online.

The question remains: who gets to access African cultural memory?

Kenyan sound artist KMRU explored this question in his 2023 album Temporary Stored. Blending sound synthesizers, field recordings, and archival recordings from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, the project liberates these stolen sounds from the colonial archive.

Today, African creatives and organizations are increasingly taking music preservation into their own hands. Empowered with digital technology, recording equipment, and online platforms, they are documenting traditional music, digitizing historical recordings, and creating new archives that are finally accessible to African audiences. Why does accessibility matter? Because preservation without access is still exclusion. Accessible archives help us reclaim culture, challenge colonial interpretations, and ensure African artists are the ones telling their own stories.

Here are four music archives in Kenya doing exactly that.

Based at The Mall in Westlands, Nairobi, Tamasha Records is one of East Africa���s most important custodians of recorded African music history. The company was established in the early 1990s, after Polygram East Africa exited the region, leaving behind one of the largest recorded music catalogs in East Africa. The collection contains more than 10,000 recordings from artists active between the 1950s and 1980s.

Tamasha has spent decades digitizing vinyl and CD recordings by legendary artists such as Franco Luambo, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Daudi Kabaka. These recordings are now available through streaming and download platforms. For many music listeners, Tamasha���s YouTube channel has become a nostalgic bridge into the world of classic East African music, also known as zilizopendwa. This is music which might have otherwise disappeared into storage rooms and deteriorating master tapes.

A similar urgency, if a different approach, shapes Singing Wells. In 2011, cultural practitioners Tabu Osusa of Ketebul Music and Jimmy Allen of the UK���s Abubilla Music bonded over one common concern����� traditional East African music was disappearing as older musicians passed away and younger generations gravitated toward global popular culture. So what did they do? They founded the Singing Wells project, got their teams in a van, and traveled across East Africa recording musicians in their own communities rather than bringing them into urban studios.

15 years later, Singing Wells has become the world���s largest open archive of traditional East African music. Its online collection contains hundreds of recordings documenting music and dance traditions from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Beyond music, Singing Wells also publishes musician biographies, field reports, and instrument documentation on their website, making it an invaluable resource for researchers, educators, and artists alike, who are seeking to reconnect and gain inspiration from their cultural roots.

Founded in 2013 by David Tinning and Gregg Tendwa, Santuri East Africa has become a leader in music education, artist development, and cultural innovation. While Tamasha preserves historical recordings and Singing Wells documents traditional music, Santuri archives the present.

Through Santuri Salon at The Mall, the community space hosts panel discussions, listening sessions, and artist talks focused on music, culture, and technology. Many of these conversations are recorded and uploaded online, creating a living archive of contemporary East African culture. One such archive is Hadithi Hangout, a monthly reading group exploring Kenya���s political and musical histories. Listeners can revisit conscious conversations on everything from the impact of colonialism on contemporary music to the evolution of Kenyan music across the generations. For future researchers looking to understand East Africa���s creative landscape in the 2020s, these recordings may be just as valuable as historical music collections.

The fourth is Calotropis Radio, which flips the model: if traditional archives collect history after it happens, this community radio station records it as it unfolds. Founded in Nairobi and also based at The Mall, Calotropis describes itself as a dealer in sound, music, and poetry. When they are not playing eclectic music selections on their website, they live-stream and archive DJ sets, community conversations, and cultural events. Since 2025, they have partnered with Kilele Summit, Santuri���s annual festival for adventurous music and technology, streaming panel discussions and artist workshops to audiences far beyond Nairobi. Calotropis demonstrates that sometimes archives are built live, one broadcast at a time.

These African archives remind us that the power to tell and preserve our own stories is now in our hands. Preserving African culture does not look one way. It can mean digitizing old records, documenting traditional musicians in remote villages, recording community discussions, or live-streaming experimental performances to audiences around the world.

What matters is that these stories remain available. Accessible archives allow culture to be studied, remembered, and reimagined. And they help future generations understand who we were, what we created, and what we valued. Ultimately, sometimes, preserving culture begins with something as simple as holding a microphone close and pressing record.