By Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

South Africa in 2026 is living through a deep political and social crisis. The historic liberation movement now governs in coalition with the party of white capital, official unemployment sits above thirty per cent, and three decades of formal democracy have left the structures of racial and colonial ownership largely intact. In this conjuncture – marked by austerity, hunger, inequality and ecological stress – the question is not whether South Africa needs alternatives, but whether organised forces can build them.

It was within these conditions that the Conference of the Left was convened at the end of May 2026. Not merely another gathering of a fragmented South African Left, the Conference opened – however unevenly and incompletely – a path towards linking socialist politics to practical questions of ownership, production, land, livelihoods, public power, and democratic economic reconstruction.

The most important sentence to take from the Conference is not a slogan. It is a task: ‘the future will not be given to us; it must be organised’. The Conference declared that the Left had not gathered to launch a new party, nor to dissolve existing formations into one structure, but to rebuild the organised power of the working class and the poor through unity in action against capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, austerity, unemployment, hunger, inequality, ecological destruction, and monopoly power.

South Africa does not suffer from an absence of declarations. It suffers from an absence of organised popular power capable of changing the material relations of ownership and production. The Conference of the Left will therefore be judged not by the elegance of its declaration, but by whether it generates institutions, campaigns, schools, co-operatives, public ownership struggles, land occupations, worker-community alliances, and democratic economic alternatives rooted in the daily life of the working class and popular classes.

Willie Bester (South Africa), Barometer of Poverty, 2021.

The Central Question: Ownership

The Conference framework placed the question of ownership at the centre. Political democracy without economic power remains incomplete. Land, mines, banks, the energy system, food system, transport infrastructure, retail chains and productive assets remain concentrated in private hands, organised around profit rather than social need. A Left strategy that does not confront this structure will not be transformative, it will amount to crisis management within the existing order.

This is why the Conference’s emphasis on public, social, worker, co-operative and community ownership matters. It shows that the struggle for socialism is not only about capturing the state at some future moment. It is also about building forms of working-class and popular power now: defending public assets from privatisation, building co-operatives, asserting community control over land and water, establishing worker-owned enterprises, demanding democratic control over finance, and creating solidarity-economy institutions that shift economic decision-making into the hands of communities.

One of the Conference Commissions proposed a Left Development Fund to support:

• Community-based manufacturing, retail, agricultural, and industrial initiatives.
• Nationalisation of mines, banks, and strategic sectors under democratic public ownership.
• Worker ownership and meaningful equity participation.
• Transformation and public ownership of the Reserve Bank.
• Co-operative financial institutions.
• Community-ownership models.

It also placed land, agriculture, and rural development at the centre of economic transformation, including land expropriation without compensation, organised land occupation for productive use, market access for small producers, and rural development as part of left organising.

This is not a small matter. It points towards an economic strategy grounded in structural power, not only policy advocacy.

Why the Solidarity Economy Matters

The solidarity economy is often misunderstood as a soft add-on to radical politics – reduced to small projects, community gardens, savings clubs, or survivalist co-operatives. Properly understood, it is about the reconstruction of society from below: who controls resources, who decides what is produced, who benefits from production, and how economic life is reorganised around need, care, ecological sustainability, and democratic ownership.

In land and agrarian reform, this is decisive. South Africa’s inherited agrarian structure was built through colonial dispossession, apartheid land laws, cheap Black labour, massive state support for white commercial agriculture, and later neoliberal deregulation and liberalisation. The post-apartheid state adopted market-based land reform – the willing-buyer willing-seller logic – and deregulated agricultural markets in ways that benefited agrarian capital while leaving land reform beneficiaries without the protections and support that white farmers historically enjoyed.

This is why land redistribution cannot be reduced to title deeds, compensation formulas or isolated farm transfers. Land reform must transform the whole agrarian structure: land ownership, water, infrastructure, finance, inputs, extension, markets, processing, storage, transport, and the power of agribusiness across the value chain.

A solidarity-economy approach to land combines redistribution with public investment, co-operative production, agroecology, local markets, farmer-led funds, resource networks and mass power from below. It means communities and workers reorganising production, land, and resources in their own interest – through land occupations, community production, smallholder support, seed systems, local processing, democratic control over water, and public procurement that supports local food systems. In short: it is the organised work of changing property relations in practice.

Willie Bester (South Africa), Miner, 2021.

Climate Crisis, Land, and Food Sovereignty

The land question is also a climate question. The industrial food system is ecologically destructive. It depends heavily on fossil fuels, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, long-distance transport, refrigeration, packaging and water-intensive production. It destroys soil, forests, water systems, and biodiversity. It produces hunger while degrading the ecological basis of life.

Food sovereignty offers a different pathway: the right of communities and countries to define their own agricultural and food systems. It requires democratic control over land, water, seed, biodiversity, local markets and food production – culturally appropriate, nutritious food available to all. A shift away from concentrated agribusiness power through supporting small producers and building agroecological systems that can feed people while repairing nature.

The Left should therefore understand land and agrarian reform as part of the response to the climate crisis. Radical land redistribution, agroecology, co-operative production, and local food systems are not nostalgic returns to the past. They are the basis for a future beyond fossil capital, agribusiness domination, and market dependence.

There are already living examples of this work. South Africa’s food sovereignty movement has built networks of organic and agroecological farmers, women-led co-operatives, indigenous seed banks, local markets and community production systems. Organisations such as Siyavuna Development Centre, Umgibe Farming Organics & Training Institute, and the Inyanda National Land Movement – within a network reaching around 20,000 organic farmers across the country – show what becomes possible when communities have support and organised infrastructure. The task is to scale and co-ordinate these efforts into a national strategy.

The Expropriation Act: A Terrain, Not The destination

The Expropriation Act (signed 20 January 2025) is a critical terrain of struggle. The Right is correct to fear expropriation because it challenges the sanctity of capitalist property. But the Left must not confuse the passing of an Act with the transformation of property relations.

The Act remains limited. It is shaped by negotiation, court appeals, compensation criteria and the continuing shadow of market-based land reform. It does not adequately place the social and ecological function of land at the centre, nor does it go far enough in requiring that land use address historical and continuing racial and gender injustice, serve accommodation and production, respect the dignity of workers and communities, and enhance ecological life.

The Left must therefore defend the Act against the Right while also going beyond it – building a broader campaign for land to fulfil its social and ecological function. We need expropriation for redistribution, food sovereignty, housing, ecological repair, public use, and co-operative production. We need land reform driven by the landless, farm workers, rural women, small producers, informal settlement residents, social movements, unions and communities – not only by officials, courts, and technocrats.

The Expropriation Act should become a site of mass education, mobilisation, and legal-political struggle. But the larger terrain remains the transformation of property relations.

Willie Bester (South Africa), It Takes a Village, 2018.

Lessons from the People’s Red Caravan

The People’s Red Caravan – a campaign and initiative of the South African Communist Party (SACP) – offers useful lessons. Its value lies in taking politics to the ground: villages, townships, communities, co-operatives, local struggles, municipal spaces, and sites of production. It demonstrates that socialist politics must be organised where people live, work, farm, trade, study, care and struggle.

But the Caravan must move from mobilisation to productive institution-building. It should not only convene meetings – it should help map land, identify local production capacities, support co-operatives, link communities to technical skills, build municipal accountability campaigns, establish agroecology demonstration sites, train young people, and connect community demands to public investment and policy struggles.

Every Red Caravan site should ask: what can be produced here? What land is available? What co-operatives exist? What public assets are unused? What skills are present? What water sources exist? What food is imported that could be produced locally? What municipal procurement can support local production? What public works can employ people? What trade unions operate here? What NGOs, churches, schools, clinics, traditional institutions and community organisations can be linked into a local development plan? This would turn the Caravan into a method of socialist reconstruction from below.

Political Economy Education as Organising

The Conference recognised the need to rebuild political education and called for a common political education programme linked to campaigns and rooted in communities, workplaces, campuses, and rural areas. It insisted that the unemployed, informal workers, migrant workers, farm workers, farm dwellers, youth, and women must be central forces of Left renewal, and that co-operatives, land-based production, and alternative economic institutions must become practical elements of socialist reconstruction.

This is crucial. Political economy education must help communities understand why food prices rise, why municipalities collapse, why land reform fails, why banks dominate, why workers are casualised, why women carry unpaid care work, why youth unemployment persists, why climate crisis hits the poor hardest, and why public ownership matters. It must not operate as a classroom abstraction.

Political education must be tied to practice: a co-operative school linked to an actual co-operative; a land school linked to a land campaign; a municipal economy school linked to municipal development planning and budget struggles; a public-ownership school linked to anti-privatisation campaigns; a food sovereignty school linked to agroecology gardens and seed banks.

Trade Unions, NGOs and Economic Policy

Trade unions have an indispensable role in economic transformation beyond wage bargaining. A broader working-class bloc must be organised – linking employed and unemployed workers, informal workers, co-operative workers, community health workers, farm workers, and public sector workers. Pension funds, bargaining councils, worker education departments, and research capacity can be mobilised to support public ownership, industrial policy, co-operative finance, and local production.

Progressive NGOs such as the Institute for Economic Justice can help connect this movement-building to serious economic policy on fiscal and monetary questions, public employment, social security, industrial strategy, trade policy, food systems, climate finance, public banking and democratic ownership. But policy must not float above struggle: it must be answerable to movements, unions, and communities.

The Left needs a division of labour. Trade unions bring worker organisation. Progressive NGOs bring research, policy and litigation capacity. Co-operatives bring practical production. Movements bring land, housing, climate and service struggles. Political organisations bring ideological coherence and strategy. The Council of the Left has the potential to co-ordinate these capacities effectively.

Willie Bester (South Africa), Care for the Children, 1995.

Toward an African Economic Development Strategy

The South African Left must also think continentally. Africa’s crisis is not a lack of entrepreneurship – it is the structure of dependency: raw material exports, debt, food imports, financial domination, weak industrialisation, foreign control over minerals and land, and the subordination of national development to global capital. The Conference declaration committed itself to Pan-Africanism, strategic delinking from imperialist dependency, regional industrialisation, public control over strategic resources, alternative finance systems, and Global South solidarity.

An African Left economic strategy must link land reform, food sovereignty, public ownership, beneficiation, regional manufacturing, co-operative development, public banks, climate justice, and democratic planning. It must ask: how do we build African capacity to feed ourselves, manufacture what we need, process our minerals, control our energy, protect our water, and build social ownership across borders?

The South African Left must learn from Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, Kerala’s people’s planning, Cuba’s agroecology and public health, Venezuela’s communes, African food sovereignty movements, worker co-operatives, and other anti-capitalist initiatives.

Practical Steps After the Conference

The Conference must now become a programme. The following steps are urgent:

1. Establish the Council of the Left with a strong economic transformation cluster focused on public ownership, co-operatives, the solidarity economy, land, food sovereignty, and local democratic economies.
2. Create a Left Development Fund to support community manufacturing, agroecology, co-operative retail, worker buy-outs, food processing, seed banks, local transport, renewable energy, and repair economies.
3. Launch a national Land, Food Sovereignty and Agroecology Campaign linking expropriation, land occupation, smallholder production, seed sovereignty, water democracy, and public procurement.
4. Build municipal solidarity-economy pilots in selected municipalities, linking councillors, trade unions, communities, co-operatives, local producers, NGOs, and technical institutions.
5. Convene sectoral indabas on mining, finance, food systems, energy and retail to identify where public, worker, community, and co-operative ownership can be advanced.
6. Develop a national political economy curriculum on capitalism, public ownership, land, agroecology, co-operatives, fiscal policy, finance, climate crisis, and African development.
7. Connect the Expropriation Act struggle to a broader campaign for the social, and ecological function of land.
8. Measure progress not by resolutions, but by institutions built: co-operatives formed, land accessed, workers organised, youth trained, public assets defended, campaigns sustained, and communities able to feed themselves.

The Conference of the Left sounds the alarm of the urgency of this work. The test is whether the Left can turn words into production, solidarity into organisation, and political economy education into structural power – building what already exists in fragments into co-ordinated, durable institutions at scale.

Socialism will not arrive as a speech. It must be planted, built, manufactured, taught, organised, and defended.

Warmly,

Mazibuko

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara is a pan-Africanist popular educator, strategist, activist, commentator and respected national and regional voice with three decades of experience in deepening democracy, municipal reform, gender justice, land reform, ecological justice, HIV/AIDS access, and LGBTQIA+ rights. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Conference of the Left, and a former member of the South African Communist Party and its Young Communist League. He is also a Board member of the Chris Hani Institute.

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Pan-Africa.

We are launching Inkani Review at the close of Africa Liberation Month. This month is not nostalgia. It is a demand: that the continent’s intellectual and political life be taken seriously, platformed widely, and connected across borders.

The structures that oppress the marginalised all over the world depend, in part, on our forgetting. They depend on fragmentation, on our inability to connect what happened to our grandparents on the margins of society to what is happening to us and our children in the city; on the silencing of the thinkers who mapped our condition before us; on the endless noise that passes for information and news today.

Reviews are one of the weapons against that forgetting.

Not reviews as polite academic exercises. Not reviews as consumer guides. Reviews as political acts, the work of placing a text inside its moment; of asking what it says about where we are and where we must go; of letting a descendant of farm worker’s reading of Govan Mbeki’s The Peasants’ Revolt in 2026 speak back to us with the rumble of what the peasants may be organising today.

The Moment We Are In

Standing in South Africa right now, it is difficult not to feel the weight of a society fracturing under the pressure of its own contradictions. Poverty is rife. Society is polarised. The issues that should shape our politics, land, health, education, inequality, have been turned against us. We no longer look to leadership for resolve. Instead, we turn on our neighbours, criminalising and blaming them for conditions they did not create.

What is missing is analysis: the patient, rigorous work of naming what is actually happening, and who is responsible for it. Too much of society has internalised the symptoms of oppression as natural facts, rather than as the products of a system deliberately designed to keep a minority as the haves and a majority locked into being the working class, the expendable, the forgotten.

Lost in endless content, distracted and disengaged, we too often leave the structures responsible for our condition without any organised force to hold them accountable. The revolution will come – it always does. The question is how we build the conditions for it: what structures we construct, what platforms we amplify, where we organise, and who we organise for.

Dismantle the Ivory Tower zine – Intifada, ‘People Power Makes Apartheid History’, 2025.

What Inkani Review Is

Inkani Review is a new platform hosted on the Inkani website, dedicated to publishing critical, in-depth reviews of books and other works, particularly those engaging with the politics, histories, and cultures of Africa and the Global South.

For us, a review is never just a review. There is profound value in different perspectives meeting on the page, across generations, geographies, and conditions of life. A constitutional judgment resonates differently when read alongside the history of the land it concerns. We hold two worlds and two time periods in the same hand, and we are richer for it.

Our aim is not to summarise. It is to surface the immediate and enduring relevance of each text, event or space, at the precise moment it is read, and to place that reading inside the struggle over what kind of society we are becoming.

In a world where high-quality critical writing lies almost exclusively behind paywalls; where newspapers and magazines have steadily reduced space for serious book reviews; and where substantial engagement is treated as a luxury, we are building a public, accessible space for politically grounded, criticism, written for movements, organisers, scholars working without institutional support, and readers far from urban centres where access to new publications is already difficult enough.

Our commitments

• A weekly review, open to submissions from a broad community of writers and critics.
• A long form review in the last week of every month for deeper critical engagement.
• High-quality translations to broaden access across the continent.
• Rigorous, expert-led engagement with Global South issues, gender, class, and geopolitics.
• A contribution to the battle of ideas, grounded in the material realities of our time.

Inkani Review is editorially independent. Grounded in an internationalist perspective attentive to questions of class, geopolitics, and Global South solidarity, it welcomes a diversity of critical viewpoints and does not impose a single line on its contributors. The views expressed are those of their authors.

Manfred Zylla with help of Katharina Forster and Jarret Erasmus, ‘Forward not Forgetting Our Solidarity’ mural outside historic site of living heritage Community House in Cape Town, 2011 (Restored by Manfred Zylla with Faried Morris and Francois Hokim, 2017).

An Archive for Those Who Come After

Critical review makes an archive possible. We gain. We expand. We build social ties across continents. We strengthen our movements, refine our thinking, and together we create texts, an archive ready for those who come after us.

This is what reclaiming the infrastructure of ideas looks like: not as a cultural accessory, but as a political necessity. If oppression depends on forgetting, then our task is remembrance, organised, collective, and made public.

We resist erasure.

Visit Inkani Review at: https://review.inkanibooks.co.za/

To submit a review or enquire about contributing: https://review.inkanibooks.co.za/submit

Inkani Review will be launched on 31 May 2026.

All work published in Inkani Review is exclusive to the journal.

Warmly,

Aphiwe

Aphiwe Ngalo Aphiwe Ngalo is a popular educator, media practitioner, and project manager whose work focuses on redressing apartheid legacies through popular education, grassroots organising, and community media. She currently serves as Managing Editor at Inkani Books. Previously, Aphiwe coordinated youth and community education programmes.

By Dalaya Ashenafi and Mikaela Nhondo Erskog

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Pan-Africa.

On 22 April, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) published a text introducing the concept of ‘Dark Green Governance’ – a pattern in which armed groups across the Sahel and beyond are no longer merely exploiting climate stress, but deliberately institutionalising environmental resource management as a source of political legitimacy. Amongst other examples, the author shows how Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) runs Sharia-based courts to arbitrate pastoral disputes, regulates access to water and grazing corridors, and supervises artisanal mining in Mali’s Liptako-Gourma region. The author is careful to note that climate functions as a ‘threat multiplier’, mediated by pre-existing socio-economic fragilities rather than operating as a direct cause of insurgency. The observation that armed groups are building formalised governance architectures around scarce resources – and that ‘reclaiming environmental commons through legitimate and inclusive governance’ is central to any serious response – is an important one.

Where our analysis departs is not in disputing what the author describes, but in asking why these groups succeed, and under which structural conditions such forms of governance arise. To identify ‘Dark Green Governance’ as a phenomenon is valuable. But what explains the specific material basis of its appeal? Why did Katiba Macina – the armed jihadist group at the heart of JNIM’s Sahelian operations – draw mass support from marginalised Fulani pastoralists? Why is this such a widespread phenomenon?

This is what our latest dossier, Class Struggle and Climate Catastrophe in the Sahel (dossier no. 99), co-authored by members of the Tricon Pan-Africa team, sets out to explore. The dossier argues that the answer is not simply that the state retreated, but that its capacity to govern land, water, and pastoral mobility was systematically destroyed – first by French colonialism, then by neo-colonial state formation, and finally by decades of structural adjustment. The governance vacuum is no accident of weak institutions; it is the product of a specific political economy.

Hama Goro (Niger), Untitled, 2014.

Since the colonial era, conflicts in Africa have been explained by every imaginable category – tribal antagonism, ethnic hatred, religious extremism, governance failures, population pressures, resource scarcity – except the one that underlies them all: class.

Drawing on the tradition of Issa Shivji’s Class Struggles in Tanzania and Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors, the dossier argues that the escalating violence in the Sahel can only be understood if it is grounded in the class struggle, given that it operates within the political economy of imperialist extraction. The climate catastrophe is an accelerant that intensifies pre-existing contradictions – not its root cause. The call to reclaim the environmental commons through legitimate governance is well taken – but it cannot be answered without asking who dispossessed communities of those commons, and through what mechanisms.

The facts are damning. The Sahel has warmed about 1.5 times faster than the global average over the past few decades, despite contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Africa accounted for less than 3% of cumulative global CO2 emissions from 1750 to 2021. By contrast, the United States, which is warming at a similar rate, accounts for 25% of global emissions. The nature of rainfall itself has changed: rain is now more intense but intermittent, producing both floods and droughts. Yet the dominant ‘climate conflict’ framework – consolidated through the UN Environment Programme, the UN Security Council, and Western-funded security research – frames climate-driven resource scarcity as the root of violence and instability in the Sahel, systematically omitting the context of colonial dispossession, structural adjustment, and militarisation that created the crisis in the first place.

Amadou Sanogo (Mali), Sans Tete (Headless), 2016.

The dossier’s case studies of Mali and Sudan reveal how this works in practice. In Mali, colonial land law destroyed social management systems. Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) from 1988 onwards finished the job: cutting veterinary and extension staff, privatising water points, and imposing a 50% currency devaluation in 1994. As the state retreated, armed groups stepped into the vacuum. This is the context for ‘Dark Green Governance’ – but the dossier reveals a layer that framework does not reach. Katiba Macina drew mass support from marginalised Fulani pastoralists not simply by providing dispute resolution in a governance vacuum, but by abolishing the grazing fees that pastoral chiefs had imposed on access to nutrient-rich floodplain pastures – fees that consumed a substantial share of pastoral cash income and that the neo-colonial state had allowed to metastasise into a system of rent extraction. For the poorest dryland pastoralists, fee abolition meant the difference between viability and dispossession. When Katiba Macina later reinstated smaller fees in 2018, many pastoralists shifted their allegiance to a rival faction that promised land collectivisation. The violence typically described as ‘ethnic conflict’ between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers is, the dossier shows, a class conflict within both communities – shaped by colonial dispossession and intensified by climate stress. What looks from the outside like ‘environmental governance by extremists’ is, from below, a contest over who sets the rules of access to land and water under conditions of engineered scarcity.

In Sudan, the story is even starker. Darfur – branded ‘the world’s first climate change conflict’ – is in reality an ecological-class war. The Bashir regime’s neoliberal restructuring after 1989, enforced by IMF and World Bank SAPs, privatised communal lands, removed agricultural subsidies, and outsourced state violence to the Janjawid militias who seized livestock, harvests, and land, creating a new class of militarised accumulators. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) evolved from these militias into capitalist enterprises controlling gold mines and smuggling routes, financed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the EU’s Khartoum Process channelled funding to Sudanese border agencies – including units linked to the RSF – to stem migration, directly militarising the response to climate-displaced populations.

Saranga (Mozambique), Monologue of a War Refugee, 2021.

Women and girls sit at the heart of this intertwined climate-political crisis. As water and firewood grow scarcer, women must walk longer distances each day, reducing time for economic activity or civic participation. Climate shocks pull girls from school, push them into early marriage, and correlate with increases in intimate partner violence. Climate change is not only reshaping physical landscapes but narrowing political space for half the population.

Yet the dossier does not end in despair. In Koubri, roughly forty kilometres from Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, members of the Watinoma Women’s Association work the land using agroecological practices – growing organic maize as part of peasant resistance to genetically modified seeds, making biopesticides from neem leaves, pounded ginger, garlic, and chilli pepper, and operating a solar-powered well that guarantees water access even in the dry season. These women embody the dossier’s conclusion: the Sahel’s future will not be secured by border walls, bases, or markets, but by confronting the capitalist and imperialist structures that convert climate stress into dispossession and war.

Original image by Pedro Stropasola. Watinoma Women’s Association in Koubri, Burkina Faso, 2025.

In Illighadad, a remote village in central Niger with no electricity or running water, Fatou Seidi Ghali – widely considered to be the first Tuareg woman to play guitar professionally – leads Les Filles de Illighadad (The Daughters of Illighadad). Their music is rooted in tende, a women’s tradition of celebration and community built around a mortar-and-pestle drum and a calabash half-buried in water — a form that, in some ceremonial contexts, also serves as a vehicle for spiritual healing. Where Tinariwen’s desert blues sing of exile and thirst – ‘lost in the night, my thirst, my desire for water awakened me’ – and musically express the conditions of structural deprivation, Les Filles de Illighadad make music from within the conditions the dossier’s images point to: women in a waterless village, drawing on collective practice, ancestral knowledge, and the very element – water – that imperialism and structural adjustment have made scarce. Their songs are not laments for what has been lost. They are acts of cultural sovereignty, insisting that the traditions through which Sahelian communities have always governed their relationship to the land – communally, collectively, through women’s knowledge and labour – have not been extinguished.

This is what reclaiming the commons looks like: not as a security strategy but as a civilisational project. The women of Watinoma growing organic maize in defiance of genetically modified seeds. The women of Illighadad making music from a calabash and water. Thirst, in the Sahel, is created by capitalism. But the people of the Sahel have not stopped building the world that comes after it.

We encourage you to read the full dossier and to share it widely.

Warmly,

Dalaya & Mika

Dalaya Ashenafi Dalaya Ashenafi is an Ethiopian political economist and strategist whose work critically engages with structural inequality, state power, and emancipatory development alternatives. With over fifteen years of experience, her analysis challenges neoliberal orthodoxy, exposing how capital accumulation reproduces marginalisation in the Global South. As a 2022 Asia Global Fellow, she investigated state-owned enterprises through a lens of socialist industrialisation. Dalaya is also the deputy principal of the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network (EWNET). Her publications on political settlements and late industrialisation centre class struggle, collective agency, and anti-imperialist frameworks. Rooted in Ethiopia’s developmental thinking, yet globally connected, Dalaya’s scholarship advances a radical vision of development that rejects technocratic fixes in favour of structural transformation and Pan-African solidarity.

Mikaela Nhondo Erskog Mikaela Nhondo Erskog is a researcher and editor at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-coordinator of its Pan-Africa office. She serves on the secretariat of Pan-Africanism Today, which coordinates the regional articulation of the International Peoples’ Assembly, and on the coordination committee of No Cold War, a peace platform promoting multipolarity and global co-operation. She is currently a PhD candidate at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University.

A mural by Bankslave depicting Shakira Wafula, who became an icon of Kenya’s Gen Z-led protests against the Finance Bill 2024 after defiantly raising the Kenyan flag before riot police.

During the June 2025 protests, Juliet Nyabuto of Women for Matiang’i said, ‘The rape and assault of women during national protests is a national shame. We will not mince words. These were not random acts of violence; these were targeted attacks meant to silence and terrorise women’. Rather than focus on the sexual violence against protestors, the media portrayed the women as unruly, and as part of the wider Gen-Z movement that was represented as chaotic, reckless, politically immature, and violent. Women and girls who came to protests began to be seen as criminals and then almost open to rape – a framework that stripped women of their political agency and masked the precarious condition that enabled that violence.

A triptych mural by Graffiti Girls Kenya depicting three young women’s faces — two joyful, one silenced with a barbed motif over the mouth — with the messages ‘You Are Not Alone’, ‘Our Safety Matters’, ‘Speak Out’, and ‘You Are Enough’, Nairobi, 2024. Credit: Graffiti Girls Kenya.

Media outlets such as the Daily Nation, Citizen TV, the Star, and social media platforms portrayed the women protestors as apolitical, passive, and vulnerable victims of violence – depictions that obscured their political activity, ultimately revealing deep patriarchal assumptions that draw from colonial logics into post-colonial Kenya. What were women doing outside the feminised domestic private sphere and marching in the masculine political public sphere? That seemed to be the overarching question. For instance, Daily Nation coupled ‘women and children’ as the most exposed during the protests – women being dependents and as vulnerable as children at the protests. The Nation roundtable on NTV Kenya shamed the victim, insisting on the idea that sexuality warranted respectability and that was not to be found in the fields of protest. These media portrayals reinforced the idea that ‘fragile’ women’s bodies trespassed on the dangerous ground of the public; but they ignored the fact that several young women had been leading and mobilising the protests, in fact many were its leaders (such as Anini Barasa, Hanifa Adan, and Shakira Wafula). By erasing these women, the media re-masculinised the public sphere and re-feminised the private sphere.

A mural by Graffiti Girls Kenya showing a woman’s face adorned with blue flowers and an outstretched hand, with the words ‘We Rise by Lifting Others’, Nairobi, 2024. Credit: Graffiti Girls Kenya.

Reactions to the violence against women came swiftly, with the Kenyan Women Senators Association calling for a criminal investigation into the attacks. Chairperson Veronica Maina criticised not only the ‘senseless violence’ but also the fact that this violence was being celebrated on social media. But neither condemned the Finance bill nor did the police move on the investigations (‘we are still trying to collect data’, said Muchiri Nyaga of the National Police Service – a classic tactic of stalling). A ‘gender specialist’ – Crispin Afifu – told Kenyan women to take care by avoiding isolated routes and walking in trusted groups. Although caring paternal advice, such a reaction ignored the structural problems raised by the protests and shifted responsibility back to them as individuals. The non-governmental organisation Usikimye took the view of care as well, but mainly care for the rape survivors and care to get their stories into the language of policy and humanitarian relief. Njeri Migwi, director of Usikimye, said of the violence of the goons and the police during the demonstrations, ‘I’m heartbroken. We can’t be fighting for freedom during the day and against rapists at night. The assaults were organised violence. The intention is clearly to make women afraid to come out and protest – and a protest without women isn’t an organic one’.

Artists from Graffiti Girls Kenya paint a mural in Nairobi, August 2024. Credit: Graffiti Girls Kenya.

The women on the streets, walking home after the protests, were not just women. They were working-class women who had no access to private transportation. Economic precarity and the collapse of public transportation exposes working women to the patriarchal aspects of the night. Class and gender intersect with economic precarity to produce vulnerability. In this regard, sexual violence during the Gen-Z-led protests is not simply a byproduct of the anarchic protests, but it emerged within the broader political economy of neoliberal capitalism that systematically exploits, disciplines, and depoliticises women’s bodies.

The reaction of these various social forces to the protests and to the violence against women is important to register and study. But even the most sympathetic and clear position, as articulated by Usikimye, does not forthrightly expose the hidden subsidies women provide to neoliberal capitalism – with individual female survivors shouldering the costs of treatment, trauma, and lost income, while rendering unpaid caregiving for children, elders, and households. The neoliberal system in Kenya, as elsewhere, has shifted the burden of care and safety to the individuals and to the households, which masks the way the Kenyan state has withdrawn from care and protection – indeed, has become the instrument not of protection but of violence to protect certain classes. Building from Migwi’s statement that the protests faced ‘organised violence’, in fact, the protestors spoke for an entire set of classes in society that face the structural violence of the neoliberal Kenyan state.

Such dynamics are not peculiar to Kenya. Across the tricontinent, similar crises perpetuated by debt and austerity amidst neoliberal restructuring emerge. They reveal the crisis is not accidental but fundamentally structural to neoliberal logic.

Warmly,

Sinthia

Sinthia Atata Joech Sinthia Atata Joech is a feminist Scholar from Kenya and currently residing in Uganda. She is a Doctoral Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Uganda. Her work engages questions of power and gender in postcolonial politics.

Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan revolutionary and President of the Conference’s International Preparatory Committee, just weeks before his assassination and the start of the gathering, keenly observed its historic meaning, explicitly highlighting that the meeting would bring together ‘two great contemporary currents of the World Revolution’: the current of the socialist revolution that started in the 1917 October Revolution of the Soviet Union and the ‘parallel current of the revolution for national liberation’. For the peoples of Africa – still living under the terrors of Portuguese colonialism, apartheid, and the machinations of neocolonialism – Havana represented a new dawn of coordinated struggle, bringing together this historic composition.

In the latest publication out of 1804 Books, we bring you never-before-seen records of the proceedings and participants of the event in Tricontinental: Havana 1966: Speeches and Documents of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples for Africa, Asia, and Latin America (February 2026). These records allow us to move beyond commemoration and into analysis of how African liberation movements forged strategic thinking on sovereignty, class struggle, and internationalism that continues to resonate today.

Colonialism and Neocolonialism: A Critical Juncture

To understand the significance of this gathering, one must first grasp the historical juncture. The Bandung Conference of 1955 had planted the seeds of political independence on the continent, but by 1966, the situation had radically evolved. The Congo crisis had demonstrated the brutal reality of imperialist intervention following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. In Southern and West Africa, the fascist triumvirate – of Salazar in Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Smith in Rhodesia, and Verwoerd in South Africa – were consolidating a racist, military-economic bloc to stem the tide of African liberation. Simultaneously, the US imperialist aggression in Vietnam served as a stark reminder that the enemy was global and interconnected. It was in this context that the Tricontinental Conference expanded the anti-imperialist front, bringing the revolutionary struggles of Latin America into a formal alliance with those of Africa and Asia.

Collectively, they took stock of the contemporary character of imperialism and its specific manifestations, first elaborated in speeches from movement leaders and then followed by resolutions from the Economic, Organisation, Political, and Social and Cultural Commissions and various Sub-Commissions (e.g. on Vietnam). Moving from the abstract to the concrete, these were then elaborated in specific resolutions dealing with the particular character of international organisations (such as rejection of the Organisation of American States), national questions, burning issues, and sectoral issues, etc.

Fidel Castro addresses delegates attending the Havana Conference, January 1966. Source: Granma International.

In the ‘General Resolution of the Political Commission on Colonialism and Neocolonialism’ – included in our new book – the conference resolved that:

Our time is characterised by great revolutionary progresses. The process of creation of a new world, more perfect, more harmonious, and more just is taking place in front of us. We are living in the times of the collapse of the colonial system of imperialism, in the times of the awakening and of the renaissance of the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Imperialism, at the breakdown of its colonial system, resorts to new methods in order to maintain, under its control, countries close to independence and to reduce to a mere formal political independence those nations that have already obtained independence by breaking their colonial chains. Thus, neocolonialism has been added to the old colonialist policy, already in agony.

After exploring the general features of that stage of imperialism, the resolution – like many of the other elucidations that followed – soberly elaborated on the new US-led dominant forces and the mechanisms deployed to maintain neocolonial structures in recent decades. For example, on the question of the post-war international financial order, the same resolution delved into the role of international financial institutions and their interests:

…the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and others [are] at the service of the expansion policy of imperialism, and in particular North American imperialism, because the United States controls these institutions. As a matter of fact, the United States alone has 25 percent of the votes in the IMF, 34 percent in the IBRD, and 41 percent in the IDB. Having this control, the United States uses these institutions for its imperialist ends, with this double advantage: it has at its disposal, in addition to its own funds, those of the underdeveloped countries who are members of those institutions, and it does not appear as directly imposing burdensome political and economic conditions on these nations.

An example of this utilisation are the loans granted by the World Bank since its foundation in 1946 to 1959 to eleven African countries, for a total of 627,500,000 dollars. How was this apparently impressive total allocated?

One third of the loans went to the Union of South Africa for the construction and modernising of communications, so as to facilitate the export to the United States of uranium and other strategic materials; for payment of the electric power installations, turbogenerators and other equipment for the uranium mines and other mines in that country. And it so happens that North American monopolies have special ‘interest’ in South African mines, not to mention that these loans were a means of strengthening the fascist and bestially racist government which has been imposed on the Black people, which form an overwhelming majority of the population.

… Numerous similar examples can be cited throughout Africa. In contrast, not a single loan has been granted for a project signifying a basic construction for the industrial development of the African countries, such as that of the Aswan Dam, or, if granted, have been subject to burdensome terms.

Following the identification of the ‘criminal practices of economic and military blockades directed against the movement of national liberation’, this resolution put forward the Conference’s programmatic ‘support of all measures directed against the neocolonialist policy’ that continued to subordinate the political sovereignty of the former colonies and resistance movements.

Left to Right: Nguyen Van Thien (South Vietnam), Paul Lantimo (Haiti), Chieh Shuu Chang (China), Florence Mophosho (South Africa), Bijamal Ramazanova (USSR), Luisa Gonzalez (Costa Rica), Amad Jamaluddin Abdulla (Arab Peninsula), Lee Siew Shoh (Malaysia), Pauline Miranda Clerk (Ghana), Kim Riong Gu (DPRK), Abdul Hamid Khan Bashani (Pakistan), Aruna Asaf Ali (India). Source: Archives of Granma and Bohemian.

The Theoretical Arsenal of Liberation

Cuba, having smashed the dogma of geographic fatalism by making a socialist revolution just ninety miles from the US, was the logical host. Yet, for the African delegations present, the conference was a critical space for profound strategic reflection for the next phase of the liberation struggle.

Among the most powerful voices was that of Amílcar Cabral, Secretary General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Cabral’s speech stands as a masterclass in revolutionary theory. He moved beyond simple condemnations of imperialism to dissect the internal contradictions of the liberation movements themselves. He famously argued that ‘the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism.’ In a direct challenge to the delegates, he articulated the harsh class reality facing the petty-bourgeois leadership of many movements, stating that to truly serve the revolution, they must be ‘capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.’

This was not abstract philosophy; it was a practical guide for the armed struggles unfolding in the forests of Guinea, the highlands of Angola, and the scrublands of Mozambique. Cabral’s intervention ensured that the conference understood that national liberation was not just about raising a flag, but about freeing the process of development of the national productive forces, which necessarily implied a socialist path. ‘In our present historical situation,’ he asserted, ‘there are only two possible paths for an independent nation: to return to imperialist domination (neocolonialism, capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of socialism.’

Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC delegation at the Tricontinental Conference, January 1966. Source: Granma International.

Voices of the Battlefield

The conference floor resonated with the voices of those in the trenches, representing a politically dense spectrum of forces rather than a purely diplomatic presence. These included armed liberation movements such as the PAIGC led by Cabral, Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) — represented by figures such as Marcelino dos Santos and Josina Muthemba Machel — alongside the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the African National Congress (ANC) — including leaders such as Yusuf Dadoo — the South West Africa National Union (SWANU), and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU); banned or suppressed nationalist currents such as Sawaba from Niger represented by Abdoulaye Mamani; labour internationalism through figures like John Kofi Barku Tettegah of the All-African Trade Union Federation; and international mass organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, represented by South Africa’s Florence Mophosho. Several delegates would later shape postcolonial state trajectories — Pedro Pires became President of Cabo Verde — while others, including Cabral and Muthemba Machel, were martyred in the course of the liberation struggle.

M. Gabriel Yumbu of the National Liberation Council of the Congo laid bare the economic roots of imperialist interest, detailing the ‘geological scandal’ of the Congo’s wealth, from uranium to cobalt, and how it was plundered by US and Belgian monopolies. He exposed the farce of neocolonial independence, where the words ‘parliament,’ ‘government,’ and ‘army’ had lost all meaning under the puppet regime in Léopoldville.

Robert Resha of the African National Congress (ANC) brought the horrors of apartheid to the podium. He painted a statistical picture of the brutality: 87% of the land reserved for the white minority; a per capita income ratio of 425 pounds for whites versus 39 for Africans; the systematic imprisonment of a people. Resha declared that with the Sharpeville massacre and the subsequent crackdown, a new phase had begun – the phase of Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’). He assured the gathered revolutionaries that despite the imprisonment of leaders like Nelson Mandela, the people were prepared for the ‘bloody and difficult days that lie ahead.’

John K. Tettegah of Ghana, speaking on behalf of Kwame Nkrumah, linked the fate of Africa to the unity of the three continents. He condemned the imperialist manipulation of the UN and the cowardice of the British Labour government in Rhodesia, calling for material and moral support to the freedom fighters until final victory.

Vietnamese delegation being honoured during the Tricontinental Conference, January 1966. Source: OSPAAAL Archive.

The Cuban Internationalists

What transformed the conference from a forum of solidarity into an engine of liberation was the concrete commitment of revolutionary Cuba. In his closing address, Fidel Castro did not mince words. He directly addressed the fear of US retaliation, a fear used to paralyze movements. Using the slanderous campaigns against Che Guevara as a backdrop, Fidel redefined the battlefield. ‘Our country is a small country,’ he admitted, ‘our territory may even be partially occupied by the enemy, but that would never mean the cessation of our resistance… for Cuban revolutionaries, the battlefield against imperialism encompasses the entire world!’

This was not rhetoric. It was the state policy of a young but fearless revolution. Fidel declared that the world revolutionary movement could count on Cuban combatants ‘in any corner of the Earth.’ This commitment shattered the isolation of the African liberation movements. The conference led directly to the creation of the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), with its headquarters in Havana. This institution became the logistical and political hub for supporting the final offensive to get rid of colonialism on the continent.

OSPAAAL solidarity posters used to mobilise global support for the liberation struggles in Libya and Angola. Source: OSPAAAL Archive.

The impact was immediate and historic as material aid expanded massively. The training provided by the Cuban Revolution to the cadres of the MPLA, FRELIMO, PAIGC, and ANC was not merely military; Cuban teachers, doctors, artists and engineers would crisscross the continent sharing with fighters and people alike. The ultimate vindication of this solidarity came years later, most decisively at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–88, where the combined forces of Cuba, Angola, and SWAPO shattered the myth of the invincible South African apartheid army, leading directly to the independence of Namibia and the definitive weakening of the apartheid regime.

The Tricontinental Conference of 1966 provided the strategic clarity and organisational framework for the final assault on colonialism in Africa. As Fidel stated in his closing remarks, the murder of Mehdi Ben Barka, like the assassination of Lumumba, would not stop the victorious march of the people toward freedom. Havana proved that a small island could serve as a powerful rear guard for the liberation of a continent. The history of African liberation cannot be written without acknowledging the pivotal role of that January in Havana.

Warmly,

Manolo De Los Santos

Manolo De Los Santos Manolo is the Executive Director of The People’s Forum and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He co-edited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020) and is the editor of Tricontinental: Havana 1966– Documents of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (1804 Books, 2026).

Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.

Kwame Nkrumah, Independence Day Address,
6 March 1957

Days after the International Court of Justice affirmed Sahrawi self-determination in October 1975, amid Spanish colonial withdrawal, Morocco mobilised over 350,000 civilians to march on Western Sahara and provide cover for military invasion and occupation. Fifty years on, Western Sahara remains the last colony on the African continent. This anniversary is not a mere historical date; it is a mirror held up to Africa and the world, reminding us that imperialism has not been defeated – only reconfigured.

As bombs fall on Gaza, as military elites devastate Sudan, and as multinational corporations extract minerals from Congo, the occupation of Western Sahara stands as one more battlefield in a global war for resources, markets, and geopolitical control. Morocco invaded Western Sahara with full support from Western powers – the United States, France, and Spain. This invasion violated international law, the UN Charter, and the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (1975) affirming that Morocco has no sovereign claims over the territory. Imperialism, as Vladimir Lenin wrote, is ‘the division of the world among the great powers for the purpose of extracting super profits’. Spain withdrew formally but not economically, retaining a 35% ownership share of Bou Craa phosphate mine until 2002. The United States and France took over as arms supplier and diplomatic cover, positioning Morocco as the subcontractor of empire.

Western Sahara became a carved-out territory whose phosphates, fisheries, coastline, and winds were deeply integrated into global capitalist circuits, as ownership was transferred to the Moroccan authorities and occupation opened new avenues for extraction and accumulation. The plunder is concentrated in two sectors:

1. Fertiliser sector: Phosphate extracted by Morocco’s state-owned company at the Bou Craa mine accounts for 10% of Morocco’s total phosphate exports, worth tens of millions of dollars yearly. These phosphates travel on the world’s longest conveyor belt (100 kilometres to El-Ayoun port) and are shipped globally to fertiliser companies, financing the occupation while depleting reserves that belong to the Sahrawi people.

2. Fisheries sector: Western Sahara’s coastal waters accounted for 73% of the quantity and 63% of the value of Morocco’s total coastal catches in 2020. Under the now-invalidated EU-Morocco fishing agreement, 99% of EU catches were made in Sahrawi waters, generating €590 million in annual exports to Europe in 2022 alone – fisheries and agriculture products stolen from occupied territory.

Underlying these economic activities is a Moroccan ruling elite – a comprador bourgeoisie – that sustains its power by exploiting Sahrawi labour. In the phosphate mines of Bou Craa, Moroccan settlers occupy most skilled jobs, while Sahrawis face systematic employment discrimination. In the fisheries of Dakhla, where most of the EU’s sectoral support funds under the fishing agreement were spent, infrastructure projects serve Moroccan settlers and the occupation economy – not the indigenous population. The occupation is not only a geopolitical conflict; it is also a class project.

To secure these economic arrangements, Morocco today plays the same role that apartheid South Africa once played in Southern Africa: a regional gendarme defending the interests of imperialist powers. It is a military partner of France and the US, an economic partner of the EU, a security partner of Israel, and a client state of the Gulf monarchies. This is not accidental; it reflects the class interests of Morocco’s monarchy and bourgeoisie. As Amílcar Cabral explained, ‘the enemy is not an abstract force, but a social class that benefits from domination’.

The Moroccan occupation has produced a long list of martyrs, prisoners, and tortured activists. The prisoners of Gdeim Izik are serving 12-year sentences after their arrest following the 2010 dismantlement of a peaceful protest camp of over 20,000 Sahrawis. Of the original 25 arrested, 19 remain incarcerated, serving terms from 20 years to life – convicted on the basis of confessions extracted under torture, including beatings while suspended, sexual assault, and the pulling out of fingernails.

The UN Committee Against Torture has repeatedly condemned Morocco for violating the Convention Against Torture in multiple cases, finding that courts relied on tainted confessions without proper investigation. Most prisoners are held over 1,000 kilometres from their families in El-Ayoun, denied medical care, subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, and punished with beatings during hunger strikes protesting these conditions. Sahrawi women activists endure house arrest, sexual violence, and constant surveillance. Foreign observers are expelled; journalists are beaten; homes are raided. Yet Sahrawi resistance remains unbroken. As Thomas Sankara said: ‘You cannot kill ideas. You can kill men, but not the movement of a people determined to be free’.

Collage illustrating systematic, colonial violence in occupied Western Sahara (Left to right; top to bottom): the first wave of refugees fleeing the bombardment carried out by the Moroccan army and Mauritanian forces, seeking safety in the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria; Meriem Mghizlat was beaten in the face, along with other Sahrawi human rights defenders and civilians, during a protest in the district of Matalla, in occupied El Aaiún, in 2010; Tabkar Haddi, holding the image of Mohamed Lamin Haidala, who was forcibly killed by the Moroccan occupying force, with the involvement of settlers, on 31 January 2015 in the occupied territories of Western Sahara; forensic exhumation of a mass grave by Spanish researchers at Mhyriz confirming remains of Sahrawis forcibly disappeared in 1976; and peaceful protest in support of hunger-striking Sahrawi political prisoners and calling for a referendum on self-determination in the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara, late 2015.

The struggle in Western Sahara is not an isolated conflict; it is a frontline of a global imperial architecture that imposes domination through military occupation, resource extraction, and the destruction of political sovereignty across the Global South. In Sudan, foreign-armed militias slaughter civilians while international corporations quietly position themselves to secure control over gold, land, and water – turning a humanitarian catastrophe into an investment opportunity. In Palestine, Israel’s regime of siege, settlements, and demographic engineering offers a blueprint for Morocco’s policies in Western Sahara: walled bantustans, resource capture, militarised checkpoints, and the deliberate fragmentation of indigenous society. In the Congo, the world’s tech giants perpetuate the same colonial labour regimes they pretend to have transcended, extracting cobalt and other minerals through chains of violence that enrich global capital while keeping local populations in conditions of structural abandonment. As Patrice Lumumba warned, ‘The day will come when history will speak – not the history taught in Brussels, Paris or Washington, but the history taught in our liberated countries’.

If Pan-Africanism is to be revolutionary, it must confront the last colony on the continent. Anything less is betrayal. The African Union recognises the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as a full member. Yet several African governments have bowed to Moroccan pressure and Gulf money – a reminder of Nkrumah’s warning in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), that ‘the enemy of Africa is not only external; it is also internal’. Thus, the task falls to people’s movements – trade unions, women’s movements, student unions, socialist organs, peasant associations – to lead where governments hesitate.

Prominent human rights defenders Cheikh Banga (left) and Mahfouda Bamba Lefkire (right) continue to face political imprisonment, repression, and intimidation. Graphic by Khalid Boufrayoua. See more on the 50 years of Occupation here.

To transform solidarity from a slogan into a material force, we must advance a concrete programme of struggle:

1. We must build a Pan-African Solidarity Front for Western Sahara, linking socialist parties, trade unions, youth movements, and women’s organisations from Cape Town to Cairo and Accra to Algiers – a united political infrastructure capable of resisting repression and coordinating action across the continent.

2. We must launch People’s Tribunals to expose Moroccan crimes – crimes of war, drone strikes, torture, enforced disappearances, and the theft of Sahrawi resources – while naming the Western, Israeli and Gulf companies that profit from occupation.

3. We must demand that the African Union impose sanctions on Morocco – economic, diplomatic and political – until it recognises the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination.

4. We must organise an international liberation campaign for Sahrawi political prisoners, elevating the imprisoned activists of Gdeim Izik and others as global symbols of anti-imperialist resistance.

5. We need to promote academic, cultural, and institutional boycotts of Moroccan state bodies complicit in the occupation, especially universities, think-tanks and cultural institutions that launder the image of colonialism under the guise of ‘African leadership’.

6. We must establish Pan-African Youth Brigades to visit the Sahrawi refugee camps, study the structures of popular resistance, document testimonies and carry the struggle back to their communities.

7. We should mobilise global trade unions, especially dockworkers, to block shipments of stolen Sahrawi phosphates and fisheries – as workers in South Africa, New Zealand and elsewhere have courageously done, proving that worker internationalism can disrupt imperial chains.

8. Western Sahara must be integrated into the programmes of socialist, revolutionary and left movements worldwide, from Latin America to South Asia – not as a marginal cause but as a central frontline of the global anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle.

9. And crucially, we must break the media siege imposed by Western governments, Moroccan propaganda networks, and their Gulf-funded disinformation apparatus by building independent African media platforms, amplifying Sahrawi journalists in the diaspora and in the occupied territories, creating multilingual digital campaigns, and training activists in counter-propaganda techniques and secure communication.

As Amílcar Cabral taught: ‘Solidarity is not a word but a practice’. These proposals – political, economic, cultural, and communicational – form the practical roadmap for turning solidarity with Western Sahara into a revolutionary force capable of confronting empire.

Map of the Moroccan berms (Wall of Shame) built between 1980–87, partitioning Western Sahara. The territory north and west of berms 4, 2, 5, and 6 is currently occupied by Morocco. The territory to the east, including Tifariti and Zug, is held by Polisario Front of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Source: Salvatore Garfi, An Archaeology of Colonialism, Conflict, and Exclusion: Conflict Landscapes of Western Sahara (2014).

The Moroccan wall – 2,700 kilometres of sand, landmines and racial segregation – is not only a military barrier. It is the material expression of an unfinished African revolution, a scar carved into the continent by imperialism and its comprador agents. But no wall, no army, no occupation has ever stopped a people whose historical mission is liberation.

The future belongs to those who resist. It belongs to the peoples who refuse to surrender their land, their dignity, their history and their horizon.

The revolution continues. And Western Sahara will be free.

Warmly,

Saddam

[Featured image: Sahrawi women hold Polisario Front flags at the Sahrawi refugee camp of Dakhla, southeast of the Algerian city of Tindouf. Farouk Batiche / AFP]

Saddam Alktif Saddam Alktif is a prominent Sahrawi human rights activist and a member of the Administrative Committee of the Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders in Western Sahara (CODESA). He is also the president of the environment committee of CODESA.

Evans Ahorsu (Tamale, Ghana), Untitled, 2025.

Ghana Television (GTV) began transmission in 1965, but Ghanaians did not have access to colour television until 1985. Global media histories demonstrate the marginalisation of Africa in the global mediascape, revealing how media innovations were slow to diffuse across the continent. Within Ghana, the North faces marginalisation on two fronts, as it is often the last part of the country to benefit from such innovations. For instance, although GTV had been broadcasting since the 1960s, the national electricity grid only reached one of Northern Ghana’s largest cities in 1989.

Once the North was connected to the electricity grid, television access began to grow, with well-to-do citizens purchasing TV sets to tune into GTV’s broadcasts. This diffusion remained in its early stages, since only a small number of people could afford colour television sets. Communal viewing became widespread: television owners would often bring their sets outside into a compound courtyard at night so that neighbours could gather to watch. During the day, it was common to see children standing outside their neighbour’s window to watch television. Throughout the 1990s, GTV maintained a monopoly on television broadcasting in the North.

No statement encapsulates the mandate of GTV – and by extension the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) – better than Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s speech at the inauguration of the Ghana Television Service in 1965:

Ghana’s Television will be used to supplement our educational programme and foster a lively interest in the world around us. It will not cater for cheap entertainment nor commercialism. Its paramount object will be education in the broadest and purest sense. Television must assist in the socialist transformation of Ghana.

President Nkrumah’s remarks emphasised the importance of education as the guiding principle of GBC’s mission and vision. In his view, education encompassed several goals: promoting science and technical training to make them accessible to the masses; focusing on agriculture; and providing general information on vocational work and practical skills for people both at home and at school.

Mandeiya Michael (Yendi, Ghana), Untitled, 2019.

Alhaji Adam Cockra, a veteran journalist from Tamale who worked at GBC for forty-two years (1966-2008), recalls how television eventually came to Northern Ghana. ‘A small transmitter was installed in Tamale to take care of the North. Staff in Tamale received by Ghana Airways [flight] what was telecast the previous day in Accra… In other words, everything viewers in the North saw on TV was a day old. Even then, only Tamale and its environs could view TV until the 1990s’.

Despite these structural hurdles in bringing television to Ghanaians who were marginalised by geography, ethnicity and class, President Nkrumah’s vision for media in Ghana extended beyond education into the realm of consciousness-raising:

Our broadcasting service should struggle ceaselessly to make itself the people’s service. It should identify itself fully with the people’s aspirations for a fuller life. It should continue to fight uncompromisingly against the forces militating against our progress. It will be its task to expose and unmask imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism in all its forms and manifestations, and support our endeavours for the political unification of our Continent.

Although Nkrumah made this statement in an era when African countries were fighting for liberation from colonial rule and the African diaspora in America was fighting for civil rights, it remains relevant today. The Global South continues to be subjected to neocolonial and imperialist violence from Europe and North America.

Many media outlets and watchdog organisations have neglected this mandate and become stooges of the ruling elite as well as of imperialist core nations such as France and the United States. This marks a stark departure from Nkrumah’s vision for Ghana’s media. For example, the French ambassador to Ghana Anne Sophie Avé (2018-2022), hosted a program called Touch of France. It aired on private stations GHOne TV and Metro TV from 2019 to 2021, promoting French propaganda and soft power under the guise of cultural exchange. Nkrumah would have described this as a neocolonisation of the media landscape.

In 2022, the US embassy organised and funded a fact-checking workshop for rural journalists in Ghana. The following year, it was a major sponsor for the twenty-seventh Ghana Journalists Awards, held in Accra in October 2023. Ahead of Ghana’s national elections in 2024, the US embassy worked with the Ghana Journalists Association to organise a workshop for journalists on election reporting. It is therefore unsurprising that journalism in Ghana today has largely failed to critically interrogate and challenge US imperialism – including, for example, how the US military has established a military base at Ghana’s international airport and its personnel enjoy more rights and protections than Ghanaian citizens.

Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana), Shine a Light, 2021.

More broadly, Ghana’s media have abdicated their watchdog role. They fail to ask the important questions that would inform the public about how such developments affect the nation’s sovereignty. The embassies of Global North nations in Europe and North America occupy an integral position in civil society circles of the country by funding research and journalism training workshops, wining and dining the movers and shakers in media and journalism, and so on, which can often stifle journalists’ ability to more sharply critique the neocolonial and imperialist actions of these nations. Yet, there are efforts to resist the prevailing contemporary conditions with a few stations like Accra-based Pan-African TV are attempting to foreground pan-Africanist values which not only engage with issues affecting the African continent, but the African diaspora at large.

The history of television in Ghana is incomplete without highlighting the role women played in developing the medium. Influenced by the Pan-African values central to Nkrumah’s vision for media in a newly independent Ghana, key aspects of early television development were shaped by Pan-Africanists such as Shirley Graham Du Bois (from the United States) and Genoveva Marais (from South Africa). Marais served as director of programmes for Ghana’s television service at its inception, and she introduced and shaped programming in line with the Pan-African and socialist vision on which the GBC was founded.

Despite these early contributions, very few women hold management positions in Ghana’s television industry today. Gender representation on television has diverged sharply from the Pan-African, anticolonial values that underpinned TV’s early years. The male gaze now dominates, and media narratives on gender are often filtered through a lens of objectification and other tropes perpetuated by patriarchal systems.

This newsletter is a lightly edited excerpt from my new book, Media, Culture, and Decolonisation: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana (December 2025), drawn from the chapter ‘Television for Social Change’. In the wider book, I show how indigenous-language television stations in Northern Ghana – particularly Dagbanli-language stations – are striving to realise the dream Nkrumah set out: media as a force for social transformation. Progressive African media organisations have much to learn from these initiatives, especially about how to build the conditions in which marginalised communities can take ownership of the radical work that media institutions are capable of doing in Ghana and beyond.

Warmly,

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed

Wunpini Mohammed Wunpini was born and raised in Tamale, Ghana. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is co-editor of African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora (Mkuki na Nyota, 2023).

US Senator Ted Cruz, who boasts that he has ‘fought for years to counter the slaughter and persecution of Christians in Nigeria,’ introduced a bill for religious freedom and accountability in Nigeria two months earlier. According to him, jihadists have murdered 52,000 Nigerian Christians and destroyed 20,000 churches and institutions since 2009, the year the Boko Haram Salafi-Jihadist group took up arms against the Nigerian state.

Victor Ekpuk (Nigeria), This American, 2022.

These claims would have been laughable in less tragic circumstances. There is no doubt that Nigeria has been bleeding, with tens of thousands of people killed by an array of non-state actors and the military. But the reality, rooted in a history of imperialist machinations and morbid manipulation of the national question by those in power or contending for power, is much more complex. And the figures put forward to justify allegations of genocide are at best conjectural.

The major source of these figures, as well as several other numbers bandied about over the years, is the colourfully named ‘International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law’ or InterSociety for short, which is headed by liberal democracy advocate Emeka Umeagbalasi. Since 2008, apart from Emeka himself, the group’s board has had only two other members: his friend, Anayo Okoli, a journalist based in the same town, and Emeka’s wife, Blessing Chidiebere Ohia-Umeagbalasi, an evangelical church leader. While the organisation lists several ‘field officers’ on its website, InterSociety has never published its research methodology, raw data sources, or verification processes for the staggering death toll figures it claims. No peer-reviewed publications, independent audits, or collaborative research with established human rights documentation organisations support these numbers.

The United States has refused to call the massacre of over 60,000 people in Gaza a genocide, including Christians, for whatever Trump’s supposed ‘cherishing’ is worth. This is despite the impeccable documentation of this genocide which shows that ‘Israel has killed or injured more than 10 per cent of Gaza’s population over the past 24 months.’ Yet, it hurls accusations of genocide and threats of invasion at a ‘shithole’ country like Nigeria for some supposed ‘genocidal’ killing of 52,000 Christians over a 16-year period, based on the most spurious ‘data’ by the most questionable ‘researchers’. There can be no more macabre definition of hypocrisy in high places.

Victor Ehikhamenor (Nigeria), Lagos Hide and Seek, 2014.

A spectrum of responses

There has been a broad spectrum of responses in Nigeria. The federal government has denied any genocide, responding with a timidity that is the very opposite of the arrogance it displays when addressing and repressing critics at home. Liberals and politicians from the traditional parties of the ruling class have been more concerned with calming the situation and averting any breakdown in the Nigerian state’s long-term strategic partnership with the United States.

Middle-class perspectives have taken two broad lines of thought. On the one hand, nationalist narratives present Trump’s tirades and threats as responses to what appear to be progressive politics by President Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress (APC) government. These include Nigeria’s support for Palestine, refusal to accept deported Venezuelans, and deepening ties with Russia and China.

On the other hand, critics have highlighted the hypocrisy of President Tinubu and the ruling APC, pointing out that an APC delegation met with John Kerry and other top US officials in 2014 to report an alleged Christian genocide in Nigeria.

The dominant perspective on the left is that the United States’ concern is much more profane than celestial. Trump’s aim, as political economist Yusuf Bangura argues, is to bully Nigeria into opening up its rich mineral resources for ‘the supply chains of US hi-tech companies and defence industries.’ Others argue that ‘targets and victims of bloodthirsty jihadists’ (whether herders or bandits) ‘have nothing to lose but their cruel chains of bloodbaths’ – including activists in the Middle Belt, where violence has killed thousands (most of them Christians). Yet Boko Haram and its offshoots have been most active in the Northeast, where most victims have been Muslims. Omoyele Sowore, National Chair of the revolutionary African Action Congress (AAC), pointed out that while the threat to launch a military action ‘may sound appealing to some…history has shown this to be perilous’.

Amaremo Elaebi aka ‘Eli the Great’ (Nigeria), #EndSars mural, 2020.

Hands Off Nigeria!

Political analysts like Jeffrey Sachs have underscored the political hypocrisy of Trump and the United States in playing the ‘moral symbolism’ card of Christian genocide. Sachs adds that this mirrors the humanitarian narrative of post-Cold War Western imperialism. But this line of politics goes even deeper for us. Britain bombarded Lagos in 1851, ostensibly to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A decade later, it annexed Lagos, beginning the period of formal colonialism, using the same lame excuse.

The hypocritical and brutish process of colonisation did not end with that. Divide and rule was a pivotal strategy of conquest. They recruited Muslims from the north into a Hausa constabulary to police Lagos and its environs in the west. Meanwhile, missionaries encouraged ethnic minorities in the north – especially those in the Middle Belt region who felt suffocated by the Emirate system that expanded after the 19th-century Jihad in that region – to join the church. They did so in droves. The religious divide, so to speak, became bound with ethnicity, geography, and politics in what would become a very complex national question – a dynamic I explored in a 2013 article on the manipulation of ethno-religious identities as masks in Nigerian politics. Donald Trump and his ilk in the United States have joined the masquerade ball with claims of genocide as their masks.

We must reject any attempt to reduce this bloodletting to unfounded claims of genocide, and tear the masks from their faces. Working-class people in Nigeria must hold the Nigerian state responsible for the generalised insecurity, without illusions of salvation from the United States. The systemic crisis of capitalism – which has engendered poverty, mass unemployment, climate change, and social anomie – is the root we must address. We must stand firm against Yankee imperialism under any guise.

Warmly,

Bàbá Ayé

Bàbá Ayé Ayé is a Nigerian socialist activist, researcher, and writer based in Lagos. A veteran of Nigeria’s labour movement and the co-convener of the Coalition for Revolution, he has written extensively on working-class struggles, the national question, and imperialist interventions in Africa. He is the Health and Social Sector Officer of Public Services International, a global union federation for workers in public services, and the author of Era of Crises & Revolts: Perspectives for Workers and Youth (2012).

In that moment – a single, withheld gesture – Sembène captures the moral ledger of empire. The war had ended in Europe, but its logic persisted in Africa. Effok was not merely a village; it was a ledger of wartime requisitions, beatings, and disappearances. The general’s smile is a mask; the uncle’s refusal, a political act. From this quiet defiance to the Thiaroye Massacre that follows, Sembène charts the journey from passive to active resistance against French colonialism – from fighting fascism abroad to confronting it at home. 

Djime Diakite (Senegal), Apothéose des tranchées (Apotheosis of the Trenches), 2016.

The First Front: Ethiopia Stands Alone

To bring Africa into the story of the World Anti-Fascist War – commonly referred to as World War II, 1939–1945 – is not to add a decorative footnote; it is to correct the record. Long before the Normandy landings, major armed stands against rising fascism took place outside of Europe, as early as 18 September 1931 with the Japan’s imperial invasion of China. The global fight against fascism began not in 1939 in Europe, but years earlier on continents too often marginalised in the historical narrative.

In 1935–36, as Mussolini’s army invaded, raining down mustard gas and chemical bombs in open violation of the Geneva Protocol, Ethiopian patriots – men and women alike -waged a multi-year guerrilla war that exposed fascism as colonialism without disguise. These arbegna (patriots) embodied a refusal that transcended gender, class, and region. 

The human cost was immense: more than 750,000 Ethiopian combatants and civilians were killed during the invasion and occupation. In 1937, following an assassination attempt on the Italian viceroy, Italian forces unleashed the Yekatit 12 massacre, killing 30,000 civilians in three days of collective punishment. In the caves of Ametsegna Washa, they gassed and machine-gunned more than 5,500 Ethiopians– one of the largest single massacres of the African theatre and a methodical exercise in terror. Still, resistance never ceased. A third of recorded patriots were women – organisers, fighters, and commanders whose defiance echoed across the continent.  Their five-year stand opened a school of resistance, seeded political geography and became a template for anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements that followed.

Ethiopians gather in Addis Ababa, heavily armed with captured Italian weapons, to hear the proclamation announcing the return to the capital of the Emperor Haile Selassie in May 1941 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Infrastructure of Victory

As the war spread, Africa became its logistical heart. Its coasts guarded sea lanes; its mines fed the war machine; its workers built the ports, rails, and airstrips that sustained the Allied fronts and enabled ultimate victory. Across the continent, convoys, aircraft, and fuel flowed – powered by African labour, resources, and sacrifice.

African and Commonwealth soldiers broke Italian East Africa at Keren and Amba Alagi, reopening the Red Sea and shattering the Axis empire on African soil. Free French and African troops captured Kufra in Libya, securing a southern flank for the desert war. In the west, Gabon and Dakar became staging grounds for French Africa and gave de Gaulle a territorial backbone and logistics base. Freetown and Takoradi ferried aircraft and guarded convoys that sustained the Middle East and North Africa fronts, even as U-boats hunted those sea lanes. In the Indian Ocean, the seizure of key islands denied the Axis a submarine springboard that could have threatened the Suez Canal and the Mozambique Channel.

Over a million African soldiers served; millions more laboured under coercive and hazardous conditions. In the Congo, uranium extracted from the Shinkolobwe mine – by African workers, many of whom suffered disastrous health effects – fuelled the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Africa’s contribution was decisive – material, strategic, and human – yet its people were denied recognition and reward. The empires that claimed to fight fascism abroad maintained its methods at home: racial hierarchy, forced labour, collective punishment.

Sammy Baloji (DR Congo), Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction, 2022.

Thiaroye: Victory and Violence

Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye recounts what happened when the front lines shifted home. The Tirailleurs who had bled for France were herded into a transit camp near Dakar to await demobilisation. When their promised back pay is devalued, their political consciousness – tempered on foreign battlefields – hardens into a collective demand for economic justice. They went on strike – not for charity, but for dignity. The colonial answer came at dawn: tanks and artillery against sleeping, unarmed men. Among them was Pays, the survivor of Nazi camps, wearing an SS helmet – he sensed what was coming but, broken by trauma, could not warn them that fascism had only changed its uniform, not its victims. 

The Thiaroye massacre of 1 December 1944 is not an aberration; it is the colonial state speaking in its clearest voice. Less than six months later, on 8 May 1945 (V-E Day) the very day Europe celebrated victory over fascism – French troops massacred thousands of Algerians in Sétif and Guelma for demanding independence. Two years later, veterans of the anti-fascist war and politicised Malagasy youth rose for independence and met the same fate. For the colonised, ‘liberation’ meant the restoration of the whip, the camp, and the gun. Eighty years on, the death toll and burial sites remain contested, and the search for full truth is still obstructed – proof that the war over memory continues.

Hassane Sar (Senegal), Thiaroye Dem Dik (‘Go to Thiaroye and Come Back’), 2016.

From Wartime Service to Postwar Struggle

Yet the war changed Africa. The experience of fighting fascism and sustaining the Allied war effort transformed ordinary workers and soldiers into political subjects. They asserted that anti-fascist promises of freedom and social justice must apply in the colonies too, fusing labour and anticolonial fronts.

In June 1945, Nigerian workers – who had fed and supplied the Allied front – launched a general strike for living wages and dignity. The following year, 70,000 South African mineworkers who had powered the Allied wartime economy – gold for reserves, coal for industry – launched a strike against the ‘fascistic’ labour regime of apartheid capitalism: starvation wages and racist labour laws. By 1947–48, the momentum was continent-wide. Across French West Africa, railway workers drew on their wartime discipline to stage a sustained strike that linked the struggle for fair pay to the broader demand for freedom.

 In 1948, in Accra, unarmed ex-servicemen marching to demand pensions were gunned down by a British officer. The killings ignited riots and radicalised a generation. Among those arrested in the aftermath of the riots was Kwame Nkrumah, who would soon lead Ghana to independence. Where he had once worked within a moderate nationalist party, he broke away to form his own movement demanding immediate self-government, recognising – as his biographer later wrote – that, after the war ended, the African Revolution had begun.

Front cover of the booklet, titled ‘Workers at War – CNETU and the 1946 African Mineworkers’ Strike’, South Africa.

Precision, Not Piety

Sembène refuses easy consolation. After the massacre, in his closing scene, a new group of young African soldiers boards a ship for Europe – just as the veterans of Thiaroye once did. History, it seems, is preparing to repeat itself. 

To remember Africa’s role in the World Anti-Fascist War is not an act of charity but of truth-telling. The continent’s battlefields were not peripheral; they were central to the defeat of fascism and the birth of the post-war world. Their struggle against fascism was inseparable from their struggle against the architecture of imperialism. But they also revealed something deeper: that fascism’s core logics – racial hierarchy, expropriation, collective punishment – were native to empire itself.

Eighty years later, the fight continues in new forms: against debt regimes, ecological plunder, militarised borders, and the weaponisation of memory. To commemorate the great victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, resist the resurgence of neo-fascism, and address the intertwined crises confronting the Global South, the Global South Academic Forum (2025) will convene in Shanghai on 13–14 November 2025 under the theme ‘The Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the Postwar International Order: Past and Future’. 

A new generation of thinkers, artists and organisers across the Global South are reclaiming this history – not to romanticise the past, but to understand the world we have inherited. As Sembène reminds us, resistance begins with precision: to see clearly what was done, who paid the price, and what still remains to be won. 

Warmly,

Mika

Mikaela Nhondo Erskog Mika is a researcher and editor at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-coordinates the Tricontinental Pan-Africa office, where she co-wrote a recent dossier titled Sahel Seeks Sovereignty. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. She is a member of Pan Africanism Today Secretariat, which coordinates the regional articulation of the International People’s Assembly. She is also part of the No Cold War coordination committee, a peace platform promoting multipolarity and maximum global cooperation.

We see and hear a socially sick world, fragmented into millions of people estranged from each other, doubled down in their efforts for individual survival but united under the oppression of a system that will do anything to satisfy its thirst for profit, even when its path is in direct contradiction to the existence of planet Earth.

… life, and the struggle for life, is not an individual issue, but a collective one.

These words speak directly to the crisis facing cultural workers today: how do we sustain collective cultural resistance when the forces we oppose isolate us, defund our spaces, and reduce resistance art to individual survival strategies? Following Tricontinental’s recent dossier Mexico and the Fourth Transformation, this newsletter draws lessons from South Africa and Mexico on how collective cultural resistance can endure both the withdrawal of support and the pressures of neoliberal individualisation.

Rebel and Revel: Zapatista art, rebellion, and resistance solidarity meeting towards the day after, autonomous Zapatista territories, Chiapas, Mexico, April 2025. Credit: Robyn Park-Ross.

The Community Arts Project (CAP), founded in Cape Town in 1977 following the Soweto uprising of 1976, was one of the most formative collective cultural initiatives of the anti-apartheid struggle. Alongside the Federated Union of Black Artists, the Medu Art Ensemble, the Johannesburg Foundation and others, CAP trained and housed artists and students, and by the 1980s was central to the formation of the idea of ‘culture as resistance’ against apartheid.

Political posters produced at CAP between 1977 and the 1990s, (Source: Community Arts Project Poster Collection, The Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape).

With the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, foreign donors withdrew, undermining the sustainability of community-centred spaces. CAP went through many transitions to adapt to the changing political and funding context, including merging with Media Works in 2002 to form the Arts and Media Access Centre, which eventually closed in 2008 due to lack of funding. The challenge of how to sustain political art collectives remains unresolved.

Without collective spaces, many artists have been left to struggle individually in a neoliberal order that depoliticises art, commodifies cultural work, and neutralises its revolutionary potential. Patrick Holo, a member of CAP and later co-founder of the Nyanga Arts Centre, with works in major national galleries and even featured in the national curriculum, in his later years of life now sells his art on the pavement in Cape Town just to make a living. His story exemplifies how cultural workers are left to rely on their own resilience, while the very conditions that marginalise them continue to profit from their individualised struggles.

Quartet, Patrick Holo (Source: Cape Gallery).

Where are our solidarity networks to support cultural workers and their crucial contributions? What can we learn from other southern contexts?

The post-revolution political strategy to prioritise culture is an underpinning influence of the maintenance of Mexican cultural collectives. This political prioritisation of cultural work dates back to José Vasconcelos’s 1920–1924 term as Secretary of State for Public Education, during which his strong commitment to cultural nationalism led to the funding of murals on public buildings to visualise a revolutionary nationalism. While subject to much valid critique, this legacy of nation-building through culture continues to be reflected in Mexico today. For example, Mexico City is rumoured to have the highest density of cultural institutions in the world. The role of the government should not however be overstated. The driving force of collective cultural resistance work is always the dedication and resilience of organised cultural workers. With or without state or institutional support, people will make political cultural work together. The question is, what precarity will they be asked to endure in order to provide this public service?

The Taller de Grafica Popular (‘People’s Graphic Workshop’), a movement of political artists founded in 1937, revolutionised Mexican graphic culture and became one of Latin America’s most influential art movements. Despite tensions between generations of artists within the collective amongst other challenges, its longevity (financially and otherwise) was due in large part to its structure:

1. Public work: posters and flyers for movements, unions, and other political campaigns, portfolios created under the name of the Taller, never attributed to individual artists and often done for free with a creative process that included a weekly internal feedback system for collective strengthening of work
2. Fine arts (‘La Estampa Mexicana’): offered a broader cultural representation of Mexico, including the diversity of the land, work, and people. It provided a form of propaganda (“served with a spoon, not a knife”), with a money-generating function – print runs were sold under the name of individual artists and proceeds portioned between the individual artist and the Taller to fund other activities
3. Calaveras publications (depictions of skulls or skeletons): Taller produced 22 calaveras newspapers between 1938 and 1965 reflecting on the political moment with humour. Building on the history of political satire through caricature tradition rooted in the work of José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), the collective gathered annually around Dia de los Muertos (‘Day of the Dead’) and worked intensively for a few days to produce a collective satirical reflection of the current political situation. Though not income-generating, they were vital to the Taller’s cultural role.

L: Detengamos la guerra (‘Stop the War’), 1951, Taller de Grafica Popular, (Source: Mexico Desconocido), R: America Libre, a 2024 reinterpretation by collective Enraizando Solidaridad in solidarity with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, (Source: Enraizando Solidaridad. Free, open access to the Palestine Solidarity portfolio here.

In Mexico today, Oaxaca is home to a rich concentration of political art collectives such as Armarte (‘arm yourself’), a feminist linocut collective producing political wheatpaste interventions in the city’s gentrifying streets. Members create and sell individual work (with the option to use the collective space and facilities) but come together monthly to design, carve, print and paste collectively around chosen themes. These themes are often tied to political anniversaries such as the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 by the Mexican police and security forces in collusion with organised crime. The collective use various income streams to fund the collective: including the sale of t-shirts, stickers, prints, zines and hosting workshops in the collective space.

Armarte wheatpasting, July 2024, Oaxaca City, Mexico. Credit: Robyn Park-Ross.

Other inspiring Mexico City based collectives include Hijas de la Luna (‘Daughters of the Moon’) a feminist linocut collective who, among other political work, recover the histories of overlooked women political artists, and Enraizando Solidaridad (‘Rooting Solidarity’) who, from the long-standing popular education creative workshop Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 68 (‘Martyrs of ‘68 School of Popular Culture’) produce graphic sets (prints, stickers, posters and wheatpastes) in solidarity with Palestine and other global struggles.

Yet Mexican collectives also face precarity. Radio Nopal, an online independent community radio station in Mexico City, recently convened assemblies to strategise survival after crowdfunding fell short. They continue broadcasting while trying to build communal solutions ‘with the certainty that the impossible can be sustained when built together’.

From South Africa and Mexico emerge urgent questions: how do we learn from the lifespans of past collectives without nostalgia? How do we adapt lessons across contexts while building new spaces for the difficult but essential work of collective cultural resistance?

As cultural workers supporting liberation struggles from South Africa to Palestine, from Nigeria to Mexico, we have no choice but to build collective structures that sustain revolutionary consciousness across regions and generations.

South African musician and composer Asher Gamedze reminds us, in his piece ‘Turbulence’s Pulse’, that the rhythms of resistance – like the rhythms of jazz – are always collective:

One important thing about time in music, particularly in improvised music, in free music
Is the fact that time itself, the feeling of time, time’s movement or its signature, the sense of time
In front, behind
Pushing and pulling in different directions
Is very clearly produced by the group of musicians playing together
Their individual times working and weaving to constitute and articulate a sense of ensemble time

This is useful to remember when we think about history
What time in music, its nature as a collective product teaches or reminds us about time in history, is that time and how it moves is produced by people working together

For the oppressed being dispossessed, as we are, from the means of movement and being subject to the times of others
Music is one space where we can articulate, define and live in our own sense of time

The world as we see and experience it today, through all the violence, tyranny, exploitation and oppression, can seem overwhelming and stuck in place
Unmoving and impossible to shift
History also can seem like a story outside of us, outside of and beyond ourselves
Taking place on a level far removed from us everyday folks
But music time reminds us that history is also a collective product

History, the movement of historical time, is produced by people
People organising to intervene in, challenge and change the dynamics of their reality
This realisation has liberatory potential
The fact that history and present society has been made by people means that the future will also be made by people, by us

So despite living and working in conditions neither of our making nor our choosing
We can indeed make time
Make history

Warmly,

Robyn Park-Ross

Robyn Park-Ross Robyn is an urban planner, researcher, and cultural worker (photographer, artmaker, and facilitator) currently based between Mexico City and Cape Town, focused on cultural resistance, spatial justice, affordable housing, and urban food security.