Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kwasi Konadu, Professor in Africana & Latin American Studies, Colgate University

The resolution passed by United Nations General Assembly on 25 May 2026 seeking recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” potentially creates a broader definition of crimes against humanity in international law and allows for restitution claims against perpetrators. The resolution could elevate the legal and moral standard for what counts as the worst crimes against humanity, and compel more people to legally pursue reparations or compensation cases and thus deter such crimes.

Proposed by Ghana, it was adopted with 123 votes. The United States, Israel and Argentina voted against it. Fifty-two countries abstained, among them the UK and European states.

There has never been a single “gravest crime” designation applied to one human event or condition. Instead, international law defines categories of crimes considered the most serious. Examples are genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and crimes against humanity. Being classified under these categories triggers severe legal consequences. These include global prosecution, lifelong accountability, international sanctions, and reparation claims.

Ghana’s declaration views transatlantic slavery and its system of forced African labour as the worst crime ever committed. It explains how millions of Africans were abducted, treated like property, and abused because of their race.

The declaration points out that the effects of slavery still influence inequality and racism today. It calls on all nations to recognise what happened, teach its history honestly, and remember the victims. It also works towards fixing the lasting damage, including institutional and monetary reparations.

I am a professor of history who has researched and written extensively on the slave trade and its impact. I argue that Ghana’s resolution represents more than a moral or diplomatic statement. It marks a decisive step in an ongoing effort of historical reclamation and political transformation. It asserts that the histories of enslavement, displacement and organised theft are foundational to the modern world.

More importantly, it insists that recognition must lead to action. For contemporary Africa, this moment is about leveraging historical truth to reshape present conditions and future possibilities within a global system still marked by the legacies of transatlantic slaving.

Slavery shaped the modern world

Transatlantic slaving was not an isolated historical episode but a foundational process that made the modern world. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, over 12 million Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands. It was a massive, organised system of theft that left African societies dealing with long-term demographic, political and economic disruptions.

During the 1800s slavery changed form. It became tied to European imperialism. Powerful nations such as Britain and France took over land in Africa and other regions. The countries that had been major slave traders became the leading imperial powers in Africa. For example, French forces in the late 1800s still captured people and forced them into service. Laws in French west Africa didn’t truly end slavery. They simply allowed colonial governments to take over land.

The colonising countries often claimed they were bringing “civilisation”. Similarly, European colonisers in central Africa – especially under Belgian rule in the Congo Free State (1885-1908) – caused massive suffering and death. Around 10 million people died over about 40 years.

The creation of diaspora communities

Over the course of transatlantic slaving, Africans participated, resisted, adapted, and preserved cultural and intellectual systems that would later shape diaspora communities and their bonds with Africa. Those bonds included shared historical experiences, cultural practices, religious systems, political ideas and intellectual traditions that travelled and transformed across the ocean.

Recent calls for reparatory justice emerge from this long-standing network of connections.

Ghana’s resolution comes out of a convergence of continental and diaspora political efforts. African states and Caribbean nations have increasingly coordinated their positions on historical injustice and reparations.

Ghana’s resolution was built on earlier declarations:

The Ghana declaration sets a precedent. It seeks to redefine the moral language of the international order. Elevating it as the gravest crime underscores slavery’s scale and duration. Its systemic nature establishes it as the fundamental architect of global capitalism, racial hierarchies and modern state formation.

Why it matters

The Ghana declaration recognises the centrality of transatlantic slavery and compels a reassessment of how modern inequalities are explained and addressed.

For contemporary Africa, this recognition carries material implications. The aftermath of transatlantic slaving are evident in patterns of underdevelopment, external dependency and unequal integration into global markets. A formal recognition at the highest level of international governance strengthens the basis for claims to reparatory justice.

Such claims may take multiple forms. These may include investment in infrastructure, education and health systems. There could also be reforms to global financial institutions that boost mobilising resources within African borders.

Equally significant is the resolution’s role in consolidating pan-African and diasporic solidarity. By aligning African states with Caribbean nations and broader diaspora communities, it reactivates a political consciousness rooted in shared histories and strategic alignments.

A unified transatlantic African bloc possesses greater leverage within – and outside – international institutions and can more effectively advocate for systemic transformation.

The Ghana resolution also functions as a global educational intervention. Public understanding of transatlantic slaving often remains fragmented or minimised. This is true particularly in regions where some groups or historical individuals benefited from it.

By placing this issue before the United Nations General Assembly, Ghana compels a broader confrontation with the scale and consequences of transatlantic slaving. This is essential for historical accuracy as well as for shaping near future policies and coordinated actions.

Resistance lies ahead

The resolution will face resistance. Some nations such as the United States and Great Britain remain wary of the legal and financial implications of a “gravest crime” recognition. The subject of reparations for them is contentious and untenable. These tensions reveal enduring asymmetries in global power and the difficulty of translating moral or historical claims into enforceable outcomes.

Yet resistance itself underscores the resolution’s significance. It exposes the extent to which historical injustices remain embedded in contemporary political and economic power arrangements.

– The transatlantic slave trade is the gravest crime against humanity – why the UN declaration matters
– https://theconversation.com/the-transatlantic-slave-trade-is-the-gravest-crime-against-humanity-why-the-un-declaration-matters-279218

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rodwell Makombe, Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies, North-West University

South-African born writer and world literature scholar Elleke Boehmer’s sixth novel, Ice Shock, is a breathtaking story about two lovers who, soon after they meet, find themselves separated to pursue different career choices in different parts of the world.

Niall Lawrence spends 14 months at a polar institute in Antarctica while Leah Nash pursues a writing career in London. This relationship, which starts when the two meet on a London train, sets in motion a philosophical interrogation of love, career choice and the sustenance of both in a turbulent world.

Through this love story told across two continents, Boehmer paints, in broad strokes, a picture of a planet in crisis, reflected through the melting ice in Antarctica, the Fukushima disaster in Japan and the volcanic eruptions that disrupt global air travel.

In this new world, the old distinctions between “here” and “there” – the centre and the periphery – are disrupted and new ways of inhabiting the planet are imagined. The changing climate intrudes into and disrupts private lives as Leah and Niall struggle to communicate across vast distances and in hostile weather conditions.

Ice Shock asks serious questions about choice, decision-making and the extent to which the unforeseen and the coincidental interrupt and change the courses of our lives. The central question is how the two manage to strike a balance between commitment to love and to career.

How is it that two people who are not looking for love become so strongly connected that their lives take a completely different turn? Is it possible some people are meant for each other? Soulmates?

Leah and Niall are entangled, we are told, like particles in quantum physics, which, once they have interacted, “remain intrinsically linked even when separated by astronomically large distances”. Their birthdays come one after the other – on 31 December and 1 January – and even their initials (NL and LN) interconnect.

As a literary scholar with an interest in travel and migration, I read my colleague’s new book as a radical re-examination of taken-for-granted distinctions such as north and south, here and there, us and them.

This book brings into sharp focus the urgency of the heating planet, showing that its effects are disrupting the most mundane human activities, incuding love relationships.

In Ice Shock, Boehmer combines the teasing style of romance fiction with the contemplative edge of a modernist novel to write about how both the global and the local are making an impact on the way people live, work and love.

Modernist novel

When I first read the book, my impression was “this is a modernist novel”. The modernist novel, which became popular at the turn of the 1900s, radically broke away from the traditional, realistic way of telling stories.

Modernist novels experimented with new narrative styles like stream of consciousness and fragmentation. Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote novels that were not only interested in telling stories but also engaging with ideas and exploring the minds of their characters.

The backdrop of Boehmer’s story (global disasters and a warming planet) mirrors the backdrop of the modernist novel (massive industrialisation, technological innovations and global catastrophe in the form of the first world war).

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Ice Shock deploys a non-linear narrative style and an open-ended plot. Typical of the modernist novel, it refuses to speak about anything with certainty.

It recalls Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, not only because of how it explores, in explicit detail, the minds of the characters but also because of the intensity of the relationship between Niall and Leah. Like Niall in Ice Shock, Peter in Mrs Dalloway loves Clarissa to the point of suffocation.

Epic love story

Ice Shock seems to ask the basic question about what it means to love. Is love the intense emotional connection between two people? Is it sacrifice? Faithfulness? Can one love without being faithful?

This is not only a story about the beauty of love but also the pain of it. Niall and Leah may be entangled like particles in quantum physics, but they are still human beings susceptible to human frailties.

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They enter into and keep various flirtatious relationships and fateful romantic entanglements from each other and, somehow, readers are complicit because we do not want to see the lovebirds separate.

Still, they remain powerfully connected. The constant friction between them seems to be the fuel that keeps them going. Boehmer suggests that love, especially between soulmates, thrives in a state of constant but productive tension.

Leah is a free-spirited, self-driven personality while Niall is thoughtful and considerate. They both know and understand each other telepathically, without words. Across vast distances, they communicate with each other through the stars and the moon.

In her review of Ice Shock, South African literary scholar Barbara Boswell describes it as “a novel saturated with extremes”.

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The lovers know their relationship is moving too fast, but they do not know how to slow it down. Is this a reflection of the preoccupation with speed in the contemporary world or the fast pace with which the planet is warming?

Perhaps the question that Boehmer is asking is how much love is enough to maintain a healthy relationship. Ice Shock is an intrusive novel that captures the inner thoughts (and reflections) of the characters in a way that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality, self and other.

Burning planet

Niall and Leah’s intense, ferocious love affair, in a sense, mirrors the seemingly irreversible catastrophe of global warming – as if to say, we all know the effects of unsustainable human activity on the planet but somehow, we keep going with the same ferocity and intensity. Leah and Niall’s love, like the warming planet, has no reverse gear.

Ice Shock is an attempt to rethink and rewrite how we inhabit the planet.

– Ice Shock is a novel about passionate love in a time of climate crisis
– https://theconversation.com/ice-shock-is-a-novel-about-passionate-love-in-a-time-of-climate-crisis-277016

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

A new feature film, Makemation, is an African coming-of-age story set in a time of artificial intelligence (AI).

Makemation was produced by Nigerian AI-developer-turned-filmmaker Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji. As conversations about AI are dominated by external global powers, his film offers a different vantage point: an AI story rooted in African realities.

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Read more: AI in Africa: 5 issues that must be tackled for digital equality

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After a successful run in Nigerian cinemas in 2025, it’s now touring internationally and I attended a screening at the Harvard Center for African Studies. It was followed by a discussion with its producer and economist Ebehi Iyoha, who researches AI in Africa. The evening foregrounded precisely what the film so deftly dramatises: that the future of AI can also be imagined, contested and built on the African continent.

Makemation is about a young girl, Zara, who discovers AI as a tool not just for personal advancement, but for transforming her community. She must navigate poverty, gender expectations and limited access to science, technology, engineering and maths education. In the process, her journey becomes a powerful reflection on youth innovation, digital inclusion and the possibilities of homegrown technology in Africa.

As a scholar of literature and cultural studies, I see Makemation as a vital intervention that challenges the dominance of western techno-narratives. It places AI within local histories of inequality, aspiration and improvisation.

My work also examines popular media as cultural archives through which African futures are imagined and debated. Makemation expands the archive through which we study who gets to imagine and write African futures.

African tech futures

The title of the film is a blending of words that combines “make” and the suffix “–mation” to evoke ideas like automation, transformation and imagination. It captures the film’s central claim: that young Africans are not passive consumers of AI, but active makers of it.

Makemation asks: who gets to shape the AI revolution? Who benefits from it? And what does innovation look like in places where infrastructure is fragile? Where formal employment is scarce, and ingenuity is often born of necessity?

It does not treat Africa as a technological afterthought. Much of the global AI debate remains abstract and heavily mediated by the concerns of major technology companies or the governments of China and the US: existential risk, large language models, automation at scale.

These conversations, while important, often obscure the material realities of communities where access to electricity, stable internet or quality education cannot be taken for granted. In many African cities, largely informal and dynamic, young people are already improvising with technology in ways that challenge narrow definitions of innovation.

Makemation demonstrates this vividly. Informality is not depicted as absence or lack, but as a site of creativity. The protagonist captures this tension when she says, “My father is a welder and my mother sells akara (street food).” She goes on to explain that she believes education and innovation can create opportunities. Lines like this connect the film’s discussion of AI to everyday forms of labour, grounding its ideas in the realities of family, work, and aspiration.

In the discussion after the screening, Akerele-Ogunsiji spoke about the importance of storytelling in shaping technological futures. If narratives about AI continue to centre only a handful of geographies and demographics, they risk entrenching existing inequalities.

Africa’s youth bulge

Africa, according to the UN, is home to one of the youngest populations in the world. This demographic reality has profound implications for AI adoption, labour markets and education systems.

If supported by inclusive policies and meaningful access to digital tools, this film tells us, this generation could shape AI in ways that reflect local priorities rather than imported assumptions.

At the heart of the film lies a set of intertwined questions about access and privilege. Who has the bandwidth, literally and figuratively, to participate in AI development? Who has the confidence to imagine themselves as technologists?

The young protagonist’s journey is not simply about mastering code or winning a competition. It’s about negotiating gender expectations, economic precarity and the psychological barriers that tell many young African girls that technology is not for them.

In this sense, Makemation is as much about social infrastructure as it is about digital infrastructure. Mentorship, community support and visible role models matter. The film does not romanticise hardship. Instead, it shows how structural constraints shape technological possibility.

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Makemation works not only because of its idea but also because it is well made. The camera often stays close to the characters, and the soft colours create a reflective mood. The slow editing gives the story time to develop.

Its most important message is to destabilise the idea that meaningful AI conversations happen only in elite spaces. Makemation demonstrates that debates about AI technologies and opportunities that come with them are already unfolding in classrooms, community centres and informal neighbourhoods across Africa.

– Makemation: a Nollywood movie that shows AI in action in Africa
– https://theconversation.com/makemation-a-nollywood-movie-that-shows-ai-in-action-in-africa-277693