Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Wandile Sihlobo, Senior Fellow, Department of Agricultural Economics, Stellenbosch University

The focus on agricultural development at the Southern African Development Community’s 46th summit in August 2026 reflected a clear understanding that the sector can still play a key role in the region’s economic development. Agriculture accounts for around 10% of the GDP of many of the regional community’s members.

The conversations about agriculture focused on improving productivity, agricultural finance, climate resilience and regional value chains, all to enhance food security within the region.

As an agricultural economist, I would argue that the sector faces three major challenges in contributing to economic growth and food security.

The first is weak land governance. Informal land tenure is a feature of most farming in the region. As a result, agribusinesses may be reluctant to invest at scale. It’s also meant that smallholder farmers, who struggle with low agricultural productivity, remain prevalent.

The second challenge is weak agricultural value chains. The summit discussed the need to deepen regional agro-processing value chains. But these can’t be fully developed if road networks linking farmers to consumption points remain in poor condition. Agriculture is about buying and selling perishable products. Roads are key.

The third big issue – and the focus of this article – is the need to boost trade between countries in the region. Agricultural production can’t be increased without new markets.

In the past few years there have been instances of trade friction. For example tension has been high between South Africa and and some of its neighbouring countries, with Namibia, Botswana and recently Mozambique signalling their intention to limit the imports of vegetables and fruits from South Africa.

Failure to make progress on this front will jeopardise the success of new entrant farmers. They need access to markets to grow and sustain their farming operations. It will also stand in the way of agriculture playing a bigger role in increasing food security.

One way to ensure shared prosperity through agriculture is for all countries to focus on producing what they can trade within the region, and to sell to world markets.

Bottlenecks

There’s a strong basis for increased trade between countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. This is because one of the elements of the SADC arrangement is a commitment to a free trade area between the 16 member countries.

In addition, five of the countries – Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa – are in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), which is meant to get goods moving freely.

In both cases the arrangements have had some impact in ensuring goods flow freely between the countries. But trade in agricultural products has not benefited substantially.

The reasons for this are three-fold.

Firstly there’s the issue of size.

Trade flows vary between the countries because they differ in size. For example South Africa has a large food market, spending over US$7 billion annually on imports. Eswatini imported only US$806 million of agricultural products in 2025, according to data from Trade Map.

South Africa accounts for more than half of the SADC’s agricultural exports to the world market, followed by Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique, according to data from Trade Map. South Africa, Zambia, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are major players in intra-regional trade.

This mismatch in size has led to tensions, particularly between smaller countries and South Africa.

Secondly, there is the issue of compliance with phytosanitary rules. For example, in 2025 Tanzania announced that it was banning imports of agricultural products from South Africa in retaliation against that country’s decision to ban the imports of Tanzanian bananas. The South African government denied it had imposed a ban, and put the reports down to miscommunication and noncompliance with general standards. The fracas underscored the sensitivity around phytosanitary rules being used as a tool to block imports.

Third, there is also a practical problem of low agricultural output in a number of countries. Consider maize, which is a staple grain in the southern Africa region. The yield has been stagnant for the past three decades at about one tonne per hectare. In South Africa it’s about six tonnes per hectare, and this is all because of differences and the continuous improvement in seed cultivars. Because of these productivity differences, most SADC members – Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique, among others – import more than they can export.

Import restrictions

Some countries have tried to boost local agricultural production by restricting imports. Botswana and Namibia are examples.

They say they would like to boost their domestic production but can’t because they rely on South Africa’s imports.

At face value, their argument is compelling. But, in my view, countries in the region can’t lay the problems of trade expansion at South Africa’s door.

Firstly, trade bans go against the spirit of the customs union, which encourages free trade, and against the SADC trade approach, which also prioritisese free trade within the region.

Secondly, countries in the region have been slow to grow their exports to South Africa. That’s because the agricultural products that South Africa needs can’t be sourced in the region. It imports wheat, rice, palm oil, poultry products and whiskies, among other products. Countries in the region don’t have a surplus of these products.

What needs to happen next

The dominance of certain countries such as South Africa needs to be addressed. But this can happen through collaboration on farm inputs and knowledge exchange, rather than unjustified restrictions on imports.

Other steps to take include:

• a clear focus on increasing increase agricultural output with an eye on expanding external growth opportunities. Without this, countries risk losing out to competitors in export markets where they don’t yet have free trade agreements.

• a comprehensive review of the SACU framework, to resolve trade friction in the region and boost exports to the world market. Under its present terms, countries in the union have to negotiate for new markets alongside other members. A review should consider giving countries greater flexibility in signing bilateral trade agreements that aren’t tied up in SACU issues.

• investment in human capital to drive economic diplomacy with the aim of helping businesses seeking new markets. For example South Africa has over 100 missions and embassies abroad. These should be equipped with staff who focus on maximising economic opportunities for the country.

– Farming can help drive southern Africa’s growth if countries in the region make trade easier
– https://theconversation.com/farming-can-help-drive-southern-africas-growth-if-countries-in-the-region-make-trade-easier-290397

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Derek R. Peterson, Ali Mazrui Professor of History & African Studies, University of Michigan

John Iliffe, the distinguished scholar renowned for his life’s work in African history, died on 20 August 2026 at the age of 87.

He shed light on big themes in Africa’s history. His 12 books were scrupulously researched, many of them being pioneering works that set out new areas of scholarship. He taught hundreds of undergraduates in Tanzania, Malawi and the UK over a career that lasted over 40 years. He trained over two dozen doctoral students, many of whom now occupy positions of importance in African and British universities.

The young Iliffe did his PhD at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He wrote about the early 20th century governor of German East Africa, Albrecht von Rechenberg, whose policies had pushed the local population toward rebellion. His dissertation came in at 1,046 pages (Cambridge’s history faculty was later to cap dissertations at 80,000 words).

In 1965 Iliffe went to Tanzania, where he took up a lectureship in the history department at the University College of Dar es Salaam. It was a heady time. Tanzania had just been born out of the union of two territories – Tanganyika and Zanzibar. President Julius Nyerere was looking for cultural and historical properties that could unify the nation. Dar es Salaam was hosting an astonishing range of liberation movements.

Iliffe and his colleagues were part of what came to be called the “Dar es Salaam School of African History”. They responded to the cadence of the age by authoring works that affirmed resistance against colonial rule.

Iliffe and his colleague Gilbert Gwassa were the coordinators of the Maji Maji research project. This involved sending students to southern Tanzania to interview elderly men and women who had taken part in that anti-colonial war.

Within two years, Iliffe published an important article about the interethnic organisation of the Maji Maji rebellion. The research helped make the rebellion a foundation for Tanzanian identity, an inspiration for a generation of artists and nation-builders.

The National Archives of Tanzania opened for scholarly use in the year that Iliffe took up his post. He seems to have read through every file. Users of the Tanzanian archives must sign the first page when they read a file, and today, researchers invariably find Iliffe’s characteristic signature there, first on the list.

African political actors at the centre of the story

In 1971, Iliffe left Dar es Salaam to lecture at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of St John’s College, where he spent the next 55 years.

From Cambridge he wrote up his voluminous notes from the Tanzanian archives and published his Modern History of Tanganyika, which came out in 1979. It was and remains the best work of national history concerning any African country.

In 616 pages, Iliffe chronicled the economy and politics from 1800 to the 1950s. Commercial and educational opportunity drew people into larger, more cosmopolitan circles, creating linguistic, financial and political infrastructures that nationalists could build upon.

In Modern History, as in all his works, Iliffe insisted on putting African political actors at the centre of the story. At a time when nationalists had come to regard tribalism as an impediment to unity, Iliffe chronicled the political work that African activists had done to create and foster ethnic solidarity. In his memorable formulation about colonial governance:

Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to. (page 324)

In the years that followed Modern History, Iliffe published on a great range of subjects. His books included:

The African Poor, published in 1987. The book showed how poor people struggled to uphold their dignity and their humanity in the face of other people’s condescension.

East African Doctors, which came out in 1998. The book brought into view the infrastructures that incubated the medical profession in eastern Africa, and chronicled the public health disasters that set the stage for Aids in the 1980s.

Honour in African History, which came out in 2004. It is my favourite among his books. Iliffe argued that, across the continent, and across historical time, Africans (like most of us) acted to secure the respect of their contemporaries. The book chronicled the changing nature of Africans’ ideas about honour. He helped us see the motivations that structure political behaviour.

Africans: the History of a Continent, which came out first in 1995 and has gone through several editions. It is the best textbook on Africa’s past. In a place where soil is thin, water is scarce and agronomy is difficult, the struggle to build up human population was the basic civilizational achievement. Iliffe’s magisterial book managed to explain the nature of Africa’s religious traditions and its political history by putting demography at the core of the continent’s history.

The opposite of an influencer

I met Iliffe in the last months of 2004. I was newly appointed to a lectureship in what was then called “extra-European history” at the University of Cambridge. He interviewed me for the job.

I spent the summer of 2004 corresponding with him about Paper 25: Africa Since 1800, for which I was to give a course of lectures. Iliffe did not use email, so our dialogue had to be conducted through postal mail. Once the teaching year began it became clear that I had much to learn. His lectures were clearly laid out, compellingly delivered and guided by a core argument: that population history could explain political, social and religious behaviour.

Iliffe was famously reclusive, the opposite of an “influencer”. All of his book manuscripts were typed out on an old typewriter he kept at hand. I never saw him at an academic conference. Among the small circle of Cambridge Africa scholars, though, he was a generous and warm host.

The questions he asked of graduate students and visiting colleagues were always about evidence and interpretation. They were never about theory. His approach to scholarship was documentary, not given to theoretical abstraction.

When a student or a colleague visited his rooms to discuss their work, he would disappear into his back rooms to emerge a few minutes later with a handful of cards. His notes were always concise, gilded with well-chosen quotations drawn from the documents he’d read through.

His passing brings an era to a close.

The nation-building project that drove him at the start of his early career has now run out of steam. So too has magisterial thematic history gone out of fashion. It is not that scholars of today lack ambition. It is that the register in which he wrote seems closed to us.

Iliffe’s thorough acquaintance with archival materials grew out of years-long immersion in collections that are hard to use. Few of us today have the personal discipline and the financial wherewithal to sustain months or years in the lonely work of reading through archives. The itinerary his career followed – back and forth between African and European universities – is scarcely possible now as salaries available in most African institutions have dramatically declined. And few of us possess the monastic habits that were at the core of his scholarly life.

His death is for me a cause of sorrow. For all of us, it is a good time to remember what disciplined, clear-minded research can yield: insights into the forces that shape and constrain human life; guidance into animating principles of our social world.

– John Iliffe: the historian who changed how Africa’s past was understood
– https://theconversation.com/john-iliffe-the-historian-who-changed-how-africas-past-was-understood-290554

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Dereje Melese Liyew, Lecturer and Reseacher, Political Science, Debre Markos University,

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has been one of Ethiopia’s most influential institutions for more than 1,600 years. Church and state were closely intertwined from the official adoption of Christianity in the 4th century until the overthrow of the imperial regime in 1974.

The church has shaped the political order, education systems and cultural identity. It remains one of the country’s largest religious institutions, along with Islam and protestant Christianity. About 43% of Ethiopians identify as Orthodox Christians in a national population estimated at 135.5 million.

The 1974 revolution marked a turning point in the relationship between the state and religion. The military junta (called the Derg) introduced secularism. The church’s status as the official state religion was abolished and its property confiscated by the regime.

The church’s influence and role in national life subsequently declined.

Since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assumed power in 2018, a significant trend has emerged. It’s marked by an increase in hostility seen in verbal and physical attacks against the institution. Attacks against Orthodox churches, monasteries, clergy and worshippers have been documented by human rights groups, religious institutions, international observers and scholars.

I am a political science researcher specialising in peace and security, state-religion relations, and political dynamics in the Horn of Africa. In a recent paper, I explored why one of the oldest and most influential institutions in Ethiopia had become a target of public hostility.

My study is based on interviews with church scholars, government officials, religious leaders and peace and security experts. There were also focus group discussions with church members.

A central theme of my findings is that violence against religious communities does not start when churches are destroyed and attacks are made against worshippers. Typically it is preceded by the systemic dissemination of hostile historical narratives.

These narratives against the Orthodox church are propagated by political elites, activists and media figures. For example, revisionist stories focus only on the Church’s historical role in seizing land and power in southern regions. But they downplay or erase its legacy as a pillar of Ethiopian literacy, architecture, and sovereignty.

My findings show that hostile stories set the stage for violence by destroying an institution’s reputation. When a group is stripped of its legitimacy, attacking its buildings and followers starts to look justifiable or even politically necessary.

My findings matter because in Ethiopia, where 98% of the population identifies as religious, managing religious affairs is crucial for national cohesion and the broader peace-building process.

Dangerous labelling and violence

The negative image of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as a symbol of domination, exclusion or ethnic privilege has been gaining traction in influential political and intellectual narratives. For five decades, these portrayals have circulated through political speeches, traditional media and social media.

These narratives have used historical reframing of the Orthodox church as imperial domination. They have also represented the church as an institution associated primarily with Amhara identity. The link to Amhara identity draws on the historical dominance of Amharic-speaking elites in the imperial state. Critics brand the church as a symbol of historical Amhara hegemony rather than a multi-ethnic spiritual body.

Since the 1970s and more prominently after 1991 the church has been portrayed as an instrument of imperial state expansion and cultural domination. In these narratives, the church is associated with the spread of Christianity, Amharic language and imperial political authority in newly incorporated areas. It is then presented as part of a broader process of cultural and political domination.

Some of these negative portrayals distort or selectively interpret the church’s history. At the same time they overlook its contributions to Ethiopian society. By marginalising or excluding these aspects of the church’s historical experience and contributions, such representations can be understood as a form of epistemic violence.

The danger is that these kinds of narratives can make physical violence seem acceptable, justifiable or unremarkable.

Religion, ethnicity and the state

A second important discovery from my research relates to the increasing confluence of ethnic and religious identities in current-day Ethiopia.

The study focuses on the tendency to identify one religion with one ethnic group. In Ethiopia, Orthodox Christianity is often depicted as a religion of certain ethnic groups and not a multi-ethnic religion.

This matters because ethnicity has become a major part of political identity in Ethiopia. This makes the linking of religion to particular ethnic groups politically loaded. Tying religious institutions to ethnic contestation risks tying them up in wider identity and power struggles.

This was evident in 2023 when Ethiopian Orthodox Tehahedo church bishops in Oromia region sought greater use of Afaan Oromo in worship. The language is one of Ethiopia’s most widely spoken languages. They also call for greater Oromo representation in church leadership. Questions of language and ethnic representation have become linked to disputes over church authority and regional politics.

As a result, religious institutions have become targets in ethnic, political and armed conflicts that are not primarily about religion. It also raises questions about whether the state has done enough to protect churches and clergy from such attacks.

What needs to be done

My study does not attempt to present the church as a flawless institution. Like other institutions, the Ethiopian Orthodox church has tended to have complex power dynamics and has struggled with governance issues of its own. It has experienced leadership divisions, struggles over representation and authority, and internal conflicts.

But denying the institution’s history and identity or its contribution to society has gone beyond rhetoric. The exclusion and marginalisation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church can deepen social fragmentation and leave its adherents more vulnerable to discrimination and violence.

I conclude from my findings that stopping physical attacks is only part of what’s required. There also needs to be an effort to dismantle narratives that conflict with the legitimacy, dignity and history of specific communities.

Understanding the relationship between narratives and violence can help to prevent harm. It can also help contribute to building a more inclusive and peaceful future for Ethiopia.

– Religion, power and politics: what’s behind the violent attacks on Ethiopia’s Orthodox Tewahedo Church
– https://theconversation.com/religion-power-and-politics-whats-behind-the-violent-attacks-on-ethiopias-orthodox-tewahedo-church-289775