Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Burak Şakir Şeker, Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University

The Houthi takeover of parts of the Red Sea gives the armed group a new platform to challenge global shipping. The group has taken over the port of Mocha, the island of Mayyun, and the Zuqar and Hanish archipelago about 160km north of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. These areas were previously controlled by Yemeni government forces.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a narrow maritime chokepoint roughly 32km wide. Lying between the Arabian Peninsula to the north-east and the Horn of Africa to the south-west, it directly links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

This geography matters. Mayyun Island, for example, divides a waterway that is used by international shipping. Historically, this passage accounts for about 12% of global trade.

The African side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait hasn’t been taken over by the Houthis. But the group’s September 2026 advance has serious economic and security implications for Egypt, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea, with the potential to escalate existing conflicts in Somalia and Sudan.

The Houthis are an Iran-aligned armed movement that controls much of Yemen, and has been fighting the country’s internationally recognised government since seizing the capital in 2014.

I have studied global maritime geopolitics and security, including issues involving the Red Sea, for more than two decades. In my view, the Houthi threat is not just a logistical one. It also poses a strategic danger to Africa’s Red Sea states.

The African shoreline is suddenly much more valuable to outsiders who want to monitor, contain or outflank the waterway opposite them. The Houthis now occupy armed posts around the strait, bringing the threat closer to the critical shipping corridor.

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Read more: The Houthis have further tightened their grip on the Red Sea. Here’s what it could mean for the world

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As it stands, an Iran-backed non-state armed group may now be able to deploy missiles, mines and fast-attack craft along an extended length of the eastern Red Sea. At the same time, Iran retains the ability to block the Strait of Hormuz.

This raises the risk of simultaneous disruption at two important maritime chokepoints, potentially leaving ships with no safe route through the Red Sea.

The risks for Africa

Disruption on the Red Sea cascades through four channels of African economies: shipping and insurance costs, port revenue, energy and food prices, and maritime security risks.

Red Sea states

Egypt

Egypt bears the highest direct financial risk. In 2024, the decline in Red Sea traffic resulting from Houthi attacks on commercial shipping cost Cairo an estimated US$7 billion in lost Suez Canal revenue. Revenue reached US$4.67 billion for the fiscal year 2025-26, which represents a 23% increase compared to the previous year. But if the diversion of shipping continues, it will soon reverse the improvement in revenue.

Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea

Over 2,000 people fleeing the hostilities in western Yemen have crossed over to Djibouti’s northern shores. Renewed fighting has pushed displacement since the escalation began in early September 2026 to nearly 94,000.

Djibouti is also a key external trade conduit for Ethiopia, which is landlocked. Ethiopia conducts approximately 95% of its trade via Djibouti.

Eritrea is also vulnerable along the frontlines. Its geographical position makes it attractive to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which want to ensure that Iran and the Houthis don’t have too much influence on the African side of the Red Sea.

Somalia and Sudan

The Houthi crisis compounds the existing crises in Somalia and Sudan.

The Houthis and Somali terror group al-Shabaab have exchanged weapons, drone technology and training in exchange for facilitating piracy off the coast of Somalia. This happens while an African Union mission in Somalia is trying to keep al-Shabaab under control.

As a result, the number of piracy incidents off Somalia’s coast jumped to a 10-year high in 2026. Somalia approved an anti-piracy bill in September 2026, aimed at preventing maritime abductions.

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Read more: Global power shifts are playing out in the Red Sea region: why this is where the rules are changing

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In Sudan, Iranian support has reached parts of the Sudanese Armed Forces. The army is battling the United Arab Emirates-backed Rapid Support Forces.

By mid-2024, the Houthis had reportedly begun helping Iran supply weapons to the Sudanese army. The US Treasury has sanctioned key Sudanese figures over these ties to Iran.

The implication is uncomfortable: the Red Sea’s African shore is not only exposed to the Houthis, it has begun to serve them.

Competition for political control

The current geopolitical shifts in the Red Sea predate the Houthi offensive.

In January 2024, Ethiopia signed a memorandum with the breakaway region of Somaliland for access to its Red Sea coast and a naval base. This was in exchange for a path towards recognition.

Somalia, Eritrea and Egypt opposed the deal. Within a year, they had established a joint security mechanism.

Regional security cooperation has since accelerated. In July 2026, Saudi Arabia hosted talks at which 14 countries – including Egypt, Djibouti, Sudan and Somalia – established the Multinational Maritime Defence Alliance.

The UAE – following clashes with Saudi-backed forces in Yemen in December 2025 – and landlocked Ethiopia are excluded.

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Read more: Red Sea crisis: expert unpacks Houthi attacks and other security threats

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At the same time, a competing alignment involving the UAE, Israel and Ethiopia has emerged, strengthened by Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025. On the other side are Somalia, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Iran has also sought a military foothold along the Red Sea corridor, including in Sudan. Eritrea, meanwhile, is using its strategic coastline to strengthen its regional position and counterbalance Ethiopia.

The result is a growing contest for influence in which Middle Eastern powers are making greater use of Africa’s strategic position.

What’s to be done

No single African state can protect the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, but governments can minimise some consequences by diversifying port access and inland trade routes. A more direct lever is improving maritime security capacity at the regional level.

In August 2026, state signatories to the Djibouti Code of Conduct and its expanded Jeddah Amendment committed to forming a combined task force to combat piracy.

The success of this initiative will rely on the ability of governments to provide the ships, intelligence, personnel and legal frameworks necessary to make this a functional security mechanism.

African states are not yet setting the broader strategic agenda, but their control of chokepoints increases their diplomatic leverage. The challenge is to use that leverage without becoming proxies in a wider Middle Eastern confrontation.

– Africa’s Red Sea states face growing risks as Houthi rebels expand their reach
– https://theconversation.com/africas-red-sea-states-face-growing-risks-as-houthi-rebels-expand-their-reach-292160

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Geoff Mapaya, Associate Professor, Department of Music, University of Venda

Kofi Agawu is regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on African music. The Ghanaian scholar, teacher and researcher has changed how the world hears and studies it.

I am a scholar of indigenous African music. I have researched and written extensively on African indigenous knowledge systems and worldviews.

I also know Professor Agawu personally. He has visited my institution, the University of Venda in South Africa. In this article, I pay tribute to his pioneering work in African musicology while taking issue with one finer point in his theories. This, I think, makes for a more useful tribute than unbroken praise.

The invention of African rhythm

Kofi Agawu, who turns 70 on 28 September 2026, was born in Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta region. He is Ewe, which is the dominant group of the region. He finished school at Achimota in Accra, studied in Britain and completed a doctorate at Stanford University in 1982. After many years at Princeton, he now teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Across six books he has made it very hard to go on saying that African music is something that is “felt” rather than something that is thought about analytically.

For most of the 20th century, writing about African music circled a single word: rhythm. Africans were said to have it in abundance, and Europeans analysed it. Harmony and form belonged to Bach and Brahms. The tools used to explain their music were seldom applied to Ewe drumming or Akan court song. Harmonic analysis, for example, which names each chord and its function. Formal analysis maps a piece’s sections, and motivic analysis follows a short musical idea as it develops.

African music received description. European music received theory. That difference was never neutral. It decided who counted as a thinker and who counted as raw material.

Agawu’s answer was patient and, I am convinced, deliberate. His first book, Playing with Signs (1991), had nothing to do with Africa. It read Mozart and Haydn as a system of signs and won the Society for Music Theory’s award for an emerging scholar. A Ghanaian had explained European music to Europe on its own terms, and the discipline could not dismiss him. Only then did he turn the same equipment towards home.

His book African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (1995) named its village, its performers and its occasions, and located the engine of Ewe rhythmic life in spoken language rather than in drums. That same year he published an essay called The Invention of ‘African Rhythm’. It showed the phrase to be largely a European commonplace, assembled over a century of writing about the continent and handed back to Africans as a description of themselves.

Read together, the book and the essay make one argument. Europe invented “African rhythm” as a badge of difference. Listened to closely, the Ewe make their rhythm out of speech, and so out of thought.

Representing African Music (2003) gave the problem its name. Agawu called it an ideology of difference: the habit of treating African music as permanently other, which flatters and diminishes in the same gesture.

Not everyone agreed.

Groove theories

The ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann called the book “the most powerful theoretical intervention in African musicology in a decade or more”, then resisted it. Agawu, he argued, questioned ethnomusicology fiercely but treated music theory, his own discipline, as if its tools were neutral. In defending African languages, ethics and aesthetics, Agawu, he argued, also sometimes presented them as fixed, risking a return to the very space of difference he sought to escape. The second objection has force. Agawu’s later work goes some way towards answering the first.

The African Imagination in Music (2016) went further. “Does African music have a specifiable essence?” Agawu asked. “The answer is yes.” He meant all of it: the traditional repertoires he calls the backbone of Africa’s musical thinking, as well as popular and art music. The outward sign of that essence, he argued, is groove.

I part company with him over its reach. Groove is the steady cycle of interlocking patterns that repeats beneath the music and draws everyone present into movement. You can hear it in this performance of Agbadza, the Ewe dance with which Agawu tells readers to begin, recorded at Abutia in Ghana’s Volta Region. Groove convincingly describes much sub-Saharan practice. Agawu claims church and concert music for Africa too, but whether groove holds there, or in the Islamicate repertoires of North Africa, remains open.

Agawu’s book won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s prize named after J.H. Kwabena Nketia, who founded the field.

Western tonality as a colonising force

On African Music (2023) is the summation of his work. Its sharpest claim concerns tonality, the system of keys and chords governing most western music. In tonal music, one chord is home. The others pull away and create a desire to return, while the ear waits for the cadence that brings it back. From the 1840s, missionaries carried this system to Africa through the Protestant hymn, sung in four parts over three basic chords. Agawu argues that it acted as a colonising force, reorganising musical consciousness so thoroughly that most of us no longer hear it working. To the Bible and the gun, he writes, “we can now add diatonic tonality as an instrument of colonial domination”.

South Africans can hear the point in their own anthem. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika began in 1897 as a hymn by Enoch Sontonga, a Methodist mission school teacher. It became a song of liberation, and it still sings in the harmonic language of the mission station.

In 2024, On African Music won the Wallace Berry Award. In 2026, Britain’s Society for Music Analysis awarded Agawu its Pascall Medal. The five scholars honoured before him had built their careers on European music.

There is a reason to read Agawu even if you never think about music. Scholars in economics, history and literature face the same forced choice between analytical standards that came with the coloniser and the cultural specificity that resists them.

Agawu declines the choice. Theory can come out of the meeting of two traditions rather than out of a loyalty test.

He does not stand alone, and a tribute that forgets his company fails him. Nketia laid the ground. The late Nigerian scholar Akin Euba developed a theory of African pianism; master drummer and scholar Meki Nzewi theorised from within Igbo creative practice; composer Joshua Uzoigwe gave one drumming tradition full theoretical weight; ethnomusicologist Jean Kidula opened Kenyan Christian soundscapes; and musicologist Kwasi Ampene brought Asante court music into the seminar room.

Agawu won African music its place in theory. Whether the musicians themselves are ever seated there is the question he put to us two decades ago, and his 70th year hands it back. His late work reads like a career summing itself up. I would rather hear it as an interrupted cadence. We still need more from him.

– Kofi Agawu: the scholar who showed the world that African music isn’t just about rhythm
– https://theconversation.com/kofi-agawu-the-scholar-who-showed-the-world-that-african-music-isnt-just-about-rhythm-290971

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Curwyn Mapaling, Professor, University of Johannesburg

Professors Curwyn Mapaling and Nokulunga Shabalala are two Black clinical psychologists working as academics in South Africa. What started as their shared frustration with the pace of change in universities became a research programme. For three years they recorded their conversations with each other, leading to three journal papers that document their own experiences in higher education and the shifts they would like to see. Here they explain why this matters.

What is the problem you’ve identified in South African higher education?

When a postgraduate student hesitates to greet you in the corridor, or questions whether you really belong behind that desk, you learn something about the university that no policy document will tell you. The institution may have hired you to transform it, but it has not transformed itself enough to fully recognise you.

Our papers are about what it feels like to be a young Black academic in a system that says it wants you but struggles to make room for you.

Black African academics remain underrepresented at senior ranks. In 2018 they held 19% of professorial posts while white men held 67%, in a system where 80% of students were African.

South African higher education remains shaped by its colonial and apartheid history in ways that go well beyond demographics. The curriculum still privileges Eurocentric knowledge. Institutional cultures carry assumptions about who is credible, who deserves authority and who should simply be grateful for the opportunity. Black academics and students have been calling for deep transformation for decades, but the pace of change has been slow and uneven.

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Read more: South African universities must do more to tackle staffs’ race and gender imbalances

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Representation has improved. Whether the institution has changed is a different question.

What has shifted is where the sector’s attention goes. As psychologists we notice what people attend to – and what they are steered away from. Universities have been absorbed by commodification: run as businesses, with students as customers and academics as producers of countable outputs. That pressure has displaced the transformation agenda.

We ask what happens to the work that cannot be counted at all. That work is care labour: the less visible human work that accompanies teaching, supervision and mentorship. It means helping a student through self-doubt, making the unwritten rules of university life easier to follow, or staying late because a student needs someone who understands what it means to be the first in their family to reach postgraduate study. In psychology the load is particular, because we sit with students facing a profession whose training places are scarce. It grows with student precarity, too. Enrolment doubled to over a million between 2014 and 2024 while support never kept pace, and campus studies have found between 60% and 70% of students food insecure. A hungry student brings that into the supervision room.

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Read more: Hunger among South African students: study shows those studying remotely need financial aid for food

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Who carries more of this labour? We do not claim to know, and our research does not measure it. But South African research shows that it falls unevenly, particularly on Black women academics. What we can say is that as early-career academics we are still close to students’ vulnerability, and we do not assume our senior colleagues are not.

How do you know how widespread the problem is?

We used collaborative autoethnography: structured conversations, transcribed and analysed for patterns, then read against the literature on Black academics’ experiences of belonging, from Black Academic Voices to Jason Arday’s work in Britain.

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Read more: Jason Arday’s death: Black academics need to feel they belong in higher education

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Two of us cannot speak for a sector, so we also read our findings against the national picture: 60% of all staff in public universities were on temporary contracts in 2022, most of them African and women.

Across our three papers we found two things that kept surfacing.

First, mentorship often functions as a site of gatekeeping. Much of academic life runs on unwritten knowledge: which opportunities are worth pursuing, how authorship is negotiated, who to approach for funding or collaboration and how professional networks are entered. Senior academics accumulate this knowledge over time and decide, sometimes without realising it, who gets access to it.

We found ourselves working against this by refusing to treat that knowledge as scarce. If we knew how something worked, we made it visible to our students rather than expecting them to work it out alone.

Second, the pressure to produce outputs squeezes out the time needed to grow as thinkers and teachers. These are structural pressures, reproduced through workload models, promotion criteria and the funding incentives of the national research output policy. For Black academics they intersect with institutional cultures that still treat their authority as provisional.

We know this because we live it, and because a generation of Black scholars has written it down. What none of us can do is quantify it. It appears in no workload model and no performance contract, and that invisibility is the problem.

What are the consequences?

The consequences extend beyond the academics themselves to having an impact on students and student engagement. Universities run the risk of losing early-career academics due to burnout and disillusionment, and students lose the mentors who understand their contexts. When relational labour goes unrecognised, departments hollow out, and when the system rewards only what can be counted, it narrows what counts as knowledge, who produces it and for whom.

This is not only an academic concern. It shapes the quality of education that students receive, the relevance of research to South African society and the credibility of the transformation agenda itself.

What should change?

Our most recent paper proposes concrete shifts at three levels.

At department level, mentorship should be built into workload models as core academic labour rather than treated as a personal choice. Pathways to opportunity, such as research assistantships and co-authorship, should be made transparent so that access does not depend on informal networks.

At institutional level, universities need real protections against exploitation and bullying for staff on short-term contracts. Promotion criteria should recognise collaborative scholarship, community engagement and the relational work that sustains academic life. In some institutions these contributions are formally recognised but may still be inconsistently valued in practice.

At sector level, the incentives that drive individualism need rethinking. Promotion and reward systems tied to monetary incentives discourage collaboration within and between universities. The research output subsidy pays universities roughly R120,000 (US$7,500) per accredited article, regardless of quality, and less when co-authors sit at other institutions. Many universities pay a share directly to the author, which turns publication into personal income and rewards the sole-authored paper over the collaborative one.

Alternatives exist. The Declaration on Research Assessment, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment and the narrative CVs now used by major funders each ask evaluators to recognise what collaborative and socially responsive scholarship looks like, not only what fits neatly into a publication count.

None of this will happen through goodwill alone. It requires structural reform: changes to the rules through which academic life is organised and through which worth is made legible. The university we imagine is not a fantasy. It is an administrative and political project, one that begins with taking seriously the experiences of the people doing the work of transformation from within.

– Academics in South Africa have to focus on ‘outputs’: what’s lost when other work’s not counted
– https://theconversation.com/academics-in-south-africa-have-to-focus-on-outputs-whats-lost-when-other-works-not-counted-290097