Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Richard G. Cowden, Research Scientist, Harvard University

South Africa is often portrayed in the media as a country struggling with inequality, corruption, crime, infrastructure collapse and public health challenges. But this isn’t the whole story.

When South Africans are asked to describe their own lives, they often reveal signs that they are flourishing in vital ways. According to the Global Flourishing Study, many South Africans are in fact showing resolve by striving to move forward from the country’s difficult past and maintaining hope for a better future.

Human flourishing is sometimes used to describe an ideal state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the environments and communities they’re part of. The global study was launched in 2021 to better understand human flourishing around the world.

Over 200,000 people in 22 countries from Argentina to Japan participated in the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study. They completed a survey about their background, upbringing, health, well-being, and other areas of life.

Recently, we analysed the data from 2,561 South Africans in the study to drill deeper. We explored how they are doing across nearly 70 health, well-being and related outcomes. The analysis offers the first comprehensive overview of flourishing in South Africa.

So, what does flourishing look like in South Africa right now?

Contrary to a gloomy view of the country, adult South Africans are flourishing in many ways that mirror the broader world. The country even has some notable strengths it could capitalise on. There are also lingering struggles that may be hindering flourishing in South Africa.

These findings show that some flourishing is still possible amid adversity. Insights from South Africa could offer clues about how to support the well-being of people living in places that are going through significant social and structural challenges.

What South Africa has in common with others

Part of our analysis compared South Africa’s average for each indicator of flourishing to the average across all other countries in the study.

For example, consider the question, “In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?” (rated on a scale from 0-10, with 0 being extremely unhappy and 10 being extremely happy). The average response was 6.95 in South Africa and 7.00 across the other countries. This suggests average happiness in South Africa is about the same as in the other countries, taken together.

The findings were similar for more than 30 of the main outcomes, including sense of purpose, social belonging, depression, gratitude, and general health.

Read more: What makes people flourish? A new survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries looks for global patterns and local differences

Despite deep-seated societal problems, many South Africans report experiences of well-being that are not very different from the rest of the world. This doesn’t mean that the country’s social and structural challenges should be minimised or overlooked. However, it does show that many people can still experience high levels of well-being in circumstances of material fragility and deprivation.

It raises questions for South African leaders, policymakers and citizens to reflect on. For example, what might the flourishing of South Africans look like if these social-structural constraints were loosened or lifted?

South Africa’s strengths

The findings also suggest that South Africans have several strengths. Compared with the combined averages of the other countries, South Africans reported lower pain and suffering, greater inner peace, hope and forgiveness of others, and greater religious or spiritual engagement. On many of these, South Africa was ranked among the top five countries.

This shines a light on the enormous potential for flourishing in South Africa. For instance, many South Africans say they have the capacity to reckon with wounds from the oppressive system of racial segregation that shaped society for decades (through forgiveness).

South Africans tend to stay grounded amid the challenges of daily life (through inner peace), which puts them in a position to transcend adversities. And they generally hold onto the possibility of a brighter future despite enduring social-structural vulnerabilities (through hope).

Read more: Christianity is changing in South Africa as pentecostal and indigenous churches grow – what’s behind the trend

Perhaps the most inspiring of these findings is forgiveness. This is a strength that appears to have been cultivated through South Africa’s protracted reckoning with the legacy of apartheid. It may reflect a general societal commitment to pursuing peace and healing over discord and bitterness.

Faith may be a foundational source for the strengths seen in South Africa. For many South Africans, religion or spirituality is something they lean on to navigate the struggles they face in one of the most unequal societies in the world.

The challenges

Like many countries in the Global Flourishing Study, South Africa has clear opportunities to strengthen and expand the conditions that support human flourishing.

South Africans also tended to report lower well-being on several outcomes. These included satisfaction with life, meaning in life, place satisfaction, social trust, experiences of discrimination, charitable giving, and several socioeconomic factors such as employment and financial well-being.

Read more: Which African countries are flourishing? Scientists have a new way of measuring well-being

These point to actionable areas that government, civil society, and private sector leaders can prioritise to improve flourishing in the country. Special attention should be directed toward supporting vulnerable groups that the analysis showed are struggling in many aspects of flourishing, including women, divorced people, and those with lower levels of education.

What this all means

The concept of flourishing invites South Africa to envision the highest ideals for its people and the kind of society those ideals might sustain. This does not mean that everyone will agree on what those ideals are, or how best to achieve them.

But the language of flourishing offers a way to unite different sectors and stakeholders around a shared goal: harnessing South Africa’s strengths while addressing challenges that hold back deeper forms of human flourishing in the country.

– South Africans are flourishing more than you might expect – here’s why
– https://theconversation.com/south-africans-are-flourishing-more-than-you-might-expect-heres-why-268695

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

African American singer Ciara received citizenship from the Republic of Benin in 2025 as a descendant of enslaved Africans. The images of her ceremony at Ouidah’s slave route memorial site, “Door of No Return”, were broadcast worldwide. Surrounded by drummers and dignitaries, she held a new Beninese passport aloft, a gesture hailed as both homecoming and healing.

As a historian of Africa, the African diaspora and Ghana, I see Ciara’s citizenship as part of a broader, complex story about how African states are reengaging with their diasporas. These are the global communities of people whose ancestors were displaced through slavery, migration and colonialism.

Several African countries have offered national identity to these descendants.

For many in the global African diaspora, Ciara’s ceremony felt like justice finally taking physical form. It was a symbolic reversal of forced displacement, affirming that descendants of the enslaved can now return as citizens rather than commodities. But behind the symbolism lies a deeper set of questions about power, inequality, and the politics of belonging.

At stake is whether Africa’s experiment with citizenship based on ancestry – what might be called citizenship diplomacy – represents genuine repair for past injustices or a ploy by governments to rebrand themselves.

A new wave of diaspora citizenship

Benin enacted a new law in 2024 which offers nationality to adults who can prove they descend from people enslaved and shipped from African shores. Proof may include DNA testing, genealogical documentation, or oral testimony. Recipients must finalise the process in person within three years.

The initiative follows similar efforts elsewhere. Ghana’s “Year of Return” in 2019 granted citizenship to dozens of African Americans; Sierra Leone has extended passports to descendants using DNA verification. Rwanda and The Gambia have launched programmes to attract “repatriates”.

These policies share a powerful moral ambition: to repair the rupture of slavery and reconnect global Africans with the continent.

Yet as Africa transforms its history into diplomacy, its diplomacy runs the risk of being less about genuine reuniting and more about using identity as a marketing strategy – selling the idea of “returning home” to improve an African nation’s global image.

This tension gives rise to four key issues revealed in my research: unequal access, genealogical governance, heritage commodification, and domestic inequality.

The unequal path to return

The first tension is access. DNA tests and ancestral research are expensive. The documentation required to verify lineage privileges those with resources, education and digital literacy. Celebrities can easily navigate this process; millions of others cannot.

In fact, those whose family histories were most violently erased are least able to prove descent.

These programmes are often promoted as open arms to the world’s Black descendants. However, they rely on technologies and bureaucracies rooted in western data regimes.

As scholars have shown, genetic ancestry databases are overwhelmingly managed by companies in the United States and Europe. These companies market and sell DNA while claiming to restore identity. The proof of African belonging is, once again, mediated by foreign tools and global capital.

Genealogy as governance

This reliance on genetics and archives revives colonial ways of classifying identity. European empires once defined African subjects through blood, “tribe” and lineage. Today, the state risks reinstating similar categories.

To decide who “counts” as African, governments are outsourcing moral authority to laboratories and paperwork. Instead, they could focus on community-based verification. This uses local historical societies, oral historians and cultural institutions that recognise shared heritage without reducing it to data.

The bureaucracy of belonging threatens to eclipse the politics of solidarity.

From memory to marketing

Another layer of complexity is economic. Governments market these citizenship programmes as engines of tourism, philanthropy and investment. Ghana’s Year of Return generated millions of dollars in tourism revenue, prompting other states to follow suit.

But when heritage becomes an industry, memory risks turning into merchandise. The descendants of the enslaved become consumers of identity rather than coauthors of the continent’s future.

There is nothing wrong with diaspora investment or travel. However, reparation should not be measured in flight packages and photo opportunities.

Inequality on the ground

Citizenship by ancestry can also create new inequalities within African societies. Returnees with foreign capital might purchase prime land, establish gated enclaves, or get privileges unavailable to locals.

In Ghana, tensions have surfaced between diaspora residents and citizens over property rights and cultural authority.

If unaddressed, these disparities could reproduce the very economic divides that colonialism imposed.

Citizenship as reparation must not translate into citizenship as entitlement. The moral gesture of inclusion loses meaning when it mirrors the social exclusions of global wealth.

Confronting historical complicity

Benin deserves recognition for acknowledging its historical role in the Atlantic slave trade, when the Kingdom of Dahomey captured and sold captives to European traders. The current government has invested in memorial tourism and educational projects around Ouidah’s slave route sites.

But recognition is only the first step. Apology without transformation leaves history unhealed. A citizenship programme can value memory only if it also builds institutions that dismantle the legacies of exploitation.

These national programmes expose a broader governance gap. The African Union (AU) officially designates the diaspora as Africa’s “sixth region”, yet there is no unified policy guiding diaspora citizenship. Each nation improvises its own standards, often shaped by domestic politics or diplomatic ambitions.

The absence of coordination creates a patchwork of eligibility rules and inconsistent rights. In some states, new citizens can vote or own property; in others, their status remains largely symbolic.

A continental framework could establish shared legal, ethical and economic principles for diaspora citizenship. Coordination would protect migrants from exploitation, prevent nationality shopping, and turn symbolic gestures into coherent policy.

Beyond ancestry: towards agency

The most profound shift must be philosophical. The descendants of the enslaved do not simply seek to return to Africa. They seek to return with Africa, to participate in a collective rethinking of freedom, belonging and justice.

Drawing from my research on diaspora reconstruction and transatlantic history, I argue that reconnecting should not be a sentimental pilgrimage. It should be a political partnership. Governments can collaborate with diaspora communities to build archives and fund educational exchanges. They can also invest in cultural institutions that preserve collective histories.

In that sense, citizenship as reparation can succeed only when it becomes citizenship as responsibility. That is, a mutual pact to build societies more equitable than the world that slavery and colonialism created.

Homecoming is an unfinished conversation. It is one that begins each time the continent and its diasporas meet not as strangers or symbols, but as partners in building the world that history denied them.

– Ciara’s Beninese citizenship: marketing ploys can’t heal the past
– https://theconversation.com/ciaras-beninese-citizenship-marketing-ploys-cant-heal-the-past-269213