Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Solaja Mayowa Oludele, Lecturing, Olabisi Onabanjo University

On any street in Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt, you’ll find abandoned plastic bottles lying around. Each year, about 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste are produced in Nigeria and much of it winds up in landfills or in the environment.

But plastic waste can be useful. In some places it’s converted to textiles and clothing. Adidas, a global shoe and apparel maker, uses ocean plastics to produce sneakers, and the clothing brands H&M and Patagonia have put their money into recycled polyester collection. They collect post-consumer plastic waste (like used plastic bottles), clean it, shred it into flakes, melt it down into pellets, and then spin these pellets into polyester yarn, which is used to make new sportswear and footwear.

We’re a team of sustainability researchers and social scientists with expertise in circular economy, ethics and plastic waste management. In a recent study, we reviewed the opportunities and challenges of using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics (the type of plastic used in beverage bottles) in Nigeria’s fashion industry.

Evidence from other regions, such as Europe and North America, shows that producing polyester fibres from recycled PET rather than unused materials can cut carbon emissions by over 45%. But little is known about its potential in Nigeria.

Our review mapped and analysed academic studies, industry reports and policy documents to identify technical, economic, environmental, social and regulatory factors shaping the adoption of recycled PET in Nigerian fashion.

We developed a theoretical model showing how knowledge from local crafts, industrial design, environmental science and policy frameworks interact to influence this emerging practice. And we made some proposals about how to foster a socially inclusive, ethically responsible and environmentally sustainable textile industry in Nigeria.

We believe that incorporating plastic waste into the Nigerian textile industry could reduce pollution, generate employment and cut a niche in the world of sustainable fashion.

Barriers beyond technology

Plastic bottles don’t have to be a social or environmental hassle. They can be a source of economic power. The concept of “waste to wealth” is more than a catchphrase – it has the potential to revive the textile industry.

But there are a number of obstacles.

Poor infrastructure: Nigerians do not have large recycling plants. Recycling tends to be small scale or informal. Recovered PET bottles are typically exported or down-cycled into low-grade products like mats or stuffing.

Consumer perceptions: In a recent survey conducted in Lagos only 18% of consumers had heard about recycled textiles. Nigerians think of recycled clothes as a sign of poverty or as second-hand goods, not as quality clothing.

Comfort: Recycled polyester is often uncomfortable to wear in hot, damp climates, as the fabric tends to retain moisture and heat. Nigeria’s average daily temperatures range from 25°C to 35°C with high humidity. The uptake among consumers will not improve until these technical problems are addressed.

Policy gaps: In Europe, companies must assume responsibility for the end of their products’ lives. In Nigeria there are no comparable regulations, incentives or infrastructure supporting sustainable textiles. This leaves local brands with little motivation to innovate.

Lessons from global and local experiments

Other countries and brands have shown what’s possible. Adidas has transformed thousands of tonnes of plastic taken from the oceans into sneakers and sportswear. H&M operates a take-back programme worldwide which gathered over 14,768 tonnes of worn garments in 2022. Patagonia has a programme called Worn Wear which invites customers to repair and reuse their clothes.

Nigeria can learn from these examples, but also has its own sources of innovation. Startup enterprises such as Chanja Datti in Abuja are testing community-based recycling and recovery. Circular fashion – where clothing is designed to be reused, repaired and recycled instead of discarded – can also be cultural fashion, as designers in Nigeria like Maki Oh are incorporating traditional textures and sustainable practices.

The way forward

At least four changes are essential to transform plastic waste into fashion in Nigeria:

1.) Take a stake in decentralised recycling centres

Regional centres with small but technologically prepared centres could generate, process and upcycle the PET waste into fibres. This would lower transport expenses, provide employment and feed directly into textile manufacturers.

2.) Assist small and medium textile enterprises

Nigeria has a fashion industry dominated by small businesses. They can be given access to finance, sustainable practice training and affordable technology to scale the use of recycled fabrics.

3.) Educate consumers

Recycled fashion needs to be perceived by Nigerians as stylish and of good quality rather than second-hand. Perceptions can be shifted through public education, collaboration with popular designers and influencers.

4.) Create enabling policies

Tax incentives to sustainable producers, recycling start-up grants and procurement policies that focus on recycled textiles would encourage industry players. Laws must not promote waste and excessive dependence on imports.

Why this matters globally

Sustainable fashion is not only a western issue. Nigeria boasts one of the largest young populations in the world, a dynamic fashion industry and a huge plastic waste crisis. Should Nigeria be able to incorporate the use of recycled plastics in its textile industry, it may serve as an example to other poor economies facing similar circumstances.

– Nigeria’s plastic waste could enrich the fashion industry: here’s how
– https://theconversation.com/nigerias-plastic-waste-could-enrich-the-fashion-industry-heres-how-264919

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Janet Remmington, Research Associate, Humanities Research Centre (and African Literature Department, University of the Witwatersrand), University of York

For black people living in South Africa during apartheid, simply moving around the country was a fraught activity, let alone crossing its borders. This was especially the case for black women, who were “rock bottom of the racial pile”, as South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo expressed it.

Coming to power in 1948 and ruling for over 40 years before democracy in 1994, the white-minority apartheid government took various race-based policies to extremes. An emphasis was on trying to control movement, keeping the black majority “in their place”.

From the 1950s, the state extended pass laws, targeting black women. It also complicated overseas travel with extra bureaucratic and financial burdens.

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Read more: What is apartheid? New book for young readers explains South Africa’s racist system

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Mobility restrictions caused an outcry, especially among the growing body of black working women in industrialising cities and towns. These women connected their everyday challenges with broader sociopolitical issues. They injected new energy and forms of activism into organisations involved in the liberation struggle, including the African National Congress (ANC).

In a recent study, I explore the stories of black women who refused to stay put in the face of apartheid’s controls. For these women, mobility was a powerful form of anti-apartheid resistance – and of self-assertion.

I highlight how in 1954, a number of these women, working across race lines, founded the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw) and drafted the Women’s Charter. The pioneering document laid groundwork for the broader Freedom Charter, which enshrined ideas on freedoms of movement and thought:

All shall be free to travel without restriction from countryside to town, from province to province, and from South Africa abroad.

Even though these ideals would only be realised much later, these activist women broke apartheid’s rules by travelling, exchanging ideas and making connections across borders.

The activist-traveller

These women’s high-risk journeys struck me as being characteristic of what journalist and scholar Mahvish Ahmad describes as a musāfir: an activist-traveller in a politically hostile environment who breaks new ground for others so they may be free.

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Read more: Imbokodo is a long overdue series of children’s books on South African women

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The mobile black women workers I have been researching have not previously been brought into view as travellers with things to say about their journeys and movements. Their travel texts are diverse, many available only in archives. They include speeches, commentaries, handwritten accounts, interviews, letters and memoirs. Some memoirs were officially published, but outside the country.

Their outputs were not the products of high education or stylised writing, but produced in the intensity of the times by working women.

Elizabeth Mafekeng

When Elizabeth Mafekeng, president of the Food and Canning Workers’ Association, was denied a passport in 1955, she boarded a plane in disguise as a domestic helper. That’s how determined she was to get to the World Conference of Workers in Bulgaria. She also took in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and China, commenting in the press that she “saw the way people should live in the world” where race was not pronounced.

Returning to South Africa, she was punished for her transgressive travel. She became the first woman sentenced to political banishment by the apartheid state. Again she took mobility into her own hands, fleeing with her two-month-old baby to then Basotholand (today’s Lesotho).

Lilian Ngoyi and Dora Tamana

Lilian Ngoyi, leader of the Garment Workers Union and president of the ANC’s Women’s League, travelled to Switzerland, London, Berlin, the Soviet Union, China and Mongolia in 1955.

Ngoyi and Dora Tamana first tried to board a ship under “European names”, only to be arrested. On a second attempt, they succeeded by air using affidavits and a raft of explanations, eventually arriving in London after stopovers in Uganda, Italy and the Netherlands. Their destination was the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland on behalf of Fedsaw. There they forged powerful solidarity networks.

Tamana reflected in a letter:

When I saw all these things, different nations together, my eyes were opened and I said, I have tasted the new world and won the confidence of our future.

On return, Ngoyi and Tamana played leading roles in the 20,000-strong 1956 women’s anti-pass march to parliament.

Frances Baard

Frances Baard was a domestic worker turned union organiser who presented the Women’s March petition to the apartheid state.

She travelled around South Africa extensively despite police harassment. Her organising work connected domestic workers, factory workers and other exploited labourers, for which she was imprisoned and banished. In her memoir, she spoke of the mind’s ability to travel:

Even though they ban me … my spirit is still there … free.

Florence Mophosho

My research includes those who travelled into exile like Florence Mophosho.

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Read more: Women in South Africa’s armed struggle: new book records history at first hand

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She was one of the few exiled women leaders of the ANC in the 1960s, based for years in Tanzania and travelling far and wide for the Women’s Secretariat. She stressed that travel was vital to advance the work of political freedom as well as global women’s emancipation. This wasn’t always appreciated by male colleagues.

Emma Mashinini

The apartheid government loosened some mobility restrictions in the 1980s. But this didn’t mean moving around was free or unencumbered. Emma Mashinini, who led the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union, undertook “a hundred and one travels” within and beyond South Africa to progress freedom for her people.

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Read more: Podcasts bring southern Africa’s liberation struggle to life – thanks to an innovative new audio archive

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In 1981, Mashinini was thrown into solitary confinement for six months. In the eyes of the state, she had “overreached” as a black woman traveller-organiser. She insisted in her memoir that it was her country and she intended to come and go.

Moving to be free

Understanding this travel and writing history helps shine new light on (often unsung) black women trade unionists and organisational leaders as anti-apartheid movers and shakers.

Insisting on mobility came at great personal cost, but in a sense these women never went alone. They travelled to gain ground for the greater cause of freedom, while discovering new versions of themselves along the way.

– Travel as activism: 6 stories of Black women who refused to ‘stay put’ in apartheid South Africa
– https://theconversation.com/travel-as-activism-6-stories-of-black-women-who-refused-to-stay-put-in-apartheid-south-africa-263854

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

At the Boston waterfront sits the Institute of Contemporary Art, an architectural marvel that gleams against the harbour in a wealthy neighbourhood. My Uber driver, an African immigrant, remarks as I get out: “Be careful, this is an expensive area.” His comment hints at the subtle tensions of race and class in such affluent spaces, where one’s presence as an outsider is immediately registered. I assure him I’ve just come to see the art.

I’d come to see Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera’s first solo museum show in the US, Hidden Battles/Hondo Dzakavanzika. This exhibition is a landmark moment of recognition for one of southern Africa’s leading contemporary artists.

When most artists are grappling with history and archives, Zvavahera is focused on the dreams she has in her sleep, not as a retreat from the past or the urgency of the now, but as a parallel form of knowledge.

As a scholar of African literary histories and archives and how they intersect with visual culture, I find Zvavahera’s work particularly powerful. It uncovers layers of meaning that operate at the subconscious, where personal memory, cultural narratives, and the imagination intersect.

From an archival perspective, the exhibition is compelling because it frames these dreamscapes with materiality – paint, paper, canvas, brushstrokes – making each a document of emotional and cultural knowledge.

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Read more: Five artists, five nations: taking to the road to find southern Africa’s hidden stories

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Zvavahera engages deeply with the traditional spirituality and African Pentecostal beliefs in which she was raised. She illuminates spirits and revelations. But she alters these dreams with emancipatory gestures: drawing in bodily features, concealing them as they morph into animal-like figures or plants. When looking closely, it’s as if the canvas was cut then sutured back with careful stitches, with each move a restoration of dignity. This is the delicacy of her brushstrokes.

The Boston gallery positions itself as a site for amplifying singular global voices in art, like Zvavahera’s. Her refusal to translate dreams into rational explanation is central to her practice. Boston audiences encounter Zimbabwean perspectives not as illustrative or ethnographic, but as intellectually and aesthetically complex. Zvavahera is placed within transnational conversations while her particular lived experiences are preserved.

The work on the show was made between 2021 and 2025, a time filled with mourning and melancholy, during and after the COVID pandemic. Zvavahera is a prophet who uses the canvas to transform dark dreams into vivid, colourful prayers. She says:

People say their prayers with words, and I’m saying my prayers with a painting.

Who is Portia Zvavahera?

Born in Harare in 1985, Zvavahera channels childhood experiences, ancestral presence, and mystical narratives into her paintings. The work blurs the line between the figurative and the abstract.

Growing up in Harare’s art scene, both modernist and indigenous art inspired her practice. She found mentorship and support from Gallery Delta and formal training from the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

Her work has earned awards and international acclaim for its emotive force and poetic intensity.

The exhibition

Zvavahera’s canvases are layered with pigment and texture, incorporating printmaking techniques alongside stencilling, delicate lace, batik wax, and even palm fronds from her garden.

The dream paintings on show are all vast in scale, almost overwhelming in their presence. They appear as recurring visions, or fragments from a psyche as troubled as it is fertile.

The imagery conjures a world of vulnerability. Spectres in her dreams besiege her and try to snatch her children, harm her body, make her grandmother sick, unsettle her spirit. But she does not succumb. Instead, she renders them into haunting paintings and drawings, binding them into linen, oil and ink.

Their titles draw from Shona proverbs and folktales. Kurwira vana (fighting for the children). Tinosvetuka rusvingo (jumping over the wall). Hondo yakatarisana naambuya (the battle that grandmother is facing). They aren’t simply explanatory notes but portals, resisting simplification, pulling the viewer into the language of a cosmology not easily domesticated by English.

Zvavahera is an artist of scale, but also of duration. The canvases demand that viewers linger. To stand before the work is to enter a meditative space, one where line and colour pulse with life. In one caption she writes:

I know there’s going to be a battle in the future when I see a bull in my dreams.

The bull, like the angelic and demonic figures in her work, are not allegory but omen, a herald of struggle. This is the artist’s autobiography in colour.

What haunts is not only the possibility of harm, but also the persistence of love. Viewers witness the artist’s insistent refusal to let her children, her spirit, her imagination, be taken over. To dream is to fight; to paint is to protect. Her canvases stage encounters between the forces of good and evil, and transform them into visions of resilience.

Running through this series is a mystical or magical impulse that is especially vivid in her characters. Her paintings and drawings develop a kind of surrealist mystic experience.

Zvavahera’s work matters because it demonstrates how art can navigate the intimate and the ancestral, the personal and the collective. It offers a worldview that’s too often marginalised in art world conversations. She brings to the fore the depth of the African imagination.

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Read more: 5 indie art spaces in African cities worth knowing more about

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Her show is testament to the fact that African artists are not only present on the global art stage, they’re also helping shape the questions, forms and languages of art itself.

– Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera turns her prayers into paintings
– https://theconversation.com/zimbabwean-artist-portia-zvavahera-turns-her-prayers-into-paintings-265213