Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tolu Olarewaju, Economist and Lecturer in Management, Keele University; University of Lancashire

Nigeria has endured decades of violent insurgencies and ranks 6th on the 2025 Global Terrorism Index. Numerous people have been killed and millions displaced. The number of casualties from terrorist attacks in 2025 can be seen in both the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Nigeria Security Tracker. Most of the casualties are in places with high poverty levels, as the Nigerian Poverty Map shows.

Tolu Olarewaju, who has researched ethnic poverty, unpacks why regions of violence and poverty overlap in Nigeria.

What is the state of poverty in Nigeria?

Poverty in Nigeria comes in various forms: a lack of income and productive resources to sustain livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition; illness and death; and limited access to education and other basic services. It includes inadequate housing and unsafe environments. It is also seen in a lack of participation in decision-making and civil, social and cultural life.

Nigeria currently has a population of 237 million people and over 133 million Nigerians are living in this kind of poverty. It is higher in rural areas, where 72% of people are poor, compared to 42% of people in urban areas. The current poverty in Nigeria is the result of two key factors:

• history – particularly the slave trade and British colonial rule, which put the economic gain of the British Empire ahead of the development of the local population

• corruption and poor governance practices.

My work shows that when initiatives are introduced to reduce poverty in Nigeria, they are often hijacked by corrupt individuals.

There have been numerous government efforts to combat poverty in Nigeria. The current administration launched the “Renewed Hope Conditional Cash Transfer” programme in October 2023 to cushion the effects of its fuel subsidy removal, which had raised the cost of living and caused inflation. The programme hasn’t made much impact on the level of poverty in the country.

The failures of successive Nigerian governments to reduce poverty stem from multiple factors. They include corruption, poor targeting of programmes, limited funding, weak legislative oversight, political interference, and the absence of a flexible, people-centred approach.

Meanwhile, poverty is the common thread across the places experiencing terrorism in Nigeria. Poor people are more likely to be recruited into terrorist groups, and their targets are likely to be poor people like themselves.

What is ethnic poverty?

Ethnic poverty occurs when there is systemic poverty for an ethnic group. An ethnic group is a social group that shares a common and distinctive history, culture, religion, language, or the like.

My work on ethnic poverty also shows that it can lead to conflicts that are easily labelled as ethnic, religious or tribal.

Ethnic poverty disparities, uneven development and radical ideologies will make any country susceptible to violent insurgencies. This has occurred, for example, in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ethiopia.

Ethnic poverty can increase hatred and violence, but economic growth could create a “win-win solution” if wealth can be shared equitably.

Nigeria is a multinational state where more than 250 ethnic groups live, speaking over 500 distinct languages. The three largest ethnic groups are the Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the west, and the Igbo in the east. The country is prone to violent insurgencies where armed groups who suffer from ethnic poverty try to overthrow the government.

How does ethnic poverty play out in Nigeria?

Poverty in Nigeria is intertwined with ethnicity. Inequalities in wealth and education persist between ethnic groups and regions. For example, 65% of the poor and less educated live in the north, where the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups are predominant. Poverty levels across states also vary. The incidence of multidimensional poverty ranges from a low of 27% in Ondo (in the south) to a high of 91% in Sokoto (in the north).

What are the solutions to ethnic poverty?

There is no single solution, but several that will mature over time. The Nigerian government should:

• Hold transparent discussions and elections to decide if a regional system of government that focuses on local problems will be better than the current centrally planned government.

• Devise a strategy that combats corruption and focuses on ethnic groups with higher poverty rates.

• Expand education and vocational training to promote peace and tolerance, and employable skills linked to local markets.

• Deliver entrepreneurship training and financial literacy programmes to foster self-reliance and community-based economic growth.

• Offer incentives for responsible industrial development and local enterprise investment in areas of high ethnic poverty.

• Implement policies that promote balanced urban–rural economic growth and integrate ethnic populations economically into the national story.

• Invest in transport, digital and communication infrastructure in remote areas to improve access to education, security and markets.

• Promote inclusive national narratives that celebrate ethnic diversity.

Together, these measures can create a more equitable social contract that gives every ethnic group a stake in national progress. By being transparent and accountable, the government can rebuild trust.

Sustained investment in people, infrastructure and local economies will help break the cycle of inter-generational ethnic poverty. Over time, these efforts can strengthen unity and share prosperity across Nigeria.

– Nigeria has a high poverty rate – what this has to do with ethnic conflicts
– https://theconversation.com/nigeria-has-a-high-poverty-rate-what-this-has-to-do-with-ethnic-conflicts-270649

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Mamokete Modiba, Senior Researcher, Gauteng City-Region Observatory

Johannesburg’s inner city is a bustling hub of economic life – a dense, dynamic web of informal traders, adjacent businesses and other users. Informal trading remains an essential survival strategy for many households. It is also a key source of affordable goods and services.

Managing this activity, however, is not straightforward. The city authorities face legitimate pressures to maintain order, safety, hygiene and accessibility in highly contested urban spaces. At the same time, they have a mandate to support livelihoods and encourage inclusive economic participation.

Balancing these objectives is complex. But, as urban planners and researchers, we believe it’s possible and necessary. It needs to be done in a way that recognises the realities of both municipal constraints. These include budgets, conflicting political pressures and traders’ contributions. Traders generate local economic activity and provide convenient, affordable goods and services.

Johannesburg’s informal trading sector should not be viewed as a problem to eliminate. Rather, it should be managed effectively. The focus for the city should be on improving how this is done.

The city has a chequered history of managing informal traders. In October 2025, Johannesburg authorities removed informal traders from De Villiers Street in the heart of the city’s central business district. The city went on to expand the operation to other inner-city areas and townships to promote “order” and “cleanliness”.

This approach was reminiscent of the 2013 Operation Clean Sweep, which disrupted livelihoods and increased urban inequality and violence. After the events in 2025, the Gauteng High Court ruled in favour of traders who took the city to court. But the court’s ruling has not been implemented.

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Read more: Africa’s city planners must look to the global south for solutions: Johannesburg and São Paulo offer useful insights

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The city’s 2022 informal trading policy provides a roadmap for a different approach. It provides a structured framework that includes:

• recognising informal traders as essential contributors to the urban economy

• setting out clear procedures for registration, spatial planning, permit processes and trader support.

Its strength lies in offering a coherent, rights-based approach that can bring transparency and fairness to how trading spaces are allocated and managed. But its success hinges on implementation that is transparent, inclusive and responsive.

A durable solution

In our view, Johannesburg can turn contested spaces into engines of shared prosperity by:

• investing in adequate infrastructure

• promoting collaboration among traders, property owners, municipal authorities and other affected stakeholders

• enforcing regulations that protect livelihoods instead of punishing them.

A durable solution requires systematic reforms grounded in provisions of the city’s 2022 informal trading policy. This emphasises co-management by various stakeholders. Among them are officials from various relevant departments, municipal-owned entities and the informal traders.

But laws and regulations have to be updated.

By-laws passed in 2012 are still being used to regulate the sector. This is even though a new policy was adopted in 2022.

Updated by-laws would enable the city to reflect the policy’s developmental orientation. This includes its focus on supporting livelihoods and expanding access to jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. It also includes creating a conducive regulatory and management environment for informal traders.

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Read more: Johannesburg’s produce market has supplied the informal sector for decades: a refresh is due

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The policy adopted in 2022 contains several important provisions that support more effective management of informal trading. Key elements include:

1) Informal trading plans.

A comprehensive, independently conducted census of all traders – registered and unregistered – will form the evidence base for this plan. This will enable the city to understand the full scale and distribution of informal trading.

The city must make enough suitable trading sites available. This expanded access would help accommodate more traders legally and reduce pressure on overcrowded locations. Throughout the process, the city must balance the need to demarcate trading sites with:

• the principle of minimal relocation to protect livelihoods

• ensuring that pavements, transport routes and other public amenities remain accessible to all.

2) Appropriate infrastructure and services.

Ensuring that informal traders have adequate services supports their livelihoods and also contributes to cleaner, safer, and more attractive streets for all users. All informal trading environments in the inner city would benefit from access to better infrastructure. This includes water, electricity, street lighting, storage, improved sidewalks, trading shelters and ablution facilities.

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Read more: Smart cities start with people, not technology: lessons from Westbury, Johannesburg

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3) Clear articulation of traders’ rights and responsibilities.

The greatest responsibility rests with the city to transform informal trading management. But the policy also makes clear that informal traders themselves have important responsibilities to ensure the system works effectively.

Once allocated trading sites, traders are expected to:

• operate only within designated areas

• avoid restricted or prohibited spaces

• help to maintain order

• conduct their business in line with applicable regulations, policies and by-laws

• play an active role in maintaining the cleanliness and upkeep of their trading spaces

• work collaboratively with the City, neighbouring businesses and other local stakeholders.

The plan also envisages the establishment of an independent informal trade forum, an informal trading task team and a dedicated informal trade unit. Urgent action is needed to constitute these structures.

Next steps

The City has an opportunity to shift from reactive, enforcement-driven approaches to a proactive, developmental model that values informal trading as a central part of Johannesburg’s economy and identity.

There are key next steps that need to be taken.

Firstly, fully operationalising the commitments of the 2022 policy by updating by-laws.

Secondly, by completing a transparent and comprehensive census of all traders. This needs to include involving them meaningfully in decisions about management processes.

Alongside this, the city should prioritise investment in adequate infrastructure and strengthen communication and collaboration platforms. It also needs to establish the dedicated structures envisioned in the policy.

Together, these actions can build an enabling system that protects livelihoods, reduces conflict, and supports a vibrant, inclusive and economically resilient inner city.

– Johannesburg has failed its informal traders: policies are in place, but action is needed
– https://theconversation.com/johannesburg-has-failed-its-informal-traders-policies-are-in-place-but-action-is-needed-270911

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Simangele Mayisela, Senior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand

Corporal punishment – usually referring to adults hitting children – was abolished in South Africa in 1997. The Constitutional Court had already ruled it incompatible with the bill of rights in 1995. In that judgement, the chief justice said that in his view, “juvenile whipping is cruel, it is inhuman and it is degrading” – as well as “unnecessary”. The South African Schools Act of 1996 also outlawed it. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that this practice is still common in many schools and homes. Educational psychologist Simangele Mayisela researched the subject for her 2017 doctorate, asking why some teachers and parents (and even children) believed it was an effective and harmless form of discipline.

How did you study the roots of this behaviour?

My PhD research used observations and interviews at a rural public school in a low-income area in South Africa to investigate the historical and socio-cultural origins of corporal punishment. I wanted to understand how teachers’ childhood and cultural exposure to corporal punishment had influenced their use of it, and how punishing children this way could affect their development.

There hadn’t been much research about how corporal punishment in schools could be passed on in culture from one generation to the next.

Under the oppressive apartheid regime’s system of “Bantu Education”, which aimed to keep black people subservient to white people, corporal punishment was widely used.

But even after South Africa became a democracy in 1994, this practice continued.

What did you see that suggested teachers had a deep belief about corporal punishment?

There were numerous examples.

I observed a grade 4 social science lesson on the types and functions of landmarks. The teacher used the example of Table Mountain in Cape Town as a natural landmark and the Ponte City tower in Johannesburg as a manmade landmark. One boy in the classroom raised his hand and, before he was called on to speak, said: “Sir, here in our village Ntabande (a hill) is a natural landmark and the Vilakazi tavern is a manmade landmark”. The teacher was angry because the boy had spoken without permission, and promised him a “hiding” after the lesson.

I also attended a community meeting about various issues, including scholar transport. The chief asked parents to give their children a hiding if they didn’t get to the bus on time. The message for teachers and parents was that traditional authority encouraged corporal punishment.

Study participants told me that parents supported the practice of teachers physically punishing their children.

In another sign of how people in this community thought about order, discipline, punishment and reward, I saw various kinds of sticks at the school where I did my research. They were not all used for inflicting pain; some were used for pointing to charts, for example. They had different names indicating different functions and intentions. In interviews, children referred to sticks as umqondisi (a person who makes something straight, puts things in order), uphiphizinyefu (cleaner of your mess), or “sweets”.

In the early childhood development class, children started the morning by reciting rhymes and moving their little bodies in meaningful imitative rhythm. One of the rhymes has this line:

Shaya tishela, shaya tishela, shaya tishela (hit the child, teacher).

What did teachers and children say about it?

In focus groups and interviews, generations of teachers (retired and working) said that when they were children, it was normal to be beaten at home and at school. It was hard to avoid being beaten, even if you behaved well.

It was not something to negotiate.

Yet they were grateful to their teachers for having used corporal punishment. They believed there was a direct relationship between that form of “discipline” and their academic success. It had enabled them to become teachers themselves. One teacher described it as “the very instrument that made you who you are”. And academic success was what they wanted for the children they were teaching.

Some could still recite things they had “learned” by rote as children. One mentioned how, when they were children, the teacher would walk around the classroom as learners wrote their essays, and unleash the “hookaai” (also a word for a whip used on animals) on them for spelling mistakes. The same kind of experience was described by the current generation of children in the study.

The teachers even referred to corporal punishment as “sweets” – making it sound like a reward.

In the way they spoke, the participants did not separate corporal punishment from the teaching and learning process. They seemed to think of the three – teaching, learning and beating – as one activity.

In my class there is a stick … I made sure that I leave no mark on a child.

Teachers believed that corporal punishment encouraged children to focus:

The person (child) begins to think.

All three generations of teachers in the study accepted corporal punishment as normal. They took this humiliating experience lightly, laughing about it. In psychology, this is a sign of coping and acceptance.

Several teachers spoke of it as part of their culture: “We believe that we must raise a child with a stick.”

Children had already internalised that idea. One said: “At home they say every child needs to be beaten.” And they believed they had called it upon themselves: “It’s me who has started her (the teacher)”. This created feelings of guilt: “If we start them, the teachers feel the pain”. Children also laughed when talking about punishment.

Of all the children interviewed, only one indicated that being beaten made him think about why he’d done what he did.

What are the outcomes of this disciplinary approach?

Being exposed to corporal punishment all the time made the community see it as a normal tool for raising children.

It appeared that teachers believed that corporal punishment produced desired behaviour from a child. But this was mainly from the child’s avoidance of physical pain, not from understanding what was “wrong” about their behaviour.

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Read more: Four reasons why physically punishing school children doesn’t work

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In a classroom where children are motivated by avoiding pain and ridicule, there is little development of higher mental functions. Fear and anxiety interfere with thought processing, hindering development and learning. It’s likely to affect the development of psychological functions related to discipline like problem-solving, self-regulation and agency.

For instance, in this study, I observed two siblings from a child-headed family coming late for the whole week while I was at the school, and they would be beaten every day for latecoming. When I engaged with the siblings, they simply said they woke up late and their brother, in high school, also got to school late. They had not learned to solve the problem of being late for school and to regulate their sleep and waking up pattern. In line with education policy, these learners are an example of children experiencing social and economic learning barriers.

The reliance on corporal punishment as a discipline measure deprives children of a chance to discover for themselves what is true and right, and the knowledge and experience they will need in adulthood.

– Why do South African teachers still threaten children with a beating? A psychologist explains
– https://theconversation.com/why-do-south-african-teachers-still-threaten-children-with-a-beating-a-psychologist-explains-270904

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Jude Kagoro, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, Universität Bremen

Uganda’s police have long faced criticism for politically charged interventions. These include episodes in which lethal force has been used in ways that observers describe as excessive or indiscriminate. The main targets of restrictive or coercive tactics are supporters of the political opposition.

For example, in November 2020, weeks before the 2021 elections, protests at the arrest of the main opposition candidate escalated into nationwide unrest. More than 100 people died.

Under President Yoweri Museveni – in power since 1986 – the police have become a central pillar of the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement. In the campaigns for the January 2026 general election, police are critical in containing demonstrations, mobilising political support and enforcing loyalty. They can be seen ferrying ruling-party supporters and guarding their processions.

They are also active against the opposition. Party activities of Museveni’s main rival Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, face routine obstruction, teargas and street confrontations. In November and early December 2025, police violently dispersed or blocked Bobi Wine’s caravans. The UN Human Rights chief condemned this.

I have published widely on themes of militarisation, security and policing, including the relationship between the Uganda police and the ruling party. It’s my conclusion that the role of the police in Uganda cannot be meaningfully analysed through a western-centric expectation of institutional neutrality.

Rather, policing has developed together with Uganda’s broader political direction of personalised authority and an ideology of cadreship that continues to shape expectations within the ruling NRM party. This has fostered, in my view, an ethos in which officers see themselves as active custodians of the existing political order. I’ve concluded that they don’t see themselves as being a neutral institution. They believe their job is to maintain the status quo.

My previous research challenges the common assumption that the police act only on direct orders to protect the regime or target the opposition. In reality, many officers believe that being visibly pro-ruling party defines them as “good officers”.

Based on my research, it’s clear that elections due in 2026 are likely to repeat these old patterns.

History of partisan policing

My extensive engagement with officers over more than 15 years, as both a researcher and a consultant, has given me a nuanced understanding of the attitudes and shared mentalities that shape policing culture. These beliefs are reflected not only in what officers say but also in their everyday behaviour.

For example, several commanders prominently display ruling party symbols or images of the president as their WhatsApp profile photos – clear signs of how pro-NRM attitudes influence officers’ conduct and become woven into police identity.

As a result, officers often take actions that favour the incumbent even without being told to. They want to signal allegiance and do what they think is expected of them as police.

This behaviour is rooted in a long relationship between political power and control of the security forces. Society expects the police to serve ruling elites rather than operate as an impartial institution. Consequently, the force today functions less as a neutral body and more as an extension of the ruling party.

Police in formation

Uganda’s police force played active roles in political policing and in supporting Britain’s colonial administration when it was established in 1906.

It continued to play the same role under the post-independence governments of Milton Obote, Idi Amin, the Tito Okello junta, Obote II, and now under the National Resistance Movement since 1986.

There have been changes in nuance and emphasis. For example, the force was initially sidelined in favour of military and intelligence agencies in the early years of Museveni’s reign. The turning point came in the early 2000s, with the appointment of senior military officers as police chiefs. This signalled a strategic fusion of military command culture with domestic policing.

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Read more: Why Uganda needs new laws to hold police in check, and accountable

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Under General Kale Kayihura, appointed in 2005, the police expanded rapidly in size, budget and operational authority. He aligned the force with the ruling party by reshaping recruitment, sidelining older officers and elevating young and highly educated cadres loyal to the party.

By the mid-2010s, the police were firmly embedded within the political machinery and sustaining Museveni’s rule.

Going beyond the use of force and coercion is also credited to Kayihura’s legacy. Under the guise of community policing, he drafted millions of largely unemployed youth into a nationwide network of so-called crime preventers. Their presence at 2016 election rallies, in villages and on urban streets was decisive in boosting National Resistance Movement turnout.

Their presence also undercut opposition mobilisations.

By 2021, however, Kayihura’s apparatus had largely collapsed. Without his centralised coordination – and confronted by the rapid rise of Bobi Wine’s youth-driven movement – the state increasingly relied on coercion alone. The result was violent campaign scenes in the 2021 elections.

Heading into the 2026 elections, the National Resistance Movement appears to have rebuilt soft-power apparatus to go with strong-arm tactics. The police’s head of the Crime Intelligence department, Christopher Ddamulira, is now central to youth mobilisation. He is using outreach programmes and targeted incentives reminiscent of Kayihura’s tactics.

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Read more: How the Ugandan state outsources the use of violence to stay in power

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They include the temporary integration of ghetto youth into the police intelligence networks, and funding small-scale business ventures. While these have been effective in diluting opposition support, it is the open use of force that dominates public debate.

Equipped with armoured carriers, high-capacity tear-gas launchers, water cannons and fast-response vehicles, security forces use their mobility and intelligence networks to disrupt opposition mobilisation.

It’s part of police strategy to restrict the mobility of opposition candidates. The candidates are especially restricted from densely populated urban areas where they could draw large crowds. Opposition candidates are often pushed onto back roads or sparsely populated routes. There they are less visible and less able to engage voters.

Police are also frequently deployed to bar candidates from being hosted by radio stations.

These police operations are reinforced by the Resident District Commissioners representing the presidency and backed by the military, which intervenes whenever political stakes rise. Together, they form a tightly coordinated apparatus of political control nationwide.

The constitution of Uganda establishes the police force under Article 211, requiring it to be national, patriotic, professional, disciplined, and composed of citizens of good character – standards that are incompatible with partisanship or the oppression of political opponents. Under Article 212, the police are mandated to protect life and property, preserve law and order, prevent and detect crime, and work cooperatively with civilian authorities, other security organs, and the public.

A familiar contradiction

Uganda’s 2026 elections will not simply test the popularity of competing political actors. They will again expose the fusion of policing and politics that has shaped the country for more than a century.

Police have consistently served as instruments of political order rather than neutral guardians of public security. Today’s officers operate within this inherited logic, in a political culture that has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power.

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Read more: Why Uganda needs new laws to hold police in check, and accountable

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The campaign trail reveals a familiar contradiction: a security force constitutionally mandated to protect all citizens, yet increasingly functioning as a political arbiter – shaping who is heard in the public sphere.

– Political policing in Museveni’s Uganda: what it means for the 2026 elections
– https://theconversation.com/political-policing-in-musevenis-uganda-what-it-means-for-the-2026-elections-271316

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Devin Smart, Assistant Professor, Department of History, West Virginia University

As Kenya’s cities grew, more and more people left their rural homes and subsistence farming systems to go to urban settlements like Mombasa to find work. In the city, meals were paid for with cash, a major transformation in Kenya’s food systems.

A new book called Preparing the Modern Meal is an urban history that explores these processes. We asked historian Devin Smart about his study.

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What’s the colonial history of Mombasa?

At the turn of the 20th century, the British were expanding their empire throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including the parts of east Africa that would become Kenya.

They built a railway that connected the port town of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with the newly established Protectorate of Uganda in the interior. This created the foundations of the colonial economy and drove urbanisation.

While Nairobi grew in the Kenyan highlands, Mombasa became the most important port in east Africa. The city grew fast as people came to work at the railway, docks and in other parts of the urban economy.

After independence in 1963, cities like Mombasa carried on growing rapidly and more and more people started working in the informal sector, which included making and selling street food.

How did rural people get their food?

During the early 1900s, the cuisines of east Africa’s agrarian (farming) societies were mostly vegetarian. Much of the food people ate was grown in their own fields, though there were also regional markets.

These communities grew lots of staple crops like sorghum, millet, maize, bananas, cassava, and sweet potatoes. They also had legumes, greens, and dairy products as regular parts of their meals.

These ingredients were prepared into a variety of dishes, like the Kikuyu staple irio, a mash of bananas with maize kernels and legumes added to it. The Kamba often ate isio, a combination of beans and maize kernels, while the Luo who lived along the shores of Lake Victoria regularly included a dish called kuon as part of their cuisine. It’s a thick porridge of boiled milled grain (often millet), eaten with fish or vegetables to add contrasting flavours and textures.

In these communities, the daily meal was also defined by seasonal variety. Food changed depending on what was being harvested or what stores of ingredients were dwindling. These were also gendered food systems, with women doing much of the farming work and nearly all the cooking.

In my book, I consider the dramatic changes in how east Africans came by their food when they left these rural food systems for the city.

How was food organised in the city?

In Mombasa, they entered a food system organised around commercial exchange. My study is about Kenya, but the story it reflects is one that’s unfolded on a global scale. The shift from subsistence to commodified food systems, from growing your own to buying it from others, has been one of the central features of the modern world.

By the 1930s, most people in Mombasa bought nearly all their food with cash, visiting small dried-goods grocers, fresh-produce vendors, and working-class eateries. In this urban food system, the seasonal variety of rural cuisines was increasingly replaced by the regularity of commercial supply chains.

This was especially the case with staple grains. In the countryside, people ate a variety of grains, but in Mombasa maize meal and wheat became daily staples eaten year-round, transforming east African foodways.

Migration also changed domestic labour in the kitchen. Many migrant men now lived in homes without women, which meant they had to prepare their own food, often for significant periods of their lives.

However, the idea that cooking was the work of women proved enduring. When women joined these households in the city, they again prepared the family’s meals.

How did street food emerge?

By the 1930s, Mombasa had a fast-growing working class. The majority of the town’s workers spent their days in the industrial district, around the railway and port. Many also had to commute a considerable distance to work.

With the long working day of urban capitalism, returning home for a filling lunch wasn’t practical, which created strong demand for affordable prepared food at midday. As this was happening, many in the city also struggled to find consistent jobs and turned to informal trades like street food to earn a living.

This convergence of supply and demand led to the rapid growth of the street food industry around the 1950s, with people opening eateries in makeshift structures outside the gates to the port and in nearby alleyways, parks, and other open spaces.

What kind of food was served?

At these working-class food spots, a popular dish was chapati, an east African version of the South Asian flatbread. People could complement it with beans, meat, or fried fish, along with githeri, a mixture of maize kernels and beans (similar to isio).

In later decades, ugali, the ubiquitous Kenyan staple made from maize meal, became more common at street food eateries, as did Swahili versions of Indian Ocean dishes like pilau (aromatic rice with meat) and biryani (rice with meat braised in a spice-infused tomato sauce).

How were street food vendors policed?

The business model that made street food work in Mombasa’s economy also brought these vendors into regular conflict with the city’s administration. Street food vendors kept overheads and thus prices low because they avoided rents and licensing fees by squatting on open land in makeshift structures.

But, in an era of urban development and modernisation, many officials desired a different kind of city, one without this kind of informal land use and architecture. Authorities began campaigns to remove these businesses from Mombasa’s landscape, arresting vendors and demolishing their structures.

This also created a tension, though, because the city’s workers, including those at the port and railway who ran the most important transportation choke point in east Africa’s regional economy, needed affordable meals at lunch.

Given that informal trade had become essential to Mombasa’s economy, there were limits on how far these campaigns could be pushed. However, arrests and demolitions did still occur, and sometimes on a dramatic, city-wide scale, which made street food a precarious way to earn a living in Kenya’s port town.

For example, in 2001, the Kenyan government launched a massive demolition campaign to clear informal business structures from city sidewalks, parks and open spaces.

After the demolitions, many rebuilt and reopened their street food businesses, but in less visible parts of town and on side streets rather than main roads. Today, these eateries remain an essential part of Mombasa’s economy and food system.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

I hope that readers will see how food history helps us understand the ways that capitalism transformed the modern world.

The regional focus of the book is east Africa, but it explores themes relevant to the history of capitalism more generally, including the gendered division of household labour, the commercialisation of everyday needs and wants, and the political and economic struggles of working-class communities to find space for themselves in modern cities.

– Street food in Mombasa: how city life shaped the modern meal
– https://theconversation.com/street-food-in-mombasa-how-city-life-shaped-the-modern-meal-266590

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Olayinka Ajala, Associate professor in Politics and International Relations, Leeds Beckett University

A month before the US carried out its Christmas day attack on militants linked to the Islamic State group (IS) in north-western Nigeria, president Donald Trump had declared Nigeria a “country of particular concern”. This was due to the alleged killing of Christians by terrorist groups in the country. Trump threatened military intervention if the attacks against Christians continued.

The threat became a reality on Christmas day when the US military’s Africa Command – in coordination with the Nigerian authorities – carried out strikes on terrorist locations in Sokoto state, North-West Nigeria.

There were mixed reactions to the attacks. Some citizens hailed the attacks, saying they hoped they would send a message to the terrorists to desist from their activities. Others condemned the strikes, citing concerns about sovereignty.

I have been researching conflicts, terrorism and the formation of insurgent groups in Nigeria and the Sahel for over a decade. After the US intervention, a key question that arises is: does the attack strengthen Nigeria’s counter-terrorism mechanisms. Or will it weaken them, and threaten national security and sovereignty?

I argue that the US military intervention will indeed strengthen the hand of the Nigerian government in fighting insurgency in the short term in four ways, including enhanced intelligence gathering. Nevertheless, there’s also a risk that it will trigger unintended consequences if Nigeria doesn’t fully take charge of its counter-terrorism initiatives. These include loss of sovereignty and internal political division.

Immediate gains

First, the recent cooperation between the US and Nigerian military would help Nigeria with enhanced surveillance and intelligence gathering. Prior to the Christmas day bombing, the US has been conducting reconnaissance flights in Nigeria. The data gathered from these flights helped identify terrorist gatherings and movements.

The US and its allies have struggled to gather intelligence in the region since closing down a US drone base in Niger following a coup in the country. The loss and subsequent withdrawal from the US drone base in Agadez has significantly degraded US and Western intelligence-gathering capabilities. This is why the US flew reconnaissance flights from Ghana for this attack.

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Read more: US military is leaving Niger even less secure: why it didn’t succeed in combating terrorism

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Second, the reported military collaboration will give the Nigerian government access to state of the art military hardware and resources. The US and Nigeria’s relationship has been fractured since 2015 following the release of an Amnesty International report in which the Nigerian military was accused of gross human rights abuses.

The US government immediately suspended sales of key military hardware to Abuja. It also banned Nigeria from using some US equipment already purchased.

Six years later Nigeria signed a military agreement with Russia.

The Christmas Day strike ordered by Trump suggests that the US might once again be willing to help Nigeria in its counter-terrorism initiatives.

Third, the intervention could help Nigeria fight terrorism along its borders. The Christmas day attack is based on intelligence that terrorist cells from Niger and Burkina Faso had entered Nigeria to carry out coordinated attacks. I have previously written about how terrorism is spreading in West Africa and how international cooperation is needed to fight the surge. Such coordinated attacks could help Nigeria’s cross-border counter-terrorism initiatives.

Finally, the coordinated attacks send a message to terrorist groups that there is a renewed effort to turn the heat on them.

Unintended consequences

There is nevertheless a risk of the US action having unintended consequences if Nigeria does not fully take charge of its counter-terrorism initiatives.

Since 2009 when Boko Haram surfaced in Nigeria, the country has been battling terrorism within and around its borders. Despite counter-terrorism initiatives such as military response, intelligence coordination, community resilience, international partnerships, and rehabilitation efforts to dismantle extremist networks and address root causes, Nigeria has not been able to stop terrorism in the country.

While renewed collaborations with the US is a step in the right direction, the possible dangers for Nigeria include:

• A loss of access and control of intelligence data. Nigeria needs to take charge of its surveillance architecture and intelligence gathering or risk a weakening of its sovereignty. Large quantities of data is collected during reconnaissance flights. But the country running the flights owns the data. It has the prerogative of what it wants to share, and when.

Nigeria has been here before: when the US drone base in Agadez was operational, all the data gathered across the Sahel was analysed by the Pentagon which decided what information to relay to its partners.

Nigeria should guard against this by taking charge of the reconnaissance and surveillance activities relevant to protect its national interest.

• Swift follow-up action. The Nigerian military needs to take advantage of the impact of the strikes. It needs to capitalise on the disarray in terrorist camps. By acting in a coordinated way after 2015, the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) was very successful in dismantling Boko Haram as an organisation and weakening its bases.

But the Nigerian military needs to keep a close eye on the terror group splintering as a result of success against its military bases. The Multinational Joint Task Force’s successes was partly responsible for Boko Haram breaking into three factions in 2016.

The initial strikes conducted by the US military will only be significant if the Nigerian army prevents smaller terror groups from being formed.

• Nigerians need to be assured the government will act in their interests. The US attack risks worsening political divisions in Nigeria if not properly managed. While Trump framed the attack as an action against the murder of Christians in the country, the Nigerian government has insisted it was part of a renewed campaign against terrorists destabilising the country.

Trump’s explanation of the attack has angered some political groups in Nigeria. For instance, Islamic cleric Sheikh Ahmed Gumi vehemently condemned the US airstrikes calling Nigerians who supported the strikes ‘stupid’ and ‘misguided’.

The Nigerian government must control the narrative and clearly explain how the renewed military collaboration with the US is in Nigeria’s national interest, and not targeted at particular ethnic or religious groups.

– US air strikes in northern Nigeria: possible windfalls, as well as dangers
– https://theconversation.com/us-air-strikes-in-northern-nigeria-possible-windfalls-as-well-as-dangers-272630

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Maureen Amimo, Lecturer, Maasai Mara University

In parts of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, it is not uncommon to hear of individuals who run naked at night. They cause trouble and instil fear in the neighbourhood. They throw stones on rooftops, make animal noises, bang on windows and doors, and chase night travellers.

In Kenya, the practice is called night running, or night dancing in parts of Tanzania and Uganda. It is claimed to be a form of spiritual possession in the communities where it is rampant.

Night runners are largely left to their own devices, but there is a sense of stigma attached to the practice.

I am a cultural studies researcher and wanted to explore how night running is seen in popular culture through fictionalised print media narratives or other appropriations. I set out to study the concept of night running as practised in rural communities in western Kenya, as well as its adoption in cities.

I conducted interviews with informants from Kisumu and Vihiga counties in western Kenya to examine the ritual and its marginal taboo position. The ritual exists on the margins because it’s a practice deemed unacceptable in public. I also examined Kenyan newspaper archives between 1990 and 2020 to trace the transformation of public discourse around night running. These articles and letters to the editor acted as a repository of understanding by Kenyans from different regions about night running.

I found that in the 1990s, newspapers reporting on night running largely exposed the ritual and its perceived links to witchcraft. Most of the reports captured the violence meted out on suspected night runners, or reflected on cases of night runners causing havoc.

These references to either night running or witchcraft appeared as hard news and in letters to the editor. They illustrated heightened stigma. In one letter to the editor published on 20 February 1993 in Kenya’s oldest newspaper, The Standard, a reader observes

the decision to burn alive the wizards and witchcrafts as reported by the daily newspapers in Kisii district was an action long overdue … I find it difficult to condone their action and say that was a job well done. Wizards have done worse and have retarded developments.

In the post-2000 period, a column titled The Night Runner in The Standard offered a direct modification of the idea of night running. The columnist, Tony Mochama, assumed the persona of a night runner as an alter ego to document his night adventures in the capital, Nairobi. Each week, the column documented different activities, from watching soccer matches to attending parties and official events.

The column co-opted the public’s memory regarding the ritual figure of the night runner. Mochama invoked the night runner as his lens for seeing Nairobi by night. This column, therefore, offered a collective re-imagination. Readers were asked to re-imagine night running as a strategy of seeing, travelling and documenting the city of Nairobi by night.

I found that the inference in the column was that the night is a significant time-space that carries extensive activity and culture. The column presented the night runner as someone who disrupts the logical and accepted order of how to operate at night.

For instance, instead of taking the night as the time of rest, the contemporary night runner works, travels the city and explores its leisure zones.

By describing a night runner as someone who moves against the grain, Mochama turned night running into a metaphor for life in the city after dark. This view enabled his audience to look beyond the stigmatised ritual and imagine its usefulness as a signal for different forms of nightlife.

The contradictions

My study found that Mochama’s articles and others within the popular culture section of newspapers created space for forays into fictional and surreal tales of night running.

These narratives explored the ritual form of night running as defined by the veil of darkness – but also its contradictions in an over-illuminated city space.

The night runner, therefore, captures the anxieties of cityness embodied in the tensions of non-belonging, especially regarding social norms. This is in relation to subjects that exist outside acceptable social norms that dictate the night as a time of rest and sleep. The narratives also raised the complexities of taboo and family in the city, where boundaries are blurred because of the freedoms of urban life.

In Mochoma’s column, readers laugh at the antics of this night runner, who is an extrapolation of a rural ritual into the city. But they are also forced to recognise the uneasy kinship ties unveiled in urban living. The night runner, in this form, is seen to overcome the unknowability of the city and instead forces an introspective inquiry into human beings as creatures with secret and uncanny habits.

The popular night runner is thus a subject that has “four eyes”. This is defined by anthropologists Filip de Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart as a person with a heightened sense of sight to see beyond the obvious, to see the shadows, the supernatural that is part of the nocturnal city.

The urban night runner sees the underbelly of the city in the invisible networks that thrive in dingy bars and backstreets. Here, prostitutes, street families and the police create uneasy alliances. In this regard, to night run in the city is to run the night, to rule over the city and its moods.

This reimagination created space for alternative ideas of night running that are less taboo. Mochama’s column, which ran from 2006 to 2012, indicates a sustained national audience for these forms of night running narratives.

Why it matters

My study found that night running as understood in modern times is a duality: the ritual of persons running naked at night and causing havoc, and a symbol of navigating the nocturnal city against the grain.

The rise in popular imaginaries of night running has enabled a public re-contemplation that has perhaps removed stigma from the taboo act. This is seen in the way people playfully use the term to reference night time activities, such as working or leisure. And in the way columnists inject humour and imagination into its references in their narratives.

These competing narratives on night running operate side by side in the public milieu through the media: the earlier ritual practice, the fictionalised narratives, and the co-opted modern appropriations.

It is no wonder that a supposed group of night runners in Homa Bay, another county in western Kenya, publicly demanded that the government allow for the registration and recognition of their union in 2023. And earlier in 2019, the BBC ran a documentary, Meet the Night Runners.

– Kenya’s ‘night running’: how a rural ritual with links to witchcraft became an urban staple
– https://theconversation.com/kenyas-night-running-how-a-rural-ritual-with-links-to-witchcraft-became-an-urban-staple-267333

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kobus Maree, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria

The world of work today, in the 21st century, is far more unpredictable than it was in the 20th century. Jobs come and go, roles change constantly, and automation and digital disruption are the only constants. Many young people will one day do jobs that don’t yet exist or did not exist a few years ago. Change is the new normal.

In this world, career counselling focuses on navigating repeated transitions and developing resilience. It is about employability and designing meaningful work-lives – not about finding a single “job for life”. It recognises that economic activity is part of wider social realities.

At its heart is the search for a sense of purpose.

As a career counsellor and academic, I’ve been through decades of innovation, research, and practice in South Africa and beyond. I have found that the work of US counselling psychologist Mark Savickas offers a useful way to understand how people build successful and purpose-filled careers in changing times.

His career construction theory says that rather than trying to “match” people to the “right” environment, counsellors should see their clients as authors of their own careers, constantly trying to create meaning, clarify their career-life themes, and adapt to an unpredictable world.

In simple terms, this means in practice that career decisions are not just about skills or interests, but about how we make sense of our lives. They are about our values and how we adapt when the world shifts.

In my own work I emphasise that career counselling should draw on people’s “stories” (how they understand themselves) as well as their “scores” (information about them). This is why I developed instruments that blend qualitative and quantitative approaches to exploring a person’s interests.

I also think career counselling should be grounded in context – the world each person lives in. For example, in South Africa, young people face multiple career-life transitions, limited opportunities and systemic constraints, such as uneven and restricted access to quality education and schooling, lack of employment opportunities, and insufficient career counselling support. My work in this South African context emphasises (personal) agency, (career) adaptability, purpose, and hope.

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Read more: Millions of young South Africans are without jobs: what are the answers?

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This goes beyond “what job suits you best”, into a richer, narrative-based process. Clients recount their career-life story, identify “crossroads”, reflect on their values and purpose, and design their next career-life chapters. Essentially, this approach helps them listen to themselves – to their memories, dreams, prospects, values, and emerging self- and career identities – and construct a story that really matters to the self and others.

I also believe that career counsellors should try to help people deal with their disappointments, sadness and pain, and empower them to heal others and themselves.

Tips for career builders

Adaptability is a central theme in current career theory. It has four dimensions:

• concern (about the future)

• control (over your destiny)

• curiosity (exploring possibilities)

• confidence (in your capacity to act).

When you develop these capacities, you are better equipped to manage career-life transitions, redesign your career appropriately and promptly, and achieve a meaningful work-life balance.

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Read more: It’s important to rethink the purpose of university education – a philosopher of education explains why

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I have found that in practice it’s helpful to:

• reflect on key “turning points” in your career-life and earliest memories

• integrate self-understanding with awareness of what’s happening in an industry, technology and the economy

• draw on “stories” (subjective information about yourself) and “scores” (objective data)

• develop a sense of mission (what the job means for you personally) and vision (your contribution to society, not just your job title).

I invite you to reflect deeply on your story, identify the key moments that shaped you, clarify your values, and decide what contribution you want to make. Then (re-)design your way forward, step by step, one transition at a time.

If it’s possible, a gap year can be a good time to do this reflection, learn new skills and develop qualities in yourself, like adaptability.

One of the best pieces of advice for school leavers I’ve ever seen was this: “Get yourself a passport and travel the world.”

How a counsellor can help

One of the key tenets of my work is the belief that career counselling should be beneficial not only to individuals but also to groups of people. It should promote the ideals of social justice, decent work, and the meaningful contribution of all people to society.

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Read more: Millions of young South Africans are jobless: study finds that giving them ‘soft’ skills like networking helps their prospects

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For me, the role of practitioners is not to advise others but to enable them to listen to their inner selves.

To put it another way: in a world of uncertainty, purpose becomes a compass; a North Star. It gives direction. By helping you find the threads that hold your life together and your unique career story, a counsellor helps you take control of your career-life in changing contexts.

There’s also a shift of emphasis in career counselling towards promoting the sustainability of societies and environments on which all livelihoods are dependent.

Career counselling is more vital than ever – not a luxury. It’s not about providing answers but about helping people become adaptive, reflective, resilient and hopeful.

– Choosing a career? In a fast-changing job market, listen to your inner self – counsellor
– https://theconversation.com/choosing-a-career-in-a-fast-changing-job-market-listen-to-your-inner-self-counsellor-268920

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Devin Leigh, Lecturer, Global Studies, University of California, Berkeley

For over three centuries, between 1526 and 1866, at least 10.5 million Africans were forcibly trafficked to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. Over half of them (with known places of departure) left from a 3,000km stretch of the west African coast between what are today Senegal and Gabon.

Scholars trying to uncover the lives of these diasporic Africans are forced to work with historical records produced by their European and American enslavers. These writers mostly ignored Africans’ individual identities. They gave them western names and wrote about them as products belonging to a set of supposedly distinct “ethnic” brands.

Now, however, the curious biography of an 18th-century Jamaican rebel confounds this inherited language. The rebel in question is Apongo, also known as Wager. His biography is a 134-word handwritten passage in the diary of an 18th-century enslaver named Thomas Thistlewood.

As a historian of the Atlantic World in the 1700s, I use the life stories and archives of British enslavers to better understand these times.

My recent study uses Thistlewood’s biography of Apongo as a window into the origins of enslaved west Africans, particularly those from what are today the nations of Ghana and Benin.

Apongo’s story offers an opportunity to better understand the complexities of west African identity and to put a more human face on those enslaved.

Who was Apongo, aka Wager?

Like many enslaved Africans, Apongo had two names. Unfortunately, neither of them completely unlocks his backstory. “Apongo” is probably the rendering of his African name into English script according to how it sounded to his enslavers’ ears. “Wager” is a name Apongo was given by his white “master”. It had nothing to do with his African origins. In fact, it was the name of his enslaver’s ship.

Thistlewood was an English migrant to Jamaica who thought of himself as a gentleman scholar. According to one of his diary entries, Apongo led an extraordinary life defined by twists of fate. He was the prince of a west African state that paid tribute to a larger kingdom called “Dorme”. After subjugating the peoples around him, the king of Dorme seems to have sent Apongo on a diplomatic mission to Cape Coast Castle in what is today Ghana. At the time it was the headquarters of Great Britain’s trading operations on the African coast.

While there, Apongo was apparently surprised, enslaved, and trafficked to Jamaica. At the time, Jamaica was the British Empire’s most profitable colony. This was due to its sugar plantation complex based on racial slavery.

Once in Jamaica, Apongo reunited with the governor he had visited at Cape Coast. He tried to obtain his freedom but, after failing for a number of years, led and died in an uprising called Tacky’s Revolt.

Unfolding over 18 months from 1760 and named after another one of its leaders, Tacky’s Revolt left 60 Whites and over 500 Blacks dead. Another 500 Blacks were deported from the island. It was arguably the largest slave insurrection in the British Empire before the 19th century.

The mystery in the diary

To appreciate why Thistlewood’s diary entry is so valuable, we must know something about the lack of biographical information on enslaved Africans. Almost all came from societies with oral rather than literary traditions. They were then almost universally prohibited from learning to read and write by their European and American “masters”.

Enslavers almost never recorded enslaved people’s birth names. Instead, they gave them numbers for the transatlantic passage and westernised names after they arrived. Rather than recording the specific places they came from, they lumped them together into groups based on broad zones of provenance. For example, the British tended to call Africans who came from today’s Ghana “Coromatees”. Those from today’s Republic of Benin were known as “Popo”. So, despite being just one paragraph long, Thistlewood’s diary entry on Apongo is among the most detailed biographical sketches historians have of a diasporic African in the 1700s.

But it also contains a mystery. The word Thistlewood used to describe Apongo’s origins, “Dorme” or perhaps “Dome”, is unfamiliar. Since 1989, when historian Douglas Hall first wrote about Apongo, scholars have assumed it was a reference to Dahomey. This was a militarised west African kingdom in the southern part of today’s Benin.

Yet scholars never defended that assumption. Recently, it was called into question by historian Vincent Brown in Tacky’s Revolt, the first book-length study of the slave uprising Apongo helped lead. Enslaved people from what is today Ghana have a well-documented history of leading slave revolts in the Americas, particularly in British Jamaica. Brown suggested that it made more sense if “Dorme” referred to an unidentified state in that region.

Now, in my study, I have built on this work to make two related arguments. Uncovering three contemporary texts that use variant spellings of the word “Dorme” to refer to Dahomey, I argue that Thistlewood’s term was, indeed, a contemporary word for “Dahomey” in 18th-century Jamaica and that Dahomey was almost certainly the kingdom he had in mind. Moreover, I demonstrate that it was both possible and reasonable for a diplomatic mission to have taken place between Dahomey and Cape Coast in Apongo’s time. In fact, such a mission actually did take place in 1779, when King Kpengla of Dahomey sent one of his linguists to Cape Coast as an emissary.

But none of this resolves the central question. The evidence of “Coromantee” involvement in Tacky’s Revolt and other Jamaican slave rebellions – including the presence of Ghanaian names among rebels and the statements of historians at the time – is overwhelming. Additionally, although Africans from Dahomey made the trip to Cape Coast Castle during the 18th century, visitors from states in today’s Ghana were certainly much more common.

Ultimately, to argue that Apongo had origins in Dahomey, one must explain how a subject of that kingdom came to be a general in a rebellion largely characterised by Ghanaian leadership.

A question of origins

What are we to make of Apongo’s origins? One answer is that Thistlewood was wrong. Apongo was “Coromantee” and we should think of him as Ghanaian. Thistlewood merely associated him with Dahomey because that was the militarised African kingdom best known to Europeans at the time.

Another possibility is that Thistlewood was correct. Apongo was “Popo” and so we should write about him as Beninese. Thistlewood simply relayed a fact of Apongo’s life and was unconcerned with questions that now preoccupy us, such as how Apongo came to lead a rebellion that appears characterised by “Coromantee” leadership.

A third answer is that Apongo’s identity was more complex than this inherited “ethnic” language allows. Perhaps he was someone who traversed and was fluent in the cultural and political worlds of both Ghana and Benin. If that’s the case, then perhaps his story reminds us that at least these two adjacent regions were not as distinct as early-modern writers claimed and later colonial and national borders supposed.

The search for Apongo is just a small part of historians’ larger, ongoing, and collaborative work to recreate the lives of Africans taken in the transatlantic slave trade.

While asking these questions requires us to work with sources written by enslavers, we do so in the hope that we can ultimately see beyond them. Our reward is better understanding how Africans’ forgotten perspectives shaped the history of our world.

– Apongo was a rebel leader in Jamaica – a diary entry sheds light on his west African origins
– https://theconversation.com/apongo-was-a-rebel-leader-in-jamaica-a-diary-entry-sheds-light-on-his-west-african-origins-268014

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Victoria Gibbon, Professor in Biological Anthropology, Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology, University of Cape Town

Museums and universities around the world hold vast collections of cultural artefacts, artworks, objectified belongings and even ancestral remains. Many were not freely given but taken during colonial times, through force, manipulation, theft or violence. For decades, they have sat in storerooms and display cases, classified into categories like anthropology, natural history or ethnology, separated from the people and communities to whom they once belonged.

In recent years, there has been growing recognition that these collections carry painful legacies.

Calls for their return have become part of a global conversation about decolonisation, justice and healing. In 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron produced a report which called for a new ethics of humanity, setting off a new willingness to return African artworks and material culture. But African calls for restitution were made at least five decades earlier following former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mobutu Sese Seko’s address to the UN.

In all these engagements, two words are often used: repatriation and restitution.

At first glance they may seem to mean the same thing, and both involve the return of something. But as South African scholars, working in the fields of history, museum studies and human biology, we argue that the difference between these terms is not just semantic. The choice of word reflects deeper politics of justice, recognition and repair.

In our recent article we explained how we see this difference, and why the work of restitution restores people’s power over their future, and gives them a sense of agency. We argue that, for its part, repatriation has come to represent something less concerned with community restoration and has more to do with an administrative and logistical exercise.

We argue that, unlike repatriation, restitution speaks directly to justice.

Repatriation: the language of return

The word repatriation comes from the Latin patria, meaning “fatherland”. Traditionally, it refers to the return of a person or their remains to their country of origin. Governments often use this term for the logistical and legal transfer of people, artworks, or ancestral remains across national borders.

In countries that were settled by colonisers, like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, repatriation has become the dominant language. This is partly due to specific laws and frameworks. In the US, for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums to return human remains and cultural items to Indigenous communities in a proactive manner.

In New Zealand, the national museum Te Papa plays a central role in repatriating Māori and Moriori ancestral remains from overseas institutions before returning them to local communities. In Australia, the choice of repatriation by activists, communities and scholars also sought strategically to draw a connection with the return of the remains of fallen soldiers.

In these contexts, repatriation is often framed as a process of giving back. States or museums take the lead, and communities receive.

Some Indigenous scholars and activists have challenged this framing, pointing out its patriarchal and statist overtones. They have introduced the concept of “rematriation”, signalling a return to “Mother Earth” rooted in Indigenous feminist perspectives, spirituality and community balance.

In South Africa, too, the term repatriation has been used, especially when the state arranged for the return of remains from abroad, as in the case of the return of Sarah Baartman from France.

Baartman was a 19th century Khoe (Indigenous South African) woman put on display in freak shows in Europe. Her body was later dissected by scientists within the realm of racial science and made to enter the systems of collecting and exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. After being turned into an international symbol of the oppression of black women, Baartman also became a focus of claims for return made by Khoe and other activists and social movements in South Africa.

Repatriation has also been used for the return of the remains of ex-combatants and other patriots.

But unease began to grow. Was this language adequate for the deep work of justice and healing that communities were calling for? Or was it more concerned with national prestige than with community restoration?

Restitution: politics of justice beyond the transaction

Restitution is about returning something to its rightful owner, not simply as a transfer of property, but as an act of recognition, repair and healing.

Restitution is not just an event, like handing over an artefact in a ceremony. It is a process, time-consuming, emotional, and often painful. It involves research into how items were acquired, conversations with descendant communities, and decisions about how to care for or honour what has been returned. It recognises that the belongings taken were not just curiosities or objects, but were tied to community, and to language, ceremony and identity.

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Read more: Looting of African heritage: a powerful new book explores the damage done by colonial theft

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In many cases, ancestral remains were classified and objectified as human remains and specimens, stripping them of their humanity. Restitution, by contrast, restores them as ancestors with dignity and agency.

Restitutionary work: healing and reconnection

Our research uses the phrase “restitutionary work” to describe the labour involved. This work goes far beyond diplomacy, logistics and transport. It includes:

• Acknowledgment of injustice: Recognising that items were wrongly taken, whether through violence, coercion, or theft.

• De-objectification: Treating ancestral remains and cultural belongings not as human remains and museum objects but as ancestors or cultural treasures.

• Community involvement: Ensuring that descendant groups and local communities decide what happens after return, in conversation with museums and national governments.

• Healing processes: Creating spaces for mourning, ceremony and closure.

• New futures: Seeing restitution not just as recovering the past but as opening pathways for cultural renewal and social justice.

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Read more: San and Khoe skeletons: how a South African university sought to restore dignity and redress the past

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For example, South Africa’s land restitution programme has shown that restitution is not simply about restoring what once was. It is about creating conditions for justice today and possibilities for tomorrow.

Similarly, cultural restitution is less about putting things “back where they came from” and more about empowering communities to reconnect with their heritage in ways that matter today.

Why words matter

The distinction between repatriation and restitution is not academic nitpicking. Words shape power. If return is framed as repatriation, the emphasis is often on the giver, the returner, in the form of the state or museum, granting something back. If it is framed as restitution, the emphasis shifts to the claimant, to the community asserting rights and demanding justice.

Restitution is not about recovering a lost past. That past cannot be restored exactly as it was. Instead, it is about creating new futures built on justice, dignity and respect. For communities around the world still living with the legacies of colonial dispossession, that distinction matters deeply.

– Looted African belongings must be returned: is it repatriation or restitution? The words we use matter
– https://theconversation.com/looted-african-belongings-must-be-returned-is-it-repatriation-or-restitution-the-words-we-use-matter-268710