The Conversation – Page 4 – MIL Africa Engine

September 22, 2026

South Africa’s minibus taxi industry has lessons for policymakers on how informal systems work

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi, Senior Researcher, UNESCO ‘Oliver Tambo’ Chair of Human Rights, University of Fort Hare, University of Fort Hare

Two recent books draw on more than a decade of research into South Africa’s minibus taxi industry. A Fork in the Road? The Formalisation of South Africa’s Minibus Taxi Industry and Blood on the Tar, Hope on the Horizon: South Africa’s Minibus Taxi Industry in Global Perspective examine formalisation, labour precarity, regulation, governance, violence, mobility and social justice. Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi sets out why the two books raise a question: whose knowledge counts when attempting to understand and transform African institutions?

Why do labels matter?

South Africa’s minibus taxi industry is often described through terms such as “informal”, “unregulated”, “illegal” or “difficult to govern”. These descriptions capture some realities. The industry has serious problems, like working conditions, exploitation, violence and conflict.

The labels used to describe the taxi industry can also obscure another reality: that it contains extensive knowledge, organisation and social practices developed by the people who work in and depend on it.

Taxi drivers know their routes. Operators understand the economic pressures of the industry. Marshals, who manage taxi ranks, understand how to coordinate taxis, control queues and direct passenger flows. Commuters understand where the system works and where it fails. Communities know what inaccessible transport means for their everyday lives.

The question is not whether this knowledge should replace scientific, technical or governmental knowledge. It should not. The question is why it is so often treated as less authoritative.

This is where African philosophy and epistemology – the study of knowledge and how it is produced and validated – become particularly relevant.

Take the word “informal”.

In South Africa, the minibus taxi industry is routinely described as part of the informal economy. Yet “informal” can easily become synonymous with being unorganised, backward, temporary or deficient.

An institution can be informal without being disorganised.

What are your books about?

The books span sociology, politics, law, social work and infrastructure. They place the taxi industry within broader questions of mobility, inequality, governance and justice.

In Blood on the Tar, Hope on the Horizon I argue that the problems confronting the industry cannot simply be understood as criminality or disorder but must be connected to historical deregulation, economic pressures and failures of governance.

A Fork in the Road examines the formalisation of South Africa’s minibus taxi industry against its historical development, labour relations and relationship with the state.

Rather than treating formalisation as a straightforward technical process, it raises questions about what is gained, what is lost and whose interests are served when an informal institution is brought under greater state regulation.

The industry has associations, social networks, rules, norms, hierarchies and systems of coordination. Its organisation may not always resemble that of the formal institutions through which the state prefers to govern, but this does not mean that organisation is absent.

This distinction matters.

If policymakers begin with the assumption that informal institutions are simply incomplete versions of formal ones, they may overlook the social systems that already make those institutions work.

What approach would be better?

Instead of asking how to formalise the taxi industry, we might ask what formalisation means in this particular African context. And then, what knowledge already exists within the industry that should inform its transformation.

Formalisation programmes have not always changed what workers experience.

My research into the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme examined its impact on precarious working conditions in the minibus taxi industry in Johannesburg. The programme was designed to phase out old vehicles. It showed that replacing vehicles or introducing formal regulations does not automatically make jobs safer. A policy can change the physical infrastructure of an industry without transforming its social relations.

Institutions are lived and reproduced by people.

Consider a taxi driver who has spent 20 years working in the industry. That driver may not have a university qualification in transport planning, economics or sociology. But they may know a lot from experience.

They may know why passengers choose particular routes, how informal agreements operate, how disputes are managed, how regulations affect work and why certain government interventions succeed while others fail.

A marshal may possess detailed knowledge of how a rank functions. A commuter may know that a technically completed road is still unusable. An operator may understand economic pressures that do not appear in official statistics.

Such knowledge should not automatically be treated as truth. Experience can be partial, contradictory or self-interested. But neither should it be dismissed simply because it was not produced in a university, government office or consultancy.

Recognising people as knowers does not mean accepting everything they say. It means recognising that they have something to contribute to the production of knowledge.

What about the question of invisibility?

Millions of South Africans depend on the industry for mobility, yet the people who make that mobility possible can remain largely invisible in public policy debates.

Workers may be invisible not only as workers, but also as producers of knowledge.

Their experiences become data collected by someone else. Their stories become evidence interpreted by someone else. Their realities become policy problems defined by someone else.

Mobility determines whether people can reach work, education, healthcare and other opportunities. A transport system can therefore reproduce or reduce inequality.

And if we want to understand that inequality, we need to listen to those who experience it.

African philosophy offers another useful perspective through ubuntu, particularly the work of South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose.

Ubuntu is often reduced to the phrase “I am because we are”. Its deeper philosophical significance concerns relationality: the idea that human existence and flourishing are profoundly connected to relationships with others.

This provides an interesting lens through which to understand the taxi industry.

What is the key take-away from your work?

That Africa should not merely be a place where theories developed elsewhere are applied. African realities can also produce theoretical knowledge.

A Fork in the Road? asks us to reconsider how we understand formalisation, informality, labour and the taxi industry’s place in South Africa’s economy and society.

Blood on the Tar, Hope on the Horizon connects the taxi industry to wider questions of mobility, justice, citizenship, governance and structural inequality. Its comparative perspective also demonstrates that the challenges facing informal public transport are not uniquely South African.

Together, the books suggest that the taxi industry is not simply a transport problem waiting to be solved.

It is also a site from which we can learn about South African society.

It reveals the limits of simple distinctions between formal and informal.

It exposes the difficulties of state-centred approaches to governance.

It shows how social networks can simultaneously create resilience and inequality.

It demonstrates how workers can be economically indispensable while institutionally marginalised.

And it shows why lived experience matters when designing policy.

African philosophy therefore has something important to contribute to contemporary debates about South Africa’s development.

– South Africa’s minibus taxi industry has lessons for policymakers on how informal systems work
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-minibus-taxi-industry-has-lessons-for-policymakers-on-how-informal-systems-work-291033

September 22, 2026

Ethiopia’s armed opposition unites against Abiy Ahmed: 5 reads on the country’s political struggles

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Julius Maina, Regional Editor East Africa, The Conversation

Seven Ethiopian armed groups have announced a new alliance aimed at overthrowing the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

The so-called Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival was unveiled in September 2026. It arrives at a time when Abiy is grappling with armed conflict and deepening political and ethnic divisions. There is fighting in the Amhara region between federal forces and local insurgents. Meanwhile, rising tensions in Tigray have sparked fears of renewed war. These are only two flashpoints in a sea of political divisions that war, elections and national dialogue have so far failed to heal.

The Conversation Africa has published extensively on Ethiopia’s attempts to hold the country together. Here are five essential reads.

National dialogue struggles to bridge the divide

Ethiopia launched a national dialogue process in 2022 after a stop to a two-year war in Tigray. The process aims to address the grievances that have led to decades of political instability and violence.

Some political actors have been left out of the process, however. They include armed groups like the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the Amhara Fano. Yet they are central to ongoing conflicts. They have now become part of the alliance of seven groups against Abiy’s government.

In a recent paper, Dereje Melese Liyew examined why the dialogue process is facing a crisis. He explains its weaknesses and what this means for Ethiopia’s efforts to resolve political conflicts without resorting to violence.

Battle for democracy

Abiy’s arrival in power in 2018 brought hopes of more political freedom. Political prisoners were released and restrictions on the media were eased.

But a stable democratic settlement didn’t follow. And the interventions weren’t Ethiopia’s first attempt at democratic governance. A culture of solving political differences with conflict, the absence of strong political institutions and ethnic polarisation have led to disagreements about the Ethiopian state.

Terefe Gebreyesus has examined what Ethiopia needs to get democracy right. In his view, four things are missing: sustained economic growth, political elites committed to democratic rules, independent political institutions, and international pressure.

Ethiopia’s past

One reason building a common political future has been so difficult is that Ethiopians do not share a common interpretation of their past.

Political movements have repeatedly drawn on competing ideas about the state, ethnicity, marginalisation and national identity. These histories shape present-day arguments over how Ethiopia should be organised.

Ethiopia needs a new rallying point instead of recycling its painful past, argues Mohammed Girma. He notes that returning to contested historical narratives can be divisive. Ethiopia instead needs a shared political project that can bring its different communities together.

Changing leaders won’t fix everything

Debates about Ethiopia’s political future frequently focus on the enormous power of the prime minister. Would term limits help address this?

Under Ethiopia’s system, prime ministers get their authority from parliament. They remain in office for as long as a majority in parliament is willing to support them. There are no fixed term limits.

However, limiting an individual leader’s time in office cannot by itself make democratic institutions stronger. The deeper issue is how political power is organised and constrained, says Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam, who has studied Ethiopia’s constitutional design and law.

He argues that meaningful political competition and mechanisms that make the government accountable matter alongside rules for how long a leader can remain in office.

What unites Ethiopia?

Amid political fragmentation, Ethiopian leaders have sought symbols capable of creating a shared sense of national purpose. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has been one of the most prominent.

The massive hydroelectric project was formally initiated by Meles Zenawi. He served as president of Ethiopia from 1991 to 1995, and as prime minister from 1995 until his death in 2012. And as early as the 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie recognised the potential of a dam for Ethiopia’s developmental needs.

But can a development project create political unity? Namhla Thando Matshanda notes that the dam offers a rare potential rallying point in a country where competing visions of national identity have repeatedly fuelled political tensions.

– Ethiopia’s armed opposition unites against Abiy Ahmed: 5 reads on the country’s political struggles
– https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-armed-opposition-unites-against-abiy-ahmed-5-reads-on-the-countrys-political-struggles-292619

September 21, 2026

A decade on, Somalia’s federal pact benefits elites and al-Shabaab – but it fails the people

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Nisar Majid, Research associate, London School of Economics and Political Science

The federal government of Somalia was established in 2013 after years of peace and reconciliation talks, held in the context of a famine in 2011 and the rise of militant Islam in the form of al-Shabaab. It was the first permanent central government in Somalia since the start of the civil war in 1991.

Peace agreements and political settlements do not necessarily transform a country’s development prospects. In Somalia and the region, conflict and political instability continue. The federal government still has limited reach and authority, and al-Shabaab is still entrenched.

Political elites at federal and state levels are seen to be corrupt and at odds with each other.

I have studied Somalia’s political economy for over 20 years. In 2016 I co-authored the book Famine in Somalia, and since 2018 I have led two research programmes examining Somalia’s persistent conflict and political instability.

Over the past three years, my work with the PeaceRep Somalia programme at the London School of Economics has sought to deepen understanding of this situation in order to better inform policy responses. The work brings together researchers based inside and outside the country. We have conducted several hundred interviews across the country and in the Somali diaspora, and analysed our data according to themes.

Two themes stand out:

checkpoint governance, or the control of movement – goods and people – by different political authorities
the control, mismanagement and manipulation of international aid.

We found that political elites and their business allies at both federal and member state levels benefit from corruption associated with international assistance. They also benefit from the rents generated at the various “chokepoints” (seaports and road-based checkpoints) along Somalia’s transport corridors.

At the same time, the international community advances its own priorities on counterterrorism, anti-migration, development and humanitarian objectives. And al-Shabaab taxes, regulates and extracts from the entire complex.

I argue that Somalia has settled into a situation which brings questionable benefits to the majority of the public, exploits displaced people, and positions al-Shabaab as a credible alternative to the official government.

Somalia’s chokepoints

Somalia has the second longest coastline in Africa – about 3,000km. The country’s major and minor seaports and landing beaches act as both avenues and chokepoints for international trade. The main export is livestock. Imports include food, electrical and electronic goods, clothes and construction materials.

This trade infrastructure links markets in the Gulf and Asia with those in the Horn and east Africa. Taxes are extracted at the entry points – including Berbera, Bosasso, Mogadishu and Kismayo ports – and on the interior roads. These taxes, formal and informal, make up a big part of the revenue generated in the country.

The recipients of these revenues include the federal government, the more autonomous federal member states – notably Jubbaland and Puntland – and al-Shabaab. This enables all these players to continue as they are.

Our research has shown how control over chokepoints has been central to political power in Somalia. It also shapes alliances between local elites and external actors like Ethiopia and Kenya.

Somalia’s business-political elites and al-Shabaab continue to profit from the way things are. Meanwhile large proportions of the population see little benefit or, in the case of internally displaced people, see aid diverted.

Manipulation of external aid

Somalia receives significant amounts of international aid for humanitarian, development and security needs. Since 2010, Overseas Development Aid has averaged US$1.6 billion annually, reaching approximately US$2.5 billion in 2024. The aid is channelled through project contracts – typically for hiring staff, construction, security, vehicle hire, offices and accommodation. All of these are highly susceptible to aid diversion and corruption.

One of the worst forms is the exploitation of internally displaced people, who are some of the main recipients of assistance. This is typically carried out by chains of “gatekeepers” who claim some of the humanitarian cash to allow access to camps. Religious leaders have spoken out against this practice.

Development aid, which supports a range of activities from institution building to public services, is no less subject to capture and abuse but is much less publicly exposed. This is partly because development actors are much better able to hide their dirty laundry. This is particularly important currently as, with the global reductions in humanitarian aid, the World Bank continues to run a large programme supporting state institutions and social protection. The security sector is even more opaque but just as susceptible to elite capture.

The core issue for me is the lack of acknowledgement that aid is diverted systematically.

The result is that external aid givers advance their own priorities but do not fully acknowledge or systematically address their role in the diversion of resources that sustain this predatory system.

The losers in this arrangement are the general population. Many see al-Shabaab as a credible alternative to the official government leadership, incumbent or opposition.

What should be done?

International donors must not just engage with elites. They must identify, engage with and support inclusive Somali-led dialogue processes. Engagement must create space for diverse voices and interests across society (including al-Shabaab). It must hear what civic networks, women’s groups, business communities and religious scholars have to say.

The humanitarian system is in a global reset. This is a process of reform driven by aid cuts. In Somalia, this reset must include acknowledgement of systemic barriers to change and address some of its perverse internal incentives, which continue to enable corruption and aid diversion.

– A decade on, Somalia’s federal pact benefits elites and al-Shabaab – but it fails the people
– https://theconversation.com/a-decade-on-somalias-federal-pact-benefits-elites-and-al-shabaab-but-it-fails-the-people-291192

September 21, 2026

Young South Africans move for work and opportunity. What happens to their health when they do?

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Carren Ginsburg, Senior Researcher in Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand

Moving between rural homes, towns and cities is a normal part of life for many South Africans. Young adults often move in search of work or education, sometimes settling elsewhere for long periods and sometimes moving repeatedly between rural homes and urban destinations. These patterns of temporary and circular migration are particularly prevalent in South Africa. They have deep roots in the country’s labour system and apartheid spatial planning.

But changing the place where someone lives can also change the conditions that shape their health: whether they have a job, what they eat, the environment they live in and the healthcare they can access. Despite high levels of internal mobility in South Africa, we still know relatively little about what happens to people’s health when they move and spend more time in urban areas.

This is the question behind the Migrant Health Follow-Up Study. Since 2018, a team of public health and social science researchers from the South African Medical Research Council/Wits Agincourt Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand and Brown University in the US have been following about 3,000 young adults aged 18 to 40 from the Agincourt sub-district in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga in the rural north-east of the country. The study compares the health of young adults who remain at home with those who move away, including people who later return or move repeatedly between destinations and their rural homes.

Using home visits and telephone interviews over five rounds approximately one year apart, the research team gathered information on migration, education, employment, household characteristics, health and health service use. Health measures included general health, chronic conditions, diet, depression risk and resilience.

During home visits, blood pressure, height and weight were measured, and HIV status was determined through dried blood spots. Following the same people over time helped to distinguish between the migrants’ pre-migration characteristics and changes that may occur after migration.

Overall the study found that migration was widespread and associated with changes in health, but this relationship varied by the health outcome, and was shaped by both personal characteristics and circumstances in destinations.

This shows that migration cannot be treated as a single health exposure with a uniformly positive or negative effect. Who moves, where they move, and how long they remain away all matter.

These insights help clarify the complex relationships between migration, urbanisation and health. This study can help address how migration and livelihood changes may affect chronic health conditions and their treatment, with policy implications for South Africa.

The study findings suggest that policies should focus on how to reduce the health risks that can accompany movement while recognising the opportunities migration can create. In turn, these results encourage policy and planning that improves migrants’ integration in destinations, by improving access to services and economic inclusion.

The differences between those who go and those who stay

Over the observation period, about a third of the sample lived continuously in destinations outside the Agincourt study area, while about a third remained within the Agincourt sub-district. The remaining participants had more dynamic movement patterns. Some moved away for the first time, some returned after living elsewhere, and others moved repeatedly between destinations and rural homes in a pattern of circular migration.

The province of Gauteng, the country’s economic engine, about 500km from Agincourt, was the most common destination. A substantial share of moves also took place within Mpumalanga province, some to the city of Mbombela (Nelspruit) and the industrial towns of Witbank, Middelburg and Secunda. Internal migration included a range of destinations and repeated movement over time.

At the time of making a move, migrants also differed from those who stayed behind in several important ways. In the study, migrants tended to be younger and more often were men. Retrospective information collected in the survey also indicated that migration was increasingly likely among younger cohorts of women. Migrants had higher levels of education and fewer chronic conditions, and appeared to be more resilient, as indicted by a psychological index of “grit”.

These findings are consistent with the well-known “healthy migrant hypothesis”: people who migrate are often healthier than their non-migrant counterparts at the point when they move.

Migration and employment are closely linked

For many young adults in rural South Africa, moving is a livelihood strategy. Migrants in our study were far more likely than those who remained at home to report being employed. On average, about two thirds of migrants were working in destinations, while more than half of those who remained at home were unemployed and looking for work.

The relationship became particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Job losses resulted in some people returning to the Agincourt sub-district. Employment levels recovered in the post-COVID period.

For those who found work, migration could also benefit households in rural areas because migrants were able to send money or goods home and contribute to household living conditions.

The health effects are mixed, not uniformly harmful

Our findings so far do not support a simple story in which migration makes people less healthy. The prevalence of chronic conditions increased over the duration of the study among both migrants and non-migrants, but the increases were lower among migrants, suggesting that some of the health advantage seen at the time of migration persisted.

At the same time, living in urban areas can introduce particular health risks. There, migrants consumed processed food more frequently and had a higher chance of abdominal obesity. Other risks were unevenly distributed. Our more recent work, for example, suggests that migration to urban areas may increase blood pressure, particularly among women. But the reasons for higher blood pressure among migrant women are not obvious. It is possible that migration may be especially stressful for women, which could be contributing to higher blood pressure.

The net effects of migration on health over time are therefore still being established.

Plan for mobility rather than treating it as the problem

The findings point to the need for attention to continuity of healthcare as people move between places, as well as to the urban conditions that shape diet, blood pressure and longer-term chronic disease risk.

This also means planning around the reality that many people’s lives span more than one place. Internal migrants contribute to destination economies while remaining connected to their places of origin. Health services, urban planning, employment, housing and social protection need to account for these patterns of residence.

– Young South Africans move for work and opportunity. What happens to their health when they do?
– https://theconversation.com/young-south-africans-move-for-work-and-opportunity-what-happens-to-their-health-when-they-do-289182

September 20, 2026

Teenage girls may know how to prevent pregnancy – that doesn’t mean they have the power to do it

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Deevia Bhana, Professor Gender and Childhood Sexuality, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Teenage pregnancy is often explained in simple terms. Girls are said to lack knowledge about contraception, take sexual risks or make poor choices.

But is it that simple?

For almost three decades, I have been researching how gender and sexuality come to matter in the lives of young people in South Africa.

My collaborators and I are currently working on The Teenage Pregnancy Project: Classroom, Cradles and Care and related projects on teenage fathers and caregivers. These projects seek to examine how pregnancy and parenting is experienced and understood by teenage fathers, mothers and their caregivers. The research is conducted mainly in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa with linked projects in Zimbabwe. It involves interviews and group discussions including the use of visual methods to understand teenage pregnancy.

The research findings tell a more complicated story than the usual explanation. It’s that poverty, unequal relationships and institutional barriers narrow girls’ choices about contraception, with dramatic consequences.

Our findings matter because they shift attention to the socio-cultural and structural conditions that shape what choices are actually possible. Decisions about sex, contraception and pregnancy are made within gendered relationships and economic and institutional constraints that may limit what young women can do.

Understanding teenage pregnancy in this way changes the question from “Why did she make that choice?” to “What made some choices easier, harder or impossible?”

Situating girls’ choices within gendered, economic and institutional environments underlines the complexity of the interventions needed. These include involving families, schools and comprehensive sexuality education.

Relationships tied to money and survival

Our Zimbabwe study involved 26 teenage mothers aged 16 to 19 from Shamva district in Mashonaland Central Province. All had experienced pregnancy while attending school. Our South African study drew on interviews with young mothers aged 15 to 18 and forms part of the Classrooms, Cradles and Care project. Together, the studies show what can happen both before pregnancy and after it becomes visible.

In our Zimbabwean research we used the term “reproductive pipeline” to describe how poverty, unequal gender relations, family expectations, sexual coercion and inadequate reproductive healthcare can combine to push girls towards pregnancy and early motherhood.

The idea of a pipeline does not mean that girls have no agency. The girls we spoke to made decisions, resisted, negotiated, sought contraception and imagined different futures for themselves. But they did so within circumstances that could sharply narrow what was possible.

Many of the girls in our South African study knew what they wanted for their futures. They wanted to finish school, find work and delay motherhood. Some knew how pregnancy could be prevented and actively sought contraception.

But wanting to avoid pregnancy and having the power and resources to do so are not the same thing.

One of the young women in our Zimbabwe study began a relationship while she was still at school. Her boyfriend, who was older than her, was already thinking about marriage. She was not. As she put it:

I was still too young and wanted to finish school, get a job … I did not know I would get pregnant.

Her experience captured a central problem in how teenage pregnancy is discussed. People tend to ask why a girl made a particular choice. Less is asked about the conditions in which that choice had to be made.

Poverty shaped intimate relationships in powerful ways. In Zimbabwe, Grace had lost both parents and was living with her elderly grandmother. Food was scarce. She explained that she entered a relationship partly because her boyfriend sometimes gave her small amounts of money:

If he could give me even 50 cents, at least I would buy whatever it could get me. I just needed the money.

Another participant, Anesu, wanted to return to her grandmother’s home. She was living with her sister and she could see that life was difficult. Unable to afford the bus fare, she entered a relationship hoping her boyfriend would give her the money. Instead, she said, he forced her to have sex and she became pregnant.

Contraception does not guarantee control

The studies’ findings also challenge the assumption that information alone prevents pregnancy.

Mutsai, in Zimbabwe, knew that condoms could prevent pregnancy. She even had condoms available. But her boyfriend refused to use them.

Girls described relationships in which older or more powerful male partners influenced whether sex happened and whether contraception was used. Some talked about how age differences, male authority, economic dependency, fear and the threat of social shame constrained their capacity to act.

Healthcare can create another barrier. Zimbabwean participants described being unable to afford transport costs to reach services, contraceptive shortages and judgment from healthcare workers. One participant could not afford US$2 for a contraceptive implant. Another could not raise the US$1 needed to travel to a government hospital and US$1 to return home. One sought contraceptive pills at a clinic but said she was required to buy a pregnancy test first.

What needs to change

Based on our findings, we make a number of recommendations.

The first is that reducing teenage pregnancy requires more than telling girls to abstain from sex or giving them information about contraception.

Secondly, sexual and reproductive healthcare must be accessible, affordable, adolescent-friendly and non-judgmental.

Thirdly, sexuality education needs to go beyond the biology of pregnancy prevention and create space to discuss love, relationships, consent, coercion, gender inequality, material dependence and the power differences that can make negotiating contraception difficult.

Fourth, boys and men must be part of the response. Pregnancy prevention cannot remain girls’ responsibility when male partners can refuse condoms, pressure girls into sex or exercise greater control over reproductive decisions – then escape much of the blame when pregnancy occurs.

Fifth, reproductive health cannot be separated from poverty and material inequality.

Sixth, schools, families and communities also need to support girls’ educational aspirations after pregnancy rather than turning young mothers into warnings about failed girlhood.

– Teenage girls may know how to prevent pregnancy – that doesn’t mean they have the power to do it
– https://theconversation.com/teenage-girls-may-know-how-to-prevent-pregnancy-that-doesnt-mean-they-have-the-power-to-do-it-290007

September 17, 2026

Africa’s Red Sea states face growing risks as Houthi rebels expand their reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The risks for Africa

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

Red Sea states

Egypt

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

Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea

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

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

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

Somalia and Sudan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competition for political control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s to be done

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

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

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

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

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

September 17, 2026

Kofi Agawu: the scholar who showed the world that African music isn’t just about rhythm

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

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

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

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

The invention of African rhythm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everyone agreed.

Groove theories

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

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

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

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

Western tonality as a colonising force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 17, 2026

Academics in South Africa have to focus on ‘outputs’: what’s lost when other work’s not counted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you know how widespread the problem is?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the consequences?

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

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

What should change?

Our most recent paper proposes concrete shifts at three levels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 15, 2026

Have South Africans always been hostile to migrants? Historians map a chequered history

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Zoe Groves, Lecturer in Modern Global, Colonial and Postcolonial History, University of Leicester

Anti-immigrant violence began to sweep across South Africa once again in March 2026. Over the following months an estimated 56,000 Malawians and 115,000 Zimbabweans were forced to flee their homes. At least 11 foreign nationals were killed.

It took the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa some months to condemn the violence.

The anti-migrant mass protests have been led by groups including March and March and Operation Dudula. The anti-immigrant groups blamed undocumented African migrants for crime, unemployment and inadequate public services, and set “deadlines” for them to leave the country. The slogan abahambe (“they must leave” in isiZulu) was repeated during burglaries and sexual assaults.

In response, governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi paid for tens of thousands of their citizens to return home, and asked the International Criminal Court to intervene.

The South African government under an African National Congress led coalition deported 19,000 migrants in just a few months. It also effectively condoned the violence, publicly shaking hands with protest leaders.

Commentators such as Nesrine Malik and William Shoki have framed the violence as supplanting the post-1994 “rainbow nation” consensus. This was a phrase coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to invoke a sense of unity in South Africa’s diverse population after nearly five decades under the segregationist policies of apartheid.

For his part, Ramaphosa has insisted that “quite a bit of the violence” was “being propelled from outside South Africa”. He did not provide evidence.

We are historians of southern African migration. Our research shows that today’s anti-immigrant activists, and the politicians who embrace them, have tapped into sentiments more than a century deep. Since the emergence of the African National Congress in 1912, nationalists and pro-democracy advocates have often harboured antipathy towards foreign migrants. They saw them primarily as competitors who undermined Black South Africans’ ability to get decent jobs with decent wages.

Still, the 20th century also presented pivotal moments when Black immigrants and South African activists successfully joined forces to resist racial and economic oppression. Those moments seem long forgotten today.

In this article we look back at that history to show how today’s anti-immigrant violence is not an aberration in South African history. But it’s also not the country’s only possible path.

Roots of the ‘rainbow nation’

South Africa’s population encompasses the descendants of British and Dutch colonisers, Asian workers, and the indigenous African population as well as Africans with origins outside South Africa’s present-day borders.

This diversity reflects the country’s history of slavery, colonialism and white settlement by the British and the Dutch. It also reflects labour recruitment programmes dating back to the mid-19th century:

Indian indentured labourers brought to work on sugar plantations from the 1860s
Chinese workers recruited to work on the gold mines during the early 20th century
migrant workers from across southern Africa, particularly Malawi and Mozambique, recruited by mining companies. Others made their own way to farms and urban jobs from the late 19th century onwards.

Freedom struggles and immigration politics

The African National Congress was formed in 1912 when South Africa was still under British colonial rule to defend the voting rights and land claims of Black South Africans. It advocated for full equality in an increasingly oppressive society.

Mining and farming industries used migrant labour to keep Africans’ wages low. As a result, some of the founders of the African National Congress called for the deportation of Indian, Chinese and African immigrant workers. Anti-immigrant demands came from across the early ANC’s political spectrum – from moderates to communists.

Henry Selby Msimang, a moderate member of the ANC executive, complained in the mid-1920s that South Africa had become a

dumping ground for the unskilled workers of the African continent.

He called for the restriction of Mozambican immigrants, and advocated for a South African “race consciousness” that explicitly excluded Malawians.

In December 1926 a large anti-Malawian riot in Johannesburg killed six and injured 25. A petition promoted by Msimang and the ANC’s pro-communist general secretary, Eddie Khaile, subsequently demanded the deportation of all Malawians and Zimbabweans from South Africa.

But there were also pro-migrant voices in the ANC. They included two former ANC general secretaries, Sol Plaatje and Richard Victor Selope Thema, and a leading ANC lawyer, Richard Msimang. Msimang denounced Khaile for retreating “behind the barbed wires of racialism and provincialism”.

Shop-floor solidarity

For their part, Black labour migrants in South Africa fought for economic justice alongside Black South Africans. The most important example was Clements Kadalie, the Malawian leader of the first major Black trade union in southern Africa, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU).

The ICU won wage increases in Cape Town and Bloemfontein, defeated segregationist plans in Johannesburg and Durban, and enjoyed several legal victories. These included overturning deportation orders against Kadalie, among other measures.

Defending the mobility of all workers, the union recognised that any system of free movement had to be underpinned by minimum wages; pay was undercut by bosses, not immigrants.

Some within the ICU decried immigration from countries outside the British Empire, such as Mozambique. But in defending the free movement of workers throughout British colonial possessions, the union offered an expansive solidarity that challenged narrower ideas of South African nationalism.

This spirit carried into the second world war years. High demand for workers combined with labour leaders’ broader imaginations to bring a string of victories for Black workers. In August 1946 mine workers in the Witwatersrand went on strike under the banner of the African Mine Workers’ Union. As many as 100,000 were involved.

The union had deliberately recruited members originating from Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique and Angola, as well as South Africa. James Jacob Majoro, a clerk and ANC member from Lesotho, served as secretary of the union. He told workers to fight for money, rather than in “tribal” disputes. The union’s president John Beaver Marks, also an ANC leader, criticised Mozambicans for being “cowards”, however.

Things changed after the second world war.

Under high apartheid, which was introduced in 1948 after an all white election in which the National Party took power, the government brutally cracked down on the African Mine Workers’ Union, the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa.

Activists were forced underground and abroad. Exiled leaders worked across the continent. African nationalists widely boycotted South Africa.

One of Julius Nyerere’s first acts as prime minister of newly independent Tanzania in 1964 was to end the recruitment of Tanzanian workers for the Johannesburg mines.

The ANC, in turn, supported global anti-colonial campaigns. It led a local “potato boycott” against the “slave labour” of Malawians and Zimbabweans on South African potato farms.

Yet the ANC – like other African liberation movements – came to define its interests nationally.

In the 1980s collaboration between Black migrants and South Africans once again flourished. This was as the apartheid government’s iron grip weakened and the withdrawal of workers from Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique gave trade unions in South Africa more bargaining power.

The rise of the ANC-allied National Union of Mineworkers – a key force in the anti-apartheid struggle – was underpinned by solidarity between workers from Lesotho and South Africa. Men like Lira Setona, a charismatic winch-driver from Lesotho, were key to the union’s workplace organising. And the union’s general secretary, Ramaphosa, worked closely with worker-leaders from Lesotho to secure the union’s successes. Ramaphosa became South African president in 2018, and has shown little sympathy for immigrants since.

Democracy and xenophobia

The ANC’s electoral victory in 1994 unleashed a little-discussed wave of anti-migrant policies. In its first year in power, the ANC used apartheid-era laws to deport a record 157,084 people. Most were refugees from Mozambique’s bloody civil war.

Visions of the “rainbow nation” have seldom included those branded as “foreign Africans” – the victims of recent violence.

Yet there is also a parallel history: thousands of South African freedom fighters across more than a century have also improved their own lives through solidarity rather than through xenophobia.

– Have South Africans always been hostile to migrants? Historians map a chequered history
– https://theconversation.com/have-south-africans-always-been-hostile-to-migrants-historians-map-a-chequered-history-290717

September 15, 2026

Social workers who protect children in South Africa carry a burden of trauma – better preparation could help

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Marinei Herselman, Lecturer, University of Fort Hare

When a child is raped, abandoned or removed from a violent home in South Africa, a child protection social worker is assigned to the wellbeing of that child. They listen to the details, assess the danger, make urgent decisions. Once the child has been placed somewhere safe, the social worker moves on to the next case.

I am a social work researcher and educator, and have worked in the field of trauma for more than three decades. Protecting children has been at the centre of that work. Over time a question has kept surfacing: who protects the people doing the protecting?

In a recent study in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, I interviewed frontline child protection social workers and supervisors, and then piloted a care programme with them. This experience suggested a troubling answer: many social workers are carrying trauma silently, in a system that offers them almost nothing to hold it.

South Africa has roughly 44,500 registered social workers for a population of about 63 million, and the Eastern Cape’s ratio is much the same, with just over 5,100 social workers for some 7.2 million people.

The scale of what child protection social workers face is difficult to overstate. In 2024-25, the South African Police Service
recorded 22,055 sexual offences against children. In the same year the Department of Social Development logged 26,852 cases of child abuse and neglect, nearly 10,000 of them involving sexual abuse.

For practitioners in the Eastern Cape, abuse, coerced pregnancy, abandonment and infant death are not separate problems. They are the same families and the same case files, one crisis leading into the next, and the law says they must deal with all of it.

I call what happens to these workers “the sound of silence”. It is the slow disconnection from the children and families they serve, from colleagues, and eventually from themselves, that sets in when trauma is absorbed day after day and never processed. I have kept in touch with child protection social workers in the Eastern Cape since my doctoral research in 2018. Over the years the same message has kept reaching me from supervisors and frontline workers: a steady wearing down. The study I describe here was my attempt to test what I had been hearing.

Drawing on what social workers told me in the interviews and workshops, I believe preparation must begin in the classroom, not on placement: students need to understand trauma and recognise it in themselves. Supervision must be treated as a trained skill, not an administrative check, and employers must create regular space for workers to debrief and reconnect.

If social work is to protect children, it must also protect the people who do that work.

What social workers said

My study had two phases. In the first, I drew on in-depth interviews with 16 child protection social workers and supervisors across four Eastern Cape municipalities, exploring how the daily realities of implementing the Children’s Act shaped their emotional wellbeing.

In the second, I worked with 22 practitioners from child protection, substance abuse, family counselling and related services to co-design and pilot a two-day trauma-informed care workshop. Trauma-informed care is an approach to running services in which everyone assumes that the people they work with may have been affected by trauma, and organises practice so as not to make that worse.

Trauma can include abuse, neglect, violence at home, a parent struggling with addiction, mental illness or prison, or parents separating.

The workshop covered the neurobiology of trauma – the way trauma can physically change a child’s brain and have lasting effects on physical health. The body holds fear that the mind cannot put into words, and social workers who listen to trauma every day carry it in their bodies too.

Workshop participants also built simple “shoebox toolboxes” – low-cost therapy kits they could recreate for home visits with children. Using crayons, magazines and glue, a child decorates the outside of the box to show how they appear to the world, and fills the inside with what they really carry. When the social workers made boxes about themselves, the inside told the same story: exhaustion, feeling unseen, and a need for more training and real reflective supervision.

Two themes came up again and again.

The first was chronic resource scarcity – like lack of transport or office supplies to do the work.

Caseloads of over 160 were reported. South African policy uses 60 cases per social worker as the benchmark.

The second theme was the near-absence of meaningful supervision – the structured, reflective support that should help social workers process what they see.

Burnout spills into private life. “I am not coping,” one worker told me. “It is affecting everything and especially my marriage.”

How training can help

Secondary trauma is the distress that builds up in people who repeatedly hear and witness other people’s trauma, producing symptoms much like those of the trauma survivors themselves. South Africa’s version is intensified by inequality and underfunding.

The implication of my findings is that trauma-informed care ought to be woven into social work education, so students enter the field with a language for trauma and the reflective capacity to sustain themselves.

The four-year social work degree must cover everything from casework to community development to law, so at present, trauma is touched on rather than taught in depth.

Outcomes from the research workshop showed what’s possible. Two shifts stood out in the feedback from the participants.

First, they began reinterpreting “difficult” client behaviour – mistrust, withdrawal, apparent resistance – as survival responses to adversity rather than defiance. Understanding behaviour produces better decisions and is also less draining for the social worker.

Second, the training gave them permission to name their own trauma. One participant said:

It’s as if I don’t feel so alone anymore.

Another, who had left the profession, admitted:

It broke me.

Trauma-informed supervision should be treated as a formal professional competency, not something assumed to arrive with seniority. And employers – government and NGOs – should build routine spaces for debriefing and peer support.

Supervision protects those already in practice; education prepares those who are coming. Neither is sufficient on its own.

– Social workers who protect children in South Africa carry a burden of trauma – better preparation could help
– https://theconversation.com/social-workers-who-protect-children-in-south-africa-carry-a-burden-of-trauma-better-preparation-could-help-290369