The Conversation – Page 59 – MIL Africa Engine

June 17, 2025

China’s support for Mali’s military carries risks: researcher outlines what they are

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Paa Kwesi Wolseley Prah, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dublin City University

Mali, a landlocked Sahelian nation of 25 million people, has faced significant instability since 2012, marked by terrorism, state neglect and armed conflicts.

That year a Tuareg rebellion started in northern Mali and President Amadou Toumani Touré was ousted in a military coup. Constitutional rule was suspended. Rebels in northern Mali went on to seize cities like Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal, declaring an independent Islamic State of Azawad and imposing sharia law.

They also destroyed cultural heritage sites, including 14 of Timbuktu’s 16 Unesco-listed mausoleums. The crisis prompted international intervention, including a UN authorised mission, which retook northern cities within weeks. Islamist rebels retreated into civilian populations and remote areas.

Despite these efforts, violence against civilians by extremist groups and community militias has continued. By 2023, 8.8 million Malians needed humanitarian assistance. Over 375,500 were internally displaced, primarily women and children.

Meanwhile, the former French colony had turned to China for military assistance. Between 2012 and 2013, China provided €5 million (about US$5.8 million) in logistical equipment to improve the Malian army’s mobility.

In August 2013, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army gave the Malian army military supplies totalling 1.6 billion CFA francs (about US$2.8 million). China made similar donations between 2014 and 2023.

I am an international security and global governance researcher. My recent research explored the impact of China’s security sector assistance on Mali’s fragility.

China’s assistance to Mali aims to equip the country to address terrorism and insurgency. But I argue that it may have unintended consequences and cause further damage to the country.

The heavy reliance on Chinese supply exposes Mali to vulnerabilities, including supply disruptions, diminished bargaining power, and limited strategic flexibility. This could destabilise security even more should China face manufacturing issues or supply chain disruptions leading to delays or shortages in the production of weapons.

It also raises concerns about the potential influence of China on Mali’s defence policies and decision-making processes. In turn this could entrench the Malian military government’s position. China takes a hands-off approach to the governance structures of the countries it engages with. Hopes of democratisation in the country could be affected.

Rich in resources

Mali has significant natural resources, including 800 tons of gold reserves (it’s Africa’s fourth-largest producer), iron ore, manganese, lithium, and potential uranium and hydrocarbon deposits.

In 2019, gold production generated US$734 million, or 9.7% of Mali’s GDP, supporting over 10% of the population.

Chinese firms, such as Ganfeng Lithium and China National Nuclear Corporation, have invested heavily in Mali’s mining sector. They are involved in a US$130 million lithium project and uranium exploration in the Kidal and Falea regions.

Despite security risks, including attacks on Chinese personnel in 2015 and 2021, China remains committed due to Mali’s resource potential.

Beyond mining, China has invested in Mali’s infrastructure. A US$2.7 billion railway modernisation project connects Bamako to Dakar, facilitating resource exports like iron ore and bauxite.

The total of Mali’s external debt to China is not explicitly stated. But the 2014 loan agreement of US$11 billion and the 2016 loan of US$2.7 billion alone suggest Mali’s debt to China could be at least US$13 billion. This is without including loans for projects like the Bamako-Ségou expressway, and bridges in Bamako.

This has often been criticised as “debt trap diplomacy”, increasing recipient countries’ dependence on Beijing. In Mali, I believe this risks entrenching economic vulnerability and giving China geopolitical leverage.

China’s security sector assistance to Mali

Historically, Mali relied on France. More recently, it’s used Russia’s expeditionary corps, formerly known as Wagner Group, for security support.

In 2011, China provided US$11.4 million in grants, US$8.1 million in zero-interest loans, and a US$100.8 million concessional loan to foster bilateral cooperation.

China’s participation in the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, starting in 2013 with 395 personnel, marked a shift in its security engagement.

Chinese peacekeepers, including engineers, medical personnel and security guards, repaired infrastructure, provided medical aid and supported Mali’s 2013 elections.

Their professionalism earned praise from the UN special envoy Albert Gerard Koenders for helping to ensure a smooth election.

China’s involvement in Mali challenged traditional European approaches to peacekeeping, particularly France’s military-heavy strategy.

How China’s assistance contributes to Mali’s fragility

In spite of the positives, China’s security sector assistance contributes to Mali’s fragility in several ways.

First, its no-strings-attached nature allows Mali’s military junta to consolidate power without making democratic or governance reforms.

This lack of accountability enables corrupt military factions to operate unchecked. Governance weaknesses and authoritarianism can continue.

Second, the heavy reliance on Chinese supply raises concerns about the potential influence of China on Mali’s defence decisions.

This over-reliance on military solutions risks escalating conflicts and could lead to human rights abuses by security forces, as seen in increased violence against civilians. It doesn’t address root causes of conflict like social cohesion or local governance.

Third, Mali’s growing dependence on Chinese aid — both military and economic — makes it vulnerable to disruptions from geopolitical tensions, supply chain issues, or changes in China’s foreign policy. This limits Mali’s ability to diversify its military capabilities or respond to evolving threats.

Finally, China’s infrastructure investments, such as the US$1.48 billion (750 billion CFA francs) Bamako-Dakar railway loan, creates “debt trap diplomacy”.

This pattern deepens economic dependence and reduces policy autonomy, further weakening state resilience.

The way forward

To mitigate the risks of Chinese security sector assistance and promote sustainable stability, Mali must adopt a multifaceted strategy.

First, it should collaborate with China to align security sector assistance with civilian-led security approaches.

Second, Mali should diversify security and economic partnerships with donors like the US, the UK, and the EU.

Third, transparent guidelines, developed through consultation with stakeholders, should assess the impacts of assistance to avoid deepening dependence.

Fourth, engaging civil society and publishing regular reports on security sector assistance use and outcomes will foster public trust.

Finally, promoting regional economic integration and ties with global powers will bolster Mali’s economic resilience.

– China’s support for Mali’s military carries risks: researcher outlines what they are
– https://theconversation.com/chinas-support-for-malis-military-carries-risks-researcher-outlines-what-they-are-257738

June 16, 2025

Highways to hell: west Africa’s road networks are the preferred battleground for terror groups

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Olivier Walther, Associate Professor in Geography, University of Florida

What’s the connection between roads and conflict in west Africa? This may seem like an odd question. But a study we conducted shows a close relationship between the two.

We are researchers of transnational political violence. We analysed 58,000 violent events in west Africa between 2000 to 2024. Our focus was on identifying patterns of violence in relation to transport infrastructure.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that roads, bridges, pipelines and other transport systems are increasingly attacked across west Africa, but little is known about the factors that explain when, where and by whom.

Violence in west Africa involves a complex mix of political, economic and social factors. Weak governance, corruption, urban-rural inequalities and marginalised populations have been exploited by numerous armed groups, including transnational criminal networks and religious extremists.

West Africa has been one of the world’s most violent regions since the mid 2010s. In 2024 alone, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data initiative recorded over 10,600 events of political violence in the region. These ranged from battles between armed groups, explosions and other forms of remote violence, to attacks on unarmed civilians. An estimated 25,600 people were killed. This has been the status quo in the region for nearly a decade.

The results of our study show that 65% of all the attacks, explosions, and violence against civilians recorded between 2000 and 2024 were located within one kilometre of a road.

Only 4% of all events were located further than 10km from a road. This pattern was consistent across all road types but most pronounced near highways and primary roads.

We think the reason for this pattern is that there is fierce competition between state and non-state actors for access to and use of roads.

Governments need well-developed road networks for a host of reasons, including the ability to govern, enabling economic activity, and security. Roads enable military mobility and reduce potential safe havens for insurgents in remote regions.

Insurgent groups also see transport networks as prime targets. They create opportunities to blockade cities, ambush convoys, kidnap travellers, employ landmines, and destroy key infrastructure.

Our research is part of a long line of work that explored the role of infrastructure in relation to security in west Africa. Our latest research reinforces earlier findings linking the two. Transport networks have become battlegrounds for extremist groups seeking to destabilise states, isolate communities and expand their influence.

The network

The west African road network is vast, estimated at over 709,000km of roads by the Global Roads Inventory Project. It compares unfavourably with other African regions. For example, paved roads remain relatively scarce in west Africa (17% of the regional network) when compared with north Africa (83%).

Poorly maintained roads impose costs on west African countries. They increase transport time of perishable goods, shorten the operational life of trucks, cause more accidents, and reduce social interactions between communities.

Still, significant variations in road quality are found across the region. The percentage of paved roads ranges from a high of 37% in Senegal to just over 7% in Mali. Nigeria has the largest road network in west Africa with an estimated 195,000km, but much of it has deteriorated because of poor maintenance.

Road-related violence is on the rise

We found that road-related attacks have been on the rise since jihadist groups emerged in the mid-2010s. Only 31 ambushes against convoys were reported in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger from 2000-2015, against 497 from 2016-2023.

Attacks frequently occur along the same road segments, such as around Boni in the Gourma Mounts, where Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) conducted nine attacks against Malian forces and Wagner mercenaries between 2019 and 2024.

Violence was the most clustered near roads in 2011, with 87% of all violent events located within 1km of a road. Our analysis shows that, though still high, there’s been a decline post-2000: 59% in 2022 and 60% in 2024. This evolution reflects the ruralisation of conflict in west Africa. As jihadist insurgents target rural areas and small towns more and more, an increasing share of violent events also occurs far away from roads.

We’ve studied the root causes of west Africa’s violence for nearly a decade, documenting the ever-intensifying costs paid by its people. In the process, we’ve uncovered overlooked aspects of the turmoil, including the centrality of the road networks to an understanding of where the violence is happening.

The most dangerous roads of west Africa

Our findings show that violence against transport infrastructure is very unevenly distributed in west Africa and that specific road segments have been repeatedly targeted. This was particularly the case in the Central Sahel, Lake Chad basin, and western Cameroon.

For example, the 350km ring road linking Bamenda to Kumbo and Wum in Cameroon is the most violent road in west Africa, with 757 events since 2018, due to the conflict between the government and the Ambazonian separatists.

The longest segments of dangerous roads are in Nigeria, particularly those connecting Maiduguri in Borno State to Damaturu, Potiskum, Biu and Bama.

In the central Sahel, the road between Mopti/Sévaré and Gao is by far the most violent transport axis, with 433 events since the beginning of the civil war in Mali in 2012. South of Gao, National Road 17 leading to the Nigerien border, and National Road 20 heading east toward Ménaka have experienced 177 and 139 events respectively since the Islamic State – Sahel Province (ISSP) intensified its activities in the region in 2017.

In Burkina Faso, all the roads leading to Djibo near the border with Mali have experienced high levels of violence since the early 2020s.

Building transport infrastructure to promote peace

Roads are an important part of state counterinsurgency strategies and a strategic target for local militants. Yes, as our work highlights, transport infrastructure is largely ignored in debates that emphasise more state interventions as a means of combating insecurity. Sixty years after the independence of many west African countries, road accessibility remains elusive in the region.

Peripheral cities such as Bardaï, Bilma, Kidal and Timbuktu, where rebel movements have historically developed, are still not connected to the national network by tarmac roads.

The duality of the transport infrastructure, as both a facilitator and target of violence, has put government forces at a disadvantage. Regular forces are heavily constrained by the sparsity and poor conditions of the road network, which makes them vulnerable to attacks without necessarily allowing them to project their military power over long distances.

Rather than building transport infrastructure, states have focused on strengthening security by investing in military bases. The military coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have further reinforced this trend, with the creation of a joint force by the countries of the Alliance of Sahel States.

Strengthening security has taken precedence over developmental support for peripheral communities, who experience the worst of the violence.

– Highways to hell: west Africa’s road networks are the preferred battleground for terror groups
– https://theconversation.com/highways-to-hell-west-africas-road-networks-are-the-preferred-battleground-for-terror-groups-258517

June 16, 2025

Kenya’s peacebuilding efforts hold valuable lessons for the rest of the world, but gaps remain

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Leonor Oliveira Toscano, PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Oslo

Kenya has been praised as a “model for the world” when it comes to peacebuilding efforts to manage outbreaks of violence within its borders. The country has systematically put in place a peacebuilding architecture rooted in a history of local peace initiatives. These date back to the early 1990s.

Over this period, the Wajir Peace and Development Committee emerged in the country’s north-eastern region. The committee successfully addressed decades of inter-clan violence in Wajir, an arid county bordering Somalia. It also inspired the emergence of numerous local peace committees across the country.

These committees have been set up in some other African countries – like Ghana, South Africa, Sierra Leone and Burundi – and continue to contribute informally to local peacebuilding in these states.

In Kenya, the committees became institutionalised after post-election violence in 2007-08 and a mediation process led by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan. They now form part of the national peacebuilding architecture.

Violence triggered by the contested 2007 presidential election outcome resulted in the killing of more than 1,000 people. The mediation process led to a power-sharing agreement signed by the presidential contenders Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.

The country’s peacebuilding architecture is now supported by several policies and frameworks. These include the constitution of 2010. The system that’s been built has the capacity to connect a wide variety of peacebuilding actors – both state and non-state, formal and informal – at all levels of society. This helps resolve conflict and build resilience.

The Kenyan government initiated a review of the peacebuilding architecture in 2023. It involved a lengthy consultation process and high levels of participation among Kenyans. The National Steering Committee on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management led the way, assisted by an independent panel of 13 peacebuilding experts.

Released at the end of 2024, the review looked at the strengths and weaknesses of the architecture.

It offers a vision for building a robust peacebuilding system, along with an actionable roadmap. One lesson is that Kenya can use the capacities and unique approaches of different peacebuilding actors. At the local level, peace committees showed that they made contributions to early warning systems and building confidence in communities.

However, insufficient resources and a consistent focus on electoral violence prevent the system from addressing other drivers of conflict.

The strengths

Local peace committees, with membership typically drawn from ordinary citizens, religious groups or local civil society organisations, play a crucial role. They support dialogue around conflict issues. They promote trust and understanding, and can build a constructive environment for conflict resolution.

Their information gathering feeds into the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development’s Conflict Early Warning and Response System (CEWARN) to prevent election violence. Local peace committees have contributed to negotiating local disputes. They have also helped de-polarise ethnic identities and facilitated local peace agreements. One example was the Modogashe Declaration. It sets ground rules to solve conflict and local disputes over pasture, water access and cattle rustling.

We are researchers in Norway on a project focusing on civilian agency, local peace and resilience building. Our own interviews with committee members in Nakuru – a county greatly affected by the violence in 2007-08 – found that peace committee members continued to work together and share conflict-sensitive information with local stakeholders. These include administration officers and religious leaders, and covered periods during and after the 2022 elections.

Further, local peace committees can offer women valuable opportunities for participation in conflict management. This contributes to their protection, for example from sexual violence.

The weaknesses

Despite these successes, Kenya’s peacebuilding architecture faces pressing challenges.

First, local peace committees aren’t perfect. They can be manipulated by politicians seeking to build local support. They can also compete with traditional actors such as elders in conflict resolution.

Kenya’s institutionalisation of local peacebuilding strengthened information flow across all levels. But it also threatens to undermine local peacebuilding agency and autonomy. Formalising local peace committees can spur an unhealthy monetisation of peacebuilding, with some members joining for financial gain. This threatens to erode the voluntary character of peacebuilding as a common good and undermine genuine priorities for peace.

Second, elite-level politics in Kenya creates the persistent risk of electoral violence. This diverts attention and resources away from other long-standing causes of conflict. The drivers of violence in Kenya are varied and region specific. They include disputes over access to land, and marginalisation of ethnic and religious communities. Climate change threatens to worsen competition and conflict between pastoralists and farming communities.

Our analysis of event data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data shows that communal violence is the deadliest form of political violence in Kenya. For their part, fatalities related to election violence have decreased. This underscores the urgent need to consistently invest in prevention and local peacebuilding beyond narrow electoral periods.

Fatalities in Kenya by type of armed violence: 2010-2023

Electoral competition can escalate violence between pastoralists and farmers, but it’s the persistence of communal conflicts that represents a serious threat. Communal violence particularly affects Kenya’s arid and semi-arid areas in the Rift Valley, eastern and north-eastern regions.

What next

Our interviews with local peace committee members show that funding for their activities diminishes outside election years. This hampers their capacity to address conflict outside these periods.

Yet research has shown that local peacebuilding can build social resilience against recurrent communal violence. Peacebuilding interventions grounded in local realities are also vital for countering insurgent violence. This is especially important as counterterrorism operations by state forces often trigger cycles of violence rather than resolving underlying issues.

Our research finds that Kenyans place significant trust in local peacebuilders, such as community leaders, elders and women. The review of the country’s peacebuilding architecture proposes a 40% quota for women, youth and people with disabilities in local peace committees.

However, quotas alone may not be sufficient to address the political and cultural challenges that entrench inequality.

Ultimately, political elites need to transform Kenya’s “win at all costs” politics. This way, the country’s mediators and peacebuilders can address the deep social and economic grievances that underpin cycles of violence.

– Kenya’s peacebuilding efforts hold valuable lessons for the rest of the world, but gaps remain
– https://theconversation.com/kenyas-peacebuilding-efforts-hold-valuable-lessons-for-the-rest-of-the-world-but-gaps-remain-257761

June 15, 2025

5 indie art spaces in African cities worth knowing more about

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kim Gurney, Senior Researcher, Centre for Humanities Research — Platform: SA-UK Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture & Technics, University of the Western Cape

Independent art spaces are collectives of artists (and others) who club together to set up a communal space – often in former industrial sites and more affordable parts of the city – to further their practice. These spaces are DIY art institutions, if you like, that operate largely under the radar. In art world lingo, “offspaces”.

Designed for purpose over profit, they encourage experimental work and creative risk-taking. They also favour art in public space, which provides an intriguing lens on the city.

My Africa-wide research took me to five such spaces, each at least 10 years old, so that I could learn their secret sauce of sustainability. I found it’s largely about shapeshifting, a capacity for constant reinvention. The key ingredient is artistic thinking, made up of five key principles highlighted in the examples below.

Offspaces are found everywhere but have notably grown across Africa over the past couple of decades, along with fast-changing cities and a resurgent art scene. One big picture point is crucial, and that’s about urbanisation. Globally, more and more people are moving to cities and most of them are young – by 2050, one in three young people in the world will be of African origin and the continent will be largely urban.

There can be a lack of imagination about what all this means and that’s where artists come in. They offer new ideas to help build the world we want to live in, rather than reinforce the one we already have.

Offspaces in Africa have to navigate prevailing uncertainty, which is a daily reality for most people living in cities. In response, artists band together to build their own pseudo institutions, bit by bit. These self-made pathways offer useful navigational tactics for others – or “panya routes”, as Kenyans call the trails that motorbike taxis invent.

The spaces I visited were all moving away from reliance on foreign donor funding (given little or no state support) towards a hybrid model that blends with local philanthropy, collaborative economies and self-generated income schemes. They also want to own their own land and hold assets so that they can think about the future.

1. The GoDown Arts Centre – Nairobi, Kenya

Murals at the former GoDown (2010), currently being rebuilt. Katy Fentress/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The GoDown Arts Centre was established in 2003. Previously a large compound of repurposed warehouses (“godowns”) in Nairobi’s industrial area, right now it’s a construction site as it morphs into an iconic cultural hub. GoDown 2.0 is a multipurpose vision that works at different scales, like a fractal. There will be a large, welcoming facade leading into a semi-public section for music and dance, with artist studios at the heart. Plus galleries, library, museum, auditorium, offices, hotel, a restaurant, conference facilities and parking.

Its rebuild is a great example of how artists create public space: in phases. It follows a radical “design-with-people” approach, starting with years of input from all directions to reconsider the building and its relationship to the city.

This ground-up ethos of horizontality, the first key principle, also shapes its signature event, an annual public arts festival called Nai Ni Who? (Who is Nairobi?). Local residents are the curators, and the everyday city is the artwork. Participants are taken around neighbourhoods on foot to experience the good, the bad, and the possibilities. These grounded insights also inform ongoing engagements GoDown has with policymakers about the shape of a future Nairobi.

2. ANO Institute – Accra, Ghana

ANO Institute’s Mobile Museum in Accra. Kim Gurney

ANO, established in 2002, repurposed a former workshop for car repairs into a gallery, after starting life in a public park. On the other side of the road, opposite the gallery, stood its office, residency space and growing library.

Most intriguingly, a striking rectilinear structure was positioned alongside. This Mobile Museum mimics the trading kiosks that line every street. Many are also shapeshifters: kindergarten by day, church by night, for example.

ANO’s empty museum, collapsible and see-through, went on a countrywide adventure in 2018 and 2019, asking people to imagine its contents, and later revisited with the results. It signalled a larger and ongoing effort, Future Museum, to find a more relevant exhibition form that’s alive to the fluid way culture is threaded here into everyday life.

ANO demonstrates the second principle of performativity – that is, not only saying things with art but doing things too. More recently, it rebuilt on a new site in central Accra, designed by 87-year-old Ophelia Akiwumi, entirely from raffia palm in a focus on indigenous knowledge systems.

3. Townhouse Gallery – Cairo, Egypt

Townhouse Gallery in 2019, exhibiting paintings by Imane Ibrahim. Kim Gurney

I visited Townhouse just after it reclaimed its inner-city premises following a partial physical collapse. But this turned out to be a false restart. It closed for good not long after, citing a complex brew of factors that ended 21 years of various battles and resurrections. That it survived so long – from 1998 until 2019 – is remarkable for an offspace.

Part of the reason was its solidarity networks, including with neighbourhood communities – mostly mechanic shops and other artisanal trades who even helped Townhouse rebuild. In its heyday, Townhouse comprised an art gallery, library, theatre and performance venue, and notably hatched other spaces.

The latest rose like a phoenix from its ashes – Access Art Space, which reanimates the same physical space with visual art exhibitions. The legacy of Townhouse is the third principle of elasticity – responding nimbly to constant flux but also being able to refuse impossible conditions with “the right no” (a necessary response in certain situations).

4. ZOMA Museum – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

One of Zoma Museum’s buildings crafted by local artisans using time-honoured building techniques. Kim Gurney

ZOMA Museum has also lived many lives. Starting small, its roots were in a three-day public arts festival called Giziawi #1 (Temporary). It comprised performances and exhibitions across the city but focused on Meskel Square, a key public space.

Zoma Contemporary Art Centre grew out of that in 2002, followed in 2019 by Zoma Museum when its co-founders bought a plot of polluted land. Its rehabilitation into an ecological haven has become a case study in sustainable architecture.

Zoma is built by local artisans from mud and straw using indigenous technologies going back centuries. Yet its elegant buildings look futuristic. Zoma is all about the fourth principle of convergence – the past, present and future all happening at once. It’s also about doing multiple things, like running Zoma School, an inherited kindergarten. The land is part of the curriculum.

Just a year after it opened, Zoma spawned yet another life, an offshoot in a newly opened park blending nature with culture and recreation.

5. Nafasi Art Space – Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The classroom at Nafasi’s self-built art school in Dar es Salaam. Kim Gurney

Nafasi is Swahili for opportunity or chance, which fittingly describes the workings of Nafasi Art Space, established in 2008 – that is, second chance. This fifth and final principle of artistic thinking means giving materials, people and situations another go.

A good example of this is Nafasi’s new art school, built using repurposed shipping containers, like the rest of its premises – artist studios, a spacious gallery and performance arena. In the 2022 academy cohort, a general practice lawyer and an accountant were learning alongside artists, with a biologist at the helm.

Nafasi Art Academy cites the city’s biggest local market, Kariakoo, as design reference, particularly its distinctive elevated canopy and swirling stairwell. The curriculum also takes local context as a starting point, structured in themes to answer community-led questions. Its key function, like all the other offspaces, is storytelling. And the story it tells best is about institution-building as art.

– 5 indie art spaces in African cities worth knowing more about
– https://theconversation.com/5-indie-art-spaces-in-african-cities-worth-knowing-more-about-258009

June 15, 2025

Small towns are growing fast across Ghana – but environmental planning isn’t keeping up

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Seth Asare Okyere, Visiting lecturer, University of Pittsburg and Adjunct Associate Professor, Osaka University, University of Pittsburgh

Africa’s urban future will be shaped not only by large cities and capitals but also by its many small and medium-sized towns.

Large capital cities are no longer the hotspots of rapid urban growth. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat), small and medium-sized towns are growing faster than large cities. These smaller towns often start as rural settlements.

Despite their rapid growth, many small towns lack infrastructure and planning capacity, leaving them vulnerable to environmental risks.

Ghana offers a telling example. While the spotlight is often on the rapid growth of the two major cities, Accra or Kumasi, dozens of smaller towns across the country are booming. At the same time, they are struggling with environmental problems such as decline in green spaces, flooding and pollution, usually associated with much larger cities.

Our research examined this issue, arguing that overlooking small towns has put them on an unsustainable path. In Ghana, small towns often “rest in the shadows” of bigger cities when it comes to resource distribution and development priorities. They receive less funding, fewer services, and scant regulatory oversight compared to major urban centres.

We conducted research in Somanya, Ghana. It lies in the eastern region, about 70km from Accra, the national capital. Our aim was to establish whether emerging sites of urbanisation like Somanya were developing in ways that made them sustainable, or replicating environmental problems seen in large cities.

To identify the drivers of environmental risks in the town, we used geographic information data and interviewed residents, institutional representatives and local assembly members.

We found that the urban growth of Somanya was linked with a decline in vegetation cover and loss of biodiversity. The main factors at play were: pollution from mining, political neglect, and lack of infrastructure facilities and services.

We concluded that current realities pointed towards unsustainable futures where environmental problems will become pronounced and the impacts on everyday life will be destructive. Based on our findings we recommend that Ghana’s national urban sustainable development policies and international development programmes must not fixate solely on big cities. Small towns require attention and investment commensurate with their growth.

Environmental risks in a rapidly growing small town

Somanya’s population grew from 88,000 people in 2010 to over 122,000 by 2021. The proportion of the municipality’s population living in urban areas jumped from 31% to 47% in that period.

Local leaders and officials we interviewed painted a worrying picture of a town rapidly growing without proactive environmental planning, grappling with multiple hazards at once.

Declining ecological resources: Rapid expansion has led to the loss of green spaces and forests around Somanya. Hillsides that used to be covered with vegetation have been cleared for large mango plantations or speculative estate development. This situation has made the area more prone to erosion and flash floods. One community elder observed:

The trees on the hills are almost all gone now. Without those natural buffers, flooding has become more frequent and severe, threatening homes built in low-lying areas.

Pollution and toxicity from industry: Somanya’s growth has attracted extractive industries, notably stone quarries and small-scale mining. These bring jobs, but also environmental hazards. Residents described clouds of dust hanging over communities near a quarry. There are also reports of chemical runoff polluting local streams and soil. Heavy dust and particulate pollution have become part of daily life, and people worry about the health effects. One resident said:

The dusty conditions are not only an infrastructure problem, but also an environmental risk for us, especially if you have underlying health conditions.

Strained and inadequate infrastructure: Basic environmental infrastructure in Somanya has not kept pace with its growth. The town’s drains and gutters are few and often clogged, so even moderate rainstorms result in street flooding. Proper sewage and waste treatment facilities are non-existent. Piles of uncollected refuse are commonly seen, sometimes burnt in the open, posing health risks. One community leader remarked that:

It is only when there’s a major flood or disaster outbreak that they pay us attention.

These infrastructure deficits mean that as the town grows, so do the environmental health risks – from water-borne diseases to flooding and pollution.

Governance lapses and political indifference: Underlying many of these problems is a sense of neglect and weak institutional capacity. Local authorities in Somanya operate with limited funding and fragmented responsibilities, and higher-level support from the central government is minimal. As an Assembly member put it:

We live in a constant state of perpetual waiting for the crumbs after big cities have taken their lion’s share of available funding. If you are not connected to the ruling party, it’s hard to get the support you need.

All these factors put small towns on a path to unsustainable futures.

Steering towards sustainable urban futures

Our research highlights the need to adopt a cross-sector, integrated approach to environmental planning at the local level. In practice, that means urban planners, environmental agencies, and community leaders all working together on development plans. For example, in Koa Hill settlement, Solomon Islands, a community-led development team with support from local groups and university experts led to the successful pilot of nature-inspired disaster risk reduction programmes.

Therefore, communities should be involved in co-designing solutions, from problem identification to experimenting strategies and evaluating outcomes. After all, residents know the local risks and resources best.

– Small towns are growing fast across Ghana – but environmental planning isn’t keeping up
– https://theconversation.com/small-towns-are-growing-fast-across-ghana-but-environmental-planning-isnt-keeping-up-257766

June 13, 2025

Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Douglas Lucas Kivoi, Principal Policy Analyst, Governance Department, The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)

The recent killing in Kenya of a young man in police detention highlights a string of systemic failures to hold the country’s security officers accountable for their actions. Despite public outrage and protests, Kenyan police officers continue to use inhumane, brutal and sometimes fatal methods with little consequence. Douglas Lucas Kivoi, who has studied policing and police reform in Kenya, unpacks the situation.

Why is the Kenyan police service given to brutality?

First, Kenya’s police institution was established as a colonial instrument of oppression. Police reforms since independence in 1963 have had little impact in changing this. Instead, successive governments have used the police to suppress dissent. This has cemented a culture of violence and police impunity. This was seen during former president Daniel arap Moi’s repressive regime, the post-2007 election violence and recent crackdowns on public protests protected under the constitution.

The reaction to mass mobilisation in June 2024 was violent. This was because the state sees public demonstrations as a threat to its authority.

Second, police brutality thrives in environments where wrongdoing goes unpunished. Kenya’s police force lacks good internal control mechanisms. A culture of silence and solidarity – the “blue code” – deters whistleblowing. Advancements and rewards are sometimes determined by political allegiances rather than professionalism.

Third, many police officers work in toxic conditions marked by poor pay, limited resources and long shifts. These contribute to feelings of frustration and aggression. The situation is worsened by institutionalised corruption where police officers extort money from citizens and demand bribes. This has contributed to diminished ethical standards.

What’s in place to punish police excesses?

Kenya has several formal avenues for holding police accountable. But all are deeply flawed.

Independent Policing Oversight Authority: This was established in 2011 in light of the post-election violence of 2007-08. Its job was to independently investigate police misconduct. However, underfunding and understaffing has led to delayed investigations.

There has also been a lack of cooperation from the police. They often fail to provide evidence or deliberately provide misleading information to impede investigations.

The authority also has limited enforcement power. It has recommended thousands of prosecutions of rogue officers. However, it has seen low conviction rates given the slow processes at the judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Internal Affairs Unit: This is a critical oversight body. It’s mandated to provide accountability and professional discipline within the police service. It’s tasked with investigating public complaints and complaints from within the police service against police officers.

The unit can recommend to the National Police Service Commission disciplinary action – such as prosecution or dismissal – against officers it finds guilty. It also monitors police officers to ensure that ethical conduct and professional standards are maintained.

However, the unit faces perceptions of a lack of independence and as an internal cover-up tool. In many instances, cases of police misconduct are simply punished by a transfer to another station.

Judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: Cases take years to move through the judicial system. Convictions are rare. The public prosecutions office has faced accusations of bias, which it exhibits through its reluctance to prosecute high-profile police killings.

The time it takes to conclude police misconduct cases allows impunity to thrive. Deliberately poor investigations carried out by the police (who are also suspects) have led to collapsed cases.

National Police Service Commission: This was established by the 2010 Kenyan constitution. The commission recruits and appoints police officers (except the inspector-general of police, who is appointed by the president with parliamentary approval). It also promotes, transfers and disciplines police officers.

However, the commission has faced claims of being unduly influenced by the inspector-general’s office in recruitment and promotions. This undermines its independence.

Civil society and the media: Organisations like Amnesty International Kenya and the Kenya Human Rights Commission document police abuses. But their reports rarely, if ever, lead to any real action being taken. The media’s attention and reporting of cases may exert temporary pressure but this doesn’t seem to have any long-term impact.

Why haven’t these mechanisms worked?

Firstly, there’s an institutional resistance to reform. Powerful factions in the police and government benefit from the current system. Whenever there is an attempt at enforcing accountability, these senior officials take advantage of bureaucratic delays, and harass investigators and whistleblowers.

In extreme cases, they enforce the disappearance of witnesses.

Secondly, a lack of political will creates a favourable environment to circumvent constitutional frameworks. This ultimately weakens any chances of accountability. At best, police in Kenya are used to defend political interests and suppress dissent.

This emboldens powerful political players who want the police to be controllable. This dissuades them from instituting actual reforms and establishing a humane policing service.

What will change things?

Until those in leadership positions genuinely prioritise independent institutions and justice over transient political gains, significant police reform is unlikely to be realised.

Elements of such reform would include steps to:

Strengthen police oversight and guarantee independence

The Independent Policing Oversight Authority Act needs to be amended to enhance autonomy. The current system is easy for the president to manipulate because he gets to appoint the authority’s commissioners.

There’s also a need to provide the authority with equipment. This includes ballistics analysis, digital forensics and crime scene reconstruction capabilities to combat police cover-ups.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions must also be required to respond to the authority’s recommendations within 30 days. Currently, cases can take years to complete. There have been instances when rogue police have used this window to eliminate witnesses or tamper with evidence.

Overhaul police training and culture

There must be a move away from paramilitary-style drills and procedures in training. Instead, officers need to practise de-escalation, communication and problem-solving tactics with the public. What exists within Kenya now is a paramilitary service not a police service.

Additionally, the police service commission needs to reward professionalism and not cronyism.

Judicial and prosecutorial reforms

Ending police impunity in Kenya requires a multi-pronged approach. This involves judicial independence, vigorous prosecution, meaningful oversight, legislative changes and public engagement.

But this requires meaningful political will.

Political accountability

Continued police impunity has eroded public confidence in Kenya’s policing and justice systems. The policing oversight authority needs sufficient funding – free of political interference – to investigate and prosecute police misconduct. Senior officers should be held accountable for not disciplining rogue officers under their charge. The presidency and interior ministry must have a zero-tolerance policy toward police brutality.

If Kenya doesn’t grapple with police impunity, then the anniversary of the June 2024 protests will be just another date in history when the state brutally attacked, maimed and killed its own citizenry. And still managed to silence them.

– Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people
– https://theconversation.com/kenyas-brutal-police-have-been-exposed-again-why-the-system-fails-people-258843

June 13, 2025

Older South Africans need better support and basic services – and so do their caregivers

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Elena Moore, Professor of Sociology, University of Cape Town

In South Africa, most long-term care for older people happens at home through the efforts of family members, largely female kin, not through government services.

With South Africa’s population growing older, combined with reduced funding for community care, higher levels of disability in old age, and widespread poverty and unemployment, family care has become more important than ever and more challenging. But government and policy makers don’t know how it happens, and we can’t just assume it happens.

The Family Caregiving Programme is the first major programme dedicated to understanding family care of older persons in southern Africa. As part of the research team for this programme we are looking at how family care works and how it can be better supported. The five-year programme aims to improve our understanding of how family care is experienced in South Africa, Malawi, Namibia and Botswana.

For the latest research report, we worked with 103 caregivers and 96 older persons in 100 family units across seven locations in three South African provinces: the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal. We worked in two rural areas, one peri-urban area and four urban areas including two townships.

Three quarters of the sample of older persons required constant care or supervision.

We found that all the care needs were being met – but at a significant cost for caregivers, older persons and society.

Care needs go beyond physiological and cognitive issues and are shaped by the physical and social environment. The environment can make care more challenging and create more dependency. Lack of access to water, sanitation and electricity adds to care work.

For care needs to be met, older persons need supported caregivers, access to care services and basic services.

The gaps

South Africa’s long term care policy encourages “ageing in place”, meaning older people should live in their homes, supported by community-based services. But the reality is that support is limited.

Of the 5.5 million older people in South Africa, around 4 million receive the Older Person’s Grant, and at least 1.5 million need help with daily activities. Very few receive home-based care or subsidised meals. Even fewer receive assistive devices and materials such as wheelchairs or incontinence products.

It’s a common assumption that if an older person lives with family, they’re being cared for. But this isn’t always true. Sometimes the available family member isn’t able – physically, emotionally, or financially – to provide proper care. Mental health support is also largely missing. Many older people experience loneliness and depression, but help is hard to find. In our study, one in five older persons experienced feelings of loneliness, anxiety and despair.

Many older people don’t have running water, proper toilets, wheelchairs, or incontinence products. If basic services are missing, the older person needs more help. Older black people in rural areas and in under-resourced townships are most affected.

Family Caregiving Programme

Older people also need help accessing healthcare. High levels of diabetes, hypertension and arthritis in many cases lead to disability in later life. But getting help to access care isn’t always available.

Mary Mwebu (we have used pseudonyms), who lives in the rural Eastern Cape and has TB of the spine and mobility challenges, has no running water in her home. She also has no accessible and affordable transport, so she hasn’t been to the clinic in 10 years and struggles to manage her pain.

Care needs of older persons include basic provision of food. Our findings show that older persons and their households spend way below what is needed for a healthy diet.

The older person’s grant, at R2,315 (US$130) a month in 2025 and similar to the cost of incontinence products for the month, is often the main income in the household and is used to cover the costs for everyone, especially in a context where 64% of people living with an older person are unemployed.

Food is the biggest cost, often up to two thirds of income. It is the first thing to cut when there’s not enough money.

Money is particularly tight in black low-income households. In many cases expenditure exceeds income, and older people are left vulnerable. If any unexpected costs like medical needs or hygiene products arise, the older person will often have to sacrifice food.

Others will obtain loans and so many fall into debt. Borrowing from loan sharks is a way to buy food but high interest rates put people in a worse position the following month.

Limiting spending, eating less, and limited help from family members are the only other ways to meet their needs.

Why care is depleting

The average older person household has five people in it. Large households have many care needs, not just elder care. We found that women – especially daughters and female relatives – are the main caregivers.

But the findings show that due to HIV/Aids and migration, older people can’t always rely on their children. In such instances care is also provided by nieces, neighbours, and adult granddaughters.

Looking after an older person often requires caregivers to relocate. Our findings showed that one in five caregivers had to move, often with young children or leaving spouses behind.

Sometimes older persons need to move to get care. This happened in one in 10 older persons in our sample. Many are reluctant to move from their homes and the process can take years.

The findings show that family caregiving is not an endless supply of “free” labour. It is physically, emotionally and financially costly, especially for black low-income women.

Some answers

The report proposes three key recommendations.

Firstly, family caregivers and careworkers should be adequately compensated for their work.

Secondly, we call for expanding home-based care services to ease the load and give caregivers breaks and mental health support.

And thirdly, care-related items, such as wheelchairs, incontinence products and healthy food, should be made more easily available.

Supporting family caregivers means supporting the wellbeing of millions of older South Africans. It’s time the country took elder and family care seriously and backed it with real investment and action.

– Older South Africans need better support and basic services – and so do their caregivers
– https://theconversation.com/older-south-africans-need-better-support-and-basic-services-and-so-do-their-caregivers-258409

June 12, 2025

5 great reads by South African writers from 30 years of real-life stories

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Hedley Twidle, Associate Professor and head of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. The Interpreters is a new book that collects the work of 37 authors, all of it writing (plus some drawing) concerned with actual people, places and events.

Soutie Press

The anthology is the product of many years of reading and discussion between my co-editor Sean Christie (an experienced journalist and nonfiction author) and me (a writer and professor who teaches literature, including creative nonfiction).

The book is a work of homage to the many strains of ambitious and artful writing that shelter within the unhelpful term “nonfiction”. These include: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony.

To give an idea of the range, energy and risk of the pieces collected in the anthology, here I discuss five of them.

1. Fighting Shadows by Lidudumalingani

We debated for a long time which piece to start the anthology with, and ultimately went for this one, which begins:

One afternoon my father and the other boys from the Zikhovane village decided to walk across a vast landscape, two valleys and a river, to a village called Qombolo to disrupt a wedding.

It’s a quietly compelling opening. First of all, there is intrigue: why the disruption? It could also easily be the first sentence of a novel (maybe even one by famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe). And so we begin with a reminder of how storytelling is such a deep, ancient and fundamental part of societies – an impulse that long predates writing and moves across and beyond the fiction/nonfiction divide. (Lidudumalingani won the 2016 Caine Prize for a short story, so he works across both.)

Lidudumalingani has the stick fighting tradition at the centre of his piece. Soutie Press

Fighting Shadows is about the tradition of stick fighting, and how it’s transported from rural areas to urban ones. But it’s also about so much more, about “the dance between then and now”, as the writer puts it later on. The prose is so deft and graceful, as if the author is trying to match the “dance” of expert stick fighters with his own verbal arts. For me it’s a story that could only have emerged from this part of the world: it has a distinct voice, precision and poetry to it.

2. The End of a Conversation by Julie Nxadi

This is the shortest piece in the anthology, but for me one of the most affecting. It traces how a young girl comes to realise that the (white) family she is being brought up with are not really her family. She is the daughter of the housekeeper, the domestic worker:

I was not ‘the kids’. I was not their kin.

It’s probably best described as autofiction, a kind of writing that lies somewhere in the borderlands between autobiography and fiction. Nxadi has spoken of how she decided to write in a way that contained her own life story – the “heartbreak” of that moment – but was also able to carry and represent the experience of others who had gone through something similar.

Julie Nxadi. Soutie Press

The piece is also a product of the #FeesMustFall student protests (2015 onwards), when many young South Africans felt able to share unresolved, awkward or shameful stories for the first time.

The End of a Conversation is such a deft, wise and subtle handling of a difficult subject, with no easy targets or easy resolutions. Somehow the writer has found just the right distance – emotionally and aesthetically – from this moment of childhood realisation.

3. South African Pastoral by William Dicey

I co-own a pear farm with my brother. I attend to finances and labour relations, he oversees the growing of the fruit.

This essay by William Dicey thinks hard, very hard, about what it means to manage a fruit farm in the Boland (an agricultural region still shaped by South Africa’s divided past). It is one of the most frank and unflinching accounts of land and labour I’ve ever come across. The writer makes the point that he could easily have stayed in the city, lived in “liberal” circles and not thought about these issues much.

William Dicey. Soutie Press

But becoming a farmer confronts him with all kinds of difficult questions (How much should he intervene in the lives of his employees? In family and financial planning, in matters of alcohol abuse?) as he is drawn into an awkward but meaningful intimacy with others on the farm.

The US essayist Philip Lopate suggests that scepticism is often the tool for moving towards truth in personal nonfiction writing:

So often the “plot” of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defences toward deeper levels of honesty.

This is very much what happens in South African Pastoral, and why it is such a mesmerising piece (even while written in such a plain and restrained style).

4. Hard Rock by Mogorosi Motshumi

My co-editor said from the start we should include graphic nonfiction (drawn stories and comics) and I’m so grateful he did. Mogorosi Motshumi’s warm, zany but also harrowing account is about coming of age under apartheid and then the heady days of the 1990s transition.

Mogorosi Motshumi. Soutie Press

In his early career, Motshumi was widely known for his comic strips and political cartooning, but this graphic autobiography is far more ambitious. The style of drawing changes and evolves as the protagonist gets older; also, there is something intriguing about seeing weighty subjects like detention, disability, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS stigma approached through the eyes of a wry cartoonist with a keen sense of the absurd.

Hard Rock is a prologue to the graphic nonfiction memoir that he has been working on for many years, the 360 Degrees Trilogy. The first two instalments have appeared – The Initiation (2016) and Jozi Jungle (2022) – and I would urge anyone to seek them out. Mogorosi’s work is a major achievement in South African autobiography and life writing (or life “drawing”).

5. The Interpreters by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele

This co-authored piece is what gave the anthology its name. The Interpreters is a reflection on being a language interpreter during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (1996-1998) into gross human rights violations during white minority rule.

Kopano Ratele. Soutie Press

A series of individuals recall the challenges of that process. Sitting in glass booths in the middle of proceedings, they had to move across South Africa’s many official languages in real time, translating the words of victims, perpetrators, grieving families, lawyers and commissioners.

Antjie Krog and co-authors write about interpreting language. Brenda Veldtman

The chapter is also a reminder of how our English-language anthology faces the challenge of doing justice to a multilingual, multivocal society where all kinds of cultural translations happen all the time.

The piece is a blend of many people’s voices, testimonies and reminiscences. As such, it also seemed to symbolise the larger project of The Interpreters: trying to record, render and honour the many voices that make up our complex social world.

– 5 great reads by South African writers from 30 years of real-life stories
– https://theconversation.com/5-great-reads-by-south-african-writers-from-30-years-of-real-life-stories-258340

June 12, 2025

Khartoum before the war: the public spaces that held the city together

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ibrahim Z. Bahreldin, Associate Professor of Urban & Environmental Design, University of Khartoum

What makes a public space truly public?

In Khartoum, before the current conflict engulfed Sudan, the answer was not always a park, a plaza or a promenade.

The city’s streets, tea stalls (sitat al-shai), protest sites and even burial spaces served as dynamic arenas of everyday life, political expression and informal resilience.

In a recently published article, I studied 64 public spaces across pre-war Greater Khartoum, revealing a landscape far richer – and more contested – than standard urban classifications suggest. Specifically, I uncovered four classifications: formal, informal, privately owned and hybrid spaces – each alive with negotiation and everyday use.

While some spaces were planned by colonial engineers or municipal authorities, many were carved out by communities: claimed, adapted and reimagined through use.

My research offers valuable insights into the design and planning of Africa’s cities. As they grow and face mounting political and environmental pressures, it’s time to rethink how public spaces are defined and designed – not through imported models, but by listening to the ways people already make cities public.

Across the African continent, cities are growing fast – but not always fairly. Urban expansion often privileges gated developments, mega-projects and high-security zones while neglecting the everyday spaces where most people live, work and gather.

In Sudan, these dynamics have been further complicated by conflict, displacement and economic instability. The ongoing war has disrupted not only governance, but also the spatial fabric of urban life.

My paper aims to invite those involved in planning policies and post-conflict reconstruction to move beyond formal, western-centric models that often overlook how publicness actually unfolds in African cities: through informality, negotiation and social improvisation.

Khartoum’s public spaces, as documented in my study, serve as diagnostic tools for understanding how cities survive crises, express identity and contest inequality.

In the wake of war and displacement, these spaces will play a role in shaping how Sudan rebuilds not just infrastructure, but social cohesion.

Pre-war Khartoum

Khartoum’s public spaces cannot be understood through conventional categories – like formal squares and urban parks – alone. These formal squares represent only one layer of a much more plural and negotiated urban reality.

Drawing on fieldwork and the documentation of 64 public spaces across Greater Khartoum, I identify four overlapping types that reflect how space is produced, accessed and contested.

1. Formal public spaces: These include planned parks, ceremonial squares, civic plazas and administrative open spaces, often relics of colonial or postcolonial urban planning. They are defined by order, visibility and regulation. Mīdān Abbas, originally an active civic space in the centre of Khartoum, repeatedly reclaimed by informal traders and protesters, is one example, illustrating how even the most formal spaces can become contested. It was notably active during Sudan’s April 1985 uprising, serving as part of a wider network of civic spaces used for political mobilisation. Informal traders consistently transformed it into a bustling marketplace, embedding everyday commerce and social exchange into the formal urban fabric.

2. Informal and insurgent spaces: These emerge beyond or against official planning logics – riverbanks used for gatherings, neglected lots transformed into social nodes or bridges appropriated by traders. They include spiritual sites like Sufi tombs, and protest spaces such as the sit-in zone outside the city’s army headquarters. These spaces reveal the city’s capacity for bottom-up urbanism and collective adaptation.

3. Privately owned civic spaces: Shopping malls, privately managed parks and cultural cafés fall into this category. While they appear public, they are often classed, surveilled (monitored through cameras or security presence) or exclusionary. The rise of these spaces coincides with the decline of state-managed urban infrastructure, reflecting the turn in Sudanese urban governance.

4. Public “private” spaces: These spaces blur lines between ownership and use. They include mosque courtyards, school grounds, building frontages or underutilised university lawns that serve as informal gathering points. Access here is governed less by law and more by social codes, trust or class.

Together, these typologies highlight that “publicness” in Khartoum is relational. It depends not only on who planned a space, but who uses it, how and under what conditions.

Planning in African cities must therefore move beyond fixed zoning maps to embrace the layered, fluid and lived nature of urban space.

Rebuilding, rethinking, resisting

Post-conflict reconstruction in Sudan – and elsewhere in Africa – must resist the allure of “blank slate” master plans. Those involve rebuilding cities from scratch with sweeping, top-down designs that ignore existing social and spatial dynamics.

Imported models, often guided by bureaucratic thinking or commercial incentives, risk erasing the very spaces where public life already thrives, albeit informally or invisibly.

Rather than imposing formality, planners should recognise and strengthen the informal and hybrid systems that sustain civic life, especially in times of instability.

Urban theorists working in and on the global south, such as AbdouMaliq Simone and the late Vanessa Watson, have long argued for planning frameworks that centre on everyday practices, adaptive use and spatial justice.

Khartoum offers a compelling case.

From the sit-ins of 2019 to tea stalls run by displaced women, public spaces in Sudan are not inert backdrops. They are active platforms of everyday life, resistance, care and community-making.

Reconstruction must begin by asking: what spaces mattered to people before the war? Which ones fostered inclusion, dignity and visibility? Only then can new urban futures emerge, ones that are rooted in the practices of those who have always made the city public, even when the state did not.

What makes spaces truly public?

The public realm in Sudan has always been shaped through negotiation, sometimes with the state, often despite it.

Rebuilding after war is not only about reconstructing buildings but also about reimagining the terms of belonging.

This requires a shift from viewing public space as a fixed asset to understanding it as a dynamic process. Who gets to gather, to speak, to rest, to protest – these are the true measures of publicness.

Understanding Khartoum’s pre-war public spaces isn’t a nostalgic exercise. It’s a necessary step towards building more inclusive, resilient and locally grounded cities in the wake of crisis.

– Khartoum before the war: the public spaces that held the city together
– https://theconversation.com/khartoum-before-the-war-the-public-spaces-that-held-the-city-together-258632

June 12, 2025

Ngũgi wa Thiong’o and the African literary revolution

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Simon Gikandi, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department, Princeton University

The passing of celebrated Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on 28 May 2025 marks the end of a remarkable period in African literary history – the fabulous decades in the second half of the 20th century when African writers came to command the world stage.

This was the time of what I call the African literary revolution. As a scholar of African literature and the author of many books and papers on Ngũgĩ, I have raised several questions about this period. Why and how did this revolution happen? What motivated this turn to the imagination as a tool of decolonisation? And what was Ngũgĩ’s role in this drama?

To answer these questions one must think of Ngũgĩ inside and outside a generational cultural project.

The African literary revolution

Accounting for this project is not difficult. One can say for certain that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the African continent entered the last phase of decolonisation, writers and intellectuals became important actors in the fight for independence. They did so by quietly entering and occupying the spaces and knowledge systems that had until then been the preserve of colonial agents.

They used the work of the imagination to challenge colonial systems of thought and imagine decolonial alternatives. And what made this a period like no other in African literary history was a powerful sense of newness and the possibilities of a world yet to come. As the Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe once put it:

There was something in the air.

Literature was asked to herald the possibilities and perils of freedom and Ngũgĩ was to play a major role in chaperoning the language of African being and becoming.

In the memoirs he wrote about his education, he would often return to his mental imprisonment in English literature and the mythology of Englishness.

Hidden in these narratives of colonial miseducation, however, was the discovery of the gift of African fiction brought by precursors. Nigeria’s Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi and South Africa’s Peter Abrahams gave Ngũgĩ a model of how English could be used against Englishness.

Coming after these writers provided him with an alternative to the “Great Tradition” of English letters.

Reimagining Africa

As a student at Alliance High School in Kenya and later at Makerere University College in Uganda, Ngũgĩ positioned himself as part of a literary vanguard that was reimagining Africa.

His first major fiction was published in Penpoint, a pioneering journal of literature edited by students at the Makerere English department. He was a delegate to the 1962 Conference of African Writers held at the university, sharing the podium with writers who were to define the African culture of letters for several decades. He was one of the few writers at this historic conference without a major publication, but his presence seemed to signal the promise of the future.

Something else made this period distinctive: this was a time when African intellectuals, writers and politicians shared a common belief in the redemptive work of art and literature. At Makerere, Ngũgĩ had been preceded by Julius Nyerere, a translator of Shakespeare in Swahili who was to become president of Tanzania. At the same college, Apollo Milton Obote, future president of Uganda, had appeared in a 1948 production of Julius Caesar, the first performance of Shakespeare at the university.

And the contributors represented in Origin East Africa, an anthology of creative writing at Makerere, provide the most vivid example of the role writing and a literary education could come to play in the making of the postcolonial public sphere. Ngũgĩ had four stories published in the anthology, coming just after a short story by Ben Mkapa, future president of Tanzania.

Ngũgĩ belonged to a generation that saw literature as a forum for critique, of questioning dominant ideas and beliefs. In this context, creative writing was asked to perform at least four tasks:

to reimagine an African past whose resources might be rehearsed for the future
to rehearse the drama of decolonisation
to account for postcolonial failure
to produce fictions that might help readers rethink a global African identity.

Ngũgĩ’s novels rose to fulfil these tasks with conviction and courage. The River Between and Weep Not, Child dealt with the wounds of history. A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood were positioned in a zone where the figure of the new nation was caught between its aspirations and desires and the possibility of failure and betrayal. Wizard of the Crow was simultaneously an allegory of postcolonial failure and the possibility of its transcendence.

And then came banishment and exile.

The late career

Although he barely acknowledged it in his writings or in public, Ngũgĩ’s late career was defined by the realities of exile and an awareness of his own displacement from his primary audience and the Gĩkũyũ language that had energised his poetics.

He was celebrated and honoured in powerful American universities and institutions including the Library of Congress. He was recognised in the global African world and cited by the few African leaders like Ghana’s John Dramani Mahama who understood the need for a forceful response to racial ideologies.

But he was a persona non grata in the one place – Kenya – where recognition mattered most to him.

In the end, there was a certain kind of belatedness in Ngũgĩ’s later fictions. The subject of these works and their points of reference were distinctly Gĩkũyũ, Kenyan, African, pan-African, and global. Nonetheless, these gestures of being African were enacted far away from the homelands in which Ngũgĩ’s writing and thinking was both intelligible and functional.

Imagining and writing about Africa away from Africa was a promise and debt. It was an obligation to a place but also a measure of one’s distance from it.

I reflected on this problem as I reviewed Ngũgĩ’s 2006 novel set in an imaginary autocratic country, Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), in its original Gĩkũyũ edition and later in its translation.

I was reading the same book, but it was pointing in two different directions – towards home and away from it.

In our many encounters, Ngũgĩ made fun of the fact that I seemed to have adopted alienation as the essential condition for thinking and writing. What he sought to do until the last minute of his life was carry within himself and his fictions that place that used to be home, its politics and poetics.

– Ngũgi wa Thiong’o and the African literary revolution
– https://theconversation.com/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-african-literary-revolution-258428