Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Misheck Mutize, Post Doctoral Researcher, Graduate School of Business (GSB), University of Cape Town

The three major credit rating agencies – Moody’s, S&P Global and Fitch – have often differed among themselves when rating African institutions and countries. Their opinions don’t have to be aligned, but a huge gap in the ratings suggests inaccuracies in the analyses.

Wrong ratings have consequences. They drive up the cost of capital. Lower ratings indicate higher risk, and lead investors to demand higher interest rates to compensate for that risk. When a sovereign (country) is downgraded, its borrowing costs increase. It has to pay more interest on the same amount of debt, and has less chance of getting funding for development.

In the last three years there have been notable examples of rating agencies differing significantly in their decisions.

The first example is African Export-Import Bank. Between June 2025 and June 2026, the three major agencies reached materially different conclusions about the creditworthiness of the bank. The African Union has highlighted the flawed ratings.

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Read more: Africa’s development banks are being undermined: the continent will pay the price

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The second example is Fitch Ratings’ downgrade of the Nigerian industrial group Dangote Industries Limited on 6 August 2024. It cited risk linked to the construction of a refinery. A year later, the Dangote Oil Refinery proved to be a transformative project that rebalanced Nigeria’s trade position. It reduced the country’s imports and increased its domestic production. Fitch was wrong and its rating downgrades put the completion of the project at risk.

The African Finance Corporation shows a similar divide. S&P New York and its Chinese subsidiary gave widely differing assessments.

And finally, Moody’s downgraded Kenya in July 2024 while S&P maintained its B-rating.

These examples highlight the same problem: the differences between rating agencies ostensibly looking at the same set of risk factors.

In my view these discrepancies present African countries with two opportunities:

• challenge the ratings

• diversify their ratings and funding relationships away from the western markets.

Lastly, the differences highlight the need for rating agencies to be more objective and base their ratings on factual data and fundamentals.

The differences

Fitch downgraded the African Export-Import Bank twice, from BBB to BBB- in June 2025 and subsequently to BB+ in January 2026 before withdrawing its rating. This means Fitch stopped assigning ratings to the bank after its contract was cancelled.

Both Moody’s and S&P maintained investment-grade ratings, assigning Baa2 and BBB+, respectively. This is a three notch difference between Fitch and S&P on the same institution.

This rarely happens in other continents because the three international rating agencies assess largely similar risk factors in an entity’s ability to repay its loans.

The question is whether Fitch’s three-notch downgrades of Afreximbank were driven by facts about the bank or by analysts’ own subjective misjudgements.

Asian agencies tend to recognise the policy importance of Afreximbank, which plays a strategic role in financing Africa’s trade and development. As a result they recognise its preferred creditor status, that its member countries continue to repay the bank’s loans even during periods of crises.

Fitch, however, argued that Afreximbank’s role in Africa was diminishing and it was not a preferred creditor because the International Monetary Fund said so.

S&P Global Ratings aligned with China’s Chengxin International Credit and Japan Credit Rating Agency.

When Fitch Ratings downgraded Dangote Industries it said the risk was refinancing linked to a new oil refinery. Fitch speculated that delays in meeting funding requirements would make financial restructuring or default more likely, and that could trigger further downgrades.

Faced with such a conservative and speculative outlook, Dangote Industries Limited decided to end its contract with Fitch Ratings. It said the rating no longer made commercial sense and the group would instead focus on securing ratings from African-based rating agencies.

A year later, the Dangote Oil Refinery has turned Nigeria into a regional exporter and bolstered its energy security.

Moody’s downgraded Kenya on 8 July 2024 after the government withdrew planned tax hikes in response to protesters. S&P decided to wait for Kenya’s August 2024 budget.

The Moody’s downgrade resulted in a two-notch rating split on Kenya between Moody’s and S&P. Within six months Moody’s had reversed the downgrade with an outlook upgrade. Skipping from negative, past “stable”, to positive. It is highly unusual for a rating agency to revise its outlook within six months and to skip one notch.

It can be argued that the revision was an implicit admission by Moody’s that its earlier ratings were incorrect.

Kenya incurred approximately US$150 million in additional interest costs on existing Eurobond debt as investors rushed to sell off their bonds.

Alternatives

The high cost of capital, driven by weak ratings from the international rating agencies, is pushing Africa to shift towards Asia for foreign funding sources.

Five African countries have already issued a combined US$5 billion in bonds from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea and the United Arab Emirates over the past two years. This shift has made Asian rating agencies more relevant as no country or institution would raise capital in Asia without a rating from local rating agencies. These are giving some African institutions stronger assessments than their western peers. Asian agencies are equally independent and credible.

When Fitch Ratings downgraded Afreximbank to speculative grade, Asian rating agencies saw it differently. Chengxin International Credit Ratings Co. kept a stable AAA rating on Afreximbank. Japan Credit Rating Agency rates the bank A- stable for its Samurai bond programme. They differ widely from Fitch on the same institution, with the same balance sheet and the same mandate.

What needs to change

The widening rating splits among the three international rating agencies present an opportunity for African sovereigns and their institutions.

First, rather than accepting rating assessments that prove to be analytically flawed, African sovereigns and their institutions must challenge these ratings. In my view this will help the rating agencies be more thorough. It will also bring flawed ratings to the attention of international investors.

Second, African entities need to diversify their ratings and funding relationships away from the western markets. Domestic rating agencies have demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of local realities.

Lastly, the rating agencies need to be more objective. Analysts’ sentiments and frustrations should not find their way into the rating process.

– Flawed credit ratings in Africa: are top 3 western agencies driven by data or bias?
– https://theconversation.com/flawed-credit-ratings-in-africa-are-top-3-western-agencies-driven-by-data-or-bias-286364

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Sally K Ledwaba, Academic Excellence Coordinator, Tshwane University of Technology

Universities have a role in challenging the status quo on issues such as gender, race, nationality and sexuality. But all too often, they replicate societal inequalities.

For example, a recent study notes that globally, only one-third of senior academics are women. In the US, universities have twice as many male professors as female.

Culture is one driver of these intersecting inequalities in higher education.

In South Africa, a report noted that in 2017, Black women made up 16% of university academics and 40% of the population, making them the most underrepresented group. There’s an imbalance by seniority as well as gender and “race”: most Black senior academics are male, and most female senior academics are White or Indian.

Trends like these raise an important question: how do the few African women who become professors navigate institutions where they are a small minority?

This was the research question at the centre of my PhD in social work, supervised by professors Adrian van Breda and Thobeka Nkomo. My research explored African female academics’ career motivations, challenges in that career and personal resilience strategies, as well as what their institutions had done to support their journey towards leadership.

The findings echoed my own experience, but also challenged some common assumptions.

I found that academic advancement is often shaped not only by individual effort, but also by those who are willing to create opportunities for others. Many participants credited White male professors for enabling their academic advancement by encouraging doctoral studies, nominating them for leadership roles, supporting their promotions, and increasing their visibility in influential networks. Few participants identified Black female mentors as enabling their rise, and references to Black male academics were largely absent.

The relative absence of Black mentorship in these accounts raises difficult but important questions about how support networks form within universities and who sponsors the next generation of scholars.

The challenge for universities is to go beyond depending on personal goodwill and to systematically embed sponsorship into their cultures and practices.

Experiences of African female professors

For my PhD research, I conducted in-depth narrative interviews with 21 African female professors in three universities in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The aim was to understand how they had advanced to senior positions.

I was struck by the similarities in their stories.

There was a complex interplay between motivation, resilience and community in the academic journey of these individuals.

Intelligence, intellectual curiosity and the quest for knowledge were the main motivations for entering the academy. As one participant put it:

I was performing well.

Another said:

I was always attracted to understanding.

Staying motivated depended on both personal strengths and supportive environments.

All participants demonstrated strong resilience. They were determined not to be excluded, navigated complex institutional environments, pursued qualifications despite obstacles, and created opportunities for themselves. Their career success was the result of years of personal sacrifice, persistence and a pursuit of excellence, often extending back into childhood.

Participants recalled barriers they faced when entering the academy:

So, everything that you do, you must do twice, because you’re being doubted and there are questions about whether you know what you’re doing.

I wasn’t promoted … and I felt it was because I was female, because my male counterparts were promoted, who I felt had the same profile as me, or even lower, and they got promoted.

Unexpected sources of social capital

However, personal resilience was not enough. Social capital was also vital: progress often occurred when people decided to open doors for others.

This participant said a senior White male in her department advised her:

… think about the project that is going to set you apart from your supervisor … if you want to succeed in this career.

Another participant spoke of a White male professor who was willing to help her get established as a researcher.

Participants’ stories showed that advancement often occurred when influential colleagues broke long-standing patterns of exclusion in academia.

Although public discourse often portrays White males as obstacles to Black advancement, this research reveals a more complex reality. The unexpected allyship of White men suggests that institutional change often progresses through relationships that bridge divides of race, gender and historical privilege.

As this participant said:

I also had a great [White, male] supervisor, who was committed to transformation, in the sense that he went overseas and used his networks to amass these resources. And he wanted to grow from the grassroots.

The role of White male academics in these stories was not uniformly positive. Some participants recalled instances in which White male colleagues impeded progress, limiting access to opportunities and upholding institutional hierarchies.

One described the difficulty she faced:

There were challenges … and [the department] had old people at the time and White males. I was replacing a male colleague … I didn’t have an environment. The office that I had was not a conducive office at all.

These findings highlight an aspect of how power operates in universities. Although merit, expertise and consistent effort are vital for academic growth, it matters for senior academics to identify potential in junior colleagues, support them and connect them to networks.

There are many possible explanations for why White male professors featured so prominently in participants’ accounts. Historically, White male professors have occupied a greater proportion of senior academic and leadership positions. They have had better access to networks, resources and influence that affect academic careers. By contrast, many Black academics have had to navigate institutions that were not designed for their success.

The study findings, therefore, tell us as much about the distribution of institutional power as about individual acts of mentorship.

Embedding the culture

As a new PhD (Ledwaba) and as a senior academic (van Breda), we both argue that transformation in higher education cannot rely solely on demographic change, such as increasing the number of African female academics. While representation is essential, it does not shape women’s academic careers or transform the academy. Rather, transformation requires a personal and institutional commitment to a culture of enabling talented scholars from historically marginalised groups to thrive.

– Black women academics in my study said their main allies were White men – what this reveals
– https://theconversation.com/black-women-academics-in-my-study-said-their-main-allies-were-white-men-what-this-reveals-285167

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, Research Fellow & Sudans Research Director, London School of Economics and Political Science

South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state.

South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly.

This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not failing so much as working? What if they stabilise order precisely by preserving the systems that make violence profitable?

Political settlements theory helps explain why peace agreements often focus on dividing power, offices and resources among elites. The hope is that if rival leaders receive a share of power, offices and resources, they will have less reason to fight. But negotiated transitions can also carry wartime systems into peace. The question, then, is not only who gets a share of the state, but what kinds of war economies, revenue systems and coercive practices are being preserved.

As an economic historian of war and peace, I have spent more than a decade tracing how rulers in South Sudan and Sudan raise money, goods, labour and other resources, and how payment is enforced through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices. My recent research paper examined how South Sudan’s peace agreements reshaped the country’s systems of revenue, spending and coercion: who could extract resources, who could allocate them, and who could enforce payment.

My analysis drew on 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival, secondary and peace agreement data. I sought to answer three questions: who collected revenue from monetary and non-monetary sources, such as cash, cattle, grain and labour; who paid; and who benefited.

What emerges is that peace settlements have redistributed access to money, offices and external finance among elites, while leaving intact the coercive revenue system and war economies that preceded them. In some cases, peace has formalised those systems by turning wartime access to extraction into recognised office, revenue authority or security control. Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians – now in the name of order.

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

The same machinery makes the state itself a prize: controlling it is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for, and when the power-sharing breaks down, as it did in 2013, the fighting returns. Peace and war become two settings of one extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Similar dynamics have emerged in other resource-rich, conflict-affected states, such as in oil-rich Angola and the mineral endowed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). South Sudan is resource-rich too, above all because of oil. But the wider issue is not only natural resources. It is the political control of revenue streams such as oil, customs, aid, loans, contracts, checkpoints, timber, charcoal and other forms of extraction.

It’s all part of a wider pattern in peacemaking that has repeatedly paired political deals with economic reforms that entrenched elite control over revenue and other resources.

None of this is inevitable. A different approach would start by treating the whole revenue complex as the heart of peacemaking itself, not as a technical issue to be postponed until after a peace agreement is signed. It would ask who controls money and other resources, including humanitarian and development assistance; who is allowed to extract resources, payments and labour from civilians; and whether people can see anything in return for what they pay.

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

South Sudan’s national revenue system includes taxes, customs, fees, oil revenues, international loans, aid and off-budget income. It also includes non-monetary extraction, such as cattle, grain, labour and goods taken from civilians. These flows are enforced through soldiers, security forces, government offices and checkpoints. Together, they form what I call a revenue complex: the machinery through which rulers extract the resources that allow them to govern, reward allies and sustain coercive power.

In much of South Sudan, “peace” has reshuffled who profits from the revenue system, not what it does to those who pay. A businessman in Malakal, a city in Upper Nile State, described the tax system as “organised robbery” in which soldiers were overcharging and pocketing the proceeds. He was told that the system had to be endured to “maintain peace”.

Predation was not a breakdown of order; it was a condition of order.

None of this began with the peace process. My peace agreement analysis starts in the early 1970s, but in separate archival research and an earlier round of just over 200 interviews, I traced the territory’s revenue complex back to at least 1899. Across colonial, rebel and independent rule, I found a similar logic: revenue sources were used to secure rulers’ control more than to fund public goods.

Across more than 120 years, changes in government did not dismantle the underlying machinery of extraction and control. Each major political settlement since the 1970s has been laid over that inheritance, reshuffling who profits from it.

Confusion is integral to the system. Traders described being shuttled from office to office to meet fresh demands; collectors themselves spoke of decrees “passed from nowhere” that shifted revenue to other units. A businesswoman in Wau described fierce competition for tax collection posts because of what could be skimmed from them. This is not administrative failure, but a system that works for those who run it. When revenue authority is spread across overlapping offices, no one can be held to account and everyone can be rewarded for their loyalty.

This performance of state finance runs all the way up. In 2012, the president conceded that some US$4 billion in oil money had simply been “stolen”. In 2026, a UN panel of experts found that South Sudan continued to sell oil months in advance of delivery, and that disputes over undelivered oil cargoes and oil-backed debts had reached UK commercial courts.

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

South Sudanese nevertheless do not reject the idea of contributing to public authority. They contrasted community-level payments and contributions, which they could see returning as boreholes, roads or clinics, with state taxation, which they experienced as extraction without return.

Many insisted that paying tax is good, so long as it is reciprocal, transparent and tied to public goods.

The problem is that peace agreements often leave that link severed, even as they formalise new bargains among elites.

What non-predatory peace would require

A different kind of peacemaking would mean taking the following steps.

• rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex

• linking what people pay to what they receive

• making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.

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Read more: Checkpoint ‘taxes’ make South Sudan one of the most expensive places to move goods

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Lastly, South Sudanese civic actors should be supported to monitor the cross-border flows – oil, arms, timber, charcoal, looted goods and finance – that fund fighting.

This work does not fall solely to donors and mediators. People are already documenting where the money goes.

A serious settlement would treat them as central to any peace worth the name.

– South Sudan at 15: how the political elite have found a way to profit from peace as well as war
– https://theconversation.com/south-sudan-at-15-how-the-political-elite-have-found-a-way-to-profit-from-peace-as-well-as-war-285846

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Emmanuelle Veuillet, Associate professor, University of Juba

When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, civil servants found themselves at the centre of a deep political and economic crisis.

The state was, and remains, the largest employer, surpassing private companies and NGOs. In 2015, the approved national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel. Over 85% were engaged in security-related functions. Despite the absence of official statistics, observations confirm that the civil service has not shrunk over the years.

As the conflict became increasingly politicised and shaped by ethnic divisions, civil servants had to navigate shifting loyalties and growing insecurity.

The war also triggered an economic collapse. In 2015, the South Sudanese pound lost nearly 90% of its value against the US dollar. Trade routes were disrupted. Domestic production of products declined and shortages of imported goods fuelled hyperinflation.

The near-total collapse of oil exports – the government’s main source of revenue – severely weakened state finances. By late 2015, the government was effectively bankrupt and increasingly unable to fund the public sector.

This resulted in long delays in civil servants’ salary payments from several months to a year. Hyperinflation also eroded the value of wages.

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Read more: Is Sudan’s war the reason for South Sudan’s economic crisis? What’s really going on with oil revenue

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This did not lead to a mass exodus from the civil service, however. During my PhD fieldwork, I found that many civil servants chose to stay. As a political sociologist, I was interested in understanding their decision to remain in a broke administration during such challenging times. I explored the little-known wartime experiences of ordinary middle-ranking civil servants to make sense of it.

Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in South Sudan, I found that civil servants chose to remain in government because – despite the absence of a salary and direct income – their jobs provided benefits. These included social status, and access to networks and opportunities. The job provided a sense of normality, too, during a period of political upheaval. It was also a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

The civil war formally ended with the 2018 peace agreement, but South Sudan remains mired in political and economic crises. My findings help explain why, despite repeated shocks, state institutions have endured.

The study

I collected the data in my study between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Western Equatoria in South Sudan. The region doesn’t have oil resources, hosts a variety of ethnic groups and plunged into war later than many others. I relied on observations from various administration offices at county and state levels, and informal conversations held during these visits.

As part of my research, I followed the stories of six civil servants – two women and four men – from different departments and directorates at the county and state levels. They held different grades within the administration. They were aged over 30 and held at least a high school certificate.

The findings

My study shows that civil servants’ attachment to a state with no money was shaped by material, social and political factors.

Before the war – from independence in 2011 to 2013 – even lower-ranking government jobs provided civil servants with a modest but stable standard of living. For instance, a cleaner (grade 16) in public administration earned around US$180 to US$200 at the time. But after the conflict began, that economic security disappeared.

By April 2017, a director’s monthly salary (grade 3) could only buy a 20kg bag of rice and a 10kg bag of red beans. An administrative officer’s (grade 12) salary could barely pay for 2kg of rice.

All civil servants had to look for other sources of income for daily survival. These included farming, small-scale businesses, and renting or selling properties. The economic security attached to a position in the civil service had vanished.

Yet civil servants continued to go to the office because it still gave them access to other forms of resources, helped them maintain their status and preserved an appearance of normality.

The benefits included:

• access to opportunities, such as NGO trainings and workshops that provided per diems for the period of participation, or a certificate of attendance that could be added to a CV

• the knowledge and power to help people and do favours, which helped them cultivate social networks that could be used to access goods, services or credit

• preserving social position and maintaining practices that reinforced a sense of normality, both in the eyes of others and for themselves

• a shared experience which fostered forms of solidarity and mutual understanding among civil servants. They organised social activities and support mechanisms, such as savings groups, among themselves rather than with other social groups.

A desired future

Despite the South Sudanese government’s withdrawal from many of its social responsibilities, civil servants continued to imagine a different kind of state. Those I interviewed shared a vision of a strong and functioning state.

It was often accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, as they imagined themselves helping to build such a state. Maintaining the functioning of state institutions and preserving some level of public service during the crisis became a meaningful commitment, a survival strategy and an investment in upward mobility within a “wished-for state”.

The decision to remain in this career was also shaped by a lack of alternatives, however. Middle-ranking civil servants had relatively low levels of formal education and lacked the networks needed to secure other employment. The private sector has remained small because of a difficult business climate and a lack of economic diversification.

The total collapse of a functioning state would mean the disappearance of their jobs – which helps explain their efforts to keep the administration going.

The economic crisis in South Sudan raises questions, however, about how long civil servants can continue to sustain state institutions.

In many cases, salaries have gone unpaid for more than a year. And cash shortages in banks prevent civil servants from accessing whatever funds may be available to them.

– Serving a state that couldn’t pay: why South Sudan’s civil servants didn’t quit during the war
– https://theconversation.com/serving-a-state-that-couldnt-pay-why-south-sudans-civil-servants-didnt-quit-during-the-war-286083

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lesedi Senamele Matlala, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Public Policy, Monitoring and Evaluations, University of Johannesburg

Across South Africa, there are various ways for people to report issues like broken infrastructure, unreliable water supply, failing clinics and poor municipal services. The channels include ward meetings, hotlines, and digital platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and X. Complaints are often shared publicly and sometimes gain traction.

But are they enough? As a researcher specialising in governance, public policy and citizen-based monitoring, I recently conducted a study examining whether the system in South Africa is working as it should. The study was prompted by the paradox that despite the expansion of citizen participation mechanisms and digital reporting platforms since 2013, public dissatisfaction with service delivery remains high. This raises questions about whether citizen feedback is influencing government decision-making.

Citizen-based monitoring was introduced by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation in 2013. It was designed to strengthen accountability and improve frontline service delivery by enabling citizens to monitor public services and communicate their experiences directly to government institutions.

My research shows that the central problem behind persistent service delivery failures is not the absence of public participation. South Africans continue to report problems, attend meetings, engage online and raise concerns about service delivery. The deeper problem is the absence of institutional response. Citizen-generated feedback is rarely integrated into formal government systems such as planning, budgeting, performance management, or service delivery processes. This means many complaints are acknowledged but not acted upon.

The study therefore recommends embedding citizen-generated feedback directly into government planning, budgeting, performance management and service delivery systems so that participation can translate into action.

The systems failures

Our research involved collecting survey data and conducting qualitative interviews with 12 representatives across government, civil society and community media. Participants included government officials responsible for citizen engagement, monitoring and service delivery oversight, leaders of civil society organisations involved in social accountability initiatives and community radio practitioners who regularly facilitate dialogue between citizens and government. The findings reveal persistent challenges.

There is limited integration of citizen-based monitoring into core government systems. In many cases, citizen feedback mechanisms operate separately from formal planning, budgeting and performance management systems. This means complaints are collected but not systematically translated into government action.

There has been a decline in participation. Interview participants reported lower attendance at ward meetings and reduced public engagement with formal participation mechanisms, which they attributed to frustration with the limited government response to citizen feedback.

There are unclear institutional mandates, such as uncertainty over whether municipalities, provincial departments, ward councillors, or national government structures are responsible for responding to citizen complaints. This fragmentation diffuses responsibility for responding to citizen feedback across departments and spheres of government, allowing issues to fall through the cracks and leaving citizens without answers.

There is inadequate follow-through on citizen feedback.

Key drivers of this include:

• Weak institutional ownership: in South Africa, citizen-based monitoring is managed inconsistently across departments and municipalities. No single institution is clearly responsible for coordinating responses and ensuring accountability. As a result, citizen-based monitoring is frequently treated as a temporary project or pilot rather than embedded within core government functions such as planning, budgeting and performance management. This leads to weak accountability, fragmented implementation and inconsistent responses to citizen concerns.

• Digital exclusion: digital platforms as WhatsApp, Facebook, X and municipal reporting portals have added another layer to this dynamic. These platforms offer new opportunities for visibility and engagement but also expose the limitations of existing systems. This is highlighted in debates on open government, where transparency does not automatically translate into responsiveness. Institutions such as the UNDP governance programme emphasise the importance of models that combine digital and offline participation. Reliance on digital tools also risks excluding those without access to technology or the skills to use it.

• Donor dependency: many citizen-monitoring initiatives rely on temporary donor-funded projects. These often collapse once funding ends.

• Low public awareness: citizens don’t know about platforms they can use to report service delivery failures.

• Limited feedback loops: citizens don’t get updates on whether their complaint was received, investigated, or resolved.

The consequence is a growing sense of frustration among citizens. They begin to question the value of engaging with formal systems when their participation does not produce visible change. It leads to declining trust in public institutions and, in some cases, increased reliance on protest action.

Signs of progress

The study also identified positive factors such as enabling policy frameworks, structured capacity-building aimed at strengthening the skills of government officials responsible for citizen engagement and service delivery monitoring and the adoption of digital reporting and communication tools by government departments and municipalities.

The study recommends embedding citizen-based monitoring more directly into formal government systems such as planning, budgeting, performance management and municipal reporting structures. This will make it more likely that citizen feedback contributes to decision-making and accountability.

In practice, this would mean that complaints raised through ward committees, WhatsApp groups, municipal hotlines, social media, or community radio are formally recorded, assigned to responsible departments, tracked through digital systems, linked to municipal performance targets, and followed up with feedback to citizens on actions taken.

It also requires recognising the continued importance of local communication platforms such as community radio. These are important channels for engagement in many parts of the country, particularly where digital access is limited.

The success of citizen-based monitoring depends on whether governments respond to what citizens are saying.

The challenge is building systems that require government to respond. In Brazil, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre linked citizen priorities directly to municipal spending decisions.

In Kenya, the Huduma Kenya service model includes complaint tracking and service-request management. South Africa could adopt similar mechanisms: complaint tracking, response deadlines, public dashboards and direct links between citizen reports and municipal budgets.

Until citizen feedback is embedded into governance systems, participation will fall short of its potential.

– Does it help to report poor government service in South Africa? Study finds what’s missing
– https://theconversation.com/does-it-help-to-report-poor-government-service-in-south-africa-study-finds-whats-missing-283526

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Dan Paget, Assistant professor, University of Sussex

Public rallies were banned in Tanzania in June 2026 for the second time in a decade. The first ban was imposed by President John Magufuli in 2016. His successor, President Samia Hassan, lifted it in 2023 as part of a reform agenda. Now she has reimposed the ban. Dan Paget has spent over a decade chronicling the struggles of Tanzania’s democracy movement amid waves of repression. He’s had a special focus on a form of political communication that’s of extraordinary significance in Tanzania: mass rallies. He unpacks what this latest ban means.

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Why has Tanzania banned political rallies again?

Tanzania first imposed a ban on political rallies nearly a decade ago, in June 2016, to slow down opposition organising.

The ban was part of a wider authoritarian turn led by John Magufuli, who became president in 2015.

Samia Hassan succeeded Magufuli upon his death in office in 2021. She signalled a new era of democratic reform, but the most substantive change she has delivered was lifting the ban on political rallies in 2023.

Her government has now reimposed the ban, this time in the wake of a violent post-election crackdown in 2025.

The government has suspended mass rallies “until further notice” because it fears that they could trigger protests that spiral out of control.

Activists had named 7 July 2026 as the date for nationwide protests against political repression.

It has become clear that Hassan’s claim to a reform agenda was something that she wanted to signal, but not deliver. Legislative reforms proved to be hollow. More substantive reforms were kicked down the road.

Instead, everyday repression has increased. Activists have been arrested, attacked or abducted. The main opposition presidential candidate, Tundu Lissu, was arrested and charged with treason in April 2025. Fifteen months later, his trial has yet to be concluded.

In this context, mass protests unfolded on election day in October 2025. They were met by an unprecedentedly violent crackdown.

A government-sponsored commission of inquiry acknowledged that at least 518 people were killed, but it alleged this was largely done by professional foreign agitators. In reality, the death toll may have been far higher, and the violence was in all likelihood carried out almost entirely by state security forces.

Why are political rallies so important in Tanzania?

In Tanzania, rallies are not just for election campaigns. They are also the means by which political parties mobilise and organise between elections.

This is especially true for Tanzania’s leading opposition party, Chadema.

Chadema has built a nationwide support base. By 2015, it had achieved a grassroots campaign network that matched the long-dominant ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (in power since independence in 1961).

Chadema built its party apparatus using rallies. Its leaders spent months and years touring Tanzania town by town. They addressed citizens in public squares. They communicated their people power ideology and asked for volunteers on the spot. These volunteers were made the new members of local party branches.

Aspiring Chadema leaders used the same methods to organise at the local level. Lissu was one of those aspiring Chadema lieutenants. Together, they created a national movement. The rally was the vehicle for that movement-building.

Magufuli banned rallies in this context. He was attempting to put the brakes on opposition organising.

What’s different about this ban compared with the one a decade earlier?

Chadema has been trying to organise and rebuild just as it did after rallies were unbanned in 2023. But another context looms larger in this latest rally ban: the prospect of protest.

In years past, this would not have caused the government concern.

While Tanzania had a culture of mass rallies, it had no culture of mass protest. There have been protests, but they were localised or non-partisan or small, or all three at once. See, for instance, the Maasai protests against forced relocation and protests in Mtwara against a natural gas pipeline.

Careful government repression and deterrence have kept a lid on the scale and intensity of these protests. The absence of intense protests became self-sustaining – as no one had ever witnessed protests on a major scale, few ever joined them.

That all changed in the October 2025 election when anger at political repression and long-stalled living standards radicalised public opinion and fuelled mass protests.

Suddenly, the notion that protests could not happen in Tanzania evaporated. Tanzania’s democracy movement took on a new, popular form. A people power movement was born anew.

In this context, the potential role of the rally in Tanzania changes. Any rally can simultaneously be, or become, a protest.

This has changed the picture for Tanzania’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

It only managed to suppress protests in 2025 by resorting to bloody and brutal repression. It does not want to have to do so again – it learned how quickly protests can scale and become a threat to the regime itself.

What does this mean for Tanzania’s struggle for democracy?

In another context, the banning and unbanning of rallies might seem like small news: objectionable in principle, but politically inconsequential. Whether campaigners can hold rallies or not, they can get their message out on television and on social media. In such contexts, rallies are as politically significant as a bumper sticker.

But rallies hold great significance in Tanzania and are central to everyday political communication.

Survey data from 2015, the last time an election proceeded without significant repression, shows that 69% of people attended rallies. Not just one or two: they attended seven on average.

Indeed, in much of Africa, the rally takes on a wholly different role. It is one of the primary channels of communication. Survey data from Afrobarometer (2019-2021) across 33 countries on the continent shows that 35% of people attend campaign rallies. By contrast, rallies are attended by just 1% in the UK and between 5% and 7% in the United States.

Africa’s levels of rally attendance are sky high from global perspectives.

But gone are the days when an opposition rally might merely provide a foothold in a locality. Today, it may become the stone that starts an avalanche among the public.

It is this logic that lies behind Hassan’s decision to torch one of her few tangible reforms, and further deepen repression in Tanzania.

– Tanzania has banned political rallies again: what the government fears
– https://theconversation.com/tanzania-has-banned-political-rallies-again-what-the-government-fears-286663

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Cathy Wilcock, Research Fellow, University of Manchester

The revolution in Sudan in 2019 has been eclipsed by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023.

But the events of 2019 demand greater attention as they hold lessons for a post-war Sudan.

Music was central to the protests in 2019. The camp outside military headquarters in Khartoum, where demonstrators gathered for weeks to demand civilian rule, became known as Sudan’s largest ever arts festival.

My research on resistance movements has led me to believe that music is not only a cosmetic accessory to protests. In Sudan, it was an integral part of the revolutionary movement that ousted the Omar al-Bashir regime. For decades, music helped cultivate anti-government sentiment and forge the networks and communities that would sustain the revolution in 2019.

I’ve explored this idea in a recent paper, drawing on interviews with protesters and musicians.

Sudanese music and resistance

Music in Sudan has historically been intertwined with popular resistance. First against colonial rulers and then – following independence in 1956 – against post-colonial despots. The patriotic anthems of the 60s and 70s expressed the sentiment that Sudan was being built by the people, not the government.

As one music fan who was a young teenager in the early 1970s said:

There were different ideas, of course, about what sounded good, but if you were making music, you were against the government, that was for sure.

One after the other, however, authoritarian regimes sought to crush all creativity – and especially music – through censorship laws and the systematic intimidation of artists.

Gigs had to be held as private events in people’s homes and even these were regularly broken up by a morality monitoring unit. Many popular musicians left for careers abroad.

But underground music scenes kept anti-government sentiment alive.

My research shows that the exodus of musicians, producers and fans under the Bashir regime did not weaken popular resistance. Instead, this displacement helped build strong transnational social networks, enabling musicians to record music outside Sudan. This was then distributed back to communities inside the borders. Later, these same social networks supported the 2019 revolution.

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Read more: Songs of freedom: the soundtracks of political change in Sudan

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Throughout recent history and across various genres and scenes, music has helped the Sudanese imagine alternatives to authoritarian rule and build the relationships needed for collective action.

Given the close historical ties between resistance movements and music scenes, examining the music of the revolution provides insight into the values, identities and visions of democratic change that shaped Sudan’s revolutionary movement.

Music, gender and class

In my paper I analyse the most prominent revolution songs – collected in a shareable YouTube playlist – to explore what protesters’ choices reveal about the movement itself. The songs point to a growing openness towards gender and class.

At the 2019 protests, the revolutionaries honoured a canon of anti-oppression anthems. These included traditional Sudanese staples, hip-hop classics and contemporary pop sing-a-longs.

Not all revolutionary anthems are lyrically political, however, and there are gendered reasons for this.

In Sudan’s decades of patriarchal autocracy, speaking openly about politics through song lyrics was often far riskier for women than for men. As a result, women-led genres, such as tumtum and aghani albanat, typically centred on romance and everyday life, accompanied by handclapping and rhythms played on the doolka drum. Among highbrow creatives, these vocal and percussive genres are considered artistically subordinate to male-dominated genres. These include haqeeba, which features instrumental accompaniment on the more technically demanding oud.

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Read more: Omar al-Bashir brutalised Sudan – how his 30-year legacy is playing out today

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However, tumtum and aghani albanat were popular with protesters in 2019. This was not because their lyrics were directly political (they were not). Rather, they represented the defiance of women who continued to create and perform music despite decades of state restrictions on women’s artistry.

Despite their lyrical playfulness and political neutrality, Sudanese society celebrated these genres in the revolution. This sends a powerful political message about a rising cultural openness towards feminine creativity, which had been inhibited by the state.

Zenig is a new Sudanese genre of music. It emerged in the early 2010s from the poor and peripheral neighbourhoods in Khartoum. It takes its rhythmic base from tumtum, and mixes this with retro keyboards, low-fi synths and improvised vocals. It is fundamentally a Khartoumian invention, and is deliberately defiant of conservative gender and class hierarchies.

Zenig contributed to the cacophony of sounds during the 2019 sit-in. One protester remembered “its fast-paced rhythmic style worked well in energising crowds”. The most likely place to hear Zenig at the sit-in was in intimate circles and small stages where friends could dance together. Before the revolution, Zenig was known in Khartoum as the music of poor outcasts.

The significance

By elevating female leadership in the music of the revolution, Sudanese revolutionaries deliberatively negotiated what an alternative ideal Sudanese society would be like; one with more empowerment for women, as both creative and political forerunners.

The inclusion of genres like Zenig at the 2019 sit-in demonstrates that Sudan’s revolution was not only about changing the regime.

For many young Sudanese, it was also an expression of yearning for broader societal change and an upending of societal power relations.

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Read more: Ethiopia’s musicians fled the country after the 1974 revolution – how their culture lives on

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The revolution in 2019 was a unique time for openness, experimentation and future-making facilitated by music.

Music and rebuilding

The war has prevented Sudanese civilians from continuing these important social negotiations.

The resistance movement and its musicians have been displaced within Sudan and to regional hubs like Cairo (Egypt) and Nairobi (Kenya). Many have tragically lost their lives. Some have remained in Khartoum and continue to make hopeful music against the odds.

Even as Sudan’s future remains uncertain, music will be surely be central in the rebuilding of civilian lives that will come.

– The rhythms that broke Bashir: how Sudan’s music shaped a revolution
– https://theconversation.com/the-rhythms-that-broke-bashir-how-sudans-music-shaped-a-revolution-284963

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

Every year on 16 June, readers around the world celebrate Bloomsday, the annual commemoration of Irish writer James Joyce’s landmark 1922 novel Ulysses.

The date marks the single day on which the novel unfolds: 16 June 1904, when its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, wanders through the city of Dublin. What began as a literary observance has become a global celebration of reading.

In 2026 the festivities in Johannesburg had a special South African quality to them. At the centre of the event was South African writer and translator Sandile Ngidi’s isiZulu rendering of the character Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, the concluding episode of Ulysses.

As a scholar of African literatures, I am interested in how literary ideas travel. My research has shown how writers from very different contexts can grapple with similar political and artistic questions. Ngidi’s translation opens up one of the most challenging works of literature to new readers.

The isiZulu translation represents only a small portion of this vast and notoriously difficult novel. Ulysses is based on one ordinary day in the lives of three characters who live in Dublin. It uses their experiences to explore identity, memory, desire, and modern life in early 20th-century Ireland.

Since its publication, Ulysses has been formally translated into more than 40 languages, mostly within Europe. Its journey into isiZulu reminds us that literature travels most powerfully when it crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries and returns us to the urgent questions of our own time.

Translation as an act of imagination

Bridge Books, a community-centred bookshop in inner city Johannesburg, hosted the Bloomsday event, which also included readings from South African writers Ivan Vladislavić and Terry-Ann Adams.

By holding a multilingual Bloomsday celebration in parts of the city where anti-immigrant groups have been marching, the organisers underscored a simple but powerful point: the civic imagination at the heart of Joyce’s work remains relevant wherever diverse communities claim space through stories and conversation.

Ulysses is really about random and seemingly mundane interactions. Molly Bloom is one of the main characters, an opera singer who spends the day mostly in bed. Bloomsday is named after her and her husband, who is also a main character. He’s wandering the city remembering the death of their son, and stewing in the knowledge that Molly is having an affair. This is the universal drama of human life.

Ngidi’s translation matters. It challenges assumptions about which languages are considered suitable for conveying the so-called world literature. African languages are not peripheral to global literary culture but active participants in it, capable of carrying, reshaping and reinterpreting some of the most demanding works ever written.

In fact, reading Joyce in isiZulu raises larger questions about literary inheritance. Who owns a literary classic? Joyce himself was deeply concerned with the relationship between language and power.

Writing from a colonised Ireland, he grappled with the complexities of expressing Irish experience through English, the language of imperial rule. His work repeatedly explores tensions between local identity and global influence, between inherited forms and new possibilities.

James Joyce for everyone

The concerns in Joyce’s fiction have become even more pertinent. Across many parts of the world, debates about belonging have become increasingly fraught. In both Ireland and South Africa, questions of migration, national identity and cultural inclusion have generated political tensions and, at times, hostility towards foreigners.

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Read more: Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task

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Joyce is often regarded as a writer for specialists and university students. His novels have a reputation for difficulty that makes them seem inaccessible. Yet events like the one in Johannesburg suggest a different story. Joyce survives because readers continue to reinvent him, finding new contexts, new languages and new communities in which his work can live.

Translation, in this sense, is more than a literary exercise. It is an act of imagination that allows readers to encounter familiar questions from a different vantage point. Rather than simply reproducing Ulysses, the translation creates a new reading experience that illuminates both Joyce’s novel and the expressive possibilities of isiZulu.

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Read more: Wretched of the Earth has been translated into South Africa’s Zulu language – why Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary book still matters

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By carrying Joyce into isiZulu, Ngidi expands not only the readership of Ulysses but also the range of perspectives through which the novel can be understood.

The translation demonstrates that African languages are not simply vehicles for local experience; they are capable of engaging the most complex works of world literature while bringing new meanings to them.

– Ulysses in isiZulu: why an African translation of the classic Irish novel matters in today’s world
– https://theconversation.com/ulysses-in-isizulu-why-an-african-translation-of-the-classic-irish-novel-matters-in-todays-world-285381

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Marloes Janson, Professor of West African Anthropology, SOAS, University of London

Nigeria’s economic hub, Lagos, ranks among the fastest-growing cities in the world. Its huge population – estimated at around 20 million – and its rapid urbanisation contribute to a sense of life where survival hinges on improvisation and ingenuity.

Nigerian musician Fela Kuti captured the megacity’s chronic difficulties with the expression “impossibilityism”. Yet, Lagos is also widely regarded as a place brimming with possibility.

My research as an anthropologist with a focus on religion shows that a significant number of Lagosians turn to religion in the hope of converting the impossible into the possible. Religion is not only for spiritual purposes, but also a practical way to solve problems.

For a better life in Lagos, there are difficulties to overcome: economic uncertainties, infrastructure failures, governance issues, inequality and crime. To maximise their chances of success, a growing number of Lagosians combine elements from different religious traditions. A prominent example is Chrislam, which emerged in Lagos in the 1970s. It fuses Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices.

Although relatively small compared to the Pentecostal churches and reformist Muslim organisations that have mushroomed in Lagos in recent decades, Chrislam needs to be understood within a broader religious transformation.

This transformation is difficult to map. Scholars of religion tend to emphasise fixed religious boundaries rather than the improvisational ways in which people practise religion. In the media, religious encounters are often reduced to conflict and violence.

Chrislam may appear to be a marginal phenomenon, but understanding it is useful for developing a new perspective. It illuminates how urban Christians and Muslims live their religion and interact with one another in ways that exceed the stereotypical images of Nigeria.

Religious shopping

“Welcome to Lagos; here everything is possible,” were the words my research collaborator, Mustapha Bello, greeted me with when I first arrived in the megacity in 2010. I soon discovered what “everything is possible” means when I met the founder of Chrislam.

Nigeria is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians along a predominantly north-south axis. Muslim-Christian relations in the south-west, with Lagos as its centre, are far more dynamic.

In this region, Muslims and Christians have long lived side by side, often in close interaction with practitioners of Yoruba religious traditions. The latter believe that the material world is shaped by unseen powers, including the òrìṣàs (personalised deities) who are held responsible for good fortune. It is this particular religious mix that created the conditions in which Chrislam could emerge.

There are two main Chrislam movements. Ifeoluwa (“The Love of God Mission”) has a small congregation of about 50 followers. Oke Tude (“Mountain of Losing Bondage”) has grown to over 1,000 adherents.

In addition to their Yoruba names, they use “Chrislam” as a way to describe their faith. While the two movements share certain practices – like drawing on both the Bible and Qur’an and invoking Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad in their prayers – they also differ. The founder of Ifeoluwa, Tela Tella, lives a secluded life in a densely populated suburb of Lagos. The founder of Oke Tude, Prophet Dr Samsindeen Saka, uses modern media to spread his message of unity between Christians and Muslims.

This mixing and matching is locally described as “religious shopping”. According to the hundreds of self-identified religious shoppers I’ve interviewed over the past 15 years, those seeking health and wealth cannot afford to be picky.

Chrislamists, for example, explained that their faith enabled them to “hedge their bets” by “combining the powers in Christianity and Islam”, doubling their chances of achieving a “good life”. And the Oke Tude imam told me that he prayed eight times a day – five times in the Muslim way and three in the Chrislam way – in order to benefit from the cumulative power of prayer.

The Chrislam prayer involves running seven times around a replica of the Ka’bah – the most sacred site in Islam – while shouting “Hallelujah” and “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

The Chrislamists I studied actively crossed religious boundaries. This needs to be understood against the backdrop of an urban environment marked by uncertainty and instability, where two-thirds of Lagosians live below the poverty line.

In this context, it’s both pragmatic and strategic to draw on the perceived potency of both Christianity and Islam.

Debunking stereotypes

Chrislam challenges portrayals of Nigeria as a country defined by Islamist-Christian clashes. While religious violence is a serious concern in the country, my research shows that Christian-Muslim relations cannot be reduced to conflict alone.

Chrislam is far from an isolated case. Across multifaith settings in Africa (and beyond), one finds movements that combine elements from different religious traditions. They defy neat classification.

A notable example is the Afrikania Mission, which emerged in Ghana in the 1980s. It blends elements of Christianity with so-called African traditional religion. Religious boundary-crossing is an integral feature of contemporary religious life in Africa.

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Read more: Is there a Christian genocide in Nigeria? Evidence shows all faiths are under attack by terrorists

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It’s not that religious differences don’t matter in these movements. They do, but religious divergence does not automatically give rise to violence or polarisation. It can just as readily serve as a basis for copying, competition, and mutual exchange.

Indeed, Chrislamists see Christianity and Islam as complementary rather than contradictory. For instance, a dedicated Chrislamist responded to my question about whether he worshipped Jesus as the son of God (as in Christianity) or as a prophet (as in Islam) by saying “he is both”.

The founder of Ifeoluwa, Tela Tella, preached:

Jesus Christ is on my right-hand side, the Prophet Muhammad is on my left-hand side; they are two of my best friends.

Why this matters

In my view it’s time to rethink how we study religion in Africa by moving beyond western, Christian-derived conceptions of religious traditions as fixed and bounded.

An Afrocentric lens begins with African forms of knowledge, practice and meaning – how African religious practitioners actually live, blend and interpret religious traditions.

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Read more: God in Nigeria: the country’s novelists help us understand the complexity of Christianity

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Viewed through this lens, Africa does not appear as a passive recipient of the so-called world religions but as a powerhouse of religious creativity and innovation.

Chrislam is then no longer an oddity or contradiction, but a political resource in a place where religious identities are often weaponised.

It provides a lesson that today’s fractured world urgently needs. Religious boundaries need not function as battle lines; they can also serve as meeting points.

– Shopping for God in Lagos: what is Chrislam?
– https://theconversation.com/shopping-for-god-in-lagos-what-is-chrislam-285308

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Joshua Brahinsky, Researcher, Department of Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University

Do the world’s religions and contemplative traditions send people to the same place – compassion, bliss, awe, a sense of God, awareness, or the universe?

We conducted a study that asked a smaller version of this question.

As scientists with a research focus on brain science and spirituality, we ask whether people from very different spiritual traditions – Buddhism and Christian Pentecostalism – use their bodies in similar ways when they’re in intense contemplation.

To make this concrete, let’s play a game. Consider the following quote and ask if it sounds like a person engaged in ecstatic Christian prayer – speaking in tongues – or someone in a deeply quiet Buddhist meditative state known as jhāna.

I let go of everything … It feels like you’re falling. The first few times that happened to me, it was terrifying. I like to call it ‘slipping upward’ because it feels like a lifting to me…

Now consider this one:

It feels like a constant invitation to let go of more control, and the more control I let go the more powerful an experience it is … The more I let go, the lighter I feel…

Can you tell which is speaking in tongues and which is jhāna? The first was meditation; the second was tongues. If you got it wrong, don’t worry – even experienced contemplative practitioners identify them correctly only about half the time.

Our research suggests that these traditions, which on the surface appear so different, may, in fact, share a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. And further, that this mechanism might be a tool for self-transformation.

Meditation and tongues

It’s true that jhāna meditation and speaking in tongues could hardly look more different.

Jhāna is an ancient Buddhist practice from India, centred on intense concentration. Speaking in tongues is a Christian prayer practice in which worshippers utter a fluid string of speech that doesn’t have a semantic meaning.

In jhāna, the body is still. You sit. You do not move. From the outside, almost nothing seems to happen. The practice is deliberate, austere, and precise. Attention is guided – patiently and repeatedly – back to a single object, often the breath. Gradually, attention gathers. The mind steadies. A sense of ease appears – sometimes warmth, sometimes a spreading pleasure.

In deeper states, meditators describe absorption so complete that the sense of acting or choosing dissolves into something quieter.

Tongues prayer unfolds in a very different register. Sound spills out. Voices rise, overlap, and break apart. Bodies sway or tremble. Some people weep; others laugh. Some rock rhythmically. People may dance.

For those who pray this way, they feel the prayer is not produced by them – it moves through them.

Placed side by side, these practices appear to belong to different worlds. If you only watched, you would not confuse them. Yet when we listened closely to how practitioners described what it felt like from the inside, the contrast began to soften.

For this study we conducted in-depth interviews with 116 practitioners and then mapped their responses against neuroscience theory. The work continues. We are currently exploring the physiological (bodily function) side of the story to see if brain activity can be used to measure the pattern we observed at the level of experience.

Across many conversations – with experienced jhāna meditators and long-time tongues practitioners – we noticed a recurring pattern. Attention gathers. Feeling intensifies. And then, at some unpredictable moment, something releases.

A familiar rhythm

Whether in stillness or fire, the rhythm was familiar. The inner sequence was strikingly similar. Attention to the act of practising feeds arousal of the senses and emotions. Arousal, in turn, stabilises attention. Together, they facilitate the sense of reduced effort – until effort is no longer required at all.

A jhāna meditator told us:

I set the intention. Then I let go.

She described it as falling upward – quiet, buoyant – as though the experience were happening through her.

A tongues practitioner said:

The more I let go, the stronger it gets.

He spoke of shaking, of tears, of feeling small – of God taking over.

In both practices, attention and feeling work together. Intensity does not disrupt focus; often it sharpens it. Focus then allows the rest of the mind to let go. In the wake of surrender, both groups described emerging clarity, a sense that the process renewed their minds.

The science

We began to suspect that both practices rely on a simple loop – one that aligns well with predictive processing, a dominant framework in today’s neuroscience. It suggests the brain uses predictive models to perceive and navigate the world. We think that people, instead of seeing everything as fully new, have maps from their previous experience that allow them to recognise that, for example, a chair is for sitting on and that a creature with arms and a beard is a person.

The loop might work like this: attention is placed and held on something – the breath, God. As attention stabilises, the object grows vivid. That vividness brings pleasure, as the brain enjoys the experience of clarity in its effort to predict sensory input.

Pleasure, in turn, makes attention easier to sustain. What begins as effortful becomes easier. Control gives way to momentum and attraction. At a certain point, practitioners report that their familiar sense of “doing” falls away as what we call the Attention–Arousal–Release Spiral develops and deepens.

Finally, surrender enables a renewal, as their minds are refreshed by a momentary release of prior patterns of thought.

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Read more: How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

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Seen this way, our analysis argues that jhāna and tongues might be culturally distinct tools acting on the same human mechanism – a spiral of attention, arousal and release that enables renewal.

Why this matters

At a moment when religion is often experienced as a polarising force, this kind of research might offer a window into a shared foundation that we can all use to shift how we experience the world.

– Meditation and speaking in tongues: the surprising similarities between two spiritual practices
– https://theconversation.com/meditation-and-speaking-in-tongues-the-surprising-similarities-between-two-spiritual-practices-284215