In the run-up to its theatrical release, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey became embroiled in online polemics after Elon Musk attacked the movie’s supposed “woke” casting. Yet beyond this contrived spectacle lies a far more important criticism to be made of the filmmakers: their decision to shoot part of the movie in Africa’s last colony, Western Sahara. Enjoying generous subsidies from the Moroccan state, they lent legitimacy to its illegal occupation regime.

As Nolan and his crew filmed along the coast around the port city of Dakhla last summer, an open letter condemning the move was signed by prominent figures in world cinema, including Javier Bardem, Pedro Almodóvar, and Paul Laverty. “Mr. Nolan filmed there without the consent of the Sahrawi people,” it read, in reference to the majority nationality in Western Sahara. “The only consent he received came from the occupying force: Morocco.”

In particular, Oscar-winning actor Bardem did not hold back. As he posted the letter on his Instagram account, he added: “For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city.”

Covering an area the size of Britain, Western Sahara is designated as a “non-self-governing territory” by the United Nations and remains on its official list of territories still awaiting decolonization. Retained by Francisco Franco’s Spain even as other European colonies won their freedom, it did not gain independence even after the dictator’s demise in 1975. Instead, neighboring Morocco and Mauritania invaded — with at least 40 percent of the Sahrawi population at the time fleeing to neighboring Algeria to escape the Moroccan air force’s bombing campaign. Half a century later, 173,000 Sahrawis still remain in Algerian refugee camps. The native Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation are subject to what Freedom House categorizes as among the least free political systems on the planet.

The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco’s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew’s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump’s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.

For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

If the construction of the vast defensive berm in the 1980s was Morocco’s attempt to entrench its military control over Western Sahara, the transformation of Dakhla into a tourist destination and green energy hub in recent years aims to consolidate the occupation as an irreversible economic reality. From the Moroccan leadership’s perspective, Sahrawi independence will look increasingly unrealistic if it can develop the territory in conjunction with international investors. It is also incentivizing Moroccan settlers to move to the territory with generous subsidies and jobs.

The clearest expression of this strategy is Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which looks to provide landlocked countries in the Sahel region with maritime access to the Atlantic via a new €1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028). Positioning the occupied city as a key logistics hub for northwestern Africa, the project aims to further integrate Western Sahara into regional trade networks.

Tourism is also key to normalizing Moroccan control, with Dakhla in particular recast as an international destination for kitesurfing and ecotourism. On a 2022 visit, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were photographed at one of the growing number of high-end hotels on Dakhla peninsula, as well as on the sweeping Atlantic coastline that would later attract the film crew shooting The Odyssey. The couple’s holiday photo shoot offered a vision of luxury resorts and leisure in which the military occupation and indigenous Sahrawi population were erased from view.

Airline Ryanair’s announcement in 2024 that it was opening new direct routes connecting Spain with Dakhla and the Sahrawi capital El Aaiún marked a further expansion of this model of occupation tourism — even as the European Commission informed airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would not be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement. At the same time, international journalists, trade unionists, and human rights defenders have looked to break the Moroccan media blockade by boarding these low-cost flights over the last 18 months, only to be detained at the airport or arrested when they made contact with local Sahrawi activists. Footage from last year even showed a left-wing delegation from the European Parliament being physically blocked from disembarking a Ryanair flight by Moroccan security forces.

The Odyssey’s subsidized production forms part of this same effort to establish Dakhla as an international — but firmly Moroccan — destination while limiting scrutiny of the occupation itself. Yet as news of the Dakhla shoot emerged last summer, Sahrawi filmmakers, journalists, and activists took to social media to contrast the free rein afforded to Nolan’s Hollywood production with the systematic repression they faced in trying to document the Moroccan state’s human rights violations, or simply in exercising creative freedom.

“I grew up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and today, as a Sahrawi filmmaker from the occupied city of Dakhla, I cannot freely enter my homeland to tell my own stories,” director Brahim Chagaf posted as part of the online campaign organized by The Western Sahara International Film Festival. “That is the great contradiction behind this landscape: while a few privileged people like Nolan can turn it into a movie, others are still waiting for the day when we can simply return to it.”

Campaigner Ghalia Djimi’s message was even starker: “Mr Nolan: I am a human rights defender. Morocco disappeared me for 3 years and 7 months in a secret prison in occupied El Aaiún.”

Her experience is far from exceptional. In its latest 2024 report, human rights NGO CODESA catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces that year. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of 18 student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.

As The Odyssey opens at the global box office, one of the Gdeim Izik prisoners, Enaâma Asfari, is currently in the fourth week of an indefinite hunger strike. In calling for his immediate release last month, Frontline Defenders said it was “concerned about reports describing medical neglect, reprisals and other forms of ill-treatment against Sahrawi human rights defenders in prison.”

“When Christopher Nolan steps on the red carpet on his way to the premiere’s screening, he will also be stepping on International Law,” insisted María Carrión, executive director of The Western Sahara International Film Festival, last month. “We ask the public to treat this film as they would a movie made in occupied Ukraine with [Vladimir] Putin’s permits, or in the illegal settlements in Palestine with [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s blessing.”

A series of rulings from the European Union’s highest court back this claim. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly found that Western Sahara is a territory with a “separate and distinct” status to Morocco and that legally its resources cannot be exploited without the consent of the Sahrawi people. Those judgments concern specific EU-Moroccan trade agreements, which the EU has tried to revive despite successive rulings from its own courts that they contravened international law. But the rulings raise broader questions about the responsibilities of international companies operating in the occupied territory, including film studios.

Given his back catalog, Nolan’s brilliance as a writer and director is unquestionable. Yet with The Odyssey, he and Universal Pictures have set a dangerous precedent as they pioneered a new form of filmmaking for our Trumpian age: occupation cinema. A country subject to a brutal colonization and a system of effective apartheid is not a legitimate backdrop for either international tourism or a Hollywood blockbuster.

It’s a cozy Thursday evening in Nairobi, and important conversations are about to begin. I ask my sound engineer, “Are you ready to record?” She signals yes. Deep breath in. Hold the mic close.

“Welcome to Hadithi Hangout Chapter. . . . ”

This is just one of the many conversations recorded and archived across Africa every single week. But why do we do it? Every single day, African creatives produce live performances, radio shows, DJ mixes, panel discussions, and cultural conversations. But where do these moments go after all is said and done?

Our continent has a long tradition of preserving and sharing knowledge through oral literature — songs, proverbs, and legends. During the colonial era, foreign researchers, institutions and labels recorded African musical heritage and took them away. Today, many of these sound recordings remain caged in museums abroad or locked behind academic paywalls, accessible only to researchers and those who can afford them.

To access the 14,000 recordings held by the African Music Archive, for example, you still need to travel to Mainz, Germany. Meanwhile, the International Library of African Music (ILAM), founded in South Africa in 1954 by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, has only recently begun digitizing parts of its vast collection and making them available online.

The question remains: who gets to access African cultural memory?

Kenyan sound artist KMRU explored this question in his 2023 album Temporary Stored. Blending sound synthesizers, field recordings, and archival recordings from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, the project liberates these stolen sounds from the colonial archive.

Today, African creatives and organizations are increasingly taking music preservation into their own hands. Empowered with digital technology, recording equipment, and online platforms, they are documenting traditional music, digitizing historical recordings, and creating new archives that are finally accessible to African audiences. Why does accessibility matter? Because preservation without access is still exclusion. Accessible archives help us reclaim culture, challenge colonial interpretations, and ensure African artists are the ones telling their own stories.

Here are four music archives in Kenya doing exactly that.

Based at The Mall in Westlands, Nairobi, Tamasha Records is one of East Africa’s most important custodians of recorded African music history. The company was established in the early 1990s, after Polygram East Africa exited the region, leaving behind one of the largest recorded music catalogs in East Africa. The collection contains more than 10,000 recordings from artists active between the 1950s and 1980s.

Tamasha has spent decades digitizing vinyl and CD recordings by legendary artists such as Franco Luambo, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Daudi Kabaka. These recordings are now available through streaming and download platforms. For many music listeners, Tamasha’s YouTube channel has become a nostalgic bridge into the world of classic East African music, also known as zilizopendwa. This is music which might have otherwise disappeared into storage rooms and deteriorating master tapes.

A similar urgency, if a different approach, shapes Singing Wells. In 2011, cultural practitioners Tabu Osusa of Ketebul Music and Jimmy Allen of the UK’s Abubilla Music bonded over one common concern — traditional East African music was disappearing as older musicians passed away and younger generations gravitated toward global popular culture. So what did they do? They founded the Singing Wells project, got their teams in a van, and traveled across East Africa recording musicians in their own communities rather than bringing them into urban studios.

15 years later, Singing Wells has become the world’s largest open archive of traditional East African music. Its online collection contains hundreds of recordings documenting music and dance traditions from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Beyond music, Singing Wells also publishes musician biographies, field reports, and instrument documentation on their website, making it an invaluable resource for researchers, educators, and artists alike, who are seeking to reconnect and gain inspiration from their cultural roots.

Founded in 2013 by David Tinning and Gregg Tendwa, Santuri East Africa has become a leader in music education, artist development, and cultural innovation. While Tamasha preserves historical recordings and Singing Wells documents traditional music, Santuri archives the present.

Through Santuri Salon at The Mall, the community space hosts panel discussions, listening sessions, and artist talks focused on music, culture, and technology. Many of these conversations are recorded and uploaded online, creating a living archive of contemporary East African culture. One such archive is Hadithi Hangout, a monthly reading group exploring Kenya’s political and musical histories. Listeners can revisit conscious conversations on everything from the impact of colonialism on contemporary music to the evolution of Kenyan music across the generations. For future researchers looking to understand East Africa’s creative landscape in the 2020s, these recordings may be just as valuable as historical music collections.

The fourth is Calotropis Radio, which flips the model: if traditional archives collect history after it happens, this community radio station records it as it unfolds. Founded in Nairobi and also based at The Mall, Calotropis describes itself as a dealer in sound, music, and poetry. When they are not playing eclectic music selections on their website, they live-stream and archive DJ sets, community conversations, and cultural events. Since 2025, they have partnered with Kilele Summit, Santuri’s annual festival for adventurous music and technology, streaming panel discussions and artist workshops to audiences far beyond Nairobi. Calotropis demonstrates that sometimes archives are built live, one broadcast at a time.

These African archives remind us that the power to tell and preserve our own stories is now in our hands. Preserving African culture does not look one way. It can mean digitizing old records, documenting traditional musicians in remote villages, recording community discussions, or live-streaming experimental performances to audiences around the world.

What matters is that these stories remain available. Accessible archives allow culture to be studied, remembered, and reimagined. And they help future generations understand who we were, what we created, and what we valued. Ultimately, sometimes, preserving culture begins with something as simple as holding a microphone close and pressing record.

On June 29, Ethiopia announced an agreement in principle with a committee representing about 45 percent of the holders of its defaulted $1 billion Eurobond. The proposed exchange would cut the bond’s principal by 12 percent, pay nearly $100 million in missed coupons, and attach a warrant that could give investors access to a future international bond. It is an important exit ramp. It is not yet the exit: nonfinancial terms, wider creditor acceptance, and the exchange itself remain unfinished.

The deal arrives more than two and a half years after Ethiopia allowed a 14-day grace period to expire on a $33 million coupon in December 2023. That missed payment was widely read as the collapse of an African growth story. For more than a decade, Ethiopia had combined rapid output growth with roads, power plants, railways, industrial parks, schools, and clinics. The default appeared to reveal that the boom had been built on unaffordable debt.

That interpretation is too simple. Ethiopia’s crisis did not result from borrowing alone, and it cannot be explained by either foreign exploitation or domestic incompetence in isolation. It emerged from a succession of debt regimes: historically specific arrangements among rulers, creditors, institutions, and social groups. Imperial governments borrowed selectively to preserve autonomy; the Derg used geopolitical credit to sustain a militarized state; the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) borrowed to accelerate structural transformation; and the present government has exchanged developmental discretion for emergency finance and restructuring. In every period, external money expanded state power. In every period, the state failed to build a sufficiently durable base of exports, foreign exchange, and accountable institutions to match its ambitions.

The central lesson is not that debt is inherently destructive. It is that sovereignty depends less on avoiding finance than on governing it: choosing investments that generate broad returns, disclosing liabilities, resolving political conflicts, and protecting citizens when adjustment becomes unavoidable. Ethiopia’s experience also exposes a weakness in the international system. A creditor architecture designed to restore sustainability can take years to coordinate, while the debtor absorbs inflation, investment delays, and deteriorating services.

Ethiopia’s rulers have long treated finance as a question of political independence. Emperor Menelik II granted a foreign concession for the railway from the French-controlled port of Djibouti in 1894. The line strengthened commerce, customs collection, and state reach, but it also tied a strategic corridor to European capital and diplomacy. The Bank of Abyssinia, inaugurated in 1906 under a concession involving the British-controlled National Bank of Egypt, similarly modernized payments while giving foreign shareholders an influential position in the country’s monetary system.

Later imperial governments remained cautious borrowers by the standards of the regimes that followed. That restraint protected one dimension of sovereignty: Ethiopia was less vulnerable to creditor demands and external-market shocks. But the achievement should not be romanticized. A narrow tax base, limited administrative capacity, and an unequal agrarian order left the state unable to finance the infrastructure, education, and productive transformation that political independence required. Ethiopia also was not uniquely “never colonized”: Liberia maintained formal independence, and Italy occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941. Formal sovereignty did not eliminate economic constraint.

The Derg, which seized power in 1974, reversed the imperial approach. Its debt regime was organized less by bond markets or International Monetary Fund conditions than by Cold War patronage. Soviet-bloc credit supplied arms and supported a state fighting Somalia and insurgencies in Eritrea, Tigray, and elsewhere. By the late 1990s, Ethiopia still carried roughly $10 billion in external debt inherited largely from the Derg; a World Bank assessment estimated that 62 percent was bilateral and owed mainly to Russia for Soviet-era military purchases.

Calling all of this “odious debt” has moral force but limited legal precision. The doctrine is contested, and the borrowed resources did not serve a single purpose: the Derg also financed state enterprises, social programs, imports, and emergency needs. Yet the political economy is clear. War, coercive agricultural policies, inefficient state projects, drought, and famine produced few export earnings with which to repay foreign obligations. The regime traded market dependence for strategic dependence on a patron. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the financial and military architecture sustaining the state disintegrated with it.

The EPRDF inherited that overhang in 1991 and spent the next decade normalizing relations with creditors. In 2004, Ethiopia reached the completion point of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. The IMF and World Bank estimated total debt-service relief at about $3.3 billion in nominal terms, including additional relief granted because lower coffee prices and exchange-rate changes had worsened the debt burden. Relief was not a blank check: it followed an IMF-supported program, a poverty-reduction strategy, and policy conditions covering macroeconomic management, social spending, and structural reform.

The reset created room for one of the developing world’s most ambitious public-investment drives. Ethiopia’s developmental state did what orthodox prescriptions often tell poor countries not to do: it used public banks, state-owned enterprises, directed credit, and external loans to build ahead of private demand. The results were substantial. Growth ran near double digits for much of the 2000s and 2010s. The national poverty rate fell from 44 percent in 2000 to about 24 percent in 2016. Roads, electricity, telecommunications, health, and education expanded. These gains were not statistical fiction, even though official growth estimates and their distribution remain debated.

The developmentalist argument for borrowing is strongest here. A country with low savings, weak private capital markets, and enormous infrastructure deficits cannot transform by waiting for tax revenue to accumulate. Public debt can “crowd in” investment by reducing transport, energy, and coordination costs. Ethiopia also diversified its creditor base. Multilateral institutions remained central, while Chinese policy banks, export-credit agencies, bilateral lenders, and — after the 2014 Eurobond — private investors financed projects that Western donors often considered too large or risky.

But the model’s internal test was not whether concrete was poured. It was whether investment raised productivity, tax revenue, and foreign-exchange earnings fast enough to service obligations denominated in dollars and other foreign currencies. That conversion repeatedly failed. The Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway improved a vital corridor but required a roughly $2.5 billion loan from China’s Export-Import Bank and later restructuring. Industrial parks produced exports and jobs, but a World Bank review found that net exports from the parks were only $163 million in fiscal 2019–20 — meaningful, yet far below the scale needed to transform the balance of payments. Public sugar projects suffered delays, cost overruns, and weak output. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, often grouped carelessly with foreign-debt projects, was financed predominantly through domestic bonds and public contributions rather than conventional external sovereign loans.

By the late EPRDF period, the decisive constraint was not simply the public-debt-to-GDP ratio. It was liquidity in foreign currency. Many state-owned enterprises borrowed abroad to import machinery, then earned revenue in birr. Exports remained concentrated in low-value commodities and services. The central bank rationed scarce foreign exchange, creating queues, preferential allocation, and a widening parallel-market premium. In 2018, the IMF classified Ethiopia as at high risk of external debt distress; reserves stood at about $2.8 billion, or only 1.6 months of prospective imports, while goods exports had stagnated.

This is where a purely neoclassical account and a purely critical account both become inadequate. Fiscal discipline mattered: projects with weak cash flows and opaque guarantees created liabilities that the state ultimately had to manage. But the problem was not excessive consumption financed by foreign bondholders. Much of the debt funded investment, often on concessional terms. Conversely, creditor hierarchy mattered: access to dollars and the terms set by official and commercial lenders constrained policy. But Ethiopia’s leaders were not passive. They chose projects, controlled state banks, delayed exchange-rate adjustment, limited scrutiny of state-owned enterprises, and used visible infrastructure to sustain political legitimacy.

Domestic politics made the balance-sheet weakness more dangerous. Land expropriation, youth unemployment, uneven regional development, and authoritarian allocation of investment contributed to the protests that destabilized the EPRDF after 2015. The party-state’s capacity to mobilize resources had been a developmental advantage; the concentration of decision-making also reduced independent appraisal and public accountability. When political cohesion fractured, the same system was less able to correct failing projects or distribute losses transparently.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government initially promised to preserve growth while liberalizing the economy. Its 2019 Homegrown Economic Reform agenda overlapped substantially with IMF priorities: reducing central-bank financing, strengthening state-owned-enterprise oversight, opening sectors to private capital, and moving toward a more flexible exchange rate. A first IMF program was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by the Tigray war. The 2020–22 war, subsequent conflicts in Amhara and Oromia, drought, and reduced donor support damaged production, public services, and investor confidence while increasing humanitarian and security demands.

Ethiopia requested treatment under the Group of 20 Common Framework in February 2021, before the Eurobond default. In July 2024, after the government introduced a market-based foreign-exchange regime, the IMF approved a four-year, $3.4 billion program, and the World Bank announced a large financing package. The reform sharply depreciated the official exchange rate, reduced the gap with the parallel market, and helped restore exports and reserves. It also raised the birr cost of imported fuel, food, medicine, and foreign-currency liabilities.

Ethiopia’s debt stock explains why restructuring became so complicated. The Ministry of Finance reported $31.0 billion in public-sector external debt at the end of September 2024. Of that, $28.6 billion was public and publicly guaranteed debt; the remainder included non-guaranteed external liabilities of entities such as Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio telecom. Multilateral institutions accounted for 53.8 percent of the total public-sector external debt, non-Paris Club official creditors for 26.5 percent, private creditors for 16.3 percent, and Paris Club creditors for only 3.4 percent. China was pivotal as the largest bilateral lender, but it did not dominate Ethiopia’s overall creditor structure.

The official-creditor committee, co-chaired by China and France, agreed in 2025 to reschedule covered debt until fiscal 2038–39. The treatment did not reduce nominal principal; it lowered the present value through longer maturities and reduced interest, providing substantial near-term debt-service relief. The agreement also required Ethiopia to obtain “comparable treatment” from other creditors. That phrase became the center of the bondholder dispute. Official creditors argued that private investors should accept relief at least as favorable. Bondholders argued that opaque official terms and conservative export projections demanded too much from a single $1 billion bond.

The June 2026 preliminary settlement splits the difference. Bondholders would take a 12 percent face-value reduction, but receive arrears in full and a warrant linked to Ethiopia’s future market access. The IMF’s fifth program review, completed two days later, reported stronger exports, revenue collection, and reserves, while warning that external shocks and debt vulnerabilities remained significant. The Fund projected reserves at 2.1 months of imports in fiscal 2025–26 — an improvement from 0.7 months two years earlier, but still a thin buffer.

The Common Framework did not cause Ethiopia’s default. The country entered it because its debt trajectory and foreign-exchange position were already unsustainable. Yet the process did demonstrate the system’s institutional weakness. It took more than five years from Ethiopia’s request to reach a preliminary private-creditor agreement. Multilateral lenders generally retain preferred-creditor status; bilateral lenders negotiate through political committees; bondholders rely on contracts and litigation threats. Comparability is demanded but not defined by an enforceable, transparent formula. Each group can delay the others while the debtor remains partly excluded from finance.

Debt restructuring reallocates claims among creditors. Adjustment reallocates income within Ethiopia. For several years, inflation near 30 percent eroded wages and savings. The exchange-rate reform made exporters more competitive and improved the supply of foreign currency through official channels, but it also transmitted the devaluation to imported essentials. Fiscal restraint and tighter monetary policy can reduce inflation over time; they do not decide who survives the transition.

The social crisis cannot be attributed to the IMF or the debt workout alone. Conflict destroyed facilities, displaced communities, and interrupted schooling; climate shocks and aid shortfalls compounded the damage. UNICEF estimated in late 2024 that 8 million Ethiopian children were out of school, mainly in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray, and linked the figure primarily to conflict and damaged schools. In 2025, public health workers staged a month-long strike over pay and working conditions, amid arrests and the suspension of a professional association. These episodes are not proof that every stabilization measure is austerity. They show why macroeconomic reform without credible social protection can undermine the human systems on which recovery depends.

The three dominant interpretations of Ethiopia’s debt each capture only part of the record. Neoclassical analysis correctly emphasizes debt-service capacity, inflation, and the need to stop monetary financing of deficits; it often treats institutions and distribution as secondary. Developmentalism correctly argues that poor countries must borrow to overcome infrastructure bottlenecks; it can underestimate political incentives, project failure, and the difficulty of generating exports. Critical political economy correctly identifies asymmetric creditor power and the tendency to shift adjustment costs downward; it becomes deterministic when it treats domestic elites as mere agents of external capital or creditors as a unified bloc. Ethiopia’s crisis arose from the interaction of all three logics.

Ethiopia can improve its position without pursuing the fantasy of complete financial independence. The first requirement is disclosure. The government should publish a quarterly, loan-by-loan register of public and publicly guaranteed debt, including creditor, currency, maturity, collateral, project, and restructuring status, and extend comparable disclosure to state-owned enterprises and public banks. Parliament and the auditor general need authority to review major borrowing before commitments become irreversible. Transparency will not remove political conflict, but it will reduce the space in which contingent liabilities accumulate unnoticed.

The second requirement is a narrower and more realistic industrial policy. Ethiopia still needs infrastructure and patient public finance, but projects should be judged against their ability to raise productivity, exports, or fiscal revenue — not their visibility. Logistics, agricultural processing, tradable digital services, tourism, and reliable power for competitive firms may yield more foreign exchange than another generation of prestige projects. State-owned enterprises that cannot cover operating costs require restructuring, but rushed privatization in a depressed market would merely transfer public assets at weak prices.

The third requirement is distributional protection. Health, primary education, nutrition, and targeted cash transfers should be specified as real — not merely nominal — floors in the government’s budget and in IMF program reviews. Foreign-exchange allocation should be transparent enough to prioritize essential medicines and productive inputs without recreating discretionary rationing. Durable stabilization also depends on political settlements in conflict-affected regions; no debt operation can compensate for the fiscal and human costs of recurrent war.

Creditors also need to change. The Common Framework should require simultaneous negotiations across creditor classes, standardized disclosure, a public method for calculating comparable treatment, and an automatic standstill on eligible debt service while good-faith talks continue. State-contingent clauses could link payments to export earnings or major disasters, reducing the need for repeated restructuring. These reforms involve trade-offs: creditors will price uncertainty, and poorly designed contingencies can be manipulated. But a system that resolves a relatively small bond only after years of delay is already imposing a large uncertainty premium.

Ethiopia’s tentative exit from default should therefore be treated as a beginning. Debt relief can create breathing room; it cannot substitute for export capacity, institutional oversight, peace, or a fair allocation of adjustment. The country’s successive debt regimes show that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development — sometimes all at once. The durable measure of autonomy is not whether Ethiopia borrows. It is whether citizens can see, contest, and benefit from the choices made in their name.

In 1950s apartheid South Africa, visibility was never neutral. To appear publicly as Black, urban, fashionable, and modern carried political meaning in a society built on racial segregation and control. It was within this environment that Drum magazine emerged as one of the most influential publications for Black readers across the country. Founded in Johannesburg in 1951, the magazine documented township life, jazz culture, fashion, sport, politics, and everyday urban experiences. Its pages offered images of Black modernity at a moment when apartheid attempted to confine and regulate Black life.

Alongside its reporting on township life, Drum regularly featured beauty contests, fashion spreads, musicians, athletes, and political figures, offering readers images of Black modernity at a time when apartheid sought to deny it. Yet the magazine did not present modernity in the same way for everyone. Women were more often associated with beauty, fashion, and respectability, while men tended to be portrayed through music, sport, politics, and public life. Two covers published only a year apart reveal how differently the magazine represented young African women and men.

The August 1956 issue, titled “Special Beauty Page — Inside,” shows a young Black woman standing in a fitted yellow dress while several men surround her with tape measures. One crouches near her legs. Another measures her waist. Others observe her body from different angles. At first glance, the image appears glamorous and playful, almost theatrical. The woman stands confidently at the center of the frame, her bright dress sharply contrasting with the darker suits around her.

Yet the longer one looks, the stranger the image becomes. The tape measures divide her body into sections: waist, hips, height. The men lean inward, forming a loose circle around her. While she is the focal point of the cover, she is also its object. Her visibility depends on being evaluated. Even her posture feels restrained. Her arms rest slightly behind her back rather than confidently occupying space. She does not look directly at the viewer or at the men measuring her. Instead, she appears distant from the activity surrounding her, as though the image is happening around her rather than with her.

The cover reflects what scholar Rachel Johnson describes as the figure of the “modern miss” in Drum magazine, where young women became highly visible as symbols of urban modernity while simultaneously remaining tied to scrutiny, beauty standards, and respectability politics. Fashionable clothing and public visibility offered women new ways of imagining themselves as modern subjects, but that visibility was rarely free from regulation. On the beauty-page cover, modernity arrives through measurement. Glamour becomes inseparable from inspection.

A year earlier, Drum presented a very different image of Black modernity. The August 1955 cover features a Black male jazz saxophonist captured mid-performance. Unlike the woman on the beauty-page cover, he appears alone. There are no figures surrounding him, no visible systems of judgment, no tools measuring or evaluating him. His body is not fragmented into parts but defined through movement. The diagonal line of the saxophone creates a sense of rhythm and motion across the frame. His posture feels active and fluid. Even though only the upper half of his body is visible, he appears more expansive than the woman, whose entire body occupies the previous cover.

What matters is not simply that one image depicts a woman and the other a man. It is that the two covers imagine modernity differently. The woman’s body becomes the site through which modernity is assessed and disciplined. The musician’s body becomes the site through which modernity is performed.

This contrast becomes especially revealing within apartheid South Africa, where Black visibility itself was already shaped by surveillance and restriction. Drum is often remembered for challenging racist representations by portraying Black South Africans as cosmopolitan, stylish, and culturally sophisticated. And in many ways, it did. Jazz musicians, beauty queens, athletes, writers, and urban youth all appeared throughout the magazine’s pages as part of a modern African world that apartheid ideology attempted to deny. At the same time, these images also reveal how unevenly that freedom was distributed.

The beauty-page cover places the woman at the center of the frame, yet her visibility intensifies control rather than autonomy. The more visible she becomes, the more closely she is measured. Her body is transformed into something legible and standardized, open to judgment and comparison. The saxophonist occupies visibility differently. His body is associated with action, rhythm, and expression rather than evaluation. He appears absorbed in performance rather than aware of being watched.

Yet even this freedom is partial. The image removes the pressures shaping Black male life under apartheid: police surveillance, economic precarity, pass laws, and racial violence remain outside the frame. Freedom becomes aestheticized. The musician appears self-contained partly because the conditions limiting him are invisible.

Looking at the two covers together reveals how media images do not simply reflect social reality but actively organize it. This broader relationship between representation and identity is also reflected in the work of scholar Mamadou Diouf, who argues that representations of African youth and public space help shape how modern identities are imagined rather than simply reflecting existing social realities. Drum offered Black readers powerful images of urban modernity, but it also reproduced different conditions for how femininity and masculinity could appear in public space. Women were often made visible through beauty, discipline, and evaluation. Men were more often represented through movement, performance, and cultural expression.

What makes these covers striking today is how contemporary they still feel. The beauty-page image resembles digital cultures where women remain hypervisible yet constantly assessed through beauty standards, desirability, and online scrutiny. The jazz musician, meanwhile, anticipates forms of masculine visibility still associated with movement, performance, and creative freedom.

Long before social media transformed visibility into a daily performance, Drum already understood something important: visibility is never simply about being seen. It is also about who gets to move freely within the frame.

It happened. Cabo Verde lost to Argentina and exited the 2026 FIFA World Cup. And I couldn’t be prouder. As a former football player, lifelong lover of the beautiful game, and Cabo Verdean-American, watching Cabo Verde compete on the world stage for the first time felt bigger than sports. What this team represented went far beyond the final score.

At the start of the tournament, predictive models gave Cabo Verde almost no chance against former world champions Spain. The result: a stunning 0–0 draw anchored by seven saves from goalkeeper Josimar “Vozinha” Dias.

Against Uruguay, analysts dismissed Cabo Verde’s disciplined defensive strategy as no match for Marcelo Bielsa’s aggressive attacking system. Commentators insisted Cabo Verde would never score. The result: a thrilling 2–2 draw, including the nation’s first-ever World Cup goal from midfielder Kevin Pina.

Then came another scoreless draw against Saudi Arabia, securing Cabo Verde a second-place group finish and a historic place as the smallest nation ever to reach the knockout rounds. By the time Cabo Verde faced defending champions Argentina, the world was paying attention and rooting for the underdogs.

And for a moment, many of us believed the impossible could happen. When Deroy Duarte equalized to make it 1–1, we felt hope. When Sidny Lopes Cabral scored again to make it 2–2, belief swept across the world.

Even after Argentina secured a 3–2 victory in extra time, Cabo Verde exited the tournament undefeated at the 90-minute mark against three former world champions. The loss hurt deeply. But not our pride. We may not have won on the scoreboard, but we won the respect of football fans around the world.

In the days following the match, widely shared reports estimated that the Argentina versus Cabo Verde match attracted as many as 2.7 billion viewers worldwide. While those figures have not yet been officially verified by FIFA, the extraordinary claim reflected something that was unmistakably true: millions of people had fallen in love with Cabo Verde’s Cinderella story.

For a nation of just over 500,000 people, that kind of global attention is extraordinary.

Cabo Verde, an archipelago of 10 islands, was previously colonized by Portugal in the fifteenth century. It was a central port in the transatlantic slave trade before gaining independence in 1975.

That independence came through the liberation struggle led by Amílcar Cabral, whose African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) fought Portuguese colonialism across both territories. Although Cabral was assassinated in 1973, two years before the independence, he helped make Cabo Verde’s independence possible, and remains one of Africa’s most influential revolutionary thinkers.

Today, the Cabo Verdean diaspora is estimated at roughly one million people, nearly double the resident population. More Cabo Verdeans now live in the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Brazil, Senegal, Angola, and elsewhere other than on the islands themselves.

For decades, Cabo Verde existed on the margins of global football.

The national team first entered FIFA World Cup qualification during the 2002 cycle and spent years competing against larger, wealthier, and better-funded football nations before finally qualifying for the 2026 tournament.

The turning point came in the 2010s. The Blue Sharks qualified for their first Africa Cup of Nations in 2013 and stunned the continent by reaching the quarterfinals. Since then Cabo Verde has become regular AFCON competitors, and made their return to the quarterfinals in 2023.

This was not a team built on global superstars or massive sponsorships.

Many players came from lower-division clubs across Europe and the diaspora. Some were recruited through personal networks and online outreach, including LinkedIn, where the federation famously connected with Irish-based defender Roberto “Pico” Lopes after he initially overlooked an earlier message written in Portuguese.

What united the squad was discipline, camaraderie, and belief.

Under manager Pedro “Bubista” Leitão Brito, Cabo Verde played with tactical structure, composure, courage, and intelligence.

In doing so, they challenged many of the assumptions often placed on African teams and Black athletes across sports: that they lack tactical discipline; that they rely more on physicality than strategy; or that they cannot compete at the highest level.

Instead, Cabo Verde demonstrated that talent exists everywhere, even when visibility, infrastructure, and resources do not. One of the clearest examples of that visibility came through Vozinha. Before the World Cup, the 40-year-old goalkeeper was approaching retirement with a modest social media following of roughly 50,000 people.

By the end of Cabo Verde’s historic run, he had become one of the breakout stars of the tournament and the most-followed goalkeeper in the world, with more than 26 million Instagram followers. Visibility changes careers.

It creates sponsorship opportunities, attracts media attention, opens commercial doors, and reshapes how athletes, and the nations they represent, are perceived around the world.

But this story is bigger than one player or one nation. The expanded World Cup also brought unprecedented visibility to African and Caribbean teams including Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, and Curaçao.

These nations were expected merely to make an appearance. Instead, they arrived prepared to compete. And that visibility matters. For a few extraordinary weeks, the world saw Cabo Verde not as a footnote, but as a nation worthy of respect, admiration, and serious attention.

Together with the other African and Caribbean nations, they helped reshape the global conversation about the expanded 48-team tournament, the continued socio-political and economic realities facing emerging football nations, and the transformative power of access, opportunity, and visibility.

In the words of Cabo Verde manager Bubista: “We wanted to show that you can achieve great things regardless of your challenges, just as long as you have a dream and chase after it.”

Thank you, Cabo Verde.

And thank you to every African and Caribbean nation that stepped onto the world stage. Your fearlessness, resilience, and courage reminded the world that greatness has never been limited by geography. The future of African football is bright.

The tales told of the origins of colonial Nairobi, formerly Enkare Nyirobi, are awash with references to railways, guns and the Imperial British East Africa Company. Animating them are hunters and loyalists; resistors displaced and burned, new locomotive terrains forged.

Yet, I would also argue that there are two critical chronicles often displaced in both formal and popular narratives about this urban space. This is, first, the important and tragic histories of its enslaved foundations; the reality that “old slave-traders [had] skirted the forests” of this region, and that many of its current thoroughfares are former slave trader caravan tracks.

As Andrew Hake wrote in 1977, in his book African Metropolis: Nairobi’s Self-Help City,

From 1850, the northern route, passing through Ngong close to the Nairobi River, was increasingly developed in spite of the fierce reputation of the Maasai and Wakwavi. Arab and Somali traders, sometimes financed by Indian Banyans at the coast, penetrated up-country in search not only of ivory, but also of porters who would carry it to the coast and then themselves be sold as slaves.

This is a history that we have chosen not to remember, yet whose afterlives we remain surrounded by. Undoubtedly, in our postcolonial governments’ conscious negation of our own blood-filled histories of enslavement, we deliberately disconnect from our people’s elsewhere — those who were forcefully displaced, tortured, killed and trafficked.

Building onto these histories of the enslaved, are, I suggest (and this is the second off-staged chronicle), other Nairobi protagonists whose sojourns in this city are not given enough weight.

Enter the “detribalized native.”

A small note here before I move forward, to say that I am not a fan of the words “tribe,” “tribal,” “detribalized,” but seek to sit, instead, in the kinds of fear that this “detribalized” population provoked in the colonial state, and which can be paralleled to the post-June 25, 2024 surveillance, violence, extrajudicial actions and the “treason” and “terrorism” policies that have been launched by the Ruto government in the last two years.

As in the “legal” and extralegal regimes of the colonial bureaucracy, these state actions targeted a population (through lawfare, slander, and inhumane violent actions) that really was just trying to make do with the new conditions of their lives; statuses indelibly and violently marked by the illegitimate rule, displacement, alienation, taxation and brutality of a settler colonial regime.

What the colonial government saw as the “insolent” behaviors of the detribalized native — of claiming their right to movement, to determine their own lives — in many ways mirrors our present.

Ruto’s remarks about “treasonous” protestors, whose right to assemble is guaranteed by the constitution, the patronizing statements by brown-nosing leaders about the need to “raise” our teenagers well, the need to discipline them to “respect” a structure that long lost any ounce of humanity, echo the vacuous disciplining broadcasts of the colonial state.

The “problem” made explicit in these illusory narratives — both then and now — is not the state itself (or the self-serving and extractive actions of parliamentarians), but those who dare question its violence. Recall the words of Kimani Ichungwa — Ichung’wah is the majority leader of Kenya’s National Assembly and one of President Ruto’s closest allies — when he dismissed Gen Z protestors as constituting a “KFC eating, Uber riding generation”? Deflecting attention from its own impotencies (that only survive by its sheer monopoly of force), the government asserts that it is “unruly” young people — as it was previously “illegitimate” and “ungovernable” African city dwellers — who are misplaced in their understanding of the present; they are ungenerous to the “progress” that has been made for them.

The imperatives of the moment, therefore, and which draw on genealogies of colonial interventions fixated on the “detribalized native,” are that one must obey and not question, that we should pay allegiance to structures that are every day and in multiple ways death-making.

But the detribalized natives remained defiant (as many of the colonial Nairobi City Council reports show); the gunfire of the colonial state could never make them obedient, or their obedience total.

Report after report (both those that survived and likely those that were burned) document a litany of African contraventions, even despite the proliferation of colonial weapons. So preoccupied was the city administration by this “detribalized” (and possibly detribalizing) force away from their “natural” rural home, that they were the target of numerous laments, parliamentary discussions (even in the British House of Lords), and city bylaws.

Although this is not a claim that the current socio-political conditions are equal, I would argue that the Ruto government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience has some genealogy in the interventions that the colonial regime used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”

And as with the colonial government, the expansion of state violence (abductions, bodies dumped in quarries, the killing of bloggers, city-wide barricades) illustrates that the government, like the population, is not even convinced of its own supremacy.

What took place in June 2024 was unparalleled in post-independence Kenya. The sheer unity, courage, defiance, complexity, imagination and love that both those on and off the streets showed in demanding better, setting afoot another Kenya, continue to shape our lives in many material and immaterial ways.

“Compensation” money cannot change this, nor will it make us forget all the lives that were prematurely stolen from us — from Rex Maasai to Kennedy Onyango (Rex Maasai was the first protester killed in the June 2024 demonstrations, and Kennedy Onyango was a 12-year-old shot dead by police; both became emblems of the state’s violence against the movement).

But while the moment may appear novel, it draws on a longer legacy of African disobedience — small and big challenges by “natives” to illegitimate rule.

The seeds of our current defiance flourish following the actions of Africans who paid fines to the colonial government for (as the archives document) holding illegal “ngoma” parties, pushing a handcart down the wrong side of the road, not leaving the town when their work contracts were over, living as urban “eyesores” who did not respect borders. Certainly, while forcefully confined to the interstices, through their disobedience, they gradually reclaimed the center.

This they also did through the Harry Thuku protests, the 1950 Nairobi General Strike, the Mau Mau uprising, and many more urban African actions.

Without a doubt, the lives of Kenya’s Gen Z are shaped by the afterlives of colonialism. And, as with the early African generations in the city, this demographic is still creating lives from within the city’s excluded arenas, while knowing that their role is at its center.

Through protests, dance, collective imaginations, political education during picnics and drunken lecture series, art, digital spaces, and beyond, other frontiers are forged. They rebel, as those earlier “detribalized” generations did, against the state’s imposed and violent choreographies and cartographies.

These youthful forms of political being and becoming are not perfect, nor can they be romanticized, but their power — as we learn from those before us — must never be underestimated.

The state knows this too; in its oscillation between lawfare and gunspeak, as in the colonial bureaucracy, the present regime performs an empty prowess.

The fear of this demographic that the government exhibits — even as they are dismissed as “spoilt,” a “youth bulge,” “terrorists,” “treasonous,” or “kids” — mirrors a colonial state’s preoccupation with the “detribalized” native and what it could eventually portend.

In this sense, the ruling coalition’s fears are well-founded; they should know that Gen Z, as the detribalized native, will always strike back.

Football in Africa is more than a sport. It is a scene of dreams, stories of post-colonial expectation, and an image reflecting the continent’s frictional integration into the global capitalist system. From its colonial introduction through the independence era to the age of football as “big business,” the game has been continuously adapted by Africans. Yet while the world celebrates stars like Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, and Didier Drogba, a closer look reveals a landscape marked by neoliberal economics, talent drain, and a growing gap between European-based diaspora and struggling local leagues. Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this essay traces African football’s journey from colonial adoption through political awakening and World Cup heartbreaks and victories, to its current era of commodification, governance struggles, and a growing divergence between the financially successful Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) and the continent’s struggling domestic leagues.

The introduction of football to Africa was neither benign nor neutral. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European colonial administrators, missionaries, and settlers brought the game to ports and outposts from Algiers to Cape Town, from Lagos to Dar es Salaam. Initially reserved for Europeans, football was intended as a civilizing tool to inculcate discipline. Africans were relegated to ball boys or second-class spectators.

Yet, in a classic act of resistance, the colonized turned the master’s tool against him. By the 1930s and 1940s, indigenous communities in Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, and Senegal formed their own clubs, turning pitches into arenas of anti-colonial expression. Matches between African and colonist teams became proxy battles for dignity. The Orlando Pirates of South Africa (founded in 1937) were not just a sports club but an organization of cultural resistance. Football became a democratic space where colonial subjects could momentarily challenge racial hierarchy. By the time independence movements gained momentum in the 1950s, football was already an effective symbol of a unified, ambitious, and combative Africa.

Independence brought political freedom and national sports associations, but for African football, the road to global recognition was paved with boycott, political activism, and power struggles.

The Confederation of African Football (CAF), founded in 1957 by Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and South Africa, quickly made anti-apartheid a core principle. South Africa’s white-only association refused to field multi-racial teams. Led by Sudanese official Abdel Halim Mohammed, CAF pushed for expulsion. In 1961, FIFA gave South Africa an ultimatum: integrate or leave. After refusal, South Africa was suspended in 1964 and expelled in 1976. This moral victory established CAF as an anti-apartheid political force, proving that football could serve justice and liberation.

Despite political gains, World Cup allocations remained grossly inequitable. Until 1966, Africa, Asia, and Oceania shared a single pre-qualifying spot. Led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and his minister of sport, Ohene Gyan, CAF boycotted the 1966 qualifiers entirely. In 1970, Africa finally received one guaranteed spot. Morocco became the first African nation to qualify directly, but representation remained a token.

Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) qualified for the 1974 World Cup, becoming the first sub-Saharan African nation to reach the finals. Preparation was a disaster of political vanity: unpaid bonuses, psychological terror, and no real training. Zaire lost 2–0 to Scotland, 9–0 to Yugoslavia, and 3–0 to Brazil. The “Zaire disaster” fed a narrative of African naivety, but it was not a failure of talent; it was a failure of governance. Four years later, Tunisia secured Africa’s first World Cup victory (3–1 over Mexico), signaling progress.

The redemption arc began in Spain in 1982. Algeria stunned reigning European champions West Germany, winning 2–1, only to be eliminated by a collusive result between West Germany and Austria — the “Gijón disgrace.” The injustice felt by Africans was rooted in colonial memory and asymmetrical global power. Algeria and Cameroon proved African teams could tactically outplay Europeans. Cameroon’s 1990 run, led by 38-year-old Roger Milla, saw it defeat the defending champion, Argentina, and reach the quarterfinals. Milla’s corner-flag dance shattered the stereotype of the technically gifted but tactically naive African side.

Meanwhile, FIFA’s introduction of youth World Cups (U-20 in 1977, U-17 in 1987) put young Africans in the global spotlight. African teams have won the U-20 World Cup twice (Ghana, 2009; Morocco, 2025) and the U-17 World Cup eight times. These platforms accelerated European recruitment of African talent.

Cameroon’s 1990 heroics, combined with the achievements of African U-20 and U-17 teams, did more than delight African fans; they helped establish African football’s respectability at a moment when the global game was being fundamentally transformed. That remaking was driven by satellite broadcasting, media deregulation, and liberalized player transfers across Europe — culminating in the 1995 Bosman ruling. Together, these forces pulled African football deeper into the global market — but on unequal terms. The same dynamics that showcased African talent also contributed to weakening the continent’s own football economy.

The 1990s marked a turning point. African football ceased to be primarily a political statement and became a competitive sport — and, increasingly, a commodity. CAF, once a pan-Africanist body, began operating as a transnational confederation, monetizing the AFCON, its flagship competition. Under presidents Issa Hayatou (1988–2017) and later Patrice Motsepe, sponsorship deals soared. Since 2016, TotalEnergies has been the title sponsor of CAF’s ten main competitions, including the AFCON. The Africa Cup of Nations expanded from eight to 24 teams in 2019 and will reach 28 teams in 2027. This increase leads to more games and, consequently, more broadcasting rights, sponsorship, and advertising revenue.

In 2000, CAF signed a $50 million deal with German firm Sportfive to broadcast four AFCON tournaments. European broadcasters historically paid low fees due to limited demand. Yet the exponential rise of African stars in the English Premier League and other top European leagues — Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto’o, Sadio Mané, Mohamed Salah, Achraf Hakimi — has boosted AFCON’s global visibility. Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal further reinforced the competitiveness of African football on the world stage. New ott platforms now reach niche audiences that traditional broadcasters ignore. CAF reports that the 2025 AFCON in Morocco achieved commercial success, generating a 90% increase in competition revenue and attracting 23 sponsors. CAF also reports that, since the 2023 AFCON in Côte d’Ivoire, the competition has seen a 50% increase in international broadcast partners and a 61% increase in audiences across European, Asian, and South American markets.

The AFCON’s commercial success stands in stark contrast to the struggles of most local leagues. Fans in Accra, Abidjan, Lagos, and Nairobi would rather watch Liverpool, Arsenal, or Real Madrid than attend a local derby. DStv, Canal+, and beIN Sports deliver highly produced European football season after season — outgunning local broadcasters on both production value and rights. Except in North Africa and South Africa, stadium attendance is extremely low. Outside the North African leagues and a few clubs with wealthy patrons or sustained government subsidies, most local clubs survive on meager gate receipts, with no media rights income or sponsorship — even as numerous well-trained young players emerge from academies.

The struggles of local leagues persists despite — and in some ways because of — the emergence of private football academies, which, for the best ones, offered higher-quality youth training and led to more consistent African team performance at the World Cup. After Cameroon’s 1990 heroics and Senegal’s 2002 quarterfinal run (including a 1–0 upset of defending champions France), private academies multiplied across the continent. From Right to Dream in Ghana to asec Mimosas in Côte d’Ivoire (which produced the golden generation of the 2000s), and Generation Foot and Diambars in Senegal, academies became essential pipelines feeding European clubs. Their economic model is built on transfer fees paid by European clubs, plus FIFA solidarity payments — fixed percentages distributed to clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23.

Today, the majority of players on Africa’s most successful national teams — except South Africa and Egypt — play outside the continent. Increasingly, they are dual citizens, European-born, raised, and trained in Europe, highlighting an additional challenge. In a fascinating reversal, the 2010s saw a “reverse muscle drain.” Second- and third-generation African immigrants born in France (Riyad Mahrez, Algeria), England (Victor Moses, Nigeria), or the Netherlands (Hakim Ziyech, Morocco) began representing their ancestral nations. Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal run was powered by a team mostly born and trained in Europe. While this improves competitiveness, it deepens the gap between these players — products of European academies — and local ones. The reverse drain, a quick fix for improved performance, helps the national team win without strong local football development systems but contributes little to local leagues or grassroots development.

On the surface, AFCON is a roaring success. Beneath the spectacle lies a structural challenge. The 2023 edition in Côte d’Ivoire generated record viewership, with 2.5 billion cumulative digital views. Diaspora fans in Paris, New Jersey, and London created a global carnival. FIFA has championed this as a model of “football development.” CAF’s deal with FIFA to host the expanded 32-team Club World Cup in Africa is presented as validation. The spectacle is undeniably colorful, dramatic, and commercially viable.

In 2022, Senegal won AFCON with a squad of 26 players, only one of whom played in the Senegalese league. Local league matches in the country are played in near-empty stadiums, with fans preferring European football on TV or streams. Local players are paid late, if at all.

Meanwhile, CAF’s “Our AFCON, Our Pride” slogan celebrates a tournament that has become a curated export product — a performance of African excellence that overshadows the deteriorating infrastructure in many countries. These nations often cannot host their national team’s matches at home, let alone produce that same excellence locally.

The story of African football is one of structural irony. Born in colonial resistance, sharpened through the anti-apartheid struggle and the fight for World Cup representation, and matured through World Cup heroics, it has finally achieved global recognition. Yet that recognition has come at a fundamental price. The commodity logic of global football has reduced many local leagues to ghost events and turned millions of African children’s dreams into speculative assets for agents and academies.

The success of Morocco’s and Senegal’s academies and diaspora proves African talent is world class, but it also shows that players must leave Africa to make a good living and become stars. When European-born dual citizens choose to represent their ancestral nations, they bring joy to Africans everywhere — a genuine pan-African achievement. But it also exposes a complex and uncomfortable reality: The continent’s domestic football infrastructure and governance are decaying even as its exported stars shine weekly through the world sports media complex.

If the game is to truly serve the continent, the goal cannot be merely to export talent, produce a commercial AFCON every two years — soon every four — or win prestigious matches at the World Cup. The goal must be to build the local ecosystem: to ensure a child in Kano or Kinshasa can grow up to be a professional in their own country, earn a dignified wage, play in a full stadium, and watch their league in prime time. Until then, the global visibility of African stars will remain just that — a reflection of individual brilliance extracted from a system that cannot yet sustain it. World Cup successes bring real continental pride. But can the achievements of a handful of stars and national teams truly speak to the lives of 1.5 billion Africans, let alone offer a path forward for the hundreds of millions of young players polishing their skills on any open patch of ground they can find?

If Spain and France meet in the semifinals of the 2026 World Cup, as the bookies predict, three of the brightest talents currently playing the game will take the field, all sharing a quality entirely unrelated to footballing skills. Kylian Mbappé, Michael Olise, and Lamine Yamal are all of mixed Maghrebi and Black African descent. France legend Thierry Henry has described Mbappé and Olise as France’s Most Valuable Player and Most Important Player, respectively, for the way the two combined to deadly effect against Senegal. The teenage Yamal scored for Spain against Saudi Arabia and showed flashes of the brilliance that has drawn comparisons to Messi despite not being 100 percent fit.

Three of the brightest stars, all with the same improbable trans-Saharan ancestry. But if anyone expects these three to be emissaries of some all-encompassing pan-Africanism, disappointment lies ahead. While there are signs that the gap between the Maghreb and Black Africa has narrowed, closer integration is being fueled not by iconic Afropeans playing the beautiful game but by trade, travel, and mutual economic interest.

None of this is to dismiss the globalized immigrant youth culture of Bondy, Marseille, and Brussels as influential in European sport and the creative industries, and increasingly in West and Central Africa too. This culture is also subtly reshaping who and what codes as African.

Take Kylian Mbappé and his younger brother Ethan. A few years ago, in Abidjan, where I live, I asked an Algerian journalist whether there was any appetite back home to claim Kylian — not for the Fennecs, it was too late for that, but as an icon, a son of the soil, the way Kenya claimed Obama. He scoffed; Algerians did not think of Kylian as one of theirs.

Yet there are news reports that the Algerian federation is now pursuing Ethan, who, because less gifted, is unlikely to get a look in with the French team. Ethan is gettable, football is soft power, and the practice of mining the diaspora for talent is only gathering pace. Now, Senegal and Morocco are not only competing with France for talent, they also battle each other to win commitments from eligible diaspora players.

How, whether — and how quickly — perceptions about where the line is drawn between Maghrebi and Black African will shift owing to players like Ethan Mbappé, who has yet to commit to any team, and even more so to the less well-known Issa Diop, who plays for Fulham in the English Premier League. Of mixed Senegalese-Moroccan heritage, Diop chose to play for Morocco and repaid the choice by heading home a stoppage-time equalizer against the Netherlands on June 30. After that goal forced extra time, Morocco went through on penalties to the round of 16.

On an instinctive level, it makes sense that it should be Morocco at the forefront from the North African side, which “feels” closer culturally and economically to countries like Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire than, say, Tunisia or Algeria. Like Brazil, perhaps, the country has emerged as a sort of leader within the Global South because it scans as multiracial and progressive. In a recent New Yorker essay, Dan Greene accurately notes that the Global South embraced Morocco’s 2022 World Cup team, which reached the tournament’s semifinals. Morocco and its national football team position themselves as representing all of Africa and the Arab world.

And yet it’s proved easier to win over the Global South than the African continent, which polices the boundaries of Pan-Africanism stringently (as an aside: South Africa has learned during this World Cup that not only North African countries risk being ostracized by the African community of nations). It’s a safe bet that most Africans would root for Morocco in a tournament only in the absence of a Black African team, and irritation with the country surged during the 2025 AFCON as a result of Towelgate and the charged tournament final between Senegal and Morocco.

African and diaspora news and social media channels are filled with accusations of perfidy, racism, and foul play by the two sides. As the fallout dragged on, the whole debacle began to seem like the resumption of a long-running family quarrel.

A post by the Instagram influencer, the Merc, caught my eye. Black Africans had never thrown North Africa out of the continent, he said in a video screed; North Africa had walked out on its own. Among his other charges: America had put a man of Black African descent in its highest office before a single North African country had trusted a Black face with real power. How many North African families would be proud enough to celebrate seeing a daughter marry a dark-skinned man from Khartoum or Accra? If the honest answer was no, how African were they, really?

Hyperbolic accusations of this sort are mostly about clicks and engagement, of course, but the Merc’s reading of the tension is ahistorical (perhaps he has never heard of Anwar Sadat?) and shallow. Algiers was a capital of African and even Black liberation as much as Accra or Kinshasa, playing host to the Black Panthers and Frantz Fanon. Its national stadium today is named for Mandela, who once trained with its guerrillas. And if we are implicating Africans in advancing colonialism, then the thousands of West and Central African tirailleurs who deployed first to Indochina and then to Algeria must be added to the ledger.

I don’t want to take the Merc as more than a single — if heavily amplified — voice. There were many other voices in the social media sphere that took a light-hearted teasing tone in commenting about Towelgate, and many of the memes were pointed but not racist.

And the sentiments expressed on Moroccan social media? Some voices were defensive and dismissive of the charges that Morocco was not playing fair, but there was also plenty of contrition. Reddit’s main Morocco thread was thick with self-reproach rather than excuse. National team captain Jihan Hakimi conceded he was not proud of the image his team had given; another player, Ismael Saibari, sought out Senegal goalkeeper Édouard Mendy at the airport to apologize.

It is messy, as these things are. The 2026 World Cup will settle one question at least: if Morocco go deep, will the rest of Africa come with them, or sit on its hands? As for Mbappé, Olise, and Yamal, if all three play in the semifinal, the world will watch three brown men with funny names playing for Europe’s two best teams.

In African football, simplicity is a snooze. While a casual spectator might be content to sit and shout: “Yay!” to celebrate a late goal, for the superfan — the continent’s own brand of match-day superhero — expectations of exaltation are sky-high. The form these icons take is as unpredictable as the game itself; step into any stadium across the continent, and you’re just as likely to encounter a local witch doctor, a diy Avenger, or a reincarnated political figure.

Long before pre-match commentary has begun, another force has already been at work. It does not step onto the pitch, yet it shapes the gravity of the contest. This is the energy of the “12th man,” expressed with unmatched intensity across the African continent. From Accra to Algiers and Kinshasa to Casablanca, support is continuous rather than reactive. Rhythm, voice, and motion fuse into a collective force that sustains teams through fatigue and pressure.

Arrive early to the stadium and the performances are likely already in full swing. Small clusters of supporters build into waves of sound that roll across concrete terraces. By kickoff, the match is already alive — not because the players have started a kickabout, but because the crowd has willed it into existence. Each chant overlaps with another, each drumbeat fills a gap in the air, and they create a layered atmosphere that pushes the game beyond tactics and into the realm of an ecstatic spirituality. Players often speak of “feeling carried” by the crowd, as though the energy in the stands reduces the weight of fatigue.

For the African superfan, support is a way of life. Travel, costume, coordination, and constant presence demand both time and resources. However, beyond the spectacle lies routine. They wake up early to prepare outfits, endure long road journeys when flights are out of reach, and squeeze into crowded shared accommodation when hotels are too expensive. The image seen on television — colorful, loud, effortless — often conceals a reality of sacrifice.

As one South African football journalist, who requested to remain anonymous, explained: “The ones who can afford [their tickets easily] cannot do what superfans do. Superfans must do everything to justify their tickets.” He made these remarks after observing the steady rise in the number of superfans in South Africa since their hosting of the 2010 World Cup. The imbalance is stark. Passion often resides with those least equipped to sustain it, forcing them into a constant negotiation between survival and support. In that sense, the superfan lives in two worlds at once: one of visibility and celebration, the other of uncertainty and personal cost.

This dual existence creates an unspoken pressure. The performance cannot slack off, because for many, presence at the stadium is about proving worth. Yet this devotion exists on a spectrum. For some, football remains purely an emotional outlet, a ritual of belonging repeated across tournaments and generations. For others, superfandom has evolved into something more complex: a platform for opportunity, and at times, survival. The lines between passion and profession are razor-thin, and the modern superfan is shaped by the demands to keep up appearances.

If the private lives of superfans reveal sacrifice, their public profile can bring opportunity or expose tension. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Michel Kuka Mboladinga, who dresses up as the country’s beloved first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, has been fully embraced. His rise has been rapid. His image is widely circulated in the media, and his presence has become embedded within the national team’s identity.

Congolese journalist Darius Tshibangu describes that transformation succinctly: “Since the [2025] AFCON, where he became a star, his status has changed. He now has a manager who handles requests. . . .  Today, he is one of the few fan leaders to have landed actual contracts.” What might appear elsewhere as commercialization is, in Congo, interpreted as recognition. “The government. . . .  always covers the travel expenses for the animators,” Tshibangu explains. “Barring any surprises, Lumumba and the others will be on the trip to the United States.”

The implications are clear: a recognizable superfan earns institutional backing, and an understanding grows among the public that a performance in the stands is just as much a part of the spectacle as the game itself. As football grows increasingly commercial, superfans like Mboladinga demonstrate the benefits of participation. Media exposure and sponsorship bring opportunities, offering financial pathways that did not previously exist.

If Congo’s reaction to a celebrity superfan reflects institutional endorsement, South Africa’s relationship with one of its most recognizable faces reveals superfandom’s frictions. At the center of recent controversies in the country stands Mama Joy Chauke. Recently, South African Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie decided to end travel benefits for fans of the national team, and a back-and-forth between the minister and Mama Joy broke out in public view. McKenzie suggested her husband should pay instead of the state; Mama Joy responded that he was “undermining” her family, and vowed to attend the competition regardless.

The same South African journalist, who witnessed the conflict, was sympathetic toward the minister’s position. He described Mama Joy as entitled and suggested that she was being used as a political pawn. He said: “South Africa doesn’t have a policy of paying for fans. . . .  the problem is that she is being used by certain people in football leadership.”

Visibility can be both an asset and a liability. And so as their profiles raise, the African superfan must navigate a paradoxical relationship with institutions. In the space between Lumumba’s embrace and Mama Joy’s confrontation lies the spectrum of what it means to be a superfan in Africa. On the one hand, the state formalizes passion, funds it, and exports it as national identity. On the other, visibility invites scrutiny, and support becomes something to justify rather than celebrate.

It raises a fundamental question: should fandom remain organic and self-sustained, or can it be structured, funded, and remain authentic? Across the continent, there is a growing skepticism toward high profile superfans. They are celebrated as cultural ambassadors, yet questioned as financial liabilities. Governments understand the symbolic return from their presence at international competitions. A single broadcast image — a painted face leading chants — can project a nation’s identity more powerfully than any official tourist campaign. It is soft power in its most organic form.

Yet, translating that value into policy is fraught. Funding superfans means making choices. It means justifying why public funds should support travel for a select group while broader populations face economic hardship. In some countries, this has led to structured systems to navigate these social tensions: registered supporter unions, official delegations, and capped sponsorship numbers. In others, it has triggered backlash, with citizens questioning whether the passion of fans should ever be institutionalized. At the heart of the debate lies a difficult question: can authenticity survive once it is funded?

Alternatives have emerged in Morocco and Algeria, where supporters’ groups are able to fund travel through a more independent model. There, groups of fans often fund journeys or raise money through informal networks and the local community. This autonomy offers flexibility, but also places the burden entirely on the public, rather than the state or federation.

If the debate over funding reveals fraught politics within Africa, the journey to this year’s World Cup exposes the harsh realities of intercontinental travel. For fans from many countries, the path to the tournament is riddled with systemic costs and barriers. Unlike previous tournaments, where proximity or loose entry requirements allowed for spontaneous travel, the US, Canada, and Mexico impose a far more difficult process. Visa applications to these countries require proof of financial stability, confirmed accommodation, and strong evidence of intent to return home. For independent supporters — many of whom operate within weaker economies — meeting these requirements can be as challenging as funding the journey itself. Additionally, the minimum expenses for a single supporter: flights, accommodation, match tickets, and internal travel far exceed what many can realistically afford. Multi-city scheduling across three host nations adds another layer of complexity, requiring careful coordination and additional transport costs. For organized supporter groups, the burden multiplies.

So, in this World Cup, it is diaspora networks that may prove decisive in rallying fans to support their teams. Large immigrant communities in both the US and Canada can be easily mobilized and stand in for fans who cannot make the journey. We’ve already seen as much from Congolese fans traveling from across North America to Guadalajara for that country’s intercontinental playoff in March. In Cape Verde’s case, long-established communities, such as the 70,000 Cape Verdeans living in Boston, could carry the nation’s presence without the need for large-scale travel from home.

For all its color and cohesion, African football fandom is not without its fractures. Just this past January, members of the Senegalese supporters group, Douzième Gaindé clashed with stadium security during an on-field argument over a penalty decision at the 2025 AFCON final. In the aftermath, 18 supporters were handed prison sentences. While some have since been released, the legal consequences remain poignant. Criminal records can complicate visa applications, placing future travel at risk.

Those moments of tension between supporters and security forces revealed a more volatile edge to African fan culture. Such moments complicate the image of the superfan as purely celebratory. They introduce a dimension often associated with ultra culture — where identity, territory, and emotion can collide. Yet the comparison between European ultras and African superfans remains imperfect. Across much of Africa, fan culture is less rigidly structured than in historical ultra environments. It is more fluid, more performative, and less defined by organized confrontation. When disorder occurs, it is often situational rather than systemic. Still, perception matters. As African fans prepare for the global stage, isolated incidents risk shaping broader narratives. The challenge lies in preserving the intensity and authenticity of support.

Due to the challenges of securing tickets to matches, or even arriving in North America, there is a growing possibility that the stands will feel more structured, less kinetic than Africans are accustomed to. And yet, absence is not inevitable. The question remains whether football, in its most polished and commercial form, is still built to receive these superfans. Because the African superfan represents something that cannot be manufactured. And if, on a summer day, that rhythm echoes through the streets, it will mean that despite cost, policy, and distance, something essential has endured — the part of football that refuses to be contained.

What makes the current age feel particularly unnerving, even desperate, is that people’s apolitical pleasures and pastimes are colonized to an unprecedented degree. Disillusioned, we’ve long come to accept that politics may be intractable. Most people now seek betterment, or simply respite, in private life. But what happens when those areas of life that would serve as retreats — for leisure, for finding meaning, for a little peace and quiet — become exceptionally loud? Our churches and temples, both sacred and profane, no longer provide escape from the world. Worse, they no longer feel like they belong to us.

So it is with football — and especially with club football, hit with a one-two punch of commercialization and politicization. As so much of life becomes flattened and homogenized, bought and sold, does international football not emerge as the only pure form left?

It’s a risible, even perverse notion: FIFA is beset by corruption, qualifiers are often tedious, and the big tournaments price out fans; the infinite expansion of the World Cup dilutes its quality. But at the end of the age of globalization, we might consider how the relationship between football, identification, and meaning-making, and the processes of deterritorialization are evolving — perhaps in ironic directions. Club football, once rooted and tied to place, has been set loose. Like Theseus’s ship, a football club might change its parts, but its identity remained relatively stable over time — a process that becomes harder to sustain when a club’s fans are drawn from anywhere, its revenue streams likewise.

These days, we football fans are beset by demands to behave the right way or to think the right things. Another sanctioned pro-forma anti-racism or anti-homophobia campaign? Whatever, you can brush it off. It’s good-hearted, but ultimately toothless. Or maybe you regard such initiatives more darkly: ideological campaigns by a technocratic elite desperate to remain relevant, or even to control what people think. In any case, that same messaging is being funneled to you at work and on public transport. It’s everywhere.

It isn’t only politics or hyperpolitics — that is, a politicization that is constant and everywhere but which gains no traction. There is the ceaseless commercialization of the game, which is making club football less competitive and more oligopolistic; it is turning players into robots and even transforming historic clubs in France or Spain into mere feeders for superclubs in England, or making a local Brazilian or German club into a franchise of a fast-moving consumer goods (fmcg) brand. Add to that all manner of bureaucratization and technocratic managerialism — video-assisted refereeing redresses small injustices while the authorities commit far greater outrages — and it’s no surprise many feel something ineffable has been lost. You might even refer to it as soul, if you don’t wince too much at the cliché.

The theorist Benjamin Studebaker refers to the four F’s of faith, fandom, family, and futurisms to describe the areas of life that act as escapes or enclaves from the hyperpolitical public sphere. But even these institutions are in the business of legitimation. Perhaps more than ever, they act as mediators for the ruling order. The authorities find they have little purchase with the populace. With football, they have a captive audience, one whose usual cynicism has been left at the gates — fans have abandoned themselves to romance and passion. It’s a level of libidinal investment the state can only dream of. It’s a great place for propaganda. But the more football is made to serve legitimation, the more fandom stops working as an enclave.

For most of football’s history, club football has been taken to be the real thing. The club was place-based, often rooted in a community, and by extension, supporters’ self-conception was interwoven with other identities. And these weren’t just off-the-peg individualistic badges; they were related to major social forces: religion, class, region, and political ideology. Moreover, the regularity of matches gave it a seamless integration into the rhythms of daily life.

In contrast, international football was the realm of pure spectacle: an occasional happening, a competition of all-star teams, often on neutral terrain. It was magic, but not lacking in ambivalences. You had to cheer for players who were your enemy for most of the year. And the nation was far too big a collectivity at times. It pasted over cleavages of class and locale. Even in small countries, the pool of national talent was vast relative to the catchment areas and transfer markets most clubs operated in. Indeed, it may have been this limited nature that made club football what it was.

Now, at the end of the age of globalization, club football at the top level is basically limitless: Global brands shop in a global market for players, managers. . . .  and fans. The nation, the ultimate modern social construction, now appears more place-bound, more limited, more real; and so with football. A national team manager can’t recruit players on the open market; he must work with what he’s given. A new owner can’t come in and change the key identifying symbols of the team. The players all speak the same language (mostly) and share a common experience of socialization (sort of). In today’s hypermodernity, where everything is deregulated, deinstitutionalized and globalized, we search in desperation for some fixity.

In the 2000s, an airy, cheery — some would say gormless — image of the nation was projected, but as economic and geopolitical conditions soured, the project became less plausible. Virulent, exclusionary nationalism returned to the scene at the same time as baseless nation-branding and sportswashing reached their apex — a fact that should not be seen as a paradox but as a necessary unity of opposites. It is a story that can be told through the World Cup itself, which has gone through its own dramatic process of attempting to represent the nation, albeit in contradictory ways.

Germany 2006 was a coming-out party for the host country: Flag-waving was back, without a whiff of sieg-heiling. The new postmodern Deutschland could speak its name without the weight of historical guilt — on condition that the nation had no determinate content, beyond tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and economic dynamism. Germany may have hegemonized Europe, but only in the guise of the post-national EU. As Wolfgang Streeck has long pointed out, European unity and harmony were a vehicle for big German exporters’ interests. But in the age of peak globalization, national interests were verboten, as were those of class. So German ruling-class interests were not pursued through the German nation but through the post-nation collectivity of the EU.

In 2010, South Africa likewise announced itself as something new and different. The rainbow nation had shed not just racism and apartheid but also the means by which that oppressive order was cast off: national-liberation struggle. So both racial and class politics were relegated to the past, even as deep inequality and developmental failures persisted.

By 2014, the global context had changed, and the commodities boom that lifted South Africa and Brazil both had ended. The lead-up to Brazil’s World Cup saw mass protests against inequality, corruption, and misdirected public spending. The subsequent years saw the national colors, previously universal and uncontested — and with a strong association with the Seleção — become the object of rancorous polarization. Anti-corruption protests swung to the right, with conservatives adopting the canary-yellow jersey — one which would soon after become the icon of the radical right under Bolsonaro.

Although Russia used its World Cup to detoxify its national image, presenting itself as open (despite sanctions) and friendly (despite the 2014 annexation of Crimea), the specter of a more assertive nationalism was always there. This was a revanchist power, shunned by the West, and for which liberal democracy was now just a series of hypocrisies and lies. In the eyes of sagacious Westerners, Russians were the worst thing: white people untroubled by colonial guilt. In reality, ordinary citizens had been shoved off the political stage, and the state swallowed the nation. Either way, dangerous stuff.

The apparent opposite was presented at Qatar’s World Cup. Along with other small Gulf states, this was a nation without a people, a contradiction in terms: credentialed and salaried labor is imported from the West, a mass of low-skilled workers is imported from South Asia, and a thin top layer of 10% of residents are actual Qatari nationals. While Qatar attempted to reframe criticism of human rights abuses as selective or neocolonial, the result was nevertheless a transparent exercise in legitimating a petro-hub and entrepôt as a member of the community of nations. It was the most explicit case of nation-branding through sport.

Nowhere in this postmodern perambulation do we encounter the nation understood in its much earlier conception: a self-determining body of citizens committed to building a collective life together. That would be far too demotic, even democratic, for the technocrats and demagogues who alternately run the show. As a consequence, attempts to rediscover the nation through football are confounded — as are attempts to rediscover a love for football through nationalism.

If for Benedict Anderson, the daily newspaper was central to the generation of national self-consciousness, stimulating the sense of a body of people existing at the same time in the same space, then it is not surprising that, in the age of hypermedia, the nation becomes much less determinate, less anchored. The nation is a free-for-all in which global branding initiatives meet their obverse: reactionary ethnic nationalism — an attempt at finding fixity in a liquefied world. Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 are part of the same whole.

Thus, we find that radical-conservative reactions to globalism do not escape the tendency toward placelessness. Much the opposite. Consider maga — it has become a franchise. So Brazil’s Bolsonaro family appeals to Trump to impose sanctions on their own country in the name of nationalism, or Orbán supporters in Hungary no longer sing their national anthem collectively, as they have traditionally done, but have it sung by a single performer, US style.

National football teams might have racist ultras insisting on ethnic purity, but how can a team represent you on the pitch if there is no longer even a pretense of a national style? Organized Germans, defensive Italians, brave English, creative Brazilians. . . .  these are just clichés of another age.

So is it all corroded, both football and nation, and with them, national football? Perhaps there is hope yet.

It may seem a shabby banality in the face of all the above, but the scarcity of an event may be its value. Rare are the moments in always-on, 24–7 capitalism when a collectivity can stop and regard itself. We lack modern rituals — and we lack recognition for the new rituals that have emerged. Recall that ritual’s relationship to time, as Byung-Chul Han argues, is that of home to place: Time becomes manageable and meaningful rather than a ceaseless stream of moments. Anderson argued the nation answered the key question of belonging by tying together time and place: “Why are we. . . .  here. . . .  now.” In a similar way, an earlier theorist of nationalism, Ernest Renan, called the nation a daily plebiscite — the ongoing assent or shared will to live together. If fragmented hypermedia impedes this process today, then the infrequent Big Event provides a little substitute.

Popular rituals interrupt the daily grind and provide a temporal home in which the people can come to see themselves, to recognize themselves. The euphoria which greeted the uprisings of the early 2010s, from Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square and beyond, was testament to the way such moments are treasured. Club football’s own daily plebiscite has become exhausting. The experience of being a football fan today is to be submitted to a barrage of legitimation stories. The World Cup, in contrast, can serve as a reminder of what is otherwise being lost, its rarity preserving ritual from total commodification.

Of course, football won’t rescue the nation. And the nation can’t rescue football. But a popular-democratic project of nation-building, if taken up once again, could yet salvage the last collectivity from mediatic spectacle, lest it be left to reactionary entrepreneurs and globalist marketeers alike.

In South Africa, we have granted sports the power to unite and divide us. Bafana Bafana’s historic win against South Korea has once again inspired the nation to chant “No DNA, just RSA!” — ostensibly asserting that citizenship, not ancestry, defines belonging in South Africa — a chant popular during major international tournament campaigns. As we leave the group stages for unknown territory, we are once again partaking in a “soft nationalism,” but this time it takes place amidst the context of hard nationalism. The same voices celebrating are also chanting that “foreigners must go.”

The prefix “South” adds a lot of baggage to “Africa.” This is a country that enacted a specific kind of colonialism, one that saw the nation as its own and not a colony of a larger empire. The apartheid government did not serve the interests of a foreign power; they were the foreign power, claiming the country as a homeland. Our history has given us a distinct national character, each “race” keenly adopting “South Africa,” but it means something different to every person who dons it. At the present moment, this means that a large part of the country is calling for the forced removal of foreigners in the name of the South African identity. There is a genuine concern that the poor Black South African has, that their lives are destined for destitution, that health care, jobs, and economic comfort are not “meant for them.” They can see it in crumbling institutions, in their own lives, and in their inability to get a leg up in the most unequal country in the world.

Thirty years of neoliberalism have not been kind to large parts of the country. This has led to a serious resurgence of right-wing politics. From political agents who wish to remove Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the post-apartheid policy framework aimed at redressing racial inequalities in business ownership and employment (which, if we are being honest, has not done its job), in favor of “free market” determinism, which would be an effective death sentence to progressive employment. To the renewed Afrophobia of March on March, an anti-migrant vigilante movement that has organized protests calling for the removal of undocumented foreigners from South Africa.

Blaming foreigners while evading genuine and difficult questions about the government, and capitalism and its failures, is easier, and it comes with the bonus of feeling like “you are a part of something bigger.” The power of giving a voice, even a misguided one, to the voiceless cannot be overstated here. For 30 years, South Africa has been great at sloganeering, and over that 30-year period, fewer and fewer people feel like those slogans meant something. March on March has given those who feel silent something to say, something to do, a tangible action — and that is a lot more than broken promises.

The face of Afrophobia as it sits now is the Zulu Man — a carefully crafted image of a proud South African fighting to “take back his country.” The Zulu ethno-linguistic group is the largest in South Africa; some anti-migrant organizing has drawn heavily on Zulu nationalist imagery and hostel-dweller networks in KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg. Tell me what you think the white supremacists, who still largely control the economy, are thinking when they see traditional attire being used to orchestrate violence against the marginalized. We have seen this play before in pre-1994 South Africa, where one group of marginalized peoples was mobilized against the other; it paints a convenient image: “See, they can’t even get along, how do we expect them to govern?” I do not condemn the Zulu man whose life is spent on the outskirts of society, in single-sex migrant worker hostels (built under apartheid to house Black workers near cities; many remain occupied and have historically been sites of political mobilization). He has genuine concerns for a better life. To suggest that Afrophobia is a “Zulu problem” is Afrophobic; to suggest that the carefully chosen poster men for March on March are somehow the be-all and end-all of Zulu identity is also Afrophobic. To ignore the influence of Zulu nationalism is also misguided. It is difficult territory: to rightfully address the ethno-nationalist dreams of some people who happen to be Zulu, while not falling into the thinking that Zulu people are “the bad ones.” To reiterate the point, this is the marginalized being mobilized against the marginalized, and those in power sit back and smile as they are left unscathed.

Back to soccer. As we unite under the banner of South Africa, what South Africa are we supporting? Are we uniting under a new nation that sees itself as separate from Africa, more South than African? When we hosted the 2010 World Cup, we were “the first African country” to do so. Now we are flirting with being the first Southern African country to cut itself off ideologically from the larger African story. We are reifying colonial borders and reproducing the logic of white supremacy. When a Bafana Bafana win is nation-building, we have to remain vigilant about the nation it is building towards.

It was June 25, 1957, just over three months after Ghana had gained independence from the British Empire. One of the empire’s crown jewels, Sir Stanley Matthews CBE, was ascending the gangway of his BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) flight at the Accra Airport when he suddenly stopped, turned, and waved with his right hand. He was diligently dressed in a suave suit, and his overcoat hung on his left arm — a sense of sartorial sophistication. He was wrapping up what he had called “the most memorable overseas tour of my life.” And it was an emotional one.

“Come back again, Stan!” chanted the loud crowd at the airport. He smiled. Hours before boarding the flight, he had told reporters that he had been “deeply touched” by the hospitality of Ghanaians.

Sir Stanley’s visit to Ghana was one of the most influential events not only in the history of sports in Ghana, but in the history of Ghana in general. Here was the world’s best footballer of that era — he had won the inaugural Ballon d’Or a year earlier — choosing to visit a three-month-old country to share his talent through teaching.

At the time, he had a successful 25-year playing career under his belt and was regarded as football’s pioneering global superstar. By all intents and purposes, he was arguably the most high-profile personality across any discipline to have ever visited Ghana at that point. The reigning “Monarch of Association Football” — as a newspaper ad called him — had visited a nascent nation at the heart of the West African coast. It was as special as it was fascinating, and would pave the way for later pilgrimages by global giants of the game such as Lev Yashin, Alfredo Di Stéfano, and Pelé in the ensuing years.

Sir Stanley had arrived on May 21, and, as the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s biggest newspaper, noted, he had a “terrific impact on the sport in this country” right from when his feet touched Ghanaian soil, his reverence reverberating raucously around the country. “No visiting sportsman has ever received the sort of reception accorded Matthews,” the paper reported.

He was given a “stately” six-mile drive from the Accra Airport to the Accra Community Center, where a reception was held in his honor. A few hours later, he was enstooled — installed in a traditional chieftaincy ceremony — as a Soccer Hene (King of Soccer) by Nii Tetteh Kpeshie, the Sempe Mantse (a traditional chief and patron of Hearts of Oak, the club that funded the legend’s trip to Ghana). Looking glad, he was clad in full traditional regalia — colorful kente over a white jumper — holding an ivory sword, with his famous feet resting on a pair of footballs. The stool he sat on would, 60 years later, be auctioned for £850.

The main brain behind Sir Stanley’s invitation to Ghana, though, was the man they called the “grey-haired soccer philosopher”: Henry Plange “HP” Nyemetei, the president of Hearts of Oak. HP Nyemetei and his Hearts crew put in a lot of heart, breaking their backs and challenging lack and luck to pluck up their courage. As the Daily Graphic noted, “a lot of sleepless nights, empty stomachs and tiring treks” went into planning the visit, which was, indeed, “a great, bold experiment.” Nyemetei said it was Hearts of Oak’s “privilege to introduce the new state of Ghana to one of the greatest sportsmen of all time.”

Sir Stanley was mobbed by fans everywhere he went, celebrated with appellations, showered with praise, and serenaded with music. He was proof that the kingdom of football knew no boundaries, just people and passion. He met all the people who mattered in Ghana: Governor-General Sir Arku Korsah; Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah; the Asantehene Otumfuor Agyemang Prempeh II (the king of the Ashanti people); the Okyehene Ofori Atta II (the king of the Akyem Abuakwa traditional area); the UK High Commissioner to Ghana Sir Ian Maclennan; and many more. The gatherings to honor him had many iterations: shindigs, soirees, sherry parties, and so on.

He played five exhibition matches across the country, featuring for Hearts of Oak against sides such as archrivals Asante Kotoko, Sekondi Hasaacas, and Cornerstones. Across these games, on relatively undulating and dusty pitches, his gentle yet genuine genius shone, even as a 42-year-old, conjuring ethereal moves such as “stylishly sedating” balls, as CK Gyamfi recalls in his autobiography The Black Star.

He “blazed” through defenses “like a wildfire set in a summer desert,” according to legendary sports writer Kofi Badu. For Badu, whenever the “magic of Matthews came to life”, it was “peerless and impeccable.” “What a man he is!” he simply ended one of his match reports. Not even the tropical humidity of Ghana could stop him — he had come in from cold Denmark — because he exerted himself, exhibiting fierce fitness that flabbergasted fans. Indeed, Sir Stanley measured up to all his monikers: the King of Wingers, the Wizard of the Dribble, the Soccer Saint, the King of Soccer — as 80,000 fans savored every bit of his mastery across Accra, Kumasi, and Sekondi.

The matches he played in offered players — both teammates and opponents — a rare opportunity to tap into greatness from close range, but it was the training sessions he organized in schools and parks that were more crucial. Sir Stanley took his time to organize workshops for grassroots footballers and school children about the rudiments of modern soccer, or what Ghanaians of that era obsessively called “scientific soccer.” He covered the craft and the culture; and professed the physical and the psychological. He spread knowledge in such a caring and contagious manner. No wonder CK Gyamfi noted that he was like “a walking encyclopedia of football.”

He was given full media privileges, too. Apart from a brilliant broadcast on Radio Ghana, Sir Stanley wrote a full center-spread column in the Daily Graphic detailing his observations of football in Ghana, commending positives and suggesting improvements. He emphasized what he said was his main “secret”: “The importance of 100 percent physical fitness.” “Some are lacking it, and as a consequence, the stamina to last the whole 90 minutes of the game is wanting. Skill and ability and enthusiasm count for nought if you are not in sound physical condition to put them into operation. So keep fit — proper!” He also entreated Ghanaian footballers to be bold and “call more for the ball”, as that “sense of anticipation is the knack that wins games.” And he advised Ghanaian footballers to normalize rolling passes low along the turf, to avoid unnecessarily hoofing the ball high.

Sir Stanley’s visit not only positioned a young Ghana in influential geopolitical circles, it also shook its football foundations internally, contributing significantly to the revolution that toppled the administration of long-time Ghanaian football chief Richard Akwei just months later. Ghanaian football fans developed an urgent craving for such progressive policies in the wake of his departure. Kofi Badu had observed in a column that Hearts’ “brave” attempt to pull off the Sir Stanley visit was an indictment on Akwei’s Ghana Amateur Football Association (GAFA). “They (Hearts) have shown that foresight which is lacking in our GAFA,” Badu wrote.

Ohene Djan, the 33-year-old who led the successful revolt against Akwei in September, and who would soon become a football colossus in his own right, stepped into power and borrowed the Sir Stanley visit blueprint from his friend and fellow Convention People’s Party (CPP) member HP Nyemetei: the ambitious invitation of top personalities and clubs into the country to “rub shoulders” with local footballers and other stakeholders.

As GAFA chairman, Djan hired three foreign coaches — George Ainsley, Andreas Sjoberg, and Josef Ember — for the national team, the first time since 1903 that Ghana had hired professional coaches. He brought in celebrated English referee Alf Bond to train Ghanaian referees into FIFA referees. There were many such Sir Stanley-esque schemes, and they worked to perfection, propelling Ghana’s football to continental power and global prominence.

Sir Stanley had predicted in his column that Ghana “in the not-too-distant future can become a force in international soccer. . . . I can confidently prophesy a great future for Ghana football.”

It took a few years, but by 1965, Ghana had become Africa’s first superstar football nation: three-time West African champions, ceremonial East African champions, two-time African champions, the first African nation to tour Eastern Europe, and the first Black African nation to qualify for the Olympic Games football tournament. More markedly, the Black Stars sent shock waves across the world of football by drawing three-all with the greatest club in the world, Real Madrid, in August 1962. They even beat Sir Stanley’s former club, Blackpool, five goals to one in May 1960.

And it all started with Sir Stanley, and the standard of studiousness he stirred among the sea of soccer stars he sighted in the state of Ghana.

The North American countries of Canada, Mexico, and the United States are currently hosting the 23rd edition of the FIFA World Cup. Probably reflecting the expansiveness of the territory in which it is organized, this tournament includes 48 teams. The first round of the knockout stage has not even ended yet, but the usual public polemics regarding ticket prices, affordability, game scheduling, visas, and the uneven conditions under which supporters and teams are required to navigate this global event are vividly underway. However, the performance of Ayyoub Bouaddi, the previously unknown 18-year-old Franco-Moroccan midfielder, in his team’s game against Brazil diverted attention from these issues to fascinating questions about postcolonialism, citizenship, and belonging.

Dazzled by the Moroccan national team’s historic match with Brazil, commentators from both the Global North and the Global South started wondering what made this miracle possible. Some praise the Moroccan Federation’s methodical work since 2010 to revolutionize the country’s sports through the Mohammed VI Football Academy, while others highlight the overrepresentation of players with dual citizenship. Some even wondered if a national team whose players were born, raised, and trained in countries beyond Morocco’s territorial borders is truly Moroccan, and whether its successes would be possible without its transnational makeup.

These questions are not new. They were raised during the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and they will continue to be asked in the future because they are, in their essence, about an open-ended postcoloniality and its ramifications for belonging to a nation. It’s almost normal to praise European national teams when they incorporate descendants of their former colonies, but audiences seem to question this same principle when a formerly colonized postcolonial state from Tamazgha (North Africa), Morocco in this case, benefits from the services of its diaspora. These questions acquire an even bigger political significance when right-wing politicians instrumentalize them to demonize immigrants and question their allegiance to their European nations. Lamine Yamal sparked a controversy by wearing custom-made boots with Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean flags to honor his origins while playing for the Spanish national team against Cape Verde.

Colonization was instrumental in the very invention of Moroccan citizenship, which was born in response to European states’ scramble to colonize the country in the 19th century. In their attempt to dominate Morocco, European powers sought to extirpate a class of wealthy Moroccan protégés from the purview of the country’s tax laws. However, the sultan was able to impose the condition that any Moroccan who returned to the country, even if he was naturalized somewhere else, would be subjected to Moroccan law. The agreement of 1880, signed by France, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Britain, Portugal, and the US, among others, made Moroccanness an eternal bond. Thus, a defensive mechanism devised to stave off the impact of extended protections of Moroccan citizens on the treasury paved the way for descendants of Moroccans to claim their right to an unbroken filiation with the land of their ancestors. Colonialism can be clearly credited for this eternal Moroccanness, which has become both transnational and indissoluble over time.

It is within this framework that Morocco’s use of dual-national players can be understood. It is true that FIFA’s eligibility framework allows players to represent a country through nationality, birth, descent, residence, and, under defined conditions, a change of sporting association. European, African, Asian, and American teams all operate within this system because modern football reflects migration, mixed families, colonial histories, labor mobility, and multiple citizenships. As a FIFA member state, Morocco reaps the benefits of this framework to both ensure footballing prestige and perpetuate Moroccanness beyond its borders. However, what makes Morocco a unique case is the extension of the politics of citizenship beyond FIFA to represent cyclical moments of renewal of the connection between Morocco and its transnational citizens. Every global sporting event offers the state a powerful platform to attract and co-opt new candidates in different fields.

The postcolonial nature of the questions raised about players who were born and raised in Europe is particularly fraught. Ousmane Sonko, the president of Senegal’s parliament, quipped during an interview with France 24 and RFI before Senegal’s 2026 World Cup opening match against France that whatever the result, “Africa will have beaten Africa.” Sonko’s remark named a familiar postcolonial irony: European national teams often draw strength from players who originate from former colonies, further complicating simplistic ideas about belonging and national grandeur.

The children of colonies played for their colonizers for decades. Similar to the African tirailleurs — colonial soldiers recruited from French West Africa — Afro-European footballers have been called into service to defend the colors of their colonial national teams. Larbi Ben Mbark, known as the “Black Pearl,” and whom Pelé named “Football God,” was born in Casablanca, joined Olympique de Marseille in 1938, and represented France 17 times. Other Moroccan players — Abderrahmane Mahjoub, Mustapha Ben M’Barek, and Abdesselem Ben Mohammed — also represented France before Moroccan independence. In the last three decades, Zinedine Zidane, a phenomenal player of Algerian origins, played for France. Kylian Mbappé, Franco-Ivorian, chose France. As already mentioned, Lamine Yamal, the Spain-born player of Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean origins, chose Spain over his father’s country. The imbrication of histories of colonialism and sports could not be any clearer.

Like in other fields, extraction has been fundamental to the growth of European football. France, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands drew strength from demographics that followed from colonial empires, labor migration, family reunification, and postcolonial settlement. Because of conquest and demands for cheap labor for post-WWII reconstruction, Europe has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the world to exploit their energy. Unlike what right-wing politicians assert, the rise in the number of immigrants is the natural result of extractive colonial practices that dislocated able-bodied people from their homelands or created conditions, through economic impoverishment, that pushed them to leave. The children of these migrants entered football and other sports through schools, neighborhoods, urban communities, clubs, and academies shaped by colonial histories. European teams and clubs extracted their talent and exploited their legitimate ambitions. In the meantime, their feats on the pitch perform resilience against — and survival of — unequal citizenship, racialization, and xenophobia.

Extraction was unidirectional. Both labor and brain drain followed the same pattern. Doctors, soldiers, players, and workers moved from former colonies to the Global North; from the periphery to the metropole. The unspoken truth has nonetheless been that the children of formerly colonized nations should feel blessed for being included in the benefits of European modernity. Powerful media routinized the image of minorities playing for predominantly white teams, normalizing and entrenching unidirectionality. However, Morocco’s mobilization of its notion of eternal citizenship to attract an entire team of talents born and trained abroad changes the optics of this unidirectionality.

In fact, Morocco’s recruitment of diaspora footballers redirects the economy of extractive practices in football. Before anything, Morocco is demonstrating how football can acquire a decolonial force with many social, cultural, and political ramifications. A player trained in Madrid, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Lille, Rotterdam, or Barcelona may acquire technical capital in Europe, but decides to reverse the direction of benefits. Unlike the usual course that allows Europe to always benefit from the talents of the Global South, Morocco’s practice is almost reparative of colonial history: It allows us to see players who benefited from the privileges of these systems redirect those benefits toward their formerly colonized country in their turn. When a Europe-born player chooses to play for Morocco, he reroutes the flow of value to his ancestral homeland. Consequently, Morocco’s national team unsettles some observers because it claims value that European systems invested in creating, but instead of benefiting Europe, Morocco reaps the yield of decades-long training.

Ayyoub Bouaddi, the 18-year-old phenomenon, made global news after his performance against Brazil. Having evolved within the French football system, he chose to represent Morocco instead of waiting for a chance to play for France. Although France looked better for him on paper, Bouaddi committed to play for Morocco one month before the start of the World Cup, defying the logic of fame and financial success. Bouaddi illustrates how foreign-born Moroccan players are leveraging a football world in which birthplace, training, ancestry, memory, opportunity, and family obligation come together to sway players’ decisions about who to play for. His choice was decolonial in many ways, primarily because it embodies the eternal Moroccan citizenship that has broader professional, political, and sentimental dimensions.

Bouaddi is a symbol of a generational shift in which playing for national teams in Europe is no longer treated as the highest form of recognition. Immigrant families and young players still dream of wearing the jerseys of Spanish, French, British, and other European clubs. European club football remains the center of money, visibility, training infrastructure, and global prestige, but club aspirations and national identification are separate. To put it differently: Europe remains the dominant professional football marketplace, where players can make phenomenal amounts of money, while national teams of origin, like Morocco, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Algeria, provide sites for the performance of identity, pride, Islam, and decoloniality. North African footballers can pursue careers in European clubs while choosing to represent African nations internationally. This new pattern demonstrates that European clubs are workplaces while national teams are where one manifests belonging.

Morocco’s unique place in this architecture is the result of systematic investment in maintaining the relationship between the country and its diaspora. Treated initially as a source of hard currency for a country with no oil reserves, official discourse and annual celebration of the return of migrants placed the diaspora at the heart of national life. This extraordinary care to strengthen ties with the country of origin has meant that millions of Moroccan-descended families strive to keep ties through language, religion, food, summer travel, remittances, family linkages, and cultural memory. For many players, Morocco functions as a living presence sustained by parents, grandparents, personal names, food, and annual visits to the country. For at least three generations, Morocco has continuously strived to strengthen the filiation and show its immigrant children their significance.

Not only do these elements form the personality of young diasporic Moroccans, they also continue to inform the relationship with the country of descent even for those born and raised in the diaspora. One’s birthplace matters, but the power of memory and spending formative summers in the bled cement belonging. A player born in Spain or France may spend the entire year learning football in European institutions and sports academies, but their target remains spending the summer in Morocco, swimming in rivers, listening to grandparents, and reconnecting with cousins in the village. Summers in Morocco become heavenly moments of escape in which the elevated status the migrant family enjoys in its homeland helps rehabilitate the damage exclusion and xenophobia instill in some of these children. The annual pilgrimage to Morocco is not just a time for vacation. It is a healing period from the ails of European racism and its coloniality.

Magharibat al-alam, which literally means “Moroccans of the world,” has become a powerful concept that holds more than a descriptive label for the diaspora. It is a strategic category in which emigration serves nation-building and its prestige. While it is mainly visible in football, it operates across various facets of Moroccan life, including investment, diplomacy, innovation, and culture. Although they still have no right to vote, Moroccans of the world are as essential for the legitimacy of the state as their co-citizens within the country. As members of the national body, Moroccan citizens abroad across generations participate in reactualizing the eternal Moroccanness established in the 19th century. This participation is sustained through a robust institutional infrastructure, which includes the Hassan II Foundation for Moroccans Residing Abroad, the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad, and administrations working directly to deal with the specific issues of this category of Moroccans.

This investment in the diaspora is not fortuitous. It is a macroeconomic asset. The World Bank put personal remittances to Morocco at roughly 7.8 percent of GDP in 2024. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported Moroccan remittances rising from more than US$11.5 billion in 2023 to about US$12.9 billion in 2024, around 8 percent of GDP. These transfers stabilize foreign exchange, support consumption, finance housing, and cushion families against financial shocks and seasonal struggles. Morocco also seeks to turn diaspora capital into productive investment in real estate, tourism, small and medium-sized enterprises, regional development, technology, and innovation. Recent policy language stresses administrative simplification, investment facilitation, and a more unified interface for Moroccans residing abroad. The state seeks to convert affective attachment — the summer return, the grandmother’s affection, the annual transfer — into longer-term economic participation.

Magharibat al-alam therefore names a dispersed human-capital network that Morocco has harnessed and continues to mobilize without requiring full migration back. Culturally, the category helps Morocco confront an intergenerational challenge: how to maintain second- and third-generation attachment to Morocco when daily life, schooling, citizenship practice, and professional futures lie elsewhere. The state answers through monarchy, Islam, Arabic, Amazigh identity, family return, summer programs, and national ceremonies. The diaspora helps narrate Morocco as a country whose national community exceeds its territory and whose influence travels through people as much as through embassies, firms, ports, or football academies.

Morocco is the first country in the history of the World Cup to have played with a team of entirely foreign-born players. Morocco has thus decolonized the game by reversing the traditional course of choice in which young talents from migrant parents experience the pressure of playing for countries that historically dominated the game. Almost everyone knows an African or Latin American player who plays for a European national team. However, Morocco is now creating a unique category in which players who would usually be able to play for European teams choose to play for their parents’ country of origin. Again, this is not a happenstance. It is the result of a national strategy to keep the eternality of the ties between Morocco and its diaspora.

In a recent interview that aired on Al Jazeera a few days before the current World Cup, Fouzi Lekjaa, president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, framed Morocco’s football project in explicitly national terms. Since 2010, he noted, Morocco has treated football as part of a broader state project linking elite competition to youth formation, civic discipline, national visibility, and soft power. In this account, the national team operates as a transnational institution at the service of Moroccanization. The national team acts as a crucible that brings together players formed in Morocco and their counterparts trained abroad to channel their descent, memory, discipline, and ambition in order to serve a project that is cast as modern, strategic, and sovereign. It serves both state and society by portraying an ecumenical and all-inclusive vision of Morocco. The origins of this ecumenical project date back to the 1970s, which witnessed the first attempts to maintain a relationship with Moroccan Jewish diasporas.

Beyond the pitch, diasporization has been good for critical reflection on the country’s identity. For historical reasons related to the migration patterns after colonization, most of the foreign-born players, including Bouaddi, are Amazigh. Their parents and grandparents left the Souss and the Ouarzazate regions as well as the Rif to work in underground mining in post-WWII Europe. While some of these migrant workers returned after their temporary contracts expired, others stayed and brought their families with them, creating their own enclaves where they sustained their Amazigh traditions and passed them down to their descendants. These youth are at ease with identity questions, and they are proud of their plural Amazigh-Arab heritage. They made history in Qatar in 2022 by carrying the Amazigh flag. Their European education allows them to challenge erasure because they understand the importance of freedom. With these players, Amazigh identity has never had such a global platform for its projection.

Despite its obvious benefits, this diasporization strategy must also confront a genuine risk. If European-trained recruitment replaces investment in Moroccan academies, the domestic league, and opportunities for children inside Morocco, the project would deepen dependence on European systems. A serious national football strategy must connect diaspora recruitment to domestic development, as Lekjaa himself noted. The player formed in Europe and the player formed in Morocco should belong to the same national football ecosystem, one that treats Moroccan talent as both territorial and diasporic. Morocco must define its dependence on the ready-made player and its relationship with one in the making locally in order for the cross-fertilization to yield sustainable results.

Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal run, its current participation in the 2026 edition, and its role as a co-organizer of the 2030 World Cup have demonstrated the country’s commitment to football as a state project. However, success at the top must widen opportunity below — in regional academies, local clubs, youth programs, and the national football competition, known as Botola. Critics of this model of investment in sports also raise questions about the equivalent for education, hospitals, and human rights. When Hakim Ziyech, the Dutch Moroccan right-winger, did not return to the national team roster, after an unexplained absence, social media commentators linked his removal from the team to his pro-Palestinian statements during Israel’s war on Gaza and the ensuing acrimonious debate that he had with Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security. The Moroccan Federation has not provided any explanation for Ziyech’s absence, which poses significant questions about the ability of Morocco to accommodate the critical consciousness of foreign-born players for whom free engagement with political questions is sacrosanct. However, global prestige is a package, and a country with great ambitions like Morocco cannot pick and choose. Bouaddi models the example of the player-student, and his trajectory can serve as an example that footballing cannot come at the expense of studies and strong educational institutions that will form and sustain the Morocco of the future.

Morocco’s national team offers much fodder for reflection on nationality after empire, migration, and global sport. Europe long benefited from African and Tamazghan players while presenting their excellence as European achievements. Mobilizing eternal citizenship, Morocco now upends this trend by placing the parents’ homeland at the core of European football decisions.

As an African feminist pushing against how systems of oppression endeavor to constrain and diminish, I am concerned with the functions of violence. Violence in its myriad forms serves to inscribe who is deemed human and who is not, who is considered deserving of dignity and who must be stripped of it. It is a language of demarcating society’s status quo and the bounds of acceptable identities and behaviors. When understood this way, violence against queer African bodies is particularly insidious as it is designed to brutally mold queer people into heteronormativity — in life and sometimes in death.

African queers are often confronted by the claim that their existences are un-African; a detestable product of Western influence. And so African leaders and others expend considerable energy in attempting to do away with queerness through various tools of violence: rhetorical, legal, political, physical, religious, and sexual. At the same time that queer Africans are subjected to violence and live with the unrelenting spectre of it, they must also find ways to resist. It is a liminal existence, but one that demonstrates that queer Africans are permanently fixed within the continent’s bounds despite concerted efforts to effect their erasure.

In the legal arena, African leaders and states untiringly expand the intended project of queer erasure through violent laws. In March, Senegal’s President signed into law a bill that doubles prison terms for same-sex relations and criminalizes pro-queer advocacy. Recently, Ghana’s parliament resurrected and subsequently passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which intensifies the existing laws, including through criminalizing queer identity and advocacy. It awaits signing by President John Mahama. Despite legal efforts to undo it, the harsh 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act remains in force in Uganda. Through this law, people who engage in same-sex activities face the risk of life imprisonment and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” Under President Ibrahim Traoré’s bold and Pan-Africanist rule, Burkina Faso criminalized homosexuality in 2025.

The legal reforms are emboldened and accompanied by the fiery speeches of African leaders who return faithfully to the mantra that queerness is un-African. Defending Senegal’s new anti-LGBTQ law, President Ousmane Sonko recently stated: “There is a kind of tyranny. There are eight billion human beings in the world, but there is a small nucleus called the West which, because it has resources and controls the media, wants to impose it [homosexuality] on the rest of the world.” When Traoré’s government criminalized homosexuality, Edasso Rodrigue Bayala, the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, explained that this development was “a historic reform” reflecting “respect for cultural values and the will to build a Burkinabé family.” At the end of 2023, Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye commented that queer Burundians should be stoned, should go and live in Western countries because they choose “satan.”

The African leaders are perhaps unconscious of the fact that they are building on and concretizing a particular brand of homophobia calcified through colonial rule when same-sex relations were criminalized. They perhaps do not know that they are leaning into and cementing the idea of a homogenous Africa, which again feeds into an earlier Western project of seeing Africa through simplified lenses. Moreover, they ignore the fact that modern-day anti-rights forces consist of networks between African politicians, religious leaders, Christian fundamentalist groups from the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

But this is the function of violence. It is an imprecise instrument that effects repression to sustain power structures. Anti-queerness especially reinforces patriarchy. This is why, even in countries such as South Africa, where constitutional rights present the illusion of freedom for sexual orientation and gender identity minorities, there are special horrors reserved for Black queer women. They are raped, mutilated and murdered for daring to step outside of the patriarchal mould. Sometimes this violence is committed by friends or sanctioned by family members.

In juxtaposition to legitimized violence, queer Africans enact multifaceted forms of political resistance that cast queerness into registers of African humanity. In Uganda, Clare Byarugaba founded the first local chapter of Parents and Families of LGBTIQ children (P-FLAG). Though she constantly lives in a state of vigilance and risk as one of the few openly queer activists in the country, she maintains that “I fight because I want those who come after me to have a softer landing, to know a different Uganda.” In Bostwana, a case initiated by 24-year-old Letsweletse Motshidiemang and supported by Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana (LEGABIBO), succeeded in decriminalizing homosexuality in 2019 by demonstrating to the court the very dire impacts of criminalization. In February this year, an array of queer people proudly paraded through Cape Town city to celebrate Pride, but also to call attention to hate crimes and inequality experienced by Black queer people.

Activist scholarship forms another critical part of queer resistance. We see this through Stella Nyanzi’s ethnographic research contextualizing how Ugandans proudly claim being both African and same-sex loving by affirming their locally-cultivated identities and names, heeding ancestral callings, and recalling documented pre-colonial same-sex practices in the Buganda kingdom. This research is a vital counter-argument to claims that African queerness did not exist before colonialism and that the marker of African-ness is the heterosexual and patriarchal family unit.

I cite these examples not to make a happy check-list of queer African activism, but to demonstrate the slow, exhausting, and often unseen work of refusing violence that is taken as normal and viable. This unsettling of the status quo is a critical means of reclaiming African identities from within, debunking the distracting and illegitimate claims of Western origins and influence, and forging marginalized African solidarities. There is no neat conclusion, but only an incremental shuffling forward in resistance to imposed “non-existence.”

“Abahambe!” (They must go!)

Gayton McKenzie shouts this at the top of his lungs at Orlando Stadium — the spiritual home of South African football, in Soweto — during a rally of his political party, the Patriotic Alliance (PA). It’s late November 2023, six months before South Africa’s general elections.

McKenzie, somehow, finds a way to raise the decibels.

“Abahambe!”

McKenzie continues screaming, jumping up and down, to the point that some of his shouts of “Abahambe!” are inaudible. He shakes the microphone while being showered in purple confetti.

“Abahambe! Abahambe!”

In his speech, McKenzie vows that when the PA is elected, his first act will be to go to the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital to “switch off the oxygen of illegal foreigners.”

The hospital is named after Rahima Moosa, one of the leading actors in the women-led march against the apartheid regime’s Pass Laws in 1956. It is the only mother-and-child hospital in the country, serving a wide, predominantly low-income catchment area.

Hospital overcrowding — and not the government corruption that has brought the health sector to its knees — is one of the big talking points of the Abahambe movement, the anti-migrant group behind the spate of recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

McKenzie — whose party didn’t win the election, but got enough seats to be a kingmaker in the government of national unity — is now South Africa’s Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, a position he received as a reward for siding with the ANC. The minister is one of the biggest voices, literally and figuratively, in the xenophobic wave sweeping Mzansi.

His “Abahambe!” sentiment lit the fire, which has been fueled by March and March, a self-proclaimed “citizen-led movement advocating for stronger immigration enforcement and protecting opportunities for South African citizens.” The leader of the movement, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, was fired from Durban-based radio station VUMA FM after commenting in a TV interview that foreign nationals shouldn’t use public hospitals. Her dismissal turned her into a martyr for the movement, amplifying her voice and presence.

Ngobese-Zuma has been given such a platform by the media that the South African Broadcasting Corporation — the country’s public broadcaster — went straight to an interview with her after President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the anti-migrant sentiment. March and March have used unsubstantiated data to claim that migrants have overcrowded the health and school system to the detriment of South Africans. These figures and statements have been uncritically and widely disseminated by mainstream media. The organization has issued a warning to all undocumented foreign nationals to leave by June 30.

March and March and Abahambe! claim to only be against illegal immigration, yet their true intent has been exposed in their supporters targeting none other than a South African soccer player, currently representing his country at the World Cup. Ime Okon, a defender with the national team Bafana Bafana, was born and raised in Johannesburg to a South African mother and a Nigerian father. He came up through the South African football system, playing amateur football in Randburg before he was signed by SuperSport United, a South African Premier Division club. Okon’s father died when he was five. He has never been to Nigeria.

Notwithstanding, some supporters of March and March have said Okon shouldn’t play for Bafana because he is “Nigerian.” This is a sentiment that the team and the South African Football Association (SAFA) have not entertained.

But this isn’t the first occasion where Bafana Bafana has been caught in the anti-migrant storm. Several Africans have been hate-watching the team at the global showpiece due to the xenophobic sentiment in South Africa. That “hate watch” — a social media banter term for when a football fan supports the opponents of a team they dislike — has turned into actual hate. Bafana players have received significant abuse on social media, including direct messages from Africans angry with South Africa’s political climate.

“If you lose a game, and you don’t perform, you can take it as players,” Bafana captain Ronwen Williams said in the pre-match press conference ahead of the clash with Czechia in Atlanta. “You can put your hand up. But when there’s false information that goes around, then it hurts. I have been a target over the last few days over things I didn’t say. I didn’t speak anything about Africa, or people supporting Mexico,” Williams continued, addressing a fake quote attributed to him where he supposedly said he was hurt by Africans supporting Mexico and not South Africa.

I have always said that as Africa, we are one. We support each other in good and bad moments. We’ve all got our own politics, our own problems, and our own fights that we deal with back home. Every country has that. I don’t know where that stems from. It does hurt. I have been attacked. . . . my country as well, for things that are going on back home.

Williams continued:

Players are human beings as well. We go through it. Sometimes it gets a lot. You want to focus on doing your job, which is being a footballer, but then you get involved in politics even though you don’t want to get into that space. But the wonderful thing about sport is that it can unite, it can make or break you. It can bring people together. We are in Atlanta now, and I see so many Africans. . . . so many South Africans and people from Mexico, in one room. That’s the beauty of sport. That’s the beauty of football. So, let’s just enjoy and have a wonderful time, and we leave politics to the politicians. Let us just play football and enjoy ourselves. Criticize us for what happens on the field, but off the field things — we can’t deal with that, and it has nothing to do with us. As Africa, let’s unite and keep going because we are all in this together.

Bafana Bafana have found themselves paying the price for their country’s sins. But it’s not only the country’s posture that has turned them into a punching bag — the team’s apolitical stance hasn’t helped them, as people don’t know what they stand for.

South Africa’s national football association (SAFA) takes a political stance when it’s convenient, like hitting out at UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin for his statement that some of the games are “uninteresting,” hinting that widening the number of participants — especially from the Global South — is destroying the game.

SAFA, like most African associations, is firmly in FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s corner, and used this as a “Gotcha!” moment to expose the double standards of Čeferin, whose UEFA announced that Somali referee Omar Artan would take charge of the Super Cup — just after he was denied a visa by the US to officiate at the World Cup. SAFA didn’t utter a word about the weaponizing of visas by the US and dismissed questions of whether they should boycott the tournament.

McKenzie, a proud Israel supporter, was flippant when EFF leader Julius Malema called for a World Cup boycott:

How do you boycott the World Cup? It has everything to do with sponsors: our players who are playing overseas will be banned. It will be Armageddon. . . . Let me say this clearly: South Africa does not support a boycott. Football should not become a casualty of geopolitics. The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event on earth. It is a celebration of the global game, and it belongs to the players and the supporters around the world.”

Meanwhile, the US, one of the co-hosts of the World Cup, has turned football into a casualty of geopolitics through its treatment of the Iranian national football team and Artan. McKenzie’s statement also ignored the African athletes who sacrificed their careers to boycott the 1976 Montreal Games, when the International Olympic Committee refused to expel New Zealand for touring apartheid South Africa. Instead of addressing America, the minister criticized Artan for using a diplomatic visa and hinted that he brought the treatment upon himself.

While the South African government has stood up to the US regime and challenged Israel about the genocide of Palestinians, some members of that very government have gone the opposite direction.

The national football team, caught in the middle of all of that, has stood for nothing. This is something that South African football in general has suffered with. When star midfielder Thembinkosi Lorch of Orlando Pirates — one of SA football’s most storied clubs — was convicted of assaulting his partner, South African football said nothing, and his club fielded him after a brief suspension.

The irony of this World Cup is that Bafana Bafana have felt most at home in the US. One contributing factor is the close bond that South Africa enjoys with Georgia — dating back to the civil rights movement and the fight against apartheid.

The South African league is one of the most important on the continent, developing African goalkeepers in particular, while Europe largely ignores goalkeeper talent from the continent.

But if Bafana Bafana continues to stand for nothing, they will continue to be associated with the current xenophobia sweeping the country, with the Minister of Sport being among the loudest proponents.

More than seven decades after the Fifth Pan-African Congress demanded the complete liberation of Africa from colonial domination, the continent still finds itself trapped in the structures of dependency. The resolutions of the historic 1945 Congress in Manchester were clear: African nations deserved full political and economic independence, the removal of foreign domination, and the right of the African people to determine their own future. Yet in 2026, many African leaders continue opening the gates of the continent to the same imperial powers that colonized, exploited, and brutalized our people.

The recently concluded Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, co-hosted by Kenyan President William Ruto and French President Emmanuel Macron, became a symbol of this contradiction. Presented as a partnership of equals, the summit sought to rebrand France’s relationship with Africa at a time when Paris is rapidly losing influence across the continent.

The summit brought together over 30 African leaders and resulted in announcements of approximately €23 billion in investment pledges, targeting sectors such as energy, agriculture, and artificial intelligence. But beneath the language of co-investment, mutual respect, and win-win lies the enduring reality of imperialism.

France did not arrive in Nairobi merely out of friendship for Africa. The summit came at a moment when French influence has sharply declined in West Africa. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled French troops and challenged decades of French military and economic control. And France has been forced to withdraw military forces from several former colonies amid growing anti-French sentiment and popular uprisings.

This explains why the Nairobi summit was politically significant for France: it was the first major France-Africa summit hosted in an Anglophone African country. Kenya became the bridge through which France hopes to regain strategic influence in East and Central Africa, after facing resistance in the Sahel.

The question remains: why was President Ruto willing to host such a summit at this particular moment? The answer lies in the class character of the Kenyan state. The current administration has consistently aligned itself with Western powers, presenting Kenya as a reliable regional partner for foreign capital, military cooperation, and geopolitical interests. By hosting Macron, Ruto positioned Kenya as a strategic gateway for France’s renewed engagement with Africa while simultaneously strengthening his government’s standing among Western allies. Far from representing an independent African development agenda, the summit reflected the tendency of comprador elites to seek legitimacy and support from imperial centers of power, rather than from the citizens of their own countries.

Kenyan authorities framed the summit as an opportunity for economic growth and foreign investment. Yet the deeper question is: growth for whom, and under whose control?

Macron described the initiative as a partnership of equals. But equality cannot exist between economies structured in fundamentally unequal ways. The relationship between France and Africa has historically been shaped not by equality but by extraction. According to France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, over 1,000 French subsidiaries operate in Africa and over 140 in Kenya alone. Major corporations such as TotalEnergies, Orange, Carrefour, CMA CGM, and Bolloré maintain extensive commercial interests in energy, telecommunications, logistics, retail, and infrastructure. While this is presented as development and partnership, the profits extracted from African labor and resources overwhelmingly benefit foreign capital.

French influence in Africa has never been exercised solely through military and economic means. Cultural diplomacy has long formed part of France’s strategy for maintaining influence abroad. Through language institutions, educational exchanges, media partnerships, cultural centers, and development programs, France projects what is often described as “soft power.” Critics argue that such initiatives also serve broader political and economic objectives by cultivating favorable elites, shaping public discourse, and reinforcing France’s long-term strategic interests. The Africa Forward concert, Macron’s cooking with influencers, and other PR activities during his visit to Kenya all evidence this.

This is why Macron’s attempt to present himself as a “Pan-Africanist” during the summit was met with skepticism among activists and progressive forces. Pan-Africanism is not a branding exercise. It is a revolutionary struggle for African unity, sovereignty, and liberation from imperial domination.

Even the summit declaration itself reflected the language of dependency politics. Discussions focused heavily on debt restructuring, private investment, credit reform, and security cooperation — issues that often operate within financial systems dominated by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

The security dimension of the summit also raised concern among activists. Kenya and France have strengthened military cooperation in recent years, with critics arguing that the recently signed military pact increasingly compromises national sovereignty. Social movements have drawn parallels between new defense arrangements and earlier military agreements involving British troops at the British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK). Particularly controversial are the defense cooperation arrangements that grant significant legal protections to foreign military personnel operating in Kenya — limiting the ability of Kenyan institutions to hold foreign troops fully accountable under local law.

At the same time, France continues presenting itself as a “stabilizing force” in Africa, despite widespread criticism of its military role in the Sahel. Many people across West Africa increasingly associate foreign military interventions with instability rather than liberation.

These contradictions became more visible during protests organized by activists and members of social justice movements in Nairobi during the summit. Protesters denounced French imperialism, foreign domination, debt dependency, and military expansion. Reports from activists indicated that demonstrators were met with police violence, including tear gas, arrests, and arbitrary detention.

The summit therefore exposed two Africas existing side by side. One Africa sits inside conference halls discussing investment frameworks with multinational corporations and foreign powers. The other Africa exists in the streets, among unemployed youth, struggling workers, peasants, students, and communities facing rising costs of living.

Only a week after the summit, Kenya witnessed protests linked to the high cost of living and fuel prices. Across major towns and cities, sections of the population expressed frustration with worsening economic conditions. These demonstrations reflected deeper class contradictions inside Kenya’s capitalist economy.

Recent developments in the Alliance of Sahel States demonstrate that sections of Africa are once again questioning foreign military domination and asserting greater sovereignty. While contradictions and challenges remain within those states, their rejection of permanent foreign military influence has inspired anti-imperialist discussions across the continent.

Ultimately, the task before progressive African forces is not simply to criticize summits such as Africa Forward. The deeper challenge is building organized political alternatives rooted in workers, youth, peasants, women, and oppressed communities. Africa’s liberation will not emerge from elite conferences hosted in luxury halls or from dependency disguised as partnership. It will come through revolutionary political organization, Pan-African solidarity, and the collective struggle of African people against imperialism, capitalism, and comprador elites who profit from foreign domination.

The future of the continent cannot be determined in Paris, Washington, London, or the boardrooms of multinational corporations. It must be determined by the organized masses of Africa themselves. The task of this generation is clear: to learn from the failures of false independence, reject dependency, and continue the unfinished struggle for a united and sovereign continent.

Abdullah Ibrahim was a difficult man to interview.

He spoke in parables, metaphors, metaphysics, and cosmology. Ask him about a concert, and he might answer with a story about a shark and a monkey. Ask him about politics, and he would take you to the Green Kalahari, or Rumi, or Einstein’s curvature of time and space. Ask a straightforward question, and he would often refuse the invitation entirely. Then, three days later, you would realize he had answered the question after all.

Over the last seven years, I have had multiple conversations, interviews, and recordings with Abdullah Ibrahim. And we tended to circle the same question. Not music. Not politics. Not even South Africa. The question, in one form or another, was always identity. Who are we? How do we become who we are? What happens when history, exile, and circumstance place distance between us and ourselves?

The first time I literally bumped into Abdullah Ibrahim was on a rainy day in 2003 on Plein Street in Cape Town, not far from Parliament. He was walking anonymously with a turned-up collar and a brimmed hat. I greeted him. “Hello, Mister Ibrahim.” He growled and continued walking in the direction of Table Mountain. Years later, I discovered that wasn’t unusual. Abdullah was difficult. Period.

Now that he is gone, I hope we can resist the temptation to pretend otherwise.

We live in a time where our celebrated dead are quickly polished into saints. Their rough edges disappear. Their humanity is edited out in favor of a version that feels easier to celebrate. Yet our lionized heroes deserve the truth, too. Like many men of his generation, exile, apartheid, and unresolved wounds left marks not only on him but on those closest to him. Talent does not excuse hurt. Those stories belong to the people who lived them. They matter. They are true.

Those stories are not imaginary. They exist alongside the public legend.

During an online launch for In My Remaining Years, the memoir by Abdullah Ibrahim’s daughter, Tshidi, better known as the rapper Jean Grae, I asked via the chat function about her parents, Sathima Bea Benjamin and Abdullah Ibrahim. She expressed appreciation that South Africans still held her mother in such affection. Then she offered a far less romantic assessment of her father.

“AI [Abdullah Ibrahim] is shitty, and so is my dad. I don’t talk to him,” she replied.

The comment was startling only to those unfamiliar with the complexities of the family. It was no secret that Abdullah and Tshidi had long been estranged. The details of that relationship belong to them. They are not mine to tell. But the exchange served as a reminder that the private experience of a parent, partner, or child is often very different from the public experience of an artist.

Musically, however, Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim’s early stage name) could seem almost perfect. South Africa’s version of Beethoven or Mozart. But better. I remember a surprise pop-up concert he gave in central Cape Town in 2016. Construction around Church Square and Spin Street stopped. Office workers abandoned their desks. Workers and watchers gathered around the piano. Even the late-summer south-easter seemed to pause. For a brief moment, Cape Town stood still while Abdullah Ibrahim held church.

Church is probably the right word. Not because Abdullah was conventionally religious, but because people listened to him with the same attentiveness usually reserved for preachers. His music carried something larger than melody. It carried memory and place and longing. Even when audiences couldn’t fully explain why they were moved, they felt it. For me, in the same tune I could hear everything from ghoema music — Cape Town’s oldest percussive tradition — to marabi, the township jazz style that emerged in the 1920s, to the chords of a missionary spiritual from the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) or Congregational church. The Moravian church bands. And even the call of the Adhan.

The world called him a jazz musician. He hated the term. “This music they call jazz is a strange term,” he once told me. “We never call ourselves jazz musicians. It’s derogatory.” If you pushed him on the subject, he could become visibly irritated. His objection was never really about genre. Abdullah Ibrahim did not see himself as part of a musical category. He saw himself as part of a much longer story. Part Cape Town. Part Africa. Part diaspora. Part spiritual seeker. Part historian. Part storyteller.

He once told me he could play Bach and Beethoven but had no interest in doing so. Then, as he often did, he quoted Rumi. “There is only one sound. Everything else is echo.” That was Abdullah Ibrahim in a sentence. Equal parts frustrating and profound. Even when he drove you mad with his riddles, there was usually something compelling underneath them.

Looking back now, I suspect many of the answers that left journalists confused were attempts to answer a deeper question. Abdullah Ibrahim was searching for home.

Not home in the geographical sense but deep in spirituality and oral and aural storytelling. Home in the sense of understanding where one belongs in a world determined to define you.

During the Covid lockdown he would occasionally call into my nightly talk show from Munich. Text messages would arrive with a supportive message on a radio topic signed: “AI, Munich.” Some Sunday mornings there would be a WhatsApp message waiting on my phone. “Come Sunday. Mahalia Jackson.” Mahalia Jackson’s recording of “Come Sunday” remained deeply important to him. He had been around Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts and carried those memories throughout his life. Yet the conversations rarely remained on Mahalia Jackson; soon it was about Sunday rituals like koesiesters and memories of his childhood in Kensington. The conversation always drifted, but it somehow always arrived back in Cape Town.

That attachment to memory revealed itself most clearly in unexpected moments. In 2016, I told Abdullah Ibrahim why I had stopped listening to one of my favorite compositions, “The Wedding.” Long before I knew who I wanted to marry, I knew I wanted that piece played at my wedding. Years later, when I finally found the person I wanted to spend my life with, I imagined it as part of the soundtrack to the day. Then life intervened. The musician I had hoped would perform it landed a major opportunity in Johannesburg and couldn’t make it. I knew I was supposed to be understanding. I wasn’t. For almost two years, I couldn’t listen to “The Wedding.” Every time it played, it reminded me of something that hadn’t happened.

I told Abdullah the story after an interview ahead of his Maynardville concerts — Cape Town’s beloved open-air theater in Wynberg. He listened carefully. Then he smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll play it just for you.” Of course, it was already on the set list. Of course, he was probably going to play it anyway. But Abdullah had a remarkable ability to make you feel that, for a brief moment, the conversation mattered. When he started playing “The Wedding” that evening, I reached over and squeezed my wife’s hand. I sat there with tears running down my face.

That too was Abdullah. For all his distance, he could occasionally display extraordinary generosity. Yet the older he became, the more suspicious he seemed to become. Years on the road will do that to a person. Years of unpaid royalties. Years of watching others profit from your work. Years of people telling you who you are and what your music means. Years of others claiming ownership over your story.

Around 2021, he asked me to help research material for a possible book project. I tracked down contacts at the AME Church in Kensington, where his grandmother had founded a Sunday school. He was delighted to learn that some of the original hymnals still existed. Then, suddenly, he lost interest. The project vanished. Years later, I was copied in on an email from Ibrahim to his lawyer in New York. Apparently, I was researching his biography and sourcing funding:

Jonas. May I introduce you to Lester Kiewitt a radio presenter in Cape Town. He has been asking questions on my biography, engaged with pastors in my childhood church and he says that he is sourcing funding. I have no idea what this is about

Lester may I introduce you to Jonas with whom you can explain your project.

The reply from Jonas Herbsman Esq. read as if this had happened before.

Dear Lester: Thank you for the explanation below. At this time, there is no further request for your assistance. Kind regards, Jonas

One day, he would invite you into his story. The next day, he would wonder why you were there. Yet beneath all the contradictions sat the question that seemed to preoccupy him more than any other: identity.

One day, he spoke about the name on his identity document. “My name is on my ID card. It says Adolph Johannes Brand,” he told me. “It’s not me. My name is Sentso. My father is Mosotho.” His father had died when he was four years old. Then he explained that his grandmother had given him his identity. “This was my grandmother who gave me this identity so I can have an easier passage.” A reference to how, under apartheid, a colored identity meant slightly more privilege than his black African ancestry.

That sentence stayed with me.

It explained more about Abdullah Ibrahim than any discussion about music ever could. Here was a man whose life had been shaped by names. Dollar Brand. Abdullah Ibrahim. Sentso. South African. African. Exile. Jazz musician. Pilgrim. Every label captured something. Every label missed something. The world spent decades telling him who he was. He spent decades pushing back.

Perhaps that is why he spoke so often about homelessness. Not homelessness in the physical sense. Something deeper. People disconnected from themselves. People who no longer know their own story. People who no longer know who they are.

Cape Town always sat at the center of that story. Not the postcard version. Not the tourism campaign. The real Cape Town. The one carried in memory. The one carried in music. The one carried by grandmothers.

When I interviewed him in 2024 and asked why so many of his compositions carried women’s names, his answer was characteristically cryptic. “The keepers are the grandmothers,” he said. Then he spoke about Kensington, District Six, Lion’s Head, family, and community. The keepers. The custodians of memory. The people who carry a story when everyone else forgets it.

On one of his final tours home, I spent an entire day with him, from interview to soundcheck to backstage after the performance. There was an esoteric conversation that left me wondering what exactly we had discussed. There was the ill-tempered soundcheck where he demanded that someone be removed from Cape Town City Hall because they happened to walk through a doorway while he was playing. There was a frail old man backstage after two hours on stage, launching into a rambling monologue about Thelonious Monk while nobody dared interrupt him.

All of it existed together. The difficult man. The suspicious man. The searching man. The wounded man. The brilliant man.

The Cape Town boy who spent a lifetime trying to understand Africa, home, and himself.

We should not hide any of it.

Greatness is not diminished by flaws. If anything, it becomes more remarkable. The real achievement of Abdullah Ibrahim’s life was not that he became famous. It was that he spent a lifetime searching for something larger than fame. A way home. A language for memory. A sound that belonged to him and to the people who shaped him.

Perhaps that is why his music still feels so intimate. Notes were never merely notes. They were fragments of Kensington and District Six. Fragments of church halls and the market on the Grand Parade. Fragments of exile and return. Fragments of a man trying to answer a question that haunted him throughout his life.

Who am I? Who are we?

For all the debates about identity, exile, belonging, and memory, Abdullah Ibrahim always arrived at the same answer.

The music.

He could spend an hour talking about cosmology, homelessness, Rumi, and the curvature of time and space. Then he would sit down at a piano and tell you exactly how he felt.