Rethinking activism in a time of desperation and despair

This essay is both a celebration and a critique of social justice activism in Africa. It sees the sacrifices and achievements of activists, but also raises questions about why activism is failing to halt socio-economic and gender inequality. It raises an alarm about the deepening social, economic and political crisis in Africa, a crisis that makes today’s activism even more difficult and dangerous. It ends by calling on activists to discuss what we need to do to rethink, retool, and revitalise both our methods and the way we understand power in the world. To secure equality and social justice we must build power, to confront oppression we must embrace solidarity and love. It aims to catalyse a conversation, but one on which millions of lives depend.   

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“We are the miracles that God made

To taste the bitter fruit of Time.

We are precious.

And one day our suffering

Will turn into the wonders of the earth.”

Ben Okri, An African Elegy

Africa’s twenty-first century freedom fighters

Africa’s history of being mercilessly exploited, its experience of colonialism and pain is matched only by its history of resistance and resilience. Neither are over. In 2024 and beyond Africa faces another period of uncertainty and transition, once more largely influenced by political, economic and environmental forces that reside outside of the continent. But once more, activism for social justice - even though getting more difficult - is rising.

Indeed, judging by what we see some might even argue that there is an inverse relationship between the closing of civic space, the erosion of civil and political rights, and the rise of resistance. The different contexts in which we see this rebellion reminds us that Africa may be a continent (not a country as it's sometimes talked about in the Western imagination), with a shared history of colonial exploitation, but nonetheless it is as diverse in its politics, as it is in its forms of activism.

In Africa democracy is like the tides. It comes in and goes out. After a few decades of a rising tide, a new democratic recession is underway, as the annual surveys of organisations like Freedom House and Civicus reveal. In some countries, democracy is already closed for business; in others it is in business rescue, except the attempted rescuers are activists. In a few countries, civic space is holding, even expanding, mainly because its boundaries are being protected or pushed by activists.

In this regard 2024 has been an important year for politics and activism. By the end of the year there will have been 24 general elections in Africa (part of over 60 in the world). Some have been stolen or rigged, Mozambique, Rwanda and Tunisia come to mind. But others have brought about unexpected changes in the political order, think of the outcomes in South Africa, Senegal and most recently Botswana.

However, the fact that there is growing dissent and alienation is evident as much from the numbers of people who don’t vote, as those that do. In SA for example 13 million eligible people didn’t even register to vote. Most of them are young. This is not apathy but suppressed anger at the failure of politicians and the dangerous perception that democracy is an elite sham.

It is also seen in protests and social movements led by Gen Z that have burst to the surface in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and now Mozambique.

Reflecting Africa’s diversity, the methods of social justice activism differ from country to country. Because the politics of each country is different, so are the methods, campaigns and visibility of civil society. The shape of activism is context dependent. Although the issues are often the same, protecting and advancing human rights, the methods will differ.

In South Africa where the space to organise and freely express is still mostly open there are 250,000 registered NPOs. Although only a fraction of these are vociferous in campaigns for equality, most of them are nonetheless made up of people working to better the lives of poor communities, innovating, imagining, struggling.

By contrast in Tunisia, once the fulcrum of the revolutionary protests that gave rise to the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010/11, in May 2024, Tunisian authorities escalated a repressive crackdown targeting human rights defenders, civil society organisations, lawyers, and journalists with new arrests, harassment, and intimidation.

In addition to tens of thousands of individual organisations there are multiple networks criss-crossing the continent working to advance equality and democracy. The Africans Rising network boasts that it has members in all 55 countries in Africa. In October the third Women’s Climate Assembly, took place in Senegal alongside the African People’s Counter COP. Over 120 women activists from 12 countries across West and Central Africa came together to tackle the urgent climate crisis under the theme, “African women stand together to defend our land, waters and forests!”

A month later the Southern African Human Rights Defenders Network held its annual conference in Johannesburg. Unfortunately, the third African Social Movements Baraza, due to take place in Kenya, had to be postponed. Nonetheless the meeting of the Tax Justice Network Africa on sustainable climate finance went ahead.

Finally, it’s also important to appreciate that direct advocacy and protest is only one of the forms of civil society activism. As important are the academic networks, cultural organisations, writers’ networks, trade union federations and faith based networks.

And then there are tens of thousands of individuals who may not be linked to a particular activist organisation but who use their positions in schools and factories, business and government, communities and universities to try and advance rights and good governance.

Listing all these organizations and campaigns could fill a book. But in sum, although we don’t often read about it in news publications -- and when we do it is presented as if activism is fragmented and disconnected -- across Africa there is a large army of people working to advance social justice.

Africa is alive with activism.

In every country.

On every issue.

In different forms and fora.

Seen and unseen.

Generating ideas.

Expressing itself in art.

Keeping dignity and hope alive.

Holding up the vision of equality and human rights.

Yet rights and hope in retreat.

Why?

Is activism failing to alter the trajectory of poverty and inequality?

In the first section of this essay, I have deliberately drawn a brief but hopeful picture of the energy, imagination, bravery, diversity, skills and vision of activists. For many oppressed people this activism is a lifeline, protecting rights and life; it’s a weather vane alerting the world to abuses and emerging threats; a source of hope and connection for the millions of people deserted by their governments.

That’s cause for celebration.

But unfortunately, given that the raison d'être of social justice activism is to seek socio-economic justice and transformation (isn’t it?), not just to defend the civil and political rights (important though they are), we must perforce also evaluate its outcomes and achievements against the stagnating or deteriorating lives facing growing millions of people who live in Africa.

And ask questions.

To do this let me start with a blunt appraisal of activism by veteran African and global activist Kumi Naidoo. Kumi wrote in his autobiographical Letters to my Mother, The Making of a Troublemaker:

“Having tried to bring about positive change in the world over the last 40 years, I am forced to admit that activism, in its current form, is failing … just as some say it cannot be business as usual we should also be saying it cannot be activism as usual either.”

Asking questions now would not be the first time people involved in liberation and freedom struggles have had to introspect. On the cusp of democracy in South Africa, the late Joe Slovo, once the leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing, dared to articulate a question on many people’s minds. In 1990 he wrote an essay titled ‘Has socialism failed?’ which was published in the African Communist. The essay asked questions that were previously suppressed, even by Slovo himself. By doing so Slovo catalysed an introspection and discussion that required the movement to look inwards at itself, even whilst it continued its difficult struggle to overthrow the dying apartheid regime and consolidate a new democracy.

Perhaps – even whilst acknowledging the roll of honour, the risks and sacrifices made by many activists - the same heretical question should be asked about activism?  

There are tens of thousands of organisations and movements in Africa that bend towards social justice and democracy. There are also hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and disadvantage who should form a ready constituency supporting efforts at building fairer, more equal societies. There is a large amount of funding going into human rights and democracy campaigns, even if not enough. So why then is the social and economic crisis in Africa getting worse?

Why is democracy retreating rather than advancing?

Why is economic and gender inequality growing?

Why is Africa’s wealth still being captured by local and foreign elites, rather than bettering the lives of the majority?

Trying to answer these questions requires a frank talk about both external and internal factors. It needs analysis of the social and economic forces within and outside Africa that are distorting society, driving social ills like gender based violence (GBV) and undermining good governance. But it also begs that we critically examine the methods, tactics, strategies, even the language, that activists are using to try and bend the arc towards justice and equality. It requires that we think about civil society power and how to build it. That’s a big discussion.

Acknowledging the blind spots of our activism

But whilst the world has been made fairer by activism, it is also important that we admit that in some crucial areas civil society has rarely succeeded in sustaining progress. And indeed, where the opposite has been happening. Gender equality and socio-economic equality are the most glaring examples.

Economic equality must matter to activists because it is a determinant of political equality. It matters because the proof of democracy’s pudding is in the eating - and millions of people struggle to eat. Gender inequality must be front of mind because it is the most fundamental measure of equality and because women and girls are once more being required to shoulder the burdens of the poly crisis in Africa. It is inextricably connected to economic equality not only through the ways women are being excluded from economic opportunity. It is also important in the way they are included through vast systems of unpaid care work or formal but rights-less domestic or casualised employment.

Democracy, from its earliest days was always meant to be a means to share power for the purpose of transformation and social equality. However, in the last few decades activism - although successful on many fronts - has not altered power structures and undermined the determinants of inequality. In fact, non-state powers have developed that have widened socio-economic equality and undermined political systems.

‘Welcome to the era of the non-state actor,’ Janan Ganesh, an opinion writer in the Financial Times, put it in January this year, arguing that:

“On current evidence, the winner of the post-American world isn’t China. It is the non-state actor. Whether good, bad or hard-to-place, these thrive when no nation is strong enough to command the global or even regional picture.”

According to Ganesh, Elon Musk, who he mistakenly called a “mostly benign example of a wider trend: the bleeding of power from the state … has a larger space programme than all but a few national governments. He has had a thumb on the scales of the war in Ukraine through his Starlink satellites.” This was months before Musk’s decisive intervention using his vast wealth and control of the social media platform X to support Donald Trump in the US election.  

So, the question we must ask is this: whilst we may still be winning some glorious battles, whilst we may still be driving progress on some issues, are we losing the war overall?

In a changed political and economic environment activists have mostly not adapted the methods and strategies we use. Put bluntly, we have not done enough to think about our power, others’ power and how to build power.

The problems confronted in this essay are by no means unique to activists in Africa. But because of our history they are often more extreme: democracy is more fragile, poverty more absolute and encompassing, the traumas of colonialism and apartheid still fresh. It may feel for African activists that there is more immediately at stake in the calculus of success or failure. Recognising the internal challenges of organisation, a constructive critique of civil society, coming from within, was the rationale for the Declaration on Building from Below and Beyond Borders written by a group of mainly African activists in 2014. But you can also find it in excellent accounts of activism written by activists in developed countries. Read, for example, the Purpose of Power, How we come together when we fall apart by #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza and Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s book Solidarity, The Past, Present and Future of a World Changing Idea where they call on us to remember:

“… that a slogan is not a magic invocation, but an invitation: the 99% doesn’t just exist by nature of wealth disparity but must be built through the hard and sustained work of active solidarity.”

But generally, these insights and ideas are not yet being incorporated into day-to-day practice and strategy.

The consequences of not adapting activist strategies to take account of the changing world around us can be devastating for struggles for socio-economic equality. In If We Burn: The mass protest decade and the missing revolution, Vincent Bevins recounts the history of ten major protests that shook politics in the 2010s. Through over 200 interviews, many with the people “who created the street movements”, Bevins records how each of these protests were catalysed by small groups of social justice activists, grew into massive popular movements, but were hijacked and turned into their opposite. Activists lost control of the movements they had started. The unintended result was a consolidation and entrenchment of anti-democratic regimes and the repression of civil society. Does that sound familiar in countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zambia? In fact, isn’t that the story of postcolonialism?

Shifting space, new threats

Africa was never poor. It is not poor now. Yet, in a recent edition of Chartbook, a daily newsletter produced by Adam Tooze, a celebrated economist, writer and political analyst, the headline read: “Africa and absolute poverty in an era of polycrisis.” Tooze’s newsletter grabbed its lead from the World Bank’s 2024 Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet report, which records how:

“In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 16 percent of the world’s population, but 67 percent of the people living in extreme poverty. Two thirds of the world’s population in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa, rising to three quarters when including all fragile and conflict-affected countries.”

Statistics about the poverty that consumes Africa’s people have an all too familiar ring. ‘What’s new’, you probably think?

Well, there is something new … and it should concern us. After several decades of rising living standards for some of the world’s poorest, the rate at which poverty is being reduced globally has slowed down dramatically. And …. as the tide of socio-economic progress and the prospect of greater equality recedes it has left absolute poverty particularly concentrated in Africa.

Aiding and abetting this the political, economic and legal conditions that briefly enabled poverty reduction are disappearing. A short era in which there was at least lip-service to human rights and rule of law is being replaced by an era of growing geo-political instability and economic uncertainty. Aid and philanthropy, however warped, is being diverted into expensive wars and a new global arms race.

Linked to this is the deliberate undermining of multilateralism and multilateral institutions that are part of the United Nations (UN), including even the foundational treaties that underlay the consensus built after the horrors of Nazism and nuclear war, such as the UN Convention Against Genocide and the International Court of Justice whose orders in relation to Gaza have been contemptuously ignored by countries that claim to be the standard bearers of democracy and human rights.

The closing of civic space we experience at a national level is carried up to the international level. The UN has seen the ascendancy of private interests for example in health and climate mitigation. All this undermines the human rights architecture that has been incrementally built up and impacts on crucial global commitments such as the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and most recently the Pact for the Future.

Racism still infuses global politics and priorities.

Although attention is understandably focused on the genocide being committed by Israel against Palestinian people in Gaza, similar outrage is being withheld from the appalling humanitarian crisis facing people in South Sudan (where 18 million people are said to face food insecurity) or the Eastern DRC. The 600,000 lives lost as a result of the 2020/21 civil war in Ethiopia seem hardly to have registered.

And yet the problem with statistics is that they hide a growing despair and resignation that is taking root amongst millions of people.

One of the most telling indicators of this desperation are the stories about migrants who die of thirst or drowning as they try to cross the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea on their ways to Europe. Although there is some (but insufficient) focus on deaths at sea, the UN states that twice as many migrants die crossing the Sahara than the Mediterranean Sea. But no one talks about that because the world’s media rarely reaches into the sands of the Sahara.

In the absence of governmental response to these and other crises veteran Indian activist Harsh Mander laments the “pathological absence of compassion displayed by leaders in this era” concluding that “therefore a resistance founded on the ideals of fraternity and love becomes even more important.”

The idea of love as a revolutionary pillar or activism is something I will return to in the concluding section of this essay.

 

Governance and the climate crisis

Tragically the bleak outlook for Africa presented in the World Bank’s report is not limited to economic measures of inequality. Its prognosis is confirmed in a variety of other reports and indicators, almost all of which paint a negative picture of the prospects for African countries over the coming period. Read for instance reports of:

• The World Justice Project, https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/2024
• The Ibrahim Index of African Governance https://mo.ibrahim.foundation/sites/default/files/2024-10/2024-index-report.pdf
• The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Conflict Index Results: July 2024
• And studies on gender inequality, such as a recent article in the Economist on the gap between women in North and South Nigeria.  

But what makes the present clutch of crises even more distressing is that unlike in past eras Africa now has to ready itself for a rapidly worsening climate breakdown, in a situation where  manufactured underdevelopment and continuous wealth transfusion has left African countries least prepared to mitigate its effects. This crisis is here already. In 2024 nine out of the ten countries worst affected by climate change were reported to be in Africa. Droughts, cyclones, floods and rising temperatures are driving crop failure, conflicts over access to water and mass migration. Managing disasters is depleting the already limited budgets of many countries, meaning there is less money for health or education.

It is also starting to reverse gains in health and the control of disease. The spread of Malaria in Ethiopia and parts of Southern Africa that were previously malaria free is directly linked to climate change.

Witness, for example, the outbreaks of viruses of Mpox, Marburg and Ebola, the large number of deaths still due to HVB, HVC and HIV, and the persistence of TB.

As Phillip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights was at pains to point out in a report he issued in 2019, the climate crisis is not democracy-neutral: catastrophic weather events and socio-economic breakdown will also have a negative impact on peace, democracy and human rights. According to Alston:

“We will see not so much focus on the climate emergency but on the ‘law and order’ emergency. And that will lead to very repressive policies designed to prevent, punish or at least restrict the sort of demonstrations that we’re starting to see around the world.”

In this context what is the response of Africa’s governments to growing inequality and threats to life?

Pravin Gordhan was a community activist who eventually was appointed as South Africa’s Minister of Finance and became known for his resistance to state capture. He died in September 2024. One of Gordhan’s mantras was to tell people to “join the dots” when it came to understanding corruption. Joining the dots is equally necessary as we analyse what is driving the deepening crisis of poverty in Africa, which - as Alston flagged - is both a cause of and causing closing democratic space.

In its 2024 report the Ibrahim Index of African Governance states that between 2014-2023 “Africa’s overall governance progress came to a halt in 2022, following four years of almost complete stagnation, as substantial advances in both human and economic development are undermined by the ongoing deterioration of the security and democratic landscape.”

Whilst activists will have to continue to try and work with and within our governments and make them work for people, we should not be under any illusions about the deterioration of governments and governance.

The vast majority of Africa’s governments are now captured by elites, oligarchs and kleptocrats of one political form or another. What does activism in the face of these types of “adversaries” demand?

Following their lead from states in the ‘developed world’, as well as from China and Russia, many African governments no longer feel obliged to even pretend to respect for national or international human rights law.

Whilst illicit financial flows bleed Africa, taking at least $90 billion a year away from human development, and while structural economic discrimination persists, these leaders are unashamedly in it for themselves, often mortgaging their countries to foreign countries or elites who are part of the new scramble for Africa’s resources.

Insulating and enhancing activism

Where does this leave activism, particularly the struggle for socio-economic rights and equality? 

Artists, musicians and poets are often better analysts of society than many politicians or journalists. They are closer to the pulse of human beings, more in touch with our agonies, more aware of our ecstasies. They can appreciate joy and despair. Because they are less self-interested, they have more permeable minds, are more sensitive to changes taking place, closer to both humans and the planet.  If we want to try and understand Africa and the world at this moment, we would do best to start our examination through the eyes of the griots. Think of the wisdom of Okri, the haunting melodies of Toumani Diabte, the zest for life of Fela Kuti … think of the diverse artistic, poetic, musical forms that we continually create all over Africa to keep joy, love and ultimately hope alive in a time of hardship.

Respected Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe is not known as a poet. But in his 2021 book, Brutalism, he writes with intensely poetic language. This may be because Mbembe believes the considered language of political or historical analysis is too detached to capture the dynamics of the present. He calls our time a “change of age” - which it is literally, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. But it’s also important to note that a “change of age” is very different from an “age of change”. It points to deeper changes in relationships and power structures, tectonic shifts in humanity. The election of Donald Trump as President of the USA is a reflection of this. So too is the genocide carried out against Palestinian people in Gaza.

To try to register this age-change and reflect “the irreducible infinity that is life” Mbembe’s analysis is full of disruption, violence, intimacy, artefact, rape and resistance, grief and celebration, myth and memory.

Much of his reasoning is bleak. It assumes we are on a path leading to the defeat of humanity as we dreamed it. He is realistic about the power of the technological forces that are turning humans into machines, machines into humans, and dispossessing billions of people. He calls this “absolute capitalism,” a “planetary social war” by elites against the world’s surplus population. In this war “blackness,” meaning the historical experience of violence, dislocation and dispossession, is becoming the norm for poor people, whatever their race or ethnicity, no longer just people with black skins.

Mbembe presents what is happening in the present as the culmination of hundreds of years of capitalism and colonialism, a kind of great comeuppance arising from the moment when the rise of capitalism started to turn human beings against each other and against nature. In his words: 

“In this climate of rage and confinement to one’s own kind, the future is no longer understood as the promise of some possible progress. It now appears as a force of dislocation and dissolution, as a truly negative experience. It is true that people are rising up in several countries of the world, and in the process, they are enduring ferocious forms of repression. At the same time many have stopped believing in the possibility of genuinely transformative action.” 

He’s right about that too. The loss of an alternative transformative vision, even if flawed, and consistent organisation behind it, has led millions of people to seek protection in the hands of political powers, like Trump or Modi, with whom they have no natural affinity. But to the extent that Mbembe does have some hope it lies within Africa. In a recent interview with fellow historian Hlonipha Mokoena, Mbembe said he believes “the future of the planet is being played out in Africa”:

 

“We are the oldest continent and the youngest. We are a reserve of power and a power in reserve, both at the same time.

Because of our capacity or resilience over centuries there must be something in our deep archive which speaks to some of the key challenges of our time.

Therefore it becomes absolutely important to engineer the African moment - in the humanities, in the social sciences, in modes of organisation of life.”

Mbembe argues that the African values and systems that were trampled on and erased by colonialism are the very values global society needs today if we are to reconfigure society around “a pact of care”, “restore meaning and truth” and “repair the fabric and visage of the world”. These values include Ubuntu and an understanding of interconnectedness of species, being and the environment which was evident in Africa’s cultures and practices before the encounter with colonialism.

According to Mbembe, Africa is now called upon “not just to save itself, but to help save human civilisation and reshape it on an equitable, sustainable and fair basis.” His view is shared by the likes of Carlos Lopes who calls for “a new era of African agency” and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela who says that in the “reparative quest … in order for futures to really change risks have to be taken.”

But as Naomi Klein and many others have pointed out, “No, is not enough.” Activists must define what type of society we are for, the systems and resources that will make possible a new vision, why they are possible, and the benefits to all of humanity that will flow from it. Many of those ideas are already there – for example the idea of building economies around well-being rather than GDP. They are being generated by activists and academics all over the world. But they lack power. That is why we must turn back to empowering and organising communities to build support for and belief in transformative ideas and campaigns.

But how do we do that?

According to Kumi Naidoo “We don’t need lofty ideas, big words or complicated concepts. We need to recognise that while we have material needs, we are also spiritual beings. We must appeal to people’s hearts as well as their heads, bringing together arts, culture and activism in a new kind of ‘artivism’ that engages people’s deepest impulses towards love, justice and freedom.” 

In an age where, perversely, ultra-rich despots seem to be winning the battle of hearts and minds by creating solidarity in hate, community via exclusion, the idea of love as “an active force” needs to be resuscitated and made an organising principle and practice of activism. In the words of the late bell hooks (in her book all about love) for civil society leaders such as Martin Luther King ‘radical love’ was “the primary way we end domination and oppression.”

As has been the case at critical moments throughout history, in this “change of age” the risks and the duty of leadership will once more fall on activists - but this time it’s the whole of human civilisation at stake. In this fundamentally changed context rethinking activism becomes necessary for two reasons. Firstly, because - despite all its strengths - it is already failing to halt the deepening of depravity and inequality on our continent. Secondly, because if we are to rise to ‘the African moment’ and galvanise people’s power behind a charged new vision, there is a need to lift our organising to a higher level. Tsitsi Dangarembga, a hugely respected writer and activist from Zimbabwe puts it this way in her book Black and Female:

“We are at a moment of decision-making concerning which knowledges we will use to plot our future and which logic we will permit to guide us past the challenges of our age, such as climate change, sustainability, immigration and inequality. The earth and its systems are not open. We cannot change the earth, a fact that leaves us with no choice but to change ourselves. …

The question is how?

An afterthought and few final words about power

Underlying most of the analysis in this essay is the question of power. Money talks power. Guns and the military talk power. Control over the media and the prisons talk power. Human rights and social justice don’t. Good ideas and evidence don’t. Today, even truth is having its power stripped away. Civil society and activism have the force of justice and many other strengths. But it doesn’t have much hard power. It did once. But for a combination of reasons, it has been whittled away by its opponents. The challenge therefore is to build an alternative power behind ideas of social justice and equality. But where, how, from what and for what vision? That perhaps is Hamlet’s twenty-first century question.

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The aims of the Rethinking Activism project are both to understand and articulate the vast challenges facing activists, but also to consider what can be done to support and improve Africa’s activism. The issues the essay raises will inform discussion at two upcoming webinars as well as an invitation to AFSEE Fellows from Africa to submit applications and essay ideas for a book of essays on Rethinking Activism which will be published in late 2025. Comments on the paper are invited from all interested parties and can be sent to markjamesheywood@gmail.com Let’s talk!  

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Mark Heywood is a researcher at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance and an activist with more than 40 years in the trenches. He has been a co-founder and leader of successful movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), as well as of movements that have been less successful. This essay is a provocation and a call to conversation. It is part of a joint Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE)/Mandela School project on Rethinking Activism in Africa. The aims of the Rethinking Activism project are both to understand and articulate the vast challenges facing activists, but also to consider what can be done to support and improve Africa’s activism. The issues the essay raises will inform discussion at two upcoming webinars as well as an invitation to AFSEE Fellows from Africa to submit applications and essay ideas for a book of essays on Rethinking Activism which will be published in late 2025