Africa Unite!
May 24, 2025, News from JAH 6
Here comes the conman
Coming with his con plan
We won't take no bribe
We've got to stay alive
We gonna chase those crazy baldheads
Out of the town
- Bob Marley, Crazy Baldheads, Rastaman Vibration, 1974
Soul Rebels,
News from JAH Six marks Africa Day 2025.
It comes at the end of a week in which we have been treated with the spectacle of a crazy baldhead (with a head of fake hair) peddling white (house) lies before Cyril Ramaphosa, an African leader, who met the madness of King Trump with stoic dignity. Big up! This edition was written during a retreat with activists from the four corners of Africa. We gathered to work on a book on Rethinking Activism in Africa which will be published late 2025. A week ago, I was in the ancient city of Marrakech, Morocco, at a Summit of medicine activists, this time from the four corners of the world.
So, Africa and activism is on my mind.
We have been beaten, enslaved, raped, roped, ridiculed. But still we rise. I am inspired by our power.
We will need it in the time ahead.
On all issues, against all indicators, Africa is once again in agony.
Thumbs Up
The #Justice4Swaziland campaign has been at the heart of organising an Africa Day Solidarity Walk in Johannesburg. The campaign is driven by activists like Qhawekazi Khumalo who refuse to walk away from the unsolved assasination of Thulani Maseko; the muder of at least 80 pro-democracy protestors in June 2021; evidence of torture, or the two elected MPs – Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube – still in Swaziland’s dungeons. For freedom to reign Africa’s last absolute monarch, Mswati III, must fall.
But Swaziland is not alone in bearing the brunt of trigger-happy governments. The Centre for Democracy and Human Rights in Mozambique continues to campaign for justice for the at least 348 people killed by police and army in protests following the rigged 2024 elections.
In Kenya, this brave piece of MUST WATCH journalism by the BBC’s Africa Eye, Blood Parliament - BBC Africa Eye Documentary, has identified the soldiers behind at least two of the murders of anti-tax protesters in June 2024. The Kenyan government has responded by trying to suppress the film: Kenya’s pact of silence with its military is breaking | Protests | Al Jazeera. But GenZ knows the truth will out.
Thumbs down: Africa is not poor
If Africa’s governments had courage, instead of falling over themselves in Trump’s tariffs war, they would say:
“Yes, Mr Trump, let’s talk about fair trade and let’s talk about unfair tax evasion. We’ll pay your tariffs if you pay our taxes.”
“Africa is not poor, it’s just that it is robbed of an estimated $89 billion per annum in illicit financial transactions and tax evasion.”
For example, a recent report by The Investigate Desk finds a 9.6 billion Kenyan shillings ($93 million) discrepancy in British American Tobacco (BAT) revenue statements for 2017-2018, “which could indicate potential tax avoidance or evasion of up to $28 million in profit tax.” (Read this statement by the Tax Justice Network Africa)
It’s time we stood up for rights. We don’t because most of our governments are in on the plunder party. But the people will not stay silent.
Activists’ bookshelf:
I bought The Rebel’s Clinic, The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon, by accident - proof that sometimes ‘must read’ books have a way of finding their way to you. Fanon is Africa’s Che. Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are still essential reading.
But how many people really know the man from whence those ideas came?
Adam Shatz’s rigorous political biography will change that. It’s not hagiography. It takes us back to the intellectual and political ferment in which Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism was forged, the divisions over ideology, the different strands of thought and action. The Algerian civil war, in which Fanon was a freedom fighter, was a definitive point in the twentieth century struggle against colonialism. The film, The Battle of Algiers, is still considered outstanding cinematography.
The Rebel’s Clinic helps us to understand the intellectual work that must underlie activism and how it intersects with art, culture and medicine. Whether by rebound or embrace, Fanon was a product of Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Jean Paul Sartre, Amilcar Cabral and others. Like Marley, Fanon was only 36 when he died of leukemia.
JAH recommends: The idiot King Trump and the all too slavish media that follows his every stupidity fills the news to the detriment of covering the real issues happening in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Read: ‘Refugee’ pageant Trumps mass murder and people with Aids. To keep up with what’s happening across our continent read This Week in Africa a weekly compilation of articles from across Africa. Africa is a Country and The Continent are also excellent sources of news and analysis.
HEALTH EMERGENCY! FOUR MILLION LIVES AT RISK
Last week’s meeting of the Make Medicines Affordable Campaign in Marrakech heard sad stories of the disruption of health systems and medicines supplies as a result of the closure of USAID and the PEPFAR programme. UNAIDS calculates that an additional four million people could die by 2029, mostly in Africa “due to the permanent discontinuation of HIV prevention and treatment programmes that are currently supported by PEPFAR”.
Think about that number.
It’s not over. The axe still hovers over whether the USA will continue to fund the Global Fund on AIDS TB and Malaria (GFATM).
“It’s a fucking catastrophe,” a leading HIV clinician in South Africa told me. But we are not out of solutions. The Summit declared that developing countries have power under international law to issue compulsory licenses for generic medicine production to counter the health emergency created by Trump. Local medicine production is possible in countries like India, Brazil and Thailand.
But unfortunately, the responses of our governments has been a whimper of complaint rather than a bang of resistance.
Closed: “Last chance for freedom of speech”
Civic space really is closing down.
But we will keep our assets.
Human rights activists face growing threats to their freedom and safety across Africa and the world. At the Rethinking Activism in Africa retreat four out of our group of 14 have recently been forced to leave their countries. Another two did not attend the meeting in person -- they were afraid to leave the country where they currently reside for fear that they might not be allowed to return.
And still, we will dance!
“Everywhere it’s war”
When Bob Marley was invited to the new Zimbabwe’s independence ceremony in 1980, he used his own money to fly The Wailers and the I Threes there to perform. The year before he had released his most political album, Survival, which includes the song Zimbabwe, where he forewarned:
“Soon we’ll find out who are
the real revolutionaries
cause I don’t want my people to be
tricked by mercenaries.”
The concert (watch Bob Marley - Live In Zimbabwe) proved a harbinger of things to come. Ordinary Zimbabweans trying to get into the stadium were tear gassed. As a result, Bob performed a free concert the next night.
26 years after Zimbabwean independence, 44 years after the launch of the OAU a new freedom struggle is necessary. Today, Africa is mostly governed by geriatric kleptocrats, propping each other up, pawning our people and natural resources to Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
But the resistance is growing, particularly of young people. From Maputo to Mbabane, from Nairobi to Nigeria, from Khartoum to Khayelitsha, the fire hasn’t gone out. But it needs to be better organised and burn towards a new vision of freedom.
As Marley’s sang in Ride Natty Ride: “We’ve got something they can never take away … It’s the fire”.
We shall overcome!
On Africa Day 2025 let us not forget that Africa is a continent of great artists, musicians and culture. Listen to Richard Mwamba’s weekly programme, This is Africa, every Saturday night on Radio 702.
Africa is a continent of great athletes like Eliud Kipchoge and Kgothatso Montjane. Africa is a continent of great activists, great intellectuals, great writers and great philosophers. As Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe explains in this podcast with Hlonipha Mokoena:
“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.”
According to Mbembe, Africa is now called upon “not just to save itself, but to help save human civilization and reshape it on an equitable, sustainable and fair basis.”
Can we rise to the challenge?
Stay safe. Keep dreaming. Another world is possible.
Mark
Heywood
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com
The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.