The AIAC Podcast

In 2019, legendary African writer and public intellectual, Binyavanga Wainaina, passed away. A few weeks ago, a collection of Wainana’s early writing was published as How To Write About Africa (Hamish Hamilton, 2022). On this special episode of AIAC Talk, we bring together Wainana’s friends and colleagues to discuss his towering legacy, and the lesser known writing, which demonstrated his irreverence, curiosity, and charity best.

The editor of the collection, Achal Prabhala is a writer, filmmaker and public health activist who lives in Bangalore, India. Neo Musangi is an experimental self-taught queer artist whose practice uses performance, text, visual and audio installations. Neo also teaches gender studies at American and St. Lawrence Universities. Dayo Forster is an internationally published novelist who also has a parallel career in financial inclusion. Originally from the Gambia, she lived in Kenya for several years.

The legacy of apartheid displacement and dispossession was meant to be remedied in democratic South Africa. Although the government has delivered more than three million homes, the social need has outstripped capacity and the collapse of the ANC-run state due to corruption has not helped. In this context, scores of South Africans take charge of their own accommodation by occupying land (sometimes privately owned, often state-owned) and erecting their own shelters. Although one expects the neoliberal state to embrace this form of self-provisioning, land occupiers are opposed by the state, and typically violently evicted. How come?

Zachary Levenson’s latest book, Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (OUP, 2022) seeks to make sense of land occupations and housing struggles in South Africa. Why does the state see them as an obstacle to housing delivery? And if, as the left tends to represent them, they constitute social movements, what kind of movement is a land occupation?

Zach, a regular AIAC contributor, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg.

August marked 10 years since the Marikana massacre, when police in South Africa shot down 34 striking mineworkers at a platinum mine in the North-West Province. This episode provoked a deeper public awareness of rampant police violence in post-apartheid South Africa, which continues to repress poor and working-class communities and entrench class, racial and gender inequalities. Are alternatives possible? What could those look like in a country rife with crime, and where many people genuinely desire public safety, but mistrust the police?

In his new book, Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa (Inkani Books, 2022), regular AIAC contributor Christopher McMichael places the institution of policing in its wider, historical context, and argues that democratic and humanistic alternatives for public safety are possible. A world without police need not mean a world without safety.

Christopher is a cultural critic and political commentator. He has a PhD in political science from Rhodes University and writes on power, crime and culture.

It goes without saying that the climate crisis is the problem of our time. Yet, despite rhetoric from governments and big corporations that structural changes are imminent, none seem to be forthcoming and emissions continue apace. How come? Professor Matt Huber joins Will to discuss his latest book, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). Professor Huber argues that the only way to confront climate change is to build working-class power on a planetary scale. What kind of politics does this entail, and if the working-class is the agent of change—who, exactly, is the working class? Professor Huber is an assistant professor of geography at Syracuse University and is also the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital.

Will is joined by returning guest, Nihal El Aaser, to discuss the roots of Egypt’s ongoing economic crisis. In The New Arab, Nihal argues that “These conditions eventually became the economic foundations of the Arab Spring, the 2011 uprisings that gave us the famous slogan 'Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya,' meaning 'Bread, Freedom & Social Justice'.” Could Egypt be heading towards another cycle of social revolt? Or does Sisi’s regime of brutal repression, which includes the ongoing imprisonment of thousands of activists (like Alaa Abd El-Fattah), make organizing on the scale required unlikely. Nihal is an Egyptian writer and researcher based in London and has contributed to various publications, including Jacobin, Verso, and Africa Is A Country.

Will is joined by Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, to discuss her latest book, Disorder, Hard Times in the 21st Century (OUP, 2022). Since the 2008 financial crisis, many analysts have scratched their heads to make sense of the crisis of liberal democracies, the decline of neoliberal hegemony, and the emerging multipolar world where the West’s dominance is challenged by China and Russia. Professor Thompson argues that a key factor driving these interlocking geopolitical, economic and political crises, are the predicaments around energy - how it is produced, distributed, and consumed. As the climate crisis makes structural change an existential necessity, how much of the coming world will change - and how much of it, will stay the same? Especially, for the global South, which is rich in clean earth metals - the energy resource of a green future?

Will chats to Professor Vivek Chibber about his latest book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn. Why, despite the powerful antagonism capitalism generates between bosses and workers, is it so resilient? Why did class disappear as an analytical category for the international left? Can the left rebuild class consciousness through organizing, or are the multiple crises the world faces too insurmountable, and the obstacles to organizing too great?

Vivek Chibber is a Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. He is a contributor to the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review, the New Left Review and Jacobin. He is also the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Organized through the Academics Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), academics at Nigeria's public universities are on strike. They're seeking to force the Nigerian government to implement a 2009 agreement promising increased pay and greater investment in tertiary education. Over the years, the government has been steadily defunding public universities and encouraging privatization. In this episode, Will chats to Sa'eed Husaini and Temitope Fanguwa to understand the origins of the strike, as well as the role of academics in Nigeria's left politics. On the heels of #EndSARS, could Nigeria be on the cusp of its own #FeesMustFall moment?

Temitope is a Marxist historian with a central focus on African economic history in the Department of History and International Studies, Osun State University, as well as a budding social justice activist and epistemic-decolonizer; and Sa'eed is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Lagos and a contributor at Africa Is a Country plus Jacobin Magazine. Sa’eed is also a regular guest host of The Nigerian Scam, a leftist podcast examining politics, history, and the fraudulence of bourgeois society from class and ideological perspectives—be sure to check it out.

Earlier this week, AIAC editor Sean Jacobs asked: “Where do African countries fall in the threatened invasion of Ukraine by Russia? Will African states side with the US or their European allies or with Russia?” The question is no longer speculative: Russia has invaded Ukraine. As Russia seeks expansion at its borders, its expanding influence beyond its borders is viewed as a push for global hegemony against the US, EU and China. Is Russia's involvement on the continent just part of another Scramble for Africa? Does Africa have any agency?

Will chats with John Lechner about whether Russia seeks influence for its own sake, or whether its motives are more nuanced. And whether, war with Ukraine means African countries will at some point, have to pick a side. John is a freelance journalist writing on the politics of the former Soviet Union, Turkey, and Africa, and is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Senegal’s victory at the African Cup of Nations caused jubilation across the continent. The Lions of Taranga’s triumph was long seen as overdue and well-deserved. At home, it gave respite to President Macky Sall’s troubled regime, as national pride overcame national despair. Not for Senegalese women though, as reports began to emerge that several women across the country were assaulted amidst the celebrations.

And yet, these stories are still at the margins of Senegalese discourse, and despite some recent advances—such as a law passed in 2020 criminalizing rape—so is much of women’s rights. In this episode, Will chats to Marame Gueye and Coumba Toure about the scourge of gender-based violence in Senegal, and importantly, how feminists are resisting it. Marame is an associate professor of African and African diaspora literatures at East Carolina University, and Coumba is a writer, storyteller, and coordinator for Africans Rising for Peace Justice and Dignity based in Dakar.