BOOK EXTRACT: Rethinking Activism in Africa — activists as antibodies against a rotten social order

Voices from within: An introduction

In 2025, South Africa successfully hosted the first African G20 Summit. For a short time, Africa’s interests were deliberately placed at the centre of the geopolitical agenda. They are reflected in the G20 Leaders’ Declaration – which mentions Africa more than 80 times – in an unprecedented way. US President Donald Trump ordered his country to boycott the summit; but he was “trumped” – made to look small, deranged and vindictive. In stark contrast, the African leaders present displayed composure and dignity.

However, the G20 Summit was also symbolic of something larger. It begged a question: what will be the place of Africa and Africans in an emerging new world order? Will Africa be the vanguard of a global democratic renaissance, cementing human rights and social justice into the architecture of our societies, connecting economic growth with wellbeing? Or will we continue to be a continent blighted by forced underdevelopment, the legacies of colonialism, and the misrule that has mostly followed it? Will we descend into new civil wars and genocide, oligarchy, kleptocracy, the immiseration of the poor – or will we move towards equality?

The answers to these questions rest in no small part on organised citizens making their vision and needs felt through civil society. They depend on social justice activists – whether we are heard, how we are heard, whether we build power, both soft and hard. They depend on the resonance of activism and its rootedness in society.

They depend on African activists (up)rising!

In this introduction and throughout this book, we explore these questions. We invite you to join us in thinking about these issues.

But where to start?

In late October 2025, Francesca Albanese – United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967 – visited South Africa to present the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture. In an interview Albanese described civil society activists as “the antibodies of a healthy society”. 

She stated: “There is something so noble about being an activist, someone who renounces to get out of your own comfort zone, who takes sacrifices, who devotes the time to others, to social justice, to taking care of others. This is something beautiful. This is solidarity in action; and solidarity is the political definition of love.”

Albanese herself is an activist, coming from years of working in civil society organisations but currently occupying a strategic position in the United Nations that allows her to speak truth to power, backed by the full weight of international human rights and humanitarian law. Her description of social justice activists as the “antibodies” of a healthy society against injustice and oppression, against violence and discrimination, is powerful and unusual. Albanese’s choice of words probably follows in the wake of a world growing used to the threat of pandemics such as HIV/Aids and Covid-19, a world that has popularised the language of medical science – in this case, to describe our immune system’s natural response to threats to its health and wellbeing.

But it’s a good analogy! Because progressive activism is premised on the possibility of a healthy society. More than that, we know that healthy societies – based on equality, dignity and human rights for everyone – are possible. “Another world is possible,” as Albanese says, and our organisations and campaigns are indeed the antibodies this conviction generates to fight injustice.

In addition, just as different types of antibodies form to meet different types of threats to health (viruses or bacteria), activist campaigns vary enormously depending on the issue, the political context and the people involved. Our campaigns also multiply and replicate; they have memory; they combine; they seek to restore and to repair. This collection of 14 essays is testament to the diversity of the “antibody response” that has been generated to fight injustice in Africa.

Inadvertently, however, Albanese is touching on something deeper:

antibodies form as a defence mechanism, as a reaction to a threat; they seek to regain the status quo ante. But in the 21st century it’s becoming increasingly clear that our body politic has become deeply diseased by colonialism, capitalism and neoliberalism; it has normalised the abnormal. And in activism, as in life, the antibodies don’t always win on their own. Sometimes a vaccine is needed to prevent infection in the first place, or to prevent an infection from taking hold and causing disease.

As activist and writer Naomi Klein puts it, just saying “No” to injustice is no longer enough. We need our antibodies. But now we need something more: we also need to learn to mobilise for the society we want, to galvanise resistance and revolution on the basis of the society that is possible – to describe the world we want, not just the world we reject.

The theme of this collection of essays is rethinking and reorganising, turning defence into attack, mounting a whole new form of immune response to the dangers of authoritarianism, disease, human rights violations, war and the deepening climate and environment crisis.

How did we get here?

The Rethinking Activism in Africa project was born in late 2024. It grew out of a sense that because the world was changing so rapidly, the tactics, strategies and methods of progressive social justice activism would need to evolve urgently to meet the demands of the new age.

In his 2024 book Brutalism, Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe has gone as far as to describe the current period as a “change of age”, not just an “age of change”.

A change of age is unquestionably under way, as well as a change of condition engendered through transformations to the biosphere and technosphere. This process, unprecedented in the shocks it is triggering, is planetary.

Although these changes are planetary, the focus of this book is our continent: Africa. In human history, Africa and Africans have suffered centuries of injustice through slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism. But just as some thinkers had begun to hold out the possibility of an African renaissance, a new age is upon us. It is one in which Africa can either bear the brunt, once more, of a “polycrisis” of wars, climate and environmental collapse, debt and disease; or one in which it could manoeuvre with eyes wide open, seeking to turn the global reordering into an “African moment”, and ultimately offering a way forward not just for the peoples of Africa but for the whole world. In this new struggle, organised citizens – what we call “civil society” – have an indispensable role.

Equality and social justice have always been the rebel’s lodestar. Africa’s history of struggle for social justice and equality is at least as old as our history of slavery and colonialism. The quest for equality has gone through historic phases, with rebellions against slavery, colonialism and apartheid; and now against hybrid new forms of authoritarianism, oligarchy, kleptocracy and neocolonialism.

As the tide recedes on each phase of resistance, the continent’s struggles leave us with new institutions and frameworks; the most recent being the democratic constitutions many African countries have adopted, and the African Union’s (AU) African Charter on Human and People’s Rights – all promising a pathway to full equality and freedom. And yet, always betrayed by the elites, at both national and global levels.

Since the 1990s, civil society has been formally recognised as a non-governmental stakeholder in matters of policy and governance, locally, nationally and internationally. For a combination of reasons, in many (but not all) African countries, civic space has opened up, allowing legal forms of struggle – against the system, but from within the system (Moyo, 2010). Civil society organisations in Africa have grown rapidly and have occupied and exploited this space.

But now a new phase in world history is beginning to accelerate. After a period of expansion between the 1980s and 2000s, for the past 10 years civic space has been shrinking. Today – as organisations such as Freedom House and CIVICUS reveal in their annual surveys – democratic space is being restricted and closed in more and more countries. In this new environment, there is much that we do not know and much that cannot be taken for granted.

Back to the virus analogy. Just as the virulence of SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) was linked to its novelty – meaning our immune systems had not yet developed a memory and a method for fighting similar viruses – the new world disorder in which we are living – described in the writings of thinkers such as Pankaj Mishra (2025), Quinn Slobodian (2023) and Achille Mbembe (2024) – also presents activists with unknown threats, as well as the breakdown of legal frameworks and systems that social justice activists had come to rely on as levers for change and protection.

There is a battle for the soul of the world, and Africa has a role to play in it. DM

Rethinking Activism in Africa, Voices and Visionaries for Social Justice is edited by Mark Heywood and is published by Jacana Media. It is available in bookshops and can also be purchased online and from Jacana Media.