In the last decade or so, Africa has become a major target of right-wing forces from the United States, as well as sections of the African elite and reactionary religious leaders who are intent on extending a culture war that right-wing groups initiated in the Global North. Much like the era of classical imperialism, these forces see Africa as a proxy through which they can extend their dominance and hegemonic ideas of superiority, discrimination, and dehumanization. This time, the agenda is to roll back the gains made by Black people against racist discrimination, by women against systemic misogyny, and to criminalize the existence of persons and social groups that have always been part of African societies.
For the African elite, the extension of a culture war into Africa is a convenient distraction from the reality of a continent facing multiple crises: the dire lack of necessities such as potable water, electricity, public transportation, public healthcare, and biodiversity preservation is a threat to the survival of individuals, communities and countries, and the continent as a whole, even as the richest classes see their wealth increasing. Africa is currently one of the most unequal places in the world. According to a 2025 Oxfam report, the continent’s governments are the least committed to addressing this crisis of ever-widening inequality.[1] The state and the powerful sections of society, which directly benefit from the impoverishment of the continent, have no solution to the dangerous reality of a bulging youth population that is not only unemployed but also despondent.
Part of the culture war agenda is the reassertion of the power of dominant groups: Black people must go back to their place of servitude; women must disappear from the public sphere, and those with different orientations toward life and love must be criminalized. This agenda is based on a primordial image of a “pure” and “untouched” African past that is not only historically inaccurate but also draws on racist assumptions that African societies were stagnant before contact with supposedly corrupting outside influences.
The attempt to remake African societies in the image of the ideal of American right-wingers and their African allies is closely linked to a cataclysmic vision of the world that believes in domination. It is the same impulse that informs Donald Trump’s wars of domination to take over territories and resources. This new imperialism goes hand in hand with the plain-faced transactional and extractivist logic that seizes resources while defunding important healthcare initiatives that save the lives of millions of people.
Like old-fashioned imperialism, this new imperialism seeks to remake African cultures and societies to conform to conservative Western fantasies that imagine Africa as the presumed past of Western societies. What appears to be a campaign for cultural revival is, in reality, a sinister attempt to assert and consolidate social control over women, gender non-conforming persons, and other marginalized groups through the manipulation of history and customs. Thus, age-old practices and social relations are reframed as corruption and miscegenation. Part of the danger lies in the creation of divisions along religious and ethnic lines. The underlying logic is that people must return to some mythical past that never existed. The pursuit of this leads to the intensification of group hostility on a continent that is still grappling with violent eruptions emanating from attempts to stick to unfounded ideas of purity.
In the face of attempts to weaponize African families by harkening back to the days of the domination of women and other social minorities, Africa, more than ever, needs to foreground solidarity, care, and compassion. Intolerance, discrimination, and violence threaten the existence of a society. The right-wing forces bent on extending their culture wars to Africa have created violent, intolerant societies where people are shot for holding different views. These dynamics are inseparable from environmental destruction, which deepens inequality by undermining livelihoods, food systems and access to land and water. The African future has to be different. It has to be a future rooted in the circumstances, aspirations, and wishes of the most oppressed and exploited sections of African society. Working-class and poor women are part of that group. We, therefore, need states that see through the eyes of an unemployed woman who is responsible for kids and has to fend for an entire household. Such a state is only possible if communities, individuals, and activists from across Africa curate and promote tolerant societies based on solidarity and push back against the hatred and intolerance that today’s cultural imperialists and their local allies want to impose on the continent.
Among other things, that state must be rooted in ideas of sovereignty held by ordinary people through the struggles, ideas, and aspirations, particularly those of marginalized sections of society.
Such a state will be anchored in ideas of sovereignty in principles of collective human flourishing, equality, justice, and rights. The basis of such a social formation has to be one where identities are understood as historical processes instead of a reified perception of culture as given, timeless, and unchanging.
Given that such a state has to be Pan-Africanist and humanist in orientation, it must amplify the struggles of people in every corner of the world. In doing so, it will help to promote a culture of care, solidarity, and alternatives as an alternative to the creeping normalcy of division, injustice, and inequality.
The foregoing requires the conscious mobilization of human, financial, and intellectual resources. Public financing has been the key driver of any far-reaching innovations in Africa. An important source of such public financing is common resources such as pension funds. These resources are already mobilized for private capital accumulation in the service of both external and internal interests. Another template is the use of common assets in which land is pooled for village-level and town-level enterprises across borders, not in a fragmented sectional way, but on an inclusive basis.
This takes seriously the material dimensions of what the late Ghanaian Philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, calls “consensual democracy”. Here, I want to add the idea of deliberative development. This calls for moving away from catch-up development to human flourishing as defined by communities through consensus-building. The question of leadership is central to this, especially the allocation of resources at the local level. Neoliberalism is corrupting the leeway in “traditional social organisation”. No small number of chiefs are involved in destructive mining, equity funds, and the new vehicles and frontiers of capitalist penetration in Africa. Because of the need for natural resource transfer, chieftaincy holds shares in private equities and all kinds of bonds. It is impossible to think of meaningful democracy of citizens when some people remain subjects with differential rights, a sliding scale of claims to belonging. What is required is thoroughgoing social equalization and a real social equality. This does not mean that one does not own land because they are from a certain place. Rather, this means that one only has access to land on the basis of residency and historical association, and not based on some ethnic affiliation. In this project, national ownership, discredited by neoliberalism, has to be viewed as legitimate and necessary. In a context of great inequality, we need public coordinating institutions that cannot be reduced to market competition. On this basis, acting in the current multipolar moment—of inter-imperial rivalries and aspiring sub-imperial ambitions—has to be anchored in redistribution. The normal functioning of the global political economy, even when it does not intend to, is unequal. This equality is deeply embedded in both political ecology and political economy.
[1] Oxfam (2025). Africa’s Inequality Crisis and the Rise of the Super-Rich. Retrieved from https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/africas-inequality-crisis-and-rise-super-rich