THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES

KNOCK, KNOCK

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:08:35 +0000

By issuing subpoenas to five Times journalists, the Trump administration reveals its first response to unwanted national security coverage: go after reporters.

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

On Friday evening, federal agents showed up at the homes of multiple New York Times reporters to deliver subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury. Those who received—or may soon receive—subpoenas include Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, according to an email that Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, sent Times staff over the weekend. The journalists had been part of a team investigating security concerns related to Donald Trump’s new Air Force One—a gift from Qatar last year that was quickly refurbished and decorated in the gaudy cream-and-gold that is typical of Trumpist style. The Times decided to immediately go public about the subpoenas, which seek to compel the reporters to testify in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times newsroom lawyer, said in a statement on Friday. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

Since returning to office, Trump has complained about the look of presidential planes. Other countries had newer planes that appeared “bigger and sleeker and sharper” than Air Force One, Trump told Fox News last year, “and it doesn’t look right.” In May of 2025, the US accepted Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner. It was reportedly worth about two hundred million dollars, and was intended to be the president’s official plane until two Boeing aircraft, commissioned in 2018 but repeatedly delayed, were ready. The Qatari plane was retrofitted to become “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said when he unveiled it in a hangar in Maryland last month. “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”

But last Wednesday, Barnes, Lipton, Pager, and Schmitt heard from sources that, as a security precaution, Trump had been forced to switch back to the old Air Force One when leaving a NATO summit in Türkiye. They wrote about concerns that the Qatari plane may not have been outfitted with security improvements, such as a missile defense system, that officials felt were necessary because of renewed threats from Iran. It was a classic public interest story: millions in taxpayer dollars had been spent to refit the plane that carries the commander in chief and a large entourage of officials, staff, and journalists, but was it even equipped with the necessary defensive features? According to the Times’ Michael Grynbaum, a senior official at the FBI requested that the Times hold the article—calling it a matter of national security—and asked to know the sources of the information. (The piece cited “people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.”) The Times refused both requests and hit publish. The article was followed, on Thursday, by another piece that delved more deeply into the specific defensive countermeasures that may have been skipped when refitting the Qatari plane. The reporting made the Times’ front page on Friday and Saturday. Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry,” according to CNN.

The episode fused two phenomena that have long infuriated Trump: being embarrassed on the international stage, and the use of anonymous sources in reporting that does not flatter him or his administration. He instructed Kash Patel, the FBI director, to oversee a leak investigation, the Times reported (quoting more people who spoke “on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions”). Patel was on his way to Chicago but canceled the trip, instead spending eight hours at the White House on Friday. The subpoenas were issued soon after, from the Southern District of New York. They are strikingly uncommon in leak investigations—let alone as the first step in such a probe. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department insisted on Saturday that “reporters are not the targets; those leaking classified information are.”

But the subpoenas must be seen as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to criminalize routine newsgathering practices, especially on topics related to national security. Last month, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas to journalists at the Washington Post, reportedly for a story relating to Venezuela, and the Wall Street Journal, for a story on military action against Iran, but later backed down and withdrew them after the news organizations pushed back. (The filings in those cases are sealed.) In January, the FBI raided the home of Hannah Natanson, a Post reporter, seizing her devices and referring to her reporting materials as “contraband” in a case “virtually without comparison,” as Maddy Crowell wrote for CJR at the time. And Trump has personally sued multiple news organizations for coverage he didn’t like. Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the Times subpoenas as an “extraordinary escalation” in efforts to “threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.”

The latest case is particularly revealing because it tells us that the Trump administration’s first impulse is now to pursue reporters, even before conducting a thorough internal leak investigation. This seems to treat journalists as criminals for legally receiving information, and looks like a cynical excuse to try to comb through their notebooks and ransack their contact lists. If the five Times journalists are forced to appear before a grand jury, they could be asked to reveal their sources—and, as Perry Stein writes in the Post, they could face charges of contempt of court or obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply. “This is not something that should be normal,” Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild-CWA, of which the subpoenaed reporters are members, told me on Sunday. “But when the president attacks journalists every single day, that becomes an unfortunate normalization—and if we ignore it, then we’re doomed.” The “really scary thing,” Schleuss added, is that Trump’s tactics against the press “are filtering down at the state and the county and the city level. You have county sheriffs who will see this and say, ‘This is how we actually prevent reporting about the no-good contracts that we’ve got.’”

The Times has signaled its intention to aggressively fight the subpoenas. “This is a naked attempt to intimidate individual reporters and to prevent the Times and other independent news media from doing important reporting protected by the First Amendment,” Kahn wrote to staff on Saturday. The paper has a very good chance of winning. As I wrote for CJR in April, the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on critical journalism have not gone down well in many courtrooms. Kahn, in his email, pointed out that the “impulsive” subpoenas “used vague pretenses of a threat to national security,” and said that “we expect to prevail.” But he also issued a warning about the impending strain of the subpoenas on the lives and families of the five targeted journalists, who, for however long this takes, will be tangled up in Trump’s sprawling web of litigation.

Other Notable Stories...

By Jem Bartholomew

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner, a Senate candidate from Maine, announced on X that he was suspending his campaign, after Politico published a story in which Jenny Racicot, a woman who dated him, said Platner sexually assaulted her. (He denied the allegations.) Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, wrote about the extraordinarily difficult, sensitive task of reporting on sexual violence. “A story like this asks you to hold two things at once: real sensitivity toward a source who is describing a traumatic experience and real rigor in testing the account,” Jessica Piper, one of the authors of the Politico story, told Morais.In May, Riddhi Setty and I wrote for CJR about how the Trump administration was helping a white, male editor, Bryant Rousseau, sue the New York Times for discrimination; Rousseau is alleging that he was subjected to “unlawful employment practices” when he was not put forward for the role of deputy real estate editor at the paper. Last Friday, the Times said in a court filing that the administration had violated the First and Fifth Amendments with the suit—and called it an act of retaliation for its journalism. The Times asked for the suit to be dismissed. (Rousseau resigned from the company in June, the Times’ Erik Wemple reported.)On Friday, a federal court in Los Angeles ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using force to prevent journalists, legal observers, and members of the public from documenting immigration enforcement operations in the Central District of California. The case, filed in June of last year by plaintiffs including the LA Press Club, the NewsGuild-CWA, and three individual journalists, came after DHS agents used militarized crowd-control weapons against people documenting immigration raids. “No federal agency has the authority to use force to prevent the public from documenting and holding the government accountable for its actions,” Jonathan Markovitz, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement.In the UK, Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, won a major case at the High Court in London on Tuesday against a lineup of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John, and Doreen Lawrence, who became an advocate for police reform after the racially motivated murder of her son Stephen in 1993, and is now a member of the House of Lords. The plaintiffs alleged a pattern of unlawful information gathering by the news organization—following revelations of phone-hacking in the British tabloid press during the aughts—but Justice Matthew Nicklin said they had failed to prove that the Mail engaged in unlawful activity. At a hearing later this month, the claimants could be ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in legal bills. (They are reportedly deciding whether to appeal.)In the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli settlers attacked several journalists, including some from CNN, who were reporting on the one-year anniversary of the killing of Saif Musallet, a Palestinian American who was beaten to death by settlers near the village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah. Soon after the journalists arrived, four people showed up wielding “wooden and metal rods and stones,” according to a CNN write-up. (Israeli police said four suspects were arrested.) Jeremy Diamond, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent, who was present, said that a full report on the attack would air on Monday night. In related news, the Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday urged Israeli authorities to investigate two recent attacks that targeted the entrances of the Tel Aviv offices of two news organizations—Haaretz, a newspaper, and Channel 12, a broadcaster—with concrete blocks or stones. The vandalism, according to CPJ, seemed like attempts “to intimidate journalists and media workers.” And several Iranian journalists said they were denied US visas to cover the World Cup, according to an article in Nieman Reports, which described the refusals as “unprecedented.” The Trump administration’s travel restrictions on several countries represented in the tournament—Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—included an exemption for athletes, staff, and immediate family members, but it did not extend to fans or media workers. For more on the World Cup—now narrowed to four semifinalists: France, Spain, England, and Argentina—see Amos Barshad’s piece for CJR on news outlets bringing politics into their coverage of the tournament, which concludes next Sunday.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Senegal Is On The Brink: The IMF, The World Bank, And The Debt Crisis That Imperils West Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:27:38 +0000

BY HANNAH NRAE ARMSTRONG AND JOHN MCINTIRE

W est Africa is reeling. Over the past five years, coups have racked Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and the juntas now in charge are dismantling the countries’ institutions. Even as they repress their subjects, they are losing territory to emboldened insurgents. And as these insurgent groups become more entrenched in the central Sahel, they are beginning to threaten the coastal states of Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo.

But amid this upheaval, Senegal remains a democracy in which strong institutions mostly govern capably. The country possesses skilled civil servants with track records of transparent, efficient fiscal management. In 2024, Senegal faced a severe political crisis when the outgoing administration resisted leaving power, but an independent Constitutional Council and an engaged civil society prevented an unconstitutional postponement of elections. Senegal is essentially the only major country in Francophone West Africa whose government remains accountable to its citizens; its stability telegraphs to its neighbors that democratic rule is both desirable and achievable.

Now, however, Senegal is grappling with its own existential threat. On a single day in February 2025, the country went from being considered one of Africa’s most stable economies to one of its most vulnerable after the discovery that President Diomaye Faye’s predecessor, Macky Sall, had hidden extensive debt. The country’s debt-to-GDP ratio has since soared from under 75 percent to over 132 percent. Amid a recent fallout between the country’s top two political leaders, Senegal is attempting to negotiate a new program with the International Monetary Fund. Without help, Senegal could default.

A little support in the form of debt relief from the IMF and the World Bank would quickly help restore balance. A punishing debt burden, on the other hand, would sap resources for badly needed public services, infrastructure, and economic development initiatives. Beyond weakening Senegal’s governing capabilities, such an outcome would create new political and security vulnerabilities throughout West Africa at precisely the moment when Russia is trying to exploit disorder to recruit new proxies.

HIDDEN FIGURES

Over the past five years, military regimes seized power in the central Sahel states, Côte d’Ivoire elected an 83-year-old fourth-term president who banned opposition candidates from running, and Togo pushed through constitutional reforms to keep a two-decade-old dynasty in power. But Senegal managed to remain stable and accountable. In 2024, civil society actors and an independent judiciary drew on what the political scientists Ibrahima Fall and Catherine Lena Kelly describe as Senegal’s democratic “muscle memory”—decades of mobilizing to defend checks and balances—to ensure elections proceeded on schedule. A duo of youthful reformers (Faye and the fiery Ousmane Sanko, who now serves as speaker of the National Assembly) defeated Sall’s handpicked candidate in a decisive first-round victory.

And until February 2025, Senegal’s economic outlook was mostly sunny, having enjoyed a strong recovery after the COVID pandemic. In recent decades, Senegal has expanded access to quality public services, closed the gender gap in school enrollment, and significantly reduced infant mortality rates. New hydrocarbon projects were expected to allow for increased government investments in roads, energy, and water.

But when Faye took over from Sall, his government commissioned an independent audit of state finances to establish the extent of Senegal’s public debt amid rumors of anomalies. The audit’s findings, published on February 12, 2025, came as a shock: they revealed an estimated $7 billion to $13 billion in unreported debt incurred between 2019 and 2023. It became clear that over the course of his second term, Sall had significantly boosted government borrowing and spending as he pursued an unconstitutional third term, all while intentionally misreporting debt figures in legally mandated public accounting to Senegal’s parliament.

The huge debt had gone unnoticed because Senegal’s presidency and finance ministry had hidden it from the National Assembly, the IMF, and the World Bank by keeping unrecorded loans off the books. But the latter two institutions played a role in the accrual of the illegal debt. Since the 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank have been long-term development partners for Senegal, making substantial technical and financial commitments intended to promote growth and reduce poverty. The most recent were a $1.8 billion loan package from the IMF and $300 million in budget support from the World Bank. At that point, these institutions had enough material evidence to discern anomalies, yet they kept financing Sall’s government.

Under Senegal’s program with the IMF, the multilateral lender would have had full electronic access to the government’s fiscal and financial data, enabling it to closely monitor financial activity. Senegalese authorities were required to provide electronic reporting every three to six months, often giving the IMF more detailed oversight of the government’s finances than the country’s own parliament enjoys. Such a discrepancy is reprehensible but by no means unusual. Members of parliament and ministry officials across Africa often appeal to World Bank officials for more detailed information about government finances than their own finance ministry provides.

Red flags appeared in Senegal’s reporting to the IMF as early as June 2021, according to IMF biannual reviews that showed that Dakar had requested modifying performance criteria regarding borrowing and fiscal balance; one review in June 2022 even waived the performance criteria altogether. By the summer of 2023, as Sall faced growing public demands that he step down when his term ended, the IMF would already have flagged serious reporting inconsistencies. But despite the IMF’s substantial access to Senegalese records (and, no doubt, misled by reporting that mixed legitimate data with alleged falsifications and significant omissions), the IMF and the World Bank gave Senegal extra money in 2023: in May, the World Bank greenlighted an extra $300 million in budget support to maintain essential public services, and in June, the IMF approved a new $1.8 billion loan package for Dakar, disbursing $279 million immediately.

Sall likely used the June 2023 disbursement as implicit collateral to convince other lenders, such as the West African Economic and Monetary Union’s regional debt market, to keep loaning him more money. Senegalese authorities submitted internal documents to the IMF in the second half of 2023 that clearly showed overborrowing. In its public December 2023 program review, the IMF identified that a financing “shift” had occurred in Senegal between 2023 and 2024, but it claimed the shift constituted “a debt management operation with no material impact” on Senegal’s debt level.

At best, the IMF failed to carry out the supervision that is essential to its role. At worst, it was pressured to ramp up lending to try to help Sall stay in power. There is some evidence for the latter in the highly anomalous way that the IMF’s reporting acknowledged and rationalized overfinancing, tarting it up as “precautionary liquidity buffers.” Western partners, and France in particular, certainly had reasons for preferring Sall over Faye and Sonko. Sall was a solid Western ally, whereas Faye and Sonko were campaigning on a sovereigntist platform and threatening to leave the French-backed regional currency. At a time when France was rapidly losing African allies to Russia, keeping Senegal close would have been a strong priority.

A DEBT BOMB DETONATES

The IMF and the World Bank are pushing Dakar for talks about restructuring. Yet they have not undertaken efforts to adjust Senegal’s debt service payments or investigate their own roles in exacerbating the crisis; they have merely asked Senegal to create a unified debt directorate and are waiting for the credit crunch to force it to the table. Meanwhile, Sall’s successors, Faye and Sonko, have been harshly punished for the sins of his regime. Senegal’s mushrooming debt problem has hovered over their administration, compelling them to abandon promises to lower electricity and fuel prices, freeze funding for dozens of planned infrastructure projects, impose austerity measures (such as reducing health-care spending by nearly 20 percent), and scramble for new financing.

Worse, the debt crisis has driven a wedge between the reformist duo. Sonko has taken a sovereigntist line and advocated against restructuring the debt (without laying out a convincing alternative), while Faye has preferred to negotiate with the IMF. In May, this dispute blew up their alliance. Faye sacked Sonko from his prime minister role; Sonko resumed his parliamentary seat and was elected the body’s president, with 132 out of 165 members of parliament voting for him. The resulting institutional crisis has pitted Senegal’s executive against its legislature. The latter has the authority to block any budget legislation or debt-restructuring framework that the presidency tries to pass. Sonko warned in June that even if Senegal enters “a crisis involving the dissolution of parliament … there will never be an agreement with the IMF.”

As Senegal’s executive and parliamentary branches remain in a deadlock, the country’s debt continues to grow and the options to address it narrow. The deadlock, however, also reflects the strength and independence of Senegalese institutions, which are nourished by a steady stream of inclusive debate. It highlights the health of a democracy that has been revitalized by a new generation’s participation.

As the leaders of neighboring countries insist that authoritarian rule is necessary to stabilize their countries, Senegal’s democracy stands as a vital rebuttal and applies positive pressure on the citizens and leaders of those countries to seek similar freedoms. Exiled West African civil society leaders often travel to Dakar to pursue graduate degrees, investigate and prepare reports on human rights abuses, and convene conferences on civil liberties. And at a time when West Africa’s rural areas are experiencing deepening abuse and neglect, it is worth noting that these freedoms extend well beyond Senegal’s capital. A few years ago, when Malians and Senegalese people living along the Falémé River mobilized to protest its devastation by gold mining practices, the state responses could not have been more different. Malian forces, siding with miners, beat and detained activists, while Senegal’s Faye issued a decree suspending all mining within 550 yards of the river.

WIN-WIN SOLUTION

Senegal is left with two ugly options: borrow more on worse terms to service its debt or restructure under a new IMF program. Faye is under significant pressure from Sonko’s legislature and the public not to pursue restructuring: the term has acquired a stink, with Sonko calling it a “disgrace.” Restructuring would likely entail highly unpopular measures such as removing fuel subsidies and lowering teachers’ salaries. For many Senegalese people, restructuring recalls the catastrophic structural adjustment programs the IMF imposed on their country in the 1980s and 1990s, which crimped the government’s autonomy and led to cuts in key sectors such as health and education without meaningfully freeing Senegal from cycles of debt and dependence. But in late June, Sonko softened his opposition to restructuring, likely to pave the way for a presidential bid by opening the door for a painful restructuring that will inevitably make Faye look bad.

If Senegal does not restructure its loans, its colossal and criminally acquired debt could crush the economy. Some public salaries are already in arrears, and pensions and energy subsidies could soon face cuts, events that could spark riots and wider unrest. And if the institutional deadlock persists, it could start to erode Senegalese democracy. The IMF already bears some responsibility for the crisis. And now its official insistence on full repayment to creditors is putting Senegal’s macroeconomic stability at risk and undermining the government’s ability to provide health care and education, transition from agriculture to manufacturing, and invest in much-needed public infrastructure.

To pull Senegal back from the brink, Washington should push the IMF and the World Bank to take a significant haircut. Between 2027 and 2031, Senegal is due to pay principal, interest, and fees on its IMF debt amounting to about $891 million; it will owe the World Bank roughly $1.37 billion in debt service over the same period. Taken together, these figures neatly parallel the $2 billion that these institutions lent Senegal in 2023, when it should have been abundantly clear not to. Relief on the approximately $2 billion owed to the IMF and the World Bank could reduce the country’s total external debt service by 16 percent, leaving it with still considerable yet more manageable payments.

The IMF and the World Bank should cancel these payments. These institutions’ principal shareholders, especially Washington and Paris, should urge them to support cancellation and bring other shareholders such as Beijing on board. The IMF and the World Bank likely believe that new oil revenue and increased fiscal pressure (that is, higher taxes and lower fuel subsidies) will allow Senegal to continue to service its debt. They are wrong. Over the past three years, oil revenue has proved disappointing, and much of it may already have been pledged as future sales. Revenues from sharply raising taxes and lowering subsidies will destabilize the country.

Although board members may argue that debt relief sets a bad precedent, the IMF and the World Bank have already helped Argentina on a much bigger scale, and in 2004, the two organizations’ HIPC debt relief initiative, aimed at helping heavily indebted poor countries, granted extensive forgiveness to reduce debt burdens to sustainable levels in Senegal. Canceling Senegal’s debt service would entail trivial losses for these international institutions, which—unlike Senegal—can seek special replenishment from other sources. Beyond assisting Dakar, this relief would benefit Paris and Beijing, its two largest bilateral creditors, by allowing the country to make good on its payments to them. And Paris has an interest in stabilizing Senegal’s debt to prevent a wider contagion. Senegal’s debt crisis threatens the larger regional economic bloc, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, whose shared currency is guaranteed by the French Treasury.

Breathing room would allow Senegal’s leaders to get back to governing and shore up stability in a region that badly needs it. It would also help the IMF and the World Bank retain their reputation for integrity at a moment when such institutions are viewed with increasing skepticism.

Dakar must also launch an investigation into the Senegalese actors responsible for the illegal debt. So far, Faye has declined to do so, likely because he worries his government may have to expose or prosecute political figures whose support he will need in the future. To incentivize Senegal to investigate its own institutions, significant debt relief from international organizations could be made contingent on a public investigation into the illegal debt to ensure a crisis like this cannot happen again and make the country’s institutions even more accountable.

El-Ghassim Wane, a former senior African Union adviser from the Sahel steeped in how good governance helps ward off conflict, noted to us that “the cost of supporting a country that has remained committed to constitutional governance and democratic principles is far lower than the cost of managing instability once it takes hold.” Debt forgiveness would help protect Senegal’s achievements; without it, the country risks falling into a debt trap for years, if not decades. And the region will lose its democratic anchor.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

When A Congressman Beat A Senator Unconscious, America Confronted The Limits Of Free Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:24:38 +0000

In John Magee’s print, Preston Brooks wields a cane against Charles Sumner, who is clutching a pen and a rolled-up speech. John L. Magee, The New York Public Library

BY PAUL QUIGLEY

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

VIRGINIA TECH

On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks strode into the United States Senate chamber and beat Sen. Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, was retaliating for a speech Sumner had given condemning slavery and personally insulting a relative of Brooks.

Though lasting only a minute, the beating had far-reaching consequences. It pushed Americans one step closer to civil war.

And, as I discovered while researching my book “The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War,” it sparked a nationwide debate over free speech, political violence and the relationship between the two.
Speak without reprisal

Northerners denounced the caning as an attack on Sumner’s right to free expression. Even if they thought Sumner’s abolitionism too radical – as most white Northerners did in 1856 – they believed a U.S. senator had the right to say what he wanted without violent reprisal.

Visual images of the caning reflected the Northern take on free speech. In John Magee’s political caricature, “Southern Chivalry – Argument Versus Club’s,” Brooks wields a sturdy stick against a defenseless Sumner, who is clutching a pen in one hand and a rolled-up speech in the other. Winslow Homer’s print “Arguments of the Chivalry” depicts Sumner writing at his desk as Brooks prepares to strike.

Homer’s headline captured the message of both depictions: “The Symbol of the North is the Pen; the Symbol of the South is the Bludgeon,” which is a quote from a speech by antislavery activist Henry Ward Beecher.

Defenders of Brooks insisted any abolitionist speech was too incendiary to deserve protected status. Brooks’ hometown newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, berated Sumner for “licentiously prostituting the principle of freedom of speech,” reflecting the widespread conviction among white Southerners that free speech had limits.
Collapsing the distinction between words and violence

The argument between supporters of Brooks and Sumner was not isolated to the caning incident. Societies throughout history have punished language deemed blasphemous, seditious, inciting or slanderous. In most times and places, authorities have hewed more to slaveholders’ conception of free speech as a limited privilege than to abolitionists’ assertion of an absolute right. In the United States, the idea of free speech as virtually inviolable became mainstream only in the 20th century.

To pro-slavery Americans, abolitionist words warranted violent responses because such words were themselves tantamount to violence.

Alexander Stephens, future Confederate vice president, justified the caning by saying, “I have no objection to the liberty of Speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.”

Another Southern politician wrote to Brooks, “Address your arguments to the Skin, to the physical sensibilities.” And one of the many replacement canes given to Brooks bore the revealing inscription “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

Slaveholders were collapsing the distinction between words and physical violence. Language could constitute violence, and an act of violence could be a counterargument.

This logic has resurfaced in our own time, but instead of slaveholders using it to maintain white supremacy, today it is more often deployed to designate certain types of expression, such as burning crosses or displaying Nazi symbols, as hate speech against marginalized communities. It has also appeared in the increasing moves by the Trump administration to label dissent as terrorism.
Suppressing antislavery language

While most Northerners in the 1850s continued to value freedom of speech over violence, the caning convinced some that they must respond in kind.

One Minnesota newspaper editor hoped that “every Northern member will fully arm himself, and if necessary plant a cannon by the side of his desk to be used as the most effectual argument in favor of Free Speech.”

It was increasingly difficult to keep rhetorical and physical violence separate as the slavery conflict heated up.

This was a new phase in the history of free speech. While abolitionists and increasing numbers of Northerners fought for an expansive idea of free expression, publishing pamphlets and newspapers and submitting petitions to Congress, slaveholders tried to suppress antislavery language.

Terrified that abolitionist words might lead to rebellions by the enslaved, slaveholders feared for their survival. As prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Political reformer Lydia Maria Child described a growing threat: “A slaveholding community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder and, in this age, sparks of free thought are flying in every direction.”

Responding to those sparks of abolitionist free thought with violent repression, including acts such as the Sumner caning, slaveholders’ violence fueled the rise of the new Republican Party. The Republicans articulated their opposition to slavery with their slogan of “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”

Brooks and his kind ultimately brought about their own demise by provoking Northern outrage – outrage that ultimately led to war once the slaveholding South seceded.

Who gets to say what to whom? Are there any words that can justify violence? These questions polarized the country after the caning. In new forms, they continue to confound American politics 170 years on.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Racial Stereotypes Of African Footballers Persist. A World Cup Is A Good Time To Talk AboutThem

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:52:43 +0000

Assumptions about natural differences between black and white athletes are entrenched in the global talent trade. Florian Schmetz/Unsplash

BY UROCS KOVAC AND IKECHUKWU EJEKWUMADU

With a Somali referee being denied entry into the US, and the surge of online racist abuse after 2026 World Cup matches, racism and exclusion in football are once again in the news.

Overt anti-Black racism in football is well reported and researched. Less visible but important structural issues remain little scrutinised, though.

The 2026 World Cup is a perfect moment to examine the deeply entrenched – but often hidden – logic of the global market of footballers that reproduces racist stereotypes about Black athletes.

Assumptions about natural characteristics of African athletes persist in football transfers. Africans are often regarded as physically strong athletes with raw talent that are lacking in discipline and technical refinement. But these assumed characteristics are far from natural – they are actively nurtured.

One of the less obvious places that this happens is in west African football academies that seek to empower young footballers, but effectively reproduce stereotypes.

We are a sport sociologist and an anthropologist who have been researching football-related migrations from west Africa to Europe since 2014. We’ve worked with aspiring footballers in Nigeria, Senegal and Cameroon. Most recently, we interviewed coaches at four football academies in Nigeria, as well as 24 football migrants in Europe. We asked the coaches about their selection strategies, and the footballers about their aspirations and career paths.

Our combined findings show that racial inequality still exists in global football. It can be detected in young footballers’ dreams, football academies’ business models, and the demands of the global market.

Strikingly, it is often reproduced through practices that are framed positively – opportunity, empowerment, inclusion – rather than through overt racism alone. This makes racial inequality in football particularly durable – it happens through strategies that many experience as allowing for social mobility.

This matters, because we cannot fully comprehend racism in sports without understanding the deeply rooted dynamics that fuel it.

‘Whiteman country’

In many west African countries, football has become one of the most attractive ways for young men to migrate overseas. Confronted with a lack of stable economic opportunities and glaring global inequalities, they seek “greener pastures” overseas, where they hope to start earning a living and providing for their families.

The footballers travel everywhere, including Asia and the Gulf States. But the most desirable destination remains Europe. This is because of the enormous popularity of European elite football leagues and the visibility of elite African footballers in European clubs. There’s a perception that European football offers the best prospects for social and economic mobility.

In western Cameroon, Europe is often called “whiteman country”. It’s a catch-all term for “the west” that has ambiguous connotations. Young people see it as a place of prosperity, comfort and economic opportunity, but also of anti-Black racism, overwork and inequality. Many see it as a key destination – often unavailable because of strict border policies – that holds opportunities.

Natural athletes

Myths about Africans as being natural-born athletes persist in the global market.

For instance, one European coach we interviewed in Cameroon emphasised that Africans were immensely talented – they had “rhythm in their blood”. They also reportedly lacked discipline. The coach consistently compared European footballers – allegedly untalented but inclined to work hard – with African players – supposedly very talented but not geared to hard work.

In Nigeria, coaches we interviewed routinely emphasised that Africans had “natural” abilities for sports. Most prominent were myths about physical strength and endurance that were supposedly inherent in African bodies.

Moreover, talented young players were often labelled as “diamonds in the rough”, raw materials with potential but in need of refinement. The labels make for disturbing parallels with images of Africa as full of natural minerals ready to be exploited.

These examples are not isolated or anecdotal – racial stereotypes about African athletes have been documented in studies over and over and over again.

They are also not isolated to football. Similar myths have been documented in many disciplines, like boxing, rugby, American football, and long-distance running.

Cultivating difference

These stereotypes have a profound influence on how football talent is nurtured on the continent.

Our interviews reveal that football academies in Nigeria strategically cultivate footballers that fit global stereotypes of the Black athlete. This is to create value in the global market.

They argue that physical qualities are the most important thing foreign scouts look for in African footballers. So academies strategically select young men who are physically strong, tall, and with high endurance. In the process, they may overlook players with high technical skills and tactical awareness.

In one instance, an academy spent years developing players, but found it difficult to sell the small players, despite their technical prowess. They eventually disbanded the team and selected a new crop of youngsters. This time they had to be at least six foot tall.

The academies, we found, also model the development of players on successful African internationals. They might focus on scouting and developing defending midfielders – a position that benefits from exceptional physical strength. Or they nurture physically imposing strikers like Romelu Lukaku or Victor Osimhen. The academies say they’re exploiting and creating a niche in the global market that’s especially fitting for Africans.

This matters, because football academies, coaches and agents play key roles as gatekeepers in the global market. They promise young footballers – often from underprivileged backgrounds – empowerment and inclusion through access to global markets.

The market is big and complicated, and not all academies reproduce these tropes – at least not consciously. But racial stereotypes clearly continue and have a profound impact on how athletes are selected and cultivated.

Racial capitalism

For a long time, prominent postcolonial thinkers have developed theories about the racial order of the global economy.

US political scientist Cedric Robinson used the term “racial capitalism” to explain how capitalism was built on a foundation of colonialism, slavery, and racial differentiation. That created a society where racialised groups are exploited to extract profit. Capitalism exploits people on the basis of imagined racial differences.

Indian feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote about “strategic essentialism” to highlight how people may deal with these structures. Marginalised groups sometimes use simplified ideas about who they are. This can help them gain recognition or improve their opportunities.

These ideas are remarkably relevant nowadays, and essential for understanding how racial inequalities endure through sports.

Global football shows how markets commodify bodies, commodify difference itself, and continue to fuel these inequalities. It also shows how people respond to this, and how talk of empowerment and inclusion can reinforce inequalities.

These issues are made visible through sport, but they are not exclusive to it. They are also not inevitable.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

DRC Has Taken Rwanda To The World Court Over Genocide Again. A Law Scholar Explains What’s Different This Time

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:25:13 +0000

The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, which is the seat of the International Court of Justice. Wikimedia Commons

BY KERSTIN BREE CARLSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR INTERNATIONAL

LAW, ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) filed a lawsuit against Rwanda at the International Court of Justice at the end of June 2026. The 60-page complaint alleges acts of genocide and other atrocity crimes by Rwandan forces and their intermediaries dating from 1996 to the present day.

The DRC has twice before brought similar cases against Rwanda at this court. Both failed on questions of jurisdiction. So, what explains yet another case against Rwanda? Kerstin Bree Carlson, a scholar of international justice and author of a book on international law in Africa, examines this history and what’s behind the DRC’s confidence in its latest push.
What did the DRC’s previous cases involve?

The DRC has twice tried to bring Rwanda before the International Court of Justice in relation to violence carried out or backed by Rwanda on its soil. It was unsuccessful both times.

In 1999, the DRC brought claims against Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda before the court over the armed invasion of its territory. It sought reparations for armed aggression and intentional acts of destruction and looting.

It later dropped its claims against Rwanda and Burundi because neither country had consented to the court’s jurisdiction.

The case against Uganda went ahead, and in 2005 the court ruled in the DRC’s favour. It found that Uganda was responsible for acts of violence in the country. In 2022, the court ordered Uganda to pay US$325 million in reparations, marking a significant victory for the DRC. Kampala paid the first instalment of US$65 million that year.

In 2002, the DRC resubmitted claims against Rwanda.

The DRC invoked eight international treaties, including the Genocide Convention. This is a UN treaty that entered into force in 1951 and establishes genocide as an international crime.

The International Court of Justice dismissed the DRC’s case on jurisdictional grounds, which drew criticism. The court said it lacked the authority to hear the dispute because Rwanda had entered a “reservation” when it joined the Genocide Convention, rejecting the court’s jurisdiction under the treaty. In the 2006 ruling, a majority of International Court of Justice judges recognised the validity of this reservation.
What has happened in the past 20 years that might change the outcome?

First, in 2008 Rwanda withdrew its reservation to International Court of Justice jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (which came into force in 1969). That means that the jurisdictional hurdle relating to Rwanda’s consent is resolved.

The DRC has invoked both these treaties in its current submission to the court.

Second, in 2008 Rwanda became a party to the Convention Against Torture (which came into force in 1987). Claims made under this UN treaty do not need to meet the same rigorous “intent” standard that genocide claims do. Further, the court’s jurisprudence is well established under the torture convention. For example, claims under this treaty played a critical role in efforts to bring Chad’s former president Hissène Habré to justice.

The DRC has invoked this history in its submission.

Third, international law has evolved. Recent cases like The Gambia’s suit againt Myanmar (2019) and South Africa’s case against Israel (2023) have expanded the Genocide Convention’s reach.

Together, these factors suggest that the DRC’s third attempt may have a stronger chance of clearing the jurisdictional hurdle. However, whether this would eventually lead to a judgment against Rwanda is much harder to predict.
Why has the DRC turned to international law?

International law, the law of nations, creates all nations as equals. The International Court of Justice is the oldest, most established global arbiter of disputes between them.

There are two principles of international law that play out in this case.

First, states are generally bound only by obligations they have explicitly accepted. This includes agreeing to the jurisdiction of the court. Second, international courts have no police force or other means of enforcing their judgments. It is up to states themselves to comply with court rulings. This compliance includes a duty on other states not to recognise as lawful situations created through serious breaches of international law.

Although the court cannot compel states to act, its opinions matter. They represent the most authoritative statements of international legal norms. In other words, International Court of Justice judgments represent the clearest statements we have regarding how international legal principles apply in practice.

Recognising international law’s persuasive power is key to understanding why the DRC has repeatedly turned to the International Court of Justice and other international courts to seek rulings against Rwanda and its proxies. These include the International Criminal Court and the African Court on Human and People’s Rights. International lawfare represents a principled battle for recognition and legitimacy.
Why does the case matter?

The DRC’s creative legal attempts to bring Rwanda to justice in relation to its engagement in and support of armed conflict in the DRC over the past several decades are efforts to invalidate violent incursions on its soil. It also seeks to reassert its sovereignty by having Rwandan-backed violence recognised as illegal by international law’s apex court.

As I have argued before and in my book examining international law in Africa, the power of international law resides in states’ agreements to use it in place of violent conflagration, and to be bound by it.

Rwanda challenges these standards in both regards. Credible allegations of Rwandan-backed massacres in the DRC date from 1996 through to the present day. Despite being the recipient of significant international legal investment, Rwanda resists participating as a good international citizen. So far, neither Rwanda nor its allies are addressing or redressing its behaviour.

By contrast, the DRC is expanding international law’s promise and potential by applying it as intended. International law derives its power chiefly from the expectations it creates.

The DRC is not blameless in the three decades of violence its submission describes. But by framing that violence through the lens of international law, the country helps legitimise alternatives to violence.

Justice Jackson’s Birthright Citizenship Opinion Includes Black Americans In The Story Of The Nation’s Search For Equality

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:44:40 +0000

Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on pending judicial nominations on April 28, 2021, in Washington. Kevin Lamarque/Pool via AP

BY AUSTIN SARAT

WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL PROFESSOR

OF JURISPRUDENCE AND POLITICA;L

SCIENCE, AMHERST COLLEGE

In the annals of Supreme Court decisions, the public likely remembers what justices wrote for the court in famous cases, such as the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.

Or perhaps the public remembers great dissenting opinions that display foresight and speak across the ages. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which legalized racial segregation, is a shining example.

But Supreme Court scholars and the public alike seldom pay much attention to concurring opinions, in which a justice expounds on the views of their colleagues in the majority. Some legal experts have denigrated concurring opinions as “the worst form of legal clutter… that are, usually, better left unwritten.”

On June 30, 2026, in the Trump v. Barbara ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson showed how wrong that view can be when she delivered a monumental concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil. The decision invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny citizenship to children born to foreign parents who are unlawfully in the United States.

Jackson, however, used her concurrence to go far beyond that and offer a new understanding of the origins of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and its promise of equal treatment. She did so while emphasizing the singular contributions of Black Americans to that endeavor.

Along the way, Jackson criticized Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s dominant originalist jurisprudence – centered on interpreting the Constitution based on how it was understood when it was adopted – for distorting the historical record. Jackson has previously signaled that a responsible use of history requires examining all relevant sources instead of cherry-picking among them to make a particular point.

As a politics scholar who has written about history and law, I believe that years from now, when Americans look back on Trump v. Barbara, it will be Jackson, not Roberts, whom they remember.

No shrinking violet

During her brief tenure on the court, Jackson has shown herself to be no shrinking violet. From the start, she has made her voice heard during oral arguments and in her written opinions.

As political scientists Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman wrote in December 2022, after her first three months as a justice, Jackson “was by far the most active participant in oral arguments.”

Since then, nothing has changed about Jackson’s style on the bench. The Washington Examiner reports that she “took up more than 20% of the Supreme Court’s questioning last term.”

Jackson also is not shy about writing dissenting opinions, and the occasional concurrence, whether in combination with others or alone. In both her dissents and concurrences, Thomas, the court’s only other Black member and its leading proponent of originalism, has been one of her main targets.

For example, in her 2023 dissent from the court’s decision to end affirmative action in higher education, Jackson directly criticized Thomas when she wrote that “those who demand that no one think about race … refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

Originalism, Jackson-style

Jackson has also called herself an originalist. However, she departs from Thomas’ brand of originalism.

For Jackson, to understand how any provision of the Constitution was understood requires unearthing sources of constitutional meaning that have been largely ignored by others on the court.

That vision was on display in her concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case. There, Jackson paid particular attention to what Black Americans did in inspiring and crafting the 14th Amendment.

This contrasts with the traditional originalist story that highlights white protagonists such as Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, who introduced the proposal to add the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, or President Andrew Johnson, who resisted the 14h Amendment on the grounds that it infringed on states’ rights.

Justice Thomas embraced this sort of vision in Trump v. Barbara. As he tells it, the birth of the 14th Amendment can be traced to the concerns of members of the Reconstruction Congress that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which extended certain fundamental rights to “all persons born in the United States,” would be repealed or overturned in the courts.

Black people have little or no role in Thomas’ account.

Black Americans and birthright citizenship

Jackson’s opinion registers her impatience with such an exclusion. She faults Thomas for his “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment (that) bears little relationship to the history of its ratification.”

Instead, Jackson traces the 14th Amendment to work done by people “within and beyond Congress.”

Jackson follows Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s suggestion that originalist judges should always attend to “all the people who are basically knocking on the windows and banging on the doors with their ideas about what should be in the Constitution.”

As Jackson recounts, “In the decades leading up to the ratification of the 14th amendment, black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country. There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding of the 14th amendment and, later, for the black civil rights movement more generally.”

Contrary to Thomas, who argues that birthright citizenship applies only to former slaves and their offspring, Jackson notes that Blacks “helped galvanize the push for full equality.” When ratified, Jackson explains, “the citizenship clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the colored conventions and their allies in Congress.”

And in a pointed dig at her colleague, Jackson writes that the “distortion of historical facts – retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims” – poses a grave threat to the constitutional project and America’s well-being.

Extending the work of the 1619 Project

Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright case builds on the approach to history taken by the so-called 1619 Project. That project, unveiled by The New York Times in 2019, “aimed to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, insists “the United States simply would not exist without us. The idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of black Americans have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”

Jackson fully embraces that story and, in her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, extends it to include what happened in 1866 when the U.S. restated and renewed its founding commitment to equality. She suggests that the 14th Amendment would not have come into being without similar “patriotic efforts” by Black Americans.

What makes Jackson’s concurrence extraordinary, Slate’s Robyn Nicole Sanders writes, “is that it insists on telling the 14th amendment story honestly … (and) it is at moments elegiac in its remembrance of the people whose suffering and resistance gave birth to the citizenship clause.”

That is why I believe Jackson’s concurrence will be remembered as one of the great opinions produced by a Supreme Court justice.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Serving A State That Couldn’t Pay: Why South Sudan’s Civil Servants Didn’t Quit During The War

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:25:17 +0000

Public administration, Yambio, Western Equatoria, South Sudan. Emmanuelle Veuillet, Author provided (no reuse)

BY EMMANUELLA VEUILLET

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

UNIVERSITY OF JUBA

When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, civil servants found themselves at the centre of a deep political and economic crisis.

The state was, and remains, the largest employer, surpassing private companies and NGOs. In 2015, the approved national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel. Over 85% were engaged in security-related functions. Despite the absence of official statistics, observations confirm that the civil service has not shrunk over the years.

As the conflict became increasingly politicised and shaped by ethnic divisions, civil servants had to navigate shifting loyalties and growing insecurity.

The war also triggered an economic collapse. In 2015, the South Sudanese pound lost nearly 90% of its value against the US dollar. Trade routes were disrupted. Domestic production of products declined and shortages of imported goods fuelled hyperinflation.

The near-total collapse of oil exports – the government’s main source of revenue – severely weakened state finances. By late 2015, the government was effectively bankrupt and increasingly unable to fund the public sector.

This resulted in long delays in civil servants’ salary payments from several months to a year. Hyperinflation also eroded the value of wages.

This did not lead to a mass exodus from the civil service, however. During my PhD fieldwork, I found that many civil servants chose to stay. As a political sociologist, I was interested in understanding their decision to remain in a broke administration during such challenging times. I explored the little-known wartime experiences of ordinary middle-ranking civil servants to make sense of it.

Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in South Sudan, I found that civil servants chose to remain in government because – despite the absence of a salary and direct income – their jobs provided benefits. These included social status, and access to networks and opportunities. The job provided a sense of normality, too, during a period of political upheaval. It was also a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

The civil war formally ended with the 2018 peace agreement, but South Sudan remains mired in political and economic crises. My findings help explain why, despite repeated shocks, state institutions have endured.

The study

I collected the data in my study between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Western Equatoria in South Sudan. The region doesn’t have oil resources, hosts a variety of ethnic groups and plunged into war later than many others. I relied on observations from various administration offices at county and state levels, and informal conversations held during these visits.

As part of my research, I followed the stories of six civil servants – two women and four men – from different departments and directorates at the county and state levels. They held different grades within the administration. They were aged over 30 and held at least a high school certificate.

The findings

My study shows that civil servants’ attachment to a state with no money was shaped by material, social and political factors.

Before the war – from independence in 2011 to 2013 – even lower-ranking government jobs provided civil servants with a modest but stable standard of living. For instance, a cleaner (grade 16) in public administration earned around US$180 to US$200 at the time. But after the conflict began, that economic security disappeared.

By April 2017, a director’s monthly salary (grade 3) could only buy a 20kg bag of rice and a 10kg bag of red beans. An administrative officer’s (grade 12) salary could barely pay for 2kg of rice.

All civil servants had to look for other sources of income for daily survival. These included farming, small-scale businesses, and renting or selling properties. The economic security attached to a position in the civil service had vanished.

Yet civil servants continued to go to the office because it still gave them access to other forms of resources, helped them maintain their status and preserved an appearance of normality.

The benefits included:

access to opportunities, such as NGO trainings and workshops that provided per diems for the period of participation, or a certificate of attendance that could be added to a CV

the knowledge and power to help people and do favours, which helped them cultivate social networks that could be used to access goods, services or credit

preserving social position and maintaining practices that reinforced a sense of normality, both in the eyes of others and for themselves

a shared experience which fostered forms of solidarity and mutual understanding among civil servants. They organised social activities and support mechanisms, such as savings groups, among themselves rather than with other social groups.

A desired future

Despite the South Sudanese government’s withdrawal from many of its social responsibilities, civil servants continued to imagine a different kind of state. Those I interviewed shared a vision of a strong and functioning state.

It was often accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, as they imagined themselves helping to build such a state. Maintaining the functioning of state institutions and preserving some level of public service during the crisis became a meaningful commitment, a survival strategy and an investment in upward mobility within a “wished-for state”.

The decision to remain in this career was also shaped by a lack of alternatives, however. Middle-ranking civil servants had relatively low levels of formal education and lacked the networks needed to secure other employment. The private sector has remained small because of a difficult business climate and a lack of economic diversification.

The total collapse of a functioning state would mean the disappearance of their jobs – which helps explain their efforts to keep the administration going.

The economic crisis in South Sudan raises questions, however, about how long civil servants can continue to sustain state institutions.

In many cases, salaries have gone unpaid for more than a year. And cash shortages in banks prevent civil servants from accessing whatever funds may be available to them.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

South Sudan At 15: How The Political Elite Have Found A Way To Profit From Peace As Well As War

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:01:31 +0000

Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Wikimedia Commons

BY MARTIN BENSON STROHMAYDER

RESEARCH FELLOW AND SUDANS RESEARCH

DIRECTOR, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state.

South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly.

This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not failing so much as working? What if they stabilise order precisely by preserving the systems that make violence profitable?

Political settlements theory helps explain why peace agreements often focus on dividing power, offices and resources among elites. The hope is that if rival leaders receive a share of power, offices and resources, they will have less reason to fight. But negotiated transitions can also carry wartime systems into peace. The question, then, is not only who gets a share of the state, but what kinds of war economies, revenue systems and coercive practices are being preserved.

As an economic historian of war and peace, I have spent more than a decade tracing how rulers in South Sudan and Sudan raise money, goods, labour and other resources, and how payment is enforced through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices. My recent research paper examined how South Sudan’s peace agreements reshaped the country’s systems of revenue, spending and coercion: who could extract resources, who could allocate them, and who could enforce payment.

My analysis drew on 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival, secondary and peace agreement data. I sought to answer three questions: who collected revenue from monetary and non-monetary sources, such as cash, cattle, grain and labour; who paid; and who benefited.

What emerges is that peace settlements have redistributed access to money, offices and external finance among elites, while leaving intact the coercive revenue system and war economies that preceded them. In some cases, peace has formalised those systems by turning wartime access to extraction into recognised office, revenue authority or security control. Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians – now in the name of order.

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

The same machinery makes the state itself a prize: controlling it is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for, and when the power-sharing breaks down, as it did in 2013, the fighting returns. Peace and war become two settings of one extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Similar dynamics have emerged in other resource-rich, conflict-affected states, such as in oil-rich Angola and the mineral endowed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). South Sudan is resource-rich too, above all because of oil. But the wider issue is not only natural resources. It is the political control of revenue streams such as oil, customs, aid, loans, contracts, checkpoints, timber, charcoal and other forms of extraction.

It’s all part of a wider pattern in peacemaking that has repeatedly paired political deals with economic reforms that entrenched elite control over revenue and other resources.

None of this is inevitable. A different approach would start by treating the whole revenue complex as the heart of peacemaking itself, not as a technical issue to be postponed until after a peace agreement is signed. It would ask who controls money and other resources, including humanitarian and development assistance; who is allowed to extract resources, payments and labour from civilians; and whether people can see anything in return for what they pay.

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

South Sudan’s national revenue system includes taxes, customs, fees, oil revenues, international loans, aid and off-budget income. It also includes non-monetary extraction, such as cattle, grain, labour and goods taken from civilians. These flows are enforced through soldiers, security forces, government offices and checkpoints. Together, they form what I call a revenue complex: the machinery through which rulers extract the resources that allow them to govern, reward allies and sustain coercive power.

In much of South Sudan, “peace” has reshuffled who profits from the revenue system, not what it does to those who pay. A businessman in Malakal, a city in Upper Nile State, described the tax system as “organised robbery” in which soldiers were overcharging and pocketing the proceeds. He was told that the system had to be endured to “maintain peace”.

Predation was not a breakdown of order; it was a condition of order.

None of this began with the peace process. My peace agreement analysis starts in the early 1970s, but in separate archival research and an earlier round of just over 200 interviews, I traced the territory’s revenue complex back to at least 1899. Across colonial, rebel and independent rule, I found a similar logic: revenue sources were used to secure rulers’ control more than to fund public goods.

Across more than 120 years, changes in government did not dismantle the underlying machinery of extraction and control. Each major political settlement since the 1970s has been laid over that inheritance, reshuffling who profits from it.

Confusion is integral to the system. Traders described being shuttled from office to office to meet fresh demands; collectors themselves spoke of decrees “passed from nowhere” that shifted revenue to other units. A businesswoman in Wau described fierce competition for tax collection posts because of what could be skimmed from them. This is not administrative failure, but a system that works for those who run it. When revenue authority is spread across overlapping offices, no one can be held to account and everyone can be rewarded for their loyalty.

This performance of state finance runs all the way up. In 2012, the president conceded that some US$4 billion in oil money had simply been “stolen”. In 2026, a UN panel of experts found that South Sudan continued to sell oil months in advance of delivery, and that disputes over undelivered oil cargoes and oil-backed debts had reached UK commercial courts.

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

South Sudanese nevertheless do not reject the idea of contributing to public authority. They contrasted community-level payments and contributions, which they could see returning as boreholes, roads or clinics, with state taxation, which they experienced as extraction without return.

Many insisted that paying tax is good, so long as it is reciprocal, transparent and tied to public goods.

The problem is that peace agreements often leave that link severed, even as they formalise new bargains among elites.

What non-predatory peace would require

A different kind of peacemaking would mean taking the following steps.

rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex

linking what people pay to what they receive

making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.

Lastly, South Sudanese civic actors should be supported to monitor the cross-border flows – oil, arms, timber, charcoal, looted goods and finance – that fund fighting.

This work does not fall solely to donors and mediators. People are already documenting where the money goes.

A serious settlement would treat them as central to any peace worth the name.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

THE INTERVIEW: ‘All I Have Is The Power To Talk And Be Heard’

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:38:26 +0000

Tucker Carlson - Wikipedia

Tucker Carlson on pitying Donald Trump, never listening to podcasts, and planning a new political party—while selling you nicotine pouches.

BY AMOS BARSHAD

On a recent afternoon, I drove down a wooded Maine road, past serene ponds with no people in sight, until I reached a big white barn. I parked, in patchy grass, near a Ford F-350 with a crane bolted onto the back, an American flag, and an idling black SUV. A guy in the driver’s seat of the SUV, whose tattoos peeked out beneath the sleeves of a white dress shirt, sent me thirty feet down the road to another guy, in a large white SUV, who politely told me to wait. Tucker Carlson was still recording.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone—a United States senator? A prison guard claiming to have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered? Donald Trump?—walk out of that barn. Carlson, who is fifty-seven, occupies a singular space in American media: after decades in corporate television, most famously at Fox News, he now hosts The Tucker Carlson Show, a video podcast, where he can and does follow his every whim, taking his hordes of fans along with him. A recent episode, “The Secret History of Biblical Giants,” has 1.5 million views on YouTube.

Eventually, Carlson—boyish, tanned, wearing an outdoorsman vest and New Balances—welcomed me into the barn. As I entered, I passed that day’s interviewee: Nick Maynard, an English surgeon who has worked extensively treating Gazan victims of Israeli air strikes.

On his show, Carlson advocates long-held hard-line conservative views, which include total opposition to immigration, abortion, and trans rights. He also takes a strong stand against war: Carlson has vociferously denounced the American and Israeli attacks on Iran—during which over thirteen thousand targets have been bombed and more than three thousand people killed—as well as Israel’s post–October 7 assault on Gaza. Carlson has personally lobbied Trump, whom he’s known at least since both were NBC television personalities, not to attack Iran. He’s an imperfect vessel for the anti-war argument, but his reach and influence may make him America’s most prominent crusader for the cause.

Because of his reputation among American conservatives, Carlson can book guests such as Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, and grill them on their warmongering. In a 2025 interview that went viral, Carlson asked Cruz to tell him the population of Iran; Cruz couldn’t do it. “You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of the government,” Carlson shouted in response, “and you don’t know anything about the country!” It was a rare thing: a complete pantsing of a powerful public figure. “I am always struck by the ignorance of policymakers,” Carlson told me. “I wanted him to feel shame. And he felt no shame.”

Carlson’s relevance is rooted in the fact that he can both book Cruz and embarrass him. It’s also connected to his symbiosis with a subset of Republicans. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll of self-identified Republicans and Trump voters, nearly 60 percent of those with a “very favorable” view of Carlson say “they want the next Republican presidential nominee to take the party in a new direction.”

What may be most significant about Carlson now is that his campaign against the Iran war and Israel’s influence on the American political system has placed him in strange cultural territory: suddenly, he has fans on the left. Cenk Uygur, the creator of the progressive news show The Young Turks, has cheered Carlson for criticizing Trump’s attacks on Muslims. When Olivia Reingold, a writer for the Free Press, compiled a dossier against Rama Duwaji, the First Lady of New York City, one of Reingold’s ostensibly damning reveals was that Duwaji had liked a Carlson post criticizing AIPAC.

Peter Beinart—the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and a prominent Israel critic—has pushed back on the left’s support for Carlson, arguing in a recent Substack video that any progressive who is going on Carlson’s show “should not leave your principles at the door. If you’re against bigotry” and “the argument that somehow white Christians are superior to Black and brown immigrants,” then don’t “ignore all of that because you think you’re working with him to try to turn US policy against Israel.” Carlson recently spoke to Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a journalist for the New York Times, who pressed him about his interview with Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist influencer.

Carlson often starts his podcast episodes with lengthy, showy monologues. He doesn’t write them down, he told me, instead sketching them out in his head during daily sauna sessions. The monologues encapsulate both his appeal and the fear he strikes in people. Whatever the topic—biblical giants, Christian nationalism, Gaza—he is a preternaturally compelling speaker. At one point in our conversation, he fell into a reverie describing all the cigarettes he smoked in Dubai while sitting down with an aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. “I love smoking so much,” Carlson said. These days, though, he mostly gets his fix via his own nicotine-pouch brand, ALP, which stands for American Lip Pillow.

Carlson’s barn, in the town of Woodstock—his family has owned the barn for years, and their summer home is nearby—feels like a GOP-themed chain restaurant. Nearly every spare inch is covered with taxidermy or Republican memorabilia. Carlson took a seat under a big stuffed bear head and torso, near a Nixon/Agnew sign and a Bush ’88 ashtray. He spit out an ALP, popped in a new one—with twelve milligrams of nicotine, he made sure to point out, making it one of the most potent pouches on the market—and we began talking. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AB: Fox fired you in 2023. Did you anticipate any of what would come next?

TC: No! I don’t anticipate where I’m going to be after dinner tonight. I’m not a planner. I never have been. A lot of our producers got fired with me. We immediately pivoted from television to the internet. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. We had the Fox studio in the other part of the barn: they came and took all their cameras and the lighting rig and the soundproofing.

I certainly did not anticipate talking about Israel. I had been on TV for thirty years. I don’t think I had ever really talked about Israel. From my perspective, I got pushed into it.

How so?

I felt I had no choice. Early in 2025, Netanyahu showed up at the White House right after Trump’s inauguration, and I thought, “This is a little early to be siphoning off the energy from this campaign and this election for the benefit of another country.” And I resented it. I very quickly began to understand the point of these visits was a regime-change effort in Iran. And that’s something that I talked to Trump about many times over ten years. Fifty times! More! In public, but mostly in private.

The breaking point and the huge change in my life came in June of 2025, with the Twelve-Day War—which was not about Iran’s nuclear program. It was the first salvo in a regime-change effort led by Israel. And that’s just antithetical to everything Trump ran on.

I’ve been to Israel several times, both for work and as a visitor. I love Jerusalem—amazing city—but I’m not interested in Israel. I don’t think it’s significant as a country from an American perspective. It’s not in our hemisphere. It’s got no resources. So I just don’t care. But once you start taking over my political system and destroying my country, then I have a right to care. So now I do care.

When you’re trying to dissuade Trump from going to war, what do you see as your role? Are you speaking as a concerned American or as a journalist?

What category do I occupy? I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m not interested at all in defining it. I’m not a politician, that’s for sure. I’m not a rival to Trump for power. I have no power. I’m someone who knows Trump, and I know him well, and I’ve known him for a long time. I can call him. He often calls me.

Do you still speak to Trump?

I haven’t spoken to him since the regime-change war began. I’m not interested in talking to him. I feel sorry for him. He’s not a man in charge of his own life at this point. I feel sorry for anybody who’s enslaved, including him. I mean, I visited him three times at the White House in the month before the Twelve-Day War, and I told him the same thing all three times: “You’re not gonna see the rise of a democratic, pro-Western government in Tehran. The best you’re gonna see there is just this suppurating wound.” And he said, “I know.”

What is it really about, in Trump’s mind? Why did he destroy himself? His administration? His legacy? The Republican Party and America? I don’t know, but maybe someone at CJR should get on this and find out.

Okay, so, three years after leaving Fox, you’re suddenly one of the most prominent anti-war voices in America—

It’s not hard, because no one else is against it! Where is everybody?

Are you surprised to find yourself in this position?

Well, no. I’ve been against war since December of 2003, when I was in Iraq and I was highly distressed by it. So I’ve had the same views for twenty-three years now, more or less. But I just stayed away from Israel because—and I would say this to people who worked for me at Fox—it’s not worth it. It’s too personal. The unwritten rule is that criticism of Israel is criticism of all Jews, and because I am not against Jews, it’s not worth it.

I’ve been to Israel a lot, so I’m fully aware of the apartheid situation in Israel. I’ve been offended by it going back twenty years. But I would always say to myself, “Okay, I’ve been in a lot of places with injustice.” I’ve seen Nigerians treat Liberians like animals, firsthand, in West Africa, and I was offended by it. But I didn’t organize my life around defending oppressed Liberians.

Occasionally, something would happen and my staff at Fox would bring me a story about Israel. I’d be like, “Nope, I don’t want to do it.” Now, that was probably cowardice on my part, but also the truth was I had mixed feelings about it. I’m not defending this. I’m just telling you the way I thought. I would sublimate it. “Is it really worth it? I don’t want to think about it, and I’ve got all these children, and I want America to be a decent place.” But the Iran war, that was too far.

There’s been speculation that hawks like Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist, have played a part in convincing Trump to continue the Iran war. Do we, meaning the public, have a good understanding of how people in the media influence Trump?

I don’t know if people have a good understanding of it. I don’t know if I always have a good understanding of it. But I don’t believe that Trump is substantially influenced by Marc Thiessen. I doubt Marc Thiessen influences his wife, assuming he has one. I think that Marc Thiessen and others like that are just a sideshow designed to divert your attention away from the people who are influencing the president. And those would include his donors. Those would include John Paulson and Miriam Adelson and Rupert Murdoch, who’s had a huge effect on Trump. Rupert Murdoch would call Trump three or four times a day to encourage him to attack Iran. And I know that because I’ve talked to Trump about it many times.

You and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, were both on Fox. Do you have any thoughts about his fitness for the job?

I feel sad about the whole thing. I think it’s disgusting to brag about killing people. It’s totally unchristian and immoral. We should treat death with reverence, period. You can certainly make the case that some people should be killed, but I don’t think anyone should ever celebrate the death of another human being. And by the way, you’re gonna be punished for that.

What do you make of Trump’s lurching attempts to end the war in Iran with the memorandum of understanding?

It’s a humiliating defeat for the United States, but it’s still an improvement over what would happen if we kept going, so I’m grateful for it. Israel is the victim in this. Israel got so far over its skis. Imagine it from Israel’s perspective: you think you’re gonna be the regional hegemon, and then, three months later, Iran becomes a global power. It’s a freaking nightmare!

But there’s no meaningful diplomatic effort; Israel doesn’t even have the capacity for diplomacy. “We’re just gonna explode your pagers.” You can talk yourself into thinking you’re far more powerful than you are, and when you do that, you get hurt. I learned that at twenty-five in a bar fight. And I never punched anyone again, because last time I did, I got the snot knocked out of me, and I had to go on TV with a black eye. I was married. With kids. I was actually thirty-two, now that I’m thinking about it. And my wife was not impressed at all, and my kids were confused. Everything about it was bad. But I realized I’m better at talking my way out of problems than fighting my way out of problems.

I don’t think I’m making complicated points, and I don’t think I’m saying anything radical. Like in that interview with the New York Times. Midway through it she gets kind of emotional and treats me like I’m a dangerous figure. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as thoroughly moderate, and more so as I get older, and I don’t think I have any weird sacred cows that I’m not admitting in public.

The Times reporter, Garcia-Navarro, asked repeatedly about your interview with Nick Fuentes, which seemed to surprise you.

I’m happy to answer questions about Nick Fuentes, but if you’re asking me your eleventh question on Nick Fuentes, I’m gonna have to call it out for what it is, which is a diversion tactic.

I feel like the thing that people are really mad about is the fact that they can’t get jobs that are well-paying enough to build an independent life. Young people are threatened by the promise of AI, which is taking away their futures. And she wants to talk about Nick Fuentes? It is so perfectly representative of the way a certain class of people in America thinks, which is small and narrow. We’re supposed to be running the world! Not with people like you, man.

You did express regret in that Times interview about interviewing Fuentes, at least on the basis that it created too much blowback for you. If you are going to continue to be a prominent anti-war voice and Israel critic, are you thinking about calibrating your approach in any way?

No. I’m not an anti-Semite; if I was an anti-Semite, I would just say so: “I’m against the Jews, here’s why.” I don’t have an employer. I don’t have investors. I don’t even have any creditors, so I can say whatever I think is true, and I plan to.

I find it so interesting that people are unwilling to accept my word. I always say, “Well, why wouldn’t I just say it? What am I going to get? Canceled? I’ve already been fired.” I had the highest-rated show in the history of Fox, and they fired me anyway. So it’s like, what are you going to take from me now?

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recently reported that JD Vance pitched having you interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison as part of the Trump administration’s pushback to negative coverage around the Epstein files. Were you involved in this idea?

I was one of the very first, maybe the first person to attack the administration in public last summer for hiding the Epstein materials. Not only was I not involved in a cover-up, I was publicly attacking them. I’ll be happy to interview Ghislaine Maxwell or anybody else. That’s my job. But no, I was not involved in a plot to cover it up.

In an interview recently, Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism “czar,” name-checked you after being asked about right-wing terror threats.

Sebastian Gorka—he’s not even American. My family’s been here for like four hundred years. And I’m the terror threat because I would like democracy and free speech. I texted him immediately and said, “Let’s have a conversation.” He never responded. He used to invite me over for dinner to his house, and I got such a creepy vibe. I just knew, I’m gonna get over there and he’s going to have me put on a costume.

Sorry, a costume? What kind of a costume?

I don’t know. I’m just guessing. If there’s anybody that has a costume room, it’s Gorka.

Speaking of free speech crackdowns—one of the most famous recent examples when it comes to Israel/Palestine is Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student-protest leader detained by ICE.

Even then, I didn’t say anything. So determined was I to stay out of this that I made the—in retrospect, probably foolish and maybe even cowardly—decision to not say anything when they started revoking people’s visas for their political views.

Now, I’m for less immigration. In fact, I’m for ending all immigration today. I don’t know how you can justify immigration when half of all white-collar jobs are going away because of AI. What are people going to do for a living? There’s no economic justification for any immigration in the United States because we can’t even figure out what we’re going to do with all these unemployed people. So it’s crazy. Social-services spending, healthcare, education—who’s going to pay for that? So I’m opposed. And in the case of Sebastian Gorka—like, I would deport him immediately.

Legacy media is in constant flux. Do you see the old-school press being able to navigate this era? Or is it slowly just withering away?

Do I see NBC News making a comeback? No! I don’t know David Ellison, but he’s not a genius, I’ll tell you that. He’s buying CBS. Are you gonna buy RCA Records next? I wouldn’t take CBS News for free. I wouldn’t take CNN for free—maybe CNN International. But, like, Paramount Pictures? This is not the future. It’s not even the recent past. It’s the distant past.

I’m not exactly sure where young people are getting their information, but wherever they’re getting it is the right place, because they are so well-informed. For years, I thought that weed and porn and SSRIs and benzodiazepines have totally disabled young people. But I don’t think that anymore. I employ a lot of them, and they’re the sharpest, hardest-working people. They give me a lot of hope. And boy, they don’t believe anything. And they’re very well-informed. So much better-informed than I was when I was twenty-seven. I thought the CIA was a force for good! I literally thought that!

I think Trump is the last Fox News viewer. I’m so grateful every single day that I got fired. I probably wouldn’t have left, knowing me. I’d just be increasingly unhappy.

And here, you feel like you’ve found your—

I feel totally happy. I mean, I think my influence is overstated. I don’t seem to have influence at all. I couldn’t stop Trump from attacking Iran. And my wife, who is hilarious, literally laughed at me after the war started: “So I guess you weren’t very good at that, Mr. Powerful Influential Guy!” What matters is the ability to affect outcomes. And I have no demonstrated ability to do that. None.

Some have referred to the current divide on the right as being a split between Fox News Republicans and YouTube Republicans. Are you strategically positioning yourself as counterprogramming?

I’m not strategic in any way. I make almost all decisions on the basis of smell and instinct. I have no real idea who watches our show. I’m sure there are people who work here who have, or claim to have, a better sense of who the audience is. I really don’t. I make all decisions about what we air myself, usually without consulting anybody. I have a short attention span. That’s been a huge advantage for me over the years.

One thing I always loved about Rachel Maddow, and I often told her this, is that she just existed in her own universe. She’s off in the Berkshires alone, thinking. She was disconnected from the herd. I’ve always wanted to be that. I haven’t always succeeded. It’s shameful the number of times I’ve covered something because everyone else was talking about it. But I really try not to be that way. And increasingly, especially as I age, I am cut off.

I’ve never posted in my life. I don’t have my password on social media. I don’t read anything. I get almost all my information by text message or phone call. That’s it. It could be every bit as wrong. But I just don’t trust anybody at all, and I don’t want it in my head. I’ve never listened to a podcast. I have some form of intense dyslexia, and something about podcasts and movies and television puts me to sleep almost immediately. I still read books every day.

Are you interested in aligning yourself with other anti-war voices?

I do know what really matters is war and finance. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? And who gets killed? And on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.

And that’s the lesson of the last two and a half months, to me. If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war—if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is—then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people. And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party.

And when you say do everything you can—

I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make sixty thousand dollars a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care. It’s not even a factor. “What about Hamas?” I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.

Would you be a candidate for this third party?

I don’t want to be a candidate. Before I did the Times interview, someone said to me, “They’re going to ask you if you’re running for president.” I was very tempted to say “I am running—on the pro-patriarchy ticket.” Just to make sure I gain no new fans.

What’s your goal in speaking to outlets like CJR or the Times—people who are presumably outside of your direct audience?

It’s the only power I have. I don’t have any tricky plan to win Times readers to my campaign for some office. I don’t have any institutional power. I don’t control a military. So all I have is the power to talk and be heard. And though it’s borne no fruit so far, I remain hopeful.

The headline of that Times interview was “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?” The Atlantic used an almost identical headline for a 2019 profile.

So weird. Like I’m using some kind of verbal magic trick to hide something. From my perspective, I am the least mysterious person who’s ever lived. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything in public that’s complicated or hard to understand. I have a commitment to not doing that. I believe if you can’t explain something clearly, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to hide something.

What do I really believe? What do you think I’m hiding? I could talk for twenty-four hours! I’ll tell you everything I believe! I can’t stop talking!

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

WHO COUNTS?

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:58:04 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ role documenting members of the press killed in the Israel-Gaza war has made it a target.

Mourners carry the body of Abd Shaat, a Palestinian journalist killed in an Israeli strike. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

At 12:37pm EST on June 25, Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), announced that the organization was reexamining the names in its database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war. “CPJ condemns in no uncertain terms the misrepresentation of combatants as journalists or media workers—or the misuse of ‘Press’ insignia. Such actions endanger every single individual journalist legitimately trying to report,” she said in a statement. “We are conducting a full review of the names on our lists to confirm that no one who was actively engaged in combat is listed in our data.” Ginsberg also pointed out that “in-person verification by researchers from outside Gaza has been impossible” because, as Gerry Shih wrote for CJR’s recent Access Issue, since the war began, Israel has barred international correspondents and press advocates from reporting independently in the territory.

Four hours later, at 4:47pm, Jacob Weisberg—the chair of CPJ’s board of directors and a cofounder of Pushkin Industries—emailed the board with an update on a parallel but distinct plan to reconsider who counts as a member of the press. He wrote, according to emails I have reviewed, that he’d established a “special task force to reexamine the question of ‘Who is a Journalist?’” He told board members: “This inquiry is not limited to Gaza, and will address questions about our protection of journalists affiliated with the non-military wings of identified terrorist organizations as well as journalists engaged in official propaganda or disinformation.” He said that nine people had already agreed to work on the task force, and that they would share their recommendation with the board at the next scheduled meeting, in October. (In response to interview requests, Weisberg referred to public statements and said that he was “not going to comment on the board’s internal discussions or processes.”)

The pair of announcements, one public and the other intended to be private, quickly set off a widespread debate about whether one of the world’s most influential press advocacy groups was caving to political pressure. Since the Israel-Gaza war began, in October of 2023, CPJ—a nonprofit headquartered in New York that promotes global press freedom, provides safety support to reporters, and produces research about attacks on the press—has kept a well-sourced and widely cited count of journalists killed. CPJ says the database records people’s names only after its researchers, based around the world, have confirmed via “at least two independent sources of information, desk-based research, and in-person research where possible” that each person is a journalist who has been killed in relation to their work. (Supporting evidence can include information from “family, colleagues, media reports, civil society, and government or independent investigations,” according to CPJ’s methodology.) The tally, at present, documents two hundred and sixty-three journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, the vast majority of them by the Israeli military, which routinely targets journalists and accuses them, without evidence, of being terrorists. CPJ’s research puts Israel’s war on Gaza down as the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. This has made the CPJ database, and the methodology behind it, a target for attacks by those seeking to discredit critics of the Benjamin Netanyahu administration.

These attacks have grown louder in recent weeks, in the wake of an article by Nicholas Kristof, published on May 11 in the New York Times’ opinion section, that reported on allegations of sexual violence perpetrated by the Israeli military, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” A right-wing news site called the Washington Free Beacon—which once ran a piece with the headline “January 6: An Anniversary Worth Celebrating”—has since published a string of articles seeking to discredit Kristof, his sources, his family members, and the organizations he cited, including CPJ. On May 23, the Free Beacon ran a story saying that CPJ had removed some names from its database of killed journalists. (The same Beacon article quoted a spokesman for Honest Reporting—an organization that Reporters Without Borders has said “constantly defames journalists and media outlets that take a critical view of Israel”—who made the absurd allegation that news organizations citing CPJ data were “amplifying Hamas propaganda.”) On May 27, the Free Beacon published another article, this one accusing CPJ of anti-Israel bias and attacking its board members for, among other things, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Behind the scenes at CPJ, meanwhile, a related, though very different, conversation was taking shape. Throughout the spring, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries or statements claiming that a number of people in CPJ’s database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war were, in fact, active combatants. After further research, CPJ removed several names. That meant that, since October 7, 2023, a total of twenty people had been removed from the list once new information emerged indicating that they did not meet CPJ’s criteria—including eight people who were found to be active combatants. On May 27, CPJ updated its site to provide details on why the recent changes had been made. At the beginning of June, the organization quietly started “a comprehensive review” of its database, according to Sara Qudah, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, who requested it. The goal was to check that everyone in the database fit the organization’s existing definition by verifying each individual’s status with at least two new independent sources; the undertaking also aims to uncover potential problems with the existing verification process. The review, which is ongoing, has been “led by a small team within the Middle East and North Africa program,” Qudah explained in an article for the New Arab, and is “entirely independent.”

Around the same time, a separate process got underway, under the auspices of CPJ’s board, which comprises almost thirty senior journalists, media executives, and leaders from related professions. (The board is not involved in the day-to-day running of the organization.) At a board meeting in early June, members discussed the recent Free Beacon coverage, and one member, Jonathan Klein, the former chief executive of Getty Images, told me that he proposed revisiting how CPJ defines a journalist. That proposal was taken up by Weisberg. “We are working on a process for the board to engage in that will allow us to consider the current definition and to assess what changes we might make,” he told the board on June 9, according to emails I have reviewed, promising “more details in the coming weeks.”

But when Weisberg sent his “Who is a Journalist?” email, on June 25, it came as a surprise to Nika Soon-Shiong, the publisher of Drop Site News and a CPJ board member since June of 2021. Though she was aware of Weisberg’s interest in the question, there had been no vote or discussion of whether to act on the proposal to reevaluate CPJ’s definition. “This was an effort led by a handful of board members to narrow the definition of who is a journalist and exclude Palestinian and Lebanese colleagues,” Soon-Shiong told me in a statement. On June 28, she sent an email to Weisberg and the rest of the board—which she later posted on X—voicing concerns. “I request that the Board vote on whether to proceed with this effort, given the absence of a clear objective, defined scope of work, or assessment of the potential institutional risks,” she wrote. Reevaluating the criteria for who counts as a journalist in a way that might exclude Palestinian and Lebanese reporters at state-backed outlets would cause “permanent reputational damage” to CPJ and would represent bowing to “political pressure,” she wrote. (Soon-Shiong also told me that, following her email, she was informed that her term on the board had expired; the set terms last five years. Weisberg declined to comment.)

The same day, Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet who serves as the Palestine correspondent at The Nation, claimed on X that CPJ’s board of directors “will formally change its definition of who qualifies as a journalist, to broadly exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who worked for government-funded media outlets.” The move, he wrote, “makes a mockery of the purported mission of the organization.” The post sparked an immediate backlash on social media, including accusations that CPJ was acquiescing to political pressure—not entirely unheard of among media and tech organizations that have, for instance, been seen bending the knee to the Trump administration as it attacks the press.

On Wednesday, July 1, as controversy and confusion mounted over the operational review and the board’s plans, CPJ’s board held an emergency meeting and voted to affirm its existing definition of a journalist. The vote was seventeen to one, according to the Free Beacon, with “Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote,” thereby halting the chair’s proposal. (The Beacon seemed to be referring to Katherine Meeks, the general counsel of Fox News Media, who did not respond to my request for an interview.) “It is not true that CPJ planned to change our definition of who is a journalist to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press killed in the Israel-Gaza war,” Weisberg said in a statement after the vote, calling reports to the contrary “unsubstantiated allegations” that “undermine” CPJ’s work and “endanger” Palestinian and Lebanese journalists.

Some media coverage confused two discrete processes—the ongoing CPJ review of its data, on the one hand, and an unsuccessful push to reevaluate the broader definition of a journalist, on the other. The board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) requested an urgent meeting with Ginsberg, held on June 30. They came away reassured. As they wrote afterward to members, Ginsberg told them, “There has been no board decision to change the definition. And if they change the definition to exclude Palestinian journalists, they can take my resignation with it.” One person in the meeting, Aymann Ismail—the AMEJA board president and a senior writer at Slate, who spoke to me in a personal capacity—said Ginsberg made a clear distinction “between the daily operations of CPJ, and the board.” According to Ismail, Ginsberg told AMEJA that CPJ’s database review was “something that they would have been doing regardless of what the board was discussing, because they care very deeply about their rigorous processes of verification.”

CPJ had, in fact, undergone a recent stress-testing of its methodology, in 2025. In the spring of that year, staff representing all parts and regions of CPJ met four times to discuss who counted as a journalist. The meetings, according to emails I reviewed, involved “kicking the tires” of the organization’s definition and figuring out “where we most often get tripped up.” Where, exactly, is the point at which someone becomes a propagandist, an activist, an influencer, a foreign agent? CPJ staff agreed that “accuracy” and publishing “fact-based” material was crucial to inclusion as a journalist; that the medium or platform in question did not matter; that for someone to be considered a journalist, their witnessing should not be a one-off; and that CPJ should look at the individual journalist, not the organization to which they were affiliated, when determining their status. The process led to a slight tweak in CPJ’s public definition: “CPJ defines journalists as people who regularly cover news or comment on public affairs through any medium to report or share fact-based information with an audience.” (Changes in italics.) In June of 2025, the board of directors voted to adopt that definition.

CPJ’s long-standing inclusion of reporters affiliated with state-backed media or militant or armed groups has made it a target of bad-faith organizations like Honest Reporting. But it’s worth emphasizing that CPJ researchers evaluate whether people killed were genuinely engaged in regular journalistic activity, and that anyone they judge to be actively engaged in combat or inciting imminent violence is automatically excluded from the data. This is in line with how many human rights organizations define journalists. The UN Human Rights Office, for instance, has said that journalists are people “documenting events, analyzing issues, gathering facts, and processing data, to inform society on matters of public interest.” Notice: not people who work for journalistic institutions, but people doing journalism. This rubric could include journalists at Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza (affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that runs the government); Xinhua News Agency in China (owned by the one-party state); or, for that matter, Stars and Stripes (owned by the US Department of Defense) or Voice of America (overseen by the US Agency for Global Media). “We recognize that across the world, individuals working for these outlets are essential in providing information to communities,” Ginsberg has said.

Some human rights professionals argue that making the test of who is a journalist about one’s function, not the politics or affiliations of their employer, is important because witnesses who work for one political group or another are more likely to be found in places where ordinary reporting is suppressed or access is denied. Amos Barshad has documented for CJR how international journalists have been trying to get into Gaza for years. Does that not make any bona fide journalistic work on the ground there a public service? A vital way of recording a war that would otherwise go unseen? And if someone is killed for doing that journalistic work—for performing the role of witness, even if they report for a state-owned media organization affiliated with a group whose politics we may find grotesque—why should they be excluded from a tally of journalists slain for doing their jobs?

Ismail, of AMEJA, told me that, following his meeting with Ginsberg, it became clear that the two separate reviews were being conflated in some reports and on social media. He added, though, that he understood why the misunderstanding had elicited such a fierce response. “This is emotional for so many people, for obvious reasons. This is a matter of life and death,” he said. “We’ve seen so many examples of the Israeli military justifying the killing of journalists who no one would question their status as journalists.” He noted the grim emergence of a new term used by the Israel Defense Forces: “They were calling these people ‘combat propagandists.’ It’s not a thing. And even if that were the case—where somebody was on someone’s bankroll—that does not make them a military target.”

Other Notable Stories …
By Jem Bartholomew

On Tuesday, NPR published—then quickly retracted—an article by Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent, stating, incorrectly, that Samuel Alito, a Supreme Court Justice, had retired. Totenberg, who is eighty-two and has been a well-sourced reporter on that beat for decades, apologized to Alito and called it her “worst professional mistake of my more than fifty years in journalism.”

Totenberg explained that the error grew out of her having misheard the answer to a question: “I asked somebody what was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘Retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the s on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed—something no reporter should ever do—that” Alito was retiring, she said, according to CNN. (The announcements referred to court staff retirements.) One NPR host told Brian Stelter of CNN that the retraction was “a worst-case scenario for us.”A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to temporarily halt its requirement for journalists to be accompanied by an official escort while inside the building, the New York Times reported. The ruling came in response to the second of two lawsuits the paper has filed in recent months seeking to overturn restrictions imposed on journalists by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. The latest lawsuit, filed in May, targeted the escort requirement, calling it “retaliatory.” Judge Paul L. Friedman, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said in a preliminary ruling that the escort policy violated the First Amendment. For more on the Pentagon’s effort to muzzle critical national security reporting, see Ivan L. Nagy’s recent timeline for CJR.

On Monday, a reporter and a photographer for CBS News Chicago were attacked during a shoot by three men, the news organization reported. One of the men reportedly shouted a racial slur at one of the journalists, who is Black, and ordered a German shepherd to attack (it did not obey); the assailants also cracked the windshield of a CBS News van with a traffic cone and smashed a camera. “They just were trying to do anything they could to scare them unnecessarily,” a witness said. Chicago police later arrested the three men, who face felony charges including committing a hate crime, criminal damage to property, and aggravated battery of a police officer. Lisa Nandy, the UK’s secretary of state for culture, media, and sport, said last week that she was likely to ask the country’s competition watchdog to scrutinize Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will significantly grow the Ellison family’s media empire and give it control over CNN. Nandy has given Paramount until July 6 to respond. “We are confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues in the UK and remain confident in our stated transaction timeline,” a spokesperson for Paramount said. In other news, Sky has announced a deal worth 1.6 billion pounds (2.1 billion dollars) to buy the broadcasting and streaming arm of ITV.For Vanity Fair, Margaux MacColl interviewed Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Politico, about, among other things, the outlet’s drive into AI. “While some media leaders have erred on the side of caution, enforcing policies that prevent or severely limit the use of AI tools, Sheikholeslami has leaned into experimentation, launching multiple public-facing AI tools and chalking up now-defunct products” as useful means of data collection, MacColl writes. One AI tool—which was still in beta and was later shut down—was asked by employees during testing to produce feature reports on fictitious lobbying groups, which it did, hallucinating false information and attributing it to Politico articles. “If you don’t participate, you don’t learn,”

Sheikholeslami told MacColl.Three men were found not guilty on Friday of murdering Lyra McKee, a journalist from Belfast who died after being struck by a bullet in Derry, Northern Ireland, in April of 2019, at the age of twenty-nine. McKee was reporting on rioting at the time; the New IRA claimed responsibility for her killing. The three men had been on trial at Belfast Crown Court since May of 2024. Judge Patricia Smyth said “McKee’s murder was an act of senseless violence” but added: “The gunman has never been brought to the court, and the evidence against those accused of assisting or encouraging has fallen short of that required for conviction.” Reporters Without Borders urged authorities to continue pursuing all legal avenues to secure justice for McKee. And Charles H. Townsend—who was chief executive of Condé Nast from 2004 to 2015, during the media industry’s transition from print to digital—died on June 11 in Florida, aged eighty-two. His daughter told the Times that his death, in a hospital, was from sepsis. Townsend “might have been an ideal steward for Condé” in an earlier era, Michael Grynbaum, a Times journalist, wrote in Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. But he “had the misfortune to reach the summit just as the mountain began to melt.”

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From Augustine To Jefferson, The Idea Of separating Church And State Has Deep Religious And Secular Roots

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:53:23 +0000

The founding generation: James Madison, left, and Thomas Jefferson, both proponents of the separation of church and state. Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

BY STEPHEN K. GREEN

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR RELIGION,

LAW & DEMOCRACY, WILLAMETTE

UNIVERSITY

The Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission released its report on June 26, 2026, on the state of religious freedom in the United States, declaring it to be under attack.

The commission was established in May 2025 to identify and report on “emerging threats to religious liberty, uphold Federal laws that protect all citizens’ full participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protect the free exercise of religion.” Despite those altruistic goals, from the beginning, the commission faced criticism that the composition and agenda of the body were slanted toward a conservative Christian perspective.

The commission conducted seven hearings over the course of a year, taking testimony from approximately 100 witnesses.

The draft report recounts numerous incidents of reputed bias and mistreatment of people based on their religious faith, and it places the blame on bureaucrats who exhibit a disdain for demonstrations of religious conviction. The report attributes much of this to the use of “the metaphor ‘wall of separation of church and state’ to justify excluding religious Americans from equal participation in the public square.”

As author of the book “Separating Church and State: A History,” I argue that the commission’s broadside on the concept of separation of church and state is misplaced, but not new. Critics have portrayed the idea as anti-religious and ahistorical ever since the Supreme Court embraced it in 1947.

Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’

In the 1947 landmark case of Everson vs. Board of Education, involving public financial aid for religious education, the justices announced that they would use the concept of church-state separation as a guide for interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Those clauses state “that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In that same decision, the justices also employed the metaphor of “a wall of separation between church and state,” a phrase borrowed from an 1802 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to an association of Baptist churches in Connecticut. At the time, the Baptists were a minority in a state that still maintained a religious establishment. Jefferson sympathized with their plight, employing the wall of separation metaphor to emphasize that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God” and not to “the legislative powers of government.”

Tradition of separation

The idea of separate spheres of spiritual and secular functions and authority was advanced by religious and secular thinkers to benefit both religion and the state.

In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities, one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the purity of the church.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.

Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”

The metaphor of a ‘wall of separation’

At the same time, religious reformers were employing concepts of walls, hedges or other barriers to ensure that the secular and religious realms remained apart.

Protestant Anabaptists – Mennonites, Hutterites, Brethren – took the theological idea of separationism to heart, seeking to keep their communities apart from what they saw as the corruptions of the fallen world. They were declining to swear oaths of allegiance to civil authorities or otherwise participate in civic functions.

The early leader of the Mennonites, Menno Simons, used the term a “separating wall” to illustrate the degree of separateness their faith required from civil authority.

Finally, Roger Williams, the Puritan-turned-Baptist founder of Rhode Island, advocated for complete religious liberty. He called for maintaining a “hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

Enlightenment figures, such as John Locke, also advanced notions of separation of church and state. In 1689, Locke wrote that the church must be “absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable.”

Influential British writer James Burgh called for building “an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil … the less the church and state had to do with one another, it would be better for both.” Scholars believe that this was likely one source for Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Connecticut Baptists where he used the same metaphor.

A familiar concept

Thus, members of the America’s founding generation were familiar with the concept of distinct spheres of authority between religion and government and the necessity of keeping those functions separate.

Even though Jefferson used the wall metaphor only once, he worked assiduously throughout his life to advance religious freedom via church-state separation. James Madison employed similar imagery, such as calling for “a great barrier” between the two.

Church-state separation wasn’t just an imagery idea; it was a concept that many people embraced. As Madison wrote, “religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

As a result, to this day, many denominations and religiously affiliated groups, such as many Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and members of Reform Judaism, among others, support the separation of church and state as essential for maintaining religious freedom.

And church-state separation continues to receive popular support. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2026, 54% of Americans say the government should enforce church-state separation – a consistent percentage – whereas only 13% believe it should stop enforcing it, down from 19% in 2021.

Narrow view

Despite this pedigree, the Religious Liberty Commission’s report expresses particular disdain for the “wall” metaphor, stating that “the ‘wall of separation’ phrase does not appear in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution.” The report calls it a “belabored metaphor” that “can wrongly imply that church and state are opposed to one another and must remain completely separate.”

The report also takes a narrow view of what is prohibited by the religion clauses: “that the government may not officially prefer one religion over another, take over the functions of a church, or coerce religious observance,” which would otherwise allow for other types of church-state intermixing such as government funding of religious education.

In her final opinion as a Supreme Court justice in 2005, Sandra Day O’Connor – a judicial conservative – reflected on the importance of church-state separation to guarantee full religious freedom.

“The First Amendment expresses our Nation’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions – one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion.”

She concluded with a challenge: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

That the commission’s report ignores the benefit of church-state separation to American society is troubling.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

How Did It Feel To Be An American Colonist In 1776? Probably Itchy, Achy And Slightly Nauseated

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:29:55 +0000

Life went on in the late 18th century, regardless of your everyday ailments. Archive Photos/Getty Images

BY KATHERINE OTT

CURATOR OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE,

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN

HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Trade the tricorn hats, bonnets and homespun shirts for flip flops, sneakers and soccer jerseys, and the intrepid revolutionaries of 1776 would have looked a lot like the people of 2026. But their sense of embodiment and experience of health was markedly different from Americans today.

It goes deeper than not having aspirin, toothpaste or air conditioning, or not knowing about germs and penicillin. What was happening in their gut and mouth and on their skin was a world away from today. Chronic bodily states of indigestion, itchy skin, flatulence and slow-healing wounds were common and accommodated.

The American colonists were friends with affliction and shared their suffering socially, in writing and conversation. Ben Franklin, no stranger to suffering, wrote that “We are first mov’d by Pain, and the whole succeeding Course of our Lives is but one continu’d Series of Action with a view to be freed from it.”

Acute illnesses like smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, yellow fever and diptheria shadowed every ache and cough. But the everyday diminishment of vitality, mobility and equanimity defined life in 1776. Illness was pervasive. Rich or poor, free or enslaved, everyone was at risk.

Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with bodies and what it felt like to be in someone else’s skin. Now that I am a medical historian, I am lucky to be a Smithsonian curator with access to a large collection of medical instruments that figuratively put some flesh on the descriptions in old letters and medical journals about rheum, dyspepsia and other then-common conditions.

Although embodied experience varied in different localities around the Atlantic Basin by climate, legal status, race and other vulnerabilities, the instruments used on those bodies capture general notions of physical well-being. A lot is missing from our connection to people in the past when all we use are words.

Human bodies were like animals’

The few medical instruments of the revolutionary era were heavy in the hand, awkward in use and imprecise to maneuver. They also tell a story of tolerance for pain and discomfort that is both disquieting and fascinating.

The design and materials of devices such as bone saws, fleams and scarifacators – used to bleed veins and skin surfaces – illustrate the close affinity of humans with other animals. The same scalpel or bone saw that cut a human also cleft sheep, horses, pigs and other animals in distress.

The veil between species was thin. In 1776, people lived closely with their animals. They brought them into the house in bad weather or spent nights on straw in the shed with them – exclusive of genteel families, that is.

Cleanliness often took the form of river bathing, intended to invigorate rather than for sanitary purposes. In place of bathing, people changed clothes. The result was a menu of skin complaints – fungal, bacterial and otherwise.

Lice abounded. Bed bugs interrupted sleep. Scabies, ringworm, rashes from numerous unknown sources and unwashed skin was wrapped in clothing of stiff linen, smelly woolens or coarse calico. The byproduct was irritated, itchy skin with the discomfort of scratches, scabs and the stink that accompanied it.

Because infancy was risky, some colonial families and midwives followed tough love and tried to “harden” the child with cold water immersion and weaning. Many Indigenous women, on the other hand, nursed their infants until they were three or four years old. One in three colonist babies did not live to their second birthday.

Tools to purge ill humors

If a person did survive to adulthood, there was a good chance they would live to 55 or 60, barring accidents or childbirth complications.

There were few professional doctors, so healthcare came from midwives, bonesetters who also cut hair and removed cataracts, ministers, and community members, including apothecaries and plantation root doctors who were knowledgeable about plants. Although Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had been established as the first American hospital 25 years earlier, institutions for care were few at the time of the revolution.

European colonists commonly believed that the balance of humors – yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm – circulating through one’s body was important for health. Belief in the efficacy of bloodletting was well-established and undisputed until well into the 1800s.

Doctors, following accepted practice, would likely have bled or purged an ill person for humoral balance. Surgeons washed their bloody hands in contaminated water and dried them on their equally bloody apron or clothes, unaware of germs.

When fluid accumulated from infection, a practitioner might use a small sharp spear nested in a metal tube, called a trocar and cannula. The pair were pushed into the body wherever swelling threatened a patient’s health, or exploration of an inner cavity was warranted. Then the doctor removed the perforating trocar, with its triangular shaped head, and left the cannula in place, as a conduit for fluids going in or coming out.

Desperate patients drank liquor to escape the procedure in this pre-anaesthesia era. Community care by family, friends and experienced elders was often more effective and safer than a trained physician.

A mouthful of troubles

Low-level scurvy, caused by lack of vitamin C, was common, thanks to diets containing few vegetables and fruits. Mild scurvy caused bleeding gums, tooth loss and foul-smelling breath.

Home manuals offering advice for health, domestic activities and marriage included many recipes for mouth wash. Ingredients often included tobacco ash, alum, sage, clove and sometimes charcoal. Charcoal also doubled for polishing teeth.

To pull a cracked or decayed tooth, a practitioner might yank it with the claw of a tooth key, painful but quicker than slippery fingers or forceps.

Without a reliable way to keep food fresh, many meals included sour milk and meat that was beginning to rot – what colonists called “high.” Spoiled food meant dyspepsia – otherwise known as indigestion – and loose bowels.

People commonly used tobacco to treat many ailments, including indigestion, respiratory problems, pain and loathsome mouth afflictions. They also turned to laudanum, from opium, as well as the poisons mercury and antimony.

A life of daily discomfort

Retrospective diagnosis is always flawed but the Revolutionary generation experienced ailments that sound similar to diabetes, arthritis, cancer, anemia, rabies, the common cold and tuberculosis. There were no effective treatments or consistent diagnosis for any of these.

Some explanations of bodily difference were obviously wrong, such as physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush’s conviction that the dark skin of African Americans was a disease, derived from leprosy. Common wisdom also held that birthmarks were caused by the mother’s experience during pregnancy.

Bodily experiences that made sense in 1776 are often inscrutable to people today. Feelings are fleeting and words inadequate. Without considering objects, understanding history is incomplete, leaving people today disconnected from those who lived it.

We can’t directly know each colonist’s individual self. But knowing their material world through medical objects of their time allows us to visit and appreciate how they managed to cut through distractions of the body and bequeath to us those groundbreaking, enduring self-evident truths.

READ ORIGINAL STRY HERE

As The US Turns 250, A Forgotten Founding Influence Helps Explain Its Current Unease

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:12:36 +0000

This painting depicts the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers leaned on French philosopher Montesquieu as they designed the Constitution. GraphicaArtis/Archive Photos via Getty

BY ROBERT A. BALLINGALL

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL

SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, many people in the U.S. are deeply concerned about the country’s future.

A recent poll by Elon University found that 69% of respondents “believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would feel more disappointment than pride about modern American democracy.” Confidence in public institutions is historically low, and the most recent Harvard Youth Poll indicates that just a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel hopeful about the future of America.”

Many are also afraid. For the 10th consecutive year, Americans reported corrupt government officials to be their single greatest fear, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, ranking above financial collapse or a loved one becoming seriously ill.

“Americans have come to see threats as not just the possibility of attack by a foreign adversary. The potential for political violence at home is part of it, along with polarization, corruption and a sense of cultural dysfunction,” pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in The New York Times. “Americans increasingly view the survival of the country as being at stake.”

How are people in the U.S. to make sense of these trends? As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, how faithful is the U.S. today to its founding principles? I’m a political philosophy scholar who studies constitutional government. In my view, an especially helpful approach to answering such questions is to revisit the towering but neglected influence of the French philosopher Montesquieu on the founding of this country.
Montesquieu and the American founding

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was an 18th-century philosopher and aristocrat whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” caused a sensation when published in 1748. His ideas shaped the American founders. At the Constitutional Convention, only the Bible was quoted more often.

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

Montesquieu was especially celebrated for his account of how and why political power needs to be separated into branches. But behind this now familiar idea was another that is less remembered: Montesquieu’s theory of liberty inspired the founders’ own understandings of this core concept of American politics.
A theory of liberty

In “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu describes political liberty as a “tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.” To be free is to believe that one is secure. But to believe as much, “it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.”

Liberty cannot be a matter of “doing what one wants,” Montesquieu warns. What if what one person wants threatens others? Then one person’s freedom to act limits everyone else’s. No one can feel secure unless everyone lives under laws that regulate what each may do. Montesquieu understood liberty in terms of this confidence or “tranquility” because it amounts to being free from the arbitrary will of others.

When Montesquieu stresses freedom from fear of other citizens, he doesn’t just mean private individuals. He especially means those acting in a public capacity, like “magistrates” or “rulers.” If public officials’ behavior doesn’t conform to predictable norms set by law, if agents of the government can summarily arrest people, seize their property or revoke their citizenship – say, by denaturalizing and deporting them without due process – it becomes impossible to feel secure.

Even if such actions aren’t directed against me or those like me, such lawlessness is still threatening because it’s unpredictable. I might support the government’s moves against other groups in the moment, but what’s to stop the government from suddenly turning on me when the political winds change?

To prevent public officials from simply doing what they want, Montesquieu famously called for the separation of political power into branches headed by different citizens.

But, he explains, it is not enough that people live under free institutions. They must also believe those institutions to be in the service of their freedom. Liberty, then, is as much a matter of opinion as of fact.
The tyranny of opinion

Montesquieu shows in “The Spirit of the Laws” how the fundamental laws of a country can permit a free way of life even as the country’s cultural norms prevent it. A country might have a free constitution while its citizens believe they hold moral obligations inconsistent with it.

For example, today, Americans might believe that the demands of racial equity or of evangelical Christianity are so pressing that executive power would be justified in ignoring the legislature or the judiciary to serve them.

“In these instances,” Montesquieu writes, “the Constitution will be free by right and not in fact.” The people – or some of them – will experience the law as a hindrance to what they believe they ought or ought not to do.

In such cases, there arises what Montesquieu calls a tyranny “of opinion.” The laws that would otherwise free people from fear of one another and of the government instead inspire a fear all their own. The laws might prevent what some people believe is morally right, or command – in the name of protecting others’ rights or the common good – what others regard as unjust or unholy.

That misalignment between constitutional law and cultural norms makes people feel insecure. It makes the Constitution seem opposed to their will and sense of duty. It can then seem appealing for a leader to promise, in the name of freedom, to ignore the law.
A bracing reminder

In recent years, figures across the political spectrum have called for radical constitutional change – or for ignoring the Constitution outright. There are calls not only to pack the Supreme Court or to ignore its decisions, but also to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College.

From Montesquieu’s perspective, polarization worsens this appetite for disregarding constitutional norms. Each party champions a cultural agenda from which supporters of the other party recoil. Whenever either party is in office, even when it respects constitutional law, its rule can feel to the other side much like the tyranny of opinion Montesquieu describes. The other side’s policies can seem to violate deeply held values, whether it’s banning transgender girls from competing in girls sports or declining to deport immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally.

According to Montesquieu, liberty depends on the kind of civic culture the U.S. seems at risk of losing. No institutions, however well designed, can preserve liberty if citizens believe their preferred cultural norms are so obligatory that political power is needed to enforce them, opposition be damned.

A culture more tolerant of moral disagreements and less quick to reach for political power to force others to accept what they find morally wrong would help ease the distrust many Americans feel toward the government and one another. Until then, Americans will continue drifting away from the liberty that the U.S. was founded to secure.

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The Rhythms That Broke Bashir: How Sudan’s Music Shaped A Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:13:05 +0000

Sudanese people protest Omar al-Bashir’s authoritarian regime in 2019. Wikimedia Commons

BY CATHY WILCOCK

RESEARCH FELLOW,

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

The revolution in Sudan in 2019 has been eclipsed by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023.

But the events of 2019 demand greater attention as they hold lessons for a post-war Sudan.

Music was central to the protests in 2019. The camp outside military headquarters in Khartoum, where demonstrators gathered for weeks to demand civilian rule, became known as Sudan’s largest ever arts festival.

My research on resistance movements has led me to believe that music is not only a cosmetic accessory to protests. In Sudan, it was an integral part of the revolutionary movement that ousted the Omar al-Bashir regime. For decades, music helped cultivate anti-government sentiment and forge the networks and communities that would sustain the revolution in 2019.

I’ve explored this idea in a recent paper, drawing on interviews with protesters and musicians.
Sudanese music and resistance

Music in Sudan has historically been intertwined with popular resistance. First against colonial rulers and then – following independence in 1956 – against post-colonial despots. The patriotic anthems of the 60s and 70s expressed the sentiment that Sudan was being built by the people, not the government.

As one music fan who was a young teenager in the early 1970s said:

There were different ideas, of course, about what sounded good, but if you were making music, you were against the government, that was for sure.

One after the other, however, authoritarian regimes sought to crush all creativity – and especially music – through censorship laws and the systematic intimidation of artists.

Gigs had to be held as private events in people’s homes and even these were regularly broken up by a morality monitoring unit. Many popular musicians left for careers abroad.

But underground music scenes kept anti-government sentiment alive.

My research shows that the exodus of musicians, producers and fans under the Bashir regime did not weaken popular resistance. Instead, this displacement helped build strong transnational social networks, enabling musicians to record music outside Sudan. This was then distributed back to communities inside the borders. Later, these same social networks supported the 2019 revolution.

Throughout recent history and across various genres and scenes, music has helped the Sudanese imagine alternatives to authoritarian rule and build the relationships needed for collective action.

Given the close historical ties between resistance movements and music scenes, examining the music of the revolution provides insight into the values, identities and visions of democratic change that shaped Sudan’s revolutionary movement.

Music, gender and class

In my paper I analyse the most prominent revolution songs – collected in a shareable YouTube playlist – to explore what protesters’ choices reveal about the movement itself. The songs point to a growing openness towards gender and class.

At the 2019 protests, the revolutionaries honoured a canon of anti-oppression anthems. These included traditional Sudanese staples, hip-hop classics and contemporary pop sing-a-longs.

Not all revolutionary anthems are lyrically political, however, and there are gendered reasons for this.

In Sudan’s decades of patriarchal autocracy, speaking openly about politics through song lyrics was often far riskier for women than for men. As a result, women-led genres, such as tumtum and aghani albanat, typically centred on romance and everyday life, accompanied by handclapping and rhythms played on the doolka drum. Among highbrow creatives, these vocal and percussive genres are considered artistically subordinate to male-dominated genres. These include haqeeba, which features instrumental accompaniment on the more technically demanding oud.

However, tumtum and aghani albanat were popular with protesters in 2019. This was not because their lyrics were directly political (they were not). Rather, they represented the defiance of women who continued to create and perform music despite decades of state restrictions on women’s artistry.

Despite their lyrical playfulness and political neutrality, Sudanese society celebrated these genres in the revolution. This sends a powerful political message about a rising cultural openness towards feminine creativity, which had been inhibited by the state.

Zenig is a new Sudanese genre of music. It emerged in the early 2010s from the poor and peripheral neighbourhoods in Khartoum. It takes its rhythmic base from tumtum, and mixes this with retro keyboards, low-fi synths and improvised vocals. It is fundamentally a Khartoumian invention, and is deliberately defiant of conservative gender and class hierarchies.

Zenig contributed to the cacophony of sounds during the 2019 sit-in. One protester remembered “its fast-paced rhythmic style worked well in energising crowds”. The most likely place to hear Zenig at the sit-in was in intimate circles and small stages where friends could dance together. Before the revolution, Zenig was known in Khartoum as the music of poor outcasts.

The significance

By elevating female leadership in the music of the revolution, Sudanese revolutionaries deliberatively negotiated what an alternative ideal Sudanese society would be like; one with more empowerment for women, as both creative and political forerunners.

The inclusion of genres like Zenig at the 2019 sit-in demonstrates that Sudan’s revolution was not only about changing the regime.

For many young Sudanese, it was also an expression of yearning for broader societal change and an upending of societal power relations.

Read more: Ethiopia’s musicians fled the country after the 1974 revolution - how their culture lives on

The revolution in 2019 was a unique time for openness, experimentation and future-making facilitated by music.

Music and rebuilding

The war has prevented Sudanese civilians from continuing these important social negotiations.

The resistance movement and its musicians have been displaced within Sudan and to regional hubs like Cairo (Egypt) and Nairobi (Kenya). Many have tragically lost their lives. Some have remained in Khartoum and continue to make hopeful music against the odds.

Even as Sudan’s future remains uncertain, music will be surely be central in the rebuilding of civilian lives that will come.

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Morocco’s Hidden History: Archaeology, DNA And Carbon Dating Rewrite The Story Of The Ancient World

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:49:35 +0000

Satellite view of the Strait of Gibraltar, where Africa and Europe meet. NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL MISR Team

BY HAMZA BENATTIA

PREHISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

For decades, stories about the ancient Mediterranean have centred on the grand cultures of Greece, Rome, Phoenicia and Egypt. North-west Africa seldom enters the picture before the arrival of Phoenician traders on the Moroccan coast about 3,000 years ago.

But archaeology is now revealing a different story.

Long before the first Phoenician ships (from today’s Middle East) sailed the western Mediterranean (between today’s north Africa and southern Europe), communities in what is now Morocco were farming and herding animals. They were also crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and participating in long-distance exchanges.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked on archaeology projects across Morocco. We’ve been investigating the origins of farming, long-distance exchange and the emergence of complex societies there. In my most recent study, I brought together archaeological evidence, radiocarbon dates and genetic data spanning nearly three millennia.

The study reveals that between roughly 3800 and 500 BCE – a period that saw the construction of Stonehenge, the flourishing of New Kingdom Egypt and the rise of Phoenician maritime trade – north-west Africa was not a marginal frontier. It was a crossroads linking the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Saharan worlds.

This has important implications for how we understand Africa’s past. For too long, interpretations of the continent’s history have underestimated the complexity and dynamism of its societies. By bringing north-west Africa back into the picture, archaeology is helping to correct that imbalance and reveal a richer, more interconnected reality.

A centre of multiple worlds

Geography helps explain why north-west Africa occupied such a strategic position in Mediterranean prehistory. The Strait of Gibraltar, which separates present-day Morocco and Spain, is only about 14km wide at its narrowest point. It served as a natural corridor linking Africa and Europe.

Far from being isolated, communities in today’s northern Morocco were embedded in long-distance networks for millennia. They maintained contacts with Iberia and other Atlantic regions and they interacted with Saharan populations. Later, they engaged with Mediterranean traders and settlers.

They were not passive participants in these exchanges. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests that local communities actively participated in the networks that connected the western Mediterranean.

Early farmers and innovation

Farming was present in north-west Africa from at least 5400 BC, during the Neolithic period when agriculture was spreading across much of the western Mediterranean.

By around 3800 BC, communities in what is now Morocco were practising increasingly intensive farming and animal husbandry. One striking example is Oued Beht. At this large open-air settlement people cultivated crops, raised livestock and stored surplus food in hundreds of large underground pits.

Recent excavations reveal this was no small farming village. Covering around ten hectares, Oued Beht is among the largest agricultural settlements known in prehistoric Africa. The site may have supported a population of more than a thousand people, pointing to a level of organisation rarely documented in north-west Africa at this time.

These developments coincided with broader environmental changes, including the Sahara gradually becoming a desert. The dryness may have encouraged communities to invest more heavily in agriculture, food storage and long-term settlement in order to adapt to a less predictable environment.

At the same time, there’s clear evidence of interaction with Iberia, the peninsula that includes today’s Spain and Portugal. Shared painted pottery styles, together with ivory and ostrich eggshell objects, point to regular contacts across the Strait of Gibraltar. These local communities were already active participants in wider networks of exchange.

New influences and local continuity

During the third millennium BC, north-west Africa became part of the wider Bell Beaker phenomenon. It takes its name from distinctive bell-shaped drinking vessels which appear across a network of communities that stretch across Atlantic Europe and the western Mediterranean.

For decades, the presence of Bell Beaker pottery in the region was interpreted as evidence that local communities were simply adopting cultural innovations from Europe.

Yet in Morocco, Bell Beaker objects are found alongside distinctive local traditions. This suggests local communities were selectively integrating new elements into existing cultural frameworks.

This was clearly a process of exchange, adaptation and local agency.

The elusive Bronze Age

The second millennium BC remains one of the least understood periods in north-west African prehistory. In Iberia, large, fortified settlements and clear social hierarchies emerge. The archaeological record in north-west Africa is more fragmentary.

Even so, there are important clues.

Burial practices such as stone-built cist graves point to changes in social organisation. At sites like Kach Kouch, there is evidence for settled farming communities with round houses, storage facilities and animal herding.

Ballintober sword found in Morocco.

There are also signs of long-distance connections continuing into this period. For example, a bronze sword recovered from the bed of a river in northern Morocco has close parallels in the British Isles. This suggests links extending far beyond the Mediterranean.

Encounters with the Phoenicians

By the early first millennium BC, Phoenician traders and settlers from the eastern Mediterranean – today’s Lebanon – began establishing settlements along the north African coast. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as a process of colonisation, with local populations as passive recipients of a more advanced culture.

Recent archaeological evidence challenges this.

At sites like Kach Kouch, local communities continued their own architectural traditions and lifestyle. They selectively adopted new elements, like wheel-made pottery and iron tools.

Kach Kouch and other settlements suggest that these societies negotiated encounters with incoming groups. They incorporated new ideas into existing cultural traditions on their own terms.

The arrival of the Phoenicians, then, did not mark the beginning of complex societies in Morocco. It was a new chapter in a much longer history of interaction, adaptation and exchange.

These advances reflect decades of work by Moroccan and international research teams. Much remains for archaeologists to do. Large parts of the region are still underexplored and new discoveries have the potential to transform our understanding even further.

What is already clear, however, is that the prehistory of north-west Africa is a story of local communities actively shaping their own place in the ancient world.

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Abdullah Ibrahim In The 1960s: How The Famous Pianist Began To Shape An African Jazz Sound

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:52:03 +0000

BY STEPHANIE VOS

POST0DOCTORAL FELLOW

STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSTY

The 1960s is a significant era in Abdullah Ibrahim’s story. It’s a time when the South African master’s international career as a jazz pianist was gradually established and he laid the foundations for the signature sound that is recognised today as people reflect on his passing.

He is best remembered for evoking soundscapes that are recognisably South African: harmonisations of church hymns, Cape Town’s ghoema rhythms and Islamic calls to prayer. His delivery in performance was characterised by a sophisticated simplicity and spaciousness.

This musical turn is mimicked by a spiritual one that culminated in his conversion to Islam and name change from Dollar Brand to Abdullah Ibrahim in 1968.

The World of Dollar Brand was a series of articles that Ibrahim wrote and published in the Cape Herald newspaper in 1968 and 1969. They reveal some of his travails and musical developments after he had gone into exile in Europe in 1962.

As I outline in my study of South African jazz artists and exile, to call this time exile for Ibrahim is perhaps a misnomer. He and his wife, jazz artist and activist Sathima Bea Benjamin, returned to South Africa from July 1968 to May 1969, and again in 1970 and 1974.

As South Africa became remote as a physical presence, however, it gained presence in the poetics of Ibrahim’s sound and discourse. These early years of his absence from South Africa present the lesser known corners of his musical career.

Yet through his music, writing and interviews of this time we can trace how Ibrahim imagined and contructed Africa musically, negotiating an African-rooted sense of identity.

The ‘exile’ years

Born in Cape Town in 1934, Adolph Johannes (Dollar) Brand had been a prolific pianist in the nightclub circuit in South Africa since he was 17 years old.

By the time he and Benjamin left South Africa in 1962, he had a solid reputation. He had collaborated on South Africa’s first bebop record, the Jazz Epistles’ Verse 1, with South African jazz luminaries like Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa.

In her biography, Benjamin recalls the couple were “literally starving for lack of opportunities” in a time of white minority rule and apartheid. A state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 stifled the South African jazz scene. With the help of a personal friend, Paul Meyer, Ibrahim and Benjamin left for Zurich.

They arrived in the bitter cold of a Swiss winter to a room infested with bedbugs, and struggled to find work. Ibrahim wrote in the Cape Herald that his initial point of contact in Zurich was Club Africana, but they found his music “too modern”. He finally “managed to strike the right note” with the club’s managers – implying some form of musical compromise on his part – and secured a residency for four and a half months a year with fellow South Africans Johnny Gertze on bass and Makaya Ntshoko on drums.

Despite these adversities, this was a time of great development in Ibrahim’s sound. He put in intensive hours of piano practice, even turning to physical exercise to “sustain a long period of two-handed attack”. He honed his skills as a solo performer, and changed his approach to composition:

A lot of the (mostly American-derived) forms I had been working with in South Africa had become restrictive. I moulded new pieces which allowed me unfettered freedom and improvisation … lots of rhythmic patterns using the pulse … as the foundation.

Ibrahim’s early compositions The Stride, Machopi or Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro are examples of this sound.

The focus on pulse (the steady, smallest beats of music) as opposed to beats organised into metre (typically blocks of two, three or four beats that form a steady, repeating pattern, for example ONE two three ONE two three) signals that Ibrahim’s ear was trained on African modes of organising sound.

Cyclical repetitions of short riffs in the bass provide the structure of the piece, with the right hand freely improvising over it. This short cycle is a hallmark of many African musical traditions.

An encounter with Duke Ellington

A key event of Ibrahim’s time in Zurich was his encounter with US jazz star Duke Ellington in 1963. The story is well-known. Ellington was performing in Zurich and Benjamin convinced him to come and listen to a set of the Dollar Brand Trio. Clearly impressed, Ellington invited Benjamin and Brand to record with him in Paris a few weeks later.

This resulted in two albums: Duke Ellington presents the Dollar Brand Trio (1964), and Benjamin’s A Morning in Paris (only released in 1997). Ellington’s endorsement undoubtedly opened doors for Ibrahim, though it would be several years before his career took off.

brahim’s travels between 1962 and 1965 reveal the difficulties of securing a living. He performed at European festivals and did residencies. Stints from 1963 to 1965 at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen resulted in the live recording released as Anatomy of a South African Village (1965) and Round Midnight at the Montmartre (only released in 1988).

Here some of his “new forms” are audible. After a period in London, Ibrahim and Benjamin moved to New York in 1965. The city became their home for the next four decades.

A solo concert

Ibrahim played his first solo concert in the famed Carnegie Hall on 10 October 1965, launching him into the New York jazz scene in a symbolically significant way.

The concert was largely self-arranged, which struck the pianist as remarkably similar to his concert arrangement efforts when he was still in South Africa.

In this concert, his preference for solo piano performance is already noticeable. In the Cape Herald he observed:

The usual line-up of bass and drums was becoming too restricted and it was quite difficult to find a bass player who could play the fast figures I wanted.

These were difficult years for Ibrahim. Despite generous assistance from the Ellingtons, he could find no work. He poured himself into practice, studying scores, remarking:

The solo piano form was beginning to take shape.
Conversion to Islam

Ibrahim and Benjamin returned to South Africa for 10 months in 1968 and 1969. It was during this time that Dollar Brand converted to Islam. Ibrahim recounts a period of cleansing and spiritual exploration that led to his conversion.

It mirrored the technical development in his musical practices, which Ibrahim said in an interview on BBC radio was connected with internal development.

According to a review in the Cape Herald of the first concert he played in Kensington, Cape Town, however, he had left his audience behind in his musical developments. Although the figure that walked onto the stage “was the old scruffy, well-loved Dollar all right”, the reviewer reports that “Dollar began playing for Dollar, way-out stuff started soaring right above the heads of the audience”. The audience whispered, they fidgeted, and then “started shouting ‘Go back to America’.”

Ibrahim had lost his Cape Town audiences by 1968, his music reconnected with them when he returned in 1974. With producer Rashid Vally he recorded one of his best known albums, Mannenberg – is where it’s happening (1974).

In the track Mannenberg the musical short cycle features again, but this time in the familiar form of the marabi pattern, a mainstay of South African jazz since the 1920s, which forms the backbone of this piece.

Coupled with the distinct saxophone timbres of Cape Town musicians Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee, these are the sounds that became synonymous with a home that was only available to Ibrahim imaginatively, sonically, after he left the country in 1974 into what became definitive exile.

They will be the soundtrack to a free memorial concert in honour of his passing in Cape Town on 29 June.

Ibrahim’s writing in the Cape Herald is referenced in this article. The anti-apartheid newspaper closed in 1986 and while these articles are available in archives, there isn’t a link to them online.

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‘America Knows Less About Itself At The Very Moment It Needs To Know The Truth’

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:23:05 +0000

John Duprey / 1963 Birmingham photograph from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor for the state of Black representation in media today. At a time when the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and targeting communities of color, many newsrooms have all but abandoned promises they made during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to increase racial diversity in coverage and staffing. As CJR reported last month, 76 percent of journalists identified as white in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, compared with roughly 58 percent of Americans who identified as white in the most recent census. “You saw the industry making all these promises, but we are in a moment where we’ve got this backlash that is really exposing which of those promises were values and which ones were window dressing or branding,” Errin Haines, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and editor at large of The 19th, told me.

In the past year, NBC News has shut down all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented groups. CBS eliminated its Race and Culture team. Bloomberg and Politico wound down their newsletters about race, according to Nieman Lab. In February, the Washington Post laid off 45 percent of unionized Black staffers amid widespread reductions, but journalists at the Post told my colleague Riddhi Setty that leadership had given up on diverse coverage long before that.

These are a few suggestive examples—but what we know about the bigger picture of representation in journalism is largely anecdotal. There is no comprehensive or current data on reductions of race coverage or diverse staffing across the industry. In 2025, the American Press Institute (API) announced that it had “acquired the survey” from the NLA so that it could relaunch and expand that research. Robyn Tomlin, the executive director of API, told me in an email that they “are working to identify potential funding to support it in the future.” For now, only historical survey data is available on the institute’s website.

“We’re absolutely in a moment now where Black journalists are being disproportionately affected by choices around whose beats get cut and what kind of teams get dismantled,” Haines said. “And frankly, whose expertise is valued versus whose expertise is considered expendable and whose communities and what kind of audiences are just optional.”

It is particularly troubling to see newsrooms cowed by the administration’s cynical efforts to reframe DEI as discrimination, because these are the institutions on which we rely to tell that story. “The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people,” Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and this magazine’s publisher, wrote for CJR in 2018. Six years later, many news organizations are still failing to tell the full American story. “You can’t say democracy is under threat and then just eliminate the journalists that are best positioned to explain how that threat is landing in Black communities,” Haines said. “If we get pushed out, America literally knows less about itself at the very moment that it needs to know the truth about itself.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of “second sight” and the ability it gives Black Americans to see the country as it truly is rather than the ideal it is often claimed to be. In A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores how that double consciousness is both a burden and a privilege for Black storytellers, giving them “a profound insight: the ability to see through the veil, to understand the contradictions of American life with a clarity often unavailable to those at the center of power. Second sight is a vision, a tool, a gift.”

The book, out this week, is an alternative history of media in America, an insightful and invaluable examination of how Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, and podcasters have shaped the nation, even while their contributions have too often been excluded from the official record. Jackson combines deep historical analysis with interviews of contemporary Black media-makers conducted over four years to trace the stories of those “who have used the tools of their time—pen, press, lens, mic—to critique the nation and imagine it otherwise.”

By structuring the book around the founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jackson shows how figures such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune fundamentally reframed our understanding of these concepts. She draws a direct line between their work and journalists of today who continue to interrogate the idea of the American project—including Cobb and Haines, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gene Demby, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, and Chenjerai Kumanyika. These journalists, Jackson writes, continue to give us “a more nuanced, evocative, and honest story about our nation. Their belief that the public can hold—and act on—this story is itself an extraordinary act of faith.”

In the book’s coda, Jackson reminds us that, as the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, “one measure of the integrity” of the flood of expected media coverage will be how it treats the stories of Americans on the margins. “Are the stories and contributions to democracy of countless unnamed Americans—whose lives and futures are tied to these histories—considered worthy of remembrance and celebration?” Jackson asks. “Whose freedom is celebrated? Whose life and liberty? Whose happiness protected? What futures imagined?”

One morning in the fall of 2022, Juliana Pache was solving the New York Times’ “Mini” crossword, as she did every day, when she came across something that stumped her. “I don’t remember the clues from that day, but there was something about one of the clues in particular from that Mini that I was like, ‘This feels like a white person would know this and I probably wouldn’t,’” Pache recalled.

The experience prompted Pache, a first-generation Afro-Caribbean American, to look for puzzles centered on Black history and culture. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make it herself. “That day, I bought a bunch of domain names, because I wasn’t sure what to name it yet. And I had never made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, ‘How hard could it be?’” She laughed. “It turns out it’s way harder than it looks.”

Pache taught herself how to construct puzzles by watching YouTube videos and found support on a Discord channel. Three months later, she debuted Black Crossword with her first mini. She has published a new puzzle every day since. The site’s tagline: “If you know, you know.” Clues this week included “‘There’s Always This ___: On Basketball and Ascension’ (2024 book by Hanif Abdurraqib),” “Radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization, The Young ___,” and “Dancer and choreographer ___ Ninja.” (The answers: Year, Lords, Willi.)

For Pache, it’s important that Black Crossword not present Black culture as a monolith. “A really big part of my goal is to connect people across the diaspora culturally,” she told me. “Language is such a huge part of how black folks across the diaspora communicate with each other. We have these kinds of shared languages.”

She has also published two puzzle books: Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora in 2024 and Black Crossword: 100 Midi Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora last year. She is currently brainstorming for her third book, which will include a wider variety of puzzles, including word searches and logic games. “There are so many ways to challenge hatred and systemic erasure,” she told me. With Black Crossword, she has found a way to do that by centering Black culture. “My primary feeling,” she said, “was this would be a joy to have.”

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Money, Food And Survival: What Drives Paid Sex Among Young Mums In 3 African Countries

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:16:01 +0000

Transactional sex is a coping strategy for some adolescents. Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images

ANTHONY IDOWU AJAYI, BERYL NYATUGA MACHOKA AND CAROLINE W. KABIRU

Transactional sex, defined as the exchange of sex for money, food, or favours, is common among young people in Africa. Studies have reported that about 10% of those aged 15-24 have engaged in this exchange in South Africa, 23% in Nigeria and 25% in Uganda. The behaviour has been linked to negative consequences such as unintended pregnancy, sexual violence and HIV infections.

Transactional sex refers to sexual relationships outside marriage that are not classified as commercial sex work, but where there is an expectation that material, financial or other benefits will be exchanged for intimacy or companionship.

We are sexual and reproductive health researchers focused on the intersection of evidence, policy, and lived realities of adolescents in Africa. We recently examined the extent and drivers of transactional sex among pregnant and parenting adolescents in three African countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya and Malawi.

In our earlier qualitative research work with pregnant and parenting girls in Nairobi’s informal settlements, we found that pregnancy intensified economic insecurity. The focus of government and most NGOs, however is mainly on preventing adolescent pregnancy. Little attention is paid to the plight and realities of pregnant and parenting girls.

Our research set out to bring attention to these girls. We did this by examining the prevalence and correlates of transactional sex among adolescents in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Malawi. We surveyed 2,243 girls: 980 in Ouagadogou, Burkina Faso; 594 in Korogocho, Nairobi, Kenya; and 669 in Blantyre, Malawi. They were all either pregnant or already parenting. The youngest participants were 12 years old in Burkina Faso and 13 years old in Kenya and Malawi. The oldest girls in all three countries were 19.

Our findings indicated that transactional sex prevalence varied by context. Living in urban informal settlement environments was a risk. The results were a reminder of the need for stronger support systems for adolescents engaged in transactional sex across the three countries, including those who are pregnant or parenting.

Our findings

Our study found that 44.3% of the girls we surveyed in Kenya, 25.4% in Burkina Faso, and 13.0% in Malawi had engaged in transactional sex at some time. The particularly high prevalence in Kenya reflects the study setting in one of Nairobi’s densely populated informal settlements. There, adolescent girls face poverty, unstable support systems, unsafe living conditions, and limited opportunities for self-development. Other studies have also shown that prevalence is lower in other settings outside informal settlements.

The most common reason girls gave for engaging in transactional sex was money. Money was a reason reported by 31.3% of participants in Kenya, 20.5% in Burkina Faso, and 7.8% in Malawi. But girls also reported exchanging sex for food, rent, shelter, clothing, school fees and sanitary pads.

In Kenya, 13.5% specifically cited sanitary pads, compared to 1.0% in Burkina Faso and 1.8% in Malawi. Smaller percentages engaged in transactional sex for school fees, phones or airtime, or other needs such as baby supplies (milk, diapers, clothes).

Individual-level factors

At the individual level, being single increased the likelihood of transactional sex across all three countries. In Burkina Faso, 20% of married and 46% of single girls had transactional sex. In Kenya it was 28% of married girls and 50% of single girls. In Malawi it was 10% of married girls and 16% of single girls.

This suggests that having a partner may provide some degree of financial, material and childcare support. Without support, single adolescent mothers may face pregnancy and early motherhood with very limited resources, increasing their vulnerability to transactional relationships.

One of the surprising findings emerged from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. There, 31% of adolescents with a secondary education had engaged in transactional sex, against 21% of those with only a primary education. This challenges the common assumption that education is an immediate shield against exploitation. It suggests that remaining in school may itself become financially difficult for adolescent girls living under poverty and weak support systems. For girls who are in school from a poor background, the need for money, food and school fees may make them engage in transactional sex.

Substance use also more than doubled the risk in Burkina Faso, among girls who reported using alcohol or drugs compared to those who did not. This association was not significant in Kenya or Malawi.

Interpersonal-level factors

At the interpersonal level, orphanhood mattered, though differently across countries.

In Malawi, girls who had lost both parents faced nearly double the risk of engaging in transactional sex, compared with non-orphans. In Kenya, girls who had lost one parent were 43% more likely to engage in transactional sex. Even more significant at the interpersonal level was the impact of low parental support in Malawi, where girls who felt unsupported by their parents were three times more likely to engage in transactional sex.

Community-level factors

We asked participants questions to assess how safe they felt in their neighbourhoods. In Kenya and Burkina Faso, a higher score for perceived neighbourhood safety was associated with a lower likelihood of transactional sex. Girls said they engaged in sex in exchange for security and protection. In Malawi, feeling safe didn’t make a difference.

What needs to change

The study demonstrates that transactional sex among pregnant and parenting adolescents is less a choice than a strategy to cope with severe socioeconomic hardship. It is shaped by distinct individual risks, fracturing family support and community insecurity.

What drives transactional sex changes from country to country. Because of this, programmes to address it need to be customised for each specific place.

Interventions should address structural vulnerabilities and strengthen family and community support systems. They must also improve neighbourhood safety to reduce adolescent mothers’ reliance on transactional sex and the harms associated with it.

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Xenophobia In South Africa: State’s Complicity With Gangs And Vigilantes Is Threatening Its Ability To Govern

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:58:21 +0000

An anti-immigrant march in South Africa, June 2026. Screengrab/YouTube/Al Jazeera English

BY LOREN B. LANDAU AND JEAN PIERRE MISAGO

Marches, Mozambicans murdered, state-sponsored evacuations, a nationally televised presidential address. Anti-immigrant mobilisation has again drawn the world’s attention to South Africa. The continental backlash threatens tourism, trade, diplomacy and investment opportunities in Africa’s largest economy, and is derailing its constitutional democracy.

Many citizens demand the country restore its sovereignty – the state’s ability to govern itself and determine its own laws within its borders – by tightening border controls. Parties promise to deliver walls, raids and deportations.

What these popular debates over sovereignty and border control overlook is that politics is not defined on the borders. It comes from control over resources and production. In South Africa’s past, this was mines. Now it is cities, townships, and the infrastructure that connects them. This is where the country’s political future is being forged. This is where sovereignty is being lost. And the state is helping to make this happen.

Over the past 20 years, we have investigated the politics of migration and xenophobia in South Africa. Together we founded Xenowatch and the Mobility Governance Lab to document incidents of xenophobic discrimination and evaluate strategies to promote secure mobility and social cohesion.

In a paper published in 2022 we argued that xenophobic mobilisation in South Africa was not merely a grassroots phenomenon by frustrated communities. Nor is it the result of a “third force” or external actors out to embarrass the country. Rather, we argue, it is a political enterprise co-produced by vigilante groups and the state through acts of commission and omission. These include failing to censure those who exclude through violence and other forms of illegal conduct. It also includes migration policies and practices that demonise those from other countries.

This has resulted in the state consistently legitimising and rewarding the criminal conduct of vigilante groups.

Our research shows that xenophobic discrimination has become a feature of post-apartheid South Africa’s socio-political landscape. We argue that the only interventions capable of disrupting xenophobic mobilisation are those that lower, or ideally eliminate, its political, economic and social benefits. This must include holding people accountable for their actions, consistent and impartial application of the law to address both illegal migration and criminal vigilante exclusion of migrants, and joint efforts by the state and civil society to counter anti-migrant mobilisation.

On the ground

Our investigations show that in townships, “community development” associations run protection rackets determining who can live, build, or conduct business in their “communities”. They work in collaboration with local police to remove unwanted people.

Elected leaders often look away or embrace them to win votes. This is not about enforcing law or creating opportunities for all. It is not about immigration control. It is about using social division to extract resources and build power. There is often strong local support for these measures and those leading them. However, they are illegal and institutionalise state complicity in extractive violence that weakens, rather than enforces, the rule of law.

From mid-2025, Operation Dudula – an anti-immigrant social movement that has now registered as a political party – and March and March – a self-described “grassroots” civic organisation focused on illegal immigration – systematically blockaded public health facilities, denying migrants access to at least 53 clinics across KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces.

The South African Human Rights Commission found that despite engagement with the Department of Health and the National Commissioner of Police (both of which committed to intervening) vigilante conduct continued. In some instances the police refused to take statements from victims.

Despite court rulings interdicting Operation Dudula, the unlawful operations continued across the country.

Without state enforcement, court orders are only paper. Rather than being sanctioned, March and March confirmed that it had

an agreement with the SAPS (South African Police Service) and Metro Police, which don’t interfere with them.

A co-authored political enterprise

Between 2022 and 2025, Xenowatch recorded 406 verified incidents resulting in 75 deaths. This translates into an average of 102 xenophobic discrimination incidents per year.

In 2025 alone, 151 incidents were recorded. In the first five months of 2026, a further 22 verified incidents were recorded. Of the 22 incidents, 14 were violent attacks that largely followed anti-migrant protests in some parts of the country.

The recent attacks resulted in at least four people dead and hundreds displaced. Despite this, officials regularly argue this is “normal” criminality. In 2008, 2010, and again in 2026, there have been accusations of a third force determined to undermine the country’s successes or punish it for its positions on Israel and Russia.

Rather than intervene effectively, the government has addressed the rise of these political formations with a National Action Plan on Racism and Xenophobia. It contains almost no plan. Rather than marshal state resources against the anti-immigrant campaigns, it focuses on education and public events intended to foster goodwill and social cohesion. Debates and dialogues are welcome. But they do little to erode the power of gangsters and criminal networks.

When the state has acted, it helps reinforce precisely the kind of political fragmentation and profit taking it purports to prevent. Its largest police operation to protect foreigners – Operation Fiela – resulted in police demanding additional bribes from migrants, a loss of economic activity and tax revenue, and only a small reduction in immigrant numbers.

All this was done in the name of restoring citizens’ faith in the immigration system. There were winners: not immigrants or citizens, but law enforcers who line their pockets and boost their operational budgets.

A recent meeting convened at the official seat of government, the Union Buildings, provides another example. On 25 May 2026, senior government ministers convened a high-level meeting with the leadership of March and March and other organisations “to address illegal immigration and the rise in anti-immigration protests in the country”.

In our view, granting groups like this access to the highest political office lends them legitimacy and gives them a place in the South African political system. Their words are broadcast on national television and radio stations. Their ultimatums come to represent legitimate political demands.

The state may temporarily quell crises. But it emboldens these groups to carry on. The results are a politics of fragmentation and self-made laws.

What needs to be done

Protecting South Africa’s constitutional democracy requires three things done simultaneously.

First, genuine accountability for perpetrators: not symbolic arrests, but prosecutions that result in meaningful consequences for instigators and perpetrators.

Second, consistent and impartial enforcement of the rule of law to address both illegal migration and criminal vigilante exclusion of migrants.

Third, the building of political will and muscle by the state and civil society, to hold politicians accountable when their rhetoric or conduct emboldens exclusionary violence and practices. This is not an issue of migration management and border control. It is one of sovereignty and law.

Civil society organisations are already pursuing litigation and winning cases in court. But court orders flouted with impunity are not victories; they are further evidence of the problem. Without the political muscle to hold the state accountable for its complicity, the co-creation of exclusion will continue.

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The Story Behind Soweto Blues, Miriam Makeba’s Famous Song About The June 16 Uprising

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:32:29 +0000

Miriam Makeba in 1969 in exile. Rob Mieremet/Nationaal Archief, CC BY

BY GWEN ANSELL

ASSOCIATE OF THE GORDON

INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS SCIENCE,

UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

Miriam Makeba sang a famous song about the 16 June 1976 uprising in her birthplace, South Africa. The protest was a pivotal point in the fight against apartheid and white minority rule in the country. The song was called Soweto Blues and its opening lines go:

The children got a letter from the Master.

It said no more Xhosa, Sotho, no more Zulu

Refusing to comply they sent an answer

That’s when the policemen came…

The song recalls the events of that day when South African schoolchildren, marching peacefully in Soweto to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as an official language of instruction alongside English in Black schools, were shot down by the police of the apartheid regime.

Soweto Blues was also the title chosen by my publishers for the cover of my historical research on the politics of South African jazz and popular music.

Many high school students in South Africa – and many of their teachers – were not fluent in Afrikaans, seen as the language of the oppressor. The move was part of a push, dubbed “Bantu Education”, to reduce Black education and cut it off from international opportunities and “subversive” English-language ideas. The system’s architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, had declared that Black children must never be educated above the level of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

Soweto Blues is one of the two compositions most closely associated with the events of June 16. The other, Isililo (Tears of Soweto), from Sakhile, was written in retrospect, in 1982, as the group’s co-leader, saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu, reflected on his nightmare memories of Soweto on that day.

But Soweto Blues was written hot, as the news of the massacre reached the world. The story of the song is a story of solidarity with the struggle against apartheid across the African continent.

Composed and recorded in Kumasi, Ghana

Ask who composed the song, and the answer is likely to be trumpeter Hugh Masekela and/or his ex wife Miriam Makeba. The song, officially released in 1977 by Makeba, is best-known in the version released on her 1989 album, Welela.

The lyrics are instantly recognisable as being penned by Masekela the rhymer – “Just a little atrocity/Deep in the city”.

But the melody tells a bigger, pan-African story. It was co-written by the trumpeter and guitarist Stanley Kwesi Todd, founder of Ghanaian ensemble Hedzoleh (“freedom”) Sounds.

Masekela was introduced to the west Africans by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti in 1973, and the collaboration produced three albums led by his name: Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz (1973); I Am Not Afraid (1974); and The Boy’s Doin’ It (1975).

But there were other collaborations between Kwesi and Masekela too, including the 1977 You Told Your Mama Not to Worry. That was recorded in Kumasi, Ghana with Kwesi as co-producer, and released in the US by the new Casablanca label, before that imprint settled into a pop and disco music identity.

Makeba came from her exile home in Guinea to record; there were compositions by Masekela and Todd, tunes adapted from tradition, and a title track about exile composed by South African singer and songwriter Letta Mbulu. Soweto Blues closed the A-side. The original album, regrettably, is currently hard to find.

A marketable title

So how did it end up as my book title? It wasn’t my intention.

The main title I wanted was Black Heroes, alluding to a 1976 Tete Mbambisa tune paying tribute to both the young martyrs of ‘76 and to US jazz star John Coltrane. That seemed to me to sum up the relationship between South African and Black American jazz as torches lighting the way to freedom.

But it appeared that “somebody in marketing” didn’t think the two words “Black” plus “Heroes”, would sell. “Aren’t there any other song titles that might be catchier?” A back-and-forth ensued, until Soweto Blues came up. “That’s it! 'Soweto’ always sells!”

The 1976 uprising sparked in Soweto, but spread across the country, from the urban settlements of Langa and Gugulethu in the Cape to the rural villages of the North West province. Parents scoured mortuaries for their dead children, many of whom had apparently been shot in the back. Nobody knows precisely how many died, but the national figure is estimated as well north of 700.

And just as the rising itself cannot be narrowed to what happened in Soweto – even if the name “sells” – so the song paying tribute cannot be confined to South Africa alone. It came from a trumpet-player exiled in the US, a singer sheltered by Guinea, and a musician born in Ghana.

Half a century later, the words of the song still have lessons about the events of June 16. The story of its creation teaches too: about a shared African history in which borders did not define humanity.

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Appolonia: The Story Of An African Kingdom That Resisted The Atlantic Slave Trade

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:49:44 +0000

Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped from the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. National Maritime Museum, London, CC BY

BY NANA KESSE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CLARK UNIVERSITY

The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s.

The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external conquest.

Europeans lacked the geographical knowledge, immunity to endemic tropical diseases, and the military power to venture into the African interior. So they became dependent on African states and merchant elites for the supply of captives.

By controlling coastal ports, regulating market access, and managing the interior trade routes that brought captives to the coast, these African brokers enabled and shaped the European trade in human beings.

Yet, this internal participation was rarely uniform. While certain powerful African societies and groups largely procured captives from weaker communities through warfare or raids, a few centralised African states chose neither to fully participate in nor completely abstain from the slave trade.

One such society was the Kingdom of Appolonia (today known as the Nzema State) in the southwestern Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Throughout the four centuries of Atlantic slavery, Appolonia traded only 352 captives while other Gold Coast towns like Elmina and Cape Coast each shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved people.

As a historian of west Africa, particularly Ghana, specialising in environmental and water history as well as the slave trade, I have spent nearly a decade researching Appolonia’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. My recent study reveals that Appolonia was the only port region on the Gold Coast where the Atlantic slave trade did not thrive, although indigenous African slavery was practised in the kingdom. Appolonia stands out as a statistical and geographical outlier within the slave trade economy.

Appolonia’s story raises several critical questions. Why did the kingdom trade so few enslaved people? Why is it important to study regions of Africa where the slave trade was less dominant? And what do outliers like Appolonia teach us about historical and reparative justice?

Appolonia in historical context

Appolonia is an Akan society in southwestern Ghana, located at the border with Côte d'Ivoire. The Portuguese named this region after Saint Appolonia, an Egyptian Christian virgin, because they discovered the area on her festival day.

The region was made up of small villages that came together to establish the Appolonian Kingdom in the late 1600s. It was here that Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was born in 1909.

The founding of the Appolonian Kingdom coincided with other grand historical developments on the Gold Coast. These include the rise of the Asante Kingdom to superpower status and the transformation of the region into a centre for the Atlantic slave trade.

These events drew Appolonia into the larger Atlantic economy. However, Appolonia was probably the only Gold Coast society that effectively said “no” to the Atlantic slave trade.

Saying “no” did not mean a complete abstinence. The 352 enslaved individuals that Appolonia shipped account for 0.0028% of the Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. My intention is not to reduce these precious lives to mere statistics. Rather, I aim to show that, in percentage terms, Appolonia’s involvement in the trade was minimal.

To illustrate this point, let’s examine some comparative data.

Distribution of slave exports from the Gold Coast. Nana Kesse, Author provided (no reuse)

The table displays slave exports from various regions of the Gold Coast. This information was obtained from the SlaveVoyages database, compiled over decades by various researchers in an international collaborative effort. It offers statistics on enslaved individuals shipped from Africa and those who survived the journey.

For instance, in the 18th-century Gold Coast, port towns like Anomabo recorded 168,348 slave exports, Cape Coast 100,434 and Elmina 85,636 – compared with Appolonia’s 352.

Consider the figures alongside the historical population densities of these areas.

During the 1700s, Anomabu had approximately 8,750 inhabitants; yet a staggering 168,348 captives were shipped from there. This indicates significant slave trading. Similarly, Cape Coast and Elmina had projected populations of around 5,000 and 25,000 residents, yet recorded high slave exports.

Appolonia, on the other hand, had an estimated population of 15,600-19,600 inhabitants but traded only 352.

What this means

Why did Appolonia trade so few enslaved people? Using demographic database analysis, European archival records, and oral histories, my research suggests two main reasons.

First, Appolonia was not a slaving society. Its economy depended rather on the gold and ivory trade.

Second, the kingdom implemented policies, such as the amonle covenant, that prevented the sale of Appolonian subjects. Amonle was a sacred ritual involving human sacrifice of Appolonian royals and the mixing of their blood with a special herbal concoction. It was then drunk by both Appolonian rulers and migrants who settled in the kingdom.

This powerful ritual served as the binding oath against selling Appolonian locals and refugees, cursing anyone who broke the oath. This policy undermined any internal system for producing enslaved people within the kingdom for sale.

The question of reparations

Appolonia’s story further complicates our understanding and approach to seeking historical justice and reparations for the slave trade. It is one thing for a known victim to demand justice and reparations from an identifiable perpetrator, whether through symbolic acts like an apology, or through monetary compensation.

It’s a different matter when the identities of both the victim and the perpetrator are unknown – or when the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same. Who dispenses reparations to whom?

In the case of Appolonia, we do not know the identities of the 352 victims exported, nor have scholars, including myself, been able to trace these captives to a specific African homeland.

We have not found historical records indicating that the people of Appolonia captured or purchased these individuals for resale. Given this context, should Appolonia be expected to offer reparations? If yes, to whom?

Conversely, is it ethically justifiable for Appolonia to seek reparative justice from the unknown Europeans who purchased the 352 captives?

Appolonia’s story complicates the call for reparative justice. However, it does not contradict the landmark March 2026 United Nations resolution officially declaring the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity”. For the slave trade is indeed the most violent and catastrophic of the many atrocities committed against Africans and African descended people.

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Conspiracy Theories That Emerged From A Civil Rights Shooting 60 Years Ago Resonate Today

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:17:43 +0000

James Meredith looks at Aubrey Norvell, partially hidden behind foliage, after Norvell shot him in Hernando, Miss., on June 6, 1966. AP Photo/Jack Thornell

BY ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN

BIZAT FAMILY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS

On June 6, 1966, on a stretch of Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, a portly, middle-aged white man named Aubrey Norvell stepped out of a gully, lifted his shotgun and fired three shots at James Meredith, a Black civil rights activist and Air Force veteran.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi four years earlier, Meredith was on the second day of a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, with the aims of registering voters and defying white intimidation.

Bloodied by bird shot, Meredith again returned to the national spotlight. The shooting transformed his walk into a civil rights spectacle.

Activists descended upon Mississippi for a three-week mass march. It featured titans of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., while inspiring Mississippians to march down country roads, volunteer their homes and food, and register at their local courthouses. During these protests, the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael introduced “Black Power,” a slogan of self-determination that marked the next stage in the Black freedom struggle.

It is a rich, intricate and evocative story – one that I tried to chronicle in my book, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”

Sixty years later, however, a mystery lingers. Clouded in the haze of a political extravaganza, Norvell never revealed his motivations for shooting Meredith.

His silence allowed for the flourishing of conspiracy theories – most notably, from those most resistant to racial equality. In a political and rhetorical strategy that echoes into the present day, many white conservative Southerners painted themselves as Norvell’s real victims.

‘A quiet, Christian man’

At first, it was civil rights activists who suspected a conspiracy. Meredith’s companions testified that law enforcement had reacted slowly to Norvell’s threat. They assumed that Norvell was a virulent white supremacist, in cahoots with a racist police force.

But as reporters investigated Norvell, they found no evidence of a hate-spewing Klansman. He lived in a middle-class Memphis suburb. He had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as a “quiet, Christian man” who never mentioned civil rights, one way or another.

Upon posting bond, Norvell disappeared from the public eye until his trial that November.
The significance of bird shot

By presenting a blank slate, Norvell allowed white Southern conservatives to launch a counternarrative. The previous decade of Black activism, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma-to-Montgomery march, had taught them that open violence ignited public outrage and prompted civil rights legislation. So they distanced themselves from Norvell.

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson noted that Meredith was attacked “by birdshot by an out-of-state resident.” It foreshadowed the language employed by a host of Southern politicians and newspaper editorialists.

Again and again, in speeches and articles and letters, they mentioned that Norvell used bird shot. If he was aiming to kill, why pepper Meredith with pellets? They claimed a conspiracy against the white South.

“The whole affair smells badly of a plot instigated by the Communist-controlled rights groups and capitalized on by the press, the government, and all the other liberal screamers,” wrote one woman to Sen. James Eastland, as I discovered during my research. Like many others, she imagined that civil rights organizations paid Norvell to wound Meredith, which would stoke a media hubbub and invite the federal government to persecute white Southerners.

Searching for a conspiracy

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened in 1956 to protect white supremacy. In an incredible twist to this tale, a commission investigator authorized a US$5,000 bribe to Norvell’s attorney if Norvell would admit that liberals paid him to shoot Meredith.

According to commission files, an FBI agent from Mississippi, high-ranking officials of the Memphis Police Department and a Mississippi district attorney all agreed that Norvell’s shooting was “a hired job for the advancement of various civil rights groups.”

Segregationists kept grasping at this far-fetched scenario, exaggerating and manipulating it to serve the purpose of discrediting the Meredith March Against Fear. A Mississippi sheriff named Jack Cauthen went even further, suggesting Meredith hadn’t even been shot in the first place. He claimed to have put his arm around Meredith, who had rejoined the march for its final days.

“His back was just smooth as silk. There hadn’t been no pellets or shots in James’s back,” asserted Cauthen, as I found while conducting research for my book. “I don’t think he was shot, no sir.”

Echoes from the past

Norvell pleaded guilty and spent 18 months in Parchman Prison in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Despite being approached by many journalists and historians – including me – he never revealed his motive. He died in 2016.

In the 1960s, white southerners perceived that their way of life was under assault by big institutions, including the federal government and the media. They blamed the Civil Rights Movement on nefarious “outside agitators” determined to smash their status. Their political motivations led them down bizarre and fantastical paths, with some even fashioning themselves as the true victims of Norvell’s attack.

Racist conspiracy theories still plague American politics, from baseless accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to false assertions that global elites are engineering a “great replacement” of white Americans.

Even if these notions emerge from a modern sense of dislocation and anxiety, I think they have roots in the same crass bigotry that defined the conspiratorial segregationists of the civil rights era.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The Social Security Trust Fund Will Run Dry In 2032 – What That Means For Retirees And Workers Who Hope To Retire

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:36:12 +0000

Social Security has lasted as long as it has thanks to the bipartisan deal that President Ronald Reagan and congressional leaders hammered out in 1983. AP Photo/Ed Reinke

BY JOHN W. DIAMOND

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR

PUBLIC FINANCE AT THE BAKER

INSTITUTE, RICE UNIVERSITY

Every year, the panel overseeing the trust fund for Social Security and Medicare publishes its annual financial report. And every year, its members make clear that the programs’ reserves will be exhausted by the time Gen X retires – meaning they will no longer be able to pay full scheduled benefits by the mid-2030s.

While many media outlets cover this news as a one-day story, this year’s report should be seen as a much more ominous warning. The latest projection, released on June 9, 2026, is that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2032, at which point incoming revenue can pay only about 78% of scheduled benefits. For the 1 in 5 Americans who receive Social Security, that means a potential across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 22% unless Congress acts.

What makes this year’s warning especially troubling is that the deterioration isn’t driven by a temporary downturn but by deeper demographic and policy changes: Fewer expected births, lower immigration, slower growth in the workforce and reduced future revenue from the taxation of Social Security benefits.

The fundamental challenge, though, has been obvious for years. There are too few current and future workers to support the growing number of retirees. And now, there are fresh headwinds that make the math even more daunting. Record debt levels and elevated interest rates are reducing the fiscal resources available for lawmakers to implement solutions, while declining immigration and birth rates mean that the supply of current and future workers is even smaller than previously projected.

These pressures don’t mean Social Security will disappear. It will always exist as long as workers and employers pay into the program. But for anyone who expects to retire starting in the early 2030s, the potential for a cut to benefits is real.

As a scholar of public finance, I argue that this looming deadline recalls the crisis policymakers faced in the early 1980s. Once again, the issue of reform is about to move from a distant worry to an immediate political problem. And failure to reach a bipartisan compromise will bring both economic pain and political damage.

Fresh pressures

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck their historic bipartisan compromise to extend the life of the program by raising taxes and the eligibility age. This time, the challenge will be far harder.

To start with, the federal government now carries a much higher debt burden, topping 100% of annual GDP, compared to about 35% in the early 1980s. And the Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits adding to that debt in the coming decades, with the annual budget shortfall rising from US$1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion in 2036 under current tax and spending laws. Public debt is projected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2036, leaving less and less fiscal room to patch Social Security.

Servicing that debt is also becoming more expensive. Although the Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates in 2024 and 2025, the cost of borrowing remains elevated as concerns over inflation grow, exacerbated by oil price spikes and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Markets now expect the Fed to hold rates steady for a while, and some investors are betting it may even raise them later this year.

The demographic picture is also unforgiving. Baby boomers continue to retire, Americans are living longer, and birth rates have fallen sharply. Since 2007, the U.S. birth rate has fallen by 23% and has remained below replacement level for years. The result is fewer future workers paying payroll taxes, even as the number of retirees grows.

A final factor is immigration.

While other aging countries have turned to immigration to shore up public finances and revitalize their labor force, the U.S. has taken the opposite approach. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, net migration to the U.S. is estimated to have fallen by 2.4 million between 2024 and 2026, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized migrants and its efforts to discourage green card applications.

The new report referenced these challenges, noting that lower immigration and fertility estimates will have “a negative projected effect on Social Security’s financial status.” It also addressed the effects of the massive policy bill that President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress pushed through in 2025, which among other things cut the income tax that retirees pay on Social Security benefits.

The near-term economic changes of that legislation will “have a positive effect,” the report said, but in the longer run it will also weaken the program’s finances.

A slow-motion crisis

It’s important to remember that before the 1983 deal was sealed, Social Security was far closer to insolvency than it is today. The program was nearing the point where it could no longer pay full benefits on time.

The problem was caused by a mix of high inflation, weak wage growth, the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, and mounting demographic pressure. Americans were living longer, birth rates were falling, and the number of workers supporting each beneficiary was declining.

The 1983 reform was negotiated under Reagan, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, with help from a bipartisan commission led by future Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. It addressed the program’s immediate financing crisis by accelerating scheduled increases in the payroll tax and phasing in a higher full retirement age, from 65 to 67. It also anticipated the retirement of the baby boomers and the growing burden they would place on future workers.

The historic overhaul, which came only after months of wrangling, bought the country time. Just as important, it showed that with bipartisan support, a Social Security deal is possible. But it also underscored the danger of waiting too long. When policymakers delay, the menu of options gets smaller, the required changes get larger, and the economic and political pain increases.

Social Security’s next crisis won’t arrive suddenly. It’s arriving in slow motion. The question isn’t whether the program can be fixed, but whether elected officials will act while they still have room to choose among less costly options. I believe the real lesson of 1983 is that waiting until the last minute will turn a chance for reform into a political emergency, and little good comes from governing by crisis.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The Secret Dinners Of Cold War Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:35:07 +0000

How invitation-only reporting took root in Washington’s press corps.

BY KATHRYN J. MCGARR

Last October, Pete Hegseth, known as the secretary of war, attempted to ban all reporters credentialed to the Pentagon who would not sign a pledge to write exactly what the Trump administration wanted. Around forty reporters walked out in protest rather than sign; their access to the building is now the subject of a prolonged legal dispute. Across the administration, we’ve seen officials blatantly play favorites in giving access to sources and information. While the flagrancy is new, controlled access has a history. The idea of certain reporters having privileged access has persisted since World War II, when an informal system of invitation-only information sessions became commonplace in United States military and diplomatic journalism. These meetings were chummy events over dinner, where information shared by officials was either off the record or not for attribution. Reporters at these dinners—all white, all men, all from mainstream news outlets—then got to set the boundaries of what they would (and would not) report to the public in their newspapers.

Invitation-only reporting based around private dinners became one of the most important journalistic conventions of mid-twentieth-century Washington, one that forged an uneasy alliance between reporters and the subjects they covered. As one reporter and attendee recalled decades later, of the dinners, “This was then really a new technique, but naturally we bent to it because we couldn’t escape it.”

The dinners began in a systematic way in November of 1942, in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. There were rumors that top men in the Army and Navy were not getting along, bringing bad publicity to the commanders. A well-connected civilian friend of Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, invited several reporters to his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for dinner and conversation. Reporters warmed to King after seeing him in this more relaxed social setting. A columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain wrote in his diary that week, “Contrary to previous impression and what I have read, King was not taciturn or difficult but very friendly and appeared to thoroughly enjoy evening.” About a week later, the New York Herald Tribune had a front-page story, written by another of the dinner attendees, that claimed the Army and Navy were getting along just fine. Nothing to see here.

Officials began having even more invitation-only background sessions in both the White House and the newly built Pentagon. Reporters began to tolerate a private conversation about the war happening within Washington and a different, public-facing conversation being written in the newspapers. When reporters were included in top-secret briefings and exclusive social gatherings, they gained status in their papers. Editors and publishers who ran newspapers all over the US liked getting confidential memos labeled “top secret” from their Washington-based reporters, which helped them feel like insiders.

Washington was already such a clubby town—white men of the press enjoyed the National Press Club, the Gridiron Club, and the White House Correspondents’ Association (which allowed women, but not at the annual dinner), among many others—that these semiofficial dinner groups would have seemed like a natural extension. However, from the beginning, some reporters complained to one another and to editors about stories based on information from the dinners being “plants,” with officials using them to get favorable publicity.

The dinners became part of a larger pattern of increased secrecy around sensitive wartime information. At the time, some of the biggest names in the press, including the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann and the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, fretted over the ethics of what they called “pipeline journalism”—certain sources having direct pipelines to certain journalists. Krock, for one, was livid after being excluded from a private briefing. “One hardly can attend them, receive inside information or background, not given to others, and write critically or detachedly of the man who gives the background and who is the host,” he wrote to Lippmann. “The whole business is repugnant to me, as I am sure it is to you. I think it is degrading to permit oneself to be so transparently used,” Krock continued, in his typical caustic tone. Still they could not risk being the only reporters to miss out on potentially newsworthy information.

Quickly Lippmann—and later Krock—got himself invited to the private dinners with King, which the journalists eventually took over hosting. Once the war had ended, these men threw a celebratory dinner for King at the Statler Hotel. The men came from newspapers, magazines, and radio, including the New York Sun, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ABC, and CBS. Everyone enjoyed a fancy meal—lamb chops featuring pineapple slices and béarnaise sauce—on their publisher’s dime. They called themselves the “Surviving Veterans of the Battle of Virginia.”

After World War II, these “dope” sessions, as some reporters called them, became routine for all sensitive reporting, especially military and diplomatic, with reporters hosting the guests of honor (sources) at hotels and splitting the bill between their employers. The background rule—under which the information that officials shared was either off the record (couldn’t be used at all) or not for attribution (couldn’t be traced back to the source)—became known as the Lindley Rule, named after one of the regular organizers, Ernest Lindley, a writer for Newsweek. Newsmen policed each other. The chief correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reassured his editor back home that confidential information was safe: “In our own little group which has off-the-record sessions with top officials we drop from the list any person who approaches the breaking of a confidence.”

These dinners (and sometimes lunches) continued on through the most high-stakes moments of the Cold War era. On April 6, 1953, in the middle of US involvement in the Korean War, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, met with about twenty diplomatic reporters in a private dining room at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC.

The newsmen, all from major mainstream outlets, chatted informally during preliminary drinks and ate a dinner of steak and strawberry ice cream at one long table. They then took turns asking Dulles questions on background. The first: What did Dulles think of the new Russian “peace offensive”? Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had died one month earlier, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had launched an effort to ease tensions with the US. Dulles answered that it was probably a “trick or a tactic.” But by the end of the long evening, he had changed his position, saying he felt there was “new Russian friendliness” for which the two-month-old Eisenhower administration should get “90 percent” credit.

In the middle of the meandering, hours-long conversation, while talking about NATO, Dulles mentioned almost off-handedly that if the Soviet Union really wanted to take over Europe, there was probably nothing that could stop it. This was potentially explosive, and as one of the newspaper reporters wrote afterward in his personal notes, it was “agreed informally afterwards among the newspaper men present” that they shouldn’t “rush into print with much of this stuff.” A New York Times reporter wrote to his editor that, “out of a sense of responsibility for national security,” they decided not to publish the bit about an unstoppable Soviet Union “when so much peace talk was in the air.”

By handpicking the “responsible reporters,” white male journalists cut off access to anyone believed to be untrustworthy, in particular women reporters, Black reporters of any sex, and those outside the political mainstream (e.g., communists and socialists).

Many reporters worked outside the private sessions, by choice or by circumstance, which allowed them to be more critical of the US and the Cold War. Some, like Sarah McClendon, who ran her own news service in the Southwest, and Ethel Payne, who worked for the Chicago Defender, simply were not invited on the basis of sex, race, or both. The leftist I.F. Stone opted out entirely, writing for his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly and relying on public documents, such as transcripts of congressional hearings, to support his trenchant critiques.

Detachment is not necessarily a virtue in journalism, but it is in political reporting, where the primary goal is to hold the government to account. Journalists who prioritize source relationships above all else have incentive not to stray too far from dominant narratives.

At times, the controversy over the dinners did spill out into public view. In one episode in 1955, reporters mistakenly reported that the Eisenhower administration believed war with China was imminent. These reports came from dinner with the hawkish Admiral Robert Carney, the chief of naval operations, but because of the Lindley Rule, reporters could not attribute the information directly to him. Instead, the vagueness made it seem as if everyone in the administration shared Carney’s beliefs. The White House had to deny it. After the incident, Eisenhower gave Carney what a reporter in the New Republic called a “public spanking” for having said anything so controversial. Reporters, editors, and publishers sent a flurry of memos to one another trying to figure out where the background system could have gone wrong.

A reporter from the New York Daily News, who had not been invited, enraged Eisenhower at a press briefing by asking: “Mr. President, are we going to have to invite your aides out to lunch or dinner in order to get the news?”

The Carney incident had been so public that reporters then had to be publicly self-critical. But they also knew that the status quo would be hard to change. Robert Riggs, the Washington bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal, concluded in an April 1955 New Republic article: “Despite the fate that overtook Admiral Carney, nothing so mutually advantageous as the Washington ‘private briefing’ will be allowed to die.” He was right, and invitation-only briefings continue to this day.

During the Cold War, the overall effect was pro-administration reporting on the most important issues of the day, including that the war in what was then referred to as Indochina, for example, was going well. That the US was the leader of the “Free World,” and the communists were enslaved. That the US must spread democracy.

Reporters were cautious about not upsetting norms that the Americans were the “good guys” and that capitalism was the only acceptable system. To this day, we speak of a Cold War consensus when, as I show in City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington, there was never more than an appearance of consensus. “The inclination to err on the side of the administration is ever present,” one reporter wrote in a 1953 letter to a historian. He admitted that he could never write exactly what he thought, or he wouldn’t have an audience: “The events as I, and I think most of my colleagues see them, sometimes run counter to the current of American folklore.”

ver the years, journalists at private dinners decided among themselves the most responsible way to report everything from the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala to the early US involvement in Vietnam. One of the most critical stories about the US to come out of the Vietnam War was by Seymour Hersh, a freelancer at the time he investigated the My Lai massacre; initially, the only outlet to publish his work was an anti-war newswire.

The holes in American folklore grew more obvious in the Vietnam era. But pressure to support the dominant, government-led narrative never truly abated. Too many journalists accepted the administration’s claims in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. As Hersh told Jared Malsin in a 2015 interview in this journal, the problem when “it’s all about access” is that “in effect—not everybody, but too many reporters—they could trade, I could almost argue, their integrity for the access. Their curiosity, let’s put it in an easier way.”

Journalists working together do have some control over what kind of information economy they want to exist in. In October of 2025, when those dozens of journalists walked out of the Pentagon, they chose integrity over access in an important and public way. They left together—as a group—and their news outlets supported them. (In March of 2026, a federal judge ruled that the Defense Department had violated the First and Fifth Amendments.) Reporters built the system from which there seemed to be no escape. Maybe they can unbuild it.

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One Health In A Fractured World: Why Global Health Governance Must Adapt To Geopolitical Fragmentation

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:18:17 +0000

BY CLAIRE J. STANDLEY AND ERIN M. SORRELL

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in global health systems and underscored how interconnected drivers such as changes in land usage, urbanization, and climate amplify zoonotic disease threats. One Health, an integrated approach linking human, animal, and ecosystem health, has gained institutional traction via global governance approaches, yet faces persistent structural challenges, including siloed mandates, funding misalignment, and limited enforcement. We argue for pragmatic, polycentric governance—local leadership supported by regional mini-lateral coalitions and existing bi- and multilateral regimes—to operationalize One Health sustainably and equitably.

Introduction

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the weaknesses of global health systems to infectious diseases. However, less recognized was how the emergence of this novel virus highlighted the global changes converging to heighten outbreak risks: increased human-animal contact and agricultural intensification, accelerated population growth and urbanization, and changing weather and climatic patterns. These dynamics are playing out repeatedly, from the devastation to the poultry industry—where migratory birds and marine mammals suffer from rampant H5N1 influenza—to surges in mosquito-borne virus infections like chikungunya and Oropouche across the Americas. While these examples demonstrate that health threats are increasingly transboundary, global governance mechanisms are at risk of fragmentation amid political instability and declining trust in multilateral institutions. This article argues that given current geopolitical fragmentation, One Health governance must evolve from idealistic coordination, toward pragmatic, resilient, and multi-level cooperation.

What is One Health?

The term “One Health” first emerged in the early 21st century due to growing scientific recognition that infectious diseases of wildlife and livestock could negatively impact humans, and vice versa. Since then, the most widely adopted definition is that of the One Health High Level Expert Panel:

“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems.”

Early origins of One Health focused on operational collaboration to contain specific infectious disease outbreaks. Yet, the field has grown considerably, benefitting from formalized, interdisciplinary frameworks and governance systems. The most prominent of these is the Quadripartite, established in 2010 between the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH; formerly OIE), and subsequently joined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2022. The Quadripartite led the development of the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) (OHJPA), providing a blueprint for how these organizations would coordinate to sustainably advance One Health collaboration and implementation, prevent pandemics, and contribute to enhancing resilient health systems.

Since its inception, the Quadripartite has successfully raised the profile of One Health, earning commitments from the G7, G20 and numerous individual countries to adopt the approach in addressing global health threats, particularly for pandemic preparedness and response. The establishment of the One Health High-Level Expert Panel brought geographically and culturally diverse interdisciplinary expertise to the Quadripartite, facilitating better navigation of policy processes and anticipation of implementation barriers. Workshops in different WHO regions further advocated for adoption of One Health strategies, enhanced regional and national coordination, and resulted in the creation of country roadmaps. Yet ultimately, such efforts are limited by the resources of the Quadripartite and critically rely on national ownership, financing mechanisms, and momentum to move from strategy to operationalization.

Intrinsic Challenges with One Health Governance

The effort to coordinate sectors with responsibilities in One Health policy and implementation may appear straightforward in theory, but faces persistent structural problems as well as legal and normative weaknesses in practice.

While broad support for One Health exists across the various sectors involved, they often operate with different mandates, budgets, and data systems, making coordination difficult or ad hoc rather than automatic. Though these operational difficulties are being addressed in some settings through multisectoral national and regional strategies, integration is unlikely to ever be fully equitable. One Health has traditionally been promoted with a human health focus by the Global North, marginalizing local and Indigenous knowledge of the cultural and environmental drivers of emergence. This imbalance is mirrored in funding: expecting the environment, veterinary, and agriculture sectors to contribute personnel, knowledge, and consumables to a human health-centric preparedness and response cycle—without acknowledging fundamental discrepancies in resources and mandates—will not resolve the problem.

Government funding is also often reactive—focused on crisis response—whereas One Health approaches to epidemic preparedness depend on sustained investment in prevention. It promotes monitoring ecosystems, conducting surveillance across animal reservoirs, and detecting early spillover. While One Health encompasses far more than just infectious diseases, this remains its most widely applied use case and the one that has gained the most political traction to date. As such, it has become difficult to advocate for One Health multisectoral funding without a looming global health security threat, resulting in trade-offs between sectors.

Finally, One Health as a global initiative lacks a central governing body with real power. While WHO, WOAH, UNEP, and FAO collaborate via the Quadripartite, no one organization can enforce policy across sectors or countries. Similarly, although OHJPA provides a comprehensive framework for advancing One Health and offers technical assistance to support national implementation targets, its initiatives are non-binding and completely voluntary.

The Added Negative Impact of Global Fragmentation

Global fragmentation is increasingly undermining One Health governance. The shift away from Pax Americana and a US-led world order towards a multipolar system has eroded trust in multilateral institutions, including those of the Quadripartite. The WHO has been most dramatically affected, with the US withdrawal prompting a comprehensive review of its core functions and strategic streamlining in response to new fiscal constraints. There have been knock-on effects across other global bodies: the US presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) in 2026 has refocused its efforts towards economic growth and prosperity, moving away from prior high-level priorities—such as the Sustainable Development Goals (South Africa) and renewable energy (Brazil)—that were more closely aligned with One Health objectives.

This geopolitical fragmentation has been shaped by the prioritization of national interests, the politicization of global health, and international conflicts. Vaccine nationalism during COVID-19, whereby high-income countries disproportionately over-purchased limited supplies of life-saving vaccines, hampered efforts of multilateral initiatives to provide vaccines to countries unable to afford them directly from pharmaceutical companies, further demonstrating the limitations of global cooperation when it is most needed. The politicization of the origins of the pandemic not only directly influenced the US decision to withdraw from the WHO, but also cast a pall over scientific efforts related to zoonotic diseases. Global health and foreign assistance budgets are easy targets in this period of fragmentation when defense budgets are on the rise, as was the case when NATO members agreed to increase their defense spending to support Ukraine. While defense stakeholders increasingly recognize the value of a One Health approach, their integration into One Health governance needs careful consideration.

Rethinking One Health Governance: From Idealism to Pragmatism

Moving from idealism to pragmatism requires confronting structural, political, and operational realities. One Health, at its core, is aspirational, requiring efficient collaboration, shared priorities, and sustained funding across a variety of sectors. The stark reality is that international governance systems are, as aforementioned, fragmented and unlikely to be sufficient; a polycentric model provides an alternative approach. Referred to as polycentric governance, this model involves systems in which authority is distributed across levels rather than centralized. Each center operates semi-independently, interacting through cooperation, competition, and coordination, while adapting to local contexts and contributing to broader system goals.

For One Health, centers of authority span communities, governments, and international organizations. The approach emphasizes local actors taking the lead, with higher levels providing support and coordination, leveraging existing and functional structures rather than creating new ones. Local communities are on the front lines of spillover—they are often the first to observe emerging risks but may lack the necessary resources to report these events or respond effectively. Governments are the seat of policy and regulation, housing national surveillance systems and allocating budgets for preparedness and response, but, as noted earlier, lack of coordination and siloed reporting systems prevent effective response. Thus, intergovernmental organizations such as the African Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can come into play and facilitate coordination between borders. For example, the African Union has a One Health Data Alliance Africa Project, which seeks to “enhance digitalized One Health governance” across the continent. As such, polycentric governance does not replace centralized authority, rather it complements it through a “system of systems.”

One Health events often require decisive action at local or regional levels without waiting for global alignment. Mini-lateral cooperation—small coalitions of middle-powered willing states—help narrow the focus on polycentric governance. It can translate One Health from broad visions into tangible outcomes. Cooperation like this can prove to be quite effective, as One Health challenges are typically geographically and ecologically focused, making global agreements inefficient. Mini-lateral groups are politically aligned sufficiently to cooperate effectively and capable of acting quickly on a shared problem, focusing on specific outcomes rather than broad mandates. One Health mini-lateralism can therefore leverage a variety of platforms including regional networks that share cross-border surveillance data, functional coalitions established for specific technical issues like vaccine research and development, antimicrobial resistance monitoring or climate-health data sharing, or public-private partnerships linking policy to operational action. One example is the newly launched WOAH-PREZODE Working Group, which is convening experts across diverse One Health fields to bridge gaps between scientific evidence and policy formulation. While not automatically resolving the structural challenges highlighted above, such efforts provide stronger opportunities to set shared objectives that rebalance sectoral inequities and prioritize local knowledge while supporting regional priorities.

When pursuing intergovernmental cooperation on One Health—be it at the mini-lateral or multilateral level) —rather than creating new frameworks or initiating new agreements, a more effective strategy may be to mainstream One Health into existing regimes that have authority, financing, and compliance mechanisms, notably climate, trade, and pandemic governance. The goal, then, is to incorporate human–animal–ecosystems linkages where decisions are already being made. Climate agreements and trade frameworks provide clear future opportunities to integrate One Health principles. However, lessons from the 2025 Pandemic Treaty should be taken to heart: while One Health was formally recognized in the Treaty as central to pandemic preparedness, important points related to implementation and funding, especially for lower- and middle-income countries, were pushed to subsequent deliberations and left unanswered.

Finally, these examples underscore the importance of aligning incentives for One Health, both between participating sectors and across levels of polycentric governance. As major powers pivot to bilateral approaches to foreign assistance and health funding, countries must react by identifying areas of convergence with One Health structures and programs. Mini-lateral coalitions can expand through inclusion of emerging economies—providing opportunities to center new voices and advance equity—as well as through the engagement of non-governmental actors: philanthropic entities, industry, and civil society organizations can all play important roles and, in turn, benefit from greater One Health integration.

Conclusion

Experts suggest that there is approximately a 50/50 chance of another deadly pandemic before 2050, and the likelihood is that it will be zoonotic in origin. While the benefits of One Health encompass far more than infectious diseases, the reality is that pandemic preparedness offers a critical incentive for the levels of political and operational commitment needed for establishing sustainable and effective One Health governance. Though some may argue that geopolitical fragmentation makes cooperation needed for a global One Health approach unrealistic, we suggest that flexible, networked governance can replace, and even outperform, simplistic visions of top-down oversight. Global change is accelerating biological and environmental risks faster than our current systems can respond: One Health is the only framework designed to manage these interconnected threats. With appropriate and effective governance to guide implementation, it can provide practical, risk-reducing strategies to strengthen ecosystem health, support productive economies, and bolster national and regional security.

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