Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Olivier Sterck, Associate professor, University of Oxford

Humanitarian needs are rising around the world. At the same time, major donors such as the US and the UK are pulling back support, placing increasing strain on already overstretched aid systems.

Global humanitarian needs have quadrupled since 2015, driven by new conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. Added to these are protracted crises in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and DR Congo, among others. Yet donor funding has failed to keep pace, covering less than half of the requested US$50 billion in 2024, leaving millions without assistance.

Notably, the US recently slashed billions of US dollars from global relief efforts. The slashed contributions once made up to half of all public humanitarian funding and over a fifth of the UN’s budget. Other donors have been cutting aid as well.

As funding shortfalls widen, humanitarian agencies increasingly face tough choices: reducing the scale of operations, pausing essential services, or cancelling programmes altogether. Disruptions to aid delivery have become a routine feature of humanitarian operations.

Yet few rigorous studies have provided hard evidence of the consequences for affected populations.

A recent study from one of the world’s largest refugee camps in Kenya fills this gap.

Our research team from the University of Oxford and the University of Antwerp was already studying Kakuma camp and then had an opportunity to see what happened when aid was cut. We observed the impact of a 20% aid cut that occurred in 2023.

The study reveals that cuts to humanitarian assistance had dramatic impacts on hunger and psychological distress, with cascading effects on local credit systems and prices of goods.

Kakuma refugee camp

Kakuma is home to more than 300,000 refugees, who mostly came from South Sudan (49%), Somalia (16%), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (10%). They have been housed here since 1992. With widespread poverty, lack of income opportunities, and aid making up over 90% of household income, survival in the camp hinges on humanitarian support from UN organisations.

When the research began in late 2022, most refugees in Kakuma received a combination of in-kind and cash transfers from the World Food Programme. Transfers were worth US$17 per person per month, barely enough to cover the bare essentials: food, firewood and medicine.

Over the span of a year, the research team tracked 622 South Sudanese refugee households, interviewing them monthly to monitor how their living conditions evolved in response to the timing and level of aid they received. We also gathered weekly price data on 70 essential goods and conducted more than 250 in-depth interviews with refugees, shopkeepers, and humanitarian staff to understand the broader impacts.

Then came the cut. In July 2023, assistance was reduced by 20%, just as the research team was conducting its eighth round of data collection. This sudden reduction in humanitarian aid created a rare opportunity to assess the effects of an aid cut on both recipients and the markets they depend on.

Consequences of aid cut

The 20% cut in humanitarian aid had cascading effects, affecting not just hunger, but local credit systems, prices, and well-being.

1. Hunger got worse. As a Somali refugee interviewed by the researchers put it: “After the aid reduction, the lives of refugees become hard. That was the money sustaining them. […] Things are insufficient, and hunger is visible.”

Food insecurity was already widespread before the cut, with more than 90% of refugees classified as food insecure. Average caloric intake stood below 1,900 kcal per person per day – well under the World Food Programme’s 2,100 kcal target and about half the average daily calorie supply available to a US citizen.

Food insecurity further increased following the aid cut, with caloric intake falling by 145 kcal, a 7% decrease. The share of households eating one meal or less increased by 8 percentage points, from about 29% to 37%. At the same time, dietary diversity narrowed, indicating that households tried to mitigate the negative impacts of the aid cut by reducing the variety of foods they consumed.

2. Credit collapsed. As a refugee shopkeeper of Ethiopian origin reported: “When we give out credit we have a limit; since the aid is reduced, the credit is also reduced.”

Cash assistance in Kakuma is delivered through aid cards, which refugees routinely use as collateral to access food on credit. When transfers are delayed or unexpected expenses arise, refugees hand over their aid cards as a guarantee to trusted shopkeepers, allowing them to borrow food against next month’s aid.

But when assistance was cut, the value of this informal collateral plummeted. Retailers, fearing default, reduced lending or refused lending altogether. Informal credit from shopkeepers shrank by 9%. Many refugees reported being refused food on credit or having to repay past debt before receiving any new goods.

3. Households liquidated assets. With no access to credit, households began selling off possessions and drawing down food reserves. The average value of household assets fell by over 6% after the aid cut.

4. Psychological distress increased. The aid cut reduced self-reported sleep quality and happiness, indicating that reductions in aid go beyond physical impacts and also have psychological effects.

5. Prices fell. With reduced expenditure and purchasing power, the demand for food dropped, and food prices went down, partially offsetting the negative effects of the aid cut.

Implications

The study carries two major policy implications.

First, aid in contexts like Kakuma should not be treated as optional or discretionary, but as a structural necessity. It is the backbone of daily life. Mechanisms are needed to protect it from abrupt donor withdrawals.

Second, informal credit is not peripheral, it is central to economic life in refugee settings. In many camps, shopkeepers act as retailers and de facto financial institutions. When aid transfers serve as both income and collateral, cutting them risks collapsing this fragile credit system. Cash transfer programmes must therefore be designed with these dynamics in mind.

Olivier Sterck receives research funding from the IKEA Foundation, the World Bank, and The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

Vittorio Bruni is affiliated with Oxford University

– ref. What happens when aid is cut to a large refugee camp? Kenyan study paints a bleak picture – https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-aid-is-cut-to-a-large-refugee-camp-kenyan-study-paints-a-bleak-picture-259055

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Eric Y Tenkorang, Professor of Sociology,, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Intimate partner violence is controlling behaviour that results in harm to victims. This can be physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, economic or spiritual harm. Women are overwhelmingly the victims and survivors of intimate partner violence.

Globally, about one third of women have experienced some type of intimate partner violence. In Ghana too, one third of women have experienced physical and sexual abuse.

Research has linked women’s experiences of intimate partner violence to their socio-economic marginalisation, although it can happen to wealthy women too. Beyond the socio-economic reasons, some also make cultural arguments.

One such factor is lineage: lines of ancestry. Lineage is a major source of wealth, privileges and responsibilities in Ghana and more broadly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Some people trace their ancestry through maternal kin members. Women in these matrilineal societies wield socio-economic and cultural power because inheritance goes through the female line. As carriers of the lineage, women have some cultural value.

In a patrilineage, people trace their ancestry through men. Inheritance goes through the male line. Women cannot source wealth from the lineage. There is noticeable gender ordering and hierarchies in patrilineal societies. Male children are considered the carriers of the lineage.

Despite these two predominant lineage systems, there is also bilateral descent. In bilateral systems, kinship is traced to both maternal and paternal sides of the family.

Recent studies have suggested a link exists between lineage and intimate partner violence. But there is limited evidence as to why this might be the case.

One of my research interests is violence against women in African cultures and I have published extensively on this subject. For a recent study, my team collected survey data, including in-depth interviews, from the three ecological areas of Ghana – coastal, middle and northern. These reflect differences in ecology, culture and modernity.

About 1,700 women responded to our survey questions on lineage and intimate partner violence. Of these, about 30 women were followed up for an in-depth interview.

We found differences in experiences of violence between women depending on the lineage system they were part of. Awareness of this pattern could inform efforts to prevent violence and empower women.

What we found

A major finding was that women in matrilineal communities experienced lower levels of intimate partner violence than women in patrilineal communities or bilateral ones. Part of the reason is women’s access to resources.

We also found that bride price payments elevated patrilineal women’s risks of experiencing intimate partner violence. Bride price payment is an exchange of resources from the groom to the family of the bride. This is in acknowledgement that marriage has taken place. Women in patrilineal systems were more likely to experience physical, sexual and emotional violence when bride price was fully paid than when it was partially paid.

Unlike patrilineal women, matrilineal and bilateral women only experienced emotional and physical violence when bride price was fully paid.

The backdrop

Ghana passed its landmark Domestic Violence Act in 2007. It criminalises acts that are likely to result in intimate partner violence. This opened the door to the establishment of a Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit to prosecute perpetrators. Structures are also in place to provide support for victims of abuse.

But criminalising intimate partner violence offers only a partial remedy to the problem. This is particularly true when behaviours that lead to such acts of violence are deeply rooted in inequality, culture and patriarchy.

Despite recent efforts to bridge gender inequality, Ghana continues to lag behind other societies in this area. Ghanaian women are discriminated against socially and culturally. They are excluded from participating in major decisions related to their households and communities. They are also marginalised economically, creating less opportunity for upward mobility.

The patriarchal nature of Ghanaian society has not helped. It has worked in tandem with existing social arrangements to deepen inequality and further render women powerless.

In my view, part of matrilineal women’s reduced risk of experiencing intimate partner violence may be explained by access to maternal resources, where they benefit more than their patrilineal and bilateral counterparts.

This background also helps explain why bride price arrangements make a difference. Contemporary feminist analysis of the payment of bride price suggests it may be interpreted as “wife ownership and purchase”. This can be a tool for oppressing and controlling women.

These findings support the argument that bride price payment may have negative consequences for Ghanaian women. This is especially so for those in patrilineal cultures where the norms and expectations associated with these payments are stronger.

A path to safety

Establishing cultural reasons why some women are at greater risk than others of experiencing intimate partner violence is important for policy in Ghana and has implications for sub-Saharan Africa.

Our research findings point to the need to empower women by providing them with the resources they need to flourish and fight abuse. It shows lineage can be a conduit for resource exchange and distribution.

Also, public education can help correct narratives of ownership and purchase which are linked to intimate partner violence. Bride price payments should have symbolic, not commercial, significance.

Eric Y Tenkorang received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

– ref. Violence against women in Ghana is deeply rooted in culture and family ties – study – https://theconversation.com/violence-against-women-in-ghana-is-deeply-rooted-in-culture-and-family-ties-study-257947

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Simon Gikandi, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department, Princeton University

The passing of celebrated Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on 28 May 2025 marks the end of a remarkable period in African literary history – the fabulous decades in the second half of the 20th century when African writers came to command the world stage.

Read more:
Five things you should know about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s greatest writers of all time

This was the time of what I call the African literary revolution. As a scholar of African literature and the author of many books and papers on Ngũgĩ, I have raised several questions about this period. Why and how did this revolution happen? What motivated this turn to the imagination as a tool of decolonisation? And what was Ngũgĩ’s role in this drama?

To answer these questions one must think of Ngũgĩ inside and outside a generational cultural project.

The African literary revolution

Accounting for this project is not difficult. One can say for certain that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the African continent entered the last phase of decolonisation, writers and intellectuals became important actors in the fight for independence. They did so by quietly entering and occupying the spaces and knowledge systems that had until then been the preserve of colonial agents.

They used the work of the imagination to challenge colonial systems of thought and imagine decolonial alternatives. And what made this a period like no other in African literary history was a powerful sense of newness and the possibilities of a world yet to come. As the Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe once put it:

There was something in the air.

Literature was asked to herald the possibilities and perils of freedom and Ngũgĩ was to play a major role in chaperoning the language of African being and becoming.

In the memoirs he wrote about his education, he would often return to his mental imprisonment in English literature and the mythology of Englishness.

Hidden in these narratives of colonial miseducation, however, was the discovery of the gift of African fiction brought by precursors. Nigeria’s Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi and South Africa’s Peter Abrahams gave Ngũgĩ a model of how English could be used against Englishness.

Coming after these writers provided him with an alternative to the “Great Tradition” of English letters.

Reimagining Africa

As a student at Alliance High School in Kenya and later at Makerere University College in Uganda, Ngũgĩ positioned himself as part of a literary vanguard that was reimagining Africa.

His first major fiction was published in Penpoint, a pioneering journal of literature edited by students at the Makerere English department. He was a delegate to the 1962 Conference of African Writers held at the university, sharing the podium with writers who were to define the African culture of letters for several decades. He was one of the few writers at this historic conference without a major publication, but his presence seemed to signal the promise of the future.

Something else made this period distinctive: this was a time when African intellectuals, writers and politicians shared a common belief in the redemptive work of art and literature. At Makerere, Ngũgĩ had been preceded by Julius Nyerere, a translator of Shakespeare in Swahili who was to become president of Tanzania. At the same college, Apollo Milton Obote, future president of Uganda, had appeared in a 1948 production of Julius Caesar, the first performance of Shakespeare at the university.

And the contributors represented in Origin East Africa, an anthology of creative writing at Makerere, provide the most vivid example of the role writing and a literary education could come to play in the making of the postcolonial public sphere. Ngũgĩ had four stories published in the anthology, coming just after a short story by Ben Mkapa, future president of Tanzania.

Ngũgĩ belonged to a generation that saw literature as a forum for critique, of questioning dominant ideas and beliefs. In this context, creative writing was asked to perform at least four tasks:

• to reimagine an African past whose resources might be rehearsed for the future

• to rehearse the drama of decolonisation

• to account for postcolonial failure

• to produce fictions that might help readers rethink a global African identity.

Ngũgĩ’s novels rose to fulfil these tasks with conviction and courage. The River Between and Weep Not, Child dealt with the wounds of history. A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood were positioned in a zone where the figure of the new nation was caught between its aspirations and desires and the possibility of failure and betrayal. Wizard of the Crow was simultaneously an allegory of postcolonial failure and the possibility of its transcendence.

And then came banishment and exile.

The late career

Although he barely acknowledged it in his writings or in public, Ngũgĩ’s late career was defined by the realities of exile and an awareness of his own displacement from his primary audience and the Gĩkũyũ language that had energised his poetics.

He was celebrated and honoured in powerful American universities and institutions including the Library of Congress. He was recognised in the global African world and cited by the few African leaders like Ghana’s John Dramani Mahama who understood the need for a forceful response to racial ideologies.

Read more:
Drama that shaped Ngũgĩ’s writing and activism comes home to Kenya

But he was a persona non grata in the one place – Kenya – where recognition mattered most to him.

In the end, there was a certain kind of belatedness in Ngũgĩ’s later fictions. The subject of these works and their points of reference were distinctly Gĩkũyũ, Kenyan, African, pan-African, and global. Nonetheless, these gestures of being African were enacted far away from the homelands in which Ngũgĩ’s writing and thinking was both intelligible and functional.

Imagining and writing about Africa away from Africa was a promise and debt. It was an obligation to a place but also a measure of one’s distance from it.

Read more:
3 things Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o taught me: language matters, stories are universal, Africa can thrive

I reflected on this problem as I reviewed Ngũgĩ’s 2006 novel set in an imaginary autocratic country, Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), in its original Gĩkũyũ edition and later in its translation.

I was reading the same book, but it was pointing in two different directions – towards home and away from it.

In our many encounters, Ngũgĩ made fun of the fact that I seemed to have adopted alienation as the essential condition for thinking and writing. What he sought to do until the last minute of his life was carry within himself and his fictions that place that used to be home, its politics and poetics.

Simon Gikandi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ngũgi wa Thiong’o and the African literary revolution – https://theconversation.com/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-african-literary-revolution-258428

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Hedley Twidle, Associate Professor and head of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. The Interpreters is a new book that collects the work of 37 authors, all of it writing (plus some drawing) concerned with actual people, places and events.

The anthology is the product of many years of reading and discussion between my co-editor Sean Christie (an experienced journalist and nonfiction author) and me (a writer and professor who teaches literature, including creative nonfiction).

The book is a work of homage to the many strains of ambitious and artful writing that shelter within the unhelpful term “nonfiction”. These include: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony.

To give an idea of the range, energy and risk of the pieces collected in the anthology, here I discuss five of them.

1. Fighting Shadows by Lidudumalingani

We debated for a long time which piece to start the anthology with, and ultimately went for this one, which begins:

One afternoon my father and the other boys from the Zikhovane village decided to walk across a vast landscape, two valleys and a river, to a village called Qombolo to disrupt a wedding.

It’s a quietly compelling opening. First of all, there is intrigue: why the disruption? It could also easily be the first sentence of a novel (maybe even one by famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe). And so we begin with a reminder of how storytelling is such a deep, ancient and fundamental part of societies – an impulse that long predates writing and moves across and beyond the fiction/nonfiction divide. (Lidudumalingani won the 2016 Caine Prize for a short story, so he works across both.)

Fighting Shadows is about the tradition of stick fighting, and how it’s transported from rural areas to urban ones. But it’s also about so much more, about “the dance between then and now”, as the writer puts it later on. The prose is so deft and graceful, as if the author is trying to match the “dance” of expert stick fighters with his own verbal arts. For me it’s a story that could only have emerged from this part of the world: it has a distinct voice, precision and poetry to it.

2. The End of a Conversation by Julie Nxadi

This is the shortest piece in the anthology, but for me one of the most affecting. It traces how a young girl comes to realise that the (white) family she is being brought up with are not really her family. She is the daughter of the housekeeper, the domestic worker:

I was not ‘the kids’.
I was not their kin.

It’s probably best described as autofiction, a kind of writing that lies somewhere in the borderlands between autobiography and fiction. Nxadi has spoken of how she decided to write in a way that contained her own life story – the “heartbreak” of that moment – but was also able to carry and represent the experience of others who had gone through something similar.

The piece is also a product of the #FeesMustFall student protests (2015 onwards), when many young South Africans felt able to share unresolved, awkward or shameful stories for the first time.

The End of a Conversation is such a deft, wise and subtle handling of a difficult subject, with no easy targets or easy resolutions. Somehow the writer has found just the right distance – emotionally and aesthetically – from this moment of childhood realisation.

3. South African Pastoral by William Dicey

I co-own a pear farm with my brother. I attend to finances and labour relations, he oversees the growing of the fruit.

This essay by William Dicey thinks hard, very hard, about what it means to manage a fruit farm in the Boland (an agricultural region still shaped by South Africa’s divided past). It is one of the most frank and unflinching accounts of land and labour I’ve ever come across. The writer makes the point that he could easily have stayed in the city, lived in “liberal” circles and not thought about these issues much.

But becoming a farmer confronts him with all kinds of difficult questions (How much should he intervene in the lives of his employees? In family and financial planning, in matters of alcohol abuse?) as he is drawn into an awkward but meaningful intimacy with others on the farm.

The US essayist Philip Lopate suggests that scepticism is often the tool for moving towards truth in personal nonfiction writing:

So often the “plot” of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defences toward deeper levels of honesty.

This is very much what happens in South African Pastoral, and why it is such a mesmerising piece (even while written in such a plain and restrained style).

4. Hard Rock by Mogorosi Motshumi

My co-editor said from the start we should include graphic nonfiction (drawn stories and comics) and I’m so grateful he did. Mogorosi Motshumi’s warm, zany but also harrowing account is about coming of age under apartheid and then the heady days of the 1990s transition.

In his early career, Motshumi was widely known for his comic strips and political cartooning, but this graphic autobiography is far more ambitious. The style of drawing changes and evolves as the protagonist gets older; also, there is something intriguing about seeing weighty subjects like detention, disability, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS stigma approached through the eyes of a wry cartoonist with a keen sense of the absurd.

Hard Rock is a prologue to the graphic nonfiction memoir that he has been working on for many years, the 360 Degrees Trilogy. The first two instalments have appeared – The Initiation (2016) and Jozi Jungle (2022) – and I would urge anyone to seek them out. Mogorosi’s work is a major achievement in South African autobiography and life writing (or life “drawing”).

5. The Interpreters by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele

This co-authored piece is what gave the anthology its name. The Interpreters is a reflection on being a language interpreter during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (1996-1998) into gross human rights violations during white minority rule.

A series of individuals recall the challenges of that process. Sitting in glass booths in the middle of proceedings, they had to move across South Africa’s many official languages in real time, translating the words of victims, perpetrators, grieving families, lawyers and commissioners.

The chapter is also a reminder of how our English-language anthology faces the challenge of doing justice to a multilingual, multivocal society where all kinds of cultural translations happen all the time.

The piece is a blend of many people’s voices, testimonies and reminiscences. As such, it also seemed to symbolise the larger project of The Interpreters: trying to record, render and honour the many voices that make up our complex social world.

Hedley Twidle worked with Soutie Press in the creation of this anthology.

– ref. 5 great reads by South African writers from 30 years of real-life stories – https://theconversation.com/5-great-reads-by-south-african-writers-from-30-years-of-real-life-stories-258340

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ibrahim Z. Bahreldin, Associate Professor of Urban & Environmental Design, University of Khartoum

What makes a public space truly public?

In Khartoum, before the current conflict engulfed Sudan, the answer was not always a park, a plaza or a promenade.

The city’s streets, tea stalls (sitat al-shai), protest sites and even burial spaces served as dynamic arenas of everyday life, political expression and informal resilience.

In a recently published article, I studied 64 public spaces across pre-war Greater Khartoum, revealing a landscape far richer – and more contested – than standard urban classifications suggest. Specifically, I uncovered four classifications: formal, informal, privately owned and hybrid spaces – each alive with negotiation and everyday use.

While some spaces were planned by colonial engineers or municipal authorities, many were carved out by communities: claimed, adapted and reimagined through use.

My research offers valuable insights into the design and planning of Africa’s cities. As they grow and face mounting political and environmental pressures, it’s time to rethink how public spaces are defined and designed – not through imported models, but by listening to the ways people already make cities public.

Read more:
Sudan needs to accept its cultural diversity: urban planning can help rebuild the country and prevent future conflict

Across the African continent, cities are growing fast – but not always fairly. Urban expansion often privileges gated developments, mega-projects and high-security zones while neglecting the everyday spaces where most people live, work and gather.

In Sudan, these dynamics have been further complicated by conflict, displacement and economic instability. The ongoing war has disrupted not only governance, but also the spatial fabric of urban life.

My paper aims to invite those involved in planning policies and post-conflict reconstruction to move beyond formal, western-centric models that often overlook how publicness actually unfolds in African cities: through informality, negotiation and social improvisation.

Khartoum’s public spaces, as documented in my study, serve as diagnostic tools for understanding how cities survive crises, express identity and contest inequality.

In the wake of war and displacement, these spaces will play a role in shaping how Sudan rebuilds not just infrastructure, but social cohesion.

Pre-war Khartoum

Khartoum’s public spaces cannot be understood through conventional categories – like formal squares and urban parks – alone. These formal squares represent only one layer of a much more plural and negotiated urban reality.

Drawing on fieldwork and the documentation of 64 public spaces across Greater Khartoum, I identify four overlapping types that reflect how space is produced, accessed and contested.

1. Formal public spaces: These include planned parks, ceremonial squares, civic plazas and administrative open spaces, often relics of colonial or postcolonial urban planning. They are defined by order, visibility and regulation. Mīdān Abbas, originally an active civic space in the centre of Khartoum, repeatedly reclaimed by informal traders and protesters, is one example, illustrating how even the most formal spaces can become contested. It was notably active during Sudan’s April 1985 uprising, serving as part of a wider network of civic spaces used for political mobilisation. Informal traders consistently transformed it into a bustling marketplace, embedding everyday commerce and social exchange into the formal urban fabric.

2. Informal and insurgent spaces: These emerge beyond or against official planning logics – riverbanks used for gatherings, neglected lots transformed into social nodes or bridges appropriated by traders. They include spiritual sites like Sufi tombs, and protest spaces such as the sit-in zone outside the city’s army headquarters. These spaces reveal the city’s capacity for bottom-up urbanism and collective adaptation.

3. Privately owned civic spaces: Shopping malls, privately managed parks and cultural cafés fall into this category. While they appear public, they are often classed, surveilled (monitored through cameras or security presence) or exclusionary. The rise of these spaces coincides with the decline of state-managed urban infrastructure, reflecting the turn in Sudanese urban governance.

Read more:
Sudan: the symbolic significance of the space protesters made their own

4. Public “private” spaces: These spaces blur lines between ownership and use. They include mosque courtyards, school grounds, building frontages or underutilised university lawns that serve as informal gathering points. Access here is governed less by law and more by social codes, trust or class.

Together, these typologies highlight that “publicness” in Khartoum is relational. It depends not only on who planned a space, but who uses it, how and under what conditions.

Planning in African cities must therefore move beyond fixed zoning maps to embrace the layered, fluid and lived nature of urban space.

Rebuilding, rethinking, resisting

Post-conflict reconstruction in Sudan – and elsewhere in Africa – must resist the allure of “blank slate” master plans. Those involve rebuilding cities from scratch with sweeping, top-down designs that ignore existing social and spatial dynamics.

Imported models, often guided by bureaucratic thinking or commercial incentives, risk erasing the very spaces where public life already thrives, albeit informally or invisibly.

Rather than imposing formality, planners should recognise and strengthen the informal and hybrid systems that sustain civic life, especially in times of instability.

Urban theorists working in and on the global south, such as AbdouMaliq Simone and the late Vanessa Watson, have long argued for planning frameworks that centre on everyday practices, adaptive use and spatial justice.

Khartoum offers a compelling case.

From the sit-ins of 2019 to tea stalls run by displaced women, public spaces in Sudan are not inert backdrops. They are active platforms of everyday life, resistance, care and community-making.

Reconstruction must begin by asking: what spaces mattered to people before the war? Which ones fostered inclusion, dignity and visibility? Only then can new urban futures emerge, ones that are rooted in the practices of those who have always made the city public, even when the state did not.

What makes spaces truly public?

The public realm in Sudan has always been shaped through negotiation, sometimes with the state, often despite it.

Rebuilding after war is not only about reconstructing buildings but also about reimagining the terms of belonging.

This requires a shift from viewing public space as a fixed asset to understanding it as a dynamic process. Who gets to gather, to speak, to rest, to protest – these are the true measures of publicness.

Understanding Khartoum’s pre-war public spaces isn’t a nostalgic exercise. It’s a necessary step towards building more inclusive, resilient and locally grounded cities in the wake of crisis.

Ibrahim Bahreldin is a member of the Sudanese Institute of Architects and the City Planning Institute of Japan, and is registered as a professional architect and urban planner with the Sudanese Engineering Council and the Saudi Council of Engineers. He is also affiliated with the King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.

The Author receives funding from KAU Endowment (WAQF) at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

– ref. Khartoum before the war: the public spaces that held the city together – https://theconversation.com/khartoum-before-the-war-the-public-spaces-that-held-the-city-together-258632

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrew Kweku Conduah, PhD Candidate, University of Ghana

Ghana’s national agenda often focuses on the country’s large number of young people. In fact a less noticed demographic transformation is reshaping society: the country’s older population is growing rapidly. According to Ghana Statistical Service estimates,
people aged 60 and above are projected to make up over 12% of the total population by 2050, more than doubling the 2021 estimate of 6.8%.

And more of these older adults are ageing alone.

That’s because of Ghana’s transition from extended to nuclear family systems, coupled with rural–urban and international migration. Traditionally, older Ghanaians aged within multi-generational households, with care provided by children and extended family. But today, migration patterns have intensified, with over 50% of the population living in urban areas, leaving many elders behind in rural communities or isolated in city slums.

I recently conducted a study across six Ghanaian communities (urban and rural). Drawing from 52 interviews, I explored the emotional, social and economic implications of ageing alone.

The participants in the study echoed a common theme: the erosion of intergenerational family structures, leaving the elderly socially and emotionally isolated.

As a 73-year-old widow participant who lives in a city put it:

My daughter is in Canada. My son lives in Kumasi, but he rarely visits. I live alone, and if I fall sick, I just wait. Sometimes, I pray someone will notice.

Such stories are no longer anecdotal outliers. Nationally representative data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey and WHO SAGE Ghana Wave 2 also reveal an uptick in solitary living among older adults, particularly widowed women and those without formal pensions. Over 22% of older respondents in urban Ghana reported living alone, a sharp contrast to previous decades, where co-residence with adult children was the norm. Many older Ghanaians don’t have reliable caregivers.

As a PhD candidate in population studies at the University of Ghana, I focus on health-related quality of life among older adults. This article draws from my doctoral fieldwork in urban and rural Ghana, using qualitative interviews to uncover the lived realities of ageing alone.

The study highlights a gap in Ghana’s ageing policies: they overlook solitary elders who live without daily family support.

The paper calls for integrated social protection for older adults living alone. That would include subsidised healthcare, community outreach services, emergency care networks, and community-based mental health interventions.

What old people had to say

Focus group discussions revealed that older adults struggle with emotional loneliness, financial anxiety and health system constraints. Despite the presence of pension associations, many older adults feel forgotten. Spiritual activities and reading offer moments of solace, but limited National Health Insurance Scheme coverage, rising living costs, and declining family support deepen the hardship.

Focus groups revealed that older women were particularly vulnerable due to widowhood, land insecurity and declining support from children. Men, while respected, felt idle and underutilised. Participants spoke of finding strength in farming, faith and fellowship, but felt forgotten in national development planning.

Ghana’s National Ageing Policy (2010) promises integrated care, but older adults, especially women, are slipping into the cracks of urban anonymity.

Ageing here is not just biological, it is physical, psychological and economic. My broader research affirms that the majority of older adults in Ghana worked in the informal sector. They therefore have no access to formal pensions or post-retirement income security.

Participants in my most recent research shared how they felt:

I was a seamstress all my life. Now my eyes are failing. No pension, no money. I survive on cassava and prayer. – 66-year-old retired woman

Ageing in Ghana is like walking into a forest — you disappear quietly. No one sees you. — 69-year-old woman

This statement underscores the gendered experience of ageing, where women often face greater economic and emotional vulnerability due to widowhood, longer life expectancy, and social neglect.

We are not dying yet. We want to matter again. – 70-year-old man

We have houses, but not homes anymore. – 75-year-old man

What next

The implications of this neglect are staggering. According to the World Health Organization, loneliness and social isolation among the elderly are associated with a 50% increased risk of dementia, depression and premature death. In Ghana, there are added challenges of inaccessible health facilities and cultural stigma about ageing. Yet most people aren’t talking about it.

Ghana introduced the National Ageing Policy in 2010 to promote the health, security and participation of older people in national development. But many elderly people still live without affordable healthcare, age-friendly infrastructure or a regular income.

What Ghana needs now is not another grand policy document. It needs practical, community-rooted and state-supported action.

Decentralised community geriatric care: Train district-level health volunteers in geriatric care, and equip them with basic tools to support older people in their homes.

Pension and informal sector integration: Extend Ghana’s pension framework to informal sector workers.

Public awareness campaigns: Reframe ageing in national media not as decline but as contribution, highlighting elder wisdom, resilience, and ongoing social relevance.

Urban planning for ageing: Incorporate age-friendly elements like ramps, benches, toilets and signage into development plans.

None of this is charity. It is a strategic investment. In 2021, Ghana spent less than 0.5% of its national health budget on elderly-specific care. That is fiscally short-sighted. Healthier, engaged older adults reduce family burdens, boost social capital, and can even contribute economically by training and mentoring others.

In the communities I visited, I encountered grassroots interventions worth scaling up: church youth groups providing weekly food support, pensioners’ associations checking in on members, and intergenerational community storytelling sessions that rebuild emotional bonds.

In Ghana’s Akan tradition, elders are considered living libraries. Their absence from the communal space is not just a social loss, it is a cultural erasure.

If the elderly are neglected, anyone may wake up on the wrong side of the demographic line one day, wondering if they too will be forgotten.

Andrew Kweku Conduah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ghana’s older people feel left behind and ignored: how to care for them better – https://theconversation.com/ghanas-older-people-feel-left-behind-and-ignored-how-to-care-for-them-better-257951

Source: – By Fortunate Mafeta Phaka, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher of herptile-human interactions, North-West University

Naming all the creatures and plants in nature is no small task. Fortunate Phaka is a zoologist who has conducted the first comprehensive analysis of naming and classification of frogs and reptiles in nine South African cultures. The list includes 136 frog and 407 reptile species that have been scientifically described. He explains why it’s important to record all the species names that people use in their own languages.

Why did you study the indigenous names of frogs and reptiles?

I am interested in the interactions between wildlife and people. These interactions include, for example, how people use wildlife in figures of speech, harvesting of wildlife for consumption, and of course how animals are assigned names.

If everyone’s names for things are known and shared, the ideas behind the names can also be shared, appreciated and valued.

Conservation planning is improved by consideration of different wildlife perspectives, which is revealed partly by the names that different people give wildlife.

Knowing local names can provide assurance that people from different cultural backgrounds are talking about the same species.

In South Africa, for example, there are 11 official spoken languages and scientists use Latin names for species. Most people aren’t familiar with the scientific names.

That’s why we extended the list of scientific, Afrikaans and English names of South African frogs and reptiles to include names in the country’s other nine official languages.

How did you go about it, and what did you find?

The project started as a pilot study in 2016, carried out in the Zululand area of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, where frog biodiversity is high and Indigenous cultural practices are still part of everyday life. Results of the pilot were published as a book in 2017 and as a scientific publication in 2019.

Following the success of the pilot study, I collected responses from 287 South African Indigenous language speakers (aged between 25 and 57) using an online questionnaire and in-person interviews while on field trips, and reviewed 18 scientific articles, dissertations and books to study naming practices even further.

The study shed light on the way people group animals (folk taxonomy) and how that compares with the way scientists group them (scientific taxonomy).

It became clear that Indigenous language names were often assigned based on unique features of frogs or reptiles, such as the sound they make, how they move or where they are found. Most of these names group several species together based on their similarities. This meant most frog and reptile species did not have Indigenous language names that were unique to them. For example, zoologists have named eight different Reed Frog species from South Africa but these eight species were assigned one Indigenous name that groups them together.

The organised way of assigning Indigenous names to animals has some similarities to how scientists assign names that are unique to each species. For example, the Grass Frog species are grouped together under the scientific genus Ptychadena, and in IsiZulu the same species are grouped under the name Uvete. These similarities meant we could combine scientific naming practices with Indigenous naming practices to give each species a unique name in multiple languages.

To ensure the unique Indigenous names remained familiar to speakers of respective languages, we added descriptive terms to the existing general Indigenous names to make them specific, instead of coining an entirely new name. For example in IsiZulu the general name Umgqagqa (used for all Reed Frogs) became Umgqagqa opendiwe (specific name for the Painted Reed Frog). And several other descriptive terms were added to Umgqagqa to distinguish between the eight Reed Frog species of South Africa.

Why does it matter to record the Indigenous names of species?

Conservation hasn’t been doing a good job of being inclusive. Knowing Indigenous names and the local perspectives behind those names is a good way to start being aware of the multiple other perspectives. Conservation should ultimately be to everyone’s benefit.

For a long time wildlife guidebooks have had very few Indigenous language names in them. With increased recording of Indigenous names, any South African would be able to open a wildlife guide and read a name in any of our 11 official spoken languages. Hopefully one day we can have more books like the Bilingual Guide to the Frogs of Zululand (IsiZulu version: Isiqondiso Sasefilidini Esindimimbili Ngamaxoxo AkwelaKwaZulu) that make it possible for you to read about your favourite wildlife in your preferred language.

Has this been done for other groups of animals or plants?

Birds and plants are two groups that have received this kind of attention.

A recent scientific publication has worked on IsiZulu names for all South African birds and another publication studied the morphology of IsiZulu bird names. There has also been work on IsiXhosa insect names, and there has been a SeSotho animal word list published online. Indigenous names for African wildlife have received sporadic attention in the past, but with the recent increases in calls for consideration of Indigenous knowledge there has been increasing focus on understanding these names and using them.

Do you have some favourite names?

I have a lot of favourites but there are some names that stand out, like Senana (Sepedi general name for Rain Frogs) and Lebololo (Sepedi name for Puff adder). These names have the same root word or sound throughout most of the Indigenous South African languages and I am curious about how this happened. Rain Frogs are also called Senanatswidi in Sepedi and tswidi is an onomatopoeic reference to the whistling sound that Rain Frogs make.

Fortunate Mafeta Phaka receives funding from National Research Foundation/South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity.

– ref. South Africa’s frogs and reptiles get their own list of names in local languages – https://theconversation.com/south-africas-frogs-and-reptiles-get-their-own-list-of-names-in-local-languages-254643

Source: – By Sarah Gabbott, Professor of Palaeontology, University of Leicester

A fossilised creature found in a South African roadside quarry 25 years ago has finally got an official name. The small, segmented, crustacean-like creature, dated to 444 million years ago, can now be introduced as Keurbos susanae. It belongs to the arthropod group of animals, which accounts for about 84% of all known species that exist today, including insects, spiders and crabs.

Palaeontologist Sarah Gabbott explains what’s so unusual about her discovery, which she named as part of the process of describing it scientifically.

What can you tell us about this creature and the environment it lived in?

The fossil is about 50cm long and has 46 almost identical segments. Projecting from each is a delicate, gill-like structure. It would probably have looked like a bit like a horseshoe crab and the gills would have been for absorbing oxygen from the water it lived in. Its insides are exquisitely well-preserved, which is very unusual for fossils – normally only the hard, more decay-resistant external features would be preserved. You can see bundles of muscle fibres that would have powered the limbs, tendons and an internal scaffold structure that gave the animal rigidity.

We think it would have spent most of its life living on, or more likely just above, the seafloor, probably walking and swimming in an undulatory (waving) motion.

It lived in the immediate aftermath of the end Ordovician extinction event more than 440 million years ago, caused by glaciations (the spread of icy conditions) across vast swaths of the planet. This extinction wiped out about 85% of Earth’s species. The marine basin that Keurbos susanae inhabited was probably very cold and at times covered with sea ice.

It was a relatively hostile environment in other ways too. Our analyses of the chemistry of the shales – the sediments on the sea bed where this animal and others lived, now turned to rock – shows that they were deposited under anoxic conditions (that is, there was no oxygen circulating freely in the water). And at times free hydrogen sulfide occurred in the sediment porewaters (the water in tiny spaces between grains of sediment) and even above the seafloor. Not much could live in these conditions and this was critical to this fossil’s amazing preservation.

It meant the carcass was not scavenged by other animals after it died. Also, the chemistry was important in the process whereby the soft tissues, which should usually rot away rapidly, became mineralised quickly after death. This turned the animal’s anatomy to mineral which survived for hundreds of millions of years until it was discovered.

It is preserved “inside out”.

Keurbos susanae is a new genus and species which we are still trying to place among other early arthropods. The fact that its insides are better preserved than its outside makes it difficult to compare with other fossils that are preserved the “other way round”.

How did you find the fossil and what else has been found in that area?

The site is in the Cedarberg mountains, north of Cape Town. To collect fossils in this area you need a permit granted by the Council for Geoscience. Fossil-bearing rocks are protected by law because of their heritage and scientific value.

Fossil hunting in these rocks takes a lot of hard work and patience, splitting open the shales with a hammer and chisel. These shale rocks are what’s left of layers of silt that were once on the sea floor. The fossils here are super rare: you can dig and split shale for days and not find a single fossil! But we know there are some in there because of discoveries made previously.

I found two specimens. The first one is complete but the second one only has the middle part of the body preserved.

In the same rocks we have found some of the earliest vertebrate fossils with mineralised teeth, called conodonts. They were eel shaped and predatory. Also eurypterids (sea scorpions), arthropods with powerful swimming appendages, which would have cruised through the frigid waters. There are also orthocones – a type of chambered cephalopod – like the mollusc fossils called ammonites, which have been found in large numbers, but with a straight shell instead of coiled.

Why has it taken 25 years to describe Keurbos susanae scientifically?

Two reasons really.

First, because of the nature of preservation, where all the insides are perfectly preserved but the outside (the carapace or body covering) is absent, it is just difficult to interpret and compare to other fossils. And secondly because the specimen’s head and legs are missing and these are key characteristics that palaeontologists would use to help them to understand the evolutionary relationships of such fossils.

If more specimens were to be found, with their heads and legs, we could be more certain about where this fossil fitted in the scheme of life. But the site where I found it has been covered in a lot of rock from quarrying activity. So we decided to describe what we had in the meantime, and not wait for more examples.

The fossil’s name, Keurbos susanae, refers to the place where I found it and to my mother, Sue, who encouraged me to follow a career that made me happy, whatever that might be.

Sarah Gabbott receives funding from Natural Environmental Research Council; National Geographic. She is affiliated with Green Circle Nature Regeneration CIC a not for profit Environmental Community Interest Company in the UK

– ref. Marine fossil found in South Africa is one of a kind, thanks to unusual preservation – https://theconversation.com/marine-fossil-found-in-south-africa-is-one-of-a-kind-thanks-to-unusual-preservation-255256

Source: – By Martin Bekker, Computational Social Scientist, University of the Witwatersrand

The problem is simple: it’s hard to know whether a photo’s real or not anymore. Photo manipulation tools are so good, so common and easy to use, that a picture’s truthfulness is no longer guaranteed.

The situation got trickier with the uptake of generative artificial intelligence. Anyone with an internet connection can cook up just about any image, plausible or fantasy, with photorealistic quality, and present it as real. This affects our ability to discern truth in a world increasingly influenced by images.

Read more:
Can you tell the difference between real and fake news photos? Take the quiz to find out

I teach and research the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), including how we use and understand digital images.

Many people ask how we can tell if an image has been changed, but that’s fast becoming too difficult. Instead, here I suggest a system where creators and users of images openly state what changes they’ve made. Any similar system will do, but new rules are needed if AI images are to be deployed ethically – at least among those who want to be trusted, especially media.

Doing nothing isn’t an option, because what we believe about media affects how much we trust each other and our institutions. There are several ways forward. Clear labelling of photos is one of them.

Deepfakes and fake news

Photo manipulation was once the preserve of government propaganda teams, and later, expert users of Photoshop, the popular software for editing, altering or creating digital images.

Today, digital photos are automatically subjected to colour-correcting filters on phones and cameras. Some social media tools automatically “prettify” users’ pictures of faces. Is a photo taken of oneself by oneself even real anymore?

Read more:
The use of deepfakes can sow doubt, creating confusion and distrust in viewers

The basis of shared social understanding and consensus – trust regarding what one sees – is being eroded. This is accompanied by the apparent rise of untrustworthy (and often malicious) news reporting. We have new language for the situation: fake news (false reporting in general) and deepfakes (deliberately manipulated images, whether for waging war or garnering more social media followers).

Misinformation campaigns using manipulated images can sway elections, deepen divisions, even incite violence. Scepticism towards trustworthy media has untethered ordinary people from fact-based accounting of events, and has fuelled conspiracy theories and fringe groups.

Ethical questions

A further problem for producers of images (personal or professional) is the difficulty of knowing what’s permissable. In a world of doctored images, is it acceptable to prettify yourself? How about editing an ex-partner out of a picture and posting it online?

Would it matter if a well-respected western newspaper published a photo of Russian president Vladimir Putin pulling his face in disgust (an expression that he surely has made at some point, but of which no actual image has been captured, say) using AI?

The ethical boundaries blur further in highly charged contexts. Does it matter if opposition political ads against then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in the US deliberately darkened his skin?

Would generated images of dead bodies in Gaza be more palatable, perhaps more moral, than actual photographs of dead humans? Is a magazine cover showing a model digitally altered to unattainable beauty standards, while not declaring the level of photo manipulation, unethical?

A fix

Part of the solution to this social problem demands two simple and clear actions. First, declare that photo manipulation has taken place. Second, disclose what kind of photo manipulation was carried out.

The first step is straightforward: in the same way pictures are published with author credits, a clear and unobtrusive “enhancement acknowledgement” or EA should be added to caption lines.

Read more:
AI isn’t what we should be worried about – it’s the humans controlling it

The second is about how an image has been altered. Here I call for five “categories of manipulation” (not unlike a film rating). Accountability and clarity create an ethical foundation.

The five categories could be:

C – Corrected

Edits that preserve the essence of the original photo while refining its overall clarity or aesthetic appeal – like colour balance (such as contrast) or lens distortion. Such corrections are often automated (for instance by smartphone cameras) but can be performed manually.

E – Enhanced

Alterations that are mainly about colour or tone adjustments. This extends to slight cosmetic retouching, like the removal of minor blemishes (such as acne) or the artificial addition of makeup, provided the edits don’t reshape physical features or objects. This includes all filters involving colour changes.

B – Body manipulated

This is flagged when a physical feature is altered. Changes in body shape, like slimming arms or enlarging shoulders, or the altering of skin or hair colour, fall under this category.

O – Object manipulated

This declares that the physical position of an object has been changed. A finger or limb moved, a vase added, a person edited out, a background element added or removed.

G – Generated

Entirely fabricated yet photorealistic depictions, such as a scene that never existed, must be flagged here. So, all images created digitally, including by generative AI, but limited to photographic depictions. (An AI-generated cartoon of the pope would be excluded, but a photo-like picture of the pontiff in a puffer jacket is rated G.)

The suggested categories are value-blind: they are (or ought to be) triggered simply by the occurrence of any manipulation. So, colour filters applied to an image of a politician trigger an E category, whether the alteration makes the person appear friendlier or scarier. A critical feature for accepting a rating system like this is that it is transparent and unbiased.

The CEBOG categories above aren’t fixed, there may be overlap: B (Body manipulated) might often imply E (Enhanced), for example.

Feasibility

Responsible photo manipulation software may automatically indicate to users the class of photo manipulation carried out. If needed it could watermark it, or it could simply capture it in the picture’s metadata (as with data about the source, owner or photographer). Automation could very well ensure ease of use, and perhaps reduce human error, encouraging consistent application across platforms.

Read more:
Can you spot a financial fake? How AI is raising our risks of billing fraud

Of course, displaying the rating will ultimately be an editorial decision, and good users, like good editors, will do this responsibly, hopefully maintaining or improving the reputation of their images and publications. While one would hope that social media would buy into this kind of editorial ideal and encourage labelled images, much room for ambiguity and deception remains.

The success of an initiative like this hinges on technology developers, media organisations and policymakers collaborating to create a shared commitment to transparency in digital media.

Martin Bekker receives funding from the National Research Foundation in South Africa.

– ref. How to tell if a photo’s fake? You probably can’t. That’s why new rules are needed – https://theconversation.com/how-to-tell-if-a-photos-fake-you-probably-cant-thats-why-new-rules-are-needed-252645

Source: – By Andrew Forbes, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand

Light is all around us, essential for one of our primary senses (sight) as well as life on Earth itself. It underpins many technologies that affect our daily lives, including energy harvesting with solar cells, light-emitting-diode (LED) displays and telecommunications through fibre optic networks.

The smartphone is a great example of the power of light. Inside the box, its electronic functionality works because of quantum mechanics. The front screen is an entirely photonic device: liquid crystals controlling light. The back too: white light-emitting diodes for a flash, and lenses to capture images.

We use the word photonics, and sometimes optics, to capture the harnessing of light for new applications and technologies. Their importance in modern life is celebrated every year on 16 May with the International Day of Light.

Scientists on the African continent, despite the resource constraints they work under, have made notable contributions to photonics research. Some of these have been captured in a recent special issue of the journal Applied Optics. Along with colleagues in this field from Morocco and Senegal, we introduced this collection of papers, which aims to celebrate excellence and show the impact of studies that address continental issues.

A spotlight on photonics in Africa

Africa’s history in formal optics stems back thousands of years, with references to lens design already recorded in ancient Egyptian writings.

In more recent times, Africa has contributed to two Nobel prizes based on optics. Ahmed Zewail (Egyptian born) watched the ultrafast processes in chemistry with lasers (1999, Nobel Prize for Chemistry) and Serge Harouche (Moroccan born) studied the behaviour of individual particles of light, photons (2012, Nobel Prize for Physics).

Unfortunately, the African optics story is one of pockets of excellence. The highlights are as good as anywhere else, but there are too few of them to put the continent on the global optics map. According to a 2020 calculation done for me by the Optical Society of America, based on their journals, Africa contributes less than 1% to worldwide journal publications with optics or photonics as a theme.

Yet there are great opportunities for meeting continental challenges using optics. Examples of areas where Africans can innovate are:

• bridging the digital divide with modern communications infrastructure

• optical imaging and spectroscopy for improvements in agriculture and monitoring climate changes

• harnessing the sun with optical materials for clean energy

• bio-photonics to solve health issues

• quantum technologies for novel forms of communicating, sensing, imaging and computing.

The papers in the special journal issue touch on a diversity of continent-relevant topics.

One is on using optics to communicate across free-space (air) even in bad weather conditions. This light-based solution was tested using weather data from two African cities, Alexandria in Egypt and Setif in Algeria.

Another paper is about tiny quantum sources of quantum entanglement for sensing. The authors used diamond, a gem found in South Africa and more commonly associated with jewellery. Diamond has many flaws, one of which can produce single photons as an output when excited. The single photon output was split into two paths, as if the particle went both left and right at the same time. This is the quirky notion of entanglement, in this case, created with diamonds. If an object is placed in any one path, the entanglement can detect it. Strangely, sometimes the photons take the left-path but the object is in the right-path, yet still it can be detected.

Read more:
Quantum entanglement: what it is, and why physicists want to harness it

One contributor proposes a cost-effective method to detect and classify harmful bacteria in water.

New approaches in spectroscopy (studying colour) for detecting cell health; biosensors to monitor salt and glucose levels in blood; and optical tools for food security all play their part in optical applications on the continent.

Another area of African optics research that has important applications is the use of optical fibres for sensing the quality of soil and its structural integrity. Optical fibres are usually associated with communication, but a modern trend is to use the existing optical fibre already laid to sense for small changes in the environment, for instance, as early warning systems for earthquakes. The research shows that conventional fibre can also be used to tell if soil is degrading, either from lack of moisture or some physical shift in structure (weakness or movement). It is an immediately useful tool for agriculture, building on many decades of research.

The diverse range of topics in the collection shows how creative researchers on the continent are in using limited resources for maximum impact. The high orientation towards applications is probably also a sign that African governments want their scientists to work on solutions to real problems rather than purely academic questions. A case in point is South Africa, which has a funded national strategy (SA QuTI) to turn quantum science into quantum technology and train the workforce for a new economy.

Towards a brighter future

For young science students wishing to enter the field, the opportunities are endless. While photonics has no discipline boundaries, most students enter through the fields of physics, engineering, chemistry or the life sciences. Its power lies in the combination of skills, blending theoretical, computational and experimental, that are brought to bear on problems. At a typical photonics conference there are likely to be many more industry participants than academics. That’s a testament to its universal impact in new technologies, and the employment opportunities for students.

The last century was based on electronics and controlling electrons. This century will be dominated by photonics, controlling photons.

Professor Zouheir Sekkat of University Mohamed V, Rabat, and director of the Pole of Optics and Photonics within MAScIR of University Mohamed VI Polytechnic Benguerir, Morocco, contributed to this article.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Light is the science of the future – the Africans using it to solve local challenges – https://theconversation.com/light-is-the-science-of-the-future-the-africans-using-it-to-solve-local-challenges-256031