Across Global Africa, people's lives are shaped by border regimes, whose contradictions are played out in arenas such as football and reflected in tensions between contribution and precarity. Issue 925 of Pambazuka News explores different and too often violent realities of movement and migration of Global Africans.

An incisive analysis that reveals how anti-immigration policies and the inhumane treatment of migrants are rooted in enduring colonial and imperial forms of violence that uproot people from their homes and deny them dignity, belonging, and recognition in societies that portray themselves as havens of freedom and opportunity.

Contrasting observations of the ongoing world cup with the Book of Shame, the article tells two different stories made possible through a similar process of coerced movement. The contradiction of European states that benefit from Global African migration yet seek to criminalize those very bodies en masse is even more disturbing when we consider how despite facing exploitation, the experiences of athletes represent a minority of those that migrate. 

An analysis of the European Union’s systematic externalization of migration management onto African states, showing how externalization constitutes a neocolonial project rooted in a governmentality of unease. Drawing on cases from Libya to Mauritania, it critiques EU aid conditionality and securitization discourse, and advocates for Pan African institutional alternatives centered on human security.

A critical examination of South Africa’s anti-migrant tensions, neoliberal political economy, and the selective critique of African intellectual traditions within contemporary liberal policy discourse.

The Conference of the Left gathered to organise against the multifaceted challenges confronting working people across Africa and the Global South in a time of deep structural crisis. 

From the historic site where Malcolm X and Cuban President Fidel Castro met more than six decades ago, peoples of African descent in America solidarize with Cuba.

African governments are positioned in an international system that cripples their autonomy through economic coercions such as debt regulation and overall asymmetric diplomatic relations. Nonetheless, the decision to accept and enforce migration governance frameworks that are harmful to Africans and migrants globally, demonstrates their agency and deserves scrutiny.

Abdullah Ibrahim has joined the ancestors. His vast musical repertoire will continue to travel across generations. 

The conditions of migrants, produced by the unequal development and structural inequality of contemporary capitalism, should not be met with criminalization and securitization. Understanding migration through Marxist political economy and decolonial frameworks, not only allows us to understand mobility as rational human right, but it also allows us to harness the benefits of migration, in congruence with Pan African solidarity.   

Cape Town | June 2026

A call for reckoning and accountability for xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks that redirect popular anger over deepening economic hardships toward fellow Africans rather than the structures that produce inequality.