Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery to become abolitionism’s sharpest tongue, warned the newly freed West Indians of his day against political drowsiness. He said: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress”.
Douglass might as well have been live-blogging in 2025.
On July 9 the Oval Office hosted what US media optimistically called a “mini-summit” with a selection of African heads of state and government. In reality, it was a mineral auction wrapped in protocol.
Fresh from cutting USAID to the bone with his “Big Beautiful Bill”, Donald Trump, received the presidents of Liberia, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. He extolled their “wonderful minerals”, suggested they buy American weapons and mused, without irony, that they should nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
The African quintet chuckled appreciatively and spoke of “win-win partnerships”, apparently unaware the wins were already lopsided. Thus 84-million West Africans watched their heads of state perform the diplomatic equivalent of a soft-shoe shuffle — proof that tyranny elsewhere can always rent a tuxedo in Africa.
Twelve days earlier, Kinshasa and Kigali signed what the White House sold as a DRC — Rwanda Peace Accord. Translation: Washington guarantees “security assistance” while Congolese cobalt, coltan and lithium secure Washington’s electric vehicle battery supply chain.
The scholar Horace Campbell, a keen observer of African geopolitics, calls it a “fraudulent peace”, noting that its enforcement is thinner than the paper it’s written on and that nothing prevents Kigali’s proxies from regrouping once the ink dries.
But hey, Wall Street is happy. When a country mortgages its subsoil to foreign chaperones, the only genuine ceasefire is on corporate share volatility.
Khartoum’s generals, meanwhile, have clocked more air miles than Emirates. Since 2023, they have ping-ponged between Jeddah, Geneva and London while the US and Saudi Arabia play part-time referees.
Each round ends the same — a handshake, a press release and fresh artillery barrages back home. The AU's own “high-level panel” is so marginal it might as well zoom in on mute. Apparently, the only safe space for African peace is a five-star hotel outside Africa.
The African ruling elite has already calculated the tolerance they enjoy and set their ambitions accordingly. If citizens choose to redraw that line — loudly, insistently, even impolitely — the algebra changes overnight
In another scene, Cameroon’s 92-year-old Paul Biya has announced he will run again on October 12. All things being equal , he will vacate the Etoudi palace at the ripe age of 99. While the northwest and southwest regions burn, Boko Haram nibbles at the north and the Treasury leaks like a sieve — but Biya’s tweet assured citizens that his “determination matches the urgency of our challenges”.
Evidently, the challenge is seeing how long a nation can function on autopilot, or before things spiral out of the control of the puppeteers who profit from the fiction that it is Biya and not them who are in the saddle. Cameroonians grumble yet queue obediently at rally grounds. Douglass’s theorem ticks forlornly onward.
From July 11-14, Africa’s richest metro survived four days on JoJo tanks while its mayor practised ventriloquism and the water and sanitation minister exclaimed “not my lane!”. Residents tweeted, then returned to rationing kettles. No mass march, just another marker on the graph of civic tolerance.
Crime-scene tapes are now permanent décor items in Delft, Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Mfuleni, Harare and Gugulethu. Six of South Africa’s ten deadliest precincts in 2019/20 and 2023/24, according to the South African Police Service’s own crime spreadsheets. Tour operators hate mentioning it. Township residents are long past shock. When massacre becomes municipal ambience, one hardly needs riot police — ennui does the job for free.
On June 26, Lomé’s youth erupted after President Faure Gnassingbé’s party rewired the constitution to stretch the family franchise towards its seventh decade. Security forces answered with live rounds, killing at least ten and detaining scores more.
Amnesty International’s interviews read like a horror novella of beatings, electrocution and disappearances. But Ecowas merely “urged restraint”, and the AU cleared its throat, then changed the subject. It could also have “remained seized with the matter”, which in practice means it does nothing more than the communiqué’s impressive verbiage.
The very body that once promised to “Silence the Guns by 2020” still outsources roughly 70% of its programmes to donor chequebooks. Its own working paper drily notes the “need for accelerated implementation” of a levy meant to end that embarrassment.
When your peacekeeping budget depends on foreign benefactors, you tend to keep your critiques politely sotto voce — especially if Washington or Riyadh is footing tonight’s hotel bill not to mention per diem for warring parties and intergovernmental officials alike.
Colonial borders, Cold War meddling, predatory capital — choose your villain. But Douglass would ask a harder question: what stories do the oppressed tell themselves? Endurance is not neutral. It is a line-item tyrants monitor daily.
When citizens treat blackout schedules, dry taps and 92-year-old lifelong presidents as cosmic weather, rulers rightly conclude that the bar for outrage sits comfortably below ankle level.
History’s hinge is banal until it isn’t. The “Arab Spring” taught us that the spark is unpredictable, but the kindling is always the same — expectations finally outgrowing excuses.
Look again at that Oval Office photo — five presidents, all younger than Paul Biya, governing nations whose median age hovers around 20. Their delighted smiles are not destiny. They are visual confirmation that power senses no imminent consequence for theatrical submission.
Douglass’s harder punchline still rings, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”. Demand, in this register, is not a trending hashtag. It is sustained, organised pressure — courtrooms flooded with litigation, streets pulsating with deliberate inconvenience, town hall and village meetings debating issues that affect the citizenry and fashioning enduring solutions, an active intelligentsia with a bias for progressive social change, ballots cast and defended.
The African ruling elite has already calculated the tolerance they enjoy and set their ambitions accordingly. If citizens choose to redraw that line — loudly, insistently, even impolitely — the algebra changes overnight.
If not, expect more nonagenarian incumbents, ‘peace deals’ signed on different continents, megacities rationing tap water and police statistics that read like war bulletins. Expect, in short, precisely the injustice we continue to buy with our silence — no more, no less!
• Gebe is a political economy and public policy analyst.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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