The Lede

The Sound of Struggle in Zimbabwe — with Thomas Mapfumo and Kwangu Liwewe

Thomas Mapfumo has been making music for more than 60 years. A popular and influential Zimbabwean protest musician, Mapfumo is known as the “Lion of Zimbabwe” and has been a persistent opponent of dictatorship since the days of white-minority rule. Days before Zimbabwe’s second election since the fall of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, Mapfumo remains cynical about the prospects for political progress.
 
“These guys are used to rigging the election,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “There's no change in Zimbabwe until these guys are removed from power.”
 
At the beginning of his career, Mapfumo mostly played covers of popular American songs by artists like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. But soon his music began to take on a much more political — and unapologetically African — shape. “I started thinking, if these people don't want us to play their music, don't we have our own music, our own cultural music?”
 
He began to experiment by blending conventional rock and blues with the sounds of traditional Shona music, creating something new and vibrant and uniquely Zimbabwean.
 
“We were just playing guitars, imitating the mbira sound,” he says. “But eventually we thought it was right if we could bring the mbira itself, actually mix it up with the guitars, and that came out very well.”
 
That might be an understatement. With his new innovative style, which he dubbed “Chimurenga” — meaning “liberation” in the Shona language — Mapfumo became the voice of a generation of Zimbabweans crying out for change.
 
It was in 1980 that that change seemed to have finally arrived. Ian Smith’s white minority Rhodesian regime had collapsed, and Mugabe’s revolutionary movement took control of the government. But Mugabe’s autocratic leadership and personal corruption quickly left Mapfumo disillusioned.
 
“Mugabe was not the kind of person that I thought he was,” he reflects. “He was an oppressor and he wasn't there for the people.”
 
Mapfumo’s music began to take aim at the post-independence government. With the release of his 1989 hit “Corruption,” the regime decided to act. His songs were banned from the radio, and Mapfumo was forced into exile in the United States in the late ’90s, where he has lived ever since.
 
Mugabe remained in power for two more decades, until he was finally overthrown by his former ally Emmerson Mnangagwa following widespread protests in 2017. But while many Zimbabweans celebrated the dictator’s fall, Mapfumo was under no illusions that the ouster of the man at the top would change the nature of the regime. 
 
“There was no new dawn in Zimbabwe,” he says. “The situation was still the same.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The American Money Driving Official Homophobia in Africa — with Lydia Namubiru and Kwangu Liwewe

On May 26, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 into law. The legislation imposed even steeper sanctions on LGBTQ Ugandans than previous laws had, outlawing the promotion of homosexuality and punishing same-sex activity with life imprisonment and even the death penalty in so-called “aggravated” cases.The law had plenty of backing within the Ugandan establishment, with only two members of Parliament dissenting. But it also had powerful backing from abroad.
 
“U.S. evangelicals have been active here for nearly four decades,” journalist Lydia Namubiru tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “Uganda itself has a very active evangelical movement as a result. They've been doing the work of winning souls, as they say, to their cause for over 40 years.”
 
The movement infrastructure built up over those years is extensive, and U.S. Christian right groups like The Family (also known as the Fellowship Foundation) have come to enjoy close ties with influential lawmakers and politicians as well as building a robust indigenous Evangelical movement. Hardline Christian groups from the United States have spent more than $50 million in Africa over the past decade. Namubiru spent months as part of a team of journalists following the “dark money” flowing not only into Africa but also Europe, Asia and Latin America in the effort to promote far-right causes. The bulk of their spending was actually in Europe, she adds, but Africa may be where it has had its greatest effect. 
 
“Culturally, Africa still remains quite invested in Christian conservatism. I do think there's some sense that this is the last frontier for conservative Christianity. They fight for it as the last bit of territory that they hold.”
 
And in countries like Uganda, where the state is relatively weak and minority protections minimal, the political situation provides them the opportunity to consolidate their power. 
 
“I think part of the appeal to Africa is that the states are very overwhelmed; they're very young and still overwhelmed by bread-and-butter issues," Namubiru says. Without a strong state to protect minority rights, she points out, it’s relatively easy for these groups to find a foothold. Uganda, she says, “wasn't really building, you know, state power, state processes, democratic processes, checks and balances, until the mid-1980s.”
 
Still, she cautions against seeing it as a uniquely African problem. 
 
“Anti-LGBTQ, ultraconservative politics targeting women's rights in this particular global moment has real popular appeal, not just in Africa, but in countries like Hungary, Italy.”
 
Instead, it is better understood as a particular regional manifestation of a worldwide phenomenon: “The backlash is global. It's not just in Uganda.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Ukraine’s Cluster Bomb Dilemma — with Sera Koulabdara, Romeo Kokriatski and Danny Postel

In July, U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine. Though neither the United States, Ukraine nor Russia is party to the 2008 convention outlawing them, it has been ratified by hundreds of other nations because of how dangerous the weapons remain long after the fighting stops.
 
“If they fail to detonate on impact, they'll lay there dormant,” Sera Koulabdara tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “They have no self destruct mechanism, so they'll be there until it's triggered by an animal walking by or a child finding it and picking it up.”
 
Koulabdara is the CEO of Legacies of War, an international advocacy and educational organization working to address the long-term consequences of Cold War-era conflicts in Southeast Asia and grew up in Laos. Many of the millions of cluster bombs the United States dropped on the country in the 1960s and ’70s did not explode, and both clean-up efforts and loss of life continue to this day, decades after the war’s end. 
 
“Globally, 97% of casualties of cluster munitions are civilians,” Koulabdara says. “And in the case where the age is known, 60% are children.” 
 
Their presence leaves Laotians, she says, with the anxiety that their lives are always at risk, forever knowing that an unexploded bomb could kill them in the fields where they farm or the roads they take to school. “That is not the future that I want to see in any country.”
 
But, says Romeo Kokriatski, a journalist and managing editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv can’t afford to be picky.
“These aren't weapons that Ukraine wants or that we would have chosen, but we were not given the things that we asked for,” he says. “We simply took them because they were offered to us.”
 
Kokriatski says that he is well aware of the dreadful consequences of cluster bombs but that Ukraine is already condemned to the long, arduous task of their clean-up — Russia has been using them since the invasion began. 
 
“Every extra day that this war stretches on is just an unimaginable tragedy. I simply can't imagine anything that would override that overwhelming priority to defeat the Russians as quickly as possible.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Reading Joyce in Kuwait — with Mai Al-Nakib and Lydia Wilson

At age 14, Mai Al-Nakib stole a book off her older sister’s shelf. That book was James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” a famously challenging modernist novel that her sister had been assigned at college. 
 
“It wasn't an easy read, no doubt,” Al-Nakib tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson. “But it spoke to me. It really resonated.” 
 
Now an award-winning novelist, she credits Joyce as a major influence on her as a budding writer.
 
“I was beginning to have a sense that writing was the thing I wanted to do,” she explains. “And here was an audacious young teenager coming into his own as a writer. And the text itself was incredibly experimental and it kind of pushed my sense of what I'd been reading my whole life.”
 
But it also resonated on a deeper level. In a piece published in New Lines’ summer print edition, she ponders how Joyce’s experiences as a young man growing up in colonized Ireland reflected her own as a young woman coming of age in 1970s and ’80s Kuwait, at the end of the country’s “golden age.”
 
“The second layer that really drew me to that novel was how critical Stephen [the protagonist] was of his environment, church, nation and family, and those ties resonated so much with me growing up in Kuwait,” she says. “Joyce’s Ireland appeals way beyond the borders and boundaries of Ireland. And so they spoke to me all the way to Kuwait when I was 14.”
“The best stories, the ones that are immortal, are the ones where it doesn't matter when they were written,” she adds. “It’s a bit of a cliche to say, but it's true, you know. It should resonate all the way through time and we can pick it up and connect. And that I think is the special thing that fiction can do.”
 
In the years since the teenaged Mai Al-Nakib first picked up the book, Kuwaiti society has changed a lot. 
 
“Kuwait at the time was very open and liberal,” she reflects. “So it isn't the place that it would become, where, in some ways, I think Joyce's words are even more applicable.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

Statecraft and Storytelling — with Faisal Devji and Faisal Al Yafai

Geopolitics is often conceived of as a realm of pure realpolitik, where ideology takes a back seat to the ruthless and unsentimental pursuit of strategic interests. But all politics involves storytelling, and geopolitics is no exception. Nation-states deploy narratives to legitimize themselves on the world stage, to shore up domestic support and to unite their allies around a common cause. But, says Faisal Devji, a professor of history at the University of Oxford, geopolitical storytelling is about more than just political strategy.
 
“They may tell one story externally or to a domestic audience and reserve another story for themselves,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. “But in the end you need some kind of narrative in order to make political decisions possible at all.”
 
In other words, these stories are not just propaganda, and a narrative is not necessarily a lie. Whether true or false or somewhere in between, they provide the blueprint with which to understand the world, to answer fundamental questions like ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What are we fighting for?’
 
“It's a story that needs to be convincing to the very people who are telling it,” Devji says. “We're really quite wedded to narratives, and our political decisions really have no meaning without them.”
 
That loss of meaning, he adds, was the problem America ran into at the end of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union spent decades defining themselves by their fight against one another until the latter’s collapse in the ‘90s left the U.S. with both uncontested global hegemony and a severe identity crisis.“The very thing that you wanted to happen  happens, and you no longer know what to do.”
 
Today, this kind of storytelling is everywhere. It’s the story of China overcoming its “Century of Humiliation” or India’s account of its rise as a great power. 
 
But the most pronounced case of the importance of a compelling story may be the war in Ukraine. The information war between Russia and Ukraine has been fought with no less intensity than what occurs on the battlefield. Russia has portrayed the war as a continuation of the Soviet fight against Nazism, while Ukraine sees it as the endpoint of a centuries-long struggle against Russian oppression, after which it can take its rightful place among its democratic peers in the West. But while that story has powerful resonances in Europe, it means very little to post-colonial nations in the rest of the world.
 
“The Global South needed to be appealed to by using a narrative that was more meaningful to them,” Devji  says. “So decolonization has been ramped up as part of the narrative, to argue that Ukraine is at the receiving end of a colonial invasion from its former colonial master and that countries which have had this kind of experience in the past need to realize this and identify with it. And how can you not identify with that?”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Republic Makes No Distinction Among Its Children — with Charazade Douah, Jean Beaman and Erin Clare Brown

Then-French Prime Minister Manuel Valls once remarked that “the Republic makes no distinction among its children.”  
 
Valls was not just speaking in platitudes: The French Republic officially does not recognize racial or religious divides, to the point that the government refuses to collect data regarding race or religion. 
 
“They don't even recognize that as a category or as a box you can check on a form,” says sociologist Jean Beaman, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of the book “Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France.”
 
“France really prides itself on not making distinctions between members of French society,” Beaman tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown. “That no matter what your origins are, you're just as French as anyone else.”
 
And yet some, apparently, are more French than others. The state might not see race, but its agents in the street certainly do. Young Black and Arab men from working class immigrant neighborhoods report regular experiences of abuse and humiliation at the hands of police across the country.
 
“It's almost a ritual,” says journalist Chahrazade Douah. “They know it's going to happen.” 
 
After a 17-year-old boy named Nahel Merzouk was beaten and then shot in the head by French police during a traffic stop, a video of the incident kindled furious protests. Douah hit the embattled streets of France’s cities to talk to the young men involved.
 
“They're very aware that it's going to get them on the front page of the news,” Douah says. “That's what they told me all over France: ‘We're breaking everything because we know that's the only way they'll talk about us. They talk about us when we are dead or when we break things. Otherwise, we are invisible.’”
 
It was an act of fury, Douah explains. But it was also an act of desperation. In the eyes of the police, none of those protesting were any different from Nahel, the boy they had just seen murdered on video. 
 
“I think we forget that these are teenagers. They have feelings. They are scared,” she says. “They're not just angry; they're terrified.”

When Biden Met Modi — with Ravi Agrawal and Faisal Al Yafai

“The way to understand India today and in the future is that this is a confident and growing nation that believes that its time has come,” says Ravi Agrawal, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and host of the podcast FP Live. “It isn't going to kowtow to a U.S.-led vision or a West-led vision. In fact, India is going to go its own way.”
 
Still, in June, President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in what was only the third formal state visit of his presidency. Agrawal, who spent many years as CNN’s New Delhi bureau chief, was watching closely. So were millions of people back in India. 
 
“This is something that India cares about but also Indians care about,” Agrawal explains. “India's global role is the topic of constant conversation on Indian prime-time TV, in Indian newspapers, in Indian advertising. It's a big part of the Indian psyche.”
 
And it is a sign of how rapidly that global role is increasing that America gave such a warm reception to a man who had once been banned from setting foot on U.S. soil. When Modi was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, he was accused of encouraging attacks against Muslims during the 2002 riots. Since entering government, Modi’s Hindu Nationalist government has continued to curtail Muslims’ religious freedoms and has faced strident criticism at home and abroad for its crackdowns against minorities and the free press. Nevertheless, Biden, whose administration has made the fight against authoritarianism a cornerstone of his foreign policy, chose not to address the elephant in the room. 
 
“Biden is looking at some sort of a larger picture and in that larger picture, what matters most of all is competition with China,” he adds. “In the last five years both countries have seen their relations with China sour. That is what has brought them closer together.”
 
If Washington was hoping for any concrete defense commitments, however, they were destined for disappointment.
 
“U.S. policymakers, and indeed the world, need to be very aware of what they're dealing with in New Delhi,” says Agrawal. “If U.S. policymakers are under the illusion that when there's a hypothetical war with China, India would come rushing to America's aid, then they are mistaken.”
 
India, he says, has other priorities, and its own vision for the 21st century’s multipolar global order. Washington was not the only stop on Modi’s world tour. Straight after leaving the U.S., Modi went to Egypt to meet President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi.
 
“India sees itself as a potential leader of the Global South, an alternative voice on the global stage,” Agrawal says. “If it can be the voice of the Global South today, it can be a bigger player on the global stage tomorrow.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

Why the Far Right Seeks Islamist Allies — with Moustafa Ayad, Rasha Al Aqeedi and Lydia Wilson

It came from the bowels of the internet. In the early 2000s, countless disaffected young men flocked to online subcultures like the alt-right, the manosphere and the red pill movement to vent their frustrations with feminism, LGBTQ rights and racial diversity. With so much rage and resentment at the modern world simmering away online, fed by conspiracies and steadily growing more extreme, it was only a matter of time until it bubbled over and spilled out into the wider world.
 
Today, many of those ideas and beliefs have filtered through into the mainstream. They have inspired terrorist attacks across the world that have taken hundreds of lives. Politicians repeat their talking points. Their most prominent proponents, like the British-American media personality and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, have global audiences.
 
But Tate, who converted to Islam in 2020, is part of a new wave of far-right figures who have ditched the movement’s traditional Islamophobia for admiration. As New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson and Rasha Al Aqeedi wrote in their recent piece “Tate and the ‘Red Pillers’ of Islam,”  many on the new right have come to see Islamists not as enemies but potential allies in their shared battle against feminism, LGBTQ rights, so-called “globalism” and secular modernity. 
 
“Even before he converted back in 2020, he said that Islam has the solution for modern society,” Al Aqeedi says. “His interpretation of Islam vindicated his pre-existing beliefs.”
 
Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, noticed the same thing.
 
“We're now in 2023. We have a group of youth, or young people, who have essentially been online their entire lives, who have witnessed massive, drastic shifts in the way that social media platforms have pushed cultures or broken down boundaries,” Ayad says. “And the same has happened in extremist communities. You have Islamists in white supremacist communities watching or listening or even taking part. And you have the same white supremacists in Islamist communities.”
 
But while it may now be far more widespread than in the past, that mutual admiration and cross-pollination is not necessarily new. “I mean, this has been going on since 2017 and before,” says Ayad. “If you look at, for instance, the September 11th attacks, you had Ku Klux Klan members in the United States say, ‘I wish our men had the balls to conduct an attack like that.’”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

African Solutions for European Problems? — with Hopewell Chin’ono and Redi Tlhabi

Last week, a delegation of African leaders from South Africa, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia traveled to both Kyiv and Moscow to try to negotiate a peace deal for the war in Ukraine. The deal was unsuccessful, with both Russia and Ukraine rejecting the prospect of a ceasefire. But the attempt nevertheless raised questions about the role of African nations on the world stage — and drew increased scrutiny of their policies toward the conflict.
 
“My view is that African countries have decided to be part of this process probably because Russia now wants a deal, but it does not want to give the credit of having secured a deal to the West,” says Zimbabwean journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. “It would rather give it to Africa.”
 
The past decade has seen Russia expand its influence substantially on the continent, which has put many African countries in an awkward position as they try to preserve their ties to both the Kremlin and the West. The ostensibly neutral South Africa especially has come under intense criticism for its continued friendliness toward Russia. 
 
"We are facing a moral crisis when it comes to neutrality at a time like this,” says South African journalist Redi Tlhabi. “We cannot morally justify this as a country that needed other nations to support our fight against apartheid.”
 
"The problem that we have in Africa is that most of our dictators on the continent tend toward countries like Russia and China because they've been cornered," Chin'ono says. "They do not want to do certain things that require trade with the West. For instance, issues of human rights. Russia doesn't care about human rights. China doesn't care about human rights.”
 
Not all African nations have been so hesitant to rock the boat, however. “I'm grateful that countries like Kenya have decided to do the right thing and not go gung-ho and be seen to be supporting an aggressor in this war,” Chin’ono says. 
 
“They are in the minority,” Tlhabi adds. “But they are voting. They are taking the chances and they're taking a human race, a human rights based foreign policy stance.”
 
Part of the problem, Tlhabi says, is that Western criticisms of Russia often come off as hypocritical given their own history of brutality in Africa and their continuing support of dictators on the continent. “There's a lot for which we can criticize the West,” she says. “But then we need to decide as nations, to what extent are we hostages of history?”
 
The stakes are high. Though the continent may be miles from the fighting, the war has hit Africa hard. Both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of food, and as a result, the war has left many nations that relied on that food facing alarming shortages.
 
"If a deal is struck, food can start coming in in huge quantities, as it used to,” Chin’ono says. 
 
Produced by Joshua Martin and Sabrine Baiou

[Rebroadcast] Catfishing a Killer — with Ugur Umit Ungor, Annsar Shahhoud and Rasha Elass

This episode originally aired May 27, 2022, and takes listeners behind the scenes of a groundbreaking New Lines investigation by genocide researchers Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud. This week, that investigation won the prestigious Chair's Award at the 2023 Drum Awards for Online Media, and so we’re rebroadcasting it for those who might have missed it when it first aired. 
 
When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the weeks unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn’t know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines’ Rasha Elass, they talk about how they used Anna to expose Amjad’s participation in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, carried out by the Syrian regime.
 
Created in 2018 “out of necessity,” Anna was able to build a rapport with dozens of Assad’s perpetrators through an elaborate catfishing scheme, giving the researchers unprecedented access into the minds of people like Amjad, ultimately leading to a chilling confession by the man who massacred dozens of Syrians. “Nobody’s ever done this before,” says Uğur. “There are no examples of people interviewing active intelligence officers.”
 
But “Anna was a double-edged sword,” he adds. “On the one hand we were unable to do any research without her; on the other hand it was also a burden, especially for Annsar, to crawl into the skin of a pro-regime person for over two years.”
 
So when the time came to terminate Anna, a simple Facebook deactivation wouldn’t do. Instead, they performed their own private funeral for her. It is moments like these that helped Annsar and Uğur find relief. They talk about how they also rely on satire and dark humor — exchanging macabre jokes that make sense only to each other — to survive the sort of work that most others will never relate to: “It might seem inappropriate to some people, but trust me, it’s the only way to stay sane.”
 
Hanging over the investigation was the question of what to do with the video when it came time to publish. For some of the countless Syrians still searching for missing family members, the video could yield answers, but it also meant making the victim’s final moments public. They needed to decide: Would it be better to allow the families to confront the graphic last moments of their loved ones’ lives? Or protect the victim’s dignity by keeping those brutal details private?
 
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El Kholy