The Political Education of an Activist

If one were asked to pinpoint the exact moment in history that one-shotted the activism landscape in Africa, it would be the 1896 Battle of Adwa, when Ethiopian forces under Emperor Menelik II defeated the invading Italian army. It was a major African victory against an invading European power at the height of the scramble for Africa, preserving Ethiopia's independence. The symbolism of Adwa—it became a beacon of resistance and pride for the African resistance—was one of great magnitude. In destroying the myth of European invincibility, it inspired early pan-African thinkers and future liberation movements, proving that colonial domination was not inevitable.

From the Battle of Adwa, one can trace a direct line to Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and even the anti-apartheid struggles of South Africa. The point in tracing this genealogy is to show that to an activist, part and parcel of their education is an apprenticeship in history. But even more drastically, in the context of most of Africa, part of the training of an activist is in the streets where they are subjected to the harsh realities of imbalanced economic resource distribution, corruption, human rights abuses, exploitation by multinational industries, and torture by state agencies like the police and army—Uganda being a case in point. In the context of repressive authorities, the education of the activist is not an abstract concept; it is inscribed in the flesh.

However, the activism space in 2025, beyond inheriting a legacy from its predecessors, has taken on a rather different dimension: activism, at least in the local context, has become an ideological training ground for political orthodoxy rather than a spontaneous response to injustices. Just as higher institutions of learning and social cliques socialize individuals into approved modes of speech, methods of protest, and thought, many activist organizations breed a herd mentality where independent thinking is punished, and sloganeering is rewarded. Just as the historically imposed univocal choice of "capitalism vs. socialism" in the immediate post-colonial past was less universalist in temper and more strategic and aspirational in character, the segmentation of the activist space into "us against them" serves less to breed a national consciousness but rather curves to institutional incentives: NGOs, political parties, the media, etc.

This is not to discard the importance of incentives; in fact, as an activist, I find it easy to see the empirical evidence that incentives matter. The vast and constantly expanding gap between libertarian principles and the size of current governments is proof that power matters, too. Politicians have been known since time immemorial to be constantly and ubiquitously experts at serving the political class. While this is morally reprehensible, morality has little influence on the daily realities of power.

Suppose we are ever going to move beyond pushing hashtags and organizing online spaces and attempt to change the power structures of our governments. In that case, we must accept that power equilibria have real, considerable inertia. We cannot shift them with hope and outrage alone; we need carefully calculated action.  And this is no rush imputation, history offers instructive examples: the battle of Adwa showed how strategic preparation and unity could overcome seemingly impossible odds; Nyerere and Nkrumah’s approach to building a national political consciousness showed the power of good political education in the face of national challenges; and Dedan Kimathi and the Mau Mau fighters showed that sustained pressure over the long term ultimately forces the oppressors into a negotiation table. In the Ugandan context, the lessons from these examples are the need for grassroots mobilization and education, the need to create robust alternative institutions; in other words, the need to move beyond reactive protest to proactive construction of alternative structures.

The current framing of the struggle as oppressor vs. oppressed in many activist circles is an oversimplification. The current realities of global politics are more complex, with deep structural dependencies, power dynamics, and trade-offs. The infrastructure deals between Chinese companies and African governments, the international aid directed to African countries—all these create dependencies that do not neatly fit in the colonial/anti-colonial narrative or continually shift the oppressor and oppressed perspective.

It is a well-known fact that activism in most local spaces is often Western-funded, a feature that significantly influences which issues are prioritized and which are not: there are very few free lunches in the activism space. While this usually comes with well-known challenges, such as donors pushing their own agenda—conditional aid with conditions that recipients must meet, which in turn takes away power from the recipients and places it in the hands of the donors. I must admit this is an oversimplification of the issue; the reality is more complex. The NGO-ization of activism has also created a professional class of reactionary activists whose livelihood is dependent on crisis. This, in turn, creates perverse incentives where the resolution of issues threatens the very existence of the same institutions that enabled their resolution in the first place. The more insidious, yet less visible, effect is that this leads to the reproduction of the same power structures that they purport to dismantle. This very fact explains the continued historical rise of dictatorships that co-opted the revolutionary language of activism. Think Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro.

However, the path forward is not to ditch activism as a whole. Given the ever-increasing range of issues, the voice of the activist has never been more relevant than today. The path forward is to reimagine the boundaries of activism beyond the oppressor-oppressed binary, imagine new autonomous institutions and forms of organization that are not wholly dependent on Western funding for their survival. The path forward lies in the creation of institutions that provide alternatives to the institutions that we oppose. Real activism today should be centered on building knowledge systems that do not depend on Western validation but cater to the daily realities of the people.

The Battle of Adwa succeeded not because of the persistence of the fighters but because they built something stronger—a nation capable of defending itself. The challenge for today's activists is then simply not to endure oppression but to create. To build institutions that do not only depend on donor funding for their survival, to build solidarities that outlive social media hashtags.

The political education of an activist in the 21st century is then an exercise in creation. The task before us is to cease recycling outrage and begin constructing the architecture of freedom. Protest if need be, but unless it grows into tangible creations that withstand the test of time, it remains noise at the periphery of history.