An exploration of how the continent figures in global reactionary thought as both resource frontier and ideological battleground
In “Africa in the shadow of the global far right”, German-Kenyan scholar Stefan Ouma dissects an underexplored entanglement: the ideological, symbolic and material connections between Africa and the surging global far right. Published in the French-language publication Afrique XXI (in translation from the original English), his essay calls for moving beyond simplistic readings of the far right as a Western phenomenon and he argues that Africa is both target and participant in the remaking of a reactionary world order.
The essay opens with a provocation. In early 2025, Donald Trump accused South Africa of “confiscating land and treating certain categories of people very badly,” echoing apartheid-era anxieties. His comments, amplified by Elon Musk on X, revived the myth of “white genocide”, which is a narrative long peddled by the Afrikaner supremacist group AfriForum, whose leaders have courted Western conservatives for years. Ouma notes that Trump’s gesture had little to do with concern for Afrikaners; rather, it was a symbolic investment in white victimhood, a story that resonates with far-right networks from the US to Germany’s AfD, to Christchurch and Buffalo.
From this moment, Ouma builds a framework: Africa, he argues, is not merely a stage on which Western reactionaries project their fantasies, it is woven into the far right’s ideological fabric. “The risk,” he warns, “is to view rising political tensions in Europe and North America as white men’s problems, to be resolved among themselves.” Instead, the far right’s worldview, which is patriarchal, hierarchical, hostile to pluralism and democracy, increasingly finds echoes across the Global South.
One form of resonance, he observes, lies in shared authoritarian and patriarchal values. From Brazil to Uganda, Kenya to Ghana, anti-LGBTQ crusades and misogynistic rhetoric parallel those of US evangelical networks and European nationalists. Other currents are even more insidious. For many Western extremists, Africa offers a racist utopia, a space of nostalgia and projection. Ouma points to the resurgence of “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again” slogans and the romanticisation of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia as a “rational” white ethno-state. South Africa too occupies symbolic territory in this imaginary: its post-apartheid experiment, with its policies of racial justice and inclusion, becomes a hated emblem of “wokeness”. The far right’s fixation on Rhodesia, he suggests, stems from its blend of rebellion and racial purity.
Ouma introduces what he calls the “false friend syndrome” – the illusion of solidarity between anti-colonial movements in Africa and far-right regimes elsewhere. He examines the embrace of Russia by new juntas in the Sahel, where Moscow presents itself as an anti-imperial ally. But beneath the rhetoric of decolonisation lies another imperial project. Drawing on Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist ideology, Russia’s engagement with Africa reproduces hierarchies under the guise of partnership. Wagner’s atrocities in Mali, Sudan and the Central African Republic, he argues, “bear the imprint of racialised ultraviolence.”
For Ouma, this convergence of ideology, nostalgia, opportunism and extractivism, demands an urgent intellectual response. “As Euro-Atlantic hegemony declines,” he writes, “African thinkers, social movements and political leaders must chart a path informed by an intersectional analysis of power, knowledge and capital.” The far right’s global ascent, he concludes, is not a distant crisis. It is the mirror in which Africa’s own struggles with patriarchy, militarism and inequality are reflected and the warning that liberation can yet be weaponised against itself.
Original article (“L’Afrique dans l’ombre portée de l’extrême droite mondiale”) was first published in English by Pambazuka News on 20 March 2025, and translated into French by Nathalie Prévost for Afrique XXI.
Pambazuka News is a pan-African platform for progressive analysis and social justice reporting.
Afrique XXI is a non-profit, reader-supported media outlet based in France that publishes in-depth political and investigative journalism on Africa’s place in the world.
