Charles Onyango-Obbo writing in the Mail & Guardian:
In the coming months, Mail & Guardian Africa shall in a “Africa 3.0” series of articles try to make sense of these little-acknowledged, but significant, shifts.More here
A lot of these happened partly by accident, but also because the state-controlled economies, military and one-party dictatorships in Africa of the late 1960s to the end of the 20th century created four types of exiles and dissidents against the political order of the time.
There were those who stood up and were jailed or, more commonly, murdered. There were the ones who laid low and shut up. Others fled abroad and spoke up and organised against the tyrants back home from there. And, finally, there were those who stayed and found spaces where they could be creative without being found out.
They hid in football, and engineered the rise of club football on the continent; they took refuge in academia; in theatre and satire, and in music. A lot of introspection took place in Africa in this period, but no one had time then to think about how the activities driven underground or subterfuge would manifest themselves in future.