Conscientize!

What separates young people who actually change things from those who simply make noise about it?In this Fireside conversation, host Olemo Gordon Brian sits down with Faith Abiodun — then Executive Director of Future Africa and Executive at the African Leadership Academy, now Executive Director of United World Colleges — for a wide-ranging discussion on political education, youth activism, and what it actually takes to engage meaningfully with African politics.Faith challenges the idea that youth is a qualification. He argues instead that the divide is not between young and old — it is between the determined and the comfortable. He makes a case for knowledge before activism, for infiltrating existing political machinery rather than building from scratch, for political salons as the training ground for a better-informed citizenry, and for reading as the most underrated tool of political formation.This is one of the foundational conversations in the Conscientize archive — and it is where the conviction at the heart of everything we do was first articulated: you cannot change what you do not understand.Originally recorded in 2021 at the African Leadership Academy. Now part of the Conscientize Fireside archive.Follow us on TikTok @the4thgeninitiative | Instagram @the4thgenerationinitiative | YouTube The 4th Generation Initiative | Substack substack.com/@the4thgenerationinitiative

In this second session of the Ideological College Uganda, Olemo Gordon Brian sits down with Surumani Manzi, Thomas Lesaffre, Twahiirwa Asiimwe, and Mushamba Dauda to examine the origins of the twin ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism — and their expression on the African continent.Together they trace the intellectual roots of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, the geopolitical conditions that allowed the West to universalise its economic model after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the deliberate choice to use Uganda and Ghana as laboratories of neoliberal development in Africa. They interrogate what neoliberalism actually entailed — the shrinking of the state, the dismantling of parastatals, the exposure of local entrepreneurs to international competition they could not win — and why it failed. They also examine why Museveni, a hardened Marxist trained in Dar es Salaam, eventually capitulated to structural adjustment, drawing on Sankara's prophetic warning at the OAU in Addis Ababa.Featured ResourcesThe End of History? — Francis FukuyamaLiberalism — Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyNeo-Liberalism — Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyA United Front Against Debt — Thomas SankaraNeoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world — Stephen MetcalfOn the pitfalls of national reform — Lwazi LushabaFreedom and Development — Julius NyerereFollow us on TikTok @the4thgeninitiative | Instagram @the4thgenerationinitiative | YouTube The 4th Generation Initiative | Substack substack.com/@the4thgenerationinitiative

In this first session of the Ideological College Uganda series, Olemo Gordon Brian sits down with Surumani Manzi, Thomas Lesaffre, Twahiirwa Asiimwe, and Mushamba Dauda in Kampala to lay the intellectual foundations for the series.Together they explore what politics is, how ideology enters and features in politics, and the place of ideological tools of analysis. They interrogate whether our borrowed conceptual tools — largely Eurocentric in origin — serve us or constrain us in understanding the African condition. The conversation also includes a preliminary interrogation of nationalism as the predominant ideology that midwifed African independence, its limits, and its relationship to Pan-Africanism as the more ambitious — and largely unrealised — project of that generation.Featured ResourcesAfrican political history shows the perils of institutionalised xenophobia — Thomas LesaffreTell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories — Amílcar CabralFollow us on TikTok @the4thgeninitiative | Instagram @the4thgenerationinitiative | YouTube The 4th Generation Initiative | Substack substack.com/@the4thgenerationinitiative

In the second part of this conversation, host Olemo Gordon Brian and Thomas Lesaffre move from the history of empire and technology to its present — and to the question that matters most for the fourth generation: what is technology actually doing to youth political engagement on the African continent?They examine the origins of the Arab Spring and the role social media played in the Tunisian revolution — and why that window of political possibility has largely closed, as governments from Egypt to Uganda have invested heavily in counter-revolutionary technology to neutralize the platforms that once threatened them. They interrogate the attention economy, the 35 cognitive scientists at Instagram whose entire job is to keep you scrolling, and what it means that the same generation whose attention is being systematically captured is also supposed to lead the political transformation of the continent. They ask a question neither can fully answer: which president on this continent was actually elected because of social media?But the conversation does not end on a pessimistic note. This continent is the youngest in the world. Young people adopt and adapt to new technology faster than any other generation. That, ultimately, may play in our favor.Continued from Part 1.Follow us on YouTube The 4th Generation Initiative | Instagram @the4thgenerationinitiative | TikTok @the4thgeninitiative | Substack substack.com/@the4thgenerationinitiative

Technology is not neutral. It never has been. It follows power, capital, and the agendas of those who finance it. The question is not whether technology is good or bad — it is: who does it serve?In this 2021 conversation, host Olemo Gordon Brian sits down with Thomas Lesaffre — politics teacher, researcher, and PhD candidate — to trace the relationship between technology, empire, and the African continent from 1492 to the present. Together they move from the Uganda railway as a tool of extraction, to the rubber economy of the Congo that powered the American car industry on the backs of forced labor, to the role of quinine in making settler colonialism physically possible, to the telegraph cable that for the first time gave London real-time control over its colonies. They examine the origin of fingerprint technology in South Africa — developed not to fight crime, but to prove racial hierarchy, and repurposed when that project failed into the administrative machinery of apartheid. And they arrive at the present: the digitalization of money across the continent, and the financialisation of populations that were previously invisible to formal systems.The central question running through the entire conversation: is the world investing in the technology that Africa needs? The answer, unfortunately, is no.Continued in Part 2.Follow us on YouTube The 4th Generation Initiative | Instagram @the4thgenerationinitiative | TikTok @the4thgeninitiative | Substack substack.com/@the4thgenerationinitiative