Global Free Speech

Global Free Speech covers international stories and trends affecting the right to speak, publish, and share ideas across borders. From government crackdowns to grassroots movements, this category highlights the global fight for free expression in diverse political and cultural landscapes.

London’s Africa Centre faces closure Earlier this month, I was saddened to learn that The Africa Centre in London may once again be shutting its doors. It won’t be the first time the centre has had to close – but it may be the last time, although the chief executive is still hopeful he can raise the millions of pounds needed to save it. There’s no point dwelling on the reasons, speculative or factual, behind its current crisis. I did though, looking through a list of its recent events, feel a pang of guilt. I could have done more to support The Africa Centre – turning up, talking to people about it, taking cognisance of the real value it has added over the years to London’s political and social life. When the Africa Centre was founded in 1961, its primary objective was to “educate about, connect to and [advocate] for Africa and its diaspora through arts, innovation, culture, thought leadership and education”. In 1964 it found a home in London’s Covent Garden – the Catholic church purchased an old tomato warehouse on King Street and gifted it “to the people of Africa in perpetuity”. When my parents emigrated to the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s, The Africa Centre was one of the very few places where people like them could find space to negotiate the cultural and social differences between them and the unfamiliar wider world. This process of cultural pollination process worked both ways, mind. Intellectuals, activists and dissidents from across the continent spoke at King Street about the political challenges faced by post-colonial African countries, educating curious audiences who wanted to learn more about a part of the world that for many was at best a construct of the imagination, if even that. For two days last June, the London Archives presented to the public a cross-section of documents, photographs and ephemera from its Africa Centre Collection. The archives were a revealing and at times startling record of political and social openness and curiosity. On one table, a poster from 1968 announced a talk about The Future of the Portuguese Territories – long before Angola and Mozambique became proxy battlegrounds for the Cold War between the Soviets and the West. From 1970, an invitation to a talk by Mrs Lydia Osiyemi, “sociology student and mother”, about The African mother and child in Britain. Judging from the poster (left), I fancy that Mrs Osiyemi’s talk was proposing African solutions to a dilemma that remains very real today – to London’s new arrivals and veterans alike. And then, from the early 1990s, in the centre’s guest book (below right), a tribute from a vanguard of democracy. “I pay tribute to those who founded this institution, and those who run it,” the scrawly script read. “This is …  a major cultural shop-window for Africa of which every African should be proud.” The author: “M.K.O. Abiola of Africa.” The Nigeria I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, after my parents moved back there for a while, was defined by the ever-present cloud of military dictatorship. I can say that now, in hindsight; it’s strange how one normalises the abnormal when we have nothing to compare it against. When Abiola, a business magnate and politician, ran for president in Nigeria in 1993 for a short while it seemed that the country would escape its history of ethnic strife. But then the military snatched victory from him and imprisoned him, extending their malign grip on the country for another half decade. The BAFTA-winning My Father’s Son is set against the backdrop of that very period. A generation before this, the Africa at the Pictures film festival curated by the centre had offered London similar context to political and social concerns across the continent. Abiola’s entry reminded me that it was in the London, on King Street, that I first began to think more clearly about the right to free expression and what happens when this is curtailed. When Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, an acerbic observation on life under military dictatorship in a fictional west African country, was shortlisted for the Booker in 1987 it couldn’t be bought in Nigeria. I got hold of my copy in London – in the Africa Centre’s cramped and musty bookshop, stuffed with books on and from the continent. It wasn’t all high-minded intellectualism on King Street. The Africa Centre was home to one of the few restaurants in London featuring cuisine from here and there across the continent – Mauritian lamb curry, Algerian couscous, fried plantain and boiled yam. Cost? Dishes were, according to a caption, “between 20p and £3”. Happy days. (An early menu is shown below left). In 2012, the Africa Centre left Covent Garden. Maintaining the Grade II-listed building proved too expensive, some said. Perhaps more to the point, it was no longer a good fit for the commercialised ambience that had sprung up around Covent Garden. The historic building on King Street was sold, and with the support of the Mayor of London and the Arts Council, the Centre relocated itself across the river in 2022, to new premises in Southwark. The last time I was there, in the summer of 2023, was to see a fascinating multi-floor exhibition about Nigeria’s Fuji music. Once again, I was surprised and delighted to learn in the Africa Centre something new about my childhood home, so very far away from it. London of the 1980s and 1990s was nothing like the crucible of cultures that it is today. While migrant communities were not quite silenced, they certainly did not have the right to a voice in the public sphere such as they do today. We complain, correctly, about febrile attempts to exclude inconvenient minority voices from the general discourse today. But we don’t, unfortunately, acknowledge enough the real contribution that physical community spaces, big and small, have made over the years to give London the cultural texture and viscera that makes the challenging and contradictory but still very charming city that it is. I’m going to miss the Africa Centre when it’s gone, and places like it, that helped shaped a city where the right to free expression is still, on the whole, seen to be a good thing. READ MORE

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Earlier this month, I was saddened to learn that The Africa Centre in London may once again be shutting its…

Photo: Sergio Kian/UnSplash There are many things to adore about China. The high-speed rail networks are great. Zooming from Shanghai international airport into the city at 431 km per hour is an extraordinary experience. The food is varied and delicious. While the country has a problem with sexual and domestic abuse within relationships, the streets are very safe. I miss being able to walk home at any hour down a dark lane without clutching keys in my hands. I could go on and many in fact do. A current trend – Chinamaxxing – sees young people from the West in thrall to China and taking to social media to say as such. One choice phrase is: “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” Chinamaxxers often overlook or downplay the negative parts of the country. The retort will typically be: “our countries aren’t perfect”. And they’re right. Europe, the UK and the USA do have problems, ones we often point out at Index. Still, some perspective is needed. We’re not talking about sporadic violations; we’re talking about systematic abuse at scale. I was bemused by an article in The New World this week interviewing a Chinamaxxer who had to change his VPN three times just to do the interview and muffle his voice when speaking about Tibet and Tiananmen Square. In the UK, a VPN is still very much a choice, not a requirement, and speaking quietly is usually done out of respect to neighbours and noise pollution, rather than from a fear you’re being spied on and could receive a knock at the door. I wonder too what the Chinamaxxers make of the fact that Gao Zhen, a prominent Chinese-American artist known for provocative sculptures of Mao Zedong, was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for slandering China’s “heroes and martyrs”? I wonder what they’d make of Guo Degang, lauded for his comedy on the national stage, now being investigated for allegedly improvising parts of a patriotic song? How would they respond to a new report from the International Campaign for Tibet, which showed how Beijing is tightening its grip on the region further, the recently passed and euphemistically labelled Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress Law helping here? In Hong Kong, activist Chow Hang-tung was convicted simply for organising Tiananmen vigils. A letter from her published by us spoke of the subtle torture of handcuffs designed to constrict and contort the body. Thoughts on this? And what about the woman who was arrested outside the same courtroom for wearing a t-shirt with Japanese characters, which were apparently deemed seditious? These are just some examples from the last week. This isn’t a case of whataboutery. I’m not asking Chinamaxxers to comment on the rights record of Venezuela or Belarus. I’m not even asking them to remark on all these individual cases. But for those who call themselves spiritually Chinese, to bypass the bad and the ugly in favour of just the good is either wilful ignorance, self-censorship or both. READ MORE

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There are many things to adore about China. The high-speed rail networks are great. Zooming from Shanghai international airport into…

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