Rescheduled!

Part 5: Making sense of the contradictions plaguing the African continent and its peoples and social movements.

November 18, 2025

11am EST/10am CST/9am MST/8am PST

Join the Institute for Social Ecology for the fifth installment in the series Examining the Winds of Change on the Africa Continent. We will hear from Roland Ngam, a Pan-African activist and ecologist based in South Africa, as he makes sense of the contradictions plaguing the African continent and its peoples and social movements.

Series Description

Examining politics on the African continent at present is an exploration in extremes. On the one hand we are witnessing some of the worst humanitarian crises stemming from the ravages of civil war in the Sudan, South Sudan, and the Congo. Deep economic crisis in the semi-industrial countries of South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria. And advancing anti-French and anti-western movements in Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. Given the growing importance of the African continent on the world scale it is critical to understand what is happening on the continent and how its social movements are relating to these events. Join us for a series of dialogues with various leaders from African social movements as we explore these and other questions.

Dr. Roland Ngam

Doctor Roland Ngam studied at Wits (pronounced Veets) University in South Africa where he was a National Research Foundation fellow. After that he became a postdoctoral research fellow in the Emancipatory Futures Studies Programme in the same University. He has since joined the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southern Africa office as Project Manager for Socioecological Transformation, overseeing projects in Southern Africa and the South West Indian Ocean Islands.

Roland’s main interests include indigenous knowledge, economics, socioecological transformation, land and agriculture, degrowth and postgrowth imaginaries, African philosophies and art.

Roland has edited several books, including:

STUNTED (on the struggle to end hunger in Africa)
No Easy Walk to Water (on water crises in South Africa)
Textiles in Africa (on the history of fabric making in Africa)

He has also developed and currently manages two websites focusing on socioecological transformation and indigenous knowledge sciences:

Denkyema.com
Climatejusticecentral.org

He writes regularly for a number of South African and international media sites. He has also published a number of peer reviewed articles in Routledge readers and other international journals.

Examining the Winds of Change on the Africa Continent, Part 5

By Institute for Social Ecology

Examining the Winds of Change on the Africa Continent, Part 5

A conversation with Roland Ngam