JOHANNESBURG, Thursday. Convener Frank Chikane opened a media briefing with a stark warning: the second Africa and African Diaspora Conference is taking shape against a backdrop of intensifying extreme right-wing political movements worldwide. The five-day gathering, scheduled for October 26 to 30 in Johannesburg, will convene Africans and people of African descent from around the world to craft actionable responses to critical challenges facing the continent and diaspora communities.
Chikane framed the conference’s timing in explicitly geopolitical terms. “The conference comes at a strategic moment, amid an upsurge of extreme right-wing politics and a clear racist intent to reinstate Europe and the US as imperial powers against all the people of the Global South, against people of African descent, and against indigenous peoples globally,” he said. The agenda reflects that urgency directly, centering on reparatory justice, racism, climate justice, economic collaboration and Africa’s future.
Parallel sessions will examine decoloniality, reparatory justice, climate justice, economic advancement and the perspectives of young people. Regional reports from across the globe will feed into those discussions, which are set to culminate in a formal conference declaration alongside concrete action plans. The event will draw prominent keynote speakers, including former South African president Thabo Mbeki and former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Beyond the core agenda, Chikane addressed the contentious question of undocumented migration in South Africa, a topic that has generated significant public debate in recent months. The country has experienced waves of protests targeting undocumented foreign nationals, with demonstrators demanding deportations. Chikane pushed back against the framing of irregular migration as a distinctly African failure of governance.
“Illegal migration, it’s not a special African problem. Europe is stuck with it. That we as South Africans must accept we are the largest economy on the continent, and indeed when people are in trouble we’ll come here,” he said. The observation carries a policy implication: South Africa’s regional economic standing brings with it humanitarian pressures that cannot be managed through protest or deportation drives alone.
What changed, in Chikane’s telling, is the geopolitical context in which these pressures now operate. Rising right-wing movements in the Global North are reshaping the terms on which migration, reparations and climate accountability are debated internationally, making coordinated continental and diaspora responses more urgent. “So we need to work out how we handle that. That’s what is critical,” he added, underscoring the need for comprehensive policy responses rather than reactive measures.
The conference positions itself as a platform for generating both intellectual frameworks and implementable strategies on interconnected challenges, from reparations to climate action. Whether the declaration and action plans that emerge from Johannesburg in late October will carry sufficient institutional weight to influence policy in member states remains the open question organizers will need to answer.