The 34th FESCAAAL will host the eighth edition of Africa Talks, titled In My Name. Youth and Activism in Africa, a special event born from the collaboration between Centro Orientamento Educativo ETS Association and Fondazione EDU, both committed for decades to promoting education and culture in and with Africa.
This edition will explore, through contributions from sector specialists, the themes of youth activism in Africa, encompassing democracy, human rights, climate justice, and gender and LGBTQ+ issues. It will analyze how young people are driving change, also thanks to new technologies, while facing challenges such as misinformation and repression.
Since 2017, the Africa Talks format has explored trends and opportunities that are revolutionizing various sectors in Africa, actively contributing to the continent’s future economic development. Each year, the event features an in-depth roundtable discussion followed by a special screening of a thematically relevant film selected from the FESCAAAL program.
How to Participate
The event will take place on Monday, March 24, 2025, at 6:30 PM at Cineteca Milano Arlecchino in Milan. Free entry.
Following the event, there will be a screening of the competition film Khartoum, directed by Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea Ahmed, and Phil Cox. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ibrahim Snoopy and Phil Cox.
Speakers
Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmed
A Sudanese director, born in Beirut and living in exile in Kenya, has
made a wide range of films, from features to documentaries, which explore the topics of identity, resilience and social justice, giving a voice to marginalized communities and those who, like very many Sudanese, started the 2019 revolution in Sudan. This revolution was betrayed by those who – in April 2023 – again chose war as the only path. His latest film, Khartoum, which won the Peace Film Prize at Berlinale 2025, is a further example of narration which questions perspectives and encourages dialogue.
Andrea Spinelli Barrile
is a journalist specialized in Africa and human rights, editor, author and co-founder of Slow News, a network of people who produce information in different ways, which very often are unconventional, and which expresses a radical point of view on the most important dynamics of our times. This is a way of doing journalism that is also political activity, in its broadest sense, to spread antibodies that can help those who read “live better in the world,” to be more aware, more critical and freer.
Ruth Muganzi
Is a militant for human rights and a queer activist in Uganda, one of the 38 African countries where relations between people of the same sex are illegal, and where defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people is very dangerous. Ruth gives a voice to these people, protecting their identity. As Deputy Editor of the Kuchu Times she tries to guarantee that these voices are heard, but often the activists are gagged, especially since when in May 2023 a new and even stricter law came into force (with penalties going as far as capital punishment) which has forced some LGBTQ+ Ugandans into exile or into hiding.
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Marie Christina Kolo
Is an eco-feminist and social entrepreneur from Madagascar and founder of Green’N’Kool NGO, with which she leads ecological initiatives and builds communities in the urban and rural areas of her country, especially with vulnerable women. In 2025 she was one of the co-founders of the Indian Ocean Climate Network, which promotes and encourages the activities of young people on climate change. She was also one of the first delegates of young Malagasies to attend COP21. In 2022 she won the Leadership Impact Award 2022 of the
US State Department
Moderator:
Anna Pozzi
Journalist and writer, expert on Africa and migration.
The film
Khartoum, Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmed, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Phil Cox | Sudan, United Kingdom, Germany, Qatar | 2025 | 78’
Five lives, one city… the fate of a nation. In 2022, five directors (four Sudanese and one British) document the lives of five inhabitants of Khartoum: a civil servant, a tea seller, a volunteer in a committee of resistance and two street children. All of them are in search of freedom. Their fates are interwoven through animated dreams, street revolutions and the outbreak of a war that forces them to flee and rebuild their lives.
In My Name. Young people and activism in Africa
(by Anna Pozzi)
From peace to democracy, from human rights to the environment, from feminist topics to LGBTQ+ questions – and much more. The topics of the activism by young people in Africa in are multiple and variegated and are enriched every day by new challenges and opportunities thanks also to the new technologies – despite the great resistance and many difficulties which are never lacking.
In recent years, youth activism has taken on an increasingly central role in the political and social panorama of many African countries. Fundamentally, it can only be that way, not only for demographic reasons, in a continent where the average age is around twenty (while in Italy it is almost 48.7). And even though the political leadership continues to be, in many cases, in the hands of elderly men, it is also true that, in all fields and at all levels – from the political one to the economic one, from the technological one to the artistic one, up to the vast world of start-ups – it is young people today who are in the fore of the changes taking place in the continent. They are also the ones to carry on many causes that affect them directly and connect them with the rest of the world.
Young Africans are in the front line in the fight for freedom and democracy, for peace and human rights, for equality and solidarity, for the protection of the environment and climate justice, showing an extraordinary capacity for commitment and mobilization. Their action is part of a long tradition of popular African movements which, over the course of history, have carried on major struggles for freedom. These struggles, for certain aspects, still continue today, even though new causes and new ways of connection and mobilization are emerging, inside and outside the individual countries, inside and outside the web. The great challenge is to create at all levels a greater civic conscience in citizens and a capacity of empowerment in civil society. This is what many young people, who are increasingly educated and determined to take their future for a fairer, more democratic and more sustainable Africa into their hands, are doing.
The new technologies are playing a fundamental role in this, in promoting absolutely extraordinary opportunities for dialogue and mobilization – and also to involve the diasporas in particular of countries at war -, but they are not without risks. If on the one hand, the new technologies and social media have transformed the way young people do activism, allowing them to organize protests, spread information and open up to the world, on the other hand, the same instruments can be used for disinformation, propaganda and manipulation, including by governments and strong powers that try to hinder the work of activists and distort their message.
t times censorship and repression are still used today with violent methods, arrests, beatings, threats and disappearances, but increasingly often also through the spread of fake news.
However, this does not seem to discourage African activists who use even highly creative instruments – from the visual arts to music, from the cinema to the theatre, from cartoons to street art – to carry on their battles.
The struggles to consolidate democracy and good governance, for the recognition and respect of human rights and freedom (including of expression) and the battles against inequalities (including of gender) are still today the most widespread in many African contexts. Activism is also increasingly expressed on topics of the environment and climate change, with very many young people who have taken up the baton of the person who was a great pioneer of the African environmentalist movement, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004, for her fight to defend the environment and in favour of women. If Wangari Maathai was in some way ahead of her time, today there are really very many young people and associations that are denouncing the devastating effects of climate change on the more vulnerable communities and are pushing up their sleeves to reduce the devastating impacts of rising temperatures, of advancing desertification, of the erosion of the coastlines and increasingly frequent and destructive extreme phenomena of the climate.
Just as increasingly larger numbers of people are carrying on campaigns for the equality of gender and the promotion of women, while those who defend the rights of LGBTQ+ people are still pioneers – and at times at great risk – in contexts deeply marked by the patriarchate and queerphobia. Many feminist and LGBTQ+ movements still operate in hostile contexts in which they risk discrimination and violence, but also legal retaliation and social stigma.
One of them, Ruth Muganzi, an activist for Lgbtq+ rights in Kampala in Uganda, is one of the speakers at Africa Talks 2025. With her there are Marie Christina Kolo, an environmentalist activist in Madagascar; Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmed, a Sudanese filmmaker living in exile in Nai robi (Kenya), co-director of the documentary Khartoum, which is having its Italian premiere here at FESCAAAL; and Andrea Spinelli Barrile, co-founder of Slow News.