Update from AfricaFocus Editor
Why You Haven´t Heard from Me for a While and The Future of AfricaFocus
AfricaFocus Notes on Substack offers short comments and links to news, analysis, and progressive advocacy on African and global issues, building on the legacy of over 25 years of publication as an email and web publication archived at http://www.africafocus.org. It is edited by William Minter. Posts are sent out by email once or twice a month. If you are not already a subscriber, you can subscribe for free by clicking on the button below. More frequent short notes are available at https://africafocus.substack.com/notes, and are also available in an RSS feed.
Editor´s Note
The most important reason that you have not heard from me in a while is simple. As you know from a couple of posts last year, I moved from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Washington, DC, where I had lived since 1982, in mid-September 2025, to Oberlin, Ohio. And as those of you who have moved half-way across a country or between continents well know, moves are almost always more complicated than we might like them to be.
That said, the move in September went quite smoothly, and I now feel at home in Oberlin as well as in DC. But there are still many steps to fully complete moving, and I am in DC now to continue the process of quadrillage (it is a word - I looked it up) of my boxes of research files. Right now I am going through about 60 remaining bankers boxes of files to sort into (1) recycling or trash, (2) preparing inventories to go to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, (3) preparing inventories to go to the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, and (4) the remainder I really want to take to my apartment in the Kendal at Oberlin retirement community.
The move itself is better described in my wife Cathy Sunshine´s substack blog ThirdAge than I could ever match. See in particular A Swirl of Emotions on leaving DC, Small-town Girl on Oberlin in the fall, and Finding community in the age of Trump earlier this year.
This post from me will be in two parts. The most substantive relates to my research files. But it is not about the files themselves. It is a copy of the GoFundMe for one of the doctoral students who is assisting me with that task but who has been left without a fellowship by Trump´s demolition of USAID. There is a link to make a contribution, which I hope you will consider doing.
Then I will share some of the ways I am trying to adjust my communications strategies for AfricaFocus to the fast pace of events and news coverage. I will ask for your feedback as I get started on that process in the coming months as I try out various options.
But I am not asking for paid subscriptions as I usually do. Instead, I am asking for you to donate to this GoFundMe which will both be a small fightback against Trump and a contribution to the future of education in Kenya as well as indirectly supporting my work to make my research files available to students and other researchers at Howard and at Duke.
Support Erick Kibigo in completing his doctoral journey
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-erick-kibigo-in-completing-his-doctoral-journey
William Minter - “I am an author, a social justice activist, and a computer programmer. You can find out more about me by searching for “William Minter Africa” on Google. I am raising money for tuition for Erick Kibigo, a Kenyan doctoral student at Howard University whose tuition fellowship was cancelled when Trump abolished USAID.”
Kenyan Doctoral Student at Howard Needs Urgent Assistance after USAID Fellowship Axed by Trump
Needed to pay backlog of tuition to Howard by May 11: $31,000.
About GoFundMe
Teachers, students, parents, clubs, and more use GoFundMe as a trusted and easy way to raise money for education needs. Education fundraising is available for your classroom, tuition assistance, after school program, or school supplies.
Effects of Trump Shutdown of USAID
Trump has done so much damage in so many ways to people in the USA and around the world that no one could possibly list them all. But one of these ways is the fallout from shutting down USAID, which has hurt many people in different ways. For just two examples, there are unemployed USAID staff who are struggling to find new jobs and pay their expenses in the meantime, as well as HIV/AIDS survivors in Zambia losing access to vital medications previously paid for by USAID.
Given my fairly secure economic situation, race, and other privileges, I have not been directly affected by Trump’s attacks. Nor have many people who I know personally. But this is different: I know the person involved, we are working together, and we have become friends and comrades.
Summary of Background
When experienced Swahili scholar and teacher Erick Kibigo got on the flight from Nairobi to Washington, DC on 27th August 2025 for a Ph. D. at Howard University, he had a full fellowship for tuition and a green card for supplementary work. He also had a B.A. and a M.A. from Kenyan universities and fifteen years of experience in teaching Swahili to Kenyans who were not native speakers of Swahili, and evaluating educational policies on the teaching of Swahili. For more on Erick´s background, click here.
When he arrived in Washington, DC, he discovered that while he was in the air, Trump was abolishing USAID and that his fellowship had disappeared with it. He was able to find temporary housing with friends of friends in Baltimore. But he lacked funds for tuition, and his modest stipend of $2,000 / month was drained by having to take the MARC train to DC for every day he had classes.
Coincidentally, at the same time, I was asking my friend Anita Plummer, director of graduate programs in African Studies, if she had any graduate students who could help me with inventories of my books and research files as I was moving from DC to Oberlin, Ohio later that month. Fortunately she recommended Erick, and I agreed to pay him for 8 hours a week to assist. I was also fortunate to be in touch with David Cohen, a Portuguese American scholar who was applying for doctoral studies at several U.S. universities to study U.S. policies toward Angola during the Angolan liberation struggles. Without the aid of the two of them, I have no idea how I would have been ready in time to load what I was taking to Oberlin on the moving truck.
Personal Message from Erick
I am a doctoral student at Howard University and a proud scholar from Kenya whose journey reflects perseverance, sacrifice, and an unwavering belief in the power of education. From humble beginnings, I worked tirelessly to support myself through my undergraduate studies at University of Nairobi and later earned my master’s degree at Daystar University. Through hard work, determination, and faith, I achieved a lifelong dream when I was admitted in a Ph. D. program in African Studies at Howard University.
Currently, I have a financial hold on my student account with a balance of $31,000. Due to budget cuts within the Federal government, I lost my fellowship for tuition, making it impossible to register for continued courses.
I am a devoted father of two children, whom I left behind for this academic journey. I have devoted my life to teaching and empowering African communities through education. My work spans teaching Swahili Language at multiple levels, including at Howard University. Beyond teaching, my deepest focus is on education policy reform to tackle the learning gap in African countries, working toward a future where African education systems are accessible and equitable. In other words, as the saying goes here in the United State, ensuring that no child is left behind.
If you are able to make a contribution it would be more than just financial help to me as an individual. It would be an investment in an educator who is committed to uplift communities through education. By supporting me, you are lighting a candle for the future of educational systems, to expand for generations to come.
First Steps in a New Communication Strategy for AfricaFocus
The first thing I have done is to start publishing short notes on the web with only a very short note and a link to an article I have read and found to be interesting to me and possibly to my readers. Sometime there are several, but most days there is at least one. You can always find the latest at this link: https://africafocus.substack.com/notes. I use a wide range of sources, including Africa-focused publications, other USA and global media, and about 30 different substacks. At some point I plan an issue on the substacks I find most useful.
To the extent I have time, I repost links to these notes on Facebook and LinkedIn. media. But I only dabble in Instagram, and have no intention of trying the option of being a TikTok influencer, which would be totally beyond my capacity in any case.
For some time, as regular readers will know, I have occasionally shared music videos or playlists of music videos from YouTube. This is a spin-off from my new method of trying to relax, forget work and the world, taking a short break during the day or a longer time in the late afternoon. I have a YouTube Channel called Solidarity Songs, which now has several years of accumulated playlists, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@solidaritysongs. I have recently added some weekly news playlists as well, but I have not yet figured out how to sort them separately from the music.
As my friends already know, my lifelong favorite way to do this has been reading mystery novels with a sense of place. My legacy website on this is http://www.mysteryplaces.net, which still works on the basis of a database although I don´t often update it with newer authors.
In the last few years, since https://bookshop.org was founded as an alternative to Amazon, I have had a affiliate shop there where I note mystery novels I read and recommend, with short comments about each. I get 10% of sales through links there. That has never amounted to more than a few hundred dollars a year, but I enjoy doing it as a way of keeping records myself of what I read. Its link is https://bookshop.org/shop/mysteryplaces.
I also do still read nonfiction as well, and those appear in another affiliate bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/africafocus.
As you can see, that is quite enough to keep me busy. And I do not know which of these I may feature in a future AfricaFocus sent out by email. So if there are any that you would be particularly be interested in, or definitely not interested in, let me know and I will take that into account.
So thank you for being my readers and many of you my friends or colleagues over many years, and hope you are as well as possible in this era of the mad king and find ways to survive, to keep up hope, and do what you are able to advance his self-destruction as soon as possible.