José Tiago de Sousa is an economist, a PhD candidate in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies at NOVA FCT—in partnership with the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences—and an ESG strategist. Hailing from Mindelo (Vila do Conde), he holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in Finance from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Economics (FEP). He has twice received the U.Porto Volunteer Award (2017/2018 and 2018/2019) and was honoured with the Active Citizenship Award in its humanitarian category, presented by the then-President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. He founded the association Solidarity Soul, took part in European Solidarity Corps humanitarian missions in Italy, Poland, and Turkey, and contributed to European projects on sustainability and gender equality. He has worked as a Senior Specialist in Social Responsibility and Sustainability at FEP and, among others, as ESG Officer at TLG Global.
African Peace Has a Beat – The ESG Perspective (Opinion by José Tiago Sousa)
Peace in Africa won’t be born only from treaties signed behind closed doors. It won’t come from drones, sanctions, or communiqués that the wind carries away before anyone has even read them. It is already being sung in Goma, rapped in Mombasa, danced in Malakal, and kept alive in the memories of elders in Karamoja. If we really want to understand where peace is happening, we need to listen to the cultural pulse of the continent. Not as decoration, but as a concrete foundation for rebuilding. The question isn’t whether Africa has a culture of peace. The question is whether the world — and, too often, our own elites — will finally take that culture seriously.
The wounds are real, and they hurt. In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the M23 group, backed by Rwanda, has taken cities, displaced millions, and turned Goma into a place where the ground still shakes under the weight of grief and resistance. In Sudan, war keeps devouring communities and futures. In the Sahel, violence has become its own language, spoken by armed groups and answered by foreign powers that too often see the region as a chessboard rather than a home. In North Kivu, forty-seven religious leaders gathered in Goma in April 2026 to remind us that even sacred words can wound when they are used as weapons. The task, they said, is to turn words of hate into words that unite. That is not naivety. That is the raw work of peace.
But it is exactly in these same places that another story is being staged. In Mombasa, Kenya, a project called Acha Gun Shika Mic — Put Down the Gun, Pick Up the Mic — uses rap to mediate conflicts between rival gangs. Its founder, Robinson Chivila Jambo, known as Taylor Torch, has seen young men who once settled everything with knives and bullets sit together in a studio to write verses and record an album about peace. That is not charity. That is cultural mediation with a beat. In South Sudan, more than 2,500 people walked for kilometres to attend a peace concert in Malakal, a town that knows the bitter taste of conflict. The musician Emmanuel Kembe didn’t bring a treaty. He brought a stage. And for a few hours, communities that had learned to fear each other rediscovered the dangerous joy of sharing the same rhythm. In Goma, the Musika na Kipaji festival, led by women, has become a space where Congolese rapper Clem Cléopâtre can tell young women they are not alone. One participant, Jean Luc Maroy, put it simply: a year earlier, that gathering would have been impossible because of the war. Now, young people are standing together around culture and around women. That is not a side effect of peace. That is peace being rehearsed.
At the same time, something deeper is moving across the continent: a revival of musical roots that is not nostalgic but insurgent. In South Africa, Maskandi — folk music with Zulu heritage — has become the fastest-growing sound on Spotify in the country, driven by a generation born after the end of apartheid. Artists like Inkos’yamagcokama and Mzukulu are not just reviving old melodies; they are reclaiming a memory that colonial modernity tried to push to the margins. The composer Mbuso Khoza, through the Amahubo project, preserves Nguni spiritual songs, poetry, and lullabies that go back centuries, treating them as an oral archive of resilience, politics, and survival. He compares his work to European orchestras safeguarding Mozart and Bach. And he is right. In Angola, the Balumuka festival honours the group Ngola Ritmo, which kept the roots of Angolan music alive through war and displacement. In Egypt and Tunisia, the Kharatet El Henna choir revives songs from the henna harvest, a tradition shaped by women and the land, in performances that speak of loss, resistance, and reconnection with a heritage that was almost erased. This is not folklore for tourists. This is sovereignty.
This is where conventional ESG, despite its good intentions, so often fails. ESG was designed in Western financial markets to help investors measure risk. It arrives in Africa far too often as a checklist: a diversity metric here, a carbon offset there, a community consultation that lasts an afternoon and leaves no trace. It measures what is legible to the North, not what matters to the South. It rewards comparability, but comparing is always choosing: which realities will be seen and which will be left out. A situated ESG, an ESG beyond the West, does not start with the investor’s dashboard. It starts with Ubuntu: I am because we are. It understands that value, harm, and obligation are relational. It doesn’t ask how a community can become investable. It asks how investment can become accountable to that community’s moral economy.
In that light, culture is not a soft issue. It is a central indicator of social governance. The Rumba Route for Peace, held in Kinshasa in 2025, drew global attention to the power of music to heal and connect, but it also included a masterclass on copyright for a hundred artists and creative entrepreneurs — because peace without economic justice is fragile. The Mukongomani Reggae na bala bala project, also in Kinshasa, gives street youth a voice through reggae, using it as a tool for education, peace, and social reintegration. These initiatives don’t treat young people as a problem to be managed. They treat them as authors of their own dignity. And on the border between Uganda and Kenya, the Lokiriama Peace Accord, signed in 1973 between the Matheniko and Turkana communities, still holds because elders, not courts, are its guarantors. Weapons were buried. Grazing land and water are shared. Those who break the rules are sanctioned, but peace is negotiated. As one Turkana elder said, the need to preserve ties between communities outweighs the challenges to peace. That is not a relic. That is a living model of restorative governance that modern states rarely manage to match.
In June 2026, the Platform for Tradition- and Faith-Oriented Insider Mediators was launched in Addis Ababa, bringing together experienced mediators from Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan. It recognises that religion can be part of the problem, but also part of the solution — and that exclusion, historical grievances, competition over resources, and identity tensions are deep causes that no airstrike can resolve. The platform also insists on the real participation of women and young people. That is not a concession to donors. It is a correction to a peace architecture that has been designed too often by men in suits for men in power.
So let’s make a cultural appeal for peace, without apologising for being African and situated. Let’s fund studios as seriously as we fund barracks. Let’s protect elders, artists, and women mediators as strategic assets. Let’s teach peace through rhythm, memory, and language, not only through security sector reform. Let’s stop importing frameworks that measure our wounds without honouring our healers. The Africa that will rise is not the one that imitates the West’s ESG vocabulary. It is the one that speaks its own languages, sings its own songs, and measures progress by the strength of its communities. Peace in Africa has a beat. It always has. It’s time we listened — and danced.
