On June 9, 2025, a convoy of dozens of buses and hundreds of cars carrying several thousand volunteers departed from the Tunisian capital city of Tunis on a more than 2,500km journey to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Palestine. Dubbed the “Sumud” Convoy for its message of steadfastness and resilience, the convoy has been organized by a coordinating committee of Tunisian trade unions and civil society groups. It is comprised of volunteers from across the Maghreb as well as Global North solidarity delegations who will join the convoy in Cairo for the final leg of the Global March to Gaza. Host to a team of medical professionals and carrying a symbolic quantity of food and medical supplies, the convoy aims to break Israel’s lethal siege on Gaza, where the occupation forces ongoing genocide and blockade of even humanitarian assistance has killed at least 54,000 Palestinian men, women, and children in the past 21 months and left all of the territory’s two million people at dire risk of starvation.

As the Sumud Convoy makes its eastward journey across the Maghreb, photographers embedded with the delegation have captured an outpouring of popular solidarity, from streets lined with residents handing out food and water to donations of fuel from petrol station owners. But while the convoy’s most immediate precedents are the numerous humanitarian flotillas that have sailed to Gaza in the past 15 years in efforts to lift Israel’s 18-year blockade of the Palestinian territory (including most recently the Madleen, whose 12-member international crew was taken captive by the Israeli Defense Forces in international waters last week), the Sumud Convoy’s border-crossing itinerary also reinvigorates the transnational convoy as a forgotten tactic of pan-African and global anticolonial solidarity.

On December 6, 1959, the 18 members of the Sahara Protest Team began the 3,500km journey from Accra in newly independent Ghana to the oasis town of Reggane in French colonial Algeria. In parallel to its brutal efforts to repress anticolonial nationalist forces during the Algerian War of Independence, the French government had also announced its intention earlier that year to begin utilizing the predominantly Amazigh region of the Algerian Sahara as a testing site for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Ghana’s then-prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, theorized the tests as a paradigmatic instance of an emergent “nuclear imperialism,” in which the Cold War-driven militarization of colonial powers threatened the exercise of self-determination by African peoples across the continent. The convoy’s direct action unfolded as a complement to efforts by Asian and African states to prevent the tests in the United Nations General Assembly.

Organized by the Ghana Council for Nuclear Disarmament, the majority-Ghanaian protest team also included activists from Nigeria and Basutoland (Lesotho), the US Black Civil Rights organizers Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland, and anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid activists from Britain and France. The crowds that lined the first leg of the convoy’s journey from Accra to Kumasi, the American pacifist A. Muste recalled, “shout[ed] ‘Freedom!’ and ‘Sahara Team!’ as the huge truck and Land Rovers rolled by.” As important as the destination itself, the Protest Team’s planned route from independent Ghana through the French colonies of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Soudan (Mali), and finally into the Algerian Sahara traversed the political boundaries that marked the continent’s incomplete decolonization.

In this sense, the Egyptian government’s ongoing detention and deportation of convoy participants and refusal to grant the convoy permission for passage through the country have their antecedents in the repression faced by the Protest Team. Detained by French colonial police and paramilitary forces upon crossing the border into Upper Volta late in 1959, Protest Team members made several attempts to continue onward, but were repeatedly detained and deported back to Ghana before being forced to abandon their efforts in January of 1960. Just as French colonial officials’ efforts to block the Protest Team’s movement itself came to dramatize the persistence of colonial rule on the continent, so too has the Egyptian government’s efforts to contain the convoy refocused attention on the delicate balance the regime attempts to walk between widespread popular support for Palestinian liberation and its long-running interest in preserving its position as an ally of Western interests in the region.

In the face of the repression encountered in the Protest Team’s first attempt, organizers argued that further resistance to nuclear imperialism required the convoy’s tactics to be carried out not solely by a team of seasoned activists, but on a mass scale. Nkrumah himself articulated the most ambitious version of this vision at the 1960 Positive Action Conference when he called for “a mass non-violent attempt to proceed toward the [nuclear] testing area” that brought together Africans from across the continent. “It would not matter,” he continued, “if not a single person ever reached the site, for the effect of hundreds of people from every corner of Africa and from outside it crossing the artificial barriers that divide Africa to risk imprisonment and arrest, would be a protest that the people of France […] and the world could not ignore.”

In the moment, Nkrumah’s speculative call to stage such a display of continental peoplehood faltered in the face of growing skepticism about the efficacy of nonviolent resistance that crystallized in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre and the intransigence of French violence in colonial Algeria. But today as we witness the transnational mass action of the thousands of people who have joined the Sumud Convoy under the banner of a Maghrebi or pan-Arab solidarity, we might detect both a popular rebuke of the neocolonial relations that continue to constrain the solidarity of postcolonial national elites with Palestine as well as the contours of a resurgent imaginary of continental peoplehood.

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