Activists, CSOs and frontline communities across the continent came together under the umbrella body, KickTotalOutOfAfrica, and engaged in a coordinated protest dubbed Africa Week of Action from August 18-24, 2025, demanding French oil giant TotalEnergies stop its operations, pay reparations to affected communities, and make way for a just and community-centered energy transition.
The Africa Week of Action saw events in more than 10 countries, including Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Senegal. Protests, creative resistance, community townhalls, and people’s tribunals put fossil colonialism on trial and advanced a clear call: Total must pay up and get out.
In South Africa, hundreds marched from Standard Bank’s HQ to TotalEnergies’ offices in Johannesburg. According to Zaki Mamdoo, Coordinator of the StopEACOP Campaign, “Banks like Standard Bank are not neutral. By financing projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in East Africa and the Mozambique LNG fields, they are complicit in the destruction, displacement, and violence inflicted on African communities. This unholy marriage between finance capital and fossil capital places a boot on Africa’s neck and must be challenged.”
In Togo, over 1,000 people came together to show TotalEnergies the “Red Card” at a football tournament aimed at raising community awareness around the company’s destructive business model. Esso Pedessi, community organiser with NGO Jeunes Verts, said this was a timely intervention.
“TotalEnergies sponsors AFCON and splashes its name across football to buy legitimacy and cover up its crimes. But no amount of greenwashing or sportswashing can hide the displacement, pollution, and violence it fuels across Africa. That is why we used football as a tool of resistance, to reclaim the game, raise political awareness, and show Total the red card. Football, like Africa, belongs to the people, not to polluters,” said Pedessi.
And in Zimbabwe, creatives and youth activists led a creative resistance teach-in hosted by Magamba Network. The event used art, poetry, music and performance as tools to inspire and advance the political imagination.
Trust Chikodzo, Climate Justice Network Coordinator at the Magamba Network, explained that “Creative actions help us move hearts in a political landscape so often devoid of rationality. By using art, we can tell our own African story against fossil fuels in a way that people can feel and be moved to act against neo-colonialism. Art allows us to cut through the lies of corporations like TotalEnergies and to speak truth in ways that mobilise, educate, and inspire.”
TotalEnergies celebrated 100 years of existence last year, yet frontline communities in Africa don’t share in that celebration because of the devastation the operations of Total have left in their wake. But communities are not taking this lying down. In South Africa, a court has nullified a permit issued to Total for gas exploration in Cape Town after concerned communities went to court.
The communities in Africa are not only taking to court but also organising on the streets and in workshops and using different tools, including art, until TotalEnergies can no longer continue with business as usual. In Benin for instance, the communities used street art, including music and street painting, to stand in solidarity with communities in Uganda and Tanzania opposing the controversial EACOP project.
And in Tanzania, CSOs led by the Organisation for Community Engagement (OCE), Green Conservers (GC) and GreenFaith Tanzania organised a football march in Chapulwa village, Nzega District, where youth affected by the EACOP project came together to play football as a symbolic gesture to “Kick Total Out of Africa” at the EACOP pipeline site.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 30 cyclists staged a protest ride in Kinshasa. TotalEnergies is among several transnational corporations interested in the sale of DRC oil blocks. They too joined in calling for the French oil giant to stop their operations, pay up and get out.
The offline actions were amplified online with incredible solidarity from across the continent, culminating in an online tribunal on Friday that attracted 80-140 guests who joined the live session to witness and stand in solidarity with the communities demanding Total pay up and get out.
The online tribunal was followed by an actual tribunal on Saturday, August 23, in Uganda, where EACOP-Affected Communities joined together with oil-affected communities and held a tribunal in Kyakaboga, attracting more than 250 villagers for a community tribunal against TotalEnergies.
TotalEnergies is drilling for oil in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda’s oldest, largest, and most pristine national park. The drilling has created human animal conflict as wild animals, including Elephants, run from their homes into neighbouring villages, destroying farms.
TotalEnergies’ century of existence is nothing to celebrate in Africa. For communities, it has meant biodiversity loss, poisoned rivers, displacement, militarisation and deepened poverty.
Concluding the week-long mobilisation, interfaith leaders, youth, and community members led by the Laudato Si’ movement Africa gathered in Nairobi on Sunday for a prayer vigil at the Holy Family Basilica that was livestreamed across the region. The event featured testimonies from affected communities and symbolic acts calling on TotalEnergies and African governments to transition toward community-owned renewable energy projects.