Hakuna Matata: Exporting joy, silencing anger

As I followed the African national teams taking part in the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco, I found myself repeatedly returning to the cultural worlds that accompany each team into the tournament. These competitions are never only about football, they are also moments in which languages, memories, and ways of seeing the world briefly come into view.

I pondered on Tanzania, drawn by its place of Swahili as a national language. From there, my thoughts drifted, almost naturally, to a familiar cultural reference: the song from Disney’s The Lion King, first released in 1994, with its well-known refrain Hakuna Matata, which is roughly translated to “There are no worries/problems”. That phrase has long traveled far beyond its original setting, yet words are rarely as simple as they appear. Behind their apparent ease, they often carry histories, experiences, and complicated forms of meaning.

In this context, accepting reality does not signal naïveté, surrender, or denial of hardship. It appears instead as a mental strategy for survival. How does one go on when the possibilities for change narrow, when the paths of development feel blocked? Through this lens, “Hakuna Matata” cannot be reduced to a cheerful slogan or a shallow philosophy of relaxation. In its everyday African usage, it was a linguistic response to concrete conditions, a way of lightening the weight of a moment rather than erasing or escaping it.

Yet once the phrase traveled beyond its local context into global circulation, it was transformed. What had been a situational tool for coping became an ideology of permanent contentment, stripped of the historical and social conditions that gave it meaning. Here lies the paradox. When words are severed from the worlds that produced them, they do not simply lose their meaning; they are reshaped to serve other expectations and other needs, often unrelated to their point of origin.

This becomes clearer when we link the phrase to what might be called the global emotional economy: an unspoken system in which feelings are produced, reformulated, and circulated across borders as symbolic resources ready for consumption. In a world marked by mounting economic pressure, accelerating pace, and eroding certainties, it is no longer only goods that are exported and imported, but emotions as well. Calmness, optimism, hope, and a light form of joy that demand nothing can all be manufactured with minimal efforts.

African art has historically played a central role in developing dense forms to manage collective emotion under prolonged crisis. Tales, songs, poetry, and proverbs were never merely expressive tools. They were ways of containing anger, postponing its explosion, and transforming it into something bearable. From this angle, joy was not the opposite of pain, but its livable form.

“Hakuna Matata” belongs to this type of emotional labor. It is a short, simple phrase capable of carrying meaning far beyond its linguistic structure. It neither denies reality nor promises to change it. It creates a psychological distance between the individual and the weight of the moment. But once it entered the global symbolic marketplace, its role shifted. It ceased to be part of a local economy for managing tension and became a ready-made emotional product, consumed as a standing promise of comfort, detached from the conditions that produced it.

In this later sense, the phrase mirrors global motivational culture, which sells individual happiness while steering clear of the roots of collective suffering. What circulates in its name is not Africa itself, but a global desire for emotions that come cheap: joy without commitment, hope without a plan or project, and reassurance that demands no confrontation with the structural causes of anxiety.

This emotional economy cannot be separated from the broader framework of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing logic for managing life. Neoliberalism does not stop at reorganizing markets, labor, and the state. It extends into the management of feeling itself. How should we grieve, rejoice, or endure anxiety without turning it into a political or social question? In this setting, the entertainment industry, cinema above all, becomes a key tool for producing light, fast-consumed emotions that do not require questioning the structures that generate pain in the first place.

When happiness is demanded regardless of conditions, sadness becomes a personal failure and anger a psychological defect rather than a legitimate response to a distorted world.

Within this logic, individuals are not asked to change their reality, but to adapt to it emotionally. Ready-made recipes for contentment and satisfaction are offered as symbolic substitutes for justice, stability, and meaning. Here, neoliberalism and the emotional economy converge. One empties the public sphere of collective action, the other fills that void with managed feelings that ease tension without touching its structural roots.

The problem, then, is not the celebration of joy or the search for reassurance. It is the transformation of both into a moral obligation and a measure of individual success. When happiness is demanded regardless of conditions, sadness becomes a personal failure and anger a psychological defect rather than a legitimate response to a distorted world.

From this point, the question should perhaps not focus on “Hakuna Matata” as a cultural expression, but on what are casually labeled “African problems.” Who defines them, and who has the authority to describe them? Why are they reduced in the global imagination to poverty and fragility, rather than understood as the outcome of a long history of structural violence, economic exploitation, and systemic imbalance?

The more pressing question is not simply what “Hakuna Matata” suggests, or whether it truly means the absence of problems. It is why Africa is constantly expected to say that, and why it is repeatedly reproduced as the only acceptable cultural response to a reality weighed down by crisis. When Africa is expected to smile at crisis it did not create alone, joy shifts from a legitimate human expression to a symbolic function, summoned whenever uncomfortable questions arise.

The consumption of African joy, in language, song, and image, does not occur in a vacuum. It takes place within a global system that favors quick emotional fixes over costly political confrontations. Instead of naming problems directly — persistent dependency, fragile economic sovereignty, and accumulated structural violence — we are invited to compress them into a managed collective mood, governed by slogans. The problem is not erased; it is redefined. No longer historical or structural, it becomes psychological, treatable with a smile or a song.

Here lies the deepest paradox. When Africa is asked to export joy, it is denied the right to anger. When its resilience is praised, its capacity to protest is overlooked. And when its words are consumed as universal comfort, they are stripped of context and of their quiet resistance. Joy ceases to be an expression of life and becomes a condition for accepting life as it is.

The challenge, then, is not to recover the “original” meaning of a phrase like “Hakuna Matata,” but to break the frame in which it is made to operate. A frame that turns Africa into a laboratory of patience, a reservoir of reassurance, and a perpetual supplier of emotional relief, while the sources of pain remain safely beyond scrutiny. At that point, the cultural question becomes unmistakably political: It is not what Africa says to the world, but what the world wants to hear from Africa, and what it would rather never hear at all.