Dispatch #36
Read about Denmark’s adoption of “the ick”, Africa’s place in the far right’s imagination, and the realities confronting girls displaced by conflict in Mozambique
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, we begin in Denmark, where a new linguistic import – the global Gen Z slang “ick” – is reshaping how young people talk about attraction and disgust.
From a pan-African publication, via France, a sharp analysis of the role the African continent plays in Western far-right circles as a symbol and a battleground, and the false friends this can create.
And from Mozambique, a harrowing report reveals how displaced girls in Cabo Delgado face systematic exploitation and abuse within camps meant to keep them safe.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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Danish dating gets the ick
In Denmark, the global Gen Z slang “ick” has entered everyday dating language, replacing old Danish words for disgust and reshaping how young people talk about attraction, revulsion, and the fine line between charm and cringe
There’s a new staple in the globalised Gen Z glossary: “ick”. Remember the Sex and the City episode “The Ick Factor”? In English, “ick” is slang for the sudden disgust you feel toward someone you once fancied, often triggered by a tiny habit. It can also be an exclamation of revulsion, like saying that something is icky. As one Love Island contestant explained: “When you’ve seen a boy and got the ick, it doesn’t go… it’s caught you, taken over your body. It’s just ick. I can’t shake it off.”
TikTok spread the term further, with countless videos of girls listing their icks, from flip-flops and nose-picking to sauce crusts on the lips. As linguist Marianne Rathje notes in Politiken, the ick has hit dating in Denmark. The term is now common in youth slang and mainstream media, replacing traditional Danish expressions of disgust like ad (ew) and bvadr (yuck). Your date picking their nose is not just revolting or awkward – it’s ick.
Rathje recalls a chat with her 19-year-old daughter about her and her friends’ dating life. What Danish dictionaries can’t explain, her daughter knows: ick is the sudden feeling that something’s off with a date. It’s like nausea. Greasy hair? Chewing loudly? Socks with sandals? Or even crocs? It just gives you the ick.
In the 1940s, ick meant something sticky or disgusting. The word is probably onomatopoeic – it imitates the sound it describes. It might even be related to the word sick. As the Cambridge Dictionary put it: “Then he kissed her! Ick!” The article then reassures readers: “If you suddenly get the ick, you don’t have to act on it straight away and break up with the person.”
The Danish language now uses ick as a noun, mostly in dating contexts. It first appeared as “the ick”, as in: “He gave her the ick, because he always ended up spitting a little in his beer.” Then there’s just “ick”, without the article: “When you feel an ick with your date, just think about whether it’s a superficial ew.” Dropping the English “the” shows that the word has taken on a life of its own in Danish.
Rathje cites students using “ick” without “the” – for example, “It’s an ick” for something awkward, or “There are way too many icks in that meme.” For them, ick isn’t just about a date gone wrong. They also use “ick!” as an exclamation of disgust, much like the Danish bvadr or ad. It looks like ick is starting to overtake the good old “turnoff”. Whether that’s an ick or not is another matter.
Original article (“Sprogforsker: Engelsk udtryk er ved at skubbe ad og bvadr af banen – men ordbog advarer mænd mod at bruge det”) was published in Danish on the 16 June 2025.
It is available here.
Politiken is a leading Danish newspaper covering news, culture and opinion.
Summary by IS
Africa’s place in the far right imagination
An exploration of how the continent figures in global reactionary thought as both resource frontier and ideological battleground
In “Africa in the shadow of the global far right”, German-Kenyan scholar Stefan Ouma dissects an underexplored entanglement: the ideological, symbolic and material connections between Africa and the surging global far right. Published in the French-language publication Afrique XXI (in translation from the original English), his essay calls for moving beyond simplistic readings of the far right as a Western phenomenon and he argues that Africa is both target and participant in the remaking of a reactionary world order.
The essay opens with a provocation. In early 2025, Donald Trump accused South Africa of “confiscating land and treating certain categories of people very badly,” echoing apartheid-era anxieties. His comments, amplified by Elon Musk on X, revived the myth of “white genocide”, which is a narrative long peddled by the Afrikaner supremacist group AfriForum, whose leaders have courted Western conservatives for years. Ouma notes that Trump’s gesture had little to do with concern for Afrikaners; rather, it was a symbolic investment in white victimhood, a story that resonates with far-right networks from the US to Germany’s AfD, to Christchurch and Buffalo.
From this moment, Ouma builds a framework: Africa, he argues, is not merely a stage on which Western reactionaries project their fantasies, it is woven into the far right’s ideological fabric. “The risk,” he warns, “is to view rising political tensions in Europe and North America as white men’s problems, to be resolved among themselves.” Instead, the far right’s worldview, which is patriarchal, hierarchical, hostile to pluralism and democracy, increasingly finds echoes across the Global South.
One form of resonance, he observes, lies in shared authoritarian and patriarchal values. From Brazil to Uganda, Kenya to Ghana, anti-LGBTQ crusades and misogynistic rhetoric parallel those of US evangelical networks and European nationalists. Other currents are even more insidious. For many Western extremists, Africa offers a racist utopia, a space of nostalgia and projection. Ouma points to the resurgence of “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again” slogans and the romanticisation of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia as a “rational” white ethno-state. South Africa too occupies symbolic territory in this imaginary: its post-apartheid experiment, with its policies of racial justice and inclusion, becomes a hated emblem of “wokeness”. The far right’s fixation on Rhodesia, he suggests, stems from its blend of rebellion and racial purity.
Ouma introduces what he calls the “false friend syndrome” – the illusion of solidarity between anti-colonial movements in Africa and far-right regimes elsewhere. He examines the embrace of Russia by new juntas in the Sahel, where Moscow presents itself as an anti-imperial ally. But beneath the rhetoric of decolonisation lies another imperial project. Drawing on Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist ideology, Russia’s engagement with Africa reproduces hierarchies under the guise of partnership. Wagner’s atrocities in Mali, Sudan and the Central African Republic, he argues, “bear the imprint of racialised ultraviolence.”
For Ouma, this convergence of ideology, nostalgia, opportunism and extractivism, demands an urgent intellectual response. “As Euro-Atlantic hegemony declines,” he writes, “African thinkers, social movements and political leaders must chart a path informed by an intersectional analysis of power, knowledge and capital.” The far right’s global ascent, he concludes, is not a distant crisis. It is the mirror in which Africa’s own struggles with patriarchy, militarism and inequality are reflected and the warning that liberation can yet be weaponised against itself.
Original article (“L’Afrique dans l’ombre portée de l’extrême droite mondiale”) was first published in English by Pambazuka News on 20 March 2025, and translated into French by Nathalie Prévost for Afrique XXI.
Pambazuka News is a pan-African platform for progressive analysis and social justice reporting.
Afrique XXI is a non-profit, reader-supported media outlet based in France that publishes in-depth political and investigative journalism on Africa’s place in the world.
It is available in English here, and in French here.
Summary by ZN
Cabo Delgado’s forgotten daughters
In Mozambique’s war-torn north, girls fleeing conflict face a second nightmare, including corruption, sexual exploitation and survival prostitution – inside displacement camps meant to protect them
Since 2017, the province of Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique has been caught in a cycle of terror. Attacks by Islamist insurgents known locally as Al Shabab, have left thousands dead and driven entire communities from their homes. But as Milda Langa reports for Integrity Magazine, the horror does not end with escape. In the shelters where the displaced seek safety, girls and young women face systematic abuse, bribery and sexual exploitation by those meant to provide aid.
In these overcrowded reception centres, families must register with officials to access food aid. Yet, as revealed in earlier investigations conducted by the same publication, displaced people are routinely asked to pay illicit “fees” for registration, an impossible demand for those who have lost everything. A 2022 report cited by Langa in the article details how local officials and NGO staff turned relief work into a “lucrative business”. Trucks filled with supplies returned half full because families unable to pay bribes were simply left out. “Where does the food go?” the report asked.
Worse still, the system’s corruption has enabled predation, the article notes. Women and girls, some as young as 12, are coerced into sexual relationships with aid workers or local leaders in exchange for food or inclusion on distribution lists. At the 2025 Annual Social Cohesion Conference, the organisation Kwendeleya revealed that more than 100 girls had become pregnant “in exchange for food”. Most cases were traced to the districts of Nangade and Macomia, which are areas with high concentrations of internally displaced people.
Beyond the camps, in urban areas such as Pemba’s Galp neighbourhood, displacement has also forced children into survival sex work. Langa shares the testimonies of two girls: a 13-year-old from Macomia who earns 500 meticais/MZN (about £5/$7) a day to support her extended family of 15, and a 15-year-old from Nangade, supporting 22 relatives after fleeing her home. Both have lost access to education. “I don’t go to school,” one said. “You have to have money to pay, but I don’t.”
The corruption extends beyond sexual exploitation. In the past, displaced families received state-issued checks for 3,500 MZN, which they could exchange for food and goods but stores inflated prices for those using the vouchers. “If two litres of oil cost 280 MZN,” one source explained, “displaced people paid 380 MZN. That was the rule of the game.” With the voucher system gone, officials now exploit the scarcity of food aid more directly: some charge bribes, others demand sexual favours, while food trucks mysteriously return loaded with undistributed supplies.
The situation in Cabo Delgado thus reveals a deeper crisis of governance and accountability. The war has displaced hundreds of thousands, but the relief structures designed to house them have become sites of renewed trauma. In Langa’s words, these girls are living through “a double hell”. First as victims of conflict, and again as victims of the corruption and violence that thrive in its aftermath.
Original article (“O duplo inferno das raparigas deslocadas em Cabo Delgado”) by Milda Langa was published in Portuguese on the 4 March 2025.
It is available here.
Integrity Magazine is an independent, critical magazine, with exhaustive, well-founded analysis, based in Maputo, Mozambique.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team