Ideas are liberating. They are liberating not only because they tend to endure for much longer than humans, which they do, but also because some ideas are genuinely good and powerful.
The idea that all people are born free with certain inalienable rights is a powerful one that beats in every heart, regardless of its misapplication in time and space. Everyone believes in their own humanity, even if people don’t always have the power to ensure it.
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And yet, ideas are also very dangerous things, not just because some very bad things have been done in the name of ideas, often even good ideas; but also because some ideas are really terrible in themselves. Fascism, for example, is a very terrible idea, whatever anyone else might find to say for it.
But the most dangerous thing about ideas of any kind, for me, is their adoption by people who are not sufficiently aware of the intellectual origins and histories of the very ideas they have adopted.
This is the problem Africa faces in a world that has changed drastically since the 1990s. And nothing has brought this home sharper than the ongoing conflict in Europe.
World wars change the world, but even small ones often do. The Russia-Ukraine war is not a contest over conditions in the present, but a conflict about what the future will look like: is multilateralism just a handmaiden of the powerful or a genuine idea for establishing world peace? And if the first, what is the place of Africa in such a world? Where would we be in the world in 2072?
I think there are three lessons for us in Africa as a people and a continent in the bold new world being carved up in Ukraine today. The first is for us to recognise that supposedly universal ideas like democracy, human rights, free market, multilateralism and so on are not really universal in their application in international affairs, if at all even in the domestic affairs of the very countries to whom these ideas are supposed to be articles of faith.
Africans would need to pay special and serious attention to the selective application of supposedly universal values such as democracy and human rights.
In particular, the United Nations and the so-called international order is useless in protecting the rights of the weak nations against the strong ones. It could not prevent the U.S and its allies from invading Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, or Ukraine.
If tomorrow, China, Russia or the U.S or any other European country decides to invade any African country, the UN system is not really strong enough to prevent it and it is important for African leaders to think deep about this, even as Mali, for example, is looking to give up one foreign power for another.
The second is that the structures of power are really diffuse and that you are not strong if you command none, one or only a few. Political power is complemented by a wide variety of institutions that are not in the political sphere.
Some of these, in fact, announce their apolitical stances on their foreheads but quite often do different. African countries would need to pay serious attention to the political behaviour of supposedly non-political structures like social media, multinational companies, global sporting organisations, international media, and even the global humanitarian organisations. When the need arises, all of these are just as intensely political as political parties, if not more so.
Social media companies claim neutrality or to be supporting democracy. But they are still national organisations deployed in the service of the wider political and economic interests of the countries of their founding.
In any battle for survival between any African country and any major power, they will not hesitate to take sides. The same is true of multinational companies, as Zimbabwe can readily testify. But this is also true of sporting organisations and all the international do-good NGOs.
When the push comes to the shove, they have both a side and an agenda, and they would not hesitate to follow suit. Just imagine what would have been the fate of Africa had the pandemic been just as catastrophic on the continent as it has been in say Europe.
Third, even though the present conflict in Ukraine has been on only for a few weeks, there has been enough evidence that Africa and Africans are no more than pawns to be used and discarded in the pursuit of other peoples ends.
On the floor of the United Nations Assembly, in African capitals and continental organisations, and around the borders of Poland, Hungary and Romania, we have seen enough that African countries and peoples do not have any agendas or interests of their own in international affairs, except for cameo roles allocated to them, despite humbling and humiliating experiences throughout the conflict so far.
But for emphasis on the three, let me begin with the third. In the prelude to actual breakout of war when Russia claimed to have “recognised” the independence of two eastern regions of Ukraine, the Kenyan Ambassador to the UN, Martin Kimani gave a brief but impassioned speech rightly condemning Russia’s attempts to redraw the map of Ukraine.
Kimani drew parallels with Africa’s colonial experience of painful redrawing of borders and our postcolonial resolve to make the most of the situation following independence. It was a great speech and Kimani himself got his 15 minutes of fame in the form of praise by most global media.
But what did Kenya or Africa get out of it? Absolutely nothing. Next door to Kimani is an African conflict in Ethiopia, much like Russia-Ukraine, where far more people have been killed, maimed and raped than so far in Ukraine.
But that conflict is not even on the agenda of the United Nations, certainly not in the way that the Russo-Ukrainian war is. The reason is not far-fetched.
In an article for the Foreign Policy magazine in 2010 titled ‘Africa’s Forever Wars’, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and foreign correspondent, Jeffery Gentleman, wrote that wars in Africa never seem to end because they are never really wars in the traditional sense.
They are just pointless armed skirmishes between people who have no clear idea what they are doing. Of course, Gentleman is silent about the role European governments and multinational companies headquartered in their capitals play in inciting wars in Africa. With such an attitude, it is easy to see why the conflict in Ethiopia would be off-agenda for the UN.
But the real point here is that because Ethiopia is not so strong on the UN agenda, envoys like Kimani would not find their voices for impassioned speech. The UN voted to condemn Russia’s recognition of two Ukrainian regions as independent states and more forcefully to condemn Russia’s invasion of its weaker neighbour.
But did the UN vote to condemn open discrimination of African refugees escaping Ukraine? Just a terse statement against it, and even that after strong appeals from a coalition of human rights lawyers. The African Union itself could only say that it was “disturbed” by the development, and even that long after countries like Nigeria and South Africa had spoken out against it.
African leaders and people must learn to think and act strategically in their own interests in this world. It is not a playfield but a battleground.
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