Providence, or perhaps merely farce, has arranged that I write these words from Paris, that grandest of colonial drawing rooms, where I have taken refuge for reasons familiar to any conscious citizen who has had the temerity to put an inconvenient question to power. I write not as a diplomat, leaving that courtly art to its experts. What the old moralists would call the whirligig of time has placed me, an exiled correspondent, inside the old empire’s capital to bear witness to Africa’s most consequential, or controversial, week depending on who you are. The arrangement is, to say the least, instructive.
This week, East Africa staged a diplomatic play without precedent in recent memory. Thirty heads of state descended on Nairobi for the Africa Forward Summit, co-hosted by President William Ruto and Emmanuel Macron. On the very same days, Yoweri Museveni, who has governed Uganda for four decades and recently secured a seventh term, was taking his oath of office in Kampala. When that pageantry cleared, the continent’s political class and business elite migrated to Kigali for the Africa CEO Forum. Three gatherings. Three cities. Three countries in the EAC. In a single week.
The attendance alone would have seemed fantastical not long ago. Felix Tshisekedi came to Nairobi, though he and Ruto share a fraught relationship. Paul Kagame came too, though he and Tshisekedi regard each other with barely concealed hostility. Egypt’s president sat in the same room as Abiy Ahmed, despite profound tensions over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Tinubu flew from Nairobi to Kigali. Ruto followed him there.
Charges of neocolonialism
Before we celebrate, we ought to recall what else unites African leaders. When Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan crushed protests against her disputed re-election, Western governments condemned the killings. Several African leaders congratulated her. She sat serenely at Museveni’s inauguration in Kampala this week. Whether this convergence represents genuine resolve, or its most expedient variant, remains the central question: the solidarity of incumbents who know that today’s dissident is tomorrow’s defendant.
And yet something stirred this week that felt different from the choreographed summits of decades past. A Cameroonian friend in Paris, who plans to move his family to Nairobi, commented: “We know France is not good for Africa, and we do not know the exact end game, but why cannot Africa seize these gatherings to forge its own future?” Kenya has begun furnishing one answer, quietly throwing open its borders to citizens of most African countries, joining Rwanda, Ghana, Seychelles and Benin.
The charges of neocolonialism directed at France need no embellishment here; the historical record is its own prosecution. But Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, offers the sharpest lens for what unfolded in Nairobi. When bebop emerged and overturned the despairing, whisky-soaked nostalgia that white American critics had decreed was jazz’s authentic form, those critics declared the new music illegitimate. The coloniser is always first to appoint himself guardian of the old style, requiring the colonised to remain frozen in their suffering, the curse of their race, and the racial hatred of the white man.
Standing in Nairobi, Macron declared to the continent’s assembled leadership: “We are the true pan-Africanists.” During the summit, he stepped uninvited onto a panel stage occupied by African artists and entrepreneurs, seized the microphone, and announced that he would “restore order”. The coloniser, as ever, mistakes the new music for noise. African citizens and leaders who ask harder questions, build their own refineries and open their borders to one another are playing bebop. The trumpet sounds more clearly, as Fanon wrote, when a people begin to understand themselves differently.
That trumpet carries economic accompaniment. Aliko Dangote, having built the continent’s largest refinery in Lagos, pledged in Nairobi last month to construct a comparable 650,000-barrel-per-day facility in East Africa, with African capital, for African markets.
In addition, Kigali’s skyline and Addis Ababa’s transformation arose from visionary leaders with the resolve to execute without flinching, showing that there is indeed some kind of political goodwill. Kenya’s path runs differently. The Gen Z movement produced something rarer than a policy reversal: it produced national consciousness, which Fanon identified as the most elaborate form of culture a people can achieve. Kenyan youth have since driven accountability into every corridor of governance, a sustained pressure that is the surest foundation for a nation’s development.
As the dust of an eventful week in East Africa settles, the continent’s measure of this moment cannot be how many billions in deals were signed. Deals have been signed in African conference rooms since the time of Kwame Nkrumah, and the cabinets of our capitals are full of them. The test is whether AfCFTA finally moves from paper to pavement, whether governments dismantle the punishing aviation taxes that make it cheaper to fly from Nairobi to London than to Lagos, and allow air travel to become what it should always have been: an artery of African movement, not a revenue trap. Africa knows the old melody. It has been playing it for sixty years. Now, at last, it must play the new form of jazz. Africa must play the bebop.
Mr Amenya is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
