What 'Make Africa Great Again' Really Means
This isn't nostalgia or borrowed slogans. It's a reclamation of truth—Africa's sovereignty was stolen, not absent. Here's what taking it back actually looks like.
What "Make Africa Great Again" Really Means
Let me be clear from the jump: this isn't nostalgia. I'm not here to romanticize the past or pretend everything was perfect before the ships arrived. That's not the point.
The point is this: Africa has been explained, studied, pitied, and "developed" by everyone except Africans for far too long. And somehow, after all the aid, all the NGOs, all the summits and frameworks and billion-dollar loans, the continent that holds the resources the entire world runs on still can't keep the lights on in most of its capital cities.
That's not a failure of Africa. That's a system working exactly as designed.
When I say "Make Africa Great Again," I'm not borrowing anyone's slogan. I'm reclaiming a truth. Greatness isn't something Africa needs to achieve for the first time. Mansa Musa didn't need a World Bank loan. The Kingdom of Kongo had a functioning bureaucracy while Europe was still burning women for witchcraft. Timbuktu was a center of learning when London was a muddy village.
This isn't history for history's sake. It matters because the story they tell about Africa—that it was a blank space waiting to be civilized—is the same story that justifies everything happening today. The debt traps. The military bases. The puppet leaders. The extraction deals where foreign companies take the gold and leave the hole.
So What Does Sovereignty Actually Mean?
It means an African child learning about Sundiata before they learn about Napoleon. It means Nigerian crude getting refined in Lagos, not Rotterdam. It means the CFA franc in a museum where it belongs. It means African courts settling African disputes. It means food grown here, eaten here, before it's exported anywhere. It means when the AU speaks, the world listens the way it listens to Brussels or Washington.
It means Africans deciding what development looks like instead of being told.
I know how this sounds to some people. Naive. Idealistic. Maybe even dangerous. The comfortable thing to do is accept the current arrangement—chase foreign investment, say the right things at Davos, keep the peace with the old colonial powers because that's just how things are.
But "how things are" is not how things have to be. And frankly, the current arrangement isn't working for the 1.4 billion people who live here.
What To Expect From This Blog
This blog is going to be uncomfortable sometimes. I'm going to name names. I'm going to question things we've been taught to accept. I'm going to highlight what's broken, but more importantly, I'm going to spotlight what's being built—because across this continent, people are already doing the work. Entrepreneurs refusing to wait for permission. Farmers reclaiming indigenous crops. Engineers building infrastructure without begging for it. Writers and artists telling our own stories.
The question isn't whether Africa can be sovereign. It's whether we have the will to demand it.
So that's what this is. Not a pity party. Not another "Africa rising" TED talk that goes nowhere. This is a space for the conversation that needs to happen—honestly, specifically, and without apology.
If that's what you came for, welcome.
Let's build.
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