What Exactly Is Africa? The Fight Over Who Gets to Define a Continent

By Farouk Mark Mukiibi

I was recently invited by the University of Pretoria’s Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), in collaboration with the Open Society Foundations, to contribute original research to a two-year Global Africa initiative examining the continent’s place within a rapidly shifting global order.

The room itself made the stakes plain. It brought together diplomats and thinkers from the United Nations and the African Union, alongside representatives of African public institutions, governments, academia, civil society, policy organizations, and the private sector – drawn from across Africa, North America, Europe, and the Caribbean.

In short: a global room, thinking about Africa.

My contribution examined Africa’s data-governance challenges and what they mean for policy, institutions, and the technological systems now quietly mediating both economic and public life. But the deeper argument I wanted to make was this: Africa’s data problem was never really about who collects, stores, or owns African data. It is, and always has been, about who controls the context around it.

Who defines the categories. Who builds the models. Who decides what counts as evidence. And, ultimately, whose interpretation becomes policy.

Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself

Data does not become knowledge on its own. Between the raw signal and the final decision sits an entire architecture: assumptions, classifications, institutions, technologies, incentives. That architecture is never neutral – it is built by someone, for some purpose, with some set of priors baked in.

This is the thread running through much of my recent work: the boundaries between markets, technology, public policy, and research are no longer as distinct as we like to imagine. They are already in conversation with one another, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Capital responds to information. Policy responds to evidence. Technology encodes assumptions. And artificial intelligence increasingly learns from the very systems built around all three.

The implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable: decisions about investment, development, regulation, public services, and AI are only ever as sound as the evidence architecture beneath them. Garbage assumptions in, garbage governance out.

Ownership Isn’t the Whole Question

For Africa, this reframes the debate entirely. It is no longer sufficient to ask whether the continent owns its data – a question that has dominated policy conversations for years. The harder, more urgent question is whether Africa is shaping the systems through which that data acquires meaning in the first place.

Because whoever structures the evidence doesn’t merely describe the future. They participate in deciding it. Definitions are never just descriptive; they are quietly prescriptive. A category built elsewhere, applied to Africa, will produce African outcomes shaped by assumptions Africa never made.

And this cuts both ways. It is not only about what outside powers, institutions, or platforms are doing to Africa. It is equally about how seriously Africa invests in understanding itself.

The Gaps Will Not Stay Empty

If African institutions do not invest in understanding their own societies, economies, languages, informal systems, and lived realities, those gaps will not simply remain blank space on a map. Someone else will fill them – with an interpretation built from outside, calibrated to outside assumptions, optimized for outside incentives.

And when those interpretations feed into global markets, international policy, and the training data of artificial intelligence systems, they don’t stay abstract. They begin to shape how Africa is governed, financed, represented, and predicted – often by people and institutions with only a partial, secondhand understanding of the continent they are modeling.

That is the real question buried beneath the technical language of “data governance”: not who owns the numbers, but who gets to decide what the numbers mean. Until Africa treats that as a strategic priority – on par with infrastructure, capital, and trade – the continent will keep being described by others, rather than defining itself.

Farouk Mark Mukiibi is the author of The African Startups Playbook and creator of the Minimum Viable Relationships (MVR) business framework. He is also a marketing consultant based in Uganda, East Africa, where he helps international brands and ventures navigate the realities of East Africa’s evolving middle class and consumer economies.