Opinion
The season of Africa
By Tolu Ogunlesi
Africa is all the rage these days. Every week, it seems there’s yet another Africa conference somewhere outside the continent – investors, bankers, journalists diplomats and academics falling over themselves to celebrate a continent once famous for its unremittingly awful news.
Africa, it seems, has come a long way from when Anthony Daniels wrote that “Africa is so technically backward that it would be cheaper to ship things from Mars than to produce them on the continent” (1987) and when Robert Kaplan published ‘The Coming Anarchy” (1994) and when The Economist magazine summed it up as “The Hopeless Continent” (2000).
Now Africa may actually be the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter of hope and good tidings of great joy.
I attended the launch of a photography exhibition, “Africa Is A Great Country”, in Stockholm, Sweden, last week. Swedish photographer, Jens Assur, visited 12 African cities, including Lagos, taking photos that seek to portray the daily realities of contemporary life across the continent.
To mark the opening of the exhibition there was an event, at which keynote speeches were delivered by the Chairperson of the African Union, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma; journalist and blogger, Minna Salami; Director of the Royal African Society, Richard Dowden, and Swedish medical doctor and statistician, Hans Rosling, and a Time Magazine ‘100 Most Influential People’ honoree, (alongside President Goodluck Jonathan), in 2012.
Ms. Dlamini-Zuma spoke of a continental renaissance, manifest in a number of ways: from the African Union’s new policy of “non-indifference” (she contrasted it with the “no-interference” policy of the defunct Organization of African Unity), to the ambitious pan-African infrastructure dreams (a highway and railway line from Dakar to Djibouti, for example), to the Pan African University idea (with campuses in Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Algeria and Nigeria). The African Union has itself come a long way from when it was an Old-Boys-Club of coup plotters, warlords and dictators – all of varying degrees of insanity.
Amidst the optimism, and “possibilism” (Rosling calls himself “a very serious possibilist”), I think there are some important things to note.
