Africa has a gift the world still needs

The demographic case is equally striking. More than 60% of Africans are under 25. By 2050, one in three people aged 15 to 24 anywhere on Earth will be African. A continent this young is not a problem to be managed. It is a generation to be partnered with

- Max Boqwana

Great gift: Africa, a continent of contradiction, where conflict and innovation, fragility and possibility, poverty and resilience live side by side.

In 1971, Bantu Steve Biko set down a sentence that has not aged so much as matured. The great powers, he wrote, “may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look but the great gift still has to come from Africa, giving the world a more human face”.

Forty-five years after his murder in police custody, the sentence reads less like prophecy than a brief. It tells Africa its task and the world what it still awaits.

In a Europe rearming, a Washington turning inward, a Middle East at war and a multilateral order audibly cracking, that brief has become urgent. The question is whether Africa, long narrated through fracture, can finally narrate itself through purpose — and whether Britain, which once drew the lines, can learn to listen to the continent that is now redrawing them.

For too long, the African story has been told from the outside in. The wars in eastern Congo and Sudan, the unconstitutional transfers of power across the Sahel, the boats in the Mediterranean: these are reported as African pathologies. They are, in truth, the long tail of choices made elsewhere. The boundaries inherited from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 remain the architecture of much of the continent’s politics. Extractive economies, distorted state formation and a global financial system that treats African sovereignty as collateral all continue to do their quiet work.