Africa In the Age of Disruption: Part 2 of 3
Fire from Friction
For the African Society of Cambridge University, and its Africa Together Conference, 2026.
Before I am permitted to say anything else, there is an apology I owe. So let me pay it before I have earned the right to your patience.
In that optimism which precedes all labour — in which all work appears within reach even before it has begun — I promised you three of these articles for the Africa Together Conference. I delivered the first, and soon fell silent. Then the silence stretched past the point at which silence could still be mistaken for deliberation, and then the conference came. I assure you, your patience was not wasted in idleness. As it is for most of us in this University, I had laid another thing in my forge. And a forge, I have come to understand, is a jealous instrument: it consents to soften only one stubborn thing at a time. You cannot bury different bars of steel in the same coals and draw them both out true; while you swing the hammer of your attention towards one, the other, unworked and neglected, will either cool or melt away. In the past two months, my PhD thesis was the steel I was required to choose. All the other tasks lay neglected. It is for this that I ask your pardon — with the meagre defence that a man hammering the last of his doctorate into shape might be forgiven a single infidelity to the people who read him.
I should account for the forge, since I have begun to lean my whole weight upon it. Lately, I have fallen into a habit of watching people work metal on YouTube while I eat. I know nothing of the craft, and I could not forge a thing to save my own life. But I have come to love the spectacle of it: the orange glow of the coals under the bellows; the bar, buried in the heart of the fire, changing colour from a dull grey to the white of the sun; the ring of the hammer and anvil at every blow; the hiss of the glowing blade as it is plunged into the quench…all of it.
I have come to love the slow and violent persuasion of a dull and recalcitrant thing into something with a use. Although I do not think deeply about such videos, as I write to you now, I am struck by the realisation that many a manmade thing we have called beautiful, or useful, was once merely metal, some raw and obstinate thing. And metal surrenders nothing of its own accord, as the single argument to which it would listen is heat. Not some gentle warmth, but fire: abundant, sustained, and merciless, enough to make any hard thing yield against its nature. Hold this image in your mind a moment, both its weight and its cruelty. I mean to earn it.
This year’s Africa Together Conference (ATC) bore the name Africa in the Age of Disruption, and it arranged itself around me with a symmetry. Mine has felt like a life pressed flat between two identical pages: the first ATC I ever entered fell in the first year of my doctorate; I attended none in the years between; and this one now falls in the last. And just as I was excited for first one, I was glad to be there for this one — gladder, I suspect, than the argument that follows will lead you to believe.
Let me be honest about my reasons for going. I know networking is important. I am, in no small measure, the residue of quiet conversations along the corridors, conversations that started slowly and then unfurled over years. But this time, networking was not my primary errand. Wherever my future is laid out across a table for discussion, in a place such as this where such discussions tend to have consequence, my errand is to put to the discussants a singular but uncomfortable question. Not to indict them, especially if I can help it. Regardless of their historical record, I attempt to extend to them the courtesy of doubt, and credit that no one of them alone intended the world that all of them together have made, that each is somehow smaller than the sum of their own decisions. And yet, they must face my question nonetheless, because they remain collectively complicit.
It is a rare grace for a student like me, a soon to be forgotten face in the daily weather of powerful people, to be granted leave to lodge my thoughts at them in a place where they are compelled to listen. The University of Cambridge grants us that grace, for here, on certain occasions, the people who arrange the present are lured by the prestige of speaking to those who will determine the future. And I had no intention of paying them the admiration they had come to collect at the expense of leaving with my question unasked. So when I found the President of Sierra Leone among the names my friends at the African Society had gathered to the conference, I felt the thrill of one who knows this door will open only once.
I know I have never walked his country; yet I believe it is not all that foreign to me. The Sierra Leonean story and the Kenyan story are one story told beneath two flags, and whosoever would rise to narrate his own version of the African story, be they statesmen or ordinary men, whether it pleased them to know it or not, inevitably narrates some portion of mine. We are all, after all, sons of the same soil.
Now, on the scale at which history actually takes our measure, we are, every last one of us, ordinary. Yet when we are granted our one moment within arm’s reach of power, we often do not use it. Instead, we surrender to the etiquette of the occasion, to that pretentious choreography by which we consent to treat the powerful as though the power they now possess were theirs by right. The dance of respectability is a common dance, and a craven one. I have danced it myself, so I too am complicit. But it is exactly the mechanism by which nothing true is ever said in the rooms where the saying of it might accomplish something.
I came to the conference’s venue, the debating chamber of the Cambridge Union, straight from my laboratory. And that evening, the conference really began for me, as it began for everyone, with the President. His session was titled, “Power, Agency and Strategic Choice”.
He spoke for an hour, and he spoke well. Not extemporaneously, for he was reading, but the speech he read had been written with care. He exuded eloquence in the remembrance of his own history, with the practised fluency of a man who has told his story so many times until it wore smooth. Listening to him, I wished that he believed what he recited. For the story this reformer told us did not dwell too heavily on how he once deposed his own head of state. Here was a former brigadier, one who had the mettle in him to take his country at gunpoint, telling us that he is a democrat. To his credit, after holding it for about ten weeks, he then handed the country back to an elected government — which is a fine thing to have done, for many brigadiers across the continent have been incapable of letting go of power once they seized it by the gun.
He reminded us that he was eventually elected properly many years later, and was then re-elected by his people for a second term in 2023, but he conveniently forgot to mention that his re-election was not in the character of a democrat. The international observers who watched that election described it — and they are more temperate than I am — as “opaque” and containing “several mathematical impossibilities”.
And so, wary of being deceived by eloquence, I wondered by what measure a man may be deciphered when I am ignorant of his past. I quickly decided that it is in the small things. In the way, for instance, that a powerful man never stoops to retrieve what he has let fall at his own feet; that two aides would have to stumble over each other to collect the dropped trinket and restore it to the man who acted as if nothing had happened. Then I remembered that there is an old cruelty folded into the arithmetic of power: that revolutionaries, if they are permitted to possess power for long enough, eventually become the reason for the next revolution.
When the President had finished his performance and the etiquettes of the moment were done, His Excellency Wamkele Mene, the Secretary General of the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, addressed us by video link. The session he now inaugurated was titled “Beyond Debt and Dependence: Africa’s Path to Development and Industrial Transformation”. He turned to the matter of money, and baited my mind with the call for domestic resource mobilisation. This is the technocrat’s name for the most damning question that can be put to the African Union: who pays for it?
While the Expert Panel that was to follow Mene’s speech had their long resumes presented to us, I pinged Claude 4.7 and followed its references to recover the African Union’s own budget for the previous year. This budget runs to some six hundred million dollars. Of the programme budget — the portion that actually funds the continental work the Union exists to perform — Africans pay for 22.5 per cent. The foreigners whose handouts we collect pay the other 77.5.
I then recovered that a decade ago, in Kigali, the African heads of state had agreed upon a remedy for ensuring the African Union is funded with African money. It was a small levy, two-tenths of a single per cent upon imports. The sum is scarcely felt by any one nation, and was more than enough to fund the whole enterprise several times over. They all had agreed to it. Then they went home, back to their State Houses, and the majority of them never followed through. Now, in any given year, roughly thirty countries do not pay even what they have already pledged.
And so, when the panel was opened to questions by Mr Olabanji Ogunjobi, this panel’s moderator and a student of the University of Cambridge, the moment found me ready. One of the Expert Panellists – H.E. Madame Nardos Bekele-Thomas, who is the CEO of the African Union Development Agency’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA NEPAD) – had wounded me already by saying that Africa “is not short of capital, but short of ideas”. In my humble opinion, we have never been short of ideas.
And so I elected to put it to her plainly. Every voice on that stage, including her own, had also said that Africa must stop depending on aid. Yet, none of them were willing to acknowledge that the people most able to enforce this were the very reason it was not being done. Amongst us was seated a head of state, and it is heads of state who have chosen to withhold a sum so small that their nations would scarcely notice its absence, yet large enough to secure the fiscal independence of their Union. They know that their Union cannot compel them to remit it. The African Union has no army, no court, no power to punish any defaulter; all it can do is pass a resolution, and pray that it will not be ignored. And so I asked Her Excellency — she who must run one of the Union’s most vital agencies — how, in practice, we were to persuade a head of state, such as this one from Sierra Leone, to remit what he had already pledged, so that the institution that lectures the world on African self-reliance will not have to go abroad to beg next year.
Her answer was gracious. She thanked me for the question, and agreed that financing the Union was a challenge, but she did not dare answer my question. She asked, instead, that we might speak of it later — as though an honest answer were a thing that could not be set down in front of the man it concerned. Well, we never spoke of it later. As she moved on to other questions, I feared that her courtesy had extinguished a fire that needed to be lit. An honest answer from her, whatever it would have been, would have struck him true, and at least the statesman’s visit to Cambridge would have birthed a memorable discomfort. This discomfort is the fire such places need, and it is such fire, applied relentlessly and in such important public places, that makes powerful people pliable to pressure. The forge of the conference had been assembled for her, she had the hammer in her hand, and from the crowd had even emerged a spark with which to ignite the coal and bury the politician within it. She chose to put out the fire and set aside her hammer. She chose diplomacy instead — sparing one statesman the agony of truth, and sparing all his peers any reason to reform.
The second day of the conference moved to the question of where Africa stands in a world whose order is coming apart. At the diplomatic roundtable, the panellist made the continent’s case on the sheer size of its landmass, the richness of its natural resources and the growth of its youthful population. H.E. Maurice Makoloo, Kenya’s High Commissioner to the UK, also proclaimed that African values possess a particular human-centredness that offers us another advantage — the one sentiment from that table I could not share, since no one is made gentle by the mere latitude of their birth. But that aside, the panel provided sufficient fire, acknowledging difficult truths such as that our heads of state can be seen to possess almost no agency at all, whenever they allow themselves to be summoned by Western powers willy-nilly into rooms not of their devising. The panel also opined that the historical fragmentation of the continent into small separate bargaining postures is itself a great modern hindrance, not only to the flow of capital, but also of ideas.
Such honest concessions set the mood for subsequent sessions, and I am told that the panel on “Energy Security and Climate Ambitions: Tensions and Trade-offs in Africa’s Green Transition” certainly understood the assignment before them. It was whispered for the rest of the conference that the debating chamber was set ablaze by the passions of their argument, between those who would have the continent go clean and go now, and those who claim the right to burn whatever they must to arrive somewhere worth arriving at, before the rules drawn up by the already-arrived can be deployed to hold us where we are. As I attended a parallel session, I did not have the luxury of watching this beautiful moment unfold. The one time there was real heat in the forge, I was elsewhere, watching another panel poking at cold coals from a distance.
In the second session of the day, I chose a panel that was named Africa in the Algorithm. As a start-up founder in the tech space, I had real skin in the game, and so I knew that it was time for my own future to be subjected to the forge. Plenty was said that I agree with, but I am certain that your curiosities draw you to where I differed. On the opening question posed by the session’s moderator, Ms Chidera Ezenwanne – also a student of the University of Cambridge – of who should own and benefit from African data, all speakers were vehement that Africans should benefit from it, but one of them mentioned, almost in passing, that ownership signifies less than the question of how that data should be governed.
On the question posed by one of the delegates in attendance, on what Africa should do while the global powers are racing towards more capable systems, the same panellist made the reasonable-sounding case — and in a room engineered for agreement, the reasonable-sounding is the most suspect thing that can be said, for it is the one thing no one thinks to stop and examine — that Africa ought not to join the race to develop our own foundation models. Her reasons were that Africa is lacking the basic infrastructure needed to justify such ambition. She maintained that we should attend first to our practical needs: to ensure every child has drinking water before routing thousands of gallons to any AI data centres; to ensure everyone is connected to the grid before granting any megawatts elsewhere, etc…
Both claims passed unchallenged, yet in my view, both are wrong. Firstly, ownership is the precondition of governance, it is not an ornament upon it. You cannot govern what you do not own, and a people who surrender ownership while debating governance will discover, too late, that they have negotiated the terms of their own dispossession. This is a mistake that Kenya has recently committed, and other African nations must be vigilant, lest they are ensnared by the same trap. As for the counsel of patience — that we must not join the race until our conditions match those of our competitors — I will grant it more than its proponents granted my objections. The opportunity cost is real: water and electricity are not abstractions, and a child without either has a claim on the budget that no data centre can outbid. The caution is not foolish. It is only mistaken about the nature of the work before us. Building under constraint does not doom the effort; more often, it has forced genuine invention. Scarcity can be a teacher. A model raised where the grid fails and the data lakes run low demands methods that the well-supplied never need to find — in system design, in training, in the mathematics itself — and to forbid the attempt until everything stands ready is not prudence but surrender. Again, we are not short of ideas. We are short of the nerve to begin before we are ready.
So far, I have spent most of this essay on what I came to dispute, and the easy version of it would end here, in a sneer. But the sneer would be a lie. The conference gave me far more than a platform to be disappointed by. Away from the dais — in the corridors and in the shadows — people argued with me, and argued well. A radiologist working in London, students of public health and from other disciplines, many who had studied here and never met one another, and others who had travelled from Manchester and from further still for this conference, all of them took my views apart to my face. None of them spoke from the lectern, nor were they granted the opportunity to pose a question to it. The friction I had come looking for was there the whole time; it had only been driven off the stage and into private conversations, where, I must say, generating it cost no one anything.
The conference closed with a gala and a screening of the opening minutes of a documentary on Winnie Mandela, at the University Arms Hotel. I have not yet seen the whole of it, and I will hold my verdict until I have. But after the screening, a South African friend made a point that has stayed with me: that the histories they are handed at school are not furnished with the Africans who actually made them — that Winnie, and others like her, survive in their memory as rumours of themselves. The remedy is not only that such films be made. It is that we make a habit of remembering our own, against curricula still curated, to this day, by the people who once curated our colonisation. To insist on that remembering is itself a kind of friction — a refusal to let a convenient past stand unchallenged — and it makes its own heat. The film, I am told, asks whether this woman has been weighed by her worst hours while the men beside her are weighed by their best. I do not yet know the answer, but the question sounds like the right one.
My complaint to you, my dear reader, regarding such conferences is not with the organisers, or with the people who fill them. All these people deserve their flowers. My complaint is with what we permit within these rooms. Because of common courtesies, the ideas which are meant to be tested are instead only displayed. We have also become collectors of trinkets: of lanyards, of panels attended, of selfies with the eminent, of the LinkedIn posts that prove to others that we were in some great place and mingled with some great people. However, I am glad that not everyone seeks to collect such cheap trinkets. Some of those I met at this conference were brave young people who had chosen to walk away from safe paths to push for reforms in their own spaces, or to build companies where they are likely to fail, and doing so before they felt ready.
So let me return to the forge. The metal we are trying to work, in the case of African issues, is not the institutions. It is the habits beneath them — deference, impunity, despotism — beaten into shape across more than a century of injustice and patient corruption, until they took on the hardness of things that seem to have always been so. We cannot soften such material by addressing it politely. Metal answers one argument only, and that argument is heat: abundant, sustained, indifferent to its preference for staying as it is. And heat is not made by agreement. It is made by friction — one hard conviction grinding against another, and the refusal to let an inconvenience pass for the sake of a pleasant evening. A room that makes no friction makes no fire, and a room that makes no fire forges nothing.
We — the ordinary people who must come to put our questions to the powerful — are also not spectators. We are entering these institutions and their powerful positions as we finish our degrees. The questions we put to the powerful right now are therefore questions that will be put to us soon enough, from the back of some other room, by people who are not yet in it.
So the question is not whether we can make the heat. The question is where we are willing to make it. Most of the honest and necessary things were said in confidence where they cost nothing and will most likely change nothing, because heat in a private conversation warms two people and then dies. The one place the fire is needed is the one place we smothered it: the open floor, the debating chamber, with power seated within reach. That is what friction is for. Not to be vented safely among ourselves once the powerful have gone to their mansions in London, but struck in front of them, where it costs the striker something and the metal is hot enough to be forged.
So I will leave a charge for whoever fills these rooms after me, at the next of these gatherings and the ones beyond it. The powerful will keep coming to say the right things and to leave exactly as they came. Do not let them. Do not let a courteous evening, or a diplomat’s practised pleasantry, pass for the friction it was meant to be. Bring the heat, and hold them in it — politely, yet without relenting — until the metal of recalcitrant power, hardened by a century of impunity, grows warm enough to be softened and moved. A better Africa will not be talked into being. It will be forged. And no one is coming to light that fire for us.
