Out of Africa

The next great shift in global power may begin here.

For most of modern history, when the great powers looked at Africa, they saw a treasure chest with no lock.

Land. Gold. Diamonds. Oil. Labor. Military position. Cold War allies. Development projects. Markets. Votes. More recently: cobalt, manganese, copper, lithium and the other minerals without which much of the twenty-first-century economy cannot function.

Africa has been explored, exploited, divided, colonized, liberated, courted, financed, armed, aided, indebted and occasionally ignored.

What it has not often been allowed to do is to define the terms of the conversation.

That may be changing. And if it is, it represents something much larger than another shift in international diplomacy.

It represents a reversal of history.

Dr. Gary Kellner comes to that question from an unusual direction.

He is a historian, but Africa is not merely history to him. For  two decades, his work repeatedly brought him to the continent—to its governments and institutions, its communities and schools, its extraordinary possibilities and sometimes staggering difficulties. He has worked with government leaders, lings and queens of its tribes, business owners, heads of NGOs, pastors, priests and imams, educators, women and children enslaved by human traffickers, as well as tens of thousands of people whose names will never be preserved by historians. Few Westerners have his breadth and depth of experience.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between studying a place and watching history happen inside it.

Dr. Kellner has done both.

So when he argues that Americans should pay considerably more attention to Africa, the interesting question isn’t whether he is right.

It is why.

And history supplies a rather remarkable answer.

The Map That Was Drawn by Someone Else

It is difficult to understand modern Africa without remembering how much of that map was created by people who did not live there.

The notorious Berlin Conference of 1884–85 did not literally draw every modern African border in a single room, as the shorthand version of history sometimes suggests. But it helped establish the rules under which European powers carved up the continent.

Britain. France. Germany. Belgium. Portugal. Italy. Spain.

They competed for territory while African political communities were excluded from the negotiations determining what would happen to African land. Existing kingdoms, ethnic communities, languages, trading networks and political relationships were subordinated to European imperial requirements.

The consequences impact Africa decades after the Europeans left.

Newly independent African governments inherited borders they generally could not afford to reopen, borders that routinely divided tribes and language groups, borders that frequently lumped together tribes that had been enemies for centuries. To challenge them wholesale might have produced endless wars.

So, the borders remained.

Then, the countries inside those borders began demanding a voice.

Ghana became independent in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah and became a symbol of a much larger movement. In 1960 alone—the celebrated “Year of Africa”—17 African countries gained independence.

One after another, colonial flags came down. New flags went up. But independence created another problem.

What exactly did these new states possess besides flags?

Sovereignty had to be defended. Economies had to be built. Colonial administrative structures had to be transformed. Education systems had to expand. Borders had to be maintained. Governments had to function.

And the rest of the world was already choosing sides in the Cold War. Africa had escaped one international contest just in time to become strategically valuable in another.

Thirty-Two Countries Walk into a Room

In May 1963, representatives of 32 independent African states gathered in Addis Ababa and created the Organization of African Unity.

The OAU was imperfect from its beginning. But consider what its founders were attempting.

African nations that had spent generations under foreign rule were now trying to establish rules under which Africans would deal with one another. Its principles emphasized sovereignty, territorial integrity, solidarity and the eradication of the remaining colonial rule on the continent.

Those words can sound bureaucratic today. In 1963 they were anything but.

Sovereignty meant: You do not own us anymore.

Territorial integrity meant: We will not permit another scramble for Africa.

Decolonization meant: Independence is incomplete while Africans remain under colonial or white-minority rule anywhere on the continent.

And unity expressed Nkrumah’s great dream—that Africa might someday possess enough collective strength to avoid becoming the instrument of stronger powers.

The dream proved considerably easier to announce than to achieve.

Africa is not one political society even though Westerners often refer to Africa as if it were a country. It contained radically different economies, languages, religions, colonial inheritances and political systems.

There were monarchies and republics. Democracies and dictatorships. Capitalists, socialists and governments attempting various combinations of both. And the Cold War powers were not inclined to leave them alone.

The United States and Soviet Union competed for influence across the developing world. African governments learned that superpower attention brought weapons, money, infrastructure and diplomatic protection.

It also brought interference.

The most notorious was when the United States sponsored a CIA plot to assassinate Congolese president Patrice Lamumba in 1961.

He would not be the last African leader to be eliminated by the Western democracies—or, at the least, with their knowledge and approval. Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Sylvanus Olympio of Togo, Amilcar Cabral of Guinnea-Bisau and Cape Verde, to name a few.

Proxy struggles and outside sponsorship became part of African politics from Angola to the Horn of Africa. The colonial era had ended. The age of outside interest in Africa had not.

That distinction matters enormously.

Because it remains true.

The OAU’s Great Paradox

The Organization of African Unity survived for almost four decades.

It helped support liberation movements and provided a continental political forum. But its greatest principle also became one of its greatest weaknesses.

The OAU revered sovereignty.

It had good reason.

Africans had only recently recovered sovereignty from colonial rulers. The last thing African governments wanted was to create a continental organization that could begin telling independent states what to do.

But what happens when the threat to Africans comes from their own governments? That question became impossible to avoid. Coups, civil wars, authoritarian governments and atrocities exposed the limits of noninterference.

Sovereignty protected weak states from foreign intervention. Sometimes it also protected terrible governments from accountability.

The catastrophe in Rwanda in 1994 made the inadequacy of the international system horrifyingly clear. The genocide was not solely an African institutional failure—the United Nations and major world powers have their own painful history there—but it demonstrated what principles of sovereignty and international caution could mean when human beings were being slaughtered.

By the end of the twentieth century, African leaders increasingly understood that an organization created for the age of decolonization was not sufficient for the age that followed it.

In 2002, the OAU became the African Union.

That wasn’t simply a change of stationery. It reflected an important evolution in the idea of African responsibility.

The continent still valued sovereignty. But African institutions increasingly claimed a legitimate interest in peace, security, constitutional government and economic integration beyond individual national borders.

The question was changing. It was no longer simply:

How do Africans keep outsiders from controlling Africa?

It was becoming:

How do Africans build enough collective power to control their own future?

That remains unfinished business. But unfinished is not the same thing as unimportant.

Then China Arrived

Actually, China had been there for decades.

Beijing supported African liberation movements, built diplomatic relationships and famously constructed the Tanzania-Zambia Railway in the 1970s.

But the scale changed dramatically in the twenty-first century. China needed commodities and markets. African governments needed roads, railways, ports, power systems, telecommunications and capital. The relationship grew.

Western descriptions of China’s African expansion sometimes reduce the story to a simple warning:  China is buying Africa.

That is too easy.

China is pursuing Chinese interests. So does Britain. So does France. So does  Russia. And, so does the United States.

The more interesting question is what African governments are doing with the competition.

It may be bargaining. That does not mean every bargain is wise.

A country pursuing American partnership, Chinese infrastructure financing, Gulf investment, European trade, and Russian security assistance does not come without costs.

The Latin American Warning

History offers a caution here.

Nearly two centuries before most of Africa threw off European colonial rule, Latin America experienced its own extraordinary wave of independence movements. Between 1810 and the mid-1820s, Spanish rule collapsed across much of the Americas. New flags went up. New governments were formed. Simon Bolívar, who led many of the independence movements, dreamed of nations capable of determining their own destinies.

Political independence had arrived.

Economic independence was another matter.

The new republics remained dependent on exporting commodities and importing manufactured goods and capital. Britain became enormously influential without needing to recreate the Spanish Empire. Later, the United States became the dominant outside power across much of the hemisphere. Foreign investment-built railroads, ports and industries, but it also created new dependencies. Governments changed. Coups came and went. Outside powers discovered that influence did not always require possession of territory.

The flags had changed. The underlying relationships of power changed much more slowly.

That history should make us careful about predicting an African century simply because Africa possesses resources the world desperately wants.

Cobalt is not power if someone else processes it, determines its price, and captures most of its value. A port is not necessarily power if the trade passing through it enriches everyone except the country that owns the shoreline. Foreign investment is not independence merely because the investor is Chinese rather than European. And replacing one powerful patron with several is not automatically sovereignty.

But there is an important difference.

African countries today are entering this competition in a world with more competing centers of power than Latin America faced during much of its post-independence history. Washington is not the only bidder. Neither is Beijing. Europe remains important. Gulf states are investing aggressively. India and Turkey are expanding their relationships. Russia offers something different again.

That competition creates risk.

It also creates leverage.

A country able to negotiate among several interested powers has something a country dependent upon one patron does not have:

the ability to say no.

History suggests that may be one of the most important measures of sovereignty.

Debt matters. Corruption matters. Transparency matters. Political influence matters. Contracts matter. But there is something subtly paternalistic about assuming that African leaders cannot recognize that foreign governments have motives.

African leaders have had several centuries of experience of dealing with the motives of foreign governments.

The change is that they increasingly have alternatives. And alternatives create leverage.

The Ground Beneath the Argument

Look beneath the soil and the international interest becomes easier to understand.

Africa holds extraordinary mineral wealth.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the continent possesses more than 40 percent of the world’s reserves of cobalt, manganese and platinum—materials critical to batteries, hydrogen technologies and the transition to lower-carbon energy systems.

But that fact comes with a warning from history.

Africa has long been rich in things other people wanted.

Gold did not make most Africans rich. Diamonds did not. Oil did not. The existence of a valuable resource and the creation of broad prosperity are entirely different propositions. For generations, much of the economic pattern was brutally simple: Extract the raw material. Ship it somewhere else. Process it somewhere else. Manufacture something valuable somewhere else. Sell the finished product—sometimes back to the country where the raw material originated.

The twenty-first-century question is whether African economies can capture more of that chain themselves.

Mining is one thing. Processing is another. Manufacturing is another. Owning intellectual property, technology, distribution networks and sophisticated businesses is something else again. That is where resources can become development rather than merely extraction.

The IEA estimates that Africa supplies about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and roughly three-quarters of its manganese yet captures far less of the value associated with the technologies that use them.

There is the opportunity.

And there is the historical warning.

Having what the world needs has never guaranteed that the people standing above it will prosper.

The Most Important African Resource Is Not Underground

It is people.

Africa is extraordinarily young.

That fact is often presented as though youth itself guarantees an economic miracle. It doesn’t.

A huge generation of young people with education, health, jobs, functioning institutions and access to capital can produce extraordinary growth. But throughout Africa, most of those educated young people cannot find jobs. When they do, they are under-employed.

Those not “lucky” enough to attend university become trapped in low-paying jobs, earning a few dollars a day, not enough to build a life, much less a future.

The results cascade like a waterfall—outward migration. Political upheaval. Recruitment opportunities for extremist movements. Pressure on cities and governments unable to provide services quickly enough.

Demography is destiny. But it is more—the demographics of Africa’s youth is an energy source. Africa’s Gen Z is disappointed, angry and volatile. What happens next depends on how governments respond.

That is why education—a part of African development Dr. Kellner has personally advanced—is not a soft humanitarian appendage to geopolitics.

It is geopolitics.

A classroom is an economic institution. So is a school for girls. So is a university. So is vocational training. Countries do not become powerful because somebody discovers lithium beneath them. They become powerful when their people acquire the capacity to determine what happens to the lithium.

Fifty-Four Votes

And then we arrive in New York.

This may be the most underestimated part of the story.

The United Nations has 193 member states. Fifty-four are African.

Do the arithmetic.

African countries account for approximately 28 percent of the membership of the United Nations.

In the General Assembly, the United States has one vote. China has one. Russia has one. France has one. Ghana has one. Kenya has one. Senegal has one. Botswana has one.

That does not mean Africa operates as a single 54-vote bloc. It doesn’t. African governments disagree with one another, sometimes profoundly. But it means that no country hoping to build broad international legitimacy can casually dismiss more than a quarter of the General Assembly.

Consequently, diplomacy in Africa looks different.

Recognition matters. Relationships matter. Development assistance matters. Trade matters. Embassies matter. And showing up matters.

The great powers are not merely competing for minerals, ports and markets. They are building relationships with governments that vote.

That is power of a different kind.

And here history becomes almost absurdly visible.

The Room Built in 1945

The allies founded the United Nations at the end of the Second World War.

Look at Africa in 1945. Most of the continent was under colonial rule. The political architecture of the postwar world was therefore constructed during a period in which most Africans had no seat at the table.

The Security Council reflected the distribution of power at the end of that war.

Its five permanent members became the United States, Soviet Union—whose seat is now held by Russia—Britain, France and China. Each received veto power. There was no permanent African seat. Eighty-one years later, there still isn’t one.

Think about the contradiction.

A continent containing 54 UN member states and well over a billion people has no permanent representation in the institution’s most powerful chamber.

Africa does hold elected, rotating Security Council seats. But permanent membership is something different. The permanent members never have to leave. And they can veto. Five states, chosen by themselves, awarded permanent power. If one can make a case for such a structure, one cannot make a case for the two erstwhile colonial powers—the United Kingdom and France—exercising that level of power.

Africa’s governments have been arguing for reform for decades.

In 2005, the African Union formalized its common position through what became known as the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration.

The demand is substantial.

Africa seeks at least two permanent Security Council seats with the full privileges of permanent membership—including the veto for as long as the veto continues to exist—and five non-permanent African seats in an expanded Council.

Twenty-one years later, that demand remains unresolved. And in 2026 it is very much alive.

This past May, African Union Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf put the argument in unusually direct language:

“Africa is not asking for a favor.”

He called the continent’s exclusion from permanent representation an historical injustice and argued that the Security Council cannot indefinitely reflect “the geopolitical order of 1945.” That is not rhetoric floating free of history.

It is history colliding with a political structure no longer relevant to the 21^st century.

Who Gets the Seat?

Of course, correcting one historical imbalance immediately creates difficult political questions. If Africa receives two permanent seats, who gets them? Nigeria? South Africa? Egypt? Another country? Should representation rotate? Should regions determine their own representatives?

What happens when national ambition collides with continental solidarity?

These are not small matters and pretending they don’t exist would weaken the African argument rather than strengthen it.

The African Union’s common position deliberately emphasizes Africa’s right to select its own candidates. That itself is significant. It says, in effect:

If the international system finally agrees that Africa deserves permanent representation, Africa should not have its representatives chosen for it.

There is that historical theme again.

Agency.

The right to choose. The right to negotiate. The right to disagree. And eventually the right to decide.

Africa Is Not a Country

This should be obvious.

Strangely, it often isn’t.

Africa contains more than 50 countries, thousands of languages and communities, enormous religious diversity, radically different political systems and economies ranging from sophisticated financial centers to areas of profound poverty.

South Africa is not Somalia. Nigeria is not Namibia. Morocco is not Mozambique. Botswana is not Burkina Faso. The Sahel is not southern Africa. A continental argument that ignores those differences becomes meaningless.

And this is where predictions about an inevitable “African century” should make us nervous.

Nothing is inevitable.

There are coups, terrorism and civil conflicts. There is corruption. There are governments that fail their citizens. There are infrastructure deficits, weak institutions and enormous inequalities. There are also democracies, entrepreneurs, universities, technology companies, artists, manufacturers, financial institutions and some of the fastest-changing cities in the world.

Both Africas are real. There may, in fact, be dozens of Africas.

The mistake is searching for one.

An African Market

There is another experiment underway that deserves considerably more attention than it receives in the United States. The African Continental Free Trade Area is an attempt to make economic geography work differently.

The World Bank describes the potential market as more than 1.3 billion people with a combined GDP of approximately $3.4 trillion. The ambition is enormous: reduce barriers to trade across African borders, encourage investment and allow African companies to reach African customers more easily.

Again, history helps us understand why that matters.

Many colonial economies were constructed to move commodities outward. African railways connected mines to ports while doing remarkably little to connect neighboring African economies to one another. Political independence did not magically redesign that infrastructure.

Continental trade integration attempts something fundamentally different. It tries to make African geography serve African commerce. Whether it succeeds will depend upon roads, customs systems, regulation, political cooperation, finance, peace and the tedious machinery that turns treaties into actual commerce.

But the idea matters.

A collection of relatively small national markets has bargaining power—but not much.

A market measured in more than a billion consumers has another.

America Has a Decision to Make

The temptation for the US government is to turn all of this immediately into a contest with China.

Who is winning Africa?

That may be the wrong question.

Africa is not a trophy. And if American policy begins with the assumption that African governments exist primarily to be won away from Beijing or Moscow, Washington risks repeating the very historical error it made in the Cold War era

African countries have interests of their own. Sometimes those interests will align with America’s. Sometimes they won’t.

The United States nevertheless possesses enormous advantages.

American universities are the best in the world and remain powerful magnets. American technology matters. American investment matters. American markets matter. Civil society matters. Diaspora relationships matter.

And despite a complicated historical record, the American idea—the proposition that individuals possess rights that governments do not grant and therefore should not casually remove—retains extraordinary power when America lives up to it.

But relationships require attention. They also require respect.

A government that arrives only when it needs a vote is not building a relationship.

It is counting.

African leaders count too.

The Long View

This is where Dr. Gary Kellner’s experience becomes especially useful.

Historians are professionally suspicious of the present.

Today’s crisis always feels unprecedented. Today’s election always feels decisive. Today’s alliance always seems permanent. Then you look backward. Empires disappear. Borders move. Institutions survive the circumstances that created them. Countries considered peripheral become central. Countries considered indispensable discover that history has continued without asking permission.

Kellner has spent enough time in Africa to have seen change that cannot be captured by a single statistic. He has seen the human consequences of institutions that work and those that don’t. He has seen what education can change and what it cannot change. He has seen what happens when the outside world’s conception of Africa collides with the Africa that actually exists.

That does not make every conclusion he draws automatically correct. It does something more valuable.

It gives him perspective. And perspective is precisely what the current debate about Africa requires.

The next great shift in global power may not happen to Africa.

It may come out of Africa.