From a humanist perspective, the central question is not who is to blame for Africa’s suffering — though blame, accurately assigned, matters. The central question is: who is responsible for Africa’s future?
The answer cannot be Europe. Europe has its own reckoning to conduct, and repatriation — of artefacts, of wealth, of narrative authority — remains a legitimate and urgent demand. The answer cannot be the Arab world, which has yet to meaningfully acknowledge, let alone atone for, its own history of African exploitation. The answer cannot be China, whose contemporary infrastructure investments across the continent carry their own logic of extraction dressed as partnership.
Who is Responsible?
The answer is Africans.
Not because Africans are uniquely culpable for the continent’s condition — they are not. But because Africans are the only ones with both the stake and the standing to build something different. Foreign powers will always act in their own interests. That is the nature of power. The question is what Africans choose to do with their own.
And that choice cannot be made while wearing borrowed hierarchies as though they were skin. It cannot be made while prosecuting ethnic wars for the benefit of political elites. It cannot be made while man-made famine is deployed as a military strategy, while gay neighbours are hunted in the streets, while women are subjugated in the name of traditions that are themselves, in many cases, foreign imports. It cannot be made while the loudest voices against foreign domination simultaneously embrace foreign ideologies that dominate their own people.
Human dignity is not a Western concept. It is not an Eastern concept. It is not a Christian concept or an Islamic concept. It is a human concept — one that various traditions have articulated in different ways, and which humanism grounds in the simplest possible terms: suffering matters, regardless of who experiences it. The Igbo child dying of preventable disease matters as much as the Hausa child. The gay Nigerian thrown from a hotel window matters as much as the heterosexual Nigerian. The woman denied education matters as much as the man who denied her. Dignity is not conditional on ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality. It is inherent. And any system — be it foreign or domestic, ancient or modern that denies it is wrong.
The unfished business of freedom
Africa’s colonial wounds are real. The underdevelopment is documented and the theft of resources, knowledge, and human beings across centuries has left consequences that will take generations to fully address. None of this essay disputes that. None of it suggests that foreign interference in African affairs is benign or should be accepted. The opposite is true.
But the guardians of Africa — those who wear the toga of resistance most loudly — must be asked to account for what has happened to the continent in the decades since the foreign boots withdrew. The wars they chose. The famines they engineered. The hierarchies they maintained. The neighbours they hunted. The children they abducted. The institutions they hollowed out. The futures they foreclosed.
The colonisers left. What remained is ours — our doing and our undoing, both.
The African who can hold two truths simultaneously — that foreign exploitation was real and must be resisted, and that African self-destruction is equally real and must be confronted — is the African who might actually build something. Not the one who wears the toga and hides the blade. Not the one who mourns the slave ship and ignores the machete. Not the one who marches against imperialism today and coordinates the Kito gang’s activities tomorrow.
The unfinished business of African freedom is not with Europe or Arabia. It is with ourselves. It always has been.
And life, as I have come to understand it, is too short for anything less than that truth.
By Kenneth Eze