Vice Chancellor Professor Andrew Hamilton Co-Chairs, Charlotte Ntim, Jonny Liu and Yasmin Kumi Committee and Advisory Board Members of the Oxford Africa Conference Members of the Oxford Africa Society and the Oxford Business Network for Africa Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
Good morning.
It is an honour for me to be here with you today. But then again, where else would I be?
You see, when Oxford sends for you, you come. Be you president or scientist, athlete or poet, you come. And you come precisely because it is Oxford.
What’s in a name? Shakespeare once asked. If we lived in a world of iambic pentameter, star-crossed lovers and sweet-smelling roses, then one might easily answer, “Nothing. There is nothing in a name. ‘Thou art thyself!’”
But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world of heritage and inheritance, a world in which reputations precede institutions, as well as individuals. We live in a world where names, and what they carry within them, matter.
When I hear the name Oxford, the people who come to mind are not Oscar Wilde or Rupert Murdoch or Margaret Thatcher, though they have most certainly done their alma mater proud.
They do not populate the story of the Oxford that I know. When I hear the name Oxford, I think of Africa.
I do! Because that is my frame of reference. I think of Oxonians who, for better or worse, have left their mark on Africa.
Oxonians like Cecil Rhodes, the famous colonial businessman and miner, after whom the prestigious Rhodes scholarship as well as the former territory of Rhodesia—now modern day Zimbabwe—were named;
Or the freedom fighter, Seretse Khama, who led Botswana to independence and became the country’s first president.
My own country, Ghana, boasts an impressive list of Oxonians. It is, in fact, a list that reads like a primer on our contemporary politics.
People like Dr. Kofi Busia, Prime Minister in the 2nd Republic; Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development in the 4th Republic; Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata, a prominent lawyer and former Chief Executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation; and His Excellency John Agyekum Kufuor, the second President in the 4th Republic. And these are but a few.
I wonder how many people are aware of their stories, of Ghana’s story that exists within the Oxford name.
A name is a biography. It is a history of who! what! when! where! how! and sometimes even why.
But history is subjective; it is the narrative of the historian. The Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken extensively about the “danger of a single story.”
When I considered the theme of this gathering—A Continent on the Move: People, Politics and Business Across Borders—one of the first things that came to mind was that phrase: “the danger of a single story.”
I wondered about the biography of Africa, about the history that is contained within the name. What is the story that comes to mind when people hear the name “Africa”? The presentation, or representation, of one?
That has always been the danger when it comes to how we discuss Africa. There has always been the assumption of a monolith: Africa as one country, not 54;
One culture, not an immeasurable number; One climate, hot! hot! hot! Africa as one intractable reality.
When you hear the name Africa spoken on television or radio or in an unfamiliar public space; When you read the name Africa in a newspaper or magazine, do you, for even the briefest of moments, wonder about the story that will follow? Which Africa will it show?
Will the story simply be about malaria, Ebola, high infant mortality and poverty; or will it also mention the innovative ways in which these critical issues are now being addressed?
Take, for instance, MedAfrica, the free mobile phone app that was created and launched in Kenya. We’re talking about a country with a population of roughly 44 and a half million—and only 7,250 doctors to serve it.
MedAfrica provides people with basic information about health and medicine, it provides its users with possible diagnoses for symptoms, and it also connects them, through a directory, to doctors and hospitals.
Another is WinSenga, a low-cost mobile app that was launched in Uganda. WinSenga monitors the heart rate of an unborn baby and provides a diagnosis that is then sent to the
mother via text message, along with suggestions for possible actions that can be taken.
Then there’s M-Pesa, a micro financing and money transfer service that relies on mobile networks, not the Internet. It allows users to pay bills and school fees, buy groceries, or make
cash transfers.
In 2014 alone, M-Pesa, which was created and launched in Kenya, facilitated over 40 billion
US dollars worth of transactions. The app is now being used in numerous other African countries, as well as in Afghanistan, India and Eastern Europe.
If you think these three apps are impressive, there are dozens more that I could list.
There are African-made and Africa-centered apps for almost everything; for cow farming and horticultural irrigation; for locating lost members of refugee families; for scheduling, tracking and paying for motorbike delivery services; for tutoring students who are studying and preparing for exams.
And for those who fear that technology is turning our world into one that is devoid of real human contact and concern, a world in which we are no longer our brother’s keeper, there’s an app called Olalashe that might restore your faith in both technology and humanity.
Olalashe means “brother” in the Maasai language, and if ever you find yourself in a dangerous place or situation in Africa, with one touch this app will send an SOS message to all of your specified emergency contacts along with a link to your exact location.
Most of the world is well aware of the very real problems that exist on the African continent. I just wish that most of the world were also as aware of the very original and modern attempts being made by Africans to solve some of these problems.
It should be common knowledge that South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are fast becoming the international leaders of mobile app innovation. So much so that people have started referring to Kenya as the Silicon Savannah.
It should be common knowledge that in terms of mobile phone usage, over the next seven years, sub-Saharan Africa will be the fastest growing region globally. As early as 2016, mobile broadband connections will reach 160 million; quadruple what it was in 2012.
My own country, Ghana, is a leader in providing broadband access. Only last Monday I commissioned into service an 800km optic fibre cable, which will provide 26 districts with high-speed access.
When it comes to Africa, when it comes to the information and the images that are associated with that name, it feels as though there is a constant battle between the rural and
the urban, the traditional and the contemporary.
There is a tug-of-war between the decades during which we were supposedly lost and the ones during which we are supposedly rising.
It is always one or the other. Rarely is the spectacular multiplicity of our continent
acknowledged, let alone promulgated.
Imagine this: A story about the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of Africa. Who might be the focus of such an article? Hunter-gatherers, such as the San and the Hadzabe? Pastoralists like the Maasai and the Fulani?
What if the article included all of those peoples and perhaps also focused on another type of itinerant lifestyle, that of—and I’ll borrow a name made popular by the multi-hyphenated author Taiye Selasi—an Afropolitan?
What is an Afropolitan, you ask? Taiye Selasi offers a definition in her essay, “Bye Bye Babar”:
“[T]he newest generation of African emigrants [.] You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others are merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: […] We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.”
With all due respect to this new generation of African emigrants, by this definition one could argue that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was an Afropolitan; as was Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and numerous others of their generation, including the African Oxonians I mentioned earlier.
But even before them, there were others, like Anton Wilhelm Amo, who is said to be the first African to attend a European university.
Amo, a member of the Nzema tribe, was born in the area that is now Ghana. He was taken to Europe at an early age and became a chambre slave to Duke Anthony Ulrich of Brunswich-Wolfenbüttel who supported his studies.
Amo earned numerous diplomas and degrees, including a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1734.
He was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, German and, one would assume, an indigenous language or two… or three.
Throughout the centuries there have been people like Anton Wilhelm Amo, Africans of the world whose stories have not been told widely, Africans of the world whose names and
contributions have been all but forgotten by history.
“A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves,” the Nigerian-British author Ben Okri has written. “Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings [.]”
We are taught at an early age about borders and boundaries, the physical structures that separate “us” from “them.”
Sometimes I wonder at the dialogue that must have taken place at the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa.
“I have signed a treaty with the King of Dahomey and my troops just discovered the source of the river Volta” the French must have said.
“You can keep the Ivory Coast, we will take the Gold Coast, we are in possession of the Fort at Elmina” The English must have replied.
All this while our great grandfathers and mothers went about their daily chores, oblivious that
their destinies were being changed forever in an European city 5000 km away.
The borders on the maps of Africa that I studied in school, and the names that were affixed to the land within those borders, gave me a very clear indication of how certain people could be
defined and where those people belonged.
We, for instance, were from Ghana. Those other people across the border from us,
depending on which direction you travelled, were from Togo, Cote d’Ivoire or—I’m showing my age here—Upper Volta, which, as you know, is now called Burkina Faso.
Different places, different people; at least that’s what I thought—until someone told me a story that broadened my perspective.
That someone was Salifu. During my youth, he worked for my family as a watchman. He’d been a serviceman with the British Brigade. He even served in the Second West African
Infantry brigade during World War II. Those experiences and the alleged non payment of his
pension by the British had left him bitter.
All of Salifu’s stories, no matter how wonderfully they started out, seemed to end with him saying, “One day, those British will get theirs. They will find themselves trapped between the
devil and the deep blue sea.”
There’s one story Salifu told me that I keep coming back to. I’ve told it over and over again in speeches; I even wrote about it in my book. It was about the proverbial Gali family, whose house sat right on top of the border between Ghana and Togo.
The house had been handed down from generation to generation of the Gali family. The house was there long before the border. In those days, the Galis called themselves Ewe. That
was the name of their tribe, and their language. But the border had brought confusion into their lives.
You see, technically, their front door, sitting room, eating area and kitchen were on Ghanaian soil. But the bedrooms, bathrooms and back door were all in Togo. So suddenly the Galis
found themselves straddling two places and two additional identities.
By day, when they walked out of the front door to go to work and school, they were to be Ghanaian. They spoke English, the country’s official language.
By night, when they exited the back door to join their neighbors in the common courtyard, they were Togolese, and were required to speak French, that country’s official language.
“You see the problem those British and French made and then left for us to solve?” Salifu would ask after he told that story. “What happens when your house is divided?”
The borders in Africa that are the most challenging, yet at the same time the most crucial to cross are the ones that have been imposed on us by others.
On 25th May 1963, a group of leaders from all corners of the continent gathered in Addis Ababa to form an organization whose primary goal was the unity of African people. They were fed up with those artificial borders, as well as the division and confusion they caused.
It was a courageous act, driven by a lofty goal, one that the Organization of African Unity, which now goes by the name “the Africa Union”, has been pressing forward to achieve—sometimes steadily, sometimes clumsily—since the day of its inception.
There are now also a number of regional blocs, such as the Economic Community of Central African States, the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community, and the Economic Community of West African States, that are also working towards that goal of unity.
These regional communities are working to enable the free movement of goods, services, capital and people across those once rigid borders. And now more than ever before technology has made the goal of African unity a virtual reality. It’s easy to take this newfound mobility on the continent for granted and forget that it hasn’t always been this way.
Not so long ago—as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s—unless it was on foot or with an automobile, you couldn’t travel from one African country to another, even if they were neighboring, without first going through Europe.
Even postal mail and telephone calls were routed through at least one European country, sometimes two.
It is true that our physical borders, those colonial constructs, are no longer as monumental or divisive; but they are not the only borders in existence.
There are new borders being drawn every day—by religious intolerance, by economic disparity, by gender discrimination, by xenophobia and ethnic conflicts, and by terrorism, hatred and fear.
The challenge to moving forward is finding new ways to not only cross these borders but to also erase them completely.
The late Chinua Achebe, our literary father, was fond of recounting an old proverb that says, “the reason the hunter is always victorious is that the lion does not have a storyteller.”
We must insist on being the experts of our own experiences, on telling our own stories of the Africa we know, as Noaz Deshe did in his film, “White Shadow,” about the plight of albinos in Tanzania; and Young Kim did in his film, “City of Dust,” about life in the slums of Uganda.
In 1969 when FESPACO, the biennial film and television festival in Ouagadougou, was launched, only 23 films were shown. Filmmaking in Africa was still in its fledgling stage.
Now the film industry in Nigeria alone—Nollywood, as it has been nicknamed—is the third most lucrative film industry in the world, behind cinema in India and the United States.
The world is literally at our fingertips. In 140 typographic characters, we can share even the most mundane news of our lives with complete strangers in faraway places. With a single hashtag, we can appeal to the humanity of our brothers and sisters across the globe and ask for help with a deadly epidemic, or with the return of kidnapped schoolgirls.
We must continue to take to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. We must continue to post, share, pin and blog about all our victories, whether large or small, personal or political. When we celebrate yet another free and fair election, we celebrate our future.
When we recognize people like Patrick Ngowi, who is revolutionizing the solar industry; Dele Olojede, the first African-born Pulitzer Prize winner; and Farida Bedwei, a brilliant software engineer with cerebral palsy who is a shining example of the many abilities of the so-called disabled, we recognize our own limitless potential.
Each story affirms that the true wealth of our resource-rich continent lies not in the gold, silver, diamonds, bauxite, coltan or oil but, rather, in our people.
That is why dialogues and exchanges, such as the ones that will take place during this conference, are so important. They give us an opportunity to share accomplishments and experiences and, yes, frustrations; they allow us to understand that we are part of a movement, a unique moment in time.
But most of all, they remind us that if we want to give this moment its due, if we want to keep it from being omitted from the pages of somebody else’s history book, then we must be the magicians, the storytellers, and the historians who claim it, —for posterity, and in the name of our beloved motherland Africa.
And this is why I accepted to give this keynote today. To help tell our own story. The story of Africa.
I wish to close with a few lines from the poem “Random Notes to My Son,” by South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile or, Bra Willie, as he is affectionately called.
“I have fallen with all the names I am but the newborn eye, old as childbirth, must touch the day that, speaking my language, will say, today we move, we move”
I thank you for your kind attention, and I wish you a pleasant and productive conference.
