Themed on advancing African agency towards global powers, the conference will be held from
October 31 to November 1, 2024, at Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya, as a partnership of the
African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand, South
Africa, and multiple partners.

Africa as a Captive Metaphorical Figure

Imagine Africa as a human being! One whose name “Africa”, was determined by invading strangers
who devastatingly disrupted her way of life. One who was brutalised and forced to adopt alien ways.
For centuries, her social structures were destroyed and foreign ones imposed, often at gunpoint or on
pain of death. Millions of her children, often the strongest, were abducted, shackled, and shipped to
foreign lands as slaves, providing all kinds of excruciating labour – under duress. Her natural resources,
from minerals to fertile lands, were plundered on an industrial scale to develop the strangers’
economies. This metaphorical Africa became a captive on her own land while watching the kin she
lost to slavery treated in the most inhuman of ways.

As a conditioned reflex, the individual, Africa, has learned to be a bystander. Deep down, she knows
she was wronged. She is aware that the afflictions continue to this day. Yet, she can’t stand up and
push her interests on existential issues that affect her. Perhaps her inaction is because silence was and
is the only way to deal with the pain caused by the strangers’ exploitative relationship over the
centuries. Perhaps the brutality, dispossession, and forced submission were and are so thorough they
left an enduring legacy of traumatised inaction.

The metaphorical Africa would be a fictional figure of amusement were it not that it describes real
happenings to real people by real people. This mucky analogy loosely compares with the former
Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi’s metaphorical narration of a chicken that was tied to a short sisal
string for so long to limit its movement to a small radius of an area. Upon being untied, the chicken
couldn’t move beyond this radius. The owner had to nudge it for the chicken to rediscover, in a manner
of speaking, its freedom of movement.

The “Africa” personality has had nudges to help her rediscover her long-lost freedom of action and
more. She has made some steps to redeem herself. She is now desirous of projecting her voice on the
global stage, to articulate her interests.

One opportunity to raise her voice is the upcoming conference-themed, “Amplifying African Voices
for Strategic Action”. Besides exploring the strategies to hoist African voices on the global stage, we
need to think along the analogy of the tied chicken, to find ways to give Africa the slight push needed
to make her move with speed beyond the mindset inculcated into her for centuries. The conference
shall bring together participants from various fields, including policymakers, academics, media
practitioners, civil society activists, think tanks, and businesspeople, among others. Speakers will be
pooled into 22 sessions divided into keynote addresses, panel discussions, and roundtables. The
conference will serve as a platform for analyzing, presenting, and understanding the intricate relations
between the African region and its nations with external powers.

The key question is how Africa can enhance beneficial relationships with the global powers across
engagement sectors. This multi-disciplinary event draws on the perspectives of scholars, practitioners,
policymakers, and activists to chart the way forward for African interests in an increasingly multipolar
world.

The Technicalities of Amplifying the African Voices

There is an observable shift by corporations, states, among other entities towards organising
themselves as global players. The shift is motivated by the potential to harness the cross-national
socio-economic resources for national and regional benefits. For example, under the rubrics of public
diplomacy, strategic international communication, and soft power, media establishments in some
Western countries, as well as Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Brazilian, Mexican, and Indian media houses,
have separated their local media programming from their global programming. They have different
content for the local audience, regional audience, and the global audience. For instance, the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has different content for different geographic audiences including
BBC UK, BBC Africa, and BBC World, among others. The Cable News Network (CNN), Al Jazeera, and
Voice of America (VOA) among others, have the same approach to content creation and
dissemination. This affirms the conference’s theme, to “amplify the African voices for strategic action”
on the global stage – to match others already engaged in it. In other words, Africa should communicate
its strategic interests toward global power in a manner distinct from news and information
dissemination within the continent.

Although the shift to become a global player may be regarded as a modern development, we can
trace it to ancient times. Athens, Sparta, and Corinth, among other city-states in present-day Greece,
used boats made from papyrus reeds to sail using wind to reach such ancient cities as Alexandria in
present-day Egypt and Rome in present-day Italy for studies, diplomacy, commerce, and military
conquest. Arguably, these laid the ground for later global activities such as exploration, slavery,
colonisation, and lately globalisation, among others. As such, the shift toward global play is not
novel, only morphing into sophisticated practices in an increasingly multipolar world.

The conference is positioned of Africa as a player who aspires to benefit from global public goods. We
particularly need to emphasize the idea of amplifying the African voice because, over the centuries,
the African voice has been ignored due to its feebleness. This explains why Africa has been a silent
partaker in all manner of global events, treaties, and negotiations. Analogously, Africa has participated
in global debates as an underdog, entrapped in exploitive relationships.

An example suffices. In April 2024, while launching a helicopter assembly and repair plant in Uganda,
President Yoweri Museveni urged African leaders to rise to the global stage. He observed that
centuries ago the African kings, emperors, and chiefs, among others heard about European explorers’
presence in Africa but they took no action. Today, the African presidents hear about other countries
going to space, but they are taking no action. As a result, he has decided to take action to start the
helicopter assembly and repair plant as a starting toward space exploration.

As aforesaid, Africa needs to position herself to benefit from the global shift, unlike in the past when
the globe positioned her for exploitation. Thus, to secure successful global positioning, the conference
participants will articulate both the historical, and futuristic technologies that would enable Africa to
amplify her voices. Notably, historical perspectives will highlight how the African continent became
ensnared in the global underdog situation as a starting point to getting out of the situation. This is
especially because African voices have over time been either overshadowed or simply misrepresented
by the other global players for their own benefits.

The conference participants will ask themselves whether there are any African voices on the global
stage as a fundamental question. Africa’s global voices could be in the forms of individuals, groups of
people, corporations, academic institutions and think tanks, media organizations, states, government
officials, activists … indeed, anybody who has a “global actor” status. If we identify some voices with
global status, then we need to evaluate them, to establish if they truly represent the African people’s
aspirations. This is especially because of the direct and indirect underrepresentation and
misrepresentations perpetrated by the external global actors, using the African people. After
identifying such African global actors, we must upskill and empower them to allow them to harness
the full potential available to Africa and Africans.

Establishing African Global Voice/Image(s)

The conference participants will figure out if the African continent needs to be presented to the globe
as a unified entity or as separate countries with distinct cultural values, and political sovereignty,
among others. Evidence suggests that Africa is presented to the world as a mixture of both unified and
separate voices. But therein lies a big question for the African agency that the conference will discuss
and strategize around. For example, Rwanda stands out as an entity, especially in the English Premier
League where it is advertised extensively. Countries such as Kenya, South Africa, Botswana, and Ghana
have national branding agencies whose mandates are to sell and project their images and voices
globally. At the same time, these countries identify with Africa, for example, by way of their
membership in the African Union, their identification with the landmass of Africa, and the many
similarities in their cultures. Across the board, the 54 African countries have their unique identities
and yet also identify with the Pan-African roots which include affinities with the African diaspora
across the world. The upshot is that national voices and images ought not to preclude collective
African voices and images.

Arguably, the effectiveness of the amplification of the African voices can only be realised when the
African countries come to a common understanding on collective priorities. This would make the
amplification of the African voices clear, and free from any confusion that may come with the different
countries pulling in different directions on the global stage. Thus, the African people and the various
entities must make compromises and agreements and then approach the global stage with a unified
voice. If they agree that the different countries need to have distinct voices on the global stage, then
each country must come up with its own single most-sellable values, practices, and physical features,
among others. Then the next step would be for the African countriesto combine the various countries’
identities into a unified brand/face that would become a global representative of the African
continent. For example, the faces of the various African champions on the global stage such as Kenya’s
long race runners, South African Amapiano artists, and West African movie stars could be brought
together into a single selling point for Africa. The easiest way to achieve this is by way of using them
to champion African perspectives on global platforms. Over time, this would result in the construction
of what we can call African countries’ global image/voice. This means the African countries’ collective
images/voices would be combined into the African image/voice.

To attain and sustain this larger image/voice of Africa on the global stage, we need experts from
different disciplines. This is why the forthcoming conference consists of participants from the domains
of academia, policymaking, activism, and various practitioners. This helps to coalesce the theory and
practice needed to shape the amplification of African voices from different perspectives, viewpoints,
and practices. They shall share conceptual frameworks, and the right mix of skill sets on how to utilise
African resources to enable effective amplification of the African voices on the ever-evolving global
stage. This is against the background that over the centuries, external actors have created a global
image of Africa as a place of lack, poverty, and suffering. Thus, the amplification of the African global
voice should aim to counter this existing externally created and amplified image.

By Job Allan Wefwafwa, Bob Wekesa, and Kabaso Kabwe