FOREIGN INTERVENTIONS IN AFRICA AND THE FORMATION OF NEGATIVE NARRATIVE: curtesy, Msingi Africa

The intervention in Iraq was couched in very benign terms. The intervention in Libya was couched in benign terms. I could give you 100 interventions where the justification objectively speaking was on the basis that there was evidence either of genocide or evidence. I'm sitting in Rwanda. The international community stood by as the genocide against the Tutsi happened. Yet in the same year they were intervening in West Africa.

The construct of benign and malign is controlled and related to the question of narrative and strategic self -interest. We have often not paid enough attention and thank you, Chairperson of the African Union, for educating us on how the international forum of decision making, these security counsel and other forum including at some stage how we transact within the international criminal court and other platform. That's evidence and that was my point. We don't control data. We don't control digital platforms. We therefore are not controlling narrative in both analog and digital forms. What can practically be done?

We do need to speak to Europeans, not as victims, because the erasure of the contribution in European consciousness of Africans to modernity and civility has constructed a white supremacist views that sees the evolution of modernity as a singularly European contribution. It is only now that our young researchers are beginning to excavate the contributions of black people, of Africans towards inventions, because until now the province of economy was not the province of black people. In my country, in Zimbabwe, when land was taken, a British court gave a judgment that said the question before them and who owned the land. I said one thing is certain. It cannot be the native, because the native has no sense of ownership. It was on that basis that land was taken. Number two, on the question of economics. Even we pejoratively only talk about our people as informal law, informal economy. Yet the informal economy is formal. That's how India developed through its cottage industry. That's how we have a psychotic addiction to colonial definitions of what. And that's why Professor Ashraf is correct. It's not just a narrative about our contribution historically. It's a narrative about our contribution now. Our young people who developed in PESA, which is now being used globally, who developed Ushaiidi, which has been used by over 300,000 organizations, including the Japanese, the US military, and the NATO forces, are never sufficiently credited. Why? Because it is not in the current psyche of most Europeans.

  It's possible that Africans are anything else except the object of charity that deserve our mercy and our pity. Why? Because they are governed by tyrants. Or Africans are incapable of ethics. And we've constantly said that Switzerland, which received the Abacha loot, which received the loot from the then -Zair and now -DRC, has constantly been ranked in anti -corruption indices as the cleanest country in the world. PLO and I are lawyers. The receipt of stolen property is theft at low.

How is it that you will have Nigeria and Kenya ranked so far? And yet the country that receives the money ranks so up. I think that if you're changing narrative, you also have to change behavior.

Our African leaders and citizens constantly confirm the European caricature, an object of pity. When we come into these spaces, we can never transact the revolution in Keters. I like to be civil, to be cautious, right? But each time I start pointing to atrocities committed by African governments, the Europeans and the Americans cheer me up. Each time I refer to the historical atrocities and continuing atrocities committed first by governments and by companies that have dampened cyanide into underground water and nuclear waste. Right? You know what it is said? This is retrogressive. It's undermining investment. It's like, listen, we cannot win the narrative battle by arguing in pockets.