A few days ago, Britain’s Prince William spoke about his children spending time outdoors, away from mobile phones and social media. It was an ordinary family comment. Yet I could not help noticing the irony.
Across Africa, millions of parents are working hard to ensure their children acquire the very technologies that some of the world’s most privileged families are increasingly trying to limit. The same pattern appears elsewhere. While wealthy consumers in Europe and North America pay premium prices for organic foods, many Africans are abandoning indigenous foods in favour of imported and highly processed alternatives.
While some societies are rediscovering local identity and cultural confidence, Africa often continues searching for validation from elsewhere. This raises an uncomfortable question: What if Africa’s greatest export is not coffee, gold, or oil, but confidence in itself? Over recent weeks, I have written about Kabaka Mwanga and the Uganda Martyrs, Burkina Faso’s celebration of traditional culture, the search for a more relevant curriculum in our schools, and the debate over whether poverty deserves as much attention as vaccines in preventing disease outbreaks. On the surface, these appear to be unrelated issues. In reality, they all revolve around the same question: Who gets to decide what knowledge matters, what history counts, and what progress looks like? I encountered this question again while discussing curriculum reform.
We want our children to think critically, yet many leave school knowing more about distant rivers, foreign civilisations, and imported ideas than the histories, geographies, and intellectual traditions that shaped their own communities. I encountered it again during recent conversations about traditional spirituality. Whether one embraces Christianity, Islam, or African belief systems is a matter of personal conviction. Yet many Africans can comfortably discuss Greek mythology, Roman history, or Biblical genealogies while becoming uneasy when discussing their own ancestral traditions. Even the debate about Kabaka Mwanga reflects a deeper struggle. History is never merely about facts. It is also about memory. Who is remembered? Who is forgotten? Who is celebrated, and who is condemned?
The stories a society chooses to tell reveal what it believes about itself. Decades ago, Pan-African thinker Stokely Carmichael challenged the world to think differently about power. Political independence, he argued, means little if others continue to control the institutions, narratives, and economic systems that shape your life. Africa’s challenge today may be even deeper. The question is not whether we control our governments. It is whether we control our imagination. Around the world, nations are increasingly searching for development paths rooted in their own histories and priorities. From America First in the United States to cultural confidence in China, India, and, more recently, Burkina Faso, societies are asking how to engage the modern world without losing themselves.
Perhaps Africa should ask the same question. The future of the continent will not be decided by whether we become more Western, more Eastern, more capitalist, or more socialist. It will be decided by whether we can participate confidently in the modern world without surrendering confidence in who we are. People can lose wealth and rebuild it. They can lose power and recover it. But when a people lose confidence in themselves, they often spend generations borrowing the dreams of others. That may be Africa’s most important challenge, and its greatest opportunity, in the twenty-first century.