By Andrew Besi
“Each day the traders are kidnapping our people… even people of our own family… Our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers… It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves. Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise… To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects… They sell them… As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men, they are branded with a red-hot iron.”
— Alfonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga) of Kongo, writing to the King of Portugal, 1526
For nearly 500 years — since the arrival of the Portuguese under Prince Henry the Navigator on our West African coast — the vastness of our ancient continent has drawn both the curiosity and the menace of Europeans, Arabs, and Asians. Africa’s wealth in flora and fauna, its beasts, birds, and minerals, provoked a hunger that reshaped the world, mostly to our disadvantage. From early trading posts to the Berlin Conference, from missionaries with Bibles to companies with gunboats, the continent became a stage upon which others played out their ambitions. Our history is long and often bruising, shaped by forces that saw Africa less as a home of sovereign peoples and more as a vast storehouse of exploitable treasure.
Yet for all these old wounds, something more unsettling shadows our present: the realisation that the gravest threats we now face are no longer foreign but domestic. What once arrived on ships now emerges from Cabinet meetings, party caucuses, and ministries, where ideological confusion, opportunistic tendencies, and corruption are cultivated as if they were national endowments. We find ourselves victims not of conquest but of our own leaders — and, more damning still, of the political culture that enables them.
It is here that history must give way to satire, because the absurdity of modern African politics surpasses anything our ancestors might have imagined. Incumbents cling to office with the ferocity of men convinced that without their daily supervision, even the sun might forget its duties. Constitutions are rewritten. Institutions are declawed. Elections are choreographed with the finesse of stage magicians who pray the audience never discovers where the rabbit came from. Term limits vanish; age limits evaporate; and a continent that once waged bitter struggles for liberation now finds itself smothered under rulers who confuse longevity with destiny. The tragedy is familiar: the hoarding of power lies at the root of the paralysis that stunts entire generations and strangles the promise of political and economic renewal.
But satire, if sincere, must also admonish. Africa sits today on a precarious precipice: youthful populations growing restless, economies staggering under debt, and governments developing chronic allergies to accountability. The tighter incumbents clutch power, the more brittle and breakable their states become. As I have reflected in earlier essays — and as more eminent scholars have warned — history is merciless to regimes that cannot imagine a future without themselves. Our continent is littered with the debris of leaders who overstayed: coups, mutinies, implosions, and the silent exodus of talent that leaves not in protest but in quiet resignation. The lesson is stark: when power is treated as permanent, crisis becomes inevitable.
No wonder the people of old Ghana often observed, “The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.” That wisdom resonates still. While Africa has endured countless external blows — conquest, extraction, partition — the greatest dangers now (just as in the days when the Portuguese tricked Mvemba a Nzinga and shipped off his own kin) grow from within. They grow in our casual acceptance of incompetence; in the nervous laughter we offer corrupt men to stay safe; in the small moral shortcuts we take to avoid inconvenience. They grow when citizens surrender vigilance and allow incumbents to convert temporary mandates into hereditary privilege.
If decay begins in the home, renewal must begin there too — in our values, in our conversations, in our daily insistence on accountability. Nations are not rescued by slogans, nor by strongmen with manufactured myths, but by citizens who resist the slow seduction of cynicism. And perhaps that is the work appointed to our generation: to ensure that the homes of our people cease being the birthplace of our undoing and instead become the foundation of a continent determined, finally, to outgrow its ghosts.
