Happy Africa Day!!!

Sixty years ago, the world said Africa wasn't ready to govern itself. Africans decided not to wait for permission. In this Africa Day special, we mark what has actually been built since: the years of life gained, the democracies defended, the technology that leapfrogged a century of infrastructure in a decade. Honest about what's unfinished, yet, proud of what's real!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

In 1960, a magazine published a cover story arguing that the newly independent countries of Africa were not ready to govern themselves. The independence would lead to chaos, they said. They said that the people could not do it. In that same year, 17 African countries became independent. Seventeen in a single year. And they wrote constitutions, elected presidents, built universities, and took seats at the United Nations. The people who said Africa was not ready were wrong. Africa decided not to wait for them to change their minds. Today is May 25th, Africa Day, the anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. The moment when African nations came together and said we are one continent and we will build our future together. This month on Learning Africa, I have been inside the hard stories, the coups, the unfinished promises. Today none of that goes away. But today I also want to take a look at the distance already traveled because it is genuinely remarkable and it deserves to be said out loud. I am Amadou. This is Learning Africa. In 1960, the average life expectancy across sub-Saharan Africa was 41 years. Today it is 62. 20 additional years of life built by African scientists, health workers and governments who launched the vaccination campaigns and fought the epidemics. Twenty years means grandchildren who would never have been seen or existed. It means whole generations of knowledge and memory that are now here and would not have been. In 1980, adult literacy across sub-Saharan Africa was around 40%. Today it is nearly 70%, and the majority of young people can now read and write. A continent that colonialism deliberately kept undereducated, built from scratch, systems that are now reaching most of its people. The teachers who drove to remote villages in underfunded cars to open schools with no textbooks, they deserve to be honored today. Then there is the political achievement that I think gets underestimated almost everywhere. The conventional wisdom and independence stated openly in the editorial pages of Western newspapers was that democracy was not suitable for Africa, that the ballot box was a Western invention that would not transplant. Since 1990, Africa has held nearly 600 multi party elections. Dozens have resulted in genuine transfers of power to opposition parties. In Ghana, Senegal, Namibia, Malawi, Zambia, Sierra Leone, voters went to the polls, chose a different party, and watched power transfer. That happened because African citizens insisted on it, because African courts ruled against incumbents, because African journalists published numbers the powerful wanted suppressed. The democracy is not perfect, the coups are real, but the argument that Africa cannot do democracy has been refuted by Africans repeatedly across decades. The distance between where Africa was in 1960 and where it stands today is the distance of a hundred of millions of individual decisions, every one made by an African person choosing to build something rather than nothing. Africa is the youngest continent on Earth. The median age is 19. By 2050, one in four people alive on this planet will be African. The largest workforce in human history is being born right now, and those young people are not waiting for permission. Back in 2024, Kenyan Gen Z protesters forced their government to withdraw a budget proposal. Young people who organized on social media marched in the streets, held their ground and won. Not because they had political parties or donor support, because they had each other and phones and the moral authority of having everything to gain. In Senegal, after a genuine political crisis and an attempted election postponement, citizens refused to let their democracy be taken. The country voted. The incumbent's preferred successor lost. Power was transferred. The institutions held, bruised, but they still held. Then there is what has been built technologically. Africa did not have the banking infrastructure. So it built something different. MPASA, launched in Kenya in 2007, became the world's most successful mobile money platform. Today, Sub-Saharan Africa counts for two-thirds of global mobile money transaction value. The continent that could not build a Western-style banking system built one of its own that fits the context that it has. Afrobeats is now a global genre. Amapiano from South Africa is played in clubs from London to Tokyo. African literature is resaping conversations about identity and belonging for global audiences, and they're doing that in African voices, on African terms, without having to translate the work for approval. The continent that the world said was not ready is now building things the world cannot imagine without it. I want to be honest about what this celebration requires. The climate crisis is real, and Africa is its most innocent victim, responsible for less than 4% of historical emissions facing some of the most severe impacts on Earth. The debt crisis is real. Many African governments spend more on debt servicing than on health or education. The governance failure that produced and continues to produce the cools that we talked about, the gap between the Africa that is building something spectacular and the Africa where hundreds of millions still lack reliable electricity or clean water, that gap is a moral and political emergency. I name these things not to dampen the celebration, I name them because the generation carrying this work forward needs to go in clear-eyed. The continent has survived slavery, colonialism, cold war proxy conflicts, death traps and epidemics. It is still here, still building, still insisting that persistence is not naivety. It is one of the most extraordinary things I know about this place. On May 25th, 1963, 32 African heads of state gathered in Addis Ababa and signed the charter of the OAU. Many had led independence movements, many had been imprisoned by colonial governments, all had been told at some point that what they were trying to do was impossible. They did it anyway. Hope is not optimism. Optimism says we'll probably be fine. Hope says, even though I can see how hard this is, I am going to keep building anyway. The leaders in Addis Ababa in 1963 were not optimists. They were people of hope. And what they started is still here, still unfinished, still reaching. Africa Day is not a celebration of arrival, it is a celebration of the decision to keep going. My name is Amadou. This is Learning Africa. Happy Africa Day.