UN General Assembly
2022

Today we believe that such attitudes and actions, which belong to another era, take place in a historical context in which Africa has become aware of its own responsibility and is increasingly speaking with one and the same voice. The divides of the colonial era between a so-called, inter alia, French-, Portuguese-, English- or Arabic-speaking Africa have lessened, as have the post-Cold war ideologies that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Today Africa wants to be itself. In truth, Africa is Africanophone, if you will allow that neologism. Africa today is no longer the Africa of the 1945s, let alone the 1960s. Today we have a host of new partners in Africa that are an integral part of the new international geopolitics, far removed from the two opposing blocs that shaped the post-war world of the twentieth century. The world has decentred to become multipolar. To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, the world is now a sphere whose centre is both everywhere and nowhere. Africa no longer can, or wants to, be the carriages of a single locomotive.