How Moscow can pervert the course of Africa’s future

On the lengthy train ride to Kyiv I read my Plokhy as we trundled through seas of mud, passing villages with blue timber churches topped by golden domes gleaming in the spring dawn. A metastasis of Putin’s atrocities against Ukraine has been the entrenching of Russian influence, powered by guns and agitprop, across my home continent of Africa. I wanted to hear what people in Kyiv thought about this trend, since it threatens to roll back democracy in Africa three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Look at Africa’s UN voting patterns, what many Africans are saying, at the sudden appearance of Russian goons in the remotest corners and at the convergence of Chinese and Vatnik rhetoric. I am no longer so enthusiastic about Africa taking the side of western powers like Britain, which has failed so badly to support the rule of law, trade and investment in poor countries. What I fear is that a sovereign Africa is about to find itself on the wrong side of history and most ordinary Africans want progress rather than to be dosed with the Rohypnol of Putin’s lies.

In Kyiv I expected to meet a beleaguered people. During Orthodox mass, I searched faces for expressions of grief and fear as they bowed to kiss their icons. Instead I saw faces that were resolute, calm. I found relatives quietly paying respects to fallen family members on the city wall of photos that extends back not  just to the last year of fighting, but all the way to 2014. Instead of pitying Ukrainians I found myself envying the clarity of their determination to survive and win. Here in Kyiv, people were at the heart of the struggle between liberty and violent despotism. No loss of confidence, no strike actions, no long Covid or working from home, no garbage in the streets, no unhappiness about one’s identity.