Great gift: Africa, a continent of contradiction, where conflict and innovation, fragility and possibility, poverty
and resilience live side by side.
In 1971, Bantu Steve Biko set down a sentence that has not aged so much as matured. The great powers, he wrote, “may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look but the great gift still has to come from Africa, giving the world a more human face”.
Forty-five years after his murder in police custody, the sentence reads less like prophecy than a brief. It tells Africa its task and the world what it still awaits.
In a Europe rearming, a Washington turning inward, a Middle East at war and a multilateral order audibly cracking, that brief has become urgent. The question is whether Africa, long narrated through fracture, can finally narrate itself through purpose — and whether Britain, which once drew the lines, can learn to listen to the continent that is now redrawing them.
