Africa’s populist trap, By Minna Salami 

In February 2022, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, delivered a speech that startled the chamber—and, briefly, the world. “We meet tonight on the brink of a major conflict in Ukraine,” he said. “The diplomacy we urged on the 17th of February is failing. The territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine stands breached. The Charter of the United Nations continues to wilt under the relentless assault of the powerful.” 

Calmly, authoritatively, he then connected the breach of sovereignty to the unfinished business of empire: the messy borders, the fractured nations, the post-colonial inheritance that continues to harm Africa’s political landscape. He said: “Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.”

Kimani’s speech travelled widely. It was quoted in editorials, shared across social media, and discussed on international news platforms. It was striking how Africa, for once, was not being spoken for––it was speaking for itself.

The following year, another powerful African voice intervened on the global stage. The occasion was the 2023 Russia–Africa Summit, and the speaker was Burkina Faso’s leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré. One line reverberated with force: “For more than eight years we [Burkina Faso] have been confronted with the most barbaric, the most violent form of imperialist neo-colonialism.

A Refuge of Tyrants

Slavery continues to impose itself on us.” His address was also met with thunderous applause. On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, excerpts from it circulated widely as a rallying cry for African sovereignty. The speech cemented Traoré’s image as a man of the people, an embodiment of African pride, a revolutionary unburdened by victim-hood. “Our predecessors taught us one thing,” he continued, “a slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied.”

Both Kimani’s and Traoré’s speeches were anti-imperialist, both were delivered by African leaders on the global stage, both called out the colonial legacies shaping contemporary politics. Yet a key difference stands out between them: one was de-colonial in orientation, while the other, I argue, embodied the rhetoric of what I refer to as PAWN: Populist Anti-Western Nativism.

This form of rhetoric presents itself as anti-imperialist but, ultimately, feeds on repressive ideology. The differences between decolonization and PAWN urgently need to be recognized because, ultimately, true decolonization cannot be reached through populism and nativism.

Populism is often conflated with a particular Western pathology: Brexit slogans, white men in red baseball caps, and “anti-woke” YouTube channels. But it is a global phenomenon, manifesting in various forms across continents. Africa is no exception. In fact, the hallmarks of populism are what make it so alluring to many Africans.

Populism centers on people’s cultural, economic, and political wounds, and promises to heal them. In Africa, those deep wounds are sustained by cyclical systems of domination: colonization, extraction, racism, and occupation. As one oppressive system recedes, another takes its place. The transatlantic slave trade gave way to colonialism. Colonialism morphed into Cold War proxy rule, which in turn evolved into neo-liberalism and extractivism. If Africa were a body, it would be covered in a thousand cuts, each one pleading for care.

Populism offers a balm. It promises to proactively address the wounds. It identifies the enemy and commits to a mass mobilization against them. It honors victims’ pain and offers moral virtue as recompense. Its political strength is the ability to fold complex political questions into a simple moral binary: us versus them. In the African context, “us” refers to native Africans; “them” is the West.

Image in the Mirror

Of course, the West’s meddling in Africa has earned condemnation a thousand times over. PAWN is structured around legitimate wounds—grief, shame, anger, fear, injustice. This emotional acknowledgement is what gives PAWN its populist appeal. The remedial formula it proposes—the West as the wound, Africa as the balm—is what makes it anti-Western and nativist. PAWN turns geography into a moral location. Virtue becomes a matter of origin rather than action. To be African is to be right because the West has been wrong.

But can a culture progress if it doesn’t look at itself with rigor? Can a culture develop itself critically if the focus is always on an external actor, however egregious that actor might be?

There’s a line I keep thinking about from Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with an imaginary vengeance.” Nietzsche’s slaves are not literal. They’re metaphors for those whose agency has been suppressed and who now derive a sense of power from vengeance rather than from freedom.

Ressentiment is, therefore, not mere resentment. It has deeper, more corrosive psychological elements. It is resentment that has been transfigured from a feeling into a moral code and a theory of justice. In this framework, the injury becomes proof—not just that harm was done, but that the harmed are now beyond reproach. It says: because I have suffered, I cannot be wrong. And because I cannot be wrong, the difference between myself and the other is not only socio-political, but existential.

In referring to Nietzsche, I don’t mean to redeem his horrific gender, race, and class politics. (As the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray wrote in her critical love letter to Nietzsche, Marine Lover, ressentiment can be turned on the man himself: “That the other has given you what escapes your creation is the source of your highest ressentiment.”)

Still, Nietzsche’s preoccupations with the effects of uneven power relationships in the human psyche help point us toward the real issue, namely, how to acknowledge colonial harm without falling into the tempting, but pernicious clarity of PAWN; how to decolonize without falling for the reductive traps of populism and nativism.

Divisive Politics

To oppose PAWN is not to dismiss African anger, or to deny the legitimate desire for repair. When the world has humiliated you, stripped your ancestors of voice, land, and language, it is tempting and, utterly human, to want to define yourself by what you are not: not Western, not a colonizer, not “them”.

The emotional appeal of PAWN is easy to understand. Yet, PAWN doesn’t just divide the world into heroes and villains, it disables the public’s ability to think in anything other than simplistic binaries.

PAWN has no ideological foundation of its own. Its only stance is adopting opposites to values traditionally associated with the West. If the West is ‘pro’ homosexuality, trans-identity, animal rights, democracy, individualism, and, of course, feminism, then PAWN dictates that Africa must be against these things.

I introduced PAWN in my recent book, Can Feminism Be African? A Most Paradoxical Question, precisely to examine the contours of the backlash against feminism in Africa. In the backlash discourse, feminism is framed as a tool of Western liberalism, and so the idea that an African woman might embrace feminism for the sake of autonomy over her body, or because Africa has a solid feminist…

• To be continued. Culled from Ideas Letter.

Minna Salami is a senior fellow and program chair at The New Institute and a public speaker. Her most recent book is Can Feminism Be African? A Most Paradoxical Question published by Harper Collins.