*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

There are no facts or statistics for anyone to argue that Africa has overcome its distressful encounter with modernity. But there is the fact of a spectre taking leave of Africa. It is the spectre of ‘Africa 1’ summit diplomacy by which the European Union, (EU), US, Britain, China, France, India, Russia, Japan, Turkey, the Gulf states, and other powerful global players related with the continent in the post-Cold War era. ‘Africa ­ 1’ had the defining feature of the congregation of 50 or so African leaders in whichever capital city to which the host president or prime minister invited them. President William Ruto of Kenya has now sounded the death knell for this format. He used the ‘M O Ibrahim In Conversation’ platform at the 2023 M O Ibrahim Governance Weekend in Nairobi in April to announce that he and his colleagues have decided on a new format. Henceforth, a delegation of seven will represent Africa at all such summits. The immediate past, the incumbent and the in-coming chairperson of the African Union and three or four other bureaucrats from the African Union Secretariat will now make up the team.

Echoing his colleagues, most notably prime minister Ahmed Abiy of Ethiopia and Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Ruto’s argument is that it is neither intelligent nor reciprocal of sovereignty for 54 African leaders, “sometimes loaded into a bus like school kids” to appear before one other world leader for a meeting at which each of the African leaders has no more than two minutes to say whatever they had to say, then a photo session with the host president or prime minister and it is all over. What is clear from the decision of the African leaders is how uncomfortable they too have been about the coordination and even the substance of the ‘Africa 1’ summit diplomacy.

Beyond that, Ruto’s announcement also indicates a season of internal criticism among African leaders against most regimes and practices of the ‘liberal world order’ in general and the pragmatism of the African response to the ‘Africa 1’ summit diplomacy in particular, notwithstanding the Africanity of the pragmatism. In what could be called the African world, there is no wisdom in declining an invitation to a meeting, a consultative session or a dialogue. The wise move is to accept such an invitation but to be in the position to say yes or no to what the host brought to the table at the session. Although developed in response to security dilemma in pre-colonial polities, the calculus is the same as the logic in contemporary diplomacy that it is unstrategic to close the line of communication with a conflict party and thus throw away the opportunity to get to hear what the other side is thinking. Collective memory of this piece of pragmatism might explain why popular disapproval of the participation of African leaders in ‘Africa 1’ summits since the year 2000 has not been that loud. Ruto and his colleagues have brought to an end what was, except for the established colonial powers, a completely new way of operationalising the relationship with the continent, as clumsy as it was. Certainly, there is something progressive in Africa’s stepping back from the pragmatism of not refusing an invitation because of the 'unwisdom' of doing so. But what might this stepping back mean?

Is Ruto the Wailing of the Siren or the Blast of the Trumpet?

The stepping back is an alarm which can be read as either the wailing of the siren or the blast of the trumpet. In post-colonial Africa, this distinction is a crucial one because each of the siren and the trumpet can be read as completely different messages. Across the continent, the siren is one of the most significant signifiers of power. It announces to road users that someone in power in the modern state is in motion and the road users should give way or pay a price. The trumpet is, on the contrary, an invitation to the folks to participate in the unfolding of power and authority. Restricted to the palaces of traditional rulers, the trumpet is sounded to either call the people to witness the departure from or return of the monarch to the palace. There must be reckoning with the distinction between the different messages the siren and the trumpet communicate, notwithstanding the vulgarisation of the trumpet as a palace practice today and even as the participatory message of the trumpet does not suggest or absolve the holders of traditional authority from overall elite complicity in the unending disempowerment of the people.

In a globally entangled world, there is no science which can tell at the moment which of the siren or the trumpet African leaders are testing by stepping back from the ‘Africa 1’ pragmatism. But there are conditions that favour the stepping back rhetoric turning into a blast of the trumpet. Among these conditions are the hostility of much of the rest of the world, particularly critical academia, to the continuing cultural and structural negation of Africa; the weaponization of popular culture into spaces of counter-hegemonic epistemes and practices by the very ordinary people across Africa and, lastly, the season of self-criticism among African leaders. It can only be the blast of the trumpet when we take these trends into consideration. At a time when global relations is shaking off its obsession with militaristic sense of power politics towards inter-cosmological conversations, a........

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