By the end of this week, African foreign ministers will gather in Cairo for the Second Ministerial Conference of the Russia–Africa Partnership Forum. Officially, it is a diplomatic meeting. Unofficially, however, it carries a far heavier meaning.

For many of us who think seriously about Africa’s place in the world, this gathering is less about protocol and more about something we have been denied for a long time: the space to choose, to negotiate, and to define development on our own terms without being punished for it.

Africa has spent decades inside a narrow corridor of “acceptable” relationships. Our foreign policy options were quietly limited. Our economic decisions were audited. Our political experiments were tolerated only when they did not disrupt Western interests. And that history still shapes how Africa moves today. This is why the Russia–Africa partnership matters, not because Russia is “flawless,” but because this relationship emerges from a different historical experience, one that does not begin with the colonization of African land and people.

We do not come to this moment without memory. Africa remembers who colonized it, who drew borders with rulers and maps, who extracted labor and minerals while preaching civilization. We remember the era of European empires, and we remember how, after independence, those empires were replaced by financial institutions, military commands, and development agencies that continued to discipline African sovereignty.

Russia does not belong to that particular history in Africa. It never ruled African societies, never ran settler colonies here, never organized our economies around a racial hierarchy. That does not make Russia virtuous, but it does make the relationship structurally different, and in international politics, structure matters.

It also explains why so many African liberation movements once looked to Moscow when Western capitals saw them as threats. From Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana to Amílcar Cabral’s struggle in Guinea-Bissau, from Angola’s MPLA........

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