The energy of the world is shifting south

Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your leaders recently, I’m going to move out of the sunshine, take a swig of cold beer and show some sympathy once more.

For a long time, those of us the British Empire left behind when you pushed off a few decades ago sniggering into your pith helmets sometimes wondered if we’d made a mistake. ‘No you can’t have a passport,’ you’d say, even though it was the Queen’s grandpa who told our ancestors to display our loyalty and come out here in the first place. We were divided in our hearts, or, as the Boers often joked, we were soutpiels – salt penises – because we had one foot in Africa, one planted in Britain, with our tackle hanging down in the Mediterranean sea. Now that you’re the sick man of Europe once more, it’s helping us to lift up one leg and choose which continent we really come from.

The IMF ticks you off more than us, your pound is in greater free fall than Malawi’s kwacha or Mauritanian ouguiyas and it turns out the Tories under Boris diverted so many billions in dodgy Covid contracts that tiny Eswatini’s monarch Mswati III can barely show himself for shame before his many wives. The last time I was in Sussex there was a three-day waiting list for a cab because all the drivers had fled back to Europe, whereas in Kenya I snap my fingers and a squadron of boda boda motorbike taxis roar up.

Our steak, beer and cigarettes are cheap, we pluck our own tea and coffee, we grab our broccoli off the trolley before it flies off to Waitrose. We sit in the bath eating mangoes. There are children everywhere because people haven’t forgotten to make love often. Our flights take off on time, you can buy a Covid vaccination certificate without actually having an injection, the police occasionally fight crime and we never turn up the central heating.

For years we’ve been irritated by the West’s habit of issuing travel advisories – or warnings – about terrorism or Ebola in our countries. These frightened away all the tourists we wanted to come and see the wildlife you lot think should have the right to trample our crops. Suddenly, the other day a joke message began doing the rounds on WhatsApp. ‘Due to current political instability in the United Kingdom, Kenyan citizens are advised not to plan travel to the UK for the foreseeable future. While large-scale violence is not anticipated, it is likely that protests will cause disruptions to travel with outbreaks of crime. Particular caution is urged around the Houses of Parliament…’ Travel plans should be put on hold until an African Union peacekeeping operation could deploy, the advisory said. If Kenyans were foolhardy enough still to travel, the bulletin cautioned them to carry toilet paper and wet weather gear.

One senses that in time you’ll put these dark post-Brexit days behind you. You’ve been there before, such as in AD 446, when the Britons wrote to plead with Theodosius the Younger’s Consul Aetius: ‘To Aetius, Thrice Consul, come the groans of the Britons… The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.’ These days you’re not driving anywhere, at least not in NHS ambulances, nor when the Just Stop Oil activists glue themselves to the roads in front of you.

All is not lost, because I think the Africans will be here to help in the future. In a couple of decades our people will make up one quarter of the planet’s population. With a current median age of 18, compared with yours of over 40, we will come over and help you when you’re all getting older. We’ll play in the football teams, write the books, perform the music, we’ll run the banks and undertake complicated operations. These things appear to be happening very slowly and people have imagined that Africa will always be poor and a place of despair, but for the first time ever, I have started to think the energy of the world is shifting south.