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As tensions escalate between Israel and Iran, African voices remain notably absent from the global stage.
In a thought-provoking commentary published on June 25, Angolan writer and psychologist Mário Chanja reflects on what this silence reveals—not just politically, but existentially—for the African continent.
“I received this message from a friend, via WhatsApp… a simple, direct, almost ‘naive’ message,” Chanja recounts.
But the message, rooted in current geopolitics, triggered in him what he calls an “abyss of memories, dreams and frustrations. An African abyss.”
The writer questions what it would mean for Africa—so often marginalized in international affairs—to act as a credible mediator between armed global powers.
“I thought of Cheikh Anta Diop, Amílcar Cabral, Marimba Ani, Asante, Amos Wilson, Frantz Fanon, Sankara and Nkrumah,” he recalls.
“The Pan-Africanist dream… capable of acting as a moral and political force in an unbalanced world.”
Instead, he laments, “we are fragmented, institutionally weakened, often governed by external interests or elites without a collective vision,” quoting Kenyan scholar PLO Lumumba.
While other nations maneuver through the diplomatic chessboard with “weapons, strategies, and global negotiating capacity,” Africa, he says, is left with little more than “memory, humanity and ancestry”—tools with enormous potential but little political weight.
Chanja passionately defends Afrocentric Psychology, a discipline he champions as an epistemological reorientation.
“It proposes understanding Africans based on their roots, their cosmology, their family structure, and their relationship with the sacred and with the community.”
But even that, he argues, is undermined by a pervasive discomfort with African identity itself.
“Many Africans do not like to be reminded of who they are.
They prefer the comfortable silence of oblivion to the disturbing call of memory,” he writes.
“This, more than making me sad, has tired me… a tiredness that is not physical… it is existential.”
In the end, Chanja argues, the most urgent conflict Africans must mediate is not between global superpowers, but within themselves.
“Between ancient Africa, the cradle of humanity and profound thought, and contemporary Africa, forgetful, submissive and, at times, complicit in its own exclusion.”
With striking clarity, he concludes: “The mediation we need is no longer just diplomatic—it is ontological… between forgetting and memory, between alienation and dignity… And this is a war that we are still losing.”
His piece is not a call to arms, but a call to awakening.
A mirror held up to a continent still seeking its reflection.
