l personally love it, l think it's chic and is a perfect geographic descriptor. Southern Africa doesn't work bc it leaves out the west and east. And i get that people may not like the sub part but it just means below. I love the name and l love being south of the Sahara. I don't know it's history or whether or not it was intended to be offensive but it's just a neutral term that we can reclaim.

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“All the people who speak ill of our country right now are people who do not like our country.”

These were the words of Emmanuel Macron, visibly frustrated by international criticism and distorted media narratives while France was grappling with urban unrest. By his logic, criticizing a nation in distress or magnifying its vulnerabilities is not objective analysis but outright hostility.

Now, apply that exact same logic to the Sahel, particularly Mali and the countries of the AES.

In the face of relentless terrorist attacks, human tragedy, and the severe trials our people endure:

• What dominates the discourse on French television networks and across Western media outlets?

• Compassion? Basic decency? Respect for the victims?

Hardly. Instead, there is systematic mockery, moralizing lectures, and thinly veiled contempt directed at our governments and our resilience.

If speaking ill of France equates to hating France, what conclusion must be drawn from the relentless diplomatic and media hostility directed at Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger?

By Macron's own definition, the verdict is undeniable: those who treat the Sahel with such condescension do not like Mali, do not like the AES, and hold no genuine goodwill toward Africa.

When Western nations face crisis and tragedy, African peoples consistently show restraint, empathy, and the basic respect demanded by human suffering. Yet that same decency is rarely reciprocated when the suffering is on our side.

This contrast makes one reality clear: in global geopolitics, superficial friendships ends where paternalism and self-interest begin.

Respect is never granted out of benevolence; it is commanded through fierce and uncompromising sovereignty.

Most African intellectuals lack the capacity for innovative thinking; it is as if reading these westerns books has neutered their creativity and ability to innovate and bring forth their own genius.

They repeat Western nonsenses uncritically and walk around prancing their Dr and Pr titles attached to their vests like flaccid name tags.🏷️

They are the worse, they hold us backward.

I operate in the economics and financial domain; all I hear from African “ experts” is western media regurgitation.

Utter crap!💩

Sam Altman is not a model to hold in esteem , he is a loser. Same for many so called Wall Streets’ leaders.

But our experts are so pathetic and sad that they actually believe in the bullshit!

Africa can only develop with a skeptical semi independent intellectual and financial elites willing to do things differently; capable of developing a challenging paradigm to the current one.

I am not saying that western media is to be thrown into the dumpster altogether, but to their credit, the West does not look into Africa or Asia as an inspiration or foundation for their ideas, as corrupted as they may be.

We must be willing to stand on our own principle and be accountable to them and to our people.

Our copy and paste Dr and Pr and Chairmen are the most pathetic frauds there are. They are no better than parrots 🦜.

Their time is coming…

I left West Africa for Europe about 4 years ago. When I first arrived, I was freezing all the time. Now I've gotten used to the European climate, and going back home is a completely different experience.

I usually go back to my home country twice a year to see my family, but every time I do, the heat feels unbearable. I honestly feel like I'm suffocating sometimes. It's weird because I used to handle it just fine, and now I keep wondering how I ever lived in that climate in the first place.

Maybe I'd readjust if I stayed longer, but I usually don't spend more than three weeks back home, so I never really get the chance.

I've also noticed that my perspective has changed in other ways. Things like chaotic urban planning, poor sanitation and the general state of public spaces stand out to me much more than they used to. It's not that I never noticed these things before, but they bother me more now.

I'm not trying to bash my home country. It's still home, and I know living abroad has probably changed the way I see things. I'm just curious whether other Africans living abroad have experienced something similar when returning home.

Does your home country feel different after spending a few years abroad? And did you eventually get used to the climate and your surroundings again, or did that feeling never really go away?

Let’s discuss in the comments

I'm starting to believe it too. He Might have been sent .

What has happened the past 10 or so years, has been the proliferation of ideas that have pitted Adam and against Eve, Eve against Adam. If we were to implement the ideas of gender ideology to the beginning of humanity, surely there would have been no need for the snake to lure Adam and Eve to eat the corrupted fruit, as her mind had already been corrupted, and his mind had been corrupted, such that we would have not seen any progress in humanity, of men and women, and Adam and Eve would have withered away to death.

The ideology attempts to reduce the history of man and women's love, survival, struggles and ultimate success to the myth of a patriarchy, where men abused women, and the relationship between the two was that of a master and slave. This reduction of history has crept its way into our school syllabus, so that young boys and girls accept the relationship between the two genders, historically, of that of oppressor and oppressed.

Instead of looking at a man for who he is, and what he has done; the framework decided to collectively look at the action of one as an action of all. The success of one is a success for all, and the crime of one is a crime by all.

These ideas, or fabrications of reality, have real world consequences, such as discussions from policy makers to "socialize" men further, to be more docile, more feminine, more weak, to nurture men against their very nature. These ideas have slithered their way throughout society, our media, and leaders espouse these lies to the masses.

These ideas place a emphasis on identity and not the competency, virtue and vices of the individual. These ideas place the identity; the group before all else, and are therefore incompatible with any modern religious framework, democratic framework, or human rights framework.

These ideas assign status and hierarchy not based on individual competency, individual merit, or individual virtue and vice, but instead of grievance, assumed privilege, and fabricated oppression.

I urge all South Africans to fight against this notion, to place all men in a single group, to place all women into a single group, and implement collective guilt, shame, or other nonsense. I specifically urge all men not to engage in the discourse, as a mind made by the above ideology cannot be unmade.

A couple key resources that supplement this and can be used for further reading:

A list of crucial introductory material

All the other crucial resources on Tigray from a carefully curated reading list to current news sources to genocide reports to social media links to a list of resources looking further into the complicated relationship between Tigrinya speakers, etc.

The Abiy regime, which played a fundamental role in the Tigray genocide, is openly neoliberal and this absolutely played a factor in them receiving impunity throughout the genocide. Not only are they neoliberal but they are fully backed by the UAE, the same UAE that has fuelled the genocidal war in Sudan and the same UAE that has deep ties to Zionist Israel which has also affected Ethiopia via Abiy supporting Israel through the U.N. Abiy's prosperity gospel and his links with those in the republican party that share it are also relevant here (the Democrats still gave Abiy impunity as they're still neoliberal at the end of the day they just did more to keep up appearances).

Abiy sought the full liberalization of Ethiopia of which he saw the TPLF as his primary opponent, Abiy openly shared his deep love for America ("I would die and fight for America") and Abiy received impunity from neoliberal powers but in spite of that he was able to utilize the ignorance surrounding Tigray to push disinformation by hypocritically and outrageously presenting himself as an anti-imperialist (1).

The TPLF, despite their many faults and their own muddy history in power as part of the EPRDF coalition, cannot be equated to Abiy whatsoever (especially when focusing on the post 2018 era) and they operated their at times deeply flawed foreign policy through cold pragmatism not neoliberalism or blind love for the West and they primarily sought to build Ethiopia through developmentalism (especially focusing on Meles) to a point where it was strong enough to stand on its two feet. This is not a defence of them but merely a correction of the misconceptions Tigray's genociders freely utilized. For more on all this, you should read this.

The west may have ostensibly criticized Abiy's regime but they still gave it full impunity regarding the genocide and not one Western power recognized it. The neoliberal west played a significant part in the Tigray genocide through giving Abiy impunity and more dubiously may have played a role in him attaining power and the earlier suspicious death of Meles Zenawi. They also continue to normalize and engage with Abiy's regime as do profiteers with their own colonial ambitions like the UAE.

Moving onto profiteers, the UAE, private Canadian companies, etc. sought to make a huge profit of Tigray's natural resources as it's extremely rich in gold (1, 2). Beyond natural resources, they also treated Tigray as a human testing zone for their drones.

However, this is not the full extent of the role they played in Tigray's tragedy. Going back decades and even a century, colonial Western powers also played a role in the events that eventually culminated in today's Tigray genocide.

In 1943, the British RAF carpet bombed Tigray with more than a 100 bombs for 2 weeks beginning on a busy market day to put down the First Woyane rebellion which nearly overthrew the oppressive Haile Selassie regime and would've prevented all the subsequent tragedies committed by him and the pseudo-Ethiopianist (referring to those who kept the same assimilationist ideology as Haile Selassie as well as his belief in an absolute centralized state which goes hand in hand) Derg against Tigray plus the other oppressed nations in Ethiopia and crucially would've prevented the spread of his genocidal and supremacist forced assimilation ideology which itself was inspired by his visits to Western countries and viewing their homogeneity as something crucial to be replicated by force in his own extremely diverse multinational empire in the name of "unity" but really supremacy (1).

In the late 1800s, the British didn't honor a deal they made with Emperor Yohannes IV. In exchange for ending the war with Egypt and rescuing besieged Egyptian forces in Sudan the British were to cede territories they were occupying but instead they allowed the Italians to occupy them which subsequently led to events that resulted in the birth of Italian Eritrea via collaboration between Italy, the colonial collaborator traitor Menelik the second (who was refashioned as a hero) and to a lesser extent colonial collaborator elites in Eritrea which all played a huge role in setting the groundwork for Tigray's tragic 102 years (1889-1991) of oppression (more here on that) and the Tigray genocide itself.

Eritrea's fundamental part in the genocide is also something that couldn't have naturally happened if not for the action of colonial powers. Crucially, half of Eritrea's population were Tigrinya speakers indistinguishable from Tigrayans (with the exception of small accent and word differences among those in the very north that alongside other minor differences are heavily emphasized by many Eritrean nationalists alongside the twisting of history and expressing their believed superiority) that share the same religion as Tigrayans and wouldn't have developed an alternate national identity and rejection of shared ethnicity with Tigrayans if this and the subsequent impact of colonialism (Like the superiority complex developed against Tigrayans in the 1960s by emulating the behavior of the colonial Italians who mistreated them toward Tigrayan laborers who came to work in Eritrea ((as a result of conditions in Tigray becoming worse due to Amhara elite oppressors that directly fuelled things like famines, banditry, etc.)) in a deeply misguided means to try and push themselves up by pushing others down, the twisting of history in an attempt to create artificial border guards and both plant/grow seeds of hatred, etc. toward this effort) hadn't occurred. (More here). In spite of this, I, like most other Tigrayans, categorically reject the far-right Eritrean Agazian movement. You can read more about that movement and how it was used to spread hatred toward Tigray at the bottom of this page here.