“With villagers driven out, they moved in to cart away Africa’s mineral wealth. This, to Arikana, was unconscionable.” For many Africans, and many people all over the world, their first awareness of the existence of Arikana was sometime between 2016 and 2019, while she was the Permanent Representative of the African Union to the USA.
Invariably such awareness arose from hearing snippets of her fiery speeches as she sought to rally fellow Africans to action against disrespect and injustice. Her exposure to the inner workings of international diplomacy, arising from a job which, according to her, she never expected to get, led her to see many unsavoury things which many others saw every day, but which occasioned no particular outrage in them. When you heard Arikana speak, your first thought was to worry for her job, and then her personal safety.
You quickly concluded that she would not last long in her job. Her outrage was wide-ranging, from disrespect that was routinely shown to African nations and their representatives in the United States when they went with their begging bowls, to inequities in the international financial system that allowed IMF and World Bank give loans to the rich Western nations at interest rates that were a sixth of what poor African nations had to pay for the same loans. She took special issue with France and the stranglehold it kept on the politics and resources of its former colonial territories.
These countries, to her, were independent in nam.
