Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.

Trump, it would seem, has detected an opportunity to enthuse his evangelical supporters. But Nigeria’s troubles are about more than Trump, American politics, or simplistic “West versus Africa” narratives. Nigeria is a state that is failing at its most basic duty: protecting its citizens.

Tens of thousands have been killed in recent years by jihadist groups and various militias. In the past year alone, thousands more have died; 3.6 million Nigerians are internally displaced — more than the entire population of Qatar. Another 400,000 have fled the violence to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Whole villages have been razed, farms and schools abandoned for fear of violence. A kidnapping economy has metastasized into one of the most lucrative industries in the country; in some regions, families now expect to pay ransom as routinely as school fees. The violence is not episodic. It is systemic, grinding and national in scope. Life in vast swathes of the country is lived under constant threat.

Trump has characteristically oversimplified the crisis by framing it solely as Christians besieged by Islamist extremists. Yes, many Christians have been murdered for being Christians, in churches. But the violence is often, if not always, indiscriminate, and Muslims have also been killed in large numbers. Many attacks are driven by resource disputes and opportunistic criminality wrapped in religious rhetoric.

In Nigeria’s northwestern region alone, there are over two dozen major criminal groups whose activities involve violent robberies, the extortion of motorists, kidnappings for ransom, and illegal mining. As the African Center for Strategic Studies has noted: “Even though they sometimes call on God during attacks or while making propaganda videos, these criminal gangs do not discriminate against their targets based on religious affiliation.” For these particular groups, Islamism is more of a useful rallying cry to lure recruits than their core activity, and Muslims are just as likely to suffer violence at their hands. Moreover, considering 46% of Nigerians — 133 million people — live in extreme poverty, scarcity is a defining feature of everyday Nigerian life. This fuels a fierce competition for resources that can sometimes spill into intercommunal violence that is more driven by socioeconomics than identities. And the Nigerian government cannot, and will not, bring an end to the anarchy. Nigeria is not simply living through religious war — it is living through state abandonment.

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In fairness, the Nigerian government faces immense challenges in combating insecurity. With a population of 230 million, four times that of Britain, Nigeria is policed by some 370,000 underfunded, under-equipped officers. For comparison, Britain has 170,000 better equipped officers. Nigeria’s military, meanwhile, is stretched thin, fighting jihadists and various armed militias across the country. Even the most capable government would struggle under these conditions.

Still, acknowledging these challenges does not absolve Nigeria’s rulers of responsibility. There is something revealing about the reflexive response from some Nigerian officials and Western media eager to “correct” Trump by emphasizing that Muslims are also dying. The implication is perverse: that a representative distribution of victims somehow redeems the Nigerian state. That Trump is exaggerating. “Yes, thousands have been killed,” the BBC reports, “but there is no evidence Christians are disproportionately targeted.”

Imagine that logic being applied to Britain: that mass murder is somehow less of a crisis if all faiths are represented in the body count. This is the modern version of the old racist shrug: “Just the usual violence in Africa.” Regrettable but normal, nothing to get all worked up about.

The Nigerian government’s official response to Trump’s threat has been to invoke Nigeria’s “sovereignty.” The problem is not with the principle itself, but with how it is being invoked as a shield not for Nigeria’s people, but for its rulers.

It is an easy tactic: the principle of sovereignty retains a quasi-religious aura despite the sometimes questionable outcomes of its practice for regular people. It brings to mind autonomy, dignity and resistance to foreign domination. That is why corrupt elites enthusiastically exploit its emotional power to divert attention from their negligence. Sovereignty has been used as a license for governments to neglect or, in extreme cases like North Korea, even kill their own citizens: after all, the argument goes, no one outside has the right to question what happens inside our borders. Meanwhile, the ordinary Nigerian buries children, pays ransoms, flees farms, and lives with the terrible knowledge that their government will not come to save them.

The contrast between Nigerian rulers’ rhetoric of sovereignty and their actions would be comic if it were not tragic. They decry Western meddling while sending their children to Western schools, stashing the funds they have looted in Western banks, and jetting off to Western hospitals after a sneeze. Nigeria’s current president Bola Tinubu prefers French hospitals, which he regularly visits, over those he oversees in Nigeria. His predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, favored London hospitals, eventually dying in one of them earlier this year. Nigeria’s rulers don’t trust Nigerian hospitals with their own care because they know they have grossly neglected and underfunded them. Where is their patriotism on this front? Can anyone imagine a French president or British prime minister jetting off to a foreign country anytime they needed medical care? What would that say about the seriousness of French or British “sovereignty” Nigeria’s political rulers, who have usually built fabulous levels of wealth through corrupt practices in politics, speak of reliance and national pride while moving around in heavily-armored convoys that speed past the insecurity endured by the citizens they govern.

In healthy democracies, mass killings trigger reckoning — inquiries, resignations, reform. In Nigeria, they trigger wooden statements of condolence from the government and little more. Nigerians complain that sometimes even these perfunctory presidential condolences take a while coming after mass killings. The political classes accept the violence because it does not touch them. They are secure behind their layers of security. And the consequences of their hypocrisy are visible in polling that would alarm the leaders of any genuine democracy: 83% of Nigerians today say they have little or no trust in President Tinubu’s government; 82% say the same of the legislature while 79% distrust the judiciary.

Nigeria’s institutions have been hollowed out by state capture and patronage. Elections are routinely rigged and manipulated. The system is not corrupt; corruption is the system. A democracy becomes a “shadow state” — to borrow the phrase of the political scientist William Reno — when informal power networks and elite interests override institutions. The corruption directly fuels insecurity: funds designated for counterterrorism efforts are often embezzled by senior military officials, undermining the entire exercise. In such systems, insecurity is not an aberration; it is a constant. And it is treated as a crisis only if it threatens the survival of elites.

So why, among the general indiscriminate violence, are Nigerian Christians so often attacked, with impunity, for being Christians? It is because the country’s rulers calculate that Christians are less likely than Muslims to respond to violence with more violence and large-scale violence. Conventional wisdom in Nigeria has it that the country’s Muslims, especially its more fervent faithful concentrated in the northern regions, are volatile if they perceive any threat to their faith. So, if the situation were reversed, and Christian terrorists were regularly slaughtering Muslims in Mosques, Nigeria’s government would be seriously concerned that a full-scale religious war could erupt. They would move more swiftly to apprehend the Christian attackers to placate Muslims, if only for the self-preservative motive of fearing they might lose control of the situation completely.

Nigeria’s Christians, meanwhile, are seen as less likely to respond with mass violence to attacks on them by jihadists, and so in the brutal arithmetic of Nigeria’s rulers, their killings are more ignorable. They are not seen as representing a threat to elite survival. Life is disturbingly cheap in the eyes of Nigeria’s ruling class — especially when that life belongs to the poor and the powerless. Contrary to their rhetoric, they simply do not place the same premium on human life as Western, and many other governments do. This is often the case in too many other African states.

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Tinubu, Nigeria’s current president, once forfeited $460,000 to US authorities to avoid further investigation into his alleged links to drug trafficking. He once famously told his supporters, “Power is not served à la carte. Fight for it, grab it and run with it.” This is hardly the language of a guardian of noble principles. It is high time the world started distinguishing between the people of Nigeria and a political class that claims to speak for them. This is especially true if that political class often attains its positions of power through manipulated and sometimes openly rigged elections, as Tinubu himself is accused of doing. Elite sovereignty without accountability is but impunity draped in a flag.

None of this means the answer lies in American boots on Nigerian soil. Military interventions in Africa usually produce more damage than solutions. The 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya which led to the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and subsequent disintegration of Libya readily comes to mind. Nigerians and Africans generally are rightly allergic to paternalism masquerading as humanitarianism. But the rejection of foreign intervention cannot become the acceptance of perpetual slaughter. That is why it is good that Trump is ramping up pressure on Nigeria’s rulers to tackle insecurity more energetically. He should bring maximum pressure to bear on them in this regard, including personal sanctions. They need to believe that not acting could potentially trigger US actions that would cost them their power and privileges. Their self-preservative instincts are the only plausible pathway towards making them take action to properly fund and equip Nigeria’s security forces, curb the corruption that fuels insecurity and address the socioeconomic deprivation that makes recruitment into violent groups so easy.

Nigerians deserve the same safety as Britons or Americans. If “sovereignty” is to mean anything, it must begin with the right of citizens not to be hunted in their own homes. States do not exist to be sovereign. They exist to provide their citizens an environment that is safe and enabling of their prosperity. Sovereignty is merely supposed to be the best means to achieving those ends.

For too long, cynical leaders in Nigeria have used the language of national pride while behaving as though the state is their personal estate. They invoke the ghost of foreign domination to deflect attention from domestic plunder. Yes, Trump’s comments were self-serving. Yes, they were framed to please an American evangelical constituency. Yes, one can question why he is not considering US intervention to stop the larger-scale slaughter currently ongoing in Sudan, for instance. But to downplay Nigeria’s ongoing crisis because one dislikes the messenger is not going to help the four million Nigerians currently too afraid to return to their homes. Their suffering will not be eased by diplomatic platitudes, nor by misguided military intervention. One need not trust Trump or American foreign policy to recognize that a government not protecting its citizens should not be able to hide behind flags and slogans indefinitely. From this point of view, anyone putting unignorable pressure on the Nigerian government to finally do its job is doing a good thing.

In the US, a small group of African American thinkers is pushing back against progressive orthodoxy on the race issue. Glenn Loury — a Professor of Economics at Brown University — has long argued that while historical discrimination against African Americans is undeniable, it is not the sole explanation for racial disparities in income or education. And Thomas Sowell, the conservative African American Stanford University economist, has taken on what he sees as progressives’ faulty answers in a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

“At the heart of the social justice vision”, Sowell writes, “is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities”, they must be the result of “such human vices as exploitation and discrimination”. In his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi stated this case plainly: “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.” Here in Britain, leading progressive think-tanks such as the Runnymede Trust also often link racial disparities — in spheres such as health, housing, education and employment — to “systemic racism”.

Debates over the causes of group disparities are fierce precisely because they shape the answers to the practical questions of what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. If racial disparities are caused by racism, the responsibility for redressing them lies with those perpetuating it, hence today’s progressive focus on the ideology of white supremacy.

But Sowell has other ideas about why some groups are doing much better. While he acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination do “prevent different groups of people — whether classes, races or nations — from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms”, he maintains that this is only part of the story. Some groups, he suggests, may be better off because they have, over a period of time, collectively mastered endeavours that have turned out to be profitable, teachable to younger generations and conducive to group progress. He cites people of German ancestry having created leading beer brands in countries as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and China — not by coincidence, but because the ancestors of today’s Germans were producing beer as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. “When a particular people have been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years,” he writes, “is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavour than others who have had no such history?”

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All groups excel at something. Those statistically worse off educationally, for whatever reason, may be underrepresented in jobs where a degree is essential but over-perform in endeavours where personal talent determines success. Sowell cites sports and entertainment as spheres in which “American groups rising out of poverty” have excelled. But most people would find it odd if someone argued that the fact that 72% of NBA players are black implies that other groups are being discriminated against in US basketball. Likewise, the fact that the median per capita income of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is higher than that of white Americans is not interpreted as a sign that the US system is designed to advantage those minorities.

To “honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism”, Sowell insists. It is an assertion that will likely make more than a few people uneasy, depending on the groups being compared (although I would argue that we should always be wary of making generalisations about groups). Because China is now one of the world’s two economic superpowers, few object to comments about how the Chinese may do such-and-such better than the Americans, but the Americans are better at such-and-such than the Chinese. But most of us feel uncomfortable if similar comparisons are made between, say, Africans and Europeans. Disparities between these two groups are so wide that there exist strong fears that drawing parallels could be interpreted as arguing that the richer group is simply superior to the poorer. Which was, of course, the explicit justification for enslaving and colonising Africans — something people haven’t forgotten.

Partly because of this, if certain behavioural patterns among some groups of African ancestry — here in the West or in Africa — are pointed to as detrimental to wider black progress, Western progressives will often describe this as ‘victim-blaming’. If an African country is corruptly and ineffectively governed, the argument goes, it is because its leaders inherited exploitative colonial structures. The question of why such structures have not been dismantled or at least significantly reformed in the decades since independence will usually be answered with reference to structural constraints, imposed by the West. Africa’s ruling elites are ultimately victims — in the Western progressive worldview, anyway. No African progressive living in Africa thinks this way.

The phrase ‘victim-blaming’ was coined by psychologist William Ryan in his 1971 book, Blaming the Victim — which was a response to discussions about the role of African American family structures, which were described as perpetuating black poverty in the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965. But I believe the concept of ‘victim-blaming’ gained the power it wields today mostly thanks to feminist activists, who used it to describe how female rape victims may be questioned about what clothes they were wearing when attacked or how late they had been out. Their rhetoric was then adopted by anti-colonialists. Explaining his reasons for rejecting an MBE in 2019, British spoken word artist, George the Poet, who is of Ugandan descent, said: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.” In many a Western progressive mind, the West violates other nations via neoliberal economic exploitation, then has the gall to tell those it has exploited that their poverty is their fault — because they didn’t work hard enough, were not well-organised enough, or allowed corruption to flourish. All in order to convince the world that the system they have built is a just one, when it obviously isn’t.

But dismissing, as ‘victim-blaming’, any arguments citing a weaker group’s actions as obstacles to that group’s progress is not helpful to anyone, least of all the weaker groups themselves. It is especially unfortunate when people do this not because they genuinely believe the argument is baseless, but because they want to signal empathy by demonstrating that they always side with the underdog — which is the sine qua non to being accepted by the progressive elite. This self-serving approach is deeply hypocritical, given that progressivism’s stated aim is to uplift groups in a weaker position, and to do that we need to have frank conversations about what may be going wrong within a group. Scholars such as Sowell and Loury, for instance, argue that the questions raised in the Moynihan Report remain valid points of discussion.

In my recent book, It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s about Wealth, I argue that the future status of blackness depends not on what happens in Britain and America — where just 3% of the world’s black population live — but on what happens in Africa, where 90% of black people live. If we are ever to speak of any kind of meaningful global racial equality, Africa must succeed. If it is to succeed, we must talk about its failures.

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Does anyone genuinely believe that the mind-boggling corruption of Africa’s ruling elites is not a major factor contributing to the continent being the poorest and least economically developed? To there being close to 500 million Africans — more than the EU’s population — living on less than $2 a day? To there being 600 million people lacking access to electricity in the year 2023? Can anyone maintain that all this poverty can be blamed on legacies of colonialism and slavery?

Even if we can blame all Africa’s problems on the past, shouldn’t the focus be on what can be done to change things today? Merely identifying the root cause of a problem does not give you a solution to the problem. That is another task entirely. Without radically improving the way most African countries are run, prosperity will continue to elude the continent. Africa has been dealt a terrible hand by history, but none of us can change the past. All we can do is play the cards we have today as best we can, so that our hand may be stronger in the future.

Of course, today’s Western progressives often appear to believe that only Westerners have the power to change anything fundamental about society, including in countries thousands of kilometres away. It is the modern-day manifestation of Eurocentrism: the idea that the world revolves around what white Westerners think and do. Development outcomes elsewhere are thus always traceable to some Western action, past or present.

In his book, Sowell emphasises that the onus of changing the fortunes of worse-off groups rests primarily on them. But the debate over the factors driving group disparities — between those who emphasise individual agency and those who emphasise external factors — does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately triumph. Both can play their part in taking practical steps to improve things for the worse-off in this world — which would involve looking at big-picture structural changes as well as honest analysis of potentially damaging group dynamics. Ideologies like products are subject to the laws of demand and supply, and there is clearly a strong demand for the social justice vision today — signalling a genuine mass craving for a fairer world in which there is less poverty, inequality and needless human suffering. We’d surely rather this craving existed than not. The key is to apply it usefully: to always be open to evidence about what is working and what isn’t, about who needs to do what, when and how.

I knew that the will to dominate did not exist only in whites: I saw Nigerians lording it over other Nigerians. So I understood why racial domination was practised — but not what made it possible. Or why, despite the grim facts of history, Africans (and the world in general) accorded white people more status than others.

For going on five centuries now, we’ve been living in a world that generally positions whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and others somewhere in between. The story about how such an order came about is familiar, incorporating the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and white supremacist ideas. But what is sustaining this order today, despite consensus that racial hierarchies are morally unacceptable? Any behavioural pattern that persists while being at odds with popular opinion must be driven by something very powerful indeed.

I believe that the chief shaper of racial group dynamics today is money. And it’s a case I make in my book It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth. It is not the only thing that matters but it is the thing that matters most in a capitalist world. Thomas Piketty has traced how the distribution of wealth determines the distribution of power. It is not merely about the raw purchasing power of money; it is also about the meaning people attach to wealth and the qualities they attribute to those who have it and those who don’t. Money, and our understanding of it, shapes racial group dynamics in everything from immigration, technology and media to stereotypes, prestige and geopolitics.

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Single European states, including Britain and Germany, have larger economies than the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and roughly 90% of the world’s black population. And even the most diverse European countries still have large white majorities — Britain’s, for instance, is 82% — meaning there is a strong correlation between national and racial wealth. Sweden, a country of 10 million people, generates a larger GDP than Nigeria, the largest black nation, with over 200 million inhabitants. Tiny Ireland, with its five million citizens, has a GDP of $520 billion, compared with the $411 billion of South Africa, the most industrialised black-majority nation, which has a population of 60 million.

The economic gulf is not just between black and white-majority countries, of course. Norway’s five-million-strong economy boasts a GDP of $505 billion, compared with the $461 billion of Bangladesh, home to 170 million people.

Meanwhile, the “best” passports are those from rich nations, irrespective of their nationals’ skin colour. In 2022, for instance, a United Arab Emirates passport was ranked the most powerful in the world, enabling you visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to 176 countries. However, as most rich nations are white-majority, we live in a world in which white people get to gate-keep the world’s best living situations, but can usually travel wherever they want at the drop of a hat. You can travel to 173 countries hassle-free if you have a German, French or South Korean passport, and 171 if you have a British or Japanese one. But if you hold a Nigerian passport, you must get a visa to travel to 145 countries; if you hold a Pakistani passport, you need one to enter 154 countries.

The correlation between race and wealth is also why Western academia, the world that I inhabit, dominates global academia. Harvard University has more in its endowment fund than the Nigerian state has in foreign reserves. The total education budget of Nigeria in 2021 amounted to the equivalent of £1.2 billion; the wealthiest British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, have annual budgets exceeding £2 billion. This cash funds world-class research and attracts the very best scholarly talent: how are poorer universities supposed to compete?

Because of their credibility and prestige, Western universities attract most of the over five million students who study abroad each year. There are over 600,000 foreign students in Britain — the most popular destination after America for international study — who usually pay at least £20,000 per year in tuition fees alone. This makes UK universities ever wealthier, ever more capable of financing world-class research and ever more attractive to global scholarly talent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Western academia is at the heart of global knowledge production today. “Decolonising” the curriculum by adding some more black and brown authors to reading lists won’t change that. In fact, it might just attract even more foreign students to the UK, and entrench the domination of Western academia. How does that further racial equality?

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Wealth brings entire countries prestige, not just universities. It means whites and successful East Asians (such as the Japanese) are often stereotyped as competent, while black and brown people, associated with unsuccessful nations, are stereotyped as less competent. Wealth gives mid-sized European nations more influence in the corridors of international institutions like the UN than black or brown nations with several times their population. It is why the Western media has global influence, while the media of black-majority nations crosses few borders.

The racial order is an international order. But the UK race debate is that it tends to ignore this reality in favour of a parochial Anglo-American lens, which arrogantly assumes the race issue can be resolved in Britain and America — where only 3% of the world’s black population resides. A proportion that will only shrink as Africa’s population is set to double to 2.5 billion by 2050. Demographic realities mean it is global-scale dynamics that will shape the future of race relations, not their manifestations in particular Western societies.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

I am hardly the first person to realise that money matters. Many Brits would readily acknowledge this, but most Westerners of all skin colours do not grasp just how important wealth is when it comes to racial inequality because of their attitude to money. Western nations are affluent societies with generous welfare systems; people can afford to be less aspirational. A 2021 survey of Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards and the French showed an average 28% of people in these nations consider it “important” for them personally to become rich. Brits placed the lowest value on wealth with only 19% saying it was important to them. Contrary to pop-culture portrayals of Americans as uber-materialists, only 30% prioritise wealth.

The same survey conducted among the Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans and Vietnamese showed an average of 58% consider it important to become rich, making them twice as likely as Westerners to prioritise money. Even the Asian nations that have been wealthy for decades now are more money-focused than Westerners — in Japan, 43% say it is important for them to become rich, while in Vietnam, the figure is an enormous 76% — and the same pattern is evident in Africa, the Middle East and South America. The status hierarchies people establish in their heads are built around the dimensions they consider most important to their everyday lives. Most people around the world consider wealth to be the most relevant indicator of status. And the race conflict today is, at heart, a conflict over group status.

Too many on the Right today deny the persistence of a racial hierarchy. Too many on the Left believe it can be lectured out of existence. But debating the details of colonialism, slavery and Western imperialism won’t change the status quo and its consequences for the everyday lives of people of colour. Not if money remains on the margins of the race debate.

As the most populous black state, Nigeria’s prospects are crucial to the future of global race dynamics, a reality often forgotten in the exasperatingly parochial race debate here in the Anglosphere. Black people worldwide yearn for a black nation that can compete with Western powers — a yearning embodied by the make-believe state of Wakanda in the enormously popular Black Panther movies. So, as Nigerians head to the polls tomorrow to choose their president in a highly unpredictable election, it is worth remembering that the result will have implications far beyond West Africa.

Contrary to expectations at the beginning of the campaign, the poll is now a three-way contest between two establishment figures and a popular third contender promising to upturn the status quo. Eight months ago, the odds-on favourite was the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu. A 70-year-old long-time politician, Tinubu is widely considered to be one of Nigeria’s chief “godfathers” — very wealthy political actors who engage in industrial-scale vote-buying, paying poor citizens cash to support their candidates. Tinubu openly brags about how many politicians owe him their positions, including current president Muhammadu Buhari.

His critics cite his corruption, increasingly visible ill-health, and numerous campaign gaffes as reasons he is unfit for the job. Tinubu once suggested the Nigerian army should recruit “50 million youths” to tackle the country’s staggering 33% unemployment rate (arguing that the policy would not be costly because they could be fed on locally-grown corn). In one attempt to laud the achievements of a governor from his party, he described him as having “turned a rotten situation to a bad one”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Tinubu did not agree to live one-on-one media interviews during the campaign and refused to attend presidential debates. At an event at Chatham House, here in the UK, he instructed colleagues to answer audience questions directed at him. His hands have been observed shaking in public and speculation is rife he may be suffering from Parkinson’s, a suggestion his campaign team stoutly refutes. They insist the gaffes are mere slips of the tongue, and tout his record of overseeing significant growth of Lagos’s economy during his 1999-2007 stint as governor, as proof that he is the can-do leader the nation needs.

The other establishment candidate is Atiku Abubakar, a 76-year-old former vice-president running on the platform of the opposition, the People’s Democratic Party. Atiku is likewise wealthy, considered corrupt, and part of the old guard in Nigerian politics. He is even more economically liberal than Tinubu and vows to privatise many state-held assets if elected. “In every great nation in this world, you find out that it is the private sector that is driving the economy, they provide the jobs, they provide the prosperity, and they do everything,” he stated in a 2022 interview. He admires Margaret Thatcher.

Though there are often a dozen or more candidates, Nigerian presidential elections are virtually always a de facto two-horse race between establishment candidates. Nigerian voters are therefore usually faced with weighing up the “lesser evil”. Many Nigerians are dissatisfied with this status quo, but don’t see it changing. But during this latest campaign, sometime in the second half of last year, a third contender started setting Nigerian social media alight, provoking excitement among voters seeking a new order.

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The insurgent candidate is the 61-year-old Peter Obi who, while a former state governor and thus no newbie to politics, is running on the platform of the hitherto marginal Labour Party. Once a banker and entrepreneur, Obi is wealthy, very pro-business and sees economic development as Nigeria’s chief priority. One of his main campaign slogans was “From Consumption to Production”, highlighting the need for the nation to boost its manufacturing prowess, as Asia’s leading economies have in recent decades.

However, while all three frontrunners are on the same page in terms of what Nigeria needs most — economic growth and job creation — what sets Obi apart is that he is not considered corrupt. His attitudes are evidently very different from the average Nigerian politician’s. For one, he shuns the ostentatious displays of wealth and Big Man behaviour commonly associated with the nation’s elites. Videos of him carrying his own luggage at airports excite Nigerian voters tired of arrogant politicians who consider such things beneath them, travelling with entourages of briefcase-carriers and yes-men to limit their contact with the public.

A people used to politicians striving to be as inaccessible and aloof as possible have been pleasantly surprised by a candidate who doesn’t place himself on a pedestal. Obi is known to shun patronage politics — his party has explicitly stated that it will not pay people to vote for him — which makes his promises to manage public finances prudently and honestly sound credible. His down-to-earth persona also lends an air of sincerity to his vows to make Nigeria a fairer and more meritocratic society. In the end, pretty much all politicians say the same thing — that they want to improve our lives. What matters is who we believe means it. Obi has been very successful in convincing young voters that he is genuine — which, given that 60% of Nigerians are under-25, has given him an edge.

But this is not a simple old versus young scenario. It is, at heart, a contest between those who believe Nigeria can be transformed into a fairer, more inclusive society, and those who consider such beliefs naïvely unrealistic. The fruits of economic growth, and the country’s natural resources, have long been gobbled up by the nation’s tiny but overbearing elite, while the vast majority remain ruinously poor. There are hardly any Nigerians who would not like to see the kind of fairer society Obi promises — the question is whether they believe it is possible.

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Persuading people that it is constitutes no small task in an extremely low-trust society. Just 7% of Nigerians believe “most people can be trusted”, while 93% believe “you must be very careful” in dealing with people. (In comparison, 67% of Brits believe most people can be trusted.) These low trust levels help Nigeria’s corrupt political class. Since the popular assumption is that pretty much everyone will help themselves to the till once in power, many conclude that you may as well stick with the devils you know, or at least those from your own ethnic group. There are those who like Obi’s message (and even him as a candidate) but doubt he would be able to reform Nigeria or even get elected, despite all the social media attention and the spate of voter surveys that have shown him in the lead.

One major issue sceptics raise is that Obi is from the Igbo ethnic group concentrated in the south-east of Nigeria; they say group-level antipathies between Igbos and northern Nigerians mean the latter would never vote for him in significant numbers — a problem, considering a slight majority of the country’s 93 million registered voters live in the North. His supporters counter that adults under the age of 35, who now constitute 40% of all registered voters, are far less ethnocentric than older generations, and will turn out for Obi in large numbers.

The undyingly aspirational nature of Nigerianness means that many simply refuse to give up on the idea of the nation becoming a great one. So Obi might be the right man at the right time: an overwhelming 89% of Nigerians currently believe the country is headed “in the wrong direction”. Additionally, 79% of Nigerians think the Buhari government has done a poor job when it comes to security — which now ranks at the top of Nigerian concerns, just ahead of the economy. As a result, trust in the ruling APC party is at an all-time low of 26%. The main opposition party, PDP — which governed the country from 1999 to 2015 — is likewise quite unpopular, and is seen as essentially a carbon copy of the current ruling party. Many want fundamental change from outside of the establishment.

The mood is not helped by the ongoing cash crisis. In October 2022, Nigeria’s central bank announced that redesigned naira notes would be introduced, and the existing ones phased out. The professed aim was to tackle counterfeiting and inflation, but some saw the move as designed to scupper the plans of politicians hoarding cash to buy votes in this year’s various elections. More than a few welcomed the idea, at first.

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However, since the new notes were introduced, many Nigerians have been unable to get them from ATMs; the central bank appears to be struggling to print enough to meet demand. Meanwhile, many businesses no longer accept the old notes. In an economy where 40% of the population don’t have bank accounts and conduct their everyday transactions in cash, this leaves many unable to pay for basic goods, including food — which has sparked riots across the country.

The stakes in tomorrow’s election are high, then. A win for Tinubu or Atiku would mean business-as-usual for the next four years. Economic growth might pick up from the currently sluggish 3% rate: either candidate’s pro-business policies would be an improvement on President Buhari’s statist inclinations. But the elite-dominated, nepotistic and corrupt status quo would hold, hampering the creative potential of Nigeria’s growing population.

A win for Obi, on the other hand, would be the Nigerian equivalent of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, a feat considered impossible at the start of the campaign for reasons including the candidate’s ethnic origins. It would open a new chapter in Nigerian politics, encouraging the belief that the nation can be organised into a well-run, economically successful and fair society. A successful Nigeria would be the pride and power of not only Africa but of blackness as a whole; it would also provide a backyard role model for other African nations hoping to clean up their politics. A real-life Wakanda for the 21st century and beyond.

No matter how sensitively you try to approach it, colonial history is an inherently divisive issue in Britain. It cannot be otherwise in a country where the descendants of those who were colonised live alongside the descendants of those who did the colonising. One’s story of successful expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

Akala poignantly expressed this in his book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire: “Even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour.” It is an emotion rarely voiced and so rarely captured in polls or surveys.

In my fellow African immigrant circles, when we complain about racism in the West, we often sum up the situation with something along the lines of: “Well, it’s not their fault, it’s because we’ve had to leave our countries to come and live in their country, that’s why they think they can misbehave towards us.” Our situation is psychologically easier to handle because we came here of our own accord, usually as adults, and can at least envisage somewhere else in the world we could go if things were to become unbearable here. This allows us an empowering sense of autonomy.

But Akala was speaking about those who, like him, were born here, in the land of their former conquerors, and who can’t envisage living anywhere else. Britain is all they know. Naturally their frustrations at the current status quo are often stronger. Why is it that they have to live in the land of their former conquerors? Why do their life options seem restricted in comparison with their white peers? Why is it that they live in a world where even if they feel Britain is a white supremacist hellhole, they can’t simply say: “Sod it, I’m jumping on a plane and moving to an African or Caribbean country where I won’t have to deal with white racists?”

Race is sometimes, but not always, a relevant proxy for the key dividing line in our world which is between so-far successful groups and so-far unsuccessful groups. The Japanese, South Koreans, Singaporeans, Emiratis and increasingly the Chinese are not on the same side of this divide as Kenyans, Pakistanis or Yemenis. They are, along with most white or white-majority nations, in the successful group camp.

It is no coincidence that, even though they’re not white and have been victims of racism and colonisation in the past, you won’t find too many Singaporeans or South Koreans today focusing on the ills colonialism rendered their societies. Successful nations and peoples usually find the present quite satisfying; when they discuss the past, it’s generally for the feel-good reason of reminding themselves how far they have come. It is not that a South Korean may not face racism here in Britain, but that, like Jewish people today, they always have the option of a wealthy well-developed ancestral homeland they can move to, if need really be. This knowledge creates a completely different psychological dynamic.

A lot of effort, however, is put into recalling the colonial pasts of nations not doing that well today for two major reasons. First, to convince the world that this is not the result of current misrule, but because of problems that have their “root causes” in colonialism and, possibly, slavery as well. In other words, something attributable to external forces beyond their control.

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The second aim is to bring white folk, Westerners especially, down a peg or two. This group tends to consider itself more civilisationally advanced as a result of having built several dozen successful states across the globe. No amount of political correctness can hide this. Their sense of superiority at having built “developed” societies while we are still “developing” engenders in us a strong psychological need to make the point that the only reason they are so rich, and we are not, is because they robbed us through colonisation and slavery and caused the problems our nations face today.

Olivia Rutazibwa outlines this position: “It is only through sustained colonial amnesia in knowledge production in [Western] society that the ills in the global South are systematically and almost exclusively attributed to the now and the local (over there)… this allows for the sustained… presentation of Western actors as firefighters when they are more often than not the arsonists.” What is thus needed, according to Rutazibwa, is to “first and foremost foreground the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial encounter as the sites from which any thinking about development-related issues need to be addressed”.

In other words, you simply can’t discuss any development issues of Nigeria or Pakistan today without first discussing colonialism. Indeed, there wouldn’t even be a Nigeria today, a country comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups speaking some 500 different languages, if not for British colonialism. Though colonialism is often portrayed as having divided Africans, it actually forced together thousands of formerly disparate communities, city-states, empires and autonomous groups into 54 Western-style nation states.

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Nigerians over the years have countered by arguing that this forcing together of overly (culturally) different peoples has created an “artificial” country that struggles to develop consensus on national norms and forge a sense of nationhood. The practicality of this point is valid in Nigeria’s case, but we should also be aware that this is precisely the argument some deploy against multiculturalism in Western societies. They say white Europeans shouldn’t be forced to live with so many people from different cultures with different value-systems. So this particular critique of colonialism is a slippery slope. We can’t argue “forced” multiculturalism is bad for African states but good for Western ones.

What is certainly the case, however, is that colonialism brought massive disruptions to the ways of life of millions of people in colonised territories, rubbishing their cultures, belief-systems, values and traditions — all the things Queen Elizabeth is praised for upholding here in Britain. Postcolonial Africans are yet to recover (and may well never recover) from this assault on their identities and are still trying to figure out what exactly they are or want to be. People were also killed, something that cannot be glossed over. Colonialism wrought serious damage.

But it is not to blame for everything. It is fanciful, for example, to suggest that the $600 billion stolen from the Nigerian people by Nigerian rulers since independence is down to colonialism. If that had been used to fund roads, schools, hospitals, universities and power systems, Nigeria would be in a very different place today. We would definitely not be in a situation whereby three-quarters of Nigerians aged 18-24 want to emigrate to richer pastures, including often to the land of their former conquerors, Britain.

Nonetheless when the issue of corruption among African ruling elites is discussed, the fact that these stolen funds are often deposited in Western banks is often raised along with the implication that it is the white man who is again robbing Africa of its wealth. I cannot imagine that, were it to emerge that Boris Johnson had stolen £2 billion from the UK treasury and deposited it in a bank in Dubai, there would be people more concerned with the role of the Emiratis in the whole affair than in the fact Johnson stole £2 billion from Britain.

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Yet a tranche of white Westerners lap up these anti-colonial arguments. They nod their heads, displaying an incredibly paternalistic and patronising attitude to Africans, painting them as helpless children who, even when they steal from their people, probably do it because the white man has told them to. All this only serves to downplay the role of corrupt African leaders in impoverishing their people: how thrilled these rulers must be as those useful idiots make the “corruption is all the West’s fault” argument for them.

And no, accounts of massive corruption in African states are not exaggerated stereotypes. In a 2021 survey of citizens in 34 African countries, an average of 58% said corruption was getting steadily worse. And not just among their elites; a third of respondents had been forced to bribe the police at least once in the past year. They also rated their civil servants, judges and local government councillors as very corrupt. Worse, 71% said “ordinary citizens risk retaliation or other negative consequences if they report corruption to the authorities”, proof they see it as a systemic arrangement. Is that the white man’s doing as well?

Of course there are global structural hangovers from the colonial era that impede the progress of African and other (poorer) global South countries today. Western countries have far more influence over and within major international organisations — from the UN to the IMF and World Bank. African countries have very weak positions in these institutions because they lack financial muscle, determined by their position in the world economy. Basically, the more you pay, the more you say.

The general stance of Africans who live in Africa is certainly not to blame the former colonialists for the problems of their countries today. They place the blame squarely on their ruling elites as a cursory glance of a newspaper in any African country will evidence. A majority — 59% — of Africans aged 18-24 believe that the impact their country’s former colonial powers have on their education systems is positive, while a quarter (25%) disagree. A majority — 57% — also feel trade relations with the former colonial power have a positive impact, while 27% disagree. Surprisingly for me, 47% even think the former colonial power’s impact on their country’s culture and identity is positive and 46% think their access to its natural resources has a positive effect, compared with 32% and 36% who disagree, respectively.

Six in ten, meanwhile, believe that foreign companies have been allowed to take advantage of their country’s resources without sufficiently benefitting or contributing to the local populations. These figures suggest the majority of African youths who actually live in Africa have quite different views from those in the West who are attempting to speak on their behalf — usually Guardianistas or their equivalents in the US. Kehinde Andrews’s The New Age of Empire at least makes the argument explicitly. Most others hide behind implication to generally say the same thing.

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Any white person who would suggest colonialism is not one of the “root causes” of Africa’s problems today is engaging in colonial amnesia, white denialism (both real but over-exaggerated phenomena), or is simply a racist. This tactic has the dual advantage of putting whites on the moral and psychological defensive as well as rallying Africans and other black folk to join in repelling the racist denialists. And if any black people in the West suggest colonialism does not really explain all African problems today, the tactic will be to portray them as “brainwashed” by the white man, dim-witted coconuts or mercenaries who in order to reap the rewards of pandering to white prejudices, are enabling “ahistorical” arguments that ignore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. An “ahistorical” argument is any argument that does not firmly point to the white man as the root of Africa’s problems today. White people who make the “colonialism is the root cause” argument will be praised as “thoughtful” and generally given the thumbs-up for showing how informed they are; they get it.

But who is this helping? Certainly not the 500 million Africans who currently have to survive on less than $1.90 a day or the hundreds of millions more who live on $2-$5 a day which is still serious poverty. It is not helping those living in countries with 50% or higher unemployment rates who are dying of easily curable diseases because they often lack access to basic healthcare. It is not helping the Africans who often live under governments that often think nothing of unleashing open violence on them to stay in power.

It is, at best, helping some black folk here in the West who might genuinely feel better believing white people have what they have while black people lack what they lack because of colonialism.

The root cause of Africa’s problems today is not colonialism or Queen Elizabeth — it is the way it is being ruled. And until that changes, the status quo will remain the same, no matter how many times we yell “colonialism”.

What the British government couldn’t accept then, and won’t acknowledge now, is that the most powerful leaders in Europe have long been Putin’s enablers. Of course, today the continent’s leaders are engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity, in an attempt to stop Russia invading Ukraine. But those close to the Russian Front are less than impressed. Commenting on Boris Johnson’s recent trip to Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested that Western Europeans need to shed the belief that they will live in a 21st century “free of armed confrontation”. Russia’s Ukraine policy, he argues, is “for all its madness… painfully rational”. Putin is “effectively exploiting European weaknesses”.

And it’s not just that Europe had lulled itself into believing war in its neighbourhood is impossible. It has also, through its own hypocrisy, given Russia the perfect justification for waging it. Back when Western nations held all the cards, they didn’t always follow the international rules they imposed on others. Warnings to Putin about the fundamental evils of war may resonate with Western audiences, but they can ring hollow elsewhere, once leaders recall the US and UK-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the 2011 Nato-led military intervention in Libya — both of which had disastrous consequences for millions of people. The illegal former invasion, in particular, set a dangerous moral precedent — one warmongers worldwide will continue to exploit in the crucial battle of narratives.

Putin doesn’t need to convince Brits he’s right — especially as Britain has said it will not be sending troops to Ukraine in the event of an invasion. Still, he will be keeping a close eye on European opinion polls. A January survey in seven European nations showed a clear majority, 62%, believe Nato should defend Ukraine if it is invaded by Russia. That is a solid sign of European solidarity, considering Ukraine is not even a Nato member. But in a crisis, the true test of solidarity is always in how much pressure it can withstand.

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When presented with risk factors, European appetites for a direct confrontation with Russia reduce significantly. Among Germans, Fins, the French, Italians, Poles, Romanians and Swedes, only in Poland were most respondents willing to accept the risks of economic downturn, higher energy prices, cyber-attacks, a refugee crisis and Russian military aggression. Nowhere else was a majority willing to accept them. “People mainly seem to support sanctions that will hurt Russia but will not hurt them”, the report noted. This is crucial, for, as the survey’s authors pointed out: “today, geopolitical strength is determined not just by military and economic power but also by the capacity to endure pain”.

And after decades of enjoying safety and prosperity that’s virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world, the West’s pain threshold is low. Some may feel tempted to blame “generation snowflake” for this weakness. But, while young Fins, for instance, are indeed significantly less likely than older Fins to be willing to suffer to defend Ukraine, younger French and German citizens are more willing to make such sacrifices than older generations. This is no straightforward generational divide.

For Putin and his circle, who will be following such surveys (as will European governments), they are evidence of the weakness of modern-day Western societies who generally just want to be left alone to continue enjoying their high standards of living. Knowing that true democracies have to be governed by public opinion, Putin will likely see this risk aversion as encouragement to invade.

Still, it’s public opinion at home he’ll be most worried about. In raising the stakes so high, Putin has forced himself into a corner particularly dangerous for dictators. If he doesn’t see any of his major demands met and then doesn’t go through with any military action, Russians may start wondering what all the fuss was about. Did our tsar blink first and chicken out of a confrontation with the West? What exactly did Mother Russia get from all this? These are questions Putin can’t afford to have too many Russians asking. It will be difficult for him to explain away all the events of recent weeks — the troop movements and drills — as nothing more than Western “hysteria”, which is Russia’s current official line.

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Moreover, as he has now unambiguously displayed his intentions towards Ukraine, he will know that if he withdraws his troops now, Western nations — wary of making the same mistake twice — will likely invest significant resources into shoring up Ukraine’s defences. That would make the country more difficult to threaten in the future, let alone successfully invade. It’s no secret that Putin wants a 21st century, multi-ethnic empire, in which Ukrainians and Russians, who he describes as “one people”, will live side by side. Even if he was bluffing a month ago, and had no intention of actually invading, Putin might end up deciding that it’s now or never.

Of course, an attempt to conquer all of Ukraine would border on lunacy. It is the second-largest country in Europe — more than twice the size of the UK — and Putin’s antics have only galvanised Ukrainian nationalism. So trying to seize the whole territory would indeed be a “bloody business”, as Boris Johnson has suggested, especially as Ukraine has a history of effective guerrilla warfare dating back to the Second World War.

The prospect of a long conflict, costly in terms of both lives and money, is more likely to deter Putin than any attempt at appeasement. Yet even if Putin is dissuaded, Russia is not the only global power that could take advantage of the West’s weakness. The centre of economic gravity is shifting eastward. The seven largest emerging economies today — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey — are projected to overtake the G7 in economic size during the 2030s. These countries want a much bigger say in how the world is run than they have today. Why wouldn’t they, one may ask.

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The only real question is how they will opt to expand their influence. Some will likely focus on peaceful means, but others will be tempted to use their increasing military power to shift the status quo in their favour. China, for one, is closely observing events in Ukraine. It came out in support of Russia, by saying it, too, opposes Nato expansion. And it will draw lessons from whatever happens on how to handle its own inevitable attempt to achieve Taiwanese “reunification” with China this century. Meanwhile, Nato member Turkey is on the side of the West in this particular conflict, supplying Ukraine its long-range armed drones, much to Russia’s displeasure. But it has shown on several occasions that it will go its own way militarily when it deems fit.

The Ukraine crisis, then, is not an anomalous conflict, but the beginning of a future for which Europe appears utterly unprepared. The continent has had it so good for so long, it has come to take everything it has for granted, including its security — which is gravely threatened by that very complacency. This century will test the West in ways it hasn’t been tested in a long time. It can only survive with the kind of fight it seems resolutely determined to avoid.

This is strange if we claim to care about people everywhere rather than just those in particular places, as liberals especially claim to do. It is also paradoxical to hold today’s progressive position that it is racist for Western societies to think themselves more “advanced” while simultaneously holding them to higher standards of justice than others. Such contradictions abound because in our debates over justice, we are reluctant to admit the truth: that while Western societies are not fair, they are pretty much the fairest humanity has built so far. And fairness is the best measure of justice we have.

Societal fairness itself is difficult but not impossible to measure. When it comes to economic fairness, Europe is the most equal of all regions with the top 10% pocketing 35% of income in 2019, according to the World Inequality Database. In contrast, those figures in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are 56%, 54% and 50% respectively; the US, at 45%, is a negative outlier in terms of income equality in the Western world.

For social mobility, OECD analysis suggest that if you’re born into a poor family in Sweden, it would take you three generations to reach the average national income; in Canada it would take four generations, in Britain five. In China, South Africa and Colombia, it would take seven, nine and 11 generations respectively. So, while you don’t want to be born poor anywhere, your chances of escaping poverty in the West are significantly higher than in most other places, bar a few notable exceptions, mostly in East Asia.

Where are you likely to be treated most fairly if you’re a woman? Sadly, you may face unfair treatment in every part of the world, but you’re least likely to experience it in the West, according to the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, which measures factors ranging from female access to political power and jobs to education levels and forced child marriages. You are also less likely to have your abilities doubted in the West, according to the latest World Values Survey. In my fatherland of Nigeria, for instance, 75% of the population believe “men make better political leaders than women”, a similar figure found in Pakistan. Over half of Russians, Turks, Indonesians and South Koreans agree. Just 8% of Germans and 12% of Australians share this bias.

There are exceptions, and countries like Rwanda vastly outperform Western nations in female political participation, women constituting 62% of Rwanda’s national legislature, compared to 34% in the UK. However, while it is not easy to be a woman anywhere, it is probably safe to say it is generally less difficult in the West.

What if you’re a sexual minority? In 2019, UCLA’s Williams Institute compiled a Global Acceptance Index, ranking countries from least to most accepting of LGBT people, and Western countries were by far the fairest. Small wonder that they dominate the list of countries deemed “safe” on the LGBTQ+ Travel Index.

Race appears to be the West’s Achilles heel when it comes to justice. While some societies like Britain are fairer than others, there’s no use dancing around the fact that there persists an informal racial hierarchy positing white people at the top, black people at the bottom and everyone else somewhere in between. While only three European nations gather data on race — Ireland, Finland and Britain — widespread discrimination against blacks and other minorities in Europe is well-documented. I think most fair-minded Brits would agree there is a significant justice gap when it comes to race in the West.

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This gap, however, has increasingly less to do with personal attitudes than with the massive wealth and resultant power disparities that have emerged between racial groups over the past 500 years, including as a result of slavery and colonialism. As I’ve written before, median white British household wealth stands at £314,000, compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. Similarly, a typical white American family owns eight times the wealth of a typical black American family and five times that of a Hispanic family. These disparities position the average person of colour weakly in a capitalist world where money is the key to autonomy. It is also worth mentioning that there are vast wealth differences between Britain’s ethnic minority groups, with median Indian households on average being as wealthy as their white British counterparts, for instance. In both the US and Britain, those of Indian descent now have higher incomes than their white counterparts, if not overall wealth.

And while this is far from perfect, there is ethnic economic inequality outside of the West, too, arguably more so; a study by academics at Harvard, Brown University and London Business School, concluded that “Sub-Saharan Africa and East and South Asia host the most ethnically unequal countries. In contrast, Western Europe is the region with the lowest level of ethnic inequality.”

When it comes to personal attitudes towards people of other races, Westerners are often among the most open-minded. When asked in the World Values Survey who they would not like to have as neighbours, 3% of Americans and Germans, and 4% of Australians mentioned “people of a different race”. In China it’s 18%, in Pakistan 25% and Turkey 41%. Two-in-three Vietnamese said they would object.

When it comes to respecting human rights, nowhere is this taken as seriously as in the West, as we can see from the UN’s Universal Human Rights Index. Growing up in Nigeria, I was from a young age depressingly aware that “human rights” were just words on a piece of paper to those in charge – and not much has changed since then. Since current president Muhammadu Buhari came to power in 2015, the country’s security forces have killed hundreds of Nigerian civilians, including unarmed youths protesting police brutality last year.

Whether it is Nigeria’s government brutalising its citizens, China herding Uighur Muslims into “re-education camps” or Libyan slave markets actually auctioning black people like cattle in the 21st-century, injustices elsewhere often provoke muted responses from Western progressives — certainly, nowhere near the outrage that accompanies even much lesser injustices in the West. This from the same people who profess to care about all of humanity, not just those living within their borders.

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Are there logical reasons to hold the West to higher standards of justice? Its wealth is certainly one, since it is easier to enforce the rule of law, respect human rights and create a generally more equitable society when you have the resources to do so. This year, the NHS alone has a working budget seven times the size of the entire national budget of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Even if Nigeria’s government had angel intentions, it simply lacks the resources to build an equitable society for its 200 million citizens. And there are many countries in the world much poorer than Nigeria. To expect the same standards of justice from them that we expect of the West is completely unrealistic.

However, there are quite a few very wealthy non-Western nations, among them countries like Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, or the likes of Singapore, Japan or South Korea. Yet while these rich non-Western nations tend to provide high standards of living and are attractive in many ways, they rarely offer the level of individual freedom and societal tolerance often found in the West.

One justification for holding the West to higher standards that I often hear from my non-Western friends is that Westerners claim to be more just than others. They love hailing “Western values” and proclaiming their societies as fair and tolerant, and this warrants subjecting them to more critical scrutiny than others. There’s a logic here and it is difficult to reconcile, say, America’s claim to be the “shining city on a hill” with its criminal invasion of Iraq (supported by Britain) which ended up causing immeasurable suffering for millions. And yet we know those who invaded will never be held to account, for who can hold powerful countries to account?

However, while such actions understandably foster cynicism towards Western moral declarations, would we rather that Western nations declare, Trumpesquely, that from now on: “No more morals or values. We will simply use our military and economic power to ruthlessly pursue our interests. We no longer care what others think of us.” Would we then happily lower our assessment standards for the West because it is no longer hypocritical? In practice, a West that shed all moral pretence would deprive others of the ability to deploy the argument of hypocrisy against it, leaving the weakest nations pretty much helpless in the face of brute power. That would hardly make for a fairer world.

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While many white progressives are ashamed of their societies for its past sins, and feel it responsible for today’s global problems, many of my non-white friends acknowledge the West’s relative fairness in private, especially those who have experience of life elsewhere. However, they believe that as people of colour, we should refrain from acknowledging this publicly, because that could only weaken our position in the quest for racial justice. Wouldn’t that encourage white whataboutism? And wouldn’t we be emboldening the white supremacists who claim that Western civilization is superior to others? How is any of this in our self-interest?

These are valid fears I share, but if we want to have an honest debate about race and the West, then it cannot be built on pretending we don’t see or know certain things. Our assessment of how fair Western societies are should itself be fair, to give credit where it is due as well as criticism. It should factor in what is going on elsewhere in human civilisation. Not because of a desire to give Westerners a pat on the back so they can feel good about themselves, but because any other type of assessment is conveniently arbitrary, and arbitrary justice is no justice at all.

Almost 10 months later, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering Floyd, is about to start. And while nobody promised to eliminate racism in less than a year, enough has happened since Floyd’s death for us to ask ourselves an important question: how likely is it that today’s antiracist activists will succeed?

For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting that even though no racial group has a monopoly on racist views — the idea that skin colour defines the quality of a person — when “racism” is spoken of these days, what is really meant, of course, is white racism. As many have pointed out, that isn’t to say that white people cannot be the target of racism. Whitebashing is certainly a thing these days; it is generally safe, even quite trendy, to make all sorts of derogatory comments about “whiteness” under the guise of “speaking truth to power”.

But we should also acknowledge that in western societies like Britain, the type of racism with the power to limit one’s life chances is typically that practised and condoned by white folk. This is partly down to the sheer potency of numbers. I, for example, cannot realistically choose not to worry about the attitudes of Britain’s 85% white population towards people of black heritage such as myself. In contrast, a white Brit does not have to be concerned in the same way about what black folk, who constitute just 3% of Britain, think about white people.

The existence of that choice is a fundamental difference; one that justifies today’s consistent focus on white racism, however repetitive or even unfair it may seem to some white Brits. But does this emphasis make the task of abolishing racism any easier?

I am not convinced — not least because today’s activists are overly focussed on the non-material sphere of life: on words, on what can and cannot be said, and by whom.

This approach to “fixing” the race problem is underpinned by a strong belief in the almost magical power of language. It assumes that the world runs on “narratives”, and that language is the only reality. Change the story, and you change everything. All of which means that white racism can be moralised into non-existence with the correct phrasing; that if we frequently mention how exploitative slavery and colonialism were, and how much western nations like Britain profited from them, white citizens will no longer believe that their societies are any better or more advanced than others.

This preoccupation with words is partly the ideological outcome of poststructuralist thinking, with its intellectually fashionable emphasis on highlighting how certain accepted “facts” function to reinforce the dominant position of powerful actors — in this case, white westerners. This approach, by its very nature, places great importance on words and how they are used.

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But the current antiracist emphasis on language is also a consequence of the kind of people driving the race debate. Following the furious fallout from cataclysmic events such as George Floyd’s death, antiracism, long a dissident reaction to white discrimination, has now achieved mainstream prominence — and, in the process, has generated its own elite elements. These are usually well-educated middle or upper-class writers, scholars, intellectuals and artists. People whose trade, like mine, is in words and ideas. It is people from this group who the organisers of public debate — chiefly the media — usually call upon to opine on race in Britain, as I am doing at the moment.

The disproportionate influence of middle-class authors is, of course, not confined to the race debate. But that does not mean we should ignore its practical consequences. For more often than not, this intellectualist preoccupation with language is accompanied by a tendency to ignore the material priorities of those minorities at the margins of society. Decolonising the curriculum might be something I feel strongly about, considering I work in academia, but I suspect the minimum-wage level might be a more important issue for the black immigrant working the till at Sainsbury’s.

Indeed, the reality is that only 1 in 3 British workers earn their living either in managerial positions or in jobs generally classified as “professional”, namely those requiring a degree-level qualification. This generally applies to all ethnic groups, with Indians being the most likely to work in professional jobs (33%), while Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are the least likely (18%).

While there may be racial issues at play here as well, with some minorities perhaps working jobs below their qualifications, this nevertheless offers a picture of the socioeconomic structure of Britain, including minority Britain. More importantly, it shows how the more material priorities of some segments of that society are often obscured in the middle-class dominated race debate. This is not about today’s activists holding bad or even consciously selfish intentions, but about the fact that we are all prone to view the world, as well as what most needs to be changed about it, through the lens of our own everyday situation.

And this works both ways. Roughly five years ago, during a trip spent travelling around Nigeria — my country of birth — a banker friend urged me to “keep things positive” if I decided to write about the experience in “western media” when I returned to Britain. I asked why he would say that, considering Nigeria was in the middle of a huge economic crisis, with civil servants going unpaid for months and millions struggling to feed their families. My (well-paid) friend replied that this was nothing new in Nigeria, and was, in fact, better not emphasised. “You know negative western media stories on Africa only make these white folk and others look down on us,” he pointed out.

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It typified the attitude among Africa’s privileged classes towards how their continent is viewed. While the majority poor population are often keen for the international media to highlight their suffering in the desperate hope some help might be forthcoming, affluent Africans are usually more concerned with the “negative stereotypes” they believe discussing poverty in Africa perpetuates. Their priorities are driven by their socioeconomic realities; they are the ones who travel abroad and come into contact with white people in international settings, conferences and what not. They understandably want to be treated as equals in these settings, not patronised, especially as they are accustomed to being treated deferentially in their own societies as a result of their class status.

They are, therefore, irritated by unflattering news stories about poverty in Africa because they know this helps shape how they themselves will be perceived abroad — as people associated with an unsuccessful continent. In essence, they are more interested in what is said about Africa than in the material reality of Africa for the majority of its inhabitants.

In recent years, I have come to notice similar class-based preoccupations in today’s western-centric antiracism, which is often too distant from the everyday material problems of the vast majority of black and brown-skinned people in the world, including here in the rich West. It is an antiracism that seems to believe policing language and boosting the influence of black and brown-skinned people in western cultural spaces is the highway to racial equality. Language and culture certainly matter, but the truth is that they can often be a distraction in the pursuit of racial equality.

Marx, despite everything, was correct in his key observation that it is the material world which determines ideology, not the other way round. Indeed, white racism today is the primordial manifestation of a global class system; one that, thanks mostly to material factors, has the power to impact black and brown lives. While it is true that numbers alone create a huge power differential between whites and others in a country like Britain, in a global context where whites constitute less than 15% of the world’s population, the only reason white racism is feared and talked about is because of the disproportionate power wielded by white wealth. Racism, after all, can only thrive when a particular racial group possesses the capacity to dominate others. Then it simply becomes a question of whether they choose to exploit that ability or not.

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It needs hardly stating that the white capacity to dominate stems from their wealth. Despite the recent economic success of a few non-white nations, most notably Japan and China, 6 of the 10 largest economies in the world today are white-majority nations. Britain alone has a larger GDP than Africa. And when it comes to per capita wealth, crucial for deciding the negotiating power of individuals in a capitalist world, 17 of the top 20 nations are white-majority societies. Crucially, whites run much of today’s world because of this wealth, not because of their words. If the west were poor, nobody would care about white racism because it would be a toothless beast.

This white economic power is also reflected in our domestic reality: median white British household wealth stands at £314,000 compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. These material realities are far more important for the enabling of white racism than whether we read more or less Shakespeare in British schools. Or whether Churchill ends up pronounced a racist or not.

That is not to deny the power of words and morality. Moral arguments played a significant role in ending the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism by rendering both embarrassingly difficult to defend. People generally like to think themselves as good, and most find it unsettling to be accused of injustice. As it happens, British identity is very much intertwined with a self-image of fairness. This is why accusations of racial inequality usually provoke a strong reaction from mainstream (by that I mean “white”) Britain; it stems from a psychological need to protect that self-image.

This desire to not be seen as unfair has often proved an ally to those who have found themselves in a disadvantageous power relationship with Britain. Obafemi Awolowo, one of colonial Nigeria’s key pro-independence leaders, often emphasised that Nigerian independence was won “without firing a single shot” thanks to a combination of mass mobilisation and moral persuasion. His message was simple yet powerful: colonial rule does not meet the moral standards and democratic values the British professed to practise. In other words, it was a fundamentally unfair system deployed by a country that claimed to uphold fairness. With time, Britain had to acknowledge that this contradiction couldn’t be squared and the system had to go.

In a similar vein, the UK protests following George Floyd’s death, demanding an end to racial inequality, have also elicited a commitment to greater fairness from the majority population. This is not to be sneered at. But one thing history shows clearly is that while moral arguments were effective in helping end the formalised racial hierarchies we saw during slavery and colonialism, they did not, and could not, end the informal racial hierarchies stemming from economic hierarchies. These hierarchies place the wealthiest racial group — white people — at the top, the collectively poorest large racial group — black people — at the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in the middle.

Aside from the practical implications of this, the knowledge that their nations tend to be wealthier and better-developed helps foster a sense of superiority among more than a few white people, while simultaneously placing many black and brown-skinned folk at a psychological disadvantage.

Meanwhile, historical debates over how we got to where we are today might be important, but unless we actually believe they can lead to white folk one day deciding to hand over half their collective wealth — which I don’t believe will happen — then “winning” such debates won’t change much in the real world. Focusing on the non-material aspects of white racism may come more naturally to those driving the race debate; it is certainly easier than coming up with practical solutions to its long-lasting material aspects. But only the latter can truly change the everyday realities of Britain’s minorities.

This is why I think by far the most important British reaction to the protests following George Floyd’s death was the government’s establishment of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, due to release its report soon. Of course, the true measure of this initiative will be in the depths of its findings and the plausibility of its recommendations to reduce the material disparities between this country’s racial groups. But acknowledging that socioeconomic power differentials are the key to enabling white racism today is a crucial beginning to a more equal and racially harmonious Britain. The sooner we start focussing more on the material side of things, the better.

Most of the people killed in the war were from a particular ethnic group – the Igbos – who had attempted to secede from freshly-independent Nigeria and were brutally prevented from doing so. Nigeria’s post-war leaders thus believed it in the interest of “national unity” to speak as little as possible about that particularly painful episode in the country’s history.

There is some logic in the strategy, since how do you teach a nation an aspect of its history that is inherently divisive? Years later, when I asked my British university class what they had learned at school about colonisation, “Nothing really!” was the chorused reply. “In A-level history, I learnt a bit about the British Empire, all positive stuff,” one student offered. “There was a little on colonialism in India, but nothing about Africa.” I teach a pretty mixed bunch, coming from various parts of Britain, and the suggested education gap on this subject strikes me as problematic.

The calls to “decolonise” the curriculum have returned this year, intensifying in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd and the attendant heated debate about race. But with something as consequential as British colonialism, I think the question should not be whether to teach it — yes — but rather how to teach about it.

This presents no small challenge, the problem being that Britain is inhabited both by the descendants of those who were conquered, and those who did the conquering. One’s story of victorious expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

My Nigerian secondary school teachers had it easier on this front. Everyone in the school — teacher and pupil alike — was Nigerian. We were thus all automatically united on one side of the colonial divide, the side of the colonised. This provided teachers with a clear perspective from which to teach colonial history, with an emphasis on prominent Nigerian anti-colonialists, stretching from the early 19^th-century resistors to the pro-independence leaders of the Fifties. It was obvious to us all who the heroes of the colonial story were, and who were its villains (the British of course).

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But the demographics are different in the UK; unsurprisingly, so are attitudes towards Empire. According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 32% of Britons are proud of the British Empire, 19% are ashamed of it, 37% are neither proud nor ashamed, while the rest don’t know what to think. On top of this, 33% of Brits believe former colonies are “better off” for being a part of the British Empire, compared to 17% who think them “worse-off”.

There clearly exists an expectation among some scholars demanding more education about colonialism that this would dramatically shift British public opinion against Empire. I wouldn’t be so sure.

This expectation underestimates the human desire to feel strong, the powerful psychological appeal for many, not just in Britain, in taking pride in the conquests of their ancestors. It offers a sense of collective strength they can tap into as individuals. If they, of whom I am one, could be so triumphant in the past, surely I too possess triumph in me?

The morality of taking pride in ancestral conquests involving the killing and subjugation of other human beings is questionable, but its psychological appeal is undeniable. People want to feel strong and they often grab at whatever gives them that feeling of strength. According to YouGov, as many as 50% of Dutch people feel proud of their past Empire; the French are only slightly less proud than the British of theirs, and less prone to shame about it.

This is not just a white people thing; the same YouGov survey showed that only one in five Japanese today are ashamed of their imperial past, despite its disastrous consequences. Turks enjoy emphasising their role in the powerful Ottoman Empire, with current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even declaring modern-day Turkey a “continuation” of the Ottomans.

Hence, while I think it important to teach about British colonialism because of its consequences for present-day history and while it is difficult for me, the son of a Nigerian father, to view colonialism and Empire positively or even neutrally, I understand why some (white) Britons feel differently. However, what complicates matters for me somewhat is that some Africans who actually experienced British colonialism had mixed feelings about it, a theme rarely explored in current debate.

I emphasise that British colonialism is what I am referring to. No one was ambivalent about the barbaric rule of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II, whose savagery cost some 10 million lives, as documented in Adam Hochschild’s heart-wrenching King Leopold’s Ghost. I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.

But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote.

According to this, while Nigeria’s educated elites wanted Britain out as fast as possible so they could start running their country, many regular Nigerians seemed to sense a fairness in the British exercise of power that they were not so sure of in their own leaders. Awolowo did not put this down to what was called “colonial brainwashing” but said that he felt many Nigerians had “good reasons” to think this way.

Of course, because British colonialism was hypocritically justified as stemming from concern (bless their good hearts) for the supposedly “savage” conditions of life in pre-colonial Africa, African anti-colonialists had little strategic choice but to construct a counter-narrative strongly negating this depiction, one portraying Africans in a positive light. This led to what Nigerian historian Toyin Falola described as the “simple but seductive thesis that Africa used to live in peace and innocence until its contact with Europeans”. And so the one-sided, sweeping colonialist narrative was countered with a one-sided, sweeping anti-colonialist narrative. But this did not mean that regular folk on the ground lost all memory of the past.

Obviously, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s famous 1958 book, Things Fall Apart, brilliantly portrayed, the disruption colonialism brought to the lives of everyday Nigerians was massive, and in my view, ultimately indefensible. Imagine foreigners come to your homeland, kill some of you, and tell the rest everything you ever believed is rubbish. Your religion is rubbish, your traditions are rubbish, your values are rubbish, the way you organise your entire economy and life is wrong.

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The assault on African ideas was so severe that the continent is still trying to recover its identity; still trying to figure out an idea for modern Africanness that would not be an imitation of Westernness or so focussed on resisting Eurocentrism it ends up defining Africans in opposition to Europeans, thus ultimately being Eurocentric itself. Post-colonial Africa is still searching for an identity that explains who Africans are, not who they are not.

Yet in an interview a few years after independence, the same Achebe who had highlighted colonialism’s disruptive nature stated: “I am not one of those who would say Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period…this is ridiculous – we have gained a lot. But unfortunately, when two cultures meet . . . what happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added.”

Intellectuals such as Achebe clearly recognised the identity crisis colonialism triggered. They also knew about British atrocities such as the looting and destruction of the ancient Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, among others. Yet on the other hand, Achebe believed that Africa benefited from the introduction of Western education, technology and medicine, as well as liberal European ideals such as “democracy” and “equality”, which had not necessarily been popular beforehand.

It is, however, important to emphasise that even between British colonies, there were significant differences in the actual practice of colonialism. It was significantly more brutal in Kenya than in Nigeria, for instance, with the former witnessing bloody events such as the Mau Mau Uprising in which thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered as late as the mid-20th century.

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I know some fear that if we start allowing for nuances in our assessments of colonialism, then we are opening the door for white people to shed any guilt whatsoever over the entire affair. That even more Britons will start asserting, humiliatingly for us, that colonialism left our ancestors “better off”. That saying anything “positive” about it is tantamount to justifying it.

I understand this line of reasoning, but I ultimately refuse to live my life in fear of what some people may say or think. That is the quintessential post-colonial complex: living dominated by anxieties over how white people see us. Instead we should liberate ourselves from the shackles of these historical complexes that yes, were thrust upon us, but that only we can shake off ourselves; those complexes that limit what we feel we can say about ourselves once white people are listening. Discussing colonialism frankly is a sign of strength, not weakness.

So for British teachers wondering how to teach the subject, it is important to cite various perspectives, including, crucially, the perspectives of the colonised; not in a wholly arbitrary manner seeking to buttress this or that grand narrative, but in a way revealing the complexities and contradictions of Britain’s colonial encounter with Africa.

This does not mean truth-seeking can be an excuse for insensitivity. The reality is that colonialism is an inherently emotive subject for millions of black and brown people in this country. We need more frank and open debate about it, definitely, but that debate should always serve the ultimate purpose of helping build this nation rather than tearing it apart.

While a black Brit may have personally experienced racism, chances are the Nigerian in Nigeria hasn’t. Yet both clearly seem to have shared something unifying in recent weeks, and I have wondered what exactly is at play here, beyond the ubiquitous and increasingly indefinite concept of ‘racism’. A discernible majority of the black opinion I have engaged points to the key role of another, slightly more specific, R-word: Respect.

The Nigerian who has never travelled abroad and the black Brit are united by a shared sense of global disrespect for the black race. The video of a white policeman casually snuffing the life out of George Floyd was a particularly humiliating reminder of that disrespect. Hence the outpouring of global support for the Black Lives Matter Movement from black people who otherwise face very different struggles in their everyday lives.

This feeling of disrespect has been articulated by Alicia Garza, the activist co-founder of BLM: “Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, disrespect, and lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.” Meanwhile, a recent CNN survey showed that 49% of black Britons have experienced disrespectful treatment from the police, compared to 26% of whites.

How literally we should be interpreting subjective evaluations of ‘respectful treatment’ might be an issue for debate, but what ultimately matters for race relations is that these feelings are out there. Public opinion on any issue hinges on popular perceptions. What the poll also revealed was that black Britons are significantly more likely to see racism as a major problem in Britain than other ethnic minorities.

On issues ranging from police treatment to minority chances of success, “the results are striking; it is often the case that black people are considerably more dissatisfied with race relations than other ethnic minorities”, said Chris Hopkins of Savanta ComRes who co-conducted the survey. This appears reflective of a feeling among many blacks that there persists an unspoken racial hierarchy which positions white people at the top, black people at the bottom and everyone else somewhere in between.

But is this feeling backed up by reality?

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Whether it is Libyans selling black Africans into slavery, which is happening right now, Chinese people contemptuously discriminating against blacks in China, or Indians doing same in India, a general low regard for black people across the world does seem to be a constant. In fact, the reason we focus on racism in the West and not elsewhere is because western societies are the most responsive to black opinion. As a general rule, the Chinese, Indians and Arabs don’t seem to care very much whether we consider them racist or not. Their societies are openly assertive of their felt superiority.

So we know about the negative perceptions of black people created by slavery and colonialism, but what exactly is driving this hierarchy today? “White supremacist propaganda”, according to the BLM narrative. Western movies and media contain overt and covert messages propagating black inferiority. These are internalised by white people and others, including black people, thus sustaining global belief in black inferiority. Hence, the ongoing campaign to pull movies and TV shows deemed racist from the sites of Netflix et al.

However, even if we accept a racial hierarchy does exist, I think this particular approach is steeped in an excessive tendency to elevate the symbolic above the material when it comes to race. A belief that it is enough to stop white people from saying certain things for black dignity to become a given.

The “white-supremacist messaging drives global disrespect for black people and black self-hate” argument was technically plausible in the 20^th-century, when Western entertainment and media were essentially the only game in town. But since the beginning of this century, we’ve lived in a world where people have access to multiple sources of information, can follow who they want on social media and one where Nigerians watch more Nollywood movies than Hollywood movies. Yet, white people are still welcomed with open arms everywhere while black people are often not. So what gives?

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It is surprising to see radical Leftists so focused on white-supremacy ideology as the great explainer of racism, when Marx himself clearly argued it is the material which determines the ideological, rather than the other way around. We live in a capitalist world, hence, our values are shaped by capitalism’s values, both at conscious and subconscious levels. What does capitalism value most? Wealth and success. So these are what impress most of the world today.

It is why even intellectuals who love bashing capitalism make sure to emphasise they are “best-selling” authors on their social-media profiles. It is why most people adopt an instinctively respectful tone in the presence of the significantly successful. They listen to their words attentively, like they expect to hear something worth knowing. Because, like it not, the world has bought into the idea of success being an indicator of specialness.

As it works on an individual level, so it does on a group level. White and predominantly-white nations remain the richest and most successful nations in the world, while black ones remain the poorest and least successful. The rest of the world is somewhere in between. It is no coincidence the world’s informal racial hierarchy faithfully reflects its economic hierarchy.

Yes, the global economic status quo was arrived at often brutally and almost always unfairly. But no matter how many times we tell the story of slavery and colonialism, it will not change the material reality on the ground. The gargantuan wealth gap between the white and black races is by far the most influential factor shaping racial dynamics today. The combined GDP of 1.2 billion-strong Africa, where 90% of the black race lives, is smaller than that of 66 million-strong Britain. Such a disproportionate wealth and power gap is not conducive to balanced race relations.

It makes too many black destinies dependent on white action and white goodwill. It creates a reality in which the world regularly sees on its TV screens large numbers of black Africans risking their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, desperate to get into Europe. Because their own governments have failed them so badly, they see no opportunities for a better life back home. Surely, no one believes such realities don’t diminish global regard for blackness? Moral arguments are important, but given our experience of human nature, the surest and most realistic route to black people getting the global respect we so strongly desire, is by us becoming collectively wealthier and stronger.

Nigerian scholar and historian Toyin Falola characterised contemporary black-white relations thus: “If Europeans regarded Africans as the ‘primitive Other’, the colonial experience enabled Africans to construct themselves as a terrorised race, raped and exploited by the patriarchal, powerful ‘white Other’.”

This reactive construct of Africanness resembles very much the construct of global blackness offered by the BLM school of thought. The problem with this approach is that it appears more interested in portraying the present vulnerability of the black collective as a moral virtue rather than focusing on eliminating that vulnerability. It obsesses over the appeal and power of whiteness, instead of trying to figure out how to make blackness more appealing and powerful.

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This construct may inspire the world’s sympathy, but it will not win its respect. Perpetual sympathy without respect means being viewed as a perpetual victim. I, for one, do not wish to be so viewed, and I suspect there are other black people who don’t either. The achievement of black strength and resultant respect can come from a consciously determined focus on black economic advancement within the diaspora populations and, crucially, in Africa. The Jewish story is a great example of collective vulnerability transformed into collective strength in the space of a generation. Powerless to stop their systematic slaughter during World War Two, Jewish leaders learnt the lesson that strength is the best guarantor of safety.

Today, the world doesn’t need to be told that the Jewish diaspora, backed up by the strong state of Israel, shouldn’t be pushed around. It is good to aim for a more morally fair environment, but wise to ensure that even if others are failed by their morals, you would not make an easy victim. Some of the greatest 20^th-century black thinkers, such as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B Du Bois, recognised this need for black strength, hence their emphasis on the need for the emergence of powerful black nations.

I realise most black Britons were born here and have never even been to Africa, but the reality is that blackness will always be associated with Africa, the black ancestral homeland, just the way whiteness will always be associated with Europe. Black destiny and African destiny are inseparable. There are already great cultural collaborations between black Britain and African artistes: Nigerian afrobeat stars Fela Kuti and Wizkid are household names in black Britain. It is time for more economic bridge-building by actively seeking to boost business ties between black Britain and the African continent.

It was the first Black Pound Day this weekend, a planned monthly event encouraging people to popularise and patronise black-owned businesses in Britain. The brainchild of Swiss, a member of So Solid Crew, it is a much needed positive mobilisation of agency towards boosting black economic strength. With Britain seeking new trade relationships, this is a perfect moment to mobilise entrepreneurs to actively seek business opportunities in Africa while encouraging British consumers to buy Made in Africa products — whether that’s Ethiopian coffee, Kenyan roses or South African wine.

It is only if we consciously strive to harness and multiply our collective resources that a globally stronger black position can be achieved. One where no black person has to “ask” for equality or justice. One where black dignity is a given. The road to black respect lies in economics, not in sociology or history. And it is a road that must pass through Africa, the heart of the black race.