When Lydia Polgreen sat down with Howard W. French for The New York Times podcast The Opinions, they confronted one of the most important questions facing Africa and the world today: Can the world afford to turn its back on Africa? French’s answer, grounded in history and moral realism, is an emphatic no. A retreat from Africa would not only forfeit the world’s new center of human dynamism; it would betray a moral debt to the continent that made modernity possible. Yet beyond this historical argument lies a challenge: Who can help Africa rise on its own terms? I suggest in this analysis that the Catholic Church in Africa, with its vast networks, intellectual and social justice tradition, and its unity of vision, possesses the moral and institutional reach to help Africa transcend the short-termism—the presentist calculus—of its political class and its foreign patrons alike.
This view was first put to me as a provocation by Professor Joel Carpenter of the Nagel Institute in Michigan in May 2023 at a Templeton Religious Trust event. He observed that, among global institutions, only the Catholic Church has both the spiritual coherence and administrative infrastructure to unite Africans around a moral purpose that reaches beyond tribe, nation, and denomination. When other structures are fragmenting, the Church’s very catholicity—its universality—may yet be Africa’s most enduring vessel for hope and social transformation.
The conversation between Polgreen and French begins from an undeniable fact: the global retreat from Africa. Western powers are cutting development aid, reducing trade, and shrinking investment. Even humanitarian programs once emblematic of American generosity, such as USAID and PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—have been hollowed out or defunded. What remains is a competition for oil, gas, cobalt, and lithium, with little interest in people. French sees in this a dangerous amnesia: the refusal to remember that the wealth of Europe and America was built on Africa’s labor, lands, and resources. To withdraw now, precisely when Africa’s demographic ascent is reshaping the planet, is to deny both history and humanity and to turn the world’s back on its future.
By 2070, Africa’s population will exceed three billion, and by the century’s end more than half of the world’s births will occur on African soil. This demographic momentum is both promise and peril. Without investment in education, health, and governance, it could fuel chaos instead of creativity. The question is not whether Africa will rise but whether it will rise with dignity.
French traces America’s engagement with Africa through three phases—humanitarian aid, economic cooperation, and conflict mediation—all of which, he argues, have collapsed into a single extractive logic. The United States now competes with China for minerals, not for the building of schools or hospitals. In the early 2000s, initiatives like PEPFAR saved millions of lives and built public health systems; today, they are replaced by short-term deals that prize profit over partnership. Europe’s imagination has also shrunk: its dominant policy concern is how to keep Africans from migrating. Border walls and refugee quotas have replaced solidarity. But, as French warns, “Even if we pretend distance will protect us, the risk will land in our laps anyway.”
He finds inspiration in Kwame Nkrumah, whose life and ideas he explores in his new book The Second Emancipation. Nkrumah grasped that the colonial map of 54 fragmented states could never serve Africa’s destiny. “Africa must unite,” he declared—not as a romantic ideal but as an economic and political necessity. Continental unity, shared markets, and free movement of peoples were the only safeguards against renewed dependency. French revives that vision as the most realistic path forward: Africa must pool its vast resources, talent, and creativity into one continental project rather than waiting for benevolence from Washington or Brussels.
Central to Nkrumah’s vision was the African diaspora. Having studied in the United States, he absorbed the radical ferment of Harlem and the Black intellectual tradition of Lincoln and Howard Universities. There he encountered W. E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore, and drew inspiration from Marcus Garvey’s dream of a united Black world. These encounters produced a trans-Atlantic solidarity linking Africa’s liberation to the struggle for racial justice worldwide. Today, millions of Africans live, work, and study abroad; they are among the most educated and dynamic immigrant communities in the West. French sees in them an immense moral and intellectual reserve—an instrument for reshaping perceptions of Africa and influencing global policy from within. Yet this will require mutual recognition between continental Africans and African Americans, whose conversations about belonging and identity are still unfolding. From this dialogue could emerge a renewed Black internationalism suited to our century.
The cost of ignoring Africa is catastrophic. Its cities are expanding faster than any in human history. Without deliberate planning and investment, Kinshasa, Lagos, or Nairobi could swell into thirty-million-person megacities of exclusion and misery. Such suffering would not remain local: economic stagnation in Africa would slow global growth, intensify migration crises, and feed the political extremism already haunting Europe and America. The world cannot wall itself off from Africa’s destiny. Disengagement would not only be immoral; it would be self-defeating.
For French, the moral logic is unassailable: Africa has always been central to the making of the modern world. Its labor fueled the Atlantic economy, its minerals powered industrialization, its peoples shaped global culture. To ignore Africa now is to repeat the blindness that justified slavery and colonialism. Yet French’s realism is not nostalgic. Western societies are aging and shrinking; their survival depends on engagement with Africa’s youthful energy. Africa is not a burden—it is the world’s last, best hope for renewal.
What then must be done? French proposes a fourfold path: reimagine unity as interlinked markets and cultural networks; invest in human capital rather than extractive industries; empower the diaspora as a bridge of renewal; and reclaim Africa’s own narrative of dignity and agency. This requires courage from African leaders and humility from the global North—an exchange between fear and friendship, between containment and cooperation. Beneath the politics lies a deeper imperative: to ignore Africa is to abandon our shared humanity. The 20th century fought for independence; the 21st must practice interdependence by embracing what Pope Francis framed as a ‘culture of encounter.’
This is where the late Senegalese social innovator Alioune Diop ( a convert from Islam to Catholicism) enters the story and where the Catholic Church’s vocation becomes evident. If French summons Africa to agency, Diop offers the theological and institutional map to get there. Through Présence africaine, Diop built an intellectual and spiritual movement that sought to de-occidentalize Christianity so that its universality might serve all peoples. He helped frame the debates that led to Vatican II’s recognition of the Church as a global communion of cultures. In Diop’s method—bold lay leadership, intellectual exchange, and institutional imagination—lies a Catholic roadmap for realizing French’s hopes.
The story of Alioune Diop is the story of a man who learned to seize the opportunity of changing times to dream of an African renaissance. A philosopher, publisher, and bridge-builder, Diop saw that the liberation of Africa could not be complete without a cultural and spiritual renewal that would restore the dignity of its peoples. He helped found the Société Africaine de Culture and built a coalition that brought together Africans and the diaspora, giving rise to the first major publications on African theology. Through Présence africaine—its journal, publishing house, and bookstore—he offered Africa a voice and a home for its intellectual imagination, shaping a new respect for African agency in the global conversation of ideas.
But Diop was never content with isolationist pride. He understood that Africa’s rebirth depended on mutual encounter—the meeting of North and South, laity and clergy, Francophone and Anglophone Africa, and between Africa and the Church of Rome. His moral and intellectual diplomacy bore fruit when, in 1962, he and his collaborators were received in a papal audience by Pope John XXIII, who recognized in Présence africaine a vital force for dialogue and renewal within the universal Church. Diop believed in the transformative power of education and in building on the assets of African cultures and the agency of her people. He saw that faith must take root in the soil of lived experience, not as an imitation of Western forms but as a flowering of Africa’s own genius.
The African Catholic Church today can embody Diop’s vision in ways that give concrete expression to universality. Christianity, he insisted, is not a civilization but a universal faith. To live that universality authentically, African bishops, theologians, and pastoral leaders must continually examine seminary formation, catechesis, and liturgy for residues of cultural captivity. The Church must nurture theology, sacred art, and pastoral practice that spring from African life without apology, confident that the Spirit speaks also through Africa’s proverbs, rhythms, and communal imagination.
Diop also showed that lay people are not auxiliaries but protagonists of renewal. His intellectual audacity reoriented Catholic discourse, proving that sanctity and scholarship could flourish in the public square. In that same spirit, the African Church can cultivate continental academies of Catholic culture and public life, led by women and youth, to generate ideas and civic education that respond to Africa’s pressing realities—migration, governance, and urban transformation.
The time has come as well for a new Présence africaine for the digital age: a pan-African multimedia platform that commissions essays, documentaries, and catechetical materials on the continent’s ecological, social, and spiritual future. Such a platform could host rotating congresses of African Catholic creators—writers, artists, technologists, and pastors—who meet in Accra, Nairobi, Kinshasa, or Dakar to continue the conversation Diop began, sustained across languages, cultures, and generations.
Faithful to Diop’s bridge-building vision, the African Church must renew its covenant with the diaspora. Just as he wove a tapestry linking Africa with Black intellectual traditions in Europe and the Americas, today’s episcopal conferences could forge enduring partnerships between African dioceses and diaspora parishes, co-designing scholarships, social enterprises, and pastoral exchanges. These bonds must be visible, measurable, and fruitful—living testimonies that the Church’s universality is not an abstraction but a communion in action.
At the same time, Catholic universities must reimagine their mission for an urban Africa in transition and characterized by religious and cultural diversity. Diop believed that ideas must serve life. Higher education can therefore become a laboratory for integral development, uniting theology, social science, and technical training in service of human flourishing. Institutes dedicated to urban development, migration, women’s empowerment, and the ethics of natural resources can link academic inquiry to parish-based entrepreneurship and social innovation.
In this way, the Church will preach Populorum Progressio for a new century that has been inspired by Dilexi Te—advocating for dignified work, land justice, fair trade within the African Continental Free Trade Area, and climate resilience. Like Diop engaging Pope Paul VI on the theology of development, today’s bishops can speak with one voice to the African Union and regional blocs, turning pastoral insight into policy vision; and synodal documents into daily acts of solidarity and practices of reversal of the unacceptable condition of God’s African people.
Diop also called for memory to be canonized. Holiness, he believed, dwells not only in martyrs and mystics but in artists, scientists, and social innovators who make faith incarnate in daily life. Each diocese could become a House of African Catholic Memory, preserving the witness of those whose faith transformed their communities and offering models for the young who seek meaning in turbulent times. He taught, too, the necessity of a politics of encounter. His gatherings drew Muslims, secular intellectuals, and artists into dialogue about the human condition. Inspired by his example, the African Church could establish Palaver Tables—forums where imams, chiefs, civic leaders, and youth organizations deliberate on the common good under a shared moral horizon.
Diop’s moral clarity also challenges the Church to defend the dignity of migrants, who embody both Africa’s vulnerability and its hope. The Church must replace reactive charity with an agenda of rights and development—accompanying, protecting, and advocating for those who cross borders in search of life.
Above all, the Church must tell the truth about Africa’s gift. Diop believed Africa had something essential to teach the world: a humanism of relationship, a spirituality of joy, and a deep sense of community that can heal the fractures of modern life. African evangelization must therefore cease mirroring the deficit narratives imposed from outside; it must proclaim Africa as a source of renewal for a weary world.
Alioune Diop’s life remains a testimony to what organized lay courage and critical love can accomplish. He showed that fidelity to the Church’s universality does not mean cultural subservience but creative participation. If his method—catholic universality without cultural captivity, empowered laity, bridges to the diaspora, and institutions that convene, publish, and build—becomes our common practice, then Howard French’s warning to the world becomes our mandate. Africa need not wait for permission to rise, and the Church must not wait for applause to serve.
In this spirit, these principles and values of Diop have inspired the formation of the Pan-African Catholic Theology and Pastoral Network, which I have the privilege of serving as Coordinating Servant. We believe that Africa is indeed rising, and we wish to be the tender hands guiding this ascent—like a young vine curling around a sturdy stake, its roots buried deep in the wisdom of the past, yet its tendrils reaching upward toward the light of a new dawn.