Reflections from the Africa At The Center Convening in Accra, Ghana
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A couple of days after the Africa At The Center convening ended, I drove two hours out of Accra to Ada, to the Nkyinkyim Museum. It was there that I learned what it means to be called an ancestor.
The title is not given to everyone who dies. When a person dies, the community gathers not only to mourn them but to count their good deeds. If what they did while on Earth was truly remarkable, they are named an ancestor and given the proper rites. If not, they are simply remembered. The counting is deliberate, communal, and unhurried. It measures a life by trust, by dignity, by what a person carried for others.
I stood there thinking: this is a monitoring and evaluation framework. It is older than any of ours, and it counts the things we keep saying cannot be counted in development.
What I had said a few days earlier
At the Africa At The Center convening, co-hosted by WACSI, EPIC-Africa, AFFORD, RINGO, and Reos Partners, I was asked to be a provocateur, one of four responding to the same question: What does development look like when Africa defines success on its own terms?
I disagreed with the question. It rests on a false premise that success has not yet been defined and that African self-definition is a future state we are leading change toward. But Africans define success on their own terms every day, in market associations, burial societies, savings groups, and in the woman who keeps a whole street fed. The definitions exist. What barely exists is a development architecture capable of seeing them. So I offered a different question: When will the systems that claim to serve Africa stop overriding the definitions already in use?
I began by telling the story of a hundred-year-old man from Port Harcourt whom I met by chance earlier this year. Pa Tony Odili was the konga player in Cardinal Rex Lawson’s Mayor’s Band, fondly called Akatakpo for the way his konga rolls acted as cues, giving highlife music to a generation. He played through the Nigerian Civil War, across Cameroon, and Chad, and he still plays today. When he plays, his hands remember things the rest of us may never know. His life is remarkable, but only to those who truly see.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: by every instrument our sector uses to measure development, Pa Tony does not exist. No baseline captured him. No log frame has a column for a century of holding a community’s memory in one’s hands. He has never been a beneficiary, a stakeholder, or a member of a target group. And yet, if you asked me to point to something in my city that is valuable, ours, a success, I would point to him.
What Ada taught me
I left Accra with a question. I left Ada with the answer.
For too long, the development and humanitarian architecture has taught us to see, value, and count differently from how our own people see, value, and count. It has taught us to set aside our history for the sake of survival, to be dismissive of community, to look elsewhere for meaning. My worry, which I said out loud in that room, is that we professional practitioners have lost the muscle for visioning, for imagining, for remembering. We have forgotten how to speak in the languages, knowledge, and definitions that have always been ours, and have instead become fluent in a borrowed one.
The future we dream of for Africa is not some new, magical place. It lives in the act of remembering. And part of remembering is learning to ask different questions. For instance, what does meaning look like? What does good look like?
Ada answered both. In the community that gathers to count, trust, dignity, mutual respect, and shared responsibility are not “intangibles” that resist measurement. They are precisely what gets measured. The people doing the measuring are not consultants. They are the ones who lived alongside you. And the verdict is not delivered in a report. It is delivered in whether you are called an ancestor.
Pa Tony is invisible to our instruments. He is not invisible to his community, which has been counting him for a hundred years.
Taking back the pen
Reimagining development from an African worldview means taking back ownership of the pen. The power to define success is the power to write the story, and for most of our sector’s history, that pen has been held elsewhere, and sometimes, if we are honest, by those of us who learned to write fluently in a borrowed language.
I closed my provocation with a question: when this era of development is finally judged, who gets to say it worked? I did not have a good answer that day, but I think I have one now.
It will not be the donors, and it will not be us. It will be the ones who gather to count.
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