Speaking on the second day of the Intra-African Trade Fair in Algiers, Algeria, on Friday, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley called for the strengthening of ties between Africa and its diaspora.
Speaking on Global Africa Diaspora Day, Mottley told her audience that the African diaspora “represents a bridge of culture, enterprise and shared destiny”.
The day aims to highlight the diaspora’s role in investment, entrepreneurship and cultural exchange and to press governments and institutions to create policies that make such cooperation easier.
“We must move from rhetoric to building the institutional frameworks that create opportunities for trade, investment, cultural exchange and connectivity,” she said.
Mottley went on to call for the dismantling of centuries of division and the building of a unity of purpose.
She recommended the film Origin, written and directed by Ava DuVernay, which speaks to “the commonalities with respect to caste that would cause humanity or aspects of humanity to treat one race superior and one inferior, one caste superior and one inferior”.
Quoting Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, the Barbadian leader went on to compare the shattered history of Africa and the diaspora to a broken vase.
“Saint Lucia produced a Nobel Prize winner by the name of Derek Walcott, whose contribution to literature is heralded across the world. And there is a quote that has been used multiple times by Caribbean leaders before myself that is appropriate today: ‘Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole,” she said.
“My friends, across the Caribbean and Africa, we are the re-assemblers, while other nations shatter our vessels of sovereignty, of ecological harmony, of ancestral continuity.
“We can choose to allow those divisions to become deeper at the very time when AI and technology threaten to deepen the divisions and widen the inequity that our people face.
“Or we can choose, however difficult it may be, to rise above the insular and the national conversations, to understand that if this world is not going to treat with respect to an international rules-based order, then we are going to see a consolidation of power, a consolidation of territory, and a consolidation of influence.”
“It is not for us to react to international circumstances. It is for us to be firm craftsmen of our fate that we believe is ours and to navigate in this perilous and uncertain world a future that reassembles the vase that was broken.”
Mottley went on to warn that the conversations and rhetoric were not enough. “…I pray that when we leave Africa this weekend that we will reach an agreement on an institutional framework that will allow us to move to a different level.”
