Western Civilization or Western Amnesia? History Africa Refuses to Forget

By Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Empires rarely announce themselves as empires. They return instead wrapped in moral language, armed with selectively remembered history, and convinced of their own innocence. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day in 2026, he did not offer a defence of civilization so much as he summoned empire once again. Cloaked in the sanctified vocabulary of “Western civilization,” his speech functioned as an exercise in calculated historical falsification, laundering centuries of conquest, enslavement, extermination, and extraction into a story of heritage under threat. From an African perspective, this was not a security address at all; it was a declaration that the West has learned nothing, regrets nothing, and intends to continue.

Rubio’s speech was constructed through erasure, deliberate, systematic, and strategic. African lives were erased as capital was accumulated. Indigenous peoples were erased as continents were settled. Asia’s famines, the Middle East’s ruins, and Latin America’s coerced obedience were written out of the civilizational narrative altogether. Civilization was presented as if it emerged organically from cathedrals, symphonies, and philosophy, rather than from slave ships, concentration camps, and gunboat diplomacy. This was not ignorance. It was intent. This erasure set the stage for what followed.

Europe’s Choice: Alignment or Irrelevance

The message to Europe was unmistakable. Fall back into formation or step aside. Align fully with an American-led project of renewed domination or accept strategic and moral irrelevance. The applause that followed was not merely approval of rhetoric; it was recognition of a shared past and a proposed future. Rubio offered Europe a familiar bargain: a return to the inner circle of power, shared access to resources, and renewed authority over the Global South. What he reignited was not confidence but appetite, an old hunger for control now repackaged in the language of security, supply chains, and civilizational survival.

What Rubio framed as partnership was, in substance, a call for collective complicity. Complicity in resource extraction dressed up as competition. Complicity in sanctions regimes that starve civilian populations while claiming moral virtue. Complicity in militarization that converts entire regions into permanent theatres of war. Complicity in the criminalisation of non-European movement while celebrating European migration as destiny. This logic depends on hierarchy.

Beneath the soaring rhetoric lay an unmistakable hierarchy: non-Europeans and non-Christians were not imagined as equal participants in humanity, but as problems to be managed, labour to be exploited, or threats to be neutralised. Africa appeared not as a continent of people, but as a quarry. The Global South was rendered not as a community of nations, but as a marketplace, a battleground, and a containment zone. This was not the language of peace or cooperation. It was the language of entitlement.

Gardens, Gospels, and the Right to Rule

It did not ask the world to collaborate; it demanded submission. It did not seek accountability; it demanded amnesia. It did not imagine a shared future; it sought to reorder the past, one in which the West rules, others serve, and violence is perpetually justified by heritage. In moral terms, Rubio’s speech amounted to an invitation to become accomplices once again: accomplices to domination abroad, to dispossession, and to mass death when resistance inevitably emerges, all so that a self-declared “civilized” core may continue to consume, command, and decide who lives with dignity and who does not. Africans have heard this language before, and we know where it leads. To understand why this rhetoric resonates in Europe, it helps to place it alongside another recent speech.

Seen alongside the remarks of Josep Borrell, the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, Rubio’s message appears less exceptional than symptomatic. At first glance, the two men speak in different registers. Borrell adopts the tone of a secular technocrat, carefully distancing himself from overt colonial nostalgia, while Rubio openly invokes faith, heritage, and civilizational pride. Yet beneath these stylistic differences lies a shared moral architecture, one that places Europe and the United States at the apex of human development and casts the rest of the world as danger, deficiency, or terrain to be managed.

Borrell’s now-infamous metaphor of Europe as a “garden” surrounded by a “jungle” reveals this logic with unsettling clarity, while Rubio supplies the moral and spiritual justification that completes it. Where Borrell invokes institutions and order, Rubio invokes Christianity and Western civilization as a binding moral community. Together, stewardship and sanctification converge into a single conclusion: the West must lead, discipline, and coerce.

For Africans and much of the Global South, the message is unmistakable. Whether clothed in the language of gardens or gospels, the underlying demand remains the same: accept Western supremacy, or be managed until you do. And that is precisely why both speeches are being heard, across Africa and beyond, not as calls for cooperation, but as warnings.

Africa’s Memory of ‘Civilization’

Africans know Western civilization not as an abstract inheritance of ideas, but as lived experience. We encountered it through slavery, colonial conquest, racial hierarchy, and extraction. The wealth and power now invoked as civilization were not generated in isolation; they were financed by African labour, Asian suffering, Indigenous dispossession, and the systematic underdevelopment of much of the world. Africa did not fail to develop. It was deliberately underdeveloped (Rodney 1972).

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, an estimated 12 to 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic (Eltis and Richardson 2010). Millions more died during capture and Middle Passage. This was not an unfortunate deviation from Western progress; it was foundational to it. Banks, ports, plantations, and early industries across Europe and the Americas were built on African bodies reduced to property. What followed was not reform, but intensification.

Colonial rule deepened the devastation. British colonialism alone left a vast ledger of death. In Kenya, during the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, tens of thousands of Africans died in detention camps marked by torture, starvation, and systematic abuse (Elkins 2005; Anderson 2005). In British India, colonial economic policies, punitive taxation, forced cash-crop production, and wartime grain exports, produced repeated famines. Conservative estimates attribute 30 to 35 million Indian deaths to British rule (Bhatia 1967), with the Bengal famine of 1943 killing around three million (Mallik 2022).

The Dutch formalized racial domination in South Africa through apartheid, a system that stripped Africans of land, labour rights, and political voice to sustain white prosperity. In Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), British settler colonialism enforced land theft and minority rule through violence, laying foundations for long-term instability.

Germany carried out the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia, exterminating 65,000 to 80,000 Herero and Nama people (Olusoga and Erichsen 2010). In Tanganyika, German colonial rule relied on forced labour and collective punishment. Later, in Europe itself, German racial nationalism culminated in the Holocaust: six million Jews murdered, alongside millions of Roma, Slavs, disabled people, and others, crimes committed at the heart of Christian Europe (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2023).

Belgium transformed the Congo into one of the deadliest sites of colonial extraction. Under King Leopold II, forced labour, mutilation, and terror killed eight to ten million Congolese (Hochschild 1998). After independence, Western intervention, including US and Belgian complicity in the removal and killing of Patrice Lumumba, ensured political instability while Congolese minerals continued to flow outward.

France waged a war of annihilation in Algeria. From conquest through the war of independence, hundreds of thousands to over one million Algerians were killed through massacres, torture, and collective punishment (Horne 1977). Portugal clung to empire in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, enforcing forced labour and decades of war that devastated societies and killed hundreds of thousands.

Italy’s colonial crimes are frequently minimized in European memory but remain seared into African history. In Libya, Italian forces established concentration camps, enforced mass starvation, and carried out executions that killed tens of thousands of civilians in the campaign to crush resistance (Del Boca 2005). Italy also inaugurated a new era of colonial warfare: on November 1911, Italian pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti conducted the first aerial bombing in history, targeting civilian areas at the Ain Zara and Tajura oases during the invasion of Libya. In Eritrea, Italian rule was consolidated through terror as village chiefs and community leaders suspected of resisting colonial authority were systematically eliminated, decapitating indigenous governance structures (Yosief 1997, Yohannes 2010). In Ethiopia, the chemical bombing of civilians was not an aberration but a deliberate strategy of conquest, normalized within Italian colonial doctrine. Across Eritrea and Somalia, Italy enforced racial laws, seized land, and institutionalized dehumanization, reducing African populations to expendable labour in a hierarchy explicitly designed to privilege Europeans.

America’s Imperial Creed

The United States, often portrayed as separate from European colonialism, was shaped by two doctrines that mirror and extend imperial logic: manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. Manifest destiny justified the westward expansion of the United States through the violent removal, dispossession, and killing of Indigenous peoples, contributing to the collapse of Indigenous populations by four to five million people (Horne 2020). American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is uniquely virtuous and exempt from the rules governing others, has repeatedly rationalized foreign intervention, regime change, and mass civilian harm abroad.

In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 civilians and inaugurating an era in which mass civilian death became an accepted instrument of power (Johnston 2020). In Iraq, US-led wars and sanctions contributed to hundreds of thousands to more than a million deaths, including large numbers of children (Iraq Body Count 2026; Burnham et al. 2006). Across the Global South, from Cuba to the Middle East, US coercive economic measures have produced widespread humanitarian suffering while entrenching political stalemate. These actions were not aberrations; they were expressions of a worldview that places American power above international law and human consequence. This is the civilization Rubio urges the world to defend without qualification.

Empire Without Colonies: Neocolonialism

Colonialism did not end; it evolved into neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965). Africa today is constrained not by colonial administrators but by debt, trade regimes, and financial architecture designed elsewhere. The World Bank and IMF impose austerity that dismantles public health systems and education. The United Nations speaks of equality while maintaining a Security Council that denies Africa meaningful power. The US dollar functions as a global instrument of coercion, weaponized through sanctions that restrict access to medicine, technology, and finance.

Mineral extraction remains central to this system. Africa supplies the cobalt, lithium, gold, uranium, and rare earths that power Western economies and technologies, yet Africans remain poor. Rubio’s call for Western “supply chain sovereignty” is not new thinking; it is the old extractive logic dressed in strategic language.

Migration, Hypocrisy, the Racial Line and Christianity Bent to Power

His hostility to migration compounds the hypocrisy. African migration is not a civilizational threat; it is the predictable outcome of centuries of extraction, war, and imposed underdevelopment. For the son of immigrants to frame migration as danger, in a country built entirely by people fleeing famine and war, is a profound contradiction, intensified by the racialization of who is deemed undesirable.

Most troubling of all is Rubio’s invocation of “Western Christianity” as moral foundation. Africans encountered this Christianity not as liberation but as accompaniment to conquest. It justified slavery, sanctified empire, and rationalized racial hierarchy. This is not the Christianity of the Gospels, nor the faith envisioned by Paul. It is Christianity reshaped to serve power, not humanity.

Conclusion

From Africa, Rubio’s speech reads not as renewal but as a call to restore hierarchy. It demands pride without reckoning and loyalty without justice. Africa does not seek Western decline. It seeks truth, accountability, and structural transformation. Civilization cannot be defended by erasing its victims, and faith cannot be invoked while ignoring the millions killed in its name. What was offered in Munich was not a vision for shared security, but nostalgia for an order that cost Africa, Asia, and Indigenous peoples tens of millions of lives. That order has no moral claim on the future.

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