Aren’t You Too Old to Be so Idealistic About Africa?: A Selection from Jacqueline Novogratz’s Manifesto for a Moral Revolution (2020)

“‘Aren’t you too old to be so idealistic about Africa?’ a prominent Nigerian businessman taunted me with a smile during a 2009 dinner party in a posh home in Accra, Ghana. Around the long rectangular table with me were eighteen West African businessmen and my colleague Catherine Casey Nanda. The air held the scent of frangipani and formality.

Catherine and I were at that table to introduce Acumen to potential philanthropic supporters in West Africa, to paint a picture of what Acumen was capable of igniting in the region, and to set the stage for raising local funds. Catherine had already shared anecdotes of potential investments we would make in Nigeria and Ghana, stories that offered strong testimony to the potential of our work. The night had been progressing swimmingly.

Then I launched into a perhaps too-rhapsodic address about Acumen’s work from a more global perspective. The man’s question about my idealism took me by surprise. His words were skeptical; his tone, cynical. I was conscious of my race, my outsider status, and the larger stakes of this first meeting to introduce Acumen to West Africa. At the same time, I experienced the man’s provocation as an affront to what my team and our collective work represented. Into the center of that table, with its starched and pressed linen and its sterling silver, attended by uniformed men wearing pristine white gloves, the charismatic questioner had thrown down a gauntlet.

I reached across the finery to accept the challenge, asking the man what he meant by his question.

‘Just what I said,’ he responded flatly. ‘Aren’t you too old to be so idealistic about Africa?’

Now all eyes were on me.

‘I choose idealism as an antidote to cynicism,’ I said, locking the man’s eyes with my own. ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t see the ugly or the challenges. I’m trying to picture how I would inspire an audience by describing only the continent’s underbelly. Isn’t West Africa much more than that?’

Internally, I could feel the presence of two voices, one telling me to put a muzzle on my mouth; the other one urging me forward. ‘Would you rather I spoke about some of my experiences with incompetence or corruption or abject indifference?’ I asked, as the timbre of my voice gradually crescendoed. ‘For I could give a lecture on any of those topics. I could also share anecdotes of elites who talk a big game of love and peace only to let down their countrymen and women, knowing that as long as they are in the ‘right clubs,’ the world will applaud their riches and ignore their misdeeds. Or I could recount times I’ve been held up, mugged, assaulted, robbed, and threatened. I could speak about colleagues of mine who fought for justice, for years, only to be murdered during the Rwandan genocide; or describe others who capitulated finally to their insecurities and their thirst for power, ultimately joining the perpetrators of that bloodbath.’

I took a breath, if only to stem my swelling emotions. ‘Sometimes,’ I concluded, ‘there are days when I have to fight a hardening of my own soul from seeing too many people treated like throwaways. So, yes, I can paint the opposite of idealistic for you. But as the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie says, there is more than a single story.’”—Jacqueline Novogratz, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World (2020)