In my essay “The new World Order”*, we have been looking at geopolitics through a triangle—Asia, the USA, and Europe—while omitting the continent that will most reshape the 21st century’s landscape.
May, 2026
Africa’s role is no longer a footnote. It is becoming a hinge: where population, resources, sea lanes, and security pressures converge—where the future’s bargains will be struck, resisted, renegotiated, or enforced.
But here is the challenge: Africa’s weight is rising faster than Africa’s leverage.
The “place” Africa occupies will not be granted by others. It will be built—patiently, institution by institution, corridor by corridor, contract by contract—often under intense external pressure.
And in 2026, that pressure has intensified: a widening Middle East war has jolted energy markets, choked trade routes, and pushed food and fertilizer prices upward—turning Africa’s external dependencies into immediate political risk.
Africa’s role in geopolitics (what the big players already know)
1) Africa is becoming the demographic center of gravity
“Place” starts with arithmetic: more than half of global population growth to 2050 is expected to occur in Africa—meaning future labor, consumers, soldiers, voters, and innovators increasingly concentrate there.
Demography, however, is not power by itself. It becomes power only when it is converted into capability: education systems that work, jobs that exist, cities that function, and institutions that can carry social pressure without breaking.
In an era of price shocks and climate volatility, the “capability test” becomes harsher: youth bulges without employment become not only an economic failure, but a security vulnerability that foreign actors can exploit.
2) Africa is a decisive node in the energy transition and supply chains
Critical minerals (cobalt, copper, lithium, etc.) are not a side topic; they are the material spine of batteries, grids, defense tech, and industrial policy. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s weight in cobalt supply and the race to shape “responsible” mineral supply chains are central to how the US/EU/China plan their next decade.
This is leverage—but only if Africa can shift from extract-and-export to value capture: refining, standards, taxation, local power, and industrial clusters. Otherwise, “strategic” becomes another word for “exposed.”
A 2026 signal: the Great Lakes region’s security situation is again being treated as a strategic minerals problem, not only a humanitarian one. Washington-hosted talks between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo this month explicitly linked de‑escalation to stability and (implicitly) to resource access and supply-chain confidence. In a bargain-driven world, peace processes increasingly arrive with an economic subtext.
3) Africa sits on (and around) maritime chokepoints that suddenly matter again
Red Sea instability has shown how quickly trade routes reroute “around Africa,” imposing costs and reshaping port importance; Egypt’s Suez revenues and regional security became global variables.
In a world of contested sea lanes, ports are not just infrastructure—they are bargaining positions. Coastal governance, logistics reliability, insurance costs, and naval partnerships become strategic currency.
Now add the Iran war: since late February 2026, the conflict has widened into energy and shipping warfare, with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted and oil and LNG flows under threat.
The result has been a global energy shock and renewed stress on maritime routing, insurance premiums, and freight costs. Brent crude has surged past $100 per barrel, with some models predicting energy spikes up to $175. For Africa, this is not “far away”: it hits budgets, inflation, and the price of imported staples. For import-dependent states like Kenya and Ethiopia, this translates to 25% jumps in fuel and fertilizer costs, threatening the very “social coherence” required to negotiate a place in the new order.
It also magnifies the strategic value of African coastlines—from the Red Sea and the Horn, down to the Cape route that becomes the fallback when the Middle East corridor is unstable. Currently, with the economic blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, the route is the primary global artery, making South African and West African port stability a Tier-1 global security priority.
As of March 22, 2026, the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has escalated from a “disruption” to a potential full-scale military flashpoint! Donald Trump issued a formal 48-hour ultimatum and threatened to strike Iranian power plants, puts the world not just in a “shocked” state; it puts us on the precipice of a massive kinetic escalation that could permanently alter energy transit to Africa. Of course, the ultimatum will be prolonged, we know Trump. Big mouth, no substance, no plan.
4) Africa is a battlefield of security models and influence
The Sahel’s political-security realignment— including the Sahel States’ trajectory and rupture from the Economic Community of West African States—signals something bigger: legitimacy crises, insurgency, and “who provides security” are increasingly internationalized (Russia’s Africa Corps, Western retrenchment, regional fragmentation).
This is geopolitics in its hardest form: when security collapses, everything else collapses with it—trade, schooling, health, investment. And once that spiral starts, external actors do not arrive as neutral helpers; they arrive with models, interests, and conditions.
2026 adds another layer: the Middle East war is driving a global contest for drones, air defenses, electronic warfare, and cheap strike capabilities. Those technologies diffuse. Where states are brittle, diffusion becomes destabilization. Africa’s security dilemma is no longer only “boots on the ground”—it is increasingly about who controls the skies, the spectrum, and the supply of armed systems that tilt local balances at low cost.
5) Africa is shaping the Global South’s institutional future
BRICS expansion (including African members like South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia—and newer partnership formats) is part of a wider move: more forums, more voting blocs, more “variable geometry.”
Even when these platforms are messy, they change the bargaining table—especially on sanctions, finance, development banking, and “rules.” The continent is not only being influenced; it is also helping rewire the institutional landscape.
But institutional influence is constrained by debt and liquidity. Ethiopia’s ongoing bond restructuring dispute and creditor frictions underline how financial sovereignty can be limited by the architecture of global debt workouts. In practice, “place” in the world order is also the ability to refinance without humiliation and to invest without macroeconomic fragility.
The agency question: where Africa “has to find its place”
Africa is not one actor. It’s 54 states, multiple regional blocs, and very different regimes. So “Africa’s place” is less a single seat—and more a set of disciplined bargaining strategies.
The African challenge is to turn pluralism into coordination without collapsing into uniformity; to stay open to partners without becoming capturable by patrons; to turn abundance into sovereignty rather than into extraction. In 2026, this challenge sharpens: war-driven price shocks reward disciplined states and punish those whose legitimacy rests on subsidized fuel, imported bread, or opaque debt.
A) Build continental leverage through market-making, not speeches
AfCFTA, the African Continental Free Trade Area, is the closest thing to a structural power project: a bigger internal market reduces dependency on external patrons. The implementation is uneven, but the ratification scale and guided-trade mechanisms show momentum.
Geopolitical meaning: the less fragmented African demand and logistics are, the less Africa must accept “take-it-or-leave-it” deals. A market that can say “no” is already a market that has begun to matter.
The Iran war underlines why this matters: when external corridors choke and import prices jump, internal trade, storage, and regional production are no longer development slogans—they are political stabilizers.
B) Turn the commodity trap into a commodities strategy
The African Union explicitly frames flagship projects around connectivity and an African commodities strategy—this is the right axis: move from resource abundance to pricing power + value chains + standards.
Hard line: without local processing, enforceable contracts, anti-corruption capacity, and grid power, “critical minerals leverage” stays mostly theoretical. The continent risks financing everyone’s transition—while remaining energy-fragile at home.
A fresh 2026 signal, February 16: the EU and South Africa are explicitly advancing “sustainable minerals and metals value chains,” with a focus on investment, regulatory cooperation, and job creation—an attempt to lock value-add (beneficiation) closer to the source.
Africa’s strategic play is to multiply such deals—without becoming captive to any single standards regime. By explicitly linking investment to local “beneficiation” (refining at the source), South Africa is successfully moving from “extract-and-export” to “value capture”.
This model proves that African states can multiply deals without becoming captive to a single patron’s “wartime urgency”.
C) Claim the “stewardship premium” as real power
In my “The new World Order”*, I define the “stewardship premium” as jurisdictions that can credibly offer predictable institutions, corruption control, resilient infrastructure, and a moral narrative backed by delivery.
Africa’s opportunity is that trust will be scarce in a bargain-driven world. Some African states can become preferred partners precisely by being boringly reliable: ports that function, permits that aren’t shakedowns, contracts that survive elections, grids that stay on.
This connects directly to the warning: a bargain-driven world is tempted to “strip-mine everything,” including institutions—yet that produces backlash and brittleness.
Translation into geopolitics: the states that protect legitimacy become the states others route trade and capital through. Reliability becomes geopolitical magnetism.
And 2026’s Middle East war makes the “premium” visible: when energy costs explode and fertilizer supply is disrupted, investors and trading partners gravitate to places with predictable policy, credible central banks, and logistics that do not collapse under stress.
D) Treat food and climate resilience as sovereignty, not charity
Food insecurity trends and climate shocks are not only humanitarian—they’re strategic (stability, migration pressure, military recruitment, and state legitimacy).
If sovereignty is increasingly defined by food, energy, development security, then Africa’s “place” is partly built through water systems, seed systems, storage, regional power pools, and insurance/finance architecture—not summits.
The Iran war adds a concrete mechanism: fertilizer markets and Gulf shipping routes are disrupted, raising input costs for global agriculture. For import-dependent African states, this translates into higher food prices and fiscal strain—exactly the kind of “silent crisis” that produces street politics, coups, or authoritarian tightening. Resilience is therefore not a moral add-on. It is a security doctrine.
E) Keep “non-alignment” practical: multi-alignment with red lines
In a fragmented order, Africa’s best posture is trade with everyone, security with caution, and no single patron with veto power. That’s “variable geometry” in practice.
But it needs red lines: debt transparency, anti-mercenary capture, local employment requirements, arbitration standards, and community consent—otherwise multi-alignment becomes elite rent-seeking.
The challenge is to diversify partnerships without outsourcing sovereignty—especially when external powers arrive with wartime urgency, offering energy deals, security packages, or financing that quietly mortgages future autonomy.
A crisp way to say it
Africa’s geopolitical role is shifting from “arena” to “arbiter”—but only where governance and coordination convert latent assets (people, minerals, geography) into dependable capability.
And Africa’s place is not granted by Washington, Beijing, Brussels, Moscow, or Delhi.
It is built—through trade integration (AfCFTA), value capture, security capacity, and the stewardship premium (legitimacy made durable).
In 2026, with Hormuz disrupted and energy/food markets stressed, the bargain-driven world is revealing its core truth: the countries that can keep their societies coherent under shock will be the countries that can negotiate their place—rather than have it assigned. Quoting Mark Carney: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
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© Robert F. Tjón, May 2026
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
This piece first appeared on Substack. I republish it here voluntarily — not as repetition, but as a trace; a place where words can rest after their first flight 👇
