In 1989, South Africa did something no state has done before or since: it built nuclear weapons, six of them, and then took them apart itself, unforced, before handing power to a government it had spent decades trying to prevent from existing. Seven years later, the continent’s states gathered at Pelindaba, the self-same research site where those warheads had been assembled, and signed a treaty making the whole of Africa a nuclear-weapon-free zone.
Fifty-three states, one signature each, an idea the Organisation of African Unity had been carrying since its first summit in 1964 — that a continent still being fought over by other people’s Cold War should at least keep the worst of that fight’s weapons off its own soil. It is one of the only times in modern history that an entire continent has renounced something in concert, and almost nobody outside Africa noticed.
That fact alone is worth pondering before asking whether the gesture could extend to conventional militarism, given that it would change who would be renouncing what. Every scenario built around a single European state — Spain leaving NATO, a founding EU member dragging the bloc, for instance — involves an actor giving up a system it helped design. Africa didn’t design the arms economy it would be renouncing. It was the territory on which other people’s security calculations were settled: colonial administrations that drew borders for extraction rather than nationhood, Cold War proxy wars fought with African bodies and non-African money in Angola and Mozambique and the Congo, apartheid-era conflicts armed from three different continents at once. A continental renunciation wouldn’t be Gorbachev laying down an arsenal he built. It would be the ground other people’s wars were fought across for half a century — never holding the weapon, always standing where it was aimed — finally refusing to go on standing there.
But here the complication is sharper than anywhere this logic has been tested before, because the whole premise of renunciation assumes an aggressor weighing gains against losses — and most of what currently kills people across the continent isn’t that kind of war at all.
Boko Haram in the Lake Chad basin, al-Shabaab in the Horn, the M23 in eastern Congo, the collapse into open civil war in Sudan — none of these are contests a renunciation could address by removing a national army from the equation, because in several of these places the national army is the last thing standing between a population and an insurgency or a warlord economy, not the aggressor. A government that disarmed in front of that kind of threat wouldn’t be making Spain’s moral point. It would be leaving people to whichever armed group moved fastest. Any version of this essay that ignored that would not be describing Africa. Frankly it would be describing a continent that doesn’t exist.
What does exist, answerable and colonial in exactly the way Spain’s NATO membership never was, is the layer sitting above those internal wars rather than inside them. French forces stayed in the Sahel and West Africa for six decades after independence under bilateral defence agreements signed at the moment of independence itself, agreements that were never really negotiations between equals. The United States built out a continent-wide military command, AFRICOM, whose officers will tell you it exists to fight terrorism and whose critics will tell you it exists to secure the same minerals the colonial administrations were after. Russian state-linked forces have rotated through half a dozen capitals in exchange for mining concessions, the extraction logic barely bothering to change its name. None of that architecture is defending Africa from Africa. It’s a continuation, updated for the present century, of the exact relationship a continental renunciation would want to expose — outside powers financing and arming a security presence whose real dividend flows out through cobalt, coltan, gold, oil, back the way it always has.
Picture this. Fifty-four flags, or as many as can be brought to agree, behind a single reader at the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, timed deliberately to the anniversary of a conference held in Berlin in 1884 that spent months carving this same continent into pieces without a single African delegate in the room. The words fit on one page: No more foreign bases. No more arms shipped in and paid for with our own resources sold back to us as the price of being protected. No more wars fought on this soil and financed from somewhere else, for people who have never once had to bury their dead in it. We were carved up in a room we weren’t permitted to enter. We are done being the ground on which the rest of the world’s wars get settled.
It is aimed precisely at one layer, not at the internal conflicts a renunciation can’t touch: the bases, the arms sales, the resource-for-security trades built on top of an instability those same outside powers had a hand in creating. Not pacifism. Closer to what the Pelindaba Treaty already did with nuclear weapons, extended now to the conventional economy of extraction still running underneath most of the continent’s active wars.
The African Union is a tougher body to move than even the EU, and for a reason that compounds the problem. Fifty-four states rather than twenty-seven, consensus culture at least as entrenched, and its own peace and security architecture substantially financed by the European Union — which means the institution built to embody African security sovereignty is currently paid for, in large part, by some of the same capitals still selling the arms flowing into the continent’s wars. That’s not a minor irony. It’s the whole argument in miniature. Even the AU’s capacity to imagine an independent security future runs on outside money, the same dependency the renunciation would be trying to break.
If this ever found traction, the most plausible origin isn’t the AU as a body but a single state carrying enough moral authority to drag the conversation — and South Africa is the obvious candidate, for a reason no other African state can claim. It has already done the most demanding version of this once: built the weapon, then dismantled it, voluntarily, at the precise moment its old government was ceding power to people it had spent a lifetime trying to erase. No coercion made that happen. It was befitting of a nation about to become something it hadn’t been permitted to be by its colonial masters. That’s not a small thing to have in a country’s institutional memory. A state that has already renounced its own most extreme weapon, at its own hardest political moment, is not a state anyone could accuse of speaking from a position of safety it had never risked.
None of which makes such a declaration likely soon. The mineral economies financing several of the continent’s worst conflicts also finance the governments that would have to make this pronouncement, which means the renunciation would cost some African states the same revenue currently keeping their own militaries paid — an internal contradiction we should not try to paper over. And the states with the least at stake in the current arrangement, the ones with genuine standing to lead, are not always the states with the diplomatic weight to be heard past their own borders.
So the straightforward place to leave this is not with the AU convening, or a Pelindaba-scale summit for conventional weapons following the nuclear one. It’s with a narrower, harder question: whether a renunciation aimed at the continent’s external architecture can stay genuinely separate from its internal wars. Fail that test, and the gesture stops looking like decolonial clarity and starts looking like abandonment of the people still living inside fighting it was never built to reach.
Pelindaba answered that question once, for one class of weapon, on a continent nobody expected to move first. Whether it can answer it twice, for a harder and more entangled class of violence, is not something this continent, or anyone else for that matter, has tested yet.
But underneath the decolonial question sits a larger one, and it’s the one that actually matters. Not which continent. Not which institution, or treaty, or summit. Which government will be vulnerable enough to put the question to its own people outright, rather than deciding it for them behind closed doors — and which population, once actually asked, will answer yes. Not just renouncing war, mind you, but the weapons that make it possible, the arms trade that profits from keeping the market simmering, the investment funds still quietly betting on their manufacture, and the language of war that saturates every news cycle so completely that peace has never once been given the airtime to sound like a serious option.
That’s the imagination nobody currently in power has found the courage for: not a single renunciation, but the whole apparatus at once — the guns, the money behind the guns, and the words that keep insisting we still need them. Africa could be where that question gets asked first, precisely because it has less to protect in the current arrangement than anyone who might accuse it of posturing. But the question was never Africa’s to answer alone. It belongs to whoever is reading this, from wherever they hold power, on any continent on Earth. And it will keep ringing, unanswered, until one government finally asks its people out loud and discovers they were readier for peace than anyone in power ever gave them credit for.