Why Selective Advocacy Betrays Africa, and Why True Shalom Will Never Arrive Until the Continent Stands at the Center
In a world loud with outrage, the cameras fixate on the defiant. Wagner, Zionists, Ayatollah’s proxies;. Hamas, Housthies, The IRGC. Regimes and movements that roar against perceived “Western imperialism” command headlines, hashtags, and fervent advocacy. Their cause is framed as righteous resistance, their violence sometimes excused as the inevitable fruit of historical grievance. Yet the disempowered giant that is Africa, ravaged by the deepest erasure humanity has ever inflicted, receives little more than polite footnotes and seasonal appeals for aid.
Why? Because Africa does not shout back with rockets or nuclear threats. It does not stage dramatic spectacles for the evening news. It simply bleeds in silence, its ancient civilizations overwritten, its children bearing foreign names, its voice dismissed as too broken to avenge anything. This is not oversight. It is selective advocacy, the psychological blanket we drape over our own complicity so we never have to look at the blood on our collective hands.
As I hinted in my recent piece, “Heavenly Hypocrisies – Earthly Barriers”, the colonization of Africa was never merely political or economic. It was metaphysical. It was the systematic erasure of our civilization, the guilt of this bruise has been white washed by religion. Colonial powers did not stop at stealing land, rubber, diamonds, and labor. They renamed rivers, mountains, and people themselves. Today, over 90% of Africans carry Christian (Western) or Judeo Arabic (Middle Eastern) names; John, Grace, Mohammed, Fatima, b-while our native identities shrink into insignificance. Missionaries arrived with crosses and Bibles, promising heavenly equality while earthly gates slammed shut. The Gospel became the ultimate sleight of hand: “Your reward is in heaven,” they preached, while empires extracted everything else.
Adopting those names was not assimilation. It was surrender. A wholesale abandonment of the identities the Creator had given us at birth. And still the visas are denied, the borders fortified, the spiritual “family” revealed as fiction the moment an African pastor named Peter tries to visit his American counterpart. Ephesians 2:14–19 speaks of Christ destroying the dividing wall of hostility, making Jew and Gentile one. Yet that wall still stands higher in the West, higher still in the Holy Land, while we pretend the promise is intact.
This is the hole advocacy has dug for itself. The urgent chorus for Gaza, for Iran, for every armed actor “fighting for their rights” leaves Africa in the shadows. We pour passion into causes that photograph well and fit neat narratives of oppressor versus oppressed. Meanwhile, the continent whose dispossession was total, soul-deep, identity-deep, remains insignificant. Forgotten.
And here is the uncomfortable question peace workers must answer: Can we really trust those who champion for a Palestine with Hamas and for an Iran with the IRGC while remaining mute on Africa’s erasure? Their advocacy feels less like justice and more like performance. A psychological blanket. A way to appear radical without confronting the bloodiest, quietest crime in history, the one committed against the very cradle of humanity. When we condemn one side’s violence and stay silent on another’s suffering, when we amplify regimes that possess missiles while ignoring the continent that possesses none, the message of advocacy does not merely mix, it dissolves. It becomes incoherent. Lost.
Peace work is dirty work. It always has been. Like war, it must be waged, not wished for. Some of us have been handed a cold cup by God or what some prefer to call the Universe has laid this on me and there are no tender ties to soften the blow. I think of the prophet Hosea. The Lord said to him: “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2). Hosea painfully obeyed. He married Gomer, loved her through betrayal, and became a living parable of divine heartbreak.
I think also of Ezekiel. God commanded him: “Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel” (Ezekiel 4:12). The prophet recoiled, “I have never defiled myself” and the Lord relented, allowing cow dung instead (Ezekiel 4:15). Still, Ezekiel had to bake and eat in public, a grotesque sign-act to warn a rebellious people.
These were not comfortable assignments. They were humiliating, scandalous, costly. Yet the prophets accepted them because the message was greater than their reputations. Some of us today carry the same burden. We must speak the difficult truths no one wants to hear: that selective advocacy is hypocrisy dressed as solidarity, that championing armed resistance abroad while abandoning the erased continent is not justice, it is fashion.
What if Africa had nuclear weapons like Pakistan? The thought experiment is brutal but revealing. Suddenly the world would listen. Sanctions, summits, frantic diplomacy. The same voices now silent would demand “engagement” and “de-escalation.” Defiant regimes command respect precisely because they can bite back. Africa, stripped of power and identity, cannot. And so it is left out, abandoned, while the cosmic boomerang gathers speed. Relationships die. Alliances vanish. When all else fails, what was sown in erasure is reaped in hostility. The continent turns inward, angry, and the world wonders why.
We have treated decolonization like another political project; flags, anthems, constitutions. We have not grasped its depth and breadth. Colonization of Africa was the theft of a people’s very soul. It replaced native cosmologies with foreign ones, native names with apostolic ones, native dignity with perpetual debtor status. That is the blood on our hands. And until we wash it off, authentic advocacy remains impossible.
So what must we abandon to reach real Shalom?; the wholeness, the peace that passes all understanding?
We must abandon selective outrage.
We must abandon escapism; the heavenly intoxication that promises rewards in the sky while earthly hell persists (as the woman riding the beast in Revelation 17 rides empires and distracts the oppressed).
We must abandon the lie that some victims are more photogenic than others.
We must abandon any advocacy that excuses violence in one place while ignoring systemic erasure in another.
Instead, we must place Africa at the center of the table. Not as charity case. Not as afterthought. As the litmus test of our sincerity. If the most thoroughly dispossessed civilization on earth is not elevated to the heart of the conversation, the world cannot move toward Shalom. The new heaven and new earth of Revelation 21 will remain a fairy tale. Earthly justice is not optional; it is the foretaste, the only credible proof that we mean what we preach.
Look at Burkina Faso, Mali, Migrations across the Mediterranean sea, to mention but a few, the cosmic boomerang is already in motion. The relationships we have killed through neglect, the alliances like “USAID” we have let wither, the dignity we have trampled, these things do not disappear. They return.
Let us choose, then, the harder road. The prophetic road. The dirty, costly, Hosea and Ezekiel road. Let us center the forgotten continent, reclaim the stolen names, demand reparations not as guilt theater but as restitution, and tear down every immigration barrier, heavenly and earthly that keeps us from one another. The Gospel of Christ is a call to lessening degrees of separation between creation, and that is why the message of Christ is dangerous, yes even to the church.
Only then will advocacy ring true. Only then will the message stop being confusing.
Only then will Shalom stop being a slogan and become the air we breathe. Africa is not asking for your pity. She is demanding its place at the altar of history.
The question is whether we are brave enough to make room. To this end, we Invite you to Physically Volunteer with us on our Marginalized Fronteirs! #Gumite – Solidarity
Learn more about author: Philip Kakungulu
Philip’s Permanent Profile Statement on all Articles:
“For the Gospel to ring true in its fullness, there must be a just two-state solution: a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestine. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, only one new humanity reconciled to God. Therefore, if the Church abandons this testimony right in the very Holy Land; the historic place of pilgrimage and divine revelation, then we have backslidden from God’s authentic mission for all humanity: to proclaim and embody the peace, justice, and unity that the Gospel demands for every people and nation.”
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