The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid. It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive.
Interpretation
Africa played a crucial role in the development of the U.K. and U.S. through its resources and human contributions.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala highlights the indispensable contributions of Africa to the formation and prosperity of Western nations like the U.K. and U.S. She emphasizes that much of what these countries are built upon, including resources and labor sourced from Africa, should be acknowledged, and thus, when there is an effort to give back or acknowledge this history, it should not be met with defensiveness but rather gratitude and recognition.
In practice
In a speech addressing international relations and reparations, one could cite this quote to emphasize the historical contributions of colonized nations.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.
It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.
People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.
The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.
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