Privilege… a loaded word.
Depending on who you ask, it is either a badge of unearned advantage or a weapon used to silence those who have worked hard despite it.
Globally, privilege often comes with the face of wealth, race, class, and access to elite education.
In the African context, however, privilege takes on a different texture — one shaped by historical narratives, global misperceptions, and the internal tug-of-war between how we see ourselves and how the world chooses to see us.
The Privilege Paradox: When the World Defines You Before You Define Yourself
By Nthanda Manduwi – Economist, Policy Analyst, and Development Advocate
When I reflect on privilege, my mind takes me to moment shortly after I moved to New York City. I was in a shared ride, and someone asked where I was from. I told her — Africa, specifically Malawi.
She immediately reached for her phone, googled Malawi, and turned to me with a face full of sympathy:
“Malawi seems so poor. This must be a real shift for you.”
I smiled. Because in many ways, she was right — but not in the way she thought.
I told her:
“Indeed it is. This is the poorest I’ve ever felt in my life.”
It was true.
In Malawi, I lived in a 6-bedroom house, with a full household staff. I did not make my own bed. I did not do my own laundry or dishes. I didn’t cook every meal or scrub my own floors. Yet, in New York — in the so-called land of opportunity — I found myself living in the smallest apartment I’ve ever had (562sqft), doing all my own housework, figuring out how to stretch my dollars, and experiencing a level of material struggle I never knew back home. And yet, somehow, I was now seen as “privileged” simply because I had made it to New York.
That moment crystallized the disconnect between how privilege is perceived from the outside versus how it is experienced from within.
What Privilege Means in the African Context
In much of Africa, privilege has been othered — something that belongs to Europeans, Americans, or the wealthy elite who ‘study abroad’ and ‘fly first class’.
Privilege is often defined by the proximity to Western systems, institutions, and norms, not by the quality of life we actually experience at home.
This external framing strips Africans of the right to define their own privilege — to recognize that:
- Living in a multigenerational home with land, community, and staff is a form of privilege.
- Having the time and space to build a business because you aren’t drowning in student debt is a form of privilege.
- Being raised with cultural wealth — knowing your lineage, your language, your customs — is a form of privilege.
The Western gaze often reduces Africa to poverty statistics, missing entirely the layered, relational, and communal wealth that exists even in spaces where material wealth is limited.
I enjoyed a conversation with a peer recently, on how he perceived my privilege. It not new, that people assume I have it easier; and I suppose I would be wrong to color them incorrect. As a social scientist, I remain aware of the social systems that I actively benefit from. I am also deeply aware of the privilege I can actively built, that I have access to now.
The Perpetual Pity Party Mindset
Because Africans are constantly fed narratives of deficit — poverty, corruption, disease — it has bred an internal mindset of helplessness.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that:
- We lack everything needed to thrive.
- Our governments are irredeemably corrupt.
- Our talents are only valid when validated by external institutions.
- The only way to succeed is to leave.
This pity party is not just an emotional reaction — it’s a systemic conditioning that strips Africans of their belief in their own agency. It teaches us that success is imported, not homegrown. It teaches us that the system is so broken that trying is pointless.
But pity has never built anything.
A New Normal: From Pity to Power
The new normal Africa needs is a shift from external validation to internal innovation.
This doesn’t mean ignoring systemic barriers — they are real and formidable. But it does mean refusing to let them define our sense of possibility.
We need a mindset shift that:
- Moves from passive recipients of aid to active architects of solutions.
- Shifts from blaming colonial history to mastering global economics.
- Stops seeking permission to build and starts creating with the tools at hand.
I’ve lived on both sides — in spaces where I am perceived as privileged simply for making it to Western spaces, and in spaces where my success was viewed with suspicion back home because it wasn’t built the conventional way.
What I’ve learned is this:
Privilege isn’t just what you inherit. It’s also what you create through grit, curiosity, and audacity.
What the Next Generation Needs to Know
African youth need to know that they do not need to apologize for ambition.
They need to know that they can build wealth, influence, and innovation from within — not just by chasing visas, fellowships, and foreign grants.
The new normal requires:
- Skill mastery: Digital skills, financial literacy, creative storytelling.
- Economic literacy: Understanding the flow of capital, trade policies, and investment strategies that shape our economies.
- Pan-African collaboration: Seeing each other not as competitors for scraps, but as allies in building continental value chains.
- Narrative sovereignty: Telling our own stories in our own words — not just letting the world google us and write their version.
The Real Privilege: Knowing We Are Enough
The ultimate privilege is self-belief in a system designed to strip you of it.
It’s knowing that being African is not a barrier, but a blueprint — for innovation, for resilience, and for building global solutions rooted in local brilliance.
I am not interested in pity parties or narratives of helplessness.
I am interested in Africans recognizing their power — not because someone in New York validates them, but because they have built, failed, learned, and built again on their own terms.
As part of my endless work, the Kwathu Kollective exists because of this belief — that Africans, when given platforms and tools, can create their own privilege.
Not borrowed. Not inherited. Created.
That’s the new normal.
with memories of a privileged shoebox in Manhattan,
Ntha
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