Africa Offers More than Liberal Moralists Know

There are holiday discoveries that slip your mind, and then there’s the kind that follows you home and won’t leave you. This one started on a balmy evening in Maputo, the capital of the southeastern African nation of Mozambique, on the grand terrace of the Polana Serena Hotel—that dazzling colonial belle of the early 1920s, with her peach walls, elegant arches, and sweeping Indian Ocean views.

The city hummed below, a charming mash-up of Portuguese heritage—tiled facades of old villas in disrepair, the railway station, a fortress, the currency museum—and raw, vibrant African rhythm. That night, the rhythm came live to Polana: a local band layering African tunes over sultry jazz. An energetic black singer stepped up to the mic. The multiracial crowd loved her because she was good, really good, not because she checked any DEI box.

In my hand, a Malfy gin & tonic—cutting through the heat like a cool breeze. And in the other? The first African premium cigar: Bongani. Smooth with dark oily wrapper, a bold red ring, and a faint scent of earth and coffee.

And as I sat there, I thought about the gap between the Africa I was experiencing and the Africa I knew, or had thought I knew, from my previous life.

Before I started writing for The American Conservative and other outlets on foreign policy, I served as a staffer in the European Parliament. And that meant I saw, up close, one of the world’s largest foreign aid bureaucracies, complete with its rituals of self-congratulation and moral posturing.

Let me be specific.

There is a thing in the European Parliament called the Joint Parliamentary Assembly with the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS), which exists in addition to the foreign affairs and development committees that cover relations with those regions. In theory, it is a forum for dialogue between European and ACP legislators. In practice? More like a luxury travel agency for members of the European Parliament.

It includes chairs, vice chairs, coordinators, rapporteurs (to the point there is hardly anyone involved without some sort of honorific title), eager to use their parliamentary stint as an all-expenses-paid passport to “exotic” destinations. Think five-star accommodation. Business class flights. Per diems that would make a hedge fund manager blush. The taxpayer, naturally, picks up the tab.

And what do they actually do there?

They deliver grand discourses and adopt non-binding resolutions on socially and geopolitically divisive issues—abortion rights in Uganda, gay rights in Rwanda—resolutions that are forgotten the moment they are voted on, including by those who wrote them. And after a few months, another jamboree at a tropical location, and another press release no one reads.

The existential choice between Russia and Europe that supposedly faces every country on earth is another hobbyhorse.

I witnessed that first hand during a foreign affairs committee visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (joined, naturally, by members of the committee on women’s rights and gender equality). After listening politely to a European version of the George W. Bush-like “with us, or against us” rhetoric, the African Union officials had to explain, patiently, to the visitors from Brussels why their calculus on Russia and Ukraine is more complex than a simple binary choice between good and evil.

None, by the way, justified the Russian aggression, but neither were they prepared to unconditionally join EU sanctions against Moscow—not least because, for better or worse, many Africans hold fond memories of Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union, which championed anti-colonialist struggles when some of those countries were still under the thumb of European empires. Some still see Russia as a valuable security partner or a vital source of grain imports.

That dynamic was best exemplified in a scandal that erupted before the EU–African Union summit in November 2025 in Luanda, Angola. There, EU officials tried to insert into the final declaration language that designated Russia and China as “hybrid threats” practicing “disinformation campaigns” and “destabilization.”

That attempt was predictably rejected by the Africans: China in particular is the continent’s main economic partner, with trade volume reaching $296 billion in 2024, zero tariffs for all but one African nation (the exception being Eswatini, which maintain ties with Taiwan), and tens of thousands of jobs and huge investments in infrastructure. Europe, by contrast, promises €150 billion ($175.5 billion) to Africa as an answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, accompanied by lectures on liberal social mores and “hybrid threats.”

My Africa trip offered me a glimpse of a different model of relationship—one based on liberty, respect, and entrepreneurship, not condescending moralism. That cigar I held in my hand was the baby of Kamal Moukheiber, a Lebanese entrepreneur who did something genuinely remarkable. He traded a finance career in London for a tobacco start-up in Mozambique, a country better known for cashews, civil war reconstruction, and—until it was neutralised by the government—an Islamist insurgency in the north. Premium tobacco? Not on anyone’s radar.

What inspired Kamal was the biography of Robert Mondavi, who founded the wine industry in America back in the 1960s. As Kamal tells me, that was the vision that guided him to launch Bongani cigars in Mozambique. Years of hard work have yielded a company that offers high-skilled, well-paid jobs that create a product that people actually want to buy.

Western states could learn from Kamal, and at least one American lawmaker already offers a better vision of relations with Africa. Libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) supports abolishing foreign aid, or at least radically rethinking it. The way it is practiced today wastes taxpayers’ money on performative guilt trips and infantilizes its recipients. Worse, it creates unhealthy dependencies that are weaponized by bureaucracies like the EU to push their own social and geopolitical agendas. Massie would rather trade with African nations and treat them like normal countries with much to offer.

Bongani is only one small example of what Africans are capable of achieving. What they need is less patronizing, less moralizing, and more open markets.

My next stop after Maputo was Bazaruto Island—a paradise where the Indian Ocean turns every shade of turquoise and the sand feels like sifted sugar. I lit up another cigar and thought about the long chain of people behind it: the growers, rollers, packers, and entrepreneurs who had built something valuable in a place most foreign experts still view primarily through the lens of aid and crisis. It seemed a better model for development than anything I had heard in Brussels.

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