Looking at Ukraine from Africa and back - with Simon Allison
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We have a lot to share with each other. We won't agree on everything. Often what is good for the one may be bad for the other. And yet this conversation is necessary and it's interesting. A perspective from Africa on Ukraine can offer a fresh viewpoint. Likewise, a Ukrainian perspective on Africa can do the same. At the very least, let's try. You're listening to the Explain Ukraine podcast. Explain Ukraine is produced by Ukraine World, an English-language media outlet focused on Ukraine.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher and the chief editor of Ukraine World.

My guest today is Simon Ellison, co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed newspaper. Simon is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ukraine World is run by Internews Ukraine, one of the country's largest media NGOs. You can support our work at Patreon. Your support is crucial as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding. You can also help fund our volunteer trips to the frontline areas where we assist both soldiers and civilians.

Donations can be made via PayPal. You can find these links in the description of this episode. This episode is produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, the country's leading institution for cultural diplomacy. Simon Ellison, welcome to this podcast. Thank you very much for having me. So you're a South African journalist and you're a founder, chief editor of one of the very successful media about Africa, which is called The Continent.

And you recently traveled to Ukraine. Tell me first what motivated you to travel for such a long distance to a country which is torn by the war, in which the war is present so much, which is dangerous. What was your motivation? What did you try to understand? You know, so throughout my own career, I have been really interested in spaces where people

Often ordinary people are mobilizing to fight for basic rights like democracy and human rights and rights of expression and political participation. I began my career in Cairo, in Tahrir Square, during the Arab Spring. So it's always been a topic that's interested me, understanding how that works at the ground level. And then the other motivation was...

You know, African media, I have worked my entire career within African media houses and

operate at a much lower resource level than medias around the world. And that means one of the things we don't do very often is to cover world news. You know, we tend to be very good at covering our own cities, our own governments. But beyond individual African borders, there's not a huge amount of coverage of Africa or of the rest of the world by African media houses. And that means that a crucial perspective on international events is being missed.

And one of the reasons that my colleagues and I started the continent five years ago was to provide that perspective on world events, which can often be a little bit different to what you are seeing from Western media houses or media houses elsewhere around the world. And that's why

I was very motivated to travel to Ukraine to sort of have a look for myself what was happening on the ground to see what the sort of reality of the conflict was like.

I've read your report actually for the Continent and I found it very, very well written and very interesting. And what I liked a lot is that you didn't stay just in Kyiv. Kyiv is the capital, it's a vibrant city, very beautiful as you say yourself, and it is more or less protected from the Russian rockets. The shelling is still almost every day by the mostly Russian drones.

I'm living in a Kiev suburb called Brovary and we have actually air raid sirens every night. But you feel kind of more protected than if you go to the front lines and you travel to the front lines to the south, to Kherson Oblast, where I myself travel very often. Tell me about this experience of traveling, traveling from a dangerous place, which is Kiev, to a much more dangerous place, which is Kherson Oblast.

I think it was important for the reporting to get a little bit closer to the front lines. I didn't go to the front lines at all, but just by traveling to Herson Oblast, going to speak to some farmers in the area, you get a sense of what living in the immediate vicinity of the war is like, and you speak to people about their experiences.

And those were incredibly powerful testimonies. And I think not only was it important for myself as a journalist to see this with my own eyes, but it was also important to record those testimonies. I know that we at The Continent think a lot about

preserving people's voices, preserving testaments from this moment so that in the future, historical record, they are present. And that's why I think, you know, you can't just report from the capital city in any context and certainly not in a conflict zone. And of course, ideally, I would have loved to have stayed longer and report from more of the country.

When I travel to the frontline zones, what surprises me is how Ukrainians continue to basically continue their normal lives despite death, despite shelling, and how agriculture continues to work, how farmers cultivate their lands. And in your story, you talk about a

a farmer who is not waiting for the help of the state to demine his fields. He has lots of hectares of fields and who invents something to demine these fields himself. What does it tell you?

I was fascinated by the resilience and the innovation that you see as a result of these terrible circumstances that people are living under. But yes, finding ways to survive, finding ways to continue working, continue farming in those circumstances. I can certainly say I was a little bit nervous because with that particular farmer, we went and sort of

toured his farm. He showed us where Russian soldiers had dug trenches, and there were the remains of their meals and their clothes. There were the remains of artillery shells around the farm, and it was all very interesting.

But it was also a little bit scary because he had said, well, you know, I have demined these fields myself with my own device, which was very impressive. But I was very much hoping that he was accurate in his own demining skills and turns out that he was.

And we were perfectly safe for the duration of the trip. But nonetheless, to think that you have to wake up every day and walk in fields where the possibility of a bomb being buried under there is very real. And the courage that it takes to get up every morning and go to work in those circumstances is quite extraordinary.

Tell me about your audience. What are the stories that interest you think, interest your audience about Ukraine? Because South Africa and Ukraine are very far away.

We had, by the way, the visits of South African writers to pan-Ukraine, for example, Damon Galgut. I've recently made a very interesting episode with a South African scholar who studied how the image of Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa was present in South African culture.

But still it's very far away obviously. And what are those topics that interest your audience about Ukraine and why do you think the Ukrainian story is interesting for people in Africa?

So our audience, we're a pan-African continental publication, which means our audience is all over Africa, but also all over the world. We have a large European audience, a large American audience, which we suspect is largely Africans in the global diaspora. And

Yes, of course, Ukraine may be far away from Africa, but the fact is we all live in this same world. And what's happening in Ukraine is, from a news perspective, certainly one of the biggest stories in the world. And in terms of what it's telling us about how the world works, what it tells us about the relations between the superpowers, what it tells us about how smaller countries are able to stand up

to aggression from whatever superpower it is, the kind of support that they are able to receive, that is all really, really interesting to, I think, anybody in the world, but certainly from an African context where many African countries have been, you know, in opposition to some of these superpower policies for very, very many decades, if not centuries.

watching Ukraine navigate through these politics has been very instructive. And I think that it has certainly informed African foreign policies going forward.

And of course one of the questions is food and food security about which you're saying a lot of things and basically you are saying that Ukraine is supplying, has been supplying before the big war about 10% of the global grain and African economies are dependent on global food supplies and if you remove this 10%

This might be those critical 10% that basically make the lives of ordinary people very difficult, what you say. Absolutely. I mean...

Most climate change projections suggest that Africa is going to be amongst the hardest hit continents, especially in terms of food security. You know, already many countries on the continent are food insecure. That means they import a lot of their grain. It's very expensive. And any disruption to those supply chains can have a devastating impact on

further down the line. And I think there's already some researchers who are suggesting links between higher food prices and the war in Sudan in unrest in various countries.

And I think that we are going to go, we're going to see a lot more of that as food becomes even more insecure and as global supply chains fracture even further. This time, you know, at the moment, what we're seeing is the United States through their tariff policies causing huge disruptions. And that is going to have

a really, really severe consequence to many African countries. And I think the reason that it is more pronounced in some African countries than it would be elsewhere in the world is because many of these countries are very poor to begin with. That means they don't have much in the way of resilience. There isn't a lot of money in a bank account somewhere or the ability to raise funds through bonds, etc., which means that when they do face a disruption, it can be catastrophic.

Let me ask how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is perceived on the African continent and how you deal with this narrative. I think one of the most widespread narratives, correct me if I'm wrong, is to say that look, it's just a big war between Russia and United States or Russia and the collective West.

And it's a kind of a proxy war where Ukrainians are only used as a pawn, as a territory, as a battleground. To which I always respond that no, that Ukrainians are actually going against the will both of Russians and of the collective West. Because lots of people in the collective West would say in the 1990s and 2000s,

that Ukraine belongs to Russia and we should not care about it and it would be okay if Russia just regains control over Ukraine

And what we see from the current American administration is precisely this approach. And basically Ukrainians are actually challenging not only Russians but a lot of minds in a wider world that would rather forget about the fact that Ukraine is an independent country with its own culture, with its own history, very deep and very interesting country.

So for me, this war is also a question how you assert your agency and your subjectivity in the world of great powers. What would you say to that? Look, I think from an African perspective, it's complicated.

And, you know, I was very struck by speaking to policymakers in Ukraine and civil society people in Ukraine, the extent to which Europe was viewed as a sort of bastion of human rights and liberal values and the extent to which people were trying to position Ukraine as, you know, a European country and therefore, you know, under that umbrella of politics.

Western political norms, etc. And that message falls very flat on the African continent in most countries because Africa's experience with Europe is as a colonizer. Ukraine often talks about Russia as a colonizer.

That has been the experience of Europe and it continues to this day where we've just seen the French military kicked out of several African countries. Those relationships are tense. European leaders are not supporting civil society activities

activists in most of the continent. In fact, most of European money in terms of Africa goes to support dictators to prevent migrants from crossing through North Africa. There are serious problems with how we perceive, you know, how we relate to the West. And by making those appeals...

to position Ukraine as a Western country, that just lacked sort of a lot of nuance when it comes to the African context, I think. And that is a struggle in terms of Ukraine making its position heard on this issue. What if I tell you, what if I approach this problem from another angle? What Ukrainians actually understand by Europe and what Africans understand by Europe is

are completely different things. So what Ukrainians understand by Europe is certain ideas developed by some European philosophers and of course not only European philosophers. And we are talking about such issues as human rights, as democracy, as bottom-up representation, as the role of society.

in the policymaking. And we Ukrainians, of course, I personally understand how hypocritical it sounds sometimes, because there is kind of this ideal Europe imagined by many philosophers and writers. And there is a real Europe which has been imperialist, colonizing, very, very cruel, racist, and to a certain part still is. So in this context, it's interesting to

well, what Ukrainians are thinking about is that if you think about Russia, for example, and Russia is our proximity, is the country that attacked us,

I don't see the other side of Russia. I don't see an attempt to, you know, talk about the individual rights, talk about democracy in a meaningful way. I rather see only the imperial discourse. While Europe is kind of a split, you can say that it is hypocritical, but still there is this set of ideas that is good and that probably is shared by many people around the world. What would you say?

I would say that now, this very moment in time is the big test of that theory. Because what we are seeing is the United States, who a similar argument, of course, can be made for the US, you know, yes, a brutal imperialist power in many ways, but also

supposed guardian of these values of human rights and democracy and free speech, etc. And what we're seeing now in the US under the Donald Trump administration is the wholesale dismantling of both the international system that supports these rights and even locally, so-called American values are being eroded in real time. And that leaves Europe with a decision. What kind of

superpower is the European Union going to be? Is it going to be one that stands up for those values, that maintains that duality of, yes, protecting our own interests and doing so often brutally and cruelly and pragmatically, as well as trying to buttress the system of democratic norms and human rights norms and

Or are we going to see a much more cold calculated pragmatic vision of the EU appear, which is focused on national security exclusively, which is extremely anti-migrant, which is using its foreign aid as a tool of soft power explicitly rather than at least maintaining the pretense of supporting migrants

broader internationalist set of values. So we're going to see that theory that you put forward is being put to the test. And I'm not confident from what I am seeing so far. I mean, already we've seen the United Kingdom, for example. I know it's not an EU member, but nonetheless, part of the sort of broader European umbrella, they have slashed their aid budget dramatically and are instead putting it into weapons production. It looks like

The Netherlands, an EU member, has done the same. It looks like Germany is going to follow down that path. And then we're seeing that actually when things become hard, become difficult, the EU is not choosing to pursue those values. It is choosing instead to pursue its own interests at the expense of the rest of the world.

And I think what African leaders would say when sort of questioned about their foreign policy over the last few years is, we told you so. Because we've been dealing with these guys for a long time. And that is why we've had to be so careful with how we position ourselves as we approach an era of major superpower contention.

That's a very, very interesting conversation. And let me continue it by raising the issue of imperialism and colonialism. Because in Ukraine, it's quite a popular and important topic. And I think we can enlarge it even further.

to the question of Europe as it is, because from Africa, Europe is imperial powers, right? Europe is France, Europe is Britain, Europe is Spain, maybe Portugal, right? But there is another Europe. There is a Europe of Central and Eastern Europe. And Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics,

is precisely the colonized Europe. It's Europe that was suffering from the colonization from both parts, from the Western Europe and from Eurasia, from Russia. And I've written an essay, I think one year ago or something, called Europe's Internal Decolonization.

saying that look, even if we look at the... I think it will sound provocative right now, but I'm very interested in your reaction to this.

Even if we look at the way how the Western empires went in the process of de-imperialization, decolonization, of course, again, I understand fully that there is a lot of hypocrisy in this, but still there is a process of gaining independence after the Second World War in Africa, in Asia.

in other parts of the world. What we witnessed in Central and Eastern Europe is recolonization and re-imperialization because those tiny independent states that emerged after the First World War were crashed down and basically the Soviet Union took over the half of Europe. And it's still, as Russia tries to do that with Ukraine, with Georgia, probably with the Baltic states,

But I often hear that this imperialism and colonialism topic that Ukrainians try to develop, that the Baltic countries try to develop, that Poles try to develop, is viewed with suspicion in Asia and Africa. People are saying, no, this is not a real imperialism, this is not a real colonialism. The real colonialism was the European imperialism.

racist colonialism in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. What would you say? I think that it can be hard for many countries in the global south to relate to Ukraine's exact experience at the moment. And that is not really Ukraine's fault, but a function of how the West in particular has responded to Ukraine. So Ukraine got attacked.

by Russia, unprovoked, illegally. And there was, frankly, an extraordinary Western response in terms of the amount of money, the amount of arms, the amount of political support that Ukraine received, you know, the opening up of borders to receive Ukrainian refugees. Now, I think all of these policies were absolutely the right thing to do and should have happened.

But those policies are not the same when they are applied in the rest of the global south. You do not see anywhere near that level of support for conflicts in Sudan or Ethiopia or the Central African Republic. And what it signals...

to the rest of the world is that Ukraine is on a different tier. And presumably those other small European states that are fighting similar ideological battles, I know the conflict hasn't got there yet, they might expect to receive that kind of support, whereas African countries certainly can't expect that support. And I think the way that many African theorists kind of theorize this

is that the international system as it stands, or maybe we should say as it stood, because who knows what the international system is going to look like after a few months more of Donald Trump. But the international system as it stands still came to Ukraine's support.

Not enough to, you know, solve the problem, but nonetheless, the level of response was enormous. Whereas the international system, as it stands, is not coming to the support of anywhere else, certainly in Africa. And in fact, from our perspective, has been set up to make sure that Africa and African countries cannot thrive. And I think that is the broader point. And that's why I think the sort of

views of what colonialism looks like in different countries is a very contentious one, because certainly from the African perspective, we feel that the odds are still stacked against us in a far greater way than it is elsewhere.

I fully feel your argument and understand your argument. Let me just maybe give a counter argument a little bit from my perspective so that we have this mosaic of perspectives. From my perspective, for example, I'm a person who is deeply linked to France. I made my PhD in France.

I learned French, I speak more or less okay French, maybe a little bit worse than English. And I found it very, very difficult to talk about Ukraine in France for many decades. Nobody was interested. Whereas France was, of course, very much interested in Africa. France was very much interested in Middle East.

There were far better and much easier ways for, as I perceive it, for writers from Africa, from artists from Africa to find their ways in the French discourse. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is a perspective from the outsider.

We still have a very little number of voices in France about Ukraine. And of course we can say that this is also a legacy of colonialism and imperialism and all the rest, and I understand it very well.

But I would say that this discovery of Ukraine in countries like France, in countries like Spain, in countries like Britain, even in countries like Germany is a very, very recent phenomenon. And we still find it hard to penetrate, let's say, French book market, to have a Ukrainian author translate it because there are very little number of translators from Ukrainian literature.

There are very little number of people who know a Ukrainian. And of course, there are very little number from Ukrainians who can write in French. So maybe we can also see it from this perspective. What do you think?

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure the analogy is accurate because, yes, of course, there are close cultural links between Francophone African countries and France because of the deep, long colonial history. Just like there are very strong cultural links between Ukraine and Russia because of the deep colonial history that you have with Russia. Yeah.

Certainly African writers and voices don't get featured very much in the Russian cultural context because that is not the sort of imperialist relationship that was developed. Let me ask about Russia and how you perceive Russia's role in Africa right now. From an outsider perspective like me, it seems that while Europe is withdrawing from Africa increasingly,

there are two powers who try to re-enter Africa and this is China and Russia. And the way how I see it, and this is very amateurish view and please correct me because I'm sure that this is a very simplistic view, but I see the trend in the 21st century of a very big risk of re-imperializing Africa but from these two powers, from Russia and China. Do you see that risk?

It's very interesting to sort of look at a lot of the conversations outside of Africa about the role of foreign powers within Africa. And there's a lot of focus on what Russia is doing in Africa. In Africa, quite rightly, there is a lot of very worrying news

sort of signs of Russian involvement, in particular in the Sahel, where there are the presence of private military contractors from Russia, mercenaries, you know, formerly the Wagner Group, now Africa Corps, supporting several of the military junters in the Sahel. There's also widespread evidence of Russian involvement in major disinformation campaigns across Africa.

That is all very worrying. But in the grand scheme of things, Russia is a very small player in Africa. Its presence is tiny and its footprint is very interestingly only in the weakest and least politically significant countries by and large, because it has struggled to create a serious foothold.

China's very different. China has made huge leaps in the last 10, 15 years in the volume of trade that it does on the African continent. And it has established itself as Africa's largest trading partner, displacing the United States. And that certainly, I think, in the long term,

means that China is going to play a more and more significant political role in the future of the continent. But that being said, a lot of the analysis that we see is limited to the big superpowers, Russia, China, the US, the EU, what are they doing? And actually, what we are seeing more and more in Africa is the influence of smaller middle powers, places like

Turkey, places like the United Arab Emirates are being far more active in Africa than they have in the past. The UAE in particular is worth talking about a little bit because they have intervened heavily in the civil war in Ethiopia on behalf of the government and in the civil war in Sudan on behalf of the rapid support forces, the paramilitary group, which is fighting the SAF, the Sudanese Armed Forces.

And that involvement, I think, is flying under the radar a bit. So as African foreign policymakers confront this era that we're heading towards, often people say, oh, are we going to have a new Cold War? I don't think that's accurate because it's not as binary as that. The power is much more fractured. And it means that we are having to sort of juggle what Russia is doing, what the US is doing, what China is doing.

But also what Turkey is doing and the UAE is doing and Saudi Arabia is doing. And then smaller African countries that are also maneuvering like Morocco and Rwanda. So it's a much more fractured political space that makes it even harder to navigate, I think. And you know what fascinates me in our conversation is that...

By talking to you I'm realizing that I'm asking questions that would very irritate me if these questions would be asked about Ukraine.

If, for example, a journalist would approach me and say, "What is the balance between American, European and Russian influence in Ukraine?" My answer would be, "Yes, this influence is probably here, but much bigger influence is what Ukrainians make themselves." Let me now ask you about these dynamics of the societies in different African countries.

I think the way how we should think, how we may think in this situation, how we may make, you know, look from Ukraine into Africa and from Africa into Ukraine. Of course, Africa is a continent and Ukraine is just a state. But still, I think it's the way how we like big powers underestimate this local agency.

And this is precisely the story that I try to convey when I talk about Ukraine abroad. Don't underestimate Ukrainian local agency. Don't underestimate the agency of Ukrainian farmers, of Ukrainian IT specialists, of Ukrainian volunteers in the army, of Ukrainian innovators, of Ukrainian civil society, of Ukrainian journalists, of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, etc.

In one of your interviews on the podcast, you were saying that there is a lot of innovation in the way how in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, people in some other countries, people work with media and how innovative African media are.

And you were talking about spreading information through WhatsApp. And it is very, very interesting. But looking broadly, because for me, Ukraine is now a very innovative country because of the need to defend ourselves against the Russians. There is lots of innovations going on on the front line, but also in the way how society works. When you look at South Africa, when you look at other African countries, where do you see these innovations going? What people...

try to create, what they succeed in creating? Well, it's a great question. And let me talk a little bit about journalism, which is the industry that I understand best. You know, we, many newsrooms in Africa have been on the wrong end of journalism.

big tech and social media and the algorithms and what, you know, how to get our content in front of audiences. We've had to fight this uphill battle against Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and Instagram merely to get our content, you know, seen by the audiences that need to see it. Nevermind, you know, well, we also don't get any of the protections that say US social media users get in terms of content moderators and, you know,

all of the attempts to sort of make the information space a little bit cleaner. So we've known for a long time that big tech platforms are not our friends. They're not the friends of journalism because we have seen it and we have then tried to develop media products that don't rely on Google or Facebook.

to reach our audiences. And so, for example, what we have done at The Continent, inspired by a Zimbabwean publication called 263 Chat, we have created a newspaper. We call it printing, but it's printed as a PDF. And then we distribute it via encrypted social messaging platforms with a one-to-one relationship with our readers, precisely so that we can escape the ability of

billionaires to influence what we see and what we don't see. And I think that now what we're seeing in journalism more broadly is a sudden realization that, oh wait, we can't really work with Facebook or Google. We can't trust them to make the right decisions. What other options are out there? And we've already been doing this for what the continent turned five this week.

and other publications before us. So in many ways, we have been exposed to some of the threats and challenges that are coming for a long time. So just like in Ukraine, the war forced this incredible innovation in many spheres of society, certainly in many African contexts,

Those same, you know, other threats, but nonetheless, major, major threats have informed the way that we are developing ourselves. And in many ways, we are several years ahead of the rest of the world. Right. And I think this is these are the things that are very, very interesting and help us to think outside of the box and help us to think in terms that go beyond this big power thing.

Let me still ask one question about Russia, because we have a stereotype in Ukraine that Russia is very active in Africa and is very, you know, trying to push forward its narratives. And the narratives is that Ukraine doesn't exist, that Ukraine are just the pawns of the West, etc., etc. I think we kind of unpacked in our conversation that

the reality in the way how people in different African countries can perceive the world and can perceive your own place in the world and therefore can relate to the questions about Russian invasion of Ukraine. And you said about that in...

In the opinion of an African citizen of an African state, for example, there is not enough attention to the wars in the African countries like Sudan, like Ethiopia and others. But it's always, when we analyze, for example, Russian propaganda, Russian information warfare, it's never a pure invention. It's never pure lies. It's a capacity to take...

a trauma, something painful, something important for you and then kind of develop it. And tell me how you perceive it and how we can make this conversation more balanced because I will give you my response to that. It's maybe wrong to compete in the level of what is more important, this conflict or another conflict.

I think it's important to see how the conflicts are related together. How can we speak about the experience of the victims in a similar way? Or how we see that the failure to react in one situation brings another situation. For me personally, it's a clear...

connection from like the Wagner Group operations in Africa and the way how they were then involved in Ukraine. Or there is a clear link between Russian engagement to support Assad in Syria and their further aggression in Ukraine. How would you respond to this? What I have seen as a journalist covering this issue for several years now is that the

Part of the disinformation campaign is emphasizing how influential Russia is in Africa. That is part of the disinformation. And what was astonishing, certainly when I visited Ukraine, was seeing Ukrainian officials

actively push Russian disinformation lines about how powerful Russia is in Africa. The truth is they are not very powerful, not very impactful, and there needed to be a more nuanced understanding of that in order not to create this picture that Russia is even bigger and even stronger than it actually is. So that was very surprising to me. And then to your other point,

I think that, yes, there's a certainly in terms of, you know, fostering solidarity. We need to focus on the human connections. The fact that, you know, these are ordinary people, whether you're in Ukraine or Sudan and Ethiopia, going through these terrible experiences, you know,

And all the politics almost doesn't matter because at the end of the day, no humans, no people should have to endure these things. And I think at that level, there is certainly common ground to be found. I absolutely agree with this. And I think we lack this when we have this macro view, geopolitical view on the world today. We really lack this personal perspective. And this is what journalism is.

is probably journalism and literature and art broadly are capable of doing. Let me ask one question about your Ukrainian experience when you were in Ukraine, you interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. What was your impression from his personality? You know, that's a great follow-up question to the previous conversation. So we talked about, you know, finding common ground and people...

relating to people as people. And the question that I asked President Zelensky in our interview was about the reports of, in the early days of the full-scale invasion, when civilians were taking trains to flee to Europe out of Ukraine, there were reports of African students being denied entry to those trains.

which were very, very damaging across Africa in terms of perceptions of Ukraine. Certainly, you know, fed into Russian disinformation attempts to portray Ukrainians as racist. And I asked President Zelensky about that, and he confirmed that these incidents had happened. He expressed some regret for them, but he went on to say, well, you know, he thought that

Everyone was making much too big of a deal of this because, you know, it wasn't Africans who were dying on the front lines, it was Ukrainians. So really, you know, Africa should just stop complaining about this. That was the sort of gist of his message. And I thought that was the wrong approach. You know, of course, no one is denying that it's Ukrainians who are dying on the front line. It's not Africans nonetheless. Those were, you know, African citizens terrified of

an impending war, just like Ukrainian citizens were who were getting on those trains. And they were denied access. And that kind of sent the message that, well, we don't think of you as humans on the same level or as capable of the same kinds of fears and suffering. And yeah, so I think he mishandled that question. He did not give a response that would have led to

an increasing understanding of Ukraine's situation there. I think I agree with you that this answer was not very good and not very thoughtful. And maybe to balance it, I will tell you one story that, of course, I mean, I cannot deny that we have problems of racism in Eastern Europe broadly. And this is one of the consequences of also the Soviet rule, which

presented its multiculturalism and, as people say, the friendship of the peoples, but which was not that much friendly to other nations and other races. But we have some good stories. And one of the stories I can tell you is that when we started traveling around Kyiv in April 2022, it was just after the liberation of the Kyiv Oblast,

We went to one village that was occupied by the Russians. And the mayor of that village stayed with like 20% of the village dwellers. All the rest have fled. Some of them were killed on the road by the Russians. So there were like 20% of the villagers. And the mayor said, I decided to stay with my people and not to flee.

And basically he was in a very difficult circumstances because he was threatened several times to be killed by the Russians because of this, because of that. And I guess after the liberation he could have been accused of collaboration because it's always a question the heads of the villages when they stay, when they don't flee,

are the heroes or are the villains and it depends on each particular case of course but he was telling the story that one person a husband of a woman so there was one family and this husband was actually from one of the African countries i can't remember which exactly and he was wounded

And the mayor was asking the Russians to go for a doctor, I think to another village or even to Brovary, to the town in which I'm living, to get a doctor. And it was a dangerous idea in itself, but he somehow succeeded to go and to get a doctor.

and to bring this doctor and give this medical aid. But what it makes me think is first that it was perfectly okay for the village dwellers and of course the villages are not that multicultural than the cities and it's quite a rare example when you can see a person from African descent in the Ukrainian village.

But the fact that there was this couple already and it was okay for the villagers is already an interesting story. And the fact that this mayor of the village was kind of risking also his health and life to get a medical aid to this man was also a good example. So you can have both. You can have this denial of the train access and then you can have

this solidarity. I mean, absolutely. These situations are so complicated and nuanced. And another example in a similar vein is, you know, what Russia likes to do in many African contexts is emphasize all the support it provided to African countries during the days of the Soviet Union. And sure, that support existed, but it wasn't Russia that provided it. It was the Soviet Union and, in fact, Russia.

Much of those links happened in Kiev, in other parts of, in other Ukrainian universities, in Kharkiv. And, you know, that legacy of support for African political movements is as much Ukraine's legacy as it is Russia's legacy. But that is so often lost in amidst the very effect of Russian disinformation efforts. Absolutely. And for example, in Ukrainian musical scene, we have

several singers in several bands in which

which are basically done by the children of these couples. And it's very interesting that they speak, of course, you can see that they have some African origin and they speak perfect Ukrainian and they're very popular. And we can say that, you know, a lot of medical universities in Ukraine have been attended by students from Africa.

Maybe my last question, and we will finish on that. How can we make Ukraine more known, better understood on the African continent? And how can we make the African continent better understood in Ukraine?

Well, I believe that a major Ukrainian delegation is visiting South Africa this week. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but it may even include President Zelensky on a state visit to South Africa. And I think that is a really, really good start in terms of, you know, fostering senior high-level relations between a major African country and Ukraine. And I

I was very surprised when this visit was announced and certainly the possibility of President Zelensky coming because when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Kiev, I think it was two years ago, he was...

Accused by commentators at the time of because he went to visit. He went to visit Moscow straight after that. And, you know, that visit was perceived as actually trying to support the Russian government.

line on the conflict. So the fact that despite that President Zelensky is considering coming to South Africa, I think is a good sign and a good recognition that South Africa is not a sort of pawn in other people's games, but it is a player in its own right, with its own agenda, its own views on how things should be done and engaging with South Africa on that level.

is a very, very important start to building a better and closer relationship as we go forward. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Simon Allison. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Volodymyr. It's been a pleasure. This was a podcast Explaining Ukraine by Internet Ukraine and by Ukraine World.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolanko, I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today was Simon Ellison, co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed newspaper. You can support our work at Patreon. Your support is crucial as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas. Donations can be made via PayPal.

You can find these links in the description of this episode. This episode is produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, the country's leading institution for cultural diplomacy. Thank you for listening. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.