You only have to look at the news coming out of Yemen to understand something deeper about Africa's place in the world's narrative.
Since the resumption of fighting in the region, the figures speak of displaced people, of families trying to flee, of dangerous sea routes and of thousands of people attempting to reach Djibouti. As of September 18, 2026, more than 112,000 people had been displaced within Yemen and nearly 3,000 had already fled by sea to Djibouti. The Djiboutian authorities were even preparing for the possible arrival of 10,000 additional people.
The subject is generally presented as a new crisis in Yemen, as yet another episode of Middle Eastern tensions, as a threat to international navigation or to the trade routes linking the Red Sea to the Suez Canal.
And Djibouti appears.
But it often appears at the end of the sentence.
That is where the problem begins.
The Bab el-Mandeb is not somewhere in the "Middle East." It lies between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. On its western shore are Djibouti and Eritrea. On its eastern shore is Yemen. Part of this maritime gate is therefore African. Its geography is African as much as it is Arab. Yet, in the way this region is narrated, Africa is very often reduced to what happens after the crisis: refugees, humanitarian aid, insecurity, economic consequences.
Africa receives.
It absorbs.
It welcomes the consequences of a story in which it is almost never presented as one of the main subjects.
This is what I call here the Africa-receptacle: an Africa physically at the center of events, but narratively placed at their periphery.
The paradox is particularly striking at the Bab el-Mandeb. The name itself is Arabic and traditionally means the "Gate of Lamentation" or the "Gate of Tears." It would be absurd to turn this historical fact into an indictment of the Arab world. The societies of the Arabian Peninsula have an ancient history with this sea, and exchanges between the two shores predate the European colonial era. But we must still ask a simple question: who has the power to make a particular space the center of the story told about that space?
This question brings us directly back to Africa.
For before being a strategic transit zone for contemporary powers, this part of the world was already a space of circulation, trade, kingdoms and organized societies. The Kingdom of Aksum had developed ties with the Red Sea long before the arrival of European powers. The port of Adulis, on the coast of present-day Eritrea, participated in commercial networks that linked East Africa to Arabia, Egypt, the Mediterranean and even the worlds of the Indian Ocean.
We must insist on this point because our representation of African history often remains trapped in a bad reflex: we narrate Africa's relations with others before narrating Africa itself.
We speak of Arabs in Africa. Of Europeans in Africa. Of Ottomans in Africa. Of the British in Africa. Of the French in Africa. Of the Portuguese in Africa. And, more recently, of the Chinese, Americans, Russians or Gulf powers in Africa.
But Africa is almost never the starting point.
Yet, on the eastern coast of the continent, cities like Mogadishu, Zeila, Berbera, Mombasa, Kilwa and Zanzibar belonged to a dense and ancient maritime world. The African populations of the coast did not live turned toward the interior of the continent waiting for someone else to come bring them history. They traded, navigated, spoke several languages, developed their own urban societies and participated in Indian Ocean exchanges.
The history of this region is obviously also that of influences and dominations from elsewhere. Omani expansions in particular exercised significant power over certain parts of the East African coast, and Zanzibar became a major center of regional trade, including the slave trade. Islam deeply marked the societies of the coast and was at once a vector of cultural, religious and commercial circulation and, in certain contexts, associated with structures of power and domination. But history cannot be reduced to the idea of a continent passively subjected to a religion or an external civilization. African societies also adopted, transformed and reinterpreted Islam according to their own realities.
It is precisely this complexity that disappears when Africa is narrated solely from the perspective of those who came to exercise their influence there.
One could speak here of an "intersectional imperialism." I deliberately use this expression as a reading grid, and not as an already fixed historical category. It designates the intersection of several forms of power — political, economic, cultural, religious, linguistic and geographic — that can end up shifting the center of the narrative far from those who actually live in the space concerned.
The issue is therefore not only knowing who owns a territory.
It is also knowing who names it, who maps it, who describes it and who ends up defining what that space means for the rest of the world.
Let us take the Indian Ocean.
Its name seems natural. It is not necessarily so in the way we imagine its history. The word "Indian" spontaneously places India at the center of the mental space, whereas the eastern coast of Africa has been integrated for centuries into the navigation and trade networks of that ocean. This does not mean that the name constitutes in itself an enterprise of erasing Africa. That would be going too far. But names have an effect: they organize our geographic imagination.
The same goes for maps.
For generations, millions of children learned to look at the world through projections that considerably enlarge territories located far from the equator. The Mercator projection was designed in the 16th century to meet precise navigational needs. It was not invented to "shrink Africa." But the visual result has become culturally powerful. Africa appears much smaller than it actually is.
And when a representation is repeated long enough, it ends up becoming self-evident.
Africa, however, is about fourteen times the area of Greenland. It is immense. It contains dozens of states, hundreds of peoples and languages, extremely different climatic and geographic spaces. But on certain familiar maps, Greenland appears almost comparable to Africa.
This is not only a question of cartography. It is a question of gaze.
On September 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution led notably by Togo and the African Union to encourage the use of cartographic representations that better reflect the actual area of the continents. This gesture may seem symbolic. It is. But symbols matter when they concern the way a population learns to see the world — and to see itself in that world.
The story of Lake Victoria tells something similar.
In 1858, the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached the great lake and gave it the name Victoria, in reference to the British queen. For European history, the lake then entered a new category: that of places "discovered."
But a lake does not become real the moment a European looks at it.
Populations lived around its shores. They knew it. They had their own names, their own uses, their own representations of the territory. What Speke discovered, in the historical sense, was therefore not the existence of the lake. He discovered a place for Europe and contributed to making his own narrative the international reference.
This is a fundamental distinction.
"Discovery" is not always the discovery of a place. It can be the discovery of a place by a power that then possesses the means to have its narrative recognized as the official narrative.
And this is precisely where the Bab el-Mandeb becomes interesting.
Because this small maritime gate is not only a passage between two worlds. It shows how African geography can be central without Africa being central in the narrative.
Djibouti is the obvious example. But we must go further than Djibouti itself.
On March 1, 2026, Djibouti, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda signed an agreement establishing the DESSU Corridor Authority. The corridor links the port of Djibouti to a set of cities and territories extending notably from Addis Ababa and Jimma to Boma, Raad, Kapoeta, Nimule, Gulu and Kampala. Its objective is to facilitate trade, improve cross-border connections, reduce logistics costs and strengthen regional economic integration.
This detail considerably changes the way we look at the Bab el-Mandeb.
Djibouti is not simply the place where the consequences of a crisis located elsewhere arrive.
It is also a maritime gate through which part of inner Africa seeks access to world markets.
Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda are not spectators of the geography of the Bab el-Mandeb. Their trade depends in part on this connection. The DESSU corridor thus shows that the stakes go far beyond the borders of Djibouti. What is at play at this maritime gate concerns landlocked African economies, their supply chains, their exports, their industrial development and their capacity to trade with the rest of the world.
This is perhaps the reversal that must begin to be operated.
The Bab el-Mandeb is not only a gate through which the world enters Africa.
It is also a gate through which part of Africa seeks access to the world.
This difference seems small. It is not.
In the first narrative, Africa is a strategic space onto which other powers project their interests. In the second, African states use their geography to build their own networks, defend their commercial interests and organize their regional integration.
The question is therefore not to replace a Western narrative with an African narrative that would do exactly the same thing in reverse. It is not about claiming that all historical phenomena have a single cause or that all external actors played the same role.
It is about putting the African subject back at the center of its own geography.
For too long, we have accepted a strange division of historical labor: others make history, and Africa receives the consequences.
A war breaks out elsewhere, Africa welcomes refugees.
A trade crisis occurs, Africa suffers the disruptions.
A power seeks a military base, Africa provides the territory.
A maritime route becomes strategic, Africa becomes a "chokepoint."
A great power discovers a resource, Africa becomes a "resource-rich country."
Even the words we use tell this hierarchy.
"Chokepoint." "Corridor." "Gateway." "Hinterland." "Zone of influence."
Sometimes we should simply flip the sentence.
What if it were not Africa that constituted the backdrop of the world's trade routes?
What if some of these routes were, in reality, routes that cross a continent whose states are themselves seeking to define the conditions of access to the world?
The African problem is therefore not only a problem of media representation. It is deeper. It touches on mental geography, on the teaching of history, on maps, on names, on the categories used to describe territories and on the centers around which we spontaneously organize our understanding of the world.
Decolonization, in this sense, cannot be only a matter of political borders.
It must also concern the right to name.
The right to map.
The right to narrate.
And above all, the right to start from Africa to understand the world, rather than systematically starting from the world to explain Africa.
The Bab el-Mandeb forces us to look this reality in the face. A crisis can break out in Yemen, but its consequences immediately cross the sea and reach Djibouti. Then they extend to Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda and other economies connected to these routes. The border between "Middle Eastern crisis" and "African problem" then becomes much less obvious than the usual categories suggest.
Geography, for its part, has never ceased to know this.
It is we who have gotten into the habit of forgetting it.
The Bab el-Mandeb is not only a gate through which the world looks at Africa.
It is a gate through which Africa can begin to look at the world again.