Afrilition: Brazil’s valiant stride towards Pan-African excellence, By Adéwálé Àjàdí

This win by Lula is another milestone towards the emerging African civilisation that Afrilition enlightens. A world of purposefully building Africa in the face of missteps and misdeeds, knowing where and what excellence looks like in spite of struggles. The face of Brazil in 2026 is 80-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a metal worker with no university certificate and nine fingers. He plans to midwife Brazil, which means repairing injustice to the country’s majority, the Afro-Brazilians. This matters to all Africans who see African excellence as more than fantasy stories...

It was always going to be like this, our journey as African World envisaged in Afrilition. I remember my last working day in Manila, Philippines, during a retreat that my then-employers organised and a now-deceased opposition figure hosted. It was an evening that filled me with sadness as we watched what had happened to the Lula legacy in Brazil, after his successor was thwarted, and then his manufactured imprisonment. It was a memorable, sad evening because humanity seemed to have lost to brutality and treachery. To see the same Lula back in power a few years after seemed a miracle. He not only survived the attempt to criminalise him but came back as still a bulwark against the tyranny in his region and across the world. He remains a friend of Africa and Africans, and also a decolonising mind, even in his 70s.

There are no perfect people, but there are significant heads of countries who play the hands they are dealt for the improvement of the majority of their people, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid. A genuine and rare champion of progress for Afro-Brazilians in a system that is totally stacked against them. Brazil is the largest home of African descendants in the Americas and outside the African continent, and its effort includes being the last to end enslavement. Brazil is the home of the largest group of returnees from enslavement, whose influence and contribution after the Male insurrection dot the coast of West Africa with ornate verandas and families linked to Bahia to this day.

In the last few hours, Brazil moved more purposefully towards transformation, not just by electing Lula again and again, leading to his fourth term; this is largely because Brazil has become and is becoming a definitive part of the African world. There is no greater and more diverse part of the African diaspora than the country of Brazil. Outside Africa, it is home to the largest and most expressive breadth of retained African civilisation outside the geographic continent. It is more significant that even though Brazil became home to all of the forms of humiliation of the African people and continues to do its best to reduce their potential, damage their spirit, and vilify their expression of Africanness, they still stand.

This job of repair for the Brazilian majority is only the beginning. It certainly needs to include stopping Police brutality and prison reforms. The Afro-Brazilian majority can be the source of resilience for Brazil, and a powerful alternative, as the aging population and reduction in workforce hit in the next few decades.

In October, Lula’s record-breaking move from second in the first round ballot to winner in the second round was an unlikely but record-breaking fact. Yes, Afro-Brazilians had a lot to do with this. In the 2022 Census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), it reported that people of African descent, mixed and unmixed heritage (or black), form the absolutely clear majority of the Brazilian population. It shifted the statistical and cultural centre away from the historically European or white majority status. This is now a mass Afro-Brazilian movement that encompasses the preto and pardo census classification. It is accompanied by an increased shift in ancestral pride and cultural valuation, and a sharp decrease in social stigma. Hence, the core of political and cultural Brazil as the majority of the country is Afro-Brazilian.

This, I think, is understood by President Lula, not just in the backroom data but also in his political priorities, from his commitments that include tackling systemic racism and racial inequality as a core pillar of governance, which has seen him create the Ministry of Racial Equality, while ensuring a 30 per cent of cabinet representation, civil service quotas, land rights, and repartitions of Quilombola Territories, among many other things. This job of repair for the Brazilian majority is only the beginning. It certainly needs to include stopping Police brutality and prison reforms. The Afro-Brazilian majority can be the source of resilience for Brazil, and a powerful alternative, as the aging population and reduction in workforce hit in the next few decades.

The demographic centre of the world will be Africa; as such it is an overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian majority nation that should be a welcome partner and a cooperative part of a Pan-African civilisation, which can come fully into excellence. This means more than a simple geopolitical play but an immense alliance in economic abundance, reducing the demographic disadvantage of an aging workforce in Brazil.

The demographic centre of the world will be Africa; as such it is an overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian majority nation that should be a welcome partner and a cooperative part of a Pan-African civilisation, which can come fully into excellence. This means more than a simple geopolitical play but an immense alliance in economic abundance, reducing the demographic disadvantage of an aging workforce in Brazil. It will be hard work, as we see hegemonic systems and classes across the world resort to genocide and war to protect their extractive gains. We must expect battles.

This win by Lula is another milestone towards the emerging African civilisation that Afrilition enlightens. A world of purposefully building Africa in the face of missteps and misdeeds, knowing where and what excellence looks like in spite of struggles. The face of Brazil in 2026 is 80-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a metal worker with no university certificate and nine fingers. He plans to midwife Brazil, which means repairing injustice to the country’s majority, the Afro-Brazilians. This matters to all Africans who see African excellence as more than fantasy stories, as life work, and especially those who recognise it is Afrilition.

Adéwálé Àjàdí, a lawyer, creative consultant and leadership expert, is author of the newly released Afrilition: 21st Century African Manifesto, and Omoluwabi 2.0: A Code of Transformation in 21st Century Nigeria.