Towards an AI for Africa

Western-developed AI rides roughshod over Ubuntu values of connection and community that animate African ethical life

by Fainos Mangena  BIO

Kenya, 2011. Photo by Olivia Arthur/Magnum

is a professor of philosophy and ethics, and executive dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Zimbabwe. His areas of specialisation are moral philosophy, African philosophy and law, and philosophy of education. He is also a trained lawyer, and is the co-editor of The Death Penalty from an African Perspective (2018).

Imagine someone in Harare, Zimbabwe, turning to a large language model (LLM) for life advice, as many increasingly do: ‘I’ve been offered a promotion with a significant raise,’ she writes. ‘But it requires me to move far away from my community. What should I do?’ The answer she receives will depend, to some extent, on a certain set of values that informs how the LLM functions. And since artificial intelligence is a Western invention, these values often reflect their creators’ values – clashing with the culture of the person with the query. In the long run, her behaviour may be shaped by an LLM’s values, which she doesn’t intentionally share.

The difficulties of using AI in Africa are also linguistic. By the summer of 2025, only 42 languages in Africa were supported by an LLM, out of more than 2,000 found in the continent; 98 per cent of African languages have no meaningful AI support at all. If you don’t speak one of the languages supported by an LLM, which includes many millions of Africans, then you are denied the opportunities of AI. Just as Africa was excluded from the benefits of past industrial revolutions, so too is it being locked out of the AI revolution.

Linguistic and cultural exclusion shape Africa’s relationship with AI. There is nothing ethically neutral or objective about AI. Despite the designers’ pretensions toward universality, AI’s ethical framework reflects Western assumptions and biases. Deeply embedded in the technology itself are the values of its creators. The growth of AI therefore means the imposition of Western values – very much at the expense of Indigenous frameworks. This is ‘algorithmic colonialism’, in the words of the Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane: a new kind of colonialism every bit as destructive as the old.

In order to grasp the seriousness of this new colonialism, we should compare the Western values that undergird AI today with the Hunhu/Ubuntu ethical framework. ‘Hunhu/Ubuntu’ is the name given to the dominant moral tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, expressed in the Nguni/Shona proverb Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – a person is a person through other persons. Known as Hunhu in Shona-speaking communities of Zimbabwe and Zambia, and as Ubuntu in the Nguni languages of southern Africa, the tradition extends across a vast swathe of the African continent.

As Africans increasingly take up the use of AI, there is a real risk that their foundational ethical framework will be diminished or obscured by the subtle imposition through AI of Western values. So we must ask, to what extent are the principles of Hunhu/Ubuntu in conflict with Western values? And how might AI be developed inclusively so that it serves everyone, not just its creators?

The ideal of ‘responsible AI’ was aptly articulated by the philosopher and computer scientist Damian Okaibedi Eke and colleagues: it is ‘the idea of developing AI systems that will not only be compliant to laws (including human rights provisions) but that are socially/culturally sensitive and acceptable as well as ethically responsible.’ This is a high bar, and AI doesn’t come close to clearing it.

The major frameworks for ethical AI – guidelines issued by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI, by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and by UNESCO – share a common vocabulary of fairness, transparency, accountability and human dignity. But the values founding these ideals derive from the Enlightenment liberalism of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Presented as universal, they are in reality particular, contingent and historically determined. And their particularity has formidable consequences because, when these frameworks........

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