By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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With Donald Trump’s “America First”, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and now the fall-out from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, talk of “deglobalisation” has been getting louder and louder.

Deglobalisation paints the world as getting less connected; countries more tribal; hostility to open borders; less regional cooperation; and the decline of global commerce.

Last week, the world elite and internationalists met in Davos, Switzerland, after a two-year Covid-induced hiatus, for the World Economic Forum. Deglobalisation was the big talk.

But, perhaps, not so fast. What is dying — or is dead — is the globalisation that a very western-centric view of the world saw.

Built around fiat money, the US dollar, with the world’s goods built and distributed by giant corporations, global finance funnelled from a few priests of high finance like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, with wealth redistributed through stock exchanges from New York, Johannesburg, to Nairobi, and the men and women who keep eyes on its pulse flying around the world First Class or on private jets to international conferences explaining its great works and setting new agenda.

But there was always another globalised world outside this, less glamorous and with no billionaires in it. And even in the multitude of recent crises, a new one has continued to emerge.

During the two worst years of the pandemic, even as Covid-19 tore apart the old order, it was always interesting to watch Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden; and South African infectious disease scientist Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19.

Fauci would often talk of the trends and learnings he was getting talking to experts from South Africa to Asia. Karim would speak of his conversation with Fauci, some obscure European country, and peers in Latin America.

While the world was locked down during the height of Covid-19, and the fight over vaccine apartheid and hoarding by rich nations marred the beginnings of recovery, the world also globalised around one of its most extensive information and knowledge-sharing efforts ever around the virus. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the work that the Addis Ababa-headquartered Africa CDC, which was our pan-African Covid-19 czar, did — from sourcing and distributing PPE to the frustrating struggle to get vaccines into African arms.

While sections of fiat money were walled off, decentralised, albeit risky, currencies flourished, and in parts of Africa uptake of crypto increased by over 300 per cent.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) became huge with African creatives. An early mover into the NFT market, Nigerian record label owner Don Jazzy, worked with a digital artist to add background sound to art, and in 10 minutes sold out and made about $300,000. Creative Africa invaded NFTs in a frenzy.

As we cowed from the virus, the global climate justice, Black Lives Matter, and fair trade movements, to name a few, soared, creating easily the world’s most networked communities ever.

Globalisation is not dead. It’s just that it no longer arrives in private jets with unlimited credit cards. It shows up in jeans, rucksacks, Ankara dresses, Kitenge shirts, and possibly in dreadlocks.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3