«Africa has a way of phasing in and out of western consciousness, each time to reappear in a different guise, stimulating a different concern and intriguing or agitating a different set of westerners. Of course, it has rarely been Africa that actively does the phasing, the disappearing and returning; rather, it has been the West that changes its interests, its enthusiasms and its worries, that from time to time reaches out to embrace Africa, to find it suddenly relevant. As the interests change, Africa recedes again from Western consciousness or becomes the focus of a new group of enthusiasts who reshape its image in the world’s eye. And then the process may repeat itself, with Africa remerging in an old and forgotten disguise, to be greeted once more with the strangely comforting reflection “ex Africa semper aliquid novi” ».

BIENEN, Henry S. e FOLTZ, William J. (ed.) (1985), Arms and the Africans: military influences on Africa’s international relations, New Haven, Yale University Press, p. 1