African Leaders Demand Control Over AI Systems Shaping Continent's Future

Africa cannot allow artificial intelligence systems designed elsewhere to determine the continent’s languages, cultures, legal systems and future. That was the message that ran through every session of the second day of the University of Johannesburg’s inaugural AI and the Law Conference, where scholars, technologists, policymakers and legal practitioners gathered for a full day of interdisciplinary engagement.

The morning’s keynotes set the tone immediately. United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Rector of the United Nations University, Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, opened with questions that cut to the heart of every conversation about artificial intelligence. “When something goes wrong, or even when something goes right, who decides? Who is liable? Who designed the system that made the decision possible? And what trade-offs did we quietly accept along the way without really naming them?” he asked.

Prof Marwala framed the challenge through three interconnected lenses: law, governance and balance. Law determines liability and rights protection. Governance shapes how oversight, data, algorithms and computing infrastructure are designed. Balance requires society to confront unavoidable trade-offs between technological advancement and its risks. “For every domain AI touches, society must decide how much certainty the law demands, how much structure governance provides and how much trade-off we are willing to accept,” he said.

The stakes are sharpest where ordinary people encounter the justice system. AI-powered legal assistance and document automation could expand access to legal services for communities historically excluded from formal justice, but Prof Marwala cautioned that meaningful regulatory safeguards must come first. “If we let the companies write the rules for the very tools meant to close the justice gaps, we risk the same digital divide simply reappearing inside the solution,” he warned.

Criminal justice presents even sharper dangers. Predictive policing and risk-scoring systems already influence bail, sentencing and parole decisions, and Prof Marwala questioned whether probabilistic technologies should guide legal determinations that demand proof beyond reasonable doubt. He also flagged a technical vulnerability that affects anyone relying on AI outputs: systems can produce responses that appear convincing while being factually wrong. “Accuracy is not truth,” he said. “The same way we have long understood that correlation is not causation, we must recognise that accuracy is not truth.”

UJ Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Letlhokwa George Mpedi then brought the conversation into the African context. Speaking at the Kruger National Park, which marks a century of protection in 2026, he drew a parallel between conservation and the responsibility facing this generation as it builds legal and governance frameworks for artificial intelligence. “We are gathered in a place that protects something precious because generations before us had the foresight to build the legal instruments to make that protection durable. I hope this conference is one more such instrument,” he said.

His warning was direct: importing AI governance frameworks developed for other jurisdictions will not adequately address Africa’s distinctive social, cultural and economic realities. “AI models are mirrors. They reflect whatever they were fed. And if the data feeding those mirrors is overwhelmingly Western, then Africa is letting someone else’s mirror define its own reflection,” Prof Mpedi said.

The risk to African cultural heritage is concrete. Traditional fabrics, patterns and other cultural expressions could be replicated and commercialised thousands of kilometres from the communities that created them, without recognition, attribution or compensation. Prof Mpedi pointed to South Africa’s protection of Rooibos through geographical indication as a working model. “Africa needs the AI equivalent of geographical indication, a legal mechanism that protects cultural provenance before it is absorbed and monetised elsewhere,” he said.

Language is another vulnerability that touches daily life directly. Africa is home to approximately 2,000 languages, yet leading AI systems perform reliably in only a small fraction of them. “An AI-driven legal aid tool is not neutral if it cannot reason competently in isiZulu or Sesotho,” Prof Mpedi said. Algorithmic bias, in other words, extends beyond discriminatory outputs. It raises fundamental questions about whose languages, legal reasoning, cultural knowledge and social realities are represented in the data used to build these systems.

Meanwhile, Prof Mpedi stressed that Africa is not without negotiating power. Through the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area, the continent represents 54 countries and approximately 1.4 billion people, giving it significant collective leverage. “We should talk together. We represent 1.4 billion people. If we harness it, it will be strong,” he said.

The two keynotes converged on a shared conclusion about what happens when law, governance and balance operate in isolation. “Law alone arrives too late. It adjudicates harm only after the fact. Governance alone lacks teeth. It can design excellent systems that no one is actually bound to follow. And balance alone is just honesty about trade-offs, with no mechanisms to enforce the choices we have made,” Prof Marwala said. “Put together, balance names the trade-offs, governance designs and manages them, and law enforces the outcome.”

The day extended well beyond the keynotes. A panel on Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability and the Future of Society brought together Professor Georg Borges of Universität des Saarlandes in Germany, Professor Arthur Mutambara of UJ’s Institute for the Future of Knowledge, and Professor Sune von Solms of the UJ Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. Technology Innovation Agency Chief Executive Officer Dr Titus Mathe delivered an industry address, grounding the discussions in the realities of innovation on the continent.

The question the conference leaves open is whether Africa’s collective leverage will translate into binding frameworks before the systems shaping its communities, courts and cultures are too entrenched to reshape.