Formula One has decided to race in Africa again, in Rwanda, and the announcement has gone about the way you would expect if you have ever watched a sport take money from a government with a complicated file. As The Athletic reported, the plan drew immediate backlash from Amnesty International and from the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo — which is awkward, given that “Africa” is doing a lot of work in the phrase “African Grand Prix.”
Into this walks Lewis Hamilton, who was asked about it at a press conference ahead of the United States Grand Prix on Thursday. Hamilton is 41, a seven-time world champion, and the only Black driver in the sport, and — as Al Jazeera reported — he said an African race would make people more aware of the continent. He recognised the concerns, too. And then, rather than delicately splitting the difference the way a press-conference answer usually goes, he widened the subject. Ignoring the standard diplomatic manoeuvre of saying nothing, he told the room, as reported, that “we need to make sure we’re pushing to free Congo, free Sudan, free Syria, free Palestine.”
This is not a new register for him. Al Jazeera’s account describes the Palestine call as renewed — he has said it before and keeps saying it whenever a microphone is placed within range. For the Rwanda question itself he was gentler: people should “approach it with humility,” he told the BBC. And he is genuinely enthusiastic about the race: The Guardian reports that Hamilton aims to extend his career into the early 2030s partly so that he can fulfil what he calls his dream of racing in Africa. He wants this Grand Prix to exist. He also wants everyone in the room to hear the list while he says so.
The objections are not abstract. As The Athletic notes, the United Nations has accused Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group in eastern DRC, an allegation Rwanda denies. CNN’s reporting adds that Amnesty has documented abuses against artisanal miners in areas taken over by M23 and alleged that gold and coltan are trafficked into Rwanda. Amnesty UK’s head of campaigns, Felix Jakens, called the race a “sportswashing” prize — the idea being, in his account, that F1’s promises about engaging on human rights ring hollow.
Now, the business model here is worth staring at plainly. A Grand Prix in a country with a human-rights file is not a tragic side effect of Formula One’s economics; at some level it is the economics. Hosts pay for the spectacle precisely because the spectacle is global and glamorous, and the glamour is the product. Then the sport’s single most famous, most credible advocate of a whole menu of inconvenient causes — a 41-year-old it cannot easily finesse — stands up at the announcement-adjacent press conference and adds the host country’s neighbours to his list. F1 got its African Grand Prix broadcast to the world; the world is now also being broadcast, by F1’s biggest name, a geography lesson about the eastern DRC. This is, if you are the host, roughly the opposite of the deliverable. It is a bit like hiring a town crier to announce your makeover and discovering he has also been briefed on the basement.
Hamilton, for his part, seems entirely comfortable being that crier, perhaps because he has figured out the leverage. Formula One needs the only Black driver in its history to keep saying nice things about racing in Africa; the cost of those nice things, as he has now written on the invoice, is that they arrive with footnotes. “Approach it with humility” is doing quite a lot of work as a sentence — it is not no, and it is not yes, and everyone present knows which list it sits next to.
Anyway, Formula One now has a race in Africa, which it has wanted for decades, and a commentator-shaped cost centre attached to it, which it has had for years. Both are scheduled to continue into the early 2030s.