"I am aware that we have to have a preferential relationship with Africa," Brazil's president Luiz Incio Lula da Silva said at a press conference in Addis Ababa last year.
"Not only because Africa is part of our history, our culture, our way of being, our way of speaking, our way of singing, our colour, but also because Africa is an extraordinary place for the future to those who believe that the Global South will be the novelty of the 21st century in the new world economy."
Lula has long recognised that Brazil shares many geopolitical and economic goals with Africa. Like many of his counterparts in Africa and elsewhere in the "Global South," Lula sees the increasing emergence of a multipolar world order as a chance to create new institutions that are less dominated by the West and are a fairer reflection of the global balance of political and economic power.