Idris Elba and Sabrina Elba Reveal What the World Gets Wrong About Africa

Good evening everyone. Wow. I'm going to do a little crowd participation. I'm going to improvise. My wife is going to be a little more structured. I'm going to say, what a time, and you're going to say, to be alive. What a time? What a time. What a time. Thank you for that. I just really want to thank Time magazine for bringing this incredible room together. The people in this room don't often get thanked, and using a platform like Time that has given humanity so many incredible moments, to thank the thankless is really important, so thank you Time for doing that. I appreciate that. It is one of these moments that you have recognize your better half. My wife is going to tell you a little bit about why we are doing the work we do. I wrote a joke, and I wasn't going to do it, but I'm going to just do it right now. The difference between philanthropy and marriage is that one is about selflessly giving all the time, and the other is giving. I did write the rest of it somewhere. I know. He's so cute. Really cute. Thank you so much, Time, for having us. This is honestly such an incredible honor. My mom stumbled across the issue at the Walmart that we literally grew up on the other day and sent me a picture, and it was a nice humbling. Thank you so much to everybody in this room. This recognition is, I mean, beyond words, and they've asked us really to think about a time or a moment or something that happened that kind of inspired and shaped our commitment to giving back, but for me, I think it's not particularly as any specific cause or any decisive moment in my life. It really kind of began with a memory, and it was a memory of my mom, and I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. I watched her. Who's from Vancouver, Canada here? Wow. Just one person. Two. Three. Yes, yes. I watched her watch her country, Somalia, fall apart on the evening news, and I remember the sadness, the stillness in her face, but I remember understanding even then that the grief that she was carrying of loving a place from too far away to help it was one that she was going to have to carry forever, although it's not her grief that necessarily stuck with me. It was her fierceness. It was because she knew that the Somalia back home, her friends, her family, was not the Somalia that was being represented in the news. It was not the story that was being told, and she refused quietly and completely to let that world's version of her country be the final one. That refusal became mine, became ours, and growing up, I became aware of the distance between the stories told about Somalia, told about Africa, told about Muslim communities and the people that I actually knew. Thank you. And look, we are too often spoken in this language of crisis. We're spoken in this language of fear, of lack, but hardship is never the whole story. The people I knew carried humor, they carried faith and pride that no circumstance could diminish. They built where there was very little to build with. They carried families, they carried communities and histories forward under a weight that most of the world is never going to be asked to bear. So I did not grow up among people waiting to be rescued. I grew up among people quietly authoring their deliverance, and that taught me something that I believe with my whole heart, that narrative is never merely narrative. The way a people are seen determines where empathy is extended and it determines where investment is directed, where opportunity is offered, and most importantly, whose full humanity is permitted to be recognized. That obviously affected me a lot growing up. It's a huge part of the reason that we do the work that we do. Talent obviously is universal, but opportunity isn't. And what we do at the Elba Hope Foundation is to focus on advancing equity throughout the continent. We decided fiercely at some point in our lives, and then we came together and it kind of just like exploded, that we would make a commitment to make sure that those opportunities were seen across the continent. Well said. There's a very famous song by The Temptations, and the first line is, it was the 3rd of December. No, it was the 3rd of September. That day I'll always remember, because that was the day that my daddy died. My father changed my life when he passed, because I realized that all of his stardom to me as a kid, only child, everything that I ever looked up to was in that man. And on the moment he passed, I realized that, wow, that's it. I am the seed. I am the flower that his seed planted. Now, when I think about the work that we do, we sort of thought about, okay, what are we planting as seeds? It's so nice to be in a room full of people that are doing this in the foundation, in the ground. We've got entertainers here. And entertainers often get such a soapbox to stand up, but we have people that are not entertainers. But where am I going with this? The point I'm trying to make about the fact that when you are someone that has an opportunity to change other lives, you are that seed. My father was that seed. And in this room, we are all seeds. We talk about planting the seeds, but actually we are the seeds. And from our work, from the connections, from this room, we actually are going to grow other seeds. We're going to grow other thoughts and we're going to really push that. And that's really important to me. That's important to my daughter who's here. And I want to say, my daughter started her own organization, not because I asked her to, but I realized again, as a seed, maybe I implanted something into her and she's doing her own thing. I digress a little bit just to say that it's really important that we do the work we do and keep going, planting seeds and giving literally inspiration to others who don't know how to give back and give help. Go on, do it. Look, thank you so much for listening. And we want to say obviously for far too long, I mean, Africa is in the room tonight, but Africa has been rendered through such a narrow lens of deficit and defined by need rather than contribution and struggle rather than strength. And we are really here to champion the changing of that narrative. The Africa we know is a continent of brilliance, of resilience, of vision, a continent of people who have been building and leading and imagining futures long before the world thought to look. So giving back for us has never been a matter of charity. It has been a matter of dignity. It's a matter of investment, not just aid, of refusing the smallest version of a people's story and insisting upon a fuller and truer one. But the urgency is that every year that story is mistold, investment is withheld. Another year of potential unrecognized, another year of lives already in motion, rendered invisible to a world that might have otherwise chosen to see them. So we're going to tell it differently. We're going to tell it fuller. We're going to tell it truer. And we're going to tell it ours, because we know when we change the narrative, we don't just change what the world sees. We change what the world believes, what the world builds, and we're going to change what is possible. So we want to ask you to humor us for a second. And if everybody could stand up. Is that annoying? Please. But this is exactly what it feels like when everyone connects. Love you to hold hands if you can. And I just want you to look at the person standing next to you. It might feel awkward in this moment. I hope you've mingled enough so that it doesn't. But you know, when we say look, really look into the eyes. Take a moment. Just really look. Do it. Just really look. In a world that feels so divisive at this current time, look at us all here, coming from different walks of life, holding hands in this room tonight. Look at each other and remember that humanity. We are all human. We all have stories to tell, and it is your neighbor's responsibility to help you share that story. So please don't forget to do that. If you've taken anything away from this, it's not just that he's very handsome. And while you're holding hands, I just want to remind you, you know, whatever we call the organizations we had, we think of foundations because foundations are important. We think of organization because organizing is important, but we called our company Hope. Hope is really important. When you stop at a red light, what do you do? You hope it works. When you give your Amex across the card, what do you do? You hope it works. The point I'm saying is that we're humans. None of the things that we made exist except in our hope and on our beliefs. Okay, so please look at each other in the eyes and say, I hope this works. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much.