Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance

Kojo Botsio, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah and two Cuban officials in Ghana during the Guevara visit in late 1964 and early 1965 when he toured several African states. Guevara would work to liberate Congo in 1965., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

PAN-AFRICANISM AND THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE

The 50th Anniversary of the OAU/African Union

The African Union has declared 2013 the Year of Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance as a slogan for the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The intention is to use the anniversary celebrations to reaffirm Africa's commitment to the ideals of continental unity and quest for Africa's renewal.

Pan-Africanism is as old as Africa's encounter, first, with slavery and, later, colonialism. Through these two experiences Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora came to see themselves as a single community with common descent and history. This consciousness crystallized into the Pan-African movement whose early form was a series of conferences organized in Western capitals between 1900 and 1945. With Africa's independence from the 1950s, the center of gravity of the movement shifted to the continent where it has remained since then.

The 50th anniversary of the OAU is seen as an opportunity not only to revive the Pan-African movement, but also to redefine it in the context of the 21st century. For an independent Africa, Pan-Africanism was not just an idea; it had to be put into practice under concrete circumstances of history. Two issues would dominate - namely, the unity of the continent and the completion of the decolonization process.

The OAU was formed in May 1963 to realize the objective of unity, but as a compromise about how such unity should be achieved. To Nkrumah, the OAU was just a step towards a Union Government which would preside over the entire continent. This idea was buried when the 1964 Summit of the OAU held in Cairo decided to respect geographic borders as they had been inherited from colonial authorities.

In 1965, Nkrumah's dream suffered another blow when Ghana's proposal for Union Government was shelved by the OAU Summit of that year and deferred to a future process which would not materialise because the following year, in 1966, Nkrumah was toppled through a coup d'état, brining to an end his illustrious career of creating a united Africa without borders and under a single, continental government.

The idea of African unity as envisaged by Nkrumah did not die completely, however. Several attempts of creating federations did take place in West and East Africa in particular, albeit with little success.

Completing the decolonization of the continent was another objective of leaders of newly independent Africa. A Liberation Committee was even established within the OAU to drive this agenda. This body played a key role in supporting liberation movements in Southern Africa, including the African National Congress.

From its inaugural summit and throughout its existence, the OAU was consistent in its opposition to colonial rule on the continents. Unity and decolonization were not the only issues, however. Newly independent states had to confront the realities of governance. Two challenges were of paramount importance and could not be deferred - namely, development and nation building.

The latter informed the OAU decision on the respect of colonial borders in order to avoid civil war as newly independent states could implode into pieces or an inter-state war take place between neighours over a border dispute. But this was not all. Borders could be settled by decree but not so for national identity which had to be constructed out of disparate ethnic and religious entities that had been put together arbitrarily by colonial authorities. African leaders had their own misgivings about the Western model of political party system which they saw as a threat to national unity, a trends emerged of one-party states.

This political party model became entrenched as an alternative to the multiparty system, the post-colonial state became more and more deformed, losing its progressive, people-centered character. It also became repressive as any political opposition to the establishment was perceived and portrayed as a threat to national unity. The masses that had been mobilized during the years of the independence struggle were silenced, demobilized, and forced into slumber.

The development challenge had to be addressed also. At independence, African countries had no infrastructure exept for the few roads leading to the ports to export raw materials. There was no industrialization, let alone any semblance of modern technological development. The human resources base was slim as no effort was made during colonial rule to develop the colonies and their people. In the absence of massive capital available for investment and with no developed entrepreneurial class, the state took the center-stage. Thus developmentalism became a preferred route for most independent African states.

The 1970s and 1980s were a period of mixed fortunes for the continent. As the idealism of the immediate post-independence period faded into the background in the 1970s, overshadowed by the repressive machinery of one-party states, the failures of the African socialist development model, and the advent of military coups and juntas, a path was prepared for Africa's entry into the "lost decade" of the 1980s. By contrast, southern Africa was experiencing an opposite trend. In this part of the continent, liberation movements had seized power through armed struggle in the mid-1970s in Angola and Mozambique and introduced a form of socialism a la former Soviet Union. Zimbabwe followed suite in 1980.

Notwithstanding these developments, the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s, imposed on African countries by the Bretton Woods institutions in the wake of the debt crisis, dismantled the African developmental state created at independence and rolled back public funding to the social sector, notably health and education. This did not help in halting the erosion of the little gains of independence. It was just a matter of time that the African masses would rise from their slumber; and this began in the 1990s with the democratization wave that swept throughout the continent.

Self-reliance also emerged and became entrenched in post-colonial development thought. Nyerere had popularized it with his Ujamaa project, and was developed further in the Lagos Plan of Action. The idea is that Africa's development must be on the basis of its own resources and endogenously informed development models. The external will be complementary. A self-reliant developmental approach envisages a developmental state taking a lead in the development of a country in the absence of well-developed productive forces and entrepreneurial class. Both regional integration agenda and self-reliance suffered heavily in the 1980s under the attack of Structural Adjustment Programmes whose development thesis and approach went against the logic of self-reliance and developmentalism.

A concept had evolved within the OAU in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (after the collapse of the Eastern bloc) which saw a dialectical linkage between development and peace and security; that Africa's development challenges goes hand in hand with the restoration of peace to the continent.

Towards the end of the 1990s democracy and good governance were brought into the equation. This thinking resulted in NEPAD and the APRM - today Africa has now a fully developed notion of shared values and the African Governance Architecture built on the AU's Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, among others. Included in this architecture, among others, is the APRM and the Pan African Parliament as well as the AU Courts and the Human Rights Commission.

On the peace front, an African Peace and Security Architecture is also in the making. The AU recognises this trilateral dialectical link - development, democracy and good governance, and peace and security. NEPAD stands as a pillar for the development link. The concept of state sovereignty has also undergone some evolution. In 1999 the OAU adopted the Algiers declaration on unconstitutional change of government. Since then, and with the inclusion of the elements of this declaration in the Constitutive Act of the AU, Africa no longer tolerates leaders who come to power through unconstitutional means. They are now subjected to a regime of AU sanctions.

Non-interference in internal affairs of member states is still sacrosanct but with a qualification this time. The AU, in terms of its Constitutive Act, can now interfere under the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. The 50 years have been long, and have seen leaders come and go. In the process, Africa has matured. Today, there is talk of Rising Africa!

--May is African and International Solidarity Month - this is an edited extract for the full edition, get the latest edition of Umrabulo, Celebrating 50 years of the founding of the Organisation for African Unity.