Rethinking Pan-Africanism in the Current Epoch

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, Co-Presidents of the People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Nkrumah lived in Guinea after the CIA-backed coup in Ghana in February 1966., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Rethinking Pan-Africanism in the current epoch

January 21, 2014 Opinion & Analysis
Lovemore Ranga Mataire
Zimbabwe Herald

POLITICAL disturbances in South Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad have put into focus the urgent need for African leaders to rethink the concrete continental unity and critically examine the ramifications of foreign military interventions in our domestic affairs.

While the internal dynamics of these individual countries are acknowledged, one cannot dismiss the existence of foreign political interference in fomenting tribal animosity in South Sudan and religious intolerance in CAR.

It is easier for some analysts to dismiss these disturbances as simply the work of power hungry individuals bent on exploiting divergent tribal origins for personal individual gain but a closer look will reveal that the absence of real continental unity has made it easy for foreign military and political forces with nefarious motives to intervene.

Is it not time that continental leaders move away from paying lip-service to African unity and revisit the tenets of the Organisation of African Unity as enunciated by the forefathers of African nationalism in the mould of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Haile Salassie, George Padmore, Marcus Garvey and others if the continent is to realize real peace and development?

Most African pessimists advance the view that times have changed and that achieving African unity as envisaged by Kwame Nkrumah and others is nothing but a flitting illusion.

They argue that the internal dynamics of individual countries, language and tribal barriers coupled with demands of a global dynamic system have created a virtual world without borders thereby making it virtually impractical to galvanize African people into a real unity project.

As far back as 1963, Kwame Nkrumah was himself conscious of this pessimism pervading the African consciousness when he highlighted that: “I have often been accused of a ‘policy of impossible’. But I cannot believe in the impossibility of achieving African union anymore than I could ever have thought of the impossibility of attaining African freedom…Africa must unite. We have before us not only an opportunity but a historical duty.”

But is it not a historical fact that one of the strongest social and intellectual movements to resolve Africa’s debilitating status and bring hope to its people has been the Pan-African movement? Is it not a fact that Pan-Africanism became a positive force following conventions in London and America in the early 1900s and that its inspiring proponents included Jamaican Marcus Garvey and later in the 1950s the likes of Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Nkrumah, and America’s WEB Du Bois?

Later, in 1963, in Addis Ababa, 32 independent African nations founded the Organisation of African Unity at which time Pan-Africanism had moved from being an idea to practical politics.

The failure therefore by the current continental leadership to nurture the legacy of Pan-Africanism for the benefit of the post-colonial generation is a serious abrogation of duty.

In the current epoch, Pan-Africanists world-wide owe it more to conscientious individuals in the mould of Ethiopian Professor Mammo Muchie who has written proficiently about the need for Africans to return to the “source” to find appropriate remedies in dealing with the current problems besetting the continent.

“Politically, Pan-Africanism has been expressed as the construction of a pan-African identity through the development of a shared goal and social and historical experience of struggling to lift up Africa from its untenable status as a marginal, oppressed and largely written off continent…It is a process which comes by sustained fostering of communication, conversation, deliberation, dialogue, coordination, cooperation and solidarity amongst the population in Africa as equal and different African citizens based on sustained development of a shared identity, consciousness and interest irrespective of colour, creed, racial origin and so on.” (Re-framing Pan-Africanism: The Making of the African Nation (2003).

Professor Muchie further asserts that the key to Pan-Africanism in the present epoch is to forge a shared value and vision worthy of shaping, mediating and putting effective mechanisms for resolving intractable conflicts and stimulate and inspire the capabilities of citizens and communities in order to achieve harmony consistent with a shared conception of an African identity.

This shared conception, according to Prof Muchie, should be a universal value which is not detained by partial interests, cultural particularisms, state-nationisms, ethnic primordial loyalties, racial classifications and other desultory practices, capable of commanding moral and political authority, much like Christ, Mohammed and Buddha commanded religious authority.

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that one of the major causes of political upheavals in Africa in the post-colonial era has been the lack of concrete unity among African nations. Does the common adage “united we stand, divided we fall” no longer bear any meaning in this present epoch where citizens seem to be motivated by individual survival instincts instead of communal survival?

Isn’t it time that the African Union moves tentatively to make the dream of a strategic standby military and diplomatic force capable of dealing with upshots of political disturbances on the continent a reality as envisaged by Nkrumah and his peers?

The fact that Africans speak different languages and practice different religions does not form the basis for making them suffer under the regime of specificity and reject the building of a consciousness of universality. The right to a universal African identity does not challenge the right to remain different, speak different languages or worship different deities. Indians speak different languages and practice different religions but this has not prevented them from overcoming specific attributes and proclaiming an Indian national identity.

Just like India, there is no reason why Africans cannot transform into a nation overcoming the tyranny of specificity and constructing a universal future. In Africa, Tanzania has achieved the ideal of a national universal African-Tanzanian by overcoming ethnic self-assertions.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki has come up with a remarkable suggestion on how to disentangle ourselves from the condemnation of Africans into ‘unite-able’ items by suggesting that we acquire universality through our shared history of resistance, consciousness, challenges and the problems we face. Mbeki’s suggestion includes our desire to become renascent as an important step in finding the missing national common denominator to unite Africa.

The challenge confronting Africa today is the realization by its citizenry of the futility of the continued fragmentation of the continent as a recipe for continued subjugation and control by erstwhile colonizers bent on fomenting tribal, ethnic and religious hatred in order to make us weaker for their nefarious machinations.