Is Pan-Africanism still relevant?

by Paul Shipale

AS we approach May 25, Africa Day, I pay tribute to one of our own Pan-Africanists par excellence Katjikururume Hosea Kutako as well as the founding President and Father of the Namibian Nation Dr Sam Nujoma, who celebrates his birthday in the month of May. In this Africa month, it is vital that we take stock of progress achieved so far including the historic World Cup in Africa for the first time. There are too many Africans apoplectically slandering and besmirching even our leaders, among them some ‘BEE tenderpreneurship’, ‘right activists’ and ‘academics’ as ‘rent-a-garbage-drum’ cat’s paw, who have dedicated themselves to bootlicking, praise-singing, and pedestrian alliances.

They are convenient tools used to advance Eurocentric-afro-pessimists agendas under the guise that they would sound more credible because of their African heritage. At the end, it has always been difficult to locate such individuals politically, culturally and intellectually.

Nevertheless, to come back to my topic after that hyperbolic detour, suffice is to say that I found solace in this piece which is largely from Julius O. Ihonvbere from the University of Texas when he made his keynote address at the All-African Student’s Conference, Ontario, Canada, May 27, 1994, Dr Manning Marable, Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City, Paul G. Adogambe who wrote about ‘vision and reality of African Unity and development’ and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza from Pennsylvania State University at the Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics.

This is the first part of a series dedicated to Africa Day, looking at the definition of the concept and ideology or philosophy of Pan-Africanism, as well as at the neo-functionalist and federalist theories of integration and the transition to AU and Nepad. I will also talk about the creation and inventions of African identity and languages, if time and space permit. Zeleza argues that historically, local spatial identities, encapsulated and articulated in ethnic, regional, and national terms, have been far more important, while broader (continental) spatial imaginaries have tended to develop as processes of globalisation, understood here to mean the expanding circuits of trans-regional connectedness that have grown in extensity and intensity. Space and the spatial, stage and contextualise cultures, economies, and politics, and invent and inscribe places and landscapes with ethical, symbolic and aesthetic meanings.

“‘Space’ is created,” argues Doreen Massey. Equally, maps are, as Woodward and Lewis argue in their massive global history of cartography, simultaneously a cognitive system, a material culture, and a social construction.

Seen in this way, then, the European mapping of Africa was implicated with imperialism both directly in that mapmaking facilitated the voyages of exploration and colonisation, and indirectly in so far as it was part of the ideological architecture of inscribing European nationalisms at home and forging collective European grandeur globally.

Upon this shriveled “blank darkness” Europe sought to write its cartographic and epistemic will, dividing the continent into colonies, themselves further splintered into allegedly primordial and antagonistic ethnic enclaves, a cognitive mapping sanctioned by the structuralist-functionalist paradigms of anthropology, the premier colonial science. Against the “tribalisation” of Africa and African cultures and identities by the colonial administration and colonial anthropology, there emerged the countervailing elite paradigms, politics and projections of Pan-Africanism in Africa. As an ideological, intellectual, and institutional formation, Pan-Africanism embodied within itself conflicting tendencies and imaginaries of Africa, premised on racial, spatial, and ideological constructs.

The difficulties African leaders have had in promoting Pan-Africanism have been due to lack of clear ideological definition of the concept as well as their inability to discern it as a viable ideological blueprint for continental unity and development.

While the underlying current of Pan-Africanism was and still remains the struggle for unity and empowerment of African people, the other major challenge it has encountered in the course of its history is how to institutionalise the pan-African idea (Walter, 1986:340).

On the one hand, it seeks to promote the unity of people of African descent in the entire world by seeking to unite Africans in the African continent with the African Diasporas, while on the other hand it seeks to promote the unification of all African people within the continent of Africa (Mazrui, 1977:68-69).

Zeleza argues that the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 entailed a remapping of Africa. In 2001, at the 37th Lusaka Summit, the OAU gave way to the African Union which was formally launched in Durban, South Africa, on July 9, 2002, which despite all its political and structural shortcomings marked a new milestone in the history of continental Pan-Africanism, of imagining Africa as a cohesive cartographic, cognitive, and conceptual unit.

In short, “Africa” the map and the place was becoming increasingly “Africa” the idea and the consciousness, buttressed by an intricate web of continental institutions. By the beginning of the 21st century, “Africa” was perhaps more “African” than it had ever been in its history, i.e. more interconnected through flows of commodities, capital, ideas, and people, not to mention multilateral conflicts and ecological and health panics, and more conscious of its collective identity in the global panorama and hierarchy of regional identities.

The historical geography of “Africa” had been stretched and deepened despite, on the one hand the centrifugal push of spatial and social identities within the continent itself, and on the other the centripetal pull of contemporary globalisation and its glocalization (global-local) effects.

Today, Africa seems to be suffering from an overdose of solutions from everywhere. Everyone has a particular solution to the African predicament. In fact, the insult to Africa and Africans can be seen not only in some of the pedestrian and wishy-washy books that have come out recently on democracy and change in Africa, but also in the fact that these “experts” and politicians actually think they have so much to teach Africans about everything under the sun.

Africa simply became a dumping ground for all sorts of ideas. Africans have gone through the entire gamut of socio-economic and political prescriptions. Meanwhile, the World Bank says that “overall Africans are almost as poor today as they were 30 years ago”, The implication here is that colonial domination, exploitation, and marginalization did better for Africans than decades of swallowing hook, line, and sinker all the garbage that has come from all nooks and corners of the world since 1960 in the name of economic models for growth and development. The current prescription for Africa is: multi-party democracy and when it does not suit them, bang! There comes a ‘regime change’ doctrine.

The west is dictating and forcing a democratic agenda on Africa and is once again putting Africa on the path to a false start: confusing democracy with elections.

In country after country, the struggle by the so-called pro-democracy forces, are made up mostly of disgruntled political opportunists, professional agitators and networkers to promote liberal democracy.
The time has come for Africans to trade among themselves. It is well known that Africa is one of the richest regions of the world.

Africa, which is the most central of all continents, contains a fifth of the world’s landmass contrary to the misguided work of western cartographers who make Africa look smaller than Europe and North America on the world map. With 54 nations and a population of 600 million, why have Africans been unable to capitalise on their advantages to change the African reality as presently constituted?

“There seems to be a deliberate conspiracy in the western media, in particular, to continue the historical denigration and marginalization of Africans and those in the Diaspora as descendants of barbarians and as people who should thank their stars that kind Europeans brought them out of the jungles for mindless and genocidal exploitation as slaves,” says Julius Ihonybere.

This in turn reinforces long discredited arguments in support of racism and justifies the decision by most transnational bodies to employ so-called experts and consultants on Africa rather than employing Africans themselves. It is clear therefore that Africa needs first, fundamental transformation through a continent-wide political agenda arising naturally from the national reconstruction projects and the empowerment of its own people. There is not a set definition of Pan-Africanism... [It] is an idea that grew out of 19th century efforts to end the slave trade and the colonisation of Africa born out of the Berlin Conference of 1884 & 85. Pan-Africanism as an ideology is humanistic in its approach, socialistic in content, Africanistic in orientation and democratic in form. The birth of Pan-Africanism can be traced to the founding of the African Association in London in 1897 and the convening, in the same city, of the Pan-African Conference three years later by Trinidadian lawyer-barrister, H. Sylvester Williams (Geiss, 1974:177). Dr W.E.B. Dubois, an African-American scholar and activist, either organised or played a leading role in a series of Pan-African congresses in the United States and Europe between 1900 and 1945 which brought together peoples of African descent from the Americas, Africa and Europe.

In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey also began to promote African nationalism and to advocate African self-government with the motto “Africa for Africans”.

The focus of Pan-African activities shifted to the African continent following the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England in 1945. The idea of Continental Pan-Africanism can be traced to the time of African nationalists like Haile Selasie of Ethiopia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea, Modibo Keita of Mali, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Tom Mboya, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Ben Bella of Algeria, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, among other African leaders of the early 1960s, including our own liberation struggle icons, Dr Sam Nujoma, and others.

For Nkrumah, the ideology of Pan-Africanism became a revolutionary movement for the unification and total liberation of the African continent.

When Gold Coast (Ghana) gained independence in 1957, Nkrumah proclaimed that “the independence of Ghana [was] meaningless unless it [was] linked up with the total liberation of the African continent” (Nkrumah, 1980:77). However, during the1930s, the pan-Africanist movement was strongly influenced by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism as reflected in the life and works of scholars and activists such as W.E.B. Dubois, Hunton, C.L. R. James, George Padmore, and Paul Robeson.

My personal belief is best encapsulated by Padmore, in his book Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), when he said Pan-Africanism was a clear alternative to communism, with which he got frustrated, as well as against tribalism as exemplified in ‘non-this’ and ‘omu-that’ rhetoric, white racialism, black chauvinism, and reverse racism of any form.

In his words, “Pan-Africanism looks above the narrow confines of class, race, tribe and religion”.

Indeed, Pan-Africanism of the 21st century cannot define itself in biological, genetic or racial categories, but in terms of its politics and social vision.

African leaders, unlike some like our founding President, have failed to develop appropriate policies for education and science and technology in order to address the deficiency in our drive for modernisation.

We must accept a vision of a federal union for integration with a roadmap and timeframe for its realization, including the Diaspora. Any other approach will amount to the usual political rigmaroles and posturing.

Credit: www.newera.com.na