POINT: Also read Kwesi Kwaa Prah’s ”’Without unity there is no future for Africa”’
Whether ultimately we call it a United States of Africa, an African Union, United Africa or what have you, the ideal of African unity is an abiding yearning. It has been with us, in different guises, since the closing years of the 19th century, not long after the start of the Scramble for Africa. In spite of a generally half-hearted pursuit by African ruling elites, no government in the half-century of post-colonialism has repudiated this cause.
Initially, it was expressed as a collective desire for people of African descent to achieve the amelioration of the conditions in which they found themselves through the legacies of slavery and allied depredations of the Western encounter. Its early initiates were predominantly diaspora Africans. This was hardly surprising for, as the saying goes, ”you see Africa whole when you are out of it”.
Interestingly, the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams — who was a lawyer in Cape Town at the turn of the century, and who is also known in Southern Africa for having championed Basotho land rights — coined the term ”pan-Africanism” to emphasise the collective and unitary intentions of this aspiration.
Subsequently, through the work and leadership of WEB du Bois and a succession of congresses that he led, the process of propagandising and attracting adherents to the position of African unity was consolidated during the three decades that followed the first Pan-African Congress (1900). By mid-century, the idea had evolved into a demand for freedom from colonial rule. The platform for this was the Fifth Congress in Manchester (1945).
The pan-Africanist movement played a pivotal role in the struggle for African independence.
The 1945 meeting in Manchester fielded a crop of pan-Africanist stalwarts including Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, SL Akintola, Wallace Johnson and many others who, in the next two decades, played leading roles in the struggle for freedom. Within 10 years of the Manchester conference, first the Sudan and then Ghana were at the threshold of independence.
The ”decade of African independence”, running from the beginning of the 1960s to the 1970s, saw independence for the majority of new African states created out of the contrivances of the Western colonial partition in the 19th century.
In the three decades that have followed, it has become clear that this checkerboard of ”artificial states”, totalling nearly 50 in sub-Saharan Africa, has been singularly unsuccessful. Side by side with this realisation has persisted and grown the aspiration for unity.
The late Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, had this to say in 1997: ”This is my plea to the new generation of African leaders and African peoples: work for unity with firm conviction that without unity there is no future for Africa. That is, of course, if we still want to have a place under the sun. I reject the glorification of the nation-state, which we have inherited from colonialism, and the artificial nations we are trying to forge from that inheritance. We are all Africans trying very hard to be Ghanaians or Tanzanians.
”Fortunately for Africa we have not been completely successful …. Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated. And it will therefore increase the effectiveness of the decisions we make and try to implement for our development. My generation led Africa to political freedom. The current generation of leaders and peoples of Africa must pick up the flickering torch of African freedom, refuel it with their enthusiasm and determination, and carry it forward.”
Few people could have made the point better. Nyerere was reflecting the deepest African nationalist sentiments of our times.
The African conscience has remained faithful to the ideal. But it comes with different formulations with respect to the steps towards unity and the forms this unity should take. At the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 (the predecessor of today’s African Union), the problem of what form this unity should take generated much debate. We ended up with an organisation with little real unity among Africans — a regional body with limited intentions and more vision than practice.
There are two main formulas for the way forward. There is what I describe as the continentalist argument. This view starts with the geographical unity of Africa as the basis of the project. Such approaches do not contend with the fact that the Arab north of the continent has another aspiration, sometimes described as ”the unity of the Arab nation”.
The other formula, which is historically and culturally more meaningful, views the task not primarily as the unity of a continent, but rather as the unity of African people. If Africans unite, most of the continent will unite, but we must democratically coexist with the various minorities who live with us as citizens.
Kwesi Kwaa Prah is director of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society in Cape Town