frica Day: The Recurring Myth of a Certain African Unity
t has become a tradition in Africa and among its Diaspora to celebrate Pan-Africanism on 25 May, Africa Day.
t has become a tradition in Africa and among its Diaspora to
celebrate Pan-Africanism on 25 May, Africa Day. On this day, Africans
across the world reaffirm the aspiration for unity that formed the basis
for many of the struggles in the continent’s recent history.
But is there much to celebrate this 25 May? Does Pan-Africanism carry
the same meaning today as in colonial and immediate post-colonial
times? It is clear that Pan-Africanism has been misdirected, and has
become an ideology with symbolic rather than concrete objectives. The
idea of Pan-Africanism should be revisited, with the aim of reorienting
it towards service delivery, performance and efficient governance.
Despite the tangible successes the African Union (AU) has enjoyed in
its brief history -- its impressive record in organising a collective
security framework with a peace and security architecture and its
growing importance as a generator of common norms to regulate an African
way of “living together” -- paradoxically it appears that the idea of
Pan-Africanism is in a deep crisis. This conclusion is based on more
than a criticism of the flamboyant excesses of the current President of
the AU, who in many aspects symbolises the antithesis of all the major
achievements of the last decades. Rather, the perceived crisis of
Pan-Africanism derives largely from the persistence of the myth of
African unity, which paralyses African dynamism within the continent
and, increasingly, in international forums. The consequence is the
absence of an efficient and respected body to lead the continent
intellectually, politically and economically by authority and example.
If there is a commonly shared belief among much of the African
intellectual and political elite, to the extent that it has become a
dogma, it is what we can term the myth of African unity. This myth is
derived directly from the African experience of the colonial period; it
is a collective reflex of the weak, which suggests that by uniting,
Africans can resist the colonial and neo-colonial hegemony. It is
principally a reactive idea, born of the painful African experience of
colonization. It has generated a huge body of literature, which
constitutes the foundation of academic and political Pan-Africanism.
This mythology constitutes the driving ideology of the AU, even though
many have forgotten that the birth of its progenitor, the Organisation
of African Unity, represented the failure of Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘African
unity’ dream. The most recent product generated by the Pan-Africanist
dogma is the African unity government, championed by Libya and its
President. This myth has become dominant and in some ways even
totalitarian, in that it has become difficult to question the usefulness
of an African Union Government without being considered an enemy of
Africa. However, most defenders of the ‘African unity’ government are
unable to articulate logically why a continental bureaucratic monolith
would be in any better position to solve issues of socio-economic
delivery than national and local structures.
Proponents of the highly symbolic idea of ‘African unity’ generally
proceed from two highly debatable postulates. The first of these is that
Africa’s artificial borders lie at the root of most of the continent’s
problems. The second is the assumption that race, linguistic parenthood
and a common past of suffering make us automatically brothers and
sisters who share the same values and ambitions. These two arguments of
the Pan-Africanist mythology are erroneous. This does not mean that
African states’ borders are not artificial, nor do I intend to
contradict the legacy of the respected Senegalese historian and
Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop by proclaiming that African cultures are
not linked by a profound common substrate. The two principal arguments
of academic and populist Pan-Africanism are in error because of the
conclusions they imply.
Since the modern state began its successful career of expansion after
the Westphalia treaty in 1648, states’ borders have generally been
shaped by wars, treaties and other encounters. In short, there are no
natural borders in the modern world. States’ borders are by definition
artificial and the only difference in Africa’s case is that these
artificial borders drawn by non-Africans. So it is less the
artificiality of the borders than their heteronomy, their reflection of a
foreign agenda that could be problematic. Even here, however, there is
no African exceptionalism, as the same principle also applied to Latin
America following Spanish colonisation. In reality, artificial borders
are in and of themselves neither good nor bad. The only certainties are
that they exist and have generated deeply rooted national identities
that have to be taken into account in any serious attempt to create
unity. Although the African Union is itself a combination of national
states, adepts of the African unity still consider African states to be
an accident of history.
Regarding the link between Pan-Africanism and race and linguistic
community, the numerous wars, violent conflicts and even genocide across
the continent amply demonstrate that there is no transcendental sense
of brotherhood unifying Africans. Rwanda and Somalia remind us that
sharing a common language, history and culture affords no protection
against barbarism. Basing a sublimated unity on race and culture is to
ignore the reality of contemporary Africa, which is more than just
black, rural and consensus-oriented. The century-long presence of whites
in Southern and Northern Africa, of Indians in East Africa and of
“Arabs” throughout the continent indicates a more cosmopolitan, diverse
and integrated continent than many of the apostles of ‘Blackness” would
like to acknowledge.
Unity does not necessarily need sentimentalism and geography to be
effective. It rather needs values and norms; shared beliefs in specific
rules of the game, which still have to be invented.
In reality, the Pan-Africanist myth is the profound expression of a
deep-seated African “lamentation”, which makes it difficult for Africans
to think about a post-post colonial time in which we cease to become
mere objects fated by historical circumstance, and strive to become the
agents and shapers of our destiny. The intellectual constructions around
race and artificial borders have not yet generated shared values around
the continent after some fifty years of independence. That Africa’s
leaders are now discussing the creation of a continental government
structure, despite our inability successfully to manage our local and
village councils and other small-scale governments is telling.
Neither race, history nor widespread under-development are
sustainable grounds for unity. The real foundation of African unity
should be based on efficient governance norms and practices, democratic
consensus and economic prosperity. Literature indicates today that
though there is no direct causal relationship between these three
concepts, each constitutes a good in its own right. To be effective,
these norms do not require the support of a Pan-Africanist ideology
caught up in the toils of obsolete and misguided debate.
Since the Pan-Africanist ideology has been unable to articulate a
vision beyond hollow concepts such as “Ubuntu” or other collective
therapeutic slogans, because sentimentalism and mythology instead of
ideas and scholarship continue to dominate the African unity debate,
there is an urgent need to revisit the Pan-Africanism. A possible way to
do so is to revisit the African unity debate along the utilitarian
lines of efficiency, common values and service delivery, thus bringing
the idea of African unity back to the people and avoiding the elitist
trap in which Pan-Africanist discussions are caught. The Pan-Africanist
dream has to be articulated along material (trade, ‘free’ movement
across borders, better communications between countries, access to each
others good and services) and immaterial (establishing the conditions
for the rule of law, peace and security) incentives that will make sense
to the common man.
One of the weakest links of the Pan- Africanist discussion today is
that it is not accompanied by a sound scholarly debate on African
integration. Such discussion is currently dominated by politicians,
development agencies and certain scholars scattered around the world,
and has failed to produce a structured research area within which
various and contending schools of thought may find expression. With the
notable exception of the South-Africa based African Renaissance Centre
and maybe the Julius Nyerere Chair at the University of Dar es Salam
there is no credible African Integration research centre in the
continent (and yet they exist in Europe and the US) able to provide
policy-makers with research based analysis and policy-options on African
unity and integration. For all their faults the African renaissance
debate and Nepad attempted to address these issues but were later caught
up in the current logic of false consensus.
Modernising the discussion about African integration, and giving it a
deeper analytical substance, would allow for the exploration of new
ideas and options. Without deeply involving African thinking and
thinkers, without a critical interrogation of the major assumptions and
postulates of the Pan-Africanist myth, African unity will remain an
elitist idea and aspiration. The complexity of development challenges
and the needs of Africa’s peoples deserve and require far better than
this.
Dr Paul-Simon Handy, Head of the African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)
