Africanism versus Continentalism
This is part 1 of an extract from the 2nd Preparatory Committee Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress that was held at the Sandton Convention Centre and Garden Court, Johannesburg on the 31 August to September 02, 2012. Present were; Prof. Sassongo Silue, Adv. Bankie Bankie, Ms. Alyxandra Gomes Nunes, Prof. Mammo Muchie, Mr Adu Amankwah, Mr. Anthony Kalu, Dr. Jahlani Niaah, Gen. Ishola Williams, Prof. Carol Boyce Davies, Dr. Mcebisi Ndletyana, Dr Simphiwe Sesanti and Prof Kwesi Kwaa Prah. Prof. Dani Wadada Nabudere was deceased. Part 2 will follow in the next article uploads.
Two contending and contrastive notions of unity are conceptually on offer today. There is the continentalist argument which starts with the geographical unity of Africa as the basis of the project. This approach does not contend with the fact that the Arab north of the continent has another aspiration, a Pan-Arab idea sometimes described as el watan el arabi (the unity of the Arab nation/homeland) whose current expression is the League of Arab States (The Arab League). The continentalist approach implicationally excludes the African diaspora. The other formula, which is historically and culturally more meaningful, views the task not primarily as the unity of the African continent, but rather as the unity of African people; Africans as historically and culturally-derived and related people who regard themselves as Africans. This formulation includes the African diaspora. If Africans unite, most of the continent will unite, but we must democratically coexist with the various non-African minorities who live with us as citizens.
The continentalists treat the maximum architecture of the idea as a regional arrangement or geographical forum; an entente of all the states on the African continent; a conceptually facile and intellectually lazy formulation which conceives the idea as an assemblage of all the states that there are today on the African continent; a “united states of Africa” conceptually based on a supposed hammering together of the neocolonial legacy we are mired in. This is the most prevalent version of the idea. Lacking in vision, it conceptually builds with the brickwork of the current neocolonial states of Africa. In other words, it assumes and accepts the post-colonial state as a credible and viable unit for social reconstruction for the near and distant future; it is implicitly unmindful of the inherent anti-unificatory weaknesses of the neocolonial order and cultivates a millenarian fantasy that we are en route to development. This is the continentalist approach to African unity. Such definitions leave little space for the African Diaspora, the historical source of our movement. They end up categorizing as Africans a whole range of non-Africans, who do not call themselves Africans and have no wish to be so regarded. Pan-Africanism has always been directly related, indeed, inspired by the African Diaspora. This is why it is a Global African project.
The continentalist view of unity is based on a rudimentary geographical logic. It has little or no consideration for the historical, cultural, political or social reasoning. At its basic and most sub-unitary level it assumes or suggests that everybody born on the continent is an African. Being African is crudely equated with citizenship. The fact that citizens of a country can be of different nationalities or nations is overlooked or not appreciated. Thus, the reality of our multicultural world is conceptually obscured and undermined. Multiculturalism is the tolerance of diversity; better still, the celebration of diversity, it is very much an ideal of our times. As a universally emancipatory ideal it also translates as respect for cultural difference in an equalitarian world.
Furthermore, the continentalist argument posits that, Africans are aggregated into socio-political units called nations. These so-called nations are in reality the bits and pieces of Africa’s demography and geography arbitrarily demarcated and chopped up by imperial European powers at the end of the 19th century and largely maintained or reconstructed in the subsequent six decades. In other words, the continentalist position regards us as mere creatures of the colonial imagination. The partitioning of Africa was done solely in pursuit of the perceived interests of the colonial powers. These states which are called nations therefore have no autonomous histories as entities beyond a hundred years and even in the exceptional cases of Ethiopia and Liberia their territorial boundaries were not irrevocably fixed with international understanding until well into the 20th century.
In the post-independence era an intellectual industry has arisen which writes ersatz histories that justify the existence of these so-called nations. Effectively, these narratives opportunistically attempt to historically root these states to the beginning of time. This sort of calculated intellectual adventurism legitimizes and lends credibility to the inherited neocolonial artifice of Western imperialism and its fragmentation of both people and history.
Under colonial rule and educational practice, the periodization of African history was formulated to acknowledge colonial power and the centrality of colonialism by marking the whole of African history in terms of; precolonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. This periodization underlines the fact that the African’s existence as a historical product can be only understood as an extension of Western history. This legitimizes the usurpation of the African’s historical independence and autonomy. The precolonial period has little structure and retreats into the vastness of African history; over 90 percent of the history of Homo sapiens. In this periodization scheme, by implication, the most important thing that has happened to Africans in our 100,000 years of history is the colonial interlude of less than a hundred years. When we as Africans and historians persist in the use of this periodization scheme, we endorse our subject status as neocolonial creatures and peddle scholarship which facilitates the holding of Africans in thraldom.
Identities have been created on the basis of these neo-colonial states which undermine and deny the overwhelming relevance of our longer and deeper identities. The significance of these latter are minimized and dismissed from important present-day considerations, but in everyday life they continue to criss-cross and affect our everyday lives. The late Chief Lintswe of the Bakgatla in Mochudi, Botswana, in the 1970s, had historically subjects and relatives in South Africa. He incessantly complained about needing a passport to visit them under trying circumstances during some of the most pernicious years of Apartheid rule in South Africa. In Zambia, political opponents of Kenneth Kaunda alleged that his parents were from Malawi and was therefore unsuitable for leadership of the country. Alhassan Ouattarra was considered by some to be a non-Ivorian because although he was born in the Ivory Coast his parents were immigrants who had come to the Ivory Coast at a time when the Ivory Coast was not administered or considered to be separate from the rest of French colonial West Africa. In 1969, the Busia administration in Ghana put out as undesirable aliens 200,000 other West Africans from the country; this included thousands who had been born in Ghana and knew no other home elsewhere. The Nigerian government took a similar route of mass expulsions of other Africans in 1983 and 1985. About 2.5 million people were in total victims of these expulsions. Other expulsions in Africa involving smaller numbers have in our post-colonial history taken place.
The Fula, Mandeng and Luo are some of the largest ethno-cultural groups in Africa but are minorities everywhere they are because of the ethno-culturally fragmenting nature of the colonial borders. Fula are to be found in nineteen countries, Mandeng in twelve, and Luo-related speakers in six. Nguni-speakers and Sotho/Tswana speakers are to be found six countries, in each instance, in Southern Africa. The Bakongo of the Lower Congo are split in three countries. The Somali were thrown in and between five borders, etc, etc. The cutting up to pieces of African ethnic formations diminished the significance of these groups in all countries. The post-colonial state was and is regarded as sacrosanct; defying all expressions of disunity. All manifestations of sub-unitary affiliations and identities are treated as anathema and dismissed as tribalism when in fact these attributes are far older than the so-called unitary state. Instead of giving democratic expression and providing some political space to age-long ethno-cultural affiliations, they are stamped underfoot as decrepit and recessive attributes at the altar of the unitary state. What we notice is that, despite the effort put into sweeping under the carpet expressions of ethno-cultural affinities, ever so often, these affinities reassert their continued vitality in the life of the society and the social psychology of people. Because of the strength and potency of these ethno-cultural solidarities they are easily manipulated by politicians to mobilize constituencies and play off rivals in intra-elitist feuds.
Thus, the African’s political and state identity, as is currently understood, created by the colonial powers, has been used to facilitate intolerance, political contestation and fissures between Africans by dominant post-colonial elites. Xenophobic tendencies directed against other African citizens, oftentimes pursued with extraordinary fiendishness and venality, have arisen in different parts of Africa at different points in our post-colonial history. Ironically, inter-territorially Africans moved more easily under colonial rule than in the post-colonial era.The ethno-cultural character and related historical identities were grievously distorted under colonialism. The African was made to believe that his/her religion and ritual were marks of heathenism and the work of the devil; that our languages were irredeemably barbarous and customs savage. Between the missionary and the colonial administrator this much was achieved. Colonialism violently defiled the place of the African in history. It appropriated the history of the African and attempted to make the African a mere adjunct of Western history and relegated to the margins of global history. This separation of the African from his/her history is strategically ethnocidal.
If the West tore the African nationality apart, Arab denationalizing cultural and political hegemony predates this by a millennium. Arab slavery of Africans; the assimilation or Arabization of Africans which commenced in the 7th century A.D. has had in those areas where Arab power and influence has been asserted, equally deleterious effects. Historically, wherever consistent and persistent assimilation takes place, it goes on hand-in-hand with dominance and hegemony over the assimilated peoples. In the Afro-Arab borderlands, Africans have lost or are losing their languages at a rapid pace. African cultures have been treated as inferior and beyond the pale. Sometimes war has been used as an instrument in tandem with Arabization. It is interesting to note that, in KiSwahili the word for civilization is istaarabu (becoming Arab – Arabization). Mwarabu wangu (my Arab) which like mzungu wangu (my European) or the Akan equivalent mi broni (my whiteman) are all references to a superior.
Zwelam Insight 