The Sunday News
For us to understand better the problems of the world and be able to solve them we must not think as ourselves, but as our ancestors and our descendants, said Lewis R Gordon. What Gordon meant by that pithy statement is that if we learn to be accountable to both the past of our ancestors and the future of our descendants, we would have learnt how to be truly responsible and really accountable. It follows that the future of things may really not be imagined and realised without a true observation and reflection of their past. It can be said without contradiction that the future is actually the past of tomorrow. In that logic and for that reason, in our imagination of decolonial Pan-African futures of Africa we really have to do some journeying to the past to see what gave birth to Pan-Africanism, how it grew and the challenges that it faced. Only after such hard work can we be able to invent a decolonial Pan-Africanism that we can export to the future. As the present world, led by the Euro-American Empire that is in trouble under the stiff challenge of China and its allies, approaches the envisaged New World Order which I have understood as the New World Disorder because of the coloniality of Empire, Africa really needs a new decolonial Pan-Africanism that will give strong answers to the strong questions of the present world. If Pan-Africanism means African unity first and foremost besides other goods and services, then Pan-Africanism is what Africa needs most in this fast-changing world. Only a decolonial and united Africa can survive the storms of the present world where geopolitical struggles of superpowers are fast becoming militarised. Without durable unity of the African continent the African countries risk being reduced, once again, into pathetic spheres of influence for some powers from out there. Pan-Africanism is the philosophy of liberation through unity that can help Africa mobilise and deploy some real political and economic weight in the world interstate system.
The birth of an idea in the Diaspora
Just as it is one of the paradoxes of the African continent that it was given the name Africa by colonialists and slave traders it is an irony that Pan-Africanism was born in the United States of America. Further to that, Pan-Africanism was born as an imitation of Pan-Europeanism and Pan-Arabism. E. W. B Dubois is on record, in 1887, arguing that Pan-Africanism was for Africans what Zionism was for the Jews. As one of the founding Pan-Africanists, we are told Dubois, as a coloured man, still retained some pride in his light skin and French and Dutch ancestry. It is Dubois that could call Marcus Gurvey, “dark and ugly” though he looked “intelligent, with a big head.” It has also been noted that the first Pan-African Conference of 1900 in the United Kingdom was really not about Africa but about African Americans and their struggle with racial discrimination. Concerned with the struggles of African Americans the young Pan-Africanism was flavoured with the religious Christian radicalism of Afro-American pentecostal churches that were breaking off from the racist orthodox churches in the United States of America. Besides being born of the pastors and the preachers in the USA, Pan-Africanism was also born of poets and singers. The likes of Dubois became the sociologists and philosophers of Pan-Africanism that was already religious, poetic, and political. It is a group of black South African students that during their studies in the USA got the brush of Pan-Africanism and took baby Pan-Africanism with them to South Africa. Pixley Isaka kaSeme, John Langalibalele Dube and Sol Plaatje are the South Africans that are credited with bringing Pan-Africanism to Africa.
West Africa had its Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah, and others also importing Pan-Africanism from the USA and bringing it to West Africa to energise the liberation struggles against colonialism there. Pan-Africanism whose ideas and energy were used to fight colonialism from Europe was, like colonialism, from outside Africa. It can be said that Pan-Africanism was domesticated into Africa after it was incubated and born in the West. And the Pan-Africanists were not agreed on everything Marcus Gurvey and Dubois had bitter fights just like Dubois had scary fallouts with one Booker T Washington in the United States. Pan-African debates were no chorus but there were messy debates and quarrels. Intellectual Pan-Africanism has been credited for freeing African from colonialism, not military Pan-Africanism, religious Pan-Africanism or poetic Pan-Africanism. Ali Mazrui actually put it on record African independence from colonialism could not have been without intellectual Pan-Africanism.
The Pan-Africanists
Frequently when we talk about Pan-Africanism we invoke emotions of glory and grandeur about Pan-Africanists and the Pan-African movement of yesteryear. But the Pan-Africanists of yesteryear were humans with all the foibles and limits. It might be because of the limits of the Pan-Africanists of then that Pan-Africanism itself became limited and failed to fulfil its goal of one Africa without colonial borders, a United States of Africa. Ali Mazrui wrote of a Nkrumah that came into power as a liberator and left as a man that had declared himself a life president of Ghana. Dubois is recorded for his intellectual snobbery and academic arrogance, and how he went to bed dressed in a three-piece suit, just to be proper, awake and asleep. Gurvey, a Jamaican who never set foot in Africa, died in obscurity in the United Kingdom after serving a jail sentence for fraud. Supporters of the legendary Pan-Africanists say he was framed of the fraud but the law, then and there, found him guilty of converting to personal use funds meant to fiancé the movement of blacks from America back to Africa. The legendary Julius Nyerere is actually remembered for resisting the end of colonial borders and insisting that African leaders of then keep their countries and not surrender them to a continental government. In other words, Nyerere became more of a nationalist than a Pan-Africanist. And nationalism is the ideology that has so divided Africans leading to xenophobia, Afrophobia and the continuing durability of colonial borders. At the end of the day, it can be argued that the trouble with Pan-Africanism was the Pan-Africanists and their buckets-full of faults. They also failed, in my view, to translate Pan-Africanism from an ideology of intellectual and political elites to a philosophy of liberation that was owned and used by the common people of Africa. They allowed Pan-Africanism to remain an intellectual and political slogan that has no meaning to the ordinary African.
Decolonial Pan-Africanism: Standing on the shoulders of the giants
The proud Pan-Africanists of these days, intellectuals, artistes and others, enjoy claiming to be standing on the shoulders of Pan-African legends of the past. Rarely do they want to look at how fragile some of the shoulders of the giants were. So, I agree that we need to stand on the shoulders of the giants but do so critically and carefully lest we fall. Decolonial Pan-Africanism, therefore, will have to be a Pan-Africanism that is aware of past faults and failures, the glory and the dangers, and the difficulty ahead in uniting Africans against imperialism and coloniality. It must be a decolonial Pan-Africanism that has learnt a lot from the past and is ready to approach the future, equipped with political and philosophical tools for the task. For that to happen we must replace the romanticism about Pan-Africanism with critique and decolonial courage, and love. Like the proverbial gold decolonial Pan-Africanism must be tested with fire not simplistic fanaticism.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Zululand, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. This piece is a simplified extract from a Keynote Address presented before the 13th Annual Humanities and Social Sciences Conferences: Africanising the Curricular Discourse in Higher Education, 3-4 November 2022. Contacts: [email protected]
