The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
VERY few political ideals are spoken of with as much passion in the continent and its diasporas as African Unity.
One can make the bold claim that in Africa and in the black diaspora African unity is a kind of political religion by which scholars, activists and politicians swear.
That is why every politician, scholar and activist must look and sound like a Pan-Africanist even when they are something else. Yet there is no divided continent and disunited people in the world as Africans and the black community at large. Such terms as black on black violence, black on black racism, Afrophobia and xenophobia have come to be used to display the violence and chaos that punctuates Africa and Africans under the sun.
So, at the end of the day, calls for African Unity have become the very evidence of the problem of disunity in Africa and in the global black world. This week my column delves into a decolonial exploration of this very ticklish subject of African Unity and its political and intellectual problematics.
Tellingly, the titans of African liberation from colonialism and imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere clashed on the subject and practice of African Unity. In principle, the two Fathers of Africa agreed that a United States of Africa was a goal that Africa was supposed to be invested in. It is the nature and the quality of the unity that divided them.
Decoloniality as a planetary sensibility and philosophy of liberation is, perhaps, a fitting vantage point from which to think about Africa and black unity at a world scale. Decoloniality is also equipped with the theoretical resources and conceptual tools that allow us to stand on the shoulders of our giants, Nyerere and Nkrumah, while retaining our power and ability to question and critique their ideas and actions.
Decoloniality resists the temptation to romanticise Africa and practice sycophancy towards its leaders and supposed legendary heroes.
A United States of Africa?
In 1963 Julius Nyerere put his mind to paper concerning the ticklish subject of the United States of Africa that Kwame Nkrumah was aggressively advancing. In a paper that was published by the Cambridge University Press, Nyerere, without mentioning the name of Nkrumah, debunked most of the myths and fantasies about African unity that the leader of Ghana, the first African country to achieve political independence, had been circulating. In the process of debunking Nkrumah, Nyerere also exposed his own toxic fantasies on African unity that we can now look back at and shudder at their tyrannical slant.
What pitted Nkrumah against Nyerere was Nkrumah’s demand for a radical and urgent United States of Africa under one government. Using his big brother status as the first black President of Africa, Nkrumah made the now famous argument that “Ghana will not be completely free if other African countries are still under colonialism.” This statement was translated and expanded to mean that African countries owed each other liberation.
It became one of the famous slogans of Pan-Africanism. Under apartheid, black South Africa used to invoke that slogan to encourage the rest of Africa to increase pressure on apartheid South Africa. Yes, there was that time when black South Africa called on the rest of Africa to help fight apartheid.
Nkrumah also made famous the idea of an “African Personality.” Africans, otherwise, from their different countries shared the same “African personality” that was made out of certain characteristics. The same way in which the idea of “Ubuntu” is marketed by South Africa Nkrumah made the concept of the African Personality as a kind of gift to Africa and mankind from Ghana.
Nyerere and other African leaders feared that Nkrumah was using his position to build himself to a President of Africa with massive powers and privileges over the continent. Some scholars think that the idea of Africa as a country, not a continent that most Westerners have was constructed and spread by Nkrumah. Nkrumah’s ambition and determination to lead the United States of Africa scared most African leaders from the idea of a United States of Africa.
Fear of the tyranny of Nkrumah turned into resistance to the idea of African Unity. African leaders clung onto the leadership of their individual countries and resisted the pressure to hand over their powers to a continental government that Nkrumah looked too eager to lead. In that way, African nationalism won over Pan-Africanism. Also in that way, African countries and their leaders found themselves defending colonial borders that were mapped and administered by colonialists and imperialists. So out of fear and maybe hatred of each other, Africans found themselves defending colonial borders and colonial nation states as they were imposed on them by Empire.
That one African has to prefer the coloniser’s way because he hates and fears another African is true tragedy.
Tellingly, for most African leaders Nkrumah had become a dangerous black coloniser that wanted to take over the leadership of other African countries in the name of African Unity. There was and still is something colonial and tyrannical about African post-independence leaders that makes Africans resort to the humiliation of thinking that maybe white settler colonialism was a better colonialism. On his part, Nkrumah the African philosopher king, felt betrayed by other African leaders that seemed not to see the precious value of the United States of Africa under one government.
When Nkrumah died, Nyerere made a painful admission that after all, Nkrumah was right about the necessity of a United States of Africa, but that was too little too late. Nkrumah had been deposed in a coup and died in the humiliating circumstances of exile.
The failure of the project of the United States of Africa that Nkrumah advanced, and which Muammar Gaddaffi also later propelled and failed to fully achieve, was due to two big problems in Africa. First is the problem of tyranny in post-independent African leaders which made other leaders fear and hate Nkrumah, and resist his idea of unity. Second is the power of colonial ideas, structures and systems of power that refuse to die even when colonialism has ended. Colonial borders and nation-states are durable.
Fear of Nkrumaist tyranny made African leaders prefer colonial borders and colonial nation-states and flee Nkrumah’s proposed United States of Africa. Both ways Africans lose to tyranny of black leaders and coloniality of power and knowledge that Empire puts in place. In other words, Nkrumah had a great solution for African disunity but that solution was accompanied by a great problem of his tyrannical streak.
That made Nkrumah what Ali Mazrui called him “a great African and a terrible Ghanaian.” That has always been Africa’s problem, caught in between greatness of ideas and terribleness of individual leaders.
What Nyerere Said
Our own Joshua Nkomo wrote of an incident where Nkrumah shocked to silence the usually talkative Patrice Lumumba by saying to him, “one day the Congo will become part of Ghana.” Nyerere feared and others feared that kind of Ghanaian imperialism of Nkrumah. Otherwise Nyerere believed in the idea of African Unity which he believed was a natural truth. But he wanted the sovereignty and diversity of African countries protected. He warned against African Unity that was only supposed to come under the leadership of certain leaders in Africa.
That is perhaps one of the stubbornest ideological problems among African nationalist leaders. When they talk of national unity or continental unity they mean unity under their own leadership which amounts to despotism and tyranny itself.
Nyerere feared national and continental unity that came through conquest of one group by another. Unity, national or continental, must be consensual and be by agreement Nyerere noted.
Frequently, in Africa, national and continental unity is forced upon the people by tyrannical groups and their despotic individuals. The idea of national and continental unity becomes ugly and discredited when it is used to mask despotism of individual leaders and tyranny of political parties.
That is why Nyerere warned about the possibility of domination of one by the other disguised as unity. People otherwise, Nyerere noted, should unite freely and happily not under compulsion. Unity under compulsion is colonial and tyrannical in nature and effect.
Nyerere worried about the way Nkrumah screamed unity and unity at Africans because genuine unity does not have to be screamed down to the people by the leader. It flows freely and fairly from happy and satisfied citizens, not bullied subjects that get bludgeoned by leaders into some unity under a dubious anti-people political vision.
One important thing that Nyerere said was that human differences of Africans should be recognised and respected. No one group should impose its identity as national and continental identity on other groups. A terrible thing that Nyerere went on to say is that rulers of Africa and their political parties should defend each other and not oppose policies of one another.
The policy of no interference and no opposition among African countries has allowed tyranny and despotism to thrive in Africa. The genocide of 1994 in Rwanda happened because African countries could not oppose even the murder of citizens by powerful groups that had guns and impunity on their side.
Under the regime of non-interference and no opposition, ruling African political parties conspire against ordinary citizens of Africa that get exposed to domination, exploitation and oppression. The fact that African governments cannot call each other out on excesses and violations costs Africans dearly in terms of security, life and happiness. African governments are cultured, up to now, and systematised into not calling each other out for any error or sin and that is a tragedy.
Decoloniality and African Unity
I go back to Chinua Achebe for a description of liberating African unity that is not imbricated in either coloniality or tyranny. Achebe in his small but telling collection of articles, The Trouble with Nigeria, argued that any form of unity is as good as the purpose for which it is formed and used. It is not about unity but its purpose and quality. Achebe noted that even thieves unite to steal, so uniting alone is not a grand goal. What we unite to do is what matters. Severally, in Africa, people and their organisations have united to loot and pillage the continent and its countries. Decolonial African unity would be that which puts ordinary Africans as the primary beneficiaries of peace, prosperity and happiness. Unity must secure the life of the African populations, their access to food, shelter, health, transport, security, dignity and free choice. Any continental or national unity that demands following without assuring human basic needs becomes colonial and tyrannical. It is telling that Nyerere, who was particular about the quality of unity accused the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at some point of being a “club of tyrants” that meet regularly to plot how to protect themselves from the people and keep power by any means necessary and unnecessary. The quality and content of any unity must be understood and judged by the standards of its good uses, otherwise it can as well be unity for coloniality and tyranny.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Hatfield, Pretoria: [email protected]
