By Mwalimu George Ngwane
25th May 2008 would have marked 45 years of state-centric PanAfricanism within the continent.
The historiography of PanAfricanism has been one of dialectically opposing ideologies and procedural battles on the methodology and ownership of its dividends.
The Diasporan divergence on PanAfricanism from 1900-1945 epitomized by W.E.B Dubois’ integrative approach of African citizenship contrasted to Marcus Garvey’s exclusionist “Back to Africa “ declaration.
Between 1950- 63, another polarization arose with a Monrovia bloc militating for a sub regional approach to PanAfricanism while the Casablanca group opted for a holistic continental unification trajectory resulting in the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U) on 25th May 1963.
With the attainment of political Independence by most African countries in the 60s the pendulum oscillitated between an atavist pseudo-nationalist group that held tenaciously to national sovereignty and an economic-integrative bloc that favoured the clustering of sub regions resulting in the Lagos Plan of Action (1980) and the Abuja Economic Treaty (1991). Muammar Gaddafi’s convening of forty Heads of State to Sirte Libya on September 9th 1999 was an acknowledgement of the flawed Pan African promises since 1900 and a resolve to rekindle the Casablanca dream through the transformation of a moribund O.A.U to a fast track African Union. Unfortunately the launching of the African Union on 9th July 2002 in Durban, South Africa, stalled the Sirte revolution and in its place erected a Durban evolution.
The Sirte visionaries predicated their PanAfricanist steam on an homegrown partnership paradigm while the Durban apostles conditioned its growth on an ever elusive development mind set of international collaboration. While we continue to applaud the pre-Independent African leaders for aggressively warding off colonialism by imposition, we cannot condone the present African leadership’s role in religiously courting colonialism by invitation.
In January 2007, the African Union placed the “Grand Debate” on its 9th session agenda in Ghana with the aim of having a minimal pan African consensus of a Union Government in the mould of a United States of Africa. The outcome was a replay of the Monrovia and Casablanca blocs with the gradualists triumphing over the fast track proponents.
In all these state-centric pan African binaries, the real beneficiaries who are the African people (citizen led) have never been consulted. While the state-centric ideological polarities have produced their thesis (fast track approach) and anti-thesis (gradual leverage) the common synthesis which is a people-led PanAfricanism with a focus on a common African citizenship has remained peripheral.
Until the ownership of PanAfricanism is citizen-oriented through the concrete establishment of common economic values, shared social identities, a consensual political front and a more authoritative African Union Commission, pan Africanism shall continue to stay at the level of futile state-centric theses and reactionary anti-theses and the result shall be the ubiquitous power jockey among a rent seeking political elite, the scramble for depleted resources among the emasculated masses and the stereotype image of a continent that has erroneously earned the stigma of “a scar on the conscience of humanity”.
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