Rethinking Pan-Africanism

Recently we attended a fascinating lecture by Dr Thandika Mkandawire who spoke about the need to rethink Pan-Africanism. For the benefit of all who were unable to attend this lecture we have provided a brief summary of the lecture below.

According to Dr Thandika Mkandawire, African intellectuals must focus their efforts on designing a new democratic Panafricanism that will strengthen the continent's capacity to exploit the vast human resources (both at the levels of the Diaspora and the Continent), and natural resources in order to eliminate poverty and disease which have been Africa's burden for so long. Efforts of intellectuals must also be aimed at weaving a web based on Africa’s great cultural diversity. If Africa does not integrate we will remain a slave to the western world. And this new Panafricanism should adopt a more democratic and participatory process as a basis for the Panafrican project.

There is the need to rethink panafricanism given the fact that political unification and economic integration of the continent have so far failed to materialise, when assessed against the dreams of the main figures of the Panafrican Movement and programmes prepared for Panafrican conferences, and declarations and speeches of African leaders. They failed when compared to other regional co-operation projects in other continents (Europe for example). They failed in relation to the needs of Africa.

This failure of Africa’s economic integration can be attributed to the lack of national basis for regional integration, which Dr Nkandawire attributes to the obstacle that an authoritarian government represents (Anything coming form the outside world was to serve the selfish interest of one person or a cluster of people.

This environment which made the African Union a matter for heads of states and which explains that it is said in the preamble of the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU): "We the heads of state and government" and not "We the African peoples".According to Dr Nkandawire this was the reason why former Tanzanian president, late Julius Nyerere described the OAU as the "Committee of Dictators".Therefore, he said, "if Africa is to unite, the spokesmen of the different political constituent elements of Panafricans should derive their power from the people.

It is necessary that the platform for the Union should have a democratic base. The lesson that can be drawn is that it was naive to think that African dictators could unite Africa".There is therefore the urgent need to create more space for more negotiation with the larger world and to rethink Panafricanism not as a State’s Project but the people’s project.

Rissi Alabi - Executive Assistant/Programme Officer (Francophone Africa), AWDF
Grace Amenyogbeli - Administrative Manager, AWDF