We need to support Pan Africanism for the realization of Africans’ strategic future

One of the latest proponents of this call for pan Africanism is the president of Uganda, H.E Kaguta Museveni who has on several forums been championing the pan African concept and encouraging all of us to embrace it in order to drive the African agenda beyond today.

He is so passionate about the concept that it was embedded among the Uganda`s biggest political party or organization where he is the chairperson as its core principles, and has gone ahead to show its practicability by being the first African country to put its military boot on battleground in Somalia when none would dare and he actually got a bashing for it from within and out but later on, results exonerated him and many joined his quest to liberate Somalia from the fangs of wrong elements and Somalis are all smiles thanks to his stance and resolve to put pan Africanism in practice.

And of late he is calling on every African nation to de-balkanize themselves and embrace pan African spirit in order to secure Africa`s strategic future and ensure its shared prosperity, and we must all support this noble call and make our forefathers who thought of this concept proud by realizing their long-cherished dream of a united people.

Just to briefly understand what Pan Africanism; it is a worldwide movement that aimed to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diasporan ethnic groups of sub-Saharan African descent.

It is also “a belief that African peoples, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny”.

Pan-Africanism serves as both a cultural and political ideology for the solidarity of peoples of African descent. Most notably championed and pioneered by Marcus Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism aimed to connect and understand the universal injustices within the Diaspora against the black race.

According to the continental body which is the successor to the OAU, Pan-Africanism is An ideology and movement that encourages the solidarity of Africans worldwide. It is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social and political progress and aims to ‘unify and uplift‘ people of African descent, wherever they are found.

Pan-Africanism is a socio-political worldview. As an ideology, and represents integrative intent directed at a fundamental change in society. In Nkrumah’s words, Pan-Africanism guides and seeks to connect the actions of millions of persons towards specific and definite goals.

It is a philosophy “based on the belief that Africans share common bonds and objectives and … advocates unity to achieve these objectives”.

We all know that Africa is a construct of colonial imagination, which happened in the 1885 Berlin conference and perfected in the resolution to balkanize her for imperial ends.

This colonial construct destroyed “the cultural and linguistic boundaries established by the indigenous African population”. Africans became estranged from one another, separating into different nationalities, people of the same family found themselves in different nations, for example, the Sabiny of Kenya and those of Uganda, the Acholi’s of Uganda and those of South Sudan etc.

We lost the opportunity to dismantle this historic injustice when the Organization of African Unity was established in 1963 to foster unity and solidarity. Since it did not deconstruct the Berlin conference stratagem of continued domination of the continent. Its focus was on colonial freedom. It did not change the narrative of the scramble for Africa. This “showed the limits of the pan-Africanism of African states”.

The decolonization project secured the independence of the African states, but their evolution followed the pattern of fragmentation determined in Berlin. Hence, Africans characterize each other as foreigners in their colonially determined boundaries, and this has continued to haunt us as we have fought one another over this berlin imaginary line, Uganda almost went to war with Kenya over Migingo, and the crisis in northern Uganda as a result of incursion by soldiers of South Sudan due to border line confusion is new in our minds too.

Sometimes this assumes the form of hatred and violence against fellow kinsmen- xenophobia as we see in South Africa, ethnic and civil wars in the rest of Africa. And Most African leaders are stuck in the sovereignty of their nationalism. So are their followers. Burundi’s stand against the African Union’s decision to deploy peacekeepers is a case in point. Pan-Africanism is pitted against nationalism. This makes Africa weak and vulnerable. It gives way for “continuity of preoccupation”. And these contradictions continue to drive Africa’s history

As the de-coloniality scholar Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni explains, the colonial matrices of power continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imagination, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South and we shouldn’t relax for the few ideals we have managed to secure.

For Africa to be for Africans, pan-Africanism should be a lived experience, not an ideological project for political rhetoric, all of us must wake up to the realization that the spirit is alive and we must live and drive it, popularize it through all forums, curriculums, cultural functions, national celebration, school debates and have an African liberation day where this concept is re-emphasized.

Through research as a lecturer of African political thoughts, I have realized that a body of pan-African thought exists. This has been developed by outstanding African scholars, political scientists, historians and philosophers living in Africa and the diaspora. It is the responsibility of African universities, secondary schools, and colleges to accommodate it in their curricula to ensure that the future leaders of this continent have a pan-African orientation when they graduate.

This must be done to expound on the lone voices of the president of Uganda and those with the same mindset, if the future of an African is to be secured today and tomorrow, we all must live and experience the spirit of Pan Africanism in our daily lives to keep it alive as we do with religion. Pan Africanism MUST be our religion.

For God and the great Pearl