Onwuchekwa Jemie
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Steve Biko. One type of struggle we regard as fundamental is . . .the struggle against our own weaknesses. –Amilcar Cabral, [1980: 121]
You must not abandon discussion out of tact . . . There should be no concession where there is a question of establishing a scientific truth . . . Remember we are focused on a quest for truth and not on a sacrosanct idol we must avoid debasing… –Cheikh Anta Diop [quoted in Van Sertima, Ivan 1986: 13]
Professor Diop does have one important desideratum that has yet to be fulfilled. He desires a forum or colloquium somewhere in which an extensive and exhaustive discussion, analysis, and clarification of his ideas can be carried out. He feels that his work and ideas have not had the proper feedback, examination, and testing necessary to properly validate them despite their ever-widening reception. . . . His is a search for truth, not the establishment of a new orthodoxy. –Charles Finch [1986: 230]
Introduction
First of all, I have quoted Cabral and Diop to make a point that applies to Pan-Africanism as a whole. All its ideas are in need of exhaustive discussion, rigorous analysis and clarification to test their validity and utility. We also need to examine the practices of the African anti-colonial struggles, from the 18th century Haitian war of independence to the 20th century South African anti-Apartheid struggle, and we need to sort out the half-baked from the sound, the helpful from the harmful, the up-to-date from the out-of-date. And in this vital exercise, we must insist, as Diop urges, on not abandoning any discussion out of tact, or out of reverence for any hero or idol. We must courageously persevere in the struggle against our own weaknesses, for they, no less than the actions of our enemies, have helped to bring about our failures and disasters.
Secondly, we must understand that we want to solve the problems of the African people, not of the African landmass or continent. The focus of African self-reparation must be to produce the conditions that would rescue Africans from their dismal plight of the last two millennia.
Thirdly, we must understand that getting our Arab and European enemies to pay us trillions of dollars for the disasters they inflicted on us–by invading, abducting, enslaving, conquering, exploiting, robbing and exterminating hundreds of millions of us–will be just like collecting rain with a basket unless we first seal up the holes in the basket. And sealing up the holes is the job of self-reparation.
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Fourthly, what has been the basic problem, the mother of all problems, of Africans for the past 2000 years? Here are some clues:
If we had African power to stop them, would Arabs have conquered and occupied one-third of our African homeland in the last 1,500 years?
If we had African power to stop them, would Arabs and Europeans have raided Africa and carried off hundreds of millions of Africans to enslave in the Americas and Eurasia in the last 1,500 years?
If we had African power to stop them, would Africa’s resources have been exported to build up Europe and America while Africans starve?
If we had African power to stop them, would Arabs have taken over Sudan for the last 50 years and waged war on the South Sudanese to Arabize them and prevent their independence?
If we had African power to stop them, would the World Health Organization (WHO) and its US masters have had unhindered access to our population to AIDSbomb us? Would they have vaccinated 97 million Africans with AIDS-infected smallpox vaccines? No enemy can go into China or the USA or Europe to do mass vaccinations: Chinese, American or European power respectively would prevent it.
Now, that gives us a glimpse into the basic problem of the Africans for the past 20 centuries i.e. POWERLESSNESS! -the lack of the power to protect our lands, our populations and our cultures from alien attacks.
On the other hand, everything on the African wish list (prosperity, security, dignity, respect, basic needs, an end to racist contempt, etc.) requires African power.
Without African power, Africans cannot ensure that Africa’s resources are used primarily to meet African needs. The great world powers will continue to extract Africa’s resources for the primary use of Europe and America, thereby denying Africans the resources for African prosperity.
Without African power, Africans cannot hold onto their land and lives and resources and cultures. We need African power to end the kinds of mayhem and ethnic cleansing and Arabization that are being inflicted on Blacks in Darfur and Mauritania, which are a humiliation for all Africans.
And the organizing of African power requires a Pan-Africanist perspective that can see ECOWAS or SADC as potential sub-continental megastates to be industrialized for the protection of all Africans.
But could African powerlessness possibly be cured by Scientific Socialism, Liberalism, Marxism, Communism, Christianity, Islam, Humanism, Continental Union Government, or by any combination of these and the other decoy solutions offered in the last 50 years by all sorts of “saviors” of Africa? Were these “-isms” designed, in the first place, to solve the specific problems of Africans? After 50 years of chasing these decoy shadows, our plight is worse than before.
Perhaps it is time to make a fresh start, to take a new and comprehensive look at our problems and what we need to do to solve them for ourselves.
Fifthly, such a fresh start requires our acceptance of full responsibility for ending our plight. It means that we accept that, whatever Arabs or Europeans have done to cause our condition, and whatever our ancestors may have contributed to our plight, the responsibility is now entirely ours to cure it. Acceptance of this responsibility is our fundamental act of self-reparation; without it, we are fooling ourselves in demanding reparations from others.
Perhaps, the first key area in need of self-reparation is Pan-Africanism itself.
The need for self-reparation in Pan-Africanism:
Outside the estacode (i.e. dollars-per-diem) ranks of AU bureaucrats and intellectuals, Pan-Africanism has lost its relevance and appeal to most Africans. All the evidence available today indicates that Pan-Africanism has failed the ordinary Africans woefully. Strictly speaking, Pan-Africanism in the 20th century scored more failures than successes.
While its basic objective of removing the blanket of white European rulers from Africa was achieved, little else has succeeded. Black governments may now rule the countries of Pan-Africa, but visible black rule has not removed the white imperialist control and exploitation of our countries; nor has it done much to improve the conditions of the overwhelming majority of Africans in the world. The expected fruits of black rule have not materialized. Poverty, powerlessness, social disintegration, cultural decay and disillusion remain the hallmarks of African countries and communities everywhere.
More seriously, in the 50 years of Continentalist Pan-Africanism, our race war enemies have inflicted three potentially terminal disasters on Africans, namely, the AIDSbombing of Africa, a resurgent Arab expansionism that is expropriating more and more of our continent, and the AU’s NEPAD that guarantees that Africa can never industrialize or escape poverty. The collective failure of the OAU and its member governments to deter/prevent the AIDSbombing of Africa is a cardinal failure of Pan-Africanism.
Clearly, therefore, we need to investigate what went wrong and why, and we need to repair the Pan-Africanism that helped make things go so badly wrong. Perhaps most importantly, in the 20th century Pan-Africanism failed to mature into a full-fledged political ideology with a sound concept of its constituency, a sound idea of its paramount strategic goals and a sound political program of transformative action. It also failed to adjust itself to the changes in its environment. For instance, it has persisted in focusing only on the European domination that was the most prominent blight on the African landscape before 1950; it has failed to recognize the resurgent Arab expansionism that followed the withdrawal of European rule, and has refused to organize an appropriate Pan-Africanist response to it. Correcting these failings is a task of self-reparation, perhaps our most urgent task of self-reparation today.
And for our self-repair of Pan-Africanism to commence properly, we need to put together a Pan-African intellectual collective whose task is to assemble “A Pan-Africanism Reader”, an anthology of the principal ideas, documents, as well as the achievements and failures of the Pan-African Movement, so we can all know what we are to repair. Then, with that body of work in our hands, we can all join in the great discussion and analysis to find out why things went wrong and what to do to repair them.
