Pan-Africanism or Imperialism? Unity and struggle towards a new democratic Africa.

• Author: Shivji, Issa G.

1. Introductory Remarks

   I am honoured and humbled by your invitation to deliver the Second Billy Dudley Memorial Lecture. Memorial lectures are no doubt occasions for us to celebrate the lives of our colleagues and comrades and learn from their contributions to the causes that we hold dear. I take it that they are also an occasion to reflect critically on our intellectual discourses and what they mean for the societies we live in. So I wish to take this opportunity to reflect with you on one of the most important of such discourses--African Nationalism.

   In this "era" of the so-called globalisation of the world into a global village, to talk on nationalism must sound anachronistic, if not foolish. But I shall be a fool, and you, I am afraid, have no choice but to bear the brunt of it!

   I will talk of African Nationalism as an anti-thesis of globalisation. For me globalisation is imperialism. So I shall call it by its true name--imperialism--and henceforth imperialism shall mean and include globalisation.

   I will talk about African Nationalism from the vantage point of a village; not Kivungu in the district of Kilosa in a country called Tanzania, where I grew up. No! I am talking of the village called Africa, the African Village. I am quite sure when I mention names like Kivungu and Kilosa you do not recognise them nor do you emotionally feel any affinity to them; but shrug them off as some administrative spaces somewhere--where?--in Africa, an African village. It is the Africanness of my village which binds us emotionally and arouses the whole bundle of perceptions, convictions, emotions and feelings associated with the phenomenon called nationalism. Thus African Nationalism is Pan-Africanism. There is no, and cannot be, African Nationalism outside of, apart from or different from Pan-Africanism.

   True, after 40 years of flying "our" flag and you being turned away from "our" airports for lack of visas (I am told Nigerians have great difficulty in getting Tanzanian visas!), you did recognise the name Tanzania but it did not quite strike a chord in you. But if I had said I come from the country of Julius Nyerere, it would have immediately stuck and you may have even felt some kind of affinity to it. Why? May I venture to say because of Nyerere's Pan-Africanism?

   African nationalists like Nkrumah and Nyerere, Nasser and Azikiwe, Modibo Keita and Amilcar Cabral, Hastings Banda and Houphouet-Boigny (yes, even them!), Albert Luthuli and Jomo Kenyatta and Ahmed Ben Bella and Patrice Lumumba were all Pan-Africanists. With varying degree of commitment to the cause or even out of political expediency, as African nationalists, they could not be anything but Pan-Africanists. As Nyerere said: "African nationalism is meaningless, is anachronistic, and is dangerous, if it is not at the same time Pan-Africanism. (Nyerere 1963a in Nyerere 1967, p. 194).

   No other continental people feel the same affinity, emotional bondage and political solidarity as do the people of Africa. Not only is our self-perception African, rather than Tanzanian or Nigerian or Chadian, even others perception of us, whether positive or negative, is African. Again Nyerere expresses well what many of us have often experienced: In a lecture in Accra on "African Unity, to mark 40 years of Ghana's independence, he observed:

   When I travel outside Africa the description of me as former President of Tanzania is a fleeting affair. It does not stick. Apart from the ignorant who sometimes asked me whether Tanzania was Johannesburg, even to those who knew better, what stuck in the minds of my hosts was the fact of my African-ness. So I had to answer questions about the atrocities of the Amins and the Bokassas of Africa.

   Mrs. Gandhi did not have to answer questions about the atrocities of the Marcosses of Asia. Nor does Fidel Castro have to answer questions about the atrocities of the Samozas of Latin America. But when I travel or meet foreigners, I have to answer questions about Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, as in the past I used to answer questions about Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia or South Africa. (Nyerere 1997)

   Territorial nationalisms, signified by our 53 flags and anthems and mini-states and trigger happy armies, can hardly be described as expression of African nationalism. Outside Pan-Africanism, territorial nationalism tends to degenerate into chauvinism at best, racism and ethnicism, at worst, all compounded by utter subservience to imperialism. Nyerere in his characteristic simple but picturesque language described what he called "exclusive nationalism, meaning territorial nationalism, as "the equivalent of tribalism within the context of our separate nation states. (Nyerere 1965 in Nyerere 1967, p. 335).

   It is not my intention to go into the history of African nationalism but I want to put forward a thesis that in this Second Phase of the Second Scramble for Africa, (which I shall explain in due course), Pan-Africanism is more important than ever before. Elsewhere I have talked about the coming insurrection of African nationalism (Shivji 2005). Today I want to go further and urge you to make it happen. Before I do that, let me identify some of the important tensions in the thought and practice of African nationalists of the independence period. This should provide us with the building blocks for a new discourse on African nationalism and Pan-Africanism as we struggle to construct a New Democratic Africa (NDA).

2. Tensions in African Nationalism

   African nationalist thought of the independence period had two major strands, Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism. African nationalism, almost by definition, was an anti-thesis of imperialism whose synthesis was African Unity. The Pan-Africanist idea was developed in the Diaspora towards the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century by such great Afro-Americans and Afro-Carribeans as Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, W. Du Bois, C.L.R.James, and others (Legum 1965). The early Pan-Africanist thought revolved around essentially cultural and racial issues whose main demand was for equality and non-discrimination (Pannikar 1961). This was reflected in the resolutions of various Pan-African congresses before 1945 (Legum op. cit. Passim). The Manifesto of the 1923 Congress, for instance, proclaimed, "In fine, we ask in all the world, that black folk be treated as men.' (Legum, p. 29).

   The turning point was the Second World War; in 1944 some 13 welfare, students, and other organisations based in Britain came together to form the Pan-African Federation which was to organise the most famous Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. The Manchester Congress was most political, with clear demands for independence and whose rallying cry was "Africa for Africans.. It was also for the first time attended by young Africans from Africa. Its two organising secretaries were Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya. Some 200 delegates attended the congress; among them were representatives of trade unions, political parties and other organisations.

   The resolutions were unambiguously political demanding autonomy and independence; sounding warnings that the age-old African patience was wearing out and that "Africans were unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world's drudgery. (Legum, p. 32); condemning and discarding imperialism while proclaiming in its own language a kind of social democracy. One resolution said:

   We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for private profit alone. We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy. (Legum, p. 155).

   Significantly, the Fifth Pan-Africanist Congress already signalled, albeit in an embryonic form, the idea of African Unity in the following words: "... [T]he artificial divisions and territorial boundaries created by the imperialist Powers are deliberate steps to obstruct the political unity of the West African peoples. Nkrumah, who organised the West African National Secretariat at the Fifth Congress, followed up the idea of African...