Pan Afrik-revisted:Towards a future praxis.

Nkrumah’s Ideas of an Africa, as one unitary state, was largely a product of generations of African American and Afro Caribbean visions of Ethiopianism, or a Black Zion. A vision formulated as the only viable response to the intransigence of the legacy of slavery, on the one hand and the paradigm of race as a collective construct on the other. A construction based largely on the affinity of affliction in the new world, enjoining the scattered and hijacked Diaspora to imagine a pristine home in Africa, based on tenuous relations across the black Atlantic divide, spanning centuries of removal.

The focus of Nkruma's ideas were well within this new world historiographical ideal of self determination. To make it plain like Brother Malcolm X would insist, a unitary power in Africa, that could effectively counter the condition of subjugation under slavery at the hands of Europe, and its later day apparition America.

His ideas were formulated around the Praxis of African communalism, offering if you will, a philosophers' well thought out theoretical rendering of the cultural dispositional raw materials of what is , the traditional modus of African societal being. In other words formulating theory to match what was inherent in the African setting. This gave way to other theories that were less theory an more pragmatic as in the case of Mwalimu Nyerere’s Ujama in Tanzania. Other ideas of this collective African context were articulated by Jomo Kenyatta, Nassir , Kaunda, and Jaramogi Odinga Odinga to name only a few. Nassir joined Egypt with Syria. Kenya , Tanzania and Uganda formed what was called the east African community. Somalia became one nation, joining the Italian South with the British North.However;casting a fervent and forlorn hope to join their other ethnic Somali brethren, partitioned by the French( later Djibouti), Ethiopia (Ogaden), and Britain(now North Eastern Kenya). The euphoria of Pan Africanism swept through out the entire continent of Africa, momentarily galvanizing the ethnic chauvinism divide.It is almost a different Africa from the Africa of today , an Africa fragmented into the abyss of ethnic chauvinism exacerbated by today’s political actors who have the vision of a Rhino.
It is not that Africa can not produce visionaries like Nkurumah, but rather can Africa, produce a visionary that visions through the interest of the west?

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia of a relatively small,Western style, Western trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in culture commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them through the west they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa. 1

Nkruma’s vision is something Langston Hughes would have termed "a dream deferred" in that his vision although marvelous seemed esoteric to Franz Fanon. In my view Fanon, gave a more astute observation of this euphoria of nationalism.His views were formulated on the more practical conditionality of the continent and its people in real time. Fanon, observed as follows,

National consciousness is nothing but a crude , empty, fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for a young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe-a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of a nation and national unity.2

Nkrumah, was later described as a dictator by some, and there were instances in Ghana where some celebrated the coup that disposed him. The others like Kenyatta, Nyerere and most of the earlier cadres of Nkurumah’s Pan African vision were the same leaders who clinged to power( most died in office) that eventually lead to ( in case of the majority) ethnic dictatorships which deepened ethnic divisions, and gave power to a favored few. A more nuanced explanation of this system bequeathed to Africa by these earlier paragons of African unity is by Claude Ake,

The state in Africa has been a maze of autonomies of form and content; the person who holds office may not exercise its powers, the person who exercises the powers of a given office may not be its holder, informal relations often override formal relations, the formal hierarchies of bureaucratic structure and political power are not always the clue to decision-making power. Positions that seem to be held by persons are in fact held by kingship groups; at one point the public is privatized and at another the private is ‘publicized’ and two or more political systems and cultures in conflict may coexist in the same social formation.3

Nkrumah, based his vision on African traditional methods of coexistence and mutual governance and minority inclusion , instead of these ideas of multi-party democracies based on European notions of transparency, invariably passed off as universal, but in reality far fetched to the majority of Africans, as noted by Claude Ake, as follows,

The African who is slated for democracy is a rural dweller who lives in a society which is still predominantly communal. She is a subsistence farmer toiling for a precarious existence. She has virtually no access to safe drinking Water, health services and sanitary facilities and she is illiterate or nearly so. What does democratization mean in this setting and for this person? There is no chance in her ignorance, her debilitating poverty and precarious existence. She is offered only the spurious choice which is framed by forces beyond her control often beyond her understanding and of Little relevance to her needs.4

The legacy of a larger polity thus remains elusive to date. All the ideas brought forth thus far, are really just a chorus of imitations with not much thought given to what it is, that makes Africa.There are the exceptions who are concerned with a more African based Epistemology. Unfortunately they are usually drowned out by the din from this loud chorus of imitational, pseudo intellectual, and hungry ventriloquism. The griot is aware that the comments on democracy in particular may be used by this recent strongman types, to assume this visionary posture, all the while coveting power for the sake of power.
by the village griot











(1)Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, London: Metchuen, 1992. p.144
(2) Franz Fanon, The Wretched Of The Earth: Richard Philcox New Translation , Grove press
(3) Claude Ake , Democracy and Development in Africa 1996 Ibadan , Specctrum Books, p. 14.
(4) Claude Ake, Democratization of Disempowerment in Afirca , CASS occasional monograph, No.1, Lagos:
Malthouse Press 1994 , p. 20.