Pan Africanism: From Kwame Nkrumah to Libya’s Gaddafi

In May 1963, many of them were among the 32 heads of state and government meeting in Addis Ababa to create the Organisation of African Unity.

When Nkrumah simultaneously released his book, Africa Must Unite, (undoubtedly thinking it was appropriate for the occasion), the assembled presidents suspected an attempt to dominate the continent and realise Nkrumah’s ambition to become the president of a United States of Africa.

Opposition to Nkrumah was led by Tanzania’s Nyerere who sought a regional approach as the more realistic way to eventually achieve continental unity.

He was a strong proponent of an East African federation as a step on this path.

Nkrumah was implacably opposed to what he called “balkanisation on a grand scale” and deemed Nyerere a rival to his leadership of the continent, one who might eclipse him as the first African leader to unite independent countries.

The book Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah, states: “Although knowing little about East Africa, Nkrumah not only disagreed but actively interfered to obstruct the East African federation.”

This only served to confirm the fears of those who felt that Nkrumah was professing African unity as a ploy to undermine their governments.

For his part, Nyerere dismissed Nkrumah’s opposition as “attempts to rationalise absurdity.”

In fact, so eager was he for regional integration that he repeatedly told Jomo Kenyatta, the least interested of the three East African leaders, Tanzania would renounce its sovereignty right away if Kenya were ready to unite.

During the 1965 Commonwealth Conference he declared that “if Mzee Kenyatta today says he is ready, then we will federate tomorrow.”

That, of course, never happened and the search for political unity soon took a back seat to moves towards economic integration.

The 1980 Lagos Plan of Action for the Development of Africa and the 1991 treaty to establish the African Economic Community (also known as the Abuja Treaty), proposed the creation of Regional Economic Communities (RECs) as the basis for African integration, with a timetable for regional and continental integration to follow.

The AU, established in July 2002 (at Gaddafi’s behest) to replace the toothless OAU, today recognises eight RECs including the East African Community.

Still, the rhetoric of political union remains.

A 2006 study adopted by the AU proposed a three-phase, nine-year roadmap to the United States of Africa commencing “immediately after the decision of the Assembly at the next session of the AU summit” in Accra, Ghana.