Pan Africanism: From Kwame Nkrumah to Libya’s Gaddafi

African Union summits rarely escape a Muammar Gaddafi lecture on his pet project: the United States of Africa.

The Libyan leader’s harping on the need for common government is derided by some as a plot for hegemony.

The idea of continental unity, though, is not new and neither is the cynicism.

In a sense, Gaddafi is unwittingly summoning us to our etymological roots.

The original meaning of the word “Africa” may be unclear, but, in ancient times, it referred only to the north coast of the continent, replacing the Greek word “Libya,” to refer to the land of the Berbers.

It only encompassed the whole continent from the end of the first century BC.

As it did so, it was slowly divorced from North Africa and soon confined to the region that, in less politically correct times, was also called Black Africa.

According to Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the conflation of Africa with sub-Saharan Africa “ultimately offer[ed]a racialised view of Africa as the ‘black’ continent... from which North Africa and especially Egypt [was] excised and attached to Europe.”

“Africa” no longer described a geographical entity, but was imbued with ideas of blackness and a mystical cultural unity. The transatlantic slave trade and the consequent forced immigration of millions of “black” Africans served to spread and cement this association abroad.

On the continent, European colonisation had much the same effect.

As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere observed, “Africans all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another, or from one country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one.”

Slavery and colonialism also gave rise to Pan-Africanism, the idea that black Africans and their descendants belonged to a single “race,” and shared both cultural unity and historical fate (a notion rejected by black American actress Whoopi Goldberg in 1998 when she declared: “I dislike this idea that if you’re a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I’ve visited Africa, and I’ve got news for everyone: I’m not an African. The Africans know I’m not an African. I’m an American.”)

Refined by the writings of Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, Pan-Africanism became the orthodoxy among the emerging class of political reformers on the continent.

The 5th Pan African Congress, organised in 1945 by Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, was attended by many scholars, intellectuals and political activists who would later become influential leaders in various African independence movements including Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and Nigerian leaders Obafemi Awolowo and Jaja Wachuku.

While generally endorsing the Nkrumah’s ideas on cultural and historical unity, the soon-to-be-all-powerful-potentates viewed political unity as a different proposition.