Gaddafi’s United States of Africa: Would you buy a used camel from this son of the desert?

I admire Muammar Gaddafi more than I admire any other serving African leader.

Among the lofty ideals I share with him is the United States of Africa.

Only as a single state, I believe, will Africa achieve the great aspirations for which its people have yearned for so long.

Yet something does not gel.

Why does the leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya scare me?

How can I explain this contradiction?

Perhaps it is because Colonel Gaddafi vividly reminds me of another African leader whom I used to admire equally intensely for his commitment to a single continental state.

Kwame Nkrumah was among the founders of African nationalism, leading Ghana to become the first European colony in Africa to attain its independence, in 1957.

In the process, he became the moving spirit of something dear to Col Gaddafi today, namely, Pan-Africanism.

This was the spirit with which -- at the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 —Nkrumah cascaded a counter-movement to the proposal that the Berlin boundary system — created by the 1885 Berlin Treaty by which European states arrogantly “partitioned” our continent between themselves without any regard for tribal affiliation — be scrapped and that the African map be redrawn in a manner recognising the integrity of ethnic groups.

At the OAU inauguration in Addis Ababa, Nkrumah successfully defended Berlin by arguing that any attempt to rationalise the boundaries according to tribes would logically culminate in thousands of unviable states.

That is why there is no Maasai Republic today and the Maasai nation continues to live in two states.

But Nkrumah had a more important purpose in mind. Such a continental proliferation into puny little ethnic states would make it far more difficult for him to realise that United States of Africa that was the strategic purpose of the Accra-based Pan-African movement.

That is why Col Gaddafi scares me.

He reminds me that, as the expression of a real movement, Pan-Africanism was converted into personal property.