Guardian

“SEEK ye first the political kingdom, and  all else shall be added unto it.” Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah’s famous injunction continues to reverberate across Africa as it celebrates the golden jubilee of the birth of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). To understand the significance of this moment, we must retrace the history of Pan-Africanism itself.

Europe’s “original sin” against Africa occurred at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-1885, when the rules were effectively set for the partition for Africa on the eve of the “Scramble” for the continent’s riches. Fifteen years after the Berlin Conference, the Pan-African movement was born when Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester-Williams, organised the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. This was the same year that African American scholar-activist William E.B. Dubois, the “Father of Pan-Africanism”, uttered the remarkably prescient prophecy: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.” Between 1919 and 1945, five Pan-African Congresses took place in Paris, London, New York, and Manchester. These meetings were at first dominated by African Americans like Dubois. But in time, Africans and Caribbeans increasingly participated in them.

Initially, the demands of these early Pan-Africanists were limited to education, economic development, and racial equality. Eventually, however, Pan-Africanism advocated African unity so that its cultures could flourish, unhampered by the denigrating influences of Western “civilisation”. Some sought refuge in an idealised African past, free of slavery and xenophobia, with writers like Martinique’s Aimé Césaire and Senegal’s Léopold Senghor developing the idea of négritude, which glorified black culture, looked back nostalgically at a rich African past, and affirmed the worth and dignity of black people. Nigerian Nobel literature laureate, Wole Soyinka, famously ridiculed the romanticism of this apolitical approach in wryly noting: “The tiger does not profess its tigritude, it pounces.”

By the time of the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the Pan-African movement had shifted its centre of influence to Africa. The conference was dominated by indigenous Africans like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, and Malawi’s Hastings Banda, men who later led their countries to independence. Dubois, in fact, was the only African American at the conference. He passed the torch of Pan-Africanism to Nkrumah in Manchester. Both Dubois and another towering Pan-African intellectual, Trinidad’s George Padmore, then worked as advisers to Nkrumah’s government. Both lie buried in Accra.

A historic battle was waged for the soul of Pan-Africanism, between a “radical” Casablanca minority bloc led by Kwame Nkrumah – and also involving Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Guinea, and Mali - and the majority of African states, grouped under the Brazzaville and Monrovia blocs, who favoured a more gradualist approach to continental unity. Nkrumah’s rejected vision of a “Union Government of African States” would have involved common economic planning (including a common currency and monetary zone), an African military command, and a common foreign policy. The Ghanaian leader was widely distrusted by his fellow African leaders for backing armed dissidents, and even his union with Guinea and Mali concluded by 1961, proved to be short-lived, dying a year later.

In May 1963, 32 African states met in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and signed the OAU Charter, effecting the disintegration of the three rival African blocs. The Charter clearly reflected the triumph of the gradualist, evolutionary path over the speedy, revolutionary course of the “radicals”. The document, however, rendered the OAU’s executive and administrative branches ineffective by according them only limited powers. Resolutions of the OAU Assembly were not legally binding, and the body lacked implementation mechanisms. The organisation’s Commission of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration was also not a judicial organ and did not have any powers of sanction. Diallo Telli, the genial Guinean technocrat and first substantive Secretary-General of the OAU between 1964 and 1972, noted that Pan-Africanism had been born into an atmosphere of “complete alienation, physical exploitation and spiritual torment.” Telli would himself be starved to death in Guinean leader Sékou Touré’s prison in 1977.

The threat of foreign intervention in the heart of Africa was symbolised by the martyrdom of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 during the traumatic Congo crisis (1960-1964). This led to recognition of the need for what Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui, described as Pax Africana — a peace created and consolidated by Africans themselves. The OAU’s aspirations for Pax Africana were, however, destroyed by the “proxy wars” waged by the United States (US) and the Soviet Union in Africa, and the pyromaniac adventures of the French gendarme. The OAU did not bother to react collectively when Tanzania invaded Uganda in 1979 to depose the “butcher of Kampala”: Idi Amin had been elected as OAU chair in 1975–1976 despite killing an estimated 300,000 of his own citizens.

But despite its shortcomings, the OAU deserves credit for its firm commitment to decolonisation and the anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa. The continental body doggedly and uncompromisingly pursued these battles, furnishing military and diplomatic support to Africa’s liberation movements. Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere chaired the OAU’s Liberation Committee that coordinated these efforts, which eventually culminated in the unprecedented imposition of United Nations (UN) economic sanctions on albinocracies in Rhodesia and South Africa.

Salim Ahmed Salim served as OAU Secretary-General from 1989 to 2001: the longest tenure in the institution’s history. His main contribution was in the area of security. As the Cold War came to an end in Africa, the Tanzanian diplomat warned African leaders of the need to observe human rights and stop regarding the notion of state sovereignty as absolute. Between 1960 and 1990, no single ruling party had lost power in Africa. Salim finally succeeded in his efforts to establish an OAU conflict resolution mechanism in 1993.

Nigerian scholar-diplomat Adebayo Adedeji, who headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) between 1975 and 1991, was undoubtedly Africa’s most renowned visionary of economic integration. He oversaw the creation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) between 1975 and 1983. He also  pushed the OAU to organise an economic summit in 1980 at which he championed the collective self-reliance and self-sustainability principles of the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA). These plans were enthusiastically adopted by African leaders, but then left to gather dust, even as an African Economic Community (AEC) was later envisaged for 2028. Less than 12 percent of current continental trade is intra-African. Mali’s Alpha Konaré, was the first chair of the African Union Commission between 2003 and 2008. His vision and eloquence were impressive, but there was often a lack of focus and reality about his approach to regional integration.

In creating the African Union in Durban in 2002, it seemed at first that African leaders like South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, and Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika had finally realised that the grandiose plans and high-sounding resolutions of the OAU era could not bring about the continent’s economic integration. African governments were forced increasingly to recognise that economic development could not simply be legislated into existence. The glue that had held the OAU together for three decades – the liberation of Southern Africa — had now come unstuck. With growing poverty and continued insecurity replacing apartheid and colonialism as the common enemy, the OAU was forced to commit suicide in 2002 in the hope that the AU could rise from its ashes like the Egyptian Phoenix.

Unlike the OAU Charter, the AU’s Constitutive Act of 2000 allowed for interference in the internal affairs of its members in cases of

unconstitutional changes of governments, egregious human rights abuses, and conflicts that threatened regional stability. This was revolutionary in light of the OAU’s rigid, non-interventionist posture.  The AU is also seeking to establish an African Standby Force, consisting of five subregional brigades, by 2015. The organisation has identified the African Diaspora as a sixth subregion in its structures. This idea has, however, so far been devoid of substance.

Another “Grand Debate” occurred at the AU summit in Accra in July 2007. This meeting revived some of the early battles of African diplomacy five decades earlier. In Africa’s contemporary battle, the gladiators had changed but the issues had not. Libya, under its mercurial leader Muammar Qaddafi, launched the vision of a “United States of Africa” that would be loosely modelled on the European Union (EU). Qaddafi came closest to Nkrumah’s Pan-African vision, calling for an appointed president and ministers, as well as a central bank. Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade advocated a limited continental government, with the AU serving as an embryonic federation with a common currency and appointing its own ministers. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni pushed for a subfederalism that would eventually culminate in a political federation under a revived East African Community

(EAC).

This contemporary debate, however, seemed ahistorical, quixotic, and impractical. The lessons of the divisions of the 1960s had to be learned before progress could be made. African leaders in Accra in 2007 were presented with three options: first, to strengthen the AU and existing regional groupings; second, to create a “Union Government” by 2015 with executive powers in specific areas as a transitory phase towards a “United States of Africa”; and third, to proceed immediately towards a “United States of Africa”.  As in the days of Nkrumah, the more federalist vision of Africa (in particular, the third option) was rejected by African leaders. This was an idea whose time had not yet come. There appeared to be a lack of priority, sequencing, or reality in these federalist schemes. Putting old wine in new bottles would clearly not integrate Africa. African leaders must vigorously pursue the first option and focus on the hard work of strengthening and funding fledgling institutions that they have created, and establishing one effective economic pillar in each African subregion. Strong economies and stable democracies must be built. After all, there has to be something to integrate for integration to succeed. The “Grand Debate” of 2007 effectively turned out to have been another “Grand Distraction”.

The new AU Commission chair, South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is currently setting out a “Vision 2063” for the organisation in a year-long celebration, amidst the harsh reality that over half of the AU’s $278 million annual budget is funded by foreign donors.  Nevertheless, the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) has been active, while the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a useful governance monitoring mechanism, though it lacks “teeth”. The AU Commission has struggled in its first decade to establish its independence to take initiatives on behalf of its 54 members. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) clearly lacks the resources and capacity to develop the continent. The Pan-African Parliament (PAP) remains a talking shop, while the Economic, Social, and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) has failed to provide genuine civil society participation in the AU’s institutions. African leaders can still routinely ignore the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ unenforceable judgments.

Algeria’s founding president, Ben Bella, famously implored his fellow leaders during the founding of the OAU 50 years ago: “So let us agree to die a little or even completely so that the peoples still under colonial domination may be free and African unity may not be a vain word.” The political liberation of Africa was complete in May 1994 when Nelson Mandela became president of a democratic South Africa. In a speech to the US Congress five months later, Mandela quoted his fellow Nobel Peace laureate, Martin Luther King’s famous words during the 1963 march on Washington: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!” Two of the twentieth century’s greatest Pan-African struggles — the civil rights and anti apartheid battles – were thus inextricably linked.

While Nkrumah’s political kingdom has now been achieved due to the efforts of our Pan-African ancestors, the quest for the socio economic kingdom continues.

Dr. Adebajo is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR), Cape Town.