An Essay on Pan-Africanism

It is not a Romance: It is Survival

By Femi Akomolafe

The other day, a well-meaning Persian gentleman asked me a question on Andrei Martyanov’s (the world’s preeminent military analyst) blog — perhaps out of genuine curiosity, perhaps with a hint of condescension: “What exactly is Pan-Africanism?”

I don’t know if I was imagining things, but the tone was all too familiar: the kind of tone one uses to ask a starving man why he insists on cooking when he could go next door and beg.

I laughed. Not because the question was funny — far from it — but because I realized, once again, that we Africans still have to explain, justify, and defend our salvation. In a world rapidly dividing into blocs — where power speaks in the accent of unity — why should anyone think that the idea of Pan-Africanism is not some tired chant from the 1960s?

No, PA is not a romantic slogan pasted on dusty walls in university dormitories. It is the bare minimum Africa needs to survive in the 21st century in a predatory world where only the powerful make and enforce the rules; their rules.

Pan-Africanism is not a dull-eyed appeal to long-lost brotherhoods or folklore. It is not Hollywood Kumbaya or such. It is a hard-nosed, survivalist ideology born of desperate necessity, not nostalgia.

The global geopolitical landscape is undergoing a Teutonic shift. The rules-based order is dead. And now, the new world is being shaped not by morality, treaties, or UN speeches but by missiles, markets, minerals, and muscle—none of which any of the colonial garrisons we call countries in Africa possess.

The United States no longer pretends that it will rely on bullying rather than diplomacy, despite its hegemonic power dwindling rapidly. Even with its behemoth economy, China is signing cooperative agreements like there is no tomorrow – SCO, BRICS, etc. India is rising and flexing its muscles. ASEAN countries have calibrated their moves and integrated their economies. Russia has shown, by brute force, that if you want your interests respected, you’d better come armed — with bombs, bankers, and everything in between

So tell me, what is Sierra Leone doing flying solo to Beijing to beg for loans or negotiate a trade agreement? What is Kenya doing, hat in hand, negotiating with Brussels, while Germany sends delegations to Ghana to fish for nurses like it’s 1884 all over again?

As I wrote in The Plantation Managers We Call Presidents in Africa, these fragmented negotiations are not just foolish but suicidal. You do not negotiate with empires as a village. You negotiate as a continent or, at least, as a regional bloc.

No single African country — not even Nigeria with its bloated ego and oil-drenched delusions — can stand toe-to-toe with America, the EU, or China.

Africa must unite economically, politically, diplomatically, and yes — militarily, or be forever condemned to a position of begging and bleeding.

The visionary Marcus Garvey was not facetious when he thundered: “Africa for the Africans! At home and abroad.”

Kwame Nkrumah, probably Garvey’s greatest Apostle, who did not merely speak Pan-Africanism but lived and breathed it, cried out: “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”

And yet, here we are. Sixty years later, still crawling to the IMF and still being lectured by French presidents and British prime ministers with imperial hangovers. Still watching our leaders genuflect to Europeans like loyal houseboys at a colonial kitchen door. Watching a narcissitic American president treat five African presidents like you would valets.

Pan-Africanism is not some forgotten ideology. It is the battle cry of every African who understands that we are being eaten alive because we are divided. It is the logical conclusion of anyone who studies history, economics, and the balance of power.

One does not need a PhD in Evolutionary Theory before understanding that big predators eat small prey, not because they are callous or wicked; their survival depends on it. Bob Marley wailed: “These are the big fish who will always try to eat down the small fish. As the small fish, I tell you again, they would do anything to materialize their every wish.”

Yes, life is one helluva Darwinian survival of the fittest.

Pan Africanism, like life, is not romance. It is realism.

Before Bismarck summoned his fellow barbarians to Berlin in 1884 to slice up Africa like ham on a German dinner table, this continent had civilizations, societies, economies, spiritual bonds, kinship systems, and trade routes.

You could travel from the gold mines of Bambouk to the spice markets of Zanzibar without a passport. You could move from the Malian courts of Mansa Musa to the Swahili city-states without meeting a border.

We had kingdoms and empires, but more importantly, we had cultural continuity. Try to get and read Chikh Anta Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Black Africa.

The Bantu-speaking world stretched from West to South Africa. The Sahelian belt had its rhythm, language, architecture, and spiritual unity. Before the colonialists reduced us to tribes, we were nations, federations, alliances — bound not by flags but by faith and shared history.

Then came the European cartographers. With ink and arrogance, they sundered kingdoms and merged enemies, created nations that never existed, and erased identities that had lasted for centuries.

They did not ask about our languages. They did not care for our histories. The result is the mess we see today: 54 weak entities, most of which are not viable, pretending to be sovereign while begging on their knees.

Pray, what sense does the nation of the Gambia make, or Togo?

How could we convince our so-called technocrats in Accra, Dakar, Nairobi, and Pretoria that no African country is strong enough to negotiate alone?

Not Egypt, which, despite its military swagger, is being humiliated by tiny Israel, fully backed by the West. Even South Africa, with its advanced industrial base and delusions of Western friendship, was humiliated by President Trump. It is not Kenya, despite its fantasy that hosting UN agencies would promote it to Geneva. And not Nigeria, whose greatest export today is comedians disguised as ministers.

Imagine the plantation manager from Togo going to Berlin to negotiate trade when almost all of the federated states in Germany have bigger budgets than Togo.

When African presidents negotiate individually, they are taken as errand boys. When we stand as a bloc — with one voice, one army, one economic policy — we become impossible to ignore.

That is the meaning of Pan-Africanism.

Pan-Africanism is not about singing “Nkosi Sikelel Afrika” at every AU summit while sipping overpriced champagne in Addis. It is not about wearing matching kente cloth at funerals for leaders who looted their countries blind.

Pan-Africanism is about power; African power. No, not the empty Black Power sloganeering of the 1960s.

It is about telling the French or any Western ambassador to pack his bags without fear of economic sabotage.

It is about confronting the IMF and the misnamed World Bank with a common African currency backed by our vast mineral wealth.

It is about building a unified African army that can defend our waters, skies, and people — not one trained in Paris and armed by Washington. Nkrumah advocated this in his suggestion for an African High Command, which would have put paid to all the civil and uncivil wars that are raging across our continent.

The onus is upon us not to leave the fight for African unity to presidents and ministers, many of whom are morally bankrupt and mentally colonized.

Pan-Africanism must be taught, preached, and lived from kindergarten to university. Let our children learn about the Kingdom of Kush before they learn about the British monarchy. Let them recite the words of Mwalimu Nyerere and Thomas Sankara before they ever hear of Plato or Rousseau.

When African children know they are heirs to civilizations that built pyramids and libraries before Europeans discovered that bathing is not a sin, they will walk taller. They will begin to look in the mirror and like what they see. They will invent, create, sell, and more.

When you tell a child that his ancestors were kings, not slaves, you inspire him to fight for his future. You offered him a positive image of himself.

We must all appeal to our ministers for education in Africa to incorporate Pan-African studies at every level and make them mandatory. They must elevate and fund Pan-African studies. No one who cannot demonstrate sufficient aptitude in Pan-African Studies should be allowed to teach in our schools. Let there be inter-African exchange programs, pan-African curricula, and continent-wide language initiatives.

Teach Hausa in Lusaka, Wolof in Gaborone, and Kiswahili in Accra. Make Zulu and Amharic household names. Instill pride in being African, and let that pride fuel the next generation of engineers, artists, economists, and generals.

This is not nostalgia. This is nation-building on a continental scale. Why did we train ourselves to think that speaking English, French, and Portuguese is cool, while it is haram to talk to ourselves in Igbo?

If you are new to Pan-Africanism and would like to embark on the journey into self-discovery, start here with these ten books listed in no particular order:

1. “Africa Must Unite” – Kwame Nkrumah
2. “The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey” – Marcus Garvey
3. “Consciencism” – Kwame Nkrumah
4. “Decolonising the Mind” – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
5. “The Wretched of the Earth” – Frantz Fanon
6. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” – Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)
7. “The Mis-Education of the Negro” – Carter G. Woodson
8. “The Pan-African Movement” – Imanuel Geiss
9. “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism” – Kwame Nkrumah
10. “The African Origin of Civilization” – Cheikh Anta Diop

These are not just books, but manuals for liberation. Please read, share, and teach them.

Pan-Africanism is not a dream; it is our only path forward. We either unite and survive, or remain divided and perish not in dignity, but in debt to those who should come to us as supplicants.

Even if it were a dream, is it not said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams?

The time for throwing useless slogans around is over. It is the time for strategic thinking, not as Ghanaians, Nigerians, South Africans, or Kenyans — but as Africans.

(Femi may well ask why I play Paul Simon.  It is ’cause I was at that concert in Zimbabwe, when Miriam Makeba sang us all on and off the stage and my parents thought I was sleeping at the neighbors – us kids were a little young to go sneaking off to concerts. ‘

Miriam Makeba testified against apartheid before the United Nations. 

The government revoked her South African citizenship and her right to return to the country.  Guinea, Belgium and Ghana issued her international passports, and she became, in effect, a citizen of the world. In her life, she held nine passports and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.  She performed all over the world, mostly with Hugh Masakela.  The concert was something that I’ve never forgotten and the last time that these timeless musicians performed together.  Ray Phiri with Stimela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo who I saw on tour once in Florida, so horribly homesick for Africa that I sneaked off and ululated with the band groupies in the back.  

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Polemicist-General of the Pan-African Republic)

My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!

I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.

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