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The drive to make something of Africa can be traced back to the 1920s and the early efforts by such leaders as the Jamaican Marcus Garvey with his demand that Africans and descendants of Africa dispersed worldwide reclaim their roots and return to their mother continent.
“Africa for the Africans!” was the rallying call. Thousands of Africans were enlisted to fight on behalf of the European colonial nations during the Second World War. They fought in trenches and the open battlefield with European soldiers. They witnessed Europeans fear, fight, win, lose, get injured, and die.
Many Africans, used to Whites in a dominant position at home in the colonies, were shocked to discover that these men too were human after all. The African fighters also felt that since they had risked their lives and shed their blood for this essentially European war, then they should be rewarded with self-rule, if not outright independence. Most independence movements in Africa, then, started or at least gained
momentum after the end of the Second World War.
Soul-searching
Many African students had also been to Europe and the United States for their university education. The racism they encountered and the aloofness of western society caused them to engage in soul-searching.
In 1912, the African National Congress (ANC) was founded in South Africa. It was the first political party in Africa. The ANC, even in those early years, was already viewing Africa as a whole and not just the situation in South Africa.
Among these vocal students in Africa were Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Namdi Azikiwe, Ahmed Ben Bella, Julius Nyerere and many others who would go on to become either the first prime ministers of their nations or first presidents and foreign ministers.
The racist policies of White-ruled South Africa, the tensions created by the post-War Cold War and the instability brought on by military coup after military coup starting in 1963 helped solidify a sense of African unity.
Many African children born in the 1960s were named after these African leaders and it is not uncommon to meet people in their 50s and 40s today named Patrick Lumumba, Ben Bella, or “Kinyata” in much of Black Africa. That demonstrated the extent to which even the ordinary people embraced the new sense of oneness on the continent.
However, no sooner had the 1960s decade started than it quickly became clear that this was going to be a disastrous beginning for Africa. There were assassinations in Togo and Nigeria of leaders, military coups in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Comoros, Madagascar, Libya, Somalia, Lesotho, Ethiopia and several other states from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Power struggle
Even as recently as 2000s, just when there was hope that there would be no more coups in Africa, coups resumed in Mauritania, Guinea, Niger and the Comoros.
With the arrival of the new millennium in 2000, the visionaries and dreamers around the world and Africa started looking to the future. There was general talk that this coming 21st century should be Africa’s, it should see a revival or “renaissance” of the African people.
Chief among these dreamers was the mercurial and colourful Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi and the then South African President Thabo Mbeki.
Col. Gaddafi started a campaign to reinvigorate the African unity drive, making several trips across the continent and pushed for the name of the OAU to be changed to the African Union, which it became in 2001.
Looking back now, it is hard to see what it was that filled statesmen and the media in Africa and beyond with hope that there was to be an African revival.
In all the efforts toward the achievement of African unity, it was obvious that Africa’s statesmen and bureaucrats were modelling their creations along the lines of the European cooperation moves. The name “African Union” sounded much like the “European Union”.
These Africans who studied in Europe and the United States and fought in British, French and Portuguese units during the war also saw something else; the undeniable advancement, orderliness and prosperity that were western society.
There was never any question that at some stage in the future, Africa’s European colonies had to start moving toward and eventually gain full self-rule. However, a few far-sighted and realistic young and western-educated Africans also knew that the attainment of political self-rule was only the start of a much bigger struggle.This much bigger struggle was the quiet realisation that it could be possible to win political or “flag” independence but still remain in a state of dependence and subordination to European powers and exploitation, if some form of economic unity and growth were not achieved.
With the formation of the OAU came other regional efforts, among them over the years, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the East African Community (EAC), the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) , the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Kagera Basin Organisation (KBO), the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA), and several other bodies.
It was not clear at the time they were founded and it remains unclear to this day what many of these regional groupings of nations stand for.
The longest-running pan-African effort on the continent has been the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament. It was first played in 1957 and has been one of the few consistent all-Africa efforts, apart from the heads of state summits.
This much bigger struggle was the quiet realisation that it could be possible to win political or “flag” independence but still remain in a state of dependence and subordination to European powers and exploitation, if some form of economic unity and growth were not achieved.
With the formation of the OAU came other regional efforts, among them over the years, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the East African Community (EAC), the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) , the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Kagera Basin Organisation (KBO), the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA), and several other bodies.
It was not clear at the time they were founded and it remains unclear to this day what many of these regional groupings of nations stand for.
The longest-running pan-African effort on the continent has been the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament. It was first played in 1957 and has been one of the few consistent all-Africa efforts, apart from the heads of state summits.
More plans
The All-Africa Games - a festival of sports mapped after the Olympic and Commonwealth Games - is also staged. In recent years, there have been other major African events spreading into the entertainment fields, notably the Big Brother Africa reality television show, the M-Net Face of Africa modelling competition, the Zain Africa quiz challenge and the Kora African music awards
Most of these pan-African entertainment competitions have been held in South Africa as South Africa is the only country with the resources, glamour and facilities to host such major television extravaganzas.
As a matter of fact, one of the major ironies of recent African history has been how the pariah country, South Africa, moved from its isolation of the apartheid years to becoming not only the pride of the continent but the one country that has helped drive economic growth in the fields of mining, mobile telephony, supermarket chains and the media.
The journey from most shunned country to most glorified climaxed this month with the hosting of the football World Cup finals in South Africa. However, the African unity effort also has shown its weaker side over the decades. When famine struck Ethiopia and eastern Sudan in 1984, it was a British Pop music campaign that brought the tragedy to international prominence, not the OAU headquarters in Addis Ababa.
With civil war raging in Somalia, even after desperate calls have been made to African countries to contribute peacekeeping troops to the war-torn country, so far it has only been Burundi and Uganda that have responded and neighbouring Ethiopia intervened in any direct way.
Africans have long had an ambivalent view of each other. Many in sub-Saharan Africa often complain about the racism they face in North Africa and during the World Cup finals or the Africa Cup of Nations, there remains a distinct air of indifference by Black African countries when it comes to supporting the
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Most of these pan-African entertainment competitions have been held in South Africa as South Africa is the only country with the resources, glamour and facilities to host such major television extravaganzas.
As a matter of fact, one of the major ironies of recent African history has been how the pariah country, South Africa, moved from its isolation of the apartheid years to becoming not only the pride of the continent but the one country that has helped drive economic growth in the fields of mining, mobile telephony, supermarket chains and the media.
The journey from most shunned country to most glorified climaxed this month with the hosting of the football World Cup finals in South Africa. However, the African unity effort also has shown its weaker side over the decades. When famine struck Ethiopia and eastern Sudan in 1984, it was a British Pop music campaign that brought the tragedy to international prominence, not the OAU headquarters in Addis Ababa.
With civil war raging in Somalia, even after desperate calls have been made to African countries to contribute peacekeeping troops to the war-torn country, so far it has only been Burundi and Uganda that have responded and neighbouring Ethiopia intervened in any direct way.
Africans have long had an ambivalent view of each other. Many in sub-Saharan Africa often complain about the racism they face in North Africa and during the World Cup finals or the Africa Cup of Nations, there remains a distinct air of indifference by Black African countries when it comes to supporting the North African teams.
African migrants and refugees regularly complain of mistreatment in North Africa as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
Most of the gruesome massacres of the 1990s civil wars in Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia have been of African against African.
There is still very little trade between African countries. Communications ventures like the SEACOM, ESSYS, and other undersea fibre optic Internet and data cables, although they carry the symbolism of African connectivity, are largely European in financing and capital.
The Sudanese businessman, Mr Mohammed Ibrahim, has instituted a prize to be awarded to African leaders who either govern well or leave power without a fight. It says a lot about the state of leadership in Africa that this prize had to be created at all or that in some years, no African leader meets the criterion that the prize demands.
In November 2008 when the US Senator, Mr Barack Obama, was elected as the first Black President of the United States, the euphoria that greeted that way was one of the greatest in recent African history.
Many Africans were convinced that this was the start of a new day for them. By mid-2010, the Obama euphoria had largely died out across Africa as Africans went about their back-breaking daily routine and struggles, having realised that apart from the token and symbolism, Mr Obama was no more a voice of hope for Africa than his predecessors in the White House.
This inability of President Obama to impact the continent of his birth should not have come as a surprise. Before Mr Obama, there had been several key African and Black first in key international positions but with little to show for it.
Kofi Annan in the 1990s and Chief Emeka Anyoku of Ghana and Nigeria became United Nations and Commonwealth Secretaries General respectively, but the bearing of these offices did not halt the 1990s civil wars and the ravages of Aids, for example.
Africa remains a weak continent. It remains the poorest continent in almost all measurements - its contribution to world trade, number of phones, TV sets, doctors per 1,000 people, Internet connectivity, number of Twitter and Facebook users, road network size, electricity consumption, literacy and other development or progress indicators.
As a percentage of any global figure, Africa consistently shows lower single-digit figures. Some of this weakness can be seen in the meetings that world power nations hold with Africa. China and France in recent years have held joint summits with dozens of African countries and a handful of African countries are regularly invited to G-8 and G-20 in what usually turns out to be more token and politically correct gesture than substantive meeting.
In the 1990s as Africa was being trumpeted as the next frontier of international investment and growth, many did not see an Asian giant rising in the form of China. That 1990s decade was largely squandered by Africa.
Today, China has become the world’s second-largest economy and has swiftly and successfully taken up the place that should have been Africa’s. Africa, for its turn, has become what many would consider a dumping ground for cheap Chinese manufactured goods.
There is also a rush by several established and rising world powers to secure Africa’s gold mines, oil and natural gas reserves that seem to be discovered very often these days.
There are few signs that African countries will be able to pool together their political, diplomatic and military resources to fight off the new designs by foreign powers on their resources.
Cause for celebration?The Africa whose leaders sit in Kampala this week will have a few immediate things to celebrate, most of it being the football World Cup and perhaps the impression in their minds that Africa is now no longer ignored as it once was in world affairs.
Much of this, though, remains unrealistic optimism. As the older generations that remember the days before or not long after independence, many have become circumspect and it is often said by them that on hindsight, the colonial era, with its sense of order and efficiency, might after all have been the golden age of Africa, the humiliation of being ruled notwithstanding.Many more Africans certainly have been tortured, killed, raped, maimed and reduced to poverty in the independence era than those that suffered these abuses during all of the colonial period combined.
