Crisis Pan-Africanism

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.

Pan-Africanists such as Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah who historically called for a stronger continental centre have not enjoyed a realization of their visions. Instead, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), replaced by the African Union (AU), emerged as institutions for African cooperation without strong supranational power. The effectiveness of both institutions has therefore been limited, particularly in terms of economic development and security.

In the absence of a strong external military threat, the subtlety or patchy overtness of ‘neo-colonialism’ was not enough to pressure African leaders to relinquish some national sovereignty in favour of a stronger AU. Without these strong external threats, major progress in economic, redistributive, political and military intergovernmental coordination in Africa has happened mainly because of major internal pressures from war, famines and/or geopolitical competition. This ‘crisis pan-Africanism’, however, has its own limitations in breadth and depth and does not presently appear to be viable at the continental scale.

THE AFRICAN UNION AND LIMITS TO VOLUNTARIST PAN-AFRICANISM

Over the years, there have been different definitions of pan-Africanism. The historian, John Clarke, in a 1988 article titled ‘Pan-Africanism: A Brief History of an Idea in the African World’, demonstrates that a common theme across the historical definitions of pan-Africanism is that pan-Africanism is ‘about the restoration of African people to their proper place in world history’, through the restoration of land, nationhood and respect. However, the approach to securing these have differed among pan-Africanists, with some focusing on educational improvements among Africans, others on racial solidarity and others on territorial consolidation. For the latter, Edward Blyden, one of the nineteenth-century fathers of pan-Africanism, envisioned a trans-tribal West African State aided by British colonial expansion; Garvey, the West Indian founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, made efforts to build a trans-continental black republic; and Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana, the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence, called for a United States of Africa.

By the 1960s, the main debate which divided African leaders into the Casablanca bloc and the Monrovia-Brazzaville bloc, was whether postcolonial Africa should take action to pursue immediate political integration (Casablanca bloc) or should pursue economic integration first while maintaining existing colonial boundaries with the ultimate goal of political integration in the future (Monrovia-Brazzaville bloc).

The creation of the OAU in 1963 was the institutionalization of the victory of the Monrovia-Brazzaville bloc. On the other hand, many African leaders recognized the many international problems in Africa, including low intra-continental trade, weak international transportation infrastructure and communication systems and common natural resources such as river basins that require bilateral or multilateral institutions to manage in concert. Therefore, hundreds of regional intergovernmental organizations were created ad hoc, as opposed to Nkrumah who advocated for a strong continental centre with an African High Command for military needs, an African civil service and other pan-African institutions.

These ad hoc institutions, however, had weak supranational power since national rulers were reluctant to relinquish some of their sovereignty. The first set of wider regional economic organizations was established by clusters of countries which had become used to pre-existing regional coordination arrangements under colonial rule—such as Francophone West Africa (Union Douanière des États de l’Afrique Occidentale in 1959), the Union Douanière et Économique de l’Afrique Centrale among Central African states in 1964 and the East African Community in 1967. Even these were limited in depth, since they did not foster a developmental integrationist approach to regional economic integration, preferring trade liberalization and facilitation measures over common industrial policies.

In other words, Nkrumah’s attempt to position ‘neo-colonialism’ as the external threat to pressure Africans into forming a strong continental centre was unsuccessful. In fact, the few attempts at coalescing African countries into stronger collectives faced this exact problem. The lack of pressure for redrawing colonial borders into larger nations/federations is observed in the short duration and eventual collapse of the Mali Federation (between Senegal and Mali, lasting barely two years in 1959–1960) and Africa’s only postcolonial political integration experiment, the Senegambian Confederation (between Senegal and Gambia, 1982–1989).

In both cases, external threats were not strong enough to outweigh the inconveniences of the perceived internal tensions (which every new federation is bound to have). This contrasts with the Dutch Republic formed in 1579 as a mutual alliance of seven Dutch provinces seeking independence from Spain; the case of the German unification in 1857, which occurred in the context of Prussian geopolitical competition with Austria; and the 13 colonies coming together to form the United States in 1776 under the pressure of the war with Britain.

Africa’s regional experiments were also freely negotiated—which tends to be more prone to territorial fragmentation than authoritarian unification—rather than a case of one African country invading another. This contrasts with: the Italian unification (1848-1871), especially with the Southern Italian states, which was led by the wealthier Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia; England imposing empire on Ireland and Wales from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and nineteenth-century Latin America, which experienced longer (but still failed) experiments with Gran Colombia (1821-1830) in South America and the Central American Federation (1823-1842).

Indeed, the Senegambian Confederation probably lasted much longer than the Mali Federation and the largely symbolic Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union (1958–1963). This is likely because the Senegambian Confederation was established after a stronger Senegal intervened militarily to support Gambia’s ruling government against a coup (under a 1965 defence agreement given that small Gambia had no army). Another major case of lasting boundary expansion (such as Morocco over Western Sahara) occurred through absolutist/military means.

In Africa Must Unite, published in 1963, Nkrumah acknowledged that barriers to continental unity included ‘the fires of sectional interests, of personal greed and ambition among leaders and contesting aspirants to power,’ who are ‘manipulated from afar’ by neo-colonial powers. Observing the strength of these forces manifest in the failure of sponsoring a peaceful path towards the attainment of African unity between 1957 and 1960, Nkrumah recognized that only with force would these barriers be broken.

Nkrumah, therefore, sought to build a continent-wide network of radical African nationalist parties committed to pan-Africanism and favourable to his ideals. The Bureau of African Affairs and other instruments of Nkrumah’s ‘informal diplomacy’ served to create support for freedom fighters from other African territories in Ghana. This was in order to speed up the creation of a Union of African States. In other words, Nkrumah sought to empower radical pan-African opposition groups and their militant wings, which were in favour of African political union. The Ghanaian leader was eventually overthrown in 1966 and his policies reversed.

Nonetheless, without the covert subversive efforts of Nkrumah to force African leaders to take steps in the direction of greater political, economic and military integration, since Nkrumah’s death in 1966, various crisis conditions, especially war, famine and geopolitical competition have performed this function. These crisis conditions have led to the formation of more substantive inter-governmental arrangements and milestones on Africa’s journey to closer continental integration. This is demonstrable in the case of West Africa, where Nkrumah directed much of his initial, late-colonial and postcolonial political efforts.

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Crisis Pan-Africanism

THE AFRICAN UNION AND LIMITS TO VOLUNTARIST PAN-AFRICANISM

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