Self-reparation for Afrikan reconstruction: Pan Africanism and Black
Consciousness

By Chinweizu
Copyright (c) by Chinweizu 2006

Please see the Feel Free notice at the end

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Steve Biko.

One type of struggle we regard as fundamental is . . .the struggle
against our own weaknesses.
--Amilcar Cabral, [1980: 121]

You must not abandon discussion out of tact . . . There should be no
concession where there is a question of establishing a scientific
truth . . . Remember we are focused on a quest for truth and not on a
sacrosanct idol we must avoid debasing. . . .
--Cheikh Anta Diop [quoted in Van Sertima, Ivan 1986: 13]

Professor Diop does have one important desideratum that has yet to be
fulfilled. He desires a forum or colloquium somewhere in which an
extensive and exhaustive discussion, analysis, and clarification of
his ideas can be carried out. He feels that his work and ideas have
not had the proper feedback, examination, and testing necessary to
properly validate them despite their ever-widening reception. . . .
His is a search for truth, not the establishment of a new orthodoxy.
--Charles Finch [1986: 230]

Introduction
First of all, I have quoted Cabral and Diop to make a point that
applies to Pan Africanism as a whole. All its ideas are in need of
exhaustive discussion, rigorous analysis and clarification to test
their validity and utility. We also need to examine the practices of
the Afrikan anti-colonial struggles, from before the 18th century
Haitian war of independence to the 20th century South African
anti-Apartheid struggle, and we need to sort out the half-baked from
the sound, the helpful from the harmful, the up-to-date from the
out-of-date. And in this vital exercise, we must insist, as Diop
urges, on not abandoning any discussion out of tact, or out of
reverence for any hero or idol. We must courageously persevere in the
struggle against our own weaknesses, for they, no less than the
actions of our enemies, have helped to bring about our failures and
disasters.

Secondly, we must understand that we want to solve the problems of
the Afrikan people not of the African landmass or continent. The focus
of Afrikan self-reparation must be to produce the conditions that
would rescue Afrikans from their dismal plight of the last two millennia.

Thirdly, we must understand that getting our Arab and European
enemies to pay us trillions of dollars for the disasters they
inflicted on us-- by invading, abducting, enslaving, conquering,
exploiting, robbing and exterminating hundreds of millions of us--
will be just like collecting rain with a basket unless we first seal
up the holes in the basket. And sealing up the holes is the job of
self-reparation.

Fourthly, what has been the basic problem, the mother of all problems,
of Afrikans for the past 2000years? Here are some clues:
If we had Afrikan power to stop them, would Arabs have conquered and
occupied 1/3 of our African homeland in the last 1500years?

If we had Afrikan power to stop them, would Arabs and Europeans have
raided Africa and carried off hundreds of millions of Afrikans to
enslave in the Americas and Eurasia in the last 1500 years?

If we had Afrikan power to stop them, would Africa's resources have
been exported to build up Europe and America while Afrikans starve?
If we had Afrikan power to stop them, would Arabs have taken over
Sudan for the last 50 years and waged war on the South Sudanese to
Arabise them and prevent their independence?

If we had Afrikan power to stop them, would the World Health
Organization (WHO) and its US masters have had unhindered access to
our population to AIDSbomb us? Would they have vaccinated 97 million
Afrikans with AIDS-infected smallpox vaccines? No enemy can go into
China or the USA or Europe to do mass vaccinations: Chinese, American
or European power respectively would prevent it.

Now, that gives us a glimpse into the basic problem of the Afrikans
for the past 20 centuries i.e. POWERLESSNESS! -the lack of the power
to protect our lands and populations from alien attacks.
On the other hand, everything on the Afrikan wish list (prosperity,
security, dignity, respect, basic needs, an end to racist contempt,
etc) requires Afrikan power. Without Afrikan power, Afrikans cannot
ensure that Africa's resources are used primarily to meet Afrikan
needs. The great world powers will continue to extract Africa's
resources for the primary use of Europe and America, thereby denying
Afrikans the resources for Afrikan prosperity. Without Afrikan power,
Afrikans cannot hold onto their land and lives and resources and
cultures. We need Afrikan power to end the kinds of mayhem and ethnic
cleansing and Arabisation that are being inflicted on Blacks in Darfur
and Mauritania, which are a humiliation for all Afrikans.

And the organizing of Afrikan power requires a Pan Afrikanist
perspective that can see ECOWAS or SADC as potential sub-continental
megastates to be industrialized for the protection of all Afrikans.
But could Afrikan powerlessness possibly be cured by Scientific
Socialism, Liberalism, Marxism, Communism, Christianity, Islam,
Humanism, Continental Union Government, or by any combination of these
and the other decoy solutions offered in the last 50 years by all
sorts of saviors of Africa? Were these "-isms" designed, in the first
place, to solve the specific problems of Afrikans? After 50 years of
chasing these decoy shadows, our plight is worse than before.
Perhaps it is time to make a fresh start, to take a new and
comprehensive look at our problems and what we need to do to solve
them for ourselves.

Fifthly, such a fresh start requires our acceptance of full
responsibility for ending our plight. It means that we accept that,
whatever Arabs or Europeans have done to cause our condition, and
whatever our ancestors may have contributed to our plight, the
responsibility is now entirely ours to cure it. Acceptance of this
responsibility is our fundamental act of self-reparation; without it,
we are fooling ourselves in demanding reparations from others.
Perhaps, the first key area in need of self-reparation is Pan
Africanism itself.

The need for self-reparation in Pan Africanism:
Outside the dollars-per-diem ranks of AU bureaucrats and
intellectuals, Pan Africanism has lost its relevance and appeal to
most Afrikans. All the evidence available today indicates that Pan
Africanism has failed the Afrikans woefully. Strictly speaking,
Pan-Africanism in the 20th century scored more failures than successes.

While its basic objective of removing the blanket of white European
rulers from Africa was achieved, little else has succeeded. Black
governments may now rule the countries of Pan Africa, but visible
black rule has not removed the white imperialist control and
exploitation of our countries; nor has it done much to improve the
conditions of the overwhelming majority of Afrikans in the world. The
expected fruits of black rule have not materialized. Poverty,
powerlessness, social disintegration, cultural decay and disillusion
remain the hallmarks of Afrikan countries and communities everywhere.
More seriously, in the 50 years of Continentalist Pan Africanism, our
race war enemies have inflicted three potentially terminal disasters
on Afrikans, namely, the AIDSbombing of Africa, a resurgent Arab
expansionism that is expropriating more and more of our continent, and
the AU's NEPAD that guarantees that Africa can never industrialize or
escape poverty. The collective failure of the OAU and its member
governments to deter/prevent the AIDSbombing of Africa is a cardinal
failure of Pan Africanism.

Clearly, therefore, we need to investigate what went wrong and why,
and we need to repair the Pan Africanism that helped make things go so
badly wrong. Perhaps most importantly, in the 20th century Pan
Africanism failed to mature into a full-fledged political ideology
with a sound concept of its constituency, a sound idea of its
paramount strategic goals and a sound political program of
transformative action. It also failed to adjust itself to the changes
in its environment. For instance, it has persisted in focusing only on
the European domination that was the most prominent blight on the
African landscape before 1950; it has failed to recognize the
resurgent Arab expansionism that followed the withdrawal of European
rule, and has refused to organize an appropriate Pan Africanist
response to it. Correcting these failings is a task of
self-reparation, perhaps our most urgent task of self-reparation today.

And for our self-repair of Pan Africanism to commence properly, we
need to put together a Pan Afrikan intellectual collective whose task
is to assemble "A Pan Africanism Reader", an anthology of the
principal ideas, documents, as well as the achievements and failures
of the Pan African Movement, so we can all know what we are to repair.
Then, with that body of work in our hands, we can all join in the
great discussion and analysis to find out why thing went wrong and
what to do to repair them.

The first key aspect of Pan Africanism that needs attention is the
doctrine of Continentalism.

1. Continentalism

The brand of Pan Africanism which Nkrumah launched in 1958 with his
First Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) was dedicated to
the political unification of all the countries on the African
continent, regardless of race or creed or -surprisingly-- anti-black
behavior. Hence, for instance, Nkrumah, quite amazingly, saw fit to
invite to that ostensibly Pan-Africanist, and implicitly
anti-colonial, conference the Apartheid South African government of
Premier Verwoerd! In his subsequent campaign for what became the OAU
and now the AU, Nkrumah relentlessly argued for what may be called
Continentalism. He claimed that only by bringing all the countries in
Africa under one continental government, could Africans defeat
neo-colonialism economically, militarily, diplomatically etc. But, in
fact, a close look at his arguments shows that they do not validly
imply a continental African government. What he actually argues
validly is that the countries created by the European conquest and
partition of Africa are each too small to defeat neo-colonialism; and
that they, therefore, should coalesce into something bigger. But what
would be big enough? He does not give any criteria for determining
that. He simply asserts, with increasing desperation as time went on
and his invalid argument fell on the deaf ears of his OAU peers, that
it must be a continent-sized state! He doesn't consider the
possibility that a continent-sized state could be too big or not big
enough.

In fact, one of his funny arguments actually suggests that what would
be required to defeat neo-colonialism is a political union, not just
of the African continent, but of the entire Third World - a
Tri-continental state that would bring all of Africa, Asia and Latin
America under one government. He said:

Thus far, all the methods of neo-colonialism have pointed in one
direction, the ancient, accepted one of all minority ruling classes
throughout history - divide and rule. Quite obviously, therefore,
unity is the first requisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary
and basic is the need for an all-union government on the much-divided
continent of Africa. [Emphasis added] Along with that, a strengthening
of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organisation and the spirit of Bandung is
already underway. To it, we must seek the adherence on an increasingly
formal basis of our Latin American brothers.
--[Nkrumah, 1973:335]

On this argument for defeating a global neo-colonialism, why should it
be all countries on the African continent that should unite, and not
all countries in the Third World? The argument is really for a Union
Government of the entire Third World victims of neo-colonialist divide
and rule, a Tri-continental Union Government for all the ex-colonial
countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America! On the other hand it
would apply equally to a Union Government of West Africa, or East
Africa or Southern Africa, or of Africa and the Arab World. Take your
pick. Like the other arguments Nkrumah put forward, it contains no
specific reasons why the union should be continental in scope and
nothing less. Please note that Nkrumah asserts, but doesn't say why
"an all-union government" of the African continent is a "primary and
basic need".

Cheikh Anta Diop, another passionate advocate for African continental
unification, was no better than Nkrumah at specifying why exactly the
admittedly larger state required for Africa's development must
encompass the entire continent.

When an advocate consistently begs the question, suspicion is aroused
that his overt arguments are mere mystifications for something held on
other, undisclosed, grounds. The real reasons might be some secret
fear or desire. In the case of Nkrumah and Diop, we get a peek at
their hidden motive for Continentalism when Diop said, in a 1976
interview:

If we black Africans take steps to include North African Arabs into a
continental federation and the latter prefer instead to elaborate
organic political ties with Arabs of Asia, this would be tantamount to
a rebuff. If north African states, rather than looking to black Africa
in a natural partnership, preferred a federation with Asian Arabs
extending to the Persian Gulf, then we would be entirely justified to
organize ourselves in an exclusively sub-Saharan federation. In such
an eventuality, no one could accuse sub-Saharan Africans of being
guilty of exclusivism, [emphasis, in bold, added] since their appeals
to the North would have been refused. [Moore, 1986: 261]

This is a clue that the unargued and illogical conclusion, that we
need an African continental state, was driven by fear of being accused
of "(racial) exclusivism". In other words, in the integrationist
atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, Pan Africanists feared that if they
advocated a union of sub-Sahara countries, or any smaller grouping
that would include only blacks, they would be accused of racial
exclusivism, i.e. segregation/"black racism". Continentalism was,
therefore, something believed without good reason, but out of fear--
in other words, a superstition!

With this clue from Diop, we can now attempt to diagnose the roots of
Nkrumah's passion for an illogical Continentalism.

Nkrumah: the roots of his continentalist superstition

As I pointed out above, Nkrumah's argument contains no specific
reasons why his proposed Union Government must be continental in
scope. This lack of Africa-specificity was typical of his
anti-colonial advocacy. For example, his pamphlet "Towards Colonial
Freedom", which was written in 1942 and published in 1947, closed with
the exhortation "PEOPLES OF THE COLONIES, UNITE; The working men of
all countries are behind you." [Nkrumah, 1973:41] In the same vein,
the "Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World", a resolution
which he wrote, and which was adopted at the 5th PAC in Manchester,
also ended, not with the exhortation "Africans/Blacks of the
World-Unite!" which would have been appropriate, but with "COLONIAL
AND SUBJECT PEOPLES OF THE WORLD - UNITE". [Nkrumah, 1973:44] Nkrumah
himself seems to have been vaguely aware that his anti-colonial theses
were usually not for Africa specifically; for, in commenting, after
Ghana's independence, on "Towards Colonial Freedom" Nkrumah himself
said, "Although I have concentrated on colonial Africa, the thesis of
the pamphlet applies to colonial areas everywhere." [Nkrumah, 1973:16
fn] Why, we may wonder, was he shy of focusing on the specific
Ghanaian/Black African situation for its own sake rather than merely
using the African situation as a convenience in arguing for the global
anti-colonial cause? In this eccentric procedure, Nkrumah was unlike
Biko whose focus was consistently on black South Africa, his immediate
and natural constituency; and also quite unlike Cabral for whom the
reality in Guinea was always the focus and who, though no less a Third
World internationalist than Nkrumah, insisted that " our own reality
is at the centre of a complex reality, but it is the former that most
concerns us." [Cabral, 1980:47] Was Nkrumah perhaps a racial
integrationist who was emotionally uncomfortable about being too much
identified with his natural, Black African constituency? And, if so, why?

In the document known as THE CIRCLE, which he drew up soon after the
Manchester 5th PAC, Nkrumah advocated creating and maintaining a
"Union of African Socialist Republics." [Nkrumah, 1973:48] These
exhortations from the 1940s suggest that Nkrumah was, at heart, a
global anti-colonialist rather than a Pan Africanist specifically; in
fact, that he was a socialist internationalist, probably a Trotskyite,
who found himself at some point obliged to focus on promoting
socialism, first in one country, Ghana, and thereafter for one
continent, Africa, pending any opportunity that would release him from
the "parochialism" of one country or continent, and let him finally
become an unconstrained global socialist internationalist. Was
Nkrumah, then, basically a universalistic socialist missionary who, as
the saying goes, "happened to be black" and who went home to
Ghana/Africa to convert his people to socialism? Or was he primarily
an African liberationist for whom socialism was a useful ideological
tool? This should be investigated as the finding could throw
unexpected light on his primary identity, constituency and
preoccupations, as well as on aspects of his behavior that have had
adverse consequences for Afrikans.

His socialist internationalism aside, there is still to be considered
the added factor of Nkrumah's commitment to "non-racialism". That was
evident in his CPP constitution (1949) which lists among its aims
"abolishing imperialism, colonialism, racialism, tribalism and all
forms of national and racial oppression and economic inequality among
nations, races and peoples . . ." [Nkrumah, 1973:59] Could Nkrumah's
"non-racialism"-probably imbibed from the 1930s American socialist
milieu with its slogan "Black and white unite and fight!"-- have
reinforced his devotion to a global, multi-racial anti-colonialism,
and helped blind him to any union in Africa that, by excluding Arabs,
would be open to the accusation of racial exclusivism? Any black
anti-colonialist intimidated by the scarecrow of "racial
exclusivism/black racism" into evading the political reality of black
skin in a white supremacist world, would not consider, let alone be
enthusiastic about, a blacks-only sub-Sahara union, even if that would
be enough to defeat neo-colonialism in Africa!

If this diagnosis is correct, we owe Nkrumah's advocacy of the
continentalist superstition to a combination of the socialist
internationalism and the non-racialism he had imbibed from his liberal
and socialist mentors in the imperialist world.

But the antidote for this particular non-racialist superstition was
indicated, even during the integrationist 1960s, by John Oliver
Killens when, in his 1965 essay "The black writer vis-à-vis his
country" he observed that:

Negroes are the only people in this world who are set apart because of
who they are, and at the same time told to forget who they are by the
very people who set them apart in the first place.
-[Killens, 1965:358-359]

A few years later, in the early 1970s, the young Steve Biko, in
building his Black Consciousness Movement, developed the much-needed
therapy for this superstitious fear. Among other things he correctly
argued that integration was a false antithesis to
segregation/apartheid, and that the correct antithesis was Black
solidarity/unity. For the specific context of apartheid South Africa,
he argued:

It is time we killed this false political coalition between blacks and
whites as long as it is set up on a wrong analysis of our situation .
. . [and because] it forms at present the greatest stumbling block to
our unity. . . . The basic problem in South Africa has been analysed
by liberal whites as being apartheid. . . . For the liberals, the
thesis is apartheid, the antithesis is non-racialism, but the
synthesis is very feebly defined. They want to tell the blacks that
they see integration as the ideal solution. Black Consciousness
defines the situation differently. The thesis is in fact a strong
white racism and therefore, the antithesis to this must, ipso facto,
be a strong solidarity amongst the blacks on whom this white racism
seeks to prey. [Biko, 1987:90]

And Biko further observes, quite correctly:

The concept of integration . . . is full of unquestioned assumptions.
. . . It is a concept long defined by whites and never examined by
blacks. . . . [It is one of the] concepts which the Black
Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man's mind.
. . . Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, .
. . the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together
with his brothers around the cause of their oppression-the blackness
of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the
shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. [Biko, 1987:91-92]

Biko, the Black Consciousness prophet, further argued that, in South
Africa,

As long as blacks are suffering from inferiority complex - a result of
300 years of deliberate oppression, denigration and derision - they
will be useless as co-architects of a normal society. . . . Hence what
is necessary as a prelude to anything else that may come is a very
strong grass-roots build-up of black consciousness such that blacks
can learn to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim. [Biko,
1987:21]

And Biko drives his point home thus:

Those who know, define racism as discrimination by a group against
another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation. In
other words one cannot be a racist unless he has the power to
subjugate. What blacks are doing is merely to respond to a situation
in which they find themselves the objects of white racism. We are in
the position in which we are because of our skin. We are collectively
segregated against -- what can be more logical than for us to respond
as a group? When workers come together under the auspices of a trade
union to strive for the betterment of their conditions, nobody
expresses surprise in the Western world. It is the done thing. Nobody
accuses them of separatist tendencies. Teachers fight their battles,
garbagemen do the same, nobody acts as a trustee for another. Somehow,
however, when blacks want to do their thing the liberal establishment
seems to detect an anomaly. This is in fact a counter-anomaly. The
anomaly was there in the first instance when the liberals were
presumptuous enough to think that it behoved them to fight the battle
for the blacks. [Biko, 1987:25]

Biko's full critique of integration should be required reading by all
Afrikans today.

This Black Consciousness therapy helped to produce a new breed of
black freedom fighter in South Africa, the self-confident type,
unconfused and uncrippled by fears implanted by false liberal
doctrines like integration and non-racialism. It produced
self-confident blacks who insisted on doing things for themselves and
all by themselves, and who did not feel they had to prove themselves
to whites.

To see the validity of Biko's doctrines for Pan Africa today, one
needs first to note Biko's remark that "the black-white power struggle
in South Africa is but a microcosm of the global confrontation between
the Third World and the rich white nations of the world." [Biko,
1987:72] More specifically, we should note that the black-white
situation in Apartheid South Africa was a special local case of the
global situation between whites and blacks. We can therefore validly
transpose Biko's doctrines to the global situation that Pan Africa
ostensibly is struggling to eradicate.

Accordingly, in a world where blacks are oppressed and exploited by
white Arabs and Europeans, any Afro-Arab alliance is just as false a
political coalition as that in South Africa was between whites and the
blacks they oppressed. To realize that is to find the intellectual
ground for the courage to repudiate the Afro-Arab alliance and
continental political union that Nkrumah promoted and Diop advocated.

Still in that vein, let us see what Black Consciousness doctrines
would say of the AU, NEPAD, and the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) prescribed for Africa by Blair's Commission for Africa. Biko
rejected the Bantustan idea on the fundamental ground that "it is a
solution given to us by the same people who have created the problem."
[Biko, 1987:82] His rejection would equally apply to the AU Trojan
horse with its wrecking crew of NEPAD, MDG etc. which-- like what Leon
Damas called "the theories that they season to the taste of their
needs"-- are designed to worsen our problems, not solve them.

In South Africa, Biko asked: "whether the Bantustan leaders do not
see the barrenness and fraudulence implicit in this scheme?" He
answered thus: "We have some men in these Bantustans who would make
extremely fine leaders if they had not decided to throw in their lot
with the oppressors. A few of them argue that they are not selling out
but are carrying on the fight from within . . . " He ended by
dismissing them and their delusions with the comment "After all, as
one writer once said, there is no way of stopping fools from
dedicating themselves to useless causes." [Biko 1987:84]

When we realize that these so-called independent African states that
have been herded into the AU by Gadhafi are nothing but the glorified
Bantustans of the G8 system of UN Imperialism, i.e. the global
system's version of those Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, we can
see the aptness of applying Biko's remark to all these black heads of
state and government in the fraudulent and useless AU.

My point in this exercise has been to illustrate that we have enough
sound ideas within the body of Pan Africanist thought to challenge and
correct the false ideas and misguided projects that have crippled us,
if only we would collect and study the tradition and use it to correct
itself. And I'd like to suggest that we form and equip a collective of
our academics to do this job. In the last 50 years, all manner of
half-baked ideas have been hurriedly implemented, and even with
desperate urgency, while the Pan Africanist intelligentsia failed to
cry foul and to subject them to rigorous debate and correction. We
must mend our ways. As a contrite act of self-reparation, we must
create the necessary organs of unfettered debate and use them
effectively henceforth.

We cannot blame Nkrumah, Diop and others for their errors. They gave
what they thought were the right ideas. But it was for us to have
collectively corrected their errors, and we didn't. We have yet to do
for Diop's ideas what he himself pleaded for. And it is our duty to
Pan Africa to do the same for all ideas on offer, even those by prima
donnas who are touchy about criticism, or by Presidents who are full
of themselves. We must do our duty and politely ask those who resent
public criticism to keep their ideas to themselves and not pollute the
public space with them.

By the way, to throw a cold and sobering splash of comparative
reality on this delirious hankering after a continent-sized political
union, we should note that the megastates and great powers of the 20th
and 21st centuries -USA, USSR, EU, China, Russia, India - are actually
of sub-continental, not continental, size. The only actually
continent-sized state is Australia, which is not a great power at all!
Unless we wish to persist in playing the fool who insisted on walking
on a cloud, we should trim our ambition to what is, at least
geographically and culturally, possible. Therefore, the project of an
African megastate should be guided by the feasibility conditions for
putting it in the power league of China, EU, USA, Russia and India,
and not by some superstitious craving for continental size.

Other issues in Pan Africanism crying out for self-reparation

Continentalism is not the only aspect or doctrine of Pan Africanism
that is crying out for correction. Having looked at that error in some
detail, all I have time to do here is list a few others, with brief
comments, so they can be attended to afterwards.

2: African identity

The question of African identity and its criteria has not yet been
rigorously analyzed or Afrocentrically resolved. What is Africa? Who
are the Africans? What are the cultural and biological boundaries of
Africa/Africanness?

This fundamental matter of defining Africa and the Africans--those
that are the constituency served by Pan Africanism-- has been
bedeviled by the same fears of exclusivism that helped install the
superstition of Continentalism. Those black Africans who fear the
white enemy would label them exclusivists are prone to evade including
the color/phenotype/racial factor when defining the African. Some
insist on defining Africanness in purely cultural terms. Some fools
even say that the African is anybody who is "committed to Africa"!
Others, such as the AU bureaucrats who organized the 2004 Conference
of AU intellectuals in Dakar, urge what they call "identity fluidity"
and assert that:

Africa, whose construction is currently on the agenda, transcends
geographical borders as well as cultural or racial barriers: it
extends from both sides of the Sahara; it is white and black, Arab and
African, continental and insular; it is a cultural meeting point where
successive strata of cultures of Eurasian origin intermingle with
indigenous cultures born in the Continent of Africa (Mbeki's Speech:
"I am an African" epitomizes these assertions in that it recognizes
all the above assets). The concept of identity fluidity has now become
imperative; . . .

-- "Draft Concept Paper" to AU Intellectuals meeting, Dakar, Oct.
2004, p.7.

On this question of identity, we sorely need to take our cue from Biko
and boldly "rally around the cause of our suffering" and, without
apologies to our enemies and their integrationist dupes in our midst,
define ourselves for ourselves on the basis of our black skin--the
cause of our suffering. A continent does not make a people, and so
cannot legitimately be used to define or name a people. Ancestry,
historical experience and culture are the valid factors for defining a
people. Our latching at all unto a geographic name (African) is a
seminal error that is spewing unending problems and confusions we
could do without, and we should find our way out of it. As a first
step out of that costly error, we must Afrocentrically limit the
African identity to those from Africa who have, over the centuries,
been singled out as targets for enslavement by the black color of our
skins. Hence, whites, European as well as Arab--the very predators who
decided to target blacks for enslavement-- cannot be legitimately
included with us, their prey, just because they've forcibly made
themselves our neighbors on the African landmass. By the Africans, Pan
Africanism can legitimately mean only the members of the indigenous
populations of Africa who were, for the last 20 centuries, targeted
for enslavement by Arabs and Europeans on account of their black skin
color. That is the fundamental historical factor. Anybody who is not a
biological descendant of these blacks cannot qualify as an African.
Perhaps we could make our usage sufficiently distinctive by reserving
the term Afrikan for such indigenous populations and their descendants
- until we adopt a name for ourselves from an Afrikan language. In
which case, we are interested in Afrikans and Afrika their homeland,
and not in Africa, the continent, and Africans -those populations of
any race whatever that are now located in the African continent,
whether black or white, indigenous our exogenous, imperialist
predators or their prey. Pan Africanism must therefore, with Black
Consciousness rigor, limit its constituency to Afrikans, i.e. Black
Africans and their global diaspora and, provisionally, rename itself
Pan Afrikanism.

Black Consciousness historical considerations aside, it would be
scientifically incorrect to define Afrikans without including the
biological/racial factor of black color/phenotype, for, as political
science assures us:

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language,
history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with
cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities,
nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. . .. In coping
with identity crisis, what counts for people are blood and belief,
faith and family. People rally to those with similar ancestry,
religion, language, values, and institutions and distance themselves
from those with different ones. [Huntington, 1997:21, 126]

Since the instantly visible mark of Afrikan ancestry and historical
experience is the black skin, it would be unscientific to exclude it
from the factors for defining Afrikanness.

Furthermore, just as it is the indigenous Chinese who define who are
Chinese, and the indigenous Arabs who define who are Arabs, and the
indigenous Europeans who define who are Europeans, so too do we
indigenous Africans, a.k.a. Afrikans, have the right and duty to
define who are Africans. And if it is in our interest to include a
phenotype factor, black skin, in our definition, we must do so,
regardless what anybody else thinks. In this regard, we need to note
the Chinese example:

To the Chinese government, people of Chinese descent, even if citizens
of another country, are members of the Chinese community and hence in
some measure subject to the authority of the Chinese government.
Chinese identity comes to be defined in racial terms. Chinese are
those of the same "race, blood, and culture," as one PRC scholar put
it. In the mid-1990s, this theme was increasingly heard from
governmental and private Chinese sources. For Chinese and those of
Chinese descent living in non-Chinese societies, the "mirror test"
thus becomes the test of who they are: "Go look in the mirror," is the
admonition of Beijing-oriented Chinese to those of Chinese descent
trying to assimilate into foreign societies. [Huntington, 1997:169]

We might, likewise, tell those of black African ancestry who claim to
be Arabs or Europeans, as well as those Arabs and Europeans who claim
to be Africans, to "Go look in the mirror!"

We could all learn from what our Afrikan-American brother, Runoko
Rashidi, said on a Johannesburg radio program recently:

The hosts asked me my positions on global African unity.
I responded, and the phone lines lit up!

The first caller was a white man who said what a "racist" I was and
how offended he was. I let him have it!!! He said that he was an
African and that I was not. I said that I was an African and that he
was not. I told him that you can teach a parrot to speak but that in
the end it was still a bird. I told him that you can dress a monkey
in a suit but in the end
it was still an ape. I told him that his ancestors came to Africa
uninvited, without passport or visa, stole the land, near exterminated
whole groups of people, and enslaved and colonized the rest. And now,
he wants to be an African!

I told him that his pedigree was European, his history was European,
his lineage was European, his culture was European, and that he was a
European! I guess that you could say that I effectively silenced him,
and every other call that I received on both programs, from African
and European alike, was extremely favorable! You would have been proud.

Yes indeed! Arabs and Europeans may be settled in Africa, but that
doesn't make them Afrikans! Just because a snake has crawled into your
bedroom and settled down to rear its young doesn't mean you should now
count and embrace it as a member of your family. It would be extremely
irrational and Afrocidal for Afrikans to accept a non-racial,
continentalist concept of their identity.

3. African Unity: unity of what, for what and against what?

African unity has been the major mantra of Pan Africanism for the past
50years. Unfortunately, the purpose of the advocated unity has been so
vague and unspecified as to leave the impression that it is nothing
more than unity for unity's sake. Worse still, the uncritical
welcoming of the Arabist-Imperialist AU suggests that even a unity in
an enemy dungeon has become acceptable to Pan Africanism. Since a
union in the prison of Imperialism or Arabism is contrary to the
Afrikan interest, the concept of African unity has to be re-examined,
and its purposes clarified and made consistent with the interest of
Afrikans. We need to bear in mind that people do not unite for nothing
or against nothing. Our experience in the past 2 millennia suggests
that Pan Afrika should be uniting against white domination, by Arabs
no less than by Europeans.

Leaving aside the question of the vague purpose of African
unification, and the question of whether the unification domain should
be continental or sub-continental in scope, Pan Africanism has failed
to examine the question of the character of the entities that it
sought to unite. Nkrumah, for all his anti-colonial fervor, was the
head of a neo-colonial Bantustan, and was seeking to unite a bunch of
such neo-colonial Bantustans. If Pan Africanism has not abandoned its
original anti-imperialist purpose, it is rather strange that it has
not focused on the task of changing the neo-colonial character of
these states it was attempting to unify. Diop touches on this when he
said in his 1976 interview: "The neo-colonial character of such
regimes is therefore an objective factor in the way of constituting a
continental federation." [Moore, 1986:262]

But even Diop failed to give the matter the type of examination it
required. He saw it merely as an obstacle to federating, rather than a
basic obstacle to such states ever saving Afrikans from imperialism,
even when federated, -and, therefore, an obstacle that should be
removed while, or even before, uniting them. After all, will
individual armed robbers, if they form a gang, stop their armed
robbery or get more effective at it? But continentalist Pan Africanism
has been so obsessed with unification that it doesn't seem to have
given this crucial aspect the attention it deserves.

Given the character of these Bantustans, is it any wonder that their
OAU/AU has been a union of Bantustan bureaucrats and an anti-Afrikan
agency of imperialism? After all, an AU of neo-colonial Bantustans
can only be a much bigger neo-colonial Bantustan than its members. The
neo-liberal IMF framework of the economic programs of its NEPAD can
only make one wonder: By what devious route, by what subtle betrayals
and mutations, has the anti-imperialist Pan Africanism of Du Bois and
Nkrumah achieved the precise ends sought by the white-supremacist Pan
Africanism of Jan Smuts that Du Bois and Nkrumah had pointedly
opposed, namely an "African continent (ruled) in the interest of its
white investors and exploiters". [Du Bois, 1970:178; Nkrumah, 1973: 17]

Obviously, continentalist Pan Africanism long ago abandoned the
anti-imperialism that inspired it. Not only has it, from its
inception, been an accomplice of Arab expansionism, it also now serves
whatever "partner" [read: paymaster] funds its lavish jamborees -be it
Washington, London, Brussels or Tripoli.

Because unification had become an end-in-itself, had become the
supreme goal, it was not asked what precise kind of unity was required
as a means to the original, but long since forgotten, anti-imperialist
aims of Pan Africanism.

Reconfiguring the concept of African Unity so it does not yield a
union of neo-colonial Bantustans, but a union of anti-imperialist and
anti-Arabist states plus other organs that will serve the Afrikan
people is, thus, an important task of self-reparation waiting to be
done on Pan Africanism.

4. Afrikan Collective Security: The Black World League

One of the glaring omissions from Pan Africanist thinking has been the
idea of collective Afrikan security-the concept, the aims as well as
the organs for effecting it. For a people whose calamities have
resulted from millennia of failure of collective security, this is a
most self-damaging omission. Addressing it is a vital act of
self-reparation. It probably requires us to insist that each Afrikan
state should explicitly declare that the security it exists to ensure
is the security of its population, territory, society and cultures
from Imperialism and Arabism. Presently, our comprador-colonial
Bantustans operationally define security as "internal security" - the
security of the neocolonial state apparatus from its victim Afrikan
population. This is a crazy carry over from the era of expatriate
European colonialism when these states were local agencies of
subjugation for their imperialist founders. That needs now to be
changed. And having redefined security Afrocentrically, we need to
invent organs for implementing it. Since neither the AU nor the UN can
ever function as an organ of Afrikan collective security from both
Imperialism and Arabism, it is imperative that we organize a Black
World League/Afrikan League to do that job for us.

5. Afrikan solidarity

Why is Afrikan solidarity so weak nowadays? And what is needed to make
it a strong, and automatic reflex yet again? In 1935, when Nkrumah,
who was passing through London to the USA to study, saw a poster that
read "MUSSOLINI INVADES ETHIOPIA," he was overwhelmed by emotion. In
his own remarkable words: "At that time, it was almost as if the whole
of London had suddenly declared war on me personally." The West
African press reacted in a similar manner. One newspaper, for example,
declared that "that war with Abyssinia is our war". Ethiopian Defense
Committees sprang up in various parts of West Africa and the Americas.
Garvey and many other diaspora leaders organized help for Ethiopia.
Some Afrikan-Americans, defying the US government's neutrality, even
went to fight in defense of Ethiopia. [Esedebe, 1980:117-121; Harris,
1993:708-713]

Why do we not react to Darfur, Mauritania, South Sudan etc with the
exemplary indignation that Nkrumah experienced when he heard that
Italy had attacked Ethiopia? What does it take to imbue hundreds of
millions of people with an active solidarity and the militant
enthusiasm to defend their group at whatever cost to the individual?
We must discover and apply such remedies to ourselves.

Having Afrocentrically and scientifically defined Afrikans-as well as
non-Afrikans-- for ourselves and in our interest, with passing the
"mirror test" as a necessary criterion; and having highlighted Pan
Africanism's weaknesses in the matters of Afrikan Unity, Collective
Afrikan Security and Afrikan Solidarity, we can get on to working out
a correct Pan Afrikanist position on Sudan and the Afro-Arab borderlands.

6. Sudan

By 1945, the agenda of Pan Africanism had crystallized as follows: to
end colonialism and color discrimination in Pan Afrika. But quite
surprisingly, the questions of Arab domination and anti-Black
discrimination were not placed on the Pan Africanist agenda. The issue
of Arab domination, surprisingly, did not attract continentalist Pan
Africanist thinkers and leaders even during the Anya Anya war in Sudan
(1955-1972). Whatever the reasons for that neglect, the project of
ending Arab domination and expansionism in Africa needs to be now
placed at the top of the Pan Afrikan agenda, in light of Afrikan
experience in the Afro-Arab borderlands in the last 50 years. In the
50 years of continentalist Pan Africanism, with the sole exception of
Zanzibar, Pan Afrika did not release any Afrikan territory or people
from Arab domination or enslavement. Rather, more Afrikan lands and
peoples have fallen under Arab rule and enslavement.

Before 1970, for lack of Biko's insight, Nkrumah and Co. threw
Afrikans into an Arab embrace that inhibited Afrikans from defending
themselves against Arab hegemonists. Since then, by failing to use
Biko's insight to clear their confusions and complexes away, the black
governments in the OAU/AU have become, as shown in Dar Fur, like the
black father who holds his own daughter down to be raped and battered
by his Arab business partner and `friend'. That is the role played by
the spineless AU presidents who met in Khartoum and Banjul this year
without expelling the Arabist government of Sudan from the AU for its
crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and without doing enough to
precipitate UN intervention to end the scandalous raping and killing
and enslavement of blacks in Dar Fur.

In atonement for all that, Pan Afrika needs to acknowledge that Sudan
is not an Arab family affair; that it is a theatre of the Afro-Arab
Race War, and that the hegemonic Arab aggressors are the great enemy
of Pan Afrika. Pan Afrika must, therefore, in contrite solidarity and
for collective security, vigorously mobilize support-financial,
military, diplomatic, ideological, propaganda etc-- for the victims of
Arabist attacks in Dar Fur and elsewhere in Sudan. We must also
mobilize support for South Sudan to attain its independence in 2011.
That is our task of self-reparation. In fact, Sudan is a serious test
of our willingness to undertake self-reparation.

7. Pan Africanism's ideological deficiency

The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, on
the part of the national liberation movements . . . constitutes one of
the greatest weaknesses, if not the greatest weakness, of our struggle
against imperialism.
--[Amilcar Cabral, 1980:122]

In the light of the weaknesses I have pointed to above, we need to
take serious note of Cabral's observation and, therefore, assemble and
test all the ideas of Pan Africanism to see if they amount to a
coherent ideology for Afrikan liberation. And if they do not, it is
our self-reparation obligation to elaborate them into an ideology with
a transformative program for breeding the kind of Black Consciousness
activists who can champion the interests and aspirations of the
overwhelming majority of Afrikans on this earth. Only by so doing can
Pan Africanism be revitalized; re-emerge, as Pan Afrikanism, from its
doldrums; and gain popular following.

With these examples, let me leave the weaknesses of Pan Africanism
and draw attention to the larger area of our

8. Afrocidal traits:

These include our Europhilia, Arabophilia and Afrophobia; also the
idiotic individualism, oblivious of collective interests, of our black
neo-colonial elites who are obsessed with personal power and
conspicuous consumania rather than the security and prosperity of
their countries. Another Afrocidal trait is a fatalistic patience,
especially under misrule, which General Jan Smuts, that white
supremacist promoter of imperialist Pan Africanism, described in 1930
as "one of the world's marvels, second only to the ass's". Yet another
is our callous indifference to the plight of other blacks.

Any shortlist of our Afrocidal weaknesses must include what Nkrumah
described as "a lack of malice, an absence of the desire for vengeance
for our wrongs". [Nkrumah, 1973:114]. Though Nkrumah lists this among
the admirable traits of the African Personality, we need to take a
critical look at it, for it is, in fact, Afrocidal.

Other observers have described it more candidly and in more revealing
detail. For example, an American reporter, David Lamb, after 5 years
traveling and observing Africans in 48 countries during the late
1970s, said:

Given all he has had to endure from the beginning of slavery to the
end of colonialism, the African displays a racial tolerance that is
nothing short of amazing. He holds no apparent grudge against the
European as an individual, and it is rare indeed for any white person
to experience even the slightest indignity because of his color. . . .
The African has forgiven, if not forgotten.

As a white settler in Kenya, a former hunter of Mau Mau freedom
fighters, explained to Lamb:

"Why has it been forgotten? Well, partly I think, because the African
isn't capable of the depth of emotion that the European has. He
doesn't love his women or hate his enemies with the same intensity.
You look at a good solid white hatred and it can last for generations.
Africans don't hate that way."

But, on the other hand, Lamb notes:

For a people who have had to tolerate so many injustices over the
centuries, yet have remained basically gentle, polite and racially
equitable, I was constantly shocked to see the cruelty, even sadism,
that Africans inflict on one another so willingly.

And he wondered what makes the African "a fatalist, intent on his own
survival but caring little for those who are less fortunate."
--[Lamb, 1985:161-162,164, 235,236]

Likewise, from Canada in the 1980s, another investigator, O. McKague,
reported:

As one female member of the Nationalist party told me, one can treat
blacks like dirt for years, cease such treatment, and almost
immediately they are willing to be your best friends. This, she
explained, is because blacks do not have the capacity either to feel
injustices or to remember them. Jews, she stated, are quite [a
different matter].
-- [McKague 1991:93]

This obscene rush to forgive and forget even the most grievous wrong
done to us by the white enemy was most publicly exhibited in
Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which,
quite sacrilegiously, placed on the same moral level both the violence
of the Apartheid oppressors and the counter violence of those who
fought their oppressors! The armed aggressor violence of the Apartheid
state criminals who inflicted the Sharpeville and other massacres and
who murdered Steve Biko was treated as no different morally from the
unarmed, defensive counter violence of the children of the Soweto
uprising. Tutu's approach is as obscene as condemning equally for
violence the soldier's hand that is strangling an infant and the milk
teeth by which the infant tries to bite off the strangler's hand!

One final trait on this shortlist. An Afrocidal trait that seems to
have emerged in the 20th century is our defensive sensitivity to any
imputation of "exclusivism/black racism". You can whitemail even the
most intelligent and self-assured Afrikan to submit to any foolishness
by the slightest hint that not to submit might be seen as
"exclusivism"/"reverse racism"/"black racism". You can even get him to
commit suicide or rape his mother by playing on that sensitivity! That
was how even Nkrumah and Diop were whitemailed, or whitemailed
themselves, into the Continentalist superstition. That even Diop-- our
formidable authority on cultural identity and its constituent
(historical, linguistic and psychological) factors-- fell into the
Continentalist superstition, against the implications of his own
cultural science, is an indication of just how effective a scarecrow
this "exclusivism/black racism" charge can be. I would be surprised if
the same whitemail is not a factor in the AU's timidity and complicity
on Darfur! Luckily, Biko gave us the therapy, and we should all
dutifully take the treatment.

As these traits are among the weaknesses our white enemies have
exploited for millennia, I would invite Afrocentric psychologists, as
a matter of urgency, to investigate and find therapies for them. I
might add that even the traits of the southern cradle/sun cultures
that Diop listed in his Two Cradles Theory, which some are inclined to
celebrate, need to be investigated-- and eliminated, if found to be
Afrocidal and to have contributed to our plight.

Conclusion

We must admit to ourselves that there are many things wrong with us,
including psychological, cultural and social weaknesses. Otherwise we
wouldn't be in the mess in which we find ourselves, and certainly not
for two whole millennia! And we must have the honesty and courage to
struggle against our profound weaknesses if we wish to survive, let
alone with any dignity and self-respect. But we must note that the
things wrong with us are not those harped on by enemy propaganda,
namely, our black skins and our so-called IQ. We have no cause for any
inferiority complex on account of those decoy issues.

Let me end by inviting all Pan Afrikanists, those who want Afrikans
to survive and prosper, and especially the academics and other
intellectuals among them, to follow Steve Biko's example and develop a
comprehensive list of our genuine weaknesses and then focus on
discovering and applying whatever remedies are appropriate for them,
regardless of white opinion.

References and suggested Readings
Bankie, F. and Mchombu, K. eds (2006) Pan Africanism, Windhoek: Gamsberg
Macmillan
Biko, Steve (1987) I Write What I Like, Oxford: Heinemann Educational
Books
Cabral, Amilcar (1980) Unity and Struggle, London: Heinemann
Educational Books
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1970) W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks, ed by Philip S. Foner,
New York:
Pathfinder Press
Esedebe, P. O. (1980) Pan Africanism, Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers
Finch, Charles S. (1986) "Further Conversations with the Pharaoh" in
Van Sertima,
Ivan ed. Great African Thinkers, Vol. I, New Brunswick: Transaction
Books, 1986, pp. 227-237
Garvey, Amy Jacques ed. (1925) Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus
Garvey, New
York: Atheneum, 1992
Harris, Joseph E. (1993) "Africa and its diaspora since 1935" in Ali
Mazrui, ed.
General History of Africa, Vol. VIII, Paris: UNESCO, 1993, pp.705-723
Huntington, Samuel P. (1997) The Clash of Civilizations, New York:
Touchstone /Simon & Schuster
Killens, John Oliver (1965) "The Black Writer Vis-à-vis His Country"
in Addison
Gayle, Jr. ed. The Black Aesthetic, New York: Anchor Books, 1972,
pp.357-373
Lamb, David (1985) The Africans, New York: Vintage Books
McKague, O. ed (1991) Racism in Canada, Saskatoon: Fifth House
Moore, Carlos (1976) "Interviews with Cheikh Anta Diop" in Van
Sertima, Ivan ed.
Great African Thinkers, Vol. I, New Brunswick: Transaction Books,
1986, pp.249-283
Nkrumah, Kwame (1973) Revolutionary Path, London: Panaf Books
Van Sertima, Ivan (1986) "Death Shall not find us thinking that we
die" in Van
Sertima, Ivan ed. Great African Thinkers, Vol. I, New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1986, pp.7-16.

-------------------------------------------

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