Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism* by OPOKU AGYEMAN


On the strength of the nature and outcome of the historical links
between Africans and Arabs over the last thirteen centuries, it is the
hypothesis of this chapter that the two ideological-political movements,
Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, are antithetical and that,
in the final analysis, there is no room for the coexistence of the two
on the African continent. An underlying premise of this hypothesis
is that African-Arab relations have, to date, been woefully unbalanced
and that this asymmetry, as expressed especially in international
and inter-racial political relations, has been weighted in
favour of the Arabs and woefully to the disadvantage of the Africans.
It needs to be emphasized, from the onset, that the terms
"Africans" and "Arabs" are used here as racial, not cultural
categories. As Chancellor Williams has noted, the Arabs are "a
white people," and of the same racial stock as the European Jews
"against whom they are now arrayed for war."1 J. S. Trimingham's
conception that the term Arab "has significance in a linguistic and
cultural, rather than in a racial sense," and is therefore to be properly
used in reference "to the result of the recent admixture" of Arabs
and non-Arab peoples,2 smacks of ethnographic inaccuracy and has
dubious analytic utility. The acculturated African in Northern
Sudan is no more Arab than the Black-American is European. "In
studying the actual records" in the history of the races, then, as
Chancellor Williams counsels, "the role of White Arabs must not be
obscured either by their Islamic religion or by the presence of the
Africans and Afro-Arabs among them".3 As we shall see presently,

1. Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues
of a Race from
4500 BC to 2000AD. Chicago: Third World Press, 1976, p.23.
2. Cited in O. Aguda, "Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," The
Journal of
Modem African Studies, Vol. II. No. 2.1973, p. 180.
3. C. Williams, op. cit., p. 24.
* Excerpt from The Pan-African World View
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM
the Arabs themselves insist that blood ties constitute the essence of
their identity.
The Arabs played a role in the invasions and conquests that
wrought destruction on the ancient Black Kingdoms and empires of
North-East Africa, as well as on the West African Black states of
Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The Arab slave trade in Africa was a
destructive force that raged from the 9th through the 19th centuries
in the Eastern seaboard of Africa, both preceding and outlasting
even the transatlantic slave trade on the West Coast. The Arabs
made depredations on the Sudan through the murderous campaigns
of Muhammed Ali at the beginning of the 19th century, and joined
in the European Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the same
century in an effort, once again, to carve out an African empire for
themselves. Through this nexus of social, economic and political
assaults, the relations between Arabs and Africans took on the
confirmed asymmetry of victimizer and victim.
Despite their awareness of the glaring disproportion in the exchanges
between the two races, the Africans, supposedly on the
basis of geopolitical considerations flavored with presumptions of
Third World solidarity, argued their way vigorously, in the post-
World War II era, into a political alliance with the Arabs. As
Nkrumah put the case, Africa's freedom "stands open to danger just
as long as a single country on the continent remains fettered by
colonial rule and just as long as there exist on African soil puppet
governments manipulated from afar."4 The construct involved here
is one of a "marriage" founded on the conception that both the
Africans and the Arabs on the continent shared identical interests
in the independence of Africa — that together they shared the
aspiration of liberating Africa from the imperialist encroachments
of the Boers to the South and Israelis in the Middle East.
To lay bare the essentially expedient nature of this "wedlock", we
need only remind ourselves of the core ingredients of Pan-
Africanism, and set them against the dynamics of the ideologicalpolitical
movement of Pan-Arabism. The core ingredients of Pan-

4. Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, New York: International Publishers,
1963, p. xvii.
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OPOKU AGYEMAN
Africanism include Afrocentricity; positive racial self-concept,
commitment to racial resurgence; racial privacy; positive conception
of African history; corporate racial family; and unity. It is
necessary to bear in mind the element of Afrocentricity in particular,
referring as it does to the Africa of the Africans, of Black
people, and decidedly not to a geographical area which includes
Africa's invaders — whether they be the Arabs who set foot there
over a thousand years ago, or the Dutch who made their incursion
some five hundred years ago. In Chinweizu's observation: "The
Arab world, even if part of it shares the same land mass with us
(Africans), is still the Arab world. Their preoccupation is Pan-
Arabism."5

Pan-Arabism
And what is Pan-Arabism? In a word, it is an ideological- political
movement representing a conscious effort to create a united Arab
nation. Its underlying principle is that the Arab states are parts of
one indivisible Arab nation. Nasser articulated this principle, for
example, in justification of the UAR's interference in Iraq's internal
affairs:
We are one Arab nation. Both our constitution and the Iraqi
Provisional Constitution provide in their articles that we are one
Arab nation. Accordingly, every Arab state has the right to
defend Iraq's Arabhood and independence from Britain, the
USA, the USSR, and all other countries. We are one Arab family
in a boat caught in the tempest of international politics.6
There is no question that the concept of Arab "peoplehood" in
play here is a racial one. Nasser himself affirmed this and made it
clear that all other bases of identity among the Arabs — religious,
geographic, etc. — are of secondary importance. Of the three circles
at whose centre he envisioned Egypt to be — Arab, Islam and Africa
— the first, the Arab circle, stood out in pre-eminence. "There can

5. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p.

494.
6. Broadcast over Radio Cairo and Radio Voice of the Arabs, April 18,1959;
cited in W.A.
Beling, Pan-Arabism and Labor, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Middle Eastern
Monographs, 1960, p. 28.
32 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM
be no doubt," he stressed, "that... (it) is the most important, and
the one with which we are most closely linked."7
The Arabs are, of course, also very much bound together by a
common religious heritage. Indeed, Islam is a core ingredient of
Pan-Arabism. At the same time, being a more inclusive basis of
identity, Islam embraces Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic
states which, W.A. Beling explains, by virtue of their non-Arabic
languages, as well as their racial and other differences, are "excluded
from the Pan-Arab concept."8
Even so, the crucial role of Islam as an instrument of Pan-Arabism
should not be missed. In this regard, it is necessary to remind
ourselves that the religion of Islam arose partly in answer to the
customary indictment by Jews and Christians that Arabs were
"savages who did not even possess an organized church,"9 and partly
in response to the state of feuding separatism and decadence in
which the Arabs were mired. By launching the new religion, by
permeating the nature of his fellow Arabs with an autochthonous
religious impulse, one whose genesis, instrumentality and language
they could readily relate to, Muhammad not only went a long way
toward asserting the Arabs' creative genius, but he also succeeded
in transforming his fello w Arabs, replacing their jealous divisiveness
with a spirit of mutual defense designed to promote common political
and material interests. His success in this was indeed staggering,
for almost at once Islam proved to be "the most important force" in
the Arabs' political and social rejuvenation.10
Nor was this all. In its external ramifications, Islam soon triggered
Arab empire-building as proselytizing brotherhoods "with an uncompromising
aggressiveness unmatched in the history of religions"
soon pierced into the heartland of Africa and beyond into Europe
and Asia.11 The essentially imperialistic, rather than beneficent or

7. Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution,

Washington,
DC:
Public Affairs Press, 1955, p. 111.
8. W.A. Beling, op. cit., p. iii.
9. The "Prophet" Muhammad's French biographer, Maxime Rodinson, makes the
point which
is
cited in Time, April 16,1979, p.49.
10. The view of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Arab historian, cited in W.
Rodney, How
Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972, pp.
62-63.
11. See C. Williams, op. cit., pp. 215-216; and W. Rodney, op. cit., p.63.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 33
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OPOKU AGYEMAN
missionary, role of Islam, is underscored by the fact, for instance,
that it featured as an instrument of the Arab slave trade: the trade
and the religion were "companions throughout, with the crescent
following the commercial caravan".12 Revealingly, following the
Moroccan invasion of Songhay, the African Muslims who had built
and ruled the empire were not spared destruction by the Arab
Muslims.13 This is by no means an isolated case. The historical
sources are replete with complaints by black Muslim rulers about
"holy wars" launched against them to take captives. The enslavement
of black Muslims became very much the confirmed pattern.
As far as Arabs were concerned, therefore, the utility of Islam,
from the first, was seen to lie in its potential as a weapon for
indoctrination, domination and, thereby, the augmentation of Arab
power around the globe. In Nasser's own words:
When I consider the 80 million Muslims in Indonesia, and the 50
million in China, and the millions in Malaysia, Siam and Burma,
and the nearly 100 million in Pakistan ... and the 40 million in
the Soviet Union together with the other millions in far-flung
parts of the world — when I consider these hundreds of millions
united by a single creed, I emerge with a sense of the tremendous
possibilities which we might realize through the co-operation of
all these Muslims.14
From such a trajectory, it comes as no surprise that the remaining
circle in Nasser's orbital schema, Africa, which he characterized as
"the remotest depths of the jungle," featured as merely a candidate
for Egypt's, "spread of enlightenment and civilization" via Islamization-
Arabisation.15
In all, at the dictates of Pan-Arabism, loyalty to a particular state
in the Arab world has been, in Bernard Lewis' words, "tacit (and)
even surreptitious," even as Arab unity has been "the sole publicly
accepted objective of statesmen and ideologues alike."16 Despite

12. Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 53. No.
4, July 1975. p. 725.
13. C. Williams, op. cit., p. 222.
14. G. A. Nasser, op. cit., p. 113.
15. Ibid., pp. 109-110.
16. B. Lewis, The Middle East and the West, New York: Harper and Row, 1964,
p. 94.
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

much recent talk, in some academic circles, of the demise of Pan-
Arabism in the wake of the defection of Sadat's Egypt, the ideological
current remains appreciably strong, as witness the very fact of
the tremendous storm generated in the Arab world over Sadat's
policy — an indication, in itself, of a fight to keep the ideology alive.
At this juncture, it is well to sum up the essence of the Pan-Arabist
ideology by noting that it is founded on the Arabs' belief, "illustrated
by the jihads through which, in the 7th and 8th centuries, they spread
Islam" into North Africa, Iberia and South Asia,
that in a rightly ordered world, dominion should belong to Muslims, and
pre-eminently to the Arabs who gave Islam to the world. Since they not
only lost dominion to the West but found themselves overrun by the
West, they have suffered from a feeling that the universe is out of its
proper order. They have therefore, as Muslim Brotherhoods
demonstrate, longed for a restoration of dominion to the Faithful so the
world will be set right again.17
In terms of goals, the cross-purposes of the two movements are
self-evident. And this means that any "alliance" between them could
only be one of convenience, limited to collaboration in the elimination
of obstacles (as posed by South Africa and Israel) toward the
attainment of what are fundamentally opposed ends. The point
cannot be overlooked, in this connection, that, outside the obligations
of the "alliance", Israel, the adversary of the Arabs, was neither
automatically nor necessarily the foe of the Africans; by the same
token, South Africa, the enemy of the Africans, was neither necessarily
nor mechanically the foe of the Arabs.
The lack of mutuality in the "Alliance"
It has to be emphasized that, even within such limited perimeters,
success of the "alliance" depended entirely on a mutuality of commitment
to its limited tactical purposes. And yet the evidence
suggests that such a reciprocity was lacking from the beginning. The
Africans drew upon, and were buttressed by, assumptions of Third
World solidarity — "the shared experience of devastation and

17.Chinweizu, op. cit., p. 494.
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humiliation under the boots of an expansionist West . . ."18 In
Nkrumah's words:
The fortunes of the African Revolution ... are linked with the world-wide
struggle against imperialism. It does not matter where the battle erupts,
be it in Africa, Asia or Latin America, the master-mind and master-hand
at work are the same. The oppressed and exploited people are striving for
their freedom against exploitation and suppression. Ghana must not,
Ghana cannot, be neutral in the struggle of the oppressed against the
oppressor.19
For their part, the Arabs seem to have conceived of the "alliance"
solely in self-interested terms; in particular, there was concern to
ensure their continued access to the waters of the Nile which, to
Egypt, "is a matter of life or death" in the sense that "if the water of
the river were discontinued or were controlled by a hostile state or
a state that could become hostile, Egypt's life is over".20 In Nasser's
words:
The Nile which runs from Lake Victoria to Cairo is not merely a route
crossing the ... African continent to the Mediterranean, but is the path of
life in the full sense of the word and with all its dimensions.21
This anxiety over the Nile, as old as the Arabs' incursion and
occupation of Egypt from 642 A.D., was a key motivating factor in
Muhammed Ali's annexation of the Sudan to the Egyptian Empire
in the 19th century, and remains as acute as ever, as in Sadat's threat
of June 5, 1980 to "retaliate with force" if Ethiopia interfered with
the river's flow to Egypt. This was in retort to Ethiopia's complaint
to the OAU that Egypt was abusing its rights to the Nile by diverting
it to irrigate stretches of Sinai Desert in a million-acre irrigation
scheme launched by Sadat.22
1

8. Ibid., p. 23.
19. Kwame Nkrumah, Address to the National Assembly, June 12,1965.
20. The words of an Egyptian army colonel, cited in Fareq Y. Ismael, The UAR

in Africa:
Egypt's
Policy Under Nasser, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971, pp.
163-164.
21. Statement on September 22,1966, during a State Visit to Tanzania. See
The Nationalist
(Dar es Salaam), September 23,1966.
22. See The New York Times, June 6, 1980, p. A3.
36 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

And now to sum up the essence of the matter. In the eyes of the
Arab leaders, Egypt is the most important entity in the Arab nation.
It therefore matters very much that Egypt's lifeline, the Nile, lies in
African hands. A united and hostile Africa could strangulate Egypt.
Among other uses, then, an "alliance" between Africans and Arabs
could be exploited to forestall such a unification of Black Africa.
Organizationally, the "alliance" was born with the Conference of
Independent African States (CIAS) which Nkrumah convened in
Accra in March 1958, which assembled Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt,
Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana, and to which Nkrumah
declared: "If in the past the Sahara divided us, now it unites us. And
an injury to one is an injury to all of us."23
We now proceed to assess the "praxis" of the alliance since its
inauguration in 1958, drawing on case illustrations in African-Arab
intercourse in the Sudan, Zanzibar, Mauritania and the Organization
of African Unity (OAU); on the triangular mesh of African-
Arab-Israeli relations; and on the effect of Islam on African-Arab
connections.

The Sudan
The backdrop to African-Arab relations in Africa's largest
country (sharing borders with 8 countries, including Ethiopia) is
provided by the Turko-Egyptian conquest of 1821 and the subsequent
rule of a Turko-Egyptian government headed by
Muhammed Ali which witnessed, among other things, the traffic in
over 1 million African slaves for the Middle East market.24 This was
followed by the Anglo-Egyptian colonization and rule from 1898
which would end in a grant of independence to a united, Arabdominated
Sudan in 1956. By the time of the launching of the
"alliance" at the 1958 CIAS in Accra, the Sudan had been independent
for some two years, during which everything had been done
23. Cited in Ali Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and
Ambition, London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p. 62.
24. Allan Reed, "The Anya-nya: Ten Months' Travel with His Forces Inside the

Southern
Sudan," Munger Africana Library Notes, Issue No. 11, California Institute-of

Technology,
Pasadena, California, February 1972, p. 3.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 37

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to complete the process of African political incapacitation and
economic disinheritance in that land.
For instance, on the insistence of the Egyptians, the British
excluded the Africans from the independence talks. Then, a few
months before independence, the Equatorial Corps of the Sudanese
Army, which was based in the South, was disarmed and sent to the
North, for fear that otherwise the Africans might break away from
the imposed unity.25 In the economic area, some 300 African
workers on the Nzara Cotton Scheme were arbitrarily replaced by
Arabs. As for the new Sudanization policy which transferred posts
held by the British to the Sudanese, all that the Africans got out of
it was 4 posts out of the 800. The remaining 796 jobs went to Arabs.26
Even though the Sudan attended the CIAS in Accra, it came away
from it with no wish whatsoever to achieve any Afro-Arab synthesis
in the country in line with the spirit of "solidarity" which the "alliance"
symbolized. On the contrary, the government continued the
tradition of Arab predominance at the expense of the African
majority. As a former Prime Minister, Sayed Sadiq el Mahdi, conveyed
the point:
The dominant feature of our nation is an Islamic one and its
overpowering expression is Arab, and this nation will not have its entity
identified and its prestige and pride preserved except under an Islamic
revival.27
This inner purpose has been echoed over the years by successive
governments and remains the guiding principle of the Arabs in the
Sudan to this day. Thus, another Sudanese Prime Minister, Mahgoub,
proclaimed in 1968:
Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations
and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in
Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent.28

25. ibid., p. 14.
26. For additional details on the different economic fortunes of Africans
and Arabs in the
Sudan,
see 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 199.
27. Dunstan M. Wai, "Revolution, Rhetoric, and Reality in the Sudan," The
Journal of
Modem
African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1,1979, p. 73.
28. Interview with the Cairo weekly, Al Mussawar, March 29,1968.
38 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Nor did the "revolutionary rhetoric" spawned by President
Nimeiry after coming to power in the aftermath of a May 1969 coup
d'etat lessen the Arabization drive, as some maintained.29 Indeed,
following Nimeiry's accession to office, the Pan-Arabists "gained
disproportionately high influence," as reflected in his decision in the
Summer of 1970 to sign the Tripoli Charter which committed the
Sudan, Egypt and Libya to a political federation.30 When some
Africans protested the new wave of Pan-Arabist effusion, expressing
the fear that a Pan-Arab federation incorporating the Sudan would
convert the Africans into a minority and thereby worsen their plight,
they were readily dubbed "racialist conspirators" and then arrested.
31
Meanwhile, Nimeiry's Prime Minister intoned loudly and clearly
the purpose of his government, for the benefit of those who still
might misconstrue its essential character:
The revolutionary government, with complete understanding of
the bond of destiny and forces of Arab Revolution, will work for
the creation of economic, military, and cultural relations with
brother Arab nations to strengthen the Arab nation.32
Not to be outdone, Nimeiry himself let it be known that the Sudan
"is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the
Arab civilizing mission."33
Even though the African majority's value systems resisted assimilation
into the minority Arab culture, the Arabs insisted on
seeing them as a "cultural vacuum" to be filled by Arab culture "by
all conceivable means."34 In consequence, under the Arab heel, a
sizeable number of Africans Islamized and Arabised themselves to
the point of "giving themselves Arab genealogies."35
29. See, for instance, All Mazrui, "Is the Nile Valley Turning into a New
System?", Makarere
University, Kampala, 1971, Mimeo, p. 25.

30. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 83.
31. 0. Aguda, op. cit., pp. 177-178.
32. Ibid., p. 128.
33. See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 27.
34. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.
35. 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 183. See also D. M. Wai, op. cit., pp. 72-73. .
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 39
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The ultimate ambition of the Arabs, however, as the official
quotations cited above portray, was to have the Sudan wrenched
from Africa and absorbed into the Arab fold — made into an
integral part of the Arab world — on the basis of "the unity of blood,
language and religion." To this end, and at the further impetus of a
desire to create a room in the South of the country for settlement
by the displaced Palestinians, they embarked on a policy of systematic
extermination of the African population. By July 1965, as
Allan Reed has ably chronicled, the intellectual class among the
Africans, in particular, had become the object of a furious extermination
campaign.36 Nor did this policy of extermination change
under successive governments. As late as December 1969, Allan
Reed witnessed the bombings of the cattle camps in Upper Nile. As
he wrote: "I passed through villages that were totally levelled, just a
few months after Nimeiry had talked about regional autonomy".37
Writing in 1968, The Daily Nation lamented that for years "whole
villages have been destroyed" and untold atrocities committed by
the Sudanese army.38
Inevitably, through their own organization, the Sudan African
National Union (SANU), the Africans resisted this regimen of
carnage; inevitably, this resulted in a civil war pitting the SANU's
Pan-Africanist nationalism39 against the Pan-Arabism of the
Arabs. It was a classic conflict between a people's yearning for
political self-determination and cultural autonomy and, in the
words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, the "flagrant colonialist"
ambitions of the Arabs.40
Meanwhile, even as the Africans outside the Sudan, perhaps out
of embarrassment, affected ignorance of the strife in the Sudan, or
found specious excuses for staying aloof from it, the Arab world, for
its part, threw in its collective weight as Syria, Libya and Egypt,

36. See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 12.
37. Ibid., p. 13.
38. Daily Nation (Nairobi), July 22, 1968, Editorial, "The Sudan Question."
39. For the essentially Pan-Africanist ideology of SANU and its military
wing, the "Anyanya",
see Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 26.
40. Interview in Playboy (London), April 1968, cited in D. M. Wai, op. cit.,

p. 73.
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM
among others, took on direct combat involvement against the outgunned
and out-supplied Africans.
The 1972 settlement which granted the Africans regional autonomy
in the South was a tactical accommodation that changed little. Writing
seven years later, D. M. Wai noted that the only thing that tied the two
racial groups together was "a mutually hateful contiguity from which
neither could escape."41 It was an "illusion", he emphasized, to think that
the schism that separates the two races had been resolved. For, in spite of
the numerical superiority of the Africans, and despite the settlement,
Africans still remained "at the periphery of central decision-making".
Only one person from the south was in the Cabinet; one out of 45
ambassadors was from the
South; only 8 out of the more than 200 Sudanese in the diplomatic service
were from the South.42
Subsequent developments have overridden the tactical aims for
which the Arabs made that settlement. Upon the discovery of oil in the
South, Nimeiry moved, in February 1982, to unconstitutionally dissolve
the South's ruling bodies, to replace them with a military-led
administration of his own choosing, and to pursue a new policy of
dividing the region into three subregions, the better to reduce the South's
political influence and dilute its autonomy. When African politicians
voiced opposition to these violations of the 1972 settlement, Nimeiry had
them promptly detained.
Not a synthesis, then, but the triumph of Arabism over Africanism
is the tale of the Sudan in the era of the "alliance."
The greatest achievement of Arabism in the Sudan has been the
unquestioned acceptance by the whole world that this is an Arab state, in
spite of the fact that only about 30% of the population is Arab. Indeed,
the predominance of the Arab Sudanese in the country's culture, politics,
administration, commerce and industry makes it de facto an Arab state.43
The fact of the matter is that, invariably, the Arabs in the Sudan,
like all other Arabs, "have conceived of the universe as rooted

41. D.M. Wai, ibid., p. 88.
42. Ibid., pp. 88n, 89.
43. 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 177.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 41
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fundamentally in Arabism. For them, there is little disagreement
about the national character the Sudan should adopt, and what its
national aspirations and loyalties should be.44
Zanzibar and Mauritania
The Arab slave trade and Arab enslavement of Africans in the
lands they controlled were interrelated, indeed twin, phenomena.
For centuries, African slaves in Arab hands served as domestics,
eunuchs, soldiers, agricultural serfs, and as slave-gangs on irrigation
works, in sugar and cotton plantations, as well as in gold, salt and
copper mines. Known as the "guardians of female virtue", the
African eunuchs served at harems throughout Arabia. Thousands
of African boys between eight and ten years old were castrated every
year and the survivors of the crude and painful operation were
reared into eunuchs.45 For the African military slaves, the tendency
was, once they had outlived their usefulness, to be betrayed into
slaughter by those they served self-sacrificially.46 Nor has the
phenomenon evaporated into the thin air of history. Survivals of it,
Bernard Lewis informs us, "can still be met" in Egypt, for instance,
where the Nubian servant "remains a familiar figure... to this day."47
Likewise, the Anti-Slavery Society reports that there were in 1962
some 250,000 African slaves in Saudi Arabia alone.48
Our concern however, is not so much with the remnants of the
odious institution in some specific Arab countries. In other words,
we are here addressing a historical phenomenon in the Arab world
as a whole, which we deem to have "continued without interruption"
to the present day.49
Consider Zanzibar. It is difficult not to remember that the outrage
of Arab wholesale enslavement of Africans in that island, which

44. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.
45. See B. Lewis, Race and Color in Islam, New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1970, p. 85. Also
Leda Farrant, Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade, New York: St.
Martin's Press,
1975, p. 2.
46. B. Lewis, ibid., pp. 69, 70, 72, 77.
47. Ibid., p. 82.
48. See Tribune de Geneve, April 30,1973.
49: B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 81; E. P. Alexandrov, Political Economy of
Capitalism, Moscow, p.
60.
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began in 1698 with the Omani Arabs' creation of a plantation
economy and a commercial empire in the North-Western Indian
Ocean,50 ended only in 1964 with the Pan-Africanist Okello's heroic
overthrow of the Sultanate. In the period between 1698 and 1964,
Zanzibar attained a dubious distinction as the most important slave
market in the Indian Ocean. It became a land where being "upper
class" meant that one was not only an Arab first and foremost, but
also that one could afford a great number of African slaves. It
developed the convention that, once born an African, one was "a
slave forever, even in the next world."51
Indeed, the Africans were called washenzi — "uncivilized beings
of a lower order"52 — and, on this account, were considered to be
deserving of every abuse. Thus, it was customary to have the wombs
of pregnant African women opened so that capricious Arab women
could see how babies lay inside of them,53 even as it was fashionable
to have Africans kneel for Arab women to step on their backs as
they mounted their mules. Slaves suspected of fugitive intentions
had their necks "secured into a cleft stick as thick as a man's thigh,
and locked by a crossbar. Sometimes a double cleft stick was used
and one man locked at each end of it."54 Routinely, men, women
and children were killed or left tied to a tree,
for the scavengers to finish off when they couldn't keep up with the
caravan, either through illness and exhaustion, or starvation, or both.
Mostly, they were finished off with a blow from a rifle butt, or their
skull smashed with a rock, as in the case of the child whose mother
complained that she couldn't go on carrying him and the heavy ivory
tusk. Ammunition was too precious to waste on a slave.55
Okello, upon visiting the island, and before single-handedly planning
the coup that overthrew the Arab regime in 1964, learned, to
50. Edward A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade, Historical Association
of Tanzania,
Paper No. 3, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 10.

51. B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 7.
52. L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 9.
53. J. Okello, Revolution in Zanzibar, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 108.
54. L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 16.
55. Ibid., p. 15.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 43
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his chagrin, that a phenomenon he assumed to be buried in history
was alive and vigorous in that land; he heard an elderly African
lament: "My grandfather was a slave, my father was a slave and I
too am now an Arab slave;"56 and he heard the shrill retort of an
Arab: "Whether you like it or not, you niggers and black slaves will
forever remain under the flag of our Holy Sultan. We shall deal with
you as we please."57
Significantly, Nasser gave the unqualified support of the United
Arab Republic to the Arab oligarchy in Zanzibar. Like the British
Colonial Office, the Arab leader took the side of the Arab minority
against the African majority over the future of the protectorate,
prompting this comment from a British newsletter: "Zanzibar is a
part of Africa and not the Middle East. The Afro-Shirazi are a more
important group than the Arab minority. These facts should be
taken into account before the protectorate ends. If not, there will
be trouble in the sweet-scented remote islands."58 And, once
trouble erupted in the form of an African coup d'etat which eventually
ousted the Arab political order, it came the turn of Gaddafi
of Libya to take up the championship of Arabism in Zanzibar.
Speaking on October 7, 1972, at a rally at the Tripoli Stadium to
mark the anniversary of the Italian evacuation from Libya, Gaddafi
declared:
Zanzibar was all Muslim, and almost all the people were Arabs ... In
1964, the enemies of Zanzibar plotted and staged a massacre in which
they slaughtered over 20,000 Arabs in Zanzibar. It was the most
notorious massacre in the world. . . . All the Arabs were annihilated in
Zanzibar and African rule developed there.59
Partly in retaliation for this "massacre" of the Arabs, Gaddafi then
set out, on his own admission, to support Idi Amin's Uganda in its
war against Tanzania, the political entity that has, since 1964,
incorporated
Zanzibar.

56. J. Okello, op. cit., p. 88.
57. Ibid., p. 95.
58. Confidential Newsletter, July 15,1960.
59. Daily News (Dar es Salaam), November 6,1972.
44 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

But if Zanzibar in East Africa represents an outrage that has only
recently been liquidated, Mauritania in Northwest Africa, occupying as it
does another vital zone of interaction between Arabism and Black Africa,
symbolizes a raging and perennial Arabian anachronism.
The process began with the invasion of "white Berber nomads"
into the area in the first millennium A.D. An Arab invading force
joined them from the 14th century and, in time, out of the fusion of
the Berbers and Arabs, came the present ruling elite, "the white
Moors." Whatever residual biological differences separate these
"white Moors"60 from pure Arabs, they are now so completely
identified with the Arabs linguistically, religiously, culturally and
ideologically that, to all intents and purposes, they are indistinguishable
from them. Indeed, a number of historians, use "white Moors"
and "Arabs" interchangeably in their works.
The official designation of this Northwestern portion of Africa is
the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. As in the Sudan, the Pan-
Arabist outlook of the political system has never been in question.
Thus, upon the country's admission into the Arab League in 1973,
President Ould Daddah pledged: "Mauritania will make every effort
and mobilize all its energies for the Arab cause."61 Nor is it any
surprise that a Pan-Arab Ministry was created in the country and
that Jiddou Ould Salek, as its political head, reaffirmed in 1979 the
country's attachment "in its totality to Arabo-Islamic culture."62
Again, as in the Sudan, policies of enforced Arabisation of the
Africans have been the norm. For instance, in 1966, Arabic was
declared the official language of the country, in the teeth of African
opposition.
Out of a population of 1.5 million, the Africans constitute approximately
500,000. They are all slaves, in varying degrees. As the
Anti-Slavery Reporter has noted, no other nation has so many
slaves.63 Entry into-slavery "is by birth, capture or purchase. The first
60. Anti-Slavery Reporter, The Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of
Human Rights,
Series VII, Vol. 13, No. 1, December 1981. p. 16.

61. West Africa, No. 2947, December 3,1973, p. 1711.
62. Confidential Newsletter, February 28,1979.
63. Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 17.
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... is the most common: being born to an existing slave woman."64
Purchase is still current: the sale of children, who, incidentally, all
belong
to the mother's master, is the most common. Even those among the
Africans who have managed to purchase their freedom, and who are thus
legally free, continue to be regarded as property by their former Moorish
masters. As Le Monde has indicated, whenever these "freed slaves"
escape the grip of their former masters, they are hunted down by the
police and the administration
and quickly restored to bondage, all "in the name of an interpretation of
Islamic law."65
Slavery is indeed the way of life in Mauritania. A typical sight in
Nouakchott, the capital, according to Bernard Nossiter, is that of "slaves
working in gardens and vegetable plots . . . while their Moorish masters
sit under trees, sipping mint tea."66 And the avenues of escape from
servitude remain as elusive as ever. As recently as February 1980,
demonstrations staged by the African Freedom Movement saw the
movement's leaders arrested, held without trial for months, and then
tortured to a point where some of them went mad.67
On July 5, 1980, as a way of "calming the slaves until the Government
(of President Haidala) has had time to work out plans on how
to cope with the anti-slavery movement,"68 and in an effort to
improve the country's international image, the Mauritanian government
published a decree abolishing slavery. Those who knew that
slavery had been formally abolished twice before and that the
country's independence constitution itself proclaims that "All men
are born free and are equal before the law," could only greet the new
announcement with skepticism.
Indeed, when investigators of the Anti-Slavery Society visited
Mauritania "to see how far the new decree was being put into effect,"
they concluded that it had had no practical effect.69 No wonder, for
"the upper and middle officials of the government, the judiciary, the

64. Ibid.
65. Cited in Africa News, August 4,1980, pp. 2,11.
66. B. D. Nossiter, "UN Gets a Report on Slaves," The New York Times, August

26,1981, p.
All.
67. Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. I7.
68. Ibid., p. 18.
69. Ibid., p. 16.
46 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

police and the rest of the civil service", do, for the most part, have their
own slaves and are determined to keep them.70 As it happens, the most
dramatic consequence of the decree seems to have been the government's
decision to set up a national commission, composed of Muslim jurists,
economists and administrators, to work out compensation for the
enslavers for the loss of slaves they have not yet incurred!
When the Anti-Slavery Society proposed that, to demonstrate its
sincerity, the Mauritanian government should ratify the international
convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and
the supplementary convention on the abolition of slavery, the slave trade,
and institutions and practices similar to slavery, this triggered a
revealing
rejoinder in August 1981 from the Mauritanian government. It let it be
known that it was not the only country which enslaved Africans and that,
in any case, any effort "to wipe out this form of discrimination," no
matter how earnest, would founder on the rock of Maurtania's
technological underdevelopment "which makes all talk about human
liberty completely derisory."71
In other words, until the country becomes technologically
sophisticated, there is, in the thinking of the white Moors in Mauritania,
every justification for enslaving the Africans. As for Western critics,
given the historical record of the West's own victimization of Africans, it
was the Mauritanian government's view that they had no moral authority
to hold brief for the Africans:
It is very easy for citizens of certain countries who in the past developed
this form of discrimination called slavery to its most debasing degree
within a framework of pure Machiavellianism and sheer materialism: It
is easy ... for these people to try to relieve the ir consciences by setting
themselves up as defenders of victims in countries which have not had
the chance to experience
technological development.72
That Arab enslavement of Africans is not a matter of the past but
a continuous, persistent and present scourge is further underscored

70. Ibid., p. 17.
71. Cited in Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 20.
72 Ibid.
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by some gruesome details of "the slave trade route from Africa to
the Arab countries in the 1970s" provided by Tribune de Geneve.73
Research done at the Encyclopaedia Africana Secretariat in Accra
has also pointed up cases of African pilgrims selling their children
to Arabs in order to pay their expenses for the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Scarcely less startling is the news that broke in February 1973 to the
effect that Arab traders had been for years exporting to the Middle
East Ghanaian children "between the tender and undiscerning ages
of thirteen and fourteen to become the virtual slaves of wealthy
Arab families."74 The shock this revelation registered on public
opinion in Ghana is well captured in a lengthy and poignant editorial
of the Weekly Spectator:
Over the past two decades Ghana has led the quest for the restoration of
the black man's lost glory and set the pace for the rediscovery of the
African personality. It is therefore revolting and exceedingly
bewildering to note that this glorious land of liberty is being used for the
watersheds of the revival of slave trade.... We recall vividly the
uncertain days of the struggle for independence when Lebanese and
Syrian merchants in Ghana constituted themselves into a volunteer force
and with three-feet-long batons in their hands, cudgelled down freedom
fighters in the streets of Accra in open daylight.... It would appear that
we have taken our tolerance too far and they have taken our leniency for
weakness and are now adding injury to insult by trading our young
daughters like apples or any other commodity. ... Our children must be
defended against slavery.75
African-Arab relations before, within, and beyond the OAU
If there is any relief from the gloom of a historically victimizing
Arab behaviour towards Africans, it lies in Ben Bella's stirring
rhetoric at the inaugural meeting of the OAU in 1963, pledging
10,000 Algerian volunteers for a showdown in Southern Africa:

73. See Tribune de Geneve, April 4,1973.
74. Weekly Spectator (Accra), February 17,1973 and March 3,1973.
75. Ibid., February 17,1973.
48 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICAN ISM VS PAN-ARABISM

A charter will be of no value to us, and speeches will be used
against us, if there is not first created a blood bank for those
fighting for independence. We must all agree to die a little.76
It was the same Ben Bella impulse which dictated that, having
itself only recently achieved its independence, Algeria would proceed to
organize special programmes of training for African liberation
movements in Southern Africa. Among those who trained this way in
Algeria was a corps of FRELIMO fighters, including Samora Machel,
soon to become the President of Mozambique.
To better understand this aberration from the Arab norm, it is
necessary to explore some background facts. These relate to the
tenacity of the support which Algeria received from three "radical"
African states (Ghana, Guinea and Mali) which operated within the
Casablanca bloc alongside two "radical" Arab States (Egypt and
Muhammad V's Morocco) and the Algerian government in exile,
the GPRA. The three African countries not only gave recognition
to the Algerian government in exile, but they carried their support
to the point where they boycotted the Lagos Conference of Independent
States, held in January 1962, in reaction to the refusal of
the organizers of the conference to invite the GPRA.
Beyond such collective efforts, Nkrumah, for one, tirelessly
proclaimed, in international forums, the justness and the moral
imperatives of Algerian liberation. He also gave Frantz Fanon, the
GPRA's Ambassador to Africa, a base in Accra from which to solicit
support for the Algerian cause among the non-Casablanca African
countries, and to work toward the opening of a southern front
through the Mali frontier to ease the delivery of arms to the FLN.
Hardly forgettable is also the selfless, even self-sacrificial, contribution
of Frantz Fanon to the same Arab cause. A black man, and
a native of Martinique, he was soon to discover in his travels that it
was not only in Europe that a black person, "regardless of his level
of education and culture, was always primarily a Negro — and

76. West Africa, No. 2743. December 27. 1969.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 49
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therefore inferior"77; even in the Third World, supposedly united by the
struggle against imperialism, racism remained rife against black people.
Thus, while he served in the Free French army in North Africa, "the eyes
that turned to watch him in the streets never let him forget the color of
his
skin."78 In Fanon's own testimony, "I was astonished to learn that the
North Africans despised men of color. It was absolutely impossible for
me to make any contact with the local population." In all, he concluded,
there was no question that the Arab "does not like the African."79
For all that, Fanon set out to counterpoise universalism to this
virus of racism, Arab or otherwise. And so, after studying medicine
and psychiatry in France, and while serving the French government
in Algeria in the fifties, he formally joined the FLN in 1956. From
that time on until his death, he devoted himself, in the words of I.
L. Gendzier, "with the intensity and the enormous talents at his
disposal to the many tasks he performed for the FLN and Algeria."
In addition to doing medical work in Tunisian hospitals and
contributing his services to the L'Armee de Liberation Nationale
(ALN) centers for soldiers and refugees, he worked for the FLN
press organs, first Resistance Algerienne and then el Moudjahid. He
also represented Algeria to the Africans.80 On the strength of a
conviction that the plight of the oppressed knows no boundaries, he
made Algeria, rather than Martinique or France, into the focal point
of his life. So seriously did he take his adopted cause that in 1958,
while pleading the Algerian case at the Accra All-African People's
Conference, he was so emotionally overcome that he "appeared
almost to break down."81 All this, even while he continued to
encounter what he himself characterized as an "appalling" level of
racism against Africans in the Arab world.82
Ben Bella, as one of the "historic leaders" of the FLN, was
impressed by this multifaceted black support. After Algerian inde-
77. David Caute, Frantz Fanon, New York: Viking Press, 1970, p. 3.
78. Observation by Simone de Beauvoir, cited in David Caute, ibid., p. 4
79. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, pp.
102-103.
80. See Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, New York:
Pantheon Books,
1

973, pp. xii, 188; F. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove
Press,
1967, p. 177.
81. I. L. Gendzier, ibid., pp. 190-191.
82. Ibid.. p. 223.
50 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICAN ISM VS PAN-ARABISM

pendence, he moved to show his appreciation through reciprocal gestures
both on the African scene, as we have noted, and inside Algeria, in
measures commemorative of Fanon.
The point that must be stressed, however, is that these efforts at
reciprocity, given their transience and all, are not so remarkable as the
fact that anti-African tendencies inherent in the Arab world quickly
extinguished them. Thus, within two years of his Addis Ababa oratory,
Ben Bella was ousted from office by forces in Algeria which, among
other things, deeply resented Ben Bella's "deviation" from Islamic
fundamentalism and Arabo-centrism; forces which, in the post-Ben Bella
era, have been concerned to emphasize Algeria's "Arab-Islamic heritage"
and, by the same token, to de-emphasize the African orientation in its
foreign policy.
The ouster of Ben Bella and the re-orientation of Algerian foreign
policy is not unrelated to the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. Visiting
the country following Fanon's death and Ben Bella's ouster, Simone de
Beauvoir discovered that "no one in Algeria spoke for Fanon." Similarly,
I. L. Gendzier, writing in J970, noted that Algerian officials "consistently
avoid any discussion of Fanon's political ideas."83 Any suggestion that he
contributed significantly to the Algerian struggle was resisted; indeed,
there was a "concerted policy" to downgrade him as a theorist of the
"Revolution"; to prove "that he was not even Algerian"; to protect the
"authenticity" of the
"Revolution" as an all-Algerian, all-Arab and all-Muslim phenomenon. In
short, as one official put it, the burden of official effort was to "de-
Fanonize" Algeria and, in the process "de-Algerianize" Fanon.84
When all is said and done, then, Fanon's "fatal flaw" as I. L.
Gendzier notes, was that he was neither Arab nor Muslim. It is
significant that, as far back as 1957, he was left out of the political
inner circle — the National Council of the Algerian Revolution. In
a revealing confession, El Mill, an Algerian official, indicated that,
had Fanon been an Arab, he would have been acknowledged as "the
major theoretician of the Algerian Revolution."85 The reality that

83. Ibid., p. 243.
84. Ibid., pp. 243,244.
85. Cited in ibid.. p. 247.
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emerges from all this is that, for today's Algerian officialdom, what
is of paramount importance is "Blood ties as opposed to commonly
held values.86 Though Fanon helped with their cause, he was,
biologically, not one of them and therefore had to be repudiated.
It is no less noteworthy that, either out of customary Arab contempt
for things African, or as a function of the reorientation of
national priorities away from African concerns, the Algerians have
studiedly kept those of Fanon's writings that touch on the predicament
of black people — such as the text of his statement at the
AAPC in Accra in 1958 and of his lecture delivered at the 2nd
Congress of Black Writers held in Rome 1959 — out of the limelight
of print.
There is no greater evidence of Arab repudiation of Afro-Arab
"common anti-imperialist front" than is offered by this dismal tale
of the dispossession of Fanon in Algeria.
Another specious fruit of the Casablanca "radical" coalition was
the involvement of Morocco, the UAR and, later, Algeria in the
Congo (i.e. Zaire), ostensibly on the side of the pro-independence
forces, as the crisis-engulfed country battled against western
neocolonialist penetration and dismemberment.
The Congo, "the heart of Africa," constituted, economically,
geographically, strategically and politically "the most vital region in
Africa,"' one whose degree of independence would substantially
determine the ultimate fate of the whole continent of Africa. If the
"alliance" was to have a modicum of credibility, it was of the essence
that the Arabs should be seen to contribute appreciably to the
African effort to wrest the Congo from the neocolonialist web of the
West, spearheaded by the Belgians, the Americans and the British.
The point attains special pertinence when it emerges, in
retrospect, that the Arabs had, in their own right and in collaboration
with the Belgians, played a not inconsiderable role in the rape
of the Congo. As Edward Alpers has shown, the violence, degradation
and rampage that accompanied the Arab slave trade was "most
noticeable in the Congo ... where the Arabs... totally devastated

86. Ibid., p. 246.
52 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN.ARABISM

the countryside, killing and seizing hundreds of people in order to
supply the ivory which was being sought.87 Henry Stanley, the
explorer, also had occasion in 1889 to remark, concerning Arab
activities in the eastern Congo, that "slave raiding becomes innocence
when compared with ivory raiding.88 In time, and significantly,
as we have noted, King Leopold of Belgium entered into
association with Tippu Tip, the leader of the Arab slave traders,
appointing him governor of his Congo International Association
whose trademark was the use of the force of arms to compel the
Africans to exploit the country's wealth in rubber and ivory.
Against this backdrop, let us now assess the contribution of the
Arabs to the struggle for genuine decolonization in the Congo. In
the early stages of the crisis of post-independence disintegration,
Morocco and the UAR, in company with the African Casablanca
Powers, contributed troops to the UN peace-keeping force. Upon
the failure of this effort, marked by the assassination of Lumumba,
the neocolonial forces gained ground to a point where, in July 1964,
Moise Tshombe, the Western puppet, assumed office as the
country's Prime Minister. Ali Mazrui states that, from then on,
among those who were "the most forthright" in refusing recognition
of Tshombe's accession were the "radical Arab States."89 This they
did, Mazrui goes on to explain, out of conviction that to recognize
Tshombe was to forgive him for his betrayal of the Congo's independence.
Upon a closer look at the evidence, however, it is not at all clear
that the anti-Tshombe exertions of the Arabs in the Congo had
anything to do with an urge to aid the cause of African independence.
As part of the evidence, we must recall the brutal and
terroristic career of the Organization de L'Armee Secrete (OAS),
an outfit of French settlers in Algeria, in waging for years, and to the
very end, a hideous war in defense of the West and French "civilization."
Only Algeria's accession to independence drove these
colonists, some 800,000 of them, from Algeria, out of fear of

87. Edward A. Alpers. op. cit., pp. 23-25.
88. Cited in ibid., p. 25.
89. Ali Mazrui, Violence and Thought, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
Press. 1969. p.
237.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 53
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reprisals for their colonialist crimes.90 The connection between all
this and the Congo is that Tshombe, in Arab eyes, committed an
unpardonable offense when he recruited many of these die-hard
former French settlers of Algeria into his army. From all this, it
would seem decidely more plausible to attribute Arab opposition
to Tshombe to a concern to settle old scores with him, rather than
to any motivation to minister to African independence.
The primacy of Arabist aims in the Arab role in the Congo is
further underscored by the incident of July 1967 when the plane on
which Tshombe was traveling was highjacked over the Mediterranean
and brought to Algeria. The Congo Government requested
his extradition to the Congo to face a death sentence. In response,
and quite revealingly, the Algerians made the return of Tshombe
conditional on a complete re-alignment of Congolese foreign policy
vis-a-vis Israel.
Overall, the cutting edge of our thesis (that Arab behaviour
toward Africa is motivated, at best by self interest, at worst by
antipathy to Africans, and hardly ever by considerations of
reciprocity in the "alliance") is provided by the role of the UAR and
Morocco, through contributions of troops and logistical support,
and in collaboration with the USA and France, in aiding Mobutu to
push back radical African insurgency across the Shaba Province,
both in 1977 and 1978.91
As for the OAU, the organisational expression of the Afro-Arab
"alliance" since 1963, its very composition illustrates the familiar
imbalance in African-Arab relations. Nine members of the Arab
League — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Djibouti, UAR,
Sudan, Mauritania and Somalia — are also members of the OAU.
While, on this account, Arab interests are well represented in the
OAU, African interests, on the other hand, are hardly represented
in the Arab League. The membership of Somalia and Djibouti in
the Arab League, far from making for the counter-penetration by

90. See D. Ottaway. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution,
Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1970. pp. 10-11.
91.. See The New York Times, November 12.1981. p. A7.
54 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

the Africans, constitutes the triumph of the Islamization-Arabisation
efforts of the Arabs. The explanation of Somalia's Arabisation
lies, firstly, in the age-old conversion of its people to Islam and the
susceptibility to Arab influence that this engendered, and, secondly
in the seduction and entrapment of the country by Arab aid.92 As
for Djibouti, even though its population is made up of the Issas (who
are related to the Somali and the Galla of Kenya and Ethiopia) and
the Afars (who are relatives of the African people of Ethiopia), its
Arab puppet President, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, insists that the
people of the country "are 100 percent Arab" and that this justifies
his decision to adopt Arabic as the country's official language, and
to make the country the 21st member of the Arab League.93
It goes without saying that the Arabs have been doing everything to
capture control of the OAU. This was apparent, for instance, at the OAU
Summit in Mogadishu in June 1974 when all the Arab members
relentlessly pushed for the candidacy of a Somali for the Secretary-
Generalship of the organization, as against a Zambian candidate. As Ali
Mazrui would observe of the incident: "At least among the English
speaking black states there was some bitterness. The behaviour of the
Arab states in their lobbying for the Somali was interpreted as an attempt
to put the OAU under Arab or Muslim control."94 This scenario was again
played out at the eleventh annual meeting of the African Development
Bank in Dakar in May 1975 where it became impossible to elect a new
president of the bank because the delegates "were bitterly ... and almost
equally . . . divided between a Ghanaian and a Libyan
candidate."95
The Arab bid for influence in the organization attained marked
success with the accession of President Moktar Ould Daddah of
Mauritania to the chairmanship in 1971; of King Hassan of Morocco
in 1972; and of the Islamized Idi Amin of Uganda in 1975 upon the
92. See David Laitin, "Somalia's Military Government and Scientific
Socialism", in Carl G.
Rosberg and Thomas M. Callaghy, Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Institute
of
International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1979, pp.
194-195.

93. See Daily News (Dar es Salaam), July 8,1977 and The New York Times, June

12,1980.
p. A14, for details of Arab neocolonisation of Djibouti since its
independence from
France in 1977.
94. Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs. Vol. 53, No.
4, July 1975, p.
740.
95. See ibid.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 55
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holding of an OAU Summit in Kampala in July of that year. It is
significant that, in spite of the manifest objectionableness of Idi Amin's
Kampala as the venue of the Summit in many African eyes and, on that
account, the boycotting of the conference by a number of African
countries, the leaders of six of the eight OAU member-states which are
also members of the Arab League attended the Summit. In the view of a
Tanzanian daily, this highlighted "the Arab world's determination to take
Africa along with it in its Middle East policy."96 The well-documented
indictment of Idi Amin by international organizations — the International
Commission of Jurists, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty
International, the Commonwealth, and the European Economic
Community — to the effect that there had developed under him "a
consistent pattern of gross human rights violations",97 did not bother the
Arabs one whit. Indeed, as Gaddafi pointedly told Newsweek in a 1979
interview: "That's not our business."98 Clearly, Arab interest in Uganda
was confined to the promotion of Arab interests — the establishment of a
beachhead from which to work for the control of the source of the Nile,
as well as the settlement of the displaced Palestinians — through the
snare of Islam and the enticement of petrodollars. To this end, the Arabs
pushed for the March 1975 agreement on "technical, economic and
scientific cooperation" signed between Amin's Uganda and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The consequence of it was the
influx of an additional large number of Palestinians into Uganda where,
among other things, they took over businesses left by expelled Asians, as
well as the training of the Ugandan army. As Obote complained to the
OAU: "Cases were known in Uganda in which Palestinians, together with
Amin's murder squads, kidnapped and subsequently murdered their
victims ... all of whom were Ugandan citizens of African stock.'199 As we
know, a large number of Palestinians and over 1,000 Libyan troops were
captured by Tanzania during the Ugandan-Tan-

96. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), July 28, 1975.
97. See, for instance, The Weekly Review (Nairobi), August 11, 1978.
98. Newsweek, June 12, 1979, p. 39.
99. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), May 28, 1973.
56 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

zania War which ended in Amin's expulsion from Uganda and his
migration into Libya.100
For the Arabs, then, the imperatives of the Arab Nation, rather than
any concern for solidarity, albeit in a tactical "alliance", account for
their
membership in the OAU. It is significant, in this regard, that virtually all
the Arab members boycotted the 1967 Summit meeting in Kinshasa on
the ground that Middle Eastern questions were absent from the agenda.
They were, and have been, interested in the organization only to the
extent of holding it captive to their purposes. That they have been
markedly successful in this objective is reflected in the organization's
silence over Arab atrocities in the Sudan, Mauritania, and elsewhere, and
over Gaddafi's aggression in Chad and elsewhere, even as the OAU
vociferously condemns
Israeli incursions into Arab lands.

The organization's accommodation and indulgence of Gaddafi is
especially revealing of its divorce from African concerns. In spite of
outcries by Uganda, Ghana, Gambia, Niger and other countries that the
Libyan has been subverting their countries;101 in spite of his aggression
against Chad, manifested, in part, in his seizure of the uranium-rich
Aouzou Strip since 1973, and in his unconcealed bid to absorb Chad into
an Islamic union with Libya;102 in spite of his self-proclaimed apostleship
of the Nasser doctrine of an Arab civilizing mission to Africa and of the
ambition of an Arab-Islamic
empire across Africa into the Middle East;103 and in spite of his
demonstrated and menacing zeal to acquire sophisticated military
capabilities to enable him to fulfill these anti-African ambitions, he has
been allowed to operate within the OAU to a point where he came close
to becoming its chairman in 1982.
In the face of so much African acquiescence, Gaddafi felt at
liberty in 1973 to initiate a boycott of the OAU's tenth anniversary

100. See The New York Junes, March 5, 1981, p. A23.
101. For a Ugandan accusation, see The New York Times. February 25, 1982, p.

A9 and
February 26, 1982, p. A7; for a similar charge from Ghana, see Daily News
(Dar es
Salaam), October 12, 1977, p.2; for the accusations from Senegal and Gambia,

see
West Africa, November 10, 1980; and for a more general treatment of the
subject, see
West Africa, January 19, 1981. p. 98.
102. See West Africa, January 19, 1981, p. 97.
103. See ibid., pp. 98-99; The New York Times. March 4,1981, p. A3; December

14, 1981, p.
A27: and January 4,1982, p. A3; Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 93.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 57
89
OPOKU AGYEMAN

celebrations unless the site was moved to Cairo, or Ethiopia agreed
to break relations with Israel. To nobody's surprise, Ethiopia caved
in and broke relations with Israel.
It is a fitting tribute to African self-immolation in the organization
that the issue which virtually paralyzed it in 1982 was an intra-Arab
one. The matter in question, the abortion of the August 1982 Tripoli
OAU Summit, had nothing to do with African outrage over, for
instance, Arab efforts to carve Eritrea out of Ethiopia and into the
Arab world, but rather over which Arab interests, Moroccan or
Algerian, should prevail over the phosphate-rich Western Sahara.
The decision by the OAU in February 1982 to admit the Polisario
Front as its 51st member opened a split that mortally threatened the
organization. Meanwhile, even as the OAU wallowed in the throes
of demise, the Arab League was left relatively intact to pursue the
Arab business.

A second effort to convene a Summit in November 1982 also
failed, this time on account of Gaddafi's effort to impose the exiled
former leader Goukouni Oueddei on Chad. Gaddafi, the prospective
host, simply refused to admit the delegation of President Hissen
Hebre of Chad, presumably because Hebre had proven to be less
pliant to his neocolonialist designs on the African country. The
Foreign Minister of Chad then appropriately requested "all African
countries present in Tripoli not to take their seats at the side of the
enemies of Africa."104

South Africa and Israel in Africa-Arab relations
The European Jews, as they set their sights on Palestine at the
beginning of this century, also nourished ideas about colonizing a
portion of Africa for their excess population. Thus, upon rejecting
Joseph Chamberlain's offer of Uganda as a home for these
Caucasian Jews, the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore
Herzl, nonetheless went on to concede that Uganda might be
eminently suitable for an extension of Israel. As he put it: "Our
starting point must be in or near Palestine. Later on we could also
104. See The New York Times. November 26, 1982. p. A4.
58 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

colonize Uganda, for we have a vast number of human beings who
are prepared to emigrate ... "105 Not surprisingly, this expression
by European Jewry of a colonizing intent jarred many an African
ear. Still, there is no question that this colonialist intent pales into
insignificance against the infinitely greater outrage of actual and
historic Arab atrocities in Africa.
At the level of rhetoric, it bears notice that, overall, Israeli
protestations of solidarity with African causes have been at least as
impressive as any professions made by the Arabs. Golda Meir, for
instance, could be moved to articulate the common experience and
consciousness of oppression, discrimination, and slavery shared by
Africans and the European Jews.106 And Theodore Herzl, the founder of
modern political Zionism, could feel called upon to assert:
There is still another question arising out of the disaster of the nations
which
remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can
comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those
terrible
episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they are
black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoners, captured and sold. Their
children
grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because
their
complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say... that once I have
witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist the
redemption of the Africans.107
Upon occasion, it developed that there was more to such declarations
than words. Thus in July, September and November of 1961,
when the "alliance" between the Africans and the Arabs had already
been struck, the Israeli government openly condemned Apartheid
and voted at the UN General Assembly in favour of sanctions
against South Africa.108 Significantly, these efforts evoked reprisal
from South Africa in the form of a rescission of the special conces-

105. See Julian Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, London: Macmillan,
1951, pp. 262-
265.
106. Golda Meir, My Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975, pp.
263-290.
107. Cited in ibid., p. 266.
108. E. A. Nadelmann, "Israel and Black Africa: A Rapproachement?", The
Journal of Modem
African Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2,1981, p. 213.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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107
91
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sions in foreign currency regulations which allowed South African
Jewish organizations to transfer money and goods to Israel.109
In spite of such travail, and despite the flourishing links that
developed via technical assistance and diplomatic representation
between Israel and Africa, Africans made a habit of condemning
Israel to please the Arabs, as in the resolution of the All-African
People's Conference of December, 1958 condemning Israel as one
of the "the main perpetrators of neocolonialism".110
The Africans might be said to have fulfilled their obligations under
the "alliance" when they took the side of the Arabs in the 1967 Middle
East war. Guinea, Somalia, Burundi, Zambia, Mali, Tanzania and Senegal
were numbered among those who vociferously declared their support for
the Arabs. The general African reaction was captured in Senghor's
statement: "We cannot remain indifferent to the struggle which our
brother Arabs are undergoing."111 Significantly, these gestures earned an
Israeli retort: "Israel makes it clear to African countries that it could
not
provide effort, money
and expertise for development if they repaid all this with anti-Israeli
demonstrations".112
Undaunted, the Africans were even more forthcoming in support of
the Arabs in the 1973 war, on account of which, almost to the last
country, they severed diplomatic relations with Israel. This extraordinary
display of solidarity was self-sacrificial in the extreme. As Ali Mazrui
elaborates:
A suggestion that Africa broke off relations with Israel for the sake of
cheaper oil from the Arabs ... distorts the sequence of events. By the time
OPEC dramatically raised the price of oil, much of Africa had already
sided with the Arabs on the Palestine question . . . The trend against
Israel in black Africa started in 1972, and had converted even Mobutu
Sese Seko of Zaire to its side before the outbreak of the October war,
while the energy

109. Ibid., p. 212.
110. Ibid., p. 195.
111. See West Africa, No. 2610, June 10, 1967; No. 2612, June 24,1967; No.
2614, July 8,
1967; No. 2618, August 5,1967; No. 2648, March 2,1968; No. 2625, September
23,1967.
112. Cited in West Africa, No. 2648, March 2,1968, p. 266.
60 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

crisis did not hit the world until about the last ten weeks of 1973.113
To better appreciate the altruism in play here, compare the
African response to the Middle East situation in 1973 with the
general African default over the cause of liberation in Rhodesia in
1965, when only a handful of states complied with a unanimous
OAU resolution that member-states break diplomatic relations
with Britain over its foot-dragging policies. Overall, it is fair to say
that when E. Feit pronounced that he knows "of no historical
instance" where a people have "voluntarily invited unknown persecutions
and sanctions upon itself for another,"114 he reckoned
without the Africans. For presently, all these unrestrained
demonstrations of Arabophilia triggered an Israeli backlash: "No
longer constrained by the necessities of black African friendship",
as E.A. Nadelmann noted, "Israel (now) pursued its relationship
with South Africa with an element of vindictiveness". Contending
that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", Israel now upgraded its
mission in Pretoria to full ambassadorial status, even as it broadened
cultural and military links with the Apartheid regime.115 And how
did the Arabs reciprocate this extraordinary gesture from the
Africans?
In the face of the emergency energy crisis that followed the Arab
oil boycott, Africans asked for help and received a stingy response.
Afro-Arab relations were quickly reduced, in Arab hands, to inter
Islam-relations, or at best to small and sporadic aid flows;116 the
so-called Bank for the Economic Development of Africa turned out
to be an Arab and not African-Arab bank, with decisions on all
projects made solely by the Arabs; again, being a commercial bank
and not an interest-free-loan institution, its objectives proved to be
profit rather than aid.

113. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 736.
114. E. Feit, "Community in a Quandary. The South African Jewish Community
and
Apartheid,"
Race, April 1967, pp. 398-399.
115. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
116. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 742.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 61
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Reduced to supplicants, the Africans alternated between shrill
calls for substantial Arab "reciprocity of solidarity,"117 accusations
of Arab ingratitude,118 and empty threats of economic retaliation
—as when in June 1974, the East African Legislative Assembly at
its meeting in Nairobi suggested that the Nile River be diverted by
the East African States so that they could then sell its water to the
Arabs, in exchange for barrels of oil.119
And what of Arab-South African relations in the period, the acid
test, if you will, of Arab reciprocity or the lack of it?
At the emergency session of the Council of Ministers of the OAU
in Addis in November 1973, a resolution was adopted calling on the
Arabs "to extend the oil embargo to South Africa, Portugal and
Southern Rhodesia until they comply with the United Nations
General Assembly and Security Council resolution on decolonization."
Significantly, four years later, in March 1977, at the Summit
Conference of African and Arab leaders in Cairo, President Kaunda
of Zambia both complained and pleaded that "Our Arab brothers
should not be a party" to the aggressive actions of the Southern
African racists by keeping up oil supplies to them.121 The implication
in Kaunda's statement — that the Arabs were still in economic
cahoots with the Boers — was soon, if obliquely, confirmed by the
South African Foreign Minister, Hilgard Muller, in a claim that
South Africa had sought systematically in "recent years" to build up
contacts with the Arabs "by means of discreet diplomacy".122 There
were, indeed, reports of substantial deals between the Arabs and
the South Africans involving the exchange of oil for gold.123
What emerges, then, is the triumph, once again, of the traditional
imbalance in the relations between Africans and Arabs. As Thomas
Land has reflected:

117. West Africa, No. 2950, December 24/31, 1973, p. 1812.
118. West Africa, No. 2946, November 26, 1973. p. 1677.
119. See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 738.
120. See C. Cervenka, "The Afro-Arab Alliance," Africa, No. 31, March 1974.
p. 79.
121. See The Weekly Review (Nairobi), March 14, 1977, p. 24.
122. Cited in a confidential newsletter.
123. See, for instance, Robert Whitehill, "Apartheid's Oil," The New
Republic, February 10,
1986. pp. 10-11.
62 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
94
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

In theory, in exchange for the diplomatic isolation of Israel, black
Africa was to enlist the support of the Arab north in unseating
the white- minority government of South Africa. But, in practice,
South Africa gained in the process by strengthening its ties with
an increasingly friendless Israel, while it went on trading with the
Arabs as well as the rest of the world. 124
These facts make the Africans' singling out of Israel's relationship
with South Africa for special condemnation both hypocritical and
irrational. Since African states retain diplomatic relations with such
countries as France, West Germany, Britain, Japan and the U.S.A. — all
of which are major backers of South Africa — the insistence on
diplomatic ostracism of Israel cannot logically have anything to do with
Israel's relations with South Africa, but only with the compulsion to
please the Arabs at the expense of Africa's own best interests. It all fits
neatly into the traditional mold of asymmetrical
relationship between the Africans and the Arabs across the
centuries.
Cast in this analytic light, the argument that the Arabs owe the
Africans no political debts since "most of the Arab world treated South
Africa as a common enemy for many years"125 becomes lame. The
Africans' break with Israel in 1973 had nothing to do with outrage over
Israel's relations with South Africa but was calculated to oblige the
Arabs; in contrast, Arab antipathy toward the Boers has little to do with a
sentiment of solidarity with the Africans, but arises from such links
between Israel and South Africa as the Arabs deem injurious to their
cause — as is shown by their furor over the intelligence that the South
Africans aided the Israeli air force during the 1973 war.126
Islam and Africa-Arab relations
From the beginning, Pan-Africanism demonstrated a concern to
cater to the spiritual needs of its racial constituency. It was recognized
that every enduring race and people have had their ow

124. Thomas Land, "Black Africa and Israel," The New York Times, February
11. 1980. p.
A19.
125. See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 738-739.
126. See E. A. Nadelmann.op. cil., p. 204.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 63
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concept of Deity, with a supreme being made in their own image;
and have nourished an autochthonous religion which gave them
strength and pointed them toward positive achievement. As Garvey
reasoned, no race or people made any impact on the world which
allowed themselves to become enslaved to a religion which
derogated and diminished them. Succinctly put, again in the words
of Garvey, "it is only the inferior race which worships an alien
God."127

The Africans of antiquity, the first to institutionalize religion on
Earth, fashioned the Eternal Spirit in their own image. Likewise,
the traditional religion of pre-colonial Africa, based as it was on the
intermediacy of dead ancestors, also fulfilled the condition of
indigenousness.
That the Asante, for instance, cultivated and practised
it, explains in good part the remarkable durability of their
political order in the 18th and 19th centuries.128 In the same vein,
Pan-Africanism at its dawn sought to create its own religious infrastructure
in the form of the African Orthodox Church which
Garvey founded in 1920, proclaiming: "Our God must be seen
through the spectacles of Ethiopia; our God must make us strong
. . . not slaves to another race and another people."129 Instead of
pictures of white Christs and Madonnas which have become key
elements of European imperialist culture in the last couple of
centuries, the African Orthodox Church featured pictures of Black
Christs and Black Madonnas; instead of the inculcation of meekness
and docility into the African congregation — the specialty of "alien"
religions — the African Orthodox Church sermonized that "The God
we worship and adore is a God of war as well as a God of peace."130
Despite such efforts, black people as a whole remain immersed
in alien religions and continue to pay heavily in psychological dis-

127. John Henrik Clarke ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa. New
York: Random
House,
1974. pp. 381-382.
128. See K. A. Busia, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political
System of Ashanti,
London: Frank Cass, 1968; W. Tordoff, Ashanti Under the Prempehs: 1888-1939,
London:OUP,1965.
129. A. Jacques Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Vol. I.
New York:
Atheneum, 1977, p.44.
130. Ibid.. p. 43.
64 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
96
PAN-AFR1CANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

orientation and servility. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo's current
tribulations bear witness to this phenomenon in so far as the African's
relationship to white Christianity is concerned. He has asserted that the
African's subordination to non-African overlords in spiritual matters is a
reflection of the "inferiority complex which haunts Africa"; and he has
cried out that "To convince me that I can only be a full Christian when I
shall be well brought-up in European civilization and culture is to force
me to change my nature."131
Significantly, the Archbishop's efforts to remodel the Catholic
Church in Zambia in a manner more suited to Africa's spiritual realities
stirred the ire of the Papacy, leading to his being summoned to Rome to
be disciplined.
The relationship of Africans to Islam bears similar marks of
disorientation and servility. Islam, the religious infrastructure of Pan-
Arabism, has, from the first, been a means of Arab penetration into non-
Arab societies. The fervent commitment of Arabs to the practice of Islam,
and the weaknesses of Pan-Africanism, have meant that the familiar
imbalance in African-Arab relations emerges in the field of religion as
well. As far back as 1917, British policy makers in East Africa noted "a
tendency on the part of the natives, to call themselves members of the
Mohammedan nation."132 The gain of Islam in molding masses of
Africans into Arabophiles have been no less spectacular in recent years,
thanks to such additional impetuses as Nasser's 1961 pledge, as part of
the UAR's drive to
win influence in Africa, "to exploit Cairo's considerable resources in
Muslim teaching and culture."133 As E.A. Nadelmann has written:
The influence of Islam in the continent, where one of every four
or five Africans is a Muslim has created a sense of identification
and religious brotherhood with the Arabs to the North. Islamic
Africans have often encouraged closer ties between the Arab and
African states . . . comprising as they do the majority of the
population in the Arab League states of Sudan, Somalia and

131. See Alan Cowell, "Christians Are Torn in the Land of Dr. Livingstone,"
the New York
Times, December 28, 1982, p. A2.
132. Cited in A. R. M. Babu, African Socialism or Socialist Africa?, London:

Zed Press, 1981,
p. 120.
133. Cited in 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 135.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 65
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Mauritania, as well as in Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Niger
and Chad; about half the population in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and
Ethiopia; and substantial minorities in Tanzania, Kenya,
Cameroon, Upper Volta, the Central African Republic, Sierra
Leone, Ghana and Benin. Africa contributes close to 50% of the
membership of the Islamic Conferences . . . and its avowedly
Muslim countries make up 40% of the total membership of the OAU.134
Nor does Islam's influence stop at disposing millions of
Africans favourably toward the Arabs and their anti-African
purposes; more directly and devastatingly, Islam remains a source
of enfeebling separatism in various African societies. As Ali Mazrui
has noted, the spread of Islam through East and West Africa has
served "to reinforce separatist tendencies. In Nigeria in the last
decade before independence, Muslim Northerners — fearful of the
political militancy of Christian Southerners — talked seriously of
secession. The word 'Pakistanism' entered the vocabulary of West
African politics."135 Since then Islam-induced disturbances have
regularly erupted in that West African country.
Similarly, the Eritreans, "primarily Muslim," have been in
rebellion against a long-standing Christian theocracy in Ethiopia. It
is all very much a "Muslim bid to pull Eritrea out of Ethiopia . . ."136
Noticeably the Arabs, at the Eighth Conference of Islamic Foreign
Ministers in Tripoli in May 1977, insisted that Eritrea is essentially
a religious issue, and one that they reserve the right to resolve in
their favour.137 The secessionist movement in Chad, instigated by
Libya's Gaddafi, is, like that in Eritrea, "a rebellion by defensive
Muslims against a supposedly Christian threat or hegemony."138
Indeed, on the strength of the fact that Eritrea is Muslim, the Arabs
insist on claiming it as part of the Arab world. By the same token,
as a map published in 1959 by the Arab League indicated, parts of

134. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit. p. 210. See Also Lansine Kaba, "Islam's
Advance in
Tropical
Africa," Africa Report, March-April I976, p. 39.
135. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 737.
136. Ibid.
137. Confidential Newsletter, June 10, 1977.
138. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 737-738.
66 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Niger and the whole of Chad, Senegal and Mali are designated as
Arab.139
Kenya, too, has been the prey of the separatism wrought by Islam.
The reaction of the Daily Nation to the call of the National Union
of Kenya Muslims (NUKM) for Muslims in the country to actively
rally to the support of the Arabs during the October 1973 War sums
up the matter:
The position of the National Union of Kenya Muslims is divisive
because it puts a wedge between the Muslims and all the non-
Muslims in this land. While the NUKM obviously feel they can
declare and join a war, the constitution of this country states
clearly that these powers are vested only in the person of the
Head of State. Where do their loyalties lie? To the Arab Muslims
or the Kenyan Head of State?140
It is to be remembered that one of the conditions attached to the
meagre aid that the Arabs have given to the Africans has been the
promotion of Islam in any recipient country. Thus, for example,
President Bongo of Gabon was compelled to change his name from
Albert-Bernard to Omar in October 1973. Astonishingly, and contrary
to the weight of historic evidence, Bongo let it be known that
his reason for converting was "because Islam makes no distinction
between men."141 In Uganda, this promotion took the form of a
systematic persecution of Christians who constitute the overwhelming
majority in the land. Visiting Uganda in 1974, Gaddafi
demanded of Amin that he Islamise the country "at any price."142
Amin himself would later admit that his decision to turn Fridays into
days of prayer and rest was a price the country had to pay for
continued Arab cash, especially Libyan. Overall, there was little
surprise that, at the Islamic Summit Conference held in Lahore,
Pakistan, in February 1974, Uganda was admitted as a Muslim state,
even though, according to the 1959 census, little more than 5 percent

39. See The Arab World, No. 101, 1959.
140. Daily Nation (Nairobi), October 17,1973.
141. West Africa, No. 2943, November 5,1973, p. 1556.
142. The Weekly Review (Nairobi), September 26, 1977, p. 7; August 11, 1978.

pp. 11, 14.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 67
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of the population of Uganda was Muslim.143 In all, it has hardly
mattered to these Arabs that the 1958 CIAS in Accra, in which all
the independent Arab States based in Africa participated, passed a
resolution attacking religious separatism as an evil practice which
militates against African liberation and unity. But then, as we have
noted, it is one of the cardinal goals of Pan-Arabism to forestall the
materialization of black African unity.
The emphasis on the Arab language as the only vehicle for the
comprehension of the Koran has added to the Arab advantage in
Afro-Arab relations. Adherence to the Islamic faith is, almost
everywhere, virtually inescapable from knowledge and thought in
Arabic. There is an inevitable connection between the faith and the
language because, as O. Aguda has noted, "a translation of the
Koran into any other language is regarded by orthodox Islamists as
an 'interpretation' and not an authentic doctrine."'144 In consequence,
the remarkable spread of Islam in Africa has been accompanied
by the equally remarkable spread of the Arab-influenced
languages of Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in the West. Swahili
has been adopted as a national language by Tanzania, Kenya and
Uganda, at the same time that it is in widespread use in such places
as Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Of course, being imprisoned in the
language of Arabia is no less a phenomenon in cultural colonization
than being incarcerated in the language of Britain or France.
It is remarkable how much blindness and irrationality on the part
of Africans it has taken to facilitate the Islamisation campaign of the
Arabs, considering the abysmally low conception of black humanity
that exists in the Arab mind and in Islamic traditions. As against the
wishful thinking of black opinion leaders such as Edward Blyden
and Malcolm X, that the Arabs and Islam are free from the infection
of prejudice against black people, B. Lewis, for instance, has established,
in a well-researched study, the reality of an association in
Arabia of blackness, ugliness and inferior station — of "a very close
connotation of inferiority attached to darker and more specificall

143. See Ali Mazrui, "Religious Strangers in Uganda: From Emin Pasha to Amin

Dada,"
African
Affairs, Vol. 76. No. 302, January 1977, p. 21.
144. O. Aguda. op. cit., p. 180.
68 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

black skins. "145 The Prophet Muhammad himself was known to refer
to Africans as "the distorted of God's creatures."146 Thus, a good
black slave who lives a life of virtue and piety "will be rewarded by
turning white at the moment of death".147 Indeed, the Koran itself
connects sin, evil, devilry and damnation with blackness, while
whiteness has the opposite associations.148 Revealingly, the Egyptian
government's furor over the Paramount Pictures' film, Sadat,
which led to the drastic decision not to allow any film from that
studio ever to be shown in Egypt, was simply to do with the fact that
a full-blooded Black American, Louis Gasset, Jr., had acted the role
of Sadat.

At its most basic, the Muslim belief that black people are condemned
to a fate of slavery by divine ordinance is at the root of the
Arabs' irrevocable commitment to the enslavement of Africans.
Thus, despite the fact that Muslim law unequivocally forbids the
enslavement of Muslims of whatever race, evidence shows that the
law was generally not enforced to protect Muslim captives from
Africa. The record shows that African Muslims in the Arab world
"were regarded as inferior and subjected to a whole series of fiscal,
social, political, military and other disabilities."149 Nor has time
changed these realities. Louis Farrakhan, a black American Muslim,
following a 1980 tour of Arabia, came away vociferously attacking
"the hypocrisies of classical Islam, especially in regard to race,"
adding:
I see Muslims taking advantage of Blacks in Arabia and Africa. I will
not jump over the black Christian to find brotherhood with an Arab
Muslim . . . The ghettoes in the Holy city where the Sudanese and other
black African Muslim live are some of the worst I have seen anywhere
... I see racism in the Muslim world...150

145. B. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 9,14.
146. See ibid., pp. 91-92.
147. Ibid., p. 5.
148. See ibid.. p. 101.
149. Ibid., p. 23.
150. Louis Farrakhan. Speech at "Welcome Home Brother Farrakhan" rally,
cited in L. H.
Mamiya, "Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Final Call: Schism in the Muslim
Movement,"
Mimeo, 1980, p. 7.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 69
101
OPOKU AGYEMAN

Set against these facts, Libya's self-righteous assertions of Islamic
beneficence to Africa attain a surreal quality:
Christianity equals imperialism, Islam equals freedom and the age of the
masses . . . Colonialism has exploited the Christian religion for its own
interests especially in Africa... Islam did not come to Africa through
colonia lism but as a humanistic religion for the liberation of man.151
Significantly, this rhetoric was tailored for the consumption of
African delegations attending a conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers
in Tripoli. Only the assumption of African infantile incapacity to think, to
know the realities and to construct an edifice of self-interests out of it —
only the assumption, articulated by Gaddafi, that the Black race occupies
"a very backward social situation"152 —could have emboldened the
Libyans to the declaration of such palpable untruths.
Conclusion
The horrendous tale of African-Arab relations that began with
the Islamic whirlwind and erupted into the Arab slave trade is hardly
buried in antiquity. On the contrary, over the years, it has been
recharged and re-enacted to a point where it remains a fixture in
contemporary politics, albeit under the guise of an "alliance".
We have sought to establish that, in spite of the "alliance", the
imbalance has persisted. Arab aggression and penetration has continued,
taking such detrimental forms as the UAR's and Morocco's
intervention against genuine decolonization in Zaire; Saudi
Arabian and Libyan neocolonialist machinations in Djibouti; Libya's
invasion of Chad and, to this day, its occupation of Chad's rich uranium
fields; and Libyan-Palestinian adventurism in Amin's Uganda.
151. Dr. Ali Treike, Foreign Minister of Libya's address at the Eighth
Conference of Islamic
Foreign Ministers in Tripoli, May, 1977.

152. Muammar Al Gaddafi, The Green Book: The Solution of the Problem of
Democracy,
Tripoli. undated, p. 45.
70 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
151
102
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Arab enslavement of Africans is hardly a thing of the past; it
persists to this day with a vengeance in such places as Mauritania,
while the scourge of colonization and forcible Arabisation of
Africans survives in such places as the Sudan. Arab racism, whose
wellspring is the Koran itself, acquires a conspicuous new manifestation
in, for instance, the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. On
top of all this, the assumed quid pro quo of the "alliance" has worked
one-sidedly to the Arabs' advantage: the very institutional expression
of the "coalition" since 1963, the OAU, has become a virtual
captive of the Arabs in the service of Arab interests. Despite the
organization's injunction against the fomenting of religious
separatism, the path of Arab imperialism has been oiled and
smoothed by the weapon of Islam whose spoils include the conversion
of untold millions of Africans into Arabophiles, as well as the
dissipation of the dream of black unity through the fostering of
religious divisiveness among African populations.
The antithesis between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism emerges
clearly in present and past relations between the two races. As
far as the future is concerned, should Pan-Africanism, now dormant
and languishing, become rejuvenated by some future generation of
African leaders bent on restoring the dignity of the African people,
there is no question that this would trigger a massive reaction, not
only by the Boers, but also by Arabs who would reason that an Africa
able to deal with the territorial encroachments and the racist
brutality of the Boers would logically also deal with the territorial
usurpations and the historic and continuing crimes of the Arabs.
Herein lies the essential opposition between the two movements.
It is to be noted that this African-Arab antagonism is not in any
way diminished by class considerations. When all is said and done,
there is no que
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