Guest Controbutor: Edam Shem Asks, What is Pan-Africanism?

The reality of the youth today is held in the discovery of our focus. It is currently lived in the quiet community conferences we hold in refugee camps in Western Uganda, the conference halls of Johannesburg, the home city of the African Union in Addis Ababa, and of course the business incubators of Nairobi and Lagos. It is also the reality we live in the streets of Egypt, Abuja, Nairobi and Tunisia when we challenge government excesses, and the reality we hold in constitutional conferences where we seek to bring to Africa the “new” invention called Devolution as well as the general feeling we have that, though the present is tough, it is a description of the realization that it has to be tough for the future to be better. We rarely use the term Pan-Africanism, and when we do, almost half of the people in the room would ask what it is. However, we understand entrepreneurship, devolution of power and resources, democracy and or good governance, an African voice, and most importantly, the general implication of our desire to embrace a future we can only dream of. In entrepreneurship, Africa today has its trendsetters who in their own limited capacity and in their own environment have developed technologies to streamline farming, innovate new ICT systems for efficient production and dissemination of knowledge, and the focus of their generation. When you walk in on a serious discussion of the youth, it will be how to innovate new ideas for their local problems, or how to begin a business to provide a critical service or a critical product to the people. Today’s Africa has a youth that understands what imperialism is because they know that they too are not immune to becoming tyrants. This understanding has made the youth of today to promote a more important concept of silent activism. We have youth who strive less for Patrice Lumumba or Morgan Tsvangirai status as celebrated activists but those who silently tell authority when they are wrong and how to correct their mistakes. It is the realization that African youth has that makes it possible for community organizations to now organize conferences in different parts of Africa (this author has attended 27 in total) to learn about how Cameroon and Nigeria’s social infrastructure is and how East Africa is integrating Kiswahili into its public life, or how the Southern African countries are tackling their social challenges. This Is Africa.

The global network of entrepreneurship, human rights activism, democracy and good governance, and capitalism enterprise all point to the fact that the new discovery of focus is yet to have a distinct name. Take a short trip into the offices of international organizations in Washington D.C and ask Ashoka about their projections for new entrepreneurs and the Youth of Africa. Have a cup of tea in one of D.Cs coffee shops with policy advisers of Africa working with either the State Department or International NGOs and the script is all too familiar, the youth in Africa hold a promising future for the Continent. Take a shorter trip to New York and ask Agencies involved in the continent and you get a similar feeling, that today more investments are in the area of devolved governments, good governance and foreign direct investments as opposed to conflicts, structural adjustments, and decolonization that was the reality of 20^th century policies about Africa. If the Western world provides little information, take a long trip to China and India. While there, muster the courage to ask where some of their greatest markets are emerging from and if the Great Supermarket in Africa does not come to their lips, then certainly you won’t need to consider this article that telling about the Youth of Africa. However, I am confident that once you look into these few areas, after all, Africa is not in the business of advertising its rise as the signs are telling to all who wish to discover their focus on this continent.

The Fear

Every day fears of war, conflict, and power are not traits of Africa. They are human traits. They will not die in Africa, and neither will they die in other societies in the World. The overwhelming military power of the United States is in response to the human understanding of power. The Russian Federation’s activities is a demonstration of political power and the Chinese rise is a demonstration of desire for power, while all the wars today are a demonstration of what humanity is when it loses its sensibilities of the civil society. This fear that is unique to Africa is one that requires us to follow the courage of our convictions to overcome.

 We choose never to live in fear

The Youth of Africa today wants to know the relevance of Pan-Africanism in our present life and how this is considered important in our established frameworks of living. However, as we discover the future, we choose never to walk in fear of ourselves or our inner misgivings about our continent. Much has been said about Africa, now it is the turn of the African Youth to speak. We have chosen to speak in a more potent voice; the voice of entrepreneurship, the voice of good governance, the voice of devolved resources, and the voice of the Africa within. We are seeking to devolve power to the decentralized systems of pre-15^th century Africa that enabled this continent to be great. Whether this is Pan-Africanism is a debate of least importance today.

The Inevitable reality therefore is that Pan-Africanism is neither an ideology nor a political philosophy, Its a Spirit. It reincarnates itself in every generation and as such every generation of young Africans has to discover its mission, from relative obscurity, and either fulfill it or betray it. I pray that in my time, my generation will not live in fear, for any single day, but to prosper in the knowledge of our infinite achievement that bears our name

Guest Contributor: Edam Shem shares his opinion on_Evolution of Pan-Africanism

“History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.”

― John Henrik Clarke

 

When one stares into the mind of the youth of Africa today, they see focus. When one stares into the heart of the youth of Africa one sees discovery. However, discovery and focus is not what everyone sees when they look into the face of the new Africa because only a selected few have the desire to look that deep. It possibly isn’t possible to look so deep, not when incidences of Xenophobia in South Africa, bodies of drowning youth in the coast of Italy, ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, violence in Burundi, the menace of Boko Haram and Alshabaab, and the bodies of 147 victims in a Kenyan University all have the hallmark of youth dying or killing for one cause or another in the Second largest Continent in the world. Indeed, the presence of so much bad “news” in the continent would blur the vision of ordinary men and women from the other side of the continent. The side that screams seven fastest growing economies in the World, the place of discovery for new minerals, the place where the next global factory is heading, the place where you find the World’s top seven intelligent cities, the place where the population of the youth no doubt explains how Africa’s youth is rising. The land of contrast, it would seem, knows how to live its ‘dark’ past and its promising future, all in one single environment. This Is Africa.

 

Fighting the Shadows

 

However, the discovery of focus is a very important concept in any human society, past and present. Societies come when they discover their focus and go when they lose their focus. The few who know have discovered the focus of Africa have a responsibility. It is the responsibility of enabling the majority to discover their focus and aim for the greatest values they have ever come across as a society. It is only when the greatest number in a society discovering this focus, that a society has the best chance of success. This is the general impact of information, knowledge, and commitment to its dissemination that the Pan-African movement sought to achieve for itself and for the Great Continent of Africa when the 20^th century awakened the African spirit from its deep slumber that seemed to have begun with the demise of Mansa Musa and the Mali Empire. The Great slumber had consumed Kingdoms like Buganda, Lozi, Ndebele, Zulu, Old Ghana, and Empires like Songahi, Mandinka, Ethiopia, Nubia, Egypt and many more that governed this land when Europe and Asia were having their discoveries. However, unlike the past, this Pan-African spirit needed to fight off a potent enemy, a potent threat to the survival of Africa and Africans. For a while, almost 70 years, the enemy was in the name of colonialism, then it assumed a new prefix “Neo” Colonialism. However, the folly of our time is to imagine that Imperialism was represented in the shape, design, and reality of the European and the new strain of discrimination, “Racism”. It was after all easier to fight a face that one could see. Africa and Pan-Africans of this past time won this war. When we speak Pan-Africanism today, we remember Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Patrice Lumumba, Milton Obote, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, and an endless list of reactionists of the time. What we too often fail to note when looking at this list is the fact that these men fought shadows. They fought and won shadows. The greater threat, the threat that had consumed this continent was still clothed in imperialism. Colonialism and racism were just some of its greatest manifestations. The Great Russian Revolutionaries (and they were revolutionaries, for those who thought otherwise and tested their spirit fell) cautioned Africa that it needed to fight imperialism, not colonialism.

 

The Revisionists

 

When Africa became independent the revisionists like (Thomas Sankara, Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Daniel Moi, J.J. Rawlings, Meles Zenawi and Philosophers like Henry Odera Oruka, Kwame Gyekye, John Mbiti had begun to realize that imperialism had changed tact from using race to using economics as a tool for social control. The era of Dictatorship had emerged and consumed even some of the revisionists. In fact, they left a much more painful past than the reactionists who fought shadows before them. However, the revisionists, some of whom still live among us today, provide the best examples of how Africa woke up and began to rise. In his inaugural speech after overrunning Kampala with his rag tag militia, Yoweri Museveni famously quoted that “African leaders have preached change until change has become synonymous with the ability of one bad group getting rid of another bad group and proceeding to be worse”. He promised to never take Uganda back to Civil War. This is reminiscent of the environment they have created for the youth of today. I would put it more potently, Their Sons. Africa began to notice that for as long as there was imperialism lurking in the background, we would serve ourselves better to forget the golden centuries of Mansa Musa (the wealthiest human being that ever lived) or the presence of Carthage and Egypt (the classical and ancient Empires that determined the present day social contract). This is the time we begin to ask the question, what is Pan-Africanism, and how do the youth of Africa consider this concept as representative of the feelings they have today. This is because the reactionists fought in the name of Pan-Africanism through conferences, street protests, and Guerilla warfare. It is also the rallying call that revisionists used to re-claim the soul of Mama-Africa when it was seemingly lost to its own imperial rulers of post-independence Africa. It certainly therefore, is not the youth of today that consider it the rallying call for the future and they ask in loud and ever increasing voices. What is Pan-Africanism? Is it Kwame Nkrumah, Muammar Gadhafi?

 

Is it a person, or a spirit?