Lagos — As a teenager, I was waiting for a bus at a Hanover (Germany) bus stop one morning in 1971 when two old German women standing next to me began a conversation about Africa and suddenly one of them started to rub my hand and muttered, "schone schvartz, schone schvartz", meaning "beautiful black, beautiful black." I was amused by this and sort of enjoyed it, recalling my own grandmother's loving caresses.

Africans living abroad experience all sorts of condescending and ignorant reactions from their host communities. Invariably, in Europe and America, someone might sometimes ask you if you know Peter or Ali, his neighbour, who comes from Africa, as if all Africans should know themselves. Only two months ago, an American couple told me they were planning a visit to South Africa and would like to drop by and visit my family if we were not far from Johannesburg. After I wrote to explain the distance and probable cost, I have not heard again from them.

To many non-Africans, especially Americans and Europeans, Africa is the country (not continent) of black people. All the details about Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Liberia and so on are just waste of breath and words when one tries to explain. Those of them who are not quite educated still regard this place as the Dark Continent that was occasionally mentioned, in passing, by their high school teachers. To many of them, it is still the country of "noble savages" as most Europeans initially believed, and white children often speak excitedly about wanting to visit Africa to enjoy the viewing of lions and other wild animals, believing that you can see the beasts on the streets or from one's window. Even the most educated and charitable still harbour deep reservations about our equality with them. Similarly, the Arabs, other Asians and other races feel superiority over Africans, no matter how cleverly they try to hide it.

Yet, all this is a myth. No race is superior to another. What is true is that, in terms of group organization, strength and power, there are more Europeans, Americans and Asians who are better organized (in their nation states), and as a result, more educated, better skilled and more advanced than Africans. In the classrooms of the world, the myth of racial superiority is broken, on daily basis, by Africans who tower above their colleagues in Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Science, the Languages, Arts and so on. Our deficit lies principally in lack of aggregated power, which is most apparent in our current political and economic disorganization. So, the European Union or the United States of America does not automatically refer to a superior race of human beings.

Personal experiences form the crux of the desire by Pan-Africanist thinkers and leaders who have advocated at one time or another a continental government for Africa. The great W.E.B. du Bois, the foremost Black American intellectual of the 20th Century, who later migrated to Nkrumah's Ghana, where he died, wrote about his "shock of recognition" in one of his books. This had to do with how, as a kid, he discovered, from childhood discrimination, that African-Americans wereregarded as inferior and discriminated against.

Du Bois, born of a middle-class family, author of so many books and a great activist, worked all his life for racial equality and for the unity and advancement of his under-privileged

fellow Black Americans. He became a Pan-Africanist and, in the end, subscribed to a return to Africa by blacks or, at least, the formation of a union government by the emergent independent African states. Other African Americans who favoured migration from racist America included Marcus Garvey and George Padmore.

Garvey, a Jamaican, wanted a return to the then West Indies (now the Caribbean Islands), while the more educated Padmore, who also migrated to Nkrumah's Ghana, wanted a mass return of Africans in Diaspora to Africa. The leftist, highly cerebral CLR James also advocated repatriation of Africans everywhere.

While all this took place, gathering momentum in the decades after World War II, there have always been African Americans like Booker T. Washington (who founded the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama) and the great slave emancipator Fredrick Douglas, who believe that, through sound education, all will be well eventually for blacks everywhere. This dream has not materialized both in the U.S and in Africa, mainly because blacks find it difficult to access formidable white organizations. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe's political philosophy was inspired by a burning search for "respect for human dignity", the title of his first book. Racist America and the travails of the African descendants there taught the great Zik a bitter lesson, which fired his life-long zeal to rouse the sleeping African giant. It was Zik's early journalistic venture in Accra, through the Morning Post, that moved young Kwame Nkrumah to emulate this model African. That ambition culminated in Nkrumah's sojourn to America, his return to pilot the Gold Coast to independence as Ghana, and his becoming the greatest champion of the need for a United States of Africa.

What Zik and Nkrumah had in common was their ability and capacity, through personal experience of the low regard harboured for peoples of African descent in America, to see the whole continent of Africa as the black man's heritage and proper stage for staging universal political emancipation. In simple terms, they wanted the African to stand tall and proud around the world, without being looked down upon. This is the secret vision of many a Pan-Africanist.

To be fair and candid, one does not expect President Umaru Yar'Adua to have the vision of Zik or Nkrumah, a vision nurtured in the furnace of racist America. Many who grow up in Africa hardly experience the crude edge of the white man's prejudice and discrimination. Even when they go on holiday abroad, they are mostly shielded or cushioned by the artificial courtesies of the hospitality industry. The President's speech in Accra during the African Union's Summit (July 1-3, 2007), summoned to debate the increasingly urgent issue of a United States of Africa, must have been a disappointment to those expecting Nigeria to give the much-needed leadership to this emergency need. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Zmbabwe's Robert Mugabe, two leaders who know the selfish mindset of the West too well, spoke the minds of Africans by driving home the arguments and rationale of the situation. For, no matter what one thinks of these two dictators and their likes, the fact remains that they have maintained power and authority over the past decades in their countries and feel secure enough to travel abroad for conferences, meaning that the opposition to them at home is not as significant as Western media reports claim. Mugabe, for example, rightly described by the Agence France Presse (AFP) report on the Accra Summit, as "still regarded as a liberation hero by many Africans," despite European and American sanctions, told a rally on the sidelines of the meeting that only Africans can help and save themselves, not foreigners. I happen to know from personal experience that President Mugabe, an ascetic and childless patriot, who lives quietly with his Ghanaian wife, Sally, understands the issues of African politics far better than our rookie President Yar'Adua and the latter's handlers.

-Odum wrote from Lagos