On October 22, the Guinness Book of Records announced the verified figures for the number of people who had participated in this year's Stand Up and Take Action in support of the MDGs jointly organised by the UN Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty.

A staggering 117 million people in 137 countries and about 8000 different activities helped beat the record of almost 44 million set last year combined with the first record attempt of 23 million in 2006.

Of this global figure it was most gratifying that almost 25 million were from Sub-Saharan Africa. Like every Pan Africanist I reject the artificial division of Africa into Saharan and Sub-Saharan enclaves. We are not the only continent that has climatic differentiation. If others are not denied their wholeness as a result of topography, why is Africa so divided?

The underlining political and economic interests behind the division is racialist, to differentiate largely Arab or Arabised Africa from Black Africa. It gets to more ridiculous level when Mauritania, Sudan are lumped with Arab North Africa.

For the Guinness record the whole of North Africa plus Sudan are regarded as part of the region! Ask yourself why Turkey that is a neighbour of EU and even a candidate member of the union is not included as part of Europe. Definitions, names of places and, in our case, even physical geography, rivers, lakes, even our oceans are defined by others because they had and still exercise the power to do so because we let them.

For us Africa is a whole continent from Cape Town to Cairo and all the islands whether on the Atlantic coast or that other inappropriately named Indian Ocean and the archipelagos.

Any country regardless of its racial, ethnic or other social composition that is a member of the AU is part of Africa as far as I am concerned. Even when the state withdraws as Morocco did from the OAU and never acceded to the AU, it does not change the geography.

Just like Mauritania withdrawing from the ECOWAS has not transferred it to the Middle East! If you take this view then the Stand Up figure for Africa this year is more than 40 million people because Egypt alone had 15 million people participating.

But whatever figure you take the Stand Up Against Poverty was hugely successful this year. It surpasses last year's figure of 10 million or 12 million (including Egypt).

But the absolute figures will even be more like 50 million across Africa because there are so many events that were not properly registered given the Internet based registration process. There are many events that the figures came in outside the reporting and verification time agreed with the Guinness.

While the Guinness is important for certification, the most important issue for me is that the movement against poverty is growing.

Peoples of the world including Africans are growing impatient and no longer willing to tolerate mass poverty in a world of plenty and are refusing to allow global leaders whether in the north or the south, enriched or impoverished countries, to continue to offer excuses for not meeting the MDGs and doing more.

The global figures, though most of them came from Asia and Africa, show that citizens of the world are not convinced that the current global financial crisis should be used as an excuse for inaction on the interests of the poor.

Almost one million people, double the number for last year, stood up across Europe belying the subterfuge of their leaders that the current crisis does not mean that they have to look more inwards and further renege on their Goal Eight commitments.

Mr Tajudeen is a Pan Africanist working with the United Nations