Issa G. Shivji
7 May 2009
(Page 3 of 4)
So, ironical or not, he could not escape making pragmatic political decisions. Mwalimu cites two examples which made him move the resolution on boundaries. Just after independence, Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi paid a visit to Mwalimu with some old book of maps. He tried to persuade Mwalimu that part of Mozambique belonged to Malawi and another part belonged to Tanganyika. Mwalimu of course was disgusted at this proposal of swallowing up Mozambique, just like that! Another example is that of Somalia publicly claiming the Ogaden province of Ethiopia, while Ethiopia whispered that the whole of Somalia belonged to Ethiopia. To prevent border wars among Africans, Mwalimu moved his resolution on the inviolability of colonial boundaries. Man proposes, history disposes. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that what Mwalimu feared came to pass, regardless of the resolution. The Ogaden war is still with us. History cannot be re-made, but it can be re-read and re-learnt.
Second in the way of unity were the vested interests of the political class. Unity meant dissolving, even if partially, the sovereignty of the newly independent states. This meant depriving the new political class, which had been landed with state power, of their power, privileges and the accompanying possibilities of acquiring wealth. No wonder, the new rulers of Africa were nervous and resistant to Nkrumah's call for African unity. Mwalimu alludes with some amusement to the situation at the 1965 Accra summit of the African heads of state during which Nkrumah wanted to establish a union government. I cannot resist quoting him again (he was a captivating storyteller and no one could tell stories of African heads of state as effectively as Mwalimu):
'Once you multiply national anthems, national flags and national passports, seats of the United Nations, and individuals entitled to a 21-gun salute, not to speak of a host of ministers, prime ministers and envoys, you would have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised. That was what Nkrumah encountered in 1965.
'After the failure to establish the union government at the Accra Summit, I heard one head of state express with relief that he was happy to be returning home to his country still head of state. To this day, I cannot tell whether he was serious or joking. But he may well have been serious, because Kwame Nkrumah was very serious and the fear of a number of us to lose our precious status was quite palpable.'
Forty years later, I believe, the state has become more than simply a site of accumulating power and privileges. It has become the site of accumulating wealth and capital. This class, which uses state positions to acquire wealth and accumulate property, is not a productive class. It does not accumulate and invest in production. It is an underdeveloped 'middle-class', as Frantz Fanon described it on the eve of independence. As he said, it is a 'little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it'. In any case, the social character of the African state and its role in the process of worldwide capitalist accumulation is an issue which our research, analysis and debates will have to address. Without understanding issues of state, class and accumulation, we cannot identify and assess the agency of the Pan-Africanist struggle.
These are very general and broad strokes on the Pan-Africanist discourse of the first generation of African nationalists, as encapsulated in Mwalimu's thought. I have no doubt that the 'mischievous' among you would want me to explore not only Mwalimu's thought but also his political practice as a Pan-Africanist, specifically in relation to the Zanzibar question. I will not oblige - not because time does not permit. That would be an intellectually lazy and dishonest excuse! I will not do so because I have done a book-length study on the union question.
INSURRECTION OF PAN-AFRICANIST IDEAS
I believe Pan-Africanism is making a comeback. I believe African nationalism is at the crossroads. It can either degenerate into narrow chauvinistic nationalisms - ethnic, racial, cultural - or climb the continental heights of Pan-Africanism. Do not glorify the nation-state, Mwalimu admonished. Rise to the challenge of being Africans first and Africans last, rather than 'fossilise Africa into the wounds inflicted upon it by the vultures of imperialism'. We, as intellectuals, have to develop a new Pan-Africanist discourse. It will undoubtedly be a different discourse from the Pan-Africanist discourse of the first-generation nationalism. But I have no doubt in my mind that it will be a discourse of national liberation and anti-imperialism - the nation this time around being the African nation. The new Pan-Africanist discourse will have to take account of the failure of the national project and its implication for African nationalism. It will have to question the first-generation nationalism, which was essentially 'state nationalism'. It will have to research on and analyse the social character of the African state and it will have to interrogate its agency. It will have to examine and scrutinise the neoliberal project and its various forms and manifestations, such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). It will have to examine and expose new forms of imperialism and world hegemonies. It will have to do many things but with a single purpose - the liberation of the African people.
What is the role of an African intellectual in the development of a new Pan-Africanism? I do not have a complete answer. I hope that the work of the Mwalimu Nyerere chair will begin to give us some answers. Meanwhile, let me simply assert that we need a new nationalist insurrection - an insurrection of Pan-Africanist ideas in the era of globalisation. In his speech at the inauguration of Kenneth Kaunda as the Chancellor of the University of Zambia in 1966, Mwalimu agonised over 'the dilemma of a Pan-Africanist'. The dilemma that he was talking about was that of a Pan-Africanist state leader. On the one hand, his conviction and philosophy pulls him to Pan-Africanism; on the other, as a head of state, he presides over building and nurturing 'territorial nationalism'.
Mwalimu could not resolve the dilemma nor did he pretend to do so! Whatever the case, he said, 'African unity does not have to be a dream; it can be a vision which inspires us.' I agree. If Pan-Africanism is only a dream, it is in the sub-conscious; beyond our control. If it is a vision, it is in the realm of the possible. We have to consciously nurture and struggle for it. We, the African intellectuals, have to make Pan-Africanism part of our peoples' collective consciousness. Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the chairman of CODESRIA's scientific committee, says we have to make Pan-Africanism a category of intellectual thought. The task of converting the Pan-Africanist vision into a category of intellectual thought squarely falls on the shoulders of African intellectuals. We do it by engaging critically with Pan-Africanist ideas; many ideas, varied ideas. Let us form Pan-African organisations and Pan-African movements - the Pan-African youth movement, the Pan-African student movement, the Pan-African women's movement, the Pan-African trade unions and so on. This time around, we have to invert the relationship. Let us work from the civil society to the state. We have to work towards building an African civil society. From the vantage point of the African civil society, we have to cajole, persuade, pressurise, criticise, even satirise, the African state. Don't demonise the State; de-legitimise it by engaging with it, not in it. That would be the beginning of building the hegemony of Pan-Africanism within African civil society. In short, let a hundred flowers of Pan-Africanist thought blossom.
New Pan-Africanism must be anchored in democracy, says Thandika Mkandawire. Africa needs some kind of social democracy, argued Archie Mafeje, whom we lost recently. On Mwalimu's 75th birthday, I argued that Africa needs a new democracy built around popular livelihoods, popular participation and popular power. But in this day and age of militarised hegemonies and despotic democracies, from Iraq to Somalia, we need to question the very concept of democracy. Where ideas are commodities, manufactured on order by ideas-traders, we need to return to the ideas of commitment and the commitment to the ideas of human emancipation. We need committed Pan-Africanist intellectuals. The question before us is: Who are we, Pan-Africanist intellectuals committed to African liberation and human emancipation, or neoliberal impostors serving 'imperialist vultures'? In her poem, Intellectuals and Impostors, Micere Githae Mugo sings:
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