Africa Uniting Less, Perishing More

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=13113

    by Mukoma Ngugi
   June 19, 2007

When in 1946 Winston Churchill called for a United States of Europe, so soon
after the World War II, many must have thought him still shell-shocked. Then
it was unimaginable that a mere generation later there would be a European
Union with a single market and a common parliament, or that Germany would
not only be re-united but host the World Cup finals in which Italy would
defeat France. But even with this living example, to speak of African
unification to Africans or Westerners alike is to be seen as an impractical
dreamer or simply insane.

One is lectured that Africa is too big, too poor, too corrupt, too
undereducated, always at war, undemocratic. In a candid moment, someone
might add that with centuries of tribal enmity Africans cannot unify because
they are, well, Africans. As if none of these problems existed in one form
or another in the Europe of 1946.

This is not to say that the problems are not real. In the Darfur region of
Sudan, an agonizingly slow nightmare is unfolding as the African Union (AU)
idly watches. The heavily flawed Nigerian elections promise more conflict in
the Niger delta. In the Congo, where millions of lives have been lost,
embers of war keep reigniting. There is worsening poverty, more money being
lost through unequal trade than gained in foreign aid, an AIDS epidemic with
a genocidal fury, and a leadership without political imagination. This is a
continent mired in quick sand.

Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana once said "Africa must unite, or perish". We are
uniting less and perishing more.

But does a Ugandan, for example, see a Ghanaian as an African and in terms
that can translate into policy? Kwame Nkrumah's major failing, which the AU
now emulates, is to have seen unification as only between governments and
not amongst African people. We have not had a single presidential race on
the continent influenced by the question of African unification, or peaceful
marches and public debates in favor unification in individual nations.
Regional cooperation treaties are signed without consulting respective
citizens. In short, Pan-Africanism has as yet to belong to the people
themselves.

And Xenophobia is on the rise. South Africans, both black and white, want to
protect their borders from the Amakwerekwere, the amaXhosa word for the
black peril. In Kenya one finds a caricaturism so ingrained in national
psyche that in parliament, members are banned from wearing African clothes.
In Ghana, Nkrumah's failures become a rejection of Africa and in Egypt or
Morocco – the horror, are we even African they ask?

There have to be more conversations between African peoples themselves. One
of the topics will, of necessity, be the nature of difference. Difference
arbitrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But a unified Africa does not mean
erasure of different cultures and languages; rather it would allow each
fluid culture to flourish under equal protection. It does not mean that
enmity ends, but rather that there are no ill political winds of nationalism
to fan into a full blown war every disagreement.

Unification means access to the best that the continent has to offer and a
shared burden when it comes to the many problems. It means having a unified
voice in international politics and economics. A unified Africa would take
Europe and the United States to task for providing farm subsidies to their
farmers that in turn cost Africa millions of dollars each year. Africa would
be able to demand that all nations with nuclear weapons abandon them as a
threat to a common humanity. Or take a unified stand against pharmaceuticals
and manufacturers of generic drugs for AIDS. Africa would be able to create
solutions and implement them and not always wait for handouts. In short,
Africa would have a bark…and a bite.

In life, individuals die where they stop dreaming. It is the same for
countries and continents. Certainly for Africa, death finds new life where
the dream of unification ends.


Poet Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness,
coordinator of "Toward an Africa Without Borders" and a columnist for the
BBC Focus on Africa magazine.

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