Pan African — unify us,
don’t divide us
Following the independence of Ghana in 1957, and other African countries through the 1960s and 70s, the Organisation of African Unity, a predecessor to the African Union (AU), legitimised the borders inherited from colonisation, writes Ntone Edjabe. But what does this form of independence and unity across colonial borders mean for African today, especially the continent's multitude youth?
Because I am an African, I am Ghanaian.
– Ama Ata Aidoo, public lecture, FESTAC ‘77I criticise those who consider African matters with a saline consciousness — the belief that everything which is bounded by sea water on the continent is necessarily African, and that everything which is outside it is not African.
– Wole Soyinka, public lecture, FESTAC ’77.
The scene is the closing performance of #FESTAC77, the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture (FESTAC) held in Lagos from 15 January to February 12, 1977. Miriam Makeba waits for the applause to quiet before announcing her final song, “Westwind”.
“West wind is the wind that came from Ghana,” she precises. “It freed our people, now it must unify us.” Then she intones the famous chorus — Unify us, don’t divide us.
Close to twenty thousand artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the diaspora had descended on Lagos for FESTAC. Held eleven years after the First World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN) in Dakar, and eight years after the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers, FESTAC was one of a series of transatlantic political and cultural gatherings that dated back to the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, where the great sociologist and historian W.E.B DuBois famously diagnosed that the problem of the 20th century to be the colour line — “the relation of the darker to the lighter races [of people] in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”.
Like its predecessors, FESTAC was built on the ideals of the Pan-Africanism — the emancipation and unity of African peoples, worldwide. But where Dakar 1966 manifested as a Franco-Senegalese platform for negritude’s ideals of black culture, and the Organisation of African Unity(OAU)-mandated PANAF ’69 looked to culture as tool of liberation and development, the organisers of FESTAC ’77 sought a middle-ground between those positions.
In his essay ‘Thinking Afro-Futures: A Preamble to an Epistemic History’, the scholar Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan has attempted to characterise this tension between the “political paradigm” and the “cultural paradigm” in Pan-Africanist thought and practice. One is an investment in “accelerated Western education, secularism in outlook, ultimate faith in science, rapid industrialisation, and above all, the dominance of a strong and stable central state over the ‘nation’”. And in the other, the cultural paradigm, represents “a unique way of life surviving across space and time in more or less discernible ways; a composite, contingent manner of meaning making, distribution, and consumption created by particular African and African diaspora populations wherever they live; and the production and circulation of aesthetic forms and practices”.
Following Ọlaniyan’s logic, Dakar ’66 was cultural (black), Algiers ’69 political (African) — FESTAC would be both black and African, hence the renaming of the festival.
Even though the birth of Pan Africanism can be traced back to the Haitian revolution (specifically, Article 14 of the First Constitution of Hayiti: “All meaning of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall henceforth be known by the generic appellation of blacks.”), what Olaniyan terms the political paradigm properly emerged with “continentalism”, during the Pan-African Congress of Manchester in 1945. It is important to note that several movements on the continent were continental in outlook; for instance the ANC was renamed from “South African” to “African” in 1923 to emphasise this fact.
It is in Manchester, however, that the leadership of the movement founded primarily by North American and Caribbean-born men (DuBois, Marcus Garvey, CLR James, George Padmore) and women (Paulette Nardal, Amy Garvey), would be handed over a young cadre of African-born activists and Marxist intellectuals (Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere). These new leaders called for a “strategic subordination” of the African diaspora in the movement, in favour of the struggle to regain independence on the continent.
Virtually all the leaders of African independence movements at least paid lip service to the idea that regional freedom would only be a step toward the freedom and unity of the whole continent. But following the independence of Ghana in 1957, and other African countries through the 1960s and 70s, the Organisation of African Unity, a predecessor to the African Union (AU), legitimised the borders inherited from colonisation. With 50-odd mini-states engaged in consolidating their territorial frontiers and preserving social relations inside them. Following the liberation of South Africa in 1994, this process was accelerated through the creation of the more bureaucratically malleable AU — which replaced the old ideal of unity with the pragmatism of a “union”.
At the same time, French speaking intellectuals (in collaboration with Harlem Renaissance poets and writers) had been articulating the idea of a specific cultural-globalist African identity conscious of racial politics, and promoting an understanding of national independence underpinned by a permanent process of psychological and cultural dis-alienation (Aimé Cesaire, Leon Damas, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Alioune Diop). These were the men behind the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar 1966 — preceded by black writers conferences in Paris (1965) and Rome (1959).
Like the Pan-African gatherings before, FESTAC 77 in Lagos would become a battleground for which version of Pan-Africanism would prevail between the “cultural” and the “political” — the main argument is over the participation of North African “Arab” countries, which the continentalists (Guinee) support and the culturalists (Senegal) deny. Would it be a festival of radical black peoples or of African states?
Miriam Makeba, a cultural worker who preferred to view black experience from a primarily political perspective, perfectly embodies this tension. There are several others; notably Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, etc.
The tension carries through her personal trajectory.
Makeba is at FESTAC as member of the Guinean delegation (where she’d lived since 1968), but she also considers herself South African (who are only participating in the festival as individual artists rather than through their state). Any “Pan” concept is an exercise in self-definition by a people, aimed at establishing a broader redefinition of themselves than that which had so far been permitted by those in power.
So Makeba sings, pointing simultaneously to the Ghanaian state, and to people like her, whose statelessness, or more precisely, whose refusal to be “stated”, has made them Pan African — unify us, don’t divide us.
This piece is intended as a provocation to potential contributors to the Q1 2020 issue of eeeteecee on Pan-Africanism— a journal a quarterly journal of news, features, analysis and opinion in any medium for a world we’d like. Do not be intimidated by the seemingly academic language. We are looking for pitches that make this topic appeal to Africans under-40. The form to submit pitches is available here.
