Africa Needs to Look at the Past to Forge Ahead

Mammo Muchie, Business Daily, 14 June 2007—It is now over 50 years since Ghana became independent and the first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, declared the country’s independence as nothing, but a great launching pad for the full and complete liberation of the rest of Africa.

It is 43 years since the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed. It is five years since the African Union (AU) has been established. It is remarkable how Africa is now caught in what Karl Polyani would have described as the “double movement.” Once more the great debate to pursue the goal of an accelerated united Africa has picked up momentum by using this half century as a moment to pause and reflect the past in order to chart the future and face the challenges ahead and look far ahead to make Africans fully democratic, rich and strong.

A key opportunity to make redundant the colonial project that has put apart arbitrarily separated communities that should be together exists by pursuing an African Union (AU) Government. Equally important, arbitrarily clubbed together communities that should have been allowed to self-define themselves with a perspective to deepen integration can pursue unity on the higher plane of African unity.

The July 2007 AU meeting of the Heads of States has one and only agenda: The African Union Government! 1957 was a milestone in linking Ghana’s freedom to the freedom of all Africa. 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was critical in creating a forum for African independent states to decolonise and de- apartheidise the continent fully. 2002 was critical for accelerating unity by changing OAU into AU in Durban, South Africa. And in July 2007 in Accra, an African Union Government may be the outcome!

Once again Africans are pausing and reflecting after 50 years of decolonisation. What are the hard gains that the people of Africa have scored separately as communities and collectively as Africans? The quest to unite has become also the urge to unite.

The real work starts when such a breakthrough comes. The double movement is unfolding in Africa with all the ramifications that open both opportunities and risks. Opportunities, because there is the positive attempt to unite, to create new institutions and move to establish the African Union Government. Risks, because there is also the persistence of the problems in Africa such as the usual difficulties of the unending presence of endemic conflicts, the lack of security, lack of meaningful economic integration and sustainable development.

The double movement back to persistent conflict or forward to a united, strong, prosperous and democratic Africa remains to unsettle the proposed plans to go beyond the constraints that have continued to complicate positive progress in Africa. But the bold proposed agenda for an African Union Government is highly inspiring. It is a big bang strategy that can potentially create space to deal with Africans’ continuing difficulties from a united perspective, vision and possibility.

When we look back in Africa, we see a history of oppression and resistance to oppression as the defining dynamics of the African experience. The further and longer we look back into history, the more visible and trying have been the tribulations and difficulties Africans have gone through. No people on this planet probably have experienced what Africans have endured throughout history. No people have displayed a will to survive as Africans have demonstrated. Africans have converted their sorrows, tears, wailing into melody and music as a means to resist those who committed every form of unspeakable cruelty to subtract and deny their humanity.

We look back to this experience not to retell and lament, but to build and make a new Africa by an appreciation of the common and shared experience that came not only to one community, but to all of us without any distinction or favour.

We change adversity into possibility. We centre our unity on our experience that no other people we know in history has endured with such a sustained assault. The Africa nation emerges not from the itemisation of language, territory and other discrete attributes. It emerges from the shared experience and history of surviving the impossible cruelties of history.

A people that read their history to unsettle and unhinge their unacceptable condition by joining in a shared project of forging the nation and innovating an integrated African economy are said to have an intelligent commerce with their past.

As Africans the longer we back cast the furthest foresight we gain to look ahead and construct a shared future. We do not look back in order to legitimise current post- colonial state oppression. No, we look back in order to forge Africa’s post- colonial liberation.

Thus the quest for African unity is not an arbitrary construction, but it emerges from the reality and need of forming the Africa nation on the basis of the attributes of a shared experience, shared history, common challenges, constrained opportunities, a shared project, ambition and dream to be free , democratic , prosperous and strong as renascent, integrated Africa.

Dr Mammo Muchie is currently Professor and Director at the Research Centre on Development and International Relations at Aalborg University in Denmark.

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