As African leaders gathered for their 27th African Union (AU) Summit in the Rwandan Capital, Kigali, earlier this month, and the African people as a whole were excited by the news of the AU launching Africa’s first single e-passport, allowing for free movement to African citizens within the continent, a symbolic step to removing colonial barriers between nations, I came across an article in the American magazine, Foreign Policy, under the title ‘Disband the African Union’.
Written by Pauline Dixon, a professor at Newcastle University in England, the article called on Africa to stop mimicking western political institutions and to go back to its pre-colonial tribal governance. “Since most countries on the continent gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, they have mindlessly mimicked western political institutions,” Dixon wrote.
“The continent has a long history of effective institutions for good governance: Loose confederacies, participatory forms of democracy based on consensus under chiefs, and free village markets, to name just a few,” the article said.
My immediate reaction was “The white man’s burden”. Another European teaching Africans to return to their innocent, primitive and exotic life. A life the European colonial powers saw as a world of disease, starvation, backwardness and savagery. A life bluntly expressed by Joseph Conrad in his novel Heart of Darkness as: “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks ... they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation.”
European colonialists claimed that they came to Africa to civilise the savages, to rescue the people from their dark dungeons of ignorance and disease and bring them into the light of civilisation. But their real motive was not lost on African wise men as eloquently put by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s Independence Leader: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
This is how the Africans lost their land, their religions, their amulets and traditional medicine. We discarded our tribal structures to adopt western democracy, we traded our village markets for western capitalism, our bows and arrows for the rifle and Kalashnikov. And after we learned the western ways, we opened our eyes, demanded our freedom and started governing our countries as we learned from the colonial masters. Now, Professor Dixon is telling us that we have been wrong all along and that we have to reverse the cycle of history, dismantle our western-style institutions and go back to the bush. Well, we simply cannot. We have crossed the Rubicon. We can adopt, emulate, or innovate systems as we like. We are in a global age where knowledge and trade have become common ground for all to play.
The AU is our house, it symbolises the dream of the African people for freedom, integration and a sense of belonging. Once I asked a British friend why the United Kingdom keeps the monarchy. He said he couldn’t imagine the UK without the queen. Yes, it is psychological and in Africa, we cannot imagine Africa without the AU.
When the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of the AU, was created on May 25, 1963, it was Emperor Haile Selassie who summed up the passion on the day by saying: “May this convention of union last 1,000 years.”
Kuwama Nkrumah of Ghana was even more emphatic, saying: “African Union now. There is no time to waste. We must unite now or perish. I am confident that by our concerted effort and determination, we shall lay here the foundations for a continental Union of African States.”
And since then the AU has achieved most of its objectives. It has pushed for the liberation of Africa from the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid. I cannot imagine how long it would have taken countries like South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique to gain their independence without the relentless efforts and single voice of Africa through the OAU. It was the OAU that had embraced Nelson Mandela when he was blacklisted by the West as a terrorist.
When the AU replaced the OAU in 2001, its vision was to have: “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena.” After almost a quarter of a century, the AU has emerged as one of the most successful regional organisations in the developing world.
The AU has been instrumental in boosting economic, cultural and social cooperation in Africa, giving priority to reducing conflict and promoting democracy. The continent’s economic renaissance was clearly illustrated on the cover of the Economist’s December 2011 edition, which featured an image of a boy flying a rainbow-coloured kite the shape of the continent, with the title ‘Africa rising’. The magazine regretted calling Africa a ‘Hopeless Continent’ a decade before.
Africa also remained the second fastest growing economy in the world in 2015 (after emerging Asia), and several African countries were among the world’s fastest growing countries, according to the latest African Economic Outlook 2016, jointly issued by the African Development Bank, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the United Nations Development Programme.
The AU is the only regional organisation that provides peacekeeping missions as part of its concept of ‘African Solutions to African Problems’. And in a further step aimed at freeing itself from donor influence, African leaders agreed in their recent summit to impose 0.2 per cent tax on all imported products to boost the organisation’s income to $1.2 billion (Dh4.41 billion) from its current $447 million budget — 70 per cent of which comes from foreign donors, which is only peanuts compared to the billions of dollars in arms that the West and former Soviet Union flooded into Africa for their proxy Cold War that devastated the continent.
Africa is rising and it is just a matter of time before the next revolutionary gadgets or apps come from a young African mind as the continent already leads the world in cashless, cardless, paperless money. And we have to disappoint Professor Dixon that it is too late for the African farmer or cow herder who orders his merchandise through his mobile phone to return to the caravan route.
Bashir Goth is an African commentator on political, social and cultural issues.
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