ON THE OCCASION OF GHANA’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

ISSN: 1543-0855

Issue 5 (2007)

Dhoruba bin-Wahad

(A Lecture Delivered at the University of Legon, 2007)

Let me start by placing my thoughts in context with a quote from Amilcar Cabral, a true son of Africa and brilliant Pan-African freedom fighter, and a historical contemporary of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, in whose memory I dedicate my talk on Ghana’s independence and why I believe the Pan-African vision of united Africa, kindled 50 years ago by Ghana’s independence, is now at a vital crossroad after decades of ignorant and self-seeking African leadership:

We can state that national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socio-economical whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people. It is a return to history through the destruction of imperialist domination to which it was subjected.

Pan-Africanism is essentially an ideology developed by the African Diaspora and based on the fundamental proposition that during the rise of European mercantile expansion and imperial conquest of Africa, people of African ancestry shared a common historical experience. Moreover, this common “African” experience included as its basis the suspension of Africans as the determinant factors in their own historical development and the imposition of European historical development as the determinant factor in the lives of Africans everywhere. In this sense, modern Pan-Africanism is an ideological response to the epoch of European and Arab imperial conquest and their respective slave trades.

Whenever one thinks of Pan-Africanism they almost always first think of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, an African-Jamaican native, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, West Africa. In the first quarter of the 20th century Marcus Garvey, having moved to the United States, led the largest mass movement of Black people based on the ideology of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism in the history of the African Diaspora. His organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), advocated “Africa for Africans” at the height of European domination of the African continent. Garvey, like Pan-African spokespersons before him, made the connection between the livelihood of Africans in the Diaspora and those on the continent long before European imperialism and imperialist competition between European states evolved into the modern globalized economy we are victimized by today.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was a foremost advocate of Pan-Africanism on the African continent, of course. Nkrumah realized that before Africa could achieve economic prosperity Africa must first achieve Pan-African political unity and independence: That without Pan-African political unity or union, the economic development of the continent will depend on individual “states” or their relationship to a global economy dominated by former imperial powers. In short, in order for Africa to prosper, Africans must return to acting in their own interests and cease operating as a footnote to European development and history. Africans must take control over their own destiny, this in essence is the fundamental proposition of political Pan-Africanism.

Those of us living here in Ghana often ask ourselves to what “historical personality” are Africans returning? Specifically, to what historical legacy have modern African nation states returned? Have we returned to the glory days of Songhay, or Mali, or the empires of Oyo or Ashanti, when Africans basically made their own history and organized their own geopolitical relationships? Or have we returned, through ethnic-based political parties to the old “pre-colonial” days when the white man negotiated with the Ga to undermine the Fante, and conspired with each to undo Ashanti power in the sub-region? Have we returned to the days before the Arab conquests of African lands and the spread of Islam’s liberating message rather than to the ideology of mercantilism that drove individual Muslim potentates to fashion their trans-Saharan slave trade? Or, to the waning years of the British Empire and European subjugation of Islamic political rule and the rise of Pan-Arab racism towards non-Arabized Black Africans that still reverberate through regions of the Sudan, Central Africa, Western and Northern Sahara and East Africa? Exactly what historical personality are African leaders reclaiming? Or are they just doggedly holding the line against the rise of a New African, a New Africa?

On the eve of the 21st century, Africa is up for sale at bargain-basement prices. Many African states and Africa’s political leadership seem to engage in dead-end diplomatic and economic activity because they perceive Africa as undeveloped rather than disorganized, misled, and exploited--its resources grossly misappropriated for the benefit of Africa’s elites.

By and large, African leaders have accepted Euro-centric concepts of government and the notion that true power is hierarchical in nature and externally conferred. Consequently, African states have acquiesced to Eurocentric power paradigms that marginalize Africa while simultaneously maintaining the economic balkanization of the continent initiated by European colonialists. To African states desperate for hard currency and favorable foreign-exchange rates for their narrow export-based economies, exploitation of Africa’s natural resources by “foreign investors,” particularly western institutions of finance capital, is just another game. “We are in power,” Africa’s ethnic, religious, and business elites would declare to critics from the African-Diaspora who question the almost absolute venality of Africa’s political leadership and the astounding incompetence of African states set up essentially to micro-manage the control of one clan, or the influence of one regional power center, over a generally impoverished and illiterate population. The short termed benefits derived from such “political” arrangements hardly begin to outweigh the long term damage that is done to the Africa, its environment, its peoples, and the African psyche. The piecemeal prostitution of Africa is a game Africans can’t not lose.

The European writer William Shakespeare once pondered the dynamic tension between human consciousness and social being: “To be or not to be” he wrote, “that is the question.” Indeed, for Africans in the 21st century, both on the continent and abroad, “to be or not to be African, that is the question.” The synthesis between Africa’s strategic and geopolitical potential and Africa’s return to its own historical continuum is indeed the question confronting African civilization today.

How can any progressive-thinking African doubt this? Since the period of decolonization on this continent, marked in history by Ghana’s independence in 1957, African poverty, poor health-care, environmental degradation and ineffective state bureaucracies have grown exponentially; and worse tendencies of mediocrity and mismanagement have been firmly institutionalized. Indeed, the malaise of backwardness in Africa is as necessary to the ‘new world order” as debt and inflation are to modern capitalist economies. And one need not posses a Ph.D. from a prestigious western university to understand that time is fast running out for Africa.

Despite the apparent dour circumstances Africa finds itself in today, we nonetheless stand at the threshold of a new century, a possible new beginning. Though still encumbered by the psychological baggage of a bygone era (which I identify as a form of AIDS, an apparently communicable political disease known as “Africa’s Imperialist Dependency Syndrome), Africa can still emerge as the centrifugal force behind an equitable global redistribution of wealth. AIDS however is a geopolitical killer. This political disease is highly infectious, and has its highest rate of infection among segments of Africa’s population who believe only through non-African intervention (such as foreign aid, investment and, in some cases, low-intensity recolonization) can Africa pull itself up out of the muck and mire of hundreds of years of slogging through the filthy backwater of European historical expansionism; out of its subordination as iconic footnotes to the glory of white supremacy and empire.

Saddled as we are today with dozens of insecure, elderly politicians holding on to power, military and police establishments on the Continent with little or no regard for African humanity, African armies led by African generals motivated not by African honor or a warrior ethos of community protection, but by Romanesque barbarism and the ethics of Fascism, creating a Pan-African moral high-ground may be impossible. But we must try. The difficulties that lie in the path of Pan-African political unity and economic integration are daunting. Indeed, some of us sitting here today have run afoul of these very forces of which I speak. And who among us can say that the liberties of ordinary Africans are vouchsafed by any of the 53 states that currently constitute the African Union?

Our best minds and ideas are dragged down by outmoded thinking and self-hatred. Africa’s resources are squandered and workers’ imagination dulled by state bureaucracies, and uninspired bureaucrats. Often thwarted by abysmal ignorance, which is to say, systems of miseducation, the best of efforts to move Africa forward often degenerate into boondoggles, or another “dream deferred” development project. All of this and more has alienated Africa’s youth and dulled their enthusiasm for progressive and aggressive participation in African governance, while simultaneously squandering the enormous political and economic potential of Africa’s Diaspora.

The best minds, the most talented, innovative, and aggressively creative flee Africa to not just survive, but to thrive. Africa is in need of her brightest children. But, instead, Africa retains mediocrity while driving away quality. Africa hemorrhages talent to Europe and has little to show for it except debt to European finance capital. Africa is facing the new millennium like a beggar on horseback – riding straight to the devil. Africa is in crying need of a “New African” personality ready to meet the challenges, which lay ahead: a New African for the 21st century.

Without Afro-centric modalities of power, Africa and Africans can never effectively rise above the negative pressures of history and regain their dynamic historical personality. With each passing day the pressure increases for dynamic and revolutionary change on the African continent. Reform has come to the end of its rope, anything short of revolutionary change on the African continent will amount to applying a band-aid to the malignant tumor of African dependency. Time is pressing in upon us. Africa and Africans must seize our own destiny and emerge from the shadow of European power into our own light, or collectively sink further into the quagmire of political balkanization and the unmanageability of uneven infrastructural development.

To accomplish the massive transformation of Africa’s resources into a better quality of life for ordinary Africans, we must construct a principled Pan-African political paradigm to sustain and manage the social and political activities of African peoples while achieving systematic trans-national capitalization of Africa’s resources. Any other approach, in my view, is ultimately a waste of time and resources. Debating corruption while useful does not address the fundamental issue and serves to conceal the real enemy of African development: That enemy is debt: That enemy is U.S. and European market controls and trade relations which rely upon African underdevelopment and dependency. Indeed, the European nation-state evolved as a mechanism by which the ‘rich’ could “legally” steal the surplus value of working people’s labor and transfer it into their own pockets; hence, the “modern corporate state” can be seen as a legal artifice by which corruption and financial exploitation acquire political and moral legitimacy. Ironically, this appears to be one of the few salient features of the European state culture African leaders have ‘Africanized’ with any degree of alacrity. Similarly, the international system of trade and commerce evolved along with the aggressive policies of European states, until what we have today are the rules laid down by former imperial powers made into international laws for everyone.

It is my belief that the African Diaspora will play an essential role in the success or failure of Africa’s economic emergence in the 21st century. At this moment, unlike in any previous historical moment since decolonization, Africa can achieve the rapid political consolidation of its vast economic potential. Despite the seeming global influence of U.S. and European finance capital, Africa is poised to move from the margins of economic and geopolitical impotency to the center stage of human development in the next millennium. We, Africans, at home and throughout the Diaspora, stand at the precipice of our own collective rebirth as a people, or we teeter precariously close to the abyss of ignoble debt, dependency, mediocrity and politically obsolete state structures. We must decide whether to bravely and boldly step toward our future, or slip into the darkness of obscurity and slouch into the 21st century. The decision is entirely ours to make. Africans can collectively decide to fashion a global Pan-African Syndicate and thereby transform the political character and economic importance of the largest Diaspora on the face of the earth. An integrated Pan-African global syndicate or association with economic and political roots firmly embedded in Africa’s political consolidation would provide Africa with invaluable economic and diplomatic leverage in pursuit of her objectives and policies. A consistent mode of Afro-centric thought, a dedicated Pan-African agenda, and a determined mobilization of mass opinion among all progressive sectors of the African family are the necessary ingredients for the completion of the decolonization process begun with Africa’s independence struggles and interrupted by the “Cold War.”

Between the independence of Ghana in 1957, and the end of white settler rule in southern Africa in 1992, the struggle for a united Africa and an effective Pan African internationalism took a back seat to Cold War rivalry and the economic “development” of individual states. It is time for those of us who claim to be progressive, who claim to be African patriots, who fancy ourselves to be opinion makers, to insist by every means available to us, including armed struggle when non-violent means are unavailable, that Africa’s leaders understand that Pan African unity is objectively synonymous with African economic development. We must insist that they carry forward policies and programs that will result in the immediate Pan-African unification of the continent. Africa is a unique place with its own set of preconditions for development. Economic development is a delusion without the political union of the African continent. This can be seen time and time again in South Africa’s relationship with its neighbors, or Kenya’s relationship with its neighbors, and in Egypt’s relationship with its neighbors. The economic prosperity of a single developed national economy surrounded by poorer underdeveloped economies can only lead to regional instability and the export of social problems.

Even those Africans who worship the white man’s pseudo-science of macro-economics should take note: The economic development and the industrialization of America and European nation-states, the latter collectively referred to today as the “European Union,” never achieved significant economic development without first arriving at Political union. Why does Africa’s political elite consistently avoid this singular lesson of socio-economic development and insist on regional and narrow nationalist agendas that undermine the basis for continental unity? Because it suits their elitist ambitions and narrow nationalist agendas. It is this pursuit of narrow nationalist and ethnic agendas upon which America and Europe rely to maintain African dependency on their “services” and markets. When conflicts of competing nationalist agendas boil over into regional civil wars, the erstwhile “peacemakers” from America and Europe are there to lend Africans a helping hand. Indeed, the United States has decided that in furtherance of its war on Islam, which it deceptively trumpets as “the war on terror,” economic engagement on the African continent should take the form of bolstering the military institutions of “friendly” African nations, rather than support African economic integration. For the United States, it is much more feasible to help train, equip, and indoctrinate African soldiers under its newly formed “African Command” than to underwrite a hydroelectric plan for Central and East Africa. The Continent has over 35% of the world’s hydroelectric potential, but 85% of its inhabitants are without electrical power. Africa’s economic elites and their military counterparts have no problem with America’s condescending policy toward their Africa; and, in fact, they are lining up for Pentagon handouts and programs, eager to rush into battle in defense of United States interests as so recently illustrated by the African Unions swift deployment of “peacekeepers” to troubled Somalia.

An Afro-centric paradigm can be transformative especially if it directs Africa toward independent and hitherto unexplored avenues of social and economic integration and development – Pan African development! That is to say, such a paradigm can return Africa to its own historical process. But how is this possible? Given the critical areas of conflict in the Ivory Coast, Eastern Congo, Sudan’s Darfur, Somalia, Chad and CAR [Central African Republic], Nigeria’s Delta region, how persuasive can Pan-African diplomacy be? The beginning of Pan-African political unity is Afro-centric thinking rather than Euro-centric thinking by a significant segment of Africa’s leaders. Once the “proposition of African political union” is accepted in more concrete than abstract terms, then a Pan-African paradigm of power become possible.

But social practice determines the veracity of ideals and therefore the criteria by which we should measure the effectiveness of an Afro-centric philosophy. In guiding the affairs of African states the extent to which the state effectively challenges exploitive Eurocentric modalities of power and neutralize them is of paramount importance. For the ordinary African from the Diaspora this is crucial to the relevancy of their presence in Africa on any significant scale. The African Diaspora often confuses “African culture” with power and political self-determinism. This is a psychological myopia derived from chattel slavery and constant subjugation to the overriding ideology of white supremacy. Africans from the Diaspora are easily deceived by cultural and traditional displays into thinking that “tradition and the African state” are one in the same, albeit on different levels. Nothing could be further from the truth. African political leaders by and large make use of culture and tradition for their own narrow political ends, rather than as a means to promote people’s collective ambition. European colonialists disempowered African traditional institutions and their leadership in order to squash popular resistance to colonial rule. African states and African leaders by and large continued this policy after “independence” in the hopes of keeping “Chiefs” and the mass constituencies out of politics. For the modern “African nation-state,” “traditional” mechanisms of power are subservient to the legal power of the state and thus political partisanship in Africa often degenerates along ethnic, linguistic, or religious lines. We must be clear about this, because the salvation of Africa may very well lie in the capacity of the African Diaspora to mediate African conflicts rather than the African state’s relying upon their former colonial masters for effective conflict resolution.

The African Diaspora is therefore correct to subject “traditional,” “African” hierarchical structures and institutions of power, especially where those structures abetted the European and Arab colonial conquest of Africa, to a “New African” criterion of Afro-centric political analysis. This is because a politically Afro-centric paradigm should and must evaluate its cultural ally of “tradition” based upon how supportive “traditional” practice is to Africa’s Pan-African consolidation, and how culture contributes to African liberation. In a word, tradition is only relevant when it is empowering – when it supports the need of the people to exercise authentic power. This may not reflect how cultural Pan-Africanism, such as currently practiced by Ghana and other West African states, perceives its role in the liberation of Africa and Africans. Generally speaking, elitist exponents of cultural Pan-Africanism tend to treat “African tradition” as static and relegated to ritual celebration, not as a dynamic political and social force belonging to the present. Even so, cultural Pan-Africanism plays a crucial role in the development of a universal African socio-ethos essential to the formation of an authentic African power base. Moreover, because African tradition is often the ritualized reflection of the African’s multifaceted socialization and spirituality, cultural Pan-Africanism, if correctly oriented, serves as the cultural reservoir from which an Afro-centric modality of power derives it subjective sustenance: mass support. This is essentially the contradiction of state-sponsored and elitist contrived initiatives such as Ghana’s “Joseph Project,” PANAFEST, and Emancipation Day Limited. These “cultural promotions” are attempts to develop an opportunistic trans-African capitalist framework or achieve a fabricated African “spiritual & material” synthesis within an exploitive global economy that consistently marginalizes Africa. While the African Diaspora generally does promote traditional modalities of power, we by and large oppose reactionary cultural norms associated with ethnic rivalry, and reconciliation with the global paradigm of white supremacy and its international institutions of finance capital.

I will close with a quote from Al-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz, Malcolm X:

A race of people is like an individual man; until he uses his own talent, takes pride in his own history, expresses his own culture, affirms his own selfhood, he can never fulfill himself. I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.

Citation Format:

Dhoruba bin-Wahad. “On the Occasion of Ghana’s 50th Anniversary Celebration,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007.