Why Pan-African Parliament is burning

THE Pan-African Parliament (Pap) is burning. Turn down the heat, or get the objectives, policies and sequencing of pan-Africanism right before building a Parliament.

The Pap has seen no small amount of disgraceful misbehaviour among some of its members over the past several days. Much of it has provoked schadenfreude, and mischievous giggles, with the customary Afro-pessimism. The main line is the old canard that “Africans can’t govern themselves”.

The apparent malfunctions of the Pap are caused by several problems; ideational, cultural, power, size, sequencing and policy. The latter two belong together.

The ideational — the founding concepts — of the Pap is problematic. For what may seem politically the right idea, Pan-Africanism is based at the outset on race. It was based on the idea that “black,” “coloured” and “native” African people — from the Tuareg and Berbers, to the Xhosa and Khoisan, necessarily shared some kind of harmony of interests. This is evident in the work of one of the outstanding thinkers and earliest protagonists of pan-Africanism, WEB Du Bois (1868-1963), from Boston, US, who is often considered to be “the father of pan-Africanism” and who made a crucial argument (one of many), regarding “the Negro”.

Universalising US particularities While Du Bois was no doubt a fine thinker, it’s fair to say that he took the particular conditions of African Americans, and universalised them across the world, specifically to the African continent. For instance, he explained that having emerged in “this American world,” the “Negro” had entered a world “which yielded him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world… this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”. From this, Du Bois wrote, emerged “two unreconciled strivings”, the most prominent of which is a “history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”. With this as a starting point, it was assumed that if only the “African”, “black”, “coloured” or “native” were unified they would attain “self-conscious manhood” and emerge “a better, truer self”.

Closer to home and to the present time, the late Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere is remembered as the most progressive pan-Africanist. Nyerere, too, based his pan-Africanism on the ideal that if Africans united nationally and continentally, they would find their place in the world and tackle all the problems of life. A particular curiosity was his belief in Kiswahili as a transnational linguistic vehicle that would secure unity and solidarity for all Africans. Although it cannot be thoroughly expressed here, there is sufficient evidence to support the idea that the ideational basis of pan-Africanism was race.

Cultural divergence, big time

Much like India, Africa is one of the most diverse places in the world. This tends to be glossed over. One point that has to be raised is that during the final phase of its colonisation, India had a single (British) colonial power, which left India with a single fairly uniform bureaucracy and administration. We can set aside the horrors of Partition for now. It is no small matter!

Nonetheless, during the last phases of African colonisation there were French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and descendants of (Dutch and French) Huguenots, as well as British colonists. There were, also, strong elements of Arabian influence, especially along the eastern parts of the continent. Each left behind its own bureaucratic customs, practices, repertoires, and religious beliefs. Besides the hundreds of indigenous language groups (and religious beliefs, customs and traditions), Africans also speak a range of European languages.

And so, Nyerere’s belief that transnational linguistic unity is necessary for pan-Africanism is weak, and lacking in a sense of history. People of the same language groups have fought and killed one another sometimes in horrific ways. And others who speak different languages (as in Switzerland) have lived in perfect harmony for many years. Language is a terribly weak vehicle to achieve unity, but it can help prevent ethnolinguistic fractionalisation — once you get past the agreement of which language should be the national or transnational language.

The issue of which language or culture should prevail as a unifying force is a cornerstone of Chinua Achebe’s understanding of Africa’s complexity.

“I don’t think anybody can suggest to another person, ‘Please drop your culture; let’s use mine.’ That’s the height of arrogance and the boast of imperialism. I think cultures know how to fight their battles…. It is up to owners of any particular culture to ensure it survives.”

Nyerere’s idea of a transnational unifying language is problematic. Whether one agrees with it or not, many people have tied their very identity to their language. Nyerere, remains, nonetheless, the (African) father of Pan-Africanism. South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma once described him in the following way: “Mwalimu, the teacher who taught the African continent about peace, democracy and unity — Mwalimu, the freedom fighter who became one of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity, he laid the foundation for the African continent to start its long and arduous road towards peace and unity.”

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● This article first appeared in Daily Maverick