The African Union and New Strategies for Development in Africa B ...

Pan-Africanism, or the pan-African idea, is as much historical as it is contemporaneous. The pan-African idea, on which what can be described as the African Integration Project, has been variously and historically anchored; it is a living idea, whose continuing evolution is reflected in the fledgling African Union. Indeed, the pan-African idea has continued to provide an intellectual and policy-prescriptive prism from which to articulate and pursue an alternative homegrown development imperative in Africa, like those articulated in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). These initiatives are in response to the forces of imperialism, masquerading as globalization, and to pressures for change by autonomous social forces in Africa.

The need for such an alternative, self-liberating articulation is clear from the economic and political writings of Kwame Nkrumah. Hodgkin (1973) has identified three principal “strands of political thought,” which influenced Nkrumah’s political “radicalism”: (a) “the tradition of Gold Coast liberal nationalism…associated with a succession of anti-colonial movements”; (b) “the ideology of Pan-Africanism, derived from…Marcus Garvey and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois…with much older roots in the nineteenth-century theories of Edward Blyden”; and (c) “Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism” (pp. 64–65). These streams of thought must, of course, be related to his academic training and background in philosophy, politics, and theology, as formative influences on the radical, humanistic collective liberating consciousness that shaped his world view and immersion in public affairs.

However, Nkrumah’s idea of pan-Africa must be viewed in the broader context of general pan-Africanist thought. The roots of this pan-Africanist thought run deep not only in Africa’s historical engagement with the wider world but also in ideas, organizations, and movements, like the Pan-African Congresses between 1900 and 1994, which are complex and multifaceted in their diversity, involving a combination of externally derived and homegrown ideas, varying points of emphasis, and the extremities of responses they have elicited within and outside Africa.