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Looking back to the decades critically, young African scholars can make the observation that the “ideology of nationalism has done more harm than good in Africa”.
The passionate belief in our nationality and nationhood that makes us feel that other nationalities are outsiders and enemies is called nationalism. It is nationalism that has given birth to other toxic passions such as tribalism and xenophobia in African countries.
When Benedict Anderson observed that nations are “imagined communities” he meant exactly that our passionate feelings about being a nation that is pitted against other nations is more imaginary that it is material. That means exactly that nationalism is a passion that is based on belief and commitment and as such it is more ideological than it is truthful.
Frantz Fanon, that gifted philosopher of African affairs, once correctly observed that “if nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end.” Fanon had seen clearly how the African nationalism of the late 1950s and the early 1960s was lacking depth and in need for political enrichment, and in need of an injection of humanism.
When nationalism is not enriched and deepened it tends to divide rather than unite the same people that it is meant to form into a nation. Embedded inside nationalism as an ideology and a passion is something colonial and inherently divisive. That is exactly why settler colonialists used the nationalism and tribalism of natives to divide and rule them.
In South Africa in particular, the colonisers packed the natives according to their nationalities and ethnicities and settled them in homelands, in the process diving the country along ethnic and nationalist lines almost beyond repair.
South Africa provides one telling example of how nationalism was not only colonised but also how colonialists weaponised the ideology against the natives to the extent that the ideology continues to haunt the country today.
It is a critical plank of my observation and argument today that at some point in the history of Africa, nationalism became colonial in its form and content, and was used by colonialists to achieve the divide and rule goals of colonial conquest and domination. For that reason, African intellectuals, leaders and political activists should work on decolonising nationalism and freeing it of its colonial legacies and tendencies, otherwise Africans will continue to be divided along national and ethnic lines.
If anything, Africans should be taught and led away from nationalism to Pan-Africanism, the philosophy and ideology of African unity. To decolonise nationalism might be to embrace, valorise, and advance Pan-Africanism. Indeed Pan-Africanism is that grand African philosophy of unity that colonialism and imperialism refused to give a chance. Decolonists, therefore, must recover Pan-Africanism and restore it to being the ruling philosophy of the African continent.
What did the Pan-Africanists Say?
In his criticism of post-colonial African leaders that had begun to divide their own people along national and tribal lines Fanon pointed out that “from nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism.”
The nationalism that was supposed to liberate Africa from colonialism and unite Africans for their development and democracy had been turned upside down into a toxic weapon of hatred and division in the continent.
Fanon, by his good way, was one of those thorough-going Pan-Africanists who dreamt of a United States of Africa that navigated and negotiated African politics and economics with one voice within the world system. The Africa of Fanon’s dreams was a united continent that would have freed itself of colonial maps and colonial borders.
It was at mid-night on the 6th of March in 1957, when the British Gold Coast formally became Ghana, that Kwame Nkrumah said to his people “our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent.” That was one of the most powerful Pan-African statements ever spoken, and it is significant that it was spoken by the first black African leader to lead his country after settler colonialists had retreated. Like Fanon, Nkrumah believed in the United States of Africa. To him, the independence of Ghana was just one small step towards the total independence and unity of Africa.
Many decades after the independence of South Africa, the last African country to be freed of administrative colonialism, Africa still has not tested the liberation and unity that Nkrumah, Fanon and others dreamt of. It is a painful paradox that it is on South African soil that the lack of African unity is presently wagging its ugly head in the form of xenophobia. It is a tragedy that South Africa seeks to lead Africa in maintaining and fortifying colonial borders and advancing the toxic ideology of nationalism.
Julius Nyerere is one of the African leaders who was sceptical about Nkrumah’s idea of the United States of Africa. Later, after Nkrumah’s dethronement in a CIA organised coup, Nyerere was to become a prophet of Pan-Africanism.
It is Nyerere who was to say, “African nationalism is meaningless, dangerous, anachronistic, if it is not, at the same time, pan-Africanism.”
The political wisdom that came down from the generation of Nkrumah and Nyerere is that Africans should abandon nationalism for Pan-Africanism. The Nyerere who had resisted Nkrumah’s United States of Africa idea had learnt from experience that a united Africa was the only sustainable future for the continent and its long-suffering people.
Decolonising Nationalism
It is Fanon again who gifted the thinking world with the observation that: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”
My argument is that the present generation of African youths must discover its mission of recovering Pan-Africanism, expanding and deepening it, and turning it into a ruling philosophy of Africa.
African youths must lead their countries towards the demolition of colonial borders and construction of a United States of Africa that will negotiate with one voice within the world system. That Pan-Africanism is an old-fashioned and tired philosophy is colonial propaganda and it should be rejected with the contempt that it deserves. What is tired and toxic is nationalism in Africa that helped the colonisation of the continent and continues to maintain colonial borders.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter