Revised Draft: November 2001

by Ali A. Mazrui

            These essays are based on the three lectures that I gave at the W. E. B. DuBois Memorial Center.  I am greatly indebted to the Center for giving me this opportunity to give three lectures under the general title of “PAN-AFRICANISM IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION”.^[1]

           
Those lectures marked two great events – one public and one personal.  The public event is Africa’s transition from the era of the Organization of African Unity, first created in 1963, to the era of the African Union, which is being born this year.  But these three lectures also marked a personal anniversary – the fortieth anniversary of my own first meeting with Kwame Nkrumah in new York.  I was then a mere graduate student at Columbia University (1960-61) and was included in a group that was introduced to President Nkrumah at a reception.  He was in New York in connection with the United Nations and the Congo’s first crisis after independence.  My meeting with Africa’s most illustrious son of the time was a truly moving experience.

            I divided my general theme “PAN-AFRICANISM IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION” into the following subthemes:

            Lecture I:          Pan-Africanism and  the Origins of Globalization

            Lecture II:         Pan-Africanism and the Globalization of Africa

            Lecture III:        Global Africa between Reparations and the Renaissance

Globalization: Origins and Scope

Africa in the twenty first century is likely to be one of the final battlegrounds of the forces of globalisation – for better or for worse.  This phenomenon called GLOBALISATION has its winners and losers.  In the initial phases, Africa has been among the losers as it has been increasingly marginalized.  There are universities in the United States which have more computers than the computers available in an African country of hundreds of millions of people.[2]  This has been the great digital divide.  The distinction between the Haves and Have-nots has now coincided with the distinction between the  Digitised and the “Digi-prived”.

            Let us begin with the challenge of a definition.  What is globalization?  It consists of processes that lead toward global interdependence and the increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances.  The word globalization is itself quite new, but the actual processes toward global interdependence and exchange started centuries ago.[3]

            Four forces have been major engines of globalization across time: religion, technology, economy, and empire.  These have not necessarily acted separately, but often have reinforced each other.  For example, the globalization of Christianity started with the conversion of Emperor Constantine I of Rome in the year 313.  The religious conversion of an emperor started the process under which Christianity became the dominant religion not only of Europe but also of many other societies later ruled or settled by Europeans.  The globalization of Islam began not with converting a ready-made empire, but with building an empire almost from scratch.  The Umayyads and Abbasids as dynasties put together bits of other people’s empires (e.g., former Byzantine Egypt and former Zoroastrian Persia) and created a whole new civilization.  The forces of Christianity and Islam sometimes clashed.  In Africa the two religions competed for the soul of a continent.[4]

            But has Africa’s role in religious globalization been that of a subject or an object – that of an actor or somebody acted upon?

            The most globalizing concept in the history of religion has turned out to be monotheism, or belief in one God.  It is widely agreed among secular historians that the first thoroughgoing monotheist in recorded history was an African – Pharaoh Akhenaton of Egypt of the 18^th Dynasty (1379-1362 BCE).[5]

            If monotheism was as a concept the most globalizing religious doctrine, the most influential monotheistic religions have been Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Africa played a part in the origins of all these three religions.

            All of them started with Semitic peoples.   Did Semitic peoples originate in Africa or in Asia?  Today Semitic languages are on both sides of the Red Sea.  Amharic and Tigrinya are among “Black Semitic languages”;

            Was Moses an Egyptian and therefore an African?  Writers and thinkers like Sigmund Freud have argued that Moses was an Egyptian.[6]  A founding father of Judaism.  Did  the life of the baby Jesus find asylum in ancient Egypt when King Herod was after his blood:  The Bible according to Matthew tells us so.  (Mathew Chapter 2, Verses 13 to 23)

            Did the first Arabized Muslims find asylum in Ethiopia – a pre Hijra Hijra?

            In any case, who decided that the Arabian Peninsula  was not part of Africa?  That decision was made neither by Africans nor by Arabs but by Western cartographers:

(a)    Arabian Peninsula was torn off Africa by a massive earthquake which also created the Rift valley.

(b)    Geologically the Arabian Peninsula has more in common with the composition of Africa than what lies to its West across the Gulf.

(c)    The languages of the Arabian Peninsula   even before Islam and Arab conquests were related to languages in the Horn of Africa rather than languages across the Persian Gulf.

(d)    The Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula – including the Queen of Sheba – were related to the Semites of the Horn of Africa.

(e)    Islam and the Arabic language have deepened links with North Africa even further as well as links with the Horn of Africa.

            Voyages of exploration were another major stage in the process of globalization.  Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus opened up a whole new chapter in the history of globalization.  Economy and empire were the major motives.  There followed the migration of people.  The Portugese helped to build Fort Jesus in Mombasa.  The migration of the Pilgrim Fathers to America was in part a response to religious and economic imperatives in Europe.  Demographic globalization reached its height in the Americas with the influx of millions of people from other hemispheres.  In time, the population of the United States became a microcosm of the population of the world, for it contained immigrants from almost every society on earth.  The making of America was the making of a globalized society or universal nation.  South Africa had Dutch settlers three centuries ago – a potential universal nation on the African continent was initiated.

            The Industrial Revolution in Europe represents another major chapter in the history of globalization.  This marriage between technology and economics resulted in previously unknown levels of productivity.  Europe’s prosperity whetted its appetite for new worlds to conquer.  The Atlantic slave trade was accelerated, moving millions of Africans from one part of the world to another.[7]  Europe’s appetite also went imperial on a global scale, and one European people, the British, built the largest and most far-flung empire in human experience, most of which lasted until after World War II. 

            For better or for worse, the globalization of labor in world history began with the slave trade, especially the trans-Atlantic variety.  African peoples were scattered in at least four continents – Europe, North America, South America, parts of Asia and of the African continent itself.  Never in history was one race scattered so widely as physical workers.  Much later Karl Marx was to proclaim “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

            In a sense the first workers of the world were Black.  Their chains were almost literal.  It took an international abolitionist movement to break those chains.  It will take a global Pan-African movement to unite those workers.  (“Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”.)

            Kwame Nkrumah entitled his last book in office NEO-COLONIALISM: THE LAST STAGE OF IMPERIALISM.[8]  We await the day when another Nkrumah would write a book entitled PAN-AFRICANISM: THE FINAL STAGE OF ABOLITIONISM.  Abolitionism from slavery was minimal African liberation.  Pan-Africanism as global movement may be the key to maximum African liberation.

Globalization: The Latest Phase

             The final historical stage of globalization came when the Industrial Revolution was joined with the new Information Revolution. Nkrumah said socialism without science is void.  But Nkrumah went nuclear rather than digital.  Interdependence and exchange became dramatically dependent upon the computer after Nkrumah’s day.  The most powerful country by this time was the United States.  Pax Americana mobilized three of globalization’s four engines: technology, economy, and empire.  Although in the second half of the twentieth century this Pax Americana apparently did not seek to promote a particular religion, it did help to promote secularism and the ideology of the separation of church and state.  On balance, the impact of Americanization probably has been harmful to religious values worldwide, whether intended or not.  Americanized Hindu youth, Americanized Buddhist teenagers, or indeed Americanized Muslim youngsters in Accra or  Mombasa are far less likely to be devout adherents of their faiths than their non-Americanized counterparts.  The United States has been a secularizing force in Africa and elsewhere.

            In the new millennium the forces of globalization are likely to continue, against the background of the meaning of the twentieth century in world history.  As the twentieth century comes to a close, scholars have interpreted globalization in three distinct ways.

            As we have indicated, the twentieth century is the only century which had world wars - 1914 to 1918, and 1939 to 1945.  This was the only century which created world diplomatic institutions - the League of Nations and the United Nations. It was World War II that gave birth to a more credible world body - the United Nations, almost eerily realizing Alfred Tennyson's vision in his 1842 poem, "Locksley Hall."

            Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

                 From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

                  . . .

                Till the war drums throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled

                In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.[10]

This was the only century which created a World Bank - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) with the International Development Association.  The twentieth century also issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights - adopted by the United Nations in 1948.  This was the only century which established a global university - the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan.  Some of these have affected Africa more deeply than others.

            This was the only century which had a world health institution - the World Health Organization (WHO).  The twentieth century also created a global mechanism to moderate trade relations - the World Trade Organization (WTO).  The Seattle meeting of WTO at the end of the millennium illustrated the depth of feelings about the organization.[11]

            This was the only century which had a part-time global policeman - the United States of America.  And, of course, this was the only century which developed a genuine world economy - or at least a close approximation to it. 

            All these were indicators of globalization.  Although the term “globalization” is indeed new, the forces which have been, as we indicated, creating it have been going on for generations.  It is only now that we have realized that the forces at work have had global repercussions and have been sometimes global in scale.  The creation of the African Diaspora as a result of the African slave trade turned out to be a manifestation of globalization.[12] 

            But is a globalized Planet Earth really a global village?  The world may be globalized - but what would make it villagized?  There is something missing - the compassion of the village has yet to be globalized.  Planet Earth will never really become a global village until the contraction of distance is accompanied by the expansion of empathy. 

            Education world-wide can have a role in that empathy-creation.  The rich must learn to be more sensitive to the poor; the better endowed be more concerned about the less; the North must learn to be more just to the South.  But for Africa there is no substitute for self-reliance as a long term struggle.

            Shakespeare said  “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It).  The new millennium asks: “Is all the world a village?”  A stage is a conceit; a village is authenticity.  Where does Africa fit in?  Through greater attention to global concerns and through greater effort at kujitegemea (self-dependence).

Nkrumah the Globalist

            Kwame Nkrumah was not only the first major Pan-Africanist which post-colonial Africa produced.  Nkrumah was the first globalist African leader.  When William Shakespeare said “All the World’s a Stage”, he might have had Kwame Nkrumah in mind.  Nkrumah genuinely regarded the world as his constituency.  It is a measure of Nkrumah’s globalization that he fell from power when he was in Beijing trying to break the impasse of America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. 

            His credentials with the People’s Republic of China had been enhanced by a prior global role – when he thought that Harold Mcmillan’s help to India in its border war with China would aggravate rather than help the conflict.  When Macmillan said it was right and proper for Britain to help a fellow Commonwealth country under attack, Nkrumah retorted that the Commonwealth was NOT a military alliance.

            Ideologically Nkrumah was also doctrinally globalist – always in search of creative synthesis.  He told us that the two most important intellectual influences in his life were V.I. Lenin, the Russian Communist revolutionary, and Marcus Garvey, the Black entrepreneur nationalist from Jamaica, who mobilized African Americans.

            In his autobiography, Nkrumah identifies himself with two of the most globalizing forces in history – Christianity and Marxism.  He said “I am a Marxist Leninist and a non-denominational Christian, and I see no contradiction in that.”

            Christianity had been a force for sacred globalization; Marxism had been a force for secular globalization.  Nkrumah sought to synthesize the two.

            Nkrumah’s interpretation of Africa was also a quest for creative synthesis.  He saw Africa as a theater of civilizational convergence.  Three grand civilizations found a meeting point in the African experience – indigenous African culture, Islamic culture and the impact of the Western world upon Africa.  Nkrumah called this tripartite convergence consciencism.[13]  I re-named it “Africa’s triple heritage”, but I was standing on the shoulders of a Ghanaian giant.

            Nkrumah’s globalism also predicted that Africa would be given its own flags and its own national anthems – but not really freedom.  He was among the first to recognize the power of the European Economic Community (now called the European Union) as just another version of Western hegemony on Africa.

            One criticism one may make of Nkrumah is that his view of Western hegemony was too Eurocentric and not yet Americocentric.  He was beginning to catch up with America  – but was not there yet.

            But how far is globalization today another form of the Americanization of the world?  And how far is Americanization partly a product of the impact of people of African descent?

 In the case of the United States, it is arguable that whatever is uniquely American in the United States’ culture and lifestyle has been due to two very different forces - the impact of the frontier and the impact of the Black presence in the American experience.  As Isidore Okpewho has said:

European influences were a “given”.  Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers looked to such European thinkers as John Locke and Montesagne.  Euro-Americans liked to think of themselves as heirs to Greece and Rome.  But where was the American personality?[14]

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) provided one answer - the significance of the frontier in American history.  He argued that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions of the frontier, which evoked such qualities as “coarseness and strength... acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical turn of mind ... restless, nervous energy ... that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom ...”.[15]  He argued that what was uniquely American in her institutions was not the Mayflower, but boundless land, and the spirit of taming the rugged frontier.  But Frederick Jackson Turner forgot one thing - what was uniquely American was also the Black presence alongside the Frontier.  This is the presence which nurtured American capitalism in its infancy and nurtured American democracy in its maturation.  For better or for worse, the making of America was inseparable from the impact of people of African descent.

In its infancy, American capitalism needed Black labour.  This is the link between America and the imperative of labour.[16]  In its maturation in the twentieth century American democracy needed the civil rights movement and deracialization to realize its original concept that “all men are created equal”.  It was Blacks who held American democracy accountable to its own ultimate ideals.  The echoes were heard all over Africa in the new Afro-World Wide Web.  The Afro-Atlantic paradigm was at work again.  The civil rights movement fed into the feminist movement.

Young capitalism often needed young black labour; but more mature U.S. democracy  needed more mature Black stimulation.  The World Wide Web has forged U.S. links.  The African presence in America has also deeply influenced music, literature, food culture, sports and the performing arts.[17]  If globalization is partly Americanization, Americanization is partly the impact of sons and daughters of Africa in the Diaspora.

The distinction between the Diaspora of Slavery and the Diaspora of Colonialism gets more complicated with the distinction between (a) African Americans (Americans is the noun) and (b) American Africans (Africans is the noun).  The great majority of African Americans are a product of the Diaspora of Enslavement.  The term “African Americans” can be either hemispheric (meaning all descendants of enslavement in the Americas) or national (meaning all descendants of enslavement in the United States).

American Africans (or Americo-Africans) on the other hand, are products of the Diaspora of Colonization.  They are usually first or second generation immigrants from Africa to the Americas.  They may be citizens or permanent residents of Western hemisphere countries.[18]  Louis Farrakhan is an African American; Ali Mazrui is an American African.

What is distinctive about American Africans is that their mother tongue is still an African language.  (In the case of Americo-Liberians, they could still speak Liberian English.)  Secondly, American Africans usually still have immediate blood relatives in Africa.  Thirdly, they are likely to be still attached to the food culture of their African ancestry.  Fourthly, American Africans are still likely to bear African family names, although this is by no means universal, especially among Sierra Leoneans, Liberians and Lusophone Africans.

On the whole African Americans tend to be more race-conscious in their political orientation than American Africans.  On the other hand, American Africans might still be more fundamentally “tribal” when the chips are down.

When does an American African family evolve into an African American family?  When it loses its ancestral language.  The umbilical chord is language.  The children of Professor Nkiru Nzegwu of Binghamton University are still American Africans (hemispherically) because the children still speak fluent Igbo.  On the other hand, my children are now African Americans - their linguistic umbilical chord has been cut.

But when American Africans become African Americans, it does not mean all ties with Africa are cut.  Relatives in Africa still abound.  Concern for Africa is often still intact.  And the internet is now providing a new network of Afro-Atlanticism, a new language.

In the case of African Americans the noun is “Americans”.  What kind of Americans? African Americans.  In the case of American Africans, the noun is “Africans”, the adjective is American.  What kind of Africans?  American Africans!

If American Africans can become African Americans, can African Americans become American Africans?  The answer is decidedly YES.  The precedent was set by the first African Americans who created Liberia.  They changed from African Americans to American Africans (Americo Liberians).

There is then the case of W.E.B. Du Bois the most outstanding Diaspora intellectual of the 20^th century.  When Du Bois became a Ghanaian a major African American became an American African – whatever Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University may conclude.

Between African Americans and American Africans

We must focus  on relations between African Americans and American Africans but also between African Americans and Africa.  Do African Americans empathize with Africa?  If so, how much? The African Diaspora helped to create America; and America fostered globalization. Indeed it is worth examining relations within the United States between American Africans and African Americans.  There are areas of solidarity in those relations; and there are areas of tension.

When Amadou Diallo was overkilled by four white policemen in New York City, pouring forty-one bullets into him, it sent shock waves in the Big City not just among immigrant Africans but also among African Americans, Latinos and other disadvantaged groups.  Being fellow victims of white racism and police brutality is an area of solidarity.[19]

And yet many African Americans feel that Africans generally are not concerned with race enough because of vastly different historical experiences.  Among African Americans many give race 60% relevance in their lives while Africans give it only 35% relevance.  This difference in racial preoccupation can be a cause of stress.

The majority of Africans (or American Africans) and African Americans are in support of affirmative action.  This is an area of solidarity.  But who precisely gets the jobs or the educational opportunities?

In reality the greatest beneficiaries are white women and African Americans, but there is sometimes rivalry between African Americans and American Africans over jobs, business opportunities, and other scarce resources.  This area of professional and occupation competition can be a source of stress.[20]

Until recently the great majority of Africans in the United States were college graduates or in the process of acquiring college degrees.  Many Africans who came to the U.S.A. came for educational purposes or got their visas and green cards on the basis of special qualifications.  The majority of African Americans, on the other hand, did not have college degrees.  This introduced a partial class factor between the two groups.

This class factor is now eroding for two reasons.  There are more Africans in the United States who do not have a college degree and are not seeking one.  Secondly, there are more and more African Americans who are exceptionally well trained and educated.[21]  So this difference is evening out between African Americans and American Africans.

Many African American heroes are also African heroes.  This includes the late Martin Luther King, Jr., the boxer Muhammad Ali, the basket-ball player Michael Jordan, the novelist Toni Morrison, and many African American singers.  This is an area of solidarity.  Even controversial Louis Farrakhan has millions of African admirers.  On the other hand, African heroes are seldom well-known in black America apart from Nelson Mandela.  Only the staunchest Pan-Africanists among African Americans have ever heard of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, Julius Nyerere or Wole Soyinka.

African-American lack of familiarity with African heroes is not really a cause of stress.  It just represents a missed opportunity for further solidarity. 

Expanding globalization may restore the balance.  In any case African American heroes get much more global publicity because they are citizens of a super-power.  It has therefore been easier for Africans in Africa to know about them than for African Americans in the United States to hear of Julius Nyerere or even Kofi Annan.

Globalization has also witnessed the rise of Africans to positions of leadership in global organizations.  But here it may be worth distinguishing between Africans of the soil and Africans of the blood.  Boutros Boutros-Ghali , the first African Secretary General of the United Nations, was an African of the soil.  Kofi Annan, the second African Secretary General, is an African of the blood.  North Africans like Boutros-Ghali belong to the African continent (the soil) but not to the Black race (the blood).  On the other hand, African Americans are Africans of the blood (the Black race) but not of the soil (the African continent).  Sub-Saharan Africans like Kofi Annan are in reality both Africans of the soil (the continent) and of the blood (the race).  Globalization has given Africans of the soil and of the blood new opportunities for leadership at the global level itself.

Even before the two African Secretaries-General of the United Nations, Africa had already produced a black Director-General for UNESCO in Paris (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).  He was Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, an African of the blood from Senegal.  His openly pro-Third World policies infuriated the United States, which finally withdrew from UNESCO in 1985 followed by its compliant ally, the United Kingdom.  The United Kingdom returned to UNESCO in 1997 after the sweeping victory of the Labour Party in the 1996 elections. 

With regard to the United Nations itself, Africa is the only region of the world apart from Europe to have produced more than one Secretary-General for the world body in the twentieth century.  Europe has produced three Secretaries-General, Africa two, and the other regions of the world have produced either one each or none so far.

The International Court of Justice at the Hague elected in 1994 an African of the soil for its President - Mohammed Bedjauni of Algeria.  The World Bank in the 1990s has had two African Vice-Presidents - Callisto Madivo, an African of the blood from Zimbabwe, and Ismail Serageldin, an African of the soil from Egypt.  In 1999, Serageldin was also a serious candidate to become the first UNESCO Director-General of the new millennium.[22]

The Commonwealth (what used to be called the British Commonwealth) has fifty-four members.  Its Sectariat is at Marlborough House in London.  In the 1990s the Commonwealth had Chief Eleazar Emeka Anyouku as its Secretary-General.  The Chief was an African of the blood from Nigeria.  The largest member of the Commonwealth in population is India; the most industrialized member-states include Canada, Great Britain and Australia; and the largest black member of the Commonwealth is of course Nigeria.

Globalization has also permitted the emergence of Black and African moral leadership on a world scale.  It began with the Nobel Prize winners for peace.  Over the years these have included Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Luthuli (1960), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964), Anwar Sadat (1978), Desmond Tutu (1984), Nelson Mandela (1994), and F.W. de Klerk (1994).  Black Nobel prize winners in literature or economics are not necessarily moral leaders.

Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King, Jr. were of course African American Peace Laureates and therefore Africans of the blood in our sense, but not of the soil.  Anwar Sadat and F.W. de Klerk were as Peace Laureates Africans of the soil but not of the blood.  Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela were Africans of both the soil and the blood.  All three were South Africans, as was F.W. de Klerk.  But we should note that F.W. de Klerk is an “African of the soil” by adoption rather than by indigenous roots to the continent.  Most North Africans, on the other hand, are indigenous to the continent, although there has been considerable racial mixture with immigrants over the centuries.

As the twentieth century was coming to a close Nelson Mandela achieved a unique status.  He became the first truly universal Black moral leader in the world in his own lifetime[23].  Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved universal status after his death.  When Dr. King was alive half of mainstream America rejected him and regarded him as a troublemaker.  Mandela was fortunate to have achieved universal moral admiration without having to undergo an assassination beforehand.  No other Black man in history has pulled off such a “pre-humous” accomplishment (as distinct from a posthumous elegy).  In the recognition of Mandela the human race may have taken one more step forward in the search for universalized ethical sensibilities.

A Conclusion

            But although Mandela is the most universally admired of all post colonial African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah remains the most globalist in perspective and orientation.

            Nkrumah came, Nkrumah saw – but Nkrumah never conquered.  Now Africa is once again singing the song of an African union – leaving the final fulfillment of African unification to future generations.

            In 1961 I met Nkrumah in New York.  He had come to New York from Ghana.  In 2001 I have come to Ghana from New York to give lectures partly in his name.  The cycle of life continues in all its inscrutable mystery.  Africans touch each other here and now, but Africans may touch each other beyond the grave.  Long before geographical globalization there was historical continuity, long before the  Internet there were the ancestors.  So it shall remain. Amen.

END NOTES