In my last piece on this column I remonstrated against those who take it upon themselves to denigrate everything Nigerian. I omitted the critical fact that some of our fellows Nigerians are among those who have built careers out of bad-mouthing their country. We sometimes exhibit a level of cynicism that confuses our enemies and exasperates our best friends.
We operate under the assumption that everything about us is nothing but a catalogue of unrequited evil. And yet, and yet, some of the most spiritual and most compassionate people I have ever met are also my countrymen and women. Believe it or not, even in government, I have met people who are incorruptible. We are not all a bunch of thieving savages as many have made us out to be.
I may have been rather hard on our fellow Africans, but this is only because true love hurts. Nigeria was a leader of the frontline states during the struggle against Apartheid. Like Father Christmas, our government always doled out millions of dollars to worthy African causes without asking for anything in return -something a country as rich as America would never contemplate. On more than one occasion, we virtually underwrote the entire budget of the Organisation of African Unity. We have also continued to pay generously for the upkeep of the African Union Commission. I think it is rather mean spirited to take our money and insult us to our face in the way many Africans do.
I also made the point about having purged myself of the pan-Africanism of my youth. But perhaps I need to explain. By ‘pan-Africanism’, I am referring to the emotional-sentimental notion that we Africans are some kind of exclusive racial collective – what the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre decried as ‘anti-racist racism’.
Pan-Africanism as a movement began in the New World, when the enslaved and brutalised peoples of African origin began to rediscover their roots and their identity. The likes of Toussaint l’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey and Edward Wilmot Blyden were the early apostles of the movement. In Africa, leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Patrice Emery Lumumba of the Congo, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Bantu Biko of South Africa and the great Senegalese polymath Cheikh Anta Diop paid the ultimate price for their pan-Africanist beliefs.
Some of these people have been my greatest intellectual and spiritual teachers. I honour them and I bow before them. There are also eminent historians such as Chancellor Williams, Martin Bernal (a Jew) and Molefi Kete Asante, whose works I have found deeply edifying.
But I believe we have to move on. The mainstream of world scholarship has by and large accepted the Afro-centric thesis of history. The next step is to move into that dialogue of world civilisations in which we bring to the table what is best in us while embracing what is best in Western and Eastern civilisations. The Chinese, once dismissed by Western scholars as ‘Oriental savages’, are not in a desperate mood to prove to anyone that they possess five millenniums of uninterrupted civilisation behind them. They are simply proving it by the bare figures of quantitative growth, techno-industrial prowess and the conquest of world markets.
For we black people, when is all this romanticism going to translate into concrete policy action? When I hear the strongman of Libya droning on like a raving lunatic about a ‘United States of Africa’, I get the jitters.
Lest I am misunderstood: I care deeply about the fate of our continent and its peoples. But I believe our salvation cannot rest on mere sentimentalism. We need a policy-analytic approach that applies the rigours of science and rationality to diagnosing our collective ills and proffering long-term sustainable solutions. Regional economic communities will obviously be part of the answer. But these must be built on economic models that generate concrete improvements in collective welfare while enhancing the life-chances of our one billion peoples.
We need an Africa of citizens, not an Africa defined by racial exclusivity. This is the route that the leaders of post-war Europe took to overcome their centuries of war and strife and to build the free and prosperous democracies that they are today.
What convinced the Germans, for example, to give up their venerable Deutsch mark for the euro was not racial sentimentalism, but the hardheaded logic of economics. The ideal of Europe is an old one, dating back to Erasmus, Descartes, Rousseau and Goethe. But its institutional architecture has been built not on moral abstractions but on the fiery furnace of economic calculus and the demands of mutually shared interests and responsibilities. And they built it block-by-block, through the dialogue of peoples and governments.
It cannot be different for Africa.
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