The African Union Ten Years After: Solving African Problems with Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance

Preface

v Preface Mammo Muchie, Phindile Lukhele-Olorunju and Oghenerobor Akpor This is the second in a series of books that we intend to produce every year by holding annual Africa liberation conferences to promote pan-Africanism and the African renaissance in order to make Africa its own leader in the 21st Century. The first book on ‘The African World; from Fragmentation to Unity’ was produced last year, 2012. This year we will launch this second book that deals with ‘The Africa Union Ten Years After: Putting Africa First is Putting Humanity First’. The series of books will follow subsequently by producing at least one book every year. We had a large number of scientific papers and we selected those that have been peer-reviewed for inclusion in this book. Many Africans from every part of the world came to Pretoria in South Africa on the tenth anniversary of the African Union and deliberated on how to position Africa to emerge as its own leader in the 21st Century. This followed from the first Africa Liberation Conference we held in 2010 in Pretoria and produced both the book The Africana World: From Fragmentation to Unity and Renaissance (Africa Institute of South Africa, 2011) and the ‘First Tshwane Declaration’. The delegates, who hailed from Africa and the rest of the world, were inspiring: they were exchanging knowledge, research findings, experiences, and building networks to maintain and sustain continuity and a dialogue that has been vigorous in order to accelerate the unity of Africa and the full realisation of the visions of pan-Africanism and the African renaissance in the 21st Century. The African Union must first and foremost be the expression of African agency to end all varieties of coloniality for good. It becomes the full realisation that there can be no room for divide and rule, and that all African states must prioritise the African interests above everything else, including their own selfinterest . Africans must prize their unity to be able to deal with the global challenges and respond to them with full agency, self-worth, dignity, self-reliance, independence and freedom. Africans must learn to compete without breaking their unity and running into conflict, and by promoting collaborative agency; they must learn to unite to enhance their knowledge, values, skills and capabilities to move ahead. Learning to collaborate with competition and learning to compete without breaking collaboration must guide the African leadership style and approach to transform Africa structurally and sustainably. There is recognition and acknowledgement that pan-Africanism was founded by Ethiopianism in the 16th Century. In 1829, African-Americans declared the Ethiopian Manifesto to realise full African pride and dignity, long before Karl vi PREFACE Marx declared the Communist Manifesto to realise the dignity of workers of the world. (The Ethiopian Manifesto, Issued in Defence of the Blackman’s Rights, in the scale of Universal Freedom, New York City, February, 1829.) Later the unity of Ethiopians was strengthened by the African liberation triple helix: the pan-African Movement that began in 1897 and was launched in 1900; the Adwa Victory in 1896 as the definitive African Victory over world empire; and the emergence of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa as the first pan-African liberation movement combining both spiritual and political disobedience to both theological and political oppression against Africans. Together these movements, the Pan-African Congresses (1900), the Adwa Victory (1896), and the ANC (1912) forged the new direction for realising and achieving the long journey to freedom and independence and African voice, agenda and agency. The ideas of pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance must not be simply slogans, they must have meaning at various levels from the epistemic to the political that Africans must eradicate the colonial imposition on the African personality . It must be nothing else but the restitution of the African personhood with the values of ubuntu and freedom from domination. The de-colonising imagination must prevail, to use Franz Fanon’s admonition. One of the outcomes of this conference to prevent any Second Scramble for Africa recurring is the Second Tshwane Declaration (see Appendix). In this year, that the African Union Commission declared as the Year (2013-2014), there should be serious education to involve all African people to facilitate the creation of African agency for full freedom and independence. Community education on Africa should be spread, and knowledge that facilitates all Africans to feel, think, be, act, vote, and value first and foremost their African...