We would not have to have the European nations paying 30% of the African Union’s bills or we would no longer have to depend upon those Arabized nations that straddle the field between Africa and Arabia with their commitments more to their Arab grandfathers than they have to their African countries. This quandary is at the root of the problem of Afrocentric Pan Africanism. There can be no effective Pan Africanism without an Afrocentric underpinning where we do what is in the best interest of Africa all the time. This is often problematic for those nations with heavily Arabized populations
Therefore, the United States of Africa must proceed with those African nations who are willing to serve African people. Why has not the African Union condemned the killing of the indigenous Africans in Libya, the Tawerghans, who have been slaughtered because they supported Colonel Gaddafi? What has the African Union really done about the intransigence of the Arabs of Sudan who have ethnically-cleansed Africans from their homelands? When African Americans look at the continent these are the issues that would like to see the African Union pursue.
When we have developed a United States of Africa with a conscious Afrocentric and Pan African leadership we will be free to explore African ethical concepts. When the Yoruba say that “Iwa” is the highest ideal and value in human relationship or the Zulu or Shona say “Ubuntu” is the source of our existence, and a thousand other ideas are invoked by African people we need to be able to catalog our contributions to the human system of values. We cannot play the role of junior brother when we were the first to attempt to count the stars and the first to discover what was edible and what was not. Having a nation worthy of our ancestral wisdom will mean overcoming all of the vestiges of colonialism.
Those who would take the economic control of the entire continent and deliver it to Europe, the USA, or China fuel the pernicious appeals to political separations and ethnic loyalties. We know this sinister scenario and we must reject it. At this initial stage in the Afrocentric development of the continent, just as among us in the United States, we must fight for the political and cultural rights of the least powerful groups among our people. This is why with scores of Africans of all origins in the United States, and people from all of the Caribbean Islands, and South America such as Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Ecuadorians, and so forth, the African American vanguard class has preached the commonality of struggle and general history.
While our specific narratives may be different our general African narrative, with its resistance and victory themes, is the same. Confront all attempts to deny legitimacy to the category of an African narrative. People who seek to deny us our history are claiming that we must be seen in the light of narrow, divisive, and fascist ways. The Haitian and Jamaican and Nigerian and Ghanaian and Afro-Brazilian are all my brothers and sisters. Consequently we must think twice before we act in order to insure that we give no balm to compradors or predators and we must secure our economic and political liberation daily.
Amilcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara would have understood it; you never give your enemies the idea that your vigilance has waned by insuring that it does not wane. So our condition is troubling and there are many minefields but we are convinced that we will be victorious in claiming our people’s consciousness. In that future time when the day breaks with our liberation may it be that our work has been laid so well that the inheriting generation will simply have to maintain and advance the Afrocentric and Pan African agenda.
Herekh! Herekh! All power to the African people! Amandla!
This is the end of the series. We shall ask Prof. Molefi Kete Asante to make more of his insightful essays available to us.
*Molefi Kete Asante is the most published African author with 79 books and more than 500 articles, chapters, and forewords. A bold revolutionary thinker, Asante has been called one of the 100 greatest American thinkers. His books, The History of Africa, African American History, As I Run toward Africa, and An Afrocentric Manifesto, are used in many schools and universities throughout the world. (Please go to www.asante.net; www.mkainstitute.com; www.afrocentricityinternational.org; and www.cla.temple.edu/AAS for additional information).