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Panel Discussion: Presentation By
Professor A.B. Assensoh, Department of African
American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington,
Indiana, USA
Commentary on Instrumental Pan-Africanism: Good
Governance, Hi-Tech, The Diaspora, And Africa's Fate in the Age of Hyper
Globalization by Prof. Chudi Uwazurike
In their life-time and beyond, several of the Black world's foremost
intellectuals and political stalwarts worked hard to leave for us, as
the next and future generations, legacies that are beyond dispute. For
example, Marcus Garvey (Caribbean) left us with international
nationalism and the Black Star; W.E.B. DuBois (USA) reminde d us of the
collective soul of the Black Folk, coupled with double consciousness;
George Padmo re (Caribbean) bequeathed to us Pan-Africanism and its
attendant glories; Nnamdi Azikiwe (Africa) left us with Zikism, as a new
ideological -cum-intellectual awakening; Kwame Nkrumah (Africa) gave us
Nkrumaism and the African Personality; Julius K. Nyerere bequeathed
Ujamaa and collective responsibility; Jomo Kenyatta (Africa) left us
with anecdotes of Mau-Mau and the Burning Spear; and, indeed, Frantz
Fanon (Caribbean and the Black Diaspora) left us with insights on the
contours of the earth's wretchedness and Black/White Masks.
Most certainly in our day, younger intellectuals are also working hard
to leave their own footprints. They include CUNY Professor Chudi
Uwazurike, whose serious scholarsh ip has been crowned with the
publication of Instrumental Pan-Africanism, which has been quoted in
full above. It is similar to ex-Ghana President Nkrumah's final
full-length book, Revolutionary path, which was published posthumously,
as Uwazurike, too, seeks to assert the importance as well as Africa's
governance, hi-tech readiness, diasporic inter-connectedness as well as
the fate of the African continent in the age of hyper-globalization.
In eight very lucid and well-articulated chapters, Dr. Uwazurike has
given a fresh coating and refurbishing to the Pan-Africanist surface. In
his preamble, which is in the form of notes, he has provided his readers
with a well-researched and discussed five-point imperative for the 21st
century. Also, he used the first chapter to showcase the problem, in
terms of the old "what is to be done?" debate: the difference, however,
is that P. Chudi Uwazurike applies his theoretical approach derived from
his reading of the technological movements of world history from Type 0
to Type I and Type II levels, as advanced by Michio Kakau and others, to
Africana issues, including the rigged world system and the burden of
economics.
Uwazurike’s essential point is that at this stage of what he and other
see as the 5th stage of pan-Africanism, the steering role of history
will be centered around the self-conscious and historically informed
BUSINESS ELITES on both sides of the diaspora. He is impressed with the
rise of the various African Stock Exchanges and the dramatic progress of
the business community. But he sees these20as a less-than fully engaged
or patriotic group – they are an asset in search of a mission. Yet, as
he has done in lampooning their money-seeking obsession in the plays,
House of Little Regrets, Yesterday Was Silent (returning Off Broadway in
September) Prisoner of the Kalakiri and in his novel Yesterday Was
Silent and Nwuzor Nwannah and the Song of a Thousand Tunes, he is less
than sanguine that they can rise to the occasion. Yet without the
domestic side of the necessary $60bn continental investment per annum
needed to ensure the desired 6% annual growth, Africa will continue to
be economically dependent.
&n bsp; By the same token, he sees the two-dimensional African Diaspora
– the immigrant diaspora and the native black Diaspora, including
African Americans and Afro-Caribbean and Latino, as part of the
possibility of making things happen. Africa’s prospects will forever
change when three key things converge
n Good governance based on consociational than combative democracy
n Leading businesses becoming innovative investors in production than
more distribution
n The trans-Atlantic, transnational diasporas working in concert, with
the burden more on the African-born
While we cannot stop the trains of the African Union, let us not allow
it head for a wreckage by ignoring the need to give it a dynamic vision
and to shore up the cultural foundations of continental unity. For these
to work, the state has to engage in visionary technocultural
transformation as all levels of society – the process that Uwazurike
describes as “instrumental pan-Africanism.”
Placing a premium on the recently-ended Cold War spectacle, our comrade
Uwazurike goes on in the subsequent chapter to offer a post-Cold War era
that rests in the bosom of a historic opening. He sees technological
laggards like today’s ‘somnolent Africa’, as a future ‘orphan of
history’ – unless the forces identified above converge swiftly to alte r
the course of destiny.
To him, the very first principle is the mental one: no success of a
historical dimension can occur without a driving philosophy of action.
Hence, a renewed instrumentalist, strategic Pan-Africanism, calls for a
new boldness in this, its fifth-stage. While Ghana's late
President20Nkrumah offered a discussion of the African personality in
the Pan-Africanist context, Professor Uwazurike advances all of the
subsumed theories with extensions. To him, Professor Ali A. Mazrui's Pax-Africana
has its good reason and place in the emergent Pan-Africanist struggles.
Even, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, as mellowed as he was, as
well as Malcolm X, have their own useful purposes in the overall
struggle for black emancipation at various levels.
Thus, Fanon, Nyerere and others left literary legacies that serve as the
strong pillars upon which Uwazurike's works rest. Instead of seeing the
ethno-cultural deficiency that colonialism and neo-colonialism has
encouraged to emerge, Instrumental Pan-Africanism is utilized to
underscore a biting ideological-cum-political anecd ote that is similar
to what ex-President Nyerere dwelt on in his Ujamaa theories; Fanon in
his psychoanalytical perspectives; ex-Kenyan President Kenyatta, in his
warrior-cum-politician mold; while Dr. DuBois and Mr. George Padmore are
presented as the antithesis of the colonial as well as neo-colonial
mirror, through which a progressive Black could see what it takes to
make the colonial master dysfunctional.
To a large extent, Uwazurike is to be commended for casting a wide net
in the wide sea of Pan-Africanism: henceforth, why not let the clarion
call also be – not just long live Pan-Africanism and, but also, may long
live Instrumental Pan-Africanism and its focus=2 0on the technological
great leap forward, led by an Africa-centered business elite, the
diaspora and a democratic civil society? (End)
A noted authority on Africa and trans-Atlantic history, former president
of the Association of Third World Studies, Ghana-born Prof. A.B.
Assensoh of Indiana University is author of Nkrumah: The Years of Exile
and several other books
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