Transcription
[Music] which many young Africans may not remember, but those of you who are students of history will remember that when the African National Congress was founded in 1912 in South Africa. The struggle cry was “amandler,” and the response was “auet,” which means “power is ours.”
Much later, in the 1960s, when the Pan-African Congress was formed with Robert Mangalisa Subukqu, another cry also became common in the struggle, and all these were designed to remind us that Africa had at one time lost her power. So they would say “Africa,” and people would respond “Africa.”
These calls were significant because the continent of Africa stands unique in modern history. Many of you young people will learn about this continent courtesy of history. This [Music] continent was overrun, and our sons and daughters were taken away.
So that when we celebrate or commemorate Africa Day and, by extension, Pan-Africanism, we must never forget that Africans were taken away from this continent. And today you find them in the diaspora in countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, Bahamas, Guadaloupe, Martinique, St. Kitts and Nevis, Cuba, Colombia, and in different parts of the world; they are Africans, and this is what gave meaning to the iconic words of Kwame Nkrumah when he said, “You are an African not because you are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in you.”
Today we are assembled here to remind ourselves that after slavery there was another project, the colonial project. European powers—all of them—in 1884 and 1885 sat down in Berlin, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and divided the continent into spheres of influence. The Portuguese were there, and they took their colonies. They took Angola. They took Guinea-Bissau. They took Mozambique. The French were there. They took Togo. They took Benin. They took Burkina Faso. They took Mali. They took Guinea. The British were there. They took what is now Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi (which was then Nyasaland), Zimbabwe. They took Somaliland. The Italians were there. They took Libya. They took Somalia. The Germans were there. We should never forget. They took what was then Tanganyika. They took Togo. They took Rwanda. They took what is now Namibia. They were there. The Dutch were there. All of them were there.
And a decade later, one of the great African writers writes a book, *The Curse of Berlin*, in which he looks at the continent of Africa and looks at her after Berlin and the creation of the countries that we now know, complete with passports and which we are proud of and for which we fight and spill blood.
But even during those difficult days when the continent of Africa was under colonial domination, the desire to regain independence was always alive. When, courtesy of history, you read about Pan-Africanism, you’ll meet individuals such as Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, who convened the first Pan-African meeting in the year 1900 in London, England. You’ll meet individuals such as George Padmore, individuals such as Marcus Mosiah Garvey. They were thinking about liberating the continent of Africa not only from the chains of slavery but colonization.
Indeed, it can be argued that aside from Ethiopia, which was never successfully dominated, and Liberia, which became a settlement for freed slaves under the Monroe Doctrine, the rest of the continent of Africa was under colonial tutelage, and the spirit of Pan-Africanism that was planted in the 1900s by our kith and kin who had been enslaved became the basis of organized struggle for independence. It left the Caribbean and came to the United States of America where great men such as W.E.B. Du Bois, sometimes referred to as the father of modern-day Pan-Africanism, were in the forefront of the struggle for liberation of black people.
Those of you who are South Africans will have heard of a great South African who, at age 27, was a student at the University of Columbia and delivered one of the most iconic speeches ever delivered on Africa: Pixley ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the African National Congress. And I urge you to go and read his speech, delivered in the month of April 1916, “The Regeneration of Africa.”
The spirit was to regain independence so that when the fourth Pan-African meeting is held in 1945 in Manchester in the United Kingdom (which is not so united as we know), Africans are there. Kwame Nkrumah is there. Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo is there. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta is present in Manchester, and the struggle to regain independence starts in earnest. It is a struggle.
But we must never forget that even when we talk about independence in the 1940s, at the beginning there were rebellions. There was resistance. Who amongst you here will not remember Shaka of the Zulu? Who among you here will forget Mkwawa of the Hehe and the Maji Maji rebellion? Who among you here will not remember Dedan Kimathi Wachiuri and Mau Mau? Who amongst you here will not remember Harry Thuku? The resistance was there. Those of you from Uganda, you remember Kabaka Mwanga of the Bunyoro, and many great individuals.
So when we commemorate Africa Day and we situate it in history in the month of May 1963, we must never ever forget that there is a long history. Students of history will remember a great Congolese, V.Y. Mudimbe, who passed on just a few months ago and his two iconic books defining Africa. But the history that we are commemorating today is the culmination of a process which, as I’ve said, started in 1945 and sees the emergence of great Africans across the continent seeking to regain independence from the colonized.
So that in South Africa we begin to see individuals such as Chief Albert Luthuli in South Africa. We begin to see Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Pixley ka Isaka Seme. You go to Namibia. You meet individuals such as the late Sam Nujoma and Andimba Toivo ya Toivo. You go to Mozambique; you find great people such as Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Moisés Machel. And in Zimbabwe, greats such as Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Never forget that in Angola you have individuals such as Agostinho Neto. And as you come up, you meet Kenneth David Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe and, of course, Hastings Kamuzu Banda in that part of the world. Africa is rising. You come to the east; you find many great Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Apollo Milton Obote. At that time, it made sense, but it resembles awe: Africa is rising.
And when Ghana regains independence in 1957, it is great. Historians will tell you that the first country to regain independence, in that sense, a little earlier is Sudan in 1956, and others will tell you it is Egypt in 1922. But Ghana’s is iconic because it is the first time that a sub-Saharan country is regaining independence. And I want you to listen to the speech delivered by Kwame Nkrumah. He tells his audience on that day that the independence of Ghana means nothing if the rest of Africa is not free. And it is the beginning of a wave, the recognition that if we regain independence as individual countries, then we will be weak because the neo-colonial project is alive and well.
And that is why in 1961 in Casablanca, Morocco, a meeting is convened to begin to think about African unity. But the neo-colonial project is alive and well. The colonialists are already telling some Africans that you should not unite. They convene another meeting in Monrovia and another one in Brazzaville to delay the unification of the continent of Africa.
So that when the meeting is called in 1963, we must never ever forget this: that the meeting was to be held either in Cairo under the tutelage of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or Ghana under the tutelage of Kwame Nkrumah. It is because of the standoff that Emperor Haile Selassie offered to host the meeting between the 23rd and 25th days of May [Music] 1963. And I want you to read the speeches. There were 32 of them. There were 32 independent states in Africa in 1963. And they spoke—each one of them speaking sense. Even the ones who became senseless a little later, there was something, there was a spirit of unity. I can still—when you hear the voices of those who are speaking on that day—David Dacko of Central African Republic say, “We are so small that we cannot survive.” Julius Nyerere says, “We have not come here to remind ourselves of how significant unity is. We want unity as the only way to immunize ourselves against the diabolical machinations of the erstwhile colonial powers.” All speeches are great. Emperor Haile Selassie, who is the host, reminds everybody that African unity and African identity is important. But the greatest speech is that of Kwame Nkrumah. He tells his audience, “Let us unite now. Let us not leave here without one government. Let us not leave here without one foreign policy. Let us not leave here without one army. Because if we delay, we are going to be divided.” They listened to him not. And that is how we end up with the Organization of African Unity rather than the United States of Africa.
But at the same time, something is also happening with our kith and kin in the diaspora. The African Americans, then called the Negroes, are authorizing. They want independence. Great individuals such as John Henrik Clarke are saying it is not enough to say “black is beautiful.” If black is beautiful and is not powerful, then it means nothing. John Henrik Clarke is saying… Martin Luther King Jr. He’s delivering his iconic speech at the Lincoln Memorial. 250,000 people listening to him, telling the people that he has a dream. Malcolm X is speaking. Henry Sylvester Williams in Trinidad and Tobago. Africans are rising. The spirit is back. People want independence. They want freedom which had been taken away so very rudely from them. It is Frantz Fanon who says that the process of enslavement and colonization was also a humiliating and dehumanizing process. [Music] leaves Addis Ababa disappointed. But the 25th day of May becomes Africa Day. We are celebrating it five days ahead of time. On the 25th, it will be 62 years since the founding of the OAU, whose contribution must never be downplayed. Because with the headquarters of the liberation movement in Dar es Salaam, that is how Southern Africa was liberated. It is because of that that we hear iconic voices crying for freedom across the continent of Africa.
So we are gathered here this morning to commemorate and to remind ourselves that the work is incomplete. It is incomplete because we are still prisoners of inherited boundaries. It is incomplete because we are still controlled from the metropoles. It is incomplete because, as Kwame Nkrumah used to say, it is easy to liberate ourselves politically; it is easy to liberate ourselves politically, but it is a lot more difficult to liberate ourselves culturally and mentally. So here we are reminding ourselves that we must undergo what our own Kwame Nkrumah calls “decolonization of the mind.”
Remember when the colonialists came, they told us that everything about us was wrong. They told our women, “Straighten your hair. Bleach your skin. Abandon your nails.” They told us, and we believed them. They told us that our names were not good. So they told us that when you are a Christian, you must adopt a name which is essentially English or French. But they told us “It’s Christian.” The impact is great and alive and well. They even told us that our languages are bad. That’s why I’m addressing you in a foreign tongue. I would have addressed you in Kiswahili. They even described us as Lusophone to mean we speak Portuguese, Francophone to mean we speak French, and Anglophone to mean we speak English. So that Umbundu is not good. Ovambo and Oshiwambo are not good. Acoyo is not good. Amhara is not good. Somali is not good. Zulu is not good. Those of you who have had the advantage of watching Alex Haley’s *Roots* will see how Kunta Kinte is removed from the village of Juffure in the Gambia, taken to the United States of America. And the first thing that they do is that they beat your name out of you so that you are Grace. You are Genevieve. You are no longer Kunta Kinte.
So we come here to remind ourselves that there is work to be done. In 1965, when Kwame Nkrumah convened a meeting in Accra, Ghana, he thought that on that day African leaders would actually accept that we be united. But speaking on the 6th day of March 1997, on the 40th anniversary of the independence of Ghana in Accra, Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah himself, who had liked a slow process, said, “We owe an apology because now we in the leadership have become so used to being called ‘Excellencies.’ We’ve become so addicted to motorcades. We’ve become so addicted to being ministers that it is not easy to unite us.” And the neo-colonial project was alive and well. One year later, Kwame Nkrumah himself had been overthrown. And a little earlier they had killed Patrice Émery Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two years later, in 1963, they had killed Sylvanus Olympio in Togo. They are killing.
So we are here to remind ourselves that we have an enemy that is alive and well; an enemy whose desire is that Africa remains disunited and weak so that she can be manipulated, so that occasionally when the spirit of true revolution comes, they are eliminated. That is how they eliminated Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau. That is how they eliminated Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. That is why they want to eliminate Rawlings and many others. That is why they are sponsoring insurgency in Burkina Faso, in Mali, in Chad, in Guinea, in Northern Nigeria. They are alive and well. And if you ever doubted me, only listen to them. Listen to them. Listen to the French president. And you know, listen to the prime minister of the not-so-united United Kingdom. Listen to them.
So today we are gathered here to remind ourselves that if Africa is to be great, it is you young men and women who must make her great. This is an intergenerational warfare. You cannot afford the luxury of do-nothingism. You cannot afford the luxury of thinking that this is not your battle. You cannot afford the luxury of saying that you are too young. You are not young. You are the right age. You cannot afford the luxury of saying that you must graduate. Graduate you will. But history has the character of recognizing her bold men and women who are prepared to sacrifice for this generation and generations yet to be born. Are you such young men? If you go to South Africa, you’ll meet young people who died in their prime because they wanted independence. Who among you here will forget Thoko Didiza and Solomon Mahlangu? Who among you here will forget them?
So we are here to remind ourselves that there is work to be done. We are here to remind ourselves that Pan-Africanism means that we who are Africans, both in the continent and in the diaspora, must now not romanticize Pan-Africanism but must give practical meaning to it. It must be a Pan-Africanism that makes us self-sufficient in agriculture. It must be a Pan-Africanism that allows us to have peace and quiet and tranquility. It must be a Pan-Africanism that allows us to earn the dividends of the fourth and fifth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence. It must be the Pan-Africanism that does not allow our young men and women to go into latter-day slavery in the Arab world. It must not be the Pan-Africanism that allows our young men and women to be humiliated at the embassies of Western countries when our young men and women in search of greener pastures are just going to flip hamburgers and work at McDonald’s in Europe and America. It must be a different Pan-Africanism. The choice is yours.
So let us commemorate, but let it also be a charge that from today henceforth we are going to change the continent of Africa. In 1996, Thabo Mbeki gave an iconic speech, “I am an African,” and when Thabo Mbeki was making that speech, he was reminding us that it can no longer be business as usual. And that is how, in 1999, a man whom we forget so very often, Muammar Gaddafi, convened Africans in 1999 and said that the OAU must change, and that is how it became the AU, beginning with the adoption of the instruments of adoption in 2001, and the coming into being of the African Union in Durban, South Africa, in the year 2002. The African Union is now anchored on Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area. And it is not lost on me that in the year 2013, when we were adopting Agenda 2063, the then chair of the African Union, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma of South Africa, wrote a letter to Thabo Mbeki in which he said, in part, that “we apologize to you for what you could see then is what has become true.”
So ladies and gentlemen, so fellow Africans present in this assembly and Africans of goodwill and friends of goodwill, when you leave here, let it not be that you have just been part of a jamboree. When you leave here, go and search yourselves. When you go to Cameroon in Ambazonia, ask yourself what you can do. When you go to Wagadugu, ask what you can do. When you go to Jama’a in Chad or Hargeisa in Somaliland, ask what you can do. Because, as one Kenyan said in 1967, many times we in Africa are looking for a Moses with a rod and staff to part our Red Seas, to call pillars of fire, to heat rocks that water may come out, to summon manna from heaven. There is no such Moses. You are the Moses. Tom Mboya said in 1967, “We are waiting for a Superman.” There is no Superman. There is no Superwoman. We are the Superwomen and Supermen.
So today, if you came here as a coward, please leave as a man and woman of courage. Cowards die many times. I’m not asking any of you to be suicidal. I’m asking you to be courageous as we commemorate Africa Day. This battle is intergenerational. Play your part, he said, “Play your part. Your children will play their part. Their children’s children will play their part. And in the fullness of time, this mother continent will regain her lost lust.”
So when I look at Africa, I look forward to the day I went from Cape Town in South Africa on my way to Cairo, through Windhoek, through Lusaka, through Lilongwe, through Nairobi, through Dodoma, to Mwanza, and Kigali, and Juba, and Khartoum. There will be no passport. I look forward to that day. I look forward to the day when I move from West Africa. There’ll be no CFA franc. There’ll be no Liberian dollar. There’ll be no cedi. There’ll be no naira. There’ll be no birr. There’ll be no shilling. There’ll be no kwanza in Angola. There’ll be no metical; there’ll only be one currency. That currency, I do not have a name for it, but for the moment, let us assume it will be called the Afro. I look forward to that day. I look forward to the day when there will be no borders at which there are tariff and non-tariff barriers. I look forward to that day when I’ll have a bus ride from Dakar in Senegal to Djibouti. I look forward to that day when I’ll have a bus ride from Asmara to Luanda in Angola. It can be done. It must be done, and it is you who will do it. That is why we are celebrating Africa Day, and that is why I say “amandler,” and that is why I say “Africa.” God bless. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]