Pan-Africanism in the 21st century: African union and the challenges of cooperation and integration in Africa

The paper examines the extent to which Pan-Africanism and Pan-African vision of promoting African unity, cooperation and integration has been achieved under the African Union (AU) in the 21st century. It also assesses the challenges of cooperation and integration under the AU. The paper adopted a qualitative approach, while data was gathered from secondary sources and analysed thematically. It notes that the quest for African cooperation and integration is not new, but dates back to philosophy and vision of Pan-Africanism and Pan-African movement from the 1950s and 1960s. This movement later took roots in the continent and championed the struggle of Africans and peoples of African descent for emancipation and the restoration of their dignity, against slavery, colonialism and all forms of racism and racial exploitation, and to overcome developmental challenges. After independence, the Pan-African movement found concrete expression in the establishment of the Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) in 1963, and later transformed to the African Union (AU) in 2002. These continental organisations have served at platforms for the pursuit of Africa cooperation and integration and addressing post-independence challenges with varying successes. The paper revealed that AU’s Pan-African agenda in the 21st century including the African Economic Community (AEC), AU Agenda 2063, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), are not without challenges. Addressing these challenges holds the key to achieving the continental goal of unity and achieving the vision and goals pan-Africanism in the 21st century in Africa.

Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin

The Nigerian film industry known as “Nollywood” was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknesses of the Nigerian state, but it inherited and carried forward one of the state’s major accomplishments: the creation of a national culture on and through television. This mission was reinterpreted in the context of a low-budget feature-film industry grounded in the informal sector of the economy. Twenty-five years on, governmental failures continue to structure the industry, even as new distribution technologies and the transnational corporations that have entered with them have created a whole new sector of production alongside the original one and have fractured the audience along class lines, adding to original linguistic and cultural divisions. Still, through its storytelling, Nollywood remains a powerful unifying cultural force on the national and Pan-African levels. In this context, Nigerian Pidgin is more important than ever as a linguistic medium of communication and as a symbol of national, regional, and Pan-African unity and communicability.

The Politics of Regional Integration in Africa

On the African continent, a commitment to Pan-African unity and multilateral organization exists next to a postcolonial society whose 54 Westphalian states interpret the commitment to unity and integration to different degrees. The tension between a long-term Pan-African vision for a unified continent that prospers and is economically self-empowered, and the national concerns of governing state-centered elites with immediate domestic security and political and economic interests, lies at the heart of the politics surrounding African integration and affects both the continent and its regions. The politics of integration demand that a patchwork of regionalisms be consolidated; states give up on multiple memberships; and designated regional economic communities (RECs) take the lead on integration or subordinate themselves to the strategy and complement the institutions of the African Union (AU). In the interest of widening the social base of regional organization, politics needs to recognize and give status to informal regional actors engaged in bottom-up regionalism. Of issue in the politics of integration and regionalism are themes of norm adaptation, norm implementation, intergovernmentalism and supra-nationality, democracy, and authoritarianism.

Introduction: Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons in Africa

On 10 September 2019, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (OAU Refugee Convention) turned 50, while on 23 October 2019 the African Union (AU) Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (Kampala Convention) turned 10. It is against this backdrop that the designation by the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government of 2019 as the Year of Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Africa, is significant.

Will African Federalism Work?; African Unity Twelve Years Later

Excerpts from Current History essays published in the 1960s and 1970s.