For this Pan-African Forum, we will be joined by Dr Amzat Boukari-Yabara, a historian and independent scholar specialising in African, Caribbean and Latin-American affairs and Dr Rahel Kassahun, founder and Managing Director of the African Unbound Center.
For this 3rd Pan-African Forum, we will be joined by Prof. Horace Campbell, an international peace and justice scholar and Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University, New York. He will give an overview of Pan-Africanism from the perspectives of the diaspora. Prof. Campbell was the Third Kwame Nkrumah Chair, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon and is Executive member of the North American delegation of the Pan African Congress.
Reginald Cline-Cole provides an analytically rigorous understanding of the differentiated spread and impact of Covid-19 around the world. In so doing he returns us to what ought to be our core concern: the political economy of uneven incorporation of African economies, societies and natures into the world economy.
It is not an accident that much of the narrative war is being fought on social media. Social media is fertile ground for having one sided debate. For the elites, it is a place where captured attention can be exchanged for dollars and because of it, careful analysis, and nuance—arguably the most important characteristics of intellectuals—are disincentivised.
A conversation exploring the different dimensions and nuances of Pan Africanism. Dr Mshai Mwangola moderates this panel comprising of Zukiswa Wanner, Brian Kagoro and Godwin Murunga.
Brian Kagoro provides a broad historical and conceptual overview of Pan Africanism
It took time to digest Beyonce's Black Is King. Conclusion: it fails to deliver us. Instead, it's just another capitalist construction of the world.
Arguably, Pan-Africanism could only have emerged beyond the shores of Africa. The continent’s riotous diversity, comparatively as dense as its famous jungles, aided the divide-and-conquer tactics of its numerous enemies. The multitudinous nature of its languages, historical traditions, customs and ethnicities meant that Africa never learnt to speak with “one voice” as it had historically spoken with cacophonies of voices. Its diversity in all things was simply astounding.
How does our culture shape our worldview in this day and age? Zein Abubakar, a former commissioner with the defunct Constitution of Kenya Review Commission (CKRC) and a member of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) recently explored the question at a lecture in Nairobi. This video is the result of a collaboration between The Elephant and Africa Uncensored.
Footage of Mwalimu Nyerere being received by US President, John F. Kennedy on his visit to the White House on 15 July 1963.
Is Pan-Africanism today any different from the brand of Pan-Africanism that we know Marcus Garvey and other black activists of their day for? What is the place of young people in today's Pan-African movement? Pan-Africanist Brian Tamuka Kagoro recently tackled the subject in a lecture on #21CenturyPanAfricanism in Nairobi.
Celebrated Pan Africanist, Brian Tamuka Kagoro recently gave a lecture on #21CenturyPanAfricanism. He took his audience through the complicated history of Pan Africanism to this defining moment for the global fight for black dignity.
Mwalimu Nyerere speaking to journalists at his residence on 13th December 1991.
At no point in its history did Africa have a more educated youth population than today. But at no point in its history did so many young people compete for so few formal jobs. Some seek greener pastures in Europe; others build a future at home. ANJA BENGELSTORFF talked to young people in South Africa, Ghana and Uganda who create opportunities for themselves – and to the benefit of others. Their lesson: Think outside the box.
Trump's new Africa strategy seems more to be concerned with checking China's growing influence in Africa. By ALY VERJEE
In this final part of a three-part series, KALUNDI SERUMAGA examines how the old imperial powers and a new entrant, China are gearing up for a second scramble and partition of Africa and what Africa can do to guard herself against the forces of imperialism at her doorstep.
The Chinese approach towards Africa may be different from the European one but will the outcome be the same? By LORENZO BAGNOLI
Africa’s middle class is akin to a "stay-behind" operation that sets up secret operatives in the territory it is vacating, says KALUNDI SERUMAGA
Two decades ago, a storm was brewing in Kenya’s teacup. Kenya’s smallholder tea farmers were ready to throw in the towel. Inefficiency, bureaucracy and corruption was impoverishing them. Grossly dissatisfied with their fortunes, many were contemplating to uproot their bushes, threatening to send Kenya’s leading export into the sort of crisis that had befallen coffee, […]
We live in a world where our certainties, including lines in the sand, the imagination of our boundaries, are crumbling. We are in a season where one of the most significant struggles is that of giving a name to the realities of our now. You know the landscape through which our metaphorical boundaries intend to […]
After a twenty-five year absence, I returned to Somalia in the summer of 2016. I didn’t go back to the cosmopolitan city of Mogadishu where I grew up (now perceived as one of the world’s most dangerous cities) but to the federal state of Puntland, where I had been officially invited to attend the Garowe […]
We are all born into the world of humanity at an ordained moment in time and space with a spiritual ordained mission yet we are the creators of our destiny. The world I came to was full of turmoil. My parents and their parents had been uprooted from their own homes to go serve settlers […]
It is this era of intelligent robots – when there is a fuller convergence between genetic engineering and nanotechnology – biopolitical questions will become central to democratic questions within the Pan-African movement. This article describes the challenges in charting the differences between the Pan-African struggles from above, as manifested in organisations such as the African Union, and Pan-Africanism from below, as manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement. The author proposes that the Pan-African movement and the unification of Africa represent the frontline forces in the struggle to preserve humanity and save planet Earth from new threats, including unethical uses of biotechnology. Such unification is also premised on the quest for reparative justice, the perseverance of human life and the repair of the planet’s endangered ecosystem.
The peering into that deep void never quite stops. I’m talking about that troublesome, discomforting place that separates the global black family, the rift between Continental Africans and Blacks who are descended from slaves. It’s a rift created by forces and events too painful and shameful for many to want to talk about, yet one […]
First, an “ancient” African fable. A chicken foraging somewhere in Africa’s bush came across a pawpaw tree that had grown diagonally instead of straight up. A ripe pawpaw was hanging at the end, which the bird could not quite reach, and so decided to walk up the inclined trunk instead. As it perched on the […]
To a greater power and a better nature you, free, are subject, and these create the mind in you that the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the world around you goes astray, in you is the cause and in you let it be sought. ~ Marco the Lombard’s counsel, from Dante’s Divine […]
Mea maxima culpa. I have not engaged with the idea of the post-colonial before. Not overtly. I didn’t notice it, you see. And that is the politest way of putting it. But I have heard about it in dribs and drabs, as one hears about people from a distant and fascinating culture that point at […]
The neoliberal order that powered economic growth and technological progress between 1989 and 2008 is broken. This system, which not only provided the architectural designs to Reaganomics and Thatcherism, but also created a nomenclature peppered with terms such as free trade, privatisation, deregulation, open markets, and reductions in government spending, has now been proven bankrupt. […]
The Elephant in conversation with Yves Niyiragira, Executive Director of Fahamu and John Githongo, former anti-graft Czar.
Nairobi, Kenya – Three months before the end of the last millennium, Africa’s arguably greatest leader-president breathed his last in a big city hospital, far away from the peasants who held him in awe and whom he loved to banter with so much. On October 14, 1999, Africa woke to the sad news of the demise […]
