PUTTING AFRICAN UNITY FIRST TO OVERCOME THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA: Africa in the 21st Century After the Quasquicentennial of the Scramble for Africa

DATE OF INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM:The proposed symposium is meant for participants for all over the world and would take place in Tshwane/Pretoria, South Africa. The symposium will be held in May 25- 26, 2011 at the Pretoria Campus, Tshawne University of Technology.

There is a need to acknowledge all the positive data both from Africa's suffering and successes to counter effectively either the continuation of the old or the new scramble for Africa. Africa must claim the 21st century as the African century. The lessons of the past, the challenges of the present, and the opportunities and possibilities of the future must be combined to bring African unity now. This is the real and most urgent challenge confronting Africa. To remain fragmented means the ruin of Africa, to unite means the salavation of Africa. A number of people argue to remain fragmented is to be realstic, to call for unity is to be unrealstic. In fact the opposite is true. To remain divided is unviable. To hurry and unite is not abstract, it is the most realstic action all Africans at various levels must take not tomorrow but with the fierce urgency of now.The unity is not just state unity, but comprehensive unity at various levels of peoples political, economic, social, community and existential lives.

Whether the Scramble for Africa lives on now or not, still to this day in substantive terms African engagement with other Africans is mostly secondary to their respective engagement with others outside Africa. There is more disengagement with one another than the much needed engagement that should be driving African history forward. In 2011, inter-European trade is 67 %, while inter African trade is 7 %, demonstrating inter-African unity remains still very low proving also a big liability to appreciate fully the revealing of African agency and unity.

All the positive energies from within Africa must be integrated to make Africa achieve agency for navigating the contours of a difficult world. As Africa had the rawest deal in human history, all efforts must be made to make sure all of Africa or united Africa get a fair, just and new deal. 2011 is 125 +1 year of the European Scramble for Africa. Since the 1963 OAU meeting, May 25 annually has been designated African Liberation Day. Every year, 25 May has been remembered as the day to overcome the colonial fragmentation of Africa that engulfed the whole continent after the 1885 Berlin meeting of the European Scramble for Africa in order to take concrete steps to advance, build and consolidate the African strategy to unite Africa and put Africa first.

Thus before the year 2011 is over, there is a need to make the broadest possible education on both the scramble for Africa, the threat of the new Scramble, the opportunities for making Africa’s time this 21st century and gathering and diseminating the value of positive data that can be gleaned from the history of suffering and resistance in the African world. Such concerted actions and education using technologies and various ways of teach-ins must be spread without fail across the African universe with interest and joy.

KEY ISSUES

• The old Scramble for Africa: is it over or does it still continue in different guises with different actors and players?
• The post-colonial states: are they robust or fragile? How can they overcome the arbitrary carving up and splitting of ethnicities and vernacular communities? Is it by degrading to vernacular and

• ethnic states or by upgrading to the unity, resistance, independence and liberation imagination as Africans? Which identity should take priority or first place- the African and the sub-ethnic and vernacular?

• There is talk of the new scramble for Africa and in fact research is being undertaken on how and why rising powers such as China and India are re-carving Africa at least by searching to exploit Africa’s rich resources. How credible is this assertion?
• The old European powers and the US are believed to continue to make concerted efforts to control Africa’s natural resources being agents of the resource curse in Africa. How to change resource curse into resource blessing?
• How will Africans navigate from a past that lives on in the present threatening Africa’s future to forge a 21st African Century? Can Africa claim the 21st century? Is the African Renaissance on? What is the African strategy for Africa a decade after the millennium? Are Africans ready to be led by fellow Africans to construct Africa’s capability to deal with a world and respond to it without sacrificing Africa’s values and interests? Who in Africa should lead Africa by displaying the ability to command legitimacy from all? What are the barriers of overcoming a variey of sub-identities to realise fully the African idenity amongst the people of Africa?
• There are a number of processes for integration: the Africa Union, the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), NEPAD, and the Pan-African Congresses- in different ways they all keep alive the Pan-African imagination.But which processes put Africa first? Do Africans put Africa first or Africa last? Is African unity a necessity given African fragmentation has not worked and remains a big liability making Africa penetrable, open to military threats from the former colonial powers and aid dependent rather than self reliant? Where is Africa now? Where is it going ? Is the African elite failing Africa? Is Fanon right when he said over 40 years ago the African elite is a problem to Africa because it has failed to 'decolonise the imagination'. It does not have a free and independent and confident African imagination. It has an imposed Western-centric and neo-colonial imagination. Is it not getting late to remain fragmented rather than consolidate the May 25,1963 start to unite Africa to end Africa's historic humilatiion and bring a pre-slavery and pre-colonial dignity with its own African pattern of modernisation? Can Africans agree amongst themselves to find a way to lead each other by building genuine engagement and selection of those amongst them who can lead them by creating a system of rotation, representation and wonder and imagination? These issues will remain on the agenda until African unity overcomes them and put them behind. We look at the Scramble for Africa to find ways to look ahead and overcome the ever present threat of old and new colonially maligned scrambles and enter into the time of active unity and inter-African engagement by building together and with the active engagement of all the united African nation. The African nation is waiting to be made!Africans must unite to make it now! That is the way to overcome both the talk and threat of any form of external scrambling over Africa! Africa must be transformed from the current resource economy that has brought the curse of scrambling to a knowledge economy and society by building productive power and skills comprehensively and with total inclusion of all the people. Putting African Unity First right now brooks no further delay.

  ...if not African Unity Now , then When? It is getting late. MORE

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