Cheikh Anta Diop the Pan-Africanist from West Africa, in his work entitled ‘Black Africa’ reminded us that Egypt was the cradle of civilization. In those days, Egypt was peopled by a African nation. It drew on the African hinterland of the Nile River. It was this catchment area that created the Nilotic civilization, the first civilization in the world with a high degree of culture manifested in its science, art and human attributes.

By the sixth century BC, with the eclipse of the Nile civilization, its people fanned southwards, and a few centuries later (around the first century), they founded the first civilization further south in the west part of Africa – in a place they called Ghana, and  later civilizations such as Nok-Ife, Zimbabwe, and others came into being. From radio-carbon research methodology it is now known that the earliest sites in Zimbabwe date to the first century of the Christian era.

Exhumation and archeological research on African history from the period of antiquity to the present day has not been undertaken in a systematic way by African people. So you have a people without a detailed modern scientific history. Through traditional methods, such as oral history, one has an outline of what happened; however, what is missing is the detail, which has to come from African people themselves.

According to Diop, a consideration of the pre-colonial African family, state, and its accompanying philosophical and moral concepts and the like, reveals a cultural unity of African people, resulting from similar adaptations by various ethnic groups in the same material and physical conditions of life. However, the period of the European colonization in general has robbed African people of their interest in their own history, a situation aggravated further by the African bourgeoisie, their intellectuals and their wholesale adoption of Eurocentric modernization theory.

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Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.10, no.1, March 2017

According to W.E.B. Dubois the objective of Pan-Africanism would be the uniting of the thought and ideals of all the native peoples of the continent, and the Diaspora in the western hemisphere and eastern hemisphere in north Africa, Arabia, India and elsewhere. Today the aspiration of African people in general is to be united with others of African descent, within an African nation, wherever they are found in Africa and in the global African Diaspora; hence, the overall conceptualization of the African nation.

The first systematic depopulation of Africa had taken place a millennium ago by the Arabs, who entered north east Africa through the Sinai in AD 639-640. These people were described as Indo-Europeans, who dislodged the African original occupants of north Africa. Having done so, they enslaved African people moving southwards, marching their captives, especially women and children, northwards and by sea into Arabia. Many, maybe most, lost their lives in this long trek. Arab expansion southwards continues today as a matter of policy, being led by Sudanese destabilizing militias in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). There is good reason to believe that this drive southwards is aided and abetted by western special forces – a similar situation of a-mixing in the internal affairs of others, as found in Syria today.

Although this history seen from the perspective of the western hemisphere is widely known and understood, it was only in the current century that the experience of those living under Arab hegemony in Africa reached the attention of the African community south of the Sahara as a result of the exposure of the Sudan issues to the glare of public opinion and the increased attention given globally to the use of violence and terror as a means of domestication and colonization, be it in Europe or in Africa south of the Sahara.

It has become known that fighting went on in south Sudan starting in the current phase with the Torrit rebellion one year before Sudan’s self-government in 1956, with the mutiny of soldiers from the south against their northern officers.  This ignited a war which continued up to the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, with a ten year interregnum following on the Addis Ababa Agreement of 27 March 1972. The question to be asked was why was the south prone to fighting? Were there lessons to be drawn for the Afro-Arab borderlands in general from the experience of south Sudan, Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, indeed from the marginalized long suffering people of Sudan? Linked to this is the question of what has been the African experience in Arabized north Africa and what are the aspirations of the marginalized Africans of north Africa, such as the Tawargha and Tebu in Libya?

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Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.10, no.1, March 2017

It would be of interest to know how much Nkrumah’s thinking on the Afro-Arab borderlands conformed to the views of his colleagues Sekou Toure of Guinea and Modibo Keita of Mali. Suffice it to conclude that Nkrumah passed on to future generations the ideological approach to African unity of continentalism, being the geographical unity of Africa as a continent, most probably based on principles of socialist solidarity. CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING OR Amended N'COBRA Papers

On the Unity of African People
guest editorial
by
B.F. Bankie
bankiebf@gmail.com
Director, The Pan-African Institute for the Study of
African Society (PAISAS), Windhoek, Namibia 

B.F.Bankie
Sudan Sensitisation Project (SSP)
www.bankie.info

amended Ncobra paper by Itibari for publication.docx