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(Dr. Diedre Badejo). Okay, good afternoon.
I know that the day has been long, it has certainly been
informative and most stimulating I hope for everyone present.
I'm going to talk to you as Prof has mentioned about
Pan-Africanism and its impact on Africana studies.
And as others have mentioned, we know that there are certain
issues now with Africana studies and questioning the significance
and so forth, but I think that there's one thing this
particular conference should point out is that it does have a
great impact on the lives of students, that there
is much to learn about our global situation
as well as our domestic situation from studying Africa.
At UCLA, where I graduated from, we had t-shirts that said,
when you study Africa, you study the world.
And that's more than a joke because the world has been in
and not only out of Africa for a very long period of time.
I start with a quote, a proverb that says,
how do you eat an elephant?
To which one says, some of you know this, don't you know this.
How do you eat an elephant?
(female speaker). One bite at a time.
(Dr. Badejo). That's right,
one bite at a time.
To address the question of race, cultural adaptation, cultural
identity and Pan-Africanism in the New World Order is to
some degree an enormous, unwieldy elephant.
The enormity of the elephant is shaped by the relationship
between what we call global Africa and its diasporas and the
New World Order in the 21st century on the one hand
and the relationship within global Africa itself
on the other, as Prof has just mentioned.
The question here is global Africa's ability to develop in
spite of those new or old world orders.
The latter relationship, however, is a more
crucial one in part because these world
orders which exacerbate the relationship.
But I contend that the latter relationship that is the old
world order is a more crucial one because global Africa is
capable of competing and succeeding in the 21st century.
I know that flies in the face of what many people think, but I
happen to believe that it's true.
That capacity, as we have been advised over the last 150 years
or so, lies in a clarity of purpose and vision
grounded in substantive, concrete analysis and
planning for our new world order.
For those of you who don't know, I've been working on the African
union, for example, and was commissioned to publish a book
on the African union for secondary school.
There is a whole nother manuscript that I have that
would be more appropriate for this level, but one of the
things that we don't give enough time to thinking through is how
the African union has the capacity to make substantive
changes even though there is a great deal of interference with
its work on the one hand and there is a lack of sustained
funding for that work on the other,
but I think the potential is there.
My purpose is to offer a comparative analysis of global
Africa's historical and cultural response to those declared world
orders as a prescription for her health and for her descendents,
both on the continent and in the diaspora.
The significance of a cultural historical analysis is best
summarized by Amilcar Cabral in the 1970 speech
he gave at Syracuse University in New York.
He states, "Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a
people's history and a determinant of history by the
positive or negative influence, which it exerts on the evolution
of relationships between people and their environment among
those people and groups of people within a society
as well as among different societies."
This is sort of where we are.
That is our elephant.
How are we going to chew on this?
The first is the creation of the diaspora outside of the African
continent in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.
Its creation constitutes historical and cultural response
to enslavement and racism, and the dual legacy of
colonialism at home and abroad.
We forget that the Caribbean was actually colonized.
It was a colony itself.
And so when we are talking about colonies, we are not just
talking about far away colonies, Africa, Asia.
We are also talking about Cuba, which is really important in
understanding that dynamic, but the Caribbean
and South and Central America as well.
The second is the transfer of Pan-African leadership from the
diaspora, which occurs in 1958, and I'll talk about that in a
minute, from the diaspora to the continent
after the 1945 Manchester conference.
The third is the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania
in 1974, which illuminated some of the internal contradictions
within global Africa's response to racism and oppression.
This third view leads to our present situation which focuses
on the shift to the continental Pan-Africanist, the internal
contradictions it revealed itself and the unanticipated
impact it had on the African diaspora,
especially in the Western Hemisphere.
Now since I have written about this, I also have to say that
one of the components of the AU that was a real struggle from
about 2002 to about 2 years ago in 2008 was the recognition of
the diaspora as the sixth region of the African continent, and we
are still working out how that is going to work.
To restate the obvious, the historical factors of
enslavement in colonialism which created the diaspora and
Africa's economic dependency had bequeathed the legacy of racial
and ethnic turmoil, cultural synchretism and confusion
and a struggling Pan-Africanism.
Part of that historical legacy is the Western definition of
race and cultural identity, which served as a lightning rod
of discord within the human family.
For people of African descent, that legacy shifted the
culturally-defined relationship between the individual, or in
the case of Africa, the ethnicity.
His and her sense of belonging between the individual and his
or her sense of their personal wealth and worth and between the
individual and his or her output or labor.
So these things had a very traumatic impact on, not just
the collective, the social being, but quite a bit of an
impact on the personal sense of who we are as people
within our larger social context.
That legacy shifted Africa's culturally-defined relationship
between leadership and accountability by superimposing
an enormous, extraneous worldview burdened with
oppositional ideas of humanity, human worth, and social
cultural accountability and responsibility.
During the 19th century, that legacy also superimposed a
Western concept of national sovereignty over
ethnoculturally-defined global populations.
Moreover, with the Western concept of nation state itself
in its infancy at that time, this superimposition
destabilized the ability of diverse ethno-political,
cultural entities to evolve internal policies based
on their internal needs.
Now what I'm suggesting here, as Prof has mentioned and other
people have mentioned, that in Africa the definition of
self was not as African.
It was as Igbo, or Zulu, or Akan, or whatever,
but these are not tribes.
And it drives me crazy when people say tribes because there
are actually more people in certain areas of Africa who
identify as a particular ethnicity than
there are say French, for example.
There are more Yoruba than there are French on the planet.
There are more Africans who speak French than there are
Frenchmen who speak French, why?
Because of the density of the population, but also the age of
humanity in those particular regions.
So when you are talking about a tribe
you are really undermining the enormity of this whole
historic and cultural experience.
So for those people who were Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, House of
Fulani who had established governments and governed in
autonomous environments to be dismantled, and I think we
talked about being dismembered before we could be
remembered to use Toni Morrison's phrase, was a
traumatic experience beyond belief.
So the idea of talking about Nigeria, for example, where most
of my work is done, is complicated by the fact that
inside of this place called Nigeria actually exists four or
five other countries, not to mention the smaller ethnic
groups, but actual living, political, viable situations.
And this was one of Nkrumah's problems when he came to power
because the chiefs wanted to maintain control
over their particular regions.
And the Akan have three major kings, they call them chiefs,
but they were actually kings of their own regions.
So this complicates our understanding of Pan-Africanism,
but also complicates some of the issues and obscures some of
these issues that became very important for us
to grapple with in the 21st century.
St. Claire Drake, for example, provides the seasoning for our
elephant by making a distinction between traditional or racial
Pan-Africanism and continental Pan-Africanism.
Drake defines traditional or racial Pan-Africanism,
I think this is what you would call classical Pan-Africanism,
as the unity of sentiment and actions between
individuals in Africa and the diaspora.
He states, "Worldwide black consciousness is a psychological
reserve that can be mobilized to achieve local ends as well as to
aid others as the liberation struggle continues".