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(Dr. Diedre Badejo). Padmore, consider as well
the insights of Dubois, Padmore, and
Garvey in the evolving global village with its increasingly
unified economies, the shared history and
global realities of Africa and her diaspora in
shaping a healthy global Pan-Africanism.
It will be continually more difficult for the diaspora to be
actively engaged in African affairs without leadership and
direction from the African nations.
You can't just go and tell people what to do.
The success of such exchanges will of course depend on how
well we know, understand and respect our deep commonalities,
our rich differences, and our troubling contradictions, and we
are yet to really get to that and grapple with it.
To accomplish this African scholars, institutions, and
students will need to incorporate diaspora studies,
Pan-Africa studies, comparitive Africana studies into
their own curricula and research agendas.
We will need the subjects or institutes for diaspora studies
on the continent itself, if we are to execute a formidable
Pan-African agenda in the future.
We must challenge our history, examine our own complexity, and
our failures as well as our successes
and institutionalize those successes.
We must continually celebrate our collective and vast
achievements from the beautiful and purposefulness of the
Ashanti gold weights to the traffic light to the marketplace
to the university and wherever we live, work, or play.
In other words, we can't do this in one place and think its done.
You know you can't have an art exhibit and say okay, you've
achieved your Pan-African goal, no.
That's an outcome, it's not the process.
What we are talking about now is the process.
For the diaspora, Pan-Africanism has inherently been a political
culture of those who professed it.
Sterling Stuckey, who I cited earlier, demonstrates this fact
in his penetrating discussion of Denmark Vesey to
Paul Robeson and beyond.
Yet, even while saying this, we must remember that human beings
are a wonderfully diverse lot and among us are those who are
better cultural or better political Pan-Africanists and
their own contributions must be equally respected.
For people of African descent in new world order,
dogmatism is the root of all evil.
As global Pan-African has demonstrated, Pan-Africanism is
more than a nostalgia we turn to one's racial roots.
During the formative years of its development, Africans busied
themselves with the work of creating
meaningful societies at home and abroad.
Today that work also involves a solid investment
in skills, ideas, finance globally.
So whatever you are doing here young people,
that contributes to making this change
substantively, in one way or another.
And the continent too can reciprocate by offering and
providing her diaspora with access to and
support from its national stage.
Let me land, as they say, with a quote from 1960 former speaker
of the Nigerian House of Assembly, the Honorable Jaja
Wachuku, "The interests of 20 million American negroes are
intertwined with those of 200 million kith and kin in Africa.
The American *** should appreciate that as long as our
continent is in existence and thrives, as long as there are
African states respected in the world community of nations,
they themselves will have a full growth,
which is what they require.
Their full contribution will be appreciated.
Their role as human beings will be greater and that is what we
want, African unity and Pan-Africanism.
Your African is an African no matter
where he or she is found".
Thank you.
[audience applause].
(Kwame Nkrumah). This mid-20th century is
Africa's, this decade is the decade of African independence.
Forward then to independence to independence now.
Tomorrow the United States of Africa.