Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The United States of Africa and African Diaspora’s remittances in 2012
Dilemma X
A United States of Africa is not a new vision.
In fact the creation of a continental union of Africa’s countries into one country has its origins dating back long before Muammar Gaddafi’s vision of a United States of Africa.
In fact, Muammar Gaddafi’s vision of a United States of Africa, came from the creator's of this very website and series of blogs, The USA4USAfrica Internet Coalition started by Mark Wood in 1996.
Gaddafi answered an email and fax forwarded ti him by a Libyan newspaper which was alerted to the early United States of Africa web.
The Europeans had long held trading forts along the African coast.
They would trade with the African nations and empires for natural resources, goods and enslaved humans. Europeans even engaged in battles between one another to maintain control over these major economic trading ports. But, the Europeans dare not venture into interior Africa, with some exceptions: northern and southern Africa.
Many people, especially those living outside of Africa, tend to forget that the independent nations of Africa today have political borders that are a result of the lines that were drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. No Africans were included in this meeting. The border lines were drawn with a total disregard to the existing ethnic groups, a disregard to the existing kingdoms, empires and city states and a disregard to the existing cultures of the continent of Africa. The European Scramble for Africa began at its most aggressive pace. African nations began to gain their independence from European powers during the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1975 Angola gained its independence from Portugal. In 1980 Zimbabwe gained its independence from its white Bristh-African Apartheid government. Finally, South Africa gained independence when in 1994 Apartheid officially ended as law and the majority black native African population could vote. Today, some view that the Scramble for Africa now has expanded to India, China and the United States, with Europe always keeping pace. History has shown that Europe’s wealth has supported the European diaspora once European nations began to depart from some of their traditional class systems. India’s modern wealth has boosted the wealth of Indians in the diaspora, China’s modern wealth and Japan’s modern wealth also supports the populations in each of their diasporas.
Of course there are many who do not shared in the economic benefits. Just as in the United States where many are middle class. Yet, there are still many who are in the economic under class in the United States regardless of the nation’s wealth. Would a United States of Africa begin to provide more economic wealth for Africans and for the entire African diaspora? Is a United States of Africa a threat to those wanting Africa’s natural resources? See the recent time-line of events creating the United States of Africa below.
A United States of Africa is not a new vision.
In fact the creation of a continental union of Africa’s countries into one country has its origins dating back long before Muammar Gaddafi’s vision of a United States of Africa.
In fact, Muammar Gaddafi’s vision of a United States of Africa, came from the creator's of this very website and series of blogs, The USA4USAfrica Internet Coalition started by Mark Wood in 1996.
Gaddafi answered an email and fax forwarded ti him by a Libyan newspaper which was alerted to the early United States of Africa web.
The Europeans had long held trading forts along the African coast.
They would trade with the African nations and empires for natural resources, goods and enslaved humans. Europeans even engaged in battles between one another to maintain control over these major economic trading ports. But, the Europeans dare not venture into interior Africa, with some exceptions: northern and southern Africa.
Many people, especially those living outside of Africa, tend to forget that the independent nations of Africa today have political borders that are a result of the lines that were drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. No Africans were included in this meeting. The border lines were drawn with a total disregard to the existing ethnic groups, a disregard to the existing kingdoms, empires and city states and a disregard to the existing cultures of the continent of Africa. The European Scramble for Africa began at its most aggressive pace. African nations began to gain their independence from European powers during the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1975 Angola gained its independence from Portugal. In 1980 Zimbabwe gained its independence from its white Bristh-African Apartheid government. Finally, South Africa gained independence when in 1994 Apartheid officially ended as law and the majority black native African population could vote. Today, some view that the Scramble for Africa now has expanded to India, China and the United States, with Europe always keeping pace. History has shown that Europe’s wealth has supported the European diaspora once European nations began to depart from some of their traditional class systems. India’s modern wealth has boosted the wealth of Indians in the diaspora, China’s modern wealth and Japan’s modern wealth also supports the populations in each of their diasporas.
Of course there are many who do not shared in the economic benefits. Just as in the United States where many are middle class. Yet, there are still many who are in the economic under class in the United States regardless of the nation’s wealth. Would a United States of Africa begin to provide more economic wealth for Africans and for the entire African diaspora? Is a United States of Africa a threat to those wanting Africa’s natural resources? See the recent time-line of events creating the United States of Africa below.
A United States of Africa makes sense
A United States of Africa makes sense
Picture: THINKSTOCK
One could put Russia (17-million square kilometres) and Canada (10-million square kilometres) inside the continent, which measures 30.2-million square kilometres. Canada, the second-largest country in the world, and the US, the third largest, can also fit comfortably inside Africa. You could place the US, India and all of Europe, including the UK, inside Africa and have territory left over.
Put another way, a United States of Africa would be the world’s largest nation in terms of territory, and the third largest in terms of population after China and India.
The continent is not poor, although its people are often in poverty. Africa has enough arable land to feed the entire world, yet in some countries people regularly confront hunger. This is what others have called the paradox of Africa: the richest land and the poorest people. Even taking into consideration the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, the continent can easily be supported by the massive savannas, deep forest resources and great arable regions. It is a matter of organisation of resources, not a lack of possibilities.
Africa’s mineral resources are fabulous. In some ways it is the richest continent on Earth. Desert minerals, grazing animals, oils for industries, petroleum and futuristic minerals for information technologies are abundant. More types of wood can be found in Africa than on all the other continents combined. Half of the world’s diamonds are here.
So how can Africa take advantage of its strengths? I believe that Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah understood the potential for creating a powerhouse by uniting Africa.
Almost all of the continent’s problems can be traced to economic exploitation and cultural degradation. The declines in agricultural production in Africa over the past 30 years have in most instances been tied directly to how Western nations provided, prohibited or reduced the natural competitive exporting behaviour of African nations.
Even today African exports have been sanctioned, and where they are not sanctioned, they are heavily taxed. Consequently, in areas such as cotton production, the European and American nations have supported their own farmers and stifled competition from African farmers supported by their governments.
There is no lack of energy, capability or technical know-how on the part of Africa; it is strictly a lack of organisational and political power to see the continent’s economic interests protected.
There is a history for African leadership with regard to nation building.
The first nation on Earth was in Africa, extending beyond the aggregation of people under a kingship or queenship. The ancient south Egyptian state of Kemet comprised 42 ethnic groups with spiritual, mathematical, philosophical and agricultural similarities. Their response to nature and to human relations was something to be envied and emulated by others.
When the pharaoh Menes came down from Kemet to unite 42 sepats — regional divisions called nomes by the Greeks — he achieved something that would have been criticised in the same way that people criticise the discussion of a united Africa.
Each sepat had its own emblem, its own name for the supreme deity, its own variation on the language of the Nile Valley, its own ethnic history and its own capital city with its own shrines — yet Menes the Great was able to achieve national status.
In contemporary times we see the giants of pan-Africanism as Marcus Garvey, WEB Du Bois, Cheikh Anta Diop and Nkrumah. Garvey believed in one aim, one destiny and one god. Diop wrote constantly about an African renaissance with cultural unity. Nkrumah saw a larger Africa than simply Diop’s cultural unity of black Africa, because he felt the north had been predominantly black before the Arabs came and had to be included in a continental state. Du Bois searched for a scientific base to political unity based on the material conditions of the continent.
I am convinced that Africa must be united as one federative union. I like the title United States of Africa. I want to be able to travel and work between Cape Town and Cairo, between Dakar and Dar es Salaam. I seek an Africa where young people can see themselves as the owners of the land. This is not a foreign idea; it is an African idea. Its origins are deep in the history of the continent itself.
• Asante is author of 75 books, including The History of Africa and An Afrocentric Manifesto. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies, a professor at Temple University and a professor extraordinarius at Unisa.
More in this section
We eurozoners must create a United State of Europe
We eurozoners must create a United State of Europe
Only a single Anglo-American style fiscal and military union can save the EU
George Washington
Addressing the Constitutional Convention – an 1856 painting by Junius
Brutus Stearns. 'In the constitution agreed at Philadelphia, Americans
vowed – in imitation of the English and Scots – to form a more perfect
union.' Photograph: AP
They were a loose confederation of states in danger of falling
out among themselves, and unsure if they would survive in an
increasingly competitive international environment. Their debts were
piling up; their currency was weak; their economies were diverse and
incompatible. The idealism that had brought them together was rapidly
evaporating. Something drastic would have to be done.
Sound familiar? The polity in question, however, is not the eurozone but the United States of America in the late 1780s, a few years after the 13 colonies had won independence from Great Britain. The great powers hovered menacingly. US merchant shipping was exposed to vicious attacks by Muslim pirates operating out of north Africa. Economically, the country was divided between a commercially oriented north-eastern seaboard, and an agrarian south and west. There was no real executive to speak of, Congress had no power to raise taxes to pay for national projects, and all international treaties had to be ratified by every one of the states before they came into force.
The debts of the revolutionary war were largely held by the individual states, with little prospect of being honoured, thus destroying all public creditworthiness. (The United States lacked a proper military, because the states could not agree on how it should be paid for, and many Americans were fearful that it might be used to undermine their liberties). So loose were the bonds that held the confederation together, many Americans feared the United States might fragment into its component parts, or succumb to civil strife.
As they debated how to reform their young republic, the patriots looked to the old continent for instruction. The example of the squabbling Italian city states and principalities of Machiavelli's time, which had laid the peninsula open to outside domination, was a terrible warning. They didn't think much of divided Poland either, in the process of being partitioned out of existence.
The patriots reserved their greatest contempt for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, with its emasculated emperor, feeble parliament, sclerotic courts and overmighty princes. This had been designed to prevent Germany from being too strong or too weak, and to prevent Germans from falling out too badly among themselves, but by the late 18th century its flaws were clear.
By contrast, the patriots were impressed by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 – the "entire and perfect union" between two former enemies that Queen Anne offered the Edinburgh parliament in order to resist France together. Scotland received generous representation at Westminster, retained its legal and educational system, and subsumed its grave financial problems into the larger whole, but gave up its separate foreign and security policy. The resulting United Kingdom – within which the political nation represented in parliament was responsible for the national debt and the common defence – proved uniquely suited to mastering its fiscal and military challenges for hundreds of years.
In the constitution agreed at Philadelphia, Americans vowed – in imitation of the English and Scots – to "form a more perfect union". A strong presidential executive was established. In the legislature, the Senate represented individual states, while the House of Representatives was elected by head of population. The rest, as they say, is history. The United States eventually became the most powerful country on earth.
The Holy Roman Empire, however, never got its act together. It was dissolved less than 20 years later at Napoleon's command. Later the second and third empires produced such a concentration of power that it threatened the peace of the continent. After the second world war, was resurrected in the form of the European project, whose dominant continental strand sought to create a union not for the concentration but the diffusion of power, especially that of Germany. To the despair of their American backers, Europe's founding fathers allowed economic, social and cultural integration, which fell to the European Economic Community, to be unhitched from politico-military integration, which fell to Nato, and from democratic representation, which remained with the national states. The EU, as it became, grew overly bureaucratic, legalistic and slow to act. The consequences are painfully visible today in the dire state of the eurozone and the sense of disenfranchisement across the continent – weaknesses that prevent Europe from dealing with pressing external challenges, especially from undemocratic states such as Iran, Russia and a rising China.
History suggests that the current crisis requires the immediate creation of an Anglo-American style fiscal and military union of the eurozone – a "democratic union". This would involve the creation of a European parliament with legislative powers; a one-off federalising of all state debt through the issue of union bonds to be backed by the entire tax revenue of the common currency zone (with a debt ceiling for member states thereafter); the supervised dissolution of insolvent private-sector financial institutions; and a single European army, with a monopoly on external force projection.
This is the only solution that will enable Europeans to mobilise in pursuit of their collective interest rather than against each other, and integrate Germany economically and militarily into the larger whole, without disenfranchising the German people or any other population of the union.
The British and the American unions made history. If we eurozoners do not act quickly and create a single state on Anglo-American lines, we will be history too – but not in the way we had hoped.
Sound familiar? The polity in question, however, is not the eurozone but the United States of America in the late 1780s, a few years after the 13 colonies had won independence from Great Britain. The great powers hovered menacingly. US merchant shipping was exposed to vicious attacks by Muslim pirates operating out of north Africa. Economically, the country was divided between a commercially oriented north-eastern seaboard, and an agrarian south and west. There was no real executive to speak of, Congress had no power to raise taxes to pay for national projects, and all international treaties had to be ratified by every one of the states before they came into force.
The debts of the revolutionary war were largely held by the individual states, with little prospect of being honoured, thus destroying all public creditworthiness. (The United States lacked a proper military, because the states could not agree on how it should be paid for, and many Americans were fearful that it might be used to undermine their liberties). So loose were the bonds that held the confederation together, many Americans feared the United States might fragment into its component parts, or succumb to civil strife.
As they debated how to reform their young republic, the patriots looked to the old continent for instruction. The example of the squabbling Italian city states and principalities of Machiavelli's time, which had laid the peninsula open to outside domination, was a terrible warning. They didn't think much of divided Poland either, in the process of being partitioned out of existence.
The patriots reserved their greatest contempt for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, with its emasculated emperor, feeble parliament, sclerotic courts and overmighty princes. This had been designed to prevent Germany from being too strong or too weak, and to prevent Germans from falling out too badly among themselves, but by the late 18th century its flaws were clear.
By contrast, the patriots were impressed by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 – the "entire and perfect union" between two former enemies that Queen Anne offered the Edinburgh parliament in order to resist France together. Scotland received generous representation at Westminster, retained its legal and educational system, and subsumed its grave financial problems into the larger whole, but gave up its separate foreign and security policy. The resulting United Kingdom – within which the political nation represented in parliament was responsible for the national debt and the common defence – proved uniquely suited to mastering its fiscal and military challenges for hundreds of years.
In the constitution agreed at Philadelphia, Americans vowed – in imitation of the English and Scots – to "form a more perfect union". A strong presidential executive was established. In the legislature, the Senate represented individual states, while the House of Representatives was elected by head of population. The rest, as they say, is history. The United States eventually became the most powerful country on earth.
The Holy Roman Empire, however, never got its act together. It was dissolved less than 20 years later at Napoleon's command. Later the second and third empires produced such a concentration of power that it threatened the peace of the continent. After the second world war, was resurrected in the form of the European project, whose dominant continental strand sought to create a union not for the concentration but the diffusion of power, especially that of Germany. To the despair of their American backers, Europe's founding fathers allowed economic, social and cultural integration, which fell to the European Economic Community, to be unhitched from politico-military integration, which fell to Nato, and from democratic representation, which remained with the national states. The EU, as it became, grew overly bureaucratic, legalistic and slow to act. The consequences are painfully visible today in the dire state of the eurozone and the sense of disenfranchisement across the continent – weaknesses that prevent Europe from dealing with pressing external challenges, especially from undemocratic states such as Iran, Russia and a rising China.
History suggests that the current crisis requires the immediate creation of an Anglo-American style fiscal and military union of the eurozone – a "democratic union". This would involve the creation of a European parliament with legislative powers; a one-off federalising of all state debt through the issue of union bonds to be backed by the entire tax revenue of the common currency zone (with a debt ceiling for member states thereafter); the supervised dissolution of insolvent private-sector financial institutions; and a single European army, with a monopoly on external force projection.
This is the only solution that will enable Europeans to mobilise in pursuit of their collective interest rather than against each other, and integrate Germany economically and militarily into the larger whole, without disenfranchising the German people or any other population of the union.
The British and the American unions made history. If we eurozoners do not act quickly and create a single state on Anglo-American lines, we will be history too – but not in the way we had hoped.
The ‘United States Of Africa’: Mugabe Calls For Formation Of Continental Superstate
The ‘United States Of Africa’: Mugabe Calls For Formation Of Continental Superstate
While French military airplanes bomb militant targets in the
deserts of northern Mali, the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has
again asserted his long-held dream of a “United States of Africa.”
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