Countenance @ http://countenance.wordpress.com/ wrote a very interesting post about the so-called United States of Africa.
"When the African Union website opens, a welcome message declares that “Africa must unite.” But while such sentiment may be growing, an initiative to move the continent towards a formal union has failed.
Good luck. East Africans in a little east African country couldn’t even get along to the point where one ethnicity slaughtered a million of the other in an attempt at genocide in 1994.
How East Africans, West Africans, South Africans, Arabs and North Africans are supposed to compete for singular control of a unitary continental state without butchering each other is beyond me.
If there can be such a thing as a semi-successful AU, it will have to: (1) Apply only to sub-Saharan (i.e. black) Africa, (2) Allow for three sub-AU semi-sovereign entities encompassing the three major types of black Africans, (3) erase the current political map of sub-Saharan Africa, a legacy of European colonialism, and redraw the boundaries around tribes and ethnicities, (4) restore Zimbabwe and South Africa to white rule. "
I don't agree with everything he said, but the African Union needs to know that Africa is going to unite (eventually) just give it a few decades. Uniting by 2012 is out of the question.
"Sudan is not really a country at all, but many. A composite layers, like a genetic fingerprint of memories that were once fluid, but have since crystallized out from the crucible of possibility" Jamal Mahjoub, a Sudanese novelist
8 comments:
Three major types of black africans? what's that?
Kushites, Nilotics, Niger-Congo mabye?
The only problem is that within those groups, there are sub-groups, many of whom don't like each other.
kizzie - I enjoy reading your blog. It gives me an insight into your part of the world that the media doesn't.
Good to be here again!
maybe i'm missing the point, but until the african populations themselves seek a "united states" structure it seems as though there won't be much chance of imposing it through the au.
By 2012 is out of the question.
But a United States of Africa is the only solution.
By 2025 isn't too much to hope for, though.
Though possibly it won't happen within the Capitalist cycle.
(1) Apply only to sub-Saharan (i.e. black) Africa
Not a bad idea, North Africa arguably has more in common (culturally) with the Middle-East than the South who it share a landmass with.
(2) Allow for three sub-AU semi-sovereign entities encompassing the three major types of black Africans
Three types of black Africans? This is news to me.
(3) Erase the current political map of sub-Saharan Africa, a legacy of European colonialism, and redraw the boundaries around tribes and ethnicities
Brilliant, but the people currently in power would never let it happen
(4) restore Zimbabwe and South Africa to white rule.
What rubbish.
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