Does Pan-Africanism Have a Future in Africa? In Search of the Ideational Basis of Afro-Pessimism

As we come to the end of the twentieth century Africa remains a deeply contested intellectual and ideological terrain; a continent that is perhaps still as misrepresented and misunderstood as it was at the beginning of the century. Ever since Africa's tragic encounter with Europe in the mod-ern times, each generation's social imagery of Africa, especially in the out-side world, but sometimes within Africa as well, has been dominated by powerful metaphors and imaginary (sic) through which Africa is con-structed and consumed, its histories and futures confiscated and con-demned. To be sure the stereotypes that structure discourses about Africa mutate, but each mutation carries with it past discursive genes, and the prevailing social rhetoric always sets Africa up against the current con-ceptions of western modernity. In the days of slave trade, African 'pagan-ism ' and 'primitivity * condemned millions of Africans to slavery. Later African 'backwardness ' and 'laziness ' rationalised colonial conquest and exploitation. After independence 'development ' became the conduit for neo-colonial interventions. Most recently, 'democratisation ' has been added to the ideological repertoire, with the West presenting itself as Prospero to Africa's Caliban. Almost invariably, then, Africa is constructed or reconstructed as a representation of the West's negative image, a dis-course that, simultaneously, valorises and affirms Western superiority and absolves it from its existential and epistemological violence against Africa. The arrogant mobilisation and deployment of this discursive power in re-cent years in Africanists scholarship has widened the rupture between Africans and Africanists (Zeleza, 1997: iii)