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Nairobi,
September 5, 2009 – Some 38 years after his death, Ghanaians have
finally decided to honor the memory of their first President, Kwame
Nkrumah with a national holiday on September 21 this year, which
incidentally would have marked the 100th anniversary of his birthday.
The day has been declared a public holiday and aptly named Founder’s
Day.
A larger than life figure, Nkrumah is credited with leading Ghana to
independence from the British and championing a United States of Africa
besides being a founder president of the Organization of African Unity,
now African Union.
The Africa Nkrumah envisaged is far from being a reality as the
experience of writer Nuruddin Farah shows.
Below we run, in his own words, an account of his frustration with
Africa’s artificial borders which, in Nkrumah’s vision, stood in the way
of continental unity. Nuruddin Farah writes:
“In 2007, I telephoned the Consulate of Botswana in Cape Town on a
Wednesday to inquire about a weekend visa to Gaborone as I meant to
attend the wedding of a close friend’s daughter there. In reply to his
question about my status and place of residence, I said that I was a
permanent resident of South Africa and that I held three African
passports and named these and the governments, which issued them.
He asked why I had not applied for a visa earlier, and I responded that
I had just got back from a book promotion tour that had taken me to the
USA, Canada, and Europe. He said I would have to wait for four to six
weeks to get a visa issued on any of the three passports I held.
I was tempted to stress my disappointment by asking why his consulate
was giving me a hard time about a weekend visa, while the British, the
French, the US, the Swiss and Canadian embassies would not hesitate to
issue me with five-to-ten-year duration visas within a few hours and
while I waited. However, I thought better of it, maybe because I doubted
he was the kind of reader that might enjoy my writings.
I got in touch with my friend whose daughter was getting married and a
professor friend of mine who was expecting me to give a lecture at the
University of Botswana to let them know that I was cancelling my trip.
The professor suggested that his department apply on my behalf and
recruit someone higher up in the government to intervene. That way, the
consulate would issue the visa and I would attend the wedding and later
in the week speak to the students and staff of the English Department. I
said that the idea of going that route did not appeal to my sense of
self-honor, and insisted that I would cancel my visit.
Six months or so later, I was a guest of the Federal President of
Germany together with several African Heads of State among them the
President of Botswana. On the second day, during coffee break, the
President of Botswana asked if I had ever been to his country, given
that I lived so close to it, in South Africa.
I replied that I had not; he wondered why not. I related to him what
happened when I applied for a visa several months earlier whereupon he
called his assistant, a lady, whom he instructed to take down my details
and to make sure that I received a visa and a letter of invitation. He
wanted me to promise that I would call on him once I got to Gaborone.
I declined to offer my details to the assistant. After all, my
intentions were lofty, not personal, and I wanted him to see the
absurdity of his government’s visa policies and to consider changing
them, as it affected other Africans. In effect, I was pointing to him
the set of circumstances that had led to my needing his facilitation,
when Europeans, Americans, and many other nationalities from outside
Africa could enter Botswana without requiring visas.
Given the opportunity, I might have referred to the to the arbitrary
carving up of the continent at a meeting in Berlin, in which European
colonial powers established borders within it, dividing our peoples into
entities bearing hyphenated identities – British Somaliland, Italian
Somaliland, Ethiopian-held Somaliland, Kenyan Somaliland and French
Somaliland – and creating never-ending conflicts.
Perhaps implicit in my refusal to accept the President’s offer was this
unspoken assertion: that the borders in Africa are stakes driven through
our peoples’ hearts. In the Horn of Africa alone, border disputes have
caused so much havoc, accounting for several all-out wars as well as the
continued war of attrition between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
When I think back on my encounters over the years with sundry consular
and immigration officials from various African countries, I cannot help
wondering what might have become of Africa if Europeans had not imposed
on our continent the maps we have today.
It follows, too, that Africa would occupy a more honorable place in the
world if millions of our able-bodied men and women had not been removed
to other continents as slaves, and if the savageries of Euro-greed in
the insatiable shape of, to give an infamous example, King Leopold of
Belgium had not been visited on the Congo. It has always been my
contention that had Europe not interfered with our history and had we
pursued its natural course, then we too would have developed in the same
way as other continents.
Colonial subjugation and the mapping of the continent did contribute to
the deceleration of our organic development as people. The mapping of
Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century tethers us to a history
littered with impediments.
The borders are but one of the numerous obstacle courses standing in the
way of our economic and social well-being.
Indeed, the ephemeral nature of borders inspires me with guarded
cynicism; their impermanence animates a caginess of the kind that
produces optimism within me.
Those of us who have known the two sides of Germany before the fall of
the Berlin Wall, for instance, will remember two of the most absurd
borders between the two German entities - the one, a line of yellow
buoys the height of a human above the water to mark the border in the
sea between the then GDR and West Germany. The other was a road bridge
at Domitz, built halfway across the River Elbe and, because uncompleted,
left suspended in midair. With the fall of The Wall and the
reunification of the two Germanys, the borders no longer existing point
to their status of impermanence.
Sadly, this is not so in Africa. Because in 1963, our continent’s Heads
of State endorsed the borders bequeathed to us by the colonial powers at
the inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity, one felt
profound sorrow at the decision, wrongfully catapulting us into
everlasting political and economical disaffection, something the recent
formations of regional groupings, dividing the continent into four main
trading blocs, will not be able to eradicate as long we continue to
endorse the border regime established in 1884 at the Berlin summit.
Borders are an anathema, which we must discard if we wish our continent
to develop culturally, scientifically and economically as a single unit
– and organically at that.”
Additional reporting by Francis Kokutse in Accra
Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media
Network Project
Source: Daily Nation
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