Based on the view that Africa is an actor in the international system rather than just being acted upon, the concept of Africa Agency is an attractive one to the extent that it provides an analytical locus. Paying a little more attention on what African Agency means would lead us to a number of questions: How has Africa acted in the past? How is it acting today? How will Africa act in future? In answering these questions, it quickly becomes evident that African Agency can be the site for concurrence and contestations across time and space.

For instance, some may damp down on African Agency on grounds that it is no more than a twenty first century successor to the earlier Afro-centric concepts. African Agency has been with us since the emergence of Pan-African movement in the mid nineteenth century through the high noon of African Renaissance at the turn of the second millennium and on the ascend of the Africa Rising notion in the 2010s decade. From this viewpoint, African Agency is not a stand-alone concept but part and parcel of African thought patterns in time and space. Indeed, students of African history would be wary of introduction of African Agency if it digresses from foundational considerations of “Africanity” in its zeal to demonstrate a contested African renewal.

The use of the term “African Agency” is fairly novel going by a cursory synthesis of literature. A careful analysis of African Agency is called for, but a quick survey would indicate its appropriation by the an organization known as Maafa (Swahili for African Holocaust),¹ which appears not just to engage in the polemics of Africa’s sorry past, but indicates remedial action through modern politics, culture and business/economics. Equally, academic works by Afrocentrics such as Walter Rodney, Franz Fanon, Aime Cesair, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela … name them, have touched on African Agency either in the exact terms in which it is framed today or in terms of African action against subjugation from the days of slavery to a present in which Africa is assessed as being mainly on the receiving end of the so-called globalization.

In another example, isn’t the deeply analytical work by organizations such as the Association of Concerned African Scholars ² very much part of African Agency without being necessarily referred to as African Agency? This author was alerted to this caucus by Syracuse University’s professor Horace Campbell whose book on the Libyan dimension of the Arab Spring brings to the fore failures and successes of African Agency in dramatic ways.³

African Agency must therefore take cognizance of its Pan-African movement antecedents which in turn factored in the origin of humanity in Africa, as scientifically discussed by no less than scholars such as Charles Darwin⁴ and Chiekh Anta Diop.⁵ If nothing else, the fact of the origins of humanity in Africa is a primordial act of African Agency – all the races of the world among them Europeans and Asians, are nothing but a mutation of the original Africans. Africa as the cradle of civilization, which other civilizations owe a debt of origination, blends into the Pan-African movement. However, the Pan African movement was/is a global movement originating among blacks in the US and the so-called West Indies. The question that then arises is whether African Agency should be seen as action emanating from the African continent or the agency of all black people who trace their origins in Africa.

It appears to me that Africa, the continent has drifted away from the rest of diasporic Africans and the common heritage has been lost on the sands of time. One therefore wonders whether we should think of African Agency on a global scale or only with continental lenses. One often hears statements such as ‘US’ president Barack Obama is first and foremost an American and only secondarily an African.’ Such sentiments are nothing short of supplanting the original definition of Pan Africanism: ‘the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified.’⁶  

Although the Pan-African movement is alive today, as seen for instance in the holding of the East African Pan African movement in Nairobi this August,⁷the concept appears to have lost a bit of its original sheen and requires massive doses of new energy – at least in terms of how it is framed. But would this end up robbing a more narrowly defined concept of African Agency of its potential sting in global politics, culture and economy? When WEB Dubois declared that ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line’⁸ in what must be a must read essay for any student of African Agency, the circumstances for global blacks at home and abroad were dire. Some would argue that the situation has improved substantially for all Africans. Others will argue that the material and emotional bearing of Africans remains dire.

In the final analysis, African Agency has no legs to stand on if it does not go back to its Pan-African movement roots. But on the other, preoccupation with the past without proper analysis on the present, with an eye on the future, might end up miring African Agency in circuitous analysis that flies in the face of the “agency” aspects. A pathway in resolving this paradox is for analyses enriched by multiple disciplinary and sectoral perspectives, one that achieves the optimal blending of historical and contemporary nuances while studiously focused on action today and in the future. It is this nuanced approached that inspires the thirteen African Resource Bank Forum slated for November 2015 (link). 

By Dr Bob Wekesa, PhD,

Research Associate, University of the Witwatersrand, [email protected] 

References

1.http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/made%20in%20africa.html

2.http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/issue87/

3.Campbell, H. (2013), Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity, Monthly Review Press. 

4.Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th Edition 

5.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi0IRivzlNM

6.Encyclopedia Brittanica

7.https://www.facebook.com/thepanafricanmovementkenyanchapter

8.W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of the Black Folk