Africa without borders

Rwanda and Burundi were recently admitted as full members of the East Africa Community. It is both historic and timely. We criticize our leaders a lot, and most of the time justifiably. However, when they do good things we should also have the integrity to say well done.

It is historic in beginning to right some of the injuries inflicted on Africa that turned us into Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone and all the phony phones in spite of the fact that majority of our peoples do not have access to any phone! And if we are to be phonic, why should it not be Africaphone?

Whenever Pan Africanists talk about colonialism critics always say we are too focused on the past, escapist and blaming colonialism when, in their view, colonialism ‘finished’ long time ago. My retort has always been: How I wish! The impact of colonialism is so pronounced in our lives that even our physical geography is determined by this shameful past. For instance, go to any of the fancy hotels on the continent and ask for the breakfast menu. The option you will be given in many places is ‘continental breakfast’ but the continent will not be referring to the African continent. If you ask for African meals (Nigerian hotels being exceptions in terms of always having African foods) many of them will tell you that they needed ‘24 or 48 hours’ notice yet they can offer you all kinds of so called ‘international’ cuisine. In ‘Francophone’ countries, choices of cheeses and wines from particular regions of France are available on demand!

Leave the foods and let us look at traveling on the continent. If you travel from Kampala to Kigali by road and it is raining in Mbarara, it is likely that it will rain all the way to Kabale and from there to Kigali. Similarly the physical geography, topography, the lush greenery, hills, valleys, all remain the same, only increasing in density as you move on. Then you reach Kabale, the last major city on the Uganda side, about 20 kilometers from where you come to the border post, Gatuna (to Ugandans) or Katuna (to the Rwandese).

Nothing has changed in the geography, the looks of the people and even the languages they speak are mutually intelligible. You will see the peasants, petty traders, carrying their wares through panya panya roads parallel to the formal border roads, while those of us with passports are waiting to cross over on either side in our vehicles. These peasants just carry on as good Pan Africanists ignoring the tarred road and officials.

After you clear border bureaucracy, your first challenge will be to change from driving on the left (as in Britain) to the right (as in France). Before you recover from the driving change you also have to adjust your watch by one hour! I am not a geographer but I am not persuaded that between Kabale and Kigali or Kampala there is an hour time difference, exactly the same time difference between Paris and London! I think this has more to do with history than geography, and that history is colonialism. Those who claim colonialism ended have definitely been quick to forget. However there is a part of the criticism that I do accept. The responsibility for keeping these mental and physical borders rests with Africans and our leaders. It does not excuse you and I, because these leaders came from among us and we are the ones who through our action, inaction or indifference keep them in power.

They enjoyed keeping us divided so that they can remain big fishes in the tiny ponds bequeathed to them by colonialism. They talk regional integration but engage in national disintegration politics. They talk Pan Africanism but preside over sectarian political systems of ‘tribalism, ‘clannish’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘regionalism’, ‘religiosity’ and other kinds of divisive politics. Since they could not hold the country together it became impossible to aspire to regional integration or Pan African unity.

The Cold War also gave some of our leaders the false confidence that they could survive as client states of the West or the East without bothering about their neighbours.

Hence the first East Africa community collapsed under the twin pressures of internal political disagreements between state elites and their external alliances. But the peoples of the region continued cooperating irrespective of what happened in the state lodges. The governments are now listening to the people and reconciling themselves to reality.

In the past few years Africa has returned to the agenda of regional integration and Pan Africanism because globalization is making most of the states irrelevant. Also with the end of the Cold War many of our states and leaders ceased to be of strategic importance and lost their opportunistic levers of playing the West against the East.

The larger point is the fact that in spite of the many challenges, our democratic struggles are succeeding. Most of the leaders are not able to rule in the old ways again. The quality of leadership is improving across this continent.

In addition to the Cold War, the old colonial rivalry especially between the British and their French cousins endured for a long time in Africa and militated against regional cooperation, integration and Pan-Africanism.

Two regions of Africa - East Africa and West Africa - suffered most the consequences of this European tribalism. As the European Union became a reality the Francophone countries suddenly became aware that they were in Africa after all because France could not take them into the Euro Zone.

What makes Rwanda and Burundi, Central Africa? Geograhically and historically if they are central to anything it is East Africa. However because the French had to distinguish their looted territories from those of their British cousins, the geographic misnomer came about. This misnomer groups Cameroon, which is in West Africa, with Rwanda, the real Central Africa, the two Congos and Gabon as Central Africa!

By formally admitting Rwanda and Burundi into the East Africa Community the political leaders are finally reconciling history with geography and snatching victory from the jaws of colonial defeat.

It is a sign of a region slowly coming to terms with itself. The biggest contribution of the two countries to the region is their peoples as workers and producers. The Banyarwanda are easily the largest ethnic group in the region. They live in their millions in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and DRC. But historically they have been badly treated in their own countries and treated as either refugees or long-term migrants with no permanent rights as citizens no matter how many generations they may have lived there. Genocide and irresponsible leadership drove many away from their homes, and xenophobia prevents them from becoming full citizens in the countries of their refuge.

Xenophobia is so strong in the region that in Uganda two popular ways of discounting the claims of your political opponent is to call them ‘Banyarwanda’ (meaning Tutsi) or Nubian (meaning Sudanese).

The expanded East Africa now provides opportunity for regional citizenship and with it the right of every citizen of the region to live, settle, work in any part of the region. With progress towards a political federation this will include the right to vote and be voted for.

For Africa as a whole we want our peoples to have the right to move, settle, work, and live without visas or passports from Cape Town to Cairo. As steady progress is being made at regional level it makes this Pan African dimension inevitable. West Africans have been free to move across their region for two decades now, and this has not led to everyone moving to Nigeria. The peoples of the Old East Africa have been free to move around and adding Rwanda and Burundi to the region does not mean that all the people will move to Kenya or Tanzania or Uganda. It just means that they are free to do so if they wish without any security or police always harassing them as ‘foreigners’.

Similarly, other East Africans could go to Kigali or Bujumbura as and when they please.

South Africa and Southern Africa need to learn from these two experiences to assure them that freedom of movement does not mean that everyone wants to come to Joburg. The majority of Africans live and would like to remain in their villages in peace, security and prosperity. Those who need to move will do so one way or the other. We need to stop criminalizing them as ‘smugglers’, ‘aliens’, or ‘illegal immigrants’. Most of them are Pan-Africanist entrepreneurs delivering goods and services to our peoples, as and when needed in the true spirit of ‘Africa sans Frontiers’ or ‘Africa without borders’.

• Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

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