The African Union and the Destiny of Africahood: The Southern Africa Development Community and Neo-colonial Challenges to Pan-Africanism

Abstract

Only a united Africa can redeem its past glory, renew and reinforce its strength for the realization of its destiny. We are today the richest and yet the poorest of continents, but in unity our continent could smile in a new era of prosperity and power”, Kwame Nkrumah, President of the first independent Sub-Saharan African State of Ghana 1957. Abraham Knife, Challenges and prospects of Pan-African Economic Integration. (http//:eiipd.org/publications/occasional%20papers/pan_african_eco_integration.htm). 23 October 2003.“To dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people`s history and a determinant of history, by the positive and negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies”, Amilcar Cabral, the late President of the Republic of Guinnea-Bissau.Centre of Pan African Culture. (http//:hierographics.org/cpacdefined.htm). 14 October 2003.