A panoramic view of a continent

Mail & Guardian

01-05-2025

Adekeye Adebajo's book is an analysis of Africa, from the perspective of 30 years of study, which offers an overview of the decades since the fall of apartheid in 1994
The 145 essays in my new book The Splendid Tapestry of African Life: Essays on A Resilient Continent, its Diaspora, and the World represent the ripest fruits of three decades of reflecting and writing on the history, regional integration, politics, foreign policy, international relations, culture, film, sports and travel of Africa and its diaspora in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean, as well as on the world beyond Global Africa.
This volume seeks to capture the zeitgeist of the post-apartheid era after the continent's five-century quest for liberation from the twin scourges of European-led transatlantic slavery and colonialism finally ended with South Africa's democratic transition in 1994.
Africa's independence battles from the late Fifties had been mirrored by similar battles in the Caribbean as well as America's civil rights struggle. Both involved citizens of the Black Atlantic: the heirs of slavery and colonialism.
I entered the field of international relations in 1990 as Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years of captivity to negotiate South Africa's democratic future at a time when the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union was ending.
The contemporary age threatens a looming battle between an America (under the erratic, nativist regime of Donald Trump), which is in relative decline and still has a large military presence in Africa, and a rising China, which remains Africa's largest trading partner at $295 billion and accounts for nearly half the continent's construction market.
Africa will have to contend with these powers, as well as others such as Russia, France, the EU and Gulf countries, which are all involved in security, trade and investment activities on the continent.
Over half of the UN's 58 peacekeeping missions in the post-Cold War era have taken place in Africa, while the world body currently has 80% of its peacekeepers deployed across the continent.
The UN thus remains Africa's most important security partner, with conflicts continuing to rage from the Great Lakes, to Central Africa, to the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and northern Mozambique.
Intra-African trade remains a paltry 15%, while Africa's external debt stands at $1.2 trillion, with governments typically spending more than 45% of their revenues on servicing these unsustainable debts rather than on vital social sectors.
Africa's continuing struggle to achieve effective regional integration and industrialisation thus constitutes a major focus of this book.
Similarly, the Caribbean's 20 micro-states have struggled to promote effective regional integration through the Caribbean Community, often prioritising parochial identities over regional ones.
These essays are divided into 10 main sections. The first part examines the legacies of pan-Africanist struggles against slavery and imperialism and Global Africa's efforts to achieve reparations for slavery and colonialism — the African Union's (AU) theme for 2025 — and to promote cultural self-realisation.
The themes covered include: the obligations of the pan-African public intellectual, Western racism towards Africa, the German genocide in Namibia, religion, the legacy on Africa of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, cultural stereotyping of Africa, the diversity of Afro-Caribbean life, white-supremacist historical monuments, transforming humanities curricula in African and African-American studies, the global apartheid of Covid-19, and the international neglect of the damage which was caused by the 2016 Haitian hurricane.
Critiques are also undertaken of past British Afro-pessimistic writers such as Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene; present-day British Afrophobes such as Nigel Biggar, Richard Dowden, Stephen Ellis and Mark Huband, as well as the Afro-pessimistic Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo.
The second part assesses the challenges of regionalism in Africa through the efforts of the Organisation of African Unity, the AU, the Southern African Development Community and the Economic Community of West African States, while examining regional integration initiatives involving Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, as well as Afro-Asian cooperation.
Part three focuses on the broad topic of African politics, diagnosing the continent's successes and failures — through its 'madmen' politicians and 'specialist' soldiers — as well as covering subjects such as conflict resolution, popular revolutions and the role of youth activists and regional hegemons.
Also discussed are the negative impacts of European colonial engineering on African state-building and the 'Afro-Arab Spring' of 2011 which toppled autocracies in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
With the advantage of having lived in South Africa as a Nigerian citizen for 21 years, I analyse, in the fourth section, the prospects of Africa's two regional hegemons — Nigeria and South Africa — providing leadership to the continent, by examining their domestic and foreign policies, as well as their collaborative peacemaking efforts and complex relationship of cooperation and competition.
I also offer a critique of the writing of South African analysts Mills Soko and Peter Fabricius.
The fifth part assesses Africa's international relations, examining the prospects for Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui's 1967 concept of Pax Africana — a peace created, cultivated, and consolidated by Africans themselves.
Fourteen Nobel Peace laureates of African descent are examined, with the Tunisian Nobelist quartet counted as a single laureate.
Issues of conflict resolution — from Liberia and Bosnia to Libya and Western Sahara — are also discussed, together with the efforts of African regional bodies and the UN to silence the guns across Africa.
I assess the complicated relationship between Africa and the EU and the roles of bilateral external actors — France, the US, China and Russia — in Africa.
The Afro-pessimistic and neo-colonial musings of the American journalist Robert Kaplan, as well as British economist Paul Collier, are critiqued, while the perspectives of African-American analyst Francis Kornegay and South Africa's Greg Mills, on Libya, are scrutinised.
The sixth part looks at the rich diversity of the Black Atlantic's culture and films, including the Nigeria-hosted second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1977; the phenomenon of Nigeria's film industry, Nollywood; Nigerian Nobel Literature laureate Wole Soyinka's play and film Death and the King's Horseman and South African director Mandla Dube's movie Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu.
I analyse too Global Africa's fatal attraction with, and triumphs in, Hollywood; examine the life and times of Caribbean-American artist Harry Belafonte and review six important African American films: Selma, Black Panther, If Beale Street Could Talk, Harriet, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom — based on a play by African-American playwright, August Wilson — and The Woman King.
The seventh part examines the history of African football, the successes and failures of modern-day Nigerian football, and the excellence of global African sportsmen at the football World Cup.
Also assessed are topics such as the genius of Brazilian football and New Zealand rugby; pan-African athletes excelling at the 2015 World Athletics championships; the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and 2021 and last year's Paris Olympics.
In addition, the golden age of West Indian cricket between 1980 and 1995 is analysed.
The eighth section presents travelogues across some of Africa's great cities: Lagos, Abuja, Accra, Abidjan, Johannesburg and Laayoune.
Part nine examines the world beyond Africa through multilateral lenses, analysing the legacies of impactful conferences in Berlin (1884 and 1885) and Bandung (1955), as well as the evolving geo-political struggle between Pax Americana and Pax Sinica.
I suggest how Africa can position itself in this rapidly changing global strategic environment, before examining the efforts of the global South to revive the Cold War-era concept of non-alignment in the wake of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
After highlighting the EU's region-building initiatives, this section engages with the UN's legacy at 75 and its institutional reform efforts; the global body's humanitarian mission in Iraq during the late 1990s; the futile attempts of the Group of Eight (G8) and G20 to alleviate global poverty and promote international development and the pretentious grandstanding of the World Economic Forum.
The 10th and final section of the book addresses the Anglo-Saxon world of America and Britain, countries in which I have spent a total of 21 years.
Issues of unilateral imperialism, hubristic hypocrisy, delusions of grandeur and dyed-in-the-wool racism are analysed in the politics of both countries, highlighting the role of figures such as Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Boris Johnson, and Rhodes (in a response to South African academic Max Price).
This book thus provides — in a comprehensive but concise and highly readable volume — a panoramic view of the Black Atlantic in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.