So Macron Is a Pan-Africanist Now!?!

At a summit in Nairobi last week, Emmanuel Macron called himself a Pan-Africanist. The outrage was immediate — and fair. But the more interesting question is the one underneath it: what is Pan-Africanism actually, what does it demand, and how much of it have we built? This episode goes into the argument at the heart of the idea — Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor, three men who all believed in it and disagreed about almost everything else — and asks what it still requires of us today. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

At a press conference in Nairobi last week, French president Emmanuel Macron said Pan Africanists. We the true pan Africanist. A French president standing on the continent that France colonized, whose resources France extracted, whose currencies France still controls in fourteen countries, calling himself a Pan-African. Now the easy answer here is outrage. And outrage is not wrong. There is something genuinely audacious about that claim, and people across the continent have said it loudly. But I want to do something that is a little bit harder than being outraged. I want to ask the question that the statement Macron made forces us to ask ourselves. But what is it as a political idea? What does it claim to be? What does it demand? And what would it look like if we were actually doing it? How would we know that we were practicing Pan-Africanism? Because as I think about it, I keep coming back to a thing, and it is that Pan-Africanism was never a single settled idea. From the very beginning, the people who believed in Pan-Africanism the most on this continent have deeply disagreed with each other about what pan-Africanism meant, what it required, and how to get there. My name is Amadou. This is Learning Africa. And today we are going into the argument that is at the heart of Pan-Africanism, the one that started at independence and has not yet finished. Let's start with the first question: What is Pan-Africanism at its core? Before we get into the arguments, once you strip it down to its simplest form, Pan-Africanism is the belief that African people on the continent and scattered across the world by the slave trade, you combine them together, they share a common interest in self-determination. And so, because of that shared interest, by acting together, Africans could build a future together that none of them could build alone. That is it. That right there is the seed. The fact that our shared interest is stronger than the divisions between us, be they the colonial borders, the different languages, the different religions we practice, the different histories that we carry, that is it. We have a shared common interest, and so when we come together and act on that, we can build something that is bigger, and the belief that we must then do that, that is Pan-Africanism. Now that might sound too simple, so I want you to consider the two characteristics of Pan-Africanism. First is that the idea was born partly outside of Africa, among people of African descent, in the Caribbean and the Americas, whose ancestors had been taken by force and who were building an identity that was trying to reclaim the connection to the continent. That diaspora dimension is still present today. When an African American is investing in an African tech company in Ghana, or a Caribbean politician is arguing for operations at the UN, that is the same idea, still traveling. The second characteristic here is that Pan-Africanism was always from the beginning an economic argument as much as it was a political one. When we go back to that shared interest, the independence movements of the 20th century, they were not just demanding flags or national entems or seats at the United Nations. They believed that if you are demanding for independence, you must also demand for control over your own economy. And so that means that these countries should have control over their resources, their trade, their currencies, their capacities to industrialize rather than just remaining the world's raw material supplier. The political freedom and the economic freedom were understood as inseparable. You cannot govern yourself if someone else controls what you produce and what that production is worth. Now that that foundation is in place, let us get into the argument. In the years around African independence, three men dominated the conversation around what pan-Africanism should look like in practice. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal. They all believed in Pan-Africanism. They disagreed about almost everything else. But there is a question that they were trying to answer. What does it look like for Africa to be free? What does it actually take? Aside from just the flags, the national identities, the anthems. Africa, in order for it to be free and to be in control of its own future, its own economy, and its own place in the world, what would that take? That's the same question they all tried to answer. Kwame Kruma looked at the African map. Thirty-something territories, most of them small, most of them poor, most of them still wired into economies that were designed to serve their former colonizers. And he said, These countries cannot survive alone. Foreign powers will play them against each other. The only real leverage that Africa has is to unite a continental government, a continental common currency, common foreign policy. And this is what differentiates him from Nerere. Not only did he see unity as Africa's only leverage, but he also thought that it should be done right now. The sense of urgency that he put behind the idea. Nyerere heard Kruma and he said, I agree with you and I agree with where you want to go, but I disagree about how we get there. Nerere's argument was about sequencing. He said, You cannot unite what does not yet exist. To build a continental government out of states with no functioning institutions, no trained civil servants, no economic base, you only get something hollow. He believed in it enough that he once offered to delay his own country's independence to help build an East African Federation. And so he did not disagree with Kruma, but he thought that Kruma was trying to build the roof before the walls. There is also Senghor. Sengor took a hard look at Kwame Kruma and Julius Nyerere and said, You are both missing something. You are both missing a deeper question here. Who are we? What is the cultural foundation that makes solidarity possible? Sengor thought that the answer was rooted in the belief that African civilization had its own values and ways of knowing that did not need to be measured against European modernity. That foundation had to be reclaimed first. Once we put these three positions side by side, we realize that none of them was necessarily wrong. Kruma's warning about fragmentation was accurate. Twenty more countries have been carved out around the continent since then. Nyerere's warning about hollow institutions, that was also accurate. Continental bodies like the EU built on weak states, they only produce weak outcomes. And Senghor's question about cultural foundation, it also rings true. You cannot build durable solidarity out of borrowed frameworks. So they were all right about the problem they were pointing at. What they had disagreed about was which problem comes first. And that argument about what comes first, it was never settled. And since that hasn't been settled, I want us now to look at where that argument stands in 2026. The African Union exists. It has a parliament, court, peace council, development agency, a free trade agreement covering all fifty-four countries of the continent. On paper, that sounds like what Kruma wanted. In practice, the EU has almost no enforcement power over member states. It is chronically underfunded. And it is watching members walk away and form their own blocks. Members violate their own constitutions without the EU being able to do anything other than issue statements. The economic picture is starker. African countries still borrow in foreign currencies. African commodities are still priced in markets in London and Chicago. The DRC produces the majority of the world's cobalt and is also at the same time one of the poorest countries on earth. As it currently stands, African countries have the flags, but they do not have yet the economies. This phenomenon is exactly what Kruma described when he coined the term neocolonialism. Sixty years later, that name has not become less accurate. Now let's look at it from Nerere's perspective and his position around national foundations needing to be strong in order for there to be a strong continental government. When we look at the state of the continent today and ask the question are the national foundations strong enough to build on? The honest answer is some of them. But the sharper critic of Nerere's position that has grown with time is this waiting for national institutions to be strong enough has no natural end point. There is no moment when a country announces that it is ready. And while we wait, the fragmentation that Kruma had warned us about keeps doing its work. African voice in global institutions is diluted because it is divided. The window has been closing for years on the opportunity to unite. Because wherever you stand on this, I think there is an argument to be made that it would be easier to unite 34 countries or 33 that we had back then than it would now be to unite the 54 countries that currently exist. That leads us into Senghor's question. Who are we? What is the foundation? Here is where I think the most unresolved work sits. Africa has over two thousand languages, dozens of colonial histories, Muslim majority and Christian majority and mixed societies, and a diaspora whose relationship to the continent is real but also complicated. Pan Africanism though cannot rest on cultural essentialism, on the claim that there is one African way of being. That road has historically been used to exclude African women, African religious minorities, and other subgroups within the continent. Pan-Africanism, an idea built to resist exclusion, cannot afford to reproduce it. What I think Senghor's question actually demands is not a single answer about African identity. What it demands is that African intellectual and cultural production be taken seriously as the foundation for African political and economic choices. It is a demand for African economists to build frameworks that fit African conditions. It is a demand for African legal scholars to build the jurisprudence of the African court. It is a demand for the African technologists to build for the African context. It is a demand for us to stop importing frameworks and rebranding them with local names. It is a demand for us to embrace the genuine thinking from the inside out and stop importing. In 2026, intra-African trade is below 17% of total African trade. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement does exist in law, but it struggles in practice because the infrastructure, the roads, the payment systems, customs, the trust between nations, that infrastructure has not caught up. African minerals still largely leave the continent unprocessed. The African Union still depends heavily on external donors for its own funding, which we have to admit is a structural contradiction for an institution whose purpose is African sovereignty. At the same time, African mobile payment systems move billions of dollars that never touch a Western bank. African writers are building global readerships in African languages. African climate scientists are changing conversations in international forums. African entrepreneurs are building companies that solve African problems without waiting for Western blueprint. Pan Africanism is the sum of all of that. The institutions, the individuals, the policy, the practice. It is not finished, but it is also not waiting to begin. Now back to Macron. The fact that a French president wants to claim Pan-Africanism is worth something. Ideas that threaten no one do not get stolen. They get ignored. The vocabulary is being borrowed precisely because it has power, because it means something real that people across this continent can feel. But an idea that can be claimed by anyone with no specific demands attached is an idea being hallowed out. And Kruma and Nere and Sengor for all their disagreements were clear about one thing. Pan Africanism was not a feeling, it is a program. Specific structural demands about who controls African economies, who sets the terms of African trade, who shapes African intellectual life. Those demands are still unmet. Not because the people who made them were wrong, but because meeting them means confronting interests, and that's inside and outside of the continent. The argument between the three men never ended. It moved. It moved into AU summit halls, into finance ministry negotiations, into decisions about whether to process minerals before exporting them, into the choices African artists make every day about which language they create their art in. The argument about Pan-Africanism, what it is, how we get there. That argument is now yours. It is yours and it is mine. You are in it just as much as I am in it. And that is whether or not we like it. Ubuntu, I am because you are.