The Ghettos of Pan Africanism by Ademola Araoye

Description

The Ghettos of Pan-Africanism excavates the tortuous trajectory of the struggle for totalistic
emancipation of black humanity and affirms the undiminished integrity of the axioms
encapsulated in Pan Africanism as a philosophy of radical action for that elusive
emancipation. The Ghettos is against the background of strenuous attempts at counterfeited
deflections of the original ideas of pan Africanism through politically driven contentious
reinterpretations of the philosophy on the home continent and increasing ethnicization of black
humanity in the Diaspora through direct and nuanced repudiation of the essences of the black
self. These deflections of the philosophy and physical defections from the race are often for
narrow and convenient ends. The Ghettos of Pan Africanism revalidates the original
understandings of pan Africanism as a race based radicalized voice articulating the centrality of
the unity of black people in pursuit of the common destiny of that one race. Pan Africanism was
never based on the aggregation of states burnishing mere fictive sovereignties in their odious
reinforced silos of massive human misery. African states are highlighted as sore fixations in
aborted transition validated by the anti-people political entrepreneurs (poliprenuers) who double
as proxies of the inimical external order and their human agency in the inimical external Other. The
Ghettos illustrates the consequences of this in the pervasive malignancy of African statehood that
is understood as an acursed impediment to the fulfillment of the emancipation thrust of black
struggle. In practical terms, the rejection of Pan Africanism as the fundamental underpinning of
political evolution by Africa’s wounding fathers in Addis Ababa in 1963 is adduced as the source of
the consolidation of Africa and black humanity along the tangents of relevance in the affairs of
humanity.
Professor Ademola Araoye is Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFund Center of
Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja, Gwagwalada, FCT,
and Nigeria. He is a former Nigerian diplomat and retired from the United Nations as Head of
Office for the Consolidation of Democratic Governance of the United Nation Mission in Liberia
(UNMIL). He is author of Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth (Africa World
Press, New Jersey, 2012) and The Sources of Conflict in the Post-Colonial African State (Africa World Press, New Jersey, 2014).

“At once profoundly erudite and deeply reflective, this book is a triumph and tour de force. It
provides a fresh discursive canon that interrogates the contested contours of pan-Africanism in a
manner that is bound to shift intellectual and normative debates in a new direction. Here
pan-Africanism is liberated from the shallow reductionism that has stifled deeper introspection;
while the debilitating stasis and paralysing structuralism of the African interstate system stands
exposed for its dehumanizing post-colonial effects. In an age where power continues to express
itself as a ruse of history, we encounter in these pages the power of an emancipatory
epistemology that is embedded in subtle interpretation, thoughtful argument, and excellent
scholarship”.
-Prof Garth le Pere, Extraordinary Professor, University of Pretoria, South Africa

ISBN: 978-1-943533-53-4 Ι Published 2021 Ι Pan-African University Press.