Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar)
Sankofa: Memory as strategy
The Akan principle of Sankofa teaches, “Go back and fetch what was forgotten.”
This is not a call to romanticise the past. It is a warning against historical amnesia. We are going to celebrate on May 23 the Omagongo/Omaongo Annual Cultural Festival, inscribed by UNESCO on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2015. The 25th of May is Africa Day, and May 28 is officially observed as Genocide Remembrance Day in Namibia.
It is a national public holiday dedicated to honouring the tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people who were brutally killed by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908. Widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century, the colonial campaign resulted in the deaths of approximately 65 000 Herero (about 80% of the population) and 10 000 Nama.
Victims were subjected to mass executions, starvation in the Omaheke desert, and horrific conditions in concentration camps. For this reason May 28 was chosen as the date because it marks the day in 1907 when German authorities ordered the closure of these brutal concentration camps, ending this initial chapter of systematic slaughter. Indeed, civilisations decline not only when they are conquered but also when they forget themselves.
Across Africa, many postcolonial states continue to operate through inherited colonial institutions, externally orientated economies, and political cultures shaped more by elite survival than by long-term civilisational vision. Independence changed flags and constitutions, but in many cases it did not fundamentally alter the architecture of dependency.
Nations that forget how they were weakened often reproduce the mechanisms of their own subjugation.
Africa’s precolonial history contains sophisticated traditions of diplomacy, commerce, governance, scientific knowledge, conflict resolution, and regional integration. The challenge is not to recreate the past, but to recover strategic intelligence from it. The Kongolese conception of kingship as stewardship, the Mali Empire’s Kouroukan Fouga charter of 1236 with its limits on power and environmental protections, the decentralised consultative traditions of the Oromo gadaa system, or the commercial federalism of the Swahili coast were not primitive anomalies. They were functioning political logics erased or marginalised by colonial rule and later dismissed by imported modernity.
Without historical consciousness, leadership becomes reactive rather than visionary. Leaders think of power rather than purpose. Societies begin to imitate rather than create. Dependency becomes normalised. Memory itself becomes colonised.
And a civilisation that loses memory eventually loses direction.
The unfinished project of nationhood
One of the least understood forces in political history is the will to be a nation.
A nation is not merely a flag, a border, a language, or even an ethnic group. Those elements matter, but they do not automatically create nationhood. What ultimately forms a nation is a collective psychological and political decision of the willingness of a people to imagine themselves as sharing a common destiny.
This is why many states exist without truly becoming nations, while some nations survive even without states.
The French thinker Ernest Renan described a nation as “a daily plebiscite”, a continuous act of collective consent rather than a biological fact. That insight remains profoundly relevant in Africa, where colonial borders often grouped together societies with different historical trajectories while separating peoples with long-standing civilisational ties.
The postcolonial African state inherited borders, institutions, and economies designed primarily for extraction rather than national cohesion. Independence therefore did not merely require governance. It required the nation making itself.
Leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara, and Sam Nujoma understood that the deeper struggle was psychological and civilisational. Political independence without continental consciousness would remain fragile.
Nyerere’s ujamaa villages failed economically in many respects, yet his Swahili language policy succeeded historically. A Tanzanian from Mbeya can communicate with one from Mwanza in a shared civic language their grandparents may never have spoken together. That is nationhood functioning as infrastructure.
Where national consciousness weakened, the state often became an arena for factional competition rather than a shared civic project. In many countries, political elites captured state institutions before genuine civic nationhood had fully formed. Citizens therefore related more strongly to tribe, region, religion, or patronage networks than to the republic itself.
The “will to be a nation” depends on several conditions such as a shared historical narrative, institutions viewed as belonging to everyone, economic inclusion, collective sacrifice, and a belief that the future can be built together.
Without these foundations, patriotism becomes theatrical rather than structural.
The deeper question is therefore not whether a country possesses borders recognised by the United Nations. The real question is this: “Do its people genuinely believe they belong to one another?”
That belief, fragile, cultivated, and constantly contested, is the true foundation of nationhood.
Africa is not poor it is structurally fragmented
Africa possesses some of the world’s largest reserves of oil, gas, cobalt, uranium, diamonds, gold, coltan, copper, lithium, and rare earth minerals. It contains immense agricultural potential, strategic waterways, vast demographic energy, and one of the youngest populations on Earth.
Yet the continent remains economically vulnerable, industrially weak, technologically dependent, and politically fragmented.
This contradiction reveals a deeper truth that Africa’s crisis is not fundamentally a crisis of resources. It is a crisis of power, organisation, and strategic sovereignty.
The tragedy of Africa is that it remains rich enough to feed the world, power the world, and enrich the world while remaining structurally organised to enrich others before itself.
This is the logic of dependency.
The resource curse and the architecture of extraction
Many African states remain trapped within what economists describe as the resource curse.
When governments depend more on mineral rents than on productive citizens, accountability deteriorates. Political elites begin to view the state not as an instrument of national development, but as a mechanism for controlling access to extraction networks. Institutions weaken. Corruption becomes systemic. Elections become struggles over resource control rather than competing visions of national transformation.
The result is visible across much of the continent: enormous natural wealth coexisting with failing public services, capital flight alongside mass poverty, youth unemployment amid resource abundance and chronic instability in strategically valuable regions.
There are important exceptions. Botswana’s relative success with diamond revenues emerged not because it possessed minerals but because it consolidated institutional capacity before extraction rents fully reshaped the political system. The lesson is not that resources determine destiny, but that institutions determine whether resources become engines of development or accelerants of decay.
History shows that nations do not become powerful simply because they possess resources. They become powerful because they build institutions capable of transforming resources into industrial capacity, technological sovereignty, military resilience, and social development.
Without institutions, resources become accelerants of decline.
Colonialism changed form more than it disappeared
Thinkers such as Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, and Andre Gunder Frank warned that political independence alone would not dismantle global hierarchies.
Their analysis associated with dependency theory and Pan-African political economy argued that the international system was designed to preserve unequal relations between industrial centres and resource-exporting peripheries.
Africa exports raw materials and imports finished products.
It exports labour and imports debt.
It exports strategic minerals while importing technological dependence.
The forms have changed, but the structural logic often remains.
Colonialism no longer requires governors in foreign uniforms. It survives through debt conditionality, currency dependency, unequal trade structures, foreign military penetration, technological monopolies, capital repatriation and the co-optation of local elites.
The greatest danger today is not direct occupation. It is the normalisation of dependency administered by Africans themselves.
This is why foreign investment alone cannot be mistaken for development.
Investment without industrial strategy produces dependency. Debt without productive transformation produces subordination. Infrastructure without sovereign planning creates externally managed corridors of extraction rather than independent national economies.
A continent that exports its minerals, its labour, its youth, and its imagination will eventually export its future.
The psychological dimension of dependency
Political domination survives psychologically before it survives militarily.
One of the deepest wounds of colonialism was not merely territorial conquest but the restructuring of consciousness itself.
Frantz Fanon warned that colonised societies often internalise the worldview of domination. Foreign approval becomes a measure of legitimacy. Imported models become synonymous with progress. Local knowledge becomes devalued.
This psychological dependency remains visible across much of Africa’s educational systems, detached from African realities, elites seeking validation abroad rather than accountability at home, development strategies designed for external investors rather than domestic transformation and cultural imitation mistaken for modernisation.
Without psychological sovereignty, political sovereignty remains incomplete.
A people taught to doubt their own civilisational capacity eventually become dependent not only economically but also mentally.
The recovery of epistemic sovereignty, the right to define what counts as knowledge, progress and legitimacy, is therefore the precondition for all other sovereignties.
No amount of mineral wealth or military hardware can substitute for it.
The Fukuyama illusion and the crisis of imported models
After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represented the final stage of ideological evolution. Many African states embraced imported governance templates under the assumption that history had reached a settled destination.
But history never ends.
Political systems detached from social realities eventually fracture. Institutions copied without historical adaptation become ceremonial structures lacking legitimacy. Elections alone do not create democracy. Constitutions alone do not create justice. Markets alone do not create sovereignty.
Across the world, including within Western powers themselves, democratic systems are experiencing polarisation, institutional distrust, inequality, and legitimacy crises.
Africa must therefore resist the temptation to imitate external models uncritically while neglecting its own historical realities and developmental priorities.
The question is not whether Africa should reject democracy. The question is whether African societies can construct systems rooted in accountability, social cohesion, economic transformation, and historical context rather than dependency on external validation.
Some hybrid experiments already suggest possibilities. Rwanda’s gacaca courts, Botswana’s kgotla assemblies, and localised participatory traditions across the continent demonstrate that institutional legitimacy often grows strongest when governance resonates culturally rather than merely constitutionally.
The challenge is not imitation. It is adaptation.
No African state can achieve full sovereignty alone
One of the great strategic illusions of the postcolonial era is the belief that fragmented African micro-states can individually negotiate on equal terms with continental-scale powers such as China, the United States, or India, or blocs such as the European Union.
They cannot.
Fragmentation guarantees vulnerability.
No African state alone possesses the scale required to industrialize independently, defend strategic resources, negotiate fairly within global finance, achieve technological sovereignty or exercise meaningful geopolitical leverage.
This is why pan-Africanism must be understood not as symbolism, but as strategy.
Continental integration is not romantic idealism. It is geopolitical necessity.
Without deeper African coordination in trade, infrastructure, defence, finance, technology, and industrial policy, external powers will continue negotiating with African states individually while benefiting collectively from Africa’s fragmentation.
A divided continent remains easier to penetrate economically, manipulate politically and subordinate strategically.
The greatest threat is internal decay
The greatest threat to Africa may not come from foreign powers alone but from internal institutional erosion.
No empire in history collapsed simply because enemies existed outside its borders. Collapse usually began with internal corruption, elite arrogance, weakened institutions, civic distrust, stagnation and the separation of ruling classes from national realities.
The same law of history applies to African states.
When governments silence criticism instead of correcting failures, they weaken themselves. When ruling parties confuse state institutions with partisan machinery, national legitimacy erodes. When youth lose faith in merit, opportunity, and justice, instability becomes inevitable.
Africa is entering a demographic century in which hundreds of millions of young people will demand dignity, participation, employment, and inclusion. States incapable of meeting those demands will face mounting pressure regardless of how powerful their security apparatus appears.
Force can delay a crisis. It cannot solve structural decay.
One of the least discussed forms of decay is intellectual dependency itself, which is the collapse of serious indigenous policy research and strategic planning. Too many governments outsource national development frameworks to foreign consultants, international lenders or external advisory firms that possess neither cultural intimacy nor a long-term stake in national survival.
A nation that cannot formulate its own development horizon grounded in its own data, debated in its own institutions, and accountable to its own citizens has already surrendered part of its sovereignty.
A warning to Africa’s political class and to Africans themselves
History is unforgiving toward leadership classes that mistake temporary control for permanent legitimacy.
No ruling elite is immune from decline. No liberation movement remains eternally revolutionary. No state survives indefinitely on slogans, symbolism and extraction while neglecting institutional development.
But the responsibility does not belong to leaders alone.
A civilisation cannot outsource its future entirely to political elites.
The deeper danger facing Africa is the possibility that dependency becomes psychologically normalised, that fragmentation becomes accepted as inevitable, that extraction becomes mistaken for development and that sovereignty becomes reduced to ceremonies while strategic control remains external.
Africa does not lack intelligence.
It does not lack resources.
It does not lack civilisational depth.
What it risks lacking is the collective continental will necessary to transform potential into durable power before another historical cycle of dependency takes hold.
The future will belong to societies capable of building strong institutions rather than strongmen, productive economies rather than extractive dependency, civic legitimacy rather than fear-based rule, continental solidarity rather than fragmentation and historical consciousness rather than elite amnesia.
The strategic minerals coordinating council a concrete first step
Diagnosis without action becomes performance.
The question, therefore, is not merely what Africa suffers from, but what concrete institutional step could realistically begin altering the trajectory within the next decade.
One practical possibility is the creation of a Pan-African Strategic Minerals Coordinating Council (SMCC).
Today, African cobalt from the DRC, lithium from Zimbabwe and Mali, uranium from Niger and Namibia, copper from Zambia, and rare earth minerals from southern Africa are largely negotiated through fragmented bilateral arrangements. Foreign firms often possess more market intelligence than the governments selling the resources themselves. African states compete against one another for investment, lowering royalties and standards in the process.
The SMCC could begin modestly but strategically, with three core functions:
1. Joint market intelligence: a shared database of contracts, pricing structures, production forecasts, and buyers.
2. Coordinated negotiation frameworks: minimum standards for royalties, local processing requirements, labour protections, and technology transfer clauses.
3. A Pan-African certification mechanism reducing external monopolisation over “ethical sourcing” standards that often function as geopolitical leverage.
A pilot coalition involving the DRC, Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and others could operationalise the first stages without requiring a grand continental treaty architecture.
The objective would not be to replicate OPEC mechanically but to increase negotiating leverage, transparency, and industrial coordination.
If successful, such coordination could later expand into continental payment systems, African credit rating institutions, shared sovereign wealth mechanisms, strategic infrastructure financing and industrial manufacturing corridors tied to battery and green-energy value chains.
History rarely changes through dramatic declarations alone. It changes through strategic institutions that become irreversible over time.
History never truly ends
It only changes the actors who fail to learn from it.
The question is not whether Africa will face external pressure, resource competition, debt leverage, technological dependency, or geopolitical turbulence. It will.
The question is whether African leaders and African peoples will respond with reactive survival or with strategic, sovereign, and united action.
Memory, nationhood, economic transformation, psychological liberation and continental integration are not separate struggles.
They are one struggle. The edge of history is not a cliff. It is a crossroads.
And the future of Africa will depend on whether the continent continues to negotiate with history as fragmented territories or rises to act as a civilisation conscious of its power, its memory, and its destiny. Let us, therefore, celebrate the Omagongo / Omaongo Annual Festival and remember and observe Africa Day and Genocide Day without forgetting who we are and where we come from.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or this newspaper. They represent our pan-Africanist perspective on issues affecting Africans.
