The Original Betrayal: OAU and the Aborted African Civilisational Continuum
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Before Africa was fractured into colonies, before borders were imposed with rulers and ink, before nationalism itself entered the African governing vocabulary, the continent was already organised—coherently, sustainably, and organically. Ancient Africa was not a blank space awaiting governance; it was a mosaic of ethno-governed communities, each sovereign, self-regulating, and economically interdependent with its neighbours.
These ethno-governed communities were not nation-States in the modern sense. They were not nationalism-organised entities obsessed with territorial absolutism or homogenised identity. Rather, they were small, interspersed, culturally coherent societies, bound by shared memory, language, customs, cosmology, and moral order. Governance was intimate, participatory, and embedded in everyday life. Authority flowed from tradition, communal consent, and moral legitimacy—not abstract constitutions.
Where survival or strategic necessity demanded scale, multiple ethno-governed communities merged—not into artificial homogeneity, but into ethno-governed territories. These formations preserved internal autonomy while coordinating defence, trade, and diplomacy. The Oyo Empire exemplifies this model. At its core stood the Oyo people, but alongside them existed other major Yoruba ethno-governed communities such as Ibadan, Egba, and Ijebu, as well as diverse populations including Hausa, Fon (Dahomey), and Bariba. Oyo was thus not a monocultural State but a multi-ethnic ethno-governed territory, unified ethnopublic through negotiated authority, reciprocal obligation, and shared economic systems.
This was Africa’s original civilisational trajectory: plural, decentralised, cooperative, and resilient.
1. Resistance as the First Expression of African National Consciousness
The earliest expressions of African nationalism did not emerge as abstract ideology, but as resistance. Colonialism was not merely political domination; it was a civilisational assault—on land, culture, governance, and dignity. Africans resisted accordingly.
Across the continent, opposition to colonial rule took many forms: armed struggle, organised protest, spiritual defiance, and cultural preservation. Figures such as Samori Touré in West Africa, Yaa Asantewaa of Asante, Chief Mkwawa of Tanzania, and countless unnamed leaders embodied this phase. Their struggle was not yet nationalism as Statecraft; it was defence of peoplehood. Land was sacred. Autonomy was non-negotiable. Community survival preceded formal nationhood.
This resistance phase laid the emotional and moral foundation for African evolutionary awakening. It affirmed that Africans were not passive subjects of history, but active agents defending their civilisational continuity.
2. From Resistance to Pan-African Consciousness
As colonial domination intensified and interconnected African destinies, resistance matured into Pan-Africanism. In the early 20th century, African intellectuals and activists—both on the continent and in the diaspora—began articulating a shared historical condition. Africa’s fragmentation, they argued, was not natural but imposed; its unity, therefore, was not utopian but restorative.
The Pan-African Congresses, beginning in 1919, institutionalised this consciousness. They asserted that Africans everywhere were bound by common dispossession and common destiny. Importantly, Pan-Africanism did not initially reject ethnicity; rather, it sought to transcend colonial fragmentation without erasing cultural plurality.
This was a crucial moment. Africa stood at the threshold of transforming its ancient ethno-governed order into a continental ethnopublic civilisation—one capable of modern governance without abandoning indigenous logic.
3. Independence and the Incomplete Birth of African Nationalism
This Pan-African consciousness eventually crystallised into nationalist independence movements. Leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Nelson Mandela transformed ideological aspiration into mass mobilisation. Flags were raised. Anthems were composed. Independence swept the continent.
Yet independence marked not the completion of African nationalism, but its first structural expression—and therein lay the problem.
The newly independent States inherited colonial borders, colonial bureaucracies, colonial legal systems, republican ideology, and colonial education frameworks. The State form itself remained external to African civilisational experience. As a result, post-independence Africa confronted instability, economic dependency, and governance systems conditioned by external know-how and interests.
In many cases, nationalist leadership devolved into authoritarianism or one-party rule—often justified as necessary for unity. But what was being unified was not ethnopublic peoplehood; it was colonial republican State machinery.
4. The Great Divergence: Casablanca Versus Monrovia–Brazzaville
It was under these pressures that African leadership divided into two ideological camps.
On one side stood the Casablanca Group—advocates of collectivistic corporatism, champions of unified African power, and proponents of a shared economic destiny. Their vision was grounded in African-socialism, the revival of ethno-governed governance into ethnopublic macro-State, and a shared economic destiny.
They understood Africa not as a collection of isolated republics, but as a civilisational continuum rooted in Kemetian philosophy—a revival of the ancient governance philosophy perfected during Pharaonic civilisation, where Kemet stood as the fountainhead of organised human society. In that civilisational order, Africa was not a periphery but a centre—drawing pilgrims from across the ancient world to learn shared governance, economic organisation, geometry, science, moral philosophy, and cosmological balance that once radiated outward to the world.
Opposing them were the Monrovia and Brazzaville Group, who embraced colonial individualistic capitalist models framed as African independence. This path adopted Western republican nationalism, derived historically from Roman imperial Statecraft—centralised sovereignty, abstract citizenship, competitive politics, and market primacy. This was not African nationalism reimagined, but colonial governance repackaged with indigenous faces.
History records—plainly—that the latter prevailed. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) institutionalised republican nationalism as Africa’s political future. This decision constituted the original betrayal.
5. The Aborted Continuum
At that precise junction, Africa’s ethno-governed trajectory diverged. Instead of evolving naturally into ethnopublic nationalism, the continent attempted to suppress its diversity under homogenising republican structures. The belief was that merging differences into abstract citizenship would globalise humanity and dissolve ethnic tension. The opposite occurred.
Under republican nationalism, power concentrated and corrupted. Capitalism rewarded extraction and inequality. Ethnicity—denied institutional recognition in republican governance structure—re-emerged with greater intensity. Ethnic rivalry for political power intensified and became a source of vulnerability and fertile ground for neocolonialism. Despite decades of effort, ethnicity could not be suppressed. This failure is empirical evidence that republican nationalism rooted in the homogeneity of peoplehood regardless of their ethnicity, is structurally incompatible with African societies rooted in ethnic homogeneity.
Across Africa today, ethnic divisions persist within republican States. The problem is not ethnicity; the problem is the attempt to govern diversity through a model designed for homogeneity.
Conclusion: Toward Ethnopublic Restoration
Modern nationalism now operates within a transformed social environment—not through the dissolution of ethnicity, but through the expansion of economic and informational interaction. Digital connectivity, transnational commerce, and shared knowledge networks have intensified African collaboration without dissolving ethnopublic identity. The expansion of web-internetisation and digital socialisation has not reshaped identity formation, but merely reinforced difference in diversity, cultural interaction, and collective belonging.
Africans remain culturally and genealogically fixed within their ethnic nations, while engaging fluidly across ethnic territories for economic activity, populocratic participation, and global exchange. Digital space functions as an economic and civic commons, not as an identity solvent.
African nationalism must therefore evolve—not by erasing difference or manufacturing hybrid identities, but by formally institutionalising fixed ethnopublic belonging within a shared continental framework of cooperation.
This is where ethnopublic nationalism re-enters history—not as nostalgia, but as correction. It integrates diverse ethnic groups into shared governance while preserving autonomy. It treats cultural plurality as a national asset. It creates space for mixed identities and collective purpose within a govoxical framework.
In the 21st century, Pan-Africanism re-emerges not merely as sentiment, but as structural re-alignment—a return to Africa’s interrupted civilisational path. Ethnopublic nationalism does not reject modernity; it re-roots it in African logic.
The tragedy of the OAU was not that it sought unity—but that it chose the wrong architecture for it. The task of this generation is not to mourn that betrayal, but to reverse it deliberately. Africa does not need to be reinvented. It needs to resume itself.
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