For the first time in Canada, an international conference on the legendary Ghanaian leader Osagyefo (the Redeemer) Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was held at the Richmond campus of British Columbia’s Kwantlen University August 19-21.
As should be expected, the conference attracted world class Pan-Africanist scholars like Professsor Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University in the United States, Dr. Hakim Adi of Middlesex University, renowned scholar and poet Dr. Atukwei Okai (see video below), of the University of Ghana and many others.
In his keynote address Asante announced that at least 17 African countries have agreed to constitute themselves into the United States of Africa with more expected to join soon.
A United States of Africa was one of President Nkrumah’s pet projects in Ghana before he was overhtrown by a combination of Ghanaian military and police officers while he was on a visit to Vietnam in 1966.
Molefi Asante (see photo and video), the formemost living proponent of the the academic discipline of Africology revealed that various committees in several African countries are currently working on mechanisms to create a continental government within the shortest possible time.
Speaking on the theme of world peace and Nkrumah’s political philosophy, Asante noted that the Ghanaian leader’s vision was all-encompassing with the central tenet being the establishment and promotion of the "African Personality," free from from neo-colonial and other entanglements.
In his welcome address, one of the organizers of the conference, Dr. Charles Quist-Adade noted that the just ended conference " will probably" be the last event in the year-long series of activities around the world to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the birth of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, "Africa’s Man of the Millennium and perhaps the most famous pan-Africanist after Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois."
Quist-Adade said it was noteworthy that the conference was being held at the confluence of the anniversaries of several monumental events in Africa, the most important of which is the fiftieth anniversary of what is popularly referred to as “The Year of Africa.”
"The year 1960 witnessed a host of events, including the end of the Mau Mau resistance in Kenya, mass riots during Charles de Gaulle’s trip to Algeria, the murder of sixty-nine non-violent protestors in South Africa’s Sharpeville Massacre, and independence for seventeen African nations," he said.
He added that while the year was marked by both the entrenched brutality of European colonial rule and the birth of new African nations, there was an overwhelming sense of optimism for a vibrant, independent, and self-sufficient Africa.
The Kwanten University professor revealed that the conference also coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela from jail, which signaled the demise of the apartheid system in South Africa.
As well, he continued, "this conference coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, which partitioned Africa among the European imperial powers. Finally, this conference coincides with yet another important milestone in the annals of Africa’s liberation movement, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, of which Nkrumah was organizing secretary."
Quist-Adade, himself from Ghana, said the Kwame Nkrumah International Conference ( KNIC) was also being held at a time when Africa’s continental body, the African Union (AU), had accepted and is working on Nkrumah’s blueprint for a continental union government.
"As one of the founders of the predecessor continental body, the Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah had single-mindedly and stoutly campaigned for a continental union government of Africa to pool its vast natural and human resources for the benefit of the continent’s peoples, " he said.
Quist-Adade informed his audience made up of African and non-African scholars, activists and community leaders from all over the world, that in July 2009, the AU issued a “Declaration on the Celebration of the 100th Birthday Anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah,” praising him as “an advocate of pan-Africanism who played a vital role in the establishment of our Continental Organization and the liberation of the Continent.”
"But as the AU progresses towards Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa, an intense debate rages in both academia and the political sphere as to whether Africa is ready for a continental union government. The debate also revolves around which is the best route to a continental government: a gradual, piecemeal route through regional economic unions, or a radical and immediate political and economic union, as proposed by Nkrumah, " he pointed out.
Professor Molefi Asante is one of the optimists. He proudly announced that there will be a United States of Africa by the year 2017 if everything goes as planned.
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