The Osagyefo, the Mwalimu, and Pan-Africanism: a Study in the Growth of a Dynamic Concept

Abstract

The notion of African continental government has run the gauntlet of criticism and ridicule in its day. Not a few African ‘moderate’ or conservative leaders and their agreeable tribe of western scholars have been only too keen to fire broadsides at it from time to time. Thus, Nigeria's Abubakar Balewa saw it as a ‘nightmare’; a union government, he said, ‘might come, so might world government’. To Dennis Austin the pan-African movement – ‘in its fundamentalist-Nkrumaistic sense of a united Africa’ – is ‘plainly chimerical’.1 And Scott Thompson, not to be outdone, saw the whole thing as ‘essentially a mirage’ – the ‘myth of Eden’ – and the endeavour towards it as one of ‘chasing the whirlwind ’.2