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Africa: Ok, You're Black, But Do You Have the Identity of an African?
Charles Onyango-Obbo
September 26, 2006

http://allafrica.com/stories/200609260703.html

A critical conversation was the theme of the International Media Summit held in Accra, Ghana, last week.

If a conference with that theme had taken place in East Africa, half the participants would have bemoaned the fact that Africa is portrayed unfairly by the Western media as a continent of famine, wars, poverty, corruption, and insane rulers.

The other half would have argued that that image is accurate, and that if Africa wants to get be viewed more favourably, then it had better clean up its act. Also, the Western media doesn't owe us anything. There would a draw.

In West Africa, such a thing wouldn't happen. There tends to be general agreement that the Western media's coverage of Africa is still heavily informed by a history of racism.

Unlike in East Africa, in West Africa the debate inevitably dwelt on the big identity issue - what does it mean, in the first place, to be African?

That question was central at the Accra summit partly because of one of the legacies that the Pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah bequeathed his country. When Nkrumah became president, it became policy that any descendant of African slaves could return and become a Ghanaian citizen.

Many African-Americans have done so over the years, and they played a key role in organising the media summit. Also present at the meeting was Africa's first female head of state, Liberia's Ruth Sando-Perry (she was chairperson of the Council of State of the Liberia National Transitional Government), the Ashanti king and, perhaps most significantly, Jamaican ambassador Dudley Thompson.

Thompson had a distinguished career as Jamaica's ambassador to various countries. However, history knows him as an old Pan Africanist soldier and a champion of reparations for slavery. Nearing 90, his voice still envelops a room like a thunder. Dudley was Jomo Kenyatta's lawyer when he was tried for collaborating with the Mau Mau, and was a lifelong friend of Nkrumah.

The combination of the above factors ensured we had to clarify "which Africa" needed rebranding. Those who are more eloquent on these matters, argued that you are not African because you are born in Africa. You are African when Africa is born in you, meaning all black people wherever they are in the world are Africans.

Though these matters don't exercise us as much on the east coast, by the end of the first day, we were beginning to feel fidgety. On the Monday evening a banquet was held to honour Africa's Living Legends (Nelson Mandela, Wole Soyinka, former ADB president Babacar Ndiaye, Kofi Annan, Dudley Thomas and Ruth Perry, and some younger new faces like former CNN anchor Tumi Makagbo and the impressive Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, director of the African Women's Development Fund).

At our table, the two of us from Nairobi were the only ones in Western suits. In the banquet hall, besides us and some Accra-based diplomats, everyone else was in African dress.

If you accept that the hue of our skin isn't enough to make us Africans, then our dress, our food, our folk tales, and history become even more critical in signposting who we are. In East Africa, we don't sweat this question the way the West Africans do. We can postpone it, but I sense it's a conversation we must have one day.

For today, perhaps the most colourful elaboration of this question is to be found in South African President Thabo Mbeki's now famous I am an African speech, which is available on the Internet. He made it on the occasion of the adoption of his country's Constitutional Bill in 1996.

That was 10 years ago, but many still wake up to it as their morning inspiration. It's said that if you're an African, you'll know why after you listen to it.

*Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.

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