…Being speech delivered by Femi Akomolafe at the ICAD conference in Accra.
Link: https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/pan-africanist-its-time-to-move-from
Fellow Pan-Africanists, salutations.
Please, lend me your ears as I pour out my grief and disappointment.
For more than forty years, I did not merely believe in Pan-Africanism — I inhabited it. I walked with it in my bones. I argued with it in my blood. I sacrificed comfort, certainty, and convenience at its altar. I gave it my best years, my sharpest thoughts, my loudest voice. My political spine was forged in the fires lit by Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and Patrice Lumumba, and the other heroes and heroines who understood that Africa’s greatest enemy would not always wear a white face.
And today, I stand before you not merely disappointed, but bereaved.
What I witnessed recently in Ghana is neither merely a setback nor a detour. It is the slow, obscene cremation of a sacred idea that was carried out not by Europe, not by America, but by Africans drunk on the cheap wine of xenophobia and petty nationalism.
This, to me, is not a political failure but a spiritual treason.
Please, I do not stand here today to ask for your attention, because attention is cheap. What I demand is your anger and your shame. I demand your reckoning.
We all should be both angry and ashamed because Africans have, once again, betrayed Africa.
Unfortunately, Pan-Africanism has been reduced to a slogan for conferences and hotel lobbies instead of what it was supposed to be, a survival doctrine.
Today, the dream of our parents for a unified Africa has been fractured, not by bombs, but by borders we did not draw and identities we did not inherit, which we now defend with murderous enthusiasm.
Xenophobia has become the new African religion.
We thought it was an aberration when we witnessed it in South Africa, which was once the moral epicenter of Black resistance. Today, African blood now lubricates the streets. “Makwere-kwere” has replaced “comrade.”
Migrant Africans are hunted like vermin by people whose own freedom was paid for by continental solidarity. South Africa has perfected the grotesque irony of a liberated people mimicking their former jailers.
And Ghana, our own Ghana, the birthland of Kwame Nkrumah, who announced to the world that Ghana’s independence was meaningless without Africa’s total liberation, now flirts with the same poison.
The colonial border, once understood as a prison fence, is now worn like a badge of honor. Suspicion has replaced solidarity. Fear has replaced fraternity.
No, I was not outraged by the illiterate hoi poloi who paraded the streets of Accra and Kumasi, vociferating against Nigerians; I was appalled and angered by the intellectual support some self-declared Pan-Africanists lent to the equation of xenophobia.
As I bluntly told the guy who sent me his piece about respecting laws and blah blah blah, hypocrisy is a sin.
You cannot be a Pan-Africanist and a xenophobe at the same time. You cannot preach Pan-Africanism while you wrap yourself in the flag of one of the colonial garrisons we euphemistically call countries in Africa. That contradiction is not ideological; it is moral. It is like preaching liberation while sharpening chains.
Those who scream “foreigners are taking our jobs” are not revolutionaries; they are colonial ventriloquists. They repeat, word for word, the lies designed in European offices and tested on African soil.
Our tragedy is no longer that the artificial borders exist; the real tragedy now is that Africans have begun to worship them.
Kwame Nkrumah warned us: the forces that unite us are greater than those imposed to divide us. But, sadly, we chose division. We chose flags over the future of Africa. We chose passports over our people.
And while we Africans engage our fellow Africans in our insane internecine battles, the real looters – multinational corporations, neo-colonial financiers, foreign governments- watch quietly, smiling. For them, our division is profitable.
Xenophobia is the cheapest and most efficient security system imperialism has ever invented.
Unfortunately for Africa, we do not see xenophobia for what it is: a counter-revolution.
It sabotages Africa’s future more efficiently than sanctions, coups, or IMF diktats ever could.
Personally, the bitterest part is that few Pan-Africanists spoke out when the xenophobes took to the streets of Ghana. It was disappointing to watch and listen to the nasty vituperations Africans in Accra and Kumasi spewed against fellow Africans in 2025. They are on the internet.
To me, the time is long past when we should own up and admit that we Pan-Africanists have failed our people. We must also realise that conferences, seminars, and congresses will not save pan-Africanism. Panels, communiqués, hashtags, or hotel-room resolutions will not liberate Africa.
Our people have had enough of the tired talks. They have had enough of the empty jargon. They are tired of the professional Pan-Africanists who fly business class to discuss unity while practicing exclusion at home.
The collapse of European civilization — moral, intellectual, demographic — has opened a rare historical window. But Africa will not rise by accident. It will only do so if we decolonize the African mind — starting with the education system that still glorifies our conquerors, still centers European values, still trains African children to admire their historical executioners.
Above all, Africa will rise only through practical, grounded, lived Pan-Africanism.
That is why I say this without apology: Instead of meeting and conferencing, Pan-Africans must pool resources and build. Build farms. Build cooperatives. Build schools. Build systems. Build relationships across borders.
I give myself as an example; I do not theorize unity from a podium. I practice what I preach.
In my humble abode in Kasoa, I live the principles I write about. I do not outsource Pan-Africanism to seminars. I organize it in real life. Those who are serious, not performative, not rhetorical, are welcome to visit and see what commitment looks like without microphones.
Africa will not be saved by those who talk the loudest; it will be rebuilt by those who do the work.
The choice before us is stark: Either we abandon xenophobia, dismantle colonial education, and practice unity, or we remain fragmented dependents in a world that has already moved on.
History will not pity us; our grandchildren will not forgive us.
Fellow Africans, the time for slogans is over. We either unite materially, practically, fearlessly, or we perish.
– Femi Akomolafe
Kasoa. December 19, 2025.
