[caption id="attachment_47611" align="alignright" width="608"] Berlin Conference 1884-1885. Google pix[/caption] By Ademola Araoye The Futures of an African age is a hopeful construct-even if perhaps so far only a Babylonian abstraction. The vision of the futures easily elicits agreement but, paradoxically, remains by no means normatively defined. That lack of a convergent normative definition-in terms of basic ideational structures to underpin consensual understandings across crucial realms of existence, universally agreed inviolable principles and procedures driving the organization of state and society , clearly articulated common assumptions around relationship of the post-colonial state and its society, especially in relation to the limits of the freedom of the state, as well as the construction of a structure of axioms to direct intra societal relationships across Africa’s artificially contrived demarcations. Flowing from these pervasive comprehensive anomie is a dearth of common ideational pivots to direct Africa’s relationship within its own internal constituencies and the undermining of a solidity of its engagement as one formidable, credible monolithic bloc and voice with a world that has proven brutish and nasty to Africa and its children from antiquity. I often refer to that nemesis of African humanity as the hegemonic External Order. In terms of the construction of a convergent normative structure, Africa unfortunately, is at sea. The misalignments and incongruence on these vital determinants of a normative definition of the futures of an African age explain why the modalities to arrive at what constitutes the end station of the Futures of an African age are constantly being refined and deferred. The attainment of a universally acclaimed character of the futures of the African age has remained an illusion also because the post-colonial African state has become stoutly anachronistic in the context of the transcendental challenges of Africa, including critically a distorted spirituality of its peoples. The state in Africa has become an impediment to the project of a futures of an African age. Consequently, the post-colonial African state and its various aggregations at the sub-regional and continental levels have been characterized by existential crisis without let since their emergence in the international states system six decades ago. Not even the transformation of the Organization of African Union to an African Union, a symbolic metamorphosis to emphasize a commitment to an era transformative engagement, has impacted on the entrenched destructive internal operative protocols of the organization. In this maligned universe of contemporary Africa rooted in the appropriated freedoms of its peoples in the last six decades, the natural order of things is subverted. The illogic is enthroned. The rational is scantly rationed. Accordingly, some surmise, and I am sympathetic to their viewpoint, that the periodic refinements of a vision of this futures is merely a cyclical and barren routine of a permanently deferred hope. The challenge then is how to break this vicious cycle of an elusive Futures of an African age. And there is a certain immediacy to this historic task. Again, the challenge of Africa’s Futures recalls the existential dilemmas of a living ghost, a reference to what I term an Aidooian idiom, torn between taking the road to Elmina or, in this instance, should Africa be Cape Coast bound. Both destinations symbolizing two unbridgeable horns of a dilemma. In a more salient expression in the context of this conversation, should Africa in looking to the futures of its anticipated age in the retention of its current configuration or is a de-linkage from, a complete rejection of its failed contemporaneous organizational structures, protocols, values, procedures and arrangements- the totality of the panoply of the structures of mis-governance and associated relationships as well as apparatuses- a critical imperative of a futures for an African age. In other words, how can Africa move from its status as a consolidated subordinated continental space that is located in the tangential subsidiarity of the enterprises of others. Africa as an appendage to the interest of other forces. In deploying the imagery of a living ghost for Africa, I borrow from the creativity and imagination of Ghanaian playwright Ama Atta Aidoo. Her Dilemma of a Ghost captures the eternal dilemmas of the peoples of Africa in the fruitless romance with its brand of a deprecated and depreciated modernity. In pursuit of this, every so often a template is designed around the futures of Africa, including the Lagos Plan of Action for Economic Development launched in 1980, thirty six years ago, by the Organization of African Union. Many new but similar templates after, lately Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, by the African Union, successor body to the OAU, was unveiled. Agenda 2063 prides itself as focused on a global strategy to optimize use of Africa’s resources for the benefit of all Africans. These two and the numerous strategies in between them are presented with fanfare in a reaffirmation of the determination of the peoples of Africa to achieve what I like to term as the holistic emancipation of its people. That is the constantly deferred end station-ultimately. To compound today’s attempt at building a compass to permanent emancipation of Africa is the reality that the choice of the Post-Colonial African state, especially in the context of the Futures, as a central theme of reflection presents its own dilemmas. Political correctness in discourses imposes its own strictures-the imperatives to formulate narratives of hope- expressed in the assumed obligation to project what they term Afro-optimism. Thou shall neither hear, nor see, nor sniff evil. Thou shall speak no evil is the preeminent mantra of the continent’s age of horrendous moral abdications. I promise that I shall speak no untoward evil, because the towering inspiration of some of the ideas that drive this continuous search for the challenges to development never spoke evil. He however spoke with unvarnished candour in an age of historic cross roads marked by horrendous turbulence that have become defining milestones of world history. It was world history as Europe groped for the way forward through its two catastrophic European wars. Francis Rory Peregrine Anderson or better known as Perry Anderson is a British diplomat, historian and political essayist. Renowned as a specialist in intellectual history, he is often identified with the post-1956 Western Marxism of the New Left. His distinctive mark being his preference of continental Marxist essayists and dialectics over those of his British compatriots. That earned him not a small measure of antagonism in the circles of his British compatriot leftist comrades. Even though I confess to having scant credentials of a Marxist, as a bloody McDonald’s and KFC whooping consuming Nigerian international bureaucrat, I take my inspiration for today’s discursive ruminations or better still lamentations from this giant. I am not apologetic about this, I would not be the first to appropriate pivotal analytic concepts from the left into interpretive currents of bourgeois investigations. Perry Anderson states that one of the basic axioms of historical materialism is that the secular struggle between classes is ultimately resolved at the political level-not at the economic or cultural-level of society. More profoundly though in relation to the question of the post-colonial state and the Futures of an African age is Anderson’s eternal truism around freedom. Anderson is clear that freedom consists in the conversion of the State from an organ superimposed on society into one completely subordinated to it, and today too, the forms of the state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the “freedom of the state”. In effect, freedom entails a constant struggle to achieve an equilibrium or a balance between the powers of the Westphalian state since its formal emergence in 1648 and its society that it has always sought to mold into a nation, then reconstructed into a nationality with supporting narratives to bolster a sense of unity and oneness. The United States of America- the world’s foremost classic modern Westphalian- has deployed this in the concept of the exceptional national character that all nationals are sold on. Italy is one of a cluster of western European states that may be referred to as post-modern states. The crafting of the Italian nationality illustrates this. Soon after the disparate states of the Italian peninsula was unified to create a single state in the 1860s, Massimo D’Azeglio, the nineteenth-century politician, painter and novelist, uttered the phrase ‘we have made Italy now we must make Italians’. The observation has been interpreted as undergirding the process and success of identity formation in Italy from the time of unification to the current day. The Pinocchio Effect, alluding to the growth impact of the process of nation building in Italy, draws on a remarkably broad array of sources to trace this forging of a modern national identity in Italy. The infusion with nationalist sentiments by D’Azeglio of the topic of an old story for a new people was both successful and pointed: it contained common Risorgimento narratives such as suffering, danger and repression and also an exaltation of individual and collective struggle in defense of the community. Also, the historian Alberto Banti has also argued that through people such as Manzoni, Guerrazzi, D’Azeglio and Hayez, Italians ‘discovered’ or forged the narratives on which is anchored a national community and a common past. This has been the prevalent dynamic in the construction of the nation-state. Yet the question of the equilibrium between how much freedom society offers the state has proven to be a shifting balance, impacted by the evolving sensibilities of human society and of the emerged lessons of human and global history. Importantly has been the role of technology in diffusing emerging global embryonic sensibilities and forging of common and the expansion of value based identities across national frontiers. Expressions of transnational value circuits such as the Greens, as political parties, purvey a specific common agenda of the global society. There is also Amnesty International as the watch dog of the protection of Human rights in all the nooks and crannies of the globe. [caption id="attachment_47614" align="alignright" width="600"] Africa[/caption] In these enterprises, the specificities and harrowing crucibles of racial history, from slavery, from both the Arab world and Europe, to colonial and contemporaneous neo-colonial dispensation revolving around the very denial of the quintessential humanity of the black race, in the instance of Africa, has impacted the preeminent sensibilities of the people. But this horrific trail from antiquity to modern day has been banished to the sub conscious level at all levels of engagements. The tendency to self-repudiate, including a massive and unprecedented exodus, at the psychical, physical, emotional and spiritual levels, of black identity defectors to whatever assures a semblance of dignity is perhaps the price to pay for survival in a difficult environment of human kind. Yet as the contrived deficits of its social and political organizations reflects, the open manifestations of these sensibilities are reined in by preeminent drivers and local champions of the illogic of Africa’s post-colonial state processes who, as a normative practice, have appropriated the totality of the discursive, spiritual, socio-economic and political spaces across the continent. The failures of the post-colonial African state has had devastating consequences. And worse still, it has a potential to bring to ruin, as manifest in the experience of the last half century, the very concept of the futures of the African age. I raise this because it speaks to the contemporary circumstances of Africa and of the imperative and centrality of a continental discourse around the axiomatic premises of the continued perceived validity and of the legitimacy of the post-colonial African state. It is imperative in this day and age to interrogate this post -colonial imposing edifice and its complicit state system as the vanguard institutions and instruments of the ultimate objective of the holistic emancipation of Africans. This remains the ultimate goal and the challenge of freedom in all its multi-dimensional ramifications and expressions of contemporary Africa. The current expressions of the post-colonial African state is a historic as they fly in the face of the original thoughts and concepts of holistic African emancipation on the pursuit of the common destiny of all Africans as undergirding the futures of a free and emancipated Africa. Elsewhere, I had alluded to the post-colonial African state as a concrete myth. But a terrible myth for that matter. There is a history to this. The extant construction of Africa is an important context and a crucial pointer to the evolution of politics in and of African states since independence. This problematic construction reflects the inability of the leaders of Africa in the immediate post-independence era to surmount the fundamental historic challenge in the post-independence era. This challenge was expressed in fractious structures and institutions of a fragile states system that was bequeathed as legacies of colonialism. The main existential dilemma before the continent in 1963 as new states emerged, often variously directed and controlled by the colonial powers, was clearly defined. It was whether in forging ahead in the post-independence era, Africa would maintain the fractious and divisive structure of the evolving continental states system that was based on the outcome of the Berlin Conference of 1884. At this conference, the imperial powers partitioned the continent according to their national interests. With hindsight the logical option was for Africa to mobilize the will to transcend the contrived divisions and build a strong and viable continental state. The failure of an ideo-philosophically divided leadership of the continent to consolidate the imperial interest driven and colonially designed states system into a one strong and viable continental federation has haunted the evolution of Africa since independence. Such a vision would radically have realigned the continental political geography consistent with the tenets of pan Africanism and in the interests of Africa as a whole. [caption id="attachment_47615" align="alignright" width="400"] Leopold Senghor[/caption] Minkah Makalani notes that although Pan-Africanism actually reflects a range of political views, at a basic level, it is a belief that African peoples, both on the African continent and in the Diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny. This sense of interconnected pasts and futures provides the rich tapestry of narratives to shore up this evolved African consciousness. This discourse then comes half a century into the independence of its states and two decades into the lives of post liberated states on the continent. Against the background of the pristine visions of the futures of Africa adumbrated two hundred years ago, it can be surmised that independence set Africa back by consolidating a curse of the division of its peoples setting them against each other within the states that by 1963 had decided the false logic of colonial expropriation and division of Africa. It comes almost two hundred years since a young black Methodist minister, Richard Allen, along with another black clergyman, Absalom Jones, in 1787 rebelled against the Church and established the Free African Society. This benevolent organization held religious services and mutual aid for “free Africans and their descendants” in Philadelphia. This early enterprise reflected an expansive worldview and an African consciousness evident also in Allen’s support for emigration back to Africa and Haiti. That impulse toward an African identity was also apparent in the religious practices of enslaved people throughout the Americas, who tended to develop syncretic religions that blended African deities and belief systems with Christianity and Catholicism, giving rise to Santería in Cuba, Vodun in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Candomblé in Brazi. Another important political form of a religious Pan-Africanist worldview appeared in the form of Ethiopianism. South Africa was thickly in the midst of the distillation of these dominant and organic African consciousness. Makalani specifies that Ethiopianism assumed institutional form in southern Africa in the late-1800s, following visits from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, especially Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. He identifies two groups, one led by Joseph Mathunye Kanyane Napo in 1888, the other by Mangena Maake Mokone that in 1892 broke from the Anglican and Methodist churches. Mokone established the Ethiopian Church in 1892, which joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church four years later. This led to several South Africans visiting the United States and attending historically black colleges, including some of the earliest leaders of the African Native National Congress. Ethiopianism was also believed to have played a role in the 1906 Natal Zulu Rebellion. [caption id="attachment_37861" align="alignright" width="400"] Thomas Sankara[/caption] The depth of these sentiments is reflected in the 1944 Manifesto of the Youth wing of the African National Congress clearly advancing that the African regards the Universe as one composite whole; an organic entity, progressively driving towards greater harmony and unity whose individual parts exist merely as interdependent aspects of one whole realising their fullest life in the corporate life where communal contentment is the absolute measure of values. His philosophy of life strives towards unity and aggregation; towards greater social responsibility. While this was in the specific context of South Africa, it indeed could be extended to the understanding that the unity of Africa is integral to the unity of the world. In fact the first two paragraphs of the preamble of the 1944 Constitution of the ANC Youth League was explicit that WHEREAS Africanism must be promoted i.e. Africans must struggle for development, progress and national liberation so as to occupy their rightful and honourable place among nations of the world; AND WHEREAS African Youth must be united, consolidated, trained and disciplined because from their ranks future leaders will be recruited. This organic African ferment of the late nineteen century was extirpated by the interaction of human foibles of Africa’s early leaders and historical exigencies that was integral to the process leading to all manners of independence across the continent. But before we delve into the curse of the post-colonial African state and its equally and inevitable complicit states system, let us touch on the concept of modernity as it is central to the evolution, the ceaseless adaptations, of the Westaphalian states system from its heuristic conceptualization to the four or even five main classes of states clearly differentiated by the evolutionary trajectory of the Modern Westphalian state to the Post-modern states, as well as the fixations in time and orientations of a mechanically created post colonial state in Africa, including the retrograde pre Westaphalian state in Asia that are unable to delineate between the secular and the metaphysical in state affairs and national life. It is crucial at this point to capture one of the most outstanding insights that have emerged from interrogative explorations in the understanding of the process of modernity. In this we fall back to Marshall Berman, via a Perry Anderson review of his work, All that is Solid Melts into Air. Modernism, Modernity, Modernization Anderson captures Berman’s essential definition that modernity is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. He calls this body of experience “modernity”. Modernity thrusts us in a paradoxical environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Berman postulated that modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But he emphasizes that it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air”. What generates this maelstrom? For Berman, it is a host of social processes—he lists scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, national states, mass movements—all propelled, in the last instance, by the ‘ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating’ capitalist world market. These processes he calls, for convenient short-hand, socio-economic modernization. Out of the experience born of modernization, in turn has emerged what he describes as the ‘amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own’—‘visions and values that have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of “modernism” ’. … Anderson concludes that the intention of Berman was to reveal the ‘dialectics of modernization and modernism’. Again, he surmises that between these two demarcations lies the key middle term of modernity itself—neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating the one to the other. What constitutes the nature of the linkage between them? Essentially, for Berman, it is development. Again for Africa, what has been the nature of the modernization process and the strand of its peculiar modernity. What has been the historical experience on which to predicate a realistic prognosis in 2016 of the futures of Africa and its peoples? What are the visions and values that have come to be loosely grouped together in the last half century of independence and the two decades of post liberation era in Africa. Kleptomania, illicit financial outflows, personal appropriations of national patrimony, civilian coup d’etat against the peoples of the continent, the institutionalization of dynastic rule, a penchant of continental leadership to move in droves from Washington to Paris, Peking to New Delhi with supplicating bowls of dignified beggars. last time they were in Delhi, each of them receive U$ 10 million on the average. Africa’s distorted modernity is the result of a two level game. This game drives the conspiracies of a largely discredited leadership and their external neo-colonial backers. The phenomenon is aptly codified in classic theoretical edifices propounded by Immanuel Wallenstein, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Falleto of the Dependencia School that is also integral to the World System theory articulated by Immanuel Wallenstain. Their kindred spirits in Africa include the Mahmood Mamdanis and Edwin Madunagus. Meanwhile, most would agree that if we are to understand the 21st-century social world we must come to grips with the concept of globalization. The concept reflects another successful foray of classical modernization school to appropriate and vacate key concepts from the radical intellectual orientation of their meanings.Among those who share this view of globalization and reject new paradigmatic thinking on the current age is Immanuel Wallerstein, the world-renowned sociologist and ‘father’ of the world system paradigm. World-system theory, however, started out not as a theory of globalization but of development. In the late 1950s, the field of development was dominated by the modernization school, which came under attack from the dependencia theories and other radical Third World approaches to international inequalities. Wallerstein’s colleague the late Giovanni Arrighi observed that ‘world-systems analysis as a distinctive sociological paradigm emerged at least 15 years before the use of globalization as a signifier that blazed across the headlines and exploded as a subject of academic research and publication. Globalization as a concept defanged world systems and turned around the focus In this globalized ferment, do the entrenched visions of the futures of a prostrate and ever supplicant Africa and values on which they are anchored constitute a legitimate brand of modernism? The subversion of legitimated visions and values are iterated in the One Party state/One Man state (OPs/OMs) that was ensconced in the classic patrimonial governance paradigm in the Cold War era, or the Post One Party State/Post One Man state (POMs/POPs) associated with the neo-patrimonial state in the era of post sovereign conferences. This transmogrification was witnessed immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Apartheid in South Africa. The end of Apartheid, what I have described elsewhere as the Post Mandela World Order, presented its very liberating moments for Africa. But, as usual, it was frittered away on the altar of the anti-climatic interfaces of human foibles with Africa’s post- independence, post-revolution historicity. Surveying the somber contemporaneous landscape, what defining and redeeming attributes demarcate the post-liberation societies of the post-revolutionary era in Africa from the pervasive systemic morass of those who got independence on a relatively golden platter. What a futile existential differentiation between Sassou Nguesso’s Congo Brazzaville, from the land of Marien Ngouabi, and Angola’s Augustiho Neto’s, a poetic visionary who extolled we the children of the bush sanzallas in the hands of Dos Santos and his globally infamous daughter, or even separate Amilcar Cabral’s Guinea Bissau from the Islamic Republic of the Gambia next door. For emphasis, you heard me right-the Islamic Republic of Gambia in the heart of West Africa- the probable home to the ancestors of Absalom Jones and Cyril Allen. Or Sedar Senghor’s negritude Senegal from Blaise Compaore’s, a treacherous assassin of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso. What separates Liberia’s Charles Gankay Taylor from his ultimate nemesis Olusegun Aremu Okikiolu Obasanjo’s Nigeria? And then Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Sani Abacha, Musa Traore, Blaise Compaore, Gnassingbe Etienne Eyadema, Jean-Bedel Bokassa. These purveyors of infamy in the arena post-colonial African state are legion. Even the icons of our peoples’ revolutions have been struck and deformed by the catatonic illogic of Africa’s post-coloniality or, as some rightly remind us, of Africa’s neo-coloniality. Resulting from the pervasive fixations with these African entrenched depreciations of authentic values, let us introduce the Africa of today as presented in a new three volume encyclopedia on Africa: An Encyclopedia of Culture and Society. At 11.67 million square miles, Africa is the second largest continent on earth, encompassing just over one-fifth of the planet’s landmass. Residents of Africa represent fully one seventh of the total world population, and population growth estimates routinely project expansion beyond two billion by the end of the century. Despite these facts, popular, and even academic, treatments of Africa often leave much to be desired. In popular media, Africa is rarely favored with mention, except in cases of war, famine, or disease. Africans are regularly caricatured as simple, backward, and inherently prone to lawlessness and violence. Such an image reduces Africans to hopeless victims of environmental, cultural, and even biological determinism. Such an image of Africa risks echoing the worst prejudices that have been hauled at the continent-claims of inferiority and helplessness that have been used to justify economic exploitation, colonial conquest, and slavery This represents the fervent candour of African intellectuals in the Diaspora. Indeed, Africa presents tragic paradoxes. Alarmingly, the reality is that most of Africa is perpetually in conflict, lawlessness and societal collapse, and vulnerable to the ravages of disease and natural disasters. African states are the world’s poorest, weakest and most artificial states launched into the international arena, raising questions as to how such states have managed to survive. The question has also been asked as to what extent the survival of those states is now threatened. Yet long term solutions to Africa’s crises remain as elusive as they are essential. Whole sub-regions in Africa are in chaos. At the start of the new millennium, crises and wars were raging in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal in West Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo (Brazzaville), and Central African Republic in Central Africa; Angola in the East; and Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea in the north and the Horn of Africa. Tribal, religious, economic and political tensions threatened to precipitate new bloodshed in Burundi, Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, Cameroun, Guinea Conakry and Zimbabwe. The Westphalian, domestic sovereignty of the post-colonial African state is often being challenged, even as its international legal sovereignty is compromised and fragile. Because of the illogic behind the construction of the post colonial African state, attempts to forge nations out of them continue to flounder. [caption id="attachment_47617" align="alignright" width="500"] Amilcar Cabra[/caption] Exploring the futures of a coming Africa era imposes navigating frightfully debilitating contradictions at many levels of practical and intellectual engagements. As has been made obvious so far, this exploration requires a careful treading in the unravelling of carefully cultivated convenient myths or spins or rationalizations that are strenuously propagated by Africans. The propagators of the spin in Africa narratives are mostly the elite beneficiaries of Africa’s subordinate status, who are determined to make impressions. In this cautious exfoliation of layers of Africa’s myths, the rational praxis forces one into a confrontation with contestations of the negating sharp realities of Africa. It may even entail challenging or in the least probing the very axiomatic understandings of the entrenched notions of the numerous conceptualizations of the facts or factions of Africa. The main thesis that I submit in this connection rests on four interlinked planks. These are first that Africa is primarily the single most endowed derivative of global value extraction; material and non-material. Second, Africa historically is associated with critically weak capacity for penetration of both its own internal and the general systemic environment. Third, as a result of plank ii, Africa is profoundly weak in the highly Hobbesian global value extraction and appropriation process. Accordingly, flowing from the first three propositions relating to its deficits in the competitive global system of value extraction and value appropriation, Africa is largely pacified, often with the moral acquiescence of factions of its elites, only as the predictable perennial largest recipient of residues of global value disbursement in the form of grants, aid and humanitarian interventions. Put together, Africa is located along the margins of global relevance. The way forward out of this historic cul de sac, I hazard, is the total repudiation of and, to amend the term of Joseph Schumpeter, constructive destruction of the current status quo: Africa’s internal structural configurations and associated problematic identities and loyalties, mindsets as well as attitudinal orientations; de-validating its pervasive dysfunctional polluted spirituality undermining the essences of its humanity; and finally, recasting Africa’s shackled intellectual firmament that historically has served as an ancillary machinery of ideational and conceptual as well as institutional replications that consolidate Africa’s tangential relevance in world affairs. This holistic constructivist deconstruction and destruction of Africa’s numerous concrete myths and along with compelling creative reconstructions would be integral to the course of replacing current myths with new edifying realities of a new millennium. All these are preamble to the key question of what factors impact the location and role of Africa in the global system and define its subservient role in its historic and contemporary transactions with other forces, be state or non –state actors in the international system. That is the central theme of the moment that I will now explore. Why are some societies, mainly Africa, which I cite conveniently as a homogenous group only for now, perpetually confined to the bottom of the totem pole of the human hierarchy? Why is Africa’s role that of a bottom scrapper! What is clear from the pattern of transactions between the elite powers, medium level actors and weak elements in the system is that they are delineated by what Ian Morris has encapsulated as their differentiated capacities to extract energy from the environment. Drawing on the ecological and evolutionary ends of biology, Ian Morris postulates that as life forms, humans and their societies survive because we extract energy from our environment and turn them to more of ourselves. Drawing on this biological paradigm, he observes that humans, like all more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures that are constantly tinkering and wondering. Thus a second attribute is that humans are just much better at tinkering than other animals. But, finally, he notes that obviously humans are not the same, as some extract more energy from the environment than others; some are more curious, creative, clever or practical than others. For Ian Morris, these three commonsensical observations explain much of the course of history. We can distil that the differentiated capacities to extract resources is the most critical predictor of the location of states and continents in the global system. Africa’s deficiency in resource extraction is the single largest factor in perpetuating its historic subordinate status and subservient role in global affairs. [caption id="attachment_30965" align="alignright" width="400"] Olusegun Obasanjo[/caption] The responses to the structure of the international system by medium level powers and weak states have varied over the centuries. The cooptation of Africa by the External order has been relatively cost-free but with unlimited dividends for the aggressor. Africa is the best field in the world to gain optimal strategic dividend for the smallest investment. In Africa, the responses to the incursion of the external order span the formal and institutionalized subservience associated with most post-colonial francophone African states, benign complicity as in most Anglophone Africa states, through radical repudiation of the status quo expressed mainly through African liberation movements such as in Algeria in the 1960s, the African National Congress( ANC) of South Africa, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Pan African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) of Amilcar Cabral. The range of responses from tepid or outright complicity and collaboration with the invader remains a fatal debilitating factor in entrenching Africa’s current situation in the world. Outside Africa, reactions have been more robust against the intrusion of foreign forces. These have included institutional defiance of the unjust global order witnessed in Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Gaddafi’s Libya. Finally, at the extreme post of reactions, there have been irrational and violent responses purveyed by such terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL), Al Shabab in East Africa and Boko Haram in West Africa. By and large, the African response to the global structure and the systemic injustices has been benign complicity and outright subservience of francophone Africa. It is this deleterious attitude of establishment Africa that has been responsible for the ossification of Africa’s inability to concretize a vision of the futures of an era for Africans and, directly flowing from this, its near irrelevance in the global scheme of things. A Geo-Political Space Configured to Fail The underpinnings of the African state and its systems are mortally flawed. Half a century into its fixations and non -evolutionary trajectory of socio-political stagnation, the African state and its inter-state system are in crisis. The crisis is reflected in the permanence of an industry like web of external interventions by state and non-state actors alike devoted to Africa across the total spectrum of human affairs. These interventions range from security, economic, political to humanitarian spheres. The fatal deficiencies of the African state and its state system have spawned the emergence of a global ostensible “do Africa good humanitarian syndrome”. This syndrome obfuscates and rationalizes the real strategic objectives of the global loot machine operating in the continent involved in the extraction of value. The do Africa good syndrome is a potent complementary instrument of the penetration of a fragmented and fractious Africa for the necessary extractive operations of external operators of the loot machine. It is quintessentially an expression of the soft face of an essentially harsh system that provide succour for the worst victims of the global loot machine at work in all of Africa. Africa’s tenacious fixation with the retention of the fictive inviolability of the many putative sovereignties of its mainly inadequate states is a historic fallacy. This is even more so in an evolutionary climate with a continuing re-evaluation of the continued salience of state sovereignty in the affairs of humankind by more advanced communities. Again in the course of a transformative agenda to shore up the legitimacy of the state, the Organization of African Union, recognizing its own functional bankruptcy, was transformed into the African Union to generate a new impulse and salience for the transcendental challenge of the futures of an African era. Yet, the African Union and in fact all the sub-regional institutions, ECOWAS, SADC, IGAAD, EADC, in their retention of the axioms and protocols and procedures of the defunct OAU, have paradoxically remained instruments of the old guard and the nemesis of African peoples. The AU serves as a validating instrument of an old Order long de-legitimated by the African people. Rather than serve as the countervailing futuristic force against the anachronistic post-colonial African state, the African Union provides the antiquated drivers of the old order the platform to validate its salience in the calculus of a new Africa. In its internal operations, the AU is a forum for the projection of state-centric putative attempts at regional power play, instead of serving a platform for the distillation of African strategic responses to the historic existential crisis of Africa. Finally, the dearth of depth of the African state and its states system eliminates it as a full participant even in the international liberal environment run on the basis of the soft protocols that protect the principle of equal rights of states with equal opportunities for all. Though like individuals, in liberal climes statuses and roles of states are to be attained, the force of the current disposition of Africa has ascribed to it a marginal role in the international system. The 1963 reactionary rejection of a visionary initiative to repudiate a balkanized Africa instituted by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 has proven to be a tragic antecedence of the curse of the African state system. The infamous compromise leading to the establishment of a loose organization in the Organization of African Unity consolidated the designs of imperial powers to ring fence a divided Africa in the service of their respective imperial interests. The decision has since haunted Africa. The Casablanca bloc, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, advanced the cause of a federation of all African countries. Other members of the bloc included Algeria, Guinea, Morocco, Egypt, Mali and Libya. Founded in 1961, its members were described as “progressive states”. The Monrovia bloc, led by Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, felt that unity should be achieved gradually through economic cooperation. These men did not, at the instigation of their controllers in France and the United States, support the notion of an African federation. Other conservative states unenthusiastic about an African federation in 1963 were Nigeria, Liberia, and Ethiopia. The conservative bloc included most of the former French colonies. Since then Africa’s geo-political structure has not significantly been altered neither in response to the evolution of the global system nor in reaction to the glaring fact of the inadequacy of current configuration to advance Africa’s interests, especially honing it institutionally to enhance its own penetration and value extraction capacity. The African deleterious mind-set is as firmly entrenched as in 1963. As a result, the current configuration of the Africa geo-political space housing a myriad of 56 ostensible sovereign states, quasi states and absolutely sheer non –entities has remained an immovable impediment to any meaningful projections of Africa’s interests. The reality is daunting. Only five African states, namely Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt , Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa each houses more than 5% of Africa’s population. The projected population of these states as at July, 2015 ranged from Nigeria’s 184,264,000, representing 16% of Africa’s population to South Africa’s 55 million people at 4.77% of the continent’s people. 43 per cent of Africa’s population is concentrated in these five states. Twenty-six African states or 38 per cent have a population of less than 5 million. 26 per cent of African states have a population of less than 2 million. 30 or 54% of states and political entities in Africa hold just about or less than 1 per cent of the population of the continent. Nine states representing 16 per cent of states in Africa have a population of less than a million. On the average, when the five major most populous states are put aside, the average population of the African state is just about 12 million. By today’s standards and given the historical context of Africa in the scheme of global affairs, about 40% of African states are highly unable to extract some value in their own local environments and hopelessly out of reckoning in the global competition for extractive value. Half a century into the so called independence of post-colonial African states and two decades into the post liberation in Southern Africa, the African geo-political landscape is configured to ensure that the continent remains out of relevance in meeting the challenges of the futures of an African era. The internal configuration of Africa has consolidated its irrelevance the global scheme of things. In fact, many of the political non entities are condemned to a permanent dependency status thriving on residues of value disbursement from powerful states to retain their fictive sovereignty. The dependency syndrome is deeply ingrained in the mindsets, such that the loyalties of the helmsmen of these states are more to themselves, their families, cronies, and critically to their metropolitan controllers. Dambisa Moyo advances that over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. This has however not impacted the wellbeing of Africans. He notes that real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population, that is over 350 million people, lives on less than a dollar a day. This figure has nearly doubled in two decades. Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. The dependency syndrome has posed a mortal danger to the integrity of Africa’s half-hearted striving for holistic emancipation. Conclusion I want to conclude on a very simple note. The extant construction of Africa is the single most debilitating factor holding Africa back from the futures of its forever postponed modernity. This problematic construction reflects the inability of the leaders of Africa in the immediate post-independence era to surmount the fundamental historic challenge in the post-independence era. This challenge was expressed in fractious structures and institutions of a fragile states system that was bequeathed as legacies of colonialism. The main existential dilemma before the continent in 1963 as new states emerged, often variously directed and controlled by the colonial powers, was clearly defined. It was whether in forging ahead in the post-independence era, Africa would maintain the fractious and divisive structure of the evolving continental states system that was based on the outcome of the Berlin Conference of 1884 at which the colonial powers partitioned the continent according to their national interests. Or was Africa capable of mobilizing the will to transcend these contrived divisions and build a strong and viable continental state. The failure of an ideo-philosophically divided leadership of the continent to consolidate the colonially designed states system into a one strong and viable continental federation thereby radically realigning the continental political geography has haunted the evolution of Africa since independence. The many African political spaces have now been fully occupied by parasites who preach false gospels to a dispossessed people. The inability of Africa to transcend the colonial antecedence of its states system has been a major historic impediment. The implication of these failures has been the lack of impetus among the leadership exploiting the system to consolidate the geo-political spaces within the continent into one or only a few very strong, viable, resilient states capable of exercising real sovereignty that could develop a real capacity to relatively autonomously extract value in its own environment and to extend same globally. Such a restructuring would prime Africa into upending the international division of labour that is heavily skewed against it, largely as a result of its deleterious internal socio-political configuration and the current alienation of its peoples. If the validation of the post- colonial structure of the Africa geopolitical spaces would be seen in terms of its realistic grasp of concrete social and historic realities, the current system has been delegitimized in its failure to respond to the haunting realities of Africa. A consolidated African political space would create a strong continent with a capacity to exponentially transform the circumstances of Africans in the international system. In fact, the consolidation of Africa’s geo-political spaces is the first imperative, moral as well as practical, of African renaissance. Justice for Africa requires the elimination and rectification of morally indefensible self- imposed arbitrary structural disadvantages that serve the interest of only a tiny fraction of its elites. This struggle for the futures of an African era is the historic obligation we owe future generations. The time to begin this inevitable adventure is now. A paper presented at the University of Johannesburg on 5 April, 2016. Ademola Araoye, a former Foreign Service Officer, headed the Political, Policy Planning Section and was Chief, Office for the Consolidation of Democratic Governance of the United Nations Mission in Liberia. He is author of Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth. He retired from the service of the United Nations only recently.