Redeemer vs Teacher: Towards the United States of Africa

African Union summits rarely escape a Muammar Gaddafi lecture on his pet project: the United States of Africa. The Libyan leader’s harping on the need for common government is derided by some as a plot for hegemony. The idea of continental unity, though, is not new and neither is the cynicism.

In a sense, Gaddafi is unwittingly summoning us to our etymological roots. The original meaning of the word “Africa” may be unclear, but, in ancient times, it referred only to the north coast of the continent, replacing the Greek word "Libya," to refer to the land of the Berbers.

It only encompassed the whole continent from the end of the first century BC. As it did so, it was slowly divorced from North Africa and soon confined to the region that, in less politically correct times, was also called Black Africa. According to Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the conflation of Africa with sub-Saharan Africa “ultimately offer[ed]a racialised view of Africa as the ‘black’ continent... from which North Africa and especially Egypt [was] excised and attached to Europe.”

“Africa” no longer described a geographical… ( Read on! )