Africa is recognised as the birthplace of humanity and the cradle of civilisation. Africa can be credited with giving rise to many scientific developments in engineering, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc. and with significant early political developments such as state formation and monarchy. Economic and political development, as well as scientific development, was perhaps more advanced in Africa than in other continents before 1500.

Some of the world’s other great civilisations, such as Kush, Axum, Mali, and Great Zimbabwe, flourished in Africa in the years before 1500. In this early period, Africans participated in extensive international trading networks and in trans-oceanic travel. Certainly, some African states had established important trading relations with India, China and other parts of Asia long before these were disrupted by European intervention.

Different forms of servitude had long been a feature of many African societies, and Africa had long-established slaving systems and slave routes, such as those across the Sahara Desert and along the Nile. These systems however, differed markedly from the transatlantic slave trade and racialized slavery that Europeans later developed to maximise plantation production in their colonies.

At first, the growing European demand for Africans on the coast prompted a relatively small trade in humanity. Early European maritime traders acquired African slaves alongside other trade goods. They were purchased at various points on the coast from Arab and African traders, who, in turn, had acquired captives through interior African upheavals, including warfare and the dissolution of major African empires and kingdoms (notably Ghana, Mali, and Songhai). The earliest Africans acquired by Europeans were used for labor and domestic service in Spain and Portugal and later in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Canary Islands, and São Tomé. The European settlement of the Americas, and especially the invention of New World sugar plantations, transformed that trickle into a transatlantic flood.

Constant and unpredictable violent attacks and kidnapping clearly had a profound and damaging impact on those African populations that were victimised by the slave trade. Many African communities tried to defend themselves from slave traders and raiders by arming or even trading slaves themselves. Others retreated to more defensible geographical regions, such as lakes or escarpments, to escape attacks and capture. As a result, some African communities experienced stagnation because of dislocation. Elsewhere, states collapsed under the pressure of violent slave trading and extreme population

Slavery played an important part in the shaping of the continent, in terms of not only economic outcomes, but cultural and social outcomes as well. The evidence suggests that it has affected a wide range of important outcomes, including economic prosperity, ethnic diversity, institutional quality, the prevalence of conflict, the prevalence of HIV, trust levels, female labour force participation rates, and the practice of polygyny. Thus, the slave trades appear to have played an important role in shaping the fabric of African society today.

Robbing African countries off the much needed labour force by taking men and women at their prime and productive age not only affected the economic activities then, but has been attributed to the poverty experienced in the continent over the years. Researchers have pointed to the correlation between countries where majority of slaves were taken and rising poverty over the years.

They indicate that if slavery never took place, the 72 percent gap in average income between Africa and the rest of the world would not be experienced today. If anything, they argue, Africa would be at par in development with Asia or Latin America.

But what perhaps continue to be the most pronounced impact of slavery on contemporary Africa is racism and skewed value judgments that created class, social status and respect based on colour. As slavery ended in other areas, slave traders found new frontiers in Africa with the trade still being practiced in the 19th century. With Africa having been the last to carry the tag and prejudice associated with slaves who are treated as second class citizens, the colour hierarchies have persisted to modern society. 

Even after slavery was abolished, black people failed to receive full rights as citizens in America. African Americans were subjected to violence, lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement.

White society for the most part refused to treat them as equals. Many African Americans rose up against unfair treatment and misrepresentation fighting for equal rights, voting rights, and economic opportunities. Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington were all visionaries and leading figures for the African American community in the early twentieth century. Although their philosophies differed, all shared a common goal of creating a prosperous and thriving black community. 

For 14 weeks and five days, between November 15, 1884, and February 26, 1885, European countries prepared and cooked their plans on how to share Africa…like a piece of cake. They called it…the Berlin Conference.

It was at this conference, in Berlin, present-day Germany, that African lands were divided on a map while the Africans themselves were exempted from the meeting. It was not an omission of invitation or a simple oversight. Rather, it was a large-scale legalized daylight robbery. Africans were considered irrelevant and incapable of making meaningful decisions on what happened to or on their lands. Since they were uncivilized, according to these European invaders, they needed help; and the participants of the Berlin Conference were to be their saviours.

Towns, lands, and rivers were all portrayed on the map that hung on the wall. With just a ruler and pencil, borders were formed, territories claimed, and trade routes were created or removed while historical background, cultural laws, sovereignty, and traditional institutions of a people dating back thousands of years were completely ignored. And just like a piece of cake, Africa, the second-largest continent in the world, was shared at a conference table.

After the Berlin Conference, Pan-Africanists convened their own Congress on Africa in Chicago in 1893, at which they denounced the partition of the continent. This new organized solidarity bore fruit in the launch of the African Association in 1897. Like all the early Pan-African meetings, the participants at the first Pan-African Conference were drawn almost entirely from the Caribbean, American or European diaspora rather than from Africa itself. The delegates talked of creating a movement campaigning for African people’s rights – and sent a petition to Queen Victoria denouncing Britain’s treatment of people in its African colonies.

WEB Dubois organized another Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919 to coincide with the Versailles peace conference at the end of the First World War, hoping in vain to persuade world leaders that US President Wilson’s lofty principle of self-determination should be applied to Africans, too.

Du Bois organized three further Pan-African conferences in the 1920s. But by the 1930s the main impetus of Pan-Africanism in the Americas was cultural, deriving from the Harlem Renaissance in which a generation of black writers and artists looked to Africa for their inspiration and identity.

The fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 had Du Bois, now 73, as its honorary chair and Amy Ashwood, Marcus Garvey’s first wife, presiding over its first session, but the torch had in reality passed to a new generation of Pan-Africanists from the continent itself, including Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.

Nkrumah soon became the voice and organizing force of Pan-Africanism. In the late 1940s and 1950s he promoted the idea of an independent West African Federation, seen as the first step towards a United States of Africa. When, in March 1957, he became leader of the newly independent state of Ghana, one of his first thoughts was to use his new position to help other Africans transcend the old colonial boundaries and work towards uniting the continent. He convened a Conference of Independent States in 1958, though at that stage there were only eight independent countries in Africa. He also went immediately to the aid of independent Guinea when France victimized it for rejecting membership of the post-colonial African franc zone. Nkrumah and the Guinean leader Sekou Touré agreed on a union of their two countries which they hoped would prefigure wider African unity.

The Congress advocated for the “complete independence of the African continent and total rejection of colonialism and exploitation in all its forms,” and called for the unification of Africa through regional blocs and the adoption of democracy. The Congress also voiced the importance of economic regeneration to replace colonial economies geared towards primary resource extraction and exploitation resulting in a phenomenon that would later be termed ‘Dutch disease’. 

Nkrumah established a series of conferences hosted in Accra between 1958 and 1960 with the aims of assisting countries still under colonial rule, fostering cultural and economic ties between countries and considering the issue of world peace. Nkrumah also hosted the All African People’s Conference which convened liberation groups and African nationalist organisations.

Despite a common vision, differing ideological commitments and diverging opinions regarding strategy and structuring of a continental organization soon divided and obstructed the pursuit of unity. The division led to the emergence of three ideological blocs on the African continent, split between the Casablanca Group (consisting of Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria) which advocated for radical and full continental integration, the Monrovia Group (consisting of Nigeria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sudan, Togo, and Somalia) which proposed a moderate approach to unification to be undertaken in incremental steps, and the Brazzaville Group (consisting of Francophone countries and led by Senegal and the Ivory Coast) which remained tied to the interests of France. A number of African leaders, including Kenya’s Julius Nyerere and Nigeria’s Abubakar Tafa Balewa, were supportive of the ideal of African unity, but many felt that Nkrumah’s grand vision for a United States of Africa was overreaching and ran the risk of dissolving sovereignty and territorial integrity – a point of particular contention among countries who had recently gained independence and hard-fought-for sovereignty. Perhaps Nkrumah naively pursued a single-minded Pan-African ambition with the assumption that other leaders would be of a like-minded predisposition. Nkrumah nevertheless underestimated the support for a continental union which would require the surrendering of sovereignty to gain a common monetary, foreign and defense policy, and by the time the OAU was established it presented itself as a diluted version of its former envisioned grandeur. The turbulence of the early 1960s pressed the notion of African countries presenting a united front in the hopes of being taken seriously on the world stage, although the newfound OAU disappointed many of its founding members.   

In 1963, delegates from 32 African countries convened in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to establish the Organization for African Unity (OAU), intended to form the continental base for pan-Africanism but resulting in a watered-down compromise between competing ideological blocs. At the outset, then, complete unification seemed unattainable. The divisions rendered the construction of a union government based on a consensus of structural, military and political institutions untenable. The OAU was thus founded with the intention that the organisation would proceed, incrementally, with unification until the eventual goal of a Union of African States was realized.  

For quite a few years commentators and ordinary citizens from throughout Africa had come to question the effectiveness of the OAU. This is particularly true after 1994 when South Africa became independent. As discussed in the previous section, the most important goal of the OAU from its inception in 1963 was to support the struggle for political independence of all colonies in Africa. This vision united all independent African countries and the OAU was able to provide leadership in the liberation struggles in southern Africa-Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

However the OAU was not as successful in addressing other important issues in post-colonial Africa. For example the OAU’s strong commitment to the national sovereignty of each country meant that the OAU was not able to effective intervene in the civil wars that devastated a number of African countries. Similarly, the OAU could not intervene in the member countries where civilian governments were overthrown in military coups. 

Moreover, although the OAU had an economic commission this commission did not have resources or capability to facilitate cooperation in addressing Africa’s economic problems. Similarly, the OAU did not have an African Court of Justice that could help settle legal disputes between member states.

Given these realities African citizens began to ask their leaders to seriously think of reforming the OAU so that it would be more effective in addressing Africa’s economic, political and social problems, through promoting greater cooperation and unity among the 54 independent nation-states of Africa. Some people suggested that the OAU be disbanded and be replaced by an organization that was similar to the European Union, which by the 1990s had demonstrated its effectiveness in facilitating collaboration and unity in Europe.

In 2000, in a move spearheaded by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, it was proposed that the OAU be replaced by a new body, the African Union. The African Union was to be more economic in nature, similar to the European Union, and would contain a central bank, a court of justice, and an all-Africa parliament. A Constitutive Act, which provided for the establishment of the African Union, was ratified by two-thirds of the OAU’s members and came into force on May 26, 2001. After a transition period, the African Union replaced the OAU in July 2002. In 2004 the AU’s Pan-African Parliament was inaugurated, and the organization agreed to create a peacekeeping force, the African Standby Force, of about 15,000 soldiers.