‘We want Africans to colonise Africa,' Ethiopian academic Mammo Muchie declared at the recent African Unity for Renaissance Conference in Pretoria organised by the Africa Institute, other NGOs and the South African government.

Muchie said Tanzania's founding president, Julius Nyerere, had dismissed his own country - and most others on the continent - as a colonial creation, and insisted: ‘Don't call me a Tanzanian, call me an African.'

‘If we all do that, we will colonise Africa,' the enthusiastic Muchie concluded, saying that pan-Africanism was the only way to erase the national borders drawn by the colonial powers. He lamented that Africans were still dying defending these artificial borders.

Muchie was making what might be regarded as the limiting case for pan-Africanism.

It was at least logically consistent for an ardent anti-colonialist to put the case this way, since it avoids the contradiction of those who are both anti-colonialist and nationalist - and so find themselves defending states created by the Europeans they deplore.

But if ‘Africans must colonise Africa' is a stirring call to arms for pan-Africanists, it is by no means clear that it is very helpful for the fulfilment of the more immediate needs of African societies. And those pressing needs must surely, practically speaking, be met for the foreseeable future within the confines of the nation state, however dubious its genesis might be.

Muchie's remarks highlighted the question: has the pan-Africanism that is the leitmotif of the African Union (AU), and of at least the African intelligentsia (many of whom were gathered at the Pretoria conference), undermined the more pressing demand of nation building?

By gazing always at the horizon, have those who are supposed to guide the continent's thinking ignored the foreground?

It seems that the pan-Africanists believe that Africa can leapfrog the nation state, going from the community directly to the continent, in much the same way that the continent is happily leapfrogging dilapidated cable telephony by going directly to the cellphone.

Yet examples of successful regional integration elsewhere, such as the European Union, have been built on the foundation of distinct national identities. The fact that even such sophisticated nations are reluctant to surrender much sovereignty to a higher regional entity - as the recent European Parliament elections have indicated - may be interpreted in different ways.

They may suggest, as the pan-Africanists would probably like to think, that European national identities have become too rigid for pan-regionalism, and that Africa is fortunate in having more embryonic national identities, which should therefore be easier to supersede.

One suspects, however, that the argument rather goes the other way - that if even older nations which are more confident about their national identities struggle to transcend them for their own greater good, younger and less mature African national identities will be even harder to abandon. If the Nuer and Dinka cannot bury the hatchet, why would one expect Sudan and South Sudan to do so?

At the same conference as Muchie, Nigerian scholar Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi argued in a critical review of the ideology of pan-Africanism that despite its lofty ideals, pan-Africanism had not - beyond serving the cause for physical decolonisation and independence of African states - led to a more secure Africa. The continent had witnessed more crises leading to inter- and intra-state civil wars than other regions of the world, he said.

That the current national borders of Africa are mostly arbitrary colonial constructs is of course not in contention. Nor is it in contention that these artificial boundaries often present a very difficult challenge to nation building.

But that is the reality that the nations of the continent face, and it is one that Africa does not confront alone, as history has also drawn awkward national boundaries in other places. Trying to redraw them is a hazardous undertaking - not least because no one could say what they might look like today had it not been for colonial intervention.

The few instances where African states have defied the Organisation of African Unity or AU injunction to preserve the borders inherited from colonialism hardly support the notion that these inappropriate borders are to blame for the continent's gravest ills.

Since Eritrea seceded in 1993 it has been in a state of war with Ethiopia - at best cold, but at worst erupting into very bitter and bloody fighting - incidentally over tiny and intrinsically worthless pockets of land defined by colonial borders.

And the more recent example of South Sudan separating from Sudan in July 2011 is even more discouraging, as the Dinka and Nuer people, having been deprived of a common enemy, have set upon each other with at least equal ferocity.

In both cases, secession might have been avoided if the national government had not marginalised the region in question and eventually driven it out to form a separate state. Ethiopia could probably have done so by giving real meaning to federation, instead of simply absorbing Eritrea.

John Garang, the Sudan People's Liberation Army's chief fighter for liberation, favoured a one-state solution for Sudan - but Khartoum largely made that impossible with its refusal to accommodate any cultural or political autonomy for the south.

These two cases suggest that it is not the borders themselves that are the problem. Break off just about any ethnically distinct segment of an African state and you will probably find other ethnic identities within it. What is important is not to try to achieve ethnic homogeneity, but to respect and nurture ethnic diversity within the state.

To return to Muchie; surely living within borders arbitrarily defined by former colonial powers does not in itself contaminate the current citizens with the taint of colonialism?

If the pan-Africanism that he espouses means anything, it must mean a broader humanity. If that can find expression in a continental identity - which perhaps it will, one day - surely it should be so much easier for it to find expression in any part of the continent, no matter how defined, in the meantime.

Peter Fabricius,is  Foreign Editor, Independent Newspapers, South Africa. This article first appeared in ISS Weekly, the online newsletter of the Institute for Security Studies.

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