France24 2010.02.22
It has been more than fifty years since the lofty ideal of
a United States of Africa was floated. France24 looks at how this dream has panned out.
By Guillaume GUGUEN
It was the stuff of dreams, hatched just as Africa was beginning to come out of the shadows of its colonial past. The concept of a United States of Africa conjured up hopes of an awakening continent. Reality, though, got in the way, hampering lofty ideals.
It is now more than fifty years since the Pan-African conferences of 1953 and 1958, where independent Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, mooted the idea of a centralised continent-wide government. Today, the “United States of Africa” is just political fiction.