We Shall Not Host Our Executioners
On 11–12 May, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, French President Emmanuel Macron stood in front of more than thirty African heads of state and announced, ‘We are the true Pan-Africanists’. This was an extraordinarily obnoxious comment that was sandwiched between bureaucratic banalities about ‘growth’, ‘innovation’, and ‘partnerships’.
In an open letter, Togolese writer Farida Bemba Nabourema responded that ‘Pan-Africanism is, at its most fundamental, the political philosophy that said no to everything France spent three centuries saying yes to: slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism’.