Having adopted a catastrophically-flawed paradigm in Kwame Nkrumah's concept of a "United States of Africa", the time has arrived for all of its inhabitants to rectify that dreadful error by recasting their vision of the continent's future in terms of the surging civilisations of China and India . "Flawed" because the historical forces which spawned the American Republic are antithetical and asymmetric to the continuum of Africa's own history.
The United States of America is a European settler colony which was subjugated and peopled by the same race that once sought to perpetrate a similar move on the African continent. In identifying it as the civilization exemplar in whose footpath Africa should follow, Nkrumah fell victim to the historical moment into which he was born. At the time he promulgated his "United States of Africa" proposal, America was the world's greatest power and the only nation with sufficient charismatic allure to seduce any aspirant to global dominion. Neither the People's Republic of China nor the Republic of India had yet attained the level of economic prosperity or political coherence that would have stood them out as models for Africa's own self-realization. Both were nations still struggling to cast aside the legacies of their own colonization and establish a foothold up the ladder of the international system.
All of that has changed. Today both China and India, having long since discarded their erstwhile European overlords, have consolidated their sovereignty, centralized their political systems, established nuclear deterrence and bulked up their productivity to the point where both countries-according to conservative projections of their future GDP contained in the Goldman Sachs Path to 2050 report - are set to surpass the United States of America and the European Union to emerge as the world's two leading economic and political powerhouses by the middle of this century.
As the progeny of identical centrifugal forces to those which shaped modern African history, it is to them that our continent should turn in envisaging its own future and forging a new constitutional and global identity. It is no longer a "United States" that Africans should aspire to create out of themselves; it is a "People's Republic". China and India - not Western Europe nor the United States of America - are the paragons Africa should pursue in reinventing itself and fashioning its own future.
Both countries were once "Africas" in their own right. Both, like Africa, were once under the heel of the European. Both turned on him, cast him out and subverted his skewed "international system." Once China and India are firmly ensconced at the political and technological helm of our planet by the year 2045, the myth of Anglo-Saxon racial and intellectual supremacy will sink back into the psychopathological swamp from whence it sprang, never to reappear. Never again will anyone from that race so much as whisper a single asininity about the inherent superiority of their species. The long-suffering peoples of the entire Southern Hemisphere will break free from the yoke of any residual inferiority complex and assert their humanity. The history of America, as a nation that was conquered by Europeans and whose aboriginal inhabitants were levelled to a state of reservation-dwelling destitution - while its agrarian and industrial development was being borne upon the backs of slaves "renditioned" from the African continent - mirrors that which those same usurpers attempted to inflict upon China, India and the African continent itself.
As former colonies which successfully overcame their own subjugation, it is to both China and India -and their burgeoning diasporas -that Africa should turn for the toolbox out of which to reconstitute itself on the road to its own ultimate destiny as the world's pre-eminent civilization. If China and India - once regarded by the West as nations inhabited by racially-inferior "Mud People" - can rise to eclipse the intellectual, scientific, technological, cultural and industrial accomplishments of the European and American worlds, then so, too, can Black Africa. But this will only be realized if our Golden Continent can successfully reinvent and unify itself not as a "United States" but as a "People's Republic".
The emergence of China and India as the two dominant forces of the 21st century will mark the official end of the "White Age." This tectonic shift in the international system will signal the first time in nearly 600 years that the leading states on this planet were ones not stewarded by Anglo-Saxons. When this development is coupled with the profound demographic upheavals that are convulsing the U.S. populace - and ones that will result in the atrophy of White Americans down to a racial minority by the year 2053 -the way will be clear for the People's Republic of Africa to join the People's Republics of China and India - alongside a victorious Caliphate - in the radical restoration of this planet's Natural Order of Things after their having been so rudely ruptured by that epistemological aberration otherwise known as the "Western Civilization".
By Paul Bita
Bita is a British based freelance film maker and internet blogger
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