On the Concept of “We are all Africans”

Bernard Lewis once grappled with the question “What is a Turk?” and finally put forward, virtually as part of the definition, the “sentiment of Turkish identity”—simply thinking of oneself as a Turk. Now the course of world history is being much affected by people who on occasion speak of themselves collectively as “Africans.” How important to the definition of an African in politics is the quality of thinking of oneself as an African? In many respects, Melville Herskovits has maintained, Africa is a geographical fiction. “It is thought of as a separate entity and regarded as a unit to the degree that the map is invested with an authority imposed on it by the map makers.” The argument here is presumably that climatically the range in Africa is from arid deserts to tropical forests; ethnically, from the Khoisan to the Semites; linguistically from Amharic to Kidigo. What have all these in common apart from the tyrann y of the map maker? One possible answer is that they have a negative common element: they are alike one to another to the extent that they are collectively different from anything in the outside world. It is perhaps this question-begging assumption which makes President Nkrumah of Ghana insist that “Africa is not, and can never be an extension of Europe.” That argument was used against the notion that Algeria was part of France, and it continues to be used against Portuguese “integration” of Angola and Mozambique. In a televised New York debate with Jacques Soustelle when the future of “French” Algeria was still in question, Ghana's Ambassador Alex Quaison-Sackey employed the argument not merely as a variant formulation of the thesis that “Algeria had to be independent of France” but as a piece of evidence in support of that thesis.