The Intellectual Legacy of Pan-Africanism

In 1938, Joma Kenyatta dedicated his work, Fating Mount Kenya, to ‘Mũigai and Wambiũ’, both man and woman, ‘and to all the dispos sessed youth of Africa; for the perpetuation of communion with the ancestral spirits through the fight for African Freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines.’ Here the shrines are seen as having been destroyed by colonialism and even earlier by slavery and the slave trade. What of course is compelling in the dedication is the author’s stress on his firm faith that the reconstruction of the destroyed shrines is only possible through the unity of the dead, the living, and the unborn.

The dead as part of the living and of the unborn is the one common thread in African thought and experience. Therefore burial grounds were revered as the sacred resting places of our forebears, and there never was any question of anyone ever thinking of digging up a burial ground to plant crops. In the Kenya of my youth, one did not point at them with the forefinger like one points at every other person. That was sacrilege. One pointed at them with a thumb between the pointing finger and the middle fingers all closed in a fist. So one imbibed this reverence from childhood. It is a shock for me, even today, to witness the indecent hurry with which governments and developers in our cities destroy these memorial grounds in their relentless pursuit of glass and concrete skyscrapers. Destruction of the memories of the past is based on our conception of modernity, but this conception really goes against the basic themes underlying African thought and world outlook.

This basic theme in the African world outlook is beautiful in its very biological simplicity. Life is continuous. We who are here tonight have not produced ourselves. We were born by those who were here before us even as those were born by those who had been there before them. And we who are present are all potential mothers and fathers of those who will come after us. Reverence for the ancestors is actually a reverence for life; for continuity and change. We are the children of those who were here before us qut we are not identical twins with them even as we shall not produce complete identicals with ourselves.