Meta Africanism
One vision. Many dimensions.
This is where you meet me at my best advancing my thoughts on Africa.
For me, Meta Africanism is the logical continuation of everything Africa needs to become.
The premise
“Africa is one, Africans everywhere have to experience Africa.”
The working premise of Meta Africanism, in Tai’s words.
Foundation
A continuation of Pan-Africanism.
Pan-Africanism argued that Africans on the continent and in the diaspora share a history and a future and should act on it together. Meta Africanism starts from that inheritance. It is informed in particular by Kwame Nkrumah, who made African unity the centre of his politics and wrote Africa Must Unite (1963), and by Kwame Ture, who carried Pan-Africanist organising from the American civil-rights movement into a life lived in West Africa.
Where that tradition asked mainly about political unity, Meta Africanism asks about lived experience. Can an African in Lagos experience Nairobi, Accra or Cairo as theirs? Do people get the same access to a good life in every part of the continent? Which stories, songs and institutions make a shared identity real, and which keep it abstract?
In short: Pan-Africanism said Africa is one. Meta Africanism asks what it would take for every African to feel that and live it.
Dimensions
The questions it asks
Each dimension is a line of enquiry, explored through writing, conversations and research.
People
“Africa is people.” Start from people’s lives rather than maps, markets or institutions and ask what each person’s experience of the continent is.
Related: Unfinished (opens on medium.com)
Abundance
“Every African should have access to an abundant life in every part of this continent.” What would have to change for that to hold true in every country, not only some?
Related: Unfinished (opens on medium.com)
Stories and culture
Music, theatre and writing are how a shared identity becomes something people feel. In Tai’s phrase, Afrobeats has made it “so cool to be African”. What does culture make possible that policy cannot?
Related: Now it is so cool to be African (opens on medium.com) · Let the Stories Bring You Home (opens on medium.com)
Public money
An abundant life depends on what governments fund. Where does public money go, and how much of it can citizens actually trace?
Related: Where Does the Money Go?
Where Meta Africanism stands
Meta Africanism is a body of thinking in development: essays, conversations and a first research pilot. It is not an organisation, a membership movement or a finished doctrine. This page will grow as the work does.
Research · Pilot edition
Where does the money go?
The first public-interest project under Meta Africanism follows spending on health, education, power and water across five countries in 2022 and 2023. It is careful about what the numbers can and cannot say.
Think it through together.
Invite Tai to a panel, a classroom or a conversation about Meta Africanism and Africa’s shared future.