Good morning. It’s an honor to be here. I want to start by thanking my sister Andrea and my brother Biafra. I think I saw a lot of the other people as well in the organizing committee. I think you will agree with me that they’ve done an amazing job. Let’s give them a round of applause.

I want to occupy us with a reflection on a very important theoretical and practical question — the question of “the return to the source.” I hope this will help scaffold the discussions that matter most to us as young Africans in this moment.

Before we dive in, I want to assume that those reading this are either the sons and daughters of Africa or the friends of the continent. If I assume correctly then we can proceed to state that there comes a time in the life of every woman and man whereby we must grow up — and the indicator of growth is that we assume responsibility.

I remember around 2008, my mother gave me my first lesson on how to handwash my white primary school uniform t-shirt. And then two years later, I would be going to boarding school and I’d have to do that on my own. That is the indicator of growth: that you can now take care of yourself, that you can now take responsibility where previously your family and your parents would have had to do that.

In Africa we like to make noise about the fact that we are young. We talk about youth as if youth is some item of merit, some everlasting marker of achievement. But we need to justify our being young by taking up responsibility. The question is: what kind of responsibility exactly are we itching to take up in regards to Africa?

When I say Africa, I mean continental Africa with 54 countries as well as a diaspora — meaning Africans who are not in continental Africa: those in countries like Haiti, Barbados, the Bahamas, other Caribbean countries, and also Africans in countries like the United States and Europe. So what is the responsibility of these Africans alive today?

Frantz Fanon — whom I assume many of you know, or should know — said something very instructive. But before we get to it, there is a deeper theoretical question we must ask about the man. Who was Fanon? Was Fanon a Martinican? Was Fanon Algerian? Was Fanon French? Or was Fanon African? I raise this to bring us to an appreciation of the arbitrariness of national identity that many Africans seem quite willing to die for.

I believe that the true Africans and the true friends of Africa are those who spend their lives — like Fanon — for the cause of the continent. The pigmentation of your skin is not very useful in determining how African you are. Neither is your accent, nor even where you were born — that was an accident of geography over which you had no control. But Fanon said something important in his magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth: “Every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and then fulfill it or betray it.”

So the question remains: what is the responsibility of our generation in regards to Africa? What is our generational mission? I want to propose that the answer lies in hearkening back to the goals of the African revolution which predates us.

What is the African Revolution About?

A friend of mine likes to say that to be African in this day and age is to be in a long line of struggle. If we claim to inherit that struggle from our forebears, one might be forced to ask: what is the struggle about? What are we fighting for?

Many of our forebears have said the struggle is for freedom. A lot of them called themselves freedom fighters. Some still do today. Freedom sounds like a noble and desirable objective — but what exactly is it?

To understand freedom, and thereby the goals of the African revolution, we turn to the former Tanzanian President, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. In his Uhuru na Maendeleo — Freedom and Development — Mwalimu states: “Freedom and development are as completely linked together as are chickens and eggs. Without chickens you get no eggs, and without eggs you soon have no chickens. Similarly, without freedom you get no development, and without development you very soon lose your freedom.”

Freedom is development and development is freedom. If I claim to be an African freedom fighter, it means I am fighting for the development of Africa. Mwalimu delineated this development — understood as freedom — in three aspects.

The first is national freedom: the ability of Africans to determine their own future and to govern themselves without interference from non-Africans. You can call this political freedom, sovereignty, or today — strategic security. On January 3rd this year, the United States went to Venezuela and kidnapped the head of state in the middle of the night. After that event I asked some colleagues: which African president today exists that that could not have been done to? The answer is any of them could have been picked up in the middle of the night, and all that you and I will do is lament, moralize, go on social media, make noise and then keep quiet. The US called the operation “Operation Absolute Resolve” — that is quite telling, because as long as all it takes for the president of say Nigeria, Burkina Faso, or Somalia to be captured is the resolve of another country, then we lack this political freedom as Africans. We are not secure.

But let’s assume we are because we can on paper vote for our leaders. Lenin said: “No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.” And Nkrumah added that “Political freedom without economic freedom is meaningless.” So Mwalimu gave us the second freedom: freedom from hunger, disease, and poverty. In Africa today, we speak of the quest for mass prosperity. How do we create wealth and ensure the health of all Africans?

The third is personal freedom for the individual — the right to live in dignity and equality with all others, the right to freedom of speech, freedom to participate in the making of all decisions which affect one’s life, and freedom from arbitrary arrest because one happens to annoy someone in authority.

Mwalimu attempted to achieve this development as freedom through African socialism — Ujamaa. After his experiment in Tanzania, he later admitted the futility of the task within the context of one nation. In a speech in Accra in 1997, he admitted the missed opportunity his generation had at independence and set the task for those who followed: “Together, we, the peoples of Africa will be incomparably stronger internationally than we are now with our multiplicity of unviable states. The needs of our separate countries can be, and are being, ignored by the rich and powerful. The result is that Africa is marginalised when international decisions affecting our vital interests are made. Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated.”

So Mwalimu understood, though late, that political freedom within the context of the nation state will not suffice as the harbinger of development. The work now falls to us to finish the aborted project of Pan-African integration.

The objectives of the African revolution have not changed — only the generation responsible for advancing them. Kwame Nkrumah called the task we have today fighting neo-colonialism — achieving real independence. By this he meant that we are not really independent if all we have to claim is a flag, an anthem, and a government with people who look like us but no substantive control over our economy, our resources, and our destiny.

When you talk of neo-colonialism, a lot of people like to say: “You Africans — you just like to complain. Colonialism happened 60 years ago. Move on.” I am all for moving on. But as we move on, it helps a great deal if we know who and what we are up against.

Think about this: the Trump administration is signing bilateral health agreements with more than twenty African governments, trading continued health assistance for the private biological data of African citizens, with no guarantee that those same people will ever benefit from what is developed with their own bodies. We begged for vaccines during COVID. We are still begging. A friend of mine calls this condition extraversion: we depend on the external for our forward march. The second and third freedoms Mwalimu spoke about are still lacking. So we still have work to do.

The African revolution has two potential enemies — who are also potential allies. Cabral used to say that “Rice can only be cooked inside the pot” — but the external dimension matters too: the firewood, the fire. Internally: those who use the state for personal advancement through corruption, tribalism, war. I called them schemers in my book. Externally: imperialism, the foreign control of our economies.

The Return to the Source

I attended the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg — a Pan-African boarding school that gathered young Africans from across the continent and dared to ask a serious question: how do you train leaders who will actually have an impact in Africa? It is a question that sounds simple but hides enormous complexity.

Up to 2024, ALA had a formal expectation — a mandate — that its graduates would return to Africa to meaningfully impact the continent for at least 10 years after their 25th birthday or after graduation from abroad. The logic was straightforward: the continent invested in you; you owe it your presence. I raise this not to settle the question — I am not sure it can be settled — but because the same dilemma is alive in many rooms today. It is what makes the question of the return to the source not merely philosophical, but urgent and personal.

We have the Guinean Amilcar Cabral — one of the world’s outstanding theoreticians of anti-imperialist struggle — to thank for this phrase.

Cabral was writing about a class of people he knew intimately because he was one of them: the educated African, the indigenous petite bourgeoisie, the person who had gone to school, acquired the language and credentials of the colonial power, and found themselves suspended between two worlds. He was direct about their condition: “They are prisoners of the cultural and social contradictions of their lives.”

For some of you reading this, that feeling may be relatable. You are African enough to feel the pull of home, and educated enough to have options that most of your people do not. You are Black enough to be reminded of it daily in this country, and credentialed enough to be in rooms where that reminder takes more subtle forms. You do not fully belong here — and after years away, some of you are no longer sure you fully belong there either. You carry two worlds inside you and feel at home in neither.

I have spoken before about what I called “the belonging handicap” — that particular burden carried by those who have been formed in institutions meant to train you to act meaningfully on the world. How all the privileges amassed from these spaces can slowly erode the certainty of where you stand, and for whom.

Cabral named this as a structural condition, not a personal failure. The marginality of this class — both in its own country and in the diaspora — produces what he called “a frustration complex”: a feeling of bitterness that breeds and develops as the educated African becomes more and more conscious of a compelling need to question their marginal status and to rediscover an identity.

And here is what Cabral observed happened next. Faced with this frustration, faced with this identity crisis, they turn to the people — the native masses. For this reason arises the problem of a “return to the source,” which seems to be even more pressing the greater the isolation of the petite bourgeoisie, “as in the case of African diasporas living in the colonial or racist metropolis.”

This is why Pan-Africanism was born outside Africa. This is why Negritude was conceived in Paris. This is why the Black Americans’ claim to African identity — which Cabral called another proof, possibly a desperate one, of the need for a return to the source — emerged from the deepest experience of exile and dispossession. The longing for the source is sharpest in those who feel most cut off from it.

If you feel that tension — that pull, that unresolved ache of not quite belonging anywhere — know two things. You are not alone. And you are experiencing a structural condition that Cabral diagnosed over fifty years ago, one that has shaped some of the most important political movements in the history of the African world. That frustration is not your enemy. It is your fuel — if you know what to do with it.

But Cabral was careful, and we must be careful too. He was clear that the return to the source “is not and cannot in itself be an act of struggle against foreign domination, and it no longer necessarily means a return to traditions. It is the denial, by the petite bourgeoisie, of the pretended supremacy of the culture of the dominant power over that of the dominated people with which it must identify itself.”

In other words: the return to the source is not nostalgia. It is not performance. It is something far more demanding — and far more liberating. It is the decision to identify, completely and without reservation, with the people and their struggle. To take the frustration of your marginality and convert it, through discipline and commitment, into the energy of transformation.

How can we be useful to Africa?

What the Return to the Source is Not

There are three common counterfeits that pass for the real thing — and each of them is a trap.

Counterfeit One: empty symbolic gestures disguising as cultural purity.

You find this a lot even with Africans on the continent. The fixation over so-called African names, African dressing. I watch YouTube sometimes and there’s a comrade who likes to parade around the world wearing hides and skins and a headdress, feeling like he is the most authentic African who ever existed, just because of how he dresses. Good luck to him in winter here.

I think there’s a risk of us cheapening the African revolution and reducing it to kente clothing we buy on the cheap from Temu or Amazon. I have a group of people I work with at The 4th Generation Initiative who keep telling me, “No, we have to change our names. Colonial names, colonial names.” Now my names don’t help — Brian, Gordon — these are British names. But are we missing something with that fixation?

You can carry the name of your ancestor — but do you carry their spirit? You can carry some very huge names, but your ancestors are turning in their graves because you’re not reflecting what you ought to be reflecting. It was Fred Hampton — Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party — who said: “Power does not flow out of the sleeves of a dashiki.” Cultural performance without political commitment is not resistance — it is decoration. And decoration, however beautiful, does not free anyone. It’s like having a Bible on your shelf that you never open — it is not going to ward off evil spirits, and it will not profit you.

Counterfeit Two: the return to some Africa of the past.

This is the more sophisticated trap. In the immediate pre- and post-independence period, its greatest expression was Negritude. Negritude was born from genuine pain. Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas — these were serious men, responding seriously to the violence of colonial dehumanization. To assert that African civilization had value, beauty, and depth when the colonial world denied all three — that was a necessary act. In the historical moment in which it was produced, I do not dismiss it.

But let me say something plainly: after all the work that Nkrumah, Fanon, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and several others have done — I do not think we have the obligation to prove to anyone again that Africans, or Black people for that matter, are human beings. That work has been done. That battle has been fought, and fought at tremendous cost. To still be organizing our intellectual and political energy around the project of proving our humanity to those who denied it is to remain trapped inside a framework that our forebears already transcended. We owe them more than that.

Negritude is not our present condition. It is a relic of a particular historical moment — a necessary phase in the long arc of African and Black political thought. But it is a relic that both Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora still flirt with. You see it whenever the assertion of cultural identity becomes an end in itself rather than a means to liberation. Whenever energy that should be directed at structural transformation gets redirected into the performance of authenticity.

Fanon — who understood the Negritude impulse from the inside because he lived it — saw the trap clearly. He argued that Negritude ultimately freezes culture. It treats African identity as a fixed essence waiting to be recovered from the past, rather than as a living thing made and remade through the struggle of actual people in actual history. Culture is not a museum piece. It is not preserved in amber somewhere, waiting for you to come home and collect it. It is built — in the heat of collective action, in the friction of real struggle, in the daily lives of people working to be free.

Counterfeit Three: opportunistic careerism.

This one is the quietest — and perhaps the most dangerous — because it does not announce itself as a betrayal but as achievement. It looks like this: you go abroad, you get the degree, you acquire the credential, the network, the accent. And then you return — not to serve, but to be served. To leverage what you have learned into a government appointment, a consultancy, or a position of influence. You use the language of transformation while pursuing the logic of personal advancement. You speak of Africa in every room you enter, and you extract from Africa in every decision you make.

In my book Leaders and Schemers, I call these people schemers. Cabral called them something similar — those who use the national liberation project as a vehicle for class ambition rather than collective transformation. The question is therefore not whether you will have a career. You will. The question is what your career serves to advance. We have to subordinate what we study, what we build, and what we become — to the needs of the African revolution.

How Does the Diaspora Return to the Source?

We have credible reasons to be where we are — education, economic opportunity, culture, faith, fellowship. Some may argue they are called to contribute in the diaspora and not in continental Africa. Some may say there are credible causes all around the world to contribute to. And the diaspora does contribute. According to the World Bank, the African diaspora remitted over $100 billion to the continent in 2023 — three times more than Africa receives in development aid or foreign direct investment.

But I want to ask an honest question: is this enough? Is it enough to send money home, or make noise about African politics from the outside in ways that sometimes hurt the continent?

I do not think so. History suggests that if financial contribution alone were sufficient, many of our countries would never have been freed. Consider Eduardo Mondlane — the son of a village chief in Mozambique, who made his way through mission schools, through Witwatersrand, through Lisbon, through Oberlin, Northwestern, Harvard, and eventually into a professorship at Syracuse University. By every measure of individual achievement, he had made it. And then, in 1963, he resigned his post and moved to Dar es Salaam to lead FRELIMO in armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. He was assassinated in 1969, never living to see the independence his sacrifice helped make possible. He declared: “Although I loved university life above all, I decided to devote the rest of my life to the war of liberation of my country, until it receives independence.” Today, Mozambique’s national university bears his name.

I am not saying everyone must go back and pick up arms. The nature of the struggle has changed. But we must take Mondlane seriously as a question. The gifts he acquired — in America, in Europe, in the international arena — were not his to keep. They were tools to be returned, in service of a people.

Let me be concrete. There are three things the return to the source has always demanded, and demands still.

First: perceive yourself as the expression and vessel for the dreams and aspirations of your people. This means asking, seriously, whose hopes you are accountable to — and whether the choices you make, day by day, are answerable to those people. As Sékou Touré put it: “To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song: you must fashion the revolution with the people.” Biko added: “In order to achieve real action you must be a living part of Africa and of her thought.” Are you a living part of Africa and of her thought? Or are you simply a spectator?

Second: foreswear convenience — commit, in Cabral’s phrase, class suicide. This is not a call to misery. It is a call to intention. As Malcolm X said: “If you are not willing to die for it, then you must take the word freedom out of your mouth.” To prosecute your historic mission, you must militate against your conveniences. The choice is stark: to scheme or to lead. To identify with the goals of the African revolution, or your own.

Third: act critically and consciously — because “you cannot change what you do not understand.” Conscientization is where the return to the source starts. One cannot fundamentally change what one does not fundamentally understand. Cabral and his comrades did not simply organize. They thought. They studied. They analyzed the social structure of their country with rigor. These were not abstract academic exercises. They were the intellectual preconditions for a movement that actually worked.

Conclusion

The questions left unanswered by the third generation are awaiting us. How do we ensure mass prosperity within a global capitalist order not designed for African flourishing? How do we think our way out of aid dependence? What does real independence look like in our specific conditions? How do we build the intellectual and ideological infrastructure that turns our youth population from a demographic fact into a genuine asset? These are the questions The 4th Generation must take up.

Taking up those questions requires hope — not as a feeling, but as a discipline. Despair is not a political program. But neither is hope a substitute for one. It is the precondition. You cannot organize toward a future you do not believe is possible.

Fanon said every generation must discover its mission and either fulfill it or betray it. The generations before us discovered theirs — and many of them fulfilled it, at tremendous cost. Mondlane never saw Mozambican independence. Cabral was assassinated eight months before Guinea-Bissau was free. They paid the full price for a future they would not live to inhabit.

We are living in that future. We are the answers to prayers our forebears did not survive to see answered. The question is what we will do with that inheritance.

The return to the source is not a flight home. It is not a dashiki. It is not a conference resolution. It is the daily, disciplined decision to be at one with your people — to vessel their hopes, to foreswear your convenience, to conscientize yourself until your understanding can inform your praxis.

That work is ours now and it begins now here in this conference and all the days that follow.

Aluta Continua.

Olemo Gordon Brian is the author of Leaders and Schemers: A Political, Intellectual and Spiritual Itinerary and the founder of The 4th Generation Initiative.

Congratulations Class of 2019 on this very momentous achievement. Thank you for believing that I could have a message to share for and on your behalf on this very auspicious occasion.

It was on the 7th of September, Day 4 of orientation when I was strolling leisurely for the first time through the main common space. There, etched in Bold letters on the blackboard was a sinister warning. It read “SMILE: THE WORST IS YET TO COME” At that time, the threat felt very empty and I brushed the writer off as a prophet of doom who was reacting to their own experiences. Few months down the road however, different actors started doing their deeds.

And when the coronavirus struck and we were forced into our rooms. With the walls shrinking in as our meals were delivered at our bedside by the very reliable hotel room service, it looked like we were approaching our nadir.

But beyond everything, as many speakers before me have mentioned already — what ties all this together is our resilience.

In the midst of what looked like a deep darkness, an unending tunnel, many of us were forced into the reflections that we got tired of doing at the academy. We were confronted with the question, “why?” Why should I submit another university application? Why should I dredge the deepest wells of my soul searching for that extra motivation to push on, that extra discipline to finish that thesis presentation, and the joy to do so with a smile. As this day drew nearer, I wondered what sustained us in our solid state and extended our breaking points? My search, just like many of you, brought me back to one phrase: We move regardless. An expression that our current SG chairman Mr Malik rephrased to We rise regardless. Indeed we arose despite and through it all.

When I joined ALA, I was sure I knew why I had come. I was convinced I was going to continue on the trajectory of winning tangible trophies and preaching the need for a real commitment to the pan-African future of this continent. As they say, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. It turned out to be two years of introspection and a lot of intangible internal transformation — just like many of you here today brethren. One of the unforeseen avenues for said transformation was the humbling call by God to the leadership of ALA church. Today, brethren, permit me to deliver my last sermon at the academy on the topic of High castles. Sermons tend to be long so bear with me. Since I don’t want to lose my diploma and in the spirit of MLA citation, I will admit I borrowed a part of this sermon from a revolutionary mentor, friend and man-who-plays-all-extreme sports not least of all Chemistry — Mr. Phenyo. Our scripture is in Exodus chapter 2 — And it is the familiar story of Moses.

Moses, a conflicted leader.

Moses was born in Egypt at a time when his people lived in bondage and slavery. They were forced to undertake back-breaking labour in the scorching African sun under a despotic regime with a brutal dictator as King. Threatened by the numerical boom of the Israelites, this despot (the Pharaoh) ordered that all male children of the Israelites be thrown into the River Nile.

So when this bouncing baby boy was born — cute like some of us in the room. His mother, out of a deep love and an awareness of the predicament that awaited him, put him in a basket and let him float down the Nile. It so happened that as the baby was floating by, one of the princesses’ of the land spotted the basket as she was taking her shower (An activity many of us may not relate to given the cold winter). She adopted him as her son and he effectively became a prince (Shout out to Prince). So this boy, whose fate once looked sealed, grew up in a majestic palace, a high castle with all the niceties life could offer.

Effectively, he was a prince enjoying life at the expense of the blood and sweat of his kinsmen who were living abysmally under the whip. He came of age and his eyes were opened to the plight of his people. Despite the pampering and the easy life that royalty offered, he couldn’t help but be appalled by the oppression of his kinsmen. His happiness was incomplete without their total liberation. Out of this deep conviction, Moses killed an Egyptian in defense of a Hebrew brother — a crime that saw him experience his first exodus from Egypt to Midian where he remained self-exiled for 40 years. But even in the arms of his beautiful wife there, he never found rest. A part of him remained with his people in bondage. So when in their lowest moment, these people cried out to God. God heard them and in fulfillment of his purpose, Moses went back this time as a liberator.

This story, to a significant degree, reflects the nature of the journey that most of us have led and will continue to lead. It is premised on the understanding that the communities from which we hail and the spaces in which we find ourselves sharply contrast. By telling this story, I am in no way trying to administer a messianic blessing and telling you to go out there as a knight in shining armour to liberate the world.

The disprivilege of privilege.

You see, like Moses, we have been nurtured in a very high castle in the past two years. By virtue of our network and education, we have become part of the African elite. But ALA is no microcosm of the real world. I’ll share three experiences that showed me that we are very removed from the reality outside our electric fence;

1. Recently, there was a power outage for about 15 minutes and we had no Wifi. In the dorms, all hell broke loose. This for me was interesting. Because millions of kids back in Uganda could not in fact access education at all at the height of the pandemic. Last academic year, we barely had any power outages and yet Nigerians are rationing electricity and increasingly relying on deafening generators because of the failure of NEPA. In what was considered South Africa’s darkest year, 2020 saw the country experience 859 hours without electricity. We have been living on an island of absolute privilege.
2. By and large, we are able to move about this campus at any time of day or night without giving much regard to our physical safety. We can freely take quad walks with our loved ones. And yet, most women in South Africa cannot take those same walks freely in their townships. Having to think about their safety from depraved men in what is now referred to as the ‘rape capital of the world.’
3. In our two years, voter turnout for SG (Student Government) elections has been overwhelmingly low. But whereas many of us can coil into our cocoons of apathy and decide not to care about who the next chairlady of the student government is, outside those electric fences, free and fair elections are hard to come by and one leader can single handedly decide the fate of a whole nation.

When I leave home, my 10-hour bus journey from Apac in northern Uganda to Kampala is punctuated by dusty roads with potholes and young adults about our age hustling for survival. Just right outside my house, through my window, I see kids studying in classes without doors and windows under the mercy of buzzing mosquitoes. ALA is a sharp contrast. Dare I say — Worlds apart.

Permit me to indulge you in three downsides of residing in high castles. Pandemics that I think threaten to taint the future of the next generation of African leaders.

The first is what I call the belonging handicap. The disprivilege of the privilege of a castle. Moses faced this dilemma. In fact, he was denied and rejected by his own people when he tried intervening in a fight between two of them. They asked him, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?” This problem also manifests as a communication barrier. Every single term I spent at the academy and then went back home, I felt I spoke with and understood my community a little less. An example from the academy that many of us can relate to is that despite the strong desire we have to deeply connect with most of the supercare staff, the language barrier for some makes the task even harder. So much as you would want to connect with your people and be of use, what you have to offer will not always be appreciated. In the most extreme of circumstances, you are considered a distant stranger and so your privilege (be it your education, knowledge, wealth, manner of speech) becomes a double-edged sword — a precondition for your othering. Surely there has to be an antidote.

The second deleterious effect of inhabiting high castles is the commitment handicap — the incentive to run away. High castles become, for lack of a better description, parachutes to escape a crashing plane. This is an oxymoron, an antithesis that castles train you to serve outside their walls but they inadvertently offer you a way out from the discomfort that exists without. Despite all the edifying conversations I have enjoyed with you all, the most disheartening ones featured comments like “I have given up on Nigeria”; “I am not going back to Zimbabwe!” The choice to run away from the problems back home in the hope that someone else will make a better reality of it becomes seductive when you are in a castle. Our official school morning bell — Mr. Tait — has a pessimistic theory that he calls the 10%. He believes that in every cohort, only 10% of graduates will actually live to fulfill ALA’s mission. Two years ago, we came to ALA on the back of a pact. A deal to impact this continent for 10 years after our 25th birthday. I say disregard this deal. Not only because ALA has no machinery to implement it (I mean they won’t send secret agents to tell you, “man you have 4 more months and we are watching you” — to my knowledge, Mrs. Mary Fox is not secretly trained as an elite assassin). But also because we don’t owe this institution as much as we owe Africa. And Africa, we owe not 10 years, but a lifelong commitment to understanding our problems and working with our compatriots to change them. Comrades, our labours will be in vain if after life in our high castles, we do not stay or come back to do what we have been groomed for. That would be the anticlimactic end to Moses’ story. The choice to run away and become apathetic is the most pathetic dimension of scheming — one to which I pray none of us falls prey. But despite the allure of this temptation, there is an antidote.

Around September last year, we started shooting our shots. And congratulations to all those who got the Yes. To those who didn’t, you can always shoot again and there are many options out there. (For those I have lost) I am talking about universities — higher castles. The thing with high castles is that they open doors to even higher castles. It is no surprise for example that many of us will be matriculating at Universities in the Middle East, Asia, the United States and the UK. We need to stop looking at these castles as ends in themselves but as means to an end — The salvation of both ourselves and our communities. If you look at a castle as an end in itself, it introduces our third and most noteworthy downside, you become a schemer.

Schemers use people and their problems to feel good about themselves. They claim to derive purpose from people’s problems. They substitute love with empathy. Schemers give charity and aid because it serves their interests and helps them sleep at night. And I’m happy it is the author of Dead Aid herself; a paragon I look up to who honoured us as our guest speaker today. Because I’m scared scheming has been subconsciously so engraved in our skeletons that our highest aspiration has become getting ourselves to a position where we can one day give aid and charity to this continent — our own home. Schemers have no real connection with the people. They use the people and their privilege to access higher castles — with no modicum of remorse. Schemers use privilege to propel their personal agenda, not society’s. They foreground the duty to self before the duty to society. It is schemers who like to play messiah and knights in shining armour. But today comrades, allow me to offer you an antidote.

Love is the antidote

Love is the antidote. It is the fuel that spurred Moses to his historic mission. Love is the language of the leader. To end my final ALA sermon, I’d like to share with you two lessons on love.

To start with, the proof of love is sacrifice. I struggled at the genesis of my two year journey here to deeply connect with people. This was because I was too self-centered — always looking to what others could give and do for me. But love looks for ways to give. Love does not center the man in the mirror. I have watched and learnt as we have all invested time and resources to establish and sustain relationships — platonic and otherwise. That’s why we will miss each other. Some more than others though. Because we committed to the undertaking labour of love — sacrifice. The sacrifice to be vulnerable with our hearts and emotions, the sacrifice to learn a new language, the sacrifice of our time and resources, the sacrifice of humility. Our emotional labour is going to be our proof of love. Moses undertook this labour, reconnecting with a people who had rejected him. Mr. Phenyo always reminded me that “The most revolutionary act is being human”…that the measure of our brilliance is going to be our ability to connect with people — to love them and feel deeply for them. We have to be ready to put in the emotional and physical labour of connecting with the people we one day hope to serve. Dare I say, because we need our communities more than our communities need us. It is this deep connection & love that makes us affirm just like Nkrumah that “I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.”

Secondly, Love, like leadership, is not about you. It is about your neighbour. To borrow from Mr. Dash, love will use a magnifying glass and not a mirror. But just like Scheming others it starts with you. You can’t scheme another without first scheming yourself. Similarly, you can’t love another without first loving yourself. You can’t lead a revolution of thousands and millions without first leading one within your own soul. But much as it starts with you, you are not the final object of love. Love foregrounds others before self. It recognizes that you don’t know it all. In the realm of the anti-messianic, love values those we wish to serve — including their opinions in their own liberation. We need to put in the work to understand the language that the people speak and to speak the language that the people can understand. Like Sekou Toure reminded us “To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song: you must fashion the revolution with the people.” One of my mentors Steve Bantu Biko added that “Inorder to achieve real action you must be a living part of Africa and of her thought; you must be an element of that popular energy which is entirely called forth for the freeing, the progress and the happiness of Africa. There is no place outside that fight for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with, and completely at one with the people in the great battle of Africa and of suffering humanity.”

If you have love, you conscientize yourself. Love should awaken to injustices around you. We’ve all had it said before that privilege blinds — blinds one to people’s problems. I argue that our privilege should empower us. It should make obvious realities even more perceptible. Just like Moses, we can not become blinded to the plight of the people whom we’ve been called to play a part in liberating.

Today, I entreat you comrades to sign a new contract. “The new deal”. One final contract. This time not for a campus job with Leshamta, Kalina, Eden or Samke but a contract with your conscience and soul — to sharpen yourself in love in whatever high castle you occupy — for the principal task of radical social, cultural, economic and political transformation of and in Africa.

Closing

The future may look bleak, the present more so. But however bleak the present or future may look, do not be discouraged. Never has Africa been more ripe for change. Class of 2019, the onus is on us. As 108 soldiers in a much broader network, we have been charged with delivering a continent pregnant with expectation, energy and opportunity. The task may seem herculean but believe me when I say we’ve gone against far greater odds in the past two years to be here today.

Comrades, tomorrow as we walk out those green gates and every day after as we spend time in our ivory towers, the main question we’ve got to ask ourselves is: Are we the next generation of African leaders or are we the next generation of African schemers?

Congratulations Class of 2019.

Thank you for your kind attention.

On July 23, 2023, Professor P.L.O Lumumba addressed the landmark 10th Anniversary lecture of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) movement at the University of Cape Town. One may be tempted to ask, Why should I care about the politics of South Africa and particularly its third-largest political party? This question stood at the heart of Prof. Lumumba’s address. A good starting point in addressing it however is over 60 years ago with a proclamation from Frantz Fanon — one of the EFF’s ideological fathers. Fanon warned Africans against the temptation to mimic Europe.

“Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” (Chapter 6: The Wretched of the Earth, 1961)

Owing mainly to their lack of imagination, our leaders duly followed the exact opposite of Fanon’s counsel, latched on to the nation state, and today Africa is still caught in endless cycles of sickening mimicry of the West. One of the avenues where this circus has yielded predictable and unenviable results is the arena of economic development. In this regard, South Africa with its level of industrialization seems to naturally take leadership. Despite its seemingly advanced position relative to the rest of the continent, South Africa is still as much a neo-colonial and ‘consumer society’ as the rest of the continent. Like the rest of the continent, the country still imports most of its food, consumer goods, culture, and development agenda from the West and China. The highest level of unemployment, inequality, and poverty means any claim to exceptionalism by Mzansi is a height-measuring contest among pygmies — misguided and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Development challenges are not unique to South Africa. They are endemic all over the continent. A reason we should care about South Africa’s political economy, its unique history with apartheid notwithstanding, is that it sits on the same development arch and trajectory as many African countries running the same neo-liberal experiment in desperate attempts to catch up with the West. Just like Euro-America represents the mirror image of our future if we don’t change course, South Africa’s report card thus far is instructive for the rest of the continent pursuing the same ‘modernist’ vision. A peek at their results thus far should show that the project under the captaincy of the ANC has been a dismal failure.

The Generational Mandate

In his lecture, Prof. Lumumba’s point of departure was the question, “What is the state of our continent today and what is the state of Pan-Africanism?” This question assumes two things. To start with, somehow, Africa finds itself in an undesirable position— in need of a new outlook. Secondly, Pan-Africanism either represents this new outlook, contains the germs of the solution, or both. Armed with the understanding that to know where we are and where we are going, we have to know where we are coming from, Prof. Lumumba dedicated much of the lecture to historicizing the African struggle and resistance to date: from slavery through colonialism to neo-colonialism. He reiterated the consensus that European colonialism disrupted the natural course of development of African communities as well as their epistemology.

Colonialism was eventually defeated in the popular struggles for independence — an opportune watershed moment on which we failed to capitalize. Most African countries, with the exception of Zimbabwe (1980), Cabo Verde (1975), Guinea-Bissau (1974), Angola (1975), Mozambique (1975), and South Africa (1994) are at least 50 years old — having obtained political freedom around the early 1960s. At this juncture of joint reflection, as Prof. Lumumba aptly described it, many African countries are now being awakened to the fact that we got the crown with the jewel. We indeed got political freedom, but neo-colonial interests have ensured that economic freedom has remained elusive.

The departing colonialists bequeathed to us systems that ensured the availability of African markets and natural resources, I will add, minds, for continued exploitation. In essence, “the neo-colonial project is alive and well”. African lives are underwritten by erstwhile colonial masters who supply their pharmaceutical products, food, clothing, and all the cool communication technologies we are obsessed with today. Our lives and health is insured by non-African actors. We import most of the food we eat despite boasting the bulk of the world’s uncultivated arable land. In exhorting Africans to wean themselves off this economic dependency, Thomas Sankara told us, “he who feeds you, controls you”. It is an open secret that political influence is undergirded by economic power. This premise should begin highlight the task of our generation.

“10 years ago you made the correct diagnosis, you discovered that they gave us the crown without the jewels, an empty vessel, that political freedom in and of itself is empty; you cannot ask a person without legs or boots to lift himself up by the bootstraps.”

In the first episode of The 4th Generation Podcast, the Chair of the Pan-African Youth Conference (PAYC), Trevor Lwere declared, “To be an African in this day and age is to be in a perpetual state of resistance.” By that, he meant, we are born into struggle. He went on to charge that the task of our generation then is to employ the right ideological tools to figure out the nature of the struggle we are engaged in and by extension our role in it. To quote Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”

Prof. Lumumba reminded us of an important contention from his intellectual ancestor Kwame Nkrumah, “Political Freedom without economic freedom is meaningless.” He commended the EFF for reaching this conclusion at their founding. In his reflection on the 10 years of the EFF in Parliament, the first National Chairperson of the party, Dali Mpofu, acknowledged that this was “the single and most important idea that led to the formation of the EFF.” The EFF is born out of the understanding that the victory of 1994 did not constitute the total freedom for which the Nelson Mandela generation fought. Neither did 1957 if you are from Nkrumah’s Ghana or 1975 if you are from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

The historic mandate of the EFF and the current generation of Africans thus is to carry Africa’s protracted struggle for true and total freedom to its logical conclusion. To deliver economic freedom in our lifetime. To borrow from Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s analysis of the challenge during Ghana’s 40th independence celebration: “My generation led Africa to political freedom. The current generation of leaders and peoples of Africa must pick up the flickering torch of African freedom, refuel it with their enthusiasm and determination, and carry it forward.” The last colonial question thus is the question of economic emancipation.

The African Vanguard?

“This South Africa which has given birth to the EFF is the anchor…[and] fulcrum of the continent of Africa. This South Africa is what will give good hope to the continent.”

If the national liberation struggles have taught us anything, it is that victory in and of itself is not enough, we must be able to safeguard it. Prof. Lumumba acknowledged that the only way Africa would be able to consolidate and protect the gains of any victory in the struggle for economic emancipation is through unity. Separate and divided, African economies would still remain unviable and susceptible both to the superior economic and military might of the West and emergent powers in this ever-changing global order. Zimbabwe should be a case in point. Prof. Lumumba indicted African leaders for failing to heed Nkrumah’s incessant calls for unity. He spoke to the humiliation Africans have and continue to suffer at the hands of foreigners even on African soil. Mwalimu Nyerere had warned us in Ghana, “Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated. And it will, therefore, increase the effectiveness of the decisions we make and try to implement for our development.” For Prof. Lumumba, the EFF represents this understanding.

Politically at least, the EFF presents an answer to the historic challenge Nkrumah and the Casablanca bloc faced. How do we overcome national chauvinism? The logo of the party is the map of Africa. For a 10-year-old opposition party that is the third largest in South Africa, this speaks volumes about its Pan-African posture and internationalist orientation. This has off course often made it a subject of misunderstanding by the mostly parochial working class that is still beholden to the mythic rainbow nation.

In their founding Manifesto, the party boldly asserts the fact that “The development of the African continent is inextricably linked to the development of South Africa. No amount of sustainable socio-economic development and stability will be realized in South Africa unless the state plays an active role in the economic development of the African continent.” It is this analysis — an understanding of our shared problems — that informs the Pan-African character of the EFF. Any form of political or economic insularity in the face of imperialism either results from naivety or ignorance of the continent’s history and its political economy. In history, this should explain the acquisition of the atomic bomb by Soviet Union and its unrelenting effort to bring as many countries as possible behind the iron curtain. It should not be a surprise then that the visionary EFF has branches in Eswatini, Namibia, Botswana, Liberia, and Zimbabwe. Whether opening branches in every African country in the hope that they will contest and win political power and eventually join hands is a viable continental strategy is a subject for another day. The party’s pan-Africanist outlook however is self-evident.

In this spirit, the EFF, more than any party has concerned itself with the political happenings in other countries on the continent. Their Twitter account is always busy with statements supporting, condemning, and correcting in equal measure. In the introduction to the lecture, the Deputy President of the party, Floyd Shivambu, reiterated the party’s commitment to reversing “all the decisions of the Berlin Conference …the colonial conference that divided Africa into unviable states and [brought about] the economic dependency that continues to define us to this day.” This means working towards materializing the long overdue integration of the continent. The vision of an Africa with no borders [read visas], one currency, one army, and one foreign policy, a vision the Nkrumahist Professor belabored all night long. There is thus no African revolution without African unity.

“We must now be in the business of spreading this message [of Economic Freedom] to the rest of the continent”

After addressing himself to the historical exigency of Pan-Africanism in Africa’s struggle against foreign domination up to the victory of popular struggles against colonialism, Prof. Lumumba posed another question, Once we removed them what did we do? This question is an indictment of the generation of liberationists and subsequent governments who were and have been largely unable to rise up to the task of securing total freedom (political + economic ). This is/was mostly born of a wrong analysis having drunk from the cup of Western education and become beholden to ‘modern’ ideas like the nation-state. Fanon had predicted this phenomenon. In the Wretched of the Earth, he anticipates the problems the unimaginative national bourgeoisie (leaders of liberation movements) of African countries would face upon assuming power.

“The national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed middle class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case, it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace. In its willful narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country” (Chapter 3: The Pitfalls of National Consciousness, 1961)

We still send out those frenzied appeals today. Be it with President Ruto hopelessly begging for a fairer financial system, PM Mia Amor Motley for climate action or a band of African leaders for food from Russia. It is thus instructive to note that this lack of imagination still inheres among most of our mostly technocratic national elite today. Well-meaning individuals who — inspired by righteous anger and frustration — capture power only to be faced with the behemoth that is imperialism. After assessing the balance of political forces, before capitulating eventually, many leaders helplessly start paying lip service to notions of unity, biding their time with no clear plan of action. They become the same confused national bourgeoisie they had criticized on their way to power.

“The time is now for this spirit of the EFF [the Spirit of Economic Freedom] to spread…This spirit must go everywhere in Africa.”

It is no wonder the professor gave a nod to the clear headed EFF as the vanguard for dislodging this confused national elite first from South Africa and then the rest of the continent. He commended the EFF’s diagnosis of the problem in 2013 and its course of action over the past decade. For him, the EFF represents a “wedding between [our] thought and action”. They fit the bill of Nkrumah’s revolutionary. The men who think as men of action and act as men of thought. They have recognized that righteous anger and frustration however justified will not cut it. They must contest political power and do so with a radical vision to make a break with the status quo. The lecture acknowledges the fact that in their decade-long existence, the EFF under the leadership of CiC Julius Sello Malema has demonstrated that they are unbowed and unapologetic in the face of unprogressive politics and policy.

It is thus easy to understand Prof. Lumumba’s faith in the EFF as that continental vanguard when he says, “This South Africa [led by] EFF is the one that will economically regenerate Africa.” As one joined the EFF Head of Political Education Dr. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi in singing “Azania”, the packed Sarah Baartman Hall rising to its feet and erupting in passioned calls for for this spirit to spread from “From Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar”, one understands why the Professor trusts them to deliver where past generations have failed.

Prof. Lumumba’s lecture was as instructive as it was galvanizing. He recognized that in South Africa, where the wounds are still fresh, something is brewing — the specter of economic freedom. This specter must haunt Africa. To borrow from the founding manifesto of the EFF, “The wind for political liberation in Africa blew from north to south, and the wind for economic emancipation should now blow from the south to the north. This wind should gain momentum in our lifetime and South Africa must be an inspiration to many other African countries to reclaim their wealth and economies from colonial and neo-colonial masters.”

Olemo is a student of Political Economy with a vested interest in Africa’s development.

Unlike many political leaders on the continent who pride themselves on playing hard to get, the EFF should serve as an example with their principle of openness to engagement and persuasion.

The Sarah Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was today packed to the overflow with members of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) movement for a public lecture that forms part of a series of buildup events to the 10th Anniversary celebration of the organization. Inside the hall, it was an atmosphere of celebration and eager anticipation for a charge from leading Pan-Africanist Professor Patrick Loch Otieno (PLO) Lumumba. Outside the hall however, as one made their way through the organized battalion of Western Cape ground forces of the EFF manning the entrance just above the memorial stairs, the sight of protesters singing liberation songs, waving rainbow flags, and holding banners some reading “EFF has blood on its hands”, was hard to miss. The protest drew members of the student body, staff, and different political formations like SASCO, Action SA, etc., in addition to other LGBTQIA+ activists who labeled PLO “a professed homophobe” in their rallying call to the UCT fraternity. Largely due to the level of organization of the cadres of the EFF that barricaded the entrance of the hall and vetted every fighter gaining access, the seminal lecture went on without a whiff of disorder.

It is worth noting that well before the public lecture and during the protests today, the position of the EFF remained consistent and unambiguous both on the invitation of the professor and the LGBTQ question. On the first, the EFF rightly denied responsibility for “what the professor says in his personal capacity” adding that they invited him to speak in his capacity as a crusader of Pan-Africanism and Economic freedom. On the latter, the EFF unapologetically maintained its view that “Gay rights are human rights” — a view consistent with the South African constitution. Many will recall the sight of the TOP 5 of the party led by CiC Julius Malema draped in a rainbow flag picketing outside the High Commission of Uganda in Pretoria in a bid to dissuade President Museveni from signing the popular Anti-homosexuality bill into law. From this lens already, the protest against the EFF on principle was misguided.

Additionally, by failing to consider Prof. Lumumba’s reflection on power politics and Africa’s subservient position relative to the West in defining and enforcing what qualifies as rights, let alone failing to heed the Professor’s counsel that democracy implies a contestation of ideas hence discourse, the students of UCT reflected a disappointing deficit in intellectual maturity in their unsuccessful effort to cancel the man.

The ridiculousness of the UCT SRC’s stricture and contention that Prof. Lumumba’s lecture on EFF’s fourth complimentary pillar is in itself an assault on the rights and dignity of members of the LGBTQIA+ community aside, what may help us reconcile what may seem like a contradiction or inconsistency in the EFF inviting the scholar is another principle of the organization, to wit, openness to engagement and persuasion. As an organization, one of the outstanding things about the EFF is their understanding that they are not always right. As such, right from the advent of the organization in 2013; wide consultation, internal discussion and debate, as well as continued political research, and education have remained key features in their operation. They recognize the importance of engagement and persuasion both internally and externally and have thus set up the party as a platform for healthy debate on pressing issues. The party defines the person who wears their red beret, the revolutionary fighter, mainly in terms of their ability to engage with all sections of the masses with their different persuasions.

After the lecture by Prof. Lumumba, this principle was on full display. The hosting Chairperson of the Western Cape PCT sounded out his digits to the hundreds of fighters who filled the hall, declaring that he was “open to engagement and persuasion” as the province prepared transport logistics for fighters to attend the ‘Festival of The Poor’ in Johannesburg. In a context where many public representatives and political leaders on the continent pride themselves on being unicorns after elections, this caught me by surprise. This attitude however obtains in all structures of the EFF. Fighters at all levels are Approachable, in touch with the ground, and above all, open for engagement. That same attitude has defined their engagements with media houses, workers, community activists, academics, students, etc., over the past decade. Why? — a mixture of revolutionary boldness and ideological clarity given that political consciousness (familiarity with EFF’s program and platform) is an explicit requirement to wear the red beret.

If not from the second invite to lecture on an EFF platform, Prof. Lumumba’s speech approving EFF’s diagnosis, prescription, and activism, culminating in his symbolic donning of the organization’s signature red beret shows that the EFF recognize PLO as one of their own — a mutual feeling. In dealing with their own, the EFF has shown in 10 years that cancel culture is not their way. At least, it cannot be a substitute for constructive engagement.

As young people got the charge to champion economic freedom in the rest of the continent with South Africa as the anchor in this new dispensation, it turned out that the protestors were on the wrong side of the door. If wisdom had prevailed, they would have joined the masses of the fighters inside the building and sat under the tutelage of Prof. Lumumba who pulled no punches in galvanizing his audience to execute their generational mandate. Their hypocrisy, selective outrage, and ill-thought attempt to de-platform PLO got in the way of their learning — a time the UCT SRC and the 1000–strong community of staff and students who signed the petition palpably got it very wrong.

Olemo is a student of Political Economy with a vested interest in Africa’s development.