AS the continent celebrates Africa Day, May 25, which coincides this year with the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), a Pan-Africanist group is organising demonstrations across the continent calling for a ‘borderless Africa’.
Every year, Africans Rising mobilises thousands of people across Africa and the diaspora under the banner of African Liberation Week (ALW) to commemorate Pan-African cooperation and solidarity.
The group has been marking ALW since Monday, with a focus on its campaign this year to ‘bring Africans [together] to advocate for the ratification and enforcement of the AU Protocol on free movement and people and goods in Africa’.
Even though the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which calls for such movement of people and goods is in place, Africans Rising does not think that integration is moving fast enough.
‘The geopolitical whirlwinds we see today demand that we build strength and prosper together, which can only happen through unity and Pan-African solidarity,’ said Hardi Yakubu, Africans Rising Movement Coordinator.
‘We must ask ourselves whether or not we are prepared to emerge from these as drawers of water and hewers of wood as we have been for the past centuries.’
Borderless Africa, which was launched during the 2022 All-African Movement Assembly in Arusha, Tanzania, also aims to ‘fight against inequality [and] multiple crises – food, energy, climate’ facing the continent.
Last year, under the theme Africa for Africans, ALW saw more than 500 actions across 46 countries in Africa and the diaspora.
This year, there are over 400 such activities.
‘We are calling upon the citizens and descendants of Africa to identify and organise events near them and invite individuals and organisations to join them,’ Africans Rising said in a statement.
Africans Rising is a global Pan-African movement of people and organisations launched in 2017.
It provides a space for ‘progressive African civil society leaders and groups engaged in various civic struggles to convene, connect, collaborate, share knowledge and build solidarity among people and across issues’.
African Rising notes on its website: ‘Africans include all people of African descent wherever they may be.
‘This theme re-echoes the historical call by Marcus Garvey for Africans to unite and take ownership and control of our homeland.
‘Its relevance in contemporary times is seen in the rush by new and old global powers upon the resources of Africa.’
