USA Africa Dialogue Series - Afrika's Impotence In The Face Of Western Interventions/Aggressions

Afrika's Impotence In The Face Of Western Interventions/Aggressions

 

Abdul Karim Bangura

 

 

As I watch frustratingly how Afrika has been impotent in the face of Western interventions/aggressions in La Cote d'Ivoire, Libya, Somalia, etc., I am reminded of what the Most Revered and Honorable Afrikan Mwalimu Ali Al'amin Mazrui postulated in his famous work,Towards a Pax Africana:  An African Perspective, almost half a century ago. Our Afrikan leaders did not heed the call, and we are now paying the price for their failure.

 

Instead of engaging in the proverbial "reinventing the wheel," I paste below a pre-pre-preliminary draft of the Introduction section of an essay pertaining to Mwalimu Mazrui's book on which I am currently working.

 

Introduction

 

Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition (1967) is one of Ali Al'amin Mazrui's major works. In an April 22, 2011 E-mail exchange between him and I, Mazrui stated that it is one of his two most favorite books—the other book being A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective (1976), which he characterized as his "most ambitious work."

      Divided into 12 chapters and an appendix outlining The Charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the first OAU resolutions, the cardinal thesis in Towards a Pax Africana is that Africa needs to develop institutions and the capacity for self-pacification if it is play a major role in global affairs. To do so, Mazrui suggests that Africa must have the military and political capacity to resolve conflict and not rely on outside powers to do it for them. He discusses such issues as African identity and dignity and how they had influenced Africa's quest for non-alignment in global affairs.

     Towards a Pax Africana has been cited in more than 130 scholarly sources (see scholar.google.com), and seven scholarly book reviews have been written on it (see Bemath, 2005:20-21). Yet, no systematic analysis has been done on the text, even though such potential exists. This essay seeks to fill this gap. I employ the mathematical concept of Fractal Dimension and Complexity Theory to explore the idea of spectrum progressing from more orderly to less orderly or to pure disorder in the text. This called for the utilization of the Pluridisciplianry approach that helped me to mix linguistics and mathematical approaches: more precisely, Linguistic Presupposition and Fractal Methodology. Before discussing all of these aspects and the results generated from the MATLAB computer runs, it makes sense to briefly examine existing works on the book—in this case, the book reviews—to give the reader a sense of what previous scholars thought about it.