Give us African unity now! Forty-seven years after many African countries gained their independence, pan-Africanism is still only words on paper. African unity is for diplomats, not the rest of us. Thus, African leaders cannot leave their summit in Accra without giving us, ordinary Africans, African unity now!, writes Cameron Duodu who has seen it all--since 1958.

African leaders have been attending summits of this kind for the past 40 years. Yes, the first summit of the (then) Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963. Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridges dotted all over Africa. But where is the "African unity" for which the OAU was formed 44 years ago, and in search of which much of the money that Africa does not have, has been expended at summits that occur year after year after year?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Let me tell you where "African unity" is. It is absolutely nowhere. Why do I say that?

Item One: It is in 1982. A big newspaper in London sends me a cable in Accra asking me whether I would like to go to Cameroon to do a feature on the country's national football team, which is about to go to the World Cup to represent Africa. We are all rooting for this team and, of course, I immediately respond in the affirmative. But to go from one African country to another, one needs a visa. Yes--19 years after the first OAU summit discussed the need to abolish frontier restrictions between African countries.

Anyway, no matter. If one needs a visa, one gets a visa. Aha--but Cameroon has no embassy in Accra. The nearest embassy is in Lagos. And to find a flight to Lagos from Accra and be able to connect from Lagos to Cameroon was just a dream. People were sleeping on the floor at Lagos airport trying to find flights to Accra. And vice versa.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Never mind. I send a cable to the newspaper in London, telling them to apply for a visa on my behalf, to be collected at Douala airport. As insurance, I also cable a friend in Douala, a fellow journalist called David Ndifang (unfortunately, now deceased) asking him to meet me, so that in case the immigration authorities are difficult, he can vouch for me. I get to Douala. The immigration authorities indicate, after looking through a list of names, that they are aware I am coming, and I smile to myself, confident that the London connection had worked. I then get the shock: yes, they have received a request to grant me a visa at the airport. But authorisation can only come from their headquarters in Yaounde. And it hadn't come. All right, could they contact Yaounde to speed matters up? Telephone lines between Douala and Yaounde are down, they tell me. All right, can David Ndifang take me home and guarantee that he will bring me back the next day to see whether the authorisation has arrived? "No," they say. I can't enter Cameroon without a visa!

There is no flight back to Accra. There won't be one for another 48 hours. There is nothing for me to do but hang about the airport for a good 48 hours. I experience small kindnesses from some Cameroonians--I am shown where I can have a shower at the airport; a lady in the duty-free shop chats to me to pass the time. There is food available, but I hardly have an appetite.

In my bitterness, I ask myself how it was possible for a country that treats the citizens of fellow African countries like dirt to have conned the rest of Africa to allow it to produce two secretaries-general of the OAU, Nzo Ekangaki and William Eteki Mboumoua?

The answer is revealed to me with glaring clarity--Africans live in a different world from that of their governments. To African governments, Cameroon is qualified to take up high positions at the OAU, because it is bilingual. That is all that matters to our governments. They do not talk to the African people, so they never get a feedback about how other African governments behave towards fellow Africans. Even if they got a feedback, it would not matter to them because "diplomacy" has its own requirements. You support Cameroon today to get a Cameroonian elected as secretary-general; tomorrow, Cameroon supports you to get elected to the OAU's steering committee. That sort of thing.

In any case, diplomats are never treated the way ordinary citizens are treated. If I had been a Ghanaian diplomat, the Ghana Ministry of Foreign Affairs would just have sent a note to one of its embassies where Cameroon also has an embassy and apprised the Cameroonians of my arrival. And the visa would have been ready at the airport, telephone lines to Yaounde notwithstanding. African unity, then, is for diplomats, not the rest of us. Indeed, if I had complained to the Ghana Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they would have expressed surprise and said: "But Cameroon extends all the diplomatic courtesies to us whenever we have to send a delegation there." Quite.

I am glad to say that there was a nice twist to this story. After 48 hours, I was so fed up that I didn't wait for a flight going to Accra but took one that was going to Abidjan, in Cote d'Ivoire. I was allowed into Abidjan without a visa, thank God. I went straight to the Hotel Ivoire, where I ate what seemed to be the best meal of my life. I slept like a baby afterwards. When I woke up in the middle of the night, the hotel radio was playing a song in my own language. The taxi driver who drove me around the next day also spoke perfect Twi. It was as if I was home. It must be said, though, that by dint of colonial madness, the Berlin Conference of 1884-86 had drawn a border across the Akan/Twi-speaking people of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, separating them into two countries. Interestingly, the Akan people dominate in both countries.

That notwithstanding, I was living real "African unity" in Abidjan. And I asked myself, where did Cameroon get its recalcitrant attitude to other Africans from? Cote d'Ivoire, after all, was also a former French colony, just like Cameroon? It was a matter of governments, not peoples, standing in the way of "African unity".

Well, the Cameroon football team didn't get its write-up. But I bet the Cameroon government constantly complains that it gets negative coverage from the world media.

Item Two: Fast-forward to 1991. I am in Egypt to interview the (then) foreign minister, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. I am in a BBC team that includes people who hold British passports. We all have visas issued at the same visa office in London. Yet while the British passport holders are waved through by Egyptian immigration officials, I am told to sit down. My passport is taken into an office. I sit down and sit down and sit down. Finally, I am allowed to enter Egypt.

I think to myself: "Whilst I, whose president, Kwame Nkrumah, married an Egyptian woman to help cement 'African unity' by bringing black Africans and Arab Africans together, have to sit in humiliation at Cairo airport, holders of the passport of a country that once invaded Egypt--at Suez in 1956--are treated like jewels."

It is not the personal humiliation that I mind, but the fact that I am losing face in the eyes of British passport holders! Oh, Gamal Abdul Nasser, champion of African unity, is this what thy hands have wrought?

Item Three: Fast-forward again, to July 2005-23 years after my Cameroon ordeal. I am obliged to pass through Johannesburg, South Africa, to go to Nairobi to do business on behalf of a major international media organisation. Because of the length of the flights, I decide to stop over in Johannesburg for a day. This means getting a visa from the South African high commission in London.

The organisation has written a note for me to take to the high commission, stating clearly that all my expenses are being met by the organisation. Nevertheless, I am asked to produce a confirmed booking from a South African hotel before the visa is issued! So a visa that I should have obtained on one visit to the visa office takes three visits.

Although I travel a lot, no-one had asked me for a yellow fever vaccination certificate in recent years. But in Johannesburg, one is demanded. I tell the brother who is at the immigration desk that because no-one anywhere asks for it, I had forgotten to pack mine.

He asks me with some menace: "Do you want to enter this country?" I say, "Yes".

He says, "In that case, you must go to the health post over there and take a jab." I go and take the jab. Cost? [pounds sterling]48 (British money). Never mind the unexpected physical pain.

I am sitting in the office of a journalistic colleague in Johannesburg when news comes through that Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has been detained at Johannesburg airport for arriving without a visa. Yes, Wole Soyinka! Unbelievable, isn't it? If an African with a name that is recognisable worldwide is treated like that, what about the rest of Africa's ordinary citizens?

We must all realise that in Africa, our governments preach "unity" without doing anything concrete about it. We must pressurise them to put their words into deeds. The current situation is like marrying a woman and not being willing to touch her.

The South African government's immigration service was, for a long time, under Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the ex-minister of home affairs, who was not the most detribalised minister South Africa has ever had, let alone the minister most devoted to pan-Africanism.

I am sure he just carried on the immigration policy that he inherited from the apartheid regime, which treated other Africans as enemies. When will such influences be eliminated? The South African authorities have a lot of education to do, to make their immigration officials realise the special position the country is in.

Do South Africa's current immigration officials know the history of the ANC abroad? Do they know that many of their leaders actually travelled across the world carrying travel documents issued by other African countries? Do the leaders themselves remember?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If they don't, let me remind them: Kwame Nkrumah sent an aircraft from Ghana to wait in Botswana, after Sharpeville and Langa happened in 1960, to ferry any South African who managed to escape and reached safety there, and who wanted to come to Ghana.

I personally met many of the refugees. The hospitality we extended to them was legendary, and it was done in the name of "African unity". Those who wanted to go elsewhere were provided with travel documents.

But 47 years is a long time, isn't it? A very long time. Only those South Africans who experienced African hospitality can tell the current crop of South African officials about it. But do they? They are probably too busy writing fine speeches about "African unity" to hold seminars for South African immigration officials to educate them about South Africa's special responsibility towards the rest of Africa. I am strongly minded to greet the African leaders who come to Accra for the summit in July with a one-man demonstration, during which I would carry a placard urging them to stop uttering empty words about "African unity" and, instead, to abolish visas between their countries immediately.

The only trouble is that if I do that, the African leaders won't even notice me. Their private jets will alight at a secluded part of Accra airport, and they will be whisked away, flanked by motor-cycle outriders, in cars whose windows are blackened out. As the French say, Tant pis! (Just too bad!) Well, I want to tell them that they should not leave Accra until:

(1) They sign a treaty lifting all restrictions on the movement of people and goods between African countries. They owe this to the people of Africa. Before colonialism arrived, African countries were trading freely with one another. Africans could travel to wherever they wanted, and so long as their own country did not treat visitors badly, they would be received in a civil manner.

Europeans came and set up in our countries, "nation states" modelled along the lines they had established in Europe, and which had led them into so many blood-chilling wars. Why should we not go back to our own way of doing things instead of copying a system that has led to the deaths of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere? For God's sake--even Europeans, the people who waged the First and Second World Wars--now allow people and goods to enter their countries free of restrictions, through the instruments signed under the European Union treaties.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yet we, whose freedom they destroyed, are too stupid to throw out the worst legacy they left us and adopt the new rules, based on common sense, which they have now written for themselves! We lost in the past, and we are losing in the present. Oh Africans--when shall we stop behaving like fools?

(2) Put the words of NEPAD into effect and begin to contribute money towards the construction of first-class roads and railway links between African countries. Even one of the greatest enemies of Africa, Cecil Rhodes, saw the usefulness of communication links across Africa and promised to build a railway network that extended from the Cape, in South Africa, to Cairo in Egypt. He couldn't do it. But if an enemy of Africa could visualise what such a linkage could do to earn him profits, why can't we, who love Africa, see the same vision and work to actualise it?

(3) Begin to contribute money to be put aside towards co-operation in establishing factories that add value to Africa's commodities before they are exported abroad. In Ghana, we have something called "susu", a savings system evolved by poor people for poor people. Because the poor know that when they go to a bank, they won't be given loans, they have their own way of helping each other. If say, 10 people work in an office, they would each contribute an affordable amount, maybe $10 per month, and give it to one individual in the group. So, instead of going home with his meagre salary, he would go home in one month with a fairly sizeable sum, and use the money for any project he wanted--buy a bicycle, or put a deposit on a house. African countries do not have too much money to spare, but if each of them drew up a plan to improve its economy by adding value to its exports, and asked for help to finance it, they could, turn by turn, take the initial steps that would strengthen their economies. There would be no conditionalities of the sort demanded by the IMF and the World Bank, and they would be able to use the money exactly as they wanted.

There are many good ideas in the books of the OAU and the AU. There are enough resolutions in those archives to go around the entire African continent and come back again! What is lacking is implementation. Can we beg the African leaders to imbibe what might be called "The Accra Spirit" and go back home determined to implement ideas which will bring real African unity closer to the African people?

Let me end on a note of optimism. In September 1959, I was seeing someone off at the Accra airport when I ran into George Padmore, that great man from Trinidad, who was perhaps the world's greatest promoter of pan-Africanism. I knew him because he was the one who organised my first trip outside Ghana--to an Afro-Asian writers' conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1958. Padmore was a very kind man--he even offered me a suitcase when he got to know that I didn't have one. As soon as I greeted him at the airport, he said to me, out of the blue: "I know you boys will do it, Cameron". He didn't explain himself but just waved to me and went off to board an aircraft to London. He never came back alive to Ghana. Those were his farewell words to me, but, of course, I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know he was terminally ill, and that he knew that he was going to England to die.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Later on, I realised that by telling me he knew we would "do it", he was stating to me, his faith that we would liberate Africa. This was his main preoccupation, and he had come to Ghana, after independence, to set up a Bureau of African Affairs for President Kwame Nkrumah, through which African freedom-fighters were receiving financial and military assistance to liberate their countries.

It was with his help that Dr Nkrumah organised the first Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958, and the All-African People's Conference in December 1958. Padmore had seen the signs, from these conferences, that the African people could be mobilised to free their continent. And he was communicating the idea to me.

How right he was! As I sat at the foot of a dais amongst the guests at Nelson Mandela's swearing-in as president of South Africa at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 10 May 1994, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the event that George Padmore had predicted to me in 1959! He had realised that Africa's liberation would occur in my lifetime, if not his. And here it was--before my very eyes.

What would Padmore say if he realised that 47 years after so many African countries gained their independence, pan-Africanism is still only words on paper? I am sure Padmore would not be too disheartened. He would probably tell me: "Listen, in 1945, when we held the Second pan-African Conference in Manchester, 'African liberation' was just two words on paper. But now, look!" To which I would have to say, "Amen, George. Amen!"