The African century begins with unity – or it does not begin.Part 1: The land without borders – the single passport to return Africa to Africans

Africa is the richest continent in the world, yet inhabited by some of the poorest people. This paradox is not inevitable. It is a two-pronged form of organized crime, the first pillar of which is addressed by the unique geographical area.

The current African borders are not borders. They are wounds. Drawn in Berlin in 1884-1885, at the Conference that sanctioned the criminal partitioning of the continent among European powers – without the presence of a single African, without consulting a single king, a single chief, a single people – they carved up civilizations as if slicing a cake. The Fulani do not belong to any state. They belong to a space that France, England, Portugal, and their accomplices have slashed with a ruler and a straight edge. Neither do the Mandinka. Nor do the Hausa. These artificial borders have a precise, enduring, and deliberate function: to maintain political entities too small to have any influence, too divided to resist, too dependent to refuse.

Sixty years after formal independence – those sham sovereignty granted with one hand while the other kept the resources, military bases, and currencies – the results are damning. Freedom of movement between African countries is often more complicated than between Paris and Warsaw, or between New York and Mexico City. A European citizen can travel through 27 countries with a single document. An African citizen needs, on average, visas to access 48 out of 54 countries. The African Union – which had solemnly promised an African passport for all by 2020 – has produced only a symbolic prototype, distributed with great ceremony to a few heads of state and, with the exception of some diplomats and senior officials of the African Union and its institutions. The people are still waiting. The people have always waited.

This is not a question of technical will. It is a question of political will that has been sabotaged from the outside, methodically, for decades.

The West is fragmenting Africa for its own sordid interests.

Let us therefore ask the fundamental question that Western governments refuse to hear: who benefits from the geographical fragmentation of........

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