By By: Hashim Yussuf Amao
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The soul of Pan-Africanism was never just about colours on flags or handshakes at summits. It was a war cry against imperial strangulation. A call to unity, self-determination, and mental emancipation. But the drums of old revolutions now sound too analogue in a world that runs on data speeds. Our problem isnβt that Pan-Africanism is obsolete. To be honest, it really is not. It is just that Africa is trying to fly a Boeing 777 with a Wright brothersβ manual. Sadly, the battlefields have changed from trenches to terminals, and from machetes to microchips.
We live in a world where who owns the model owns the mind. Google probably knows your child more than your mother does. Meta dictates how you mourn. Amazon shapes what you consume before your cravings even wake. And while these technological giants mine data from African youth, their profits rest in tax havens. We have become digital farmers without a market share. The colonialism we fought with bullets is now back, but this time wearing a hoodie and coding Python.
But this essayist has a mind-troubling question: what is digital independence when your entire cyberspace is built on rented infrastructure? What is sovereignty when your citizensβ biometrics are processed abroad? What is unity when fifty-four African nations have fifty-four data policies? To be honest, itβs like expecting a school of fish to fight a shark while swimming in opposite directions. In the age of AI, Africaβs disunity is not just a weakness; it is a death sentence.
Pan-Africanism must now wear a digital cloak. It must walk into the cloud and not just into conferences. The African Union should no longer be a chamber of sleepy speeches and recycled communiquΓ©s. It should become the Digital Defence Ministry of Africa, a firewall against data plunder and algorithmic apartheid. Our universities should not just teach literature and law, but teach our youths how to code the culture and engineer their liberation.
The other day I was engaging myself in a loud silent question: where is the AI model that understands the Nigerian pidgin or Jamaican patois? Where is the chatbot that speaks Fulfulde? Where is the search engine that recognises the Zulu local dialect or Owe Yoruba? Instead of being served by Afrocentric tech, Africans are being surveilled by it. While we binge on imported software, our own languages are treated like footnotes on the internet. How long shall we remain digital tenants in a house built on African data?
And what is our defence? Our youth despite being bright as they are still struggle to scale because weβve built border walls around bandwidth. A Nigerian startup founder can not even expand into Ghana without wading through regulatory mud. An app born in Kenya dies before it breathes in Togo. Yet we claim unity. And look, unity without interoperability is hypocrisy in WiFi form. Pan-Africanism without digital consolidation is a masked funeral for African innovation.
We must prioritize a special ministry for digital economy like the Nigerian government does, and fund continental EdTech projects, where African children learn robotics and AI in Swahili, debate machine ethics in Zulu, and build apps that address Lagos traffic or Sudanese irrigation with native insight. We must build data centres in Accra, Nairobi and Kigali that do not bow to foreign firewalls. We must create African operating systems that recognise not just our fingerprints, but our philosophies.
This digital revolution cannot be imported. The moment we outsource our intelligence to foreign bots, we become less human and more user. Our cultures become datasets and our stories become content. Our futures become disposable. And the digital map, just like the colonial one, leaves Africa as a footnote in the margins of global power. The call is loud: let Africa not only unite, but unite online. Let us not just decolonise minds, but also machines.
In the age of AI, Pan-Africanism must mutate into Pan-Digitalism. From Accra to Addis, from Oluyole Ibadan to Kigali, the creed must change: βNo African left offline. No idea coded in isolation. No data mined without consent.β For if we fail, the ghost of colonisation wonβt return on ships, it will arrive via software updates. And this time, it wonβt ask for gold or palm oil. Itβll take your soul and rename it metadata.
Hashim Yussuf Amao is a pan-Africanist and writes from Oluyole Ibadan, Nigeria.
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