Conventional pan-Africanism, the sort promoted by long-past, failed and incompetent Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkurumah (or the long-serving ex-Northern African leader who would eventually be deposed during the Arab Spring) which advocates for a continent-spanning single union is sorta kindda clearly a terrible idea. For lots of reasons which we will discuss.

Why might one want to organize the entire continent under a single government, and reasons not to?

— Economies of scale: Scale breaks down at some point, and almost certainly would, at a scale as large as the continental African expanse of land and that huge a population of people. It becomes far more trouble than it is worth.

— A mutual colonial history?
So... a losers' organization. Collecting all the losers together to... what? prove the colonial bullies wrong? To what end? And is that an important enough reason to come together?

Last time, we discussed governing competence as the ability of a central government to understand + perform the one job they were created to do.

What might that look like in an existing contemporary example in sub-Saharan Africa? Does any such example even exist given the state of the entire subcontinent?

The contemporary Rwandan government as a competent government

It is very well known the troubles Rwanda had in the 1990s, when all of the sorts of people who now question the competence and mandate of its government stood by and did absolutely nothing as tons and tons of people were hacked to death by their own very neighbors and friends.

First up, what does competence mean?

Competence means both the understanding of how to do things + the ability to get them done. For example, I am absolutely incompetent at boxing. For the clear reason that I have no expert knowledge of how to fight with my hands. How best does one make a fist, so as avoid breaking one's own fingers as they land their punches? Or move, to enable ease in evading punches thrown by one's opponent and quickly surging forward to land hopefully successful ones in return ... all without losing one's balance? I have no idea what answers to these questions are. And that's only the understanding part of the equation. Whether I have the right physical traits or mental strength (ability) to enable my boxing is a whole different matter.

Clearly, competence is a difficult thing to achieve, and most people are incompetent at most things. The same thing interestingly is true of governments. Most governments are incompetent at their job. What is that job and why do governments exist at all?

Why governments exist

Imagine that you became the leader of a poor, failing sub-Saharan African country — which became independent from its European colonizers sometime in the 20th century — with absolute power.

The country's administration has progressively declined since the colonizers left. Nothing works... not public infrastructure which is supposed to be available to all the people: the roads are terrible which hinders transportation and distribution of goods, hence makes them more expensive than they could be. Power (electricity) which powers all of our machines is lackluster. A huge portion of the people lack toil-free "access to clean water all over the year independent of geographical season". Think about all the usual banal problems facing people in black African countries. Your people really battle every last one of them.

Aside these infrastructural problems, there exist people problems too, which are probably even more deleterious. Relationships between individuals are completely shot. And rule of law only exists on paper. All of the governments before yours consistently betrayed the "mandate" of governing, and the citizenry has absolutely no trust in the government. Maybe they in fact consider government agencies and affiliates to be adversaries.

People cannot enter into business relationships between one another either because of a lack of trust (there's no legitimate 3rd-party arbitrator in the case that they do), maybe betraying the trust of other people is even culturally glorified as clever behavior. People also are used to bad behavior going unpunished, so that their morality suffers: not because they are inherently bad people, but because there is nothing to be gained in behaving well, and nothing to lose in bad behavior. And therefore their morality slacks.

Some contemporary liberal progressive black people with a sub-Saharan African origin take stances against the idea of race and believe it unworthy of being taken seriously since race is only about arbitrary skin color and no substantial commonalities. Ethnicity (people of the same local culture and language), they say instead, is an identity which is real and only what should be embraced.

In reality, race doesn't seem to only constitute skin color/tone. Racial groups when examined have several other phenotypical differences... including hair type (texture, length), general body height, the size and shapes of different body parts (skull, eyes, nose, ears etc).

By phenotypical differences, there are huge similarities between people of different ethnicities around the same geographical environment. There are these similarities for example between (Liberian, Gabonese and Angolan) people, (Eritrean, Somali) people, (Korean, Japanese) people or (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) or (Syrian, Saudi Arabian) people.

These clearly are real phenotypical differences in people in different parts of the world. And the fact of their consistent replication over several generations proves these differences are genetic. I don't think progressive black liberals who refute the idea of race would dispute that fact. Consistently reproduced similarities in phenotypes of people in different parts of the world are real, and that is what 'race' is. Could the word 'race' have lost its original meaning, but the concept we have just described be real? Yes.

— Discrimination against a group can happen for different reasons: (i) the discriminating people feeling insecure and with a need to put down some other group. This seems to be inherent in humans. There's a consistent ingroup vs outgroup dynamic everywhere on lots of different axes. (ii) the avenging of a perceived slight by that group against the now discriminating group (iii) outright bullying for a perceived weakness.

— Some discrimination against black currently seems to exist because black people are thought of as undesirable: poor, uncultured and stupid. Discrimination on race doesn't occur against blacks alone. It does again other races too: Indians (all of the subcontinent), West Asians and North Africans (Arabs, Bedouins etc), Latinos, east Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese etc) etc. But black people seem to bear the worst of it, and western Caucasians, the least. So maybe there is an order of races in order of increasing amounts of melanin... from western whites to African blacks? But why?

Is it based on economic and cultural success in the modern world.. around and after the beginning of industrialization? Or economic and cultural success before then? Granted that interaction between people from different places used to be rare and difficult, was there ever a time when black people were thought of more highly, and western caucasians were not at the top of the pyramid? Say in the 1300s? What civilizations were the most economically productive then, and what did each race think of one another?

Black Africa clearly is the most economically underdeveloped part of the world. There's been lots of explanations proposed for this: some of them are geographical, others are genetic (they claim black people are just outright stupid). So maybe this is why racism against blacks is the worst of all of them? What if black Africa became as developed as western Europe? Might there exist anyway this sort of discrimination against black people? Is it about the color of our skin, instead?