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Happy Africa Day! Do You Know What It’s All About? Read Here!

Happy Africa Day!

Each year on May 25, the continent celebrates Africa Day. Just how to celebrate the day is open to broad interpretation. In Zimbabwe, May 25 is a public holidayย while on Senegalโ€™s former slave port, Goree Island, a new movement dubbed “Africans Rising”ย to reclaim peace, dignity and justice for Africans on the continent and the diaspora.

Elsewhere, there are concerts and ceremonies to mark the day. Africa Day is also celebrated by Africans abroad, as diaspora communities of different nationalities come together in cultural attires and swap traditional recipes.

But like many other holidays, the point and history of the Africa Day celebration seems lost on many. Its origins can be traced back to April 15, 1958โ€”when the first Conference of Independent African States brought the fathers of Africaโ€™s liberation movements together. At the time, there were few independent African states, but the few leaders in attendanceโ€”from Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia and othersโ€”were there as a collective platform to reject colonialism and find a common interest.

In a way, the meeting was far ahead of its time, imagining an interstate organization with a shared objective but it sowed the seeds of what would become the Organisationย of African Unityย (later rebranded in 2001 as the African Union) launched on May 25, 1963 by 32 free nations, led by Tanzaniaโ€™s Julius Nyerere, Ghanaโ€™s Kwame Nkrumah, Sรฉkou Tourรฉ of Guinea and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. Every year since, Africa Day has been celebrated on May 25.

More than half a century later, colonialism is no longer the common enemy, and finding a clear message from a community of states has become more difficult. The African Union uses Africa Day to highlight certain development theme, this year its youth but what that means in practical implication often gets lost. Progress remains the broad objective, but getting there is quite literally proving difficult.

Free travel, and by extension free trade, between countries remains a tall order despite the very obvious advantages it promises. A 2014 IATA study projects that opening up to 12 key air routes between countries on the continent will create โ€œan extraย 155 000ย and $1.3 billion in annualย GDP.โ€ At the moment, up to five million passengers a year face difficulties traveling between African countries due to โ€œunnecessary restrictions on establishing air routes.โ€ Throughout the continent, only 10 out of 55 countries allow visa-free entry for Africans or grant visas on arrival. In comparison, Americans can travel to at least 20 African countriesย without similar restrictions face d by Africans.

For its part, the AU says itโ€™s aware of the problem and wants to fix it. Last year, it finally launched its continental passport but so far, the passport has only been madeย available to heads of statesย and high-ranking officials. Some countries have recently relaxed their entry requirements for Africans, as such some progress was recordedย last year across the continent. Over the coming years, trade between African countries could also improve, especially given Trumpโ€™s isolationist โ€œAmerica Firstโ€ stance. At the moment, intra-Africa trade accounts for a small share of trade on the continent but Trumpโ€™s policies could see more African countriesย forced to trade with each other.

Itโ€™s unfortunate that just getting together to celebrate Africa Day is proving more difficult than it did for Africaโ€™s liberation leaders more than 50 years ago. As Africans are still trying to figure out how exactly to celebrate this cross-continental holiday, perhaps itโ€™s time to get back to the original message behind this day and figure out what it means today. Unity is still a relevant and honorable goal, but making it practical means removing the barriers between nations.

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