Pan-Africanism and Neo-Colonial Desire in Europe: A Critique of the EU’s response to the African Continental Free Trade Area

The African Union’s highly ambitious African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is now operational and seeks to build pan-African economies of scale by removing tariff and non-tariff barriers between its current thirty-eight participants. Notwithstanding criticisms that the AfCFTA will empower middle-income regional powers such as Nigeria and South Africa at the expense of smaller neighbours, the AfCFTA project underscores the revival of the African Union on the international stage, as well as the revival of an emancipatory and progressive pan-Africanism. The European Commission has signalled that the AfCFTA will become the bedrock of a future Europe-Africa bicontinental free trade area. By removing barriers to trade between themselves, African countries will, according to the European Commission, ready themselves for an agreement with Europe where goods flow freely between the continents. Applying a neo-colonial critique derived from the work of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and Frantz Fanon – as well as from contemporary scholars such as Ndlovu Sabelo-Gatsheni in relation to the concept of global coloniality – this paper points to the dangers of Europe’s strategic interception of the AfCFTA. In particular, it points to the dangers of the co-optation of erstwhile emancipatory pan-African projects by a European Union that has historically demonstrated – and embedded – its neo-colonial trade and aid agenda in former colonies. Moreover, the paper points to how through the AfCFTA the EU threatens to achieve its free trade ambitions - hitherto embodied in Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) – to the detriment of local manufacturing, agro-processing and nascent industry. Reflecting on the work of Sabelo-Gatsheni, the paper explores how Europe’s discursive practices enable this strategic subversion – namely through ‘othering’ and the racialised securitisation of formerly colonized peoples.