The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was a pivotal event in world history. The Wall, which until then had symbolised the ideological divisions of the Communist East and the Capitalist West, could no longer hold back the ideological change that had been spreading in Eastern Europe and across the world.
The political, social and economic changes that ensued seemed to confirm political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement that history had ended. He opined that the “flow of events over the past decade [have] made it difficult to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history”, and that the ideological evolution of humanity was complete, with Western liberal democracy prevailing as the ultimate form of human government.
By Western liberal democracy, Fukuyama meant government in which people consent to their rulers, and rulers, in turn, are constitutionally constrained to respect the people’s rights. It emphasises the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and systematic checks and balances between branches of government. It provides a foundation for multiparty elections, political and human rights, free media, a market economy, and a robust civil society. Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of this political paradigm at the moment it was primed to spread across the globe.
Many of the West’s allies embraced the liberal democratic form of governance. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was ousted from power and Patricio Aylwin was democratically elected as president. South Africa’s Apartheid system ended in 1994 and Nelson Mandela became the president of the newly formed “rainbow nation”. In Kenya, this wind of change triggered the process of political reform in 1991 with the repeal of section 2A of the constitution, returning Kenya to a multiparty state. The changes set in motion culminated in the promulgation of a new democratic constitution on 27 August 2010.
Argued to be one of the most progressive in the world, the Constitution of Kenya (2010) enshrines many values and principles that have the potential to transform Kenya into an equitable, just and fair society. However, a governance dividend facilitated by a constitutional framework only occurs in a society where citizens have high public trust because their leaders are accountable to their aspirations and desires. At the centre of democratic societies lies the idea of accountability whereby a social contract exists between a responsive and accountable state and responsible and active citizens, which also takes into account the interests of the marginalised, alienated, and dispossessed.
Social Accountability – A philosophical reflection
This form of civic initiative that fosters accountability through the organised collective action of citizens and other non-state actors to hold power to account for their responsibilities and obligations has been broadly defined as “social accountability”. Indeed, social accountability processes create different avenues for citizens and non-state actors to participate directly in political processes by providing them with leading roles in the process of constructing more inclusive and just democratic societies by catalysing their engagement with state actors in an informed, systematic and constructive way.
Social accountability initiatives, however, do not take place in a vacuum but within the public sphere. In his seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere as “the realm of our social life in which something approaching a public opinion can be reached”. The public sphere, Nanjala Nyabola observes, is the “space in which all conversations with power across and between groups collide and some kind of national narrative is produced” through formal and informal social accountability mechanisms between the citizens and the state, resulting in the creation of a public opinion.
According to Habermas, public opinion is created by an ongoing debate (verbal or non-verbal) on what society should be like – the push-and-pull between the policy action and inaction of the state, and the citizens’ posture or reaction towards the state. Habermas called this push-pull process the “rational-critical debate”. He argued that “rational-critical debate” rests on the idea that social order is the capacity of actors within the public sphere to perceive the intersubjective validity of the different claims on which social cooperation depends. That is to say, the capacity of actors to agree and act on the normative social accountability mechanisms by which society is to be governed.
In Habermas’ formulation, these mechanisms can only be constituted within a socio-institutional framework “that is historically meaningful, that normatively meets the requirements of the social-welfare state, and that is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable”. Such a formulation, he further notes, “can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development”.
To put it differently, social transformation within a society can only be achieved when the structure of the public sphere reflects the historical development of the people, and the agreed social accountability mechanisms that facilitate interactions within the public sphere mirror the agency and the epistemic constituents of the people. It is in this light, therefore, that we can observe that despite African states implementing economic and public policy recommendations prescribed by Western nations and international organisations, they still exist in a state of perpetual underdevelopment.
A normative understanding of Kenya’s public sphere
To explain this underdevelopment, in his paper Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A theoretical statement published in the 1975 issue of the journal of Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Nigerian scholar and political theorist Peter Ekeh argued that unlike in the Western political tradition, where politics comprises a public and a private realm, the colonial experience in Africa led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one, as in the West. Many of Africa’s political problems are due to the dialectical relationship between the two publics.
Ekeh notes that in Western societies, the public and private spheres are governed by the same normative standards: “What is considered morally wrong in the private realm is also considered morally wrong in the public realm [and] what is considered morally right in the private realm is also considered morally right in the public realm.” However, because of the imposition of imperial rule, postcolonial African states have two public spheres: the “civic” or “state” sphere, and the “primordial” sphere.
This segmentation of the public sphere fundamentally distorts social accountability mechanisms in our society. Let me illustrate by way of example. Kenyans from all walks of life gather every day to plan their social calendars. Graduations, funerals, weddings and chamas form the tapestry of a Kenyan’s lived daily experiences. In these events, Kenyans form committees, pick chairpersons, appoint treasurers to keep financial records and plan their events. Within these processes and functions, social accountability measures – though not implicitly stated – are agreed upon to make sure an event happens according to plan and the monies allocated are used prudently. Once the event has taken place, the chairperson convenes a meeting to “break the committee”. The treasurer presents his or her report. If there is a surplus, it is reimbursed or disposed of through an agreed method. If there are debts, the committee deliberates on how to settle them. Indeed, rarely do we ever hear of reports of unscrupulous behaviour. This is the primordial public – scrupulously honest and conscientious. On the other hand, it is no surprise to find the same cadre of Kenyans – dependable, church-going and honest to a fault – engaging in massive fraud, corruption and other corrupt practices as civil servants, public officials and politicians when acting in the civic sphere.
In his groundbreaking work, The Souls of Black Folk, the African-American philosopher WEB Dubois describes this phenomenon as “double consciousness”: an internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonised groups in an oppressive society. In this kind of society, Dubois notes, an individual’s identity is divided into several parts, making it impossible to have one unified identity and behaviour. In a sense, therefore, because of the fragmentation of the African public sphere, and the norms and the social contract(s) that govern it, individuals live in a state of “psychic turbulence”, unable to reconcile their morals, norms, and beliefs, leading them to suffer from a kind of split personality disorder.
This inability to reconcile one’s own identity is a direct outcome of the colonial imposition of the state, located through the distortion not only of the public sphere, but more importantly, of the social contract – the social accountability measures that governed African public spheres. In The Invention of Africa, the Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe explains, “Colonialism and colonisation basically mean ‘organisation’, ‘arrangement’. The two words derive from the Latin word colere, meaning to cultivate or to design.” He goes on to point out that Western colonisers organised and transformed non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs. The methods for acquiring, allocating, and exploiting land in colonies; the practices for domesticating natives; and the methods for managing pre-existing organisations and implementing new modes of production can be used as three main keys to explain the modulations and methods typical of colonial organisation:
Thus, three complementary hypotheses and actions emerge: the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective. These complementary projects constitute what might be called the colonising structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the colonising experience.
Colonial matrix of power
The undergirding logic of the colonising structure is an oppressive system of power that Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano termed the “coloniality of power”—an expression coined to name the structures of power, control, and hegemony that emerged during the era of colonialism. In his article, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Quijano describes the colonial matrix of power as being glued together by four interrelated domains: control of the economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labour, control of natural resources, racial capitalism); control of leadership and authority (political institutions and the control of the monopoly of violence – army, police, etc.); control of gender and sexuality (family and education) and control of knowledge and subjectivity (norms, ideas, values, the public sphere, etc.). These domains, he further adds, are glued together on the racial and patriarchal foundations of knowledge. In other words, the matrix of power imposed a civic sphere that predicated ways of thinking, language, ways of life and of being that were determined by male-white European standards. And in turn, notes the Algerian psychiatrist and militant philosopher Franz Fanon, the matrix of power did not just impose its grammar and logic on the people it dominated; rather, by a turn of perverse logic, it turned to the past of the oppressed people and distorted it, disfigured it and destroyed it, and through this created a context in which the matrix of power was legitimised.
To support this system, the matrix of power, however, relies on actors and institutions. This enables it to conserve, expand, and change its structure to preserve itself through a process of legitimation. According to Ekeh, legitimation is the process of making something admissible to society. The legitimation of the colonial matrix of power in Kenya entailed presenting itself first through the rhetoric of euro-modernity as salvation. Salvation was focused on abolishing the Arab slave trade on the East African coast and saving African souls through their conversion to Western Christianity. The second stage was in the civilising mission which was comprised of British settler occupation and, finally, the last stage, which continues to date, that began with the independence project in 1963 and is characterised by salvation through development and modernisation.
The actor used in the legitimation of the latter phase is the African bourgeoisie. In the Habermas formulation of the public sphere, its development and institutionalisation within the European state were brought about by the European bourgeoisie who enshrined constitutional and democratic practices – freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making, etc. – as a means of checking arbitrary forms of power and state domination. However, unlike their European counterpart, the African bourgeoisie emerged from a different socio-historical process.
The great transformation of the 15th century – that in the Atlantic destroyed civilisations, enslaved Africans, spurred European dominance, and from 1492 comprised the violent genocide in the Americas – was the emergence of a structure of dominance that was led by Europeans, both in the internal conflicts within Europe and in their colonisation of lands and peoples outside of Europe.
Domination of the vested interests within the African slave conquest and internal struggles within Europe led to a process where imperial internal differences among European states created a particular historical trajectory. These socio-political conditions paved the way for the advent of the colonial matrix of power and racial categories within a new international order controlled from the Western hemisphere.
The establishment of the transatlantic trade curated within the colonial matrix of power created an economic class of African middlemen/women with a predatory posture. This kind of “African middleman/woman” came in three general groupings. The first were local self-appointed middlemen to foreign economic interests who transformed domestic slavery into a violent and weaponised trade. By the 19th century, an estimated nine to fourteen million people had been enslaved in the east coast of Africa over a period of one century. Most were shipped to the port of Luanda to be transported to the Americas through the sea port of Zanzibar, but smaller markets existed in Lamu, Malindi and Mombasa.
The second group were the local merchant classes, who had previously been traders in other goods, responding to the geopolitics of the time. Among the most disreputable African slavers in East Africa were the Nyamwezi. A close-knit community, the Nyamwezi started off as porters working on caravans, but graduated to slave trading because of its economic benefits. The Nyamwezi traded in slaves from the western part of Congo, modern-day Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. As for the Yao, they had initially dealt in animal skins, hoes and tobacco, but moved into the bigger, more valuable ivory and slave trade, becoming the most notorious slavers of all indigenous East African peoples.
The third group were warlords disguised as local leaders to enable them to gain legitimacy to engage in the African slave trade. Of note was Hamad bin Muhammad, also known as Tippu Tip, a slave and ivory dealer who operated mainly between Zanzibar and Tabora. He was considered a gangster and a pirate of the most brutal kind. In May 1867, Tippu Tip seized the encampment of Chief Nsama of Tabwa between Lake Mweru and Lake Tanganyika, captured a large consignment of ivory and took possession of hundreds of slaves. The story goes that it was in Tabwa village that he acquired his name “Tip” because of the sound of guns. Tippu Tip’s mantra was simple: slaves cost nothing, they only require to be gathered.
The African slavers disappeared, leaving their descendants to become part of the colonised masses of Africans inhabiting a continent that had been ravaged by 400 years of slavery and resource extraction. Africa was left with the seeds of a nimble socio-economic class characterised by a culture of hubris, greed, venality, and intellectual and spiritual penury. The descendants of the African slavers later reinvented themselves under the British, who perceived that, for the colonial project to succeed in Kenya, they needed native collaborators who would give the newly created colonial order legitimacy. This arrangement irrevocably reinvented the collaborating class of Africans whose loyalty was to the newly established colonial government, a class produced en masse through the colonial institutions – Western church, civil service and the mission schools – that would later rise to political dominance in post-independent Kenya.
Acting as agents of the colonial matrix of power, this new social class fashioned postcolonial Kenya’s public sphere and the conditions that govern it – social accountability mechanisms – for their own self-interest. In this kind of public sphere, governance is “just a front activity” and social accountability mechanisms are repurposed so as to limit the political agency of citizens. Through its actors and institutions, the colonial matrix of power stifles the emergence of what Michael Johnston refers to as “deep democratisation”:
[The] process whereby citizens become able to defend themselves and their interests by political means. It is “democratisation”, not in the sense of establishing formal democratic institutions for their own sake, but rather in the sense of broadening the range of people and groups with some say about the ways power and wealth should – and should not – be pursued, used and exchanged.
In addition, moral language and social norms are appropriated and distorted so as to erode democracy’s emancipatory power and rob the public of the moral resources to hold power to account. In this kind of climate, social accountability takes a nihilistic and morally vacuous characteristic. It is why, for instance, a civil servant or politician will take money from a “deal” that might benefit his people and will also spread the benefits around to his relatives as an act of social accountability. This despite the greater costs to national development. It is also why every five years during the election cycle, the Kenyan electorate demands money and other “goodies” in exchange for their vote instead of demanding accountability in the use of public resources when a politician takes public office. In fact, the politician who does not dish out “goodies” is considered not to meet his end of the bargain viz. social accountability.
Despite the aberration caused by the colonial matrix of power through its actors and institutions, however, the innate desire of man for freedom is the history of the human struggle. This struggle with the forces of nature and/or over the process of the allocation of natural resources and the resultant products when the former are mixed with human labour, is a struggle determined in the realm of politics. Thus, Harold Laswell’s definition of politics as the process of determining who gets what, when and how. WD Mignolo elucidates that the colonial matrix of power survives because it is external to society, and is, therefore, above it. But it also works only because it is internal to society, and is, for that reason, within it. Through its agents and actors, it continually morphs as it is constructed and reconstructed and deconstructed, invented and reinvented, through its interaction – as a whole and of its parts – with others. As such, the matrix of power must be seen as a power structure transforming the public sphere and the rules – the social accountability mechanisms – that govern it, while, at the same time, also being transformed by society.
Reconstruction through a dialectical process in the Kenyan context
In this regard, not only have the colonial matrix of power and Kenyan society been acting upon each other, they have also, simultaneously and crucially, acted upon the normative social accountability mechanisms that have been governing the Kenyan public sphere since its inception in 1895 have been transforming themselves through a dialectical process within Kenya’s life. In the development of social and physical phenomena, according to Marx, there is a constant struggle between form and content and between content and form, resulting in the eventual shattering of the old form and the transformation of the content. This whole process, according to the three dialecticians, can best be pictured as a spiral, where the movement comes back to the position it started, but at a higher level. For instance, when a soya seed is planted, it germinates into a stalk. The original soya seed is negated. The stalk grows, and produces even more and better seeds, which are harvested and processed in the making of soya powder; the negation is thereby also negated. At the social level, historical progress is achieved through a similar series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negated, this does not represent its total elimination. The new stage does not completely wipe out the stage that it supplants. Rather, it overshadows it, although remnants of the older stages are still observed.
Kenya’s public sphere has transformed in five dialectical phases. In the first phase, circa 1888–1940, the dominant norms that governed social accountability were white minority rule and black subjugation through violence and raw material extraction. In this phase, the matrix of power, through the colonial state and British imperialists, passed laws and statutes to implement an imperial agenda of resource extraction from the newly formed colony. Black subjugation – and in some cases extermination – was necessary to carry out this feat, which was primarily by means of violence.
The second phase (1940–1963), characterised by white minority rule, black subjugation and mediation – which came through creating a collaborating class of Africans – became the normative framework that governed social accountability. During the interwar years, the colonial state was weakened by demands for resources and manpower to fight the war and as such, it transformed itself yet again into a white settler-dominated social formation, engaged in organising production and marketing for capital. Violence toward the African was increasingly becoming difficult and, to pacify the natives, rapid agrarian change in the African reserves, through the twin processes of soil conservation and cash crop development, was employed to appease the forces of resistance. This phase ushered in agrarian reforms, significantly the Swynnerton Plan, to create an African gentry to perpetuate the matrix of power. Military operations during the Mau Mau war put an end to this phase.
In the third phase (1963–1992), the norms that governed social accountability were black rule, big man politics and state oppression. These norms manifested themselves in our political life through the Africanisation of public life, governance through an imperial presidency and a vigilant venal security apparatus. Corruption and the tribe became the primary instruments used to sustain the social accountability norms in this phase.
In the fourth phase (1992–2010), the norms that governed social accountability were coalition-building, state-driven maendeleo and oppression. The return of multiparty politics to Kenya saw the emergence of coalition movements in active politics (NARC coalition, Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group [IPPG]) and in civil society. The ability to bring people together and demand change warranted state attention and responsiveness. The state apparatus became more development-centric. Top-down maendeleo-style growth filled the bureaucratic state’s ethos as a path toward proving the legitimacy of the political leadership. Reforms were brought to the civil service and professionalisation and state ideology informed the policy posture of the government. State oppression, particularly of dissenting voices, and during electoral seasons, remained.
The fifth phase (2010 to present), has been characterised by coalition building, devolution of power and resources, and the development of the material well-being of the people, which first manifested itself with the passing of the 2010 constitution that made provisions for the devolution of power and resources. As in the previous phase, coalition building in the public sphere still characterises this phase. Evident through political formations such as Jubilee, NASA, Kenya Kwanza, Azimio, and in civil society groups, social movements and formations, this is a key social accountability mechanism in Kenya’s public life. The ability to mobilise people and demand change warrants state attention and responsiveness. The improvement of the material conditions of the people is perhaps the most compelling evolution of this mutually antagonistic and complimentary change within the public sphere. It is for this reason that we observe the shift in Kenya’s politics viz. the 2022 elections and more recently the Gen Z protests that have become the internal logic of the revolution.
The reason for the latter dialectical process is in part due to the overbearing nature of the colonial matrix of power, one of the objectives of which is to transform society into a capitalistic state. But it is also in part because society is demanding agency to define its material conditions. Within this framework, the “livelihood question” is perhaps the most important factor that will dictate social accountability mechanisms within the public sphere in this phase. Indeed, creating a governance infrastructure that will take into account the “livelihood question” will increasingly become the central debate in Kenya’s pubic sphere as has been showcased by the ongoing Gen Z revolution.
Yet, despite this evolution (which arguably has contributed to progress in the material and political conditions of the people), the colonial matrix of power still hinders deep democratisation and progressive social accountability mechanisms to restructure the public sphere to be responsive to the aspirations of the people. Mignolo observes that for public spheres in formerly colonised societies to become more democratic, they have to detach from the overall structure of knowledge – the colonial matrix of power – in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution. This detachment constitutes a delinking from ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in a world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality enforced. He notes further that:
Epistemic reconstitution is taking place in many places and in many forms. But this is not a task you can find in the state and inter-state relations. This is a task of what I would call the emerging global political society: people taking their/our destinies in their/our own hands.
Makueni case study
In Kenya, for instance, these emerging political societies have been observed among the people of Makueni County. In the 1970s, Kenya was ravaged by a severe drought that gravely affected the lower eastern part of Kenya, a semi-arid region of high temperatures and low rainfall. With little government and donor support, the community came together to build sand dams – popularly called Silangas – to renew the local water resource. Using locally available materials and employing the traditional system of mwethya – a mechanism of mutual community support and shared labour – a political society emerged that formed the backbone of food farming and water conservation using sand dams.
The overarching lesson from the emerging political society in Makueni is that by taking their destiny into their own hands and using indigenous knowledge systems and values, they inadvertently began a delinking process from the matrix of power that has led to the emergence of a public sphere that reflects the historical development of the people, and agreed social accountability mechanisms that mirror the agency and the epistemic constituents of the people of Makueni.
Importantly, because of the internal self-organising capacity of this political society, social accountability mechanisms are “codified” and institutionalised and, therefore, the moral language and social norms created within this context provide emancipatory power and arm the public with the moral resources to hold power to account. This can lead to what some scholars have termed “transversal”, “hybrid” or “diagonal” accountability.
Despite this success, much still needs to be done and, in this, the role of civic societies will be crucial. Since the 1990s when the era of good governance and democracy ushered in the age of political openness in Kenya, civil society organisations have been involved in state reform. That is, they have advocated for vertical accountability – the ability of a state’s population to hold its government accountable through electoral processes. It focuses on the relationship between citizens and their elected representatives, and horizontal accountability (the oversight that different institutions in a political system exercise over each other is commonly termed horizontal accountability).
However, because of the overbearing of the colonial matrix of power on our governance structures, social accountability measures that address the plight of the people have not been forthcoming. To foster this, civic society must transform itself into a site of radical thinking of the global matrix of power, born out of the lived experiences of the Kenyan people. These experiences, Achille Mbembe argues, will open different pathways to what he calls “Afropolitanism”: a politics that uses the history and present of Africa to think about global emancipation. For Mbembe, the colonial matrix of power did not just affect Africa but also affected global humanity. For this reason, the re-enchantment of politics is also a rejection of the violence that came with coloniality. This is to say, to radically redefine the “native being” and open it up to the possibility of becoming a human form of being rather than a thing. This possibility of becoming human requires, on the one hand, the affirmation of a different humanity, “the possibility of reconstituting the human after humanism’s complicity within the matrix of power. And on the other, it demands becoming one’s ‘own foundation’ in the creation of ‘forms of life that could genuinely be characterised as fully human’”.
This transformation will lie in the capacity of civic society to act as a catalyst where political societies can emerge and become robust, democratic, and resilient. From a programmatic perspective, this will entail a four-pronged approach. First, it will entail an aggressive shift towards social policy reform with regard to the material conditions of the people. To note, governance debates since the end of the Cold War have largely focused on the implementation of liberal democratic ideals, that is, electoral reforms, constitutional change, robust civil institutions and a free and liberal civil society. The shift towards social policy should now focus on improving the human capabilities of Kenyans by emphasising improving the material conditions of the people. To do this, the need for civic society to enforce constitutionalism will be paramount. State institutions must adhere to the spirit and the letter of the constitution. More radical reforms of the civil service must be enforced to end the cult of “Kanuism” that has gripped the country since the independence project was conceptualised. As noted above, civil service within the matrix of power has been a site of primitive accumulation. Upending this logic will involve not only policy and legislative remedies, but also the moral sanction towards the civil service and the political class. The Gen Z revolution has already provided the initial momentum to institutionalise this culture in Kenya’s public sphere with initiatives such as social jail and “greeting” your political representative.
Second, postcolonial theologians argue that, colonial theology is actually determined, shaped, and defined by European colonialism, implying and reinforcing notions such as Eurocentrism, colonial exploitation, and the superiority of European values and culture. In praxis, the courting of the pulpits by the political class has been a way in which colonial theology has cemented itself in Kenya’s public sphere. The push to ban politicians from accessing the pulpit is a step in the right direction. The body politic of the church must make this an internal policy. Moreover, there needs a theological re-reorientation away from colonial theology towards the construction of a theology that can spur new moral imaginations. Indeed, religion broadly, and Christianity specifically, has the capacity to recognise turning points and possibilities in order to venture down unknown paths and create what does not yet exist. It is to create the capacity to imagine and generate constructive processes that are rooted in the day-to-day challenges of violence and yet transcend these destructive patterns.
Third, the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. This means that the state was fashioned as an externally oriented supply chain system protected by a violent police force. Orienting the state inwards towards the needs of the people will include radical political economy transformation that corrects history while at the same time re-fashioning a different kind of economic model that empowers individuals, and fosters a more equitable and sustainable future. It will also include a complete overhaul of Kenya’s security apparatus.
Fourth, we must explore the complex state of education in Kenya, specifically, the recently established Competence Based Curriculum (CBC). We must also revisit the subject of educational inclusion (and exclusion) and we must interrogate the different epistemological and systemic framings of what constitutes education and knowledge, and the effects that these have on our educational and social landscape.
Finally, we must heed Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana and a prominent figure in the Pan-African movement, who said, “No one is independent unless Africa is free.” This statement encapsulates the notion that true independence for African nations was interlinked with the liberation of the entire African continent from colonial rule and external influence. It reflected his advocacy for Pan-Africanism, which aimed to unite African nations for their mutual benefit and progress.
