Welcome Address at the Opening Ceremony of the Kwame Nkrumah International (KNIC) Conference

Thank you all Seema, Farhad, and John for the kind words. While I would reserve my thanks to the long list of helpers and enablers to the closing ceremony, I cannot resist the temptation to thank my colleague, Dr. Frances Chiang, who more than anyone else, helped me in planning and executing this conference. For the past two years Dr. Chiang, in a display of extraordinary patience and dodged determination has stuck with me through thick and thin, through moments of despair and disappointments, frustration and anguish to the logical end. Frances, I am grateful to you. You are one of the most dependable and trustworthy persons I have ever met. I also think it is important to render special thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Kwantlen's Office of Research and Scholarship and the Centre for Academic Growth whose generous grants made it possible for us to invite our keynote and plenary speakers. Lastly, I thank my family for their patience and tolerance. For the past two years they have had more than their fill of my obsessive pre-occupation and the only string in my conversational violin--KNIC. Geralda, Maayaa, Christopher, and Malaika, thank you for your tolerance and most of all your encouragement. I am thankful to you. This conference will probably be the last event in the year-long series of activities around the world to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the birth of Dr. Kwame Africa's Man of the Millennium and perhaps the most famous pan-Africanist after Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is noteworthy that the conference is being held at the confluence of the anniversaries of several monumental events in Africa, the most important of which is the fiftieth anniversary of what is popularly referred to as Year of The year 1960 witnessed a host of events, including the end of the Mau Mau resistance in Kenya, mass riots during Charles de Gaulle's trip to Algeria, the murder of sixty-nine non-violent protestors in South Africa's Sharpeville Massacre, and independence for seventeen African nations. While the year was marked by both the entrenched brutality of European colonial rule and the birth of new African nations, there was overwhelming sense of optimism for a vibrant, independent, and self-sufficient Africa. The KNIC also coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela from jail, which signaled the demise of the apartheid system in South Africa. As well, this conference coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, which partitioned Africa among the European imperial powers. Finally, this conference coincides with yet another important milestone in the annals of Africa's liberation movement, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, of which Nkrumah was the organizing secretary. The KNIC is also being held at a time when Africa's continental body, the African Union (AU), has accepted and is working on Nkrumah's blueprint for a continental union government. As one of the founders of the predecessor continental body, the Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah had single-mindedly and stoutly campaigned for a continental union government of Africa to pool its vast natural and human resources for the benefit of the continent's peoples. In July 2009, the AU issued a Declaration on the Celebration of the 100th Birthday Anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah, praising him as an advocate of pan-Africanism who played a vital role in the establishment of our Continental Organization and the liberation of the Continent. But as the AU progresses towards Nkrumah's vision of a United States of Africa, intense debate rages in both academia and the political sphere as to whether Africa is ready for a continental union government. The debate also revolves around which is the best route to a continental government: a gradual, piecemeal route through regional economic unions, or a radical and immediate political and economic union, as proposed by Nkrumah. …

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