Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies

The recent clamor by some African leaders for an integrated Africa, anchored on the notion of a quasi-federal government as championed by Kwame Nkrumah and other radical Pan-Africanists in the early 1960s, has revived an issue that many thought had been buried at the 1963 Addis Ababa conference. It has also placed the radical variant of Pan-Africanism on the discursive radar. Against this background, this article adopts descriptive, historical, and analytical methods to retrospectively examine and to provide a prospective prognosis on the place of radical Pan-Africanism in the African integration project. In it, we show that many agential and structural factors have frustrated and continue to frustrate attempts to achieve the supranational African community promoted by radical Pan- Africanists. We argue that these factors cannot be divorced from the nature of post-colonial African states, which offer opportunities to ruling elites that a supranational environment cannot.