The recent Malawi Constitutional Court ruling annulled the presidential elections out for a rerun, and became the second African country to do so after the Kenyan Supreme Court 2017 Ruling for a presidential re-run. Malawian social media was already abuzz with clips of the Kenyan Chief Justice Maraga’s short announcement of the historic ruling. On social media, this short clip was circulated as a way to already influence what the judgement should be. But while the Constitutional Court of Malawi got inspiration from the Kenyan 2017 ruling, there were many firsts to it. One of the dominant ones was that all 5 the judges who sat on this constitutional court ruled unanimously for a fresh election. This was not the case for the 7 judges of the court of appeal in Kenya. This historical moment evoked and resonated with my research on Xenophobia in South Africa on many fronts. I do not go into the depth of my research here, but I rather point out here in very simple terms what these African borrowings ought not to be.

What Pan Africanism is not

What my research: “The South African Student #Fallist Movements: Xenophobia and the Impossibility of Including the African ‘Other’” argues in the sub-section: “South African Exceptionalism, Xenophobia, and the African Other Black Student”  is that citizens of African countries need to revisit and revise Pan Africanism into a more literal practice of borrowing from each other, and that Pan Africanism is not a historical event. Here, there exists a great Lacuna and interregnum between Pan-Africanist thought and the Nationalist ideals on the continent. Pan Africanism should not be a disjointed affair. It need not be an archival project, a theoretical descriptor, a romanticised past, or simply of academic and theoretical worth. Pan Africanism in the 21st century should not be grammars of exceptionalism, neither should it be a nostalgic concept of Black tax, Ujamaa, Ubuntu and the like. Pan Africanism should not be the exceptionalism of Ethiopia as Abyssinia, a magical precolonial space frozen in Time, Pan Africanism should not be a precolonial space frozen in a utopian mystical homogeneous Africa. The very one broadcast by BBC and CNN among others as a special place in special features as a either of tragedy or un-penetrated geographies, landscapes, flora and fauna.

Pan Africanism is not the exceptionalism of South Africa as the North of a ‘Global South’

Pan Africanism is not the exceptionalism of Kenya as an innovative and social media hub in East Africa

Pan Africanism is not the exceptionalism of Nigeria as the economic intellectual and spiritual labour giant of the African continent

Pan Africanism is not the exceptionalism of Ghana as the Black star frozen in time for the sporadic return to understand slavery and the door of no return

Pan Africanism is not the exceptionalism of Rwanda as the host of water development in Africa

The Pan Africanism of the 21st century ought to borrow from places across Africa, to make reference to all of these, but at the same time to disrupt and to make new, Because the very demon of exceptionalism carries with it the dictions of death: oppression, narcissistic tendencies, autocrats, survival, ignorance.

Therefore if you feel and are African, travel to another African country, a neighbouring one for that matter, and leave your stereotypes at home. Go learn from them!

Dr Serah N. Kasembeli is a Literary n Cultural Studies Scholar/Cultural Critic, Research Consultant, Founder among others. She talks and writes about Culture, Epistemic Violence/Colonial Violence, Historical Trauma and its Repair.