Pan -Africanism finds a new momentum in the Caribbean

Augustine OGBU works as a doctor, dealing with patients in the clinics of the striking Caribbean of St Lucia.

When he returns home in the coastal city of Rodney Bay, he clashes for his second job – as owner and solo chief of a Nigerian to take away.

“Souche Egusi and Fufu, it’s more popular … They also like Jollof’s rice,” said Dr. Ogbu, wrapping a list of his customers’ favorite dishes.

The 29 -year -old man is from Nigeria – 230 million inhabitants – but crossed the Atlantic for Sainte -Lucie – 180,000 inhabitants – to train as a doctor in 2016.

He set up his point to take at home, appointed Africana Cterbops, in 2022, after being constantly by his friends from St Lucian for the Nigerian dishes.

The point to remember is now flourishing, says Dr. Ogbu at the BBC, and not only because its island customers think that food is tasty.

“They know that we all have the same ancestral origin. So, most of the time, they want to get in touch with this,” said Dr. Ogbu, adding that the interest in African culture has “enormously” since his arrival almost ten years ago.

St Lucia is not alone in this phenomenon.

Through the Caribbean, the desire to reconnect with the population African heritage seems to have strengthened in recent years.

The people of the Caribbean expressed African pride by cultural means, such as food, clothes and travel, while governments and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic gathered to forge economic ties.

Africa had a long presence in the Caribbean.

A significant part of the population of the islands has descended from the western slaves and Centrafrans, which were forcibly transported to the Caribbean by European merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Slavery was abolished in a large part of the Caribbean in the 1800s, while the independence of the European powers came to the following century.

The descendants of the slaves have preserved certain African customs, but have largely developed their own autonomous cultures, which differ from one island to another.

In the past, there have been major campaigns to encourage African pride, as Dorbrene O’Marde said, who heads the antigua and Barbuda repairs support commission.

“It was particularly strong in the 1930s approximately, then again in the 1960s – we saw a major effusion in synchronization with the (American) Movement Black Power during this period,” he said, speaking to the BBC on the island of Antigua.

Mr. O’Marde thinks that the Caribbean attend a renewed and more promising version of this “pan -Africanism” (a term used to describe the idea that people of African origin should be unified).

“He has widened beyond psychological and cultural themes and we are now talking about broader economic terms, such as stronger transport ties between the Caribbean and Africa,” he said.

“We are now in a different phase of Pan -Africanism – which will not decline before.”

One thing that separates this wave of African pride from those preceding social media.

Dennis Howard, entertainment and cultural business professor at the University of Antilles, says that a “large” quantity of Jamaicans connects with Africa via platforms such as Tiktok.

“People learn more about the history of blacks beyond slavery,” he told the BBC of his home in the Jamaican capital, Kingston.

Mr. Howard also underlines the world rise of Afrobeats, a musical genre of Nigeria and Ghana.

He believes that in Jamaica in particular, the popularity of Afrobeats is partly of the desire to reconnect with the continent.

“Thanks to musical clips, (the Jamaicans) see certain parts of Africa such as Jamaica and are developed. We had a concept of Africa like this place where it is behind and it is a pure dirt road … Music changes this.”

Questioned from the point of view of certain Jamaican commentators online – that the islanders do not need to recover their African heritage because they have an equally valid and harsh Jamaican inheritance – Mr. Howard stresses that the two are not distinct.

“Our whole culture is African, with a small pinch of India, Europe and Chinese. But for the most part, it is derived from the African. It is the most dominant part of our culture,” he said.

Those who lean in their African inheritance do not only consume culture, but actually put themselves on flights and explore the continent.

The tourism authority in Ghana – once a major starting point for the enslaved Africans shipped in the Caribbean – told BBC that there had been a “notable increase” of the holidaymakers in recent years.

Similarly, Werner Gruner, Consul of South Africa in the Bahamas, said that in the last two or three years, his office has seen an increase in local populations traveling to South Africa, Ghana and Kenya.

“I see a lot of interest in the safaris and I think that people are also starting to realize that South Africa and other African countries are in fact very well developed,” said Grune.

Even Burkina Faso, a country in economic difficulty under the military regime which is not well known for tourism, is apparently on the lists of buckets of certain people. Mr. O’Marde says that some of his countrypeople want to visit the country because of the Pan -African tendencies of his leader, Ibrahim Traoré.

Going to the mother of the Caribbean mother can however be complicated, travelers often forced to fly via Europe.

Earlier this year, in a speech in which she qualified as “girl from Africa”, the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley called for the construction of “air and sea bridges” between Africa and the Caribbean.

“Let’s make these changes, not only for heads of state, but for ordinary people who wish to exchange, travel and forge a common future,” she said.

Key institutions such as the African Union, the African Development Bank (AFDB) and the African Export-Importation Bank (Afrixhank) have worked on the “commercial” angle, hosting conferences and creating memorandums of understanding with their Caribbean counterparts.

Afreximbank says that trade between the two regions could drop from around $ 730 million (540 million pounds sterling) to $ 1.8 billion (1.33 billion pounds sterling) by 2028, provided that the right conditions are obtained.

But for the moment, Africa and the Caribbean have some of the lowest indicators in the world for transport infrastructure, the quality of logistics and the efficiency of customs, according to the World Bank.

In an attempt to reduce trade barriers, the first minins of Grenada and Bahamas called for Africa and the Caribbean this year to launch a shared currency.

The Prime Minister of Bahamians, Philip Davis, told the delegates during an Afrexbank meeting in Nigeria, that they should “seriously” consider a single digital currency, while Dickon Mitchell de la Grenade said: “Such a decision would symbolically confirmed and practically our common identity not only as business partners, but as members of a truly global Africa”.

Having more than 60 countries to coordinate and launching a standard system would not be easy, but Mitchell said it should be done if the regions “take control of (their) own”.

Back in Sainte-Lucie, Dr. Ogbu says that his attempts to bring Egusi, Fufu and Jollof to the local population are a small but worthy contribution to the strengthening of relations between Africa and the Caribbean.

In June, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu signed various cooperation agreements with St Lucia during a state visit and Dr. Ogbu considers Africana chops as an extension of this.

“I can say that I work hand in hand with the Nigerian government and even the Saint Lucian government to promote African culture,” he said.

The doctor and businessman is now trying to upgrade his food business to a full -fledged restaurant – and he hopes that “cultural exchange” between Africa and the Caribbean is also forcibly.

“It’s great!” he said. “I’m really, really excited about this.”