“What makes African countries vulnerable to continuing manipulation by former colonial powers is their essentially unviable nature built as they were to serve foreign interests and mostly lacking in organic linkages and legitimacy among the peoples forcibly brought together in these artificial states. But more than the economic linkages, in many countries security and intelligence networks help in retaining metropolitan hold."

This paragraph is the more troubling of several in the ‘New Robes and Old- Fashioned Imperialism’ (Pambazuka News 184, Pan-African Postcard). The situation in the Cote d'Ivoire is nothing made new...it is only a continuation of a struggle never fulfilled.

Let the author make a case for an Africa of "Tribal States" or a Federation of Kingdoms...something without borders drawn in the 1800s.....born of Ancient Kingdoms...many of which imploded and would have been decimated by disease, starvation and infighting.

The fact is that the map was drawn, colonies were bought, traded, carved up and out, and a nationalist wave brought the winds of change that gave us the AU of today.

For many nations to survive they must quickly grasp that the age of Capital States, Dakar, Abidjan, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Dar Es Salaam, Accra, among others has come and gone, well going.

African nations one and all must stand and identify their national interests and find a way to carry internal development out that actually results in an equitable sharing.

The map of Europe, and the Map of the United States are not dissimilar, peoples and regions vastly different were melded together and a Nation created. Many suffered civil and regional wars for decades but a national mission was evident through each creation, and destruction of these societies.

I have lived and worked in former English and French colonies. It is the NATION, separated from the tit of the former master(s) that must be developed. Economic power in all of these countries are based on relationships with former colonial families or business interests. Success and business development are guided by their own societies who still feel that SUCCESS can only be associated with an affinity for French, Arab, English or Portuguese culture, no matter how subtle.

Nkrumah is surely rolling in his grave, but would have found his Pan-Africanism still at a loss to unite peoples so divided by the most mundane questions of language, skin colour (shades of brown), or regional feuds left unsettled for 2 centuries. Dr. Abdul-Raheem might also offer a picture of a region or country that went without contact with actual or vestigial contacts to former colonial powers. Is Pan- Africanism a solution when so many states are as colonial as their mates in history?