An opportunity to abolish Africa’s false divide

by Naefa Khan-Crookes, Business Day

NORTH Africa has been portrayed as distinct from the rest of Africa, a clever divide-and-rule technique. Frantz Fanon, writing half a century ago, succinctly encapsulated this phenomenon when he wrote : "Africa is divided into Black and White and the names that are substituted — Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara — do not manage to hide this latent racism. It is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco- Latin civilisation. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilised — in a word, savage."