Pan-Africanism was supposed to be the answer. After centuries of enslavement, colonization, and partition, the idea was simple and enormous: Africa is one. Its people, scattered across the continent and the diaspora, share a common origin, a common wound, and a common destiny. The borders drawn by Europeans at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 were artificial. The nations they created were inventions. The only real nation was Africa itself.

Kwame Nkrumah believed this with the force of a man who had seen the alternative. He watched as newly independent African states, each with their own flag and anthem and seat at the United Nations, immediately began to fracture along the same ethnic and regional lines the colonizers had exploited. He warned that Africa must unite or perish. He proposed a continental government — a United States of Africa — with a common military, a common currency, and a common foreign policy.

He was ignored. Not because the idea was wrong, but because the men who had inherited the colonial states had also inherited the colonial appetite for power. A United States of Africa would mean sharing that power. And sharing power is the one thing that power never volunteers to do.

Julius Nyerere tried a different path. In Tanzania, he built ujamaa — a system of communal agriculture and collective self-reliance rooted in what he called African socialism. The idea was that Africans did not need to import European ideologies. They had their own traditions of communal living, shared labor, and collective decision-making. These traditions, modernized and scaled, could form the basis of a new kind of state.

It did not work. Not because the traditions were false, but because the scale was wrong. What works in a village does not automatically work in a nation of millions. The farmers walked miles to their fields and back. The cooperatives bought their crops at prices set by bureaucrats who had never held a hoe. The system malfunctioned not from malice but from the distance between the idea and the earth.

Sankara tried yet another path. He did not wait for Africa to unite. He did not build a theoretical system. He looked at what Burkina Faso had — which was almost nothing — and asked: what can we do with this, right now, today? He vaccinated children. He planted trees. He built roads. He banned the exploitation of women. He refused foreign aid that came with conditions. He lived on $450 a month.

He was killed for it. And the man who killed him ruled for twenty-seven years.

The Pan-African idea is not dead. It lives in the African Continental Free Trade Area. It lives in the African Union, however imperfect. It lives in every conversation between a Nigerian and a Ghanaian, a Kenyan and a South African, who recognize in each other something that no passport can capture.

But the nation it was supposed to build — the United States of Africa, the continental government, the single African identity that would transcend the borders drawn in Berlin — that nation was never built. And the question is whether it was ever possible, or whether it was always a dream that required a kind of selflessness that power does not permit.

Nkrumah said Africa must unite or perish. Sixty years later, Africa has neither united nor perished. It has done something more complicated and more human: it has survived, fragmented, in pieces that do not quite fit together but refuse to fall apart.

Is that enough? Or is the Pan-African idea still waiting for the generation brave enough — or desperate enough — to try again?