They are calling it Africa’s answer to Brexit. Even as Britain’s decision to leave the EU threatens the very fabric of the European project, African countries that were once carved up by European colonialists, are seeking to break down borders through closer integration.
Next week, the African Union, which groups 54 countries, will issue e-passports that permit recipients visa-free travel between all member states. Beneficiaries will initially be limited to heads of state, foreign ministers and permanent representatives of the member states to the AU’s Addis Ababa headquarters.
The ideal is to eventually roll it out to all 1bn Africans, although that might take years, or even decades.
Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, chair of the AU commission, described the initiative as both symbolic and important, saying it was a “step toward the objective of creating a strong, prosperous and integrated Africa”.
A goal in the 2063 agenda — a document in which AU members have laid out a 50-year action plan — includes the free movement of goods, services and people around a continent whose borders were drawn by colonial cartographers at the end of the nineteenth century with little thought to geography or ethnicity. Africa’s 55 countries are made up of an estimated 10,000 separate polities arbitrarily merged, according to Martin Meredith, an Oxford historian.
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