The Pan-African Myth
They tell you it's about freedom.
They say it’s unity.
They parade fists and drums
and call it heritage,
but what they build
is not home for all—
only for themselves.
Pan-Africanism was never about all of Africa.
It was not about the Fulani,
nor the Horn,
nor the Jews of Ethiopia
cast aside in silence.
It was never about the Berber,
never about the North,
never about those
who don’t fit neatly into the southern script.
It was a myth—
crafted to mirror the Pan-European lie,
just another continent-sized flag
that drowns real people
under borrowed slogans.
They tell us:
“We were all kings.”
“We were all one.”
But not all of us
lived in golden palaces.
Some of us
were already being hunted
by those same “brothers.”
It was never about all of us.
Only the parts they could claim.
Only the voices
they could retune
into one song—
easy to chant,
easy to sell,
easy to forget.
And now that song echoes everywhere—
in schools, in screens,
in movements that won’t say our names
because we don’t fit
the story they want to tell.
The world was divided
between Pan-Europe
and Pan-Africa—
two mirrors reflecting each other,
two masks pretending to fight
while holding the same blade.
But where were we?
Where were the Kurds,
the Fulani,
the Mizrahi,
the stateless,
the silenced,
the ones without empires
to write poems for them?
We were outside the myth.
And still are.
So don’t sell me unity
built on my erasure.
Don’t ask me to join hands
with those who have already
shut the door.
This world was never ours.
It was drawn, packaged, divided
between the ones who claimed Europe
and the ones who claimed Africa.
The rest of us
were only ever meant
to disappear.