1. “A recent concept...” You could say that for any political theory. People strategize based on current conditions. “No historical basis,” Historically there was no sense of continental identity, nobody even thought of themselves as “African,” but things change, historically... https://twitter.com/ucheperkins/status/1288951376199004161

...2. “The erasure of ethnic and tribal identities,” is a caricature, there is no more contradiction between Pan-Africanism/ethni-tribal identity than there is between ethno-tribal identities and families within the tribe, or between individual identities within the family...

...Pan-Africanism, as I advocate for it, is about nested identities. Individuals are nested in families, families in ethnic groups, ethnic groups in nations. As things are, when one moves beyond the ethnic group, we find systems and institutions dominated by colonial dynamics...

...I once discussed Pan-Africanism with an Igbo individual who was rightly proud of his Igbo ethnic nationality and did not want to subsume it in an international monoculture. I responded that I am proud of my own ethnic nationality and shared the same aversion to monoculture..

...The question isn’t whether there will still be individual ethnic groups, it is on what terms does one enter into the international community? Currently, if one goes beyond the borders of one’s state, one is engaging a European dominated order...

...The European dominated order has no regard for Africana ethnic identity either of the continent or of the diaspora. We enter the world ordered by Western colonialism on a debased undignified basis, we either live where we were stolen to or must chase our stolen resources...

...Pan-Africanism, as I advocate it, proposes the creation of a global supernational community where every Africana nationality (ethnic or state) will be heir to intellectual and material dignity and prosperity because the intellectual basis is Afrocentric not Eurocentric...

...and because the terms of engagement, unlike when one engages the European dominated global economic order, will be restorative and cooperative not exploitative. Put simply, the prouder you are of your Africana ethnicity, the more Pan-African you should be...

...I ask a simple question: If you are proud of yourself, who you are and who your ancestors and culture have allowed you to be, how can you willfully and enthusiastically remain tethered to a Eurocentric, Pan-European world built on the degradation of that culture?...

...If you want to stand tall as Akan, as Oromo, as Xhosa, as Banyamulenge, as Haitian, as Afro-Cubano, as Afro-American, the only way to assume your full height in a globalized world is to stand tall as an African...

...The assumption that to unite is to lose our identities is the kind of simplistic, rigid reasoning I would expect from a son of Europe. The African mind, with its infinite nuance of interpretation should approach things with more sophistication and old wisdom...

...If you want your culture to be more than a quaint, expiring thing in a world where Eurocentric Western capitalism eats everything it lays hands on and degrades and tries to atrophy everything autonomously African, you must build a new world around it to sustain and empower it.