From Wilmot Blyden to Yakubu Gowon: Intellectual and Practical Projects of West African Regional Integration

The paper examines the centrality of political and economic goals to the lager vision of regionalism. In the nineteenth century, the ideas propagated by Wilmot Blyden, in a Pan-Africanist framework, were to convert culture and religion into agencies of unification. The slogan, “African for Africans,” popularized by him and others, could not become a practical project as European colonization disrupted the emerging African elite’s agenda of modernity. Nevertheless, anti-colonial struggles in the first half of the twentieth century aligned ideas of liberation with those of regionalism. The Organization of African Unity was established in 1963 to unite the newly independent countries and to lay the foundation of continental cooperation, but the most concrete effort was the creation of the Economic Community of West African States under the leadership of Yakubu Gowon in 1975. Since then, the region has been making a series of efforts towards greater integration, including the use of the ECOWAS passport to facilitate movements from Cameroon to the Gambia, as well as to promote greater trading and educational ties. This long history is crucial to understanding the complex interactions between compelling intellectual visions and complicated practical politics, a catalogue of failures and remarkable successes, along with the key elements that the past provides to understand contemporary realities.