Dr Pius Adesanmi adds to this discussion.

Dialogue 417 falls into some of the semantic traps Paul Zeleza
identifies in his essay, "Africa: The Changing meanings of "African"
Culture and Identity" (2005). I'd like to be educated more on the idea
of a "no man's land" or an "axis of Africa", whose physical/geographical
materiality would be beyond the existing borders of any of the existing
nation-states/nation-spaces. If it were even remotely feasible, would
this non-aligned "Africa" not bear too close a resemblance to US
secretary of the navy, Gordon England's "imagined Africa", implicit in
his very reassuring and comforting statement that US navy vessels
deployed in the Gulf of Guinea are only there patrol "the ungoverned
areas of Africa"? In a lecture delivered at the Nigerian Institute of
International Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi took England to task,
asking the American to identify which portion of the African continent
does not belong to a state or to a people. England was of course moving
the idea of a "no man's land", the only difference being that his
nauseating choice of words and framing carry the burden of his
Kiplinesque History. The "axis of Africa" is no less problematic: it is
evocative of one misguided emperor's recent hegemonic naming of the
other. We shouldn't echo him while naming ourselves.
 
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