Ambassador ARIKANA is the mouthpiece of Africa and its Diaspora

Her Excellency Ambassador Dr Arikana Chihombori-Quao, a medical doctor by profession, has been fighting a fierce war against the hurdles that Africa and the Black Diaspora have been facing for almost a century. This native of Zimbabwe, when talking about her career as a great diplomat states that this journey started as a “game”, and an attempt that she thought would have proven futile. When the proposal to accept the post of African Union (AU) ambassador to the USA was made to her by a friend and colleague, she thought that a semester of work would have seen her returning to her cherished career of family doctor. Destiny had a different choice for Dr Arikana. She found herself driven by a passion which enabled her to perform beyond the requirements of her job.

Wakanda One Village Project

One of her first international assignments saw Dr Arikana working as the chair of the African Union-African Diaspora Health Initiative (AU-ADHI), a medical Pan-African initiative, since 2012. This organization mobilizes health professionals in the African Diaspora to assist with Africa’s continental healthcare crisis. This assignment also included the African Union-Diaspora African Forum Americas (AU-DAF) that she has been chairing since 2010. Most West Africans became familiar with Arikana’s impressive abilities and boldness when she launched the “Wakanda One Village Project” in January 2019 with the aim of building an efficient “development infrastructure” in an African country. The concept was one which saw the creation of an ultramodern and efficient community housing  health facilities, schools, universities and all that was needed for growth and development. Africans in the Diaspora were willing and ready to be the complete force behind the project.

Ghana visit

 Ambassador Arikana visited Ghana in December 2021 with a group of Black diasporans to sell the Wakanda Project. Ghanaians were eager to see the project materialize as such an infrastructure would echo the strategic location of their country for Pan-African achievements. But, other Ghanaians were afraid of a situation that would lead to parochial individual petit interests being given pre-eminence over the mass benefit that the project was intended to represent. Some months later it was rumoured that Ghana would not been granted the “seat” of the project, and that a southern African country or several of them had obtained that privilege and, sadly enough, the reason that most citizens heard was that the demand for little bribes disappointed the architects of the mega-project.

During that meeting, held at one of the most prestigious hotels of Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana, the audience witnessed, for the first time, the bold, innovative and constructive ideas of Ambassador Arikana. The choice of Ghana for this project could be related to the prominent presence of Pan-Africanism at the core of early postcolonial Ghana’s policy and politics as embodied in President Kwame Nkrumah. Ambassador Arikana championed these visionary activities although she was no longer the ambassador of the African Union (AU) to the US.

Arikana’s message condemned colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, injustice and similar phenomena perpetrated by the Western countries in their interactions with Africa. She associated most of these calamities with the 1885 Berlin Conference. It, therefore, came as no surprise when, in October 2019, she was removed from her position as the representative of the African Union (AU) to Washington. Her open, vitriolic, radical and Fanonist position could not be tolerated by Western institutions.

Admiration for Burkina Faso

As part of her Pan-Africanist mission, Arikana visited Burkina Faso this year with a group of Black diasporans whom she introduced to the Burkinabè president, Captain Ibrahim, as “sons and daughters” of Africa who were , in most cases, traveling back to Africa for the first time, and she asserted her alliance and acceptance of the political line that Burkina Faso had embarked on. She had bought into the anti-imperialist policy of the Burkinabè regime and did not hesitate to cite the Burkinabè decision as an example to be emulated by the whole of Africa. Dressed in a red T-shirt and a red beret, the accoutrement of a true freedom fighter, she commended the Burkinabè president as a visionary reincarnation of revolutionary Thomas Sankara and applauded the young president’s determination to implement the core message behind the creation of the Organization of the African Unity (OUA), in 1963. Let us remember that OAU is the predecessor of the African Union. In a speech at the University of Cape Coast on 21 August, she said “we need more Traorés in Africa”, an expression that demonstrates her admiration of the blunt de-linking anti-imperialist policy (and many of its components) that the country of the incorruptible Man embarked upon.

That two-day conference was indeed the 14^th Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture, an event that is regularly held and confers doctorate degrees on prominent figures, primarily politicians and distinguished academics. Several African presidents and Black scholars were conferred degrees by the University of Cape Coast in line with the practice of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture. South African Thabo Mbeki and Professor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong-Ellen Gurney, Professor of History and of African-American Studies at Harvard University in the US was the speaker of the 13^th Memorial held in 2023.

This week, Ambassador Arikana “graced” the University of Cape Coast with lectures on the theme “imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, the three Axis of evil for Africa”. The audience noticed that some of her statements were overt indictments of some Ghanaians whom she thought belonged to the generation of postcolonial African cadres of civil servants and decision makers that had failed the African youth.

Other exciting ideas in her lecture addressed the hope represented by the African youth and the power that lies in the hands of African women. To the youth, she said “if your president, your minister does not work towards the defence of the interests and the progressive movement of your society, remove him or her.” To women she had this to say: “Men owe us, women because we gave birth to them; we must therefore have mutual respect and harmony. But if the men refuse that you sit at the dinner table with them, take that chair and get yourself a seat. If the men in your country coil in their shell and are incapable of condemning the corruption that retards the development of your country, take that role/job upon yourselves”. These examples were reminders of the following occurrences: the removal of the dictator, Blaise Compaoré, from power in Burkina Faso in 2014 by young men and women; certain august persons like Yaa Asantewaa and the Amazons; and the historical protest of women who devised an impeccable strategy and walked hundreds of miles to defy the French colonial police in Mali and Senegal when the men were beaten to submission.

Ambassador Arikana’s whole trajectory as a diplomat and an activist demonstrates her courage, determination, passion, vision and exemplary leadership. Her tours, lectures, speeches, unequivocally, attack and condemn the human and material hindrances to the onward march of Africa and her diaspora. Since she was speaking in university whose primary mandate is the training of teachers in Ghana, Ambassador Arikana recommended that the teaching of Kwame Nkrumah’s writings be made compulsory at the University of Cape Coast (and certainly other universities in the country), and she recommended, for a better understanding of the machinery of imperialism, John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Moussa Traoré is Professor at the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.