This is continued from my landing at the Jomo Kenyatta Int’l Airport. So tell me, will a United States of Africa solve any problems or create bigger ones? Enjoy…

Minutes after clearing customs, I bought a Safaricom SIM card, negotiated a ride for (about 1300KSH) to the school where I’d be interviewing students and was discussing the possibility of a United States of Africa. Good idea? Potentially disastrous? Which language would we speak? Could we finally exert some pull in trade agreements? Would we lose our cultures? Become stronger? Was this entirely laughable?

It was a Friday and I was having this conversation at a plush conference room in the library at USIU (the United States International University) in Nairobi. Complete with swivel chairs, projector, several sockets for laptops and a phone, you could quickly tell that this school was in the big leagues. These students belonged to a pan-African student club they called YALDA (Youth Alliance for Leadership Development in Africa). Founded in 2007 by Bukamu Hulela while at Harvard University, YALDA is active in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Egypt and the United States – a total of twelve universities. She wasn’t even 22 years old and she’d created an organized network of students around Africa. If YALDA Kenya was anything to go by, this organization’s members are a driven and insightful bunch. Organizations like this made you feel that a United States of Africa wasn’t so far fetched.

My thoughts drifted to Sofiene and the gang in Tunisia. What would they think of this? They were just beginning to make sense of being Arab, Mediterrenean and African. The Amideast students had only just been convinced that not every country south of their border was at the precipice of a bloody TV Cinq-worthy headline-making civil war. Then let’s not forget it was nearly impossible to make friends with people my age in Ethiopia because of the language and ideological barriers. A United Africa of any sort would be a feat. Slowly, my thoughts returned to the conversation in the room.

Alan, a second year student of public admin, was absolutely against the idea. “I don’t want to ever lose my identity. I’m a Luo and that comes before being Kenyan. It just won’t work. Africans are just too different,” he said.