Pan-Africanism: Challenging the Global Agenda — Report
The Director of the International Business Acceleration Centre (IBAC) and founder of the GlobUs International Expert Club, Yulia Berg, has said that Pan-Africanism has given African countries the space to understand and question the global agenda.
She was speaking during one of the club’s capacity-building conferences, held in line with the recently defended PhD thesis of Cameroonian researcher and author, Dr. Michael Ndimancho. Dr. Ndimancho made a strong call for Pan-Africanism to translate into an economic force capable of accelerating Africa’s development.
“economic consciousness. a subject that I consider not merely an academic preoccupation but a fundamental question concerning Africa’s historical destiny, present realities and future possibilities’’ Ndimancho stressed.
By this, both experts suggest that the philosophy of Pan-Africanism is not limited to a cultural or historical identity. It is also a powerful catalyst that enables African policymakers, civil society, the private sector, the media, students and other stakeholders to understand, question, resist and reshape dominant global ideas, interests and power structures that do not include a practical African agenda.
The Pandemic and the Rise of Pan-African Consciousness
According to Yulia Berg, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 gave fresh momentum to Pan-Africanism, encouraging wider audiences to question issues connected with the global agenda.
“In my own perception, the pandemic of 2020–2021 gave a great impulse for the development of Pan-Africanism and for Pan-Africanism to cover greater audiences that started questioning a lot of the issues related to the global agenda,” she said.
She added that the transformation now visible across the world is “irreversible and inevitable,” even though the precise shape of the future world order remains undefined. In her view, that future will depend largely on expert communities, politicians and members of civil society who dedicate themselves to implementing the changes they believe in.
The GlobUs International Expert Club held a roundtable in Douala, Cameroon, on Saturday, October 24, 2026, to celebrate the successful defence of Dr. Michael Ndimancho’s doctoral thesis, Satiric Delineation of Black Consciousness Thought. The event brought together scholars, researchers and entrepreneurs from Russia, Cameroon, the United States and Poland, as well as online participants, to examine the relationship between Black consciousness, economic sovereignty and the future of Pan-Africanism.
Yulia Berg, political scientist, described the occasion as an event “of great significance.” She applauded Dr. Ndimancho’s research for approaching Pan-Africanism from an unusual and compelling angle, combining literary, media, historical and philosophical sources.
“What is essential about the research that was done is that it focuses around the next level of questions dedicated to economic sovereignty and real political sovereignty,” she said. “But the angle taken to look at those fundamental and very serious issues is very interesting.”
Berg noted that the thesis does not rely solely on conventional academic sources. By drawing extensively on literature and media, it also reveals a central obstacle to sovereignty in Africa: the long suppression of independent thought.
“For many years, it was being suppressed, and what came as a consequence of that was a very particular kind of mentality where either you have layers to what you think, to what you say, to what you do, or else your chances to survive in this complicated environment are much lower,” Berg explained.
From Consciousness to Sovereignty
The Russian political scientist stressed that the strength of Dr. Ndimancho’s work lies in its combination of a deep understanding of social and political processes with a firm grasp of the foundations of Pan-Africanism and the conditions required to build sovereign states.
“The research itself and the topic itself fully deserve a separate event to have it discussed and brought to light to wider audiences,” she said.
The roundtable therefore served not only as a celebration of an academic achievement, but also as a platform for a wider conversation on how African societies can transform cultural and intellectual awakening into durable economic and political sovereignty.
A Club Born in a Changing World
Founded in 2022, GlobUs was created at a moment when global politics and the geopolitical agenda were undergoing profound change. Berg explained that the club emerged from the recognition that the contemporary turbulence would not leave the existing world order unchanged.
“The tricky question being explored by the members of the GlobUs Expert Club is how the world would come out of the current turbulence, and what would be the philosophical, economic, and value-based guidelines that would define the image of the future,” she said.
According to Berg, the club’s discussions and research focus primarily on the global transformation now under way, with Pan-Africanism playing an important role in that process.