The death in a car accident in Kenya of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem has robbed the cause of Pan-Africanism of its most energetic and charismatic modern advocate. Born in Funtua, Nigeria, in 1961, he studied political science at Kano’s Bayero University before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and completing a doctorate on party politics in Nigeria. In no sense did he neglect the often desperate political needs of his Nigerian homeland, and he helped found the Centre for Democracy and Development under the Abacha dictatorship, remaining its Chair until his death.
But his indefatigable efforts as both journalist and campaigner always embraced Africa as a whole. After a spell in the 1980s at the Institute for African Alternatives, he worked for the Africa Research and Information Bureau, and it was in this period he first wrote for the NI, about Africans’ experience of racism in Russia (www.newint.org/issue211/black.htm).
