I | INTRODUCTION |
Pan-Africanism, philosophy that is based on the belief
that African people share common bonds and objectives and that advocates unity
to achieve these objectives. In the views of different proponents throughout its
history, Pan-Africanism has been conceived in varying ways. It has been applied
to all black African people and people of black African descent; to all people
on the African continent, including nonblack people; or to all states on the
African continent.
The formal concept of Pan-Africanism initially
developed outside of Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It
developed as a reaction to the impact of European colonialism in Africa on
peoples of African descent. In the mid-20th century, activists in Africa adopted
Pan-Africanism as a rallying cry for independence from colonial rule. Some
African Pan-Africanists sought to unite the continent as one independent nation.
From these origins and objectives, Pan-Africanism developed in two basic forms.
In one form, known as Continental Pan-Africanism, it advocates the unity of
states and peoples within Africa, either through political union or through
international cooperation. In its other, broader form, known as Diaspora
Pan-Africanism, it relates to solidarity among all black Africans and peoples of
black African descent outside the African continent. Developed and interpreted
by thinkers, authors, and activists around the world, Pan-Africanism remains a
significant force in global politics and thought.
II | BACKGROUND |
European contact with sub-Saharan Africa
began in the mid-15th century, when the Portuguese established a thriving trade
on Africa’s western coast. By the end of the century, in addition to buying
items such as pepper, gold, and ivory, the Portuguese were buying increasing
numbers of African slaves. The Portuguese were followed by slave traders and
colonists from Britain and, later, France. In the 16th century the expansion of
agricultural plantation economies in new European colonies in North and South
America and the Caribbean made African slavery exceedingly profitable. European
demand for African slaves increased, and more and more Africans were enslaved by
West and Central African slave traders and taken from Africa. See
Atlantic Slave Trade.
Early European trade in Africa was
accompanied from its very beginning by European attempts to seize territory from
African states in order to secure control of the sources of the goods they were
purchasing. After conquering territory, European colonialists set out to control
the African population for use as inexpensive labor in plantations, mines, and
other flourishing businesses established in the African colonies. In this way,
the first contacts of European traders with Africa marked the beginning of
European domination of African peoples.
Colonialism systematically degraded Africans,
both slaves and residents of Europe’s African colonies. Slaves labored under
cruel and dehumanizing conditions for no pay or extremely low wages.
Furthermore, these slaves were scattered in far-flung European colonies,
separated from their African homes and relatives. From the mid-15th century to
the late 19th century, an estimated 6 percent of Africans in the slave trade
were taken to the British territory that became the United States; 17 percent
were sent to Spanish territory in North and South America; 40 percent to
European-held islands in the Caribbean Sea; and 38 percent to Portuguese
territory in South America. This dispersion of African peoples is known as the
African Diaspora. The term Diaspora also refers to these dispersed
peoples’ descendents, who largely compose the present-day population of people
of African descent outside of Africa.
Africans in the African colonies were
indoctrinated with the notion of the inherent supremacy of European culture
through everyday interaction with Europeans and through the few colonial schools
Europeans established. The political systems of the indigenous African peoples
were transformed, as traditional African rulers were usually forced to act as
pawns of the colonial administration. Colonialism also had a major economic
impact on Africans, as agricultural commodities, minerals, and people were
usually exported from the African colonies to Europe and the New World rather
than being used for the direct benefit of Africans. Roads, bridges, ports, and
other facilities were built only to facilitate this export trade.
Slavery and the colonial system were hated by
Africans and were institutions that the Pan-African movement arose to combat.
Pan-Africanism also developed to overcome the obstacles facing the African
Diaspora—a scattered, diverse, and often disadvantaged population of people of
African descent. Pan-African thinkers would maintain that, although they were
dispersed throughout the world, African people and people of African descent
were a unified people and should try to work together for the good of all.
III | DEVELOPMENT OF PAN-AFRICANISM |
Africans resisted European domination from
their earliest contacts with Europeans. The record of this resistance is present
in the early communications between the rulers of African states and the
monarchs of Europe in the 17th century, as well as in the routine physical
resistance of Africans to slavery from the beginning of the slave trade. Modern
resistance to colonialism, however, began with the development of a formal
Pan-African movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1900 Henry Sylvester
Williams, a lawyer from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, organized a
Pan-African conference in London to give black people the opportunity to discuss
issues facing blacks around the world. The conference attracted a small but
significant representation of Africans and people of African descent from the
Caribbean and the United States, as well as whites from Britain.
The original political objective of the
meeting was to protest the unequal treatment of blacks in the British colonies
as well as in Britain. However, the speakers also used the forum to make
statements about the needs to uphold the dignity of African peoples worldwide
and to provide them with education and other social services. In addition,
speakers at the conference celebrated aspects of traditional African culture and
pointed out great historical achievements of African peoples in the tradition of
influential Pan-African pioneer Edward Wilmot Blyden. Blyden, a Caribbean-born
Liberian educator, wrote extensively in the late 19th century about the positive
accomplishments of Africans and may have coined the term
Pan-Africanism.
The next several Pan-African meetings were
organized by distinguished African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounder
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The
consequences of World War I (1914-1918) raised serious concerns among blacks in
the United States. The main issues were the well-being of African American and
African soldiers who had served in the war and the status of former German
colonial territories in Africa that had been captured during the war by Britain,
France, and other Allied powers. Du Bois convened the first Pan-African Congress
in Paris in 1919. The congress was held at the same time as the Paris Peace
Conference, at which European powers negotiated the aftermath of the war.
The agenda of the first Pan-African Congress
resembled that of the 1900 conference in its concern for the plight of Africans
and people of African descent. Significant emphasis was placed on the provision
of education for Africans and the need for greater African participation in the
affairs of the colonies. Specific interest in the African territories of the
conquered German colonial empire was also expressed. A proposal was made that
these territories be held in trust by the newly founded League of Nations with
the goal of granting the territories self-determination as soon as possible.
Nevertheless, the territories were placed under the nominal supervision of the
league, which distributed the territories to other European colonial powers
without demanding that the new colonial rulers move the territories toward
self-determination.
The next Pan-African congresses sponsored by
Du Bois were held in 1921 (in London, Paris, and Brussels, Belgium), 1923 (in
London and Lisbon, Portugal), and 1927 (in New York City). These congresses were
attended by increasing numbers of representatives from the United States,
Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Several important factors affected the
growing popularity of the congresses. First, many delegates were sponsored by
international labor movements, which were growing in size and power in the
1920s. A second factor was the growth of the black nationalist movement of
Marcus Garvey. The Garvey movement was important in the United States as a
popular expression of the sentiments of African unity and redemption among
working-class blacks. His followers contrasted with the more elite black groups
cultivated by Du Bois. Garvey, a Jamaican, founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 to promote black pride, political and
economic improvements for blacks everywhere, and the repatriation of blacks to
Africa (often called the “Back to Africa” movement).
The institutional growth of the Garvey
movement was swift and international in scope. Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro
World, achieved wide distribution, and chapters of UNIA sprung up all over
the Americas, as well as in Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Garvey also
established a steamship company, the Black Star Line, with which he hoped both
to enter international trade and to transport blacks to Africa. Garvey hoped to
oversee the repatriation of tens of thousands of American blacks to the West
African nation of Liberia, which had been founded by freed American slaves in
the early 19th century. The Garvey movement declined when Garvey was arrested
and imprisoned in 1925 on charges of mail fraud relating to the operation of the
Black Star Line, and his repatriation scheme was never fulfilled.
Influenced by Garvey’s ideas, young Africans
studying in London founded the West African Student Union (WASU) in the late
1920s. WASU became a focal point for younger, more politically aggressive blacks
from Africa and the Caribbean who agitated for African independence from
colonialism.
In the late 1920s and the 1930s, public
awareness of the plight of peoples of African descent grew as black cultural
movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in the United States gained
recognition. The Harlem Renaissance, centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New
York City, disseminated the works of black writers such as Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Du Bois himself, along with other black
artists espousing black pride and challenging racial injustice. In France, a
similar movement, called the négritude movement, followed the Harlem
Renaissance. The movement developed in Paris among French-speaking African
intellectuals and activists whose works affirmed the integrity of African
civilization, defending it against charges of African inferiority. Noted
proponents of négritude included the authors Léopold Sédar Senghor (who later
became the first president of Senegal), Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, and
Léon-Gontran Damas.
IV | AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE |
In the 1930s and 1940s, global forces such as
the Great Depression (the worldwide economic slump of the 1930s) and the
development and onset of World War II significantly hampered the efforts of the
Pan-African movement. Nevertheless, concern for Africa among people of African
descent remained strong in the United States and Britain. American and British
Pan-African groups mounted substantial protests when Italy invaded Ethiopia in
1935. In 1937 African American groups formed the Council on African Affairs, the
first American lobby organization led by blacks. The council worked to raise
awareness in the United States about the plight of Africans living under
colonialism and advocated the liberation of African colonies. It was headed by
the internationally renowned black singer and film star Paul Robeson and
included such important black scholars and activists as W. E. B. Du Bois,
educator Alphaeus Hunton, future congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and
educator Mary McLeod Bethune. The council also attracted African American
artists such as singer and actor Lena Horne, who helped raise funds for
projects.
In the early 1940s Kwame Nkrumah, a native of
the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana) in West Africa, founded the African
Student Organization in the United States. At the time, Nkrumah was a student in
the United States. In 1944 Nkrumah left America for London, where he joined an
important group of Pan-Africanists led by Jamaican activist George Padmore and
Trinidadian author C. L. R. James. Also in the group were Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya
and Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, who, like Nkrumah, would eventually become
leaders of their countries. In 1945 this group sponsored the fifth Pan-African
Congress, which brought together numerous African nationalists and trade
unionists. The meeting, held in Manchester, England, gave great impetus to the
movement for African independence and fostered African leadership of the
Pan-African movement.
In 1957 Ghana became the first sub-Saharan
African state to gain independence, and Nkrumah became its first prime minister.
Nkrumah held the Pan-Africanist view that the independence of Ghana would be
incomplete without the independence of all of Africa. To work toward this goal,
he appointed Padmore to establish a Pan-African Secretariat within the Ghanaian
government. The secretariat pursued the twin goals of total African independence
and continental political union in two series of international conferences, held
between 1958 and 1961: First, the All-African Peoples’ Conferences were held to
stimulate independence movements in other African colonies. Second, Nkrumah
organized the Conferences of Independent African States to establish a
diplomatic framework for the political union of Africa. By inviting
representatives from independent North African states to the conferences and by
holding the 1961 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Cairo, Egypt, Nkrumah’s
intent was clearly to unite the entire African continent.
In 1960 Nkrumah invited W. E. B. Du Bois to
live in Ghana to act as an adviser and to initiate a project that Du Bois had
proposed, the Encyclopedia Africana, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the
culture and history of African peoples. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963 with this
project incomplete. However, the publication of several books during this period
made Continental Pan-African philosophy more widely known. Notable among these
books were Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956) and Nkrumah’s
Africa Must Unite (1963).
In 1960, 17 African countries gained
independence. By the end of 1963, approximately 80 percent of the African
continent was independent. Nkrumah’s goal of establishing a United States of
Africa with a centralized power structure was opposed by the leaders of many of
the new African countries, who resisted giving up their nations’ newfound
autonomy. In May 1963 representatives from 32 African nations of both North and
sub-Saharan Africa met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and founded the Organization of
African Unity (OAU, now African Union) as a loose federation of independent
African states committed to continent-wide cooperation. The unfinished African
independence movement, political differences among the independent nations, and
the poverty of the African continent kept political union from becoming a
reality.
V | PAN-AFRICANISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS |
The concept of Pan-Africanism as a political
force reemerged in the Diaspora with the beginning of the Black Power movement
in the United States. In the early 1960s Malcolm X, a charismatic and forceful
leader of a black Muslim group called the Nation of Islam, began publicly to
espouse an aggressive philosophy of racial unity and self-reliance that came to
be known as Black Power (or black nationalism). In 1966 civil rights activist
Stokely Carmichael became head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), an influential civil rights organization, and then led SNCC and other
groups to adopt Black Power as a guiding principle. In the United States,
Pan-Africanism came to be regarded as the international expression of Black
Power and Malcolm X as the American voice of Pan-Africanism.
In early 1964 Malcolm X traveled to Africa,
giving well-received speeches to the governments and universities of Ghana and
Nigeria. In his talks, Malcolm X expressed the theme of Pan-African unity by
declaring that American blacks would not be free as long as they experienced
racism in America and as long as Africa was not free. On a second trip to Africa
later that year, Malcolm X became the first black American to speak before the
OAU. On that occasion he asked for the assistance of African leaders in bringing
charges of racism by the American government before the United Nations (UN).
(The charges were never heard before the UN.) Back in the United States, Malcolm
X counseled American blacks to acknowledge their kinship to Africa as a part of
the civil rights movement.
VI | LATER DEVELOPMENTS |
Several Pan-African organizations formed in
the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of these was the
African Liberation Support Committee, headed by activist Howard Fuller (who
later took the name Owusu Sadaukai), renowned poet Amiri Baraka, black scholar
and activist Maulana Karenga, and other prominent African Americans. This
organization worked to increase support within the United States for liberation
movements in Africa and promoted the observance of May 25 as African Liberation
Day, a holiday established by the OAU to mark its birth. These projects became
the instruments through which black Americans supported the growing revolutions
in southern Africa by black Africans seeking to achieve independence in Rhodesia
(later named Zimbabwe) and in South-West Africa (Namibia) and majority rule in
South Africa.
Another major event of this period was the
sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in June 1974 and
headed by Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. The meeting drew an international
delegation of more than 5,000 Africans and people of African descent, including
100 from the United States. However, it revealed a growing schism within the
movement between Marxist and non-Marxist political alliances and approaches to
issues. Thus, the achievements of this meeting were few.
Between 1974 and 1980 the Pan-African
movement welcomed the independence of the last European colonies in Africa. By
raising public awareness and putting pressure on their governments throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s, Pan-African groups around the world succeeded in
focusing the world’s attention on the injustices of white minority rule in
Namibia and South Africa.
VII | THE LEGACY OF PAN-AFRICANISM |
Continental Pan-Africanism continues to
surface as a strategy for addressing the problems of Africa, notably in the form
of regional cooperative groups. Examples of these are the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community
(SADC, formerly the Southern African Development Coordination Council), which
are trade blocs that have played significant roles in regional economic
integration. With the increasing pressure of economic competition from
international trade blocs in North America, Europe, and Asia, the achievement of
economic and political unity on the African continent remains a viable and
urgent quest.
Peoples of black African descent around the
world face a number of similar socioeconomic and political challenges as they
strive to create better futures for themselves and their descendants. These
peoples’ international cooperation and shared strategies for bringing about
social change are the legacy of Diaspora Pan-Africanism.
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