Published
by Just-Web Research Institute [2nd January, 2020]
PAN-AFRICANISM
“AS A POLITICAL,
IDEOLOGICAL, AND CULTURAL MOVEMENT IN THE DIASPORA”
BY
DEEDENWII, BARITURE
N.
(ND, D.cl)
INTRODUCTION
Pan-Africanism stresses the need for
"collective self-reliance". Pan-Africanism
exists as a governmental and grassroots objective.
Pan-African advocates include leaders such as Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed
Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, King Sobhuza II, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gaddafi,
grassroots organizers such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X,
academics such as W. E. B. Du Bois,
and others in the diaspora. Pan-Africanists
believe that solidarity will enable the continent to fulfill its potential to
independently provide for all its people. Crucially, an all-African alliance
would empower African people globally.
The realization of the Pan-African objective
would lead to "power consolidation in Africa", which "would
compel a reallocation of global resources, as well as unleashing a fiercer
psychological energy and political assertion...that would unsettle social and
political (power) structures in the Americas".
Advocates of Pan-Africanism i.e.
"Pan-Africans" or "Pan-Africanists" often champion
socialist principles and tend to be opposed to external political and economic
involvement on the continent. Critics accuse the ideology of homogenizing the
experience of people of African descent. They also point to the difficulties of
reconciling current divisions within countries on the continent and within
communities in the diaspora.
Because it refers neither to a single political ideology
nor a clearly discernible philosophical tradition, Pan-Africanism is difficult to define. Many scholars avoid
defining it, noting that black internationalism has varied drastically
according to time and place. Indeed, various conceptions of Pan-Africanism have
been aligned with disparate political and theoretical positions, from largely
religious to communist to even, Paul Gilroy suggests, fascist forms. Yet, the
concept can be said to signify a set of shared assumptions. Pan-Africanist
intellectual, cultural, and political movements tend to view all Africans and
descendants of Africans as belonging to a single "race" and sharing
cultural unity. Pan-Africanism posits a sense of a shared historical fate for
Africans in the Americas, West Indies,
and, on the continent itself, has centered on the Atlantic trade in slaves,
African slavery, and European imperialism. Cultural and intellectual
manifestations of Pan-Africanism have been devoted to recovering or preserving
African "traditions" and emphasizing the contributions of Africans
and those in the diaspora to the modern world. Pan-Africanists have invariably
fought against racial discrimination and for the political rights of Africans
and descendants of Africans, have tended to be anti-imperialist, and often
espoused a metaphorical or symbolic (if not literal) "return" to
Africa.
MEANING OF PAN AFRICANISM
Pan-Africanism is a political,
ideological, and cultural movement centered on the liberation of Africa and
Africans both on the continent and in the Diaspora. The primary tension in the
history of the movement has been the precise nature and relative importance of
race and class, and their relation, in this struggle (Allen 1969).
There are many definitions of Pan-Africanism and even
debate about when it began and what actors and actions constitute the movement.
These different conceptions hinge largely on whether one is referring to an
organized historical movement self-identified
as “Pan-Africanism” that began in the late nineteenth century and
continues into the twenty-first. The alternative is a “general sentiment
of international black kinship” (Weisbord 1973), sometimes written with a
lowercase p (i.e., “pan-Africanism”;
cf. Shepperson 1962), identified as existing as far back as ancient Egypt (Nantambu
1998), including slave revolts and (inter)nationalist tendencies in the
Caribbean and Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated
with such names as Nat Turner,
Paul Cuffee, Denmark Vesey,
Toussaint-L’ouverture, Joseph Cinque, Martin Delaney, David Walker,
Edward Blyden, and many others. The remainder of this entry focuses primarily
on the first, the contemporary organized movement, though their predecessors
have always been explicitly recognized and honored.
Pan-Africanism is an internationalist philosophy that is
based on the idea that Africans and people of African descent share a common
bond. Pan Africanism, therefore seeks the unity and autonomy of African peoples
and peoples of African descent; it is also a vision dedicated to fulfilling
their right to self-determination. African Diasporas the global dispersion of
people of African descent from their original homelands emerged through slave
trading, labor migration, commerce, and war. Imagining home, through a
collective identity and cultural identification with Africa, Pan-Africanists
mobilize for the continent's restoration, prosperity, and safety.
Pan-Africanism allows African and African Diaspora communities to transcend the
status of ethnic minority or oppressed nationality by replacing it with the
consciousness of being "a nation within a nation."
As originally conceived by Henry
Sylvester-Williams (although some historians credit
the idea to Edward
Wilmot Blyden), Pan-Africanism referred to the unity of
all continental Africa.
During apartheid South
Africa there was a Pan
Africanist Congress that dealt with the oppression of
Africans in South Africa under Apartheid rule. Other pan-Africanist organisations
include: Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association-African
Communities League, Trans-Africa and the International People's Democratic
Uhuru Movement.
Additionally, Pan-Africanism is seen as an
endeavor to return to what are deemed by its proponents as singular,
traditional African concepts about culture, society, and values. Examples of
this include Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude movement, and Mobutu Sese Seko's
view of Authenticité.
An important theme running through much
pan-Africanist literature concerns the historical links between different
countries on the continent, and the benefits of cooperation as a way of
resisting imperialism and colonialism.
ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PAN-AFRICANISM
Pan-Africanism originated in the New World, not in
Africa. Among the early activists who campaigned against slavery and promoted
the repatriation of slaves to Africa were Prince Hall, a
black cleric in Boston in the late 1700s, and Paul Cuffe, a
Bostonian shipbuilder who in 1815 founded a repatriation settlement in Sierra Leone (initially
established by the British as a refuge for freed and runaway slaves in
1787). Frederick Douglass, David Walker,
James Horton, James Weldon Johnson,
and many others were also involved in this effort. Another slave refuge,
Liberia, was established as a result of the efforts of the American Colonization Society.
The 1884 Congress of Berlin,
at which the European imperial powers partitioned Africa into colonial
possessions, galvanized the Pan-African movement, and the African Emigration
Association was established in the United States in
1886. In 1893, Pan-Africanists convened a conference on Africa in Chicago, at
which they denounced the partition of Africa. In 1897 the African Association
was formed under the leadership of Henry Sylvester Williams, a
Trinidadian sometimes referred to as the grandfather of Pan-Africanism. He
convened the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900.
In the early twentieth century, two notable
PanAfricanists were Marcus Garvey and
W. E. B. Du Bois. Garvey, a Jamaican, promoted black pride, repatriation to
Africa, and African self-determination. His ideas on Pan-Africanism remained
popular for decades, particularly in the Caribbean, where they melded with reggae
and liberation ideology in the 1970s. Du Bois, sometimes credited as the father
of Pan-Africanism, was a cofounder of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United
States. His scholarly writings on the struggle against white domination, the
social conditions of African Americans,
and the connections between black Americans and Africans gave Pan-Africanism a
truly global scope.
During the early twentieth century, the movement in the
Americas was also linked to the Harlem Renaissance and
to black writers and artists such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,
and Paul Robeson.
PanAfricanism also contained a focus on negritude, or the idea of a shared
African personality and identity, as portrayed by activists and intellectuals
in the French Caribbean and African colonies such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé
Césaire. Frantz Fanon and
other writers criticized this strand of Pan-Africanism as being elitist and in
consort with French colonial power.
A series of Pan-African Congresses were held in this
period largely under the leadership of Du Bois in Paris (1919), London and
Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York City
(1927). Participants were drawn largely from the Caribbean, American, and
European diaspora rather than from Africa itself, and the conferences focused
on gradual self-government and interracialism rather than on African
independence.
After World War II,
the primary focus of PanAfricanism shifted to independence movements on the
continent of Africa. In 1944 the Pan-African Federation united several African
groups in the first organization promoting African independence and autonomous
development. In 1945, the federation convened the Sixth Pan-African Congress in
Manchester, England. Participants included future African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of
the Gold Coast (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya, S. L. Akintola of Nigeria, Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson
of Sierra Leone,
and Ralph Armattoe of Togo. At this Congress, Nkrumah founded the West African
National Secretariat to promote a “United States of Africa.” In 1957, Nkrumah
led the Gold Coast to
independence, with the nation renamed Ghana. He also promoted the cause of liberation
of the whole continent. The First Conference of Independent African States,
held in 1958 in Accra, Ghana, launched Pan-Africanism as an intergovernmental
movement on the continent.
In subsequent years, as more colonies achieved
independence, different configurations of new states and interpretations of
Pan-Africanism emerged: the Union of African States (1960); the African States
of the Casablanca Charter (1961); the African and Malagasy Union (1961); the
Organization of Inter-African and Malagasy States (1962); and the
African-Malagasy-Mauritius Common Organization (1964). However, the East
African leaders Julius Nyerere of
Tanganyika, Milton Obote of Uganda, and Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya were unsuccessful in creating a regional union of states. Indeed,
Pan-African unity repeatedly came into conflict with goals for national
independence of individual former colonies. While Nkrumah’s dream of a united
Africa was not realized at this time, the Organization of African Unity(OAU)
was established in 1963, with headquarters in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, most African
colonies had attained independence and Pan-African activism waned. However,
the civil rights movement
in the United States brought social and political changes, and some observers
would place leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
within the PanAfricanist tradition. From the 1970s to the 1990s, many of the
underlying goals of Pan-Africanism were kept alive in liberation struggles in
places such as Jamaica and Zimbabwe, and in the black nationalist struggle
against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In addition, transatlantic connections persisted, such as in the Rastafarian
movement of Jamaica, which looked to Haile Selassie I
of Ethiopia as its leader. The music of Bob Marley and
other reggae artists came to symbolize the struggle of Jamaica and other
colonies for autonomy. Pan-Africanist ideals found expression in many forms of
music, literature, and other cultural forms that linked Africans and the
diaspora and enriched the larger heritage.
Other dimensions of Pan-Africanism emerged too, such as
the Afrocentric movement to represent history from an Afrocentric perspective
rather than the conventional Eurocentric perspective, as well as the effort to
advance Pan-African nationalism rather than Eurocentric Pan-Africanism
(Nantambu 1998). The scholarly field of Pan-African studies, or African
studies, emerged in North American and European universities in the 1960s.
In its historical forms, Pan-Africanism contributed
significantly to solidarity and black consciousness on both sides of the
Atlantic, as well as to decolonization and postcolonial national development in
Africa. The tripartite heritages of indigenous African, Islamic, and Western
cultures were articulated in the writings of Nkrumah as “consciencism,” and in
those of Ali Mazrui as Africa’s “triple heritage.” However, the movement was
less than successful in achieving its goals, being criticized for its
Eurocentric depictions of the problems of Africans. Pan-Africanist leaders were
criticized for focusing on personal interests and micronationalism, and for
failing to advance nation-building and continental unity as a foundation for
development. Pan-Africanism failed to acknowledge ethnic and cultural
differences in African and diasporic contexts, and it did little to alleviate
African poverty and underdevelopment.
AIMS
AND OBJECTIVES OF PAN-AFRICANISM
The vision and ideology of Pan-Africanism was the
dominant ideology of the African people for almost the whole of 20th century,
although somewhat eclipsed by territorial nationalism in the last quarter. It
was born of five centuries of oppression, exploitation, domination, and more
particularly, humiliation and indignity, visited on the African people by
European imperialist powers. Understandably, it was the ‘diaspora’ which first
gave birth to the idea of pan-Africanism. The first Pan-African Congress was
convened by that great African mind, W. E. B. Du Bois in 1919 on the heel of
the first imperialist war. The demand of the first Congress revolved around
equality of races, for the black people to be treated like any other human
race. It was attended largely by diasporans.
Pan-Africanism originated in the late 19th century in
the West Indies. The spark for its creation was European colonialism's impact
on Africa and African-descended people around the world. In the mid-20th
century, Pan-Africanism became a rallying cry for the African independence
movements. Some elements sought a unified postcolonial continent-wide African
nation.
The Pan-African movement developed two strains.
Continental Pan-Africanism dealt with the continent itself, emphasizing
political union or international cooperation. Diaspora Pan-Africanism attempted
to bring together all black Africans and persons of African descent.
The underlying assumption of Pan-Africanism is that all
African people have common ties and objectives that can best be realized by
united effort. All Africans around the world have a common future based on a
common past of forced dispersal through the slave trade, oppression through
colonialism and racism, economic exploitation, and denial of political rights.
All Africans also share a common history, culture, and social background, all
of which are denied by white racism.
Other
aims and objectives are;
1.
Promoting Pan-Africanism: To help reinforce the
vibrant flames of panafricanism burning throughout the diaspora and on the
continent and to equally promote the increasingly urgent and enduring
imperatives of the struggle for the total liberation and unification of Africa
as a single sovereign entity requisite for the consolidation of her political
independence, and as a bulwark against neocolonialist subversion and
manipulation of the peoples' right to self-determination, in order to withstand
imperialist sabotage in all their ramifications and be able to create real
opportunities for effective democratic institutions, self-determination and
social mobility, social justice, economic development, and thereby contribute
positively in the all-round development of the individual as a member of
society, and help in improving the quality of life for all;
2.
Networking for change: To assist in the
engineering and the construction of a political platform to facilitate
self-mobilisation and to service and power bottom-up, people-to-people,
polycentric and democratic mass movement constantly networking for synergies
and seeking common grounds for effective strategies, non-violent joint-actions,
and to create infrastructure appropriate to our needs to live in peace and in
dignity, in a common determination to help put a permanent end to an old story
beginning from centuries of slavery, to colonialism, neocolonialism, and
today's real and continental dangers;
3.
Interactive information: To help establish in a very
systematic and comprehensive manner, an authentic clearing-house of research,
information gathering, handling, distribution, exchanges and other
consciousness-raising activities focusing attention, encouraging reflection and
stimulating informed discussions and actions on the need for change, what needs
to be changed, and the direction of such a change, in the light of concrete
historical experience of struggle of the working classes throughout the world,
theoretical analysis, identification, defence and the advancement of the
interests of Africa's poor and constantly alienated peasantry and working class
majority;
4.
Challenging Neocolonialist Dogmas and Imperialist Propaganda: To
help promote non-violent and exclusivesly peaceful means of social and
political advocacy through the promotion of political litracy, and mounting
challenges to neocolonialist propaganda and subterfuges, neoliberal imperialist
mantras and distortions, dogmas of the extreme right, racism, ethnocentricism,
and all forms of xenophobia, discrimination based on sex, caste, religion,
nationalism, and bourgeois notions of supremacy, leftwing extremism, fascist
terrorrism by states and groups and generally support people's struggles,
international working class solidarity, particularly in the effective reversals
of the institutionalised mechanisms of social exclusion and economic
exploitation beginning with the World Bank and the IMF and the international
finance monopoly capital, which are nothing more than modern versions of
slavery and man's inhumanity to man;
5.
International Solidarity: To help in the intensification of
international solidarity campaigns involving a broad range of stake-holders,
inter-disciplinary team that pay more attention to solutions that address root
causes of the recurrent and emerging problems facing our people in order to
power the needed changes. To enter into close collaboration with local and
international organisations whose interest concern the contradictions within
and between states, that generate the phenomenon of the rich getting richer at
the expense of the poor, the ecology, peace, and social progress.
ACHIEVEMENTS OF
PAN-AFRICANISM
Originally, Pan-Africanism sought unity of all African black
cultures and countries. It expanded to encompass all black-descended people in
the world, those who had been forced to the Caribbean, the United States, Latin
America, the Middle East, and South Asia through the transatlantic and
Islamic/East African slave trades as well as later immigration.
In 1900 Henry Sylvester-Williams organized a
Pan-African conference that brought Africans from the Caribbean and United
States to London to discuss common concerns with white Britian. Initially, the
meeting sought to protest unequal treatment of blacks in colonial Britain and
in Britain itself. Speakers also spoke of the need to preserve the dignity of
African peoples and to educate them and provide social services.
Pan-Africanism had twin tasks in
relation to correcting the historical injustices of slavery, colonialism and
racism: free Africa and unite Africa and her people. It is deliberate that the
phrase her people is included in the quest for unity.
v
Promoted liberation movements and protected Ethiopia against
French invasion.
v
United people of African origin across the world.
v
Provided a forum for the black to discuss their problems.
v
Opposed nuclear tests on African soil.
v Glorified the black people
and colour
THE
CHALLENGES OF PAN-AFRICANISM
Colonial conquest was commonly followed by control of
the native
populations as a source of cheap and reliable
labor in mines and on African plantations. Europeans came to dominate a
market-based production of raw materials.
Europeans imposed a caste system and a foreign type of
governance over the tribal peoples, and the British were notable for using the local
officials as pawns. Internal developments were made to facilitate the
extraction of African
wealthfor
European benefit.
The 1919 Pan-African Congress had an agenda similar to that
of the 1900 meeting. Africans needed education and the right to participate in
their own affairs. The former German colonies were of particular interest, and
a proposal was made that the League of Nations holds them in trust until they
were ready for self-determination. The league did take the territories under
nominal oversight but gave them to the other European states without requiring
any move toward self-determination.
Drawing attention to the problems of black people in
the late 1920s and 1930s was the Harlem Renaissance, the most prominent of the
black cultural movements of the time. The Harlem Renaissance, centered in New
York's predominantly black neighborhood, brought public awareness of the work
of such black writers as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay as
well as DuBois.
PROSPECTS
OF PAN-AFRICANISM
Africans fought the colonialists from early on.
Discontent with the system and dislike of the colonialists led to efforts to
unify Africans for their own good. African rulers protested in writing to their
European counterparts, and slaves rose against oppression periodically in the
Americas and the Caribbean.
In 1925 Garvey was arrested on mail fraud charges in
connection with the operation of the steamship line, and the movement faded.
Garvey's ideas lingered on, stimulating African students in London to create
the West African Student Union (WASU) in 1929. WASU brought together the young,
aggressive African and Caribbean blacks who wanted political independence for
the African colonies.
The
ideology asserts that the fate of all African people and countries are
intertwined. At its core, Pan-Africanism is a belief that African people both
on the continent and in the diaspora share not merely a common history but also
a common destiny.
Many
advocates of Pan-Africanism in the diaspora included Marcus Garvey, W.E.B Du
Bois and George Padmore. Their inspiration and encouragement certainly paved
the way for Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and others in Africa to take up the challenge to
liberate not only their countries but also the entire continent of Africa.
Many
Africans are afraid that the ideology of Pan-Africanism cannot be effectively
realised in contemporary times considering the civil predicament that has
rocked the continent over the years.
The
thoughts of these people do not come as a surprise to because the largest
Pan-African Movement today, the African Unity (AU) has not been effective after
the overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and other advocates of this great ideology.
Contrary
to the dreams of the Pan-Africanists to unite the African continent into one
single Federal State, the AU has not achieved its core objectives of uniting
Africa.
Critics
also accuse the ideology of homogenizing the experiences of people of African
descent. They also point the difficulties of reconciling current divisions
within countries on the continent and within communities in the diaspora.
Many
of such criticisms come from the United States and the European Union (EU). But
interestingly, they were also not able to unite without encountering
difficulties in one way or the other.
CONCLUSION
Conclusions
In this paper, we have presented Pan Africanism as a philosophy or a way of
life for Africans, as defined mainly by people of African descent worldwide
(Clarke 2012). In many ways, it provided a structure that enabled Africans to
organize their world, and to work toward a world in which their humanity would
be affirmed. Within the narrative, language or discourse of genealogy,
Pan-Africanism has to be understood as a search for knowledge and truth about
Africa, about what Africa is, and a future that can be created (Nkrumah 1963;
Njemanze and Njemanze 2011). Emerging as it did in the aftermath of slavery and
colonialism, it drew attention to the ways in which the encounter with
modernity led to the total colonization of Africans, including in the spheres
of culture, economics, religion, and politics. Even though it rose as a
response to modernity, Pan-Africanism was and is a call for the
self-preservation of people of African descent and a re-unification of Africa
(Young 2010; Mbeki 1999; Nantambu 1998; Mulemfo 2000). That a history of Pan
Africanism begins with the encounter with modernity should not be taken to
imply that African history and identity did not exist prior to slavery and
colonialism. Instead, the encounter destroyed and led to the disintegration of
Africa (Armah 2010). While early Pan Africanists initially thought the future
of Africa lay in embracing capitalism, Christianity, or even Marxism, at the
birth of the 21st Century, particularly with the call for an African
Renaissance, there was an implicit and explicit acknowledgement that the tools
and structuresof modernity had not be enable to radically alter the conditions
of Africans for the better.
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