Pan-Africanism

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Pan-Africanism

In its most general sense the term Pan-Africanism refers to a movement that seeks to unite and promote the welfare of all people identified with, or claiming membership in, the African or black race. Pan-Africanism is based on the idea of overcoming vast differences in language, ethnicity, religion, and geographical origin. Despite these divisions a degree of cultural unity has to some extent already been achieved among the African population of the United States because of forced interethnic mingling without regard to cultural or regional background during the slavery experience. Slavery forged African Americans into a truly Pan-African people who came to share a belief in a common destiny, deriving from the historic humiliations of slavery, colonialism, and racism. On a more positive note, Pan-Africanists also insist on recognizing the historic importance of contributions that Africa and the black race have made to civilization and human progress since the dawn of history.

Pan-Africanism assumes that the political unification of Africa will contribute to the welfare of all black people of African descent, whether or not they actually live in Africa. The African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois defined Pan-Africanism as "the idea of one Africa uniting the thought and ideals of all peoples of the dark continent," but observed that the idea had stemmed "naturally from the West Indies and the United States." Pan-African and black nationalist sentiments in the United States and in the Caribbean have provided much of the ideology for nationalist and decolonization movements on the African continent.

During the period 1957–1974 most of the colonial powers withdrew, at least formally, from their African colonies. Since then, political Pan-Africanism has focused on removing the vestiges of colonialism, particularly in South Africa, and on promoting economic and political unity among African nations. The institution that presently seeks to accomplish geopolitical unification of the continent is the Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963. In the United States the best-known African-American support organization is TransAfrica, founded in 1977.

Documents illustrating the history of Pan-Africanism began to appear during the late eighteenth century. Of signal importance was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1787). Equiano's tract, published in England, has been identified by historian Imanuel Geiss (1974) as "proto-Pan-Africanism," but it lacked the militant self-assertiveness that is associated with the modern movement. Equiano, who had been enslaved as a child and traveled as a cabin boy to the New World, believed for a time that the African condition could be improved by resettling Christianized Africans from Europe and the Americas in Africa. Although he came to abandon that plan, he remained committed to the destruction of African slavery through the agencies of Christian missionary activity, free trade, and the establishment of an African nationality.

In 1787 British reformers began a campaign to resettle England's so-called black poor in the West African colony of Sierra Leone. Abolitionists saw themselves as creating a center for missionary activity and African redemption from the slave trade. Their efforts were supported by a small cadre of proto-Pan-Africanists, but Equiano eventually came to oppose African resettlement.

The diversity of the peoples who settled Sierra Leone illustrated the complexities of Pan-African identity. The first settlers were a mixed group, including African-American loyalists who had been evacuated with the British after the American Revolution and runaway slaves from the West Indies. A second group of immigrants came from Canada—ex-slaves who had fought on the British side in the American War for Independence and then temporarily settled in Nova Scotia. A third element also came from Nova Scotia but ultimately derived from a group known as Maroons, escaped slaves who had formed independent colonies in the mountains of Jamaica. These Maroons, after staging an unsuccessful revolt in 1795, were deported first to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. A fourth group were the so-called recaptives, persons of various African ethnicities deposited in Sierra Leone over the years after being recaptured from slave traders by the British fleet.

Black Americans showed an immediate interest in Sierra Leone. A group of settlers arrived from the United States in 1816, transported by Capt. Paul Cuffe, a man of mixed African and American Indian ancestry. Along with James Forten, a black sailmaker of Philadelphia, Cuffe hoped to develop Christianity, commerce, and civilization in Africa and to further thwart the slave trade while providing a homeland for African Americans. This emigrationist variety of American Pan-Africanism was undermined in 1817, however, with the formation of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States, usually called the American Colonization Society (ACS). Because the ACS included a number of prominent slaveholders in its leadership and expressly denied any sympathy for abolition, the black American population was generally hostile to it. With the death of Cuffe, Forten became silent on the subjects of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.

African Americans who supported the movement, as did Peter Williams Sr. and John Russwurm, were subjected to considerable public scorn. In the early nineteenth century, black Americans went through one of their periodic frenzies of name changing in an attempt to affirm their American loyalties. At this point even some of the more militant nationalist and Pan-Africanist organizations began to prefer the designation "Colored" over "African." Notable exceptions were the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ).

The ideologies of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism evolved in the climate of the American and French revolutions, which gave currency to ideas of republican government and inspired certain classes of Africans to think of creating an African nation-state. One should not, however, assume that Pan-Africanism was simply an imitation of European or United States' ideology. It arose simultaneously with the European nationalisms and was a cognate rather than a derivative. C. L. R. James viewed the Haitian slave revolt (1791–1803) as the decisive event in the history of Pan-Africanism. Du Bois observed that the Haitian revolt led to the Louisiana Purchase and thus had a direct effect on white Americans' conceptions of nationalism and Manifest Destiny. It can be argued that Pan-Africanism and black nationalism in the Haitian republic were historically intertwined with the growth of the American nation and its conception of Manifest Destiny.

The Haitian revolt provided the impetus for the abortive revolution of the Jamaican Maroons in 1795. It also inspired early Pan-Africanism in the United States. Prince Hall, the Masonic lodge master from Massachusetts and sometime advocate of emigration, expressed his admiration of "our African brethren … in the French West Indies." There is no way of determining the extent to which Pan-Africanism touched the imaginations of the slave population of the United States, but there is some evidence that they were influenced by it. Herbert Aptheker has speculatively linked the slave conspiracy of Gabriel Prosser to the revolution in Haiti. The conspiracy of Denmark Vesey was said to have been inspired by the Haitian revolt, and Vesey was reputed to have dreamed of a black supernation uniting the southern states to the Caribbean.

Pan-African sentiments were strong among the African-American population of the early republic. The so-called Free African Societies of New York, Boston, and Rhode Island often expressed their identity with other Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. Early black newspapers revealed an interest in the history of Africa and the destiny of the African race. Overt identification with African affairs became unfashionable, however, when in 1816 the American Colonization Society was founded for the purpose of resettling the so-called free people of color in the colony of Liberia. David Walker published an incendiary Appeal Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829, in which he denounced Liberian colonization. Another early pamphleteer was Maria Stewart, who, although she referred to herself as an African, was equally hostile to the colonization movement. So too was Richard Allen, an organizer of the AME church, who believed in the unity of African peoples and a special God-given mission for them but steadfastly opposed any talk of Liberian colonization.

Peter Williams Sr., an Episcopal priest in New York, took a more tolerant view of African colonization. He eulogized Paul Cuffe, memorializing his voyages to Africa, and he remained friendly with John Russwurm, even after the latter was burned in effigy by anti-emigration activists. Classical black nationalism became practically indistinguishable from Pan-Africanism in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1862 the quest for a national homeland represented a desire to create, in Henry Highland Garnet's words, "a grand center of Negro Nationality." Although Martin Delany and a number of other black nationalists focused on Cuba and South America as possible sites for this "grand center," most black nationalists were inevitably drawn to Africa as the logical focus for a scheme of universal Negro improvement. Alexander Crummell, a protégé of Peter Williams, made his peace with the American Colonization Society and settled his hopes on Liberia. The entire generation of classical black nationalists, like the hero of Martin Delany's novel Blake (1859), believed in a commonality of interests among all African people, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, or North America.

At the time of the American Civil War, the Constitution of the African Civilization Society (1861) represented the Pan-African agenda in terms of "the civilization and Christianization of Africa, and of the descendants of African ancestors in any portion of the earth, wherever dispersed. Also the introduction of lawful commerce and trade into Africa." It also stated a commitment to "Self-Reliance and Self-Government, on the principle of an African Nationality, the African race being the ruling element of the nation, controlling and directing their own affairs."

The heavy emphasis on Christianity and civilization among nineteenth-century Pan-Africanists was among its more notable features. The cultural nationalism in the 1850s was universalist in its concepts and did not seek to promote an alternative to European or American definitions of culture. Even when celebrating the history of Africa's past attainments, nineteenth-century Pan-Africanists ironically betrayed an attachment to European definitions of progress and civilization. The early Pan-Africanists' appreciation for the African past was usually limited to a fascination with Egyptian grandeur and its Ethiopian roots.

Nonetheless, Pan-Africanism, in its attraction to Egyptian origins of civilization, initiated the movement known in the late twentieth century as Afrocentrism. William Wells Brown and other nineteenth-century African Americans celebrated the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians and made high claims for the potential of native Africans untouched by European decadence. This fascination with Egypt appeared even in the writings of Frederick Douglass, who normally disparaged the idea of racial pride. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a West Indian migrant to Liberia who is often called the father of modern Pan-Africanism, claimed ancient Egypt as his ancestral heritage. In recent years the "Egyptocentric" approach to African history, championed by the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, has been immensely popular among some factions of American Pan-Africanists.

Blyden, like many later Pan-Africanists, was increasingly interested in contemporary African cultures and folklore. He was well known in the United States, where he traveled and lectured extensively. Blyden advocated the study of West African languages and cultures in the African schools and universities and insisted that pristine African societies were culturally and morally superior to those of primeval Europe. The Sierra Leone physician Africanus Horton likewise defended traditional African cultures. Toward the end of the century younger scholars, like J. E. Casely Hayford of the Gold Coast and the American W. E. B. Du Bois, also celebrated Egypt, Ethiopia, and Meroë (in the Sudan) as black sources of world civilization. At the same time, they followed in the tradition of Blyden by encouraging a respect for traditional African village life as manifested in the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1885 Otto von Bismarck convened the so-called Berlin Conference at which the European powers partitioned the continent of Africa, and the Congo was consigned to the "protectorship" of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. While the partition awakened mixed emotions among many black Americans, Blyden, Crummell and the African-American historian George Washington Williams hoped, at first, that the Belgian model would provide a workable plan for attacking the slave trade and promoting "the three Cs." By 1890, however, Williams had denounced Leopold for his brutal exploitation of the Congo. Byden, the Pan-Africanist par excellence, continued to praise Leopold as late as 1895. Crummell supported European colonialism until his death in 1898 because of his belief that the British would hinder the spread of Islam and suppress the Arab slave trade in the Sudan. Nonetheless, Africans and black Americans were becoming increasingly disillusioned with European colonialism. Booker T. Washington, for example, spoke out against British imperialism and became active in the Congo Reform Association. Washington also encouraged African missionary activities, industrial education, and colonial reform, while his political machine contributed to a series of conferences on Africa. Washington worked behind the scenes to organize a missionary conference at the Atlanta Exhibition in 1895, where participants included Alexander Crummell and the AME bishop, Henry McNeal Turner.

Black missionary activity in Africa gave rise to a religious manifestation of Pan-Africanism called Ethiopianism. The movement derived its name from its adherents' obsession with the cryptic biblical prophecy, "Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God" (Psalms 68:31). Crummell, Blyden, and other Christian preachers had long employed the allusion in their sermons, but the Ethiopian movement was an independent movement of the African masses and a departure from traditional Christianity. It was what some scholars have referred to as a revitalization movement in that it revived Christian teaching by adapting it to the indigenous cultures. It often preserved elements of ancestral religions and carried with it a strong antiwhite feeling. The new militancy is often attributed to the inspiration of Bishop Turner, who visited South Africa in 1898, preaching religious independence and establishing the AME Church there. In short order, however, the zeal of South African Christians exceeded Turner's expectations, as Africans declared their independence not only from the white churches but also from the African-American-dominated AMEs. Thereafter, a much larger independent church movement came into being, revealing attitudes that were both nationalistic and Pan-Africanistic.

St. Clair Drake and George Shepperson have described the political aspect of Ethiopianism as an element of Pan-African consciousness, spreading rapidly northward and eastward and becoming more strident in its attacks on colonialism. In Nyasaland, now known as Malawi, John Chilembwe led a premature revolt in 1914, which has been attributed to the influences of Chilembwe's studies in the United States and his exposure to Ethiopianism after his return to Africa. Later in the century, in Kenya in the 1950s, the Mau Mau movement had ties to the Ethiopian millennialism that Jomo Kenyatta called "The New Religion in East Africa." It was from the Ethiopian movement that the slogan "Africa for the Africans" began to take on radical political implications. Ethiopianism is important as at least one of the sources of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica.

Edwin S. Redkey has detected grassroots Pan-Africanism in the movement that established all-black towns in Oklahoma during the 1890s. Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma, a Yoruba man from Barbados, became a missionary in Oklahoma, where he recruited for Chief Alfred C. Sam's back-to-Africa movement. J. Ayodele Langley has shown that Sam, a Twi speaker from the Gold Coast, eventually received the moral support of Casely Hayford, despite the latter's original skepticism. William H. Ferris, John E. Bruce, and Du Bois, all protégés of Alexander Crummell, had been connected with Faduma through their association with the American Negro Academy. The academy also included among its honorary members Duse Muhammad Ali, the London-based Sudanese nationalist who was editor of the African Times and Orient Review.

Ferris and Bruce, although well acquainted with the failure of Chief Sam's back-to-Africa movement, nevertheless became supporters of Marcus Garvey's similar repatriation effort after World War I. Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association revealed in its very name the traditional concern of Pan-Africanism. Garvey was less successful as a repatriationist than some of his predecessors, but he did a great deal to generate mass enthusiasm for African nationalism and the Pan-African movement. Garvey was an inspiration to a generation of African political leaders, and his name became a household word in small towns throughout the black world. After Garvey's death, his second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, remained an important figure in the movement.

Garvey did much to popularize the idea of African independence, and he was unexcelled in his celebration of Africa's ancient glories. William H. Ferris, John E. Bruce, Carter G. Woodson, Arthur Schomburg, and J. A. Rogers contributed to Marcus Garvey's newspaper, Negro World, and did much to popularize the notion that black peoples of the upper Nile were the unrivalled progenitors of world civilization. Pan-Africanist cultural expressions in the tradition of Blyden were certainly more obvious among Garveyites than among those intellectuals who disassociated themselves from the Garvey movement.

In 1900 Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidad barrister, and Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church, convened the London Conference, widely regarded as the first international meeting to apply the term Pan-African to its program. W. E. B. Du Bois, although he played an important role in the London Conference, never referred to it as the first Pan-African Congress, reserving that distinction for the meeting that he called in Paris in 1919 at the time of the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. The convention brought together fifty-seven delegates from Africa, the West Indies, and United States, but American participation was limited because of the refusal of the U.S. government to grant passports. Ida B. Wells, who was accredited as a representative of Garvey's UNIA, was thus unable to attend, and William Monroe Trotter was forced to pose as a ship's cook in order to get to Paris. Du Bois was assisted in setting up the Congress by his connections to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the influence of the Senegalese deputy, Blaise Diagne. Du Bois insisted that the Congress had influenced the peace conference to establish a Mandates Commission for administration of the former German colonies. Du Bois worked with the Pan-African Congress at its subsequent meetings of 1921, 1923, and 1927.

During the 1920s a cultural development known as the New Negro Movement, centered in such urban centers as Harlem, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, contributed to the development of cultural Pan-Africanism. The movement found expression in the literary Garveyism of Ferris, Bruce, and Rogers, but the term came to be associated with the publication of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925). The so-called Harlem Renaissance, an offshoot of this New Negro Movement, was much indebted to cultural developments in Europe and the United States after World War I, including "primitivism," cultural relativism, and the Freudian revolution in sexual values. In the view of Sterling Brown and Arthur P. Davis, this fostered a "phony exotic primitive" stereotype and "grafted primitivism on decadence." Sentimental Pan-Africanism, as expressed in the sensual imagery of Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage," appealed to wealthy whites and influential white intellectuals but avoided Pan-Africanism as a political ideology. Although Locke included an article on Pan-Africanism by Du Bois in The New Negro, he dismissed Garveyism. The works of Charles T. Davis, Tony Martin, and David Levering Lewis are essential correctives to the view of the Harlem Renaissance that emphasizes bohemian aestheticism to the neglect of political Pan-Africanism and the Garvey movement.

During the 1930s Pan-African cultural nationalism came to be identified with the Négritude movement, defined by francophone black intellectuals René Maran, Leopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Négritude emphasized such mythic traits of the African personality as sensuality, emotional sensitivity, and the purported softness of the black man. Cheikh Anta Diop (1978) has lamented the relationship of Négritude to the primitive stereotype and has opined that "the Negritude movement accepted this so-called inferiority and boldly assumed it in full view of the world." Indeed, many African and African-American intellectuals did celebrate African "primitivism." Nineteenth-century black intellectuals had shown little interest in the culture of the masses, aside from the occasional militant Christianity expressed in the Negro spirituals. Twentieth-century intellectuals celebrated black American folk culture for its "pagan," pre-Christian elements and its Pan-African cultural connections.

Data collected by Leo Frobenius, the German scholar, interpreted in the light of social science, heightened the interest of Du Bois, Césaire, and Senghor in the cultures of precolonial, sub-Saharan Africa. This led black American intellectuals to a reappraisal of their folk heritage and its African roots. The development of anthropology, with its doctrine of cultural relativism and its ties to scientific relativism, made possible an increased respect for "primitive" cultures. The concepts of Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits contributed to the metaphysical foundations of a new African cultural nationalism that merged modernism with primitivism. Fashionable modern artists, such as Picasso and Modigliani, demonstrated their discontent with the conventional norms of European cultural expression by borrowing from African graphic modes. The increasing respectability of jazz, after its celebration by European and American audiences, was another factor in the transformation of Pan-African cultural nationalism.

In 1939 the Council on African Affairs was organized by Paul Robeson and Max Yergan, with Ralph Bunche and the novelist René Maran on the board of management. The council was promoted by numerous prominent black individuals and organizations throughout the 1940s but came under attack during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Meanwhile the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, U.K., in 1945. Du Bois was accorded a place of honor in Manchester, although Pan-African leadership by this time had passed from African-American to African leadership, represented by Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikewe, and Jomo Kenyatta. Older West Africans, such as Ras T. Makonnen and George Padmore, continued to play significant roles. Padmore, a Trinidadian who had participated in the Manchester Conference, gained considerable influence with Nkrumah, who as president of Ghana (the former Gold Coast), hosted a conference in the Ghanaian capital of Accra in 1958. Shirley Graham, the only American officially in attendance, read an address by her husband, Du Bois, who was hospitalized in Moscow.

Since formation of the Organization of African Unity, black Americans have supported the Pan-African movement from a distance. The major emphasis in recent years has been on the struggle against apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. The efforts of African Americans in support of the South African struggle have been moderately successful. Black Americans have been unable to exert much influence over American foreign policy regarding Western and Central Africa, regions of the continent that have experienced much economic hardship and domestic unrest. The hopes of Garvey and Du Bois for an economically prosperous Africa have not yet been realized despite the attainment of political independence.

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wilson j. moses (1996)

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History