Pan-Africanism

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Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism is variously portrayed as a set of ideas and actions, a social and political resistance movement, an ideology, or a general philosophy challenging the effects of colonization and racial discrimination in Africa. Its goal is to foster development of an Africa-wide supranational identity and promote development of African nations in all sectors. Pan-Africanism also denotes cross-national and cross-group participation and identity. Thus, it is an attempt to link all peoples of African descent on the African continent or residing in the Americas and Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere in the global African community, including black-skinned people in India, Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and the Andaman Islands. Pan-Africanism emerged in response to African experiences with Europeans in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It is a vehicle for regenerating and unifying Africa, and for promoting a feeling of oneness among all peoples of the African world.

Pan-Africanism originated in the eighteenth century among early activists in the United States, the West Indies, and England who focused on the legacy of slavery and oppression. In the twentieth century it evolved into an intergovernmental movement focusing on postcolonial development. The term came to be used as an adjective attached to a variety of activities in which peoples of Africa and African descent participate in the black experience, including, but not limited to, labor, economic development, education, the arts, literature, sports, media, and religion. Common threads include matters of race, identity, equality, development, and community and unity. There is disagreement, however, on the scope, meaning, and goals of Pan-Africanism, particularly regarding leadership, political orientation, and national versus continent-wide interests.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR 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.

CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF PAN-AFRICANISM

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as globalization accelerated and global attention turned to the new economic powers in Asia (and to the crises in southwestern Asia), renewed African marginalization became the concern of Pan-Africanists. Conflicts in Sudan, Rwanda, Zaire/Congo, and Sierra Leone prompted international efforts to restore peace and stability. These circumstances created the impetus for a revitalized Pan-Africanism. The original goals of solidarity and identity remained in place, but the development focus shifted to overcoming neocolonialism and recolonization, resurrecting the goals of continent-wide economic development and supranational identity, incorporating new forms of solidarity and ways to bring Africa into the global arena, and, once more, rescuing Africa from being regarded as chaotic, underdeveloped, and oppressed.

By 1995 the fifty-three-member OAU had dealt with many struggles, including border disputes, conflicts and aggression among member states, separatist movements, and independence struggles in the continent’s last remaining colonial states. In 2002 the OAU was replaced by the African Union (AU), modeled on the European Union as an organization designed to promote even greater African economic, social, and political integration. As noted by Mazrui in 2001, Africans assumed globally prominent leadership positions toward the end of the twentieth century, including Amadou Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, who served as director-general for UNESCO from 1974 to 1987; Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the first African to serve as Secretary General of the United Nations (from 1992–1996; Kofi Annan, the second African Secretary General of the UN (from 2007); Mohammed Bedjaoui, who served as president of the International Court of Justice at the Hague from 1994 to 1997; and Callisto Madavo of Zimbabwe and Ismail Serageldin of Egypt, who have both served as a vice president at the World Bank. Black and African Nobel Peace Prize winners in the twentieth century were Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Lutuli (1960), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964), Anwar al-Sadat (1978), Desmond Tutu (1984), Nelson Mandela (1993), and F. W. de Klerk (1993).

The South African leader Nelson Mandela became the most universally revered of African postcolonial leaders. Under his guidance as president, South Africa, the continent’s economic powerhouse, assumed leadership in peacekeeping, diplomacy, and continent-wide development. In the early 2000s, President Thabo Mbeki continued

South Africa’s leadership in diplomatic and economic initiatives that sought to promote all aspects of African development within and across countries, to cultivate a Pan-African supranational identity, and to carve out an effective role for African states on the world stage. Specific initiatives included recognition of the historical legacy of oppression; moral renewal and restoration of African values; cultural, educational, political, and economic transformation; science and technology development; and development in media and telecommunications.

In 2002, Mbeki launched a related initiative. His Millennium African Recovery Plan (2001) was renamed as the New Africa Initiative (NAI) after consultations with Senegalese President Aboulaye Wade. Mbeki proposed the revised plan to a meeting of the G8 leading industrial nations in Italy in 2001. The plan was launched as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and designed to attract foreign direct investment in Africa for development in energy, agriculture, communications, and human resources. Other regional organizations, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC), would function collaboratively. NEPAD broadened into a wide variety of development initiatives and programs, many in new areas such as health care and HIV/AIDS programs. The long-term effectiveness of NEPAD in realizing Pan-African development goals remains to be seen, however.

Many other dimensions or uses of Pan-Africanism have emerged in expanded forms as a result of global interconnectedness. Early features of the movement have persisted, such as the tricontinental ideology linking Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean; links between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism; and a sense of solidarity, unity, and shared legacy and needs. However, globalization has also enhanced the interconnected activities of Africans and the African diaspora in the fields of television, radio, and print media; theology and religion; theater, art, music, and literature; sport; trades unions and worker organizations; and other civic, economic, and social organizations. In addition, increases in the number of African refugees and immigrants settling in the West have added new infusions to the diasporic mix abroad. Consequently, Pan-Africanism has retained much of its original spirit and goals, but it has also evolved into an extremely broad variety of forms and interpretations that are ever more global in scope.

The original goals and elements of Pan-Africanism have thus proved enduring. Contemporary Pan-Africanism, however, and within it the African Renaissance and NEPAD, have been challenged for still framing African development needs and goals in terms of external superpower influences and solutions; for failing to break patterns of conflict and underdevelopment on the continent; and for failing to reconcile internal development with wider continent-wide development. NEPAD has been challenged as a vehicle for promoting South African development interests disguised as continental development leadership (Africa Confidential 2005).

Twenty-first-century Pan-Africanism still faces its original challenges of overcoming racism, promoting African identity and postcolonial development, fostering unity of Africa and the diaspora worldwide, and resolving the ambiguities of identity and loyalty that resulted from African and European interactions. Additional challenges include the AIDS pandemic on the continent; increases in the numbers of displaced persons and refugees; chronic poverty and famine; a “brain drain” of skilled labor; and crime, violence, and corruption. Some also argue that the contemporary strengthening of black American cultural and capitalistic influences in Africa and the Caribbean at the expense of indigenous values could possibly undermine the traditionally radical spirit of Pan-Africanism (Ackah 1999). In addition, because membership in Pan-African institutions has largely comprised intellectuals, activists, and politicians, it never became a mass movement.. However, as noted by Abisi Sharakiya in 1992, the endurance and recognition of the Pan-African movement remains unchallenged, and it is likely to persist in some form in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackah, William B. 1999. Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Contradictions, Politics, Identity, and Development in Africa and the African Diaspora. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.

Adi, Hakim, and Marika Sherwood. 2003. Pan-African History:Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787. New York: Routledge.

Africa Confidential. 2005. “Pan-Africanism Meets Market Economics.” Africa Confidential 46 (1): 1.

Davidson, Basil. 1994. Modern Africa: A Social and Political History, 3rd ed. New York: Longman.

Du Bois, William E. B. 1965. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: International Publishers.

Esedebe, P. Olisanwuche. 1994. Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Makgoba, Malegapuru W., ed. 1999. African Renaissance: The New Struggle. Cape Town: Mafube/Tafelberg.

Mazrui, Ali A. 2001. “Pan-Africanism in the Era of Globalization.” Binghamton, NY: SUNY Institute of Global Cultural Studies. Available from http://igcs.binghamton.edu.

_____, and Toby K. Levine, eds. 1986. The Africans: A Reader. New York: Praeger.

Mbeki, Thabo H. 1998. Africa: The Time Has Come. Selected Speeches. Cape Town: Mafube/Tafelberg.

Nantambu, Kwme. 1998. “Pan-Africanism versus Pan-African Nationalism.” Journal of Black Studies 28 (5): 561–175.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1966. Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers.

Sharakiya, Abisi. M. 1992. “Pan-Africanism: A Critical Assessment.” TransAfrica Forum 8 (4): 39–53.

Diane Brook Napier

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism