IF COLONIALISM DID NOT BRING PAN-AFRICANISM INTO BEING, WHAT WERE THE REASONS FOR PAN-AFRICANISM AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTINENT? AFRICAN STUDIES - PAN-AFRICANISM MARGARET AKUOKOR ANKRAH

Pan-Africanism is a sociopolitical world view, philosophy, and movement which seek to unify  native Africans and those of  African heritage into a global African community. Generally, Pan-Africanism calls for a politically and economically united African or unity of African people. 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. It therefore posits a sense of a shared historical fate for Africans in the Americas, West Indies, and on the Africa continent. Many Pan-Africanists have consistently fought against racial discrimination and political rights of Africans and descendants of Africans and have tended to be anti-imperialist.

 The modern conception of Pan-Africanism if not the term itself, dated from at least the mid-nineteenth-century. The African-American Martin Delany, who developed his own re-emigration scheme, reported in 1861 the slogan after an expedition to Nigeria during 1859–1860 and Edward Wilmot Blyden adopted it when he arrived in West Africa in 1850. Blyden, originally from Saint Thomas,US virgin Islands (then under Danish rule) played a significant role in the emergence of Pan-Africanist ideas around the Atlantic through his public speeches and writings in Africa, Britain, and the United States and proposed the existence of an "African personality" resembling contemporary European cultural nationalisms. Blyden's ideas informed the notion of race consciousness developed by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) at the end of the nineteenth century.

Pan-Africanism grew out of the nineteenth century with the efforts to end slavery and the slave trade. At this time blacks worldwide were being oppressed. Slavery existed in America, South America, and the Caribbean. Also the colonization of Africa (born out of the Berlin Conference of 1884 & 85) had begun. As a result of these events, black people world wide began to realize that they faced common problems (slavery, colonization, and racism), and that it would be to their benefit to work together in an effort to solve these problems. Out of this realization came the Pan African Conferences. The belief that people of African descent throughout the Diaspora shares a common history, culture, and experience and should stick together. This belief is the principle idea behind Pan-Africanism.

The developments and growth of Pan-African sentiments in the late nineteenth century was seen as a continuation of ethnic or "pan-nationalist". It was a reaction to the limits of emancipation for former slaves in the Diaspora and European colonial expansion in Africa. There are a number of reasons why black internationalism had particular resonance during this period. African contact with Europeans, the slave trade from Africa, and the widespread use of African slaves in the New World colonies were the most salient factors. At the same time, as abolition spread gradually around the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, Europeans increasingly viewed race as a biological and, thus, inherent difference rather than a cultural one.

Back in Africa, the establishment of Sierra Leone by the British in 1787 and Liberia by the American Colonization Society in 1816, also contributed to the emergence of Pan-Africanism and were probably the original source of the phrase, "Africa for the Africans." Pan-Africanism was the product of extraordinary, European-educated Africans and African-Americans. Apart from the contributions of West Africans and African descendants in the Europe, South Africa developed a distinctive form of race consciousness in the form of “Ethiopianism”. Up to the contemporary Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, the word Ethiopian was a term used for all Africans. “Ethiopianism” emerged in response to European colonial settlement, the institutionalization of white supremacy, and rapid industrialization, particularly in mining areas like the Rand region near Johannesburg. Its leaders were largely graduates of missionary schools, but most in their audiences were illiterate. Thus, “Ethiopianism” became a significant means of spreading proto-nationalist ideas and a sense of Pan-African unity in southeastern and South Africa. The notion of “Ethiopianism”, however, spread to West Africa, notably the Gold Coast and Nigeria, by the end of the nineteenth century, where it blended with other Pan-Africanist currents.

Although the exact origins are disputed, the term Pan-African first appeared in the 1890s. P. O. Esedebe maintains that the Chicago Congress on Africa held in 1893 marks both the transition of Pan-Africanism from an idea to a recognizable movement and the first usage of the word itself. In their collection on Pan-African history, however, Adi and Sherwood point to the creation of the African Association in 1898 and the convening of the first Pan-African conference in 1900 in London, both organized by the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams, with the objective of "bringing into closer touch with each other the Peoples of African descent throughout the world," as the beginning of the "organised Pan-African movement."

Despite these differences, scholars agree on the important role that the African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois played in developing the idea of Pan-Africanism and marshalling a transnational political movement around it. Indeed, Du Bois contributed significant speeches to the proceedings of the Chicago Congress and the Pan-African 1900 conference. In his "Address to the Nations of the World" at the latter, Du Bois declared:

“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences of race … are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”

Although Williams was unable to bring plans for a second conference to fruition, Du Bois soon initiated his own movement, resulting in five Pan-African Congresses during the first half of the twentieth century (1919, Paris; 1921, London, Brussels, Paris; 1923, London and Lisbon; 1927, New York; 1945, Manchester, England). During this period the nature and tenor of Pan-Africanist cultural and political activities changed drastically.

Also, the World War I brought thousands of African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans into contact with one another. The pressures of the war also led the imperial powers of Europe, that is, Britain, France, and Germany to train and employ colonial subjects in crucial industries while, as colonial combatants, many others saw firsthand the depravity that a supposedly superior European civilization had produced. Colonial soldiers were also pointed to the racism implicit in being asked to fight to "make the world safe for democracy" when this world would not include them, a suspicion confirmed for many when the Allies refused to include a guarantee against racial discrimination in the League of Nations charter following the war. As a result, the interwar years witnessed an unprecedented growth in a sense of racial unity and the popularity of black internationalism.

In the development, the most famous Pan-Africanist movement of the period was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A) founded in 1914 by Marcus Garvey. After Marcus struggled for some time to attract an audience in his native Jamaica, he immigrated to Harlem in 1916, where he and a young, educated Jamaican woman, Amy Ashwood (who later married Garvey), relocated the U.N.I.A. on firmer balance. The U.N.I.A. quickly became the largest African-American organization due to the diligent work of black women in the movement, especially West Indian emigrants like Ashwood and Marcus Garvey's secretary and second wife, Amy Jacques. The peak of the U.N.I.A.'s success was probably its international convention in 1920, at which Garvey presented the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, demanding "self-determination for all peoples" and "the inherent right of the Negro to possess himself of Africa."

Again, the interwar period also witnessed the peak of a number of Pan-Africanist literary and cultural movements, especially in New York, London, and Paris, and the emergence of a trans-Atlantic periodical culture. In the United States, the New Negro movement of the 1920s, better known as the Harlem Renaissance, not only drew attention to the work of African American artists but also displayed distinct Pan-Africanist sensibilities. Writers like James Weldon Johnson  inspired others around the Atlantic, for example, the Nardal sisters from Martinique and Una Marson from Jamaica, (the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and a playwright), to assert positive images of blackness while experimenting with stylistic innovations, often informed by black musical forms like the blues. Yet, the New Negro movement was not solely a literary or artistic movement: Pan-Africanist political organizations, including the explicitly communist African Blood Brotherhood, can also be seen as manifestations of it.

However, by the mid-1930s across the Atlantic in Britain, a key group of West Indian and African radicals assembled that communism and particularly, the recent of success of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) had its greatest impact on Pan-Africanist activists and intellectuals. The Trinidadians George Padmore and C. R. L. James were most significant in this regard. Padmore served as head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and editor of its monthly newspaper, the Negro Worker, and James was an internationally known Trotskyite.

Again, the growing awareness of Stalin's abuses in the Soviet Union and, more importantly, the apathy with which the governments of Europe and the League of Nations greeted Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Haile Selassie's pleas for intervention led them both to split from the Communist Party and centered Pan-Africanism in their political and intellectual work. In 1938, James published two important books of Pan-African history, the Black Jacobins and A History of Negro Revolt. Both situated contemporary anti-imperialist struggles in Africa within a larger tradition of resistance stretching back to slave uprisings in the New World. As James explains in a revealing footnote that he later added to the Black Jacobins, "such observations, written in 1938, were intended to use the San Domingo revolution as a forecast of the future of colonial Africa." James formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia in 1935 along with Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, the Trinidadian musician and journalist Sam Manning, Ras Makonnen from British Guiana, the Sierra Leonean trade unionist I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and president of postcolonial Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. The group soon became the International African Service Bureau and published a series of important journals which included Africa and the World (July–September 1937), African Sentinel (October 1937–April 1938), and International African Opinion (July 1938–March 1939).

The sojourners from Africa and the Caribbean created a number of other organizations in the interwar in Britain, most notably were the West African Student Union (WASU) and the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP). Harold Moody, a West Indian doctor who was outspokenly anticommunist, also founded the latter as an interracial association with the intention of fostering greater understanding and cooperation across racial boundaries. A small group of law students from West Africa, led by Ladipo Solanke established the WASU to challenge racial discrimination and racist representations in Britain. However, these movements were encouraged by the example of the National Congress of British West Africa under the leadership of J. E. Casely Hayford, which envisioned the creation of an independent "United States of West Africa." The LCP and the WASU published two significant mainstays of the black British press during the period, The Keys and Wãsù (Preach), respectively.

 Though initially neither was radical politically, by World War II both organizations begun to call for an end to British colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, and the WASU's local hostel in particular became an important place for Pan-Africanist ideas. In fact, several members of WASU went on to become prominent politicians in postcolonial Africa.

Though they received less attention in the extant literature, students, writers, and activists from the Francophone Antilles and French West Africa also developed a distinct form of Pan-Africanism, or internationalisme noir (black internationalism) in Paris between the wars.

After serving in World War I, the ambitious lawyer and philosopher Prince Kojo Tovalou-Houenou from Dahomey founded the Ligue Universelle pour la Défense de la Race Noire (International League for the Defense of the Black Race), which published the first black newspaper in France, Les Continents, during the second half of 1924. The Martinican novelist René Maran also played a major role in the paper as both an editor and writer. More so, the most well-known expression of black internationalism in interwar France was the literary and philosophical movement known as Negritude. The Martinican poet Aimé Césaire coined the term during 1936–1937. In addition to Césaire, the work of Léon-Gontran Damas and Léopold Sedar Senghor are usually credited with establishing and defining the movement. Yet, Negritude emerged within a broader spectrum of Pan-Africanist activities, from the Senegalese communist Lamine Senghor's  Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (Committee for the Defense of the Black Race), which was founded in 1926 and published the short-lived journal La voix des nègres. The essential contributions of women to the development of both Anglophone and Francophone forms of black internationalism were overshadowed by their male contemporaries and fared little better in scholarship on Pan-Africanism.

Immediately after the upheavals of World War II, the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester marked a turning point in black internationalist activities around the Atlantic. Though ostensibly under Du Bois's guidance, it was organized primarily by socialist Pan-Africanists in Britain, especially George Padmore, and was the first Congress to include a significant number of Africans like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.

Following the Manchester Congress, the site of Pan-Africanist activities shifted from the United States and Europe to the colonies in the Caribbean and Africa. In fact, many of the key figures in the movement, Du Bois, Padmore, and Alphaeus Hunton relocated to Africa during this period.

In 1956, Padmore's classic Pan-Africanism or Communism appeared and in 1958 Nkrumah hosted the first All-Africa People's Conference at Accra in the wake of independence from British colonial rule in 1957 and the creation of an independent Ghana. In the postcolonial era, the nature of Pan-Africanism and the problems facing Pan-Africanist projects changed dramatically. For the first time, Pan-Africanism became a broad-based mass movement in Africa and enjoyed its greatest successes as an international liberation movement in the first two decades after the war.

Through his rhetoric and, most importantly, his example as president of independent Ghana, Nkrumah dominated this period in the history of Pan-Africanism. The context of the Cold War profoundly shaped the struggle for independence in Africa. The All-Africa People's Conference at Accra in 1957 was attended by some 250 delegates.

Again, in 1963, due to the efforts of Nkrumah, President Sékou Touré of Guinea, President Modibo Keita of the Republic of Mali, and Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded in the midst of decolonization and the euphoria of independence in West Africa. However, economic neocolonialism and the limits of political independence quickly extinguished the optimism of the immediate postcolonial period, leading Pan-Africanist scholars like the Trinidadian historian Walter Rodney to re-evaluate the long-term repercussions of the Atlantic slave trade and European imperialism for Africa. The 1960s also witnessed a number of intra-African disputes between newly independent states, many of which were precipitated by border issues inherited from colonialism.

Another significant feature of the postwar period to the development of Pan-Africanism was the convergence of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism which previously remained distinct movements in North Africa. Traditionally, Pan-Arabism focused on North Africa's historical links to the east, to the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, while sub-Saharan Pan-Africanism looks across the Atlantic to African descendants in the Americas.

Moreover, religion (Islam) enjoys pride of place in Pan-Arabism as the basis of the perceived unity of the Arab world, but loosely defined cultural similarities and "racial" solidarity or, in Nkrumah's words, a distinctive "African personality" underlie Pan-Africanism.

The flowering of anti-imperialist, nationalist movements in North African after World War II, and especially the Egyptian revolution of 1952, however, signaled the emergence of a fusion of the two movements. Initially, this resulted principally from the political vision of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who succeeded Muhammad Naguib as Egypt's leader. He maintained that his country had historically occupied the center of three concentric circles, the Arab world, the Muslim world and Africa, and argued on this basis that Egypt should not remain indifferent to liberation struggles in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite his exaggeration of the importance of Egypt to Africa's future, the appearance in 1959 of Gamal book, The Philosophy of Revolution, marked an important moment in the intersection of the Pan-Arab and Pan-African movements.

Not only that, the triumphant resolution of the Suez Crisis in 1956 also enhanced Nasser's international standing, making him a source of inspiration and a symbol of the larger struggle to free Africa and the Arab world from European hegemony. The pioneering works of the Senegalese historian and politician Cheikh Anta Diop, such as The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1963) and The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974), which resituated Egyptian history within its larger African context, represent another important intellectual manifestation of this moment in the history of Pan-Africanism.

The final, bloody years of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962) also strengthened ties between Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism. The anti-colonial war in Algeria had originally split intellectuals and politicians in Francophone Africa due to the special status accorded the territory as a legal part of France. Things began to change, however, after Ghana's independence in 1957 when Nkrumah, an outspoken proponent of the Algerian cause, became the new state's first president.

In addition to Nkrumah's Ghana, Guinea and Mali joined the predominately Arab, pro-Algerian Casablanca Group, and Nkrumah became the first sub-Saharan African leader to support Arab nations in denouncing Israel as a "tool of neocolonialism" in Palestine when he endorsed the Casablanca declaration.

After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) emerged as the primary agent of Arab-African cooperation after 1963. Many then interpreted the June War of 1967 between Arabs and Israel as an attack on a member of the OAU and an occupation of African territory by Israeli forces, which only served to strengthen the importance of anti-Israeli sentiment as a basis for Arab-African solidarity. By the time of the October War of 1973 between Arab nations and Israel, politics in the Middle East and Africa were more intertwined than ever due to the nearly unanimous severing of African states' diplomatic ties to Israel.

The mid-1970s also saw the elaboration of a new philosophy and a new outline for long-term economic, technical, and financial cooperation between Africa and the Arab world. In some respects, oil and, particularly, the creation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) were important in this regard and transformed Nigeria into a crucial state in Arab-African relations. Oil profits and the institutional framework of OPEC enabled significant capital transfers from Arab to African states between 1973 and 1980. Yet, those funds fell short of Africa's real needs for development capital, and these factors often proved to divide rather than promote unity. Ultimately, the dramatic downturn in oil prices beginning in the early 1980s not only hurt oil-producing countries but drastically reduced Arab aid to Africa.

At the end of the twentieth century, debates surrounding "globalization" and renewed interest in transnational communities and cultural networks sparked a number of attempts to reconsider the history of Pan-Africanism, particularly among scholars associated with the growing fields of African Diaspora studies and Atlantic history. The delegates at the Sixth and Seventh Pan-African Congresses held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Kampala, Uganda, in 1974 and 1994, respectively also revisited this history. They did so, however, in an attempt to emphasize the need for unity in confronting contemporary economic exploitation in Latin America and Africa as well as the revolutionary potential of Pan-Africanism for the future.

Likewise, following the end of both the Cold War and apartheid in South Africa, the new African Union was founded at Sirte, Libya, in March 2001 to replace the OAU and was called on to address problems as diverse as the marginalization of Africa in international affairs, the global economy, and the AIDS pandemic on the continent.

One final development in black internationalism was the emergence of the concept of the "Black Atlantic" which figured the future of Pan-Africanism. The idea was originally introduced by black British scholars, Paul Gilroy, who emerged from the Cultural Studies group under the leadership of Stuart Hall at Birmingham University and his work focused heavily on African American and black British literature and popular culture. The notion of the Black Atlantic injected new life into attempts to examine the historical formations outside of the analytic framework of the nation-state by highlighting the singular importance of the legacy of the Middle Passage and African slavery around the Atlantic.

In Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy offered a compelling critique of the increasingly unproductive impasse between "essentialist" and "anti-essentialist" positions on racial and ethnic difference and what became known in the late twentieth century as "identity politics." Many of the insights as well as the potential pitfalls of this approach have been picked up by academics in the Americas, and especially the United States. For example, Brent Hayes Edwards expanded  on this scholarship while also exposing the tendency of much work on the African Diaspora to overemphasize similarities and obscure the differences rather than recognizing the management of difference (cultural, economic, linguistic, etc.) as an inescapable and, indeed, constitutive aspect of the elaboration of any particular vision of Diaspora.

In conclusion, the success of Pan-Africanism is the only way Africans can survive the foreign onslaught and live as a truly liberated people. Until Africans understand Pan-Africanism, its value and benefits, and apply it, we will come out of the underdevelopment, poverty, endless border wars, economic domination and the dictatorship of the European imperialists. Like the way Nkrumah put it: ‘Only a united Africa can redeem its past glory, renew and reinforce its strength for the realization of its destiny.’