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The
Historical and Ideological Foundations of Pan-Africanism
Ghelawdewos
Araia, Ph.D
Paper
presented at the annual conference of Reemergence
of Pan-Africanism in the 21st Century:
Implications for Empowerments of Black Educators
and Students in the African Diaspora, Friday,
November 3, 2006,
Central
Connecticut
State
University
Pan-Africanism literally
connotes to all-Africa (n) movement that embraces
the ideology of liberation for continental and
Diaspora Africans in the political, economic and
cultural spheres. Pan-Africanism has a rich but
complex tapestry that dates back to the 18th
century. To be sure, however, the ideological
roots of Pan-Africanism are not in Africa but in
the Caribbean and the
United States
. In point of fact the early harbingers of Pan-Africanism
are Prince Hall, who demanded the repatriation of
Blacks to Africa by directly confronting the State
Assembly in Massachusetts in 1787, and Paul Cuffee,
another Bostonian, * Quaker, and a shipbuilder,
who actually ventured in resettling 40 African
Americans in Sierra Leone from the United States
in 1815.
While repatriation became a
manifestation of early Pan-Africanism in the last
quarter of the 18th century and the
first decade of the 19th century,
race-relations took another dimension to propel
pan-African resistance. In this regard, the
epitome and forerunner in the struggle for racial
equality, David Walker’s Appeal,
published in 1829, reminisced the glorious past of
African civilization, in an effort to educate
people of African descent and challenge the then
dominant white supremacists. Subsequently, by the
mid-19th century, African pioneers such
as James ‘Africanus’ Beale Horton and James
‘Holy’ Johnson of Sierra Leone and Edward
Blyden from
Liberia
took the lead in the struggle against racism and
European imperialism. Blyden is perhaps the first
pan-Africanist thinker to use the concept of
‘African Personality’ and he portrayed
Africa
as “the spiritual conservatory of the world.”1
Other less known advocates of
repatriation and pan-Africanism were Daniel Coker,
Lott Carey, John Russwurrum, Martin Delaney, Henry
Highland Garnet, and Alexander Crummell. These
pan-Africanists deserve credit and it is worth
making a passing remark on their achievements. Dr.
Carey, like Cuffee strongly supported repatriation
and was involved in its making; Coker, an ex-slave
and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church (AME), settled 88 Africans at
Cape
Mesurado
in Liberia.2
Russwurrum,
a Jamaican educated in
America
, was founder and editor of the Freedom’s
Journal, first published in 1827.
Later, Russwurrum himself migrated to
Liberia
and founded the Liberian Herald in 1830 and
held various positions in the Liberian government
from 1836 to 1857. Martin Delaney was a doctor
trained at Harvard and an ardent abolitionist.
However, unlike other pan-Africanists who
advocated the repatriation of the African Diaspora
to Africa, he advanced the idea of Negro
colonization of central and south America and the
Caribbean in his treatise entitled ‘The
Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored
People in the United States, Politically
Considered’ written in 1852. Later on, however,
Delaney too joined the chorus of his other
colleagues and advocated on behalf of repatriating
Diaspora Africans to
East Africa
. Crummell went to
Liberia
in 1853, worked in collaboration with Blyden and
published The Relation and Duties of the Free
Colored Men in America to Africa in 1861.3
On top of repatriation and
race-relations issues and agendas, the one great
historical incident that further precipitated the
pan-African movement was the Haitian Revolution,
first led by Boukman in 1791 and later by
Toussaint L’overture that culminated in the
founding of the first Black republic in 1804 in
the western hemisphere. Another great historical
event that raised the political consciousness and
confidence of Africans in the continent and the
Diaspora and added fuel to pan-Africanism was the
resounding victory of
Ethiopia
over
Italy
at the battle of
Adwa
in 1896.
It is against this background
and historical development that we must now
examine the two prominent pan-Africanists, namely
W. E. B. Du Bois from the
United States
and Marcus Garvey from
Jamaica
.
The Trinidadian barrister
Henry Sylvester Williams is credited for coining
the concept of pan-Africanism, but ultimately Du
Bois and Garvey championed the idea and cause of
the pan-African movement. Bishop Alexander Walters
of AME Zion Church and president of the National
Afro-American Council was a close associate of
Williams. Both played a major role in convening
the first pan-African conference in London that
took place in July 23-25 1900. The conference,
however, could have not taken place without the
support and cooperation of the African Association
in London that included West Indians, West
Africans, South Africans, and some White
sympathizers.
Soon after the first
pan-African conference, in an attempt to
disseminate pan-African ideas, Sylvester Williams
founded a paper, The Pan-African in 1901,
but it did not last long. However, other papers in
Africa like the Lagos Standard and the Gold
Coast Chronicle followed the footsteps of The
Pan-African and carried pan-African news and
views on their respective issues. Meanwhile, a
Nigerian student at Edinburgh University, Bandele
Omoyini wrote a book in 1908 entitled Defence
of the Ethiopian Movement; in a similar vein,
Casely Hayford of the Gold Coast (now Ghana)
authored a book entitled Ethiopia Unbound.
In both titles the word ‘Ethiopia’ refers to
all ‘sun-burnt faces’ Africans.
Although he did not use the
term ‘pan-Africanism’ succinctly, Du Bois
embraced Pan-Negro or pan-Africa, as an ideology,
as early as 1890 when he was post-graduate student
in Germany, but his ideological foundation was
eclectic to say the least. On the one hand, he was
for pan-Africa liberation; on the other, he sought
white technology and capital for its realization.
On the one hand, he advocated for ‘alliance
between black and white labor [class], and on the
other he preached the color line as the problem of
the 20th century. To be sure, a
majority of white progressives founded his NAACP
at Niagara in 1909, and it was an elitist
organization owned and managed by the ‘Talented
Ten’. This,
however, is only to critically extrapolate the
early Du Bois ideological orientation and not to
belittle his ideas by any means. Du Bois is a
giant among African Americans who deserves a huge
acclaim. He was a prolific writer on African and
African American issues. His early articles like
“The Negro Race in the United States” that
appeared in the London Times and “The
African Roots of War” in the Atlantic Monthly
are towering expressions of pan-Africanism. Du
Bois book The Negro published in 1915 dealt
with the history of the kingdoms of sub-Saharan
Africa and it was widely read by Africans and
non-Africans alike along with Carter G.
Woodson’s Journal of Negro History and
his book The African Background Outlined.
Marcus Garvey, by contrast,
founded a grassroots organization, the UNIA,
managed by Africans that represents 400 million
Africans that Garvey claimed to liberate.
Moreover, Garvey founded self-reliant stores,
factories, corporations, and shipping lines, owned
and run by Africans in the Diaspora. Although the
advocacy of self-sufficient economy is stronger in
Garvey, Du Bois also entertained the same economic
agenda. Booker T. Washington influenced Garveism
at least in its early stage. While Garvey was in
favor of capitalism, the Du Boisian ideology was
similar to George Padmore and others who were
socialist in orientation.
In 1919 and 1920 a series of
race riots took place in the United States, and
coincidentally the first UNIA meeting or the Negro
Convention as it was popularly known took place in
New York in August 1920 and was attended by
delegates from 25 countries. The conference
adopted, among other things, a comprehensive
agenda known as ‘Declaration of Rights of the
Negro Peoples of the World.’ The motto and
slogan of the Declaration, in brief, was “We
shall ask, demand, and expect of the world a free
Africa.” Garvey also called his second Negro
Convention in 1921 at Liberty Hall in New York and
meanwhile Du Bois’ Pan-African Congress took
place in London in 1921 from 27-29 August.
Apparently, the 1921 Pan-African Congress, with
its attendant Declaration to the World or
the London Manifesto though considered the
most radical congress, Garvey and his followers
perceived it as reformist and integrationist.
The third Pan-African
Congress met in London and in Lisbon on November
1923 but the conference was ill prepared and had
no clear-cut conference programme. Du Bois held
his last congress in 1927 in New York and this
congress came close to Garvey and the UNIA’s
racialist agenda in its tones and program. The
participants were predominantly African-Americans,
but Africans from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone,
Liberia and Nigeria also attended the conference.
One of the speakers in the conference was the
famous Melville Herskovits, anthropologist and
author of Myth of the Negro Past.
Despite the reformist Du
Boisian pan-Africanism and the radical pan-African
Garveyism, however, it was the former that had
more influence and ideological impact on Africans
in the Continent. With the exception of Lagos
where the UNIA enjoyed temporary acceptance and
its Negro World circulated in and around
Lagos, most of the National Congress of British
West Africa (NCBWA) members were either
independent pan-Africanists or to some degree
supporters of the Pan-African Congresses of Du
Bois.
Despite the chasm between Du
Bois and Garvey, and the UNIA and NAACP leadership
styles, the torchbearers of pan-Africanism in the
Continent marched unabated. Some of these
protagonists were Professor Adeoye Deniga of
Nigeria, Joseph Casely Hayford (founder of NCBWA)
of Ghana, and Ladipo Solanke of Nigeria. After the
death of Casely Hayford in 1930, the West African
Student Association (WASU) carried his legacy; and
when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, prominent
Nigerians formed an Abyssinian support
association, and subsequently they formed the
International African Friends of Abyssinia in
London. Ultimately, this organization transformed
itself into the International African Service
Bureau in 1937. The Italo-Ethiopian conflict
ignited a Black-White clash in Harlem, New York
and by default heightened the pan-African
consciousness of Black New Yorkers. All of a
sudden, Ethiopia became a rallying cry and nerve
center for pan-Africanism, although as shown
earlier the name was associated with the Black
experience as a whole; and to be sure, Garvey’s
national anthem incorporated, in part,
‘Ethiopia, land of our fathers.’ Likewise,
George Padmore, in his article ‘Ethiopia in
world politics’4 condemned the
Italian aggression against Ethiopia as racist and
a conspiracy of revenge. In West Africa, major
newspapers like The Sierra Leone Weekly,
the Nigerian Daily Times, the Vox Populi
of Gold Coast, The Gold Coast Spectator,
and the West African Pilot all expressed
the fury of the African people against Italian
attack on Ethiopia. Jomo Kenyatta, who served as
honorary chair of the International African
Friends of Abyssinia, wrote “Hands of
Abyssinia” in Labour Monthly of September
1935.
While Italy was determined to
attack Ethiopia, in the 1930s an African Diaspora
group comprised of Leopold Senghor, Jean
Price-Mars, and Aime Cesaire founded an extension
of pan-Africanism organized around Negritude. They
were, in effect, against the moderate and
conservative leadership of Blaise Diagne and
Gratien Candace, and in favor of cultural and
heritage reaffirmation of the African people. In
turn, however, Senghor was moderate compared to
other revolutionary pan-Africanists such as Kwame
Nkrumah and Sekou Toure.
The legacy of Du Bois,
Garvey, and the various pan-African conferences
resulted in the formation of the Pan-African
Federation in Manchester in 1944 by the
International Service Bureau. The Federation had
the following objectives:
- To
promote the well-being and unity of African
peoples and peoples of African descent
throughout the world;
- To
demand the self-determination and independence
of African peoples and other subject races
from the domination of powers proclaiming
sovereignty and trusteeship over them;
- To
secure equality of rights for African peoples
and the total abolition of all forms of racial
discrimination.5
The Federation created a
special secretariat and included the following
famous pan-Africanists: Dr. Peter Millard of
British Guiana as chairman; R. T. Mekonnen
(formerly known as Peter Griffith) of (now)
Ethiopia, treasurer; George Padmore of Trinidad
and Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, joint
secretaries; Peter Abrahams of South Africa,
publicity secretary; Jomo Kenyatta, assistant
secretary.6
The
first congress of the Federation in Manchester
attracted 200 delegates from all over the world,
and for the first time it bridged pan-Africanism
and the liberation struggle in Africa. It was also
for the first time that a majority of continental
Africans attended the Congress. The Manchester
Congress was a radical departure from pan-Africa
ideals to a concerted action for the total
liberation of African colonies. Out of this
congress also evolved the West Africa National
Congress in august 1946 with Kwame Nkrumah as its
outspoken leader.
A decade later, i.e. In March
1957 Ghana became independent and Nkrumah called
the first pan-African conference of independent
African countries (Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia, Morocco, Liberia, Ghana) in Accra from 15
to 22 April 1958. The first conference of
independent African countries agreed to launch
pan-Africanism in Africa; to promote economic
cooperation; to appreciate one another’s
culture. Above all, they agreed on the total
independence of the continent and declared war on
apartheid. They have also agreed to meet every two
years, and decided the second conference, thus, to
be held at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1960. African
states expected to attend the Addis Ababa
conference were Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana,
Guinea, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Togo,
Tunisia, Madagascar, Congo Kinshasa (as it was
then known), Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia. But,
while Morocco and Congo stayed away due to
internal crisis, Mali, Togo and Madagascar opted
not to go due to pressure from France and their
own indifference to pan-Africanism.
The 1960 all African
conference, thus, gave way to dissension and
division among Africans and by April 1961 they
formed two seemingly antagonistic groups, namely
the Casablanca and Brazzaville. The Brazzaville
group constituted Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville,
Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast,
Madagascar, and Senegal; and the Casablanca group
comprised of Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Algeria
(represented by the Provisional Government),
Libya, and Egypt. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Congo
Kinshasa, Nigeria, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone,
and Tunisia, remained neutral and uncommitted.
Although for the most part the ideological
differences between the two groups are not clearly
delineated in some literature, they essentially
differed in their political and economic outlooks.
The Brazzaville group thought embracing
pan-African socialism would keep the former
colonizers (or the West as a whole) at bay and
deprive Africa of the potential aid needed for
development that Europeans can provide. By
contrast, the Casablanca group equated Western aid
with panhandling and dependence and argued instead
that Africa must develop its own common market for
a viable development.
But in the spirit of pan-Africanism,
Africans wanted to reconcile and iron out their
differences, and Senghor of Senegal took this
noble initiative. It was agreed upon to form a
six-state sponsoring committee, two from each
group, to call a pan-African meeting. Liberia and
Nigeria from the neutral group, Cameroon and Ivory
Coast from the Brazzaville group, and Guinea and
Mali from the Casablanca group. On May 8, 1961 the
pan-African conferees met at Monrovia, capital of
Liberia. However, not all African states attended
the conference. Morocco stayed away because, this
time, it resented Mauritania’s presence with
which it had territorial dispute; Ghana, Guinea,
and Mali wanted to postpone the meeting on the
ground of ill preparation by the conference; and
for unknown reason, Sudan and Egypt declined to
attend.
The African leaders should
have read Patrice Lumumba’s poem, written five
months before the Monrovia conference, for
inspiration and commitment to pan-Africanism.
Lumumba’s poem, in part, reads:
The dawn is here, my brother,
dawn! Look in our faces,
A new morning breaks in our
old Africa,
Ours only will now be land,
the water, mighty rivers
Poor Negro was surrendering
for a thousand years.
And hard torches of the sun
will shine for us again
They will dry the tears in
eyes and spittle on your face.
The moment when you break the
chains, the heavy fetters,
The evil, cruel times will go
never to come again.7
Despite the absence of some
African states, however, at least 18 African
states fully participated and decided to invite
the missing sister-states to attend in the
forthcoming Lagos conference of January 1962. In
the Lagos conference, the Dakar recommendation and
the proposal put forth by Ethiopia, Liberia and
Nigeria were accepted, and after long and arduous
deliberations, the African states resolved to set
up an inter-African and Malagasy organization with
an assembly of heads of states and governments, a
council of ministers, a general secretariat and
commissions. This resolution, named The Lagos
Charter, was a milestone in the annals of African
history. Now, two camps within the pan-African
movement, namely Casablanca and Monrovia existed
but they were all in favor of the formation of a
pan-African organization, only differing in
approach. At the same time, the Pan-African
Freedom Movement of Eastern, Central and Southern
Africa (PAFMECSA) transcended the PAFMECA of 1958
was formed.
Africans, irrespective of
their affiliation, focused on their similarities
rather than on their differences, and there was a
consensus amongst the pan-Africanists that the
formation of an African union was imperative and
urgent. With respect to this sense of urgency, it
is important to recite retrospectively Emperor
Haile Selassie’s speech in the Lagos Conference.
This is what he said:
“We are told that Africa
has been split into competing groups and that this
is inhibiting cooperation among the African states
and severely retarding African progress. One hears
of the Casablanca group and the Monrovia group, of
the Conakry and Dakar Declarations, and we are
warned that the views and policies of these
so-called groups are so antithetical as to make it
impossible for them to work together as partners
in an enterprise to which all are mutually
devoted. But do such hard-and-fast groupings
really exist? And if certain nations sharing
similar views have taken measures to coordinate
their policies, does this mean that, as between
these nations and others, there is no possibility
of free and mutual cooperation? …Ethiopia
considers herself a member of one group only –
the African group. When we Africans have been
misled into pigeonholing one another, into
attributing rigid and inflexible views to States
which were present at one conference but not at
another, then we shall, without reason or
justification, have limited our freedom of action
and rendered immeasurably more difficult the task
of joining our efforts, in harmony and
brotherhood, in the common cause of Africa…No
wide and unbridgeable gulf exists between the
various groupings which have been created …We
urge that his conference use this as its starting
point, that we emphasize and lay stress on the
areas of similarity and agreement rather than upon
whatever disagreements and differences may exist
among us.”8
By
the end of 1962 and early 1963, thus, preparations
were underway for the formation of the pan-African
union. By the end of December 1962, there were at
least 32 independent African states and on March
1963 Ethiopia invited African heads of states and
governments to convene in Addis Ababa in May 1963.
Foreign ministers meeting began on May 15 1963 and
when they ended their meeting, they appointed a
sub-committee composed of Algeria, Cameroon,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Nigeria,
Tanzania, and Tunisia to draft a charter. Beyond
this, however, the foreign ministers meeting did
not achieve much, but it paved a way for the
summit conference of the 32 independent African
states. This would be a historic conference
because the Casablanca and Monrovia groups ironed
out their differences and sat together.
In his opening address,
Emperor Haile Selassie reiterated the urgency of
the formation of African unity and said, “This
conference cannot close without adopting a single
African charter. We cannot leave here without
having created a single African organization…If
we fail in this, we will have shirked our
responsibility to Africa and to the peoples we
lead. If we succeed, then, and only then, we will
have justified our presence here.”9
President Sekou Toure of
Guinea was of the opinion that the previously
proposed Casablanca and Lagos charters aimed at
uniting Africans and not dividing them. At the
Addis Ababa summit, thus, he proposed what he
called the Charter of United Africa. President
Senghor of Senegal was in favor of an economic
committee and gradual unification of Africa.
President Nkrumah, influenced by Garvey and the
UNIA and who, for sure, read a book entitled The
Philosophy of Marcus Garvey (1926), however
opposed the idea of gradual unification and
proposed rather an All-Africa Committee of Foreign
Ministers. And most importantly, Nkrumah said,
“we shall thus begin the triumphant march to the
kingdom of African Personality, and to a continent
of prosperity and progress, of equality and
justice…” What Nkrumah calls ‘African
Personality,’ if understood contextually, is
simply an extension of Aime Cesaire and Leopold
Senghor’s Negritude. Incidentally, although the
African American writers and artists of the Harlem
Renaissance in New York (e.g. Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes, Zola Neal Hurston, and Paul
Robeson) did not expressly used Negritude
or ‘African personality’ in their works, they
were diligently in search of their African
identity.
Finally, with the exception
of Togo, whose admittance to the Addis summit
refused following the assassination of its
president Sylvanus Olympio, all 31 independent
African states became signatories and founding
members to the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
Thanks to the long and arduous struggle of
Africans in the Diaspora and the Continent,
African countries are now completely independent
and the pan-African organization, has been
reformed and renamed African Union (AU), but
whether the latter realizes the mission and
objectives of the former and its founding fathers
remains to be seen.
As the early pan-African
ideology had a tremendous impact on Africa, the
struggle of the African people in Africa and the
subsequent formation of the Organization of
African Unity had an impact on the African
Diaspora too. Among prominent African American
leaders, Malcolm X clearly understood the nexus
between the African experience and the Black
Diaspora. On December 12, 1964, he stated: “When
the African continent in its independence is able
to create the unity that’s necessary to increase
its strength and its position on this earth, so
that Africa too becomes respected as other huge
continents are respected, then, wherever people of
African origin, African heritage or African blood
go, they will be respected – but only when and
because they have something much larger that looks
like them behind them.”10
Notes and
bibliography
- J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and
Nationalism in West Africa, Oxford at the
Clarendon Press, 1973, p. 8
- Ghelawdewos Araia, LIBERIA: Rebirth of a Nation,
Vol. 6, No. 3, 1997
- J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and
Nationalism in West Africa, Ibid, p. 20
- Crisis, lxii, no. 5 (May 1935), p. 139,
quoted in Ayodele Langley
- Adenkule Ajala, Pan-Africanism: Evolution,
Progress, and Prospect, Andre Deutsch,
1974, p. 10
- Adenkule Ajala, Ibid, p. 10
- Adenkule Ajala, Ibid, p. 131; reproduced from the West
African Pilot, Lagos, 6 May 1961
- Addis Ababa Summit 1963, Publication and
Foreign Language Press Dept, Ministry of
Information; quoted in Adenkule Ajala, Ibid,
p. 48
- Adenkule Ajala, Ibid, p. 53
- Sis. Marpessa Kupendua, “Africans on the Move,” Nkrumaist,
19 February, 1998
*
Some historians contend that Paul Cuffee is
originally from Rhode Island
Other
relevant sources for Pan-Africanism:
- Ghelawdewos Araia, “What is Wrong with
Afrocentrism?” African Link, Vol. 6,
No. 1, 1997
- Ghelawdewos Araia, “The Philosophical and
Historical Roots of Racism,” African Link,
Vol. 8, No. 3, Third Quarter, 1999
- Ghelawdewos Araia, “Tribute to Julius Kambarage
Nyerere,” African Link, Vol. 8, No.
4, Fourth Quarter, 1999
- Ghelawdewos Araia, “Shades of Black and White:
Conflict and Collaboration Between Two
Communities,” African Link, Vol. 9,
No. 2, 2000
- American Society of African Culture, Pan-Africanism
Reconsidered, University of California
Press, 1962
- Manthia Diawara, Pan-Africanism and Pedagogy,
http://www.blackculturalstudies.org/m_diawara/panafr.html
- New Internationalist, http://www.newint.org/issue326/simply.htm
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