PAN AFRICANISM
Pan Africanism is a political and cultural phenomenon which regards
Africa, Africans and African descendants abroad as a unit. It aims at the
regeneration and reunification of Africa and the promotion of a feeling of
solidarity among the people of the African world. It glories the African past
and inculcates pride in African values. Even though the leadership and the
aim of Pan Africanism have undergone changes over the years, the
movement has moved along certain basic consistent ideals – the idea of
African unity and African pride. From inception, Pan Africanism has centred
around the ideals of Africa as the homeland of Africans and persons of
African extraction, solidarity among men of African blood, belief in a
distinct African culture, Africa for Africans in church, state, and the hope for
a united and glorious future Africa. By extension, the idea of Pan Africanism
is expressed in the idea of African personality, African socialism and African
democracy.
As for the exact date that Pan Africanism began, there is no
universally accepted date. What we know is that contrary to the popularly
held view, Pan African sentiments pre-dated the London Pan African
Congress of 1900. Indeed, Pan African sentiments and feelings date to the
18th century, in the period immediately following the American declaration
of independence. It arose the minds of the Afro-Americans who were
suffering social injustices and who were being discriminated against in the
Americas. Specifically, some of the factors which gave rise to Pan
Africanism included: the humiliating and discriminatory experience of the
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Africans in the diaspora, the racism that accompanied the campaign to end
the Atlantic slave trade and European imperialism.
THE PAN AFRICANISTS
Some of the Pan Africanists were Edward W. Blyden, W.E.B., DuBois,
Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and
Stokely Carmichael. By far, Blyden, an Afro-west Indian who later adopted
Liberian citizenship, and became an influential journalist, clergyman,
diplomat, scholar and administrator in Liberia can be regarded as the father
of Pan Africanism. Among other books and essays, he wrote Hope for
Africa, “The Negro in Ancient History” and ‘Africa’s Service to the world’.
His works represented a good refutation of 18 th and 19th centuries anti-
African propaganda. According to him, men were the creation of the
circumstances in which they lived. What they become in life is often
dictated not by their personal abilities but by their environmental
influences. This is true of the Africans. He argued that Africa was behind
Europe not because of any fundamental differences but because of
differing circumstances. Blyden tried to establish African personality by
drawing attention to the contributions of Africans to civilization and
humanity. According to him, the exploitation of the resources of the New
World would have been impossible but for the labour that Africans supplied
because neither the aboriginal Amerindians nor their European conquerors
had the physical labour-power to exploit the resources of the New World.
As it turned out, black labour led to the production of sugar and tobacco
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which in turn contributed to the growth and wealth of the British and the
European economies. Contrary to the racist view, Africans, according to
Blyden, possessed a respectable past, though it is a past that is truly marred
here and there by “abrrations of barbarism”. But this is true of the
Europeans also. They were once backward.
Blyden also championed the idea of an “African nationality” arguing
that Africa was in dire need of this. He said “we need some African power …
some great centre of the race where physical, pecuniary and intellectual
strength may be collected. We need some spot whence such an influence
may go forth on behalf of the race as shall be felt by the nations”. He
argued that if Africans remained disunited, they would never receive the
respect of other races. This included implicitly the idea of the O.A.U., even
if Blyden did not explicitly call for this.
In his famous The call of providence to the Descendants of Africans in
America, Blyden lamented that Africa’s wealth was being plundered by
foreigners while her own children, the legitimate owners, languished in
poverty abroad. He was convinced that African exiles would never become
first-class citizens in a white world. He was of the opinion that if the skill
which these exiles were wasting in developing another man’s country were
channeled towards the uplifting of their ancestral homeland, the result
would be a prosperous and respectable African power.
Blyden is also noted for advocating the idea of “African Personality”.
He was against the Africans especially the educated ones living in foreign
lands who ridiculed things African. He argued that no amount of training
could transform an African into a European. Every race, he submitted,
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possessed something essential for the completion of the whole, and which
other peoples do not have. Speaking on the development of Liberia, he said
the country would not be a carbon copy of the U.S.A., rather it would
develop along her own peculiar national and traditional line.
In order to preserve Africa’s cultural heritage, Blyden called for the
establishment of a West African University and a West African Church to be
run by Africans. Such was the nationalist outlook of Edward Blyden that a
Lagos newspaper described him in 1890 as “the highest intellectual
representative and the greatest defender and up-lifter of the African race”.
THE PAN AFRICAN CONGRESSES
Henry Sylvester-Williams, a West Indian barrister organized a Pan
African Conference in London in 1900. Attended by 30 negro intellectuals
from England and the West Indies with several American blacks, the
conference was called the arouse British reformers to protect natives in
African areas from abuses but did not advocate political independence. It
was also to protest against the trend of colonial policy in South Africa and
Rhodesia. It was at this conference that the word Pan African was first
used.
The next conference held in Paris in 1919. It was summoned by Du
Bois, an Afro-American intellectual partly of West Indian descent. It
coinceded with the Paris Peace Conference which ended the 1 st World War.
57 persons met in Paris to voice African complaints during the Peace
Conference and to petition the Allied Powers to place the former German
colonies in Africa under international supervision. The conference was also
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called to forge a link between Francophone Africans and their English
speaking counterparts.
Between August and September 1921, three sessions of Pan African
Conference were held in London (U.K.), Brussels (Belgium) and Paris
(France) respectively. This Conference demanded, among other things, the
recognition of civilized men as civilised, regardless of their race or colour.
The third Pan African Conference held in London (UK) and Lisbon
(Portugal), Portugal in 1923. Four years later in 1927, the 4 th Pan African
Conference held in New York. Thereafter, another Pan African Conference
did not hold until after the Second World War. This was 5 th Pan African
Congress which held in Manchester, U.K. in 1945 where about 200
delegates and observers were present. Though William E. Burghardt Du
Bois was the chairman at this Congress, the initiative and leadership of the
meeting, for the first time fell on Africans, rather than American and West
Indian Negroes. Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Peter Abrahams and other
future African leaders played important roles at the Congress. Another
important change at this Congress was the more radical and militant
approach adopted by the Africans at the Congress rather than the
moderate approach which had previously guided the past Congresses.
Indeed, by this time (1945), the Pan-African Congress had begun to demand
for positive political action to obtain self government for African states.
The Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945 set the torn for the 6 th
Congress held in Accra in 1958. The major emphasis in 1958 was the fight
for independence in each colony. Cooperation among colonial peoples the
world over was also called for as a method of achieving this objective.
