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1. ROOTS |
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2. PAST GLORY Pan-African resistance took other forms, too. The racist idea of white superiority and African backwardness was challenged, for example, by the publication in 1829 of David Walker's Appeal, which drew attention to Africa's glorious history, including that of ancient Egypt. By the mid-nineteenth century these notions were being actively promoted within Africa, too, by James 'Africanus' Beale Horton and James 'Holy' Johnson from Sierra Leone and by the Liberian Edward Blyden, who campaigned tirelessly against racism and British imperialism. Yet all of these early Pan-Africanists were pro-Western: they wanted to create autonomous African nation-states that would develop both economically and educationally along orthodox Western lines. |
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3. CARVE-UP & CONGRESS Advert |
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4. GARVEY & DU BOIS Marcus Garvey lived his early life in Jamaica but his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) failed to achieve lift-off until he moved to New York in 1916. In Harlem, however, his ideas about black pride struck a chord almost immediately. By 1920 he was being talked of as the 'Black Moses': he held an international convention with delegates from 25 countries and led a 50,000-strong parade through the streets of Harlem. His most popular slogans were 'Back to Africa' and 'Africa for the Africans', sentiments which ironically suited the racist Ku Klux Klan. In 1925 Garvey's dream fell apart when he was imprisoned for mail fraud connected with his Black Star shipping line: after two years in jail he was deported to England and never regained his influence. But Garveyism remained the most popular form of Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean and resurfaced long after his death in the reggae scene of the 1970s. WEB Du Bois was an altogether different figure from Garvey, rooted in rigorous academic research into the social condition of African-Americans. Co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he edited its newspaper The Crisis from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois saw the problems of Black Americans and Africans in an internationalist way, as part of a general struggle for justice. He organized another Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919 to coincide with the Versailles peace conference at the end of the First World War, hoping in vain to persuade world leaders that US President Wilson's lofty principle of self-determination should be applied to Africans, too. |
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5. HARLEM RENAISSANCE & NEGRITUDE Another important strand of Pan-Africanism was négritude. This was a term identified with nationalists and intellectuals from France's Caribbean and African colonies, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, who propounded it in Paris in 1933. The key idea was that all Africans, whether in exile or at home, shared an 'African personality'. In practice the movement became an argument for African nationalism that was peculiar to the French colonial context; when its leaders eventually took power in an independent state, as Senghor did in Senegal in 1960, they held power on behalf of a Westernized, pro-French élite (and 40 years on, Senghor's party has only just lost power in Senegal, for the first time). Most prominent among the critics of négritude was the writer Frantz Fanon, a doctor from Martinique who put his own Pan-Africanism on the line by joining the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria. |
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6. NKRUMAH TAKES UP THE FLAME Advert Nkrumah soon became the voice and organizing force of Pan-Africanism. In the late 1940s and 1950s he promoted the idea of an independent West African Federation, seen as the first step towards a United States of Africa. When, in March 1957, he became leader of the newly independent state of Ghana, one of his first thoughts was to use his new position to help other Africans transcend the old colonial boundaries and work towards uniting the continent. He convened a Conference of Independent States in 1958, though at that stage there were only eight independent countries in Africa. He also went immediately to the aid of independent Guinea when France victimized it for rejecting membership of the post-colonial African franc zone. Nkrumah and the Guinean leader Sekou Touré agreed on a union of their two countries which they hoped would prefigure wider African unity. |
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7. CROSSROADS & CONGO The political divide was important. The Brazzaville group believed Pan-African socialism would frighten the West away and rob Africa of the aid and investment it needed for development. The Casablanca group argued that Western economic exploitation meant it was more important to develop an African common market and institutions than to go cap in hand for aid. Another conference in Monrovia in 1961 involving both sides failed to bridge the gap. |
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8. NATIONALISM ASCENDANT Instead of the United States of Africa dreamed of by Nkrumah, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) came into being in 1963 with a headquarters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The OAU has since been a fairly ineffective collection of nation-states, much like any other regional grouping. Though it does retain in its constitution the ideal of Pan-African union, in practice this remained a moribund, forgotten project for decades. It was only as the end of the twentieth century loomed - as the unsustainability of the African status quo and the inexorable progress of globalization became ever more evident - that the Pan-African vision came back into sharp focus. |