Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism is the belief that people of African descent have common interests and should be unified. Historically, Pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement. There are many varieties of Pan-Africanism. In its narrowest interpretation, Pan-Africanists envision a unified African nation where all people of the African Diaspora can live. In more general terms, Pan-Africanism is the sentiment that people of African descent have a great deal in common, a fact that deserves notice and even celebration.

Pan-Africanist ideas first began to circulate in the mid-19th century in the United States, led by Africans from the Western Hemisphere. The most important early Pan-Africanists were Martin Delany and Alexander Crummel, both African Americans, and Edward Blyden, a West Indian.

Those early voices for Pan-Africanism emphasized the commonalities between Africans and black people in the United States. Delany, who believed that black people could not prosper alongside whites, advocated the idea that African Americans should separate from the United States and establish their own nation. Crummel and Blyden, both contemporaries of Delany, thought that Africa was the best place for that new nation. Motivated by Christian missionary zeal, the two believed that Africans in the New World should return to their homelands and convert and civilize the inhabitants there, a practise that various European missionaries had already attempted.

Although the ideas of Delany, Crummel, and Blyden are important, the true father of modern Pan-Africanism was the influential thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. Throughout his long career, Du Bois was an advocate for the study of African history and culture. In the early twentieth century, he was most prominent among the few scholars who studied Africa. His statement, made at the turn of the twentieth century, that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line” was made with Pan-Africanist sentiments in mind.

Among the more-important Pan-Africanist thinkers of the first decades of the 20th century was Jamaican-born Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey. In the years after World War I, Garvey championed the cause of African independence, emphasizing the positive attributes of black people’s collective past. His organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), boasted millions of members, envisioning and then making plans for a return “back to Africa.” Garvey’s Black Star Line, a shipping company established in part to transport blacks back to Africa as well as to facilitate global black commerce, was ultimately unsuccessful.

Despite their origins outside the United States, such Pan-Africanist thinkers drew many of their ideas from African American culture. Furthermore, James and Padmore resided in the United States for significant periods of time. An exchange of ideas about Africa and peoples of African descent took place between those intellectuals and African Americans, with African Americans taking the lead. It was, in many ways, a black Atlantic intellectual community. Senghor and Césaire, in particular, were greatly influenced by Du Bois and by several Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.

By the late 1940s the African American intellectual leadership of the movement had receded, with Africans now taking the lead. That was due in part to the leftist or communist sympathies of many Pan-Africanist advocates, as in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the United States was in the midst of a Red Scare, when Americans with communist affiliations or sympathies were actively persecuted and prosecuted. The most-important figure of this period was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who believed that European colonial rule of Africa could be extinguished if Africans could unite politically and economically. Nkrumah went on to lead the movement for independence in Ghana, which came to fruition in 1957. Many African Americans cheered those developments in Africa.

Pan-Africanist cultural thinking re-emerged with renewed force in the United States in the late 1960s and ’70s as one of the manifestations of the Black Power movement. By the early 1970s it had become relatively common for African Americans to investigate their African cultural roots and adopt African forms of cultural practice, especially African styles of dress.

In subsequent decades perhaps the most-prominent current of ideas that can be called Pan-Africanist has been the Afrocentric movement, as espoused by such black intellectuals as Molefi Asante of Temple University, Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, the American historian Carter G. Woodson, and Maulana Ron Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa. With its roots in the 1960s, Afrocentrism gained particular popularity in the United States during the 1980s. The movement emphasizes African modes of thought and culture as a corrective to the long tradition of European cultural and intellectual domination.