Professor Adekeye Adebajo, a senior research fellow at UP’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, charts the history of Pan-Africanism, and calls for Africa and its diaspora “to harness past efforts to ensure the rebirth of a continent and its diaspora”.

Pan-Africanism can be defined as the efforts to promote the political, socio-economic and cultural unity of Africa and its diaspora. The ideology was a reaction by Africans in the diaspora to the twin plagues of slavery and colonialism. The 400-year Transatlantic slave trade saw 12 to 15 million Africans forcibly transported to the Caribbean and the Americas. This was followed by a century of colonial rule in Africa. Led by black churches in America and the Caribbean, civil society groups fought against both scourges.

St Thomas’s Edward Blyden has often been referred to as the “Father of Pan-Africanism”. He championed the concept of Ethiopianism, urging African-Americans to return to Africa to help develop the continent, inspiring Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. Blyden’s 1887 classic Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race was adopted by Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui in his influential 1986 nine-part documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. The African Renaissance was championed by South Africa’s Pixley Seme, before being adopted by his compatriot Thabo Mbeki.

Fifteen years after the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884/85, at which European imperialists established the rules for Africa’s partition, the Pan-African movement was born when Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester-Williams convened the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. Between 1919 and 1945, five Pan-African Congresses took place in Europe and America, and were dominated by towering intellectuals such as America’s W.E.B. du Bois and Trinidad’s George Padmore. By the time of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the movement had shifted its centre of influence from the diaspora to Africa, but had lost its civil society dynamism and close links to the diaspora. Du Bois symbolically handed over the torch of Pan-Africanism to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in Manchester.

The role of female activists has often been overlooked in the Pan-African pantheon. Jamaica’s Amy Ashwood Garvey, Kenya’s Wangari Maathai and Micere Mugo, Senegal’s Mariama Bâ, Nigeria’s Buchi Emecheta and America’s Maya Angelou are some of its leading lights. Angelou worked closely with Malcolm X to mobilise African leadership in support of the civil rights struggle in apartheid America. Two decades later, African-American civil rights lawyer Randall Robinson used the TransAfrica Forum to wage the anti-apartheid struggle in the US.

Trinidad’s CLR James was a pioneering voice in post-colonial studies, while Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall incorporated issues of race, gender and hegemony into cultural studies. South Africa’s Ruth First devoted her life to studying military rule across Africa and contributing to Southern Africa’s liberation.

Africa and its diaspora also produced noteworthy philosophers. Martinique’s Frantz Fanon preached democracy, development and revolutionary change across Africa. Bissau Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral – inspired by Fanon – formulated critical theories of revolutionary decolonisation and re-Africanisation. Steve Biko’s innovative Black Consciousness sought to build the cultural self-esteem of his black compatriots. Beninois scholar-politician Paulin Hountondji advocated a self-dependent African epistemology, while Congolese intellectual VY Mudimbe deconstructed the Western “invention” of Africa.

Finally, cultural Pan-Africanism represented the reaction by the African diaspora to the racist indignities that black people had suffered over centuries of Western domination. Martinique’s Aimé Césaire and Senegal’s Léopold Senghor developed the idea of négritude, which poetically glorified black culture, looking back nostalgically at a rich African past. The realm of music produced the radical reggae rhythms of Jamaica’s Bob Marley, the rebellious Afro-jazz of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and the anti-apartheid melodies of South Africa’s Miriam Makeba. 

From Addis Ababa to Abuja through Atlanta and Antigua, Africa and its diaspora now need to harness all of these past efforts in order to rebuild a people-led civil society movement that can ensure the rebirth of a continent and its diaspora.

Prof Adebajo’s book of essays, Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty, was recently published by Jacana.