The idea of the first-ever All –African People's Conference (AAPC) was mooted in Accra, Ghana, in April 1958 by John Kale (1932 –1960) from Uganda. In his inaugural speech in March of 1957, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah (1909 –1972) said: "The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the African continent's total liberation."
Hundreds of delegates from 28 African countries and colonies attended the AAPC in 1958. At least 65 national liberation movements were represented, and this conference was directly linked to 17 African countries' independence in 1960 alone.
Ethiopia Unbound, one of the first English novels published in 1911 by an African writer, has been described as "one of the most important contributions to the literature on African nationalism," which made a plea for a unified African nation can be credited to the Ghanaian, J. E. Casely Hayford (1866 –1930). If Kwame Nkrumah is credited with Pan Africanism's father, then Pan Africanism would have many grandfathers. The African political consciousness can be inextricably linked to all its forebearers. The Virgin Island-born Liberian educator, Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832 –1912), is regarded as the "father of Pan –Africanism." He mentored Casely Hayford, who shaped the Vision of independence of Ghana for Kwame Nkrumah.
The First Pan – African Conference held in London from 23 to July 25, 1900, organized by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester William (1869 –1911), was attended by 37 delegates from Africa, the West Indies the U.S., and the U.K. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868 –1963) played a leading role, drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World") to European leaders appealing to them to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self –government and demanding political and other rights for African Americans.
The Subsequent International Conference on the Negro in 1912 took place in Tuskegee. It was organized by Booker T. Washington (1856 –1915), who had been Fredrick Douglas's successor (1818 –1895). Fredrick Douglas vehemently objected to the ACS (American Colonization Society), a group of people who wanted to solve the African plight in the Americas by pushing Africans' repatriation from the Americas to a new African Colony. Douglas successfully convinced U.S. president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) to abandon the idea of colonization and support suffrage for blacks. Lincoln's public speech on the topic led actor John Wilkes Booth, who was vigorously opposed to emancipation and black suffrage, to assassinate him.
Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech suggested that Blacks should secure their constitutional rights through their own economic and moral advancement rather than confrontative demands on legal and political rights. Although this made him popular among whites, it colluded with younger Dubois. Though they both agree that colonization was undesirable. They disagree specifically on political rights,
Booker T. Washington worked together with philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the owner of Sears Roebuck, who made substantial donations to Tuskegee. They collaborated on a pilot program for Tuskegee architects to design six model schools built for African-American students in rural areas of the South. The Rosenwald Foundation supported the schools by giving matching funds to communities committed to operating the schools and provided funds for construction and maintenance, with the cooperation of white public-school boards required. Nearly 5,000 new, small rural schools were built to improve blacks' education throughout the South from this collaboration. Many of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)were founded under this initiative.
Nevertheless, Washington was criticized by the leaders of the new NAACP. Especially W. E. B. DuBois demanded a firmer tone of protest to advance the civil rights agenda. Washington maintained that confrontation would lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks in society and that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way to overcome pervasive racism in the long run. At the same time, he secretly funded litigation for civil rights cases, such as challenges to Southern constitutions and laws that had disenfranchised blacks across the South since the turn of the century.
DuBois thought it is always a good time for African Americans to advance their positions in society regardless of the obstacles, and fear of retribution should not deter. He postulated the Talented Tenth premise: The "Talented Tenth" refers to the one in ten Black men that have cultivated the ability to become leaders of the Black community by acquiring a college education, writing books, and becoming directly involved in social change. In the Talented Tenth, Du Bois argues that these college-educated African American men should sacrifice their interests and use their education to lead and better the Black community, then publicized by W. E. B. Du Bois in an influential essay of the same name, which he published in September 1903. It appeared in The Negro Problem, a collection of essays written by leading African Americans.
Later in Dusk of Dawn, a collection of his writings, Du Bois redefines this notion, acknowledging contributions by other men. He writes that "my panacea of an earlier day was a flight of class from mass through the development of the Talented Tenth; but the power of this aristocracy of talent was to lie in its knowledge and character, not in its wealth."
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. (1887-1940) offered a different vision of Pan African nationalism and imperialism. He supported and worked actively for repatriation. Although the idea was in line with the ACS interest, it differs because the real exodus should operate without American and European support. His idea was professing self-reliance; thus, a move and resettlement in Africa of the Africans, by the Africans, for the Africans from the Americas. Although his campaign was most popular and economically successful, the shipping line's actual operation incorporated, The Black Star Line, created to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy - was mostly unsuccessful, partially due to infiltration by federal agents.
Kwame Nkrumah was an astute scholar of the African affairs in the Zeitgeist. With a Trinidadian intellectual named George Padmore (1903-1959), they made the colonialists' case in 1945. They argued that African identity and African social stability were inextricably linked to the conservation of existing conventions concerning land rights while promoting an African nationalism that demanded unity and cultural awareness among Africans.
Note that the Zeitgeist of the decolonization movement was well saturated across Africa in various forms. Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay (1864 -1946) was a Nigerian political nationalist who came from a returnees family and was married to Bishop's daughter Ajayi Crowther (1809 – 1891). Macaulay was one of the first Nigerian nationalists and a strong opponent of many colonial policies for most of his life. As a reaction to claims by the British that they were governing with "the true interests of the natives at heart," he wrote: "The dimensions of "the true interests of the natives at heart" are algebraically equal to the length, breadth, and depth of the Whiteman's pocket." In 1908 he exposed European corruption in the handling of railway finances, and in 1919 he argued successfully for the chiefs whose land had been taken by the colonial government in front of the Privy Council in London. As a result, the colonial government was forced to pay compensation to the chiefs.
The Nigerian nationalist political evolution was closely related to the Ghanaian and the Pan Africanist movements, with few exceptions. The Pan-Africanist movement has a blindside. It considers colonial emancipation and self-determination. It fails to consider the over-hatching domestic sentiments and the influence of traditional authorities and ethnic customary factors. This Pan-Africanist oversight on domestic cultures' role and influences continue to rehash Peace and Stability's antithesis in the African World.
While they celebrated their new nations, the African states failed to consider that the new nations they inherited from the colonialists were a remnant of the decimated cultures and fractured societies across the continent. Traditional systems were destroyed, and kingdoms were broken into pieces. The growing discontent of the ethnic debacle and inability to solve the problem or acknowledge or recognize the problem within the pan Africanist masterminds was culpable to the implosion of domestic bloody coup d’état that unraveled the newly independent nations across Africa in the 1960s.
African states who failed to mobilize political participation socially and political pluralism across their society's diverse cultures before independence were susceptible to military coups. The 1960s marked an era of African leadership decapitation across the World. About ninety percent of the political assassinations in the 1960s were Africans in various parts of the World.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, nonviolent protesters challenged legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States and the Union of South Africa. Comparing these movements gives us a better perspective on the recent history of black liberation struggles in the two societies. The African National Congress's (ANC) "Campaign of Defiance Against Unjust Laws" in 1952 resulted in the arrest of approximately 8000 recently enacted apartheid legislation. Whereas in the U.S., the nonviolent phase of the American civil rights movement was a coalition of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, the URBAN LEAGUE, and the NAACP, which began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 and culminated in the great Mississippi and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, campaigns of 1963-65. The movement was remarkably successful in the United States. It led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which effectively outlawed separatist "Jim Crow "laws and assured southern African Americans access to the ballot box. In 1966, a new generation of African youth and students in Oakland, California, led by Huey Newton (1942 -1989) and Bobby Seale (1936 -), founded the Black Panther Party (BBP, and they were prepared and armed for self-defense).
The Pan African movement's complexity is Religion, described in Professor Ali Al'amin Mazrui (1933-2014). The African Americans initially were mostly Christians of various denominations, mostly protestants. The statistics collected in 2010 are as follows: Black Protestant (59%), Evangelical Protestant (15%), Mainline Protestant (4%), Roman Catholic (5%), Jehovah's Witness (1%), Other Christian (1%), Muslim (1%), Other Religion (1%), Unaffiliated (11%), Atheist or agnostic (2%). Although these statistics are official, it remains to be verified. The Black Muslims should be around ten percent.
Nevertheless, in the face of growing terror from the Supremacist group such as the Ku Lux Klan, Africans began to organize various resistance forms. One of the first notable movements was the 'Call to Rebellion' by Minister Henry Highland Garnet (1815 – 1882). He made history when President Abraham Lincoln chose him to speak to the House of Representatives—making him the first African speaker to address Congress. In 1919, a radical U.S. black liberation organization called The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was established in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs (1888 - 1966), a response to the KKK, declared that: The Klan Forces Us to Protect Ourselves! On July 4, 1930, Wallace Fard Muhammad (1877 -1934) founded the Nation of Islam, an African-American political and Islamic religious foundation and movement. Fard was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole; 1897 –1975), who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until he died in 1975 and was proclaimed as The Messenger of Allah (God) to the Nation of Islam believers. Elijah Muhammad was the teacher and mentor of Malcolm X (1925 – 1965), Louis Farrakhan (1933 -), Muhammad Ali (1942 -2016), and his son, Warith Deen Mohammed (1933 -2008).
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) was a famous spokesman for the Nation of Islam during the civil rights movement. After he traveled across Africa, he publicly renounced the Nation of Islam. He founded the Pan-African Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and the Islamic Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI). He advocated for freedom by any means necessary and was assassinated in New York City. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr. 1929 – 1968), an African American Baptist minister inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts and successes in combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. People often pair Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X because of the two of the most iconic figures of the 20th century and the civil rights movement. Both men were leaders of their separate movements. King served as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Malcolm X as a minister and leading national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI). However, most people believe the two men had very different approaches to the challenge of achieving racial justice and equality in the U.S. Despite the disparity of their approaches, they met the same violent fate. African resistance to colonial rule, apartheid, supremacist laws, segregation, racism, or any other name culminated in the same agenda of European dominion. It is unnecessary to give it further credence of analysis as they attempted to do in South Africa with Good Neighborliness. Apart from its tendency to fall into entrapment of these trigger words, anticolonialism in Africa differed from place to place. Over time, they thought they were all fighting what can be termed white invasion, domination, and normalization of crime against humanity by the European race.
The Romans have tried to erase Egyptian civilization from existence to prove that they own the source code to human civilization, therefore, are entitled to the supreme decree of humanity and human society. The Pan African Movement was in the Zeitgeist of a world that has had enough of colonial domination. Several assassinations took place in the 1960s. Among the other notables were Patrice Lumumba's killing, former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bantu Stephen Biko (1946 – 1977) in South Africa. Biko is viewed as the "father" of the Black Consciousness Movement and the anti-apartheid movement's first icon. Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), who was jailed for 27 years and later became the first native South African President, called him "the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa." The South African movement (South African Native National Congress (SANNC), was started in 1912 by John Langalibalele Dube. The primary mission was to bring all Africans together as one people, defend their rights and freedoms. It was later established as the ruling political party of South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC).
The 1966 Nigerian bloody coup d'état that ended the first political rule on January 15 was quickly followed by another bloody coup d’état that ousted President Kwame Nkrumah and ended the regime of the Convention People's Party government of in Ghana on February 24, 1966. Nkrumah's removal marked the advent of the gradual decline of the Pan African dream. The Vision was finally put to rest when Emperor Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari Makonnen 1892 –1975) of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 was assassinated and deposed.
This problem also drove an indelible wedge into the Pan Africanist movement itself and brought the end to the purpose of the Organization of African Unity (OAU; the intergovernmental organization established under the initiative of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana on May 25, 1963, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with 32 signatory governments. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was launched to end colonialism and unite Africa's peoples. With most of its founders gone and much of African countries under military and dictatorial rule, the continent's leaders inaugurated a new successor, the African Union, in Durb an, South Africa. With the establishment of the A.U., the OAU was disbanded on July 9, 2002, by its last Chairman, South African President Thabo Mbeki, and replaced by the African Union (A.U.). Some of the key aims of the OAU were to encourage political and economic integration among member states and to eradicate colonialism and neo-colonialism from the African continent.
The late 1970s and 1990s have been difficult for the African States. The OAU rendered lame duck and War all over West, Central, South, East Africa. Famine and starvation in Ethiopia and Somalia; severe economic challenges all over the continent with no end in sight. Then the Rwandan genocide occurred for 100 days between April 7 and July 15, 1994, during the Rwandan Civil War. This all started on the evening of April 6, 1994, when the aircraft carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutus, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as it prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda. The assassination set in motion the Rwandan genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century. An estimates 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by Soldiers, police, and militia who assumed control in the ensuing power vacuum.
The U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922 – 2016) of Egypt had established the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 1992, and Kofi Atta Annan (1938 – 2018) of Ghana was appointed to the new department as Deputy to then Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding. Annan was subsequently appointed in March 1993 as Under-Secretary-General of that department. This means that Kofi Anna was responsible for Peace Keeping and should have been responsible for deploying Rwanda's peace mission. The Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, who was force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, claimed that Annan was overly passive in responding to the imminent genocide. Ten years after the genocide, Annan admitted, "I could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support."
The United States blocked Boutros-Ghali's re-nomination and vetoed Annan that he would be a suitable replacement. Therefore, two Africans served back-to-back as the U.N. Secretary-General. The A.U. complements the regime of Kofi Atta Annan. He served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the U.N. were the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipients based on his performance on the Bosnia issue and NATO support.
The Pan Africanists have a loose and equivocal theory of pan Africanism. The theory and the practicality were never genuinely aligned. Scholars are often generous to one another to tolerate the inclusion and expansion of Pan Africanism. However, to understand Pan Africanism, it is vital to understand its source and its original definition.
Pan Africanism is an appropriated term from Pan Americanism, which predates it. Pan-Americanism is a movement that seeks to create, encourage, and organize relationships, associations, and cooperation among the states of the Americas through diplomatic, political, economic, and social means.
Following the independence of the United States of America in 1776 and the independence of Haiti in 1804, the struggle for independence after 1810 by the Hispanic American nations evoked a sense of unity, especially in South America, where—under Simón Bolívar in the north and José de San Martín in the South—there were cooperative efforts. Francisco Morazán briefly headed a Federal Republic of Central America. The American Revolutionary War also inspired early South American Pan-Americanists. A suppressed and colonized society struggled, united, and gained its independence. In the United States, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson set forth Pan-Americanism principles in the early 19th century. Soon afterward, the United States declared through the Monroe Doctrine a new policy concerning interference by European nations in the Americas' affairs.
In the 19th century, South American military nationalism came to the fore. Venezuela and Ecuador withdrew (1830) from Gran Colombia; the Central American Federation collapsed (1838); Argentina and Brazil fought continually over Uruguay, and then all three combined in the Paraguayan War (1865–70) to defeat Paraguay; and in the War of the Pacific (1879–83), Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia. However, during this same period, Pan-Americanism existed in the form of a series of Inter-American Conferences—Panama (1826), Lima (1847), Santiago (1856), and Lima (1864). The main object of those meetings was to provide for a common defense. The first of the modern Pan-American Conferences was held in Washington, D.C. (1889–90), with all nations represented except the Dominican Republic. Treaties for arbitration of disputes and adjustment of tariffs were adopted. The Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (which became the Pan-American Union) was established. Subsequent meetings were held in various South American cities.
The historical Pan Africanists duplicated the concept, the principles, and the philosophy. Therefore, without equivoques, pan Africanism is a movement that seeks to create, encourage, and organize relationships, associations, and cooperation among the states in the African worlds through diplomatic, political, economic, and social means.
The Organization of African Unity was formed to promote the unity and solidarity of the African States; coordinate and intensify their cooperation and efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa; to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and independence; to eradicate all forms of colonialism from Africa; and to promote international cooperation, having due regard to the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The African Union (A.U.) was formed to replace the OAU for many reasons. The OAU could have just updated its charter principles to accommodate new development and development requirements and advancement on the continent. No particular reason was officially documented. However, observers and scholars argue that the switch was made to soften the organization's suspicious inclination towards former hegemonies. The A.U. expands its charter to embrace the United Nations and the international communities. It also asserted to ensure African peoples' full participation in the continent's development and economic integration and established Pan African Parliament.
Article 29 of the Constitutive Act of the African Union (ratified July 11, 2000), states: Any African State may, at any time after the entry into force of this Act, notify the Chairman of the Commission of its intention to accede to this Act and to be admitted as a member of the Union. African Union definition of What is African constitutes any person anywhere that can trace his or her heritage to the continent of Africa's indigenes at any time and is willing and prepared to support the development and advancement of the continent.
In February 2012, the Caribbean Republic of Haiti signaled that it would seek to join the African Union. While the A.U. initially signaled to upgrade Haiti's status from observer to associate, the African Union Commission announced that "according to Article 29.1 of the A.U.'s Constitutive Act, only African States can join the African Union." Therefore, "Haiti will not be admitted as a Member State of the African Union. This now clarifies that the African Union, not a culture entity, rather it is an integration of "continental Region political Economic Communities."
Even though it is so, the African Union and the CARICOM should still find a way to build a bridge, which can only be logically built if they adhere to culture and heritage. What the Pan Africanist wanted was to build a global competitive advantage. They approached this with the tool available to them within the dominant European pedagogy. This is insufficient and made it impossible to capture the magnificence of the entirety of the African World. The pan Africanist's political prong approach to capture pan-Africanism proved insufficient and led to its decline. Pan Africanism today remains in academic or communal silos and theories.
If the attainment of political power were Pan Africanism's goal, Barack Obama's ascendance as the President of the most powerful nation in the World would have fulfilled its purpose. Kofi Annan, who leads the United Nations for almost a decade, would have done it. Africans run all African countries, and all Caribbean countries have a substantial representation of African interest. While political representation is reasonable and necessary, it is safe to say it is not what the purpose of Pan Africanism ought to be.
The Pan Africanist wanted to achieve with Pan Africanism to turn the global African presence into a global competitive advantage, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, or the Americas. The goal was the same everywhere. Nevertheless, achieving this goal requires a culture to consciously match its value creation potential with the opportunities generated by its predisposed global relationship and presence. This means that if globalization is indeed a relationship economy, there is no reason not to think of the possibility of how African sustainable development solution is not imminent. To explain the role and what I would herewith describe as the African opportunity, we need to explore the dynamics of world economic power through cultural lenses, not only from national or political perspectives. We must first understand that what or who is African is not the priority but Africanism itself.
The agreement on the concept, principle, and philosophy will rekindle and reawakened the Neo Pan African movement. Pan Africanism then has to have a clear understanding of the existing schism to forge the necessary cooperation and operation strategy. The Pan Africanists have to learn to cultivate harmony within the schisms that exist along with the Social, economic, and political existentialism through cultural lenses. Therefore culture is critical.
When we observe most answers to cultural questions in the African context, we often find ourselves defaulting to artifacts, traditions, languages, and ethnic mores. However, that is only a fraction of what makes culture—looking to explore culture from an economist's perspective because economics and culture are interdisciplinary and interrelated. Culture is the summation of a full range of human potentials and specific qualities with which an individual identifies and connects as a member of its society. That complex-whole includes a hierarchy of knowledge, common sense, beliefs, arts, laws, morals, approaches, customs, traditions, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a person as a member of such society.
Being attuned to one's culture allows the individual to tap into its natural and instinctive resources. They are predisposed to convey the cultural values that constitute what can describe as a cultural strength. The question, then, is, can Africa create a competitive advantage in the global arena without reconnecting with its Diaspora? This connection cannot be on political terms, rather cultural. The African Union has to rethink its strategy about engaging the African Diaspora. The Pan Africanists have to begin to observe pan-Africanism through cultural lenses.