The Pan-African Imperative

Revisiting Kwame Nkrumah's Vision for African Development

Michael Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032125206
• eBook ISBN: 9781000516036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the principles of Pan-Africanism are more important than ever in ensuring the liberation of the people Africa, those at home and abroad, and the rapid development of the African continent.

The writings and practice of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first post-independence prime minister and president, were key in laying out a vision for post-independence Africa. Now, in an effort to counter the deluge of neo-liberal thinking that has engulfed so much of the debate on African development in recent decades, Michael Williams illuminates just how important a role an Nkrumaist intellectual framework can play in providing an accurate diagnosis of, and effective solution to, Africa's development crisis. This is done by examining Nkrumah's vision of the critical role Pan-Africanism must play in the development of the continent.

Raising vitally important questions about Africa's development and the quality of life of its populations, this book will be a key text for researchers of African politics, development studies, and the Pan-African movement.

1Historical evolution of Pan-Africanism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224990-2

Definition

While the definition of Pan-Africanism, like the movement itself, has evolved over time, much of what it means today is what it meant centuries earlier: the collective movement of African people towards unity, independence, and liberation. This movement has expressed itself in small-scale to large-scale endeavours, in short periods to periods of much longer duration, and from one part of the globe to another. It has also incorporated a wide spectrum of human behaviour. This has included either a sole reliance on, or a combination of, various political, economic, religious, and cultural activities. Although never centrally coordinated, the Pan-African movement, in its broadest terms, has been, and continues to be, a movement of people of African descent working together, often across ethnic and geopolitical boundaries, to unify and liberate Africa and Africans everywhere.

However, today, after, and in response to more than 500 years of Africa’s entanglement with European insufficiency and capitalist expansionism, viz., slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, the Pan-African movement has evolved into a variant of the international socialist movement as well. In other words, the struggle to emancipate Africa and its people, those at home and abroad, has become an integral part of the universal struggle between capital and labour, that is, between the owners of the means of production and the workers of the world, whose labour power produces the fruit upon which the owners depend in their unbridled accumulation of wealth. In fact, nearly all of the leading advocates of Pan-Africanism during most of the twentieth century, and beyond, have either been socialists or, like Malcolm X, heavily attracted to an economic system that would ensure an equitable distribution of socially produced wealth.¹ After all, the plight of the slave, his colonial brother, and the modern proletariat is much the same: their labour power is exploited to enhance the wealth of a rich minority. This is why Nkrumah was able to surmise that ‘Capitalism is but the gentleman’s method of slavery.’² George Padmore, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Julius Nyerere, John Henrik Clarke, Robert Sobukwe, Modibo Keita, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Ahmed Ben Bella, Cheik Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Eslanda Robeson, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Ture, Thomas Sankara, Muammar Qadhafi, and Kwame Nkrumah are just some of the important Pan-African socialists who, through their thought and action, helped to define the movement as we know it today.

Even the legendary Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey, who has been unfairly chided, by some, for being a so-called black capitalist, was not only very sympathetic to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution³; he also constantly spoke about the need for egalitarianism, equal opportunity, and true brotherhood within the global African community. These notions were particularly important to him whenever he spoke of bringing Africans from different parts of the world together for resettlement in Africa.⁴ In short, Garvey’s allegiance to the aspirations of African workers, from his years in Jamaica before arriving in Harlem until his final years in London, was unwavering. Instead, what often gets mistaken as his opposition to socialism was his battle with so-called socialists themselves, black and white, who, out of jealousy, envy, and ideological disparity, were bent on destroying Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and his fiercely Pan-African movement.⁵

In short, the highest definition of Pan-Africanism remains, to date, the Nkrumaist ideological embodiment of what Nkrumah, his contemporaries, and their predecessors bequeathed to their descendants in the fight against the exploitation and domination of Africa by international finance capital: one, unified, socialist Africa, that is, the United States of Africa, self-reliant and free of any variant of racial and ethnic oppression, gender domination, and class exploitation. As Nkrumah noted years ago, ‘Socialism and [African] unity are organically complementary.’⁶ This, in fact, was the exact prescription W.E.B. Du Bois, the so-called ‘Father of Pan-Africanism,’ gave to the delegates at the ‘All African People’s Conference’ held in Accra in December 1958: ‘Awake Africa! Put on the beautiful robes of Pan-African socialism. You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have freedom and dignity to attain!’⁷ Nothing has happened since then, including the onerous burden of an ascending globalization, that would warrant Pan-Africanism being redefined or taking a different course from that which has been crystallized by its progenitors. Indeed, this study is designed to demonstrate that there is no other way that Africans, at home and abroad, can achieve their complete liberation.

Origin

The roots of Pan-Africanism lie squarely in Africa. For too long historians, and even Pan-Africanists themselves, have traced the movement to unite the continent and its people to the transatlantic slave trade or, sometimes later, to the Pan-African Conference held in London in July 1900.⁸ This meeting, organized by Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad, is often credited with putting the word ‘Pan-Africanism’ in the dictionary. Then, nearly two decades later, Du Bois—who actually attended the 1900 London conference—began organizing a series of Pan-Africanist Congresses in 1919. The most significant of these congresses, the fifth, was held in Manchester, England, in 1945 under the leadership of Padmore and Nkrumah.⁹ These formal gatherings, and lest we forget the brilliant conventions organized in Harlem by Garvey and his UNIA during the early 1920s, represent a cherished legacy in the struggle to unite Africa and its scattered and suffering people.¹⁰

However, this was not the beginning. After all, even Williams was busy organizing fellow Africans from different parts of the world—to give them an independent voice in resisting the oppression that had engulfed them—into his African Association in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.¹¹ And more than a century earlier, we have documented evidence of displaced Africans, slaves in New England (USA), struggling to reunite with the motherland.¹² Indeed, the efforts of countless numbers of Africans in the Diaspora to return home, discussed below, constitute an integral part of the Pan-Africanist movement as well, the tragic and anomalous histories of early statehood in Liberia and Sierra Leone notwithstanding.¹³

Instead, it seems far more accurate to argue that the movement to unite Africa and its people, which represents the very epitome of Pan-Africanism, began somewhere in the long centuries before foreign invaders entered Africa and changed its course. During this pre-invasion period in Africa, we have a near steady progression of smaller and weaker ethnic formations being swallowed up by, and integrated into, larger, stronger, and more developed ethnic and regional formations as part of the process of creating huge nation-states. This evolutionary, Pan-African process is, in fact, what the slave traders, from both the east and the west, and later European imperialism served to arrest. Two relatively modern and glaring examples of this process took place amongst the expansionist empires of the Asante in West Africa and the Zulu in Southern Africa—both of which were brutally dismantled by British imperialism.¹⁴ But they were not the only ones. Once again, this process was taking place in several regions throughout the continent, so much so that it would not be difficult to argue, or to at least honestly speculate, the following: had Africa not suffered from these external invasions, the number of nation-states in Africa, currently, would hardly reach 10, let alone the 55 artificially created ones we have today.

Before the invasions, the economic, political, and cultural interactions between the various regions and peoples of Africa were characterized by absorption, immersion, assimilation, domination, and integration.¹⁵ This process, not unlike what took place in much of the world outside of Africa, was shaped largely by the wide variety and similarity of Africa’s topography and geography, and the normal socio-cultural vicissitudes that occur when people struggle to adapt, survive, and flourish in the physical environment and social milieu that they meet. This same process helps to explain why precolonial African cultural patterns, throughout much of the continent, share so much in common, especially in matters relating to familial life, governance, health care, agriculture, linguistic structure, artistic expression, and the philosophical concepts of time, space, and being.¹⁶

Although this movement in Africa was not conscious of itself, unlike modern social movements (with their stated programmes, agendas, and objectives), this informal human activity should not cloud our understanding of where Africa was headed: family, clan, tribe, nation, and continent, in short, Pan-Africanism—before, that is, European imperialism fossilized Africa at the tribal stage while balkanizing the entire continent into the factitious, fragmented, warring mess it is today.

Early emigration efforts

As stated earlier, an integral part of the Pan-African movement during its pre-twentieth-century phase included experiences that resulted from the forced, violent removal of countless millions of Africans from the African mainland to the plantations of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean islands. Not only were there communities and leaders, in Africa, who fought against this grave human tragedy, there was also a vast community of stolen Africans, dispersed throughout the Western Hemisphere, who sought every means possible to return to the African motherland. This struggle began in earnest during the earliest years of slavery. Not only did the lyrics of songs sung by Africans during this period, in both North America and the Caribbean, indicate a strong desire to reunite with Africa; even attempted suicides often reflected their longing to return home (specifically to the ancestral abode).¹⁷ This rudimentary manifestation of Pan-African consciousness among enslaved Africans and their emancipated brethren continued throughout the slave period. In fact, it continued for many decades after slavery, albeit at different levels of momentum and with different degrees of success. As would be expected, this longstanding interest among the displaced Africans of the Americas in physically returning to Africa was greater among those who were most oppressed and/or who felt the most excluded from Western Hemispheric institutions.

The repatriation experiences of Africans in the Diaspora who returned to West Africa during the nineteenth century to establish Sierra Leone and Liberia are often included as part of the historical evolution of Pan-Africanism. However, these experiences were more anomalous to, than congruent with, the historical evolution of the Pan-African movement. Both states became, in effect, colonies of Great Britain and the United States, respectively (although Liberia was, technically, independent). And with the assistance of a class of educated, privileged, and financially advantaged African descendants from abroad, the indigenous populations were compelled to provide exploitable labour for foreign capitalist investments.¹⁸

Still, the willingness of thousands of Africans in the Americas and Western Europe to return to Africa—albeit arranged under white tutelage—is an indication of the strong Pan-African sentiments among the scattered descendants of Africa at that time and long afterwards. Moreover, many emigration movements, organizations, and leaders that emerged after the founding of Sierra Leone, and especially of Liberia, often centred their efforts around the existence and symbolic nature of these two states.

As an alternative to the white-dominated emigration schemes of groups like the American Colonization Society, which transported thousands of Africans in North America to Liberia, there were many black-dominated efforts to reunite the African Diaspora with the African mainland.¹⁹ This activity also represented a genuine sentiment and burgeoning interest in Pan-African unity. As early as 1773, slaves in New England petitioned the Massachusetts colonial legislature to be emancipated in order that they may return to Africa. During this same time, Africans from Jamaica, who were exiled by Great Britain to Canada, were organizing themselves around identical requests to their European captors. In the Caribbean, men such as Cinque in Cuba and Daaga in Trinidad led movements in the 1830s to reunite with Africa. The wealthy New England shipping merchant, Paul Cuffe, whose father was from the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana, is often credited with organizing the first successful attempt to return Africans in the Diaspora back to Africa. Having done so in 1815, Cuffe died unexpectedly two years later. Had he lived longer he may have achieved even greater success, given his financial strength and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historical evolution of Pan-Africanism
• 2 Nkrumaism and radical Pan-African thought
• 3 Continental unification as a prerequisite to African development
• 4 Class exploitation and socialist reconstruction in Africa
• 5 Conclusion: Political guidelines on achieving a unified socialist Africa
• Select bibliography
• Index