Never, perhaps, in the course of modern African history have we faced a challenge like the one, which shall be the subject of this inquiry; a challenge so settled by previous studies and the factual evidence and yet so unsettled by our everyday politics. At the core of this challenge rests the notion that sustainable development in Africa depends on the degree of African integration. This explains why the relentless search of the magic formula for a more perfect union, the building of a social, political, economic, and environmental home base in Africa has been one of the dominant and most persistent trends in post-independence Africa’s political and socio-economic evolution.
This quest has resulted in the creation of two continental organizations including the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 and its successor, the African Union (AU) in 2002. Such quest has also given rise to a variety of federations, confederations, regional, and sub-regional organizations throughout Africa, including most notably the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) , the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the East African Community (EAC). These supranational communities in Africa, which represent the most practical embodiment of the Pan-African ideal to date, were designed to foster socio-political and economic development in Africa through a united front. They are the ethos of the African effort toward unity and the ideal of Pan-Africanism, the notion that people of African descent—both in Africa and abroad are not merely bound by a simple common identity and historical legacy but, most importantly, by a sense of common destiny.
At its core, the story of Pan-Africanism is a story of identity and destiny. It is one of the most extraordinary experiences in human civilization. Uprooted from the African continent and hurled away to the Americas. They were not supposed to have survived. But they did. They did both physically and spiritually. Africans showed a level of resiliency that is unique in the course of history. Having prevailed, in extraordinarily adverse circumstances, they embarked triumphantly on a journey to seek out and reconnect with the other African that they left home. Pan-Africanism is therefore the story of men and women, who in quest of their identity, found themselves in each other and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Today, the challenge for Africa is not merely one of survival. We argue that Africa is at a historical juncture in its existence where the arrows can be brought together for a triumph against the ills that continue to beset it. The fact is that Africa has in the past met with such inflection points. However, for a variety of reasons that we will examine throughout this book, Africa has repeatedly missed such opportunities. One such missed opportunity took place a little over 70 years ago as African states gained their political independence and could have seized the moment to write their own history. This moment is different. The level of education and awareness among Africans both at home and in the Diaspora coupled by unprecedented levels of access to technology, in particular, changes the game.
The search for a united Africa in the twenty-first century, amidst the ubiquity of technologies, however, raises a good number of questions relative to the very essence of Pan-Africanism and its critical nexus within Africa’s development challenges. These questions continue to be of critical importance in the analysis of Pan-Africanism as an idea and as a movement. The new materials that our research has unearthed at the Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) of the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, shed a new light on an already rich and complex tradition. These original proceedings of the six major Pan-African Congresses from 1900 to 1945 challenge, in fundamental ways, most of what we know today about Pan-Africanism and the Pan-African Congresses, which are arguably the most important events in the history of the Pan-African movement. While there have been extensive discussions of the Pan-African Congresses within the literature, including fundamental disagreements as to the exact number of conferences, Congresses, and conventions, this study does not seek to settle this debate. Rather, it seeks to build on consensus and will therefore focus on the most consequential Congresses, which took place between 1900 and 1945. This choice is especially relevant since the available data contained in original proceedings of the Congresses held within such time span gives us the evidence needed for a study based more on data and less on speculation.
Who are the main drivers of the Pan-African movement? The existing scholarship has done a remarkable job fleshing out the roles of key individuals in shaping the idea and movement of Pan-Africanism. However, a re-examination of Pan-Africanism along the lines of a different set of organizational frameworks will, in no uncertain terms, help further the analysis. Most significantly, there is yet another imperative, which could be equally important: the need to rethink the debate on the key drivers of the Pan-African movement . There is indeed quite a consensus around key figures including Henry Sylvester Williams, William E. B. Du Bois, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Horace Campbell, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Julius Nyerere, and so on. Their place in the annals of Pan-African History is secured and our work does not seek to challenge this consensus.
However, our analysis of the fresh materials on the original proceedings of the Pan-African Congress points to the preeminent role of individual actors and institutions that the existing scholarship has, at best, just alluded to and, at worst, completely ignored. Specifically, while the existing literature has had only occasional forays into the role of key black institutions such as the black press and the black church, it has tended to ignore the preeminent role of yet another key black institution: Black Institutions of Higher Learning and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in particular. Our findings from re-examining the original proceedings of the Pan-African Congresses constitute a direct challenge to many of the pre-conceived notions about this particular aspect of Pan-Africanism. This will be a key contribution that our study seeks to bring to the rich scholarship on Pan-Africanism.
In light of these findings, this book seeks to challenge key notions about Pan-Africanism in an effort to help advance the debate on an idea and movement that has, to some extent, been handicapped by an over reliance on secondary sources. In the process, our study will challenge some of Pan-Africanism’s key theoretical assumptions, particularly, the one advanced by Imanuel Geiss. In his work, which came to be a reference in the study of Pan-Africanism, Geiss argues, in a rather definitive way, that there are no comprehensive reports of the original proceedings of the Pan-African Congresses (1974, 232). The Du Bois papers from the Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, do tell a very different story. Comprehensive reports of all the Pan-African Congresses are indeed available and this book seeks to make ample use of such proceedings to shed light on a debate that has been and continues to be burdened by a belief in a lack of primary sources.
This book will also build on such re-examination in order to address other major questions related to Pan-Africanism . Does Pan-Africanism have a philosophical and theoretical framework? This very question along with the suggestion that the difficulty in conceptualizing Pan-Africanism is undoubtedly related to antecedent conceptions about whether one could speak of African philosophy per se; questions rooted in prejudice. At this point it will suffice to point out that such philosophy and theoretical framework has been established be Edward Wilmot Blyden and that such tradition has lived on with Du Bois and subsequent Pan-Africanists including Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, to name but these.
Of equal importance are the following questions: Why has Pan-Africanism not achieved its goal of continental unification? What lessons can be learned from the Pan-African experience? What are the link...