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Ideas Matter: Framing Pan-Africanism, Its Concept and History

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Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien / Vienna Journal of African Studies. No. 38/2020, Vol. 20, 5-31. doi:10.25365/phaidra.133 Ideas Matter: Framing Pan-Africanism, its Concept and History Arno Sonderegger1 Abstract This article looks at the rich history of Pan-Africanism considering its many twists and turns and ambiguities in order to provide an original frame for tackling the writing of its unfolding – both in the sense of the Pan-African concept`s development and its realisation in history. Therefore, it contains an extensive treatment and a critical discussion of Pan-Africanism`s historiography from Geiss (1968) to Adi (2018).The article hints at some crucial aspects so far missing or being underrepresented in prevailing accounts, regarding convincing readings of the entanglements between global, colonial and metropolitan levels in the historiography of Pan-Africanism. It is argued, in particular, that more attention should be paid to existing global histories of nationalism and of global racial discourses, and to the interplay between modern (European) political categories and modern (African) Pan-African ways of reasoning. Moreover, the ambiguities and diversity of colonial situations should be taken into account in a more sophisticated manner than is the case. The article sketches how 1 Arno Sonderegger, University of Vienna; contact: [email protected] I express my gratitude to the four reviewers Walter Schicho, Ingeborg Grau, Tomi Adeaga and Carl Bodenstein who took their time to help me notice some shortcomings in the first draft of this article and gave me the opportunity to rework it according to their suggestions. Thanks also to Immanuel Harisch for his last minute comments. My thanks go also, and above all, to the participants in the international conference about “The Long History of Pan-African Intellectual Activism: More Than a Centenary, 1919-2019” which I had the honour to host at the African Studies Department of the University of Vienna on May 16th and 17th 2019. They were the first to hear some of the ideas, expressed here in more detail, and to give critical comments – that is, food for thought. © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ [3]), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the license is provided, and it is indicated which changes were made. 6 Stichproben such a slightly different account of Pan-Africanism`s history in the 20th century could look like. To define Pan-Africanism is no easy task. Though the word “Pan- Africanism" first appeared in print in 1900 – around the conference meeting organised by Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911) in London in July of that year – the ideas and concepts ingrained in it are older. Nevertheless, it was since then that the first steps in the development of what was to become an increasingly organised “movement” were taken and left clearly recognisable traces in the historical record (see Geiss 1968: 139-156, Sonderegger 2010: 175-187, Adi 2018: 19-23, 25-28). In 1919, the African American scholar and public intellectual William Edward Burghard DuBois (1868-1963) used the opportunity of the peace treaties in Paris at the end of World War One to stage what he named the First Pan-African Congress. Five decades later, in 1968 a first extensive treatment on decolonisation and the role African ideas and activities played in this process of world historical significance was published in Germany; this book was simply called Panafrikanismus (Geiss 1968). The very next year, its author, the German historian Imanuel Geiss published an article under the same heading, albeit this time in English. This was half a century ago, and it opened in the following way, “Although it is talked about a great deal, Pan-Africanism is one of the least known political movements or concepts of our time. There are a number of reasons for this: as a concept Pan-Africanism is still very vague, today perhaps more than only a few years ago, and its history is complicated and little explored; …” (Geiss 1969: 187, my emphasis) Research and exploration of the topic has increased over the following decades. Today, much more is known about particular protagonists, networks and organisations falling, in one way or another, into the range of what is, often without any further reflection, absorbed into the realm of “Pan-Africanism”. Conceptually, our understandings of Pan-Africanism are still “very vague”, and matters are “complicated”, as Geiss (1969) put it; and it is not by chance that Geiss` book – and its English translation published a Ideas Matter 7 few years later in particular (Geiss 1974) – is still considered a classic description of Pan-Africanism`s history. One of the reasons for the difficulties in trying to define Pan-Africanism is due to its already long and multifaceted history. It is not a history that can be told in one singular linear narrative. Many people today understand it, to various degrees, in terms of a “young”, progressive, oppositional, anti- systemic liberation movement dedicated to fundamental, radical critique of ruling inequalities in today`s world. Others think instantly of the institutional level and the so-called Pan-African institutions that came to life in the wake of decolonization, chief among them the Organisation of African Unity (1963) and its successor organisation, the African Union (2001/02). Here, having grown into a heavy and barely flexible bureaucracy (a system of its own), the opposition or anti-systemic dimension of these institutions` “Pan-Africanism” is – if it is kept alive at all – directed exclusively against the dominant powers in world politics and the international economy. This is in striking contrast to the many forms of Pan-African intellectual activities that are well alive on civil societal levels among Africans and people of African descent. Pan-Africanism therefore is many different things at once, and it has been that way for some time already. Pan-Africanism is older than it seems to many. Some “essential” features of Pan-African thought can be located in the minds and writings of Africans living in West and South Africa as early as the 19th century, and even earlier in other parts of the globe to which men and women of African origin were dispersed during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Still, most people think of the mid-20th century when Pan-Africanism is concerned, while some would extend the time frame to the first half of that century, but tend to keep its history to a relatively short period nonetheless. This trend was already evident when Imanuel Geiss (1969: 187) considered the new political varieties in Pan-African thought emerging to the full after World War Two which were aiming at least at participating, if not at assuming power right away, in terms of “Pan-Africanism in its strictest sense”. This definition – quite arbitrary in fact and hindsight – is understandable to a certain degree as Geiss, in the 1960s, was writing under the spell of the high hopes of decolonisation and early independence. However, this is only one fragment of Pan-Africanism`s history. Actually, 8 Stichproben Geiss` time perspective in looking at the history of Pan-Africanism was much broader than might be expected: “Although Pan-Africanism burst upon the world scene rather abruptly and spectacularly after the second world war, its roots go farther back in history than is commonly thought. If the actual beginning of Pan- Africanism in its strictest sense is taken as 1958, with the first two conferences ever held on African soil (although they continued the tradition of their forerunners), it has both a narrower and a wider pre- history; the former dating back to the first Pan-African Conference, held in London in July 1900, while the origins of the latter can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century.” (Geiss 1969: 187) Henceforth, the year 1787 in particular was going to become sort of a short- hand date for the beginning of this long time history of Pan-Africanism (see Frühwirth in this volume). Geiss summarized the reasoning behind this dating well, “In 1787, at the corners of the famous triangle of the slave-trade (later the triangle of Pan-Africanism), important developments occurred which were to become relevant for the formation of Pan-Africanism: in America the effective beginning of organized abolitionism and of organized activities by free Afro-Americans; in Britain the beginning of abolitionist agitation; and in West Africa, as an indirect result of abolitionism, the foundation of Sierra Leone, which was to make a significant contribution to the formation of the modern intellectual elites in British West Africa.” (Geiss 1969: 187f.) What Geiss hinted at – in the Eurocentric terminology of “pre-history” so common at the times (and, unfortunately, still with us) – might be better called a long-term history of Pan-African intellectual activism, long pre- dating the coming of age of the Pan-African Congress movement in 1919 as well as the Black nationalist variants of Pan-Africanism in North America and the Caribbean since World War One. Indeed, Geiss` book contains essential materials on it (Geiss 1968, Geiss 1974), as does the recently published monograph on the history of Pan-Africanism by Hakim Adi (2018). Ideas Matter 9 The rich history of Pan-Africanism is full of twists and turns, of adherence to dogmatic beliefs, and of dissidence. That is another reason for the conceptual “vagueness” of Pan-Africanism. Its history is not only a history of struggling against a seemingly clear-cut foe – i.e., White oppression – but one of struggles for differing social and political goals between those who were engaged in it.
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