Pan-African History Pan-Africanism, the perception by people of African origins and descent that they have interests in common, has been an important by-product of colonialism and the enslavement of African peoples by Europeans. Though it has taken a variety of forms over the two centuries of its fight for equality and against economic exploitation, commonality has been a unifying theme for many Black people, resulting for example in the Back-to-Africa movement in the United States but also in nationalist beliefs such as an African ‘supra-nation’. Pan-African History brings together Pan-Africanist thinkers and activists from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds of the past two hundred years. Included are well-known figures such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Delany, and the authors’ original research on lesser-known figures such as Constance Cummings-John and Dusé Mohamed Ali reveals exciting new aspects of Pan-Africanism. Hakim Adi is Senior Lecturer in African and Black British History at Middlesex University, London. He is a founder member and currently Chair of the Black and Asian Studies Association and is the author of West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (1998) and (with M. Sherwood) The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (1995). Marika Sherwood is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She is a founder member and Secretary of the Black and Asian Studies Association; her most recent books are Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (2000) and Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935–1947 (1996). Contents v Contents Preface vii Dusé Mohamed Ali 1 Ahmed Ben Bella 7 Edward Wilmot Blyden 11 Amilcar Lopes Cabral 16 Aimé Césaire 20 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano 26 Constance Cummings-John 29 Martin Robinson Delany 34 Cheikh Anta Diop 40 Frederick Douglass 44 W.E.B. Du Bois 48 Olaudah Equiano 53 Nathaniel Akinremi Fadipe 57 Frantz Fanon 64 Amy Ashwood Garvey 69 Marcus Garvey 76 Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford 82 James Africanus Beale Horton 86 W. Alphaeus Hunton 90 C.L.R. James 95 Claudia Jones 100 Martin Luther King Jr 105 Toussaint L’Ouverture 109 Patrice Émery Lumumba 113 Ras T. Makonnen 117 Malcolm X 123 Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 129 Harold Moody 134 Jamal Abd al-Nasir [Nasser] 138 Francis Nwia Kofi Kwame Nkrumah 143 Julius Kambarage Nyerere 147 George Padmore 152 vi Contents Paul Leroy Robeson 159 Walter Rodney 163 Léopold Sédar Senghor 169 Ladipo Felix Solanke 174 Sékou Ahmed Touré 177 I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson 181 Eric Williams 185 Henry Sylvester Williams 190 Index 195 Preface vii Preface The dawn of the twenty-first century coincided with an upsurge in Pan-African activity, the most obvious example being the creation of the new African Union by Africa’s governments, largely as a response to the adverse consequences of globalisation.1 Fears about globalisation have also led to a renewed interest in diasporas and ‘transnational studies’ and consequently there is a continuing and increasing interest in the history and significance of the African diaspora, the global dispersal of peoples of African descent, responsible for the emergence of Pan-African ideologies.2 However, there has never been one universally accepted definition of what constitutes Pan-Africanism. Most recent writers on the subject are reluctant to provide definitions or provide several, acknowledging that the vagueness of the term reflects the fact that Pan-Africanism has taken different forms at different historical moments and geographical locations. Others, recognising that definition is dependent on time and place, feel forced to provide lengthy historical explanations of the development of the various Pan-African ideas and movements that have emerged since the late eighteenth century.3 So what do we mean by major figures from Pan-African history? Our definition includes women and men of African descent whose lives and work have been concerned, in some way, with the social and political emancipation of African peoples and those of the African diaspora. Not surprisingly their perspectives have differed, according to time, location and the nature of the problems they confronted. Some may have focused on just one part of Africa, North America, the Caribbean or Europe, yet their lives and work have achieved symbolic status, or been influential amongst people of African descent and others struggling against oppression and for liberation. What underlies their manifold visions and approaches is the belief in some form of unity or of common purpose among the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora. Such perspectives might be traced back to ancient times, but modern Pan-African history is principally connected with the dispersal of peoples of African origin brought about by the trans-Atlantic trade taking enslaved Africans to the Americas, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the subsequent emergence of global capitalism, European colonial rule and imperialism. Pan-African history therefore includes chronicling a variety of ideas, activities and movements that celebrated Africaness, resisted the exploitation and oppression of those of African descent, and opposed the ideologies of racism. viii Preface Our earliest entries are three activists of the eighteenth century who played a significant role in the struggles against slavery and racism: Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the revolution in St Domingue, the only successful slave revolution in history, helped to establish Haiti as a symbol of the possibility of successful liberation and African independence in the Western hemisphere. The two British-based writers and activists, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, pioneered the writing of the slave narrative and were influential champions of the humanity of Africans and the abolitionist cause. During the nineteenth century the existence of legal slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans continued in many parts of the Americas and Africa, while in Africa itself, European colonial activity increased throughout the century, culminating in the so- called ‘scramble’ for Africa and the onset of the era of imperialism. As in previous centuries, the crimes perpetrated against those of African descent were excused and justified by racist ideologies which now sometimes assumed a pseudo-scientific form. For most activists, in this period of Pan-African history, the struggle to ‘vindicate the race’ and refute notions of African inferiority was a necessity that became one of the dominant themes in their writing and activism. For some in the diaspora, like Martin Delany and Edward Blyden, a physical return to Africa was seen as vital, not least for the ‘regeneration’ of the continent itself. Others, such as Frederick Douglass, the foremost African American activist of the nineteenth century, took a different view and were determined to struggle to end legal slavery and to gain their rights in the USA, the country of their former enslavement. In Africa itself, Sierra Leonean James Horton, was just one of those who began to develop the principles of a new political science that concerned itself with the possibilities and principles of African self-government and an embryonic nationalism. The nineteenth-century activists have been seen as significant pioneers in the develop- ment of Pan-African thinking. Horton and Edward Blyden laid the foundations for the nationalist movements and ideologies that were later developed by J.E. Casely Hayford and others in West Africa in the early twentieth century. Blyden was the inspiration for the Francophone Négritude movement, while it was Delany who first used the phrase ‘Africa for the Africans’, later associated with, and popularised by, Marcus Garvey. The organised Pan-African movement can be said to have begun with the founding of the African Association in London in 1897 and the subsequent convening, in the same city, of the first Pan-African conference three years later.4 Led by the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, the early twentieth-century Pan-Africanists were concerned with strengthening the unity of all those of African descent, so as to solve what they saw as ‘the problem of the twentieth century ... the problem of the colour line’, and to ‘secure civil and political rights for Africans and their descendants throughout the world’. The struggle against colonialism and the activities of the imperialist powers in Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere also became one of the most important issues for Pan-Africanists during the first part of the century. Some, such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, believed that economic considerations must inform their Pan-African vision and maintained that the development of business and trade connections were crucial if ‘true independence’ was to be achieved. One of the key figures in Pan-African history Preface ix in the early twentieth century, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, combined political and economic aims with the advocacy of a physical and psychological return to the African continent. During the 1930s, Pan-Africanism was strongly influenced by the international communist movement and by socialist, anti-imperialist and internationalist perspec- tives, such as those developed by the Profintern’s International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. It was these perspectives that informed the activism and writing of George Padmore and Isaac Wallace-Johnson and the work of Alphaeus Hunton, Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois in the Council of African Affairs and elsewhere. C.L.R. James was of course for many years one of the leading figures in the international Trotskyist movement, while Marxism and an internationalist perspective were also present in the life and work of Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Walter Rodney. Before 1945 many of the leading political figures in Pan-African history lived and worked in the diaspora rather than in Africa itself. Indeed for a time Europe might be seen as a centre of the Pan-African world.