Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora Since 1787

217 Pages·2002·1.36 MB·English

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).

Pan-African History
Political figures from Africa and the
Diaspora since 1787
Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood
First published 2003 by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sherwood, Marika.
Pan-African history : political figures from africa and the diaspora since
1787 / Marika Sherwood and Hakim Adi.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Pan-Africanism–History. 2. Black nationalism–History.
3. Nationalists–Africa–Biography. 4. African Americans–Biography.
I. Adi, Hakim, II. Title.
DT30 .S515 2003
320. 54´9´092396–dc21 2002011566
ISBN 0-203-41780-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-41926-X (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–17352–3 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–17353–1 (pbk)
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