Pan-Africanism

Origins of Pan-Africanism

Those scholars who take an Afrocentric approach to Pan-Africanism argue that the beginnings of the movement have their place in the resistance of Africans to European domination and slavery in the 16th century, if not earlier. Records show that communications between African rulers and European kings in the 17th century contained nascent efforts to think about the unification of the African peoples.

A formal Pan-Africanist movement began in the early 20th century, though the ideational groundwork was laid in the last quarter of the 19th century by Edward Wilmot Blyden, the Danish West Indies–born educator who later served as Liberia's foreign minister and interior minister before moving to the British colony of Sierra Leone. Blyden, who may have first used the term Pan-African, was cited as an important influence on Pan-Africanist figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence in 1957, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, founder of the négritude movement and Senegal's first leader.

The first Pan-African conference was convened in 1900 by Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer, to provide a forum for blacks to air their grievances against inequities in Britain and its colonies. The conference turned toward discussions of the need to rebuild the dignity of African peoples around the world through the creation of educational and social services systems appropriate to their needs and the celebration of traditional African cultures. Later, W. E. B. Du Bois convened a series of Pan-African Congresses (1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927), which preserved the agenda of Williams's conference, while at the same time adjusting to the needs of blacks in the wake of World War I, including the needs of African American veterans and the status of the colonies stripped from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Around the same time, the Jamaican thinker Marcus Garvey started the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had as its goal the promotion of black pride and political and economic emancipation, as well as the repatriation of blacks to Africa. While Garvey's latter plan was thwarted by his arrest and the closing of his Black Star Line, his ideas led African students in the United Kingdom to found the West African Student Union in the late 1920s.

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