Pan-Africanism was born outside Africa. The first Pan-Africanist Congress, which was held in London in 1900, was attended largely by African Americans and political activists from the West Indies. Most of these were congregates of anti-slavery Pentecostal churches in the USA. In other words, the Pan-African philosophy and movement was born from the African diaspora and generated by descendants of slaves in the Americas.
Widely considered ‘the father of Pan-Africanism,’ William F. Burghardt DuBois was introduced to Pan-Africanism in London in 1900 at the very First Pan-African Congress. The person who introduced Pan-Africanism as a term to DuBois was a Trinidadian lawyer, H. Sylvester Williams, who is recorded as the first person to use the term publicly. At any rate, that the first Pan-African conference in Africa was held as late as 1957 in Accra, Ghana, is a telling fact that Pan-Africanism came late into Africa.
Defective from Inception
When Pan-Africanism eventually arrived it was imported into Africa by African intellectuals, some of whom studied in the US and Europe and then became political leaders in post-colonial African countries. These include the founder of the African National Congress (ANC), Pixley Ka Isaka Seme (South Africa), Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), Mr Peter Mbuyi Koinange (Kenya), Dr Hastings K. Banda (Malawi), Dr Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and George Padmore (a Jamaican). It is worth noting that Marcus Mosia Garvey was a Jamaican who, paradoxically, never set foot in Africa, even though he led the ‘Back to Africa’ movement.
Remarkably, both the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism and the western-educated African elite knew no other knowledge or political sensibility except the colonial education and colonial political system bequeathed to them by the colonialists. This mainly explains why the African elite were so alienated from ordinary Africans to the extent that some of them became black and native colonisers of their countries.
Colonial attitudes
In his famous 1975 essay pungently titled Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement, Peter Ekeh forcefully and convincingly argues that western-educated African intellectuals and political leaders had become colonial in their political orientation. They fought and ousted colonial administrators in Africa only to replace them and they failed to institute alternative political and economic systems in Africa.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously described the colonially educated intellectuals and political leaders of the Global South as “walking lies” that had lost connection with the communities and ordinary peoples of the Global South. These ‘walking lies’ who called themselves ‘founding fathers’ did little or nothing to improve the living conditions of ordinary Africans. Such figures chanted Pan-Africanist slogans with one hand and with the other they clobbered Africans. They did much to harm Africans by negating the tenets of Pan-Africanism whilst singing its name. Their attitude proves that Pan-Africanism, as they understood it, was un-African from inception.
I am not discouraging young Africans from celebrating African heroes nor am I discouraging them from ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as it is said. I am also not about to give currency to the unfortunate sentiment that African Americans or white people should not be admitted into a Pan-African intellectual and political universe. I am only asking that we do none of these things uncritically.
The Organization of African Unity
In 1963, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, marking a monumental step in the quest for African unity and liberation. This gathering wasn’t just a casual meet-up; it was a spectacular assembly of 32 African leaders who pledged to work together to eliminate colonialism and promote unity. The OAU became the official voice of the African continent, inspiring nations to prioritize their shared interests over regional rivalries. While the OAU eventually transformed into the African Union in 2001, its legacy remains indelible in the quest for self-determination, fostering a network of support that still reverberates throughout Africa today.
Pan-Africanists against Pan-Africanism
Accordingly, because of its genealogy, Pan-Africanism remains colonial and un-African, largely a buzzword in university corridors and a slogan in political rallies, and not an experience of the mass of ordinary Africans on the continent. Pan-Africanism was born in the anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggle, but it became infected with the slavish system and coloniality. It was co-opted, usurped, and weaponised by the same structures of power that it was birthed to fight. In this regard, Nietzsche’s advice that “those who fight monsters ought to be careful of becoming monsters” becomes useful. In other words, victims of European slavery and colonialization should not make innocent Africans under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism their victims also.
In his 1962 book, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide, Colin Legum reports how Pan-Africanism was generated as a kind of imitation of the then-existing movements of Pan-Europeanism and Pan-Asianism. He narrates how the founding fathers of Pan-Africanists in the Americas were bitterly divided, with W. E. B. Dubois publicly calling Marcus Garvey “an ugly black man with a large head” and Garvey accusing Dubois of being a white man (Dubois is said to have frequently boasted of his French blood and light skin). The personal egos of leading Pan-Africanists came in the way of Pan-Africanism. This bitter rivalry seems to create a divide between the two pan-Africanists, who also were victims of European slavery.
Kwame Nkrumah
When the Pan-African movement arrived in Africa, the African founding Pan-Africanists also had strong divisions of their own. Kwame Nkrumah, on the one hand led a school of Pan-Africanists that demanded radical African unity that would lead to a United States of Africa under one government. On the other hand, Julius Nyerere led a school of moderate Pan-Africanists that privileged African economic unity by independent African countries with their own national governments. In that way, paradoxically, the divisions and disunity of the African elite negated African unity. African masses were left divided and disunited as intellectual and political elites performed ideological feuds. Legum reports how Nyerere and other heads of independent African states feared that Nkrumah was selfishly consumed by the ambition to be the life president of Africa, reducing other countries to provinces and their leaders to mere provincial governors. In that way, fear of the tyrannical leanings of leading Pan-Africanists undermined Pan-Africanism and sustained the African divisions that colonialism imposed on the continent.
Concerning Nkrumah’s tyrannical tendencies, Ali Mazrui, in his 1997 article, “Nkrumah: A Leninist Tzar”, details not only how Nkrumah imitated Vladimir Lenin but also how he had despotic political tendencies. Mazrui, who was a keen Nkrumah watcher, noted in other writings how Nkrumah, at some points in his declared life presidency and one-party state career, had more political prisoners in Ghana than there were in apartheid South Africa. So a leading Pan-Africanist was ruling his country the same way colonialists and apartheid regimes did in Africa – with an iron hand. He had become a tyrant in his own country. That is another way in which Pan-Africanism itself was usurped and colonised. African leaders had come to imitate and reproduce the same colonial ethos that they had risen to fight. Mazrui concluded that Nkrumah, the first black president of an Independent African country, had become a “great African” but a “terrible Ghanaian.”
The feminist critique
Then, there’s the feminist dimension to the equation. African feminists such as Amina Mama and Hakima Abbas, in the editorial of Feminist Africa of 2015, ask stubborn questions about what Pan-Africanism has done to African women by marginalising them from African economies and polities. The Pan-Africanist movement began and grew as a ‘boy club.’ Even though Rwanda leads the entire world in the political representation of women, women remain politically and economically peripherised in many African countries, while non-gender conforming people are punished.
Not only is the marginalisation of women a growing problem in Africa, but Africans are also increasingly going to war against one another on the continent. Recently, for instance, African political commentator Dr Lonzen Rugira decried how the South African-led SADC military deployment in the DRC might further destabilise the troubled East Africa region. This military deployment comes when, as Dr Rugira observes, diplomatic opportunities for peace in the DRC have been unbelievably squandered by African leaders. Besides the spectacles of xenophobic and Afrophobic violence that frequently explode in South Africa, Africans are increasingly warring against each other on the continent, much to the exhaustion of the Pan-African ideal.
To be continued….
By Zacham Bayei