Pan Africanism (Across Africa) is a belief that people from Africa and their descendants should be united after being captured into slavery and used like they are not humans.Â
Since 1897 this movement for a United Africa has created several movements in the the United States of America spreading across continents and landing in Africa in the post World War II era.Â
Africans coming together to build Africa!
An Agenda to make all Africans in the diaspora and mainland Africa to understand they are ONE and can only be strong if they unite.Â
Pan-Africanist ideals emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to European colonization and exploitation of the African continent.
Pan-Africanist philosophy held that slavery and colonialism depended on and encouraged negative, unfounded categorizations of the race, culture, and values of African people.
These destructive beliefs in turn gave birth to intensified forms of racism, the likes of which Pan-Africanism sought to eliminate.
As a broader political concept, Pan-Africanism’s roots lie in the collective experiences of African descendants in the New World.
Africa assumed greater significance for some blacks in the New World for two primary reasons. First, the increasing futility of their campaign for racial equality in the United States led some African Americans to demand voluntary repatriation to Africa.
Next, for the first time the term Africans, which had often been used by racists as a derogatory description, became a source of pride for early black nationalists.
Hence, through the conscious elevation of their African identity, black activists in America and the rest of the world began to reclaim the rights previously denied them by Western societies.
In 1897, Henry Sylvester-Williams, a West Indian Barrister, formed the African Association in London, England to encourage Pan-African unity; especially throughout the British colonies. Sylvester-Williams, who had links with West African dignitaries, believed that Africans and those of African descent living in the Diaspora needed a forum to address their common problems.
In 1900, Sylvester-Williams organized the first Pan-African meeting in collaboration with several black leaders representing various countries of the African Diaspora.
For the first time, opponents of colonialism and racism gathered for an international meeting.
The conference, held in London, attracted global attention, placing the word “Pan-African” in the lexicon of international affairs and making it part of the standard vocabulary of black intellectuals.
The initial meeting featured thirty delegates, mainly from England and the West Indies, but attracted only a few Africans and African Americans.
Among them was black America’s leading intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois, who was to become the torchbearer of subsequent Pan-African conferences, or congresses as they later came to be called.
He was to become the MODERN FACE of Pan-Africanism in the years to come.
The 1900 Pan-African Conference participants read papers on a variety of topics, including the social, political, and economic conditions of blacks in the Diaspora; the importance of independent nations governed by people of African descent, such as Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia; the legacy of slavery and European imperialism; the role of Africa in world history; and the impact of Christianity on the African continent.
Perhaps of even greater significance was the formation of two committees.
One group, chaired by DuBois, drafted an address “To the Nations of the World,” demanding moderate reforms for colonial Africa.
The address implored the United States and the imperial European nations to “acknowledge and protect the rights of people of African descent” and to respect the integrity and independence of “the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc.”
The address, signed by committee chairman DuBois as well as its president Bishop Alexander Walters, its vice president Henry B. Brown, and its general secretary Sylvester-Williams, was published and sent to Queen Victoria of England.
The second committee planned for the formation of a permanent Pan-African association in London with branches overseas.
Despite these ambitious plans, the appeals of conference participants made little or no impression on the European imperial powers who controlled the political and economic destiny of Africa.
It was not until after World War I that DuBois revived the Pan-African congresses.
Following the war, European and American politicians gathered for a peace conference in Versailles, France.
DuBois, who attended the conference as a special representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed to President Woodrow Wilson.
In a letter to Wilson, he urged the American government to initiate a comprehensive study of the treatment of black soldiers.
Moreover, DuBois expressed hope that the peace treaty would address “the future of Africa” and grant self-determination to the colonized peoples.
President Wilson subsequently released a Fourteen Point memorandum, which suggested the formation of a League of Nations (United Nations) and called for “an absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based on the principle that the interests of the population must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government.” Although historians have questioned the impact DuBois’s request had on Wilson’s Fourteen Point memorandum, it was apparent that the loudest voice on behalf of oppressed blacks in the New World and colonized Africa belonged to the participants of the Pan-African Congress.
Who was W. E. B. Du Bois?
(23 Feb. 1868–27 Aug. 1963)
The scholar, writer, editor, and civil rights pioneer, was born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and itinerant laborer.
In later life Du Bois made a close study of his family origins, weaving them rhetorically and conceptually—if not always accurately—into almost everything he wrote.
Born in Haiti and descended from mixed race Bahamian slaves, Alfred Du Bois enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army but appears to have deserted shortly afterward.
He also deserted the family less than two years after his son’s birth, leaving him to be reared by his mother and the extended Burghardt kin.
Long resident in New England, the Burghardts descended from a freedman of Dutch slave origin who had fought briefly in the American Revolution.
Under the care of his mother and her relatives, young Will Du Bois spent his entire childhood in that small western Massachusetts town, where probably fewer than two-score of the four thousand inhabitants were African American.
He received a classical, college preparatory education in Great Barrington’s racially integrated high school, from whence, in June 1884, he became the first African American graduate.
A precocious youth, Du Bois not only excelled in his high school studies but also contributed numerous articles to two regional newspapers, the Springfield Republican and the black-owned New York Globe, then edited by T. Thomas Fortune.
In 1888 Du Bois enrolled at Harvard as a junior. He received a BA cum laude, in 1890, an MA in 1891, and a PhD in 1895.
Du Bois was strongly influenced by the new historical work of the German-trained Albert Bushnell Hart and the philosophical lectures of William James, both of whom became friends and professional mentors. Other intellectual influences came with his studies and travels between 1892 and 1894 in Germany, where he was enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelm III Universität (then commonly referred to as the University of Berlin but renamed the Humboldt University after World War II).
Because of the expiration of the Slater Fund fellowship that supported his stay in Germany, Du Bois could not meet the residency requirements that would have enabled him formally to stand for the degree in economics, despite his completion of the required doctoral thesis (on the history of southern U.S. agriculture) during his tenure.
Returning to the United States in the summer of 1894, Du Bois taught classics and modern languages for two years at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
While there, he met Nina Gomer, a student at the college, whom he married in 1896 at her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The couple had two children. By the end of his first year at Wilberforce, Du Bois had completed his Harvard doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870,” which was published in 1896 as the inaugural volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series.
In high school Du Bois came under the influence of and received mentorship from the principal, Frank Hosmer, who encouraged his extensive reading and solicited scholarship aid from local worthies that enabled Du Bois to enroll at Fisk University in September 1885, six months after his mother’s death.
One of the best of the southern colleges for newly freed slaves founded after the Civil War, Fisk offered a continuation of his classical education and the strong influence of teachers who were heirs to New England and Western Reserve (Ohio) abolitionism.
It also offered the northern-reared Du Bois an introduction to southern American racism and African American culture.
His later writings and thought were strongly marked, for example, by his experiences teaching school in the hills of eastern Tennessee during the summers of 1886 and 1887.
Although he had written his Berlin thesis in economic history, received his Harvard doctorate in history, and taught languages and literature at Wilberforce, Du Bois made some of his most important early intellectual contributions to the emerging field of sociology.
In 1896 he was invited by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a study of the Seventh Ward in Philadelphia.
There, after an estimated 835 hours of door-to-door interviews in 2,500 households, Du Bois completed the monumental study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899).
The Philadelphia study was both highly empirical and hortatory, a combination that prefigured much of the politically engaged scholarship that Du Bois pursued in the years that followed and that reflected the two main strands of his intellectual engagement during this formative period: the scientific study of the so-called Negro Problem and the appropriate political responses to it.
While completing his fieldwork in Philadelphia, Du Bois delivered to the Academy of Political and Social Science in November 1896 an address, “The Study of the Negro Problem,” a methodological manifesto on the purposes and appropriate methods for scholarly examination of the condition of black people.
In March 1897, addressing the newly founded American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., he outlined for his black intellectual colleagues, in “The Conservation of the Races,” both a historical sociology and theory of race as a concept and a call to action in defense of African American culture and identity. During the following July and August he undertook for the U.S. Bureau of Labor the first of several studies of southern African American households, which was published as a bureau bulletin the following year under the title The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study. During that same summer, Atlantic Monthly published the essay “The Strivings of the Negro People,” a slightly revised version of which later opened The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Together these works frame Du Bois’s evolving conceptualization of, methodological approach to, and political values and commitments regarding the problem of race in America.
His conceptions were historical and global, his methodology empirical and intuitive, his values and commitments involving both mobilization of an elite vanguard to address the issues of racism and the conscious cultivation of the values to be drawn from African American folk culture.
After the completion of the Philadelphia study in December 1897, Du Bois began the first of two long tenures at Atlanta University, where he taught sociology and directed empirical studies—modeled loosely on his Philadelphia and Farmville work—of the social and economic conditions and cultural and institutional lives of southern African Americans.
During this first tenure at Atlanta he also wrote two more books, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of poignant essays on race, labor, and culture, and John Brown (1909), an impassioned interpretation of the life and martyrdom of the militant abolitionist.
He also edited two short-lived magazines, Moon (1905–1906) and Horizon (1907–1910), which represented his earliest efforts to establish journals of intellectual and political opinion for a black readership.
With the publication of Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois emerged as the most prominent spokesperson for the opposition to Booker T. Washington’s policy of political conservatism and racial accommodation. Ironically, Du Bois had kept a prudent distance from Washington’s opponents and had made few overt statements in opposition to the so-called Wizard of Tuskegee.
In fact, his career had involved a number of near-misses whereby he himself might have ended up teaching at Tuskegee.
Having applied to Washington for a job shortly after returning from Berlin, he had to decline Tuskegee’s superior monetary offer because he had already accepted a position at Wilberforce.
On a number of other occasions Washington—sometimes prodded by Albert Bushnell Hart—sought to recruit Du Bois to join him at Tuskegee, a courtship he continued at least until the summer of 1903, when Du Bois taught summer school at Tuskegee.
Early in his career, moreover, Du Bois’s views bore a superficial similarity to Washington’s. In fact, he had praised Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, which proposed to southern white elites a compromise wherein blacks would forswear political and civil rights in exchange for economic opportunities.
Like many elite blacks at the time, Du Bois was not averse to some form of franchise restriction, so long as it was based on educational qualifications and applied equally to white and black.
Du Bois had been charged with overseeing the African American Council’s efforts to encourage black economic enterprise and worked with Washington’s partisans in that effort.
By his own account his overt rupture with Washington was sparked by the growing evidence of a conspiracy, emanating from Tuskegee, to dictate speech and opinion in all of black America and to crush any opposition to Washington’s leadership.
After the collapse of efforts to compromise their differences through a series of meetings in 1904, Du Bois joined William Monroe Trotter and other Washington opponents to form the Niagara Movement, an organization militantly advocating full civil and political rights for African Americans.
Although it enjoyed some success in articulating an alternative vision of how black Americans should respond to the growing segregation and racial violence of the early twentieth century, the Niagara Movement was fatally hampered by lack of funds and the overt and covert opposition of Washington and his allies.
Indeed, the vision and program of the movement were fully realized only with the founding of a new biracial organization: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NAACP grew out of the agitation and a 1909 conference called to protest the deteriorating status of and escalating violence against black Americans.
Racial rioting in August 1908 in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, sparked widespread protest among blacks and liberal whites appalled at the apparent spread of southern violence and lynch law into northern cities.
Although its officers made some initial efforts to maintain a détente with Booker T. Washington, the NAACP represented a clear opposition to his policy of accommodation and political quietism.
It launched legal suits, legislative lobbying, and propaganda campaigns that embodied uncompromising, militant attacks on lynching, Jim Crow, and disfranchisement.
In 1910 Du Bois left Atlanta to join the NAACP as an officer, its only black board member, and to edit its monthly magazine, The Crisis.
As editor of The Crisis Du Bois finally established the journal of opinion that had so long eluded him, one that could serve as a platform from which to reach a larger audience among African Americans and one that united the multiple strands of his life’s work.
In its monthly issues he rallied black support for NAACP policies and programs and excoriated white opposition to equal rights.
But he also opened the journal to discussions of diverse subjects related to race relations and black cultural and social life, from black religion to new poetic works.
The journal’s cover displayed a rich visual imagery embodying the sheer diversity and breadth of the black presence in America.
Thus the journal constituted, simultaneously, a forum for multiple expressions of and the coherent representation and enactment of black intellectual and cultural life.
A mirror for and to black America, it inspired a black intelligentsia and its public.
From his vantage as an officer of the NAACP, Du Bois also furthered another compelling intellectual and political interest, Pan-Africanism.
He had attended the first conference on the global condition of peoples of African descent in London in 1900.
Six other gatherings followed between 1911 and 1945, including the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, and Pan-African congresses held in Paris in 1919; London, Brussels, and Paris in 1921; London and Lisbon in 1923; New York City in 1927; and in Manchester, England, in 1945.
Each conference focused in some fashion on the fate of African colonies in the postwar world, but the political agendas of the earliest meetings were often compromised by the ideological and political entanglements of the elite delegates chosen to represent the African colonies.
The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey enjoyed greater success in mobilizing a mass base for his version of Pan-Africanism and posed a substantial ideological and political challenge to Du Bois.
Deeply suspicious of Garvey’s extravagance and flamboyance, Du Bois condemned his scheme to collect funds from African Americans to establish a shipping line that would aid their “return” to Africa, his militant advocacy of racial separatism, and his seeming alliance with the Ku Klux Klan.
Although he played no role in the efforts to have Garvey jailed and eventually deported for mail fraud, Du Bois was not sorry to see him go.
(In 1945, however, Du Bois joined Garvey’s widow, Amy Jacques Garvey, and George Padmore to sponsor the Manchester Pan-African conference that demanded African independence. Du Bois cochaired the opening session of the conference with Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey.)
Du Bois and the NAACP fought for officer training and equal treatment for black troops throughout the war, led a silent protest march down Fifth Avenue in 1917 against racism, and in 1919 launched an investigation into charges of discrimination against black troops in Europe.
Before becoming a founding member of NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois was already well known as one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era.
The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, Du Bois published widely before becoming NAACP’s director of publicity and research and starting the organization’s official journal, The Crisis, in 1910.
Du Bois, a scholar at the historically Black Atlanta University, established himself as a leading thinker on race and the plight of Black Americans.
He challenged the position held by Booker T. Washington, another contemporary prominent intellectual, that Southern Blacks should compromise their basic rights in exchange for education and legal justice.
He also spoke out against the notion popularized by abolitionist Frederick Douglass that Black Americans should integrate with white society.
In an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Du Bois wrote that Black Americans should instead embrace their African heritage even as they worked and lived in the United States.
Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903.
In this collection of essays, Du Bois described the predicament of Black Americans as one of “double consciousness”:
“One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
The term “double consciousness” has come to be widely used as a theoretical framework to apply to other dynamics of inequality.
When Du Bois became the editor of the organization’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, he used his perch to draw attention to the still widespread practice of lynching, pushing for nationwide legislation that would outlaw the cruel extrajudicial killings.
A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades.
Du Bois, who considered himself a socialist, also published articles in favor of unionized labor, although he called out union leaders for barring Black membership.
Under Du Bois’s guidance, the journal attracted a wide readership, reaching 100,000 in 1920, and drew many new supporters to NAACP.
With Du Bois as its mouthpiece, NAACP came to be known as the leading protest organization for Black Americans.
“One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Du Bois served as editor of The Crisis until 1934, when he resigned following a rift with NAACP leadership over his controversial stance on segregation.
He viewed the “separate but equal” status as an acceptable position for Blacks.
Du Bois also resigned from the NAACP board and returned to Atlanta University.
After a ten-year hiatus, Du Bois came back to NAACP as the director of special research from 1944 to 1948.
In this role, he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans.
He wrote the famous NAACP publication, “An Appeal to the World,” a precursor to a report charging the United States with genocide for its ugly history of state-sanctioned lynchings.
Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.
Throughout his life, Du Bois was active in the Pan-Africanism movement, attending the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900.
He later organized a series of Pan-African Congress meetings around the world in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927, bringing together intellectuals from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States.
At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana.
Yes! In 1961, Du Bois was invited by the veritable President Kwame Nkrumah to live in Ghana to write the Encyclopedia Africana, but only finished the first three chapters.
In 1961 he died in his sleep at the age of 95 in his house, as a Ghanaian.
He died on the eve of the civil rights march in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech and where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP announced Du Bois’s death from the podium.
DuBois’ work is still very important today.
He thought a lot about the past and used it as a guide to move forward and not move backwards.
He moved from the USA after the government failed to renew his passport (identity as an American) and had difficulty in living a comfortable life as an American.
So after moving to Ghana and becoming a Ghanaian citizen in his twilight years, he felt at ease to be among his own.
His wife, Shirley Graham Dubois was the first black director of Ghana National Television (Now GBC) between 1964 and 66 (when the British were no longer in charge of managing the national television).
Years after his death, the US Postal Service has twice honoured him by placing his image on National Postage Stamps.
Will Africa Ever Unite?
Africa needs PRACTICAL LEADERS to make this work.
With a focus on making it a Nationwide agenda, it must be part or even better, a foundational course in all academic curriculum to guide posterity.
After 1945, like minded racial groups decided to put their countries in order through unity.
Europe worked on their European Union and today it’s still relevant and helping to empower Europe more (despite intra-country migration frictions due to terrorism).
But what about Africans? What did we do to our 1,000 year old Pan Africanism? Till date we are yet to PRACTICALLY UNITE.
As African Pan-African legend, Dr. Nkrumah once said on the day he was overthrown whiles he was on a plane to Russia.Â
“This coup d’Ă©tat in Ghana will spread all over Africa and it will sink Africa. Everything will be destroyed but Africa will rise again after many years!”
Let’s hope for a United future for Africa but it must start today with some PRAGMATIC ACTIONS!Â
Like:Â
- Free Border (One Passport for Free Pass for all Africans) Across Africa CountriesÂ
- Trading in a Common CurrencyÂ
- Domestication of EverythingÂ
- The Creation of African Industrial Hub
- A United (Pan-African) Energy for all African Countries tapped from the biggest rivers in AfricaÂ
- A United (Pan-African) Mining HubÂ
- The Creation of The Re-Genesis (Starting Afresh in all Things)
- Â Development of a New Education SystemÂ
- Development of a New Political System (Not based on any Colonial Democratic System)
- Renaming of Africa (The colonialists gave us that name)Â
- Development of Pan-African Science
And more that I will be sharing later.
