Pan-Africanism is a Utopian Movement Whose Time Never Came

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Pan-Africanism is an ideology whose time never came, perhaps because it was mainly a utopian idea which stirred hopes among Blacks in a North American and European diaspora.

The term was established at the first Pan-African Conference, held in London in July 1900. It was organized by the British-based African Association, which was founded by the South African campaigner Alice Kinloch.

Its “Address to the Nations of the World” condemned racial oppression in the United States as well as throughout Africa and demanded self-government for Britain’s colonies. It was drafted under the chairmanship of the African-American activist W.E. B. Du Bois and included his phrase “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour-line.”

He organized his next Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. The aim was to influence the post First World War peace conferences held in the city. The Congress proposed the creation of new states in Africa based around the confiscation of Germany’s former colonies.

Perhaps the leading Pan-Africanist of the time was Marcus Garvey. He had established his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914. Garvey re-established the UNIA in New York in 1917, where it soon attracted thousands of adherents. At its height the UNIA’s membership has been estimated at over four million. It was the 20th century’s largest Pan-African political movement.

Its newspaper, Negro World, preached an anti-colonial message: “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.” The UNIA established links with Liberia, governed by Americo-Liberians, hoping to secure land there to settle African-American migrants.

Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the outbreak of the Second World War four years later strengthened Pan-African demands for an end to colonial rule; in Britain, George Padmore and the Pan-African Federation made preparations for a new gathering at the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945.

Considered the most important of all Pan-African conferences, its participants included future African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. It condemned the colonial borders imposed on Africa.

The independence of Ghana in 1957 created the conditions for a new stage in the struggle to liberate and unite the continent. Now its president, Nkrumah declared that Ghana’s independence was “meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”

At the age of 93, Du Bois moved to Ghana in 1961, officially to take up the editorship of the “Encyclopaedia Africana” at the invitation of Nkrumah and would die there two years later.

Soon enough one African entity after another achieved independence, as the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese empires were dismantled. By 1980 most of the continent was free of foreign rule.

Today, there are more than 50 independent states, and not a single colony, in Africa. But while a few half-hearted attempts at union between former colonies were made, Pan-Africanism as a realistic possibility is long gone. If anything, things have moved in the opposite direction.

Many African states are failed states or little more than notional entities. They are homes to many dozens, sometimes hundreds, of peoples riven by ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious conflict.

The Congo, for example, is more an illusion that a state. It has none of the criteria that make a nation. Instead, as political scientists Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills have observed, this vast country has become “a collection of peoples, groups, interests, and pillagers who coexist at best.” Much of it is in the hands of various rebel groups.

Wars fought for political separation have become omnipresent in post-colonial Africa. From the division of Sudan to the continued fragmentation of Somalia, and the protracted struggles of Cabinda in Angola, Casamance in Senegal, and Azawad in Mali, conflict over secession continues to the present day.

Will Ethiopia and Nigeria, the two most populous African countries, both wracked by conflict, be next? The conflict between the government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, doesn’t provide much hope.

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, has vowed to “bury this enemy.” This, from a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. The African Union headquarters may be located in Addis Ababa, but he’s no Pan-Africanist.