Pan-Africanism.

« Pan-Africanism. I INTRODUCTION Pan-Africanism , philosophy that is based on the belief that African people share common bonds and objectives and that advocates unity to achieve these objectives.

In the views of different proponents throughout its history, Pan-Africanism has been conceived in varying ways.

It has been applied to all black African people and peopleof black African descent; to all people on the African continent, including nonblack people; or to all states on the African continent. The formal concept of Pan-Africanism initially developed outside of Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It developed as a reaction to the impact of Europeancolonialism in Africa on peoples of African descent.

In the mid-20th century, activists in Africa adopted Pan-Africanism as a rallying cry for independence from colonialrule.

Some African Pan-Africanists sought to unite the continent as one independent nation.

From these origins and objectives, Pan-Africanism developed in two basicforms.

In one form, known as Continental Pan-Africanism, it advocates the unity of states and peoples within Africa, either through political union or throughinternational cooperation.

In its other, broader form, known as Diaspora Pan-Africanism, it relates to solidarity among all black Africans and peoples of black Africandescent outside the African continent.

Developed and interpreted by thinkers, authors, and activists around the world, Pan-Africanism remains a significant force inglobal politics and thought. II BACKGROUND European contact with sub-Saharan Africa began in the mid-15th century, when the Portuguese established a thriving trade on Africa’s western coast.

By the end of thecentury, in addition to buying items such as pepper, gold, and ivory, the Portuguese were buying increasing numbers of African slaves.

The Portuguese were followedby slave traders and colonists from Britain and, later, France.

In the 16th century the expansion of agricultural plantation economies in new European colonies in Northand South America and the Caribbean made African slavery exceedingly profitable.

European demand for African slaves increased, and more and more Africans wereenslaved by West and Central African slave traders and taken from Africa.

See Atlantic Slave Trade. Early European trade in Africa was accompanied from its very beginning by European attempts to seize territory from African states in order to secure control of thesources of the goods they were purchasing.

After conquering territory, European colonialists set out to control the African population for use as inexpensive labor inplantations, mines, and other flourishing businesses established in the African colonies.

In this way, the first contacts of European traders with Africa marked thebeginning of European domination of African peoples. Colonialism systematically degraded Africans, both slaves and residents of Europe’s African colonies.

Slaves labored under cruel and dehumanizing conditions for no payor extremely low wages.

Furthermore, these slaves were scattered in far-flung European colonies, separated from their African homes and relatives.

From the mid-15thcentury to the late 19th century, an estimated 6 percent of Africans in the slave trade were taken to the British territory that became the United States; 17 percentwere sent to Spanish territory in North and South America; 40 percent to European-held islands in the Caribbean Sea; and 38 percent to Portuguese territory in SouthAmerica.

This dispersion of African peoples is known as the African Diaspora.

The term Diaspora also refers to these dispersed peoples’ descendents, who largely compose the present-day population of people of African descent outside of Africa. Africans in the African colonies were indoctrinated with the notion of the inherent supremacy of European culture through everyday interaction with Europeans andthrough the few colonial schools Europeans established.

The political systems of the indigenous African peoples were transformed, as traditional African rulers wereusually forced to act as pawns of the colonial administration.

Colonialism also had a major economic impact on Africans, as agricultural commodities, minerals, andpeople were usually exported from the African colonies to Europe and the New World rather than being used for the direct benefit of Africans.

Roads, bridges, ports,and other facilities were built only to facilitate this export trade. Slavery and the colonial system were hated by Africans and were institutions that the Pan-African movement arose to combat.

Pan-Africanism also developed toovercome the obstacles facing the African Diaspora—a scattered, diverse, and often disadvantaged population of people of African descent.

Pan-African thinkers wouldmaintain that, although they were dispersed throughout the world, African people and people of African descent were a unified people and should try to work togetherfor the good of all. III DEVELOPMENT OF PAN-AFRICANISM Africans resisted European domination from their earliest contacts with Europeans.

The record of this resistance is present in the early communications between therulers of African states and the monarchs of Europe in the 17th century, as well as in the routine physical resistance of Africans to slavery from the beginning of theslave trade.

Modern resistance to colonialism, however, began with the development of a formal Pan-African movement at the dawn of the 20th century.

In 1900 HenrySylvester Williams, a lawyer from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, organized a Pan-African conference in London to give black people the opportunity to discuss issuesfacing blacks around the world.

The conference attracted a small but significant representation of Africans and people of African descent from the Caribbean and theUnited States, as well as whites from Britain. The original political objective of the meeting was to protest the unequal treatment of blacks in the British colonies as well as in Britain.

However, the speakers also usedthe forum to make statements about the needs to uphold the dignity of African peoples worldwide and to provide them with education and other social services.

Inaddition, speakers at the conference celebrated aspects of traditional African culture and pointed out great historical achievements of African peoples in the tradition ofinfluential Pan-African pioneer Edward Wilmot Blyden.

Blyden, a Caribbean-born Liberian educator, wrote extensively in the late 19th century about the positiveaccomplishments of Africans and may have coined the term Pan-Africanism. The next several Pan-African meetings were organized by distinguished African American scholar W.

E.

B.

Du Bois, cofounder of the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The consequences of World War I (1914-1918) raised serious concerns among blacks in the United States.

The main issueswere the well-being of African American and African soldiers who had served in the war and the status of former German colonial territories in Africa that had beencaptured during the war by Britain, France, and other Allied powers.

Du Bois convened the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919.

The congress was held at thesame time as the Paris Peace Conference, at which European powers negotiated the aftermath of the war. The agenda of the first Pan-African Congress resembled that of the 1900 conference in its concern for the plight of Africans and people of African descent.

Significantemphasis was placed on the provision of education for Africans and the need for greater African participation in the affairs of the colonies.

Specific interest in the Africanterritories of the conquered German colonial empire was also expressed.

A proposal was made that these territories be held in trust by the newly founded League ofNations with the goal of granting the territories self-determination as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, the territories were placed under the nominal supervision of theleague, which distributed the territories to other European colonial powers without demanding that the new colonial rulers move the territories toward self-determination. The next Pan-African congresses sponsored by Du Bois were held in 1921 (in London, Paris, and Brussels, Belgium), 1923 (in London and Lisbon, Portugal), and 1927. »