Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism is a movement that seeks solidarity and unity among the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora, based on the belief that they share a common history and a common future. Rooted in resistance to slavery and colonial rule, it emerged as an organised political movement around 1900, led at first by people of African descent living in the Caribbean, the Americas and Britain. It helped inspire the decolonisation of Africa and led to the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.

Pan-Africanists trace their movement back to revolts on slave ships and plantations, the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth-century "Back to Africa" movements. Being removed from the continent allowed people in the diaspora to see Africa as a whole. In London, a group of black abolitionists called the Sons of Africa, addressed by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano in a 1791 edition of his book on slavery, held meetings, wrote letters and lobbied Parliament. A religious current, Ethiopianism, gave the idea another early form.

The African Association was founded in London in 1897 by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, with Alice Kinloch from South Africa and others. In 1900 it organised the first Pan-African Conference, at Westminster Hall in London, to protest against the seizure of land in the colonies and racial discrimination. A series of Pan-African Congresses followed: in Paris in 1919, London in 1921 and 1923, New York in 1927 and Manchester in 1945. Among the movement's leading advocates were the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and the organiser Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association adopted a red, black and green flag on 13 August 1920 that became a pan-African symbol.

On the continent itself, a common identity grew out of living under, and resisting, colonial rule. In the 1930s the Nigerian journalist Nnamdi Azikiwe, writing from the United States, Accra and Lagos, became the best-known pan-Africanist in British West Africa. The Manchester congress of 1945, organised with the help of Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, brought together anti-colonial activists from Africa and the diaspora and pressed the case for decolonisation.

When Ghana became independent in March 1957, its leader Kwame Nkrumah emerged as the leading champion of continental unity. In April 1958 he hosted the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, attended by every independent African state except South Africa; Frantz Fanon came as a delegate of the Algerian independence movement. Nkrumah's call for a full political and economic union won little agreement, and after 1960 the movement divided into rival Casablanca and Brazzaville blocs.

In 1963, at a summit in Addis Ababa, 32 African states founded the Organisation of African Unity. Its charter pledged to raise living standards, defend members' sovereignty and support liberation movements, as the decolonisation of Africa continued. The OAU set up a committee to aid liberation movements, and members such as Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella boycotted Portuguese and South African goods.

Algiers hosted a Pan-African Cultural Festival in July 1969, attended by thousands from Africa and the diaspora. After Nkrumah's death in 1972, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi became the most outspoken advocate of a "United States of Africa". The Seventh Pan-African Congress, held in Uganda in 1994, was the first to address women's issues specifically. In the United States, pan-African ideas became closely associated with Afrocentrism, which arose in the era of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The OAU was later succeeded by the African Union, whose Commission sits in Addis Ababa and which has launched the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. Critics argue that Pan-Africanism blurs the very different experiences of people of African descent and struggles to bridge divisions within African states.

Our 1938 and 1945 maps show colonial Africa, including French West Africa, and our 1960 and 1985 maps show the independent states of the OAU era.