Pan-Africanism
Pan-African advocates include leaders such as Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, François Duvalier, Aimé Césaire, Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Robert Sobukwe, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, King Sobhuza II, Robert Mugabe, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Ture, Dr. John Pombe Magufuli, Muammar Gaddafi, Walter Rodney, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, grassroots organizers such as Joseph Robert Love, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, academics such as W. E. B.
[15] As a philosophy, pan-Africanism represents the aggregation of the historical, cultural, spiritual, artistic, scientific, and philosophical legacies of Africans from past times to the present.
Pan-Africanism as an ethical system traces its origins from ancient times, and promotes values that are the product of the African civilisations and the struggles against slavery, racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.
[17] In London, the Sons of Africa was a political group addressed by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano in the 1791 edition of his book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery.
Outside his writings, Azikiwe actively participated in pan-African politics, promulgating intellectually, in person around the Black Atlantic from West Africa and the Caribbean to the United States and western Europe.
With the exception of South Africa, all independent states of the African continent attended: Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan.
[27] This conference signified a monumental event in the pan-African movement, as it revealed a political and social union between those considered Arabic states and the black African regions.
[33] The membership of the All-African Peoples' Organisation (AAPO) had increased with the inclusion of the "Algerian Provisional Government (as they had not yet won independence), Cameroun, Guinea, Nigeria, Somalia and the United Arab Republic".
The creation of the OAU Charter took place at this Summit and defines a coordinated "effort to raise the standard of living of member States and defend their sovereignty" by supporting freedom fighters and decolonisation.
Championing the support of liberation movements, was Algeria's President Ben Bella, immediately "donated 100 million francs to its finances and was one of the first countries, of the Organisation to boycott Portuguese and South African goods".
It represented the application of the tenets of the Algerian revolution to the rest of Africa and symbolized the reshaping of the definition of pan-African identity under the common experience of colonialism.
[citation needed] In the United States, the term is closely associated with Afrocentrism, an ideology of African-American identity politics that emerged during the civil rights movement of the 1960s to 1970s.
[citation needed] Pan-Africanism has seen the contribution of numerous female African activists throughout its lifespan, despite the systemic lack of attention paid to them by scholars and male pan-Africanist alike.
In order to fight against racism towards black people in Britain, Jones set up the West Indian Gazette, which sought to cover topics such as the realities of South African apartheid and decolonisation.
She spoke at Newcastle, York and Manchester for the Aborigines Protection Society which led to a resolution being passed that demanded the British government to end racial oppression in South Africa.
Now fully engrossed in the British anti-colonial dialogue, she wrote a 19-page pamphlet on the diamond trade in South Africa was in 1897, her views were beginning to become distinctly Pan-African in their calls for an end to continental dehumanisation.
Kinloch's main contribution to pan-Africanism however was in her co-founding of the African Association in 1897 with lawyers Henry Sylvester Williams and Thomas J. Thompson, where they and 11 or 12 others gathered at the Charing-Cross Mansions hotel in London.
[49] In response to rapidly increasing birth rates, while in government, she stressed the importance of family planning and legislated sex education in Guinea's primary schools, despite strong opposition from the Muslim majority population.
[48] On the international level, Cissé was the first African president of the United Nations Security Council in 1972 and succeeded in passing two resolutions, condemning Israel's aggression against Palestine, and Apartheid in South Africa.
[56] She continued to organise for women's rights all her life until in 1977, when a government raid conducted in response to her son Fela Kuti's activism, led to her being thrown from a second storey window.
[57] Since the onset of the digital revolution, the internet and other similar media have facilitated the growth of many core pan-African principles by strengthening and increasing connections between people across the diaspora.
[61] Nigerian artist Burna boy's guiding philosophy is Pan-Africanism, as he firmly believes in rebuilding bridges with the African Diaspora, viewing Africa as the Mother Continent and birthplace of humankind.
[65] The emergence of COVID-19 has delayed its implementation but in the long term, the African Union hopes that the agreement will spur industrialization, substantially boost trade, and contribute to increasing economic integration throughout the continent.
[66] As originally conceived by Henry Sylvester Williams (although some historians[69] credit the idea to Edward Wilmot Blyden), pan-Africanism referred to the unity of all continental Africa.
Other pan-Africanist organisations include: Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, TransAfrica and the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement.
[72] An important theme running through much pan-Africanist literature concerns the historical links between different countries on the continent and the benefits of cooperation as a way of resisting imperialism and colonialism.
[81] Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire states,[85] One major weakness of Pan-Africanism and Africa's regional arrangements has been the failure to protect Africans from their homemade tyrants.
[86] Pan-Africanism has been accused of placing too much focus on a superficial monolithic "African" or "black" identity while ignoring the complex ethno-religious differences and conflicts that exist among Africans (especially in Nigeria, where independence leaders abandoned national unity after independence in favour of promoting the interests of their own ethnic groups over others), and it has been noted that the ideology relies on constructing a "common foe" such as colonialism in order to maintain its relevance and legitimacy.
[90] To the CAA's dismay, the proposals introduced by the U.S. government to the conference in April/May 1945 set no clear limits on the duration of colonialism and no motions towards allowing territorial possessions to move towards self-government.
[104] One of these movements involved Y'en a Marre, which was a collection of mainly Senegalese rap artists that are attributed with helping to remove former President Abdoulaye Wade from office in 2012 through the mass electoral mobilization of Senegal's youth.
