The Pan-African Pantheon

Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers

Adekeye Adebajo

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526156808
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: African History

With forty accessible essays on the key intellectual contributions to Pan-Africanism, this volume offers readers a fascinating insight into the intellectual thinking and contributions to Pan-Africanism. The book explores the history of Pan-Africanism and quest for reparations, early pioneers of Pan-Africanism as well as key activists and politicians, and Pan-African philosophy and literati.Diverse and key figures of Pan-Africanism from Africa, the Caribbean, and America are covered by these chapters, including: Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Arthur Lewis, Maya Angelou, C.L.R. James, Ruth First, Ali Mazrui, Wangari Maathai, Thabo Mbeki, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Chimamanda Adichie.While acknowledging the contributions of these figures to Pan-Africanism, these essays are not just celebratory, offering valuable criticism in areas where their subjects may have fallen short of their ideals.

PART 1

INTRODUCTION: THE ROOTS AND ROUTES OF
PAN-AFRICANISM

1

PAN-AFRICANISM: FROM THE TWIN PLAGUES OF EUROPEAN LOCUSTS TO AFRICA’S TRIPLE QUEST FOR EMANCIPATION

Adekeye Adebajo

“The Trans-Atlantic slave trade paved the way for colonialism in several ways. It integrated the economy of several African peoples into that of the Americas and Europe, and thus into a capitalist world economy dominated by western Europe … The overall result was underdevelopment … the legacy of wars ensured that Africans could not unite to protect their interests in the way that Europeans were able to coordinate their plans for the partition of Africa at the Congress of Berlin.”¹

J.F. ADE AJAYI, NIGERIAN HISTORIAN

“SEEK YE FIRST THE POLITICAL KINGDOM, and all other things will be added unto it.” The famous biblical injunction of Kwame Nkrumah, founding Ghanaian president and Pan-African prophet, of the 1950s continues to reverberate across Africa and its diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas² seven decades after it was first uttered. Having achieved Nkrumah’s political kingdom by 1994 with the liberation of South Africa, Africa and its diaspora found, however, that all other things were not added unto it. Africans and their descendants are still on a painful quest for three magic kingdoms: peace and democratic governance; socio-economic transformation; and cultural equality. This epic griot’s tale of prophets, kings, divas³ and marabouts will thus focus on the elusive quest of Africa and its diaspora to attain these three magic kingdoms over the past five centuries.

Pan-Africanism can be defined as the efforts to promote the political, socio-economic and cultural unity, emancipation and self-reliance of Africa and its diaspora. The ideology argues that Africans on the continent and around the globe share a common history and destiny.⁴ Pan-Africanists in the Caribbean and the Americas felt physically dispossessed by slavery, while those on the continent felt economically, socially and mentally dislocated through colonialism. They were therefore seeking to affirm their sense of worth and dignity. Blacks in the diaspora had deeply internalised a racism born of four and a half centuries of European slavery, and suffered from a profound sense of low self-esteem and self-loathing. The concept of Pan-Africanism developed amid the sweltering oppression of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, and was transported back to Africa by its students who went to study in the US and Europe.⁵

The subject of Pan-African political thought is one that has historically been under-researched. One of the first contemporary attempts to synthesise these ideas into a single volume was the Malian-Frenchman Guy Martin’s African Political Thought, which was published in 2012.⁶ More recently, Hakim Adi, a British historian of Nigerian origin, published Pan-Africanism: A History in 2018.⁷ Our own book on The Pan-African Pantheon covers 36 Pan-African figures, and is similar to Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood’s Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (2003), which covers 40 Pan-African figures.⁸ A key difference, however, is that while Adi and Sherwood’s very useful compendium has 3–5-page biographical sketches of each of these figures, our volume has more substantive, 15–20-page essays that go beyond the short biographies of these figures to examine the struggles in which they were involved within a broader historical and contemporary context.

Another contemporary volume is African-American scholar, Reiland Rabaka’s edited 36-chapter 2020 Routledge Handbook on Pan-Africanism.⁹ Though comprehensive in its coverage, this book is organised thematically rather than biographically or regionally. It covers issues as broad-ranging and diverse as black internationalism, black feminism, queer Pan-Africanism, black nationalism, Black Consciousness, Africanisation, Afrocentrism, African social movements, and Pan-African aesthetics. The book therefore does not compete directly with our volume which focuses instead on 36 Pan-African figures, and examines their struggles within the fields in which they wrote or were active.

Our volume does not attempt to develop any theory or philosophy of Pan-Africanism. Instead, we set out the history of Pan-Africanism and the evolution, interaction and intellectual ideas and impact of the 36 Pan-African figures covered in this book. We have thus not imposed any theoretical or philosophical framework on any of the authors. The book provides short, readable, multidisciplinary biographical essays about the intellectual thinking and contributions to Pan-Africanist ideals of unity and liberation of these 36 prophets, poets, and philosophers. Even in the Pan-African context, many of these figures have been forgotten, and are not widely studied. The main thrust of this volume is thus to create a Pan-African canon composed of well-known figures and less well-known ones, including many marginalised female figures. This book consistently stresses the importance of African agency, and views history from a Pan-African perspective. The focus on slavery and colonialism in this Introduction is to provide a necessary historical background for undergraduate and graduate students often lacking in such knowledge, and to underline the fact that Pan-Africanism was a reaction to, and outcome of, both slavery and colonialism. The struggle for reparations addressed near the end of the Introduction flows logically from this history of Pan-African emancipation, and the issue of reparations has become one of the major movements that is redefining a new Pan-Africanism.

This book on the Pan-African pantheon has conceptualised Pan-Africanism broadly, and not narrowly. Seventeen of its subjects were pioneers or proponents of Pan-Africanism and would define themselves as Pan-Africanists. The other 19 figures were shaped by Pan-Africanist ideals, whether they were conscious of them or not. They all broadly believed in the dignity of Africans on the continent and its diaspora. Some may argue that figures such as Jamaican-Briton Stuart Hall and St Lucia’s Derek Walcott cannot be regarded as Pan-Africanists, but we consider this a parochial and limited understanding of the term since they were both shaped by the ideas and sensibility of their African heritage, even if these were expressed in diverse ways.¹⁰

This is particularly true after the concept of Pan-Africanism had ceased largely to be part of a civil society-led movement by the 1960s, and had become part of intergovernmental regionalism in Africa. By incorporating issues of race, gender and hegemony into Cultural Studies, and by criticising race prejudice in the Western media, Stuart Hall championed ideas that were intimately connected to causes and issues championed by Pan-Africanists. Likewise, Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning playwright and poet, wrote lyrical poetry about his native Caribbean that celebrated the beauty and integrity of his Africanderived culture. Many Pan-Africanists have embraced his work, as he has embraced theirs. Walcott, in fact, noted that his book Omeros “tries to say the same sort of things that [C.L.R.] James said so often, so steadily, before my own generation of writers”.¹¹ Pan-Africanism is thus not a monolithic but a diverse concept, a broad church of many faiths.

We are not necessarily saying that all of our 36 figures are direct proponents of the ideology of Pan-Africanism. We insist, however, that these figures are Pan-Africanists in the sense that they are intellectually and geographically the major figures from Africa and its diaspora in their respective fields of politics, activism, social science, philosophy, literature and music. For example, while not directly espousing Pan-Africanism, Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai lived it by waging her environmental struggles not just in Kenya, but across East Africa. Egyptian United Nations (UN) secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali may not widely be considered to have been a Pan-Africanist, but he was fiercely outspoken about protecting the continent’s security interests as a prophet of Pax Africana. While Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka may not explicitly have espoused Pan-Africanism as his guiding philosophy, he wrote and preached against autocracy across Africa, and lived for a while in Ghanaian exile while editing the Pan-African journal Transition. The Ghanaian-British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in fact, criticises early Pan-Africanism as essentialist, and the chapter in this book, in turn, critiques Appiah’s own approach to Pan-Africanism. But it is still important that Appiah engaged in Pan-African debates as a Ghanaian-Briton based in the diaspora.

This book is particularly timely in seeking to ensure that Pan-African knowledge production forms part of, and influences, mainstream global thinking. It comes at a time of increasing interest in Pan-African thought and Africa’s international relations. The volume also responds to current efforts to decolonise university curricula across the globe and to create civil society movements in support of contemporary Pan-Africanism. Diverse and key figures of Pan-Africanism from Africa, the Caribbean and America are covered in these 38 chapters. While acknowledging the contributions of these figures to Pan-Africanism, these essays are not just celebratory, but also critical in areas where their subjects may have fallen short of their ideals.

There are three unique features about this volume. Firstly, as the 38 essays are written by African, Caribbean and African-American scholars largely based in their regions, the book contributes substantively to efforts to transform curricula in all three regions and across the globe; secondly, the book covers 36 major Pan-African figures in a bid to build a contemporary Pan-African canon; and thirdly, the volume encourages a cross-generational dialogue between scholars, as well as between past figures of Pan-Africanism and more contemporary ones with whom current students would already be familiar.

This Introduction begins by tracing the origins of Pan-Africanism historically to the twin scourges of European slavery and colonialism. We argue that the brutal humiliation of these two epic events conducted over five centuries forced Africans to conceive the concept of Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean and the American diaspora, as well as eventually on the mother continent, as a way of coping with, and challenging, the pervasive racism and repression that these two scourges represented. Africa and its diaspora thus embarked on three quests for self-emancipation in the areas of governance and security, economics, and culture. The results of these three continuing quests have been mixed owing to the terrible legacy of the tragic inheritance of Africa and its descendants. Before concluding and summarising the 37 other chapters in the book, we briefly assess the role of contemporary debates on reparations for slavery and colonialism in contributing to rebuilding Pan-Africanism as a civil society movement.

In using the formulation of a mother continent and its African diaspora in this chapter, I diverge from Barbadian scholar Hilary Beckles’s idea of “Global Africa” to describe both Africa and its diaspora in order to move away from a “centre–periphery” discourse (see Beckles in this volume). My usage of Africa as mother country does not connote a hierarchical system that places Africa above its diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas. It is simply the recognition of a historical fact of the origins of these enslaved descendants of Africa. This depiction is, for me, especially appropriate, given the historical disconnection that occurred between Africa and its diaspora when Pan-Africanism returned home in the 1960s. There is still a wide geographical, political, economic and cultural gulf between the continent and its descendants, which we cannot wish away.

I. The Original Sin: Europe’s Enslavement of Africa

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery was undoubtedly Europe’s “original sin” against Africa. European locusts – explorers, slavers, merchants, missionaries, imperialists – arrived in Africa in the fifteenth century, and for the next five centuries ravaged the continent. In the process, they spread destructive plague and pestilence. As with the biblical locusts, the agricultural sector, in which most Africans found sustainance, was destroyed; famines proliferated; and the greatest migration in human history was enforced, with enchained human cargo being transported to the Caribbean and the Americas as chattel in totally degrading circumstances. In comparing European slavery to a plague, this phenomenon can be likened in its destructive socio-economic impact to the “Black Death” (1346–53), which killed over 50 million of Medieval Europe’s 80 million people: an astonishing 60 per cent of the population.¹² But there is an important difference: while the Black Death was a natural disaster that lasted eight years, the slave trade was a human act that endured for four and a half centuries.

Colonialism was the continuation of slavery by other means, with enslavement dehumanising Africans globally and providing the racist justifications and economic methods to implement alien rule on the basis that Africans could not yet stand on their own feet in the difficult conditions of Western “civilisation”. Four and a half centuries of European enslavement of Africans (1450–1888) to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas thus created one of the world’s largest diasporas, and flowed seamlessly into a century of European colonisation of the African continent. Both systems involved profit-driven exploitation – cloaked under the perverse justifications of a mission civilisatrice – which blamed their African victims for their own misfortunes, while the whole project was legitimised by Western leaders, capitalists, churches and scientists.

Aside from numerous slave revolts in the Caribbean and the Americas, there were many cases of African resistance to European colonialism. One of the most famous was the seventeenth-century Queen Njinga, who ruled the Ndongo kingdom in contemporary Angola for three decades. She bravely resisted Portuguese colonisers through adroit diplomacy and military prowess, and by forging effective alliances.¹³ Pan-Africanist movements emerged by the eighteenth century to provide African resistance to the evils of slavery. It was...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Part 1: Introduction: The Roots and Routes of Pan-Africanism
• Part 2: The Pioneers
• Part 3: The Politicians
• Part 4: The Activists
• Part 5: The Social Scientists
• Part 6: The Philosophers
• Part 7: The Literati
• Part 8: The Musical Activists
• Notes
• Index