Pan-Africanism
Africans and the African diaspora share a common political destiny, and continental unity is the condition of genuine independence rather than a sentiment about it.
What does this mean?
Pan-Africanism began in the diaspora rather than on the continent — among Caribbean and African American intellectuals arguing that people of African descent everywhere shared a political interest — and moved to Africa as decolonisation approached. Its central argument is structural: that the borders drawn at Berlin in 1884 produced states too small and too dependent on single commodity exports to be genuinely sovereign, so that political independence without continental integration produces flag independence and little else.
From that follow its characteristic positions: continental federation or at minimum deep economic union; control of resource extraction by African institutions; non-alignment between Cold War blocs; and cultural recovery against the assumption that development means becoming European. Nkrumah put the case most directly, arguing that Africa must unite or be picked apart state by state.
Its practical record is mixed and it knows it. The Organisation of African Unity was founded on the compromise position — cooperation among sovereign states rather than federation — and its successor the African Union continues that. Continental free trade arrived in 2021, sixty years after the argument for it was made.
Where did it come from?
Formalised at the Pan-African Congresses from 1900, led intellectually by W. E. B. Du Bois and organisationally by Kwame Nkrumah, who hosted the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Accra. It shaped the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s and produced the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.
Major thinkers
- W. E. B. Du Bois
- Kwame Nkrumah
- Frantz Fanon
- Amílcar Cabral
- Walter Rodney
Historical figures
- Kwame Nkrumah
- Julius Nyerere
- Patrice Lumumba
- Thomas Sankara
- Haile Selassie
What it looks like today
- The African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area, in force since 2021
- Campaigns for the restitution of looted cultural objects from European museums
- Debt cancellation and resource sovereignty arguments in African international policy
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Generally socialist in orientation, holding that resource extraction under foreign ownership reproduces colonial economics regardless of formal independence.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
Committed to cultural recovery and to rejecting the equation of development with Europeanisation.
Nation and the world
Distinctive on this axis: strongly anti-imperial and continental rather than either state-nationalist or globally internationalist. Solidarity is defined at the level of a continent and a diaspora.
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Genuinely divided. Some currents held that one-party states were needed to build national unity; others treated that as the betrayal of the project.
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- Its diagnosis has held up: states dependent on a single commodity export and lacking regional markets have proved persistently vulnerable.
- The continental free trade area it argued for is now the largest such area by number of countries.
- It provided the intellectual and organisational infrastructure of the independence movements, and of the campaign against apartheid.
Its strongest criticisms
- Federation was never achieved, and the sovereignty-first compromise of the OAU is the position that actually prevailed.
- Several of its leading figures used the language of continental unity to justify one-party rule at home.
- Critics argue it underrates the depth of national, ethnic and linguistic differences it proposed to subsume.
Common misconceptions
- That it is only a cultural or identity movement. Its core proposals — federation, monetary union, common tariffs — are institutional and economic.
- That it began in Africa. The first Pan-African Congress met in London in 1900, and the movement’s early leadership was largely from the Caribbean and the United States.
- That it is a single political programme. Its adherents included liberal democrats, Marxists and monarchists.
A caveat
The tradition’s internal split over whether one-party rule was a necessary stage means a match here can be consistent with very different views on the power axis. Read that axis separately.
Sources
- Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite · 1963
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa · 1947
- Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa · 1972