Pan-Africanism is the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified. Historically, Pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement. There are many varieties of Pan-Africanism. In its narrowest political manifestation, Pan-Africanists envision a unified African nation where all people of the African diaspora can live. African diaspora refers to the long-term historical process by which people of African descent have been scattered from their ancestral homelands to other parts of the world. In more general terms, Pan-Africanism is the sentiment that people of African descent have a great deal in common, a fact that deserves notice and even celebration.
Pan-Africanism covers a wide range of intellectual positions which share the assumption of some common cultural or political projects for both Africans and people of African descent. The political project is the unification of all Africans into a single African state, sometimes thought of as providing a homeland for the return of those in the African diaspora. More vaguely, many self-identified Pan-Africanists have aimed to pursue projects of solidarity – some political, some literary or artistic – in Africa or the African diaspora.
The Pan-Africanist movement was founded in the nineteenth century by intellectuals of African descent in the Caribbean and North America, who saw themselves as belonging to a single negro race. As a result, the Africa of Pan-Africanism has sometimes been limited to those regions of sub-Saharan Africa largely inhabited by darker-skinned peoples, thus excluding those lighter-skinned North Africans, most of whom speak Arabic as a first language.
Pan-Africanism began as a movement in the diaspora among the descendants of the slave populations of the New World and spread to Africa itself. As a result, the forms of solidarity it articulated aimed to challenge anti-black racism on two fronts: racial domination in the diaspora and racialized colonial domination in the African continent. In the twentieth century, this racialized understanding of African identity has been challenged by many of the African intellectuals who took over the movement’s leadership in the period after the Second World War. Founders of the Organization of African Unity, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had a notion of Africa that was continental. However, the movement’s intellectual roots lie firmly in the racial understanding of Africa in the thought of the African-American and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals who founded it.
The greatest wrong that, the departing colonialists inflicted on us, and which we now continue to inflict on ourselves in our present state of disunity, was to leave us divided into economically unviable States which bear no possibility of real development. Pan-Africanism used to be a very charming doctrine when the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe, Marcus Garvey, Tambo, Robert Sobukwe, Eduardo Mondlane, Patrice Lumumba, and many great African giants were greated involved in spreading it. It had fundermental values that edified and promoted the African spirit and it was a common belief that Africans had a common interest. The unity of the peoples of Africa was strongly embroiled in it, such that people from different countries would feel like one people. Pan-Africanism spoke to the daily struggles of the African person and how possibly the struggles could be turned into positives by way of using the Africanness of all African individuals to construct an absolutely rich African culture.
The coming of independence ensured a whole new dispensation in Africa. The majority of the African countries dismally failed to realise the independence they were fighting for. Independence by definition of democracy and socialism became a myth, with most of our liberation movements claiming to have a monopoly over the very people they liberated. Slowly and strangely dictators started to flimsily show their true colours, some became even more dictatorial than the settler regimes they had just unseated. Some of the notable dictators that had “claimed” to represent the people under the broader doctrine of Pan-Africanism include Mobutu Sese Seko, Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Hifikepunye Pohamba, Yoweri Museveni, and Idi Amini. All hopes of having the United States of Africa crumbled as these dictators showed no signs of being prepared to be a “yes man “ to anyone else.
The African continent was again taken back to a class system, and the elite class emerged, only that this time around the elite class were those in power, those that claimed to represent the people. They owned mansions in foreign lands, invest in businesses abroad, and built empires for themselves outside of the African continent. Resources that were meant to be shared with the people became State resources, which they constantly tapped into to build their empires. The doctrine of socialism became far-fetched. A new set of the bourgeois classes had been set setting the people aside, and different interests began to manifest. The hopes of a United Africa embroiled in socialism were crushed.
Africa greatly failed to utilise the raw materials at its disposal. The end result was that most African countries became some of the poorest countries on this earth besides sitting on plenteous resources. Just like what Nkrumah wrote that the political-economic situation in the world is one in which a tiny minority of the people grow “richer and richer, while the rest grow poorer and poorer. Africa became just like the rest of the world after gaining independence.
Africa and Africans are not only to blame as the reason why Pan-Africanism failed to work. some of the brilliant Pan-Africanists were betrayed by their own people for example Thomas Sankara was assassinated by his own great comrade Blaise Compaore who became a people to the West and a disguise to the African liberalisation similarly the developed world has continuously thrown spanners in the way to the progress of Africa. Brilliant minds like Colonel Gaddafi who is regarded as one of the greatest Africans to have ever lived continuously faced opposition from the Europeans. Gaddafi promoted a policy of having one African currency and a United Africa, and because of many Pan-African policies, the Western world through Nato influenced riots in Libya that led to his assassination of Colonel Gaddafi on October 20, 2011.
The next episode will be focusing on the life, achievements, and dreams of The late Col Muammar Gaddafi had for the United States of Africa.
Kamukama Rukundo Clinton is a Ugandan freelance journalist, book author, and columnist for 1cananews who can be contacted via WhatsApp at +25670439540 and rukundopeter33@gmail.com
