NEVIS Review N0 18
Section II
Ref# 18.2
June 3, 2013
---------------------------
(Ed’ note- The following incisive and thoughtful article on Pan-Africanism is by Dr
Costantinos, a frequent contributor to
NEVIS. We would like to thank Dr Costantinos for his continuous association with NEVIS. Dr Costantinos is a
Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies, Addis Ababa University.We are really honored to have intellectuals
of high caliber like him in our series of articles in NEVIS. We would also
thank our hundreds of readers who eagerly expect our semi-monthly articles, and
continuously encourage us for the (volunteer) work we love to do..The following
is part I of the article titled,” The Promises & Pitfalls of Pan-Africanism
:Ideological and agency trajectories for African Integration”. Part two, which shall
deal with “Ideological basis for Pan-Africanism and African
unification and the conclusion part, will appear in the our
next edition. NEVIS ET*)
The Promises
& Pitfalls of
Pan-Africanism
Ideological and
agency trajectories for African Integration
Part I
By Costantinos BT Costantinos, PhD
A
dialogue starter ‘think piece’ for African Union Summit
-----------------------------------------
Abstract
Pan-Africanism represents the complexities of black
political and intellectual thought over two hundred years. What constitutes
Pan-Africanism, what one might include in a Pan-African movement often changes
according to whether the focus is on politics, ideology, organisations or
culture. Pan-
Africanism actually reflects a range of political
views. At a basic level, it is a belief that African peoples,
both on the African continent and in the Diaspora,
share not merely a common history, but a common
destiny. This paper raises the tangential issues of
the trajectories on the stewardship of African unification
are marked by uniquely austere
organisational-strategic issues. Even under democratically favourable
contemporary global conditions, historical,
ideological and strategic characteristics internal and external
to the unification process still would make that
transition a costly exercise. African Unification, without
any doubt, is in crisis. Africa has very little, if
any, experience in open democratic discourse and is
unfamiliar with the critical values and practices
that anchor that culture and tradition. In the face of the
fact that past and present constitutions had never
actually been effectively established as democratic
structures, they are criticised for failing to
protect the rights of the citizenry. Such gross generalisations
attempt to assess failure and make a move in a game
by reference to a set of rules, which on the one hand
are alien to the majority of the populace and had
never been in forced, on the other. Significantly, this
depends upon the emergence of supportive set
of political institutions that are recurrent and valued patterns of political
behaviour that give shape and regularity to politics. The power of a
given set of factors to explain these possibilities, the susceptibility of
concepts to empirical investigation, and the potential of the approach to
generate policy recommendations, however, will no wonder lead to an imperative
to adopt an institutional approach. The key question is therefore whether the
endowment of political institutions is conducive to African integration and
unification!
-----------------------------------
1. Introduction
Today, humankind stands on an extraordinary, and
perhaps, seductive sets of dilemma: a
global lifestyle and value system in which the 21st
century has ushered in unprecedented global
wealth; yet, such a lot that is all lavishly
squandered, while Africa is haunted by an oppressive
present -- an embodiment of famine, wars, and
devoured natural environment. The
interconnectedness of people and good governance
locally and its impact on integration were
manifested by how seemingly minor incidences can
turn into genocides of mind boggling
proportions that continue today two decades after
Rwanda; fracturing the foundations of social
accord in distant communities. Although Africa is
lumped as a political community, it is also a
continent, where various nationalities who speak
over 2000 languages, enjoy varied cultures
and inhabited their own territories since ancient
times. Nonetheless, it is also a new continent
modelled under the totalitarian rule of colonialists
and the military that were handpicked to
replace them. Carrying arms became a sign of manly
distinction. Coupled with Stalinist
ideology, the pervasive military ethos brewed
military discipline to breed a culture of conformity
and uniformity. Hence, Pan Africanism grew out of
19th century efforts to end the slave trade.
“Colonialism, born out of the
Berlin Conference had begun in earnest as of 1884 & 85. As a result
of these events black people
worldwide began to realise that they faced slavery, colonisation, and
racism, and that it would be to
their benefit to work together in an effort to solve these problems.
Out of this realisation came the
Pan African Conferences of 1900 (London), 1919 (Paris), 1921
(London, Brussels, and Paris),
1923 (London), 1927 (New York)… Some of the most influential blacks
of the time participated in these
meetings: Slyvester Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey,
Kwame Nkrumah, etc. The belief
that people of African descent share a common history and culture
and should stick together was the
principle idea behind Pan-Africanism: bringing all black people
together expressed through
history, literature, music, art…, (Rosenberg,
M., 2003).
The initial motive for this papers arose from Yoweri
Museveni’s presentation of the Working
Document for the Tripartite
Meeting (28
August 2004) to the presidents of Kenya, Tanzania and
Uganda; a presentation that set the tone for African
political, economic and social integration.
Museveni rightly underpins the
excessive ‘balkanisation’ of Africa, asserting there from the need
to take decisive strategic action
in respect of politician integration. He further goes on to ask “why
do I think that economic
integration is not enough to guarantee the future of the black man even if it
is successfully implemented?
“Economic integration, without political integration, is slow. It will
take longer for the benefits of
integration to spread around the (continent) evenly. It also splits our
consciousness.” He goes on to
alarm the world on the greatest danger looming over our heads. He
underlines the “fact that while
Europeans and Americans are now basing themselves on Mars and
outer-space, Africa has almost
forgotten how to make the spear. Africa was conquered and the
spectre of Slave Trade was
visited on us because we lagged behind in technology. Africans today
survive at the mercy of others.
Rationality would have propelled us to quickly use the recovery of
our independence to ensure that
Africa stands up once and for all time”.[1] Museveni audaciously
declares how “Africa was
plundered but survived the slave trade, colonialism and the neo-colonial
regimes. We survived Western
Imperialism. Are we to wait for what future Asian imperialism will
offer? We occupy one of the
biggest land masses with considerable natural resources. Why can we
not turn, at least, parts of this
land mass into a powerful base for the Black race?”
This paper raises the tangential issues of the
trajectories on the stewardship of African
unification that are marked by uniquely austere
organisational-strategic issues. Even under
democratically favourable contemporary global
conditions, historical, ideological and strategic
characteristics internal and external to the
unification process still would make it a costly
exercise. African Unification, without any doubt, is
in crisis. It heavily depends on the legitimacy
of national democratic process that is honest,
predictable, transparent and accountable in the
execution of the African states’ broader unification
responsibility. It is apparent that as the
continent enters this new era of political pluralism
there is a need to overhaul the administrative
machinery and develop institutional alternatives to
the centralised, bureaucratic and
hierarchical organisational structure of the state;
that will determine the terms of entry into the
unification
process.
-----------------------------
2. The Pitfalls and Promises of
Pan Africanism:
2.1.The Scramble for Africa:
The Scramble for Africa, also known as the Race for
Africa was a process of invasion,
occupation, colonisation and annexation of African
territory by European powers during the
New Imperialism period, between 1881 and World War I
in 1914. Because of the heightened
tension between European states in the last quarter
of the 19th century, the partitioning of
Africa may be seen as a way for the Europeans to
eliminate the threat of a Europe-wide war over
Africa. The last 59 years of the 19th century saw
transition from "informal imperialism" of control through military
influence and economic dominance to that of direct rule. The Portuguese had
been the first post-Middle Ages Europeans to firmly establish settlements,
trade posts, permanent fortifications and ports of call along the coast of the
African continent, from the beginning of the Age of Discovery, in the 15th
century. There was little interest in, and less knowledge of, the interior for
some two centuries thereafter.
European exploration of the African interior began
in earnest at the end of the 18th century.
By 1835, Europeans had mapped most of north-western
Africa. In the middle decades of the
19th century, the most famous of the European
explorers were David Livingstone and H. M.
Stanley, both of whom mapped vast areas of Southern
Africa and Central Africa. Arduous
expeditions in the 1850s and 1860s by Richard
Burton, John Speke and James Grant located the
great central lakes and the source of the Nile. By
the end of the 19th century, Europeans had
charted the Nile from its source, traced the courses
of the Niger, Congo and Zambezi Rivers, and
realised the vast resources of Africa. Even as late
as the 1870s, European states still controlled
only 10 percent of the African continent, all their
territories being near the coast. The most
important holdings were Angola and Mozambique, held
by Portugal; the Cape Colony, held by
the United Kingdom; and Algeria, held by France.
By 1914, only Ethiopia, Liberia and the Dervish
State were independent of European control.
Technological advancement facilitated overseas
expansionism. Industrialisation brought about
rapid advancements in transportation and
communication, especially in the forms of steam
navigation, railways, and telegraphs. Medical
advances also were important, especially
medicines for tropical diseases. The development of
quinine, an effective treatment for malaria,
enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be accessed
by Europeans.[2] However, in Africa –
exclusive of the area which became the Union of South
Africa in 1910 – the amount of capital
investment by Europeans was relatively small,
compared to other continents. Consequently, the
companies involved in tropical African commerce were
relatively small, apart from Cecil
Rhodes's De Beers Mining Company. Rhodes had carved
out Rhodesia for himself; Léopold II of
Belgium later, and with considerably greater
brutality, exploited the Congo Free State. These
events might detract from the pro-imperialist
arguments of colonial lobbies such as the
Alldeutscher Verband, Francesco Crispi and Jules
Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas
markets in Africa would solve the problems of low
prices and over-production caused by
shrinking continental markets.
----------------------------------------------------
2.2. Pan-Africanism - A brief history:
Pan-Africanism represents the complexities of black
political and intellectual thought over
two hundred years. What constitutes Pan-Africanism?
Pan-African movement often changes
according to whether the focus is on politics,
ideology, organisations or culture. Pan-Africanism
actually reflects a range of political views. At a
basic level, it is a belief that African peoples, both
on the African continent and in the Diaspora, share
not merely a common history, but a
common destiny. This sense of interconnected pasts
and futures has taken many forms,
especially in the creation of political
institutions. One of the earliest manifestations of Pan-
Africanism came in the names that Africans gave to
their religious institutions [3]
An important political form of a religious
Pan-Africanist worldview appeared in the form of
Ethiopianism. Ethiopia’s African diasporic
religious symbolism grew in the 1800s among blacks in the United States and the
Caribbean, through a reading of Psalm 68:31, “Ethiopia shall
soon stretch forth its hands unto God,” as a
prophesy that God would redeem Africa and free the
enslaved. The verse served as a bulwark against a
racist theology that declared black people were
the descendants of Ham, the cursed son of Noah whose
children were to be the hewers of wood
and drawers of water. Ethiopianism thus emerged
initially as a psychic resistance to racist
theology, soon becoming the basis of a nascent
political organizing. Négritude is a literary and
ideological movement, developed by francophone black
intellectuals, writers, and politicians in
France in the 1930s. Its founders included the
future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar
Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the
Guianan Léon Damas. The Négritude writers
found solidarity in a common black identity as a
rejection of perceived French colonial racism.
They believed that the shared black heritage of
members of the African Diaspora was the best
tool in fighting against French political and
intellectual hegemony and domination. They formed
a realistic literary style and formulated their
Marxist ideas as part of this movement.
Ethiopianism took institutional form in South
Africa; African diasporic activist-intellectuals
were beginning to convene pan-African conferences.
The first of these was the Chicago
Conference on Africa, convened on August 14, 1893.[4]
In southern Africa in the late-1800s,
Ethiopianism assumed institutional form following
visits from the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, especially Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.[5] (Bogues, Anthony, 2003; Esedebe, P.
Olisanwuche,
1994; Fierce, Milfred C., 1993 & James, C.L.R,
1995.)
-------------------------------------
2.3.Congresses and Communist
Movements
By the 1920s, Pan-Africanism represented an ideology
with multiple currents. Along with
Garvey and the UNIA, several others pursued
Pan-African liberation. The African Blood
Brotherhood was an extremely small organisation by
comparison, never reaching more than a
few thousand members. Its members, especially its
founder Cyril Briggs (from the small
Leeward Island of Nevis), the Barbadian orator
Richard B. Moore, and the African-American
social worker and clubwoman Grace Campbell,
articulated a Pan-African politics that sought to
link African liberation, national independence in
the Caribbean, and anti-racist struggles in the
United States with proletarian revolution for
socialism. Many ABB members became the first
black members of the American Communist Party and
pursued their Pan-African vision within
the institutions of the Moscow-based Communist
International, where they met and built ties
with Francophone black radicals in Paris, as well as
West African activists. (Lemelle, Sidney and
Robin Kelley , 1994 & Magubane, Bernard
Makhosezwe, 1987. )
The most enduring representation of
early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanism came in the
Pan-African congresses. W. E. B. Du Bois, the
renowned scholar and intellectual who headed the
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured
People’s publicity department, where he
edited its magazine The Crisis, had been a
member of Crummell’s American Negro Academy
and participated in the 1900 Pan-African Conference
in London.[6] The fourth PAC, organised by
the Women’s International Circle for Peace and
Foreign Relations (a black women’s club in New
York led by Addie W. Hunton, Nina Du Bois and Minnie
Pickens,) met in 1927. It was originally
to meet in Tunisia or the Caribbean, but when the
French and British governments blocked the
congress, it was moved to New York City. At the New
York congress, former African Blood
Brothers Richard B. Moore and Otto Huiswoud pushed
the adoption of a resolution supporting
black workers and calling for Egyptian, Chinese and
Indian liberation, and urging Caribbean
national liberation and federation [7] (Martin,
Tony, 1976, Moses, Wilson, 2004 & Taylor, Ula, 2002)
Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere convened the last
Pan-African Congress June 17–19,
1974, in Dar es Salaam. Commonly known as the Six
PAC, this was the first congress held in
Africa. Nyerere considered this meeting, coming
after national liberation had spread throughout
Africa and the Caribbean, as an opportunity to
discuss the “means, and further, the progress, of
opposition to racialism, colonialism, oppression and
exploitation everywhere,” and placing these
in “the context of a worldwide movement for human
equality and national self-determination.”
Alluding to the new challenges presented by
independence, Nyerere asked those present to recognise that “an end to colonialism
is not an end to the oppression of man,” and to continue working “against
oppression by the leaders of those countries which have recently attained freedom,
whether this is directed against other black men and women, or against people
of different races.” (Walters, Ronald W., 1993)
-----------------------
3. Political contestation in
Africa: beacons of hope or serious disappointments?
It is worth pointing out that overall noticeable
changes in the direction of democratisation
process, or more accurately political liberalisation
process, have occurred but this process
remains constantly threatened by the exorbitant
weight of the central power concentrated in the
hands of the executive branch and the scale of the
economic problems awaiting solution.
3.1. Constitutional conferences
and reforms:
Africa has very little, if any, experience in open
democratic discourse and is unfamiliar with
the critical values and practices that anchor
democratic culture and tradition. In the face of the
fact that past and present “Constitutions” had never
actually been effectively established,
especially as democratic structures, they are
criticised for failing "to protect the rights of the
citizenry". Such gross generalisations attempt
to assess failure and make a move in a game by
reference to a set of rules which on the one hand
are alien to the majority of the populace and
had never been in place and in force on the other.
Democracy must actually exist, take definite
shape and structure and become a working process,
before particular criticisms, claims and
demands can be based on it. In this sense and
generally speaking, constitutional reforms have
been key elements in the transition resulting in
major restructuring of the African polity. On the
other hand, it would not be a gross violation to say
that, thanks to the presence of a majority
parliamentary group devolved to the party in power,
the national assemblies have played and
continue to play the role of rubber stamp chamber.
Nowhere have an elected representative
challenged the Executive and the spirit of the
single party practices continues except in Ghana
and Zambia. The judiciary power has played a more
visible role by the favourable judgements
rendered to certain opponents in the regime bad
books.
------------------------------
3.2.Federalism, ethnicity and the
re-institutions of traditional systems:
A lot has been said here and there about
decentralisation yet the debate on federalism has
not been deepened from fear of seeing national unity
disintegrate as the case with Tanzania and
Zanzibar, Cameroon -- Anglophone and Francophone. In
Uganda the Buganda kingdom
partisans have forced the debate on federalism in
the context of the drafting of the new
constitution; and the talks on decentralisation as a
means to satisfy the Velleities of the Touareg
Independence Movement in Mali. The single most
important influence over how transitions
have been conceived is the politics of ethnic
self-determination and self-government. Consistent
with this strategy, Governments have undertaken a
major restructuring of the nation-state,
cutting it up into a score of sub-states based on
ethnic identity. One major obstacle to efforts to
install and consolidate democratic system in Africa
is the all powerful, highly centralised and
hierarchical bureaucratic structure.[8]
African Unification, without any doubt, is in
crisis. It heavily depends on the legitimacy of
national democratic process that will in turn depend
in important ways on it being perceived as
reasonably honest, predictable, transparent and
accountable in the execution of the African
states’ broader unification responsibility. Public
sector corruption and inefficiencies undermine
political, economic and social stability by
undermining citizen’s faith in the democratic process.
In situations where public officials are seen to be
using their positions to advance parochial
interest and self-aggrandisement, a general loss of
respect for authority and the law occurs and
despondency in the general population develops. It
is apparent that as the continent enters this
new era of political pluralism and democratic
governance there is a need to overhaul the
administrative machinery and develop institutional
alternatives to the centralised, bureaucratic
and hierarchical organisational structure of the
state. (Costantinos, BT., 1996)
------------------------------------
3.3.Unanswered
questions of African unification:
Because
discussions leading to African futures tend to be one of dejection, the so
called post-Cold War political history of the continent is fast replacing
African economics as the morbid art or science. But caution, not cynicism,
should be the craft of the well wisher - as has been amply demonstrated by
Museveni. While participants in the complex traffic web of African futures could
be torn between professional caution and the genuine desire for a better future
for their continent, repeated attempts to dispel the prevailing gloom by
pointing to the bright spots of the
African past and calls for the fostering of those
cultural resources to check the overall drift
towards ‘non-unification’ have not yielded to
popular demands, that raises some questions.
-
What do we mean by
African unification in the first place?
-
Does unification
have indigenous roots?
-
Is perhaps all this
talk of African unification an academic or a public relations exercise?
Lurking in the background of all these questions is
the rather disturbing one: is
perhaps all this talk of African
unification an academic or a public relations
exercise? The stark reality of the new
concept of the failed state in Somalia and the
“community-based” and locally-perpetrated genocide
in Rwanda, to name a few, make
this last question less cynical than it would
otherwise appear at first sight. Indeed as
Museveni asserts “Africans today are surviving at
the mercy of others. Rationality
would have propelled us to
quickly use the recovery of our independence to ensure that
Africa stands up once and for all
time. The independence and Post-independence
African leaders need to bear the
historical responsibility for the future tragedies that
may befall the Africans in
future.” African
leaders are articulate in stating their
unification aims and positions and in promoting them
within and through the AU; but to
describe the strategy is problematique for a number
of reasons.
African States cannot be expected to know all their
political objectives and means-ends
calculation openly when it comes to issue of unity
and one cannot suppose that their formally
declared aims and purposes exhaust their ideological
and strategic intentions. Hence, the way in
which Museveni envisions the concepts and goals of
political unification in specific contexts may
be at variance with the global “meaning” or “sense”
attributed to them. The specific mode of
concern about African unification may be more
revolutionary than processual, egalitarian than
liberal, or more substantive than procedural. Or, it
may switch from the liberal code or
structural model of union to the revolutionary code
unpredictably. These possibilities make the
task of describing Museveni’s unionising reform
objectives a bit difficult. The articulation of
ideas and ends of unification is not monolithic. It
is modulated within the network of domestic
and foreign participants. It includes statements of
aims for “general audiences”, like the goal of
securing peace and stability and prevention of
balkanisation. But it also includes discourses and
associated objectives designed primarily, though not
exclusively, for consumption by specific
constituencies.
For these reasons, it is not easy to give an exact
account of African unification goals and
ultimate political ends pursued by Museveni. The
author has lingering doubts and questions
about the current status and mission of the dominant
regional organisations and at the core of
them the African Union about the nature of
the alliance that all point up the need for caution
in taking Museveni’s declaratory goals of “African
unification” at face value. Nevertheless, one
can describe fairly accurately the declared reform
goals on the assumption that they are
significant, if not exhaustive, indicators of
Museveni’s real intentions. This is admittedly a
simplifying assumption, but one which provides a
point of departure for analysing an involved
and controversial strategy. What does this leave for
African Unity? Practically nothing but
problems to solve! African Unity needs to be built -
and built - virtually from scratch.
-----------------------------
Notes
[1]
] “African leaders need to bear the historical responsibility for the future
tragedies that may befall the Africans in future.
Space-based weapons are going to be the dominant forms of aggression. The Black
race is just sitting in these micro
political units created by Colonialism (the 53 States of the African Union)
completely oblivious of what is going on in the
World. What always amazes me is the ability of Africans to hate themselves and
love their enemies. We love and get
mesmerised by the strength and might of others but we are indifferent to
building our own?”
[2]
Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by
"informal imperialism", was also attractive to
Europe's ruling elites for economic and racial reasons. During a time when
Britain's balance of trade showed a
growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental
markets due to the Long Depression
(1873–96), Africa offered Britain, Germany, France and other countries an open
market that would garner them a
trade surplus: a market that bought more from the colonial power than it sold
overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to
run an unfavourable balance of trade. As Britain developed into the world's
first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly
important sector of its economy.Invisible
financial exports kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments
outside Europe, particularly to the
developing and open markets in Africa such as to the white settler colonies,
the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast
Asia. In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas,
where cheap materials,limited
competition and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another
inducement for imperialism
arose from the demand for raw materials and Britain wanted the coasts of Africa
for stopover to Asia.
[3]
From the late-1780s onward, free blacks in the US established their own
churches in response to racial
segregation
in white churches. They were tired, for example, of being confined to church
galleries and submitting to church rules
that prohibited them from being buried in church cemeteries. In 1787 a young
black Methodist minister, Richard
Allen, along with another black clergyman, Absalom Jones, established the Free
African Society, a benevolent organisation
that held religious services and mutual aid for “free Africans and their
descendants” in Philadelphia. In 1794 Jones
accepted a position as pastor of the Free African Society’s African Episcopal
Church of St. Thomas. Allen, desiring to
lead a Methodist congregation, established in southern Philadelphia’s growing
black community the Bethel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, which also served as a way station on the
Underground Railroad. Africa in the name
of these early black religious institutions reflected an expansive worldview
and an African consciousness evident also
in Allen’s support for emigration back to Africa and Haiti. Indeed, in 1824
this impulse led approximately six thousand
blacks from Philadelphia and other U.S. coastal cities to immigrate to Haiti; a
community descended from
Philadelphia blacks who settled in what was then eastern Haiti still exists in
Samaná, a small peninsula city in the northeast
of the Dominican Republic.
[4]
Lasting a week, it drew, among others, Henry McNeal Turner and
Alexander Crummell, the Egyptian Yakub Pasha, and
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bishop Alexander Walters. Topics of
discussion included “The African in
America,” “Liberia as a Factor in the Progress of the Negro Race,” and “What Do
American Negroes Owe to Their Kin
Beyond the Sea.” That impulse toward an African identity was also apparent in
the religious practices of enslaved
people throughout the Americas, who tended to develop syncretic religions that
blended African deities and belief
systems with Christianity and Catholicism, giving rise to Santería in Cuba,
Vodun in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and
Candomblé in Brazil. In contrast, enslaved people in the United States tended
not to develop elaborate belief
systems, but their African-informed religious practices helped foster a sense
of collective identity, just as Vodu and Santería
did, and served as the basis of certain radical political practices. The
Haitian revolution, itself facilitated and organised
through Vodun, inspired several southern enslaved ministers like Nat Turner,
Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey
to lead or plot slave revolts.
[5] Two groups, one led
by Joseph Mathunye Kanyane Napo in 1888, the other by Mangena Maake Mokone in 1892, broke
from the Anglican and Methodist churches, Mokone establishing the Ethiopian
Church in 1892, which joined the
African Methodist Episcopal Church four years later. This led to several South
Africans visiting the United States and
attending historically black colleges, including some of the earliest leaders
of the African Native National Congress.
Ethiopianism was also believed to have played a role in the 1906 Natal Zulu Rebellion.
At the same time that Dusé
Mohamed Ali prepared to launch his journal, a young Jamaican printer by the
name of Marcus Garvey was travelling
throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Garvey would land in Europe in
1912, and upon arriving in London, he
joined the ATOR staff. Ali’s journal and the political ferment in London
exposed Garvey to an even wider diasporic
world than he had encountered in his travels throughout the Americas. He began
to envision a global movement that
would unite the race and found an African empire. Upon returning to Jamaica in
1914, Garvey established
the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African
Communities League. He met little
success in Jamaica, but a trip to the US to raise money and to meet Booker T.
Washington altered his life.
[6]This
congress also established a second Pan-African Association, which Du Bois
controlled. This PAA fared little better
than its first iteration, but it did allow Du Bois to stave off the deep
schisms that began to develop between the
Anglophone and Francophone participants. In 1923 Du Bois was able to convene a
third PAC in London and Lisbon,
Portugal. The approaching Paris Peace Conference would decide the future of
Germany’s African colonies. Du Bois called for
the Pan-African Congress to meet in Paris, and it was convened February 19–21,
1919. Presided over by Blaise Diagne
of Senegal and Du Bois, it attracted delegates from throughout the African
Diaspora, though no representatives
came from the British West Indies, and hardly any were present from West
Africa. White representatives
from France, Belgium, and Portugal defended their countries’ colonial policies,
while the U.S. representative
William Walling argued that changes to American racial policies were on the
horizon. Indeed, the resolution
adopted at the congress tended more toward moderation and gradual reform than
anything approximating a demand for
immediate independence, calling on the proposed League of Nations to establish
rules and codes for governing
African colonial subjects and outlined a series of guidelines for governing
Africans and peoples of African descent. n
planning the second congress, he expressed a desire to “have a strong
representation of the West Africans.” The second
congress met in London, August 27–29, 1921, and in Brussels and Paris from
August 31 to September 2, 1921.
Importantly, a third of its participants came from Africa, though only seven of
the 113 were from the Caribbean. The
congress’s resolution came out more forcefully for self-government in Africa,
the return of expropriated lands, development
of the masses and for race leaders to align themselves more closely to black
workers.
[7]
Moore and Huiswoud soon emerged at the fore of an effort among black
radicals in the communist movement to build an
international organisation with African diasporic radicals from the Caribbean
and Africa. The Trinidadian George
Padmore had joined the American Communist Party while a student at Howard
University in 1927. Rising rapidly within
the party, he found himself in 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, heading the Communist
International’s Negro Bureau
and leading the newly formed International Trade Union Committee of Negro
Workers that organised black
maritime workers in Europe, who helped circulate the organisation’s journal, The
Negro Worker.
[8]
Built over the last fifty years, the organisational imperative of the
massive bureaucratic machine is to
command and
control and is preoccupied with its own survival and enrichment. It is unlikely
that the powerful
bureaucracy
will abandon its privileged position and control of the state apparatus to
democratically elected political leaders or
respect the institutional restraints of democratic rule without struggle.
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