III.

Development of Pan-Africanism

Africans resisted European domination from their earliest contacts with Europeans. The record of this resistance is present in the early communications between the rulers of African states and the monarchs of Europe in the 17th century, as well as in the routine physical resistance of Africans to slavery from the beginning of the slave trade. Modern resistance to colonialism, however, began with the development of a formal Pan-African movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1900 Henry Sylvester Williams, a lawyer from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, organized a Pan-African conference in London to give black people the opportunity to discuss issues facing blacks around the world. The conference attracted a small but significant representation of Africans and people of African descent from the Caribbean and the United States, as well as whites from Britain.

The original political objective of the meeting was to protest the unequal treatment of blacks in the British colonies as well as in Britain. However, the speakers also used the forum to make statements about the needs to uphold the dignity of African peoples worldwide and to provide them with education and other social services. In addition, speakers at the conference celebrated aspects of traditional African culture and pointed out great historical achievements of African peoples in the tradition of influential Pan-African pioneer Edward Wilmot Blyden. Blyden, a Caribbean-born Liberian educator, wrote extensively in the late 19th century about the positive accomplishments of Africans and may have coined the term Pan-Africanism.

The next several Pan-African meetings were organized by distinguished African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The consequences of World War I (1914-1918) raised serious concerns among blacks in the United States. The main issues were the well-being of African American and African soldiers who had served in the war and the status of former German colonial territories in Africa that had been captured during the war by Britain, France, and other Allied powers. Du Bois convened the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. The congress was held at the same time as the Paris Peace Conference, at which European powers negotiated the aftermath of the war.

The agenda of the first Pan-African Congress resembled that of the 1900 conference in its concern for the plight of Africans and people of African descent. Significant emphasis was placed on the provision of education for Africans and the need for greater African participation in the affairs of the colonies. Specific interest in the African territories of the conquered German colonial empire was also expressed. A proposal was made that these territories be held in trust by the newly founded League of Nations with the goal of granting the territories self-determination as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the territories were placed under the nominal supervision of the league, which distributed the territories to other European colonial powers without demanding that the new colonial rulers move the territories toward self-determination.

The next Pan-African congresses sponsored by Du Bois were held in 1921 (in London, Paris, and Brussels, Belgium), 1923 (in London and Lisbon, Portugal), and 1927 (in New York City). These congresses were attended by increasing numbers of representatives from the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Several important factors affected the growing popularity of the congresses. First, many delegates were sponsored by international labor movements, which were growing in size and power in the 1920s. A second factor was the growth of the black nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey. The Garvey movement was important in the United States as a popular expression of the sentiments of African unity and redemption among working-class blacks. His followers contrasted with the more elite black groups cultivated by Du Bois. Garvey, a Jamaican, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 to promote black pride, political and economic improvements for blacks everywhere, and the repatriation of blacks to Africa (often called the “Back to Africa” movement).

The institutional growth of the Garvey movement was swift and international in scope. Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, achieved wide distribution, and chapters of UNIA sprung up all over the Americas, as well as in Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Garvey also established a steamship company, the Black Star Line, with which he hoped both to enter international trade and to transport blacks to Africa. Garvey hoped to oversee the repatriation of tens of thousands of American blacks to the West African nation of Liberia, which had been founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century. The Garvey movement declined when Garvey was arrested and imprisoned in 1925 on charges of mail fraud relating to the operation of the Black Star Line, and his repatriation scheme was never fulfilled.

Influenced by Garvey’s ideas, young Africans studying in London founded the West African Student Union (WASU) in the late 1920s. WASU became a focal point for younger, more politically aggressive blacks from Africa and the Caribbean who agitated for African independence from colonialism.

In the late 1920s and the 1930s, public awareness of the plight of peoples of African descent grew as black cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in the United States gained recognition. The Harlem Renaissance, centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, disseminated the works of black writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Du Bois himself, along with other black artists espousing black pride and challenging racial injustice. In France, a similar movement, called the négritude movement, followed the Harlem Renaissance. The movement developed in Paris among French-speaking African intellectuals and activists whose works affirmed the integrity of African civilization, defending it against charges of African inferiority. Noted proponents of négritude included the authors Léopold Sédar Senghor (who later became the first president of Senegal), Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, and Léon-Gontran Damas.