A Short history of Pan-

Africanism
For Global Pan-Africanism Network
By: Adam Hudson (GPAN USA country rep.)
Pan-Africanism: birthed by slave rebellions
● Africa is seen as the “Dark Continent” -- a place with no civilization;
Europeans created this myth to justify slavery and colonialism.
● Africa has around 4,000 ethnic groups and, before the Europeans came, was
home to several civilizations, city-states, and kingdoms -- just as civilized
anywhere else.
● During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from the late 1400s to the late 1800s,
Europeans kidnapped, stole, and trafficked over 10 million Africans from
Western and Central Africa (from the Senegambia region down to Angola and
Mozambique) to work as slaves in North America, the Caribbean, Central and
South America -- working on plantations and building infrastructure.
● That slave labor enriched their empires, fueled a global economy, and built
modern capitalism.
● Pan-Africanism, as an ideology, was birthed during the trans-Atlantic slave
trade as a form of African resistance to captivity.
● On slave ships and plantations, enslaved Africans socialized, communicated,
and inter-married with each other. Despite violent suppression, enslaved
Africans brought their cultures with them to the Americas, such as food,
music, and elements of their spirituality. This amalgamation and fusion of 45
different African ethnic groups led to the creation of new African cultural
identities in the diaspora -- African-American, Jamaican, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-
Cuban, etc. You can see it in the culture -- jazz, bomba, samba, blues, and
other forms of Black music that have clear African roots.
○ This was, arguably, a real Pan-African synthesis.
● Rather than identifying by their specific ethnic groups -- Yoruba, Mende,
Ashanti, etc. -- enslaved Africans in the Americas self-identified as “African.”
● African abolitionists in the diaspora also referred to themselves as “Africans.”
● Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved African kidnapped from the Kingdom of
Benin and became a free man, writer, and abolitionist, referred to himself as
“The African” in his writings.
● The first use of the term “African-American” was documented in 1782, around
the time of the American Revolution. A self-described “African-American”
delivered an anti-British sermon.
● The Haitian revolution also bolstered the collective African identity in the
diaspora and further emboldened slave revolts and abolition in other parts of
the Americas.
● Before Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, there were repatriation
efforts dating back to the 1700s as part of abolition.
● Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) led repatriation efforts to Africa. Cuffe was born in the
American colony and current state of Massachusetts. His mother was an
Indigenous American woman of the Wampanaog tribe and his father was an
enslaved African of Ashanti origin who was later freed by his master, which
meant Cuffe was born into a free family.
● Cuffe was a whaler, businessman, and abolitionist. As a sailor and mariner, he
used his skills to organize repatriation efforts. He traveled to Sierra Leone and
helped repatriate formerly enslaved Africans to a settlement of repatriated
Africans.
● Martin Delany (1812-1885) is another important Pan-African figure. He was
an African-American journalist, physician, and soldier who was born a free
person of color in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). He visited
Liberia and dreamed of establishing a settlement for liberated formerly
enslaved Africans in West Africa. His efforts were cut short during the
American Civil War as he returned to the United States and joined and
recruited for the United States Colored Troops.
● Delany is best known for coining the phrase “Africa for Africans” -- decades
before Marcus Garvey was even born.
Pan-Africanism: anti-colonialism and African unity
● Once the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended throughout the Americas (Brazil
abolished slavery in 1888), Europeans began their “Scramble for Africa.”
During the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, European powers -- Britain, France,
Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy -- met to carve Africa for
themselves and establish their colonies and spheres of influence.
● After the American Civil War ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished in the
United States, the American South quickly established a regime of racial
apartheid to politically and economically disenfranchise Black people, along
with inflict racial terrorism, including lynchings.
● Much of the Caribbean, despite the abolition of slavery, remained colonized
by Britain and France. Black people in Europe also faced anti-Black racism.
● Amidst racial apartheid, anti-Black racism, and European colonialism, Pan-
Africanists held conferences to address their issues. But one man took Pan-
Africanism to another level and laid down a crucial blueprint.
● Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a Jamaican journalist, entrepreneur, and political
activist, saw Black people oppressed wherever he traveled and wondered,
“Where is the Black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom?
Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy,
his men of big affairs?” He could not find them so he said, “I will help to make
them.”
● In 1914, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
The UNIA was, perhaps, the biggest mass movement for Black nationalism and
Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century. Garvey and the UNIA preached Black self-
determination, pride in African roots, repatriation to Africa, and the expeling
Europeans from Africa. The UNIA had chapters in the United States, Cuba, the
Caribbean, throughout the African diaspora, and Africa. Black nationalism was a
threat to European colonial interests in Africa.
● The U.S. government infiltrated the UNIA, charged Garvey with tax evasion,
deported him to Jamaica. He died in Britain in 1940.
● In 1920, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA created the Pan-African flag for people of
African descent -- red, black, and green. Red for the shared African bloodline of
African people, black for Black African people and a Black nation, and green for the
land of Africa. Many African countries, after independence, adopted these colors into
their flags.
● The UNIA also influenced Black Power activists and movements, such as Malcolm X
and the Black Panther Party.
● To overcome the damage of the Berlin Conference, newly-independent
African countries had two different visions for the future of Africa.
● The Monrovia Group, the moderate nationalists, favored keeping the colonial
borders but giving each nation its own sovereignty.
● The Casablanca Group, the radical Pan-Africanists, supported a unified
African continent with socialist economics. Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed
Sekou Toure fell into this camp -- a united Africa under African socialism.
● Post-independence, the Monrovia Group won, by sheer majority, but Pan-
African never stopped there.
● Some confuse Pan-Africanism for just African continental unity. However, the
African diaspora, especially people of African descent who are descendants
of victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was always in the picture. In recent
years, the African Union declared the African Diaspora to be its Sixth Region.
REFERENCES
● Pan-Africanism: A History by Hakim Adi
● Africa and the Blues by Gerhard Kubik
● The Power of Black Music by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
● The Transformation of Black Music by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P.
Ramsey, Jr.
● Origin of the term “African-American” traces back to 1782:
● African-American ethnicity: https://blackdemographics.com/african-american-ethnic-heritage/ ;
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Migration_Patterns_-_An_Alternative_for_Locating_African_Or
igins
;
● Slave trade map/graphic:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of
_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html
; https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/a/Atlantic_slave_trade.htm
● The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E.
Baptist