Pan African History

Brings together Pan-Africanist thinkers and activists from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds of he last two-hundred years.

The first survey of the Pan-African movement this century, this book provides a history of the individuals and organisations that have sought the unity of all those of African origin as the basis for advancement and liberation. Initially an idea and movement that took root among the African Diaspora, in more recent times Pan-Africanism has been embodied in the African Union, the organisation of African states which includes the entire African Diaspora as its 'sixth region'. Hakim Adi covers many of the key political figures of the 20th century, including Du Bois, Garvey, Malcolm X, Nkrumah and Gaddafi, as well as Pan-African culture expression from Négritude to the wearing of the Afro hair style and the music of Bob Marley.

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.

This book recounts the life story of the pioneering Henry Sylvester Williams through original research, each chapter set in the social context of the times, providing insight not only into a remarkable man who has been heretofore virtually written out of history, but also into the African Diaspora in the UK a century ago.

Chronicles and examines the origins, development, directions, and leaders of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Africa, America, and Europe

W. E. B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent African American intellectual of the twentieth century. As a pioneering historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, and as a novelist and autobiographer, he made the problem of race central to an understanding of the United States within both national and transnational contexts; his masterwork The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is today among the most widely read and most often quoted works of American literature. This Companion presents ten specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars which explore key aspects of Du Bois's work. The book offers students a critical introduction to Du Bois, as well as opening new pathways into the further study of his remarkable career. It will be of interest to all those working in African American studies, American literature, and American studies generally.

This book makes a critical contribution to the study of pan-Africanism and the education of African people for continental African citizenship. It is a unique endeavor in that it intersects the social history of pan-Africanism and the education of African people at a 'global' level and provides reflections from a multidisciplinary perspective on the urgency for continental pan-Africanism educational system in order to produce a more renascent African for the twenty-first century. Arguing that Pan-African Education is a mass-based educational system that will ‘craft’ a pan-African African personality, John Marah calls for integrated African school systems and curriculum changes conducive to larger social integration and institutionalized pan-African educational processes. The establishments of pan-African Teachers Colleges; intensive language institutes; pan-African literature courses; the training of African military and police forces; the use of music, sports, media and other extra-curricular activities (the hidden curriculum), etc.; are viewed as essential aspects in the socialization of a pan-African character or personality. Pan-African Education is an essential read for students and scholars of Pan-Africanism, African and Africana Studies, and Black Studies.

"In a critical, well-researched, and illuminating analysis of history and literature, this study highlights the dynamics of the relationship between Africans and African-Americans since the original separation of the Middle Passage. The study emerges at a timely phase, as America struggles with its racial heritage, its ethnic future, and multiculturalism, and as people of African descent create new contexts for defining identity in a nation that struggles to embrace Africans who have arrived, this time, as voluntary migrants."--BOOK JACKET.

A Guyanese by birth and a Kenyan by citizenship, Ras Makonnen would still regard these two aspects of his life as accidents of history—his roots and destiny are in the continent of Africa. For the last half of the twentieth century, he has striven, along with the other major architects of pan-Africanism, to reconcile the forces that still divide the continent. This volume is a further contribution to that struggle. Makonnen’s analysis of the pan-African movement starts in the former British Guiana (Guyana) in the early twenties, warms up to the North American scene where, as a young man, he got increasingly more aware of the African and diasporic African person’s position in world history. He then describes his days in London and Manchester from the mid-thirties to the fifties; Accra (Ghana) until the fall of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 and thereafter Nairobi (Kenya), where he worked and made his transition. Although the narrative is peppered with the most delightful character sketches of early African and other Black leaders, the author’s main concern is to interpret the quality of life amongst Black people at home and abroad. He does so by employing a wide historical perspective and by infusing into his study of particular pan-African actors his knowledge of the intellectual and political climate at large. He produces in the process a vivid participator’s commentary on whole areas that have been quite neglected in conventional studies of pan-Africanism. Black intergroup relations in North America and the African diaspora in the Caribbean; race relations in Britain; Black intellectuals and the white Left; Black expatriates and African socialism—these are just a few of the themes examined against a background of individual famous personalities as well as others not documented before. With an autobiographical thread that runs throughout, Makonnnen’s narrative is a uniquely diversified pan-African portrait.