What is Pan-Africanism
Celebrating Africa Day - 25 May -

What is Pan-Africanism?
INTRODUCTION: Modern pan-Africanism is about on hundred years old. It was in July 1900 that Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidad-born barrister, organized the first pan-African conference in London. He wanted, he stated, to 'bring into closer touch with each other the peoples of African descent throughout the world.' This first gathering was a small affair - only four representatives from Africa itself attended - but it was the beginning of a movement that would grow in the course of the century, attracting men and women around the world to an ideal of justice and human rights.

Pan-Africanism is a people's movement, a struggle against the unjust and unlawful oppression of Black people. Such oppression is nothing new, for its origins lie in the enslavement and exploitation of Black people dating from the first appearance of Europeans in Africa. From the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, slavery and the slave trade devastated vast areas of the continent. Some fifteen millions were shipped across the Atlantic to the plantations of the Americas, ranging from Brazil to the southern states of the US.

This massive and violent transplantation of peoples damaged Africa's development, encouraging conflict and emptying parts of the continent of its youngest and fittest people. It also created large Black communities on the other side of the Atlantic, in almost every Caribbean island, in many South American countries and in the American South. Oppressed and exploited as slaves, these people survived the horrors of the plantation and kept alive important elements of their African culture through the generations. With the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century came social reforms and the hope of a better life, but racism and discrimination persisted. Migration spread the African Diaspora more widely; Black people moved to Europe, to the northern states of the US and Canada.

The development of Black communities around the world coincided with a new phase in Europe's penetration of Africa. Just 16 years before the first pan-African conference, the major European powers had gathered in Berlin to discuss the sharing out of colonies in Africa. In what was known as the 'scramble for Africa' the British, French, German and other governments carved up the continent, sending in troops, settlers and missionaries to almost every territory that was not already occupied.

The heyday of colonialism involved the wide-scale exploitation of African resources and African people. It also reinforced European ideas of white superiority and Black inferiority, ideas that had been used to justify the inhuman practice of slavery. The achievements of Black people and African cultures were dismissed as 'primitive'. Many of the colonialists saw it as their duty to impose European beliefs and systems on the colonized peoples - whether they wanted them or not.

From this experience of oppression and humiliation emerged a new generation of African leaders, mostly educated in European-run schools but eager to rid their countries of the colonial masters. Such leaders dreamed of seeing their nations free of outside rule and of restoring a sense of pride in their people's African identity. Some also had an even greater dream - of seeing a divided and exploited Africa reunited.