Pan Africanism: A Brief Intellectual History

Abstract

In this article, I will historicize the socio-political and cultural emergence of Pan Africanism as an ideology. In doing so, one is enabled to appreciate its continued relevance and significance as well as its limitations and imposed misrecognition, morass misapplications, and muddled ambiguities within history. Historicizing Pan Africanism as a discourse frees it from an essentialist rendered definition and enables a new understanding in which Pan Africanism is to be understood as a performative-operative discourse. Being performative means that it ceases to be a close-minded rigid ideology proscribed by racial consciousness; it means assuming a new pose of repudiation that is dependent on contemporary socio-cultural tissues of historical experiences. But our concept is not just performative, it is also discursive because it generates a new sense of meaning for our contemporary understanding of Africanity. On the Origins and Intellectual History of a MovementAlthough the term Pan Africanism was first coined by Henry Sylvester Williams in 1900, Immanuel Geiss suggests that the idea dates back to 1787 events such as the agitations of the abolitionist movements and freed slaves in Americas, Britain, Sierra Leone, Libreville, and other West African colonies. 2 Other scholars have suggested that the idea goes back to 1783 BC and inclusive of all social-historical struggles that has occurred within Africa's geographical world. 3 In my view however, the idea emerged around the 15th century. Although I recognize the significance of those historical antecedents that occurred in Africa prior to the 1500s such as the struggles against the Assyrians in 666 BC or the indigenous resistance to Rome and Greece, and later of the Arabs in 642 AD, I do not agree that the idea predates the 1500s. While our contemporary discourse of Pan Africanism emerged within the province of struggles, they were not abstract struggles, they were struggles localized within 15th century history and onwards, which according to John Clarke became the main roots of Pan Africanism, both in action and social thought [. . .] nourished by the events of the fifteenth century -the second rise of Europe, the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Western colonialism. 4 A thought further confirmed by Walter Rodney:Pan Africanism is something we must define in struggle. What is essential to the African slave struggle is the common experience of exploitation and oppression and the unity which the slaves forged, a commonality which could only be operative when they moved against European exploitation and oppression . . . that . . . is the essence of Pan Africanism in the period when it was born (in the fifteenth century) and it had to be born in a context where a large number of Africans from different social background were thrown into a context in which this necessity would arise. 5The significance of the 15th Century is that prior to this period, race was not a notional point of human categorization. One was not excluded or oppressed on the basis o...

African philosophy in the age of neoliberal capitalism

“…For Michael O. Eze, a reconceptualisation of pan‐Africanism that transcends a fixed historical moment and “racial affinity” is desirable in the era of neoliberal globalisation (cf. M. O. Eze, , pp. 663–674).…”

“…663–674). Eze's “appeal for a new understanding of Pan Africanism is to generate a new understanding of Africanity that is not dependent on race but on our varying, mutating historical circumstances and its divergent degrees of internal differentiations” (M. O. Eze, , p. 670). This, in my opinion, is a call to Ubuntuize pan‐Africanism, to reach what Falola calls pluriversalism.…”