Pan‐Africanism and the Politics of History

Abstract

Africa is not a country! It is neither a homogenous socio‐cultural group nor a unanimous ethno‐political sovereign. How then could we speak of Pan‐Africanism without generating an ambiguous vernacular mode of identity formation deeply rooted in questionable intellectual claims grounded in politics of history? To make sense of our discourse, therefore, is to localize it within the context of its emergence. These context(s) are the Trans‐Atlantic era and colonial historicity with their associative epochs of subjective domination and shared responses of African peoples to this condition. Among other things, colonialism thrived through a denial of historical culture to non‐Western people(s) with a false promise of “civilizing” the barbarian – a strategy that evacuates all possibility of human enterprise. In Africa and in the African Diaspora, the “uncivilized” is also a non‐historical being of no consequence; an imposed misrecognition that enabled his/her objectification and domination. Pan‐Africanism emerged as a restorative agency in this struggle for freedom and dignity by offering a new pose of repudiation grounded in historical unity of the African experience.