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The long movement to unite people of African descent and free the continent: from Marcus Garvey and negritude, through the congress series where Du Bois named 'the color line,' to the decisive 1945 Manchester Congress with Padmore, Nkrumah, and Kenyatta...
The long movement to unite people of African descent and free the continent: from Marcus Garvey and negritude, through the congress series where Du Bois named 'the color line,' to the decisive 1945 Manchester Congress with Padmore, Nkrumah, and Kenyatta, and on to Ghana's freedom and the 1963 OAU.
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After a revolt of enslaved people defeated French forces, Haiti declared independence and became the first Black-led republic in the Americas. The victory showed that enslaved Africans could overthrow a colonial power and govern themselves. It became a lasting point of pride and reference for later Pan-African and abolitionist thinkers across the diaspora.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, a West Indian-born scholar who emigrated to Liberia, published a collection of essays arguing for the dignity and distinct contribution of African peoples. He urged people of African descent in the diaspora to look to Africa and championed what he called the African personality. He is widely counted as an early intellectual forerunner of Pan-African thought.
Mangena Mokone, a minister who broke from a white-run Methodist mission, founded the Ethiopian Church, taking its name from a biblical verse about Ethiopia stretching out its hands to God. The move launched an African-led independent church movement known as Ethiopianism. It linked Christian faith to Black self-rule and fed a wider current of religious and political independence.
The army of Emperor Menelik II routed an invading Italian force at Adwa, halting Italy's attempt to colonize Ethiopia. It was a rare and decisive defeat of a European power by an African state during the scramble for the continent. Adwa and an independent Ethiopia became a powerful symbol of Black sovereignty for Pan-Africanists worldwide.
The Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams convened the first Pan-African Conference, gathering delegates of African descent from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In his address to the meeting, W. E. B. Du Bois declared that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. The conference began an organized tradition of Pan-African gatherings.
Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which after he moved to the United States grew into the largest mass Black movement of its era. It preached racial pride, economic self-reliance, and a redemption of Africa often summed up as Back to Africa. Garvey remains a contested figure: admirers hail his mass appeal, while critics point to his 1922 meeting with the Ku Klux Klan and his 1923 conviction for mail fraud tied to the Black Star Line.
W. E. B. Du Bois organized the first Pan-African Congress in Paris while the victorious powers negotiated the postwar settlement at Versailles. With the help of the Senegalese deputy Blaise Diagne, delegates petitioned the peacemakers to protect African interests and grant a greater say to colonized peoples. Its demands were reformist and modest, seeking better colonial rule rather than independence.
Garvey's UNIA held its first international convention at Madison Square Garden, drawing thousands of delegates. It adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, a charter demanding equality and African self-rule. Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois became bitter rivals, splitting Black political opinion over Garvey's separatism and back-to-Africa program.
The second congress held sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris under Du Bois's leadership. Delegates issued a statement on the rights of colonized peoples and pressed the new League of Nations to address colonial abuses. Like its predecessor, it was a gathering of a small educated elite and stopped short of demanding an end to colonial rule.
The third congress convened in London and Lisbon, keeping the series alive despite thin funds and organizing difficulties. It again petitioned for reforms and a voice for Africans in colonial government. The gatherings remained cautious and reformist, working through petitions rather than mass protest.
The fourth congress drew more than two hundred delegates to New York, with much of the fundraising and planning done by a group of Black women known as the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations. It repeated calls for reform and greater African participation in government. After it the series lapsed for eighteen years, and historians describe these early congresses as elite and reformist rather than mass movements for independence.
Black students from the French colonies, among them Aime Cesaire of Martinique, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and Leon Damas of Guiana, launched the journal L'Etudiant noir. Cesaire is credited with coining the term negritude, which affirmed Black identity and African cultural values against French assimilation. The movement gave Pan-Africanism a strong literary and cultural voice in the French-speaking world.
Unlike the earlier gatherings of scholars and professionals, the Manchester congress drew heavily on trade unionists, workers, and student activists from Africa and the Caribbean. This broader base gave the meeting a more radical and grassroots character. Delegates connected colonial freedom to the struggles of ordinary workers.
The delegates elected the veteran scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, then in his late seventies, as international president of the congress. Having chaired the earlier congresses, he served as an elder statesman and living link to the movement's beginnings. A younger generation of African and Caribbean activists now took over the practical leadership.
Jomo Kenyatta, then living in Britain and active in the Kikuyu Central Association, served as a joint secretary of the congress, as did Kwame Nkrumah. The organizing team also included Ras Makonnen, who ran the practical arrangements, and Peter Abrahams, who handled publicity. Amy Ashwood Garvey, the Jamaican activist and former wife of Marcus Garvey, co-chaired the opening session.
The congress broke sharply with the reformism of earlier meetings and demanded autonomy and independence for Africa and the colonized world. It endorsed mass action, strikes, and boycotts as tools of struggle, and stated that colonized peoples might have to use force if peaceful means failed. This shift set the agenda for the postwar drive to decolonize.
Several delegates went on to lead their nations: Kwame Nkrumah became the first leader of independent Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Hastings Banda of Malawi. Obafemi Awolowo, then a law student in London, was among the Nigerians present and later became a premier of Nigeria's Western Region. Because so many future leaders attended, many historians treat Manchester as a launch point for African independence, though others caution against giving one meeting too much credit for movements with deep local roots.
The congress issued a Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World, largely drafted by Kwame Nkrumah. It called on workers and farmers in the colonies to organize and to fight for their freedom, urging them that they had nothing to lose but their chains. The declaration turned the meeting's resolutions into a direct appeal for mass struggle.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress met at Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall in Manchester over seven days in October 1945, weeks after the end of the Second World War. George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah were its chief organizers, working through the Pan-African Federation. It gathered around ninety delegates and marked a turning point toward demands for full independence.
also in Freedom movements: how the colonized won their independence, Nkrumah and Ghana: the first colony to fall
Led by Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party, the Gold Coast became independent Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African colony to break from European rule. Nkrumah tied Ghana's freedom to the wider liberation of the whole continent. The event became a model and a rallying point for independence movements across Africa.
Nkrumah and George Padmore convened the All-African Peoples' Conference in newly independent Accra, bringing the Pan-African movement onto African soil and toward mass parties rather than diaspora intellectuals. Delegates included young activists such as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Frantz Fanon of Algeria. The meeting coordinated support for liberation movements still fighting colonial rule.
Thirty-two independent African states signed the charter of the Organisation of African Unity in the Ethiopian capital. The founding was a compromise: Nkrumah and the Casablanca group wanted an immediate continental union, while the larger Monrovia group favored cooperation among sovereign states. The gradualists prevailed, and critics say the OAU protected existing borders and governments at the expense of the deeper dream of continental unity.
The sixth congress was the first to be held on the African continent, hosted by Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. It focused on the remaining liberation struggles in southern Africa and on debates over class, socialism, and the direction of independent states. The meeting exposed tensions between governments in power and the radical, diaspora-based tradition of earlier congresses.
The Organisation of African Unity was formally succeeded by the African Union, launched at a summit in Durban. The new body promised closer economic and political integration, echoing the old Pan-African goal of continental unity. Supporters see it as a step toward that vision, while critics note that a united Africa on the scale Nkrumah imagined remains unrealized.
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