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vested interests. These diametrically opposed meta-narratives, while both open to criticism, have nonetheless continued to shape debates on the image of Africa in international news. Beyond that, they have played a critical role in ideologically shaping several pan-African media initiatives primarily aimed at contesting and redefining international news narratives on and about the continent. Using pan-African(ist) media initiatives, including Pan-African News Agency (PANA), SABC Africa, and South Africa’s Multichoice Limited as illustrative and
Pan-Africanism, but he also had an influence on Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean. Jamaican scholar Horace Campbell described him as an outstanding “scholar-activist in the tradition of W.E.B. Dubois, C.L.R. James, Marcus Garvey, or George Padmore” (see Morris, Cudjoe, Grant and Duggan in this volume) and as one of the Caribbean’s most significant contributors to Pan-Africanism. 25 Similarly, Jamaican scholar Robert A. Hill described Rodney as: a Pan-African thinker and political activist in the fullest sense [who] stands out as a unique
“How good and how pleasant it would be before God and man To see the unification of all Africans.” 1 – B OB M ARLEY B OB M ARLEY’S MUSIC REPRESENTS an impressive catalogue of ideas of the black experience and the framing of a Pan-African order germane to freedom, justice, redemption, sovereignty and development. This body of work is decidedly an instrument for decolonisation. It is rooted in the
already be gathered, but conditions in London were dire, too, and a colour bar there would make accommodation and dining difficult for those attending. At the last minute, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was relocated in the industrial city of Manchester, where Ras Makonnen could provide food at his restaurants and accommodation in the homes of his friends. 2 Considering the challenges of the hour, the
N UMEROUS SCHOLARS AND POLITICAL ACTIVISTS view William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as the “father of Pan-Africanism”. Du Bois was clearly one of the premier architects of the Pan-African perspective and the historic Pan-African movements. This claim can be sustained by analysing him as a path-breaking scholar and prodigious activist of the twentieth century. When placed within this context, it becomes undeniable that Du Bois was a pioneer of Pan-Africanism. An African American born in 1868, just three
the ideas of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor (see Irele in this volume), W.E.B. Du Bois (see Morris in this volume) and Frantz Fanon (see Rabaka in this volume). He also greatly admired the African-American civil rights leader and Nobel laureate Martin Luther King Jr. His master’s thesis focused on industrialisation in West Africa, and his studies helped develop a Pan-African awareness alongside a deepening of interest in the Western intellectual canon. It was at Sussex that Mbeki further engaged his passion for Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats, discovered the German
black pride through praising black Americans’ rootedness in, and contemporary connection to, Africa and to people of African descent wherever they lived across the globe. Malcolm’s promotion of the idea of Pan-Africanism – the notion that the common genealogical root of people of African descent provided a commonality of purpose in fighting white oppression – struck a resonant chord among many black Americans 7 at that historic moment when the non-violent, “mass action” phase of the US civil rights movement was sweeping across the American landscape, and black
“There’s Ruth First, a white woman whose name is not evoked nearly enough.” – A NGELA D AVIS 1 T HIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON R UTH F IRST’S commitment to Pan-African activism. The first section broadly introduces the South African journalist, writer, scholar and activist, setting out the defining themes of her life’s work as a revolutionary and her “courage of principle”. 2 As a Pan-Africanist in her
, though still embryonic, all conform to James’s expectation of the transcending of Lenin’s vertical, hierarchical, centralised, vanguardist organisational form. However, perhaps because of his mastery of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, and despite his work and association with Pan-Africanism and Caribbean politics, James is often treated as a ‘European’ thinker, particularly by those who see a conflict between race and class, and between Pan-Africanism and Marxism. This has also arisen because of James’s own avowed
‘When I started I did not know quite the line of approach’, Padmore wrote to Richard Wright in July 1954 about the book he meant to call ‘Black Zionism, Pan-Africanism and Communism’, ‘but it developed as I went along’. Countering Cold War allegations that African independence movements were communist-inspired, he hoped ‘to give a coherent picture of the ideals and