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against the perceived advances of people of colour.11 Events on US soil were informed by those occurring overseas. The Pan-African Conference first met in London in 1900 to discuss the decolonization of Africa. In 1955, several delegates gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss the future of the ‘third world’. The period from the end of the Second World War into the 1950s saw anti-colonial insurrections throughout the occupied territories of the European empires. This period saw the publication of works such as W. E. B. Du Bois’ Color and Democracy (1945), Aimé Césaire
colonialism. He notes how native intellectuals have, in the past, attempted to cherish a generalised pan-African culture in their resistance to colonial ways of seeing. But this tendency ‘to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley’ (p. 172). This is because the historical circumstances of African peoples in different parts of the globe cannot be so readily unified. To create an abstract notion of a pan-African culture is to ignore the different conditions of African peoples in a variety of locations, such as in
’.40 He effectively performs the diversity of the nation-to-be. A particularly interesting feature of Mandela’s underground journey in its later stages is that, on a far wider scale than Kaunda’s, it expanded on to an international, specifically Pan-African, stage. In February 1962 Mandela secretly left South Africa on a ‘mission’ to establish contact with what would become the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at their conference in Addis Ababa, and also to raise political and economic support for the ANC’s new military campaign. Following time spent in Ethiopia
In general, then, the woman – and usually the mother – figure stands for the national territory and for certain national values: symbolically she is ranged above the men; in reality she is kept below them. If male filial figures experience the gravitational pull to the national ground, women constitute part of its gravid mass. As, for example, in the iconography of Hindu nationalism, in many forms of African nationalism, as also in Pan-Africanism, the elevated woman figure takes on massive, even continent-wide proportions. She is the Great Mother, Durga, Mama Afrika
Literature: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester University Press, 1996). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). See also Kadiatu Kanneh’s critical account of Gilroy in her African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (London and New York
only the children who benefit from being taken away from their home. By their presence, the Kwadere children confirm, if further confirmation were needed, that the family is more than a genetic inheritance. The Lennox family has been, throughout the novel, a voluntary community. That is one of its strengths. As a trope, the Lennox family is placed in opposition to meta-narratives of social determinism, whether these are Marxism, Pan-Africanism or one or other of the many versions of globalization. 15 Although the Lennoxes may have been more
of cultural nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Instead, Chennells claims that Lessing ‘identified one aspect of the post-colonial condition before it became a foundational idea in post-colonial theory’; 52 she ‘is at one with post-colonial theorists who proclaim cultural hybridity as the irretrievable condition of post-colonial modernity’. 53 Claiming Lessing as an example of cultural hybridity might seem to sit uneasily with the image of her as the venerated ‘grande dame’ that began this chapter. Yet this curious mixture of authority
‘savages’ and establishing a state (2004: 39–43).49 This tension between gender formulation, ideology and the Monument persists: in 2004 a pan-African fashion show was held at the Monument. What emerged from this event was a perceived lack of direction regarding the Monument and its representation of history in relation to the present. Bongani Madonda asks ‘Africa? Which Africa? Perhaps the fashion splash will point the way’ (Sunday Times, 2004: 5). The controversy continued in 2005 when Egoli50 actress Michelle Pienaar was photographed from above, lying on the Monument
particular importance to Matshikiza, more so perhaps than for someone like Abrahams, who identified more broadly as ‘African’ and who was particularly invested in this Pan-African affiliation during his involvement in anti-colonial activities in London. Esmé Matshikiza has commented that [Todd] had so much inborn faith in himself and who he was and where he came from that he was extremely self-confident about being a South African. I don't like to use the words a ‘black South African’, because for him
). Historically, Marxism has provided the most effective means of organising and pursuing resistance, he suggests. The wealth of anti-colonial action could not have happened without the impact of Marxist thought and its various interpretations around the world which made possible Zapata’s Mexican rebellion of 1910, the Peruvian Marxist Mariátegui’s radical writings, the revolutionary achievements of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba and Latin America, resistance in Anglophone and Francophone Africa, the insurgency of women’s revolutionary groups, Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism