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Benyamin Neuberger shows that, in the twenty-first century, Edward Wilmot Blyden remains one of the powerhouses of Pan-Africanism due to his unique and historical contributions to ideas around African unity, identity, dignity, sovereignty and prosperity. Blyden had a profound influence on the makers of modern Pan-Africanism; current generations unfamiliar with his ideas, therefore, need to revisit his perceptive reflections on African identity, self-determination, Africa’s umbilical links with the diaspora and the meaning of territorial nationalism in colonial West
London in 1900 was the imperial metropolis sans pareil, the permanent or temporary home to hundreds of thousands who traced their ancestry to the imperialised territories, the jumping-off place for countless thousands who wished to make a new life abroad, the centre of a government whose decisions influenced the destinies of 400 million people around the globe. This chapter on the Pan-African Conference of 1900 will show that London was also a city shaped by anti-imperialists. 1 It situates the Conference, an
had resulted in the uprooting of 15.4 million Africans from the continent and their shipment to other parts of the world between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. 7 When the African “slave trade” reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, Pan-Africanism as an ideology and strategy began to take root, particularly in America. 8 Despite having grown up in Jamaica at the height of militant Garveyism, there is little indication that Dudley Thompson fully embraced these militant ideas in his youth. While he was a student at Oxford, Thompson was very much aware
B OUTROS B OUTROS -G HALI , the sixth United Nations (UN) secretary-general (1992–6) – the first African and the first Arab in the world body’s history since its founding in 1945 – died in a Cairo hospital at the age of 93 in February 2016. 1 This essay highlights the Egyptian scholar-diplomat’s strong Pan-African diplomatic background and fierce pro-African battles to promote what Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui described as Pax Africana (see Gatsheni-Ndlovu in this volume). I assess Boutros-Ghali’s election as UN secretary-general in
in 1959, his political passions were mobilised in the cause of Pan-Africanism. He was an intellectual formed deep in the vortex of the age of extremes, and for most of his life he espoused positions which others perceived to be both extreme and fanatical. His politics forced an abrupt separation from the modes of life which an aspiring colonial professional would have anticipated: his future
its Black British citizens have portrayed their area in poetry, visual art and music. Through engagement with these documents of lived experience, I pick up Lisa Palmer's argument that during the 1970s and 1980s, Handsworth was an important ‘site of anti-imperial and anti-colonial, self-organised Pan-African activism and knowledge production.’ 2 In this vein, the following pages add to a growing discourse which frames Handsworth as a vibrant centre of ‘black intellectual life’, meanwhile scrutinising the
movement in the first half of the twentieth century will thus be the focal point of our considerations on the global dimension of art. This will also make it possible to examine the close connections between globalisation in the arts and liberationist movements such as anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, anti-racism, and the US Civil Rights movement. These links constitute a key feature of transcultural modernism and therefore necessarily form part of any consideration of this subject. The ‘globalisation’ of modern
instrumental in Pan-African politics, focused around a group of activists that included Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, who would go on to lead Kenya and Ghana, respectively, to independence. Through Padmore, Abrahams also became deeply involved in Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial activities in London. He was briefly employed by the British Communist Party before, like Padmore, abandoning any formal attachment to communism. Abrahams, along with Padmore, West Indian activist Ras Makonnen and Kenyatta, was on the organising committee of
government, elected in July 1945, would grant independence to the colonies. They were quickly disillusioned. Joe Appiah, who had represented the West African Students’ Union (WASU) at the 1945 Pan-African Congress and became president of the union, reports that independence for my country came under Tory rule and not under the rule of our ‘best friends’ – the so-called ‘socialist believers’ in human dignity – Labour! I count this as one of the greatest betrayals of friends by friends in all
understanding of pan-Africanist ideas, and African regional values and interests. The process of construcing the OAU and choosing its defining norms demonstrates the importance of the idea of pan-Africanism as well as the interplay between ideas and other factors in norm creation and policy-making. While an ambiguous idea can pose challenges, it can also be beneficial for uniting disparate groups. 1 In the case of pan-Africanism, groups of leaders were able to hold different interpretations about some aspects of pan-Africanism and how they should be applied. However, they