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of exceptionality. Concretely, this takes us to Sipalo’s departure from Northern Rhodesia in 1953 to study in India and to two pan-African conferences. I then explore Sipalo’s increasingly visible place in a complex anticolonial network of people, organizations and publications around 1960, following him to Accra and to the climax of his global biography at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, prior to his retreat from public life. 18 Throughout, I place particular emphasis on how Sipalo interpreted
university in Washington DC to move beyond the white man’s depictions of Africa as a land held back by the relics of “primitive barbarism.” In pursuit of this goal, Azikiwe sought to engage his fellow students in a Pan-African dialogue: It is highly essential that the African speak and open his mind to his Afro-American brother … We do not hold you guilty for your notions … We realise the effects of your history. We understand fully the situation which necessitated your psychologic and philosophic concept of the average African. Nevertheless
most unsympathetic. 2 This essay focuses on Amy Ashwood Garvey as a life-long internationalist, Pan-Africanist and feminist, tracing the shifts in her intellectual and political development. Pan-Africanism cannot be understood as a monolithic paradigm. Rather, I argue that it represents a diverse solidarity of people of African heritage on the continent and globally, committed to the idea of Africa and the improvement in the lives of African peoples everywhere. Garveyism is one variant of this tradition. While the history of Pan-Africanism
P IXLEY KA I SAKA S EME – the moving spirit behind the formation of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 – is also known as one of the pioneers of Pan-Africanism. 1 His association with Pan-Africanism originates from an address he gave to a student public-speaking competition at Columbia University in New York in April 1906. At the time that he gave the speech, Seme was about to graduate from Columbia College with a bachelor’s degree. The address, titled “The Regeneration of Africa”, earned him the first prize
contributions to Pan-Africanism. As a result of an angst in Lewis’s consciousness awakened by his exposure to anti-imperialism at an early age in St Lucia, 4 then moving to the English “mother country” for his further education at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he met and interacted with other anti-imperialists, 5 he became perhaps what the Trinidadian author and Nobel Literature laureate, V.S. Naipaul, would have called a “Mimic Man of the New World”. His was an experience similar to that of Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall (see Magubane
consequence, Communist activities in the Atlantic world took a dual direction during the interwar period. While the Negro Bureau and its main propagandist, the African-American Communist Harry Haywood, focused on the ‘American Atlantic’ by promoting the so-called Black Belt thesis, the ITUCNW attempted to encompass a larger radical ‘African Atlantic’. Together with various other political and intellectual networks of Pan-African activists and movements, they formed the Black Atlantic of the interwar period. 10 The
, Manchester, where the entrepreneurial Makonnen had established himself as a restaurateur. As Padmore recalled the story, the pamphlets’ publication was linked to a new umbrella organisation, the Pan-African Federation, for which he served as secretary. Formed in 1944 and based in Manchester, the Federation included the West African Students Union, the Kikuyu Central Association, and other colonial and exile
the “African idea” which speaks to how Africans invented themselves and how, through ideas of Pan-Africanism, they forged a common Pan-African identity. But the interventions of Kwame Anthony Appiah in his book In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992) challenged the use of “race” to describe African people as a common “black race” (see Ampiah in this volume). Appiah was extremely critical of what he regarded as essentialist ideas of Africa, arguing that African identity has never been a primordial racial fixture. To him, Africans were not
personify the Pan-Africanism and pride in African culture and identity that many of the aforementioned leaders were seeking. From this perspective – focusing on Makeba’s story and weaving it into the fabric of broader history – this essay explores the interrelationship between cultural expression, specifically music, and social dynamics. It explores how Makeba’s experiences and activities on and off stage had an impact on her society, and, conversely, how her music and her life were shifted and shaped by various political and social movements
Lux , the London journal of the Christian Evidence Society; 3 that sharp critic of politics and imperial racism, the Jamaican doctor Theophilus Scholes; Henry Sylvester Williams who organised the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900; and the medical doctors John Alcindor, James Jackson Brown and Harold Moody, all of whom had practices in London in the early part of the twentieth