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J.F. A DE A JAYI , N IGERIAN HISTORIAN “S EEK YE FIRST THE POLITICAL KINGDOM , and all other things will be added unto it.” The famous biblical injunction of Kwame Nkrumah, founding Ghanaian president and Pan-African prophet, of the 1950s continues to reverberate across Africa and its diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas 2 seven decades after it was first uttered. Having achieved Nkrumah’s political kingdom by 1994 with the liberation of South Africa, Africa and its diaspora found, however
This collection of lively biographical essays examines historical and contemporary Pan-Africanism as an ideology of emancipation and unity. The volume covers thirty-six major figures, including well-known Pan-Africanists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and Thabo Mbeki, as well as popular figures not typically identified with mainstream Pan-Africanism such as Maya Angelou, Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, Miriam Makeba, Ruth First, Wangari Maathai, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, V.Y. Mudimbe, Léopold Senghor, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The book explores the history and pioneers of the movement; the quest for reparations; politicians; poets; activists; as well as Pan-Africanism in the social sciences, philosophy, literature, and its musical activists. With contributions from a diverse and prominent group of African, Caribbean, and African-American scholars, The Pan-African Pantheon is a comprehensive and diverse introductory reader for specialists and general readers alike.
T HIS ESSAY PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW of George Padmore’s contributions to the development of Pan-Africanism as an intellectual tradition and political movement. Padmore, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago at the turn of the twentieth century, does not enjoy the same levels of popular recognition as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah (see Morris, Grant, and Biney in this volume). And yet he was seminal in Pan-Africanism’s evolution, and his impact on the movement continues to be felt to this day
-six years after writing “Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar”, Ali Mazrui delivered the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg memorial lecture at the University of Ghana, Legon, in March 2002. The address was titled “Nkrumah’s Legacy and Africa’s Triple Heritage: The Shadows of Globalization and Counter Terrorism”. In it, Mazrui reinforced his previous indictment of Nkrumah, declaring, “By a strange twist of destiny, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was both the hero, who carried the torch of Pan-Africanism, and the villain who started the whole legacy of the one-party state in Africa”. 12 Furthermore
latter role better than the Ghanaian-British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose insights into Pan-Africanism are evocatively articulated in his monograph, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), 1 in which he bears witness to the genealogy of, and the discourse regarding, Pan-Africanism. In his book, Appiah opens up a particularly local dialogue and narrative by engaging with African cultures and identities through a discussion of universal concerns about human associations. He simultaneously contends with a grand question germane to
’s grandfather Josiah Ransome-Kuti was a musician who had recorded in the London studio of EMI early in the twentieth century. By the turn of the century, he had teamed up with other choirmasters to start rejecting the domination of Yoruba Christian hymns by European compositional principles, and replacing them with a much more African texture of composition, progression and even melody. Fela’s father, Israel Ransome-Kuti, was also an accomplished musician, aside from being an educationist and clergyman. Fela's mother was an activist who was part of the global Pan-African
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
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