Pan-Africanism and "Pan-Africanism": Some Historical Notes

Abstract

T HE TERM PAN-AFRICANISM has been bandied about in recent years with disturbing inaccuracy. A striking example of this occurs in the highly publicized Twentieth Century Fund's Tropical Africa (New York, 1960, II, p. 280) which in a most inadequate section on African nationalism says, In Garveyism the alloy of was smelted into the ore of Ethiopianism. It would be difficult to find more misunderstandings of the nomenclature and processes of African politics in so few words. If misleading assertions of this sort can appear in such an elaborate and expensive study in 1960, the time has surely arrived when historians should come to the aid of synoptic students of Africa, the pan-Africanism of whose academic approach has become so individual that it distorts out of all recognition the Pan-African movement and the pan-African movements. It may be found helpful, both in tracing the origins of pan-Africanism and in employing the term accurately in studies of contemporary African politics, to use, on some occasions, a capital P and, on others, a small one. If a collective term is required, all-African is useful. with a capital letter is a clearly recognizable movement: the five Pan-African Congresses (1919, Paris; 1921, London; 1923, London and Lisbon; 1927, New York; 1945, Manchester), in all of which the American Negro scholar, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, played a major part; it is linked with the publication of George Padmore's Pan-Africanism or Communism? (London, 1956) and with the first All-Africa People's Conference at Accra in December 1958. It is for this movement that Dr.

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