Library:Pan-Africanism: A History

Pan-Africanism: A History
Author	Hakim Adi
Type	Book
Source	1804 Books
PDF	PDF

Abbreviations

AATUF	All-African Trade Union Federation
AADC	African and African Descendants Caucus
ABB	African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption
ACS	American Colonization Society
AEC	African Economic Community
AERDA	Association des Étudiants du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain
ALSC	Africa Liberation Support Committee
AME	African Methodist Episcopal [Church]
AMEZ	African Methodist Episcopal Zion [Church]
AMSAC	American Society of African Culture
ANC	African National Congress
ANLC	American Negro Labor Congress
APU	African Progress Union
ASA	African Studies Association
ATOR	African Times and Orient Review
AU	African Union
AZAPO	Azanian People’s Organisation
BET	Black Experimental Theatre
BLF	Black Liberation Front
BPM	Black Panther Movement
BPP	Black Panther Party for Self-Defence
BRP	Black Renaissance Project
BUFP	Black Unity and Freedom Party
BWP	Black Workers’ Project
CAA	Council on African Affairs
CAO	Committee of African Organisations
CDRN	Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre
CGT	Confédération Générale du Travail
CGTU	Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire
CI	Communist International
CIA	Central Intelligence Agency
CIO	Congress of Industrial Organizations
COPAI	Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism
CORAC	Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs
CPGB	Communist Party of Great Britain
CPP	Convention People’s Party
CPSA	Communist Party of South Africa
CPUSA	Communist Party of the United States of America
ÉTA	Étoile Nord Africaine
ERC	Ethiopian Research Council
EWF	Ethiopian World Federation
FEANF	Fédération des Etudiants Noire en France
FESTAC	World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture
FLN	Fronte de Libération Nationale
FRELIMO	Frente de Libertação de Moçambique
GCARPS	Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society
GEP	Group of Eminent Persons
IAFA/IAFE	International African Friends of Abyssinia/International African Friends of Ethiopia
IASB	International African Service Bureau
ICDEP	International Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People
ICFTU	International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
ICWDRW	International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World
ICU	Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
ILD	International Labor Defense
ISC	International Student Conference
IUS	International Union of Students
KUTV	University of the Toilers of the East
LAI	League Against Imperialism
LCP	League of Coloured Peoples
LDRN	Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre
LVN	Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerasse
MPLA	Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola
NAACP	National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NCBWA	National Congress of British West Africa
NEPAD	New Partnership for Africa’s Development
N’COBRA	National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
NCNC	National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons
NJAC	National Joint Action Committee
NNC	National Negro Congress
NWA	Negro Welfare Association
NWCSA	Negro Welfare, Cultural and Social Association
NOI	Nation of Islam
NUSAS	National Union of South African Students
OAAU	Organization of Afro-American Unity
OAU	Organisation of African Unity
PAA	Pan-African Association
PAC	Pan-Africanist Congress
PAF	Pan-African Federation
PAFMECA	Pan-African Movement for East and Central Africa
PAIGC	Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde
PAP	Pan-African Parliament
PCDE	Provisional Committee for the Defence of Ethiopia
PCF	Parti Communiste Français (Communist Party of France)
PLP	Progressive Labour Party
RC	Rassemblement Coloniale
RDA	Rassemblement Démocratique Africain
RILU	Red International of Labour Unions
SAC	Société Africaine de Culture
SASO	South African Students Organisation
SNCC	Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
UAS	Union of African States
UAR	United Arab Republic
UCM	University Christian Movement
UCPA	Universal Coloured People’s Association
UFOA	Union des Femmes de l’Ouest Africane
UGCC	United Gold Coast Convention
UGEAN	Uniao Geral dos Estudantes da Africa Negra sob Dominagao Colonial Portuguesa
UGTAN	Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire
UI	Union Intercoloniale
UN	United Nations
UNIA	Universal Negro Improvement Association
UNITA	União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
UTN	Union de Travailleurs Nègres
WANS	West African National Secretariat
WASC	West African Students’ Confederation
WASU	West African Students’ Union
WAYL	West African Youth League
WFTU	World Federation of Trade Unions
WICPFR	Women’s International Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations
WIDF	Women’s International Democratic Federation
YMCA	Young Men’s Christian Association
ZANU	Zimbabwe African National Union
ZAPU	Zimbabwe African People’s Union

Acknowledgements

It has been remarked on many occasions that books involving historical research are collective enterprises involving the work not only of the author but also many other individuals and institutions. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all those who have contributed.

The idea for this book first emerged while I was teaching a course on Pan-Africanism to undergraduates and realized that there were very few texts written this century that they could consult. I’m therefore indebted to those students, formerly at the School of Oriental and African Studies, New York University (London campus) and the University of Chichester, for all the questions they posed.

I must also thank Hugo Frey of the Department of History and Politics and other colleagues at the University of Chichester for supporting my application for sabbatical leave, which enabled me to devote several months to completing this book.

I would also like to thank the staff at the many libraries and archives that assisted my research. I am particularly grateful to Anna O’Neill, Jane Rackstraw, Wendy Ellison, Sue Booker and other library staff at the University of Chichester who fulfilled my many requests for articles and books.

Several colleagues have been kind enough to share the results of their research and knowledge with me and I’m particularly grateful for the continual help and support of my friend Marika Sherwood. I am also grateful to Marika for correcting numerous errors in the text. Thanks also to Keisha N. Blain, Michael Goebel, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, John Munro, Saki Nakao and Amilcar Pereira. I would also like to thank Zainab Abbas, Abdul Alkalimat, Kathleen Cleaver, Anthony Dawton, Olivia Gandzion and Teslim Omipidan for their help with the photos.

Last, but not least, I would like to acknowledge the critical support of my wife Esther, always a rock in good times and bad.

Without the help and support of the above mentioned and many others this book would not have been completed.

Introduction

In May 2013, the African Union (AU), the organization of all African states, held its twentieth summit fifty years after the founding of its predecessor the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in May 1963. The AU, which was barely ten years old, adopted the theme of Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance for the anniversary summit. A special AU publication explained that

Pan-Africanism is an ideology and movement that encouraged the solidarity of Africans worldwide. It is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social and political progress and aims to ‘unify and uplift’ people of African descent. The ideology asserts that the fates of all African peoples and countries are intertwined. At its core, Pan-Africanism is ‘a belief that African peoples both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny.’¹

Nothing could exemplify this belief better than the AU itself, an organization with a membership that not only includes fifty-three out of the fifty-four African states but also the entire African diaspora. The diaspora is designated the ‘sixth region’ of the AU and consists of ‘people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality … who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union’.²

The AU Echo expressed the view that Pan-Africanism could be considered both ‘a governmental and grassroots objective’, and suggested that it encompassed the thinking of such significant figures as Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddafi on the one hand and Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey on the other. It suggested that the ‘foundations of contemporary Pan-Africanism were laid by the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945’. This congress, it stated, ‘drew up the general outline of a practical programme for the political liberation of Africa’.³

Definition

In fact, there has never been one universally accepted definition of exactly what constitutes Pan-Africanism. Some writers on the subject are even reluctant to provide a definition, or suggest that one cannot be found, acknowledging that the vagueness of the term reflects the fact that Pan-Africanism has taken different forms at different historical moments and geographical locations.4 Nevertheless, most writers would agree that the phenomenon has emerged in the modern period and is concerned with the social, economic, cultural and political emancipation of African peoples, including those of the African diaspora.⁵ What underlies the manifold visions and approaches of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Africanists is a belief in the unity, common history and common purpose of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora and the notion that their destinies are interconnected. In addition, many would highlight the importance of the liberation and advancement of the African continent itself, not just for its inhabitants, but also as the homeland of the entire African diaspora. Such perspectives might be traced back to ancient times but Pan-Africanist thought and action is principally connected with, and provoked by, the modern dispersal of Africans resulting from the trafficking of captives across the Atlantic to the Americas, as well as elsewhere, from the end of the fifteenth century to the close of the nineteenth century. This ‘slave trade’, the largest forced migration in history, and the creation of the African diaspora was accompanied by the emergence of global capitalism, European colonial rule and anti-African racism.

Central to the development of Pan-African thinking and action was the creation of the modern African diaspora, resulting from the trafficking of enslaved Africans. At least 12 million Africans were transported to the American continent, millions more died in the perpetration of this great crime, and new nations came to be established in the Caribbean, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere in which those of African descent were either the majority or a significant minority. Nevertheless, as a consequence of enslavement and the anti-African racism that accompanied it, Africans were generally denied the same rights as Europeans and, in many instances, were not even considered human. Special laws were enacted to maintain such inequalities, even when Africans were legally free, or when the status of slavery no longer existed. The best-known examples are perhaps to be found in the United States where, even in the late twentieth century, African Americans were prevented from voting, forced to accept inferior segregated facilities, including education, and were routinely attacked and intimidated by terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and even by the police. Underpinning racist laws and practices and anti-African racism in general has been the idea that Africans are naturally inferior to other humans, especially those of European origin.

Historically racist ideas concerning alleged African inferiority have been connected to the obvious economic and political motives of those who have benefited most from slavery, colonialism and capital-centred societies. Such ideas have been widely promoted and have appeared in various forms. As Muhammad Ali, the famous African American sportsman, expressed it in a speech at Howard University in 1963:

Everything good and of authority was made white. We look at Jesus, we see a white with blond hair and blue eyes. We look at all the angels, we see white with blond hair and blue eyes … We look at Miss America, we see white. We look at Miss World, we see white. We look at Miss Universe, we see white. Even Tarzan, the king of the jungle in black Africa, he’s white!6

Such Eurocentric ideas of white (European) superiority and black (African) inferiority have endured and in varying forms have had a significant influence on attitudes to Africa and Africans. As late as 2007, for example, the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, in a speech that quickly became infamous, arrogantly asserted ‘The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history.’ He added that for thousands of years there was no ‘idea of progress’ in Africa.⁷ His views were widely condemned and not only in Africa. However, they were strongly reminiscent of those contained in a speech made over forty years earlier by an apparently eminent English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper. In a public lecture at the University of Sussex in October 1963 Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, stated: ‘Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.’⁸ But Trevor-Roper was only repeating something that was a long-established Eurocentric view. In 1830, the well-known German philosopher Friedrich Hegel stated ‘At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.’⁹

Pan-Africanism therefore evolved as a variety of ideas, activities, organizations and movements that, sometimes in concert, resisted the exploitation and oppression of all those of African heritage, opposed and refuted the ideologies of anti-African racism and celebrated African achievement, history and the very notion of being African. Pan-Africanism looks forward to a genuinely united and independent Africa as the basis for the liberation of all Africans, both those on the continent and in the diaspora. However, it should be made clear that historically there have been two main strands of Pan-Africanism. The earlier form emerging during the period of trans-Atlantic enslavement originated from the African diaspora, stressed the unity of all Africans and looked towards their liberation and that of the African continent. The more recent form emerged in the context of the anti-colonial struggle on the African continent in the period after 1945. This form of Pan-Africanism stressed the unity, liberation and advancement of the states of the African continent, although often recognizing the importance of the diaspora and its inclusion. The continental focus of this form of Pan-Africanism can be seen in the orientation and activities of such organizations as the OAU and the AU. The more recent continental form of Pan-Africanism is likely to include the peoples and states of North Africa, the earlier form sometimes does not. I use one single term ‘Pan-Africanism’ to include all ideologies and movements that have at their centre the notion of the unity and advancement of Africa and its diaspora. I see no reason to adopt the proposal made by George Shepperson, many years ago, that Pan-Africanism with a capital letter should only be used to refer to the major congresses mainly organized by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) from 1919 onwards, as well as other events such as the 1958 All-African People’s Conference; whereas it should be presented without a capital letter when referring, for example, to Négritude and Garveyism, as well as ‘for all those All-African movements and trends which have no organic relationship with the capital “P” variety’.10 To my mind, on the contrary, Pan-Africanism might be more usefully viewed as one river with many streams and currents.

Black Internationalism

In more recent times it has become fashionable mainly in some academic circles in the United States to use the term ‘black internationalism’ as an alternative to Pan-Africanism. The editors of one key text on the ‘Black International’, for example, define black internationalism as chiefly referring to those struggles which ‘although situated mainly in specific localities’, were ‘connected in some conscious way to an overarching notion of black liberation’. At the ‘core of black internationalism’, they assert, is ‘the ideal of universal emancipation’. However, as they present Garveyism and Black Power amongst other examples of such struggles, it is difficult to see how black internationalism can usefully be distinguished from Pan-Africanism.¹¹

In another influential text, Brent Hayes Edwards traces the rise of what he refers to as black internationalism to the period following the First World War and suggests that France, and particularly Paris, was an important locale for the emergence of ‘the stirrings of the cultures of black internationalism’. However, even in this case there is a recognition that these post-war stirrings which include the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude had important antecedents in an earlier period. Indeed, Edwards specifically mentions the consciousness already existing at the time of the London Pan-African Conference in 1900, which recognized that the struggles waged by African Americans, for instance, were part of a wider Pan-African struggle to address what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as ‘the problem of the twentieth century’.¹²

Edwards seems to have borrowed the phrase ‘black internationalism’ from Jane Nardal (c.1900–1993), an influential and important Martinican writer in Paris in the 1920s, who used the term internationalisme noir to refer to the growing links between ‘Negroes of all origins and nationalities’. Nardal particularly highlighted such developments as ‘a certain pride in being black’, and ‘in turning back towards Africa, cradle of the blacks, in recalling a common origin’. However, there is no doubt that she also used the phrase to refer to the growing Pan-Africanism as described by Du Bois in his essay ‘Worlds of Colour’.13 Moreover, there seems to be no evidence that the term black internationalism has ever been widely used by other writers nor by activists. Pan-Africanism has been and remains the preferred term and therefore will be used throughout this historical survey.

The Forerunners

Before the concepts of Pan-African and Pan-Africanism fully emerged at the end of the nineteenth century there were various organized efforts by Africans in the diaspora during the eighteenth century to unite to combat racism, to campaign for an end to the kidnapping and trafficking of Africans, or to organize to repatriate to the African continent. In Britain, for example, there appear to have been several informal efforts before African abolitionists, led by Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797) and Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–?), formed the Sons of Africa organization in the 1780s to campaign for an end to Britain’s participation in the trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. The Sons of Africa appears to have been one of the first Pan-African organizations. Its members came from different parts of West Africa but as a consequence of enslavement and forced migration, found themselves in England where they organized collectively to find solutions to the common problems they faced. The Sons of Africa wrote letters to the press, lobbied Parliament, jointly addressed the Quakers and co-operated with other abolitionists and radicals as part of the wider campaign against the trafficking of Africans and for the rights of all.¹

Across the Atlantic in Boston in 1784 the abolitionist Prince Hall (c.1738–1807) and others organized the first African Masonic lodge in North America as a means of combatting racism and for mutual support and with a clear orientation towards Africa. Hall subsequently organized lodges in Philadelphia and Rhode Island and identified himself with efforts being made by some African Americans to return to Africa, while other Africans in Rhode Island also organized various types of fraternal organization.² Three years later an African Church movement developed in Philadelphia and Baltimore out of the Free Africa Society founded in Philadelphia by Richard Allen (1760–1831) and Absalom Jones (1746–1818), which itself emerged from opposition to racism within the Methodist Church. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church became the most notable outcome of this movement, which also emerged in other North American cities and, through the activities of Daniel Coker (1780–1846) and others, soon also extended to Sierra Leone in West Africa.3 An earlier African Baptist movement had begun in Savannah in the 1770s and some of its disciples had subsequently founded similar churches in Canada and the Caribbean colonies. A notable example was George Liele (1750–1820), sometimes known as the first Baptist missionary, who established the Ethiopian Baptist Church in Jamaica in 1793.⁴

What is noticeable about such early initiatives is that they identified positively with Africa and were often accompanied by efforts to refute the dominant racist ideology of the day, which argued that Africans were inferior to Europeans, or even sub-human and only fit for enslavement. Absalom Jones specifically referred to the links between those in Africa and the diaspora in one of his most famous sermons in which he not only refers to ‘our brethren in Africa’ but also to all Africans’ shared history.⁵ The African American activist and missionary Daniel Coker wrote his own refutation of pro-slavery arguments in A Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister published in 1810.⁶ David Margrett, or Margate, another African missionary preached a message of revolutionary African liberation on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1770s, in London as well as in South Carolina and Georgia. It was said of him ‘that he can’t bear to think of any of his own colour being slaves’, and he said of himself ‘that he had been called to deliver his people from slavery’.⁷

The best-selling writings of Equiano and Cugoano also aimed to undermine the racism that justified slavery, as well as attacking the slave trade and slavery itself. Such writing was sometimes a collective endeavour undertaken in the interests of all Africans and had a wide influence. Indeed Equiano, who was more usually known by his slave name, Gustavus Vassa, specifically reclaimed his African name, Olaudah Equiano, and re-styled himself ‘The African’ in his Interesting Narrative.⁸ As others have pointed out, the self-designation ‘African’ was one of the first elements of a new Pan-Africanist thinking that emerged in the eighteenth century amongst those in the diaspora. What became important was not a narrow national identity, as Fante, Igbo or Yoruba, but the new common Pan-African identity – African. This is clearly the case for African Masons, Christians and activists such as the Sons of Africa, as well as individual writers. Moreover, despite the prevailing anti-African racism, Africa was often presented in a positive light in the writings of Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley (1753–1784), James Gronniosaw (1705–1775) and others.⁹ A new African form of Christianity often linked communities, and therefore contributed to a growing Pan-African consciousness, throughout the Anglophone world in Britain, North America, the Caribbean and West Africa.

However, perhaps the most important event to undermine both racism and the slave system during this period was the revolution that broke out in the French Caribbean colony of St Domingue in August 1791. That revolutionary struggle eventually led in 1804 to the creation of Haiti, the first modern ‘black’ republic anywhere in the world and only the second independent country in the entire American continent. The revolution disproved any racist notion of African inferiority, since the African revolutionaries had defeated the armies of Britain, France and Spain, the most powerful in Europe. Victory elevated Haiti to iconic status amongst all those of African descent and produced new heroes and heroines such as Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803), Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), Sanité Bélair (1781–1802), Cécile Fatiman (fl. 1791), Henri Christophe (1767–1820) and Alexandre Pétion (1770–1818). Haiti’s constitution established the principle of equal human rights and established the country as a safe-haven for all Africans.10 Indeed, in the early nineteenth century several thousand African Americans migrated to Haiti from Philadelphia and other cities in the United States.¹¹ Haiti also acted as a base for future assaults on the ideology of racism by some of the country’s leading intellectuals and statesmen such as Anténor Firmin (1850–1911) and Benito Sylvain (1868–1915).

The Haitian Revolution might also be considered an early form of Pan-Africanism, of African unity, alongside other acts of liberation carried out by the enslaved during this period, such as the Revolt of the Malés in Brazil in 1835.¹² One historian has presented such resistance in the Caribbean as a ‘200 years war’, or ‘one protracted struggle launched by Africans and their Afro-West Indian progeny against slave owners’.¹³ The Haitian Revolution united Africans from different parts of the African continent, as well as those born in the Caribbean. They established their own common language of communication, religious practices and worldviews in pursuit of liberation, and they managed to maintain a struggle and vision of freedom for over a decade. The various Maroon communities, or settlements of liberated former African slaves, that existed throughout the American and African continents in the modern period can be thought of as other early forms of Pan-African unity. Of these the most celebrated was Palmares in Brazil, an African kingdom where thousands of liberated Africans from different backgrounds found refuge for nearly a century until it was destroyed by invasion in 1694.¹⁴ However, Palmares was not an isolated example and South America was the location for many such African settlements, variously called quilombos, cumbes and palenques, which may also be considered early forms of Pan-Africanism.¹⁵

The Haitian revolution was clearly an inspiration to many. Prince Hall, for example, referred positively to the revolutionary events in St Dominque and the struggles of those he referred to as our ‘African brethren’.¹⁶ Nanny Grigg, one of the leaders of the 1816 Bussa rebellion of enslaved Africans in Barbados, reportedly exhorted her comrades to act ‘in the way they did in San Domingo’. The Revolution also appears to have had a direct influence on José Antonio Aponte (d.1812) and his comrades who organized a large-scale rebellion in Cuba in 1812, and on Denmark Vesey (1760–1822), who had been a slave in Saint Domingue before his self-liberation and preparations to lead the enslaved to rebellion in South Carolina in 1822. Indeed, references to the inspirational Haitian Revolution can be found amongst many in the diaspora in this period, from the revolutionary demands of Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835) in London to Bostonian David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1819).17 Walker’s Appeal is a significant early Pan-African text. Within it Walker (c.1785–1830) refers to ‘the sons and daughters of Africa’, condemns racism, extols Africa’s glorious historical past, claims an African origin of civilization, demands enlightenment and calls on his ‘afflicted and slumbering brethren’ to follow Haiti’s example and liberate themselves.¹⁸

Repatriation

There were several early efforts by Africans in the diaspora to return to the African continent. In 1792 Thomas Peters (1738–1792), born in Africa, enslaved and then self-liberated during the American War of Independence, led over 1,000 ‘Black Loyalists’ from Nova Scotia in Canada to the new British colony of Sierra Leone, where they continued to agitate for their rights and even self-government.¹⁹ The Nova Scotians also began to speak of themselves as Africans and it might be said that they also began to develop a Pan-African consciousness. In part this was based on their common experience of enslavement and of the slave system, but, it was also based on knowledge of the world around them. They lived in a period where there were many large-scale rebellions of Africans culminating in the Haitian Revolution. In the early 1770s, for example, there were three major rebellions of Africans against the slave system in Suriname, Jamaica and St Vincent. The rebellion in Suriname involved tens of thousands of Africans and Amerindians and all three were widely reported in the North American press. There is therefore evidence of the development of an embryonic Pan-African consciousness based not only on common experience but also a common demand for liberty. Evidence of this thinking can, for example, be found in the petitions sent to the last governors of the British colonies in North America on behalf of enslaved Africans demanding freedom and the right to work so that money could be saved to send ‘Africans home to their native country’. These Africans demanded the same rights as other humans and declared ‘we are a freeborn pepel and have never forfeited that natural liberty [sic]’.²⁰

Other African Americans organized repatriation to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century, including the Bostonian Quaker merchant Paul Cuffee (1759–1817), who began his efforts in 1815. Cuffee used his own ships and part-financed the first African American settlers to Sierra Leone and he also contemplated aiding migration from the United States to Haiti. Efforts to repatriate to West Africa were also made by Africans and their descendants who had been kidnapped, enslaved and transported to Brazil, Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean. After 1835, significant numbers of Africans from Brazil and Cuba returned to Lagos, Porto Novo and other West African cities. It is estimated that around 8,000 made the Atlantic crossing in the nineteenth century, often with no certainty that they would reach Africa alive or still at liberty.21 Another notable advocate of repatriation was the Barbadian J. Albert Thorne, who established his African Colonial Enterprise and envisaged emigration to the British colonies in central or east Africa.²² There are therefore many remarkable stories of Africans from the diaspora who made the return journey to Africa in this period.²³

It must also be remembered that after 1807 tens of thousands of African ‘recaptives’, those enslaved and then freed on the high seas by the actions of the British navy also returned to Africa. Initially most were taken to the British colony of Sierra Leone from where many travelled to other parts of West Africa, often returning to their original homelands, but also further afield, as an influential, Western-educated population.²⁴ The African American AME Church established itself in Sierra Leone from the 1820s and from 1876 onwards Freetown’s Fourah Bay College provided university degrees for students throughout Anglophone West Africa. Sierra Leone and its population therefore became very significant in the emergence of Pan-Africanism in the nineteenth century, as the activities of James Africanus Horton, Edward Blyden and their circles demonstrate.

The modern country of Liberia in West Africa, which was founded and developed by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the early nineteenth century, also became a haven for repatriated African Americans. The AMS had been founded in 1817 as an unholy alliance of humanitarians and slave owners with differing motives, including racism and fear of the growth of a free African population in the United States, for encouraging the migration of African Americans. Nevertheless, after its declaration of independence in 1847, Liberia was viewed by many as another symbol of African achievement, alongside Haiti. African American colonization of Liberia was seen by some as providing another opportunity to prove the capabilities of those of African descent; a means to establish a base in Africa to elevate the position of all Africans.

By the end of the nineteenth century the African kingdom of Abyssinia had also assumed a similar iconic status partly because of its ancient history and a monarchy that traced its origins to biblical times. Even more importantly Abyssinia, led by its Emperor Menelik II, managed to defeat an Italian Army of invasion, at the historic battle of Adowa in 1896, and so preserve its independence from European colonial rule. It was the only African country to do so, although Liberia, strongly connected to the government of the United States and the Firestone Rubber Company also managed to preserve some measure of independence from the major European powers during their scramble for African colonies at the close of the nineteenth century.

The growth of colonies of Western-educated Africans in Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere in West Africa, many of whom were personally connected with the struggle against enslavement and racism, was certainly a factor contributing to the emergence of emancipatory ideas with a broad Pan-African rather than just local character throughout the nineteenth century. Certainly Western-educated Africans residing in Africa tended to identify more with each other and with other educated Africans in the diaspora than they did with uneducated Africans in the continent. Indeed, it could be said that an African intelligentsia of clergymen, doctors, lawyers and teachers emerged on all sides of the Atlantic, in Europe, the Americas and in Africa during this period. This intelligentsia influenced and drew inspiration from each other. Several prominent figures emerged such as Martin Delany, from the United States, Edward Blyden from the Caribbean and the Sierra Leonean James Africanus Horton.

Prominent Figures

Martin Robinson Delany (1812–1885), was an abolitionist, writer and medical practitioner, who welcomed the ‘common cause’ that was developing between ‘the blacks and colored races’ of the world. He travelled to West Africa and advocated the ‘regeneration of Africa’ by those in the diaspora. He began to argue that despite the enormous contribution that Africans had made to the United States their future lay in emigration. At first, he considered that this must be to other parts of the American continent but gradually became convinced that it was emigration to Africa that was required if the ‘Colored Race’ was to re-establish its ‘native characteristics’, and return to its ‘former national position of self-government and independence’. He presented many of his views in his major work The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852). In 1859 Delany and his colleague Robert Campbell (1829–1884) travelled to Lagos and other Yoruba kingdoms, in what is today Nigeria, where they were granted land for settlement. Delany’s plans for mass migration to West Africa were interrupted by the American Civil War, in which Delany became the first African American officer in the Union army, as well as by its aftermath. At the end of his life he returned to practising medicine and to writing a refutation of Social Darwinism, The Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Race and Colour (1879). Delany spoke increasingly of the unity of all those in the diaspora and in 1860 clearly stated his policy ‘Africa for the African race and black men to rule them. By black men I mean, men of African descent who claim an identity with the race.’25 The phrase ‘Africa for the African’ pre-dated Delany and was in common usage by the mid-nineteenth century.²⁶ It is likely to have been an adaptation of the demand ‘Ireland for the Irish’.

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), a politician, writer, educator and diplomat, has been viewed as one of the key thinkers in the development of Pan-Africanism. He was born in St Thomas in the Caribbean and after unsuccessful attempts to enter colleges in the United States emigrated to Liberia in 1851, with support from the AMS. He was both a teacher and newspaper editor and became a strong advocate of repatriation to Africa from the diaspora and ‘racial pride’. For Blyden the ‘object of Liberia’ was ‘the redemption of Africa and the disenthralment and elevation of the African race’. He believed that African redemption would be brought about through the ‘Christian civilization’ of African American migrants and he was subsequently given an official government appointment to encourage migration from the diaspora to Liberia. Blyden also began to study history to find evidence to refute charges of African inferiority and to combat the prevailing racist views of the day. He published his own major work on the subject, A Vindication of the Negro Race in 1857. Blyden continued to exhort others in the diaspora to return to Africa and establish a ‘home and nationality’ of their own and he believed that Liberia could be the nucleus of what he referred to as ‘a West African state’. His thinking therefore had a great appeal for other educated West Africans, he was also an advocate of establishing a West African university to train West Africans for self-government and to build West African unity, but his entry into Liberian politics and outspoken comments on Liberians of mixed parentage led to his exile in Sierra Leone. From there he urged the British government to expand ‘Christian civilization’ throughout the region. He was equally enthusiastic about the territorial expansion of the United States in West Africa, again believing that ‘African redemption’ might be brought about through colonial rule.

In 1872, he established his newspaper Negro designed to ‘serve the race purpose’ and one of the first publications specifically aimed at audiences in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. Blyden believed that Africans had their own unique contribution to make to the world and an equally unique ‘African personality’. He also believed that Africans must develop an education suited to their own needs, history and culture and he encouraged the study of African languages and Arabic. He was also a defender of Islam and many of his articles on this subject are contained in his most famous book, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887).

During his own lifetime Blyden was a very influential figure who had a significant impact on his contemporaries, especially the younger generation who began to organize on a pan-West African basis, or agitate for political reforms throughout British West Africa, including J. E. Casely-Hayford (1866–1930), John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910) and Mojola Agbebi (1860–1917). However, he was also a firm supporter of British and other forms of colonialism in Africa, a position that he shared with many other Western-educated Africans in the nineteenth century. He was given official positions by the colonial government in Sierra Leone and he believed that Britain was the colonial power best suited to protect the interests of Africans but also that the partition of the continent by the European powers was in the interests of ‘African regeneration’ and for ‘the ultimate good of the people’. He even welcomed the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 and was reluctant to criticize the atrocities carried out by Belgian and American interests in the Congo. Blyden was one of the first to articulate the notion of ‘African personality’ and the uniqueness of the ‘African race’ and to establish influence in Africa and in the diaspora. For this reason, he is often seen as one of the key figures in the emergence of Pan-Africanism. Blyden’s views, encompassing as they do support for colonial rule, the ‘civilizing mission’ and various ideas of ‘race’ are clearly rooted in the nineteenth century and yet his contradictory ideas influenced later Pan-Africanists such as Marcus Garvey (1870–1940) and even Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972).27

One of those who worked with Blyden in Liberia was African American Alexander Crummell (1818–1898) a missionary and abolitionist, who studied at the University of Cambridge in England. Crummell too had a strong belief that it would be those Christians from the diaspora who would ‘civilize’ Africa and he therefore became a strong advocate of African American migration and of the development of Liberia. His was a common view, that the regeneration of Liberia and of Africa in general must come from outside. Both Crummell and Blyden were influenced by the theories of German philosophers such as von Herder. They believed that Africa’s destiny was God given and that the African ‘race’ had specific qualities that would turn contemporary inferiority into ‘that superiority and eminence which is our rightful heritage, and which is evidently the promise of our God’. For this purpose, in his later life when he had left Liberia, Crummell founded the American Negro Academy in 1897, to ‘accomplish the civilization of the Negro race in the United States’. Blyden even believed that racism against African Americans was part of the divine plan to drive ‘the oppressed from the house of bondage, as Israel was from Egypt, to do his work in the land of his fathers’.²⁸

Another of Blyden’s co-workers for African American migration was Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), an important African American figure in the nineteenth century, a writer and former politician, who became one of the leaders of the AME Church in the southern United Sates and one of the main proponents of African American migration to Africa in this period. He reportedly said, ‘the Negro will never be anything here while Africa is shrouded in heathen darkness’, a view that would no doubt have been supported by Blyden, Crummell and others.²⁹ Turner travelled to both Sierra Leone and Liberia on several occasions and established the International Migration Society and two newspapers, the Voice of Missions and the Voice of the People, to encourage migration to Africa. He was also one of the first to preach that the Christian god could be conceived of as an African.

James Africanus Horton (1835–1883), a physician, scientist, historian and writer has been called ‘the father of modern African political thought’ and was also a key figure in the development of Pan-Africanism. Born near Freetown in the British colony of Sierra Leone, Horton was recruited by the War Office and sent to Britain in 1855 where he became one of the first Africans to train as a medical doctor. He was also one of the first African scientists in modern times to research and write on Africa and perhaps the first scientist to describe the symptoms of sickle cell anaemia. It seems that it was while he was in Britain that Horton became aware both of racism and his African identity and adopted the name ‘Africanus’. After his graduation, he also became one of the first Africans to receive a commission in the British army. He served throughout the British colonies in West Africa but suffered from racism and discrimination throughout his army career.

In 1865 Horton began his political writing with the publication of an address to the London-based African Aid Society entitled Political Economy of West Africa – The African’s View of the Negro’s Place in Nature. His first political writing was prompted by the report of Britain’s Parliamentary Select Committee on the West African colonies that recommended ultimate withdrawal from this region by the British government and the creation of conditions that would lead to self-government. Horton wrote in support of African self-government but also took the opportunity to repudiate the dominant anti-African racism of the time. Horton further developed his ideas which in 1868 were republished in his most famous book West African Countries and People, British and Native with the Requirements Necessary for Establishing that Self-Government recommended by the Committee of the House of Commons, 1865 and a Vindication of the African Race. Horton, who became a supporter of Blyden, used the book to present a lengthy critique of Victorian racism, including the views of the anatomist Robert Knox who published a book entitled The Races of Man (1862) in which he had referred to the dangers of a future ‘United States of Africa’.30 Horton’s other main aim in the book was a vindication of Africans in which he borrowed freely from the work of others as well as presenting a programme for the self-government of Britain’s West African colonies. Horton too had an important influence on other educated West Africans and declared that his aims were to develop among them ‘a true political science’ and ‘to prove the capacity of the African for possessing a real political Government and national independence’. He thus became the first African to openly campaign for self-government not just in one country but throughout British West Africa and to champion the cause of what he referred to as ‘African nationality’.³¹

Like Blyden, Horton thought in terms of pan-West African as well as diasporic political activity and he also thought that ‘civilization’ would be brought to Africa from outside. However, his ideas probably influenced those who drafted the constitution for the short-lived Fanti Confederation (1868–1874). Horton supported the Confederation, believing that it was working towards the ‘self-government of the Gold Coast’, and he argued that it should be recognized by the British government. Horton was also in communication with the leaders of the Accra National Confederation, formed in 1869 with similar aims, believing that it contained ‘the germ of that form of government’ that he had advocated in his writing. Horton too was a man of many contradictions. One of the wealthiest individuals in West Africa and often closely connected to the colonial authorities, his own experiences of racism and efforts to combat it, as well as his position in society, drew him to advocate African self-government and forms of African unity and Pan-Africanism, especially throughout British West Africa.

Ethiopianism

Occurring at the end of the nineteenth century, during the period of the European ‘scramble’ for African colonies, were several notable struggles of Africans in west, central and southern Africa against what were perceived as racist practices and attitudes within Christian churches. African resistance led to what was commonly referred to as the Ethiopian movement, a movement to establish independent African churches. This movement is generally seen as commencing in what is now Lesotho in 1872, when 158 Africans renounced the control of French missionaries. The Ethiopian, or African Church, movement was often influenced by African American and Caribbean missionaries originating within the AME, AMEZ and Baptist churches. It was also inspired by various biblical texts mentioning Africa, most notably the psalm verse ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.’32

The term ‘Ethiopia’ came to be used as a synonym for Africa and the biblical verse had inspired many of the forerunners. It was certainly used by Prince Hall in one of his most famous speeches published as A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge (1797) but often known as ‘Thus Doth Ethiopia Stretch Forth Her Hand from Slavery, to Freedom and Equality.’³³ In 1829 African American Robert Alexander Young published The Ethiopian Manifesto, Issued in Defence of the Blackman’s Rights, in the scale of Universal Freedom, emphasizing that he spoke of the ‘whole of the Ethiopian people’ since all were without rights.³⁴ There are numerous other examples including a chapter entitled ‘Ethiopia Stretching Out Her Hands Unto God; or, Africa’s Service to the World’ in Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race.³⁵ Although often expressing itself in religious terms, Ethiopianism also articulated a range of anti-colonial strivings encapsulated in the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans.’ As a broad cultural and political movement, an early form of Pan-Africanism, it was certainly enhanced by Abyssinia’s military victory over Italy at the battle of Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia, as it is now known, was the only African state to decisively defeat a European colonial power in this period and thereby preserve its independence and sovereignty. Emperor Menelik (1844–1913) when affirming his country’s sovereignty, declared, ‘Ethiopia has need of no one, it stretches its hands unto God.’³⁶

The name Ethiopian appears to have first been used by the Rev. Mangena Maake Mokone (1851–1931) when he broke away from the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the Transvaal to form the Ethiopian Church of South Africa in 1892. Mokone used the term Ethiopian influenced by the psalm but also because he hoped that the church would spread throughout Africa.37 He corresponded with Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and, with Charlotte Maxeke (1874–1939) as an intermediary, his church subsequently affiliated with the AME church in the United States.³⁸ The latter sent missionaries to South Africa during this period as did another African American church, the National Baptist Convention. Both denominations began to sponsor students from southern Africa to study at African American colleges in the United States. Perhaps the most famous of the Baptist’s recruits was John Chilembwe (1871–1915), from what is today Malawi, although the AME Church appears to have had a much larger impact on South Africans. The AME Church established its own branch in Pretoria in 1896 and Bishop Turner made a five-week visit to South Africa in 1898, strengthening the Ethiopian movement and the influence of the AME Church throughout the region.³⁹

The AME Church itself had a long relationship with Africa, having sent the first missionaries to Liberia in 1821. Like other African American churches, it often combined support for missionary work and ‘advancement’ in Africa with its support for various repatriation schemes. In the 1880s Bishop Turner became one of the leading ‘African Emigrationists’, even calling on the United States government to support the repatriation of up to 1 million African Americans. He too was of the view that the creation of the diaspora was part of a divine plan for the ‘redemption of Africa’.⁴⁰

Ethiopianism in South Africa, as well as elsewhere, was also clearly a manifestation of wider social and political unrest and was associated with the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’. Ethiopianism in South Africa was strengthened by the outbreak of the Second Boer War and subsequently considered a contributory factor to the 1906 Zulu or Bambatha Rebellion in Natal. This rebellion also led to one of the earliest Pan-Africanist texts, A Defence of the Ethiopian Movement (1908), written by Bandele Omoniyi (1884–1913), a young Nigerian student based in Britain who ended his short life engaged in politics in Brazil.⁴¹ By the time Omoniyi’s book was published there were over seventy independent African churches of various denominations in South Africa, which were collectively viewed as a threat to white supremacy and European colonial rule.⁴² Although some Ethiopian churches were narrowly based among speakers of one African language, many did not distinguish between speakers of different languages and had a Pan-African orientation. Often this was encouraged by the gaining of Western education, as well as by the emergence of a local African press and papers such as John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu (Black Opinion), founded in 1884, which regularly commented on African American matters. A Pan-African orientation was further cemented by contact with those from the diaspora, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, or the African American sea captain Harry Dean, and particularly for the few Africans who studied in the United States.43 Elsewhere in southern and central Africa, Ethiopianism often took the form of an African Watch Tower movement, which separated from the American parent body and was considered such a threat that its founder was expelled from what is today Malawi in 1914. Nevertheless, the movement and its offshoots continued to spread and played some part in the anti-colonial uprising led by John Chilembwe in 1915.⁴⁴

In British West Africa in 1898 the AMEZ Church supported the establishment of an African Methodist Church in the Gold Coast. Here S. R. B. Attoh-Ahuma (1863–1921) a politician, journalist and writer played a leading role along with other leading African Methodists. Evidently independence from European control drew these Africans to the AMEZ Church. As one pointed out, ‘It is indeed an entirely Negro Church; organised by Negroes for Negroes, manned, governed, controlled, supported by Negro energy, intellect, liberality and contributions.’⁴⁵

In Nigeria, Mojola Agbebi (1860–1917) and others broke away from the American Baptists. Propounding the doctrine that ‘European Christianity is a dangerous thing’ they formed the Native Baptist Church in Lagos in 1888, the first independent African church in Britain’s West African colonies. Agbebi, who was also a prolific journalist and one of the most prominent Nigerian newspaper editors, worked with Blyden and became one of his closest supporters. Born David Brown Vincent Agbebi changed his name and encouraged others of Sierra Leonean origin, whose families had adopted European names, to follow his example. He also encouraged the wearing of traditional dress and pride in traditional culture and music within and outside the church. Agbebi saw these new African churches as places, ‘governed by Africans, worked by Africans, supported by Africans, minus the trammels, complexion, and dominations of a foreign and alien race’.⁴⁶ He subsequently travelled to Britain and the United States and met with Du Bois, John E. Bruce and other early Pan-Africanists.

John E. Bruce (1856–1924) who had started his life enslaved, was a mainly self-taught historian, journalist and writer. An active member of the AMEZ Church he played an important role in the development of Pan-Africanism, linking like-minded figures in West and South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States. In addition to Agbebi, his contacts included Blyden, Dusé Mohamed Ali (1866–1945), founder of the African Times and Orient Review; two of the founders of the South African National Congress John L. Dube (1871–1946) and Solomon Plaatje (1876–1932); J. E. Casely-Hayford, one of the founders of the National Congress of British West Africa. Bruce was also connected with African American intellectuals and later became an important figure in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), writing for and editing the UNIA’s Negro World. The connections between Agbebi, Blyden, Bruce and others demonstrate that Pan-African networks were becoming well established by the dawn of the twentieth century.

The Chicago Congress on Africa

The first gathering to be described as ‘pan-African’ was the Congress on Africa held in Chicago in August 1893 at the same time as the World’s Columbian Exposition, and attended by Frederick Douglass (c.1818–1895), Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell, Alexander Walters (1858–1917) of the AMEZ Church, Hallie Q. Brown (1849–1949) former principal of Tuskegee Institute and T. Thomas Fortune (1856–1928) the African American editor of The New York Age, who later claimed to have conceived although not implemented the idea of holding a Pan-African congress. African Americans were well-represented, continental Africans less so, and the overall orientation of the Congress retained the Eurocentric notion of the African as subject, rather than agent, and the need to bring ‘civilization’ and commerce to Africa from outside. The Congress therefore included presentations from ‘well-educated blacks as well as elite and middle class whites’.47 Even here, however, resistance to such Eurocentric thinking was evident and Bishop Turner declared that Africans were the original humans from whom both civilization and Europeans were descended. The Congress also discussed the controversial question of African American emigration to Africa.⁴⁸

A similar congress was held two years later in Atlanta, organized by the Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa. It was notable for a message of greeting from Blyden, who did not attend, praising the British invasion of the kingdom of Asante, as well as the contribution of Etna Holderness, a Liberian and perhaps the first continental African woman to speak at such an event, who had come to the United States as a nursemaid and wished to return to Africa as a missionary. There were also contributions from Crummell, Bishop Turner and Fortune. Other African Americans, most associated with missionary endeavours, also participated but most of the contributions were concerned with missionary activity and ‘saving’ and ‘civilizing’ Africa, including those from a representative of the AMS.⁴⁹

The First Pan-African Conference

The first Pan-African Conference was held in London in July 1900, convened by Henry Sylvester Williams (1869–1911), a Trinidadian lawyer, and the organization he and others founded in London in October 1897, the African Association. The circumstances that led to the convening of the conference are far from clear. T. Thomas Fortune claimed that around 1896 he had initiated the idea of such a gathering ‘out of which might be evolved an association of the Africans and the descendants of Africa, from all parts of the world’, and that Williams who was in New York at the time took up his suggestion. However, there is no other evidence to substantiate this claim.⁵⁰

The African Association was mainly concerned with various injustices in Britain’s African colonies, as well as the Caribbean. It aimed to present accurate information, to influence British public opinion so that ‘Members of Parliament could be instructed that the better treatment of Native Races should command greater attention in Parliament.’ It declared that it wished to encourage unity amongst Africans and be a representative body on ‘matters affecting the destiny of the African Race’.51

The Association was evidently concerned with the treatment of Africans throughout the continent, although it seems likely that it was particularly concerned with events in South Africa. It was opposed to the violence and racism of the European colonial powers in Africa, as well as economic conditions in the Caribbean, although not necessarily opposed to colonial rule itself, nor the ‘civilizing’ mission. It was particularly concerned that educated Africans were not consulted and had no say regarding the fate of their compatriots and the African continent, and it is important to note that in its name and activities it used the term Africans to include both those from the continent and from the diaspora. It certainly lobbied the British Parliament about conditions in the Caribbean and southern Africa, as well as the promotion of racism in Britain, and submitted proposals for reforms. It concerned itself with the colonies of the other European powers in Africa too. But although it received some support from enlightened opinion in Britain, it was viewed with contempt by the British government.

However, its aims soon received favourable reports in the press in Britain’s West African colonies. Although membership was only open to ‘Black Men’, its joint-founder was an African woman, Anne Victoria Kinloch (c.1863–?) from South Africa, who came to Britain in 1896 and had been lecturing and writing on the oppression of Africans in her homeland throughout the country. Little is known of Kinloch’s motives for travelling to Britain but her important role was made clear by Williams who wrote that ‘the Association is the result of Mrs Kinloch’s work in England and the feeling that as British Subjects we ought to be heard in our own affairs’. Kinloch herself explained that ‘with some men of my race in this country, I have formed a society for the benefit of our people in Africa’.⁵² Although the Association claimed that ‘no one not of African descent’ could be a member, it also appears that the treasurer of the Association was Frank Colenso, the son of the Anglican Bishop of Natal, who was of European not African descent, but who like his father was a strong campaigner for the rights of the Zulu and other Africans in South Africa.⁵³ The other officers and committee members were mainly law students or lawyers from the Caribbean and West Africa. The Association’s supporters included MPs and members of the Anti-Slavery Society and Aborigines’ Protection Society. It most notable supporter was perhaps Dadabhai Naoroji who had been Britain’s first Indian parliamentarian.

Within a short time, the Association’s patrons included Mojola Agbebi and Booker T. Washington, and it soon referred to itself as the Pan African Conference Committee. It also consulted other leading African Americans including Bishops Alexander Walters and James Holly about its intention to hold a conference. This would be timed to coincide with the Paris Exhibition, to assemble ‘men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and the outlook for the darker races of mankind’. Plans for the conference, which was still mainly aimed at influencing enlightened public opinion in Britain, were also widely reported in the African American press, as well as in Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean.

It seems that after Williams met with the Haitian writer and Pan-Africanist Benito Sylvain in Paris, the scope of the conference was broadened to include ‘the treatment of native races under European and American rule’; consequently lynching in the United States would also be discussed. One important aim of the conference was to demonstrate that those of African descent could speak for themselves against all the injustices they faced and contemporary reports stressed that this was the first occasion on which Africans had united for ‘the attainment of equality and freedom’. Williams also insisted that women deserved a ‘prominent position’ at the conference.

Benito Sylvain (1868–1915), a Haitian diplomat, philosopher and writer, was his country’s envoy to Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia and then the latter’s aide-de-camp. He learned of the African Association from Booker T. Washington on his return from Ethiopia in 1897, and it seem likely that he was in contact with Williams for some time before 1900. Sylvain had been educated in Haiti and France and spent several years based in Paris. There he had become a leading campaigner against racism and a prolific defender of Africans in many published articles. Between 1890 and 1897 he published a newspaper, La Fraternité (‘in defence of the interests of Haiti and the Black Race’) in collaboration with his brother and two politicians from Guadeloupe. In 1898, he founded l’Association de la Jeunesse Noire, an association for young Africans in Paris, where Sylvain worked with Anténor Firmin, another notable Haitian. They had discussed convening an international conference to consider issues relating to anti-African racism and inequality but then decided to work with Williams and the African Association. Sylvain subsequently published his major work and PhD dissertation entitled Du Sort des Indigenes dans les Colonies d’Exploitation in 1901.

Anténor Firmin (1850–1911), a Haitian politician, diplomat writer and anthropologist is best known for his book De l’égalité des races humaines (1885). This was written as a counter to the publication of the now infamous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines by Count de Gobineau, which attempted to prove European superiority and African inferiority. Firmin, in opposition, stated that ‘all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of colour or anatomical form’, and refuted de Gobineau’s racist arguments. In 1900, Firmin was appointed to head the Haitian legation in Paris and the Pan-African Conference elected him vice-president for an envisaged Haitian branch of the newly-created Pan-African Association.

The Pan-African Conference was held at Westminster Town Hall, not far from the British Parliament, from 22 to 24 July 1900. The discussion focused on slavery, colonialism, racism – all forms of oppression against Africa and Africans and how they might be removed. In addition, there was also a focus on possible forms of reparation for Africa and Africans. The Conference was chaired by Bishop Alexander Waters and included speakers from the United States, the Caribbean and Africa, in addition to those based in Britain.54

Key participants included John Archer (1863–1932), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), Rev. Attoh-Ahuma (1863–1921) and Frederick J. Loudin (1836–1902), as well as Catherine Impey and Jane Cobden Unwin. Two African American women spoke at the conference. Anna J. Cooper (1858–1964), formerly enslaved, was a member of the American Negro Academy, a leading educator and human right activist, the author of the influential Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South, who would later influence Jane Nardal.⁵⁵ At the London conference, she spoke on ‘The Negro Problem in America’. Anna H. Jones (1855–1932), a Canadian-born suffragist, was also a key speaker who delivered a presentation entitled ‘A Plea for Race Individuality’. Other women including African American sisters Ella D. Barrier (1852–1945) and Fanny Barrier Williams (1855–1944) also attended. Sylvain, delivered one of the main speeches as the representative of Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia. Capt Harry Dean (1864–1935) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) were amongst the distinguished participants of this international gathering, which concerned itself with many of the key issues and problems facing ‘African humanity’.

The conference’s ‘Address to the Nations of the World’, which condemned racial oppression in the United States as well as throughout Africa and demanded self-government for colonies, was drafted under the chairmanship of Du Bois and included the famous phrase ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour-line’.⁵⁶ Du Bois had already coined the phrase ‘Pan-Negroism’ in his lecture ‘The Conservation of Races’ in 1897. It was perhaps an understandable term but one that was not destined to become popular.⁵⁷

The conference recognized the importance of the ‘three sovereign states’ Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia, sent a ‘memorial’ to Queen Victoria calling her attention to the conditions imposed on her ‘native subjects’, and intended to establish branches in Africa, the Caribbean and North America of a new Pan-African Association (PAA). The PAA was presided over by Bishop Walters, with an executive committee that included Sylvain, Williams, Archer, Coleridge-Taylor, Loudin and Anna J. Cooper. It appears that Du Bois was not elected a member and within a short time Dr Robert Love, Tengo Jabavu and others were added to the executive.⁵⁸

Plans for a second conference in the United States in 1902 and a third in Haiti in 1904 were announced and Williams launched the first few issues of a magazine, the Pan-African, which it seems only focused on Africans within the British Empire. There were also plans for a ‘bureau in London with the object of watching the interests of the African races all over the world’.59 However, despite his strenuous efforts and extensive travel to the Caribbean, the United States and South Africa, both the Pan-African Association and the Pan-African soon collapsed and therefore no further conferences were organized.⁶⁰ There is some evidence that the demise of the PAA was the result of a differences within its executive committee but the precise cause remains unknown.⁶¹

Although the Pan-African Association and its publication were short-lived and Williams was unable to organize further Pan-African conferences, his activities and those of the African Association should not be considered a failure. He established the words Pan-African and Pan-Africanism and initiated the modern Pan-African movement by convening the London conference. Moreover, he had consolidated the Pan-African networks linking all those working for the advancement of Africa and Africans in the continent as well as in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. Only Blyden appears to have been outside Williams’ orbit, largely it appears because he chose to be. The London Pan-African Conference recognized the rights of women, the need for self-government and began to discuss the question of reparations too. What it lacked was the ability to sustain itself and any programme to bring about the desired and necessary change.

Pan-Africanism and Garveyism

The Pan-African network

Following the London conference several years passed before such a major event was again organized. Nevertheless, several of the key figures remained active and further developed various aspects of Pan-Africanism. In a series of lectures and articles Edward Blyden elaborated his notion of the uniqueness of the ‘African Personality’, as well as his defence of African traditions and political and economic institutions, most notably in African Life and Customs (1908). Amongst other things, Blyden claimed that traditional African institutions were not unlike the socialism desired by so many in Europe.¹ Mojola Agbebi likewise continued to oppose Eurocentrism and to defend African forms of Christianity, championing the inclusion and promotion of African music, culture and languages. Blyden’s and Agbebi’s writing was followed avidly not only by those with a Western education in Africa, but also by Africans in the diaspora in Europe and the United States.

Pan-Africanist ideas were central to J. E. Casely-Hayford’s novel Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (1911), which he dedicated to ‘the sons of Ethiopia the world over’. Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford was a lawyer, journalist, writer and politician, born into a prosperous elite family in the British colony of the Gold Coast. His reputation was made first as an anti-colonial journalist then as a lawyer defending indigenous land rights. He worked with the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society and was later a founder member of the National Congress of British West Africa and a major sponsor of the British-based Pan-Africanist Dusé Mohammed Ali’s African Times and Orient Review.² Ethiopia Unbound, can be seen as another example of the Ethiopianism that influenced Marcus Garvey.³ Considered by some to be the first Pan-African novel, it was also partly autobiographical, its literary form was simply a means to allow a discussion of many of the main political concerns of the Pan-Africanists of the day. Through Kwamankra, the novel’s main character, Casely-Hayford praises the work of Horton and especially Blyden as designed ‘to re-veal everywhere the African unto himself … to lead him back into self-respect’, and to restore ‘his true place in creation on natural and national lines’. The novel is concerned with developing the ‘African nationality’, encouraging ‘race emancipation’, and proudly claims that Africa was the ‘cradle of civilization’. It looks forward to the prospect of those of African descent around the world modernizing African society whilst retaining its best African features in the manner of Japanese modernization. Casely-Hayford therefore also advocated the creation of a university in West Africa that might combat the Eurocentrism that accompanied colonial rule.4

Both Casely-Hayford and Blyden sent messages of greeting to Booker T. Washington’s ‘International Conference on the Negro’ held at Tuskegee in 1912. It is possible that both Washington and Thomas T. Fortune had planned to hold such a gathering even earlier but it was not designed to develop the overtly political concerns established by the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900 and is not to be considered a Pan-African gathering, despite the later view of Du Bois that it constituted one.⁵ Indeed, it was mainly directed at missionaries, including those of the AME and AMEZ churches, as well as colonial governments, with the aim of discussing to what extent the vocational education methods developed at Tuskegee Institute might be employed in the African and Caribbean colonies. Both Bishops Walters and Turner attended and Casely-Hayford’s message did strike a Pan-African chord, as he called for unity between those in West Africa and the United States and the development of an ‘African nationality’.⁶

A more representative event was the founding of the Negro Society for Historical Research, launched in 1912 in the United States by John E. Bruce and the bibliophile of Puerto Rican origin, Arthur Schomburg. Both were associated with the American Negro Academy founded by Alexander Crummell in 1897. The new Society aimed to study ‘Negro History’ but also to collect rare books, documents and photos relating to the subject. Amongst its honorary and corresponding members were several African rulers, as well as Du Bois, Blyden, Casely-Hayford, Agbebi and Alain Locke (1885–1954), later a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Members in Britain included the Jamaican Pan-Africanist writer T. E. S. Scholes (c.1858–1940), Dusé Mohammed Ali and the Nigerian Moses Da Rocha (1875–1942).⁷ Both Da Rocha and another member, F. Z. S. Peregrino (1851–1919) a Gold Coaster active in South African politics (sometimes as a government informer), had attended the 1900 Pan-African Conference.⁸ There were several representatives from the British West Indies, as well as from Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Costa Rica and Brazil. The member from Panama was Marie Du Chattelier, later an organizer with Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.⁹

Bruce had joined Thomas T. Fortune’s Afro-American League, one of the first black civil rights organizations in the United States, in 1890 and subsequently became its president. He was also involved with the Niagara Movement, as well as other African American organizations, and became a strong supporter of armed self-defence against lynching and other forms of terrorism aimed at African Americans. In 1913, he formed the secret Loyal Order of the Sons of Africa, convinced that there was a need for a Pan-African organization with its headquarters in Africa and members on the continent, as well as in the United States and the Caribbean. Bruce had originally envisaged an organization that would fight for the rights of all Africans, both by employing lawyers and through organized self-defence. The officers of the Loyal Order included James Aggrey (1875–1927) from the Gold Coast and Schomburg, as well as others from the Caribbean and West Africa. The organization probably had some Masonic connections and it is possible that Bruce considered that its members should arm themselves and seek some support from Japan and India.10

Bruce and Casely-Hayford both had a strong connection with another early Pan-Africanist, Dusé Mohammed Ali, who claimed to be of Egyptian and Sudanese origin. He had worked as both an actor and seafarer before establishing himself in Britain as a journalist who wrote critically about British imperialism and who defended the rights of Africans in the continent and diaspora. In 1911, he published the partly plagiarized In the Land of the Pharaohs, a vigorous condemnation of British colonial rule in Egypt. Ali was strongly influenced by the Universal Races Congress, held the same year in London, which he attended alongside Du Bois, Scholes, Agbebi, who represented Blyden, the South African activist and journalist Tengo Jabavu (1851–1921), Anténor Firmin, and the former president of Haiti, François Legitime. Ali began publishing his African Times and Orient Review (ATOR), a ‘Pan-Oriental Pan-African’ journal in 1912. The paper was financially supported by Casely-Hayford and a consortium of three other West Africans and was distributed in the British West Indies, North America, West and East Africa, as well as in India, China, Japan and Europe. In its pages, Ali called for Afro-Asian solidarity, attacked racism and imperialism and supported global anti-colonial and Pan-African struggles. During 1912 and 1913 Marcus Garvey was employed as a journalist and it is generally agreed that Ali and the politics he espoused had a significant influence on Garvey.¹¹ The ATOR attracted other significant international contributors and distributors including Bruce, Agbebi, Peregrino, Attoh-Ahuma, Aggrey, the Trinidadian Felix Hercules (1888–c.1930), African American, writer and activist William Ferris (1874–1941) and Kobina Sekyi (1892–1956) the anti-colonial writer and activist from the Gold Coast who was subsequently one of the leaders of the National Congress of British West Africa.¹²

What is evident is that by the eve of the First World War a Pan-African network incorporating new and older figures existed and spanned three continents. There were also clear attempts to organize across Africa and the diaspora and to develop publications that could speak to the problems facing millions of Africans around the world: colonial rule, various forms of economic, social and political oppression and the ubiquitous anti-African racism. In the United States, for instance, over 1,100 African American men, women and children were murdered by racist mobs between 1900 and 1914 and many more attacked and wounded. It was reported that there were two racist murders of this type every week. This was in addition to the legal segregation and discrimination that occurred throughout the country and particularly in the southern states during this period. In Africa, the violent colonial conquest and division of the continent by the major European powers continued but was almost complete by 1914. Segregation along racist lines was also common within Africa as were atrocities, the most infamous being the genocide that occurred in what was then the Belgian Congo. Half the population, an estimated 10 million people, had been wiped out in the thirty years before 1908. In the Caribbean and South America, the legacy of slavery continued in the form of colonial exploitation and impoverishment. Anti-African racism during this period was globally ubiquitous, even in European countries such as Britain and France, where a colour bar and other forms of racism were widespread and legal.

Garvey and Garveyism

The man who would become the most significant figure during the period of the First World War and after was the Jamaican journalist, writer, trade unionist and activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) who first established his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914. It seems likely that Amy Ashwood, Garvey’s first wife, may have been the UNIA’s first member and secretary but as the organization was launched before she met Garvey, claims for joint founding may not be appropriate.13 The early Jamaican UNIA was concerned with social and economic ‘upliftment’, and it soon adopted the famous motto ‘One God! One Aim! One Destiny!’ Nevertheless, it declared itself to be non-political and claimed it wished to emulate Booker T. Washington and ‘establish a Tuskegee in Jamaica’.¹⁴ However, the UNIA Manifesto included amongst its aims establishing ‘a universal confederacy amongst the race’, as well as promoting ‘racial pride and love’, developing education, commercial enterprises and ‘conscientious Christian worship’, as well as assisting in ‘the civilizing of backward tribes in Africa’. It was formed ‘In view of the universal disunity existing among the people of the Negro or African race, and the apparent danger which must follow the continuance of such a spirit.’¹⁵ Garvey explained that wherever he had travelled ‘I saw the injustice done to my race because it was black.’ He had then been inspired by Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery, and whilst he was in London, immediately before returning to Jamaica in 1914, ‘his doom … of being a race leader’ dawned on him. According to his own account: ‘I asked “Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” I could not find them, and then I declared, “I will help to make them.”’¹⁶

Garvey’s approach was influenced not only by his initial admiration for Booker T. Washington, and his sojourn in Britain and central America, but also by his upbringing in Jamaica, where the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, and demands for self-government, were still a living memory. Garvey was also influenced by J. Robert Love (1839–1914), publisher of the Advocate, a Jamaican newspaper, which like others in the Caribbean and African colonies, as well as elsewhere, championed a Pan-African approach and was concerned about the ‘destiny of the Negro Race’, and ‘Africa for the Africans’. Love publicized the 1900 Pan-African Conference and worked with Sylvester Williams when he visited Jamaica to organize a branch of the Pan-African Association.17 By the time he had reached London in 1913, Garvey was adamant that those from the Caribbean, rather than those from the United States, would ‘be the instruments of uniting a scattered race who, before the close of many centuries will found an empire on which the sun shall shine as ceaselessly as it shines on the Empire of the North today’.¹⁸ However, as has been pointed out, Pan-African influences on Garvey would have been manifold and certainly included Blyden, Horton and Casely-Hayford, as well as many others.¹⁹

It cannot be proven that Garvey was influenced by Chief Sam’s African movement but certainly Sam established an important precedent for Garvey’s Black Star Line and plans for African repatriation, as was remarked by the media and authorities at the time.²⁰ Chief Alfred Sam (c.1880–c.1930) was a trader from the Gold Coast, with a company registered in New York who was concerned to develop trade links between West Africa and the United States. In 1913 Sam secured rights to land in West Africa and bought a ship with the aim of encouraging the emigration ‘of the best Negro farmers and mechanics from the United States to different sections in West Africa’. Sam’s trade and emigrations schemes were referred to as an ‘African movement’ concerned with ‘men and women of African blood’, and he also proposed to create an Ethiopian Steamship Line.²¹ Sam’s repatriation plans were enthusiastically received by prominent African Americans in Oklahoma and soon several hundred had been persuaded to financially commit to the scheme, much to the concern of the government of the United States and British colonial authorities. Eventually about sixty African Americans made the trip to West Africa and the venture faced many difficulties and official opposition. What it does show is that some African Americans were willing to face the uncertainty of life in Africa rather than continue to live in the United States, that dreams of ‘repatriation’ endured and that Sam, as well as Garvey, managed to tap into these Pan-African dreams. Chief Sam’s plans had a vociferous champion, the Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma (c.1855–1946), a Sierra Leonean member of the American Negro Academy and the AME Church, who joined the voyage and wrote a series of articles defending the African movement. Although, Dusé Mohammed Ali was a strong critic, it is quite possible that Marcus Garvey learned from the African movement and was inspired by it.²²

Garvey re-established the UNIA in New York in 1916 where it soon attracted thousands of adherents, first throughout the United States and soon after internationally. By 1919 he had travelled widely and established about thirty branches in different American cities. At its height, the UNIA’s worldwide membership has been estimated at over 2 million but no precise figures exist. Undoubtedly it was the largest political movement of Africans during the twentieth century, embracing not just a few intellectuals but the masses both on the African continent and throughout the diaspora. The organization’s newspaper Negro World, launched in 1918, preached an anti-colonial message, ‘Africa for the Africans at home and abroad,’ challenged notions of white supremacy and extolled the greatness of Africans and of Africa’s history. Like his nineteenth-century predecessors Garvey spoke of the greatness of Egypt and an African origin of civilization. The Negro World circulated, often illegally, throughout colonial Africa and the Caribbean, indeed throughout the diaspora. The UNIA established women’s and children’s organizations and promoted commercial ventures of many kinds, the most well-known being the ill-fated Black Star shipping line which aimed to aid commercial ties between West Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, which was first established in 1919. There was also a Universal Millinery Store and a Universal Steam Laundry, as well as several grocery stores and restaurants.

The UNIA’s Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, launched at the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World held in New York in 1920, demanded self-determination for those of African descent ‘wherever they form a community among themselves’. The Declaration condemned anti-African racism and defended ‘the inherent right of the Negro to possess himself of Africa’, and the necessity of Negro nationalism, political power and control. The UNIA at first even refused to recognize the League of Nations because it ‘seeks to deprive Negroes of their liberty’. It also envisaged a ‘Negro independent nation on the continent of Africa’ to which those in the diaspora could return.23 The UNIA increasingly became identified, certainly by its detractors, with the notion of a return to Africa, which had been such a controversial part of African American Pan-Africanist thinking in the nineteenth century. In his Philosophy and Opinions, first published in 1923, Garvey concluded: ‘the future of the Negro … outside of Africa spells ruin and disaster’. In his view the solution for those in the diaspora would be brought about ‘by redeeming our Motherland Africa from the hands of alien exploiters’, and by establishing there ‘a government, a nation of our own, strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth’.²⁴

Garvey and the UNIA were, for a time, feared by the major colonial powers and by the government of the United States, especially when Garvey attempted to forge links with the government of Liberia and declared himself provisional president of a future independent African republic. Garvey’s plans to establish ‘American and West Indian Colonists’ in Liberia were unsuccessful and rebuffed by the Liberian government following the latter’s commercial agreement with the Firestone Rubber Company and, in 1924, the Liberian government banned all UNIA members from entering Liberia.25 Garvey not only faced rejection from Liberia; within a few years his Black Star Shipping Line was close to bankruptcy and in 1922 he was arrested and subsequently convicted of what appears to have been a false charge of ‘mail-fraud’. In the wake of these and other problems, Garvey announced that he was abandoning his previous opposition to colonial governments, and other radical demands, which he argued were only fit for the period of World War and major upheaval.²⁶ In 1925 he was imprisoned as a result of the fraud conviction and sentenced to five years in the Atlanta Penitentiary. In 1927 Garvey’s prison sentence was commuted by order of the president of the United States. and he was immediately deported to Jamaica where he re-established the headquarters of the UNIA. Garvey was exonerated from this conviction only in 1987, nearly half a century after his death.

The New Negro movement

Nevertheless, the achievements of Garvey and the UNIA were impressive. He had arrived in the United States unknown and almost penniless and within a few years had created the largest African American organization and largest Pan-African organization in history. The circumstances produced by the First World War certainly raised expectations amongst African Americans, both those who joined the armed forces and those who stayed at home. But the impact of the war led to Pan-African demands for various forms of liberation that were widely felt in Africa and throughout the diaspora too. In the United States, the rise of Garvey and the UNIA certainly coincided with the ‘New Negro’ movement and what is more commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Both reflected a new assertiveness and confidence amongst African Americans that found its expression not only in political demands and organizations but also in literature, art and the music of the ‘jazz age’. The ‘New Negro’ was a term that had been utilized even at the end of the nineteenth century but it gained greater currency through the activities of Hubert Harrison, especially the publication in 1917 of New Negro magazine, which was associated with a faction of Harrison’s Liberty League, and later with the publication of Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925).²⁷

The New Negro movement was stimulated by the First World War in which 380,000 African American soldiers participated, some of them serving in Europe. In the same period around 500,000 African Americans migrated to the northern cities. In the first quarter of the twentieth century well over 100,000 migrants entered the United States from the Caribbean many of them arriving in New York. Many of the leading political figures of the ‘New Negro’ movement were Caribbean migrants: Garvey, Hubert Harrison from St Croix; activists and writers such as Wilfred Domingo (1889–1968) and Claude McKay (1889–1948) from Jamaica; journalist and communist Cyril Briggs (1888–1966) from Nevis; writer Eric Walrond (1898–1966) from Guyana. The experiences of migration and international travel had a radicalizing impact, as did the international events such as the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. These created the conditions for great expectations by the end of the war. Booker T. Washington and Henry McNeal Turner had both died in 1915 and Garvey’s most significant rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, had advocated compromise and accommodation during the war. The scene was set for new politics and leadership to emerge that spoke to the aspirations of the ‘New Negro’, which were especially important following the renewed racist attacks and riots at the termination of the war.

Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was a writer, journalist and popular orator of Caribbean origin, who was referred to by his contemporary, A Phillip Randolph, as ‘the father of Harlem radicalism’. He established the Liberty League of Negro Americans and edited The Voice, ‘the first newspaper of the “New Negro Movement”’ in Harlem, New York in 1917. It was Harrison who first developed the concept of ‘Race First’, and later the concept of ‘race consciousness’, before Garvey, even though Harrison considered himself a socialist and internationalist. According to Harrison the ‘New Negroes’ wanted equality before the law, were opposed to lynching, disenfranchisement and the First World War. Harrison argued for armed self-defence and for the rights of Africans, as well as Asians, throughout the world. Garvey had initially and unsuccessfully tried to follow the path of Booker T. Washington when he arrived in New York, but he certainly spoke at Liberty League meetings and it is likely he was a member. The UNIA was also at first non-political and it seems that in many respects Harrison paved the way for Garvey and introduced him to radical Harlem politics, while many members of the Liberty League, such as it secretary (and police informer) Edgar Grey, as well as W. A. Domingo, Irena Moorman-Blackston and John E. Bruce, later joined the UNIA. In 1920 Harrison himself became the principal editor of the UNIA’s Negro World. Harrison would even claim that the idea of a Black Star shipping line originated with a former Liberty League member, Charles Seifert, and he clearly saw himself and the League as preparing the ground for Garvey and the UNIA.28

As well as the political movement that centred on Harlem and was evident in such newspapers as The Liberator, The Emancipator, The Voice, New Negro and Negro World, the period immediately following the First World War was also characterized by a literary and cultural movement, perhaps announced by the publication of Claude McKay’s sonnet ‘If We Must Die’ in 1918, although evident in earlier work such as Meta Warwick Fuller’s sculpture Ethiopia Awakening (1914). However, Harrison later claimed that there was no specific ‘Harlem Renaissance’ but rather a continual flowering of African American culture stretching back even to the 1850s. Nevertheless, it could be argued that not only was there a cultural renaissance following the First World War but also that this coincided with the ‘New Negro’ movement, which itself had wider Pan-African concerns and a renewed interest in Africa.29 It is not by coincidence that such a movement was almost contemporary with similar Pan-African assertiveness elsewhere, for example the Francophone Négritude movement which it strongly influenced. Not only in America, but also in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe there were similar strivings for more Africa-centred political and cultural developments that arose in opposition to Eurocentrism, colonialism and anti-African racism. It was this Pan-African striving that gave United States-based political and cultural developments such as Garveyism and the Harlem Renaissance such wide appeal, and made identification with Africa central to both. Many who would become influential Pan-Africanists were attracted to the movement and many notable writers contributed to the UNIA’s Negro World including Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Arturo Schomburg, J. A. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus’s second wife, who wrote a regular women’s page.³⁰

Women and the UNIA

It could be argued that women were central to the development of the UNIA and formed its ‘backbone’ from the time of the movement’s founding. Amy Ashwood, Garvey’s first wife, claimed to have been the UNIA’s first member and played a leading role when the UNIA was based in Jamaica. Amy Jacques, Garvey’s second wife also played a significant leadership role, not just in relation to Negro World but more particularly during the time of her husband’s imprisonment. Women dominated auxiliary organizations of the UNIA such as the Black Cross Nurses, the Universal African Motor Corps and many other such groups formed within the UNIA. Every local branch of the UNIA had a ‘lady president’ and women may have formed the majority in many local branches. Key organizers included Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X, who joined the UNIA in Montreal and then was the secretary of a UNIA branch in Omaha and probably fulfilled similar roles in Milwaukee. It is even reported that she worked directly with Garvey. Other important women within the UNIA include Mamie De Mena and Henrietta Vinton Davis. Davis became the first international organizer for the UNIA, chaired major meetings and conventions and was the only female member of the delegation that met with Liberian President King in 1924. She was also part of the UNIA commission that drafted the petition to the president of the United States demanding Garvey’s release from prison. Garvey once described her as ‘the greatest woman of the Negro Race today’. De Mena became assistant international organizer, a major speaker, responsible for all the UNIA’s North American chapters, worked as editor of Negro World and acted as Garvey’s representative.³¹

The African Blood Brotherhood

Another organization that emerged in Harlem in the immediate post-war period was the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) founded in 1919 by another immigrant to New York from the Caribbean, Cyril Briggs. The ABB also further developed some of the ideas of Hubert Harrison. It stood for both ‘Race Radicalism’ and ‘Class Radicalism’ and amongst its aims were ‘A Liberated Race’, and ‘Absolute Race Equality – Political, Economic, Social’. Other aims included ‘immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere’, and it also envisaged the organization of a ‘worldwide Negro Federation’, and a ‘Pan-African army’.32

Briggs described himself as ‘pro-Negro’, while at the same time asserting ‘the Negro’s place is with labour’. The ABB established branches within the United States, as well as in parts of the Caribbean, and included an illustrious membership that included Wilfred Domingo, Claude McKay, and future communists Grace Campbell (1883–1943), Richard B. Moore (1893–1978), Otto Huiswoud (1893–1961) and Harry Haywood (1898–1985). Briggs and the other members combined elements of a Marxist analysis of the world with a ‘Race First’ and Pan-Africanist orientation. There were some initial attempts of the ABB to work with Garvey and the UNIA but Briggs later wrote that he established the organization with the aim of ‘combating several aspects of the Garvey movement and particularly its “Back to Africa” philosophy’. The ABB’s attitude to communism was based on ‘its belief that all such forces as menace white capitalist control of the world … and the imperial regimes of Europe should be encouraged by the darker peoples who stand to benefit most by the undermining and destruction of European imperialism and white world domination’.³³ Briggs and other ABB members were therefore greatly inspired by the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Communist International 1919.

The UNIA and Africa

Whatever the exact numbers of its members, it is evident that UNIA branches were established in many parts of Africa, the Caribbean and North America, as well as in such European countries as Britain and France. Garvey and the UNIA certainly established their influence and made a significant impact throughout the African continent. Some of this influence was generated by Africans who were in contact with the UNIA, such as Dusé Mohammed Ali who worked on the Negro World, or those from South Africa, such as Sol Plaatje, who spoke at UNIA meetings while he was visiting the United States and James Thaele, a leader of the African National Congress who strongly supported the UNIA when he began publishing the paper African World in 1925. Many Africans were also radicalized by their experiences of the First World War, when communication between Africans from many different national backgrounds occurred and the expectation that their enlistment would lead to significant change had been generated. A British army officer even suggested that the global conflict necessitated ‘encouraging strong and isolated tribal nationalism’ amongst Africans, so as to combat what was referred to as the danger of ‘a violent Pan-African upheaval’ brought about by the conditions of the war.34 Partly as a consequence of the war, there was a more general awareness of anti-African racism, coupled with opposition to it, and a rising consciousness of the right of Africans to govern themselves, or at least be consulted about how they were governed. Various forms of African nationalism, as well as Pan-Africanism, were on the rise and were manifest in the founding and early life of such organizations as the South African National Congress and National Congress of British West Africa.

The UNIA in West Africa

‘Race consciousness’ was evidently an important factor in the successful spread of Garveyism throughout West Africa. One contemporary report noted that there was support for the Black Star Line all along coastal West Africa and explained, ‘Any all black proposal, well-financed cannot fail to succeed in Africa. Race consciousness is just that strong.’³⁵ It seems that such consciousness stemmed from the experience of the First World War. As the Times of Nigeria explained in 1920 ‘One lesson above all others that the results of the late world upheaval have taught the African races is the necessity for organising an African brotherhood.’ Garvey and the UNIA echoed many of the ideas elaborated by Blyden but added an important economic dimension and the notion of self-help that particularly appealed to the ascendant merchant and professional classes in West Africa.³⁶

A UNIA branch was established in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1920, with a female division initially headed by Adelaide Casely-Hayford, the wife of J. E. Casely-Hayford.³⁷ UNIA members from Sierra Leone also attempted to establish branches in Senegal but these attempts were thwarted by the French colonial authorities, which were also concerned about UNIA activities in Dahomey and Cameroon. It is to be noted that in Sierra Leone support for Garvey and the UNIA was often strongest amongst those who were Western educated. The Freetown branch sent the only delegate from British West Africa, George O. Marke, to the UNIA’s International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World held in August 1920. Marke was subsequently appointed supreme deputy potentate of the UNIA and was part of the ‘technical commission’ despatched to Liberia in 1921.³⁸

Garvey’s most significant initiative in West African began with his overtures to the Liberian government in 1920. Although the UNIA’s mission to Liberia was initially welcomed by the government of that country, the head of the mission was critical of the government of Liberia, while the latter came to suspect that the UNIA would be a subversive influence in the country, especially after it came to an agreement with the Firestone Rubber Company.39 Marke also headed the UNIA delegation to the League of Nations that unsuccessfully petitioned for confiscated German colonies in Africa to be established as self-governing territories. The UNIA made repeated unsuccessful attempts to petition the League in 1922 and 1928. Then in 1929 and 1931 Garvey travelled to Geneva to try and convince the League of his case but he was again unsuccessful.⁴⁰

In Nigeria one of the key figures was Akinbami, the son of Mojola Agbebi, who headed the Black Star Corporation in Lagos until it was dissolved in 1922. A UNIA branch was established in Lagos in 1920 under the presidency of Amos Shackleton, the Jamaican ‘Bread King’ of Lagos. Several other members of the branch were of Caribbean origin but most of the officers were Nigerians, including the secretary, Ernest Ikoli, the well-known journalist and editor, who was later one of the founders of the Nigerian Youth Movement. As in Sierra Leone many of the leading members were Western-educated lawyers and clergymen and several were also members of the National Congress of British West Africa. UNIA branches were reportedly also established in Ibadan and Kano but it seems likely that organized support for the UNIA waned after the collapse of the Black Star Line, while local politics and the activities of the NCBWA were a constant distraction. The illegal Negro World was evidently widely circulated throughout West Africa, both in the British and French colonies. Its significance is evident from the fact that it and the activities of the UNIA were widely reported in the local press. Censorship did not curtail readership as is clear from the testimony of Nnamdi Azikiwe, subsequently Nigeria’s first president, who ignored the warnings of his father concerning the dangers of reading such a seditious publication.⁴¹

The UNIA in Southern Africa

In South Africa, it was reported that there were five UNIA branches in Cape Town alone during the 1920s, in addition to others situated throughout the country in other towns and cities including Johannesburg and Pretoria. It seems that sailors from North America, and particularly the Caribbean, were important couriers of news about the UNIA and the Negro World and some of the first members of the UNIA in South Africa also originated from the Caribbean.⁴² There were branches of the UNIA in Basutoland and South West Africa, while its influence also spread to Mozambique.⁴³ Tengo Jabavu described how political repression in South Africa had created the conditions for support for Garvey and the UNIA:

Whose Black Republic propaganda promises great things. It promises among other things: the expulsion of the white man and his yoke of misrule from their midst; Negro autonomy (‘I Afrika mayi buye’ = Let Africa be restored to us) with Garvey himself as Lord High Potentate; a black star fleet with powerful black armies bringing salvation, and bags of grain to relieve Africans from the economic pinch.44

The Cape Argus appeared concerned about the ‘increasing influence of Garveyism in Africa’, which the newspaper feared ‘is capturing the imagination of the black people of Africa.’⁴⁵ The South African and other colonial governments concurred and therefore did everything possible to prevent the circulation of the Negro World. When Garvey announced a worldwide speaking tour in 1923 measures were immediately taken to prevent his appearance in Africa, and consequently Garvey never stepped foot on the African continent. Nevertheless, in southern Africa and more widely there were strong rumours that Garvey would soon arrive ‘with a large force of black soldiers to drive the white man out of the country’.⁴⁶ As in the United States, the myth of a black liberator was attractive to those who were not only hostile to the government but also critical of existing leaders. One African supporter of the UNIA declared that as an uneducated person all that he could do was promote the ideas of the UNIA and ‘to spread the spirit of the new Negro’.⁴⁷

Many of the supporters of Garvey and the UNIA in southern Africa identified with the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’, linking it with their own ‘I Africa mayi buye’ (Let Africa be restored to us), as well as drawing on earlier forms of Ethiopianism that expected African liberation to be brought by African Americans. Garvey’s speeches, his elevation as provisional president of Africa and other aspects of the UNIA’s programme were reinterpreted in various inspirational ways. A worldview which asserted that Africans not Europeans were the rightful masters in Africa was strengthened as well as a sense of unity between those on the continent and in the diaspora. A key transmission role was often played by seafarers of Caribbean origin who distributed Negro World and often played a key role leading UNIA branches in South Africa.⁴⁸ The UNIA’s African Orthodox Church also established a presence in South Africa, as well as in Rhodesia, Uganda and Kenya. The UNIA’s influence in South Africa may be judged from the many correspondents that contributed to the Negro World. In Nyasaland those who had been associated with the rising of 1915 were also connected with the UNIA, while the founder of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) in South Africa, Clements Kadalie, wrote of his support for Garvey and there were several prominent Garveyites within the ICU, as well as within the ANC. Some historians have seen the impact of Garveyism as a significant influence on the later emergence of both the ANC Youth League, as well as the Pan-Africanist Congress.⁴⁹

Support for Garvey in Africa was dented by the Liberian government’s deportation of the UNIA delegation in 1924, the subsequent banning of US-based UNIA members from Liberian territory and Garvey’s conviction for fraud. The actions of the Liberian government were criticized by some sections of the press in British West Africa but although the National Congress of British West Africa and sections of the Western-educated elite had welcomed many of the economic aspects of Garvey’s programme, they had often been more cautious about embracing what for some was viewed as subversive politics. Several West Africans first contacted the UNIA whilst in the United States and were intrigued by the commercial possibilities it offered.

The Negro World was widely read in West Africa, despite or perhaps because it was illegal. Several correspondents from West Africa appear in the pages of Negro World while others, such as Kobina Sekyi in the Gold Coast, where there were reported to be two branches, were critical of the attempts of Garvey and others in the diaspora to ‘redeem’ Africa but wrote in support of Garvey following his conviction.50 The influence of the Negro World should not be overestimated, however, since Africans eagerly read or listened to reports from any publications from abroad that provided ‘race consciousness’ and a Pan-African perspective. The Negro World clearly had to compete with other publications with a Pan-African orientation from Europe and North America.⁵¹

The Negro World was clearly influential in East Africa too, as Jomo Kenyatta reported. According to his account even illiterate Africans would gather around a reader to listen to articles and then by memorizing them spread the words of ‘upliftment’ to others.⁵² Such words spread far and wide. The king of Swaziland famously told Amy Ashwood Garvey that he only knew the name of two black men outside Africa. One was the boxer Jack Johnson, the other Marcus Garvey.⁵³ However, penalties for possession and distribution of the Negro World were severe. An agent in Nyasaland, for example, was sentenced to three years of hard labour. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that the Negro World, Garvey and the UNIA were widely known in Africa even in the Portuguese colonies. Attempts at censorship only added to the grievances of literate Africans and widespread hatred of colonial rule. In some parts of Africa, such as South Africa and Kenya support for Garvey and the UNIA continued well into the later 1930s and even after Garvey’s death. There is some truth in Garvey’s claim that the UNIA had ‘stirred Africa from centre to circumference’, and that the continent had been ‘awakened through our propaganda of “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad”’.⁵⁴

The UNIA and the diaspora

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA also exerted a significant influence on Africans in the diaspora. According to one historian, in addition to those in the United States, UNIA branches were established in Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, Canada, Columbia, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, as well as throughout the Caribbean. Cuba contained the largest number with over fifty branches, followed by Panama with forty-seven.55 In Britain, there were four branches during the 1920s and two of these were in Wales. Garvey was also in contact with Ladipo Solanke, the founder of the Nigerian Progress Union and West African Students’ Union (WASU) in London, where his ideas appear to have coincided with the students’ own views about self-reliance and race consciousness. At one stage Solanke seems to have wished to head a UNIA branch in London but although unsuccessful in that regard he and the WASU were granted the use of a house Garvey owned in West London as their first headquarters.⁵⁶ In France, the Dahomean Kojo Tovalou Houénou, founder of the Ligue Universelle pour la Défense de la Race Noire and editor of Les Continents met and corresponded with Garvey, spoke at the 1924 UNIA convention and is reported to have sent copies of the Negro World to Dahomey. Later, Garan Kouyaté, the secretary-general of the communist-linked Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre also attempted to correspond with Garvey but was ignored when the latter visited Paris in 1928. On that visit, Garvey appeared to prefer the company of those concerned with the more reformist La Dépêche Africaine. The UNIA also had some links with Africans based in Lisbon, Portugal who in the early 1930s published A Mocidade Africana and frequently referred to Garvey and the UNIA.⁵⁷

In the United States, Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Holy Temple of Science based in Chicago, a predecessor of the Nation of Islam, proclaimed Garvey the forerunner to his own coming, and therefore as a prophet of Drew Ali’s unorthodox version of Islam.⁵⁸ While in Jamaica, the early followers of the creed of Ras Tafari also acknowledged Garvey as a prophet and a forerunner of their divinity, the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. Marcus Garvey is reported to have prophesied ‘Look to Africa where a black king will be crowned, the day of deliverance is near,’ although there appears to be little evidence of Garvey uttering this phrase. A few days after Haile Selassie’s coronation in 1930 Garvey wrote in his paper The Blackman:

We have no doubt that the time has now come. Ethiopia is now really stretching forth her hands. This great kingdom of the East has been hidden for many centuries, but gradually she is rising to take a leading place in the world and it is for us of the Negro race to assist in every way to hold up the hand of the Emperor Ras Tafari.⁵⁹

Garvey in this way emphasized a modern form of Ethiopianism, one that was taken up and elaborated by Garveyites in Jamaica, such as Robert Hinds and Leonard Howell. Howell was one of the first to establish a Rastafari community and doctrine, as well as a known Garveyite, as were many of the early supporters of the Rastafari movement. However, Garvey’s reported views on the movement were at best ambivalent and there is some evidence that he disagreed with the notion of the divinity of Haile Selassie.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, the Rastafari movement was to become significant, first in Jamaica, then throughout the Caribbean and eventually globally. Garvey’s teaching, however misinterpreted, or reinterpreted, remained central and therefore in time took on a new global significance.

Indeed, during the 1930s Garvey openly criticized Selassie for neglecting Ethiopia’s modernization and defences, while at the same time denouncing the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy. Subsequently he became ever more critical of Haile Selassie, alleging that he ‘allowed himself to be conquered by playing white’, an approach that led to further divisions within the UNIA and in turn criticism of Garvey by some of his followers. Garvey refused to issue a call to UNIA members and other Africans to go the immediate defence of Ethiopia, which reportedly led to many members of the UNIA deserting the organization. The national representative of the UNIA in the United States commented: ‘the UNIA which has cried aloud about “redeeming Africa” for 17 years is dying because it has not lived up to its high-sounding principles of Negro nationalism. Disgrace stares us in the face.’61

Garvey seems to have completely misjudged the global Pan-African support for Ethiopia and the significance of the Italian invasion. He even claimed that ‘Mussolini copied our Fascism,’ and ‘Mussolini and Hitler copied the programme of the UNIA – aggressive nationalism for the black man in Africa … We hadn’t the character to stand behind it but they adopted it.’⁶² But such comments only discredited him further. His position was adversely commented on by many significant commentators, including Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the United States and George Padmore, who wrote that in Britain Garvey’s stand ‘made him very unpopular amongst the African students, who attempted to break up his meetings’.⁶³ However, Haile Selassie had also gained some unpopularity amongst Africans in Britain for his statements denying he was a ‘Negro’. The mood of the times maybe best summed up by Isaac Wallace-Johnson one of the leading Pan-Africanists from the African continent who wrote in 1937 of how he had admired the UNIA as an important ‘stepping stone’, when it was ‘in full swing’, but that in recent years Garvey had ‘fallen a thousand degrees below what he was at the period of the inception of the UNIA’ and that his philosophy was now ‘quite contradictory to that of the progressive elements of civilization and culture’. He concluded, ‘Let no one be misled by Mr Garvey or his big talks about African Redemption and the rest of it … He might have been a great leader in the past. But … Marcus Garvey like the rest of past leaders has obviously outlived his usefulness in so far as leading the African peoples may be concerned.’⁶⁴

Garvey’s politics, meeting with the leadership of the racist Ku Klux Klan in 1922 and links with the masses put him at odds with Du Bois and other African American leaders, as did the UNIA’s support for the racist legislation of United States Senator Bilbo in the 1930s.⁶⁵ Following his deportation and relocation to Jamaica, Garvey entered into local politics as well as remaining active in Pan-African matters. However, he became increasingly isolated and in some ways marginalized from the movement he had created, despite new UNIA publications and two UNIA conventions held in Jamaica in 1928 and 1931. Garvey also toured throughout Europe and in 1928 and 1931 petitioned the League of Nations to create an independent black state in Africa, a similar demand to that made by Du Bois and his Pan-African Congress movement some years earlier. Garvey’s finances also suffered during this period, as well as his political popularity and in 1935 he left Jamaica almost bankrupt and settled in London. He remained active in Pan-African politics and made some particularly significant speeches in Canada in the late 1930s, where he vowed: ‘We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind,’ an exaltation that was later paraphrased and made famous by the Jamaican singer Bob Marley.66

By the time of Garvey’s death in 1940, the UNIA had become divided and Garvey himself had sometimes become associated with a political orientation that was rejected as too moderate by other more radical Pan-Africanists, such as George Padmore and Isaac Wallace-Johnson.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, his legacy was immense, particularly in Jamaica where following his death his ideas exerted a major influence on the Rastafarians and where he was subsequently declared the country’s first national hero. His influence was acknowledged by other Pan-Africanists, most notably by Kwame Nkrumah who stated that during his student days in the United States, ‘Of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.’ Garveyism too has remained an influential trend of Pan-Africanism especially in the African diaspora. Garvey made this supremely self-confident judgement of himself and the UNIA: ‘Despite what the world may say in criticism of me, we have rendered more service as an organisation than all the other Negro organisations put together have done in the last 100 years. We have given a national consciousness to the Negro.’⁶⁸

Du Bois and the Pan-African congresses

W. E. B. Du Bois had emerged as a leading Pan-Africanist during the London conference in 1900. However, three years earlier, he had written of the need for what he referred to as a ‘Pan-Negroism’, led by African Americans, in his well-known essay The Conservation of Races. At the time he had written, ‘if the Negro is ever to be a factor in the world’s history’ it would be because of the efforts of ‘black hands, fashioned by black heads and hallowed by the travail of 200,000,000 black hearts beating in one glad song of jubilee’. In his essay he stated, ‘we, as American Negroes, are resolved to strive in every honourable way for the realization of the best and highest aims, for the development of strong manhood and pure womanhood, and for the rearing of a race ideal in America and Africa, to the glory of God and the uplifting of the Negro people’.¹

Certainly, Du Bois had become one of the key African American political figures, known for the publication of seminal work such as The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the creation of the Niagara Movement in 1907 and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1911. Du Bois also became the influential editor of the NAACP’s publication The Crisis. For African American advancement, he initially envisaged a leadership of those referred to as the ‘Talented Tenth’, those who had received the benefit of ‘Higher Education’. As he expressed it in 1903, ‘The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.’ Responding to criticism he later sought to change this aristocratic view. In 1915, for example, he expressed the view that, ‘The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be merely a narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing Negroes sense the coming unities: a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of coloured races, a new unity of men.’² Although undoubtedly still a very male-centred approach this was a significant change. Such change and development continued throughout Du Bois’ long life.

Du Bois’ position as a leading African American political figure was somewhat dented by his support for the government of the United States during the First World War, despite the focus of his 1915 essay ‘The African Roots of the War’, and his policy of urging African Americans to ‘forget our special grievances’ and ‘close ranks’ for the war effort.3 He was certainly criticized by other key figures in the United States, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, for what appeared to be the moderation of his views. However, he and others argued that Africans, especially in the diaspora, would best undermine racial oppression through their participation in the war and, he considered, that in this respect they were fighting for their own freedom. In the post-war period, he reconsidered this position and his call for returning African American soldiers to meet racist violence by fighting back was viewed with alarm by the United States government. It was in these circumstances, that Du Bois began to claim that a ‘debt of blood’ had been given by many during the First World War and that Africans required reparation for hundreds of years of enslavement.⁴ He argued that the future of Africa was key to the future of the entire ‘Negro race’ and sought to continue the tradition of major international Pan-African gatherings by organizing the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. As he said at the time:

We black people, in addition to our rights of ordinary consideration, have proven ourselves worthy of extra consideration. And so, we are holding a Pan-African Congress. The whole black world is virtually represented. We shall never rest, we shall never cease to agitate, until we have received from the world what we have in such yeomanly fashion rendered – fair play.⁵

The initiative of Du Bois has sometimes led him to be considered the ‘father of Pan-Africanism’ and therefore, to some disregard for the efforts of Henry Sylvester Williams, the convenor of the London conference in 1900. Du Bois certainly revived the phrase ‘Pan-African’, and re-established a central Pan-African movement linked to his name. He was clearly aware that Africa’s fate would be discussed and decided in France and accordingly he argued: ‘The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement means to the Jews … the centralization of the race effort and the recognition of a racial fount … Amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the condition of colored peoples throughout the world.’⁶ This Pan-African initiative of Du Bois was supported by the NAACP on the basis that an event focusing on global African matters might well be good publicity for the Association and the domestic issues it championed. In addition, Du Bois may well have been prompted by the criticism he had faced within the United States, as one of the principal recruiters of African American troops who had faced carnage and racism during the war. There was also a need to re-establish his leadership credentials, not least because of the growing popularity of the UNIA and Garvey, who Du Bois described as ‘the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world’.⁷

In addition to other considerations, the New Negro movement, as well as Garvey’s agitation, heralded a renewed interest in Africa and Pan-Africanism. As Du Bois expressed it: ‘Then came the First World War, and among American Negroes at is close there was determined agitation for the rights of Negroes throughout the world, particularly in Africa.’8 At the same time as the Congress, therefore, Du Bois planned to address the leaders of the victorious powers gathering at Versailles in France and to press that the principle of self-determination, which was much trumpeted by President Wilson of the United States, should also be applied to Africa and Africans. Du Bois proposed that a new ‘internationalized’ African state might be established from Germany’s confiscated African colonies. In his view, such a creation should consider the views of ‘intelligent Negroes’ both in Africa and the diaspora, but he envisaged it would be administered on a ‘trusteeship’ basis by the great powers themselves. Du Bois even hoped that Belgium and Portugal would voluntarily forfeit their colonies for this new ‘international Africa’, which would also constitute the realization of the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’. He later claimed that from this proposal emerged the ‘mandated territories’, former colonies nominally governed under the auspices of the League of Nations, but largely indistinguishable from other colonies and generally governed by the victors of the First World War, Britain and France. However, his argument for a new African state was ignored. Perhaps what was most significant was that Du Bois’ plan was very similar to that announced by Garvey and the UNIA, that also demanded that Germany’s colonies should be confiscated and administered by Africans.⁹

Du Bois initially hoped to discuss his plans with the United States government and that he would be appointed an official delegate to the post-war peace conferences to speak on behalf of ‘two hundred million of black people’. However, he received no government support and no such position. He then considered a small Pan-African gathering but managed to gain the confidence of Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese deputy to the French National Assembly. Diagne (1872–1934) who had distinguished himself by acting in a similar manner to Du Bois, and recruiting hundreds of thousands of Africans for the French war effort, was acting as an aide to the French president, Clemenceau. Du Bois therefore had some limited official support from the French government for the Congress, although he was apparently told ‘don’t advertise it’, but faced opposition from the governments of the United States, Britain and the other colonial powers. He also had the support of Ida Alexander Gibbs Hunt (1862–1957), an African American suffragist and NAACP member based in France, who acted as assistant secretary to the congress, as well as a Guyanese barrister, Edmund Fredericks (1875–1935), who was a representative of the London-based African Progress Union (APU). These three, Du Bois, Hunt and Fredericks, together with Diagne, constituted the organizing committee of the Paris congress and, under Diagne’s presidency and with the addition of Rayford W. Logan (1897–1982), formed an executive committee to implement its decisions.¹⁰

First Pan-African Congress, Paris 1919

Eventually fifty-seven participants from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States made their way to Paris, although most were already residing in France and both the British and French colonies in Africa were represented by a single delegate. Twelve delegates represented nine African countries, Liberia had three delegates, including a future president, and constituted the largest African delegation. Twenty-one delegates represented the Caribbean, including thirteen from the French Antilles, and sixteen delegates came from the United States. The president of the London-based APU, John Archer, also attended and spoke at the Paris congress. Archer had first met Du Bois at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London and would play a significant role in the next two congresses. The African Progress Union can be considered an important British-based Pan-African organization. It was formed in December 1918 for ‘voicing African sentiments’ and ‘furthering African interests’ following a series of meetings of Africans and ‘descendants of African blood’ in London. It described itself as ‘an Association of Africans from various parts of Africa, the West Indies, British Guiana, Honduras and America representing advanced African ideas’. Amongst other things, it demanded self-determination for Africa and Africans as well as reparations for ‘the black race’. Its initial membership was largely dominated by mainly male professionals, although some students were also involved and one of its first major concerns was to combat the growing racism and ‘race riots’ that exploded in Britain’s towns and cities in 1919.11 Another speaker who would in future play a significant role was Addie Waites Hunton (1866–1943) who had been in France with African American troops, was one of the authors of Two Colored Women with American Expeditionary Forces and the following year became one of the founders of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World (ICWDRW).¹² She reminded the predominantly male congress of the important role of women and urged the participants to consider ‘the necessity of seeking their co-operation and counsel’.¹³

The ICWDRW was initiated by some of the leading African American women activists such as Margaret Murray Washington, wife of Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Addie Hunton and Addie Dickerson in 1922. All its eighteen founder members were prominent in African American organizations such as the National Association of Negro Women, and it remained an elite and exclusive organization which required its members to pay an annual fee. Its main purpose was:

the dissemination of knowledge of peoples of color the world over in order that there may be a larger appreciation of their history and accomplishments and that they themselves may have a greater degree of respect for their own accomplishments and a greater pride in themselves.¹⁴

Although particularly interested in women from Africa and the African diaspora, the Council also concerned itself with women in Asia. However, its Pan-African sympathies were often at the forefront and although most of its focus was the United States, it had close relations with women in Haiti, Liberia and Sierra Leone where it had strong links to Adelaide Casely-Hayford, whose activities were becoming well-known amongst such African American women.15 The members of the Council saw themselves as representing African women at various international gatherings since, as Mary Terrell explained: ‘It was my privilege to represent, not only the colored women of the United States, but the whole continent of Africa, since I was the only one present at that meeting who had a drop of African blood in her veins.’¹⁶ It is also significant that leading members of the Council also participated in the wider Pan-African movement, specifically the congresses organized by Du Bois.

The First Pan-African Congress issued three major resolutions:

a)  That the Allied and Associated Powers establish a code of law for the international protection of the natives of Africa, similar to the proposed international code for labour.

b)  That the League of Nations establish a permanent bureau charged with the special duty of overseeing the application of these laws to the political, social, and economic welfare of the natives.

c)  The Negroes of the world demand that hereafter the natives of Africa and the peoples of African descent be governed according to the following principles:¹⁷

These principles covered the use of land, labour and capital in the colonies, as an attempt to prevent the exploitation of the ‘natives’. The right to education and health care was also demanded, as was the right to freedom of conscience and to be involved in, or consulted, about the form of colonial government. The League of Nations was envisaged as the guardian of these rights. Such demands were made in the expectant spirit produced by the conclusion of the ‘war to end all wars’, as well as United States President Wilson’s fourteen points. These included the aspiration for ‘An absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based on the principle that the interest of the population must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government.’ Sections of the American press and even representatives of the colonial powers found nothing unreasonable in the demands of the Pan-African Congress. A representative of French colonialism even pointed out that some of the demands had already been implemented.¹⁸

The deliberations of the Pan-African Congress were covered in the American and French press, as well as by the news media in Africa, but largely ignored by the Allied governments meeting in Paris. The proceedings appear to have given Du Bois and other African Americans the opportunity to criticize racism and government inactivity within the United States, although even this was done in muted tones. The occasion also gave Diagne as well as Gratien Candace (1873–1953), Joseph Lagrosillière (1872–1950) and Achille René-Boisneuf (1873–1927), the representative of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the French National Assembly, the opportunity to deplore racism in the United States and extol the virtues of France and French colonialism. Representatives of French, Belgian and Portuguese colonialism even spoke at the congress and presented colonial rule in glowing terms. Even John Archer appears to have compared Britain’s treatment of its ‘citizens of colour’ unfavourably with the French situation and indeed this may have been exactly what the French government had intended.19 However, the participation of Diagne, Candace and other representatives of the French colonies was viewed with alarm by the French colonial authorities.²⁰

The First Pan-African Congress had little lasting influence, was criticized for its proximity to the French government and for ignoring Marcus Garvey, the other major Pan-African figure of the day.²¹ It did, however, re-establish a formal Pan-African movement, even if this was one assisted by Europeans, as had also been the case in 1900. Du Bois had hoped that a more permanent ‘central headquarters’ might be established in Europe but this did not occur, although it is evident that he considered that a permanent organization had been created with Diagne as president and himself as secretary. He even envisaged the creation of an ‘international quarterly Black Review issued in English and French and possibly Spanish and Portuguese’.²² The congress did, however, facilitate the development of a Europe-based network with strong support in France, Belgium and Britain. The delegates therefore resolved to hold a second congress in Paris in 1921.²³

The National Congress of British West Africa

The period following the First Pan-African Congress witnessed several important developments. African aspirations for political change were stirring on the continent as well as amongst those in the diaspora. One of the most significant developments was the founding in March 1920 of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) by forty-five delegates meeting in Accra, in the British colony of the Gold Coast. The NCBWA revived the notion of ‘West African nationality’, the view that all peoples in West Africa, especially the four British colonies, were inter-related and had a common destiny. It was an idea that both Horton and Blyden had contributed to and emerged out of the common economic, social and political aspirations of Anglophone and Western-educated Africans, many of whom were the offspring of related elite families that dominated politics and the press in British West Africa. J. E. Casely-Hayford became the main ideologist of West African nationalism and it was he and Dr Akiwande Savage (1874–1935), an attendee at the 1900 Pan-African Conference, who initiated plans for the NCBWA in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gambia as early as 1914. The NCBWA managed to combine the dream of a future self-governing West African ‘nation’ with a strong commitment to the existing British Empire. In the meantime, the politicians of the NCBWA sought reforms that would largely be of benefit to themselves and attempted to strive for a ‘united West Africa’. In future, there would even be a demand for ‘dominion status’, as enjoyed by Canada and Australia. Despite its contradictions, West African nationalism, or Pan-West Africanism, endured and was revived again by Kwame Nkrumah in the 1940s and 1950s.24 The notion of a ‘united West Africa’ also had a significant influence on younger West Africans studying in Britain. The founding of the NCBWA certainly influenced the founding of the West African Students’ Union in 1925 and led to its founder, Ladipo Solanke, publishing his own approach to the subject entitled United West Africa (or Africa) at the Bar of the Family of Nations.²⁵

One of the key features of the NCBWA was that although unelected it claimed to speak for the people of the four British colonies, a prospect that alarmed the colonial authorities, and it began to make moderate demands on that basis. It demanded an end to racism in employment, some participation in government and limited elections, compulsory primary and secondary education and the creation of a West African University, along the lines proposed by Blyden. The founding conference opposed the further partitioning of parts of West Africa, occasioned by the confiscation of Germany’s colonies and condemned any alienation of land. The conference also discussed various economic questions and welcomed the launch of the UNIA’s ‘Black Star Line’. The NCBWA saw itself as composed of the ‘natural leaders’ of West Africa, who wished for moderate reforms to prevent ‘political unrest’. The NCBWA was also in contact with other sections of the existing Anglophone Pan-African network including the African Progress Union in Britain and organizations in Trinidad and British Guiana. The founding conference was also welcomed by Dusé Mohammed Ali’s Africa Times and Orient Review, which commented, ‘It behoves the coloured people of the world to show a united front’, and ‘unity amongst West Africans is an essential to commercial and political prosperity’. In fact, the NCBWA was one of the earliest examples of African unity within the continent.²⁶

Second Pan-African Congress, London, Paris, Brussels 1921

Du Bois’s Second Pan-African Congress was eventually held in three European cities, London, Paris and Brussels in August and September 1921. It was considerably larger than the first congress with over 113 delegates, the majority, over forty, from the African continent and only seven from the Caribbean. Over twenty represented those based in Europe, however, participants did not in the main represent organizations, so the gathering could not be said to be truly representative. Du Bois later blamed the lack of participation from the Caribbean on the influence of Garvey and the UNIA, although it might just as easily be explained by other factors including a lack of support from the leading figures in the French Antilles. Before the first session held in London, Du Bois and other key figures had also met with members of the International Department of the British Labour Party, the party that would soon form a government in Britain.27

Dr John Alcindor (1873–1924), the new president of the APU, opened the London session, which was held in Westminster Hall. The APU, and particularly its secretary, Robert Broadhurst (c.1859–1948), played a major part in organizing the congress, although the latter did not always see eye to eye with Du Bois.²⁸ Broadhurst originated from Sierra Leone, but spent much of his life in Britain where he was a member of the several Pan-African organizations including the UNIA. He was also in personal contact with many key figures in Africa, including the members of the NCBWA.²⁹ The NCBWA was also in contact with Du Bois, who commented with some approval on its founding and the deputation which it sent to England to present various grievances to the king. In The Crisis, Du Bois also noted that demands for political independence were evident in Egypt and Sudan, while from South Africa two delegates from the African National Congress and the African Political Organisation had been sent to London to lobby for political reforms. Elsewhere, in the Caribbean, Du Bois observed growing efforts and movements for unity, but he managed to ignore the UNIA in his global survey. Nevertheless, he proudly announced that many of these movements would be represented in the Second Pan-African Congress, out of which he suggested ‘will undoubtedly grow a larger and larger unity of thought among Negroes and through this concerted action’.³⁰

The second congress had many of the features of the first. It was almost entirely the creation of Du Bois, who had significant disagreements not only with Broadhurst, who objected to the Brussels venue, but also with Diagne, who was concerned about the political demands of the congress and the ability of Du Bois to speak for African Americans. Du Bois also found that colonial authorities in Europe were greatly troubled by the activities of the UNIA and on several occasions he had to explain how his Pan-Africanism differed from that of Garvey. His great achievement was to persuade the participants that Pan-Africanism mattered and that such a gathering could make a difference by discussing the solutions to common problems. He was aware that he and a few others were speaking on behalf of those who had no idea they were being represented. But he argued that there was a world problem, a ‘certain common denominator’, and ‘they had got to talk about it’. He again hoped that after the Brussels session it would be possible to create ‘an international and permanent organisation’.

Du Bois was assisted in Europe by Walter White (1893–1955), of the NAACP, and by Jessie Fauset (1882–1961), the novelist and literary editor of The Crisis. Fauset also spoke at the London session on African women, mentioning the educational work of Adelaide Casely-Hayford (1868–1960) and Kathleen Easmon (1891–1924), who were establishing a vocational school for girls in Sierra Leone, as well as the role of African American women in the struggle for emancipation. At least a dozen other women attended the congress in London, Paris or Brussels.31 Among the other participants in London were Albert Marryshaw (1887–1958), a trade unionist from Grenada, Hastings Banda (1898–1987), the future president of Malawi and John L. Dube (1871–1946), the founding president of the South African Native National Congress, later the ANC. There were also several prominent African Americans including tenor Roland Hayes (1887–1987), and Ida Gibbs Hunt, as well as those from the Caribbean and West Africa who were residing in London. John Archer, the former president of the APU chaired part of the London session and introduced Shapurji Saklatvala, an Indian communist who would later be elected to the British Parliament. During the entirety of the second congress there were also representatives from Haiti, Madagascar, Abyssinia, Martinique, French Congo and many other countries.³²

The London Manifesto

One of the main issues discussed in the London session was the ‘colour bar’, the discrimination and segregation that existed in relation to Africans throughout the world. It was an opportunity for speakers to give their heartfelt personal experiences and views. Other participants, such as Alcindor, were keener to present a moderate image and therefore the main result of the London session was the rather ambivalent ‘London Manifesto’, which seemed to bear all the hallmarks of Du Bois’ thinking and contained both moderate and more radical aspirations and demands.³³ It commenced by again contrasting conditions facing those of African descent in the United States with those allegedly less severe facing those living under French rule. It condemned the United States intervention in Haiti and the encouragement given to Italy to act in a similar way in Abyssinia. It ended with six demands that were similar to those presented in 1919; racial equality, limited self-government, the right to education and freedom of conscience, common ownership of land and global cooperation ‘on the basis of Justice, Freedom and Peace’.³⁴

According to the manifesto the world faced

Two eventualities; either the complete assimilation of Africa with two or three of the great world states, with political, civil and social power and privileges absolutely equal for its black and white citizens, or the rise of a great black African state, founded in Peace and Good Will, based on popular education, natural art and industry and freedom of trade, autonomous and sovereign in its internal policy, but from its beginning a part of a great society of peoples in which it takes its place with others as co-rulers of the world.³⁵

Here was a plea for Justice and ‘noblesse oblige’, an indication that Du Bois and those who gathered in London, strong advocates of ‘racial equality’, held views that were not so very different from those of Garvey and the UNIA. The main difference was that Du Bois was not seeking to establish a mass movement to establish the ‘great black African state’, but rather to gather together like-minded ‘thinking leaders’ who could present a coherent and compelling argument to the big powers. Here too Du Bois was convinced that an intelligentsia, ‘the talented tenth’, should be recognized as the ‘natural leaders’ of the ‘Backward and Suppressed Groups of mankind’. He was also of the view that Haiti and Liberia showed that Africans were capable of self-government and that those peoples and countries that were less developed than the big powers could, and should, be helped to advance along the road to development and self-determination. However, there was criticism too of the failure of the colonial powers, ‘for deliberate transgression of our just demands and their own better conscience’. In short, according to Du Bois, Britain, Portugal and Belgium were exploiting, even enslaving the land and labour of the colonies, failing to provide adequate education and making no or few efforts to train the inhabitants for future self-government.

The Brussels session

The London session received some coverage in the press in Britain before most of the delegates moved on to Brussels for the second session that was presided over by Blaise Diagne and conducted in French.36 The session in Brussels, held in the Palais Mondiale, was attended by more Europeans than Africans including some colonial officials, and facilitated by two well-known Belgian visionaries Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Brussels-based Union Congolaise, formed in 1919, sent eighteen participants, including its charismatic leader Paul Panda Farnana who had also helped organize the gathering. Nicola de Santos-Pinto, a planter from Sao Tomé and Dr José de Magalhaes, represented the Liga Africana, based in Lisbon, an important connection since the next congress would be held in that city. A representative of the International Confederation of Students also addressed the Brussels session.

The most significant feature of the Brussels session was that it came under attack by the Belgian government and the press for its alleged Garveyite politics and links with the UNIA. The Belgian Colonial Ministry had discovered some UNIA activity in the Congo, although this seems to have been limited to a few copies of Negro World and information claiming that the Black Star Line would free Africans. The Belgian government also expressed concern about the spread of Simon Kimbangu’s African Church movement in that region and believed that it too was inspired by the UNIA. Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) was a Congolese religious leader who developed his own African version of the Baptist faith. He was said to have performed miracles and attracted a large following not just in the Belgian Congo but also in French Congo and Angola. His ministry was therefore viewed with alarm by the Belgian colonial authorities since it was considered to contain Pan-African and anti-colonial tendencies. Kimbangu was arrested for sedition in 1921 just before the Second Pan-African Congress and initially sentenced to death, although this sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The Belgian government was also concerned about the activities of the Union Congolaise and its leader, Paul Panda Farnana (1888–1930), the most highly Western-educated African in Belgium, who had trained as an agronomist. Panda had already demanded that Africans should be educated and involved in the government of the Congo and predicted dire consequences should this not occur. He also appears to have had strong contacts within the Congo, including with those close to Kimbangu. Panda was attacked in the Belgian and colonial press as a subversive Garveyite but he also presented his own views, defending Garvey and the right of African Americans to return to Africa and at the same time championing the Second Pan-African Congress where: ‘United as at a battle front, the intellectuals of the black race will collaborate for the moral and intellectual development of indigenous Africans.’37

The fear of subversive activity linking Garvey, Kimbangu and Panda therefore also had an impact on Du Bois and the Brussels session. Du Bois too was criticized by the press, one publication even announced that the NAACP was funded from Moscow and was meddling in the Belgian Congo. An atmosphere had been created that condemned all Pan-Africanism as interconnected, subversive, anti-colonial and a threat to Belgian interests in the Congo and created common cause between the governments of Belgium, France and the United States.³⁸

The pressure was such that it led to what one participant called three days of ‘pleasant generalities without a word of criticism of colonial governments’.³⁹ Then the Brussels session ended in uproar when Diagne, technically a servant of the French government as well as the president of the Pan-African Congress, strongly objected to the content of the ‘London Manifesto’, which was being presented to the gathering by Du Bois, the secretary of the congress. Diagne took particular objection to the description of Belgium’s colonial policy as ‘still mainly dominated by the banks and great corporations who are determined to exploit Congo rather than to civilise it’. It was perhaps a prudent precaution that the manifesto had been complimentary about French colonial policy, but it had been similarly critical of Portugal, while Britain was mainly criticized for its failure to adequately educate the ‘natives’ and prepare them for self-government. According to Diagne, Du Bois was promoting ‘radicalism’ and ‘separatism’, and other dangerous ideas. Diagne was particularly opposed to the sixth resolution of the London session that demanded ‘The ancient common ownership of the Land and its natural fruits and defence against the unrestrained greed of invested capital.’ He refused to put the ‘London Manifesto’ to the vote because it contained such ‘communist’ theories, while instead allowing all present to vote on a more moderate proposal submitted by the Belgian Otlet.40 The Brussels session therefore concluded in some disharmony.

The Paris session

The Paris session began with more eulogies to French colonial rule and denunciations of Garvey and communism from Diagne and Gratien Candace but also contained anti-colonial criticism too. Du Bois made it clear that African Americans had no desire to solve the colonial problems of France but he also repeated his view that ‘no Negro in any part of the world can be safe as long as a man can be exploited in Africa, disfranchised in the West Indies, or lynched in the United States because he is a coloured man’. Eventually nearly all the resolutions in the London Manifesto were adopted, although Resolution six was re-drafted to a more acceptable demand: ‘The return to Negroes of the land and its natural fruits.’ However, if the aim was to re-establish unity and develop a permanent Pan-African movement, Du Bois was unsuccessful. There appeared to be some differences between the African Americans on the one hand and some of their more moderate brothers based in Europe. No permanent organization was established, although a ‘secretariat’ was for a time established in Paris under the direction of Candace and Isaac Beton. In Paris too, Du Bois was questioned as to whether he was an advocate of ‘Africa for the Africans’ and in any way linked with Garvey. He concluded that assimilated Africans such as Candace and Diagne might be strong advocates of racial equality but were ‘curiously timid’ when the exploitation of Africa by ‘predatory capital’ was being discussed. Behind such differences Du Bois detected a more serious question; to what extent could the Pan-African congresses be said to speak for those in Africa and the diaspora, to what extent could Du Bois and even thirty of his intellectual colleagues claim to speak for African Americans? Du Bois concluded that the Pan-African Congress might not speak for all but that it did three things: it brought into face-to-face contact a group of ‘educated Negroes of the calibre that might lead black men in the modern world’; it discovered amongst them more points of agreement than difference and it expressed the need for further meetings.⁴¹

Du Bois did hold some meetings with representatives of the League of Nations. He also submitted a petition from the Second Pan-African Congress to the League, through the Haitian diplomat Dantès Bellegarde (1877–1966), who became famous for his opposition in the League of Nations to the occupation of Haiti by the United States and for exposing the so-called Bondelswarz Massacre by the South African government in what is today Namibia. Bellegarde had also attended the congress and Du Bois was later to call him ‘international spokesman of the Negroes of the world’.⁴² The congress petition, however, made few demands. Regarding the demand for eventual African self-government, it suggested that an African might become a member of the League’s Mandates Commission. It drew attention to the racism directed at ‘civilised persons of Negro descent throughout the world’. It concluded by acknowledging that the League has very little power to do anything but considered that it should ‘take a firm stand on the equality of races, and that it suggests to the colonial powers … to form an International Institute for the study of the Negro problem, and for the evolution and protection of the Negro race’.43

Third Pan-African Congress, London, Lisbon 1923

Despite the differences exhibited in 1921, Du Bois took the initiative to organize a third congress that was held in London and Lisbon in 1923. He later wrote that the ‘Paris office’, that is the French Pan-African Association led by Candace and Beton, nearly ruined the organization of this gathering and the members of the Pan-African Association were criticized for behaving as ‘Frenchmen first and as Negroes second’.⁴⁴ In fact, Du Bois had been considering holding the congress in the Caribbean, mainly it seems for financial reasons, and at the last minute had to reconvene it in Europe. London seems to have been added as an afterthought, with very little preparation, but evidently with the support of the future Labour prime minister, Ramsey MacDonald and the Fabian Society the congress was convened in London in November 1923.⁴⁵ The congress later took special measures to try to deal with the disorganization and indebtedness of the ‘Paris office’ and to make sure that it was only one of several regional offices, not an organizing centre. It was envisaged that regional offices in England, Portugal, West Africa, the British West Indies, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Haiti and Liberia would take responsibility for organizing the next congress, to be held in 1925.

It is worth noting that Du Bois later wrote that the Pan-African movement had been ‘losing ground’ since 1921 and the organizing committee of the third congress only comprised Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt and Rayford Logan. Hunt played a particularly important role, personally donating funds to finance the congress, while the National Association of Colored Women paid Du Bois’s travel costs to Europe.⁴⁶ The London session was evidently small and included amongst its main speakers notable Europeans such as Professor Harold Laski, H. G. Wells, R. H. Tawney and Sir Sidney Olivier, a former governor of Jamaica. Other speakers included Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, who spoke on the ‘The Coloured Races and the League of Nations’, Rayford Logan and Dr John Alcindor. Two Africans Kamba Simango from Mozambique and Chief Amoah III from the Gold Coast also spoke and appear to be the only continental Africans present.⁴⁷ The London session was perhaps most significant for a series of demands and requests to the colonial and other powers. The most notable of these was directed at Brazil and Central America and urged ‘that peoples of African descent be no longer satisfied with a solution of the Negro problem which involves their absorption into another race without allowing Negroes as such full recognition of their manhood and right to be’.48

Columbus Kamba Simango (1890–1966) is now an almost forgotten figure but Du Bois stayed with him whilst in London. He was a missionary who was initially self-taught as well as educated in South Africa and at Hampton Institute in the United States. He collaborated with Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits and became one of the first African anthropologists. He subsequently married Kathleen Easmon, who was visiting the United States with her aunt, Adelaide Casely-Hayford. In the 1920s he travelled to London where his new wife died in 1924. The following year he married another West African, Christine Coussey, who originated from the Gold Coast. Both worked as missionaries in Angola and Mozambique before Simango was charged with the rape of a white missionary in 1932. He then went with his wife to the Gold Coast in the 1930s and after independence became an important point of contact between Nkrumah’s government and FRELIMO, and head of the Portuguese radio service in Ghana.⁴⁹ Simango also attended the Lisbon session, organized by José do Magalhaes and the Liga Africana, which was reportedly larger than the London session.

In Lisbon, some fifty participants represented Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tomé, Cape Verde, Guinea, Nigeria and the United States, fewer countries than the thirteen represented in London. However, both meetings were small and generally unrepresentative of Africa and the African diaspora. Two of the major speakers were colonial ministers, one the current Portuguese Minister of Colonies. Apart from a focus on Sao Tomé most of the session appears to have been devoted to the history and future of the Pan-African movement, as well as the particular problems facing African Americans. It appears to have been viewed by Du Bois as mainly memorable for its culinary delights and harmonious deliberations rather than for any political achievements.⁵⁰

The third congress agreed on various demands: the right of Africans to a voice in government; the right of access to land and its resources; trial by juries of peers; free education for all and higher education for ‘selected talent’; the abolition of the slave trade and liquor traffic; world disarmament but failing this the right of Africans to bear arms. In other demands too there was some continuity from previous congresses. The plea that Africa should be developed not for profit but for the benefit of Africans was reiterated, as was the demand that capital and labour be organized for the benefit of the many not the few. Both reflected Du Bois’ socialist leanings but they were simply pleas, neither Du Bois nor the congress developed any programme to realize such aims.⁵¹

The same could be said for the other more specific demands presented by the congress regarding specific regions of the world. These included the demand that the ‘civilised British subjects’ in West Africa and the Caribbean should be granted the ‘institution of home rule and responsible government without discrimination as to race and colour’, and that such areas as Northern Nigeria, Uganda and Basutoland needed to be developed ‘with the specific objective of training them in home rule and economic independence, and for eventual participation in the general government of the land’. Such demands now appear rather naïve and there were similar pleas for an end to ‘white minority’ rule in South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia. However, the third congress did highlight the global oppression of Africans even in the allegedly free republics of Haiti, Liberia and Abyssinia, which were said to be in the ‘grip of economic monopoly and usury at the hands of the money-masters of the world’. As might be expected, the congress was also critical of lynching and other forms of racial oppression in the United States, and England and France for financing ‘the slave trading industrial monopolies in the Portuguese colonies’. But such criticisms and demands were directed at the League of Nations, which although dominated by the major colonial powers was asked to appoint African representatives to the Mandates Commission and the International Labour Organisation. Nevertheless, all the demands of the congress amounted to one plea, ‘that black folk be treated as men’.52

The demands made by this congress were made on behalf of ‘civilised’ Africans and in many ways echo the demands Du Bois made for the ‘talented tenth’ in the United States. There is no overall demand of ‘Africa for the Africans’, or even a reiteration of previous demands for self-government and self-determination. Indeed, there was an acceptance of the view presented by the colonial powers that most Africans needed more preparation and training before such rights were granted. It was not accidental that Du Bois was so close to MacDonald and the Fabian Society in Britain, who would soon show themselves to be such zealous defenders of the British Empire. At this stage Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism was that of gradualism and minor reforms and showed a mistrust of the majority of Africans, something that was not so evident in Garveyism. Even before the congress, Du Bois’s leadership was rewarded when he was named as the United States official envoy for the inauguration of President King of Liberia, who had previously attended the Second Pan-African Congress. Du Bois travelled directly to Liberia from Lisbon to make his first visit to Africa.

Fourth Pan-African Congress, New York 1927

Du Bois originally intended to hold a fourth congress in the Caribbean in 1925. He lamented the fact that ‘the Pan-African idea was still American rather than African’, and had the aim of ‘moving the centre of this agitation nearer other African centres of population’. He explained that his original plan was to charter a ship and hold meetings throughout the Caribbean but he had difficulties finding such a ship and concluded ‘I suspect the colonial powers spiked this plan.’⁵³ The Fourth Pan-African Congress was eventually held in New York in August 1927, financed and largely organized by Addie Waites Hunton of the ICWDRW, in conjunction with the National Association of Colored Women and the Women’s International Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations (WICPFR), together with the support of Ida Gibbs Hunt and Jessie Fauset. It was therefore almost entirely organized by women and it appears that the ICWDRW also wished to support a fifth congress that it was proposed might be held in the Caribbean.54

There were over 200 delegates in attendance at the congress, and over 5,000 participants overall, although most of these were from the United States. There were African representatives from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Liberia but, as Du Bois admitted, Africa was ‘sparsely represented’. The Caribbean was represented by Haiti, the Bahamas, Barbados and the Virgin Islands. Some of the most notable speakers were non-Africans: Melville Herskovits, John W. Vandercook, author of Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe King of Haiti and other books on Haiti. Other speakers included Chief Amoah III from the Gold Coast and the Haitian Dantès Bellegarde, as well as the NAACP’s William Pickens and the historian William Leo Hansberry.⁵⁵

The resolutions of the fourth congress reiterated previous demands. Africans everywhere needed: ‘A voice in their own government’, rights to the land and national resources, modern education for all children, the development of Africa for Africans and ‘not merely for the profit of Europeans’. Once again there was a demand for economic reform to develop society for the ‘welfare of the many rather than the enriching of the few’, and a plea for the treatment of all humans as ‘civilized despite difference of birth, race or colour’.⁵⁶ In addition there were specific resolutions calling for the removal of United States troops from Haiti, for increased educational provision in Liberia, and for ‘continued independence’ for Abyssinia. The independence of Liberia and the removal of US troops from Haiti were important issues taken up by both the ICWDRW and the WICPFR at the time. Hunton had visited and written a report condemning the United States occupation of Haiti and in 1929 she helped establish the Save Haiti League.⁵⁷

The congress praised some of the political and educational reforms in Britain’s and France’s African colonies, while demanding that Belgium gave Africans some voice in government and restored land ownership to them. Portugal was praised for its ‘liberal and far-sighted colonial legislation’, but at the same time criticized for allowing unbridled ‘financial and industrial power’ to drive it and its colonies into bankruptcy. In the Caribbean, the demand was for ‘the federation of the islands’ an unlikely occurrence since they were in the hands of several colonial powers. There was also a demand for an ‘utter erasing of that colour line between mulattoes and blacks, which sprang from slavery and is still being drawn and encouraged by those who are the enemies of Negro freedom’. Regarding the United States, the congress drew attention to the latent political and economic power of African Americans and encouraged its use both in elections and as consumers. It concluded: ‘Lynching, segregation and mob violence still oppress and crush black America but education and organized social and political power begin to point the way out.’58

Du Bois continued to believe that the ‘colour line’ was a global problem and thus the Congress also desired ‘to see freedom and real national independence’ in Egypt, China and India and demanded an end to the United States interference in Central and South America. Perhaps as a result of Du Bois’ own recent visit to the Soviet Union, as well as the presence of Otto Huiswoud, a leading communist originally from Suriname, special thanks were offered to the Soviet government ‘for its liberal attitude toward the coloured races and for the help it has extended to them from time to time’. There was also a paraphrasing of Marx’s famous dictum in a congress resolution: ‘We urge the white workers of the world to realize that no program of labor uplift can be successfully carried through in Europe or America so long as colored labor is exploited and enslaved and deprived of all political power.’⁵⁹

Despite the apparent link between Pan-African concerns and organized labour, the congress represented a definite decline for Du Bois and his Pan-African movement. Yet again plans were made to hold a fifth congress and to establish a permanent organization and Huiswoud’s name appeared amongst those appointed to a preparatory committee, which included Bellegarde, Logan, Du Bois and Addie Hunton. Du Bois wished to hold such a congress in Algiers or Tunis in North Africa but was denied permission by the French government. Du Bois wrote to Bellegarde that ‘until we black folk developed international interests … I would not undertake to push the Pan-African congress.’ Evidently Rayford Logan did try to persuade him to convene another Pan-African congress but Du Bois would not again be involved in such a gathering until 1945, a congress he took no part in organizing.⁶⁰

The four congresses established the idea of Pan-Africanism, consolidated Pan-African networks and drew activists from the United States, Liberia, Ethiopia and Haiti, as well as those from Africa and the Caribbean resident in Europe. The congresses took a stand against racism and began to raise the demand for self-determination in the colonies. However, few representatives from organizations on the African continent participated, there was little support from African American organizations and no permanent organization, organizing centre or publication was established. The congresses were also criticized for the moderate political views expressed and for the exclusion of Marcus Garvey, perhaps the leading Pan-Africanist of the time.

Pan-Africanism and communism

Both the Pan-Africanism of Garvey and that espoused by Du Bois were criticized by those in Africa and the African diaspora who were drawn to the revolutionary ideas of communism, the prospect of a new world that was ushered in by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the construction of a new socialist society in what became the Soviet Union. Du Bois’ Pan-African vision seemed to some to be too reliant on the benevolence of the League of Nations and the socialist parties of France, Britain and others connected with the Second International. These parties often supported openly racist policies or, like the British Labour Party, established governments that did nothing to end colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean. Garvey’s Pan-African approach did claim ‘Africa for the Africans at home and abroad’ and in 1920 the UNIA promulgated a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World’.¹ However, although the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’ certainly inspired many, neither Garvey nor the UNIA had a programme to realize such a demand, nor guarantee the rights of Africans on the continent, or in the diaspora.

In 1919, following the Russian Revolution, the new Communist International (Comintern or CI), formed by Lenin, the Russian Bolsheviks and communists throughout the world began to formulate a revolutionary Pan-Africanist approach to the problems facing Africans and the African diaspora. The Comintern openly opposed colonialism and one of the conditions for admission to its ranks was that communist parties ‘must support – in deed, not merely in word – every colonial liberation movement’.² However, the connection between socialism and Pan-Africanism was established well before the emergence of the Comintern. Indeed, Du Bois had written about the need for a socialist orientation for the Pan-African movement in his 1915 essay The Negro. There he welcomed ‘the coming unities’, and the need for ‘a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of the colored races, a new unity of men’.³ Other early Pan-Africanists, such as Caribbean-born Hubert Harrison, an activist in New York in the period before the First World War, had also advocated an adherence to socialist principles. In 1911 he explained, ‘Socialism is here to put an end to the exploitation of one group by another, whether that group be social, economic or racial.’4

There is now a voluminous literature on the relationship between the international communist movement and Africa and the African diaspora, especially in the United States and South Africa, some of it written in recent years and based on archival material from the Comintern.⁵ There have also been a few studies that have sought to examine the Comintern’s approach to what was termed the ‘Negro Question’, that is how the liberation of Africa and the African diaspora might be brought about.⁶ What can be concluded is that during the inter-war period, and partly in response to the activities of Du Bois and Garvey, the Comintern took what can be termed a Pan-Africanist approach to the liberation of Africans and the African diaspora in which the agency of Africans, and those of African descent, played a vital role.⁷

The international communist movement took up for solution the problem of African and black liberation from the time of the founding of the Comintern in 1919. The analysis and actions of the Comintern provided a new impetus to the worldwide struggle for black liberation and Pan-Africanism, and presented and highlighted the experience and inspiration of the Russian Revolution, which advanced the possibility of a new revolutionary road for the emancipation of all those of African descent. In the period between the two world wars many throughout Africa and the diaspora looked towards communism and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union as the means to a new society free from oppression, colonialism and racism. Many, including some well-known personalities, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson (1898–1976), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Louise Thompson Patterson (1901–1999) and Josiah Gumede (1867–1946), travelled to the Soviet Union and publicly announced how impressed they had been with what they had seen. For many years, the Soviet Union was viewed as a model for the colonial countries of Africa and the Caribbean as well as metropolitan ones, in terms of its economic development, as well as for its approach to the ‘national question’ and racism.⁸ Many others throughout Africa and the African diaspora were inspired to join a communist party, or became closely identified with the international communist movement, such as McKay, Jomo Kenyatta (1891–1978), Audley Moore (1898–1997), Claudia Jones (1915–1964), Isaac Wallace-Johnson (1894–1965) and Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972). The communist movement played a leading role in some of the key political events in relation to Africa and the diaspora during the twentieth century and, in many cases, was the most organized and significant political force.

The oppression and exploitation of Africa and of all those of African descent had been an important issue for the communist movement even before the twentieth century, as is evident from the writings of Karl Marx and other Marxists in the nineteenth century. Both Marx and Engels took a keen interest in the struggle against slavery and the slave trade in the United States, as their writings on the subject demonstrate. Although Marxism spread to both the American and African continents during the nineteenth century, it was poorly developed in relation to what was later called the ‘Negro Question’, even though it clearly influenced significant figures such as Du Bois and Harrison.9

It was left to V. I. Lenin and the Comintern to establish a general revolutionary political line for the communist movement on the liberation of Africa and the African diaspora. Lenin’s writings certainly contain several references to the status of African Americans, some of his writings also focus on the partition and exploitation of Africa and its significance in the epoch of imperialism.¹⁰ But of even more significance are the views he and other Bolsheviks developed on what came to be called the ‘national and colonial question’. Just as in Russia, where Lenin called for a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the largely non-Russian peasantry, he also called for an alliance between the revolutionary movement of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and the anti-colonial movements and oppressed peoples in the colonies, to undermine and destroy imperialism. Lenin regarded the revolutionary movement in the colonies as vital in this struggle, since it was there that imperialism might well be breached at its weakest link.¹¹

The Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World, launched in 1919, therefore included a call to the ‘Colonial Slaves of Africa and Asia’ to rise up against colonial rule.¹² The Comintern’s call immediately struck a chord with black people in both the United States and in Africa. In the United States, the first area in which significant numbers of black communists emerged, the Russian Revolution, the founding of the Comintern and the publication of its Manifesto immediately exerted an influence on several key figures including Harrison. Several others, especially Caribbean migrants to the United States, such as the members of Harlem’s 21st AD Socialist Club, Otto Huiswoud, Richard B. Moore and Grace Campbell, were similarly inspired. Another member, the Jamaican Wilfred Domingo, as early as 1919 wrote:

Will Bolshevism accomplish the full freedom of Africa, colonies in which Negroes are the majority, and promote human tolerance and happiness in the United States by the eradication of the causes of such disgraceful occurrences as the Washington and Chicago race riots? The answer is deducible from the analogy of Soviet Russia, a country in which dozens of racial and lingual types have settled their many differences and found a common meeting ground, a country which no longer oppresses colonies, a country from which the lynch rope is banished and in which racial tolerance and peace now exist.¹³

Another important figure influenced by revolutionary events in Russia was the Jamaican writer Claude McKay, who publicly wondered if Bolshevism might make the United States ‘safe for the Negro’, and argued: ‘If the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be free.’ McKay referred to the Russian Revolution as ‘the greatest event in the history of humanity’.14 Yet another influential Caribbean migrant was Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB).¹⁵

The ABB, initially founded in 1919, included amongst its members Wilfred Domingo, Richard B. Moore, Otto Huiswoud, Grace Campbell, Claude McKay and Harry Hayward. Its aims included ‘immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere’. It combined elements of Marxist analysis with those of Pan-Africanism, and had branches throughout the United States and in parts of the Caribbean.¹⁶ It subsequently became an important means of recruiting African Americans to the American Communist Party and for disseminating communist ideology amongst African Americans.¹⁷ In later years the Pan-Africanist leanings of the ABB would have some influence on the policies of both the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and perhaps even on the Comintern. The revolutionary events in Russia even influenced Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Many of the members of the ABB were associated with the UNIA, some were even former UNIA members, while Garvey himself initially welcomed the emergence of Soviet Russia. In 1924, he publicly mourned the death of Lenin in Negro World, calling him ‘probably the world’s greatest man’, and sent a telegram to Moscow ‘expressing the sorrow and condolence of the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world’.¹⁸

In Africa and amongst Africans overseas, especially those in the armed forces during the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Comintern were also significant events. In South Africa the founding of Africa’s first communist party in 1921 was inspired by the emergence of the Comintern, although at the time of its founding it probably had only one black member.¹⁹ However, one of the leaders of the new party, W. H. Andrews, prophetically wrote: ‘The influence of the Russian Revolution is felt far beyond the boundaries of the vast Soviet Republic and probably has even more immediate appeal to the enslaved Coloured races of the earth than to Europeans.’²⁰ Indeed, even before the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), revolutionary Marxists in the International Socialist League in South Africa were quoting Marx’s famous dictum ‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin while in the black it is branded,’ and issuing leaflets in Sesuto and Zulu.²¹

The Comintern

The Comintern’s approach to African liberation was informed not only by the writings of Lenin but also by the practical experience of communists seeking solutions to the problems that faced the revolutionary movement in various parts of the world, including the United States and Africa. It should be noted that the Comintern was perhaps the only international organization of the day that was openly based on a platform of anti-racism. At its second congress, in 1920, it adopted statutes proclaiming that

The Communist International breaks once and for all with the traditions of the Second International, for whom in fact only white-skinned people existed. The task of the Communist International is to liberate the working people of the entire world. In its ranks the white, the yellow, and the black-skinned peoples – the working people of the entire world – are fraternally united.22

Lenin’s Preliminary Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions submitted at the second congress, specifically demanded that ‘all Communist Parties render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and subject nations (for example, in Ireland, among the Negroes of America, etc.) and in the colonies’.²³

It was at the fourth congress of the Comintern that what came to be known as the ‘Negro Question’ was discussed in detail. Those attending the congress included Claude McKay, the representative of the ABB. McKay considered that it was time for the Comintern to call a ‘Negro Congress’ and he wrote that ‘the Third International will be amazed at the fine material for Communist work there is in the Negro Race’.²⁴ Another important delegate was Otto Huiswoud, an official representative of the Workers’ Party of America and another leading member of the ABB, who was subsequently made chairman of the Negro Commission established by the congress. The most important consequences of the deliberations at the fourth congress were not just the fact that a Negro Commission was established and a ‘Thesis on the Negro Question’ agreed, but also that a policy was established in relation to all ‘Negroes’ throughout the world, that is for Africa and the African diaspora. The role of the two black delegates at this congress should not be underestimated. Huiswoud and McKay played a key role in drafting the ‘thesis on the Negro Question’ and made a big impact on the Congress, as is clear from the letter of ‘fraternal greetings and best wishes’ sent to the ‘Negro Workers of America’, which was addressed to McKay from the chairman of the Comintern.²⁵ It is also clear that McKay was profoundly influenced by his experiences in the new Soviet Russia which he referred to as ‘one great nation with an arm in Europe that is thinking intelligently on the Negro as it does on all international problems’.²⁶

The ‘Thesis on the Negro Question’, agreed at the fourth Comintern congress argued that, ‘the Negro problem has become a vital question of the world revolution’, and therefore concluded that, ‘the cooperation of our oppressed black fellow-men is essential to the Proletarian Revolution and to the destruction of capitalist power’.²⁷ What was essentially a Pan-Africanist policy for the Comintern, was at least partly a consequence of the view that those of African descent had been the victims of a particular form of racist oppression. It was also based on what seemed to be the emergence of a new awakening and common struggle epitomized by the rapid development of the Garvey movement, as well as the influence of Du Bois’ Pan-African congresses in the post-war period. The fourth congress of the Comintern implicitly recognized this fact by pledging to organize a ‘general Negro conference or Congress in Moscow’, and by calling for support for ‘every form of Negro movement which tends to undermine or weaken capitalism or imperialism, or to impede its further penetration’.28 One of the consequences of this new approach was the recruitment of black students to the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow (KUTV), which had been especially established to train communists from colonial countries and oppressed nations.²⁹ Another was that individual communist parties sought to collaborate with the Pan-African movement. In 1924, for example, communists in the United States, at that time organized as the Workers Party of America, wrote to the fourth international convention of the UNIA urging its members to become ‘makers of history’ and defending the right of African Americans to migrate to Africa, or anywhere else in the world. The Workers Party made it clear that it stood for the rights of African Americans, as well as the rights of all, and unequivocally stated ‘We stand for driving all the European imperialists out of Africa and for the right of self-determination of the peoples of Africa.’³⁰

The American Negro Labor Congress and the World Negro Congress

The Comintern’s efforts to address and solve the ‘Negro Question’ were hampered by the weaknesses and often inactivity of individual communist parties. At the fifth Comintern congress in 1924, both the French and British communist parties were criticized for their inactivity, the French for not doing more to organize amongst Africans living in France; and the British for not openly demanding the independence of the colonies in their propaganda.³¹ In the French case, this criticism also came from African and Caribbean party members. The Communist Party in the United States also came under criticism from its African American members for its approach and the latter called for their own American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) to be established, a demand supported by the Comintern.³² But despite a resolution at the ANLC’s founding in 1925 calling upon its executive committee to ‘lay the foundation for a world organisation of the workers and farmers of our race and to make this organisation a leader and a fighter in the liberation movements of all darker-skinned peoples in the colonies of imperialism everywhere’,³³ the ANLC failed to make the desired breakthrough and was unable to convene the ‘World Negro Congress’, which many of its members desired.³⁴

World Anti-Colonial Conference and League Against Imperialism

In 1927 Brussels, Belgium, was the venue for the famous ‘World Anti-Colonial Conference’, which led to the founding of the League Against Imperialism and for Colonial Independence (LAI). The Brussels conference was convened by the League Against Colonial Oppression, which had been founded by German communists in 1926. Nearly 200 delegates participated in the conference, representatives from throughout the colonial world, and such personalities as Nehru, Madame Sun Yat-sen and Albert Einstein. There were also many representatives from Africa and the African diaspora including Messali Hadj and Hadj-Ali Abdelkader from the Paris-based L’Étoile Nord Africaine; Carlos Martins from Haiti; Max Clainville-Bloncourt and Camille St Jacques, representing the Paris-based Union Intercoloniale; Lamine Senghor (1889–1927), member of the French Communist Party and Narcisse Danaé representing the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre; J. T. Gumede of the African National Congress; James La Guma of the CPSA; and Richard B. Moore, representing the ANLC. William Pickens of the NAACP, George Weston, president of the UNIA and other African American radicals such as Hubert Harrison had been encouraged to attend the Brussels conference by the ANLC but were unable to do so. However, Pickens did subsequently attend the second congress of the LAI held in Frankfurt in 1929, along with several African American delegates such as Williana Burroughs, as well as future president of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta, then residing in London, and Garan Kouyaté, originally from West Africa but representing the Paris-based Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre.35

The 1927 conference established its own five-member ‘Negro Commission’, including Bloncourt, Martins and Gumede, with Senghor as chairman and Moore as rapporteur, and devoted a whole session to the ‘Negro Question’. Moore played a major part in the conference and introduced and presented the ‘Common Resolution on the Negro Question’, which included references to Africa, the United States and the Caribbean. The resolution demanded:

1. Complete freedom of the peoples of Africa and of African origin;
2. Complete equality between the Negro race and all other races;
3. Control of the land and governments of Africa by the Africans;
4. Immediate abolition of all compulsory labour and unjust taxation;
5. Immediate abolition of all racial restrictions, social, political and economic;
6. Immediate abolition of military conscription and recruiting;
7. Freedom of movement within Africa and elsewhere;
8. Freedom of speech, press and assembly;
9. The right of education in all branches;
10. The right to organize trade unions.

The Resolution concerned itself with ‘the emancipation of the Negro peoples of the world’, and was perhaps the most politically developed statement that had been formulated on this issue.

To accomplish its aims Moore called for ‘the organisation of the economic and political power of the people’, in unions and co-operatives, a struggle against ‘imperialist ideology’, and he stressed the importance of ‘unity with all suppressed peoples and classes for the fight against world imperialism’.36

The LAI was first based in Germany, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, its main centre was in England; it also established branches in India, Latin America, North Africa and even in Japan. It became an important organization assisting the anti-colonial struggle, especially throughout Britain’s colonies in Africa and amongst those of African and Caribbean origin residing in Britain and in France. The Brussels conference undoubtedly created the conditions for leading African activists to learn more about the communist movement and subsequently to become influenced by its ideology. Following the conference, La Guma and Gumede from South Africa, together with E. A. Richards, chairman of the Sierra Leone Railway Workers’ Union, were invited to visit the Soviet Union to see for themselves the gains of the revolution. On his return to South Africa, Gumede proclaimed ‘I have seen the new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem.’³⁷ This was not an uncommon sentiment. The previous year W. E. B. Du Bois had also spent several months in the Soviet Union. He subsequently wrote: ‘I stand in astonishment at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.’³⁸

La Guma’s visit to Moscow was to prove vital in the development of Comintern policy in relation to South Africa and for the CPSA, in which he was a key member.³⁹ It allowed him to discuss the political orientation of the CPSA with the leading figures of the Comintern.⁴⁰ It was in the course of these discussions that a new policy emerged which built on the demands advanced at Brussels for ‘the right to self-determination through the complete overthrow of the capitalistic and imperialist domination’.⁴¹

The sixth congress of the Communist International

During the sixth congress of the Comintern, held in 1928, there were important developments in relation to the policy on the Negro Question in general and particularly in relation to the United States and South Africa. Here too, African, Caribbean and African American communists would play a leading role and many of them expressed criticism of their own and other communist parties. The congress occurred at a time when the Comintern took the view that the world was entering a new period of economic and political crisis in which there was an increasing likelihood of wars and revolutionary struggles breaking out. The Negro Question, affecting as it did large parts of Africa and the Caribbean, became even more important, while in those areas where communist parties existed, such as the United States and South Africa, the need to rid them of any manifestations of ‘white chauvinism’ became even more urgent. The policies adopted during this ‘Third Period’ also called for a less conciliatory approach to rival political ideologies, leaders and organizations that were often condemned as ‘reformist’, that is encouraging faith in the existing political system, such as Du Bois, as well as Garvey and the UNIA. In part, however, such changes had been discussed for some years and had often been urged by black communists themselves. One of these was a much greater emphasis on ‘Negro workers’, which consequently led to the Negro Question becoming a much greater concern for the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), sometimes referred to as the Profintern, the trade union centre of the Comintern.42

The sixth congress adopted two key resolutions, or ‘theses’ on self-determination for African Americans in the United States and Africans in South Africa. The thesis on the ‘Black Belt’ in the United States, that is those southern states where African Americans formed a majority population, argued that they constituted a nation of a special type, with the right to govern themselves and to demand independence from the rest of the United States if they so wished. The other thesis advocated what was termed a Native or Black Republic in South Africa, that is South Africans should struggle for what was later referred to as majority rule. Although the Comintern, and its highest body the Congress, played a decisive role in the adoption of these theses as policy, black communists also played a leading part in drafting and advocating their adoption. The most significant of these communists were James La Guma, the African American James W. Ford (1893–1957), who later stood as vice-presidential candidate for the CPUSA, and Harry Haywood, then a thirty-year-old African American student at the Lenin School in Moscow. Indeed, for these black communists the theses on self-determination were a means of empowerment as they forced the Negro Question to the centre of Comintern policy. Haywood, like his elder brother, had been a member of the ABB and had only joined the American Communist Party in 1925. It was as a student, three years after joining the Communist Party, that he took part in the discussions regarding the future orientation and work of the communist parties in both the United States and South Africa.⁴³

In South Africa, black self-determination meant increased Africanization of the Communist Party, its membership as well as the leadership. The theses specifically instructed the South African party to ‘orientate itself chiefly upon the toiling masses’, noting that ‘the Party leadership must be developed in the same sense’. In short, the policy adopted by the Comintern created all the conditions for African ascendancy in the South African communist movement and for a policy that put Africans at the centre of the struggle for liberation in that country. The new theses did, however, meet with some resistance. Some South African communists, black as well as white, rejected the new policy as ‘Garveyism’ and considered that it endorsed what they considered to be the Garveyite slogan of ‘Africa for the Africans’, a notion they had hitherto opposed. However, supporters of the thesis, such as La Guma, enjoyed the support of the Comintern and its president who declared that in relation to South Africa the Comintern ‘must say very clearly that in the struggle between the Negroes and the whites that it is on the side of the Negroes’. Despite this support, the Comintern was not a monolith and its leadership far from omnipotent, accordingly disagreements within the South African party continued for some time.44

The situation in the United States in some ways mirrored that in South Africa and the Black Belt thesis also created controversy. There was considerable opposition to the idea that African Americans were a ‘nation within a nation’, a people for whom racism was a ‘device of national oppression’. Within the Communist Party, Haywood only gradually accepted the thesis but then became its greatest champion. His position, and that of the Comintern, was not entirely new since the notion that African Americans constituted a ‘nation within a nation’ had been advanced since the nineteenth century by writers and activists such as Martin Delany. In 1917 Cyril Briggs, the founder of the ABB had also demanded self-determination and a ‘separate political existence’ within the United States for African Americans, while in 1935 Du Bois would also discuss the issue in his article ‘A Negro Nation Within the Nation’.⁴⁵

The Black Belt thesis highlighted several key issues: the right of African Americans to choose their own future, and the fact that African Americans’ desire for liberation had a potentially revolutionary character that should not be underestimated. Comintern policy drew not only on Lenin’s analysis that African Americans might constitute a nation, but also on their own experiences of struggle. At the same time it provided a new basis for the struggle against racism and ‘white chauvinism’ in the United States and created the conditions for encouraging a new approach and a re-evaluation of African American history and culture, linking both to Africa and the wider African diaspora.⁴⁶ The result, according to Robin Kelley, was a new chapter in the history of the Communist Party in the United States; for the first time communist ideas began to circulate amongst African Americans in the southern states, precisely the area where the struggle for Civil Rights later emerged.⁴⁷

The Native Republic and Black Belt theses were therefore important developments in the Comintern’s Pan-Africanist approach based on the perceived common interests that linked people of African descent around the world. As the Comintern explained:

Whether it is a minority (USA etc.), majority (South Africa) or inhabits a so-called independent state (Liberia, etc.), the Negroes are oppressed by imperialism. Thus, a common tie of interest is established for the revolutionary struggle of race and national liberation from imperialist domination of the Negroes in various parts of the world. A strong Negro revolutionary movement in the USA will be able to influence and direct the revolutionary movement in all parts of the world where the Negroes are oppressed by imperialism.48

After 1928, these questions assumed even greater importance within the communist movement and some black communists such as Haywood and Ford found themselves in influential positions. This approach also had a significant legacy in South Africa, as can be seen in the later demands of the African National Congress. There has also been a significant legacy in the United States, as can be seen from the first and final demands of the Black Panthers’ ten-point programme: ‘we want power to determine the destiny of our black community’ and ‘we want a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny’.⁴⁹ This legacy can also be seen in the demands of other individuals and organizations during the Black Power era and later that demanded African American self-determination. In this sense, the approach of the communists raised the consciousness and perspectives of the wider Pan-African movement.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers

In keeping with the resolutions of the sixth congress of the Comintern, in 1928 the Profintern created a new body to organize black workers – the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Led by the African American James W. Ford, the ITUCNW initially had members from the United States, South Africa, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Cuba. It eventually hoped to include representatives from Haiti, Portugal’s African colonies, the Belgian Congo, Liberia and French Equatorial Africa, as well as from Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and other countries in Latin America. Subsequently, however, the ITUCNW did not have any responsibility of organizing in South America, although it retained its connections throughout the Caribbean.⁵⁰ Evidently the ‘Negro Question’ was an important factor in some Latin American countries, such as Brazil and Cuba, where the demand for black self-determination was similarly promoted by the communists.⁵¹ The ITUCNW was assigned ‘the task of drawing Negro workers into the existing trade unions, of further creating new trade unions and of unifying the wide mass of Negro workers on the basis of the class struggle’. Towards that end, the ITUCNW convened the First International Conference of Negro Workers, the long-desired World Negro Congress, which finally met in Hamburg, Germany in 1930 and marked an important landmark in the Comintern’s Pan-Africanist activity.52

Some of the intended delegates to the conference were prevented from attending by the action of colonial governments, but representatives from the United States, the Gold Coast, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Haiti and Jamaica eventually gathered together in Germany for the historic conference.⁵³ At the close of the conference a new executive committee of the ITUCNW was elected ‘to give concrete aid and assistance to all Negro workers and to help them build up class unions in their countries’. It included amongst its membership Ford, George Padmore, African American Helen McClain of the National Needle Workers’ Union, E. Reid from Jamaica, Nigerian Frank Macaulay (1891–1931), E. F. Small (1891–1958) from Gambia, Albert Nzula (1905–1934), one of the leaders of the CPSA and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté (1902–1942) as African representatives.⁵⁴ Indeed one of the significant features of the conference was the relatively large proportion of delegates from the African continent, a contrast with the domination of Du Bois’ Pan-African congresses and the UNIA’s convention by diasporic Africans. The other significant feature was a focus on the struggles of workers, especially those in the colonies, as a vital means to bring about the liberation of Africa and the diaspora. This was a focus that would be repeated fifteen years later when Padmore convened the famous Manchester Pan-African Congress. The representation of women was rather less impressive since only two African American women Helen McClain and Williana Burroughs (1882–1945), a teacher and representative of the ANLC, appear to have participated.⁵⁵

The Negro Worker

The First International Conference of Negro Workers was also a major event in the career of Trinidadian George Padmore (1903–1959), who had joined the Communist Party while a student in the United States, who subsequently became a leading figure in the ITUCNW and the editor of its publication The Negro Worker. This publication had first appeared in both French and English in 1928, edited by Ford, and was distributed, or often smuggled, around the world mainly by black seamen sometimes disguised as a religious tract.⁵⁶ Padmore was also responsible for many of the articles in The Negro Worker and for writing many other ITUCNW publications, most notably The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931).⁵⁷ The publications of the ITUCNW chronicled the struggles of black workers in Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and Europe. They consistently identified the main enemy of the ‘Negro Toilers’ as the great powers, particularly British, French and US imperialism, while presenting the Soviet Union as the ‘Champion of the Oppressed’. They constantly warned readers of the ‘reformism and national reformism’ promoted by a host of ‘mis-leaders’ – the British Labour Party, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Unions in South Africa, for example. Garveyism was always presented as the most dangerous form of ‘ideological deceit’, guilty of ‘denying the class struggle’ and the ‘possibility of the revolutionary struggle of the Negro masses for self-determination’.58

At the same time, the readers of The Negro Worker were encouraged to support not just struggles in Africa and the African diaspora but also the struggles for national liberation in India and China and warned of the dangers of fascism and the prospect of a new world war. The Negro Worker was one of the first publications to expose Nazi Germany’s aim to obtain colonies in Africa, at the expense of the other colonial powers. Perhaps most importantly, The Negro Worker offered practical advice to those involved in struggles. It presented concrete demands that could be fought for, and was very much a collective organizer, disseminating Marxism and a sense of unity of struggle throughout Africa and the African diaspora, as well as amongst all the oppressed and exploited in the world.⁵⁹ It is a tribute to its effectiveness that the publication was banned by the authorities in most African and Caribbean colonies.

The Caribbean

The ITUCNW along with The Negro Worker took a strong interest in the Caribbean. Indeed, two of the committee’s founders represented Guadeloupe and Cuba, while both Jamaica and Haiti were represented in Hamburg. The ITUCNW took up the responsibility of organizing amongst the workers in the Caribbean, especially in Jamaica, but it also gained organized supporters in St Lucia, British Guiana, Grenada, Haiti, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico and in the Dutch Antilles.⁶⁰ The Negro Worker regularly carried articles on the Caribbean and made much of the 1932 visit to Moscow made by Vivian Henry, general-secretary of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association, and Hubert Critchlow (1884–1958), general-secretary of the British Guiana Labour Union.⁶¹

Even before the founding of the ITUCNW both Huiswoud and Cyril Briggs had been sent to work in the Caribbean by the American Communist Party, in 1930 it became officially known as the CPUSA, which had been given a responsibility for that region by the Comintern. During the preparations for the Hamburg conference Huiswoud had visited several Caribbean countries and had even held a public debate with Marcus Garvey in Jamaica. During the 1930s the CPUSA established links in Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and strengthened its ties with the Communist Party of Cuba. One of only a few communist parties in the region, the Communist Party of Cuba was founded in 1925. By 1929 the Cuban party began to pay much more attention to the recruitment of black members, especially amongst the sugar workers. By the time of its second congress in 1934 several black workers had risen to leadership positions. The congress discussed the issue of winning over the ‘Negro Toilers’ to the revolutionary struggle and attacked any ‘discrimination against Negroes’. The congress also discussed the need for ‘greater clarification of the Negro Question as a national rather than a “racial” question typified in the slogan for self-determination of the Negroes in the Black Belt of Oriente Province’.62 The influence of the Communist Party in Cuba increased and it became known as the party of black workers. Consequently, the influence of the Cuban party also spread outside the island and perhaps especially in Jamaica. One of the most significant organizations in the Caribbean in contact with the ITUCNW was the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association (NWCSA), led by Elma Francois (1897–1944) in Trinidad. Originally from the island of St Vincent, Francois and the NWCSA became leading organizers of workers during the rebellions that erupted in Trinidad in the later 1930s, and Francois became the first woman to be charged with sedition for her political activities. She was later named a national heroine of Trinidad and Tobago.⁶³

Britain and the Negro Welfare Association

Much of the Comintern’s work on the Negro Question centred on the British Empire, since Britain was the world’s leading imperialist power, with colonies throughout Africa and the Caribbean. However, despite the urging of the Comintern and the ITUCNW, the British party was slow to seriously engage with anti-colonial activity in Africa and the Caribbean, or amongst African and Caribbean residents in Britain. Much of this work was left to the LAI and its affiliate the Negro Welfare Association (NWA), founded in London in 1931. One of the Association’s most important constituencies consisted of African and Caribbean seamen based in Britain’s main ports such as London and Cardiff. Black communists again played a pivotal role in this work, men such as the Barbadian Chris Jones [Braithwaite] (1885–1944), who led a committee of ‘Coloured’ seamen in London, Harry O’Connell, from British Guiana, who organized in Cardiff, and another Barbadian, Arnold Ward (1886–?), who became secretary of the NWA.⁶⁴

Although charged with organizing African and Caribbean people in Britain and in the colonies the NWA was initially led by English communists connected with the LAI. Nevertheless, its aims were unmistakably Pan-Africanist: ‘to work for the complete liberation and independence of all Negroes who are suffering from capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination … [and] to analyse, expose and combat capitalist exploitation and oppression in Africa, the West Indies, the other Negro colonies as well as in the USA’.⁶⁵ Certainly all the leading black communists in Britain were all active members of the NWA. So too were many who played a key role in the anti-colonial movements in Africa such as Jomo Kenyatta and Isaac Wallace-Johnson.

The secretary of the NWA, Arnold Ward, was constantly in contact with Padmore of the ITUCNW, William L. Patterson (1891–1980) in the United States, Isaac Wallace-Johnson in West Africa, Harry Thuku (1895–1970) in East Africa and others in the Caribbean, so that through the NWA important Pan-African networks were established and developed. It campaigned on a variety of issues: racist legislation in South Africa, land alienation in Kenya and self-determination in the Caribbean. The NWA also called for mass economic and political struggle in the colonies to achieve ‘complete independence’. Together with the LAI it championed the anti-colonial struggle in West Africa and worked closely with the West African Students’ Union, the Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society and, particularly, the Sierra Leonean activist Isaac Wallace-Johnson, who was closely connected with the ITUCNW. In addition, the NWA also had allies within Britain’s Parliament, who were kept fully briefed on West African and other colonial issues, enabling them to question official policy. The NWA worked closely with all the main Pan-African organizations in Britain, including the League of Coloured People and the International African Service Bureau as well as playing a pivotal role in the important global Pan-African networks that were established during this period.

The French connection

In France, the Communist Party had first organized African and Caribbean workers and students during the early 1920s in the Union Intercoloniale, alongside those from South East Asia. However, by 1926 the black members formed their own Pan-African organization, the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN), led by the famous Senegalese communist and decorated war veteran, Lamine Senghor. The CDRN enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the French Communist Party but many of its leading members were communists. Its publication La Voix des Nègres was widely read not only by African and Caribbean people in France but also in the Caribbean and French West Africa. Only a year after its formation Senghor and Garan Kouyaté, with Communist Party support, formed a similar organization Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN). The Ligue and its publication La Race Nègre, were ostensibly established to ‘work for the revolutionary education, organisations and complete emancipation of the entire Negro race’, but it seems that most of their activities focused on African seafarers and workers in France as well as establishing some influence in the French colonies in west and equatorial Africa.66 Kouyaté, who became the leading figure in the Ligue following Senghor’s premature death, was particularly successful at establishing independent unions of black seamen in some of France’s main ports, even though his approach ran counter to that proposed by the Communist Party and the ITUCNW.

The ITUCNW, especially Padmore, took Kouyaté and the LDRN under its wing and helped them to establish a new publication the Cri des Nègres, a sister organization in Germany, the Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerasse (LVN) and, in 1932, a new organization in France the Union de Travailleurs Nègres (UTN). With ITUCNW support the UTN established its branches in Marseilles, Bordeaux and Le Havre, as well as in Paris, and even had some influence in Belgium. Communist-led Pan-African activity in France was hampered both by internal weaknesses and by the repressive actions of the police and security services, which managed to infiltrate agents into several organizations. Nonetheless, there were clearly successes and important networks established not only in the Francophone world but with those organizing in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. In the late 1930s Paris became the headquarters of the ITUCNW and important Pan-African networks were established around the anti-colonial struggle, in the aftermath of the assassination of André Aliker, a communist newspaper editor from Martinique, and in opposition to the invasion of Ethiopia.67

Scottsboro and Ethiopia

Two events were particularly significant in the development of global Pan-Africanism in the 1930s, namely the Scottsboro case in the United States and the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy, and the Comintern and black communists were centrally involved in both.

In 1931 nine African American youths were arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama on bogus charges of raping two white women. They were subsequently convicted and all but one were sentenced to death. The Comintern transformed the case of the Scottsboro Boys, as the youths were known into a trial of racism in the United States and its campaign has been widely credited with saving the lives of the defendants. The campaign itself was a huge international event: ‘Workers and activists rallied in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, across Europe and the United States, in parts of the British Empire and its dominions, and in the farming collectives of Russia.’⁶⁸ In Europe, much of the campaign centred on the speaking tour of Ada Wright, the mother of two of the Scottsboro boys and was organized by the communist-led International Labor Defence (ILD), an organization established to provide legal aid and support.⁶⁹ The campaign presented communists with the opportunity to raise other aspects of the global Negro Question including anti-colonialism.⁷⁰ In Germany Josef Bilé, a leader of the LVN, spoke of the consequences of colonialism in Cameroon; in Britain, Ward and Padmore spoke on Scottsboro platforms; while in West Africa, Wallace-Johnson organized support in the Gold Coast and Nigeria.⁷¹ The Haitian Scottsboro Defence Committee, led by Jacques Roumain, the famous writer and the founder of the Communist Party of Haiti, was outlawed and Roumain subsequently arrested and imprisoned.72

Indeed, the Scottsboro Campaign helped the Comintern expand its Pan-Africanist activities. By the time of the first World Congress of the ILD in 1932, it had established branches in South Africa and Madagascar and was addressed by delegates from Trinidad, British Guiana, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Liberia, while other delegates from France’s colonies were prevented from attending.⁷³ Other communist-led organizations such as International Red Aid also expanded in Africa during this period, after the first Red Aid committee was established in Sierra Leone in 1931. By 1932 local committees had been established in Cameroon, Togo, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar and South Africa.⁷⁴

The invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy in 1935 became a major cause célèbre for many throughout the world and particularly for Africans and those of African descent. The Italian invasion highlighted the injustice of colonial rule throughout Africa and was waged against the only African country that had successfully resisted colonial conquest. Ethiopia had become a symbol of independence and pride for black people all over the world and they rallied to its defence. Here too the communists were to play a key role. The Comintern, and especially black communists, vigorously supported Ethiopia’s struggle for independence, even before the invasion of October 1935, and viewed the attack on Ethiopia as a major step in the build-up to a new world war. Support for Ethiopia was strongly voiced by James Ford at the seventh congress of the Comintern, at which the need for the broadest unity against the danger of fascism and war was the main theme. James Ford explained that: ‘In the United States the American Negroes are seething with indignation against this attack on the Ethiopian people. In like manner, the toiling masses from South to North Africa, groaning under the heavy yoke of imperialist domination, are awakening to the call of battle for defence of the independence of Ethiopia.’⁷⁵

In the United States, African American communists played a leading role in various Ethiopia defence committees. The campaign in support of Ethiopia’s independence created some of the conditions for the convening in 1936 of the historic National Negro Congress (NNC).⁷⁶ Formed on the initiative of the CPUSA the NNC, which elected A. Philip Randolph as its president, was one of the broadest political bodies in African American history and included more than 500 organizations including the NAACP, the Urban League and many churches.⁷⁷

Throughout the world black people rallied in defence of Ethiopia. In Trinidad where it has been claimed that ‘The Abyssinian War awakened the consciousness of the Trinidad working class,’ the communist-led NWCSA led a ‘Hands off Abyssinia’ campaign, just as it had organized earlier campaigns in defence of the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon.⁷⁸ In Kenya at a meeting organized by the Kikuyu Central Association, Africans had resolved to ‘march to Ethiopia to defend their brothers’.⁷⁹ In the Gold Coast, Wallace-Johnson helped to establish an Ethiopia Defence Committee, while in South Africa, the CPSA organized ‘Hands off Ethiopia’ demonstrations, and successfully appealed to the harbour workers of Durban, who refused to load ships with supplies for the Italian Army. In Brazil too, there were demonstrations organized by the communists in support of Ethiopia.80 One of the most important centres of support for Ethiopia was in Paris, where an International Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People was established, which comprised some 200 organizations from several countries. In 1936, this Committee organized a conference of ‘Negroes and Arabs’ with the aim of ‘intensifying the struggle for Ethiopian independence’.⁸¹ In Britain the NWA took up the Ethiopian cause. It adopted a resolution, proposed by Jomo Kenyatta, that specifically stated that the NWA saw ‘symbolised in the fight of the Ethiopian people to maintain their independence, the whole struggle of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples for liberation’. The resolution concluded that ‘millions of colonial and semi-colonial people in Africa and throughout the East are gaining strength from the magnificent fight which is being put up by the Abyssinians to maintain their independence’.⁸²

Conclusion

The international communist movement, and especially black communists, played an important role in the development of a new radical Pan-Africanism that emerged in the inter-war period as well as contributing to the specific struggles unfolding in Africa and the African diaspora. In South Africa, for example, the communists advanced the view that Africans must be their own liberators and at the centre of the struggle for liberation in that country, and created an alliance between the Communist Party and the African National Congress (ANC) which mobilized the masses of the South African people and eventually brought an end to the racist regime.⁸³ That struggle led to the emergence of many heroic fighters and communists who became known globally such as Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

In the United States, African Americans and other communists played a leading role in the development of revolutionary politics and organizing amongst African Americans in the southern states, politics that would eventually culminate in the struggle for civil rights and the demand for black empowerment. The experience of African American communist Hosea Hudson in the 1930s is instructive. The communist press, he noted, ‘was always carrying something about the liberation of black people, something about Africa, something about the South, Scottsboro, etc etc. We would read this paper and this would give us great courage.’⁸⁴ This courage and the communist worldview that produced it not only had a profound effect on post-Second World War struggles but also on a whole generation of African American activists and cultural workers, including Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Audley Moore and Louise Thompson Patterson.

In other areas of the world the Comintern’s Pan-Africanist approach and analysis of the way forward for Africa and the diaspora provided similar inspiration. For example, despite attempts by the colonial authorities to ban The Negro Worker and other communist publications, the ITUCNW managed to influence the workers’ movement in the Caribbean, especially in Britain’s colonies, where large-scale strikes and anti-colonial rebellions broke out in the latter part of the 1930s.85 In West Africa too, the ITUCNW influenced the burgeoning workers’ movements which were destined to play such a key role in political events especially during the 1940s.

The impact of the communist movement and its politics can even be seen in the various Pan-African networks that emerged in the period. Thus, although George Padmore broke with the communist movement he continued to use the contacts and connections he had established in his later Pan-Africanist career, including associations with Jomo Kenyatta and Isaac Wallace-Johnson. This was evident with the unsuccessful attempts by Padmore and Kouyaté to convene a World Negro Unity Congress in Paris or London as early as 1935. The Comintern’s Pan-Africanist perspective created the conditions for the new Marxist-influenced Pan-Africanism during the 1930s and perhaps reached its apogee with the convening of the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945. The networks established by black communists and the Comintern endured for many years. In 1945, for example, the British-based communist Desmond Buckle from the Gold Coast drafted a Pan-African document to present to the United Nations. The text, Manifesto on Africa in the Post-War World was sent by a group of British-based and US Pan-Africanists under Padmore’s direction. In the same year Buckle, also represented the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade Unions, a South African workers’ organization, at the inaugural meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions. Most importantly, perhaps, the Comintern powerfully reinforced the internationalist and revolutionary perspectives in the Pan-African movement, perspectives that offered a vision of a world in which working and oppressed people cast off the yoke of oppression and took control of their own destinies.