Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism holds that people of African descent across the continent and the diaspora share a common political destiny, and that liberation requires solidarity and unity across the colonial borders arbitrarily imposed from outside.

It began in the diaspora as a response to slavery, segregation, and colonial rule. Early congresses led by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and the cultural nationalism of Garvey, forged a consciousness of shared struggle; Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) gave it a searing analysis of colonialism and decolonizing violence.

It treated national independence as necessary but not sufficient. Nkrumah, who led Ghana to become the first sub-Saharan colony to win freedom in 1957, argued in Africa Must Unite (1963) that separate small states carved out by colonizers would remain economically dependent and easily divided, so continental unification was the real condition of sovereignty — an ambition partly realized in the Organisation of African Unity and its successor, the African Union.

The tradition spans socialist and liberal-developmentalist wings — 'African socialism,' state-led development, and market-oriented currents — united less by an economic doctrine than by the goals of unity, dignity, and freedom from external domination.

Its critics point to the persistence of the colonial borders it hoped to transcend, the failures of post-independence one-party and military states, and the gap between continental ideals and national interests; defenders answer that the project of solidarity and self-reliance remains unfinished rather than refuted.

Its defining question — the relation between peoples, colonizer and colonized — is one these axes, drawn from disputes internal to European states about their own governance, were simply never built to ask.