Conclusions
Conclusions
After the 1935 invasion of Abyssinia by the Italians, there was urgency within the Pan African Movement to build the independence movement. The 5th Pan African Congress brought an alliance between the differing forces to inspire the decolonization process. Many of the leaders of the 5th Pan African Congress went home to their societies and reneged on one of the cardinal principles of Pan Africanism, ’that the peoples of one part of Africa are responsible for the freedom of their brothers and sisters in other parts of Africa and, indeed black people everywhere were to accept the same responsibility. “In his document written on the eve of the Pan African Congress, Walter Rodney wrote that the “African petty bourgeois leadership since independence has been an obstacle to the further development of the African revolution.”
Rodney himself was assassinated in Guyana in 1981, by a political leadership which claimed to be in the forefront of Pan African ideals. By 1980, Walter Rodney had made the clear point that Pan Africanism cannot be based on exclusion, because everywhere in the Pan African world there were Africans living in multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies. In South Africa a new philosophy of Ubuntu emerged to anchor the Pan Africanism of the 21st century to affirm the position that Pan Africanism was linked to human emancipation. This concept of the liberation of humanity became even clearer when big companies claimed the right to patent life forms and the convergence of biotechnology and nanotechnology gave corporations power to invent life.
At the end of the Cold War there had been a resurgence of radical Pan Africanism with the progressive African women at the forefront. The struggles against gender violence, warfare, destruction, and violation had taken the Pan African discussion to a new level. With the emergence of fundamentalist forces who wanted to control the minds and bodies of women, there was also the clarity of the need for a secular Pan African movement that was rooted in deep African spirituality. When a militarist groups such as Boko Haram emerged in Nigeria and promised to sell young girls into slavery, the progressive women were re-energized and began to build new pan African networks against the oppressive governments and the women who legitimized these governments. Pan Africanists such as Ifi Amadiume and Micere Mugo sought to, as it were, re-envision Pan Africanism. Micere Mugo in her essay on Re-Envisioning Pan Africanism: What is the role of gender, youth and the masses,” noted that,
“…though not cited in intellectual discourses that have so far come to be the literary cannon on Pan-Africanism, in their activism, as well as participation, women were and have always been the heart of the Pan-Africanism’s essence, or if you like, substance. My point is that Pan-Africanism may be seen as manifesting itself in two major ways, which are equally important: through the movement itself and through its lived aspects. As a movement, Pan-Africanism has been characterized by fluctuation, registering bouts of life and dormant lulls. On the other hand, its lived aspects, actual substance, or essence, have always remained alive and persistent over historical time. Ordinary people, or the masses, including the majority of Africana women, have been the key keepers or carriers of this essence.”
It is this emancipatory approach to Pan Africanism that is informing one section of the forces that carry forward the Pan African Movement. Cultural workers in all parts of Africa are in the leadership and carry forward the traditions of creativity that had bene expressed by cultural artists such as Fela Ransome Kuti, Paul Robeson, Hugh Masakela, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Tupac Shakur and Bob Marley. It was Bob Marley who, through both the medium and the message, called for a conception of African unity and human freedom which was linked to the emancipation from mental slavery. Bob Marley was another notable Pan-African spokesperson of the century, who wanted to transcend racial divisions, with a universal message of African unity, love, peace and human emancipation. Africans and non-Africans alike embraced his music and ideas and his message of Pan African emancipation was an inspiration to all of humanity. The challenge for Pan Africanism in the twenty first century is to take the conception of emancipation beyond the material plane to grasp the limits of the human potential imposed by the eugenic civilization of the contemporary period.
In 2011 the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia launched a new phase of popular struggles for global rights. Since these interventions external forces have doubled down to hijack the liberatory processes in Africa. War situations, the arming of militias and external forces plundering Africa dominated the news out of Africa while among Africans overseas the rise of racism, xenophobia and exclusion demanded new forms of solidarity in the struggles for peace and social justice. The call for the 8th Pan African Congress offered now opportunities to rebuild the emancipatory traditions.
There were many new and creative forms of organizing and communicating that emerged in the period of the information revolution. After the destruction of NATO the imperial forces doubled down to harness the tools of social media to create confusion, doubt and insecurity among the youth. Conservative and militaristic leaders employed tools of regionalism, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation to disorient the producing classes. Schools and places of learning became centers for intimidation and obscene competition while religious zealots torment communities with divisive energies. It was from Latin America with more than 150 million Africans where there was a call for a new movement for emancipation and transformation. The social forces that are coalescing for the 8th Pan African Congress are seeking to learn the positive lessons of the movement in order to build a strong force for the full freedom of Africa in the 21st century.
*Dr. Horace Campbell is Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. A member of the Pan African Congress International Planning Committee, he is the author of Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. His most recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for the Forging of African Unity. Dr. Campbell’s other books includes Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation.
