Imperial machinations to divide the Pan African Movement

Ghana had become a magnet for Pan Africanism and leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X made pilgrimages to Accra. Maya Angelou was another of the Pan African forces that moved to live in Ghana. While the Nkrumah forces sought to build a coalition for the total independence of Africa in a formation that was to be called the Casablanca Group, western supported organs resisted the idea of an all-African organization and came up with what they called the Monrovia Group under the leadership of William Tubman of Liberia. The Monrovia had convened in Liberia after the radical call of the meeting of African leaders in Morocco in December 1960. The Casablanca group had met in Morocco in December 1960, the year of African Independence, and called for the immediate political union of Africa.

This group included leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gama Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Ben Bella of Algeria, King Mohamed V of Morocco, and Modibo Keita of Mali. This group met in May 1961 in response to the December meeting of 1960 and included leaders from Nigeria, Liberia, Togo, and observers from the French speaking areas. They argued for slow steps to be taken to lead to African unity. One of the primary aims of this group was to oppose the mobilization of an all-African army after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. Inside the USA the anti-Communism of the Cold war had created a rupture among Pan Africanists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois, on one side, and others such as Alphaeus Hunton, who became rabid anti-communist. Patrice Lumumba was also characterized as a communist and the British, Belgians and USA conspired to eliminate him.

The USA, France, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Italy and South Africa worked hard to break the cohesion of the Pan African forces and unleashed intellectuals and operatives to undermine the Pan African movement. It was in the wake of this imperial resistance that saw the removal of leaders such as Ben Bella, Nkrumah and Keita.

The themes around which the 6th Pan African Congress was called included total independence and self-determination, unity and self-reliance of Africans in all parts of the world. Central to the theme of self-reliance and self-determination was the question of advancing a command of science and technology. At that historical moment, Tanzania was the headquarters of the OAU Liberation Committee and Tanzania represented the principal example of self-reliance. The largest delegation of Africans outside of Africa at that Congress was the North American delegation and the forces of the Black liberation movement in the USA that had been organized under the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC). From Brazil Abdias do Nascimento joined the US delegation to Dar es Salaam and after 1974 was an instrumental force in strengthening the Pan African networks in Latin America.

The declaration of the Sixth Pan African Congress on the support for armed struggles exposed the ideological lead taken by the liberation movements. However, the anti-communist position promoted by France, the USA and South Africa sought to create deep divisions and the depth of this division was manifest in the position of the Pan African Movement over the question of the independence of Angola. Sections of the Pan African Movement carried a racial line and argued after 1975 that the Angolans should not ally with the Cubans to fight against the invading South African Army.

After the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980 the African leaders convened in Nigeria to hammer out the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) incorporating programs and strategies for self-reliance development and cooperation among African countries. In response, the World Bank issued the Berg Report in 1981 and went into over drive to obstruct economic integration. Elliot Berg, the World Bank functionary in this report, argued that the reason why African economies were in difficulty was because of the role of the state in the economy. It was argued that there should be an emphasis on ‘liberating the forces of the market’ in order both to revive exports and improve the incomes of the rural agricultural populace. Structural adjustment and IMF conditionalities strengthened foreign capital in the same measure as it weakened African governments.