Pan-Africanism
Learn about Pan-Africanism — the intellectual and political movement that united people of African descent against racism and colonialism.
Pan-Africanism was the intellectual and political movement advocating solidarity among all people of African descent worldwide — both on the African continent and in the diaspora created by the slave trade. It challenged European colonialism and racial ideology, and provided the intellectual foundation for African independence movements.
The movement had roots in the 19th century, when African American and Caribbean intellectuals like Edward Wilmot Blyden and Henry Sylvester Williams articulated the idea of shared African identity and destiny. W.E.B. Du Bois organized a series of Pan-African Congresses (1919–1945) that brought together Black intellectuals from across the world. The Négritude movement, led by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, celebrated Black cultural identity and rejected European claims of cultural superiority.
Pan-Africanism directly inspired the decolonization movements that swept across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and other independence leaders drew on Pan-Africanist ideas. The Organization of African Unity (founded 1963, now the African Union) institutionalized the movement's vision of continental solidarity. Pan-Africanism's legacy endures in ongoing debates about African identity, unity, development, and the relationship between the continent and its diaspora.