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Pan-Africanism and the Organization of African Unity




Pan Africanism Definition

Pan-Africanism is a sociopolitical worldview, and philosophy, as well as a movement, which seeks to unify both native Africans and those of the African Diaspora, as part of a "global African community".

Pan Africanism represents the aggregation of the historical, cultural, spiritual, artistic, scientific and philosophical legacies of Africans from past times to the present. Pan Africanism as an ethical system, traces its origins from ancient times, and promotes values that are the product of the African civilization and struggles against slavery, racism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.

Pan-Africanism is usually seen as a product of the European slave trade, rather than as something arising in the continent of Africa itself. George Shepperson described it best by saying, "Pan-Africanism was the gift of the New World of America to the Old World of Africa". Enslaved Africans of diverse origins and their descendants found themselves embedded in a system of exploitation where their African origin became a sign of their servile status. Pan-Africanism set aside cultural differences, asserting the principality of these shared experiences to foster solidarity and resistance to exploitation. In reality, African American and Afro-Caribbean Pan-Africanists often adopted contradictory positions that belied their universalist Pan-Africanist aspirations.

The idea and notion of Pan-Africanism was floating around for many years and could be seen and expressed in poems before 1900 called the Negro Spirituals. This dream gradually morphed into a dynamic ideology for social political action. Author S.O Arifalo credits Henry Sylvester Williams a man of West Indian heritage whose contact and meetings with a large number of West Africans during his undergraduate studies in...