AFRICAN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATIONS
THE 5TH PAN–AFRICAN CONGRESS MADE TWO DEFINITE RESOLUTIONS. WHAT WERE THE RESOLUTIONS AND HOW DID THESE RESOLUTIONS AFFECTED AFRICANS?
AFRICAN STUDIES - PAN-AFRICANISM
LECTURER: KWAME OBADELE KAMBON
Pan-Africanism is a sociopolitical world view, philosophy, and movement which seek to unify native Africans and those of African heritage into a global African community. Generally, Pan-Africanism calls for a politically and economically united Africa or unity of African people. Pan-Africanist ideals emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to European colonization and exploitation of the African continent.
Pan-Africanist philosophy held that slavery and colonialism depended on and encouraged negative, unfounded categorizations of the race, culture, and values of African people. These destructive beliefs in turn gave birth to intensified forms of racism, the likes of which Pan-Africanism sought to eliminate. As a broader political concept, Pan-Africanism roots lie in the collective experiences of African descendants in the Diaspora.
Pan-Africanism assumed greater significance for some blacks in Europe for two primary reasons. First, the increasing futility of their campaign for racial equality in the United States led some African Americans to demand voluntary repatriation to Africa.
Next, for the first time the term Africans, which had often been used by racists as a derogatory description, became a source of pride for early black nationalists. Hence, through the conscious elevation of their African identity black activists in America and the rest of the world began to reclaim the rights previously denied them by Western societies.
The vision and ideology of Pan-Africanism was the dominant ideology of the African people for almost the whole of 20th century, although somewhat eclipsed by territorial nationalism in the last quarter. It was born of five centuries of oppression, exploitation, domination, and more particularly, humiliation and indignity on the African people by European imperialist powers.
Understandably, it was the ‘diaspora’ which first gave birth to the idea of Pan-Africanism. And the Pan-African Congress which was a series of five meetings in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945 was intended to address the issues facing Africa due to European slavery, racism and colonization.
Another reason for Pan-Africanism was that it was aimed at the economic, intellectual and political cooperation of the African countries. It demands that the riches of the continent be used for the enlistment of its people. It therefore called for the financial and economic unification of markets and a new political landscape for the continent.
Even though Pan-Africanism as a movement began in the 1776, it was the fifth Pan-African congress that advanced Pan-Africanism and applied it to decolonize the African continent. Unlike the four earlier congresses, the fifth one involved people from the African Diaspora including Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Americans. The call for a “United States of Africa” by some leaders mirrored the unifying cry of the delegates at the Pan-African Congress of 1945 in Manchester.
The Pan-African idea died, apparently, until fifteen years afterwards, in the midst of the Second World War, when it leaped to life again in an astonishing manner. The more immediate inspiration of the Fifth Congress arose after the World Trade Union Conference in London in February, 1945.
The Colonial delegates to the World Trade Union Conference were invited to Manchester, where the British section of the Pan-African Federation was just in the process of coming to life. An informal meeting was held, at which representatives from the various Colonies exchanged information and discussed their problems.
As a result of these discussions, George Padmore, Chairman of the International African Service Bureau, threw out the idea of convening another Pan-African Congress. It was warmly received and endorsed by Dr. Peter Milliard, President of the British Section of the Pan-African Federation, and its Treasurer, T. R. Makonnen; Jomo Kenyatta, Secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association of Kenya, I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, General Secretary of the West African (Sierra Leone) Youth League, and representatives of Negro organisations in Great Britain.
The oversea delegates took it to their respective countries and discussed it with their peoples. The response was immediate, and the business of organising the Fifth Congress quickly proceeded.
The 1945 fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, Britain was the most historic Congress. It followed the foundation of the Pan-African Federation in Manchester in 1944. The congress was organized by people of African origin living in Manchester. The reason for the congress was that Africans again fought in the Second World War and after the war, many felt that they now deserved independence. One of the demands was to end the colonial rule in Africa and end to racial discrimination, against imperialism.
It demanded human rights and equality of economic opportunity. The Pan-African Congress manifesto itself positioned the political and economic demands of the Congress within a new world context of international co-operation, arising from the grim ordeal of the war of liberation against “Fascism”.
More so, the fifth congress was a turning point event that sparked an intellectual and practical transformation of the objective of Pan-Africanism. This global African congress brought together intellectual drivers of Pan-Africanism such as, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey and others.
The congress was also endorsed by Amy Jacque Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. While previous Pan-African congresses had been controlled largely by black middle-class British and American intellectuals, the Manchester meeting was dominated by delegates from Africa and Africans working or studying in Britain.
The new leadership attracted the support of workers, trade unionists, and a growing radical sector of the African student population. With fewer African American participants, delegates consisted mainly of an emerging crop of African intellectual and political leaders, who later won fame, and power in their various colonized countries.
OBJECTIVES AND RESOLUTIONS OF THE CONGRESS
Once again, at the Fifth Pan-African Congress the banner against Imperialism, against man’s political and territorial domination by other men was raised high by representatives of the Colonial and Coloured masses.
The congress had two main objectives, thus, it sought to liberate the whole of Africa from colonial rule and secondly, it sought to unite all Africans descent living in the Diaspora and on the continent of Africa.
Notwithstanding, there were a number of resolutions passed such as the criminalization of racial discrimination and the main resolution which condemned imperialism and capitalism. The conference adopted a number of resolutions which affirmed the right of all colonial people to control their own destiny.
It demanded an immediate end to colonial rule in Africa and granting of complete independence. It therefore called on farmers, workers and intellectuals in Africa to organize themselves to fight against imperialist exploitation and for independence.
In view of this, the Congress participants encouraged colonized Africans to elect their own governments, arguing that the gain of political power for colonial and subject peoples was a necessary prerequisite for complete social, economic, and political emancipation. It endorsed the method of non-violence, non-co-operation and passive resistance in the fight to achieve political freedom for colonial people.
This politically assertive stance was supported by a new generation of African American activists such as the actor and singer Paul Robeson, the Minister and Politician Adam Clayton Powell, and the educator and political activist William A. Hunton Jr. who took an increasing interest in Africa. After the congress, the conference had some impact on the nationalist cause. It helped the Nationalists leaders in Africa to articulate their demands and supported them in the struggle for independence.
It increased the level of national consciousness among the colonial people of Africa. Some of the persons who participated in the conference later led their countries to independence on their return home. Such people included Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who led the Gold Coast to attain independence in 1957 under the auspices of the Convention People’s Party.
AFTERMATH OF THE 5TH CONGRESS
After the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945 with its powerful resolutions that were intended to totally uproot European colonialism and its racist practices, Pan-African nationalism remained in the realm of ideas. It was only thirteen years later that the Pan-African political movement landed in Africa in 1958 after Ghana’s independence.
The idea of the African personality became one of the main pillars in the process of the revitalization of African cultural values that were eroded by European cultural domination. The first two Pan-African conferences known as the All African congress were held on the African soil in Accra, Ghana in April and December 1958 after Ghana gained independence under Kwame Nkrumah. Eight African governments that were independent at that time, namely, Ethiopia, Liberia, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Ghana, attended the April conference.
These governments on behalf of Africa as a whole issued a joint declaration condemning colonialism and the apartheid system in South Africa.
In December the same year, 1958, the All-African Peoples’ Conference was held. It purposefully linked itself with the Pan-African tradition. ‘The wider implications of the first two Accra Conferences of 1958 ushered Pan-Africanism into the realm of ‘realpolitik’ (Thompson 1969: 126), leading to the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in May 1963, inspired by Nkrumah, with their annual bi-annual meetings, thus institutionalizing Pan-Africanism.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded to promote unity and cooperation among all African states and to bring an end to colonialism. It had 53 members by 1995. The OAU struggled with border disputes, aggression or subversion against one member by another, separatist movements, and the collapse of order in member states. One of its longest commitments and greatest victories was the end of apartheid and the establishment of majority rule in South Africa.
Also, after the 5th congress, 52 delegations representing Independent States in Africa and the Caribbean, Liberation Movements and communities of people of African descent in North America, South America, Britain and the Pacific met at the University of Dar Es Salaam’s Nkrumah Hall for a sixth Pan African Congress.
The Congress nevertheless, made a big impact on the Liberation Movements of the African countries who were still under colonial domination, especially the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau and settler colonialism in the then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa.
In April 1994, another Congress was held on the African continent in the one hundred years of history of the Pan-Africanism. At the Congress President Y. Museveni of Uganda was the Patron, Col. K. Otafiire the Convener and Dr. T. Abdul-Raheem the Secretary General.
The Congress set up a Post-Congress Secretariat under the leadership of the Secretary-General, which continued to function in Kampala into the late 1990s. The theme of the Congress was ‘Facing the Future in Unity, social progress and democracy, the perspectives towards the 21st century’. More than thirty African countries were represented by different political forces and groups, especially opposition, pro-democracy, youth and women activists.
The congress closed with a re-invigorated Pan African movement, which led to the re-structuring of the OAU into the African Union (AU) under the influence of the Libyan leader Momar Gaddafi established in 2001.
Yet the AU and the promotion of the African Renaissance concept by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, despite their apparent promise, in the final analysis failed to meet one of the cardinal principles of the Pan African movement, the integration of the Diasporas and the Continent. In the Borderlands the AU was paralysed, being unable to go to the root of the Darfur issue and advance solutions, merely separating the belligerents.
The campaign for reparations, for example, for Arab–led slavery, is at the stage of ‘fence- setting’. That led to the creation of a powerful moral position supporting reparations. The World Conference against Racism and its NGO Forum, both of 2001, showed the way forward for positive action on such diverse issues as slavery and colonialism and provided remedies such as reparations.
The NGO Forum pronounced on Slavery in Mauritania, Sudan, Cameroon and Niger as well as on Africans and African Descendants providing for reparations.
In conclusion, the fifth Pan-African congress demanded African consciousness and an African freedom and development. Although many of Pan-Africanism's twenty-first-century American adherents still thought of a movement for achievable economic and political goals, the ideology, for better or for worse, was not dominated by such concerns.
Pan-Africanism had merged with "Afrocentrism," a semi-religious movement, existing mainly on the sentiment level, among the many people who identified emotionally with black Africa and believed their own interests to be tied inextricably to its fortunes.
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