Pan Africanism

We named different buildings at C4L after people.  For example, our Mentor Centre is named after Charlotte Macheke, the first African women to earn a university degree.  The main building on campus is named after Tiyo Soga, the first ordained priest in South Africa – he became a Presbyterian minister in 1856.  A Xhosa, he studied in Scotland, married a local lass there, and they came back to South Africa as missionaries in 1857.  Needless to say, he was not always accepted by fellow clergy - just as she had challenges adjusting.

Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859.  The influence of “social Darwinism” spread fast, being broadly accepted as fact by the 1870s.  A fellow missionary of Tiyo Soga’s – named John Aitken Chalmers – predicted that Africans were doomed to become extinct.  Social Darwinism gave rise to this kind of thinking, like the concept of a super race that drove the Third Reich only a few decades later.  Chalmers was upset that Africans were not converting to Christianity, thus his backlash.

Writing in the May 11^th edition of the King William’s Town Gazette, Tiyo Soga dismissed the assertion that only a Eurocentric outlook would secure perpetuity for blacks.  He pointed to references even in the Bible of blacks and thus to their resilience: “I find the Negro from the days of the old Assyrians downwards keeping his individuality and distinctiveness amid the wreck of empires, and the revolution of ages.  I find him opposed by nation after nation.  I find him enslaved – exposed to all the vices and the brandy of the white man.  I find him in this condition for many a day – in the West Indian Islands, in Northern and Southern America and in the South American Colonies of Spain and Portugal.  I find him exposed to all these disasters and yet living – multiplying and never extinct.”

This heralded the dawn of an awareness that would later be called Pan Africanism.

The Pan African Movement

The movement was formalized in London in 1900.  An American sociologist attending that indaba was WEB du Bois.  His concern at this inaugural meeting was: “The problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences of race – which show themselves chiefly in the colour of the skin and the texture of the hair – will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”

So the movement began with the intent to secure equal rights for black people where ever they were all over the world. 

But in 1915, a Jamaican called Marcus Garvey challenged du Bois.  Whereas du Bois was an assimilationist, trying to secure equal rights so that blacks could integrate into any setting, Garvey was an exclusivist, who believed that different races could not be reconciled.  While du Bois championed full civil rights in America for blacks, Garvey promoted a return to the motherland – “Africa for Africans”.

One way or the other, the Pan African movement’s focus for its first half century was on the diaspora.  But that changed with the emergence of independent African states in the aftermath of World War II.  Ghana was the first nation to gain its independence and Kwame Nkruma hosted a Pan African congress – in Africa for the first time – in 1958.  Its focus shifted to helping African nations to emerge.  This came to pass, and later congresses were held in Tanzania in 1973 and Uganda in 1994 – and in January 2014 in South Africa.

In the African setting, these two strategies are not unfamiliar.  For example, in the former Portuguese colonies, blacks could become full citizens or “assimilados” if they learned to speak Portuguese, studied the colonial curriculum, dressed in European clothes, etc.  The dark shadow cast by this approach was that local culture was of absolutely no value.

Then there was segregation or as it was called in its most Vorwoerdian form – apartheid.  In this approach, there was space for both – but apart.  The “Africa for Africans” slogan took on a more sinister anti-white sense – exacerbating racial tensions.  Implicit in this approach is that each and every culture has some value, but some are worth more than others.  This has been called “open racism” in comparison to assimilation which is called “closed racism”.

Black Supermacy or Black Consciousness?

Malcolm X is an African American folk hero.  He is to America what Steve Biko is to South Africa – the best known voice among black thinkers.  Like Biko, his personal views evolved.  They had some roots in the teachings of his father – an exclusivist - who believed that black Americans should all migrate back to Africa, being unwelcome in America almost a century after its civil war.  The influence of Elijah Mohamed shaped his views, until his own penetrating insights began to see through the charades of the Nation of Islam, that had brought him from prison to the status of national spokesman for black supremacy.  This group taught that blacks should first and foremost come to terms with their own identity and shake off the “colonization of the mind” that kept them enslaved to white agendas - long after slavery was abolished.  So it refused to cooperate with whites, or even with other civil rights groups that promoted integration with whites.  It was fiercely proud and isolationist.

As Malcolm X began to perceive the Nation of Islam's imperfections, he started to open up to collaboration with other civil rights groups.  This was anathema to his long-time sponsors.  Seeing it as betrayal, they assassinated him. Thus, African Americans sorted out their own differences without the help of the whites in authority.  While this was part of their defiance, the use of such violence emptied black supremacy of authenticity.  This was not a case of white supremacists beating up blacks - like the case of Steve Biko.  It was self-destruction.

One has to bear in mind that blacks in the diaspora are a minority, whereas they are the vast majority in Africa, even in South Africa which still has a significant white population.

 

• Every time a black is called a “coconut” in South Africa, it illuminates a paranoia that infers that the opposite to white supremacy is black supremacy.  It is not.
• Even though there is a huge difference between black supremacy and affirmative action, this can get confused at times; this is often described as Triumphalism
• It is inconsistent to be happy that Barrack Obama is the most powerful man in the world and yet wish that you could exclude whites from your own African work place
• Affirmative action in favour of the majority is, in a word, odd
• 150 years after Tiyo Soga married the intrepid Janet, mixed marriages are still very rare in South Africa.  This primary human relationship should become a future focus of Pan Africanism.  If you cannot figure it out at family level, how on earth can you win at work place level or in political arena?