Epistemological Questions in the Study of the Pan-African Movement

Abstract

Faced with pressures from below and the wave of new energies from the African peoples, the Executive Council of the African Union (AU) in May 2013 declared an ambitious agenda for a people centered Union to achieve the agenda of full unity by 2063. This goal of the unification and the emancipation of African peoples in all parts of the world had been articulated by the Pan African Movement from the outset. Social movements such as the Garvey movement had given coherence to the concept of the full unification and thinkers such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Wangaari Mathai and Kwame Nkrumah had refined the conceptions of Pan Africanism. Emancipation, unification and dignity had been key aspects of the Pan African movement from its inception.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had been a crucial link between the Pan African movements of the Fifth Pan African Congress up to the formation of the OAU in 1963. Kwame Nkrumah had maintained that the independence of Ghana would be “incomplete without the independence of all of Africa.” It was this spirit that informed the OAU liberation Committee and this Committee was the driving force behind the OAU up to the formal end of apartheid in 1994.The presentation will examine five approaches to the study of the movement: Positivism, Marxism, Feminism, Constructivism and the emancipatory approach.

The renewed confidence of Africans is emerging in the midst of an economic depression in Europe and at a moment when Africans are stating clearly that there must be new values for African unity, for healing ourselves and the world (Maathai 2010). The urgency for planning across borders has been reinforced by the ravages of Global Warming and the multiple disasters that face the ordinary producers. These pressures from the structural conditions of exploitation are reinforced by the changes in the international financial architecture. Temporarily, the ordinary people have created their own cross border monetary transactions with the traders, especially women, establishing innovative methods for freedom of movement. Even at the moment of planning for full unification there was recognition that the full tasks of the Pan African Project were incomplete. There are still outstanding colonial outposts where African peoples live in Western Sahara, Comoros and Diego Garcia, Guadeloupe Martinique, Puerto Rico, Cayenne (among others).

It was this recognition that ensured the clarity that the tasks of Pan African liberation are incomplete. In the effort to embrace a new thinking about the relationship between people’s unity and economic transformation, new conceptions of Pan Africanism are being refined within the conception of Ubuntu. Intellectuals are caught between the growing neo-liberal and state centered approaches to Pan Africanism and the voices from below demanding full emancipation.