By Francis Kokutse

After the last Pan-African Congress in South Africa in 2014, nothing much has happened, and it seemed everyone went to sleep, but thanks to the Togolese President, Faure Gnassingbe, there is a renewed determination to bring back Pan-Africanism among Africans and Black people in the diaspora. Accordingly, Togo is  preparing to host the 9th Pan-African Congress.

For many who do not understand what Pan-Africanism is, Peter Kuryla, an associate professor of history at the Belmont University, in the U.S., defines it in an article as “the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified.”

 Kuryla said, historically,  Pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement and listed  many varieties of Pan-Africanism. “In its narrowest political manifestation, Pan-Africanists envision a unified African nation where all people of the African diaspora can live,” he added.

Somehow, attempts to bring people of African descent together has not been taken seriously this past decade. Togo’s minister of foreign affairs and African integration, Prof Robert Dussey says, it took the hug of a Black Brazilian couple  to jolt him into action.

“I was on an official visit to Brazil and after everything, this woman and her husband, awed on seeing an African official,  walked to me, and then hugged me. They ended up shedding tears. It was tears to remind us that we have failed the Black people in the diaspora,” Prof Dussey said.

On his return, he approached President Gnassingbe on what must be done to revive Pan-Africanism to include the Diaspora. Together, they decided to involve the African Union, and that was how the plans for the 9th Pan African Congress was set into motion. Togo’s involvement is not surprising, though a small country, it has always played big roles when it becomes necessary. The late President Gnassingbe Eyadema is credited with the roles he played in the birth of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Giving a background to Pan-Africanism, Kuryla said the ideas first began to circulate in the mid-19th century in the United States, led by Africans from the Western Hemisphere. The most important early Pan-Africanists were Martin Delany and Alexander Crummel, both African Americans, and Edward Blyden, a West Indian.

“Those early voices for Pan-Africanism emphasized the commonalities between Africans and Black people in the United States. Delany, who believed that Black people could not prosper alongside whites, advocated the idea that African Americans should separate from the United States and establish their own nation,”  he said.

For Kuryla, the true father of modern Pan-Africanism was the influential thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. Throughout his long career, Du Bois was a consistent advocate for the study of African history and culture. In the early 20th century, he was most prominent among the few scholars who studied Africa. His statement, made at the turn of the 20th century, that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line” was made with Pan-Africanist sentiments in mind.

He mentioned the Jamaican-born nationalist, Marcus Garvey, as among the more-important Pan-Africanist thinkers of the first decades of the 20th century. In the years after World War I, Garvey championed the cause of African independence, emphasizing the positive attributes of Black people’s collective past.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, among the most-prominent Black intellectuals who advocated Pan-Africanist ideas were C.L.R. James and George Padmore, both of whom came from Trinidad. From the 1930s until his death in 1959, Padmore was one of the leading theorists of Pan-African ideas.

Kuryla said the first formal Pan-African Congress (the first to bear that name) took place in 1919 in Paris and was called by Du Bois. A second Pan-African Congress followed that meeting two years later, which convened in three sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris. The most-important result of the second Pan-African Congress was the issuance of a declaration that criticized European colonial domination in Africa and lamented the unequal state of relations between White and Black races, calling for a fairer distribution of the world’s resources.

After the third Pan-African Congress in 1923 and then the fourth in 1927, the movement faded from the world picture until 1945, when the fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England. Given that Pan-Africanist leadership had largely transferred from African Americans to Africans by the mid-1940s, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Padmore played the most-prominent roles at that congress.

With the coming of independence for many African countries in the decades following World War II, the cause of African unity was largely confined to the concerns of the African continent. The formation of the Organization for African Unity (OAU) in 1963 solidified African leadership, although a sixth Pan-African Congress was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974.

The 7th Pan-African Congress was held in Kampala, Uganda April 3-8, 1994, and was followed by the 8th Congress which was held in Johannesburg from January 14-16, 2014, under the theme “Mobilizing Global Africans, for Renaissance and Unity” and brought together one hundred and twenty participants representing institutions and organizations of Africans from around the world.

In order to prepare for the 9th Congress, various meetings were held as a prelude to the main congress in Lome. There was one for the Southern Africa region from  December 3 -4, 2023 in Pretoria, South Africa, on the theme  “Pan-Africanism, Science, knowledge and technology” . Participants at this pre-congress recommended among other things, the establishment of an African Scientists Directory to contribute to the African Professionals Database, which will serve as an all-inclusive platform aimed at linking the expertise of African professionals based in Africa with their counterparts in the diaspora.

This was followed by the Western Africa regional preparatory conference, held from  March 14-15, 2024, in Mali under the theme “ Diaspora, Afro descendants and Development”. At this conference, it was emphasised that, challenges of systemic discrimination, social injustice, inequitable access to economic opportunities, limited education and other barriers  faced by Black people in the diaspora and Afro descendants communities, hinder their full potentials.

Then there was the  Northern Africa regional preparatory conference, which was organized online by the Kingdom of Morocco on April 18, 2024, on the theme “ Pan-Africanism and migration “. This meeting highlighted the important role of the African Union for orderly and coordinated management of migration to establish several mechanisms including the Migration Policy Framework for Africa (MPFA) and its 2018-2030 Action Plan. Furthermore, African embassies around the world were encouraged to hold Africa Day celebrations in their countries of residence.

The fourth, the Central Africa regional preparatory conference, organized online by the Republic of Congo on May 24, 2024, under the theme “Economic Pan-Africanism and African Emergence,” called for the need to eliminate tariff barriers, promote intra-African trade, diversify the economy in Africa and strengthen regional and continental integration, by accelerating the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

There was also the  Eastern Africa regional preparatory conference, held in the United Republic of Tanzania on July 6, 2024, under the theme “Africanophonie, Cultures, Education and Pan-African identity.” The meeting recalled that the people of Africa are essentially Africanophone due to the preponderance of African languages ​​in their daily interactions and the need to decolonize minds and imaginations on the continent through the training of elites and executives whose profiles and skills are in line with the current and future needs of Africa.

Brazil organized the sixth and final preparatory conference for the  Diaspora region, from August 29-31, under the theme “Memories, restitutions, reparations, and reconstruction.”  Addressing the participants, Prof Dussey said, “Pan-Africanism was born in American and Caribbean Afro-descendant milieus, and so we cannot build the Pan-Africanism of the 21st century without the Afro-descendants.”

He said the dispersion of people of African descent around the world after the transatlantic slave trade, imposed on the African community, a duty of global unity, a duty whose roots go back to the end of the 19th century, and which materialised through the holding of the Pan-African Conference in 1900 on the initiative of the Afro-Trinidadian Henry Sylvester-Williams and the various successive congresses.

Dussey is looking forward to the Lome congress where he hopes, Africa will for once help rebuild itself from the ashes. As a pan-Africanist of our time, there is no doubt that he wants to see a new Africa rise.

(C) TPA2024