1. Week 4 Early Black intellectual thought and the rise of Pan-Africanism

2. Key Issues
According to these early pan-Africanists, what ‘unites’ them? Race? Empire? Africa? Oppression?
Are there more similarities or differences between the voices that emerged from Africa (Plaatje), the West Indies (Garvey), or America (Du Bois)?
What were the boundaries these men fought against – political, geographical, temporal?
What role did writing play in the resistance of these early pan-Africanists, and how did it differ from the slave narratives and the Back to Africa movement discussed earlier?

3. Outline
1. Setting the scene: Abolition, Reconstruction, and the Scramble for Africa
The rise of Pan-Africanism:
Definition
Historiography
Conferences
3. Sol Plaatje
4. W.E.B. Du Bois
Marcus Garvey
What unites these voices?

4. Pan-Africanism – a definition?
Traditional definition: a movement for the political independence and unification of Africa itself. (Immanuel Geiss, J. Ayodele Langley)
Pan-Africanism vs. pan-Africanism (St. Clair Drake)
A range of components:
the idea of Africa as the homeland of Africans and African descendants;
the idea of solidarity among people of African descent;
glorification of an African past and African culture;
the struggle for political independence from colonialism;
the struggle of people of African origin, particularly living outside Africa, against racial prejudice (P.O. Esedebe, W.B. Ackah)

5. Pan-African Conferences
1900 (London), 1919 (Paris), 1921 (London, Brussels, Paris), 1923 (London & Lisbon), 1927 (New York), 1945 (Manchester)
Du Bois attended July 1900 London Pan-Afr conference, with 31 other delegates. From Liberia F.R.S. Johnson, country’s former attorney-general, and from Ethiopia, Benito Sylvain, asst to Emperor Menelik II.

6. Sol Plaatje(1876-1932) Native Life in South Africa (1916)
‘At this time we felt something rising from our heels along our back, gripping us in a spasm, as we were cycling along; a needlelike pang, too, pierced our heart with a sharp thrill…but then we lived in a happy South Africa that was full of pleasant anticipations, and now – what changes for the worse have we undergone! For to crown all our calamities, South Africa has by law ceased to be the home of any of her native children whose skins are dyed with a pigment that does not conform with the regulation hue.’

7. W.E.B. Du Bois( ) ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.’
5 March 1897American Negro Academy, Du Bois stated that African Americans must ‘take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism.’
1906 Niagara Address:
‘We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.’

8. Souls of Black Folk
Manning Marable argues that Souls of Black Folk (1903) blends main themes that comprised Du Bois’ emerging social theory:
“double consciousness”;
the beauty and originality of Negroes’ “sorrow songs” and black religion;
the unique spirituality of the Negro people;
the necessity to develop black educational institutions;
the general division of the modern world along the “color line”.

9. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) UNIA formed 1914. Stated objectives:
To establish a universal confraternity among the race
To promote the spirit of race pride and love
To reclaim the fallen of the race
To administer to and assist the needy
To est commissaries or agencies in the principal countries of the world for the protection of all Negroes, irrespective of nationality
To promote a conscientious Christian worship among the native tribes of Afr
To establish universities, colleges and secondary schools for the further education of the boys and girls of the race

10. UNIA Anthem First stanza Ethiopia, the tyrant’s falling,
Who smote thee upon thy knees?
And thy children are lustily calling
From over the distant seas.
Jehovah the Great One has heard us,
Has noted our sights and our tears
With His spirit of Love he has stirred us
To be one through the coming years.

11. What unites these authors?
Importance of travel and exile in their life experience
Centrality of travel/exile in their narrative technique.
Polyphonic technique: Gilroy calls it a ‘self-consciously polyphonic form’.
Tension between particularism and transnationalism.
Control in publishing sphere, ie editorship over important journals