9-th, 2004 - 26: 1   (Posted By: Webmaster)
The Pan African Movement

The Pan African Movement

If strong national governments have been sought as the necessary basis for economic development, pan-African unity since independence has been Africa's means for overcoming the limitations of national weakness in a parlous world. Although most African statesmen have consistently urged pan-African unity, it was Kwame Nkrumah who was its most articulate early spokesman. In their individual frailty, said Nkrumah, the new states of Africa could do little to influence the great powers, neither to dissuade them from a senseless and dangerous arms race nor to cause them to divert defense expenditures toward solution of the economic problems of the developing countries. In unity, however, Africa could accomplish much. It could be a powerful voice in the United Nations, a third force to balance the giants of West and East, and an economic community which would raise Africa from a depressed supplier of raw materials to an industrialized, modernized region, healthy and prosperous in its own right. Nkrumah therefore decried political and economic association with former colonial masters, arguing, for example, that an African common market was the proper alternative to associate membership in the E.E.C. favored by France's former colonies.

During the pre-independence years immediately following the Second World War, the pan-African movement was directed primarily against the political restrictions and racial indignities of colonial rule. The Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 was concerned with anti-colonialism and the rights of black men in general, these themes converging in the demand for national independence in Africa. At the same time French-speaking colonials from Africa and the West Indies developed the idea of nègritude and founded the journal, Prèsence Africaine, which extolled African cultural achievements in a manifestation culminating in the two conferences of black writers and artists held in 1956 and 1959. By 1957, however, with the independence of Ghana achieved and freedom for other territories clearly in sight, the emphasis of pan-Africanism shifted quickly toward a search for international unity in pursuit of the objectives so persuasively set forth by Kwame Nkrumah.

The year 1958 marked several important developments, most of which were directly connected with Nkrumah and Ghana. In April, the Conference of Independent African States met in Accra where it recognized the revolutionary National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) as the legitimate representative of Algeria and emphasized African unity in practice by forming a special African group among the African ambassadors at the United Nations. September saw another grouping come into being, the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (P.A.F.M.E.C.A.), designed to encourage independence movements in its defined area; then, after Guinea had opted for freedom from France, there came the Ghana-Guinea Union in November, 1958, which gave dramatic indication of the capacity and desire of Africans

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