Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage in addition to strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African ancestry. Based on a common goal dating back to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial assist base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.

Pan-Africanism can be said to throw its origins in the struggles of the African people against enslavement and colonization and this struggle may be traced back to the first resistance on slave ships—rebellions and suicides—through the fixed plantation and colonial uprisings and the "Back to Africa" movements of the 19th century. Based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political fall out and aims to "unify and uplift" people of African ancestry.

At its core, pan-Africanism is a conviction that "African people, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share non merely a common history, but a common destiny". Pan-Africanist intellectual, cultural, and political movements tend to view any Africans and descendants of Africans as belonging to a single "race" and/or sharing cultural unity. Pan-Africanism posits a sense of a shared historical fate for Africans in America, West Indies, and on the continent, itself centered on the Atlantic trade in slaves, African slavery, and European imperialism.

Pan-African thought influenced the build of the Organisation of African Unity now the African Union in 1963. The African Union Commission has its seat in Addis Ababa and the Pan-African Parliament has its seat in Midrand, Johannesburg.

In the age of globalization and rapid technological advancement, the compression of space and time facilitated by new technologies has contributed to the growth of Pan-African thought in a way that is helping to promote unity throughout the diaspora.

Overview

Pan-Africanism stresses the need for "collective self-reliance". Pan-Africanism exists as a governmental and grassroots objective. Pan-African advocates add leaders such as Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Robert Sobukwe, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, King Sobhuza II, Robert Mugabe, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Ture, Dr. John Pombe Magufuli, Muammar Gaddafi, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, grassroots organizers such(a) as Joseph Robert Love, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, academics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Anténor Firmin and others in the diaspora. Pan-Africanists believe that solidarity will allows the continent to fulfill its potential to independently administer for all its people. Crucially, an all-African alliance would empower African people globally.

The realization of the pan-African objective would lead to "power consolidation in Africa", which "would compel a reallocation of global resources, as alive as unleashing a fiercer psychological energy and political assertion ... that would unsettle social and political power to direct or determine structures...in the Americas".

Advocates of pan-Africanism—i.e. "pan-Africans" or "pan-Africanists"—often champion socialist principles and tend to be opposed to outside political and economic involvement on the continent. Critics accuse the ideology of homogenizing the experience of people of African ancestry. They also point to the difficulties of reconciling current divisions within countries on the continent and within communities in the diaspora.