The Contemporary Relevance of Pan-Africanism

It is a singular pleasure for me to be in Accra in the year of Ghana’s 50^th independence anniversary celebration. Ghana holds a special place in our collective Pan-African imagination for its early independence under the illustrious leadership of President Kwame Nkrumah, whose dreams of African unity and regeneration remain as pressing as ever. I have always wanted to visit Ghana, a country that acquired mythic status in my youth because it was an unwavering beacon of liberation for the rest of the continent yearning to be free from colonial barbarity; the first president of my homeland, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, was a friend of Dr. Nkrumah and spent many years here in Kumasi, from where he returned to lead the nationalist movement in Malawi. And dare I mention that your football team, the Black Stars, beat us 12-0 in October 1962, two years before our independence! We of course attributed that to the fact that you were independent and we were still under colonial rule, which must have galvanized my parents’ generation in their fight for independence!

I feel especially humbled and honored that I have been asked to speak on “The Contemporary Relevance of Pan-Africanism” on this august occasion to launch the Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the Institute for African Studies, University of Ghana. First, let me thank the Director of the Institute, Professor Takyiwaa Manuh, who I have known for many years for inviting me. Let me also commend her and her colleagues and the university at large for securing the resources to create this important Chair in memory of one of Africa’s most remarkable leaders. President Nkrumah was not only a great Pan-Africanist, but also a distinguished intellectual in his own right, a true philosopher-king. It is important for our universities to create endowed chairs as a mechanism of recognizing, nurturing and celebrating intellectual excellence. And it is crucial for our societies to develop new cultures of philanthropy in which individuals and corporations support and endow public and private institutions including universities. Partnership between the state, capital, civil society and academe is indispensable for the realization of the quintuple dreams of African nationalism—decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration—four of which remain to be fully realized.

As this is my first visit to this wonderful country and given the importance of the occasion, I trust you will understand if my prepared remarks go over the time I have been allotted. I also seek your indulgence if I start my presentation with a brief historical account of Pan-Africanism given the fact that I am a historian. More importantly, I believe we cannot fully appreciate the contemporary relevance of Pan-Africanism without understanding its past. The past, the present, and the future are always interconnected, they are intersected historical processes.

Pan-Africanism in Historical Perspective

Pan-Africanism encompassed various political, cultural, and intellectual movements based on a series of shared presumptions and objectives. It was inspired by the desire to instill racial pride among African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora, to achieve their self-determination from European domination, to promote solidarity among them, and to foster their social and economic regeneration. Thus, Pan-Africanism had two main objectives: first, to liberate Africans and the African diaspora from racial degradation, political oppression, and economic exploitation; second, to encourage unity or integration among African peoples in political, cultural, and economic matters. Pan-Africanist ideas were derived from the experiences of and struggles against slavery, colonialism and racism, as well as internationalist ideas of democracy, Marxism and socialism, and nationalist ideas from other parts of the colonized world, such as Ghandian philosophy. So Pan-Africanism was a complex movement, which had diverse origins, contexts, objectives, ideologies, and forms of organization. It was also gendered in terms of the relative participation of men and women, and in the construction of its ideologies, as an imaginary that was primarily nationalist; nationalist imaginaries have`, historically, tended to be masculinist.

At least six versions or imaginaries of Pan-Africanism can be identified: Transatlantic, Black Atlantic, continental, sub-Saharan, Pan-Arab, and global. Proponents of the first imagined a Pan-African world linking continental Africa and its diaspora in the Americas. The second version confined itself to the African diasporic communities in the Americas and Europe, excluding continental Africa, as articulated in Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic, in which the cultural creativity and connections of the African diaspora in the United States and Britain are celebrated, while continental Africa is largely ignored. The third focused primarily on the unification of continental Africa. The fourth and fifth restricted themselves to the peoples of the continent north and south of the Sahara, and in the case of Pan-Arabism, extended itself to western Asia or the so-called Middle East. While Gamal Abdel Nasser proudly saw Egypt at the center of three concentric circles linking the African, Arab, and Islamic worlds, Cheikh Anta Diop argued for the fundamental cultural unity of Africa rooted in the civilizations of the Nile valley including Pharaonic Egypt. The sixth sought to reclaim the connections of African peoples dispersed to all corners of the globe.

Each version, as a discourse or a movement, developed at different times and in different ways. For example, while transatlantic Pan-Africanism developed as a movement of ideas, with little formal organization apart from periodic conferences, and predated indeed spawned continental Pan-Africanism, it was the latter which first found institutional fulfilment with the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. The connections and reverberations between these Pan-Africanisms were, and continue to be, intricate, complex, and contradictory, spawning both narrow territorial nationalisms and broad transnational movements, including dozens of regional integration schemes. Pan-African movements were often complimented and constrained by other transnational movements, those organized around religion, for example, or colonial linguistic affiliations.

The nationalists who led the movements for independence almost invariably subscribed to some form of Pan-Africanism, to the notion of a shared, collective African identity that was in opposition to European identity. There were several reasons for this. First, it reflected the overdetermination of race in the colonial world, the fact that globally colonialism imposed the subordination of the “darker” to the “lighter” races, and Africans everywhere seemed to be under some form of European oppression and exploitation. Second, the nationalists were linked through intricate institutional and ideological networks, for example, through education in regional and metropolitan universities, participation in regional and international political organizations and social movements, and the cultural intersections and traffic between Africa and the diaspora. Third, the project of nation-building was seen both as one confined to, and transcending, the colonial borders, of forging coherent postcolonial nation-states around the territorial space drawn up by the colonialists, states which would eventually be integrated together. But the internal demands of nation-building proved more pressing and enduring than those of Pan-African integration. As nationalism intensified in each colony, indeed, as independence was achieved, the struggles and visions of the future were increasingly anchored on the interests of the nation at the expense of Pan-Africanism.

Transatlantic Pan-Africanism had its roots in the dispersal and dehumanization of African peoples to the Americas and Europe through the Atlantic slave trade. The centers of this triangular trade which connected western Europe, western Africa, and the Americas became centers for the development of Pan-Africanism. As an ideology and a movement it first emerged among the enslaved Africans in the diaspora because they were the earliest to bear the full brunt of European racism, oppression, and exploitation. Regardless of where they came from in Africa or what social position they had held in African society or now held in the Americas, they were all lumped together as racially ‘inferior’. So they were more inclined to see Africa and Africans as a unit than the Africans on the continent itself who remained isolated or attached to their ethnic groups or nations. The lead taken by the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the United States in organizing Pan-Africanism can be attributed to the fact that racial ideologies there were more severe than in Latin America. Also, Britain was a colonial superpower and later the United States became a global superpower.

Africans in the diaspora were constantly being reminded of Africa by their European masters who tried to impress upon them that Africa was primitive. Repudiating this thinly veiled justification of slavery required diaspora intellectuals to focus on Africa and demonstrate that it had made major contributions to world civilization. Consciousness of Africa was also sustained by the continuous flow of people, ideas, values, visions, practices, and expressive culture from Africa to the Americas and vice-versa. After slavery was abolished there were waves of African students. From the Americas came the ‘Back to Africa’ movements. Beginning at the turn of the 19^th century, groups of free Africans from the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Britain moved to Sierra Leone and Liberia. There were also migrations from Brazil to West Africa. The new immigrant diaspora communities played a crucial role in the construction of African modernities and in the development of Pan-Africanism. Among the most renowned Pan-African intellectuals was Edward Blyden, who migrated from St. Thomas at a young age and settled in Liberia. He saw Africa as a product of a triple heritage, the indigenous, Islamic, and Christian traditions, a concept that was further developed by Kwame Nkrumah in his treatise on consciencism, and Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan intellectual in the film series, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage.”

Analysis of transatlantic Pan-Africanism tends to focus on the development of nationalist movements and ideologies. Pride of place has gone to the Pan-African congresses associated with the great African American scholar-activist, W. E. B. Dubois, who famously declared that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Between 1900 and 1945, five Pan-African congresses were held in Europe attended by delegates from the continent and the diaspora, mostly from the English-speaking countries. The early congresses called for increasingly substantial colonial reforms, while the 1945 Manchester congress, the last to be held outside the continent, categorically demanded  independence for African and Caribbean colonies. From the congress delegates, such as Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, returned to their respective countries to lead nationalist movements to independence, which was largely achieved in the next three decades.

There were of course other movements besides the Pan-African congresses. The Carribean, a region that experienced both slavery and colonial rule and was thus uniquely placed to connect the experiences of slavery in the Americas and of colonialism in Africa, produced many of the leading Pan-African thinkers and organizers, such as Marcus Garvey from Jamaica, and George Padmore and C. L. R. James, the illustrious revolutionary thinkers from Trinidad. Garvey was the founder of the Universal Improvement Association in 1914 in Kingston, which was relocated to the United States in 1915 and quickly became the largest African American mass movement the country had ever seen. The UNIA established its own journal, the Negro World, and a shipping line, and the flamboyant Garvey preached fervently for ‘Back to Africa’ and the creation of a United States of Africa, one largely founded on capitalist principles. The annual UNIA conventions were attended by delegates from more than 25 countries. The movement eventually collapsed, thanks to state machinations, aided by opposition Garvey garnered from other civil rights activists, including Dubois, who had more scholarly and socialist inclinations.

During the 1930s both Dubois’ congresses and Garvey’s conventions were moribund. In their place emerged a series of Pan-African organizations, such as the League of Colored Peoples and the International African Service Bureau, both formed in England, which vociferously protested the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, an invasion that shook Africans everywhere. In the United States, Paul Robeson, the famous singer and activist, founded the Council on African Affairs, and African students formed the African Students Association, both of which organized meetings and called for African development and independence. In Africa itself Pan-African sentiments were expressed through the lively African press and emerging political associations. In West Africa there was the National Congress of British West Africa, formed in 1920, and the West African Students Union, formed in 1925, while in South Africa the African National Congress was created in 1911, all of which highlighted the abuses of colonialism and called for African solidarity and struggle for emancipation. In the Francophone world the Universal League for the Defense of the Black Race was founded in 1924 and called for the formation of a unitary Black state embracing sub-Saharan Africa and the West Indies.

From the 1950s as African and Caribbean colonies gained their independence, Transatlantic Pan-Africanism waned as the nationalists concentrated on national development and regional integration. The Pan-African conferences hosted here in Accra in 1958 – the Conference of Independent African States and the All African Peoples Conference – for example, were largely confined to continental Africans and state actors or leaders of nationalist movements. The attention of African and Caribbean leaders increasingly turned inwards to the OAU and the Caribbean Common Market, respectively. No wonder the sixth Pan-African Congress of 1974 held in Tanzania attracted relatively little interest. In the meantime, in the United States, struggles for civil rights were gathering momentum and scoring some legislative victories. In Latin America, where the politics of racial identity had historically undermined Pan-Africanism, there was rising African diaspora or racial consciousness, as manifested in the four Congresses of Black Culture in the Americas held between 1977 and 1984.  There were connections between these processes: the nationalist achievements in Africa and the Caribbean inspired civil rights struggles in the U. S., while civil rights activists in the U. S. provided crucial support to liberation movements fighting against recalcitrant settler regimes in Southern Africa by applying pressure on the American government and companies.

The traffic and flows between Africa and the Americas which facilitated and sustained transatlantic Pan-Africanism also involved periodic and cumulative cultural exchanges. For example, in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries African American missionaries played a critical role in the spread of Christianity in several parts of the continent, especially in West and Southern Africa. The influence of the cultural practices of the African diaspora on African expressive culture has also been remarkable. Many forms of popular music in 20^th century Africa from rhumba and jazz, to reggae and rap, were imported from the African diaspora. Congo’s celebrated rhumba was heavily affected by Cuban music; South African jazz reflected strong American influences; Senegalese reggae borrowed from Jamaican reggae, and so on. In the realm of literature, there were close connections between the literary movements of Africa and the diaspora, most significantly the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In the arts, more broadly, there were Pan-African festivals, such as the Colloquium of the World Festival of Black Civilization (FESTAC) held in Nigeria in 1977. And in the United States the African elite often received their academic and political education in the HBCUs before colonial universities were belatedly established in the twilight years of decolonization or the historically white universities opened their segregated doors in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

The Contemporary Relevance of Pan-Africanism

Clearly, Pan-Africanism played a major role in the struggles for emancipation and self-fashioning in Africa and the diaspora in the twentieth century in all spheres from the political to the economic, the cultural to the intellectual. Since independence there have been divergent conceptions of Pan-Africanism that are sometimes encapsulated, rather simplistically, in antagonist dualisms: continentalism versus globalism, continentalists versus regionalists, radical unionists versus functionalist gradualists. Additional contestations have centered on which comes first, economic or political integration, about the primary architects of Pan-Africanism, states or civil society, presidents or the people, and the basis of a Pan-African identity, national or racial, consciousness or citizenship.

Our Pan-Africanist commitments must transcend these unproductive dichotomies. In my view, Pan-Africanism remains a powerful force in the twenty-first century both because its objectives are far from achieved and the new challenges facing Africa and the diaspora require Pan-African responses. In other words, the past that created Pan-Africanism is not over, and for Africa and the diaspora the present will remain impoverished and the future incomplete without Pan-Africanism. Thus, the imperatives for Pan-Africanism are simultaneously historical and contemporary, ideological and instrumental. The historical imperatives include the continued marginalization of Africa and the diaspora and the unfinished business of emancipation for Africans at home and abroad. The contemporary imperatives encompas the current processes and projects of globalization, the growth of African international migrations and expansion of new diasporas, the resurgence or reconfiguration of Pan-Africanism among the historic diasporas, and the revitalization of African regional integration efforts. Progressive Pan-Africanism provides a countervailing ideology to the triumphant neo-liberalism of the post-Cold War world, and offers alternative instrumental possibilities to mobilize all manner of capital—financial, social, cultural, and intellectual—for socioeconomic development in Africa and the diaspora.

Despite the enormous historical achievements of decolonization and civil rights, African and Caribbean states remain marginalized in the world and African diasporas in their host countries. The pace, breadth and depth of the strides we have made since independence and civil rights over the last fifty years vary enormously between countries and regions, among social classes and genders, across periods and sectors. Nevertheless, our states and societies are still largely pawns rather than players on the world stage. This will not fundamentally change unless we pull all our resources—demographic, political, economic, cultural, and imaginative—to fight for our collective emancipation and empowerment. Pan-Africanism remains a powerful force through which Africa and the diaspora can reinforce each other’s struggles, help reposition each other, become each other’s keepers: African states have a responsibility to raise the costs of marginalizing the diaspora, while the diaspora have a responsibility to lower the costs of engagement between Africa and the global North.

The present has brought its own contexts and challenges that demand, and facilitate, Pan-Africanist redress. Several stand out including the new forms of globalization, democratization, migration and diasporization. Contemporary globalization entails, on the one hand, a process of intensifying global interconnectedness among countries and communities, characterized by increased velocity of flows, from capital to commodities, ideas to images, visions to viruses, religions to reflexivities; and on the other, a project of global capitalist restructuring underpinned by neo-liberal ideologies and policy interventions known across Africa by the infamous name of structural adjustment programs (SAPs). The catastrophic regime of neo-liberal capitalism has led to the decomposition of the developmental state in the global South and the welfare state in the global North, which has undermined the socioeconomic standing of both Africa and the diaspora. While globalization currently represents a triumph of capital over other social classes, it has provoked the rise of new civil society organizations and transnational social movements, whose growth is facilitated by the very intrusive tentacles and information technologies associated with globalization. The communication and connections between Africa and its diasporas both old and new, have never been better thanks to the new information technologies and the velocity of global flows, which create new possibilities for forging Pan-African solidarities.

One of the dynamics that characterizes contemporary African politics is democratization. Needless to say, democratization is a complex and contradictory phenomenon, but it has recast the contexts and conceptions of Pan-Africanism. There is ample evidence that since the turn of the 1990s the number of states following and abiding by features of democratic governance—principally elections and multi-party politics—has increased, notwithstanding reversals, blockages, and manipulations by Africa’s wily dictators, many of whom have learned to maneuver democratic politics to their advantage, and despite the fact that in many countries the new democracies amount to little more than the recycling of fractions of the same bankrupt political class, and elections are often marred by harassment and intimidation of the opposition, violence, vote rigging and human rights abuses, not to mention third term campaigns to allow incumbent presidents to stay beyond the constitutional limits of two terms as happened in my own country when the venal President Muluzi who succeded the Banda dictatorship following the country's democratization in 1994 desperately, but unsuccesfully, sought a third term. 

But even if the trunks of the old leviathan remain deeply rooted in Africa’s rocky political soil, its branches have been tempered by the strong winds of social struggles for popular participation. For one, this means Pan-Africanism can no longer be an elite project, let alone a state-led project. Civil societies, both in Africa and the diaspora, have a profound role to play in constructing the architecture of a Pan-Africanism befitting the conditions, demands, perils, and possibilities of the 21^st century.

The rising rates of African international migration also create new conditions and prospects for Pan-Africanism. To be sure the numbers are not as large as they often made out in the sensational media. By 2005, only 3% of the world’s population lived outside the country of their birth, compared to 2.5% in 1960, and 2.1% in 1930. In 2005, only 1.9% of Africans did so, down from 3.2% in 1960, although the actual number of Africa’s international migrants nearly doubled from 9.1 to 17.1 million, the majority of whom went to other African countries. The minority who migrated overseas largely went to the global North rather than other regions in the global South, with the notable exception of the Arabian Peninsula.

African migrants to the global North are unusually well educated. In 2000, while the continent’s proportion of skilled workers was only 4%, 30.9% of all immigrants from the continent were skilled workers. In other words, the ‘brain drain’  is exceptionally severe for Africa. For example, the African born population in the U.S. currently claims the highest levels of education of any group in the country, foreign born or native born. In 2000, among the African-born residents aged 25 and above, 49.3 per cent had a bachelor’s degree or more as compared to 25.6 per cent for the native born population and 25.8 per cent for the foreign born population as a whole. The irony of people from the least educated continent in the world having the highest levels of education in the world’s richest country is quite striking.

The pitfalls of the ‘brain drain’ are real, but so are the possibilities of ‘brain mobility’. International migrants, especially the skilled ones among them represent both developmental liabilities and assets for the developing countries. What is at stake is how to convert migration drains into gains, which depends on the congruence of interests involving the principal stakeholders, namely, the diasporas themselves, governments, and multilateral agencies. Government policies towards migrants and diasporas have been characterized by three main tendencies: the permissive, restrictive, and diaspora options. The diaspora option is based on the recognition that migrants become diasporas, people with multiple identities, engagements and commitments firmly tied to their countries of origin and residence, who are willing and able to contribute simultaneously to both.

Unfortunately, the diaspora option tends to be seen by governments and development agencies largely in economic terms, as an economic resource, a remittance pipeline. There can of course be little doubt the new African diasporas constitute a strategic economic asset, that it is already the continent’s biggest donor, whose remittances exceed foreign direct investment and official development assistance. These diasporas also possess an enormous stock of social capital—skills, knowledge, networks, civic awareness, cultural experience and cosmopolitanism—that can provide not only access to global markets and investment and stimulate technological innovation, but also invigorate democracy, strengthen civil society and encourage the growth of new philanthropic cultures. Moreover, diasporas can be crucial intermediaries between Africa and foreign governments and international development agencies.

In short, the new African diasporas precisely because of their social capital, the racialized reflexivities they acquire in the diaspora, and their heightened anxieties and abilities to defend Africa, represent a growing powerful force in the development of Pan-Africanism for the twenty-first century. The new African diaspora and their offspring can help invigorate the re-awakened interest in Africa among the historic African diasporas and serve as trans-oceanic bridges, as cultural mediators, in the case of the Atlantic, between Africa and African America, whose communication and knowledge of each other have largely been through the distorted lenses and prejudices of imperialist and racist media. Throughout the Americas and in Europe there is a reawakening Pan-African consciousness, for varied reasons, as can be seen in the increasingly assertive blackness in Brazil, the growing Afrocentric cultural affirmation in the United States, and the increasingly strident Afropolitan identities emerging among the African diasporas in European cities. These struggles and reconstructions of identities are simultaneously cultural and political, economic and social as Africa’s historic diasporas seek new ways to renegotiate their place in their host societies, to achieve their historic and humanistic dreams of full democratic citizenship.

It is becoming increasingly clear, or it ought  to, to African policy makers and intellectuals that the diaspora and Pan-Africanism may constitute the most reliable vehicles for enhancing Africa’s presence in the world system. The Pan-Africanism of the twenty-first century must take the diaspora option seriously, which requires devising creative strategies for knowledge and skill circulation, the formation of national, regional, and continental knowledge networks that facilitate brain mobility, from academic exchanges to consultancies and temporary return migrations, to the transmission of information and vigorously defending Africa which is routinely defamed in Euroamerica with little social cost. In short, the diaspora, both the historic and contemporary, constitutes Africa’s eyes and ears in the world, the interpreter of the world to Africa and Africa to the world. It is indispensable to the globalization of Africa and the Africanization of globalization. The provision of dual citizenship by several countries including Ghana is a move in the right direction.

The formation of the African Union ushered in a new phase in Africa’s long search for continental integration and unity with the diaspora. Notwithstanding its structural weaknesses and idealistic ambitions the AU is a much more robust organization than its predecessor, more committed to the pursuit of development, democracy, and human rights than the OAU which was preoccupied with the politics of decolonization, national sovereignty, and presidential camaraderie. in part, this reflect the conjunctures, the different moments, during which the two organization were created. The first independence of the 1950s and 1960s that ushered in the OAU represented a homage to state sovereignty, the seductions of state power, the second independence of the 1990s and 2000s an acknowledgment of civil society, the sanctions of popular disaffection. The OAU was largely a presidents’ club, the AU is potentially more people friendly. The difference between the two is democratization, the dreams of the first uhuru for the symbols, and of the second for the substance, of nationhood and statehood, the consciousness that has taken place in the African imaginary over the last half century of the indivisibility of the democratic developmental state project.

Unlike the OAU, which represented the triumph of continental Pan-Africanism over trans-Atlantic Pan-Africanism, the AU gestures, tentatively so far, towards a global Pan-Africanism for the 21^st century that could create a new compact between African and its diaspora. The conceptual and concrete challenges of pursuing this project are immense indeed in so far as people of African descent are spread in various regions of the world, experience different degrees of sovereignty and marginalization, and encompass historic, contemporary, and overlapping diasporas. The AU has designated the diaspora as Africa’s sixth region and allocated it representation in the Economic Social and Cultural Council: 20 civil society organizations (CSOs) out of a total of 150 CSOs.  It is not yet clear how the diaspora will be mainstreamed in the activities of the AU. Indeed, some argue of greater importance than the integration of the diaspora in African state and regional institutional structures is the need to strengthen connections and communication between Africa and its diasporas among the oridnary people. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. The incorporation of the diaspora in the AU’s Pan-African project represents a return to the future in so far as the very notions of African unity and integration, the inspiration behind the enduring dreams of Pan-Africanism, are derived from the diaspora imaginary arising out their homogenization and racialization in the lands of their dispersal.

In 2004 and 2006 the AU organized two important meetings, the Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora (CIAD). CIAD I was held in Dakar, Senegal and CIAD II in Salvador, Brazil, and brought together hundreds of intellectuals and a handful of presidents, although there was little real dialogue between the politicians and the intellectuals. And last week (September 11-12) the AU held the Regional Consultative Conference for the African Diaspora in Europe in Paris. In the meantime, the AU “has mandated South Africa to present in the first half of 2008 the African Union-African Diaspora Summit at the level of Heads of State and Government. The theme of the Summit is ‘Towards the realization of a united and integrated Africa and its Diaspora: A shared vision for sustainable development to address common challenges.’ The essential objective of the Summit is to produce a practical program of action for co-operation between the continent and its Diaspora.” 

There can be little doubt that the imperatives for contemporary Pan-Africanism are both old and new, so are the contexts, objectives, and key players. For one thing, it is no longer driven by demands for political independence in Africa and the Caribbean and political enfranchisement in the rest of the diaspora which inspired and preoccupied earlier generations of Pan-Africanists. Unlike for the first half of the twentieth century, the key players include states controlled by Africans on the continent and the diaspora in the Caribbean and diaspora state actors some at the highest levels of government as in Canada, the United States, and Brazil. Also, while the elites still dominate pan-Africanist networks within Africa and the diaspora and between them, flows of various kinds and levels of intensity are more common than ever. Thanks to these flows both Africa and the diaspora are more conscious of their being “African” and the “diaspora” than ever before and of the complex ties that connect and separate them. These flows include people, cultural practices, productive resources, organizations and movements, ideologies and ideas, images and representations. But as before, they share national and social marginalities in the global racialized hierarchies of power and privilege. And as President Nkrumah, one of Africa’s most foresighted and brilliant minds taught us, that will not change until we unite, until Pan-Africanism becomes our guiding praxis. Thank you!

Speech given at the Launch of Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, September 21, 2007.