The rise and fall of pan-Africanism
One of the most important strands in the nationalist movements that developed in Africa from the early twentieth century onwards was the influence of panAfricanist thought. Pan-Africanism, which stresses the cultural and spiritual unity of people of African descent, had its roots not in Africa itself but in the African diaspora, its leading lights being such figures as the American academic and writer W.
E. B. Dubois and the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. However, in the 1930s and 1940s a number of African students from the British colonies, such as Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya and Julius Nyerere from Tanganyika (Tanzania), became interested in pan-African thinking, and used its tenets in their respective struggles for liberation. Meanwhile, in the French Empire, figures such as the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor developed their own negritude movement, which also stressed the cultural affinity of African peoples.pan-Africanism
The belief that Africans wherever they live share common cultural and spiritual values. Pan-Africanism was an important influence on the rise of nationalist movements in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century, but after decolonization its impact waned as the new states were reluctant to compromise their independence.
When the process of independence began in the mid-1950s, one important question was that of what influence pan-Africanism would have on the new Africa. As its fundamental belief was that all African peoples shared common social and cultural ties, the logic of pan-Africanism suggested that the continent should cast aside the artificial state boundaries established by the Europeans and move towards a federal form of government. This was certainly the view of Nkrumah who, as the leader of the first major Sub-Saharan state to achieve independence, was in a strong position to further this agenda.
In April 1958 he convened a conference of the independent African states in Accra, and in December followed it with an All-African People's Conference which included delegates from countries still under colonial subjugation. In these gatherings he preached the cause of African unification, and added weight to his words by deeds, such as agreeing in November 1958 to form a loose union between Ghana and Guinea, to which Mali was added in 1961.Nkrumah's ideas proved, however, to be extremely divisive. On one side, Ghana's stance won support from its fellow radical states in the Casablanca Group, such as Guinea, Mali, Morocco and the United Arab Republic. On the other, Nkrumah was opposed by the more numerous Monrovia Group — the traditionally independent states of Ethiopia and Liberia, as well as Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the majority of the former French colonies. Their opposition to Nkrumah's ideas rested on two factors. The first and most obvious was that the leaders who made up the Monrovia Group saw little benefit to themselves in merging their
Congo Crisis
The civil war that took place in the Congo (the former Belgian Congo) from I960 to 1963. The crisis was caused largely by the attempt of the copper-rich province of Katanga to secede from Congo. The secession was defeated eventually by a UN force, but in the process there were scares that the dilatory UN response would lead the Congolese government to turn to the Soviet Union for support.
United Nations (UN)
An international organization established after the Second World War to replace the League of Nations. Since its establishment in 1945, its membership has grown to 192 countries.
Organization of African Unity (OAU)
The organization of African states founded in Addis Ababa in 1963. It has upheld the territorial status quo in Africa and acted in the 1960s and 1970s as an important forum for attacks on colonialism. At the July 2002 Durban Summit the OAU was formally disbanded and became the African Union (AU).
states into a larger political entity.
Indeed, Nkrumah's vision only exacerbated disputes that had already appeared at a regional level. One of the reasons why the French Community had collapsed between 1958 and 1960 was the fact that tensions had grown up over the question of whether French West Africa should continue as a federation or become a series of sovereign independent states. In the end, the latter solution had been chosen, largely as a result of the vehement opposition to federalism of one of the most influential figures in Francophone Africa, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. Having won the battle once, Houphouet-Boigny had no intention of losing the second round of this struggle against Nkrumah and became his bitter enemy.The second reason for opposition to Nkrumah was that the policies which he pursued as Ghana's leader provoked resentment among his neighbours. The defining issue here was his stance towards the major international issue affecting Africa in the early 1960s, the Congo Crisis. This began in July 1960 when, shortly after the granting of independence, Belgian troops unleashed a unilateral military intervention to suppress a mutiny by the Congolese army, while almost simultaneously the copper-rich southern province of Katanga announced its secession. In order to defend itself against this double-pronged attack, the Congo government of Patrice Lumumba appealed to the United Nations (UN) for assistance. This was granted and the Belgians were persuaded to withdraw, but the UN then proved reluctant to assist with the defeat of Katanga. Exasperated by this attitude, Lumumba made overtures to the Soviet Union for support, but in doing so he signed his own death warrant, for in January 1961, as the Congo slid into full-scale civil war, he was assassinated by a coalition of both domestic and international conservative forces. The Congo Crisis then dragged on for a further two years until the Katangan secession was ended.
The significance of the Congo Crisis for African international politics was not so much that it brought the Cold War into the continent, for in 1960 the Soviet Union clearly lacked the capability to intervene effectively, but that it further radicalized those regimes that were appalled by the West's connivance in the ousting of Lumumba.
Chief among these was Nkrumah, who had strongly backed Lumumba on the basis that they shared a common pan-African, socialist vision. Following Lumumba's assassination, Nkrumah's rhetoric became increasingly radical and confrontational, while reports circulated that Ghana was creating links with disaffected groups in other countries in order to promote the overthrow of their ‘bourgeois governments'. For example, in January 1963 Ghana was implicated in the assassination of President Olympio of Togo. This naturally did little to widen the appeal of Nkrumah's pan-African vision, and even those, such as Nyerere, who sympathized with his agenda, advised him to adopt a more gradualist approach.The final defeat for Nkrumah's pan-African schemes came in May 1963 with the holding of a conference of the independent African states in Addis Ababa, which agreed that rather than moving towards continental federation, the African states should become members of an Organization of African Unity (OAU). While the name paid due respect to the ideals of pan-Africanism, the reality was that the OAU's main function was to uphold the status quo. Indeed, in 1964 the
OAU passed a resolution pledging member states ‘to respect the frontiers existing on their achievement of national liberation'. From this point on the pan-African dream faded, a process that was accelerated by Nkrumah's losing power in a coup in 1966.