Women played a central role in the development of Pan-Africanism. It can even be claimed that it was a woman, the South African Alice Kinloch, who initiated the modern Pan-African movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In the early 21st century it has become fashionable, mainly in some academic circles in the United States, to use the term “Black Internationalism” as an alternative to Pan-Africanism. This phrase was also first coined by a woman, Jeanne Nardal, an influential and important Martinican writer in Paris in the 1920s, who used the term internationalisme noir to refer to the growing links between “Negroes of all origins and nationalities.” There is no doubt that she also used the phrase to refer to the growing Pan-Africanism of the period, and therefore it is difficult to see what distinguishes the two terms.
There has never been one universally accepted definition of exactly what constitutes Pan-Africanism. It has taken different forms at different historical moments and geographical locations. What underlies the manifold visions and approaches of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Africanists is a belief in the unity, common history, and common purpose of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora and the notion that their destinies are interconnected. In addition, many would highlight the importance of the liberation and advancement of the African continent itself, not just for its inhabitants but also as the homeland of the entire African diaspora. Pan-Africanist thought and action is principally connected with, and provoked by, the modern dispersal of Africans resulting from the trafficking of captives across the Atlantic to the Americas, as well as elsewhere. The largest forced migration in history, and the creation of the African diaspora, was accompanied by the emergence of global capitalism, European colonial rule, and anti-African racism.
Pan-Africanism evolved as a variety of ideas, activities, organizations, and movements that, sometimes in concert, resisted the exploitation and oppression of all those of African heritage; opposed and refuted the ideologies of anti-African racism; and celebrated African achievement, history, and the very notion of being African. Pan-Africanism looks forward to a genuinely united and independent Africa as the basis for the liberation of all Africans, both those on the continent and in the diaspora. However, it should be made clear that historically there have been two main strands of Pan-Africanism. The earlier form emerging during and after the period of trans-Atlantic enslavement originated from the African diaspora and stressed the unity of all Africans and looked toward their liberation and that of the African continent. The more recent form emerged in the context of the anti-colonial struggle on the African continent in the period after 1945. This form of Pan-Africanism stressed the unity, liberation, and advancement of the states of the African continent, although often recognizing the importance of the diaspora and its inclusion. The continental focus of this form of Pan-Africanism can be seen in the orientation and activities of such organizations as the Organisation of African Unity and the African Union. The more recent continental form of Pan-Africanism is likely to include the peoples and states of North Africa, while the earlier form sometimes does not.
Although women such Alice Kinloch and Jeanne Nardal have played an important role in the emergence and development of the modern Pan-African movement and its ideologies, there have been few studies devoted solely to women’s involvement with Pan-Africanism. Some significant organizations such as the Pan-African Women’s Organisation, founded in 1962 and still in existence, have no written history and have therefore been excluded from many accounts. It is evident that women were generally less prominent than men in the Pan-African movement, but also that the literature has often overlooked, underestimated, and sometimes ignored the role of women.
It may be considered that modern Pan-Africanism began with the founding of the African Association in London in October 1897, since it was that organization under the leadership of the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams that convened the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900.1 Although membership of the African Association was apparently initially only open to “black men,” its joint founder was an African woman, Alice Victoria Alexander Kinloch from South Africa, who came to Britain in 1895 and had been lecturing and writing on the oppression of Africans in her homeland throughout the country.2
Kinloch has been described as “a woman of mixed race from the Cape” in perhaps the only biographical account of her life.3 She was born in Cape Town but spent much of her early life in Kimberley before arriving in Britain c. 1895. She spoke on the “ill-treatment of Natives in South Africa” at several meetings in the north of England in 1897 as well as for a women’s organization in London and had her views published in a pamphlet titled Are South African Diamonds Worth Their Cost, which apparently “attracted considerable attention” throughout the country. It was after this speaking tour that she and Williams jointly agreed to found the African Association. Her important role was made clear by Williams, who wrote that “the Association is the result of Mrs Kinloch’s work in England and the feeling that as British Subjects we ought to be heard in our own affairs.” Kinloch herself explained that “with some men of my race in this country, I have formed a society for the benefit of our people in Africa by helping them to bring some of the dark side of things in Africa and elsewhere to light.”4 Kinloch was the African Association’s first treasurer before she finally returned to South Africa in early 1898.5 She was invited to the Pan-African conference in 1900 but was unable to attend. It seems that later in life Alice Kinloch migrated to Kenya with her husband and other family members.6
The African Association continued with its plans to convene a Pan-African Conference in 1900. It aimed to assemble “men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and the outlook for the darker races of mankind.”7 Williams insisted that women deserved a “prominent position” at the conference, and two African American women featured as speakers. Anna J. Cooper, a formerly enslaved woman, was the author of the influential Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South, who would later influence Jeanne Nardal.8 Cooper spoke on “The Negro Problem in America.” Anna H. Jones, a Canadian-born suffragist, was also a key speaker who delivered a presentation entitled “A Plea for Race Individuality.” Other women including African American sisters Ella D. Barrier and Fanny Barrier Williams also attended, while Cooper was elected to the executive committee of the new Pan-African Association that emerged from the conference.9
The most significant and widespread manifestation of Pan-Africanism in the early 20th century was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in 1914 and re-established in the United States two years later. The UNIA and Garveyism attracted adherents throughout Africa and the African diaspora in the interwar period and beyond. It can be argued that women were central to the development of the UNIA and formed its “backbone,” despite the fact that gender roles within the organization could often be proscriptive.10
Amy Ashwood, Marcus Garvey’s first wife, claimed to have been the UNIA’s first member and acted as the organization’s secretary. However, as the organization was launched before she met Garvey, claims for joint founding may not be appropriate.11 Amy Jacques, Garvey’s second wife, also played a significant leadership role, not just in relation to her regular column, “Our Women and What They Think,” in the Negro World but more particularly during the time of her husband’s imprisonment in the United States in the 1920s and after she became the Negro World’s associate editor, a key speaker, and for a time de facto leader of the UNIA.12
The UNIA also established special women’s and children’s organizations, while the Negro World attracted celebrated women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston. In West Africa, for example, a UNIA branch was established in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1920, with a female division initially headed by Adelaide Casely Hayford.13 Women dominated auxiliary organizations of the UNIA such as the Black Cross Nurses, the Universal African Motor Corps, and many other such groups. Every local branch of the UNIA had a “lady president,” and women may have formed the majority in many local branches. Key organizers included Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X, who joined the UNIA in Montreal and then was the secretary of a UNIA branch in Omaha and probably fulfilled similar roles in Milwaukee. Other important women within the UNIA include Maymie De Mena and Henrietta Vinton Davis. Davis became the first international organizer for the UNIA, chaired major meetings and conventions, and was the only female member of the delegation that met with Liberia’s President Charles D. B. King in 1924. She was also part of the UNIA commission that drafted the petition to the President of the United States demanding Garvey’s release from prison. Garvey once described her as “the greatest woman of the Negro Race today.” De Mena became assistant international organizer, a major speaker, was responsible for all the UNIA’s North American chapters, worked as editor of Negro World, acted as Garvey’s representative, and was for a time the most visible representative of the UNIA in the United States.14
Women also played a significant role in the Pan-African Congresses organized by the African American activist W. E. B. Du Bois from 1919–1927. During the first congress held in France in 1919 Du Bois had the support of Ida Alexander Gibbs Hunt, an African American suffragist and NAACP member based in France, who acted as assistant secretary to the congress. Hunt was one of the four key figures, including Du Bois, who constituted the organizing committee of the Paris Congress and who subsequently formed an executive committee to implement its decisions.15
A speaker at the first Pan-African Congress who would in future play a significant role was Addie Waites Hunton, who had been in France with African American troops, was one of the authors of Two Colored Women with American Expeditionary Forces, and the following year became one of the founders of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World (ICWDRW).16 She reminded the predominantly male congress of the important role of women and urged the participants to consider “the necessity of seeking their co-operation and counsel.”17
The ICWDRW was initiated by some of the leading African American women activists such as Margaret Murray Washington, wife of Booker T. Washington; Mary Church Terrell; Mary McLeod Bethune; Hunton; and Addie Dickerson.18 The council was particularly interested in women from Africa and the African diaspora, and it had close relations with women in Haiti, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where it had strong links to Adelaide Casely Hayford.19 The members of the council saw themselves as representing African women at various international gatherings since, as Mary Terrell explained on one such occasion, “I was the only one present at that meeting who had a drop of African blood in her veins.”20 Leading members of the council also participated in the wider Pan-African movement, specifically the congresses organized by Du Bois.
At the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921 Du Bois was assisted in Europe by Jessie Fauset, the novelist and literary editor of The Crisis. Fauset also spoke at the London session on African women, mentioning the educational work of Hayford and Kathleen Easmon, who were establishing a vocational school for girls in Sierra Leone, as well as the role of African American women in the struggle for emancipation. At least a dozen other women attended the congresses held in London, Paris, and Brussels, including Hunt, but Fauset is particularly important for her written impression of the event.21 Hunt was again a member of the small organizing committee. She played a particularly important role, personally donating funds to finance the congress, while the National Association of Colored Women paid Du Bois’s travel costs to Europe.22 The Fourth Pan-African Congress, eventually held in New York in August 1927, was financed and largely organized by Hunton of the ICWDR, in conjunction with the National Association of Colored Women and the Women’s International Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations (WICPFR), together with the support of Hunt and Fauset. It was therefore almost entirely organized by women, and it appears that Hunton and the ICDRW also wished to support a fifth congress that it was hoped might be held in the Caribbean, but which never took place.23
Women were also attracted to the third major expression of Pan-Africanism in the early 20th century, the international communist movement under the direction of the Third Communist International (Comintern). From its inception, the Comintern established a Marxist-Leninist as well as Pan-Africanist approach to what was termed the Negro Question, that is the global struggle for liberation and empowerment waged in Africa and throughout the African diaspora. There is in the early 21st century quite an extensive literature on some of the early communist women activists in the United States including Hermina Dumont (1905–1998) and Williana Jones Burroughs (1882–1945), as well as later activists such as former communist Audley Moore.24 Other significant women include Josie Mpama, a member of the South African Communist Party, and Elma Francois, a leading activist in Trinidad.25 Burroughs contributed to the communist Party’s Daily Worker, attended international congresses, and was one of the organizers and a speaker at the Hamburg conference of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers in 1930 (ITUCNW). The only other woman attending the Hamburg conference appears to have been Helen McCain of the National Needle Workers’ Union, who was initially included among the new executive committee of the ITUCNW.26
The woman who was perhaps most significant in the early period was Hermina Dumont, who, as the wife of Otto Huiswoud, traveled widely organizing throughout the Caribbean and then eventually in Europe, where she aided her husband to lead the work of the ITUCNW and edited its publication Negro Worker. During the 1930s the Huiswouds were clandestinely based in Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland but made a major contribution to the communist movement’s activities in Africa as well as among the diaspora in the Caribbean and Europe.
It is now accepted that women played a leading role in the partly cultural Pan-African movement in France that came to be known as Negritude (the affirmation of Blackness or African-ness). The Nardal sisters from Martinique are the most famous “mothers” of Negritude, but the opposition to assimilation and Eurocentrism that were the chief characteristics of the movement were found in the work of less well known writers such as Suzanne Lacascade, an Antillean author who celebrated the African roots of Antillean languages and cultures and denounced French racism.27
Paulette Nardal (1896–1985) and her younger sister Jeanne were contributors to La Dépêche Africaine, an “independent journal of correspondence between blacks,” first published in 1928 by the Comité de Défense des Intérêts de la Race Noire.28 Its initial issue featured a now-famous article by Jeanne Nardal, “L’Internationalisme Noir” (Black Internationalism). Nardal argued that in the post-war period “blacks of all origins and nationalities, with different customs and religions, vaguely sense that they belong in spite of everything to a single and same race. . . . From now on there will be a certain interest, a certain originality, a certain pride in being black, in turning back toward Africa, cradle of the blacks, in recalling a common origin.”29 Like other contributors, Nardal combined elements of Pan-Africanism with a moderate yet critical approach to French colonial rule. The Nardal sisters were involved with several other publications including the bilingual La Revue du monde noir that was associated with the weekly “circle of friends” that they held just outside Paris. These were a meeting place and opportunity for African Americans in Paris, as well as intellectuals from Africa and the Caribbean, to discuss Pan-African cultural and other issues of the day, often in English as well as French. There some of the pioneers of what would become known as the Negritude movement met with the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. The Revue declared that its Pan-African aim was to “create among the Negroes of the entire world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual and moral bond that will permit them to know each other better, to love another fraternally, to defend their collective interests more effectively and to glorify their race.”30 The existence of such journals emerged out of a Paris-based Pan-African milieu, and within that setting the Nardal sisters, who were both bilingual, interested themselves in all matters concerning Africa and the diaspora. Moreover, Paulette Nardal suggested that a new “race consciousness,” a Pan-African approach to cultural matters, an identification with Africa as expressed in the Revue, and particularly noticeable among black women, was becoming instrumental in addressing their common problems.31
Paulette Nardal also wrote for a new student magazine L’Etudiant noir, first published in Paris in early 1935, which is often seen as the literary birth of what came later to be called Negritude. What the Nardals and their male counterparts shared was perhaps a recognition that they were grappling with the common problems facing Africans and Antilleans, colonialism, racism, eurocentrism, assimilation, and paternalism, as well as the common view that they might benefit from a Pan-African unity, in cultural as well as other areas, and the emancipatory solutions that would emerge from it.
Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was a highpoint of Pan-African sentiment and activity in which several women played a notable part. In France Paulette Nardal became secretary of the World Committee against Fascism and War.32 She worked closely with other organizations such as the International Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People (ICDEP) and played a prominent role working to channel funds raised in British West Africa to the Ethiopian government, writing on the significance of the invasion for the press in France and French West Africa and forming the Comité d’Action Ethiopienne.33 Thereafter many protest events were organized in France and internationally as Ethiopia’s defense became very much a cause célèbre.
In Britain Amy Ashwood Garvey became one of the leaders and treasurer of the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA), formed in London in July 1935 “to assist by all means in their power in the maintenance of the territorial integrity and political independence of Abyssinia.”34 She had been an important activist since the 1920s, when she had jointly organized the Nigerian Progress Union.35 Indeed, the IAFA established its headquarters at Garvey’s restaurant in London’s New Oxford Street, itself an important new Pan-African locale.36 Garvey addressed the West African Students’ Union on Ethiopia and inspired the creation of the Ethiopian Defence Fund, administered by an all-female committee.37 In West Africa, Constance Cummings-John was a leading campaigner in support for Ethiopia both for the British-based League of Coloured Peoples and the West African Youth League.38 In Trinidad Elma Francois, a domestic worker originally from St Vincent, organized the Negro Welfare, Cultural, and Social Association (NWCSA); linked the Ethiopian conflict with the problems facing working people in Trinidad; and pointed out that the preparation for fascist Italy’s attack on Ethiopia came “at the same time with the attack on the general living standards of the Negro peoples throughout the world.”39 It was in this context that Paulette Nardal would write of the “common soul” that united all those of African descent “in the common defence of Ethiopia.”40 It is also evident that international Pan-African networks were established in this period linking Nardal and Garvey to women activists in West Africa and those such as Aidi Bastian, one of the founders of the Ethiopian World Federation, and communists such as Louise Patterson in the United States.41
Garvey maintained her central role in Pan-Africanism with her membership of the London-based International African Service Bureau in the later 1930s and her involvement in the Pan-African Federation that succeeded it. At the close of World War II, both she and Amy Jacques Garvey were involved in discussions about the convening of the Pan-African Congress, which was eventually held in Manchester in October 1945. At that famous congress, Amy Ashwood chaired the opening session and at the end of the congress reminded the predominantly male delegates that “for some reason very little has been said about the black woman,” who “has been shunted into the social background to be a child bearer.”42 She was one of only two women speakers and only seven female participants. However, women, including the British wives of some participants, played a key role in the organizing of the congress, as stenographers, and in other capacities that are not evident from the congress report.43 European women had long played a key role in the Pan-African movement, such as Nancy Cunard, the co-author with Padmore of The White Man’s Duty; and Dorothy Pizer, who worked with him on many publications and co-authored How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to Britain. Padmore also had the support of his Austrian partner, Frieda Schiff, when he edited Negro Worker.44 After the Manchester Congress much of the PAF’s secretarial work was undertaken by Pizer, while Dinah Stock, another English woman, became the executive editor of its publication Pan-Africa, first issued in 1947.45
Although it might be said that Pan-Africanism returned to the African continent, especially through the activities of Kwame Nkrumah from the late 1940s, little has been written of the role of women in this homecoming. The Nigerian activist Funmilayo Ransome Kuti (1900–1978) evidently played a key role in Nkrumah’s Kumasi conference in 1953, but very little has been written on that event or about the role of women during the more famous conferences held in Accra in 1958, although women’s movements were conspicuously present at the All-African Peoples Conference and the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent held in 1960.46
The growing demands for unity in Africa can best be seen in the emergence of a Pan-African organization for women across the continent in 1962, the year before the founding of the Organization of African Unity. Although women such as Ransome-Kuti, Mbalia Camara, Gisèle Rabesahala, Aoua Keita, and Jeanne Martin Cissé are now becoming more well known for their role in the anti-colonial struggle in the years after 1945, and Keita and Cissé have written memoirs, the histories of women’s activities and the organizations they established in Africa are still in their infancy.47
Ransome-Kuti, for example, as well as her activities in Nigeria as president of the Federation of Nigerian Women, was also involved with other women and Pan-African struggles throughout West Africa, and in South Africa, Trinidad, and elsewhere. She corresponded with the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) and the WASU, collaborated with Amy Ashwood Garvey, and struggled for the rights of women internationally as a leading member of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), an organization that also played a key role in Africa.48 According to her biographers, Ransome-Kuti was an important pioneer who participated in women’s conferences in Algeria, Guinea, Dahomey, Togo, and Liberia even in the 1950s and is seen as playing a key role in the founding of women’s organizations in Sierra Leone and Ghana.49
In Francophone Africa during the anti-colonial struggle many women were mobilized through the Pan-African Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), which continued to build grassroots support and was particularly successful in Guinea as well as in French Soudan (Mali). In both colonies there was a strong emphasis on organizing among women, however, the oppression of women meant that they often faced many additional obstacles to their political involvement, were denied the right to speak or organize in public, and were often forced to operate clandestinely even within the RDA.50
Keita, a midwife and trade unionist from French Soudan, and Cissé, from Guinea but also active in Senegal, were RDA activists who both became leading members of the Union des Femmes de l’Ouest Africane (UFOA) established following a conference in Bamako in 1959 under the presidency of Sira Diop and attended by women’s organizations from Guinea, Senegal, French Soudan (Mali), and Dahomey.51 The UFOA grew out of the Women’s Union of Ghana-Guinea, established as a result of the All African Peoples’ Conference in 1958. In March 1961 the Third All African People’s Conference, held in Cairo, specifically called for an “African Women’s Association Conference with a view to creating a unified organization of African women.”52 Keita and Cissé as well as others then became leaders of a growing Pan-African women’s movement and organized a series of meetings throughout Africa in 1961. At a meeting in July 1961 in Guinea, attended by women’s organizations from Senegal, Togo, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, a preparatory committee for a Pan-African women’s organization was established and invitations were sent to all women’s organizations in Africa, including those fighting for national liberation. In July 1962 women from across the continent assembled in Dar-es-Salaam to found this organization. Women from fourteen independent African countries were present: Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Liberia, Togo, Tunisia, and Tanganyika, while others such as Nigeria were conspicuous by their absence. There were also representatives from the liberation organizations including the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress in South Africa; FRELIMO (Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique); FLN (Front de liberation nationale); MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola); FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola); ZANU and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African National Union and Zimbabwe African People’s Union); PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde); SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation); United National Independence Party of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia); and the Zanzibar National Party and Afro-Shirazi Party (Zanzibar). Those present founded the African Women’s Union (AWU) and declared July 31 should be African Women’s Day. Cissé became the first secretary-general of the AWU, which until 1968 was based in Guinea, and thereafter in Algeria and Angola. In 1974, during its congress in Senegal the AWU was renamed the Pan-African Women’s Organisation (PAWO).53 The fiftieth anniversary of the PAWO was celebrated with some fanfare by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in 2012, and the organization has since been incorporated within the African Union. However, almost nothing has been written about its history, and it is not clear if any archives exist.
It could be argued that the era of Black Power was initiated by important female cultural workers such as Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Guy. Guy, a Trinidad-born, New York–based writer, was a founding member of the Harlem Writers Guild, On Guard for Freedom, and the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage—organizations that believed artistic endeavor should serve the interests of black people, and whose members were sometimes at the forefront of Pan-African struggles themselves. Guy and others, including Maya Angelou and singer Abbey Lincoln, took a leading role in the demonstrations at the UN Security Council meeting in New York in February 1961, condemning the assassination of the Congo’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.54
At a later stage, other African American activists such as Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver became iconic figures with a global influence. Audley Moore also became an influential figure as one of the leading participants in the Black Power conference held in Bermuda in 1969, subsequent Pan-African congresses, and the global African reparations movement. In 1955 Moore established herself as one of the founders of what would become a global African reparations movement when she founded the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves. She continued to campaign and educate about the need for African reparations for the remainder of her life.
From the 1960s gender roles and women’s liberation became more important concerns for many organizations and individuals connected with the wider Pan-African movement. The Black Panther Movement and the Black Liberation Front in Britain, for example, were for a time both led by women, and several Black women’s groups eventually emerged from the British Black Power movement.55 However, there has still been widespread criticism of organizations and individuals. The Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, for instance, has been criticized for its male-centered approach and language and a lack of gender sensitivity, even though it included several leading women activists such as Mamphela Ramphele.56
The Black Power era is associated with demands for political empowerment in the African diaspora as well as the African continent but also with numerous manifestations of a cultural revival, which again stressed the importance of respect and admiration for African cultures, history, languages, textiles, clothing, hairstyles, aesthetics, and music and was most succinctly encapsulated in the memorable phrase “Black is beautiful.” The affirmation of the legitimacy of African/Black culture has been a constant feature of Pan-African struggles against racism and Eurocentrism throughout the 20th century, as well as before, and is evident in the activities of numerous personalities including cultural workers such as Katherine Dunham, Miriam Makeba, and many others.
Earlier cultural initiatives included the first World Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Paris in 1956, followed by a second congress in Rome in 1959. Both were organized under the auspices of the Negritude-oriented Présence Africaine, the publishing house and “cultural journal of the Negro world,” founded in Paris in 1947 by the Senegalese politician Alioune Diop and his wife Christiane Yandé-Diop. Although their aim was to “confirm, exalt and glorify the culture of the Negro peoples,” women were not present at the congresses nor at what followed, the International Société Africaine de Culture (SAC).57
Women were certainly present at the famous First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1968 and hosted by Senegal’s president, Léopold Senghor. Participants included Josephine Baker, Rosa Guy, and Katherine Dunham. However, many were opposed to its central focus on Negritude, as well as an apparent lack of concern with contemporary anti-colonial struggles.58 The African American choreographer Dunham, who acted as a cultural advisor to Senghor, the festival’s main architect, even declared that the term Negritude was “meaningless.”59
The Pan-African Cultural Festival convened by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the Algerian government in 1969 was a significant contrast to the Dakar festival. Algeria had already established itself as an OAU-designated haven for revolutionaries and radicals when South African exile Miriam Makeba was granted Algerian citizenship, and in addition to the African countries represented there were also delegations from several national liberation organizations. In addition, there were revolutionary organizations from the diaspora including several leading figures from the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the United States such as Kathleen Cleaver.60 There were also several cultural performers and intellectuals from the United States participating including Nina Simone, Angelou, and Guy.61
The Black Power era also gave rise to the important African American Black Arts movement with a multimedia approach to counter Eurocentrism and contribute to political and ideological change. Influential women artists included Betye Saar (1926–) and Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). Also influential was the artwork used in Soulbook, the Revolutionary Action Movement publication specifically dedicated to the “Peoples of Afroamerica, Africa and to all the Peoples of the World,” by the “sons and daughters of Africa” who produced it. Perhaps even more influential was the artwork of women artists M. Gayle Asali Dickson and Matilaba in the Black Panther Party’s Black Panther.62
The Black Arts movement, with all its contradictions, had an influence outside of the borders of the United States, but perhaps even more influential was the popular music of the period and the compositions and recordings of such African American artistes as Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and others, some of whom performed in the major Pan-African cultural festivals. Simone’s Young Gifted and Black (1970) for example, spoke for and to a generation and had a global Pan-African significance. African musicians such as Makeba also contributed to new Pan-African popular culture, which identified with political themes such as the struggle against apartheid.63
In view of heightened gender sensitivity, it is perhaps surprising that “the call” for the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania in 1974 and the first with that title to be held in Africa, should be so male centric.64 Nevertheless, African American women such as Sylvia Hill and Judy Claude played a leading role in the preparations for the congress.65 Among others issues, gender politics were much in evidence and the congress provided a steep learning curve for many participants, perhaps especially those from the United States, visiting Africa and often engaging with those fighting for the liberation of the continent and their politics for the first time.66 Some, like congress organizer Hill, returned to the United States to commit themselves to the struggle against apartheid and in support of the liberation struggles throughout southern Africa.67 The congress itself was notable for its important resolutions on the oppression of women in which it gave “its total support to the political struggles waged for equality by black women” and called “upon all the states and organizations participating in this Congress to tackle the problems of the oppression of women thoroughly and profoundly.”68 Despite these groundbreaking resolutions, no organizational method was developed for their realization.
C. L. R James, when looking forward to the Seventh Pan-African Congress in 1976, specifically highlighted the need for the involvement of women, but the eventual preparations were led by a mainly male International Preparatory Committee (IPC) that initially included only two women, before it was belatedly decided that more women should be added.69 When the congress eventually convened in Uganda in 1994 many pointed to the prominent role of women and the fact that a two-day “Pre-Congress Meeting for Women” was held with some three hundred participants and key speakers including Graca Machel and Betty Shabazz.70 Consequently, a Pan African Women’s Liberation Organisation (PAWLO) was launched to help implement the “Pan African Women’s Plan of Action” agreed at the congress and as an alternative to the widely criticized existing PAWO (Pan-African Women’s Organisation).71
In the later 20th and early 21st centuries women have continued to play a significant role in the newly formed African Union, the successor to the OAU (Organisation of African Unity), in the global African reparations movement and in Pan-African organizations and gatherings within Africa and throughout the diaspora. However, the scholarly literature has not kept pace and much work remains to be done. The subject of women and Pan-Africanism will be an important area for future research.
There have been very few studies devoted to the subject of women and Pan-Africanism and indeed few major surveys of the history Pan-Africanism itself in recent years.72 Two important contributions are Tracy Sharpley-Whiting’s Négritude Women published in 2002, which provides an analysis of the role of the Nardal sisters and other Francophone women in the emergence of the Negritude movement; and the collection of articles edited by Keisha Blain, Asia Leeds, and Ula Taylor entitled “Women, Gender Politics and Pan-Africanism” published in 2006.73 The latter collection recognized that women had been underrepresented in the literature and aimed to “capture the gendered contours of Pan-Africanism and centralize black women as key figures.” However, although a very welcome addition, the collection largely focuses on the American continent, indeed mainly on women who were active within the United States. This highlights a major feature of the literature, which has tended to focus on women in the diaspora, or from diasporic communities, rather than African women on or from the African continent.
The literature has more usually concentrated on biographical accounts of individual women and their activities, such as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, or Constance Cummings John, rather than on the role of women in the Pan-African movement in general, although Barbara Bair’s chapter “True Women, Real Men: Gender, Ideology and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement,” first published in 1992, is an important exception.74 Biographical accounts have been supplemented by important autobiographies such as those by Cummings John and Aoua Keita.75
Recent scholarship, such as that by David Kilingray and Marika Sherwood, has revealed the important role of the South African Alice Kinloch in the founding of the African Association and the birth of the modern Pan-African movement.76 However, for the more recent period there are large gaps in the literature that have only been partly filled by the reflections and other writings of activists themselves.
It is difficult to detail a few repositories for a movement and ideology of such breadth and diversity. The most important primary sources are often to be found in the memoires and testimonies of key activists such as Jeanne Martin Cissé, Jesse Fauset, and Sylvia Hill, as well as the commentaries of Zaline Roy-Campbell, Bonita Harris, and Fatima Mahmoud.77 Key journals such as The Crisis, The Black Scholar, and Negro Digest, some of which are available online, also provide useful sources of information, as do sources mainly available in archives such as Negro Worker. Another important source of information is the multi-volume collection The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, edited by Robert Hill. This collection not only covers an extensive time period but also provides primary sources relating to the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) and related organizations and individuals, some of them women, in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and other parts of the American continent as well as the United States.78
However, sources for the African continent are more difficult to find. There appears to be almost no written or available archival history of the Pan-African Women’s Organisation (PAWO), even though its continuing existence has recently been celebrated by UNESCO, and it is now incorporated within the African Union. Sources are also difficult to find regarding the role of women in two of the most important continental Pan-African organizations, the Organisation of African Unity and the African Union.79
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