Title: The Origins and Proliferation of Pan-Africanism
Headings: The Origins, Purpose, and Proliferation of Pan-Africanism
The Origins, Purpose, and Proliferation of Pan-Africanism
History of Pan-Africanism
African Association and Pan-African Congresses
African Independence
Modern Pan-Africanism
Sources

Content: Henry Sylvester Williams, the power behind the African Association, and his colleagues were interested in uniting the whole of the African diaspora and gaining political rights for those of African descent. Others were more concerned with the struggle against colonialism and Imperial rule in Africa and the Caribbean. Dusé Mohamed Ali, for example, believed that change could only come through economic development. Marcus Garvey combined the two paths, calling for political and economic gains as well as a return to Africa, either physically or through a return to an Africanized ideology. Between the World Wars, Pan-Africanism was influenced by communism and trade unionism, especially through the writings of George Padmore, Isaac Wallace-Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Paul Robeson, CLR James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Walter Rodney. Significantly, Pan-Africanism had expanded out beyond the continent into Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. W.E.B. Du Bois organized a series of Pan-African Congresses in London, Paris, and New York in the first half of the twentieth century. International awareness of Africa was also heightened by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. Also between the two World Wars, Africa's two main colonial powers, France and Britain, attracted a younger group of Pan-Africanists: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Ladipo Solanke.