Africans Rising in Solidarity w/ Black Lives Matter through a Pan African Lens

Africa World Now Project

[Image: Claudia Jones Paul Robeson Amy A Garvey with friends in London England, Source: Source Pan African News Wire]

W.E.B. Du Bois (1933) in, Pan-Africa and new racial philosophy, presents his early articulations of Pan Africanism as “the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro people” wherever they are in the world.

George Padmore (1955) in, Pan Africanism or Communism, asserts that “the idea of Pan Africanism first arose as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity among Africans and peoples of African descent" (95).

I have explored in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, why Pan-African discourse is not a dominant expression in African diasporic resistance in the U.S. today. This is not to say a Pan-African discourse is not present at all, but when situated in the historical and intellectual genealogy of African decedent experiences in the U.S., it is marginal at best.

Even with this contextualization, the marginalization of Africana women in the formation and evolution of Pan African thought and practice is important to center.

This disarticulation has distorted the historical narrative of radical and Pan African thought of the fact that in “early coverage of the 1900 Pan-African Congress reveals delegates, “all eminent in their sphere” who represented the United States, Canada, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the then Gold Coast, most of the islands of the then British West Indies included Miss Anna Jones (Kansas), and Mrs. Annie Cooper (i.e. Anna Julia Cooper) (Washington, D.C.) among others (see Adi & Sherwood 2003, for listings).

Mabel Dove Danquah attended the 2nd Pan African Congress. Her husband Joseph Boakye Danquah, himself a major pan-Africanist was one of the African students that Amy Ashwood Garvey nurtured in the West African Students Union in London (Davies, 2014: 80).

Adelaide Casely Hayford, who married the pan-Africanist J.E. Casely Hayford in 1903 and as a pan-Africanist herself, briefly held the position of lady president of the UNIA branch in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She spent two years in the U.S. studying girls schools, became an associate of U.S. women like Nannie Burroughs, and would later develop her own school for girls. In 1927 she attended the fourth Pan-African Congress in New York (Davies, 2014: 80).

Today, we explore the current rebellion through a Pan African lens with Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity.
Africans Rising is a Pan-African movement of people and organizations.

Next, you will hear, in order, of speaking: Coumba Toure, co-coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity; Hakima Abbas, executive co-director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID); M. Adams, community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc; Taalib Saber, Pan Africanist, filmmaker and principal attorney at The Saber Firm, LLC, where he practices Education and Special Education Law, Civil Rights, and Personal Injury Law; Dimah Mahmoud, co founder of the Nubia Initiative, a humanist, activist, and passionate change-maker; Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator, Mathare Social Justice Center and member, Social Justice Centres Working Group in Nairobi, Kenya; and Yoel Haile, Criminal Justice Program Manager with the ACLU of Northern California.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!