Liberation and Pan-Africanism

In: Monthly review: an independent socialist magazine, Band 25, Heft 6, S. 12-28

Abstract

The Pan-African movement is in utter disarray & independent Africa is suffering under neocolonial subservience to imperialism partly because of the limitations of bourgeois nationalist ideologies & strategies for decolonization. The historical movement of Pan-Africanism led by W. E. B. Du Bois & later by Kwame Nkrumah sought a unity imposed from above & not one emanating from a mass base. Consequently, the Pan-African movement remained abstract & ethereal, led by New World blacks alienated by Western racism, in search of privileges from colonial powers for "civilized" Africans only. The Pan-African conferences of the 20th century met in Western capitals & not clandestinely in Africa. Their participants bound themselves to pursue their goals by constitutional nonviolent methods in the face of imperialist aggression. Their adherents were largely the scattered intelligentsia & not the masses back in Africa. When the former colonies were granted independence, the bureaucratic-military machine of the colonial administration, & the econimic institutions of imperialist design were not dismantled, but merely transferred or inherited. The emerging authoritarian, exploitive, & elitist regimes adopted a series of contradictory political positions: anticommunism but antiimperialism; national liberation along with abstract nonviolence; & nonalignment yet economic development through foreign investment. Attempts at forging a union of African states were really efforts by neocolonial regimes to consolidate their power over the still exploited & demobilized masses. Genuine Pan-Africanism, as espoused by Franz Fanon & Amilcar Cabral, means the development of the national productive forces through socialist institutions by awakened workers & peasants. This requires the destruction of neocolonial structures, through armed struggle if necessary, by a truly internationalist movement that breaks the bonds of the village universe & tribalism & progressively integrates itself with other African & world revolutionary currents. A. Karmen.