Lomé, the capital city of Togo, will be hosting the 9th Pan-African Congress in the coming months. This highly significant event for the African world and Afro-descendants, which is part of the implementation of the 2021-2031 Agenda of the African Union’s “Decade of African Roots and the African Diaspora”, is the fourth of its kind on the continent after the Dar-es-Salam (1974), Kampala (1994) and Johannesburg (2014) Congresses.
This continental appropriation of the Pan-African Congress as an institution that periodically brings together the African community, after the first five editions were held outside African lands, is justified by the emancipatory and universalist aims of the Pan-African movement, which from the end of the 19th century and especially in the 20th century fought alongside African anti-colonial national liberation movements to liberate a whole part of humanity from colonial imperialism.
What’s more, it reflects the continent’s interest in pan-Africanism, both for its mobilizing force in the face of emancipation challenges, and for its unifying power within a framework of fraternal solidarity. In the words of Georges Padmore, “the idea of pan-Africanism emerged first and foremost as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity between Africans and peoples of African descent”.
Pan-Africanism emphasizes on solidarity between African nations to help transcend the divisions inherited from colonization, and between Africans and Afro-descendants to reconnect Africa and its diaspora. It enables the African community to be seen as a unit, despite its diversity and dispersion around the world. In the 21st century, Pan-Africanism presents a range of challenges in a context where Africa intends to emancipate itself from all foreign guardianship, rid itself of all forms of external domination and act, in line with aspiration 7 of the AU’s Agenda 2063 and the vision of the African Political Alliance, “as a strong, united and influential player and partner on the world stage”.
The aim of this article is to highlight one of the major issues at stake at the 9th Pan-African Congress in Lomé, on the general theme of “Renewing Pan-Africanism and Africa’s role in the reform of multilateral institutions: mobilizing resources and reinventing ourselves for action”. This issue, which is of paramount importance, is the reaffirmation of the value of Pan-Africanism to ensure the historical continuity of the movement.
Indeed, the history of Pan-Africanism is a rich and varied narrative whose issues have evolved over time and space. From its very beginnings in Afro-American intellectual circles, Pan-Africanism was intended and affirmed as a movement to emancipate African communities from domination and forms of historical injustice. It initially embodied opposition to slavery and discrimination against African communities in the name of the ideal of equal human dignity and the ideal of justice, the challenge at the time being to deconstruct and undermine the foundations of racial ideologies.
Pan-Africanism then became involved with the question of the administration of African peoples under colonial domination, and subsequently with the decolonial liberation struggles between the fifties and sixties. With great African figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Modibo Keïta, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Julius Nyerere, Haile Selassie and Thomas Sankara, Pan-Africanism was synonymous with an effort to re-appropriate oneself on an African scale and with an anti-imperialism that was supposed to liberate from neo-colonialism. The current revival of interest in the movement is sufficient proof of the historically consubstantial relationship between liberation struggles and pan-Africanism in African and Afro-descendant circles.
The Pan-African Congress in Lomé will reaffirm the paradigmatic value of Pan-Africanism. The whole interest of pan-Africanism for Africa in the 21st century lies in the renewed awareness that it is only by being united that Africa can truly take part in global governance, as the first ministerial conference of the African Political Alliance already pointed it out in May 2023.
Pan-Africanism is renewing itself in line with the new vitality of our times, and offers the opportunity to bring Africa’s great causes to the international stage in a close order. Pan-Africanism can still play today the role it played yesterday in backing national liberation movements. The movement’s transformation into a people’s movement is an essential element on which we must capitalize in order to address Africa’s current concerns in terms of dignity, freedom, sovereignty, independence, respect and representativeness in the entente of continents and on the international scene.
The context of our world is that of the triumph of a predatory instrumental rationality and a globalization that destabilizes Africa and African communities. To hold its own in this atmosphere, Africa must assert itself as the center of its own movement, putting itself in a position to refuse to be reduced to a merely instrumental entity. Pan-Africanism provides the indispensable ideological and operational framework for this, since a united Africa, speaking with one voice, and acting accordingly in a spirit of unity, can only outsmart the traps of subordination from wherever they come on the international scene.
By reaffirming the value of Pan-Africanism and bringing African communities together in Lomé, the 9th Pan-African Congress of Lomé is helping to ensure the historical continuity of the movement. The roots of Pan-Africanism go back to the 19th century. The movement was formed and consolidated, and made its way through the twentieth century, with moments of softening and moments of extreme vitality.
Holding the 9th Congress is an opportunity to bring the Pan-Africanist movement into the present, and to put it on the doorstep of the future. It is in the interest of the African world not to let Pan-Africanism die, and the Lomé Congress will enable us to respond to this imperative. The 9th Congress will enable African states, peoples and Afrodescendants to ensure the historical continuity of the movement of Pan- Africanism.
By Prof. Robert Dussey
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
