Pan-African Movement

Pan-Africanism is a political and cultural movement asserting the unity and common destiny of African peoples, both on the continent and across the diaspora scattered by the slave trade, and opposing colonialism and racial oppression wherever they held power over African lives.

Its earliest organised expression came from Black intellectuals in the Americas and the Caribbean rather than from Africa itself: the first Pan-African Conference met in London in 1900, and W. E. B. Du Bois organised a further series of Pan-African Congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1927. The pivotal meeting was the fifth, held in Manchester in 1945 and attended by figures including Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, which shifted the movement's centre of gravity toward the immediate goal of African decolonisation rather than diaspora solidarity alone.

That shift bore fruit as African states won independence through the 1950s and 1960s: Pan-Africanist argument, with Nkrumah among its most forceful advocates, underpinned the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, reorganised in 2002 as the African Union, and the movement's ideas continue to shape the continent's efforts at regional cooperation to this day.