Pan-Africanism

The modern conception of Pan-Africanism, if not the term itself, dates from at least the mid-nineteenth-century. The slogan, "Africa for the Africans," popularized by Marcus Garvey's (1887–1940) Declaration of Negro Rights in 1920, may have originated in West Africa, probably Sierra Leone, around this time. The African-American Martin Delany (1812–1885), who developed his own re-emigration scheme, reported in 1861 the slogan after an expedition to Nigeria during 1859–1860 and Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) adopted it when he arrived in West Africa in 1850. Blyden, originally from St. Thomas, played a significant role in the emergence of Pan-Africanist ideas around the Atlantic through his public speeches and writings in Africa, Britain, and the United States, and proposed the existence of an "African personality" resembling contemporary European cultural nationalisms. Blyden's ideas informed the notion of race consciousness developed by W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) at the end of the nineteenth century.

The growth of Pan-African sentiments in the late nineteenth century can be seen as both a continuation of ethnic, or "pan-nationalist," thinking and a reaction to the limits of emancipation for former slaves in the diaspora and European colonial expansion in Africa. There are a number of reasons why black internationalism had particular resonance during this period. African contact with Europeans, the slave trade from Africa, and the widespread use of African slaves in the New World colonies were the most salient factors, leading first those in dispersion and then many in Africa to envision the unity of the "race." At the same time, as abolition spread gradually around the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, Europeans increasingly viewed race as a biological and, thus, inherent difference rather than a cultural one.

Back-to-Africa movements—particularly the establishment of Sierra Leone by the British in 1787 and Liberia by the American Colonization Society in 1816—also contributed to the emergence of Pan-Africanism, and were probably the original source of the phrase, "Africa for the Africans." From 1808, English Evangelicals at the CMS Grammar School in Freetown taught their "liberated" students that there were other Africans around the globe, which instilled a sense of a common destiny. Many mission-educated Sierra Leoneans like Samuel Crowther (c. 1807–1891) and James Johnson (1836–1917) moved or, in some cases, moved back to Nigeria, primarily Lagos, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, where they were joined by returning freed people from Brazil and the Caribbean. These groups quickly coalesced into the Christian, African upper class that produced the leaders of early Nigerian nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism was the product of extraordinary, European-educated Africans and African-Americans, in other words, those most exposed to metropolitan culture and the influences of the modern world.

Ethiopianism.

Apart from the contributions of West Africans and African descendants in the New World, South Africa developed a distinctive form of race consciousness in the form of Ethiopianism. Up to the contemporary Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, the word Ethiopian has enjoyed a privileged position in the Pan-Africanist vocabulary as a term for all Africans and as one referring only to the inhabitants of a specific state (Abyssinia). The movement denoted by the term Ethiopianism draws on the former denotation and takes its name from the "Ethiopian Church" founded in 1892 by Mangena M. Mokone (1851–1931) who separated from the African Methodist Episcopal mission over discrimination in the church.

Ethiopianism emerged in response to European colonial settlement, the institutionalization of white supremacy, and rapid industrialization, particularly in mining areas like the Rand region near Johannesburg. Its leaders were largely graduates of missionary schools, but most in their audiences were illiterate. Thus, Ethiopianism became a significant means of spreading proto-nationalist ideas and a sense of Pan-African unity in southeastern and South Africa. Following the last Zulu uprising in 1906, white South Africans and the British associated the movement with the insurrection and became hypersensitive to any potential expressions of the "peril." The notion of Ethiopianism, however, had spread to West Africa, notably the Gold Coast and Nigeria, by the end of the nineteenth century, where it blended with other Pan-Africanist currents.