Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism, and the Struggle for Race Vindication

Abstract

Since the miraculous rediscovery, language translation and republication of Anténor Firmin’s masterful text The Equality of the Human Races (2002), the overwhelming majority of published essays have focused on Firmin’s intellectual contributions to the academic disciplines of Anthropology, Egyptology, Philosophy and Africology. Although several writers have repeatedly made worthwhile mention of Firmin’s profound influence on Pan-African studies and his intimate nexus to the first Pan-African, London conference in 1900, very few contemporary writers to date have extensively explored his early dialogue and discourse with fellow countrymen Benito Sylvain and Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams. These three Caribbean intellectuals would begin several years of alliance and planning that would eventually culminate in the historic conference of one hundred eighteen years ago. The inaugural Pan-African Conference in 1900 constituted an international Black response to the global systems of racism and imperialism. H.S. Williams first popularized the term “Pan-Africanism” in 1897 when he founded a Pan-African association in England. Within the compositional framework of this chapter, my twofold purpose and intent will be to critically excavate and explore the formidable role of Firmin’s early intersectional correspondence with two other Caribbean nationalists who then collectively organized to spawn this timely, anticolonial, anti-imperialist, freedom movement. The early Pan-Africanist ideology and its evolutionary movement functioned as an essential counternarrative to the hegemonic, cultural imposition of Euro-America and served fundamentally as a source of universal race pride, race unity and race vindication for all people of African heritage and descent.