Pan-Africanism: Political, Economic, Strategic or Scientific?

Abstract

IN a discussion of Pan-Africanism, whether political, economic, strategic or scientific, we must first define what we understand by Pan-Africanism and determine area which is in process of integration. The first conception of Pan-Africanism as it germinated in South Africa some years ago and that of today, will be conveyed in course of this paper, but what I see in it is best expressed by Mr. Duncan Hall, Australian writer, in his definition of functional as the co-operation which grows, not so much by theory, as by doing practical things together. And to word cooperation I would add word solidarity. The area over which spirit of Pan-Africanism broods is my favourite stamping ground: Africa south of Sahara, which is, truly, Africa. Africa north of great desert is not true Africa since Mediterranean is much less of a bar to intercourse between Europe and North Africa than is desert to intercourse between North Africa and tropical regions to south. The French showed that they realized this logic of human geography when they made coastal provinces of Algeria an integral part of France, as if intervening sea were but a very large river; and enterprising Englishmen and Englishwomen who still trek overland from Europe to South Africa learn to their cost power of North African desert barrier. Besides, North Africa is in temperate zone, while area which is Africa to me lies mainly in tropics. There is, of course, temperate South Africa, but she too is, or has been until recently, isolated, as a result of her position at tail end of a continent in a particularly landless and sparsely populated hemisphere. When one looks at world as a whole, one finds that most of land masses and overwhelming majority of people of this earth are in Northern Hemisphere. Consequently Africa south of Sahara, even Union of South Africa despite magnets of its gold and its increasingly important strategic sea route between East and West, is well away from human stream flowing broadly round top of world, a stream flowing right across Union's sister Dominion, Canada. And population in Africa I am dealing with is thinly spread. There are only 104 million peopl;e, less than 3 million of whom are white, in that self-contained zone.