Rethinking the Pan-African Agenda: Africa, the African Diaspora and the Agenda for Liberation

Abstract

The original Pan-African ideal had, as its programmatic agenda, the struggle to free Africans in the diaspora from slave bondage and to liberate the African continent from the despicable occupation by European imperial powers. This article revisits this agenda for liberation, placing it in the current crisis of globalisation and examining the continued marginal place of Africa in the global capitalist political economy. The article sketches out the genealogy and contours of the liberation agenda that looped the African diaspora to developments on the African continent, dating back to the antislavery struggles at the end of the eighteenth century through to the era of independent Africa. I argue that the highest point of the liberation agenda, the final defeat of apartheid in South Africa, ironically coincided with the deepening of Africa’s place on the lowest rungs of the global capitalist system. Today, globalisation has fastened rather than loosened Africa’s position on the ladder of the global political economy. To push back against Africa’s continued marginal position perforce requires returning to the original motivation of the Pan-African agenda and ideal: the unity of purpose and collective action of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora for radical liberation.