The Black Nationalist Movement in Azania

Abstract

Black Nationalism in Azania is just a node in a long thread of black radical thought beginning with resistance to colonial conquest. It is intricately tied and connected to black struggles on the African continent and the New World. At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer and Pan-Africanist, was practising in South Africa; the 1919 Pan-Africanist conference and the 1945 Manchester conference also had immense influence on the country’s Pan-Africa thought. Black Nationalism in Azania was inspired by the Ethiopian religious movements, African religious-political thought and prophecy, the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois, George Padmore, among others, the writings of Negritude proponents like Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, and anti-colonial literature by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon among them.