African Solidarity Research Articles

Harlem, Addis, and Johannesburg: African Solidarity and African American Internationalism in Harlem from the 1960s to the 1990s

Abstract This 2021 ASA Presidential Lecture combines sociopolitical history with personal reflections on Black Harlem during African decolonization. It begins at the turn of the twentieth century and traces Harlem’s transformation into an international center of pan-Africanist activism and cultural production. Brown explores solidarities that grew as Harlem politicians, grassroots leaders, and residents encountered political exiles and cultural leaders from the continent, the diaspora, and aligned political movements worldwide. These alliances and modes of protest facilitated a hardening of militant activist traditions and cultural cohesion that shaped an anti-imperialist pan-African movement and ultimately a multinational Black political movement in the 1960’s to 1990s.

The United States’ Position in Africa: On Solid Ground or Shifting Sand?

After decades of benign neglect, followed by a four-year period of outright disdain, the United States finally announced on August 8, 2022, a policy towards the continent of Africa that seemed to herald an era of treating the countries of Africa with respect and dignity, and acknowledging African agency in our bilateral and multilateral dealings. The question is whether the countries of Africa take this newly announced attitude seriously and will they act accordingly. Is the US position in Africa on a solid foundation, or are we witnessing a shift in global alliances with this significant portion of the global south moving closer to those who are not our friends? The large number of African countries abstaining on the United Nations votes calling for a Russian pullout from Ukraine or condemning Russia for the invasion have exposed cracks in African solidarity with the so-called West. But is this a new phenomenon, or an indication of the way things have always been?

Analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War’s Consequences on Sustainable Livelihoods of Refugees in Africa

The Russia-Ukraine War will leave behind unprecedented scars among the primary conflicting parties and the international community. One of such scars is already being felt – a surge of refugee influx into neighbouring countries with mounting humanitarian needs. As the world continue recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war will make the recovery process more complicated. While geopolitical relations are threatened, the global economy is also affected – prices of commodities have gone high. The livelihood is endangered and many other services such as education and healthcare have been heavily impacted. Many countries are realigning their financial policies to meet economic uncertainties. Support for the most vulnerable that includes refugees is likely to be threatened. Amidist these challenges, refugees, particularly those in low-income countries, Africa inclusive, are left in peril. With that in mind, this paper aimed at analysing the relational consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war on sustainable livelihoods of refugees in Africa. Secondary qualitative data was obtained through the exploration of relevant literature, reports, articles, and news. While imploring “social solidary theory” of Émile Durkhein (1858-1917) and the African Solidarity perspective of “ubuntu”, the paper argues for a “re-envisioned collaboration” among African states in the context of global crises vis-à-vis the plight of refugees in Africa.

Avoiding Hardship, Deflecting Conflict: From Fostering to Reluctant Relatives among World-Connected Bamiléké Families (Cameroon)

In 1982, Esther Goody demonstrated the importance of child fostering for social reproduction. Why, in the 2010s and 2020s, does the idea of child fostering remain a valorized expression of “African solidarity” when so many Bamiléké simultaneously retreat—even recoil—from engaging in this practice? Bamiléké parents replace fostering, once praised for promoting resilience, with concerted cultivation. This contribution explores how changes in kinship and class formation contribute to the decline of child fostering among transnationally-connected middle-class Bamiléké in Cameroon and in several of its international diasporas. It presents two contrasting emic ideals regarding the who and the how of good parenting, employing sharply distinct notions of kinscription—or which kin should be responsible for which aspects of childrearing—and of the role of hardship in child development. Three further case stories, from the perspectives of fostered children and foster parents, illustrate exemplars that influence new norms and debates regarding child fostering, kinship obligations, and good parenting that emerged during the early 21st century. The multiplicity of ideas regarding responsible parenthood generates conflict, which many Bamiléké parents seek to avoid by becoming reluctant relatives. New orientations toward parenting demonstrate that parenting and parenthood reflect and contribute to social inequality.

Collective memory and the transatlantic slave trade: Remembering education towards new diasporic connections

In countries from which enslaved Africans were forcibly taken to the new world, critical discussion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) and its Diaspora remains elusive, especially in educational spaces. Ghana is one such country that is deeply connected to the TST and yet struggles to engage it in the social studies syllabus. This article contributes to this literature by using a single instrumental case study approach to interrogate the inherent contradictions in Ghana’s collective remembering of the TST and its Diaspora in the junior high school (JHS) social studies syllabus. Using data from nine interviews and a directed content analysis of the 2007–2019 JHS social studies syllabus, I find that while the syllabus highlights the TST, it fails to critically and deeply engage students on either the TST or its Diaspora. Rather, it situates the TST as a minor event in the broader and monumental colonial, anti-colonial, and post-independence narratives. Ultimately, this creates misinformation and ignorance about the TST and its Diaspora among Ghanaian youth, further facilitating a disconnection between them and the TST’s Diaspora. In the article, I discuss broader implications for African and African Diaspora relationships and solidarity. I recommend a critical collective remembering (CCR) approach to teaching the TST which comprehensively highlights actors, victims, survivors, counter-narratives, and contemporary implications. CCR uses relevant creative, technology-based, and collaborative pedagogical and dialogical methods to make this history and social studies education relevant and meaningful for the younger generation.

Diasporic Blues Imagination: Filipino Becoming and African American Solidarity

Diasporic Blues Imagination: Filipino Becoming and African American Solidarity

The Trial of African Solidarity (vol I): Is this the Africa we Fought for? Kuzituka Did’ho J-M

Book Review

Oncopediatrics death: Does cancer endanger the family in Cameroonian context?

Context and aimFamily as the basic social structure is relevant for caring in pediatric cancers because it supports almost all the treatment in the Cameroonian context. During a work in 2018, published in February 2019 on the behaviours of carers when a child is about to die of pediatric cancer, we were struck by the sentence of a saddened mother, “I didn’t expect to talk about this, since the child died, the word family does not mean anything for me anymore”. Thus, this article is interested by the future of families that lost a child of cancer and is based on a qualitative research. With family as focus, the main questions are knowing how families face cancers treatments and how about their future after the death of children in the Cameroonian context. Material and methodData collection is based on a literature review and semi-structured interviews with nuclear families, single-parent families and extended families, who are bereaved of pediatric cancer. Semantic analysis permits data's interpretation through the model of deviant orientation of Parsons T., related to alienation and extended to rebelliousness or withdrawal that have a relative look with the spontaneous order of methodological individualism and functional substitutes of functionalism. ResultsTherefore, this methodological device shows that emergence of nuclear families in Africa is related to poverty and westernization of some African cultural trends, which has an effect on the emblematic “African solidarity”. The financial dwindling of extended families, due to the high costs of pediatric cancers treatments in the exclusive charge of patients’ families, is leading to the transition from mechanical to organic solidarities. Hence, the nuclearization of certain extended families and individualization of some behaviors. In a context where the recourse to psychology only refers to foolish people, this isolation in turn entails a significant emotional investment, mainly among people who keep the patients, as mothers who are pillars of their families. This emotional overflow continues even after the death of the child, so that even the current relationship particularly in the nuclear or monoparental families where mothers are pillars, is at stake. ConclusionOn the hole, knowledge and understanding of the cultural and psychosocial determinants able to deconstruct families after children's death, is an asset to look for a better future for patients and families during cancers treatments.

Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Entangled Belongings

Abstract Based on auto/biographical and ethnographic narratives and conceptual theories, this essay explores the Global African Diaspora as a racialised space of belonging for African diasporas in the US, the UK, and – more recently – the clandestine migration zones from Africa to southern Europe. Both approaches are used to illustrate the author’s roots, routes, and detours; an interpretive paradigm highlighting the interconnectedness across time and space of differential African diasporas. The critical analysis interrogates transnational modalities of black and Global African Diasporic kinship, consciousness, and solidarity engendered by shared lived experiences of institutionalised racism, structural inequalities, and violence.

Ghana and the United Nations’ 1960s mission in the Congo: a Pan-African explanation

This paper examines Ghana’s engagement in the United Nations (UN) mission during the Congo political crisis in the 1960s. The paper examines competing rationales behind Ghana’s decision to contribute towards the UN operation in the Congo. Ghana’s participation, to date, has been primarily understood through the lens of anti-colonial sentiment, African solidarity and regional influence. This article argues that in addition to these explanations, more attention must be paid to the value attached to pan-Africanism and the post-independence political union agenda of President Kwame Nkrumah. The article demonstrates how for Nkrumah, an operation under the aegis of the UN would prevent the powers of the Cold War (the United States and the Soviet Union) from interfering with the right of independent self-determination within Congo affairs. The UN mission, I contend, was a window of opportunity for Nkrumah’s larger pan-African ambition. Although Nkrumah’s mission failed, the article argues for the normative value of Nkrumah’s pan-African vision of promoting a regional structure to unify the African states as an important reason for Ghana’s participation in the Congo operation.

Towards a Pan African political culture: Critical pedagogy, reparative justice and the end of global white supremacy

This paper is an extension of previous work on African peoples’ experiential knowledge, cognitive interests, contested political and cultural power. African centered critical pedagogy, reparatory justice and Pan African political culture are presented as integral to realizing emancipation from the destruction of imperialist domination. The paper posits that to realize AU Agenda 2063 and the global Pan African aspirations, a Pan African political culture must be inculcated in all institutions of the African world. Challenges related to the Pan African Movement and realization of the AU Agenda 2063 are noted. Rather than a consensus of meaning, ideological clarity and strategic purpose, a dissonant cacophony of ideas and agendas proliferate. The paper notes a disconnect between African governments’ state centric approach to Pan Africanism and the endogenous people centric Pan Africanism, and despite recognition of the need for Pan Africanist institutions and policies there is an absence of cohesive and persistent effort, clarity of purpose and sustainable institutional support. It concludes that there is a general consensus that continental political unity, global Pan African solidarity, participatory democracy and non-capitalist people centered economy are fundamental to the Pan African purpose, and global Pan African organization is necessary for African peoples to regain power of political self-determination, overcome impoverishment, racial based oppression and the structural violence of global white supremacy.

Charles Quist-Adade and Wendy Royal, eds., Re-engaging the African Diasporas: Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Pp. 377. $74.00 (cloth).

Charles Quist-Adade and Wendy Royal, eds., <i>Re-engaging the African Diasporas: Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization</i>. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Pp. 377. $74.00 (cloth).

The Irony of ‘African Solidarity’ in Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi

This paper deals with the misuse of the African traditional communal mode of living in modernizing post-colonial African societies that have been transformed by Western capitalism and individualism. In the impoverished community portrayed in Ousmane Sembene’s film Mandabi, this traditional communal mode of living, to which people refer in colloquial term as “African solidarity”, is ironically used as a means to meet one’s individualistic and selfish needs at the expense of others; thus, turning it into a factor of social and economic regression. Mandabi also unveils and suggests a new form of hybrid and productive solidarity that fits better African post-colonial nations that have been affected by Western capitalism and individualism.

Joining AMISOM: why six African states contributed troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia

ABSTRACTDeployed to Mogadishu, Somalia in March 2007, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) became the Union’s longest running, largest, most costly, and most deadly operation. Yet, of the 54 AU members, only 6 contributed troops to AMISOM: Uganda (2007), Burundi (2007), Djibouti (2011), Kenya (2012), Sierra Leone (2013) and Ethiopia (2014). This article applies a widely utilized theoretical framework to explain peacekeeping contributions in order to analyse why these six states chose to join AMISOM. It concludes that there is no single or uniform explanation for their decision. Nevertheless, the most common official justifications – assertions that events in Somalia posed a direct security risk to the troop-contributing countries (TCCs) and normative commitments to African solidarity – were often less important than other unacknowledged or downplayed factors. Specifically, a combination of institutional, political, and economic factors was generally more important in understanding why these six states became AMISOM TCCs. Joining AMISOM did help alleviate some regional security concerns but the decision also brought tangible benefits at home to both the TCC governments and their militaries.

South Africa’s Withdrawal from The Rome Statute: A Note on Democratic Alliance v. Minister of International Relations and Cooperation and Others

Abstract Africa and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are having a turbulent relationship, since the implication of the Sudanese President Omar A-Bashir by the Court with the atrocities committed in the Darfur region. The attitude of African countries against the Court has led to some rampaging voices, calling for an African solidarity to exit the ICC. Few African countries, including South Africa, have stepped to the plate responding to the call. However, the process has been coated with uncertainties, mostly leading to constitutional power wrangle among the constitutional branches of governance. The High Court of South Africa, for instance, has been the ‘mediator’ when the executive and legislature clashed over South Africa’s pursuance to withdraw from the ICC. Thus, this commentary revisits the case of Democratic Alliance v. Minister of International Relations and Cooperation and Others, and exposes the power ‘wrangle’ between the executive and legislature when South Africa engineered her failed exit from the ICC.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Between Afrocentric Foreign Policy Thrust and Domestic National Security Interest: A Review of Nigeria's 'Intervention' in Mali

This paper focuses on Nigeria’s participation in the military intervention in Mali in January 2013 to assist the country’s beleaguered government fight the al-Qaeda supported Tuareg rebels and restore peace and stability to the West African neighbour. While the paper contends that Africa as the centre-piece of Nigeria’s foreign policy since its attainment of independence in 1960 is understandable given the country’s vantage position in Africa, it nonetheless examines the rationale for troops deployment to Mali in the face of threat to its domestic national security orchestrated by the activities of Boko Haram in the North and other armed opposition groups elsewhere in the country. This is with a view to finding out whether its action is in consonance with its perceived national interest or African solidarity or both. The national interest approach will be utilized for the paper.

Ancestor-reverence as a Basis for Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance’s Quest to Re-humanise the World: An African Philosophical Engagement

Pan-Africanism is an ideological framework whose emphasis is on unity and liberation of all Africans who were colonised on the African continent, and those in the diaspora who were forcibly dislocated from Africa and dispersed as slaves. The African Renaissance is a pan-Africanist project that seeks to restore to the Africans the spiritual and material values that were dented by colonialists and enslavers. In 1963, a number of African states that had gained independence formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to pursue the goals of pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance. One of the major criticisms against the OAU and its successor, the African (AU), was and continues to be that their pan-Africanism is reduced to an elite project by reducing pan-Africanism to a government-to-government relationship, instead of a people-to-people relationship. This means that ordinary Africans are excluded from being directly engaged in finding solutions to the spiritual, political, economic and social ills that continue to haunt the African continent in their quest to re-humanise themselves following the dehumanising colonialism and slavery. Through a philosophical approach, an argument is made that a serious, critical examination of Ancestor-Reverence will expose its potential to give expression to a highly desired sense of African solidarity, people-to-people pan-Africanism, and a fulfilment of the African Renaissance’s quest for re-humanising not only Africans but the human race as a whole.

Icon(oclastic): John S Saul reflects on Southern African liberation struggles

ABSTRACTJohn Shannon Saul has described himself as a ‘revolutionary traveller’. Over the past five decades (and counting!) he has been involved in profound social, political and economic change in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. These decades saw active building of the left in Canada as well, with Saul working as an activist in the Southern African solidarity movement, challenging Canadian government and corporate collusion with white dictatorship and, later, their participation in the ‘recolonisation’ of that region. An author (more than 20 volumes and a vast number of academic and popular articles), an editor (This Magazine; Southern Africa Report), and an activist, Saul remains committed to anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist work in Canada, Africa and elsewhere. In this article he reflects on his career working on liberation movements and revolutionary struggles, while at the same time looking forward to new challenges and opportunities.