African Women and Pan-Africanism
By Dr Nicole M Gipson
Global neoliberalism, working through local neo-colonial states, has developed to crisis-fuelled, environmentally destructive, and militarized extremes of extraction, while Africa remains subject as ever to the Western economic doctrines that have patently failed the millions of Africans living with various levels of precarity and insecurity. [1]
The legacy of Pan-Africanism, in the unfinished business of African liberation from post- and neo-colonial forces of oppression, would not be complete without the recognition of the vital role African women have played within it. African feminist scholarship, which is determined to lift African women out of “transgenerational obscurity” by rewriting them back into history, highlights African women’s contribution to the development of what Kwame Nkrumah called the “African personality” and brings their contribution to Pan-Africanism into sharp relief. Although neo-colonial hegemonies exercise a persistent and pernicious hold on Africa and the African diaspora today, this entry focuses on the participation of African women in the Pan-Africanist movement of the twentieth century and their contributions to current scholarship as pan-African thinkers.
The Pan-African Congress
The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism defines Pan-Africanism as “a simultaneously intellectual, cultural, social, political, economic, and artistic project that calls for the unification and liberation of all people of African ancestry, both on the African continent and the African diaspora.” [2] Working definitions such as these present challenges not due to their content, but what they omit. Pan-Africanism is the most remarkable where it is the most dynamic – as a movement more broadly and more precisely in the progression of its congresses. According to The Routledge Handbook, the prevailing scholarly consensus classifies Pan-Africanism into three periods: “the Pan African idea period 1776 – 1900; the Pan-African Movement period 1900 -1958 and the Pan African Movement period from 1958 to the present.” [3] However, closer examination of its congresses provides a clearer understanding of Pan-Africanism’s elasticity.
Much attention has been devoted to the first, four Pan-African Congresses, in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927 whose main sessions took place in London, Paris, Brussels and New York respectively. Even greater attention has been paid to the fifth, 1945 Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, which attracted a much greater contingent of African attendees than in previous Congresses with such distinguished participants as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana). Historians Marika Sherwood and Adi Hakim have documented the role women played in the Fifth Congress, not just behind the scenes but also in the significant roles played by women attendees such as Amy Ashwood Garvey (Jamaica) who chaired the opening session entitled ‘The Colour Problem in Britain’, and Alma La Badie, a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, who addressed issues in child welfare. [4] There is a common thread that runs through these conferences, the absence of African Women. By the 1974 Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, women’s issues were openly addressed, as African women had already become increasingly active participants in the decolonisation struggles in their respective countries and the Pan-African movement. The Seventh Pan African Congress held in Kampala, Uganda in April of 1994, “was the first of the Pan African Congresses which clearly placed women on the agenda.” [5] However, there were two meetings organized, run and attended by women in 1960 that also contributed to the Pan-Africanist movement.
“Letter to Council Women,” March 10, 1960.
Dorothy Height, the president of the National Council of Negro Women, wrote this letter to report on her trip to Sierra Leone, after attending the first meeting of West African women as a participant and a facilitator. The women leaders in attendance, from such countries as Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, shared their experiences in their home countries, discussed mobilisation and community building strategies that would be effective across borders. As African women were at the forefront of the decolonisation struggles across the continent, these female attendees also redefined their changing roles domestically and internationally as citizens of emerging independent countries. This event was a precursor to a more ambitious meeting with an even wider-ranging agenda, the first Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent held later that year in July 1960 in Accra, Ghana. [6] The event organized by the National Federation of Gold Coast (NFGW) inaugural speech, given by Nkrumah himself, was an acknowledgement of African women’s past role in the construction of his Pan-African vision and a clarion call for a deeper commitment to an even farther-reaching international propagation of its tenets:
Women of Africa, yours is the duty and privilege of hoisting high the nationalist banner of redemption; yours is the glory of answering the call of our beloved Africa… yours is the honour to fight relentlessly for the total emancipation of this great continent; yours is the task of projecting the African personality to the world of today.” [7]
Invited delegates from the United States included Pauli Murray, Mrs. Anna Hedgeman, Christine C. Johnson, the President of the Afro-American Heritage Association and the wife of W.E.B DuBois, Shirley Graham DuBois. However, they were not the only ones. Women’s organizations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Sudan, and the delegates from the United Nations and the World Health Organisation were also invited and attended. African female leadership attendance at international events such as these were important for several reasons: they created networks for women at the forefront of Africa’s liberation struggles; they formalized African women’s agendas; and created cooperative environments that fostered women pioneers in other African liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Algeria, Tanzania, Guinea.
Unfortunately, as countries like Ghana began to consolidate their independence movements into Republics, African women began to confront real challenges in gender equity as participants in the postcolonial project of nation-building at home and abroad, as African feminist agendas were side-lined, and women activists were written out of history by politically bureaucratised postcolonial republics and successive military regimes. The feasibility of the Pan-African framework to operate across gender lines was put to the test.
Pan-Africanist Feminism
A cursory examination of Pan-Africanism’s ideological foundations could suggest that while prominent male scholars like WEB Dubois have developed its intellectual framework, women have exclusively played the role of well-organized foot soldiers of its propagation. [8] A growing body of scholarship has contributed to a necessary corrective to this misconception. Today, the conceptualization of Pan-Africanism as a part of a framework of Black feminist scholarship and class and gender dynamics, with a broader culturalist component can certainly be attributed to the contributions of female scholarship. In the 2016 fall issue of the Women, Gender and Families of Color journal, in an article entitled, Women, Gender Politics, and Pan-Africanism we learn that Claudia Jones’ notions of “super-exploitation and triple oppression” qualified her as a significant and more radical Pan-Africanist intellectual in Harlem and London. These signature theories coupled with what Carole Boyce Davies called “the Claudia Jones model”, which linked “activist work with intellectual work,” have shaped our current understanding of intersectional feminism and welfare activism. [9] African women scholars have made significant contributions to our understanding of transnational Black feminism or Pan-Africanist feminism. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Bibi Bakari Yusuf, Oyeronke Oyewumi, and Ifi Amadiume’s examination of “African gender systems,” and the “recovery of local epistemologies” have advanced our understanding of a broader conceptualisation of Pan-Africanism. [10] Finally, Amina Mama argues that the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists is but one iteration of “transnational networking strategies” which are perpetuating Nkrumah’s dream of African unity in the 21st century. [11] Be it through grassroots mobilisation or scholarship, it is evident that the efforts of African women Pan-African Feminists have both modernized and advanced the Pan-Africanist project.
[1] Amina Mama, “Nkrumah’s Legacy, Feminism and the Next Generation,” Contemporary Journal of African Studies 10, no. 1 (2023): 169–200, https://doi.org/10.4314/contjas.v10i1.7, 171.
[2] Reiland Rabaka, ed., Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 8.
[3] Ibi
[4] Adi, Hakim and Marika Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (London: New Beacon Books, 1995).; and
Marika Sherwood, Manchester and the 1945 Pan-African Congress (Savannah Press, 1995).
[5] “Rebuilding The Pan African Movement, A Report on the 7th Pan African Congress.” African Journal of Political Science / Revue Africaine de Science Politique 1, no. 1 (1996): 1–8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23489739.
[6] “Letter to Council Women,” in World History Commons, https://worldhistorycommons.org/letter-council-women [accessed November 15, 2023
[7] Nkrumah, Kwame. I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1961), 249.
[8] Zaline Makini Roy-Campbell, “Pan-Africanism and the Organisation of African Unity – OAU,” African Journal of Political Science New Series 1, no. 1 (June 23, 1996): 45–57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23489743.
[9]Carole Boyce Davies, “Pan-Africanism, Transnational Black Feminism and the Limits of Cultural Analyses in African Gender Discourses,” Feminist Africa, no. 19 (September 2014): 78–93.
[10] Ibid, 86.
[11] Mama, ““Nkrumah’s Legacy”, 191.