After the Unconference: proceeding with my project

The unconference on Saturday was a very thought-provoking and enjoyable experience. The opportunity to get feedback from my classmates while I was writing certainly helped to bring up some questions that I would not have considered otherwise. From here, it is clear that I need to properly decide on the direction that my project will take. In speaking with Konrad after my proposal presentation (in which I expressed a fear of the daunting scope of Pan-Africanism) he suggested that I consider the relationship between the Pan-African and the national in Africa and how national liberation leaders dealt with this tension. This is a very interesting idea and certainly one I would like to explore as I think it could help me bring in the cultural aspect that I have been looking for since one of the elements of this could be the ways in which national identity was expressed and whether Pan-Africanism had to compete in the same spheres. However, during the unconference, I realised that I am still also interested in the process of migration and its effects on this ideology. At this point, I think I could use my first proposal as a small part of the new direction of my project, yet I am still somewhat unsure as to how to go about exploring this. Therefore, at the unconference I tried to explore some contextual points that may be useful for either direction.

During the morning session, the first point I wanted to address was Pan-Africanism and its relation to other ideological concepts. Confronting Pan-Africanism will be an important aspect of whichever direction my project will take as its influence upon African independence movements and their leaders has been widely recognised. One of the questions that I think it would be interesting to address is how Pan-Africanism differed in its manifestations in each country. Pan-Africanism began as diasporic ideology in the nineteenth century in America and the Caribbean. In the twentieth century, it came into contact with communism, which would play an important role in its development. During the unconference, I wrote about the anti-communist direction of Pan-Africanism in America during the mid-twentieth century, resulting in the publication of key Pan-African thinker George Padmore’s monograph Pan-Africanism or Communism?  I suggested that a key difference between Pan-Africanism in America and Pan-Africanism in Africa is that imperialism was more of a concrete threat to Africa than communism was to America, meaning that Pan-Africanism was a practical alternative. This would mean that it was adapted in order to suit the needs of African national liberation. However, since the unconference I have briefly delved deeper into the relationship between Pan-Africanism and communism and the ways in which this may have impacted upon national liberation, and I have found that the situation was much more complex than I first thought as many Pan-Africanists identified as communists and the comintern had a specific interest in Africa and African liberation. Therefore, it is clear that more research needs to be done into this area as it would be a huge oversight to misrepresent its complexities.

The other point I focused on, during the afternoon session, was how migration affects the perception of national identity in the leaders that I have chosen to look at. Clearly, this point would be more relevant for my original proposal, however I think it could also have some significance for the other idea is it illustrates that perhaps there was no clear distinction between the Pan-African and the national as even the advocates of Pan-Africanism retained close ties with their national identities. For this segment I looked at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and his writing on the Kikuyu people to whom he belonged. I argued that he displays close personal ties to his homeland and Kikuyu identity. It seems significant that this is the focus of his writing during his time abroad, and I suggested that it was partly the experience of travelling during the colonial period that caused him to reflect upon his national identity. The problem that I have come up against with this is how to define what is national? The diversity of ethnic groups across African nations makes me very wary of applying a national identity upon those who identify as belonging to groups such as the Kikuyu. In the most technical sense they are national as they reside within the boundaries of a nation yet this is at risk of being an oversimplification. If I am to explore the tensions between the Pan-African and the national, I will definitely need to give more thought to where these identities fit in.

Briefly, another question I have to answer is how I chose the figures I am looking at. I have been focusing on Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah at the moment. I chose them because their experiences abroad are very similar, they both become the first presidents of their countries, and their countries represent different parts of Africa as Kenya is in the east, and Ghana in the west. However, I am aware that any conclusions I draw from two countries are not very strong as this is not a big selection. Adding more figures from more countries would be valuable, and there are others to choose from; however, this also makes the project much bigger and I am conscious of the scale.