By Ahjamu Umi
Republished from Hood Communist.
Since its initial organizational expression in 1900, the phrase Pan-Africanism has been expressed in many different forms. For some, its current meaning is defined as unity between all people of African descent across the world. For others, Pan-Africanism is an ideology defined by nebulous elements of the type of unity previously described. For still many others, Pan-Africanism is represented by social media famous individuals who claim Pan-Africanism as a set of beliefs without any clear defining criteria.
For those of us who identify Pan-Africanism not as an ideology, but as an objective, we define Pan-Africanism as the total liberation and unification of Africa under a continental wide scientific socialist government. This is the framework for revolutionary Pan-Africanists who endorse the concepts of Pan-Africanism laid out by the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, and others. The reasons we humbly, yet firmly, advance one unified socialist Africa as really the only serious definition of Pan-Africanism are connected to dialectical and historical materialism. By dialectical and historical materialism we mean the historical components that define matter and the conflictual elements that transform that matter. In other words, the history of a thing and the forces that have come to shape that thing’s characteristics over time.
For example, for African people (“All people of African descent are African and belong to the African nation”—Kwame Nkrumah—“Class Struggle in Africa), the reason we live on three continents and the Caribbean in large numbers in 2025 is not the result of higher desire on our part to see the world. It’s not because God placed people who look like us in every corner of the planet. The only reason is because colonialism and slavery exploited Africa’s human and material resources to build up the wealth of the Western capitalist world. As a result of this irrefutable reality, it makes zero sense in 2025 for African people to imitate the logic of other people in defining ourselves based solely upon where we are born.
This approach is illogical because African people were kidnapped from Africa and spread across the world. Even the Africans who left Africa on their own to live in the Western industrialized countries, did so only because colonialism made the resources they seek unavailable in Africa. Consequently, an African in Brazil can and does have biological relatives in the Dominican Republic, Canada, Portugal, the U.S., etc. These people will most likely never meet and even if they came across each other, they probably could not communicate due to language barriers, but none of this changes the cold stark reality that they could easily be related. So, it makes no sense for Africans to accept colonial borders to define ourselves i.e., “I’m Jamaican and have no connection to Black people in the U.S., etc.”
Secondly, and more important, wherever African people are in 2025, we are at the bottom of that society. The reasons for this are not that there is something wrong with African people or that we don’t work hard enough and don’t have ambition. Anyone who has arisen at 5am on any day in Africa knows those conceptions of African people are bogus. Any bus depot at that time of morning shows thousands of people up, hustling, struggling to begin the day trying to earn resources for their families. The real reason we are on the bottom everywhere is because the capitalist system was built on exploiting our human and material resources. As a result, capitalism today cannot function without that exploitation. In other words, in order for DeBeers Diamonds to remain the largest diamond producer on earth, African people in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Azania (South Africa), etc., must continue to be viciously exploited to produce the diamonds. Its this system that has made the zionist state of Israel one of the world’s main diamond polishing economies despite the fact diamond mines don’t exist in occupied Palestine (Israel). Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Hershey, Godiva, Nestle, etc., all rely on similar exploitative systems that steal African resources and labor to continue to produce riches for those multinational corporations while the masses of African people die young from black lung, mining these resources, often by hand.
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Meanwhile, since the wealth of capitalism is dependent upon this system of exploitation to continue uninterrupted, the mechanisms of the capitalist system have to ensure that African people are prohibited from waking up to this reality. Thus, the maintenance of systems of oppression to keep the foot of the system firmly placed on the necks of African people everywhere. Whether its police, social services, etc., this is true. This exploitation marks the origin of the problem, and therefore, logically, it is also where the solution must be addressed. In other words, while we can recognize that the consequences of this exploitation have global dimensions, we cannot expect the problem to be resolved solely through actions taken outside of Africa, such as in the U.S. or elsewhere.
All of the above explains why one unified socialist Africa has to be the only real definition for Pan-Africanism. Capitalism, as the driving force behind the exploitation of Africa and the global African diaspora, cannot serve as the solution to the suffering it has created. Instead, Africa’s vast resources—including its 600 million hectares of arable land, its immense mineral wealth, and the collective potential of its people—must be reorganized into ways to eradicate poverty and disease, including
Ways to educate all who need education to increase the skills to solve these problems. And, in accomplishing all of this, our pride as African people based upon our abilities to govern our own lives, coupled with the necessity for others to respect us for the same, eliminates the constant disrespect—internal and external—which defines African existence today.
This Pan-Africanist reality will eliminate the scores of African people who are ashamed of their African identity overnight. Now, what we will see is those same people clamoring to instantly become a part of the blossoming African nation.
Revolutionary Pan-Africanism cannot be mistaken in 2025 as a pipe dream or simply the hopes of Africans everywhere. Building capacity for this reality is the actual on the ground work that many genuinely revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizations are engaging in on a daily basis. The work to forge that collective unity based upon the principles cited by people like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Robert Sobukwe, Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Amy/Amy Jacques Garvey, Carmen Peirera, etc. Principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism.,the Revolutionary African Personality articulated by Nkrumah, the understanding of how to build political party structures as documented by Ture,the understanding of the role of culture in guiding our actions as expressed by Cabral, etc., and many of these types of cultural and principle approaches to building society have been seen in recent times through the work of the former Libyan Jamihiriya and what’s currently happening in the Sahel region. These efforts will only increase and become even more mass in character.
We challenge a single person to express why revolutionary Pan-Africanism is not what’s needed for African people. Not just as one of many ideas, but as the single objective that would address all of our collective problems. Hearing and seeing no one who can refute that statement, the next step is how we collectively increase African consciousness around the necessity to contribute to on the ground Pan-African work. The first step is getting people to see the importance of getting involved in organized struggle. The second step is ensuring that those organizations have institutionalized, consistent, ideological training as a priority.
To seriously embark upon this work brings no individual recognition. It brings no prestige. It requires a clear focus and a commitment to detail, but what it will produce is an ever increasing capacity that will one day manifest itself in the type of revolutionary Pan-Africanism described here that will fulfill the aspirations of African people everywhere while placing us in the position to contribute to all peace and justice pursuing struggles across the planet earth.
This post has been syndicated from Read - Hampton Institute, where it was published under this address.