PAN-AFRICANISM AND NEGRITUDE

Abstract

Decolonisation of Africa was not left to the colonial subjects alone, forthe black diaspora (descendants of African slaves) in the West Indies and the United Statesalso participated in it. The two groups played a major role in freeing the continent from the shackles of colonialism.Theycombined forces under two intellectual movements, namely Pan-Africanism and Negritude. Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement for unity and solidarity among Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the New World, while Negritude is a literary, cultural movement that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule; and while Pan-Africanism spun off from the agitation for racial equality by the black diaspora in the New World and was widely popular in the English colonies, Negritude was triggered by France’s Assimilation policy and was widely popular in the French colonies. Efforts to achieve sustainable unity among African countries are bedevilled by their heritage of colonial fault lines. This paper discusses the two nationalist movements which, inadvertently, helped lay the foundations of the Anglophone-Francophone rivalry that militates against African unity. After more than six decades of independence, Africa is expected to have outgrown the unintendedschism created by these two anti-colonial movements. Keywords: