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Pan-Africanism is the political project calling for the unification of all Africans into a
single African state, to which those in the African Diaspora can return. In its
more vague,and cultural forms, Pan-Africanism has pursued literary and artistic projects that bring together people
in Africa and her Diaspora.
This movement began in the nineteenth century among intellectuals of African
descent in North America and the Caribbean who thought of themselves as members of a single,
"Negro" race. In this they were merely following the mainstream of nineteenth-century thought
in North America and Europe, which developed an increasingly strong focus on the idea that
human beings were divided into races, each of which had its own distinctive spiritual, physical,
and cultural character.
The intellectuals born in Africa who took over the movement's leadership in the period after the World War II
, developed a more geographical
idea of African identity. The founders of the Organization of African Unity
(OAU), such as : Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah , had a notion of Africa that was more straightforwardly continental. African unity for them was the unity of those
who shared the African continent (though it continued to include, in some unspecified way,
those whose ancestors had left the continent in the enforced exile of the slave trade).
In the area of culture integration, two Pan-Africanist efforts have been mounted.
In1966, the First World Festival of Negro Arts was held in Dakar, Senegal. A large contingent
of African American artists traveled to Africa for the event.
Then, in January 1977, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture was held in Lagos, Nigeria.
FESTAC '77 was the largest and most wide-ranging presentation of traditional and contemporary
visual and performing arts in Africa ever seen.
Currently, the areas in which Pan-Africanist ideals are most evident are commerce and development, especially as Africans and African
Americans seek to become business partners.
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