In 1967, Afro-Palestinian Fatima Bernawi became the first woman to be arrested by the Israeli Occupation Forces after planting explosives in a theatre frequented by Israeli soldiers. Though sentenced to life, she was released ten years later, continuing to fight for Palestinian nationhood.

Leading up to the founding of the Organization of African Unity in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia emerged as an unlikely progenitor of the unprecedented moment. Ethiopia’s rise to the forefront of pan-Africanism was sustained by the influence of Black consciousness in the African diaspora, culminating with the far-reaching activism of Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey.

Over the last few weeks, France has seen unrest at the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Moroccan and Algerian origin shot and killed by police officers in a Paris suburb. The events dawn on the 98th birthday of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who, educated in Paris, spent a critical part of his life in Algeria supporting its nationalist liberation movement against France, seeing the revolution as a ‘bridgehead’ of a pan-African vision.

By the second half of the twentieth century, Islam re-emerged as an ideological tool for African Americans fighting within civil rights and Black Power movements. Ironically, the proliferation of Black Islamic organizations in twentieth-century United States—most famously the Nation of Islam—often masks the gradual, centuries-long formation of said organizations, their ideologies, and their influence on modern Afro-diasporic identity.

The important role Palacio played in placing Garifuna culture on the world stage was on par with the pan-African legacies of musicians such as Bob Marley and Fela Kuti.

At the height of their careers in the Harlem Renaissance, celebrated African American writers Langston Hughes and Alain Locke found themselves in an apartment in Paris, where they met the likes of Réné Maran, the first Black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt, and Leopold Senghor, the revered Senegalese poet and politician. It was the apartment of Paulette Nardal, the eldest of the seven accomplished Martinican sisters who brought the best creative minds of the Afro-anglophone and -francophone worlds to produce the acclaimed Négritude movement.