As a new generation of activists and politicians promote the legacy of anti-colonial pan-African nationalists, acknowledging the shortcomings and contradictions of such leaders provides a roadmap for emulating their more uplifting legacies.
In late May 2020, as racial and social justice protests erupted in the United States following the killing of George Floyd, the African Union (AU) issued a statement urging the US ‘to intensify’ efforts to end racial discrimination. The statement invoked a similar resolution at the First Assembly Meeting of the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), condemning racism in the US in 1964.
In the months following Floyd’s death, energized scholars and activists churned out opinion pieces and essays highlighting and historicizing the heritage and power of black internationalist solidarity. One of the hottest recent academic works on this theme has been Worldmaking After Empire, by Adom Getachew of the University of Chicago. Getachew traces the anti-colonial criticism of select African, Caribbean, and black American anglophone nationalists in the three decades after the end of the Second World War. She argues that their decolonization project ‘sought to create a domination-free and egalitarian international order’ until it became derailed by ‘ideological and institutional transformations’ in the 1970s.
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