The Rise & Fall & Rise of Pan-Africanism
...One day in 1961, a 93-year-old man from Western Massachusetts named W.E.B. Du Bois picked up and relocated to Ghana, a newly independent state in West Africa. Cold War hysteria had stripped him of his freedom and turned him into a pariah in his own country. Suspecting his Communist affiliations, Joseph McCarthy set his sights on Du Bois and the State Department went so far as to strip him of his passport for six years in the 1950s.
Two years after his passport was restored to him, Du Bois severed his ties to the United States. While he goes down in history as one of the most influential African-American intellectuals, he chose to die an African citizen. “I have returned that my dust shall mingle with the dust of my forefathers,” he wrote to a Ghanaian official at the time. Ghana in 1961 was still riding high on the euphoria of its liberation from Britain four years earlier...
Subject: Delegates from Junior NAACP, Cleveland, with W. E. B. Du Bois Date: 1929
Subject: Du Bois attending President Nkrumah’s Inauguration, Accra, Ghana Date: 1960 July 1
Subject: Du Bois, W. E. B. with Tang Ming-Chao, Ting Hsi-lin, Chu Poshem, Mao Tse-tung, Anna Louise Strong Date: ca.1959
Subject: Du Bois, W. E. B., shaking hands with Nikita Khrushchev; Shirley Graham Du Bois in background Date: ca.1958
Subject: Du Bois, W. E. B., and Paul Robeson, Salle Pleyel, Paris, World Peace Congress Date: 1949 April 20
Du Bois: A Chronology:
1945 Attends founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco as representative of the NAACP.
1948 Co-chairman, Council on African Affairs.
1950 Chairman, Peace Information Center in New York City; candidate for U.S. Senate for New York Progressive Party. Wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, dies and is buried in Great Barrington.
1951 Indictment, trial, and acquittal of subversive activities charges brought against him by the Justice Department; marries Shirley Graham.
1951-1959 Extensive speaking, writing, and international travel; wins Lenin Peace Prize in 1958.
1961 Becomes member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Invited to Ghana by President Kwame Nkrumah to edit the Encyclopedia Africana.
1963 Becomes citizen of Ghana. Dies on August 27th and is buried with a state funeral in Accra. Du Bois’s death is announced by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP as the March on Washington begins on August 28th.
PAUL ROBESON. MBOYA. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT.
Developing a brother/sister relationship with Malcolm X has been very important to me.
Because Mr. Malcolm X came to Africa, and I was able, along with others, to help him to meet all of the Africans of power in Ghana at the time.
In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou's son, to Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo, Angelou served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. Angelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, where she joined a thriving group of African American expatriates. She served as an instructor and assistant administrator at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company.
Malcolm X - Black American History, a history of black people in the United States.
He also began developing an independent Pan-Africanist and, in some respects, "Third World" political perspective during the 1950s, when anticolonial wars and decolonization (see Decolonization in Africa: An Interpretation) were pressing public issues. As early as 1954 Malcolm X gave a speech comparing the situation in Vietnam (see Vietnam War) with that of the Mau Mau Rebellion in colonial Kenya, framing both of these movements as uprisings of the "darker races" creating a "tidal wave" against U.S. and European imperialism. Indeed, Africa remained his primary political interest outside of black America. He toured Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana in 1959, well before his famous trip to Africa and the Middle East in 1964.
MALCOLM X-BARACK OBAMA-OGINGA ODINGA
When Malcolm visited African in 1964 he visited Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was during that trip that he met with Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, Uganda’s president Dr. Milton Obote, President Julius K. Nyerere and Muhammad Babu of Tanzania. Babu, Malcolm and Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) held a meeting during this period in New York City. Malcolm talked about meeting President Kenyatta, Malcolm however, was also aware of Kenya ’s Oginga Odinga.
OGINGA ODINGA. KENYETTA. MBOYA.
MALCOM X IN AFRICA
OGINGA ODINGA, FATHER OF RAILA ODINGA
Odinga sat on the edge of his chair and leaned forward, facing Joe and I. He told us of his visit to America and how American Freedom Fighters--civil rights activists had secretly visited with him in Atlanta as he was under State Department security control. He told us how the famous American Freedom Fighter, Malcom X had embraced him (Odinga) and that there was even a song written in America called, "Oginga Odinga of Kenya."
Airlift students withTom Mboya (fourth right), Gloria and Gordon Hagberg (second and third right
Their cook was Hussein Onyango Obama, none other than the paternal grandfather of President Obama. Gloria recalls the times Hussein’s son, the youthful student Barack Obama Sr, would visit their house, announcing: “I’ve come to see the old man!”
TO BE CONTINUED.