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Abstract

Pan-Africanism as an ideology has taken many forms prior to its being defined by the time of the Pan-African Conference of 1900. Since then, one pan-Africanist vision has proven especially memorable. Nkrumah’s call for a United States of Africa envisioned in the form of a Pan-African socialist federation was widely rejected by the majority of the independent states of the early 1960s. The formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, which represented a compromise of a Pan-African institution, achieved little success besides helping to achieve independence for the remaining states on the continent, alongside fighting to end apartheid in South Africa. However, the issues of rising inequality since independence and lasting economic dependence for ‘development’ on Western states have proved disappointing when compared to the visions imagined for the people of the continent before 1961. The extent to which leaders on the continent within and outside of the new iteration of the OAU, the African Union, have engaged more actively to create a truly Pan-African union, taking on the major elements of the early pre- and post-independence movement in order to achieve human development across  the continent first over economic growth has been explored throughout this essay. I have especially highlighted the major elements and aims of the Nkrumah vision using a historical approach to highlight the lasting differences in political and economic approaches taken by both individual nations and continental institutions over the past 60 years.

Course: International Development - BA - C28415

Date Deposited: 2021-03-11

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13671.html