ABSTRACT
Kwame Nkrumah’s perceptive observation in 1961 that “Africa is fast gravitating to the whirlwind of world politics” was equally applicable to the fortunes of the Pan-African Movement. Between 1900 and 1957, the “New Pan-Africanism,” initiated by Henry Sylvester Williams in London in 1900, experienced lean times politically largely because both the European colonial powers and the U.S. government were hostile to it. Its impact, therefore, on world politics was minimal at best. However, with the independence of Ghana in 1957, and largely through the efforts of Nkrumah, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the international community began to pay some attention to the movement and then proceeded to undermine it. Despite the obstacles the movement faced, its leadership as well as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) continued to press on with some success for complete political decolonization in Africa, the defeat of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the clarification of its concept of an African identity relative to African continental and geopolitical imperatives. It is, indeed, clear that the movement’s role in helping to make the 1960s the African decade in the independence struggle and in fostering African unity was significant.
