ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the contemporary history of the core elements of Pan-Africanist thought and activism in France in the 20th and 21st centuries. Scholarship that traces the rise and evolution of Pan-Africanism establishes a firm temporal and geographic divide that locates the movement in the African diaspora in the 19th and early 20th centuries and situates it as a primarily continental phenomenon in Africa from the mid-20th century to today. In many ways, Mwasi has taken up the mantle of their 20th century Pan-Africanist predecessors who challenged French imperialism on two fronts, in the metropole and in the colonies. Mwasi’s Pan-Africanist activism is therefore inextricably intertwined with its goal of redressing the historical erasure and on-going sidelining of black French women from discourses of liberation. In the French context, Pan-Africanism continues to be an important organizing principle for activists seeking to counter the enduring myth of a France that does not see race.
