Pan-Africanism is a political and cultural movement based on the belief that people of African descent have significant commonalities and should be unified. Since the mid-19th century, Pan-Africanists have envisioned many scenarios for Pan-African unity and solidarity. Some hope to create a borderless Africa which will be home to all of its descendants, while others celebrate cultural and historical connections of Afro-diasporic people across the world through the arts. 

The earliest formulations of Pan-Africanism are thought to have sprung from the writings and biographies of men like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Henry Sylvester Williams, and George Padmore. These notable figures were developing Pan-Africanist ideals alongside many women visionaries who have been sidelined in historiography. Women were integral to organising the Pan-African Congress (PAC) and directed the movement towards fairer, more progressive Afro-diasporic collectivity. In this article, AMAKA remembers some foremothers who shaped Pan-Africanism throughout the 20th century. 

Alice Victoria Alexander Kinloch (1863 - 1946)

Pan-Africanist ideas manifested in a movement through a series of gatherings which brought together people from the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The first Pan-African conference, billed as a world gathering of Black people, was held in London, United Kingdom, in July 1900. It was organised by the African Association (AA), which had been encouraged by the work of a South African woman, Alice V. A. Kinloch, originally from Natal. In 1897, Kinloch, a human rights activist, writer and public speaker, travelled to England to give several lectures on the mistreatment of South African miners and became treasurer of the AA. 

In an article published in the Quaker weekly, Kinloch acknowledged that "with some men of my race in this country, I have formed a society for the benefit of our people in Africa… I think the time has come for us to bear some of our responsibilities... I am trying to educate people in this country in regard to the iniquitous laws made for blacks in South Africa." Henry Sylvester Williams (1868-1911), the conference's principal organiser, corroborated this later, saying, "The Association is the result of Mrs. Kinloch's work in England and the feeling that as British subjects we ought to be heard in our affairs."

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

In his opening address, Alexander Walters, chair of the first Pan-African conference, said "for the first time in history, black people gathered from all parts of the globe to discuss and improve the condition of their race, to assert their rights and organise so that they might take an equal place among nations". However, only two Black women took the floor: Anna H. Jones of Missouri and Anna J.Cooper. Jones, a leader in the state chapter of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), delivered a paper on "The Preservation of Racial Equality." Cooper was the only Black woman allowed to sit on the Executive Committee and impressed the audience with her paper "The Negro Problem in America". She was also involved in drafting the delegates' petition to Queen Victoria denouncing racism and injustices against Africans perpetrated by white people in Rhodesia and South Africa.

Born in slavery in North Carolina to an African mother and a white plantation owner, Cooper lived through the civil war, segregation, the advent of feminism, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and Pan-Africanism. After the abolition of slavery, she excelled in Mathematics, Science, Latin and Greek - subjects that were not open for further study to Black women at the time. She fought to be accepted into the upper levels of these classes and later obtained a master’s degree in mathematics in 1887 at Oberlin College in Ohio. 

She started campaigning against racial segregation and women’s rights to education and became a well-known public speaker. In 1892, Cooper founded the Coloured Women’s League in Washington and published her seminal work “A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South”, a milestone in African women’s social and political philosophy. Cooper raised her half-brother’s five children while working on her doctoral thesis, “The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848”, at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1925, she became the fourth African-American to be awarded a doctorate and the first Black woman to be awarded a doctorate at the Sorbonne. 

Ida Gibbs Hunt (1862–1957)

After the London conference, fifty-seven delegates gathered for the first PAC in Paris, France, in February 1919. The participants hailed were from the French, British and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa, the West Indies, the Belgian Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Haiti and the United States of America. Civil rights activist and educator Ida Gibbs Hunt was the main organiser, primary translator, and assistant secretary of PAC at the time. Born into a wealthy family in British Columbia, Canada, Gibbs Hunt felt a strong responsibility to uplift Afro-diasporic peoples and promote women’s rights. 

She became a Pan-Africanist after marrying diplomat William Henry Hunt and travelling with him to Liberia, France, Madagascar, and Guadeloupe for his diplomatic assignments, where she wrote articles and reviews on literary and cultural themes. Gibbs Hunt often gave speeches in support of peace, women’s suffrage and civil rights for African-Americans. At the Third PAC in London in 1923, she delivered a paper entitled “The Coloured Races and the League of Nations”, advocating for world disarmament and the appointment of Black representatives. In subsequent years, Gibbs Hunt co-chaired the Conference’s Executive Committee with W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), widely known as the Father of Pan-Africanism, who relied on her for her fluency in French, organisational skills, and political connections.

Amy Jacques Garvey (1895 - 1973)

Women were heavily marginalised in most PACs, and the meetings were accessible only to the intellectual elite. In the 1920s, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and his first wife Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969), emerged as an alternative, becoming the largest and most influential Pan-African organisation of the 20th century. Garvey's second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, a journalist and feminist Black nationalist, headed the women's division at UNIA, which Amy Ashwood had set up to allow women to be at the forefront of Pan-Africanist organising. 

Amy Jacques' activism has been downplayed by historians who often describe her as a "perfect spouse" instead of recognising her as a prolific writer and co-architect of Garveyism in her own right. Born into a middle-class family in Jamaica, Amy Jacques received an unusual education at the time and developed an early race, class, and feminist consciousness while working as a clerk to oversee her late father's estate. In 1918, she moved to the United States, where she became an advocate for Black economic self-sufficiency. After her husband was sent to prison in 1923, she became the unofficial leader of the UNIA. In her 1963 memoir "Garvey and Garveyism", she clearly states that much Garveyite thought was the result of her efforts. Similarly, despite her opposition to many of the PAC's approaches, she helped recruit delegates to some of the PACs to ensure the movement's continuity.  

New Pan-African leaders 

In historical texts, women have been systematically erased from the Pan-Africanist movement, even though in 1955, Du Bois was forced to admit that: “In 1927, American Negro women revived the Congress idea and a fourth Pan-African Congress was held in New York, United States.” A group of twenty-one women, led by women, many of them members of a women’s organisation called “The Circle of Peace and Foreign Relations”, made another congress possible. Still, it was not until the Fifth PAC that the silencing of women activists was loudly addressed. In October 1945, forty-five years after the first pan-African meeting at which only two women had taken the floor, Amy Ashwood Garvey was the only woman to take the floor. She reminded Pan-African leaders that women, too, were active in combating racism and colonialism and should not be relegated to domestic chores. 

The end of the Second World War rang in a new era for Pan-Africanism, and by the late 1940s, the American intellectual leadership of the movement had receded. Africans took the lead in a decisive effort to end colonialism, and African women did not accept the sidelining of their contributions anymore. At the Sixth PAC in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974, their activism resulted in the passing of the “Resolution on Black Women”, in which the congress declared their “total support to the political struggles for equality undertaken by black women” and called on “all the states and organisations [sic] participating in this Congress to tackle the problems of the oppression of women thoroughly and profoundly.” 

Keeping up their momentum, Pan-African women organised the Women’s pre-Congress Meeting ahead of the Seventh PAC in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994. More than 300 people (74% women) from 28 countries attended workshops on culture, law, child rights, the environment and building Pan-African liberation movements. Many of the initiatives born at that time, most notably the Pan-African Women’s Liberation Organisation (PAWLO), continue to fight for Afro-diasporic women today. This revolutionary meeting would have never been possible without the relentless work of the Pan-African foremothers and their insistence on speaking their minds.