Continuing the discussion on Pan-Africanism

Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams is credited by most while some credit Americo-Liberian Edward Wilmot Blyden for creating the concept after arriving in Britain in 1896. Based upon critical observation, both likely came to the same conclusion and championed the idea at about the same time.

Williams was more focused and concerned about the unity of Africans on the continent.

Blyden took a broader view and included all the African diaspora. He believed that African Americans especially had and should play a role in African development and encouraged them to return.

Today the concept includes both.

In the Western Hemisphere, Pan Africanism started when the first slaves were loaded in leg irons and handcuffs onto a Spanish⁄Portuguese slave ship in the 1400s.

It seems that when most North Americans think about slavery, they think of the United States, but Spain and Portugal started the trade more than 100 years before the British became engaged in the early 1600s after defeating the Spanish Armada.

The first shipment of African slaves was brought to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean in 1501. Ninety-five percent, or about 2 million, of the African slaves in the Western Hemisphere were in Spanish and Portuguese slave colonies in what is now called Latin America. Only about 5 percent were shipped to North America.

The Caribbean Islands of Barbados, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and later Jamaica and Saint Dominique were among the first slave colonies of the Spanish, French and British – and among the most brutal.

Today, the descendents of African slaves are 26 percent of the population of Colombia, 45 percent of the population of Brazil, 62 percent of the population of Cuba, 95 percent of the population of Haiti and make up a significant percentage of the population throughout Latin America.

Africans in the diaspora have deep yearnings that come from being violently uprooted, cut off from ancestry and – through extreme violence – made despised slaves in a hostile society. Because of imperialism, colonialism and slavery, Pan-Africanism has not been an easy sell on the continent or in the diasporas. We were estranged from each other and from ourselves.

A slave is made and not born. Part of the process was through violence to teach slaves to fear Europeans and to idealize, esteem and desire things European and despising things African.

They succeeded. During slavery and for more than a 100 years after it was abolished, many Africans in the diaspora accepted European standards of beauty and imitated their skin color and physical features.

In the 1960s, African Americans self-willed a psychological revolution setting and example for Africans around the world.

The yearning and emptiness was eloquently described by Du Bois: ‘‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Poet Countee Cullen also put into words the struggle of so many in his poem, ‘‘Heritage.” Here is an excerpt:

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

Van Caldwell, a lawyer, lives in Kettering. He can be e-mailed at wvcaldwell@comcast.net.