Africa Must Unite: Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and the Founding of the OAU (1945-1963)

Pan-Africanism as a political movement predated Nkrumah by half a century. Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian barrister, convened the first Pan-African Conference in London in July 1900, attended by 37 delegates including W.E.B. Du Bois, who prophetically declared that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line." Du Bois subsequently organised four Pan-African Congresses between 1919 and 1927 — in Paris (1919, timed to coincide with the Versailles peace conference), London and Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York (1927) — each demanding African self-determination while working within the framework of gradual reform.

Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica in 1914 and headquartered in Harlem from 1916, offered a more radical vision. At its 1920 International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in Madison Square Garden — attended by 25,000 delegates from 25 countries — Garvey was elected "Provisional President of Africa." His Black Star Line shipping company, though commercially disastrous (it collapsed in 1922 with debts of $476,000), gave Nkrumah the name for Ghana's national football team and shipping line decades later.

The intellectual groundwork also drew from Négritude — the literary movement founded by Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), and Léon-Gontran Damas (French Guiana) in 1930s Paris — and from George Padmore, the Trinidadian Marxist who broke with the Communist International in 1934 to champion African liberation exclusively. Padmore's "Pan-Africanism or Communism?" (1956) would become a foundational text.