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Following the Biafran allegations of genocide against the Nigerian government during the Civil War, pro-Biafran groups emerged in the United States to pressure the American government into political intervention in the form of recognizing the Biafran republic. In response, African-American Civil Rights hero James Meredith counter-balanced the pro-Biafran groups, and advocated for one Nigeria in the United States. By analyzing public speech, correspondences, fact-finding mission reports, congressional hearing testimonies, and oral interviews, this paper examines Meredith's pro-One Nigeria (Pan-African) activism during the Nigerian Civil War, and promotes a nuanced understanding of the international dimension of the Nigerian Civil War. This study proposes an episode of transnational history of the global black liberation movement of the long sixties, and demonstrates that Meredith's pro-one Nigeria activism during the Nigerian Civil War was influenced by his background as a Civil Rights leader and his pan-African ideology. Plain Language Summary: This article examines the role and activities of James Meredith as an "American defender" of One Nigeria, advocating for One Nigeria in the United States during the Nigerian Civil War. His pro-Nigerian activism was a direct response to the mobilization by the pro-Biafran groups in the United States demanding the American government intervention in the Nigerian Civil War in the form of political recognition of the former Eastern Nigeria, which renamed itself the Biafran Republic. An African-American Civil Rights icon, Meredith framed as a neocolonial destabilization agenda in postcolonial Africa the pro-Biafran groups' pressure for the American government's recognition of Biafra as a sovereign republic. He connected the African American Civil Rights Movement with the struggle against neocolonial control in postcolonial Africa, situating both within the global black movements of the long sixties. Meredith's battle with pro-Biafran groups in the United States and his advocacy for one Nigeria aligned with the pan-African goals of foremost continental pan-Africanists, including Kwame Nkrumah. A foremost continental Pan-Africanist, Nkrumah not only campaigned against the balkanization of African countries but also advocated for the United States of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malcolm X's appeal to the African Heads of State at the 1964 Organization of African Unity (OAU) meeting was necessary to strengthen the Pan-African bonds between Africans and African-Americans during that time. Following the anti-communism push in the post-WWII United States, many Black leaders disassociated with the anti-colonial movements in Africa and began to have a more domestic focus in their pursuit of freedom. While Malcolm X had consistently viewed the struggle of African-Americans as connected to the independence struggle of continental Africans, his 1964 appeal was a high mark. Through a comparative analysis of the speeches of the African Heads of State from this OAU summit, the author explores the way those leaders addressed the African-American, South African, and Palestinian struggles differently. Based on that study, the author concludes that Malcolm's appeal to these leaders was necessary if the African-American problem was going to gain more attention from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abdias Nascimento's legacy is timely in a world experiencing exacerbated racial conflict and setbacks in public policy addressing inequality. This essay addresses two dimensions: on one hand, Nascimento's life and work, and the tools he used to combat racism in the diverse realms of social and political activism as well as culture and the arts; on the other, IPEAFRO's efforts and initiatives to make his legacy a living one, current with the needs of our time. My sources are my firsthand experience as Nascimento's translator, co-author, and co-worker for 36 years; and his archives, the contents of which IPEAFRO is in the process of organizing, microfilming, digitizing, and making available via internet, a project that I coordinate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento's views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nascimento transcended the country of his birth and established himself in the minds and hearts of Africans everywhere as a combatant against racism and classism. Abdias do Nascimento was to Brazil what Langston Hughes and Katherine Dunham were to African Americans, a phenomenon of cultural energy that lifted his people to the highest dimensions of art in defiance of a designed degradation of blackness. Abdias grew up as a rebel spirit, as he would often say, in the tradition of his mother, who had called out abusive behavior toward blacks, in a brazenly racist country that had exploited the indigenous and African people for centuries. Thus, he was to become a Malcolm X, Du Bois, and Paul Robeson in the Brazilian context. Combining artistic skill, militant resistance, world knowledge, historical understanding, and an adventurous nature, his active mind did not rest in one field but in several art forms and research areas. He found his first love in the practice of African art and spirituality while creating the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio de Janeiro in the l940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African intellectuals are debating the future of knowledge construction in the wake of the collapse of colonization, European settlerism, and apartheid. Tawanda Sydesky Nyawasha has posited the debate between Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism in his paper "I am of Popper; I am of Asante: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa" published in Studies in Philosophy and Education as an expression of this contested ground. This response article argues that Africans have a duty to interrogate their own epistemological discourses in order to understand the history of knowledge construction on the continent of Africa. As the construction of the first pyramid at Sakkara was a consolidating event of human study, detailed investigations, elaboration of ideas, and advancement of the sciences and arts around 2700 BCE, clearly, African studies should stand at the head of the discourses about knowledge. Therefore, in this response, the author challenges Nyawasha's understanding of Afrocentricity and criticizes the marginalization of African perspectives as just another assertion of Eurocentric ideas as universal when in fact they arise from a specific history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that a distinctive character of the Black city is revealed in its connections to African heritage preservation. The Africanized Black city is situated within the long foundations of Pan African thought. A main assertion is that Black dignity is (re)instilled through the reconstruction of Afrocentric identity and philosophy for the Black urbanite navigating the unresolved problem(s) of the color line. Pan African legacies in the African American encounter with the modern city erected the localization of "African Home," where the spiritual citizenship inhabited by Pan African architects generated an agency of self-determination in Black placemaking. In this way, Black placemaking "refers to the ways that Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Du Bois's interactions with Ethiopian government representatives who were sent to America during the first half of the 20th century, and identifies numerous ways in which Du Bois provided direct and indirect support to Ethiopia and Ethiopian causes. Previous works in this genre emphasize Du Bois's vast and varied contributions to Pan-Africanism and African American political and social thinking. However, this essay adds new information to existing narratives on Du Bois's Pan-African focus by unearthing his specific focus and contributions to Ethiopia. Ultimately, the findings reveal the extent of Du Bois's contributions to Ethiopia and debunk some old myths regarding his Pan-African agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, it has become popular to read the later work of W. E. B. Du Bois through a Marxist lens. Not only is Du Bois often considered a participant in the Marxist tradition, his historiographical masterpiece Black Reconstruction is often offered up as evidence for such arguments. Here, I challenge those who have attempted to interpret Du Bois as a Marxist by situating his work in relation to the Pan-African tradition to which he dedicated decades of his life. Du Bois's views on Reconstruction and economics are shaped by Pan-African ideas, not Marxist theory, and his theoretical and practical confrontations with both his White and Black Marxist contemporaries reveals the distance between his Pan-Africanism and their Marxism. Contrary to the prevailing interpretations, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction is not a Marxist text but a Pan-Africanist argument against Marxism's inability to account for the structure of modern European Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Robeson is one of the greatest yet most unknown figures of the 20th century. This article goes beyond the traditional bibliographic style of documenting this great life, toward constructing a usable philosophical framework from it. Utilizing Robeson’s own works, and building on the small critical literature already in existence, I present his philosophical framework - comprised of anti-colonialism, socialism, and human rights. I present these dense, interconnected, and ever-expansive philosophical stances into a form of communication that can be easily understood, evaluated, taught, and compared. Understanding the philosophies, actions, and examples of his ideological framework will provide the appropriate contextual background for understanding (to play off the title of Robeson’s 1958 book, Here I Stand) where Paul Robeson philosophically stood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most outstanding initiatives that the African Union (AU) has taken that distinguishes it from its predecessor (the Organization of African Unity) is the adoption of the African diaspora as its sixth region. This article has two principal sections. First, by establishing the reasons for adopting the African diaspora as its sixth region from development perspectives, it explores how the African diaspora can engineer development processes in Africa and the challenges that the AU must address if the African diasporas are expected to play this role. In the second section, the article explores how Ghana provided a political base for Pan-Africanism and how Nkrumah laid an intellectual foundation for the movement. It also examines how Rawlings and Kufuor built on Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist legacy by creating incentives for the returnees/repatriates from the diaspora. While probing the character of the returnees/repatriates phenomenon and politics in Ghana, the second section also explores the controversies that center on dual citizenship, the right of return and abode, and voting rights of Ghanaians Living Abroad (GLA). Finally, the section investigates the receptivity of the traditional political system to the returnee/repatriate phenomenon in Ghana. The article concludes by making recommendations on how the Ghana-diaspora relations can be strengthened. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that the racial identities assigned to Ethiopia in the late 19th century and early 20th century were a direct result of the sexualized racial identities that were due to racist philosophies of colonialism. Teshale Tibebu’s and Harold Marcus’s essays on the national identity of Ethiopia and Lewis Gordon’s philosophical views of the sexual nature of racial identities serve a foundation for the rationale behind Ethiopia’s identity redefinition. Ethiopia, defeating Italy at Adwa, could not be seen as Black by many in the global community. Key contributions of this essay are how Ethiopians themselves defined their own nation and a discussion of how this identity was redefined in the discourse surrounding the global response to Italy’s occupation in 1936. This new characterization allows us to move beyond traditional motivations of colonization and examine the racialized and gendered bodies of the colonized and colonizers in the context of modern Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The desperate Eurocentric intellectual undertaking to undermine the Afrocentric conception of reality is not a recent development. It originated the moment Europeans awoke from the slumber of their Dark Ages to find themselves lagging far behind in the march of the world's civilizations. The subsequent expropriation of principles and standards from ancient African civilization, the brazen European abduction of African people into slavery, and the unpardonable colonization, exploitation and dehumanization of African people all concatenate to drive European scholars into adopting an aggressive stance toward ideas that expose them in their cultural, social, political, economic and intellectual nudity. The Eurocentric prerogative to subvert the Afrocentric conception of reality is therefore a struggle for European survival and is inspired by the desire to keep the world misinformed in order that Europeans may escape their inferiority and crimes. This exegesis identifies the disappearance of the slave that Afrocentricity facilitates and the sordid nature of Europe's transactions with non-European peoples in history as the major reasons behind European intellectual discomfiture with Afrocentric principles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to survey a number of names offered for the discipline that originated as Black Studies. Taking the position that practice is not arbitrary, although naming could be quite arbitrary, the author examines the practice of the field to suggest that those who see the study as a discipline have participated in Afrocentric analysis or critiques of African phenomena. Thus, the name Africology is suggested as the referent for Afrocentric analyses and critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of repatriation figures prominently in a repertoire of symbols and concepts associated with Rastafarianism. Yet the experiences and perspectives of repatriated Rastafarians remains an uncharted area of research in Rastafarian scholarship and studies in the African diaspora, more broadly conceived. What impact does an actual physical repatriation have on the Rastafarian ethos of repatriates? For example, is there a reworking or confirmation of notions of Zion and Babylon that comes with actually experiencing the fulfillment of repatriation? Based on ethnographic research in Ghana. West Africa, this article explores the experiences and perspectives of repatriated Rastafarians from Jamaica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maulana Karenga ends the "Creative Production" chapter in Introduction to Black Studies with a justifiable, negative critique of literature's modern lapse into types of detachment and personal gratification that are antithetical to the Black studies enterprise. Scholars have embraced this negative critique of the possibilities of literature to contribute to the problem-solving activities of the discipline. Karenga's critique is required study for the discipline as he issues a call for discourse "to provoke and expand the discussion, not to close or avoid it." This essay is a response, provoked by Karenga, that evaluates axiological and epistemological variables of the academy, the discipline of Black studies, and African culture that support the rescue of the literary in Black studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For approximately 150 years, Africans fled enslavement on Southern plantations and lived autonomously in Florida, using discrete African art forms, traditions, and sensibilities in their modes of communications, rituals, sub- sistence strategies, and battle plans to prosper and achieve and sustain their freedom and autonomy. This article reconstructs the ways cultural forms and practices, such as àrokô, nsibidi, tusona or sona (ideographic writing systems), and mmomomme twe and ogede (incantations), functioned in these self-emancipated Africans' stratagems to escape from Spanish, British, and American plantations; thrive socially and economically in the autonomous settlements they established; elude recapture; and defeat their former enslavers and other foe militarily despite their adversaries' incessant onslaughts, advanced artillery, manpower, and economic advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role African American Studies has played in responding to the quandary of multiple consciousness as initially outlined by Du Bois, arguing that the origins of African American Studies were informal but nonetheless incisive in its analysis, as can be see in such works as David Walker's Appeal. When taken as a hemispheric phenomenon (as opposed to a North American boundedness), certain fundamental themes reoccur in both the informal and the subsequent formal scholarship, such as the condition of exploitative labor extraction, the relationship to Africa, and the transnational linkages and meanings of the diasporic experience. The article ends with a call to marry prescription and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the construction of an Africalogical method to examine Nkrumahism's contribution to pan-African agency. Description of Afrocentricity; Concepts involved in the Afrocentric paradigm; Relationship between the individual and the collective sense of self; Components of the social landscape.

Focuses on a study which analyzed the translation and distribution of television programs across Africa's linguistic distributions and the steps toward Pan-African exchange. Factors that led to the regional economic groupings in Africa; Details on African radio and television program exchange; Methodology; Results and analysis.

Discusses the progressive contribution of Afro-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox to United States race relations and his struggle with mainline White supremacist sociological traditions. His potential contribution to a Pan-Africanist knowledge base; His views on political class struggle; Relation of African labor exploitation with Marxist literature.

Proposes the use of Pan-African nationalism as an Afrocentric approach in the analysis of the struggle of the African people. Comparison with Pan-Africanism; Conceptual definition of Pan-African nationalism; Eurocentric analysis of the African liberation struggle.

Presents an overview of the misconceptions over the stark reality that has actually shaped the movements of Pan-Africanism and Zionism. Movements in polarity; Pan-Africanist misconstruction; Academic Eurocentrism.

Comments on different Pan-African studies concerning the African experience in the world. Views on the work done by Professor Aisha Blackshire-Belay concerning the national and international transformation of the African people; Details on the problems faced by Africans such as the proliferation of HIV infections and poverty.