Pan-Africanism is an ideology for the unity of Africa. Nkrumah said it was necessary because the neo- colonialists would rule in Africa through division of Africans and because combined Africa has a population and size more comparable to the oppressors like the United $tates. In Pan-Africanist thought, Africans belong to Africa first, not tribes or nations.
At least as far back as 1917, the British imperialists are on record as fearing Pan-Africanism, because it would make dividing and conquering more difficult in Africa. Today, the Zionists continue in the same mold, by trying to create tensions between North Africa and the rest of Africa, by pointing to Arab slave-owners in Somalia for instance. While there can be no excusing slavery, opposition to slavery does not mean that it is necessary to make friends with I$rael in general.
The economic content of Pan-Africanism is unity of exploited people against exploiters--whether its advocates or detractors know it or not. More than 95% of the people united by Pan-Africanism are exploited or super-exploited people. The target of Pan-Africanism is those enemy oppressors who would use divisions amongst Africans against them.
MIM believes that Pan-Africanism should be thought of as a strategic concept like "Third Worldism." It is not worth splitting communist forces over strategic concepts. Comrades with good ideological principles may nonetheless disagree on the existing balance of forces in the world and what is possible for progress, and we believe Pan-Africanism is one of those concepts, if properly conceived by communists.
Historically, Pan-Africanism has been the rallying cry of more progressive and revolutionary forces in Africa. The opponents of Pan-Africanism usually oppose it for the wrong reasons and fall into the reactionary camp much more often than the supporters of Pan-Africanism.
In particular, in southern Africa, the conception of the revisionist "Communist Party" of South Africa and the African National Congress has stressed unity of white and Black workers in opposition to Pan- Africanism. In contrast, MIM would say there is a qualitative difference between the white petty-bourgeoisie mistakenly referred to as "workers" and the Black workers making 3 or 5% of what whites make per hour.
While the rise to power of the ANC in what we call Azania is progressive-- only because what was in place before was the extremely repugnant and backward apartheid regime--it is now clear that the ANC's approach of uniting with the white petty-bourgeoisie and imperialists on an equal plane has limited the ANC's ability to drive the situation further forward in southern Africa. For this reason, while ANC rule is certainly more "normal" than apartheid rule, it is Pan-Africanism that correctly identified the economic basis for socialism in Azania and elsewhere in Africa. It hardly matters whether activists call themselves Black African trade unionists or Pan-Africanists, the economic content of their struggle is the same.
Opposing or supporting Pan-Africanism should not be a dividing line question, unless we speak of the extremes. On the one hand, the ANC and phony communists oppose Pan- Africanism, because they really believe there is a united "working-class" composed of Africans and settler whites who make 20 times as much per hour as the Africans. These phony communists and their allies have long ago abandoned the labor theory of value, so their opposition to Pan-Africanism must be attacked as a matter of ideological principle. There will never be global peace until all peoples acknowledge each other's labor correctly.
On the other hand, the number of reactionaries posing as Pan-Africanists is much smaller in number than the number of reactionaries opposing Pan-Africanism on behalf of the exploiters. To be sure, as with any idea, there are those who take it up and ruin it. When Pan-Africanism turns into cultural tokenism and opposition to universal truth production through science, then Pan-Africanism becomes simply a wing of reactionary post-modernism.
In application, it is the Trotskyists who are most apt to take up the simplistic approach that all nationalism is bad and even Pan-Africanism is bad. These Trotskyists have abandoned the labor theroy of value and that is why they are apt to equate white settlers and African workers as classes to such an extent that the Trotskyists see the whites and Blacks in one class. Such Trotskyists really know nothing about Marxism's approach to class or nations.
How tribal, national and Pan-Africanist questions appear in African conditions is something for the African Maoist scientists to determine. MIM does not have any branches in Africa, and so it only raises those questions of universal validity and understanding. There is a long historical tradition of Maoist Pan- Africanism.
Note: A.M. Babu African Socialism or Socialist Africa? London: Zed Books, 1981.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org