EDITORS, BLACK AGENDA REVIEW
The Pan African Congress of Azania’s 1959 Manifesto provides a radical blueprint for African self-determination.
In thinking about the South African peoples’ fight against the apartheid, the history of the Pan African Congress (PAC) gets short shrift. In fact, it is probable that many people, especially the younger generation, do not know the history and significance of the PAC. The Pan African Congress of South Africa – later, the Pan African Congress of Azania – was formed on April 6, 1959 with a leadership that included Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe as President, and Potlake Kitchener Leballo as Secretary. The PAC consisted of a group of younger activists who broke away from the African National Congress (ANC) over stark ideological differences. These activists, known as “Africanists,” rejected collaboration with the white oppressors and agitated for an African-led Black liberation movement. They argued a new society had to be based on African self-determination as Africans were (and are) the majority of the population and the laboring base of the nation.
The PAC felt betrayed by the ANC leadership. They called the ANC elite a “captured black leadership.” This was clear in the ANC’s adoption of a conciliatory “Freedom Charter” which the PAC argued was premised on the principle of “multiculturalism,” the principle that South Africa belongs equally to all those who live in it. PAC members were adamant that there could be no equality between the oppressed and the oppressor, the slave and the master, the dispossessor and the dispossessed. Moreover, they argued that “multiracialism” was a mechanism to privilege white minority rights.
The PAC’s position was also explicitly Pan-Africanist. It pushed against South African exceptionalism and, echoing Marcus Garvey and George Padmore, advocated instead for a “United States of Africa…as an effective bulwark against the forces of imperialism, colonialism,…and tribalism.” The PAC’s specific objectives were: uniting African people across the continent; fighting to overthrow white domination and implement self-determination; and striving for the establishment of “African Socialist Democracy” based on African peoples’ material conditions. In Sobukwe’s words, “We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.” At the center of the praxis of liberation, the PAC argued, was land. Land was the inalienable right of the indigenous African people. Africa was for Africans.
The PAC suffered for its radical position. In its first and most successful campaign on March 21, 1960, the PAC organized a large protest against the pass laws. This protest was a significant turning point in the fight against apartheid. The apartheid regime responded with brute force. In what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre, police in Sharpeville opened fire on the protestors ,killing 69 and injuring 180. Another massacre occurred in Langa, near Capetown. The apartheid regime declared a state of emergency and unleashed a progrom against PAC activists. It banned both the PAC and the ANC, forcing many dissidents into exile. The PAC regrouped while in exile, developing an armed wing (the Poqo, later renamed the Azanian People Liberation Army (APLA)), and continued to struggle for self-determination. But thousands of its members were arrested, detained, imprisoned, and tortured by the apartheid regime. Sobukwe was incarcerated on Robben Island until 1969, and held under house arrest until his death in 1978. Between the repression and the group’s own internal contradictions, the PAC lost force.
Meanwhile, the ANC was invited to the negotiating table with the apartheid regime. It is important to contrast here the position of the celebrated Nelson Mandela with that of Robert Sobukwe on the issue of land. While Sobukwe and the PAC centered land as the basis of African liberation, for South Africa’s ANC president, Mandela, declared, “In our economic policies, there is not a single reference to things like nationalization, and this is not accidental: There is not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology.” It is no wonder that, in this “post-apartheid” moment, whites still own 80% of the land.
The PAC is mostly forgotten today, and its radical vision of African self-determination – African people’s control of African land and resources – remains a distant dream. But we are hopeful that one day their vision outlined in their 1959 Pan African Manifesto, adopted at the PAC’s inaugural conference, will be realized.
The 1959 Pan Africanist Manifesto
(Adopted by the Pan African Congress at the inaugural conference, April 5, 1959 at the Orlando Communal Hall, Soweto, South Africa)
PREAMBLE
A. A Chain of Reaction
The significant portion of our social milieu begins with the expansion of the markets founded by the rising commercial capital of Western Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century. Succeeding years witnessed the “discovery” of new lands by the Europeans, the Papal award of the whole of Africa to the Portuguese, increased European slave raids on Africa, denuded Africa of Africans and led to the establishment in the Americas of the greatest mass chattel slavery that the world had ever known. Africa had been successfully robbed of Africans. It was this chattel slavery that contributed substantially to the initiation of the European industrial revolution which in turn resulted in the unleashing of a chain of reaction which culminated in the rape of Africa and the close of the last century.
B. Land Robbery and Political Subjugation
Early European settlement of Africa, especially of its southern tip, was a direct result of the rise of European commercial capital. Wave upon wave of European settlers came to Africa and their penetration of the interior involved the loss of sovereignty by the indigenous peoples and the alienation of more and more portions of their land. With the rise of the industrial capital of Europe and its increased search for raw materials and more markets, the partition of Africa went apace and the doctrine of “effective occupation” was enunciated, a theory calculated to “sugar coat” the bitter pills of land robbery and political subjugation. More and more settlers came into the country, until today there are 5,000,000 Europeans who up to the dawn of African liberation had constituted themselves as a ruling class over the 250,000,000 indigenous peoples. Africans had been successfully robbed of Africa.
C. Established by the Sword
The advent of European imperialism and colonialism to Africa brought in its wake the phenomenon of white domination, whether visible or invisible, which is characterized by the political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation of the indigenous African masses. Throughout this historical epoch, the age of white domination, whenever the spokesmen or representatives of white domination have sprouted a conscience, they have referred to the phenomenon as the “spread of Western civilization” or “the extension of Christian trusteeship.” The undisguised truth is that White domination has grounded down the status of man and stunted THE NORMAL GROWTH OF THE HUMAN PERSONALITY ON A SCALE UNPRECEDENTED IN HUMAN HISTORY. White domination was established by the sword and is maintained by the sword.
D. Expulsion of Imperialist Exploiters
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