The Challenge to the Colonial Powers
Document
The opening statement of the Fifth Pan-African Congress: Africans will govern themselves, within a united world.
We demand for Black Africa autonomy and independence, so far and no further than it is possible in this 'One World' for groups and peoples to rule themselves subject to inevitable world unity and federation.
Read that last clause carefully: in 1945, the founders of African independence placed African self-government alongside a wider vision of world unity and federation. The statement does not specify a blueprint for an African federation, but it shows that independence and unity were conceived together, in the same breath, by the same generation.
Context
Weeks after the end of the Second World War, delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States met in Manchester, among them Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Amy Ashwood Garvey, with George Padmore as principal organizer and W. E. B. Du Bois as a Pan-African elder. The Congress produced several statements; the opening one put the colonial powers on notice that Africans would govern themselves.