- 1 All translations of French quotations into English are by Margot Chesné for this introduction.
- 2 In other American and Caribbean regions outside the United States, categorization labels and self-i (...)
- 3 For more on circulations and the transnationalization of the BLM movement, see number 6 of this jou (...)
1What does Africa stand for? In her essay, which bears this existential question as its title, writer Léonora Miano describes “the transatlantic deportation of sub-Saharan Africans and European colonization” as “the origins of Africanity.” Thus, “to call oneself African [...] is to know that one comes from deep wounds” (Miano 2017: 108).1 On the other side of the Atlantic, the use of identifying categories to refer to people of African descent has varied and evolved over time (Smith 1992). In the United States, while some have claimed the term “African American” as a reflection of their dual identity and consciousness, others express a preference for the term “Black” (Sigelman, Tuch & Martin 2005)2. Paradoxically, of these two terms, it is “African American” that more closely refers to this history of transatlantic deportation and the loss of connection with Africa. In the US context at least, the second term is understood as placing less emphasis on national embeddedness in the United States than on global diaspora networks, with the rapid expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement over the past decade also supporting this understanding.3 This raises the question of how these terms have been historically associated or dissociated from one another.
2The very origins of the African diaspora stem from the mass deportation of captive peoples from the African continent to the Americas and territories in the Indian Ocean and Asia. This forced migration was accompanied by a process of racialization of these enslaved peoples (Cottias 2007). Thus, certain physical and cultural characteristics supposedly common to these people were systematically associated with their “African” ancestry and their subordinate status. Envisioned as an anti-slavery and anti-racist resistance movement, Pan-Africanism, which subverts this stigma, is underpinned by bonds of racial solidarity. As structuring elements of post-slavery societies, including on the African continent, Blackness and Africanity developed in an interdependent manner (Pierre 2013).
3The interdependence between these two fundamental notions in the identification of peoples claims belonging to the African and/or Black community, in other words, the relationship between Pan-Africanism and the process of racial categorization, has nevertheless been the subject of very little analysis to date. However, racial categorization, identification, and self-identification with racial categories are historical, social, and political processes that have spread throughout the world. While the emergence of Pan-Africanism is concurrent with this process, Pan-Africanism has also embraced diverse political currents across space and time. Some Pan-African struggles have attempted to transcend racialized affiliations in order to envisage transnational anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial solidarity, while others emphasize culturalist solidarity and revive its racial foundation (Apter 2016). It is therefore essential to consider how the various political and cultural actors of Pan-Africanism have positioned themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with regard to the history of racialization.
4Logics of domination and otherization that rely on markers of identification are not, however, a European invention. We understand racial logics as a shared idea that supposes physical and cultural differences between groups which are passed down from one generation to the next (Takezawa 2005). While these logics may have existed in many societies before the European invention of “scientific racism,” the social, political, and economic structures that exploit these differences were transformed with its introduction and integrated into global processes of racialization (Clarke & Thomas 2006; Pierre 2013; Takezawa & Schaub 2022). In a post-slavery context, these racial logics operating within societies on both sides of the Atlantic were transformed to reinvent logics of domination and otherization.
5This issue examines the repercussions of the transatlantic matrix of race on post-slavery societies in both the Americas and Africa. While racial categorizations were conceived as tools of enslaving exploitation and imperialist domination, these same categories were subsequently reappropriated by those who were initially subjected to this process. As markers of external identification and self-identification, racial representations were transformed as they circulated from one society to another. We will examine the ways in which racial logic has been mobilized within Pan-African movements from the 19th to the 21st century. How does this influence the vision of “Africa” as a community of belonging, as well as the process of identification and self-identification of the African Being?
6The aim herein will be to study the circulation and transformation of racial thinking on the African continent and in the diaspora, as well as to elucidate the strengths and limitations of its mobilization within the Pan-African movement. In this context, Blackness as well as Whiteness have been mobilized as markers of external identification and self-identification for communities of African descent. The political mobilization of racial ideologies can be a tool of resistance, but it can also generate internal conflicts within African societies or between them. Is there a convergence in the anti-racist and/or Pan-African resistance strategies adopted in different post-slavery societies? Or, on the contrary, have the various interpretations of chromatic cultural and political concepts such as Negritude and Blackness been sources of divergence within Pan-Africanism? How has this affinity or divergence been exploited by national and international political powers (Thioub 2012; Pierre 2013; Apter 2016)?
7There is thus a question of unity and divergence in the various conceptions of Pan-Africanism where geographical dispersion has played a fundamental role in the circulation, transformation, and confrontation of representations relating to Africa. Complex relationships—imagined or experienced—between Africans on the continent and their diaspora, particularly in the Americas, bear witness to this. However, throughout the historiography of Pan-Africanism, although the contribution of leading figures in the diaspora to Pan-Africanist movements has been generally recognized, little attention has been paid to their engagement with the continent, its societies and peoples, or to the tensions and differences that arose as a result. One of the emblematic illustrations of this dynamic is the “Back to Africa” movement, which envisaged the physical repatriation of the diaspora to the African continent. In this introduction, we propose to examine the ambivalent role played by the African diaspora in this moment of connection and confrontation marked by racial logics.
8The “Back to Africa” movement reflects a Pan-African desire to establish a homeland in Africa, envisioned as a claim of belonging to the continent of origin. Indeed, this homeland was perceived as a space of redemption for some members of the diaspora. However, it is important to note that, in the context of the transition between an economic system based on slavery and the emergence of imperialist capitalism, the “repatriation” of populations of African descent who had previously been enslaved was also presented as a “solution” to the socio-demographic “problems” posed by the gradual increase in emancipations (Suzuki 2020). As has been largely demonstrated, a historical continuity can be observed between, on one hand, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in European and American legislation, and, on the other, the subsequent colonization of the African continent (Rossi 2017). The movement for return ensured this continuity.
9In this context, abolitionist figures like Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Iquiano, themselves freed from servitude, argued for the establishment of a colony in Africa that was envisioned as a land of refuge for newly emancipated people. This idea led to the founding of two colonies: Sierra Leone, created in 1787 under the auspices of the British Crown, and Liberia, established in 1822 under the impetus of the American Colonization Society. Like the name of the Society suggests, the “Back to Africa” movement was in keeping with a colonial logic: for its advocates, colonizing Africa and creating a homeland for its diaspora were by no means contradictory objectives.
10If the abolitionist movement itself reveals a certain flexibility in its racialized conception of the world order—thus helping to pave the way for the colonization of Africa and its integration into the imperial capitalist system—the participation of freed members of the diaspora in this imperial project also reflects the complexity of their relationship with Africa and Africans (Boutelle 2023). This relationship was characterized, in the words of Achille Mbembe, as a double encounter: the first with “another other” and the second with “others of [their] kind.” Thus, there is constant oscillation between identification and distancing (Mbembe 2013: 48).
11The city of Freetown underwent rapid and significant growth, becoming a nerve center of British colonial expansion in West Africa (Everill 2013). In the context of abolition, so-called “legal” trade was supposed to replace the slave trade. Under the banner of the triptych “Civilization, Commerce, Christianity,” the expansion of the commercial sphere as well as evangelization were mobilized as moral and political justifications for the colonial enterprise. At the same time, Liberia, founded as a settler colony for freed African Americans, embodied a dual dynamic, both emancipatory and imperial (Vaughan & Maddison 2025). On one hand, it represented an escape from the slavery system and a space for free political and economic expression. On the other, Liberia also embodied expansionist ambitions. The arrival of new waves of migrants required territorial expansion to ensure the subsistence of the settlers, often to the detriment of the local peoples (Everill 2013). The founding of the country, followed by numerous battles of conquest, was thus part of a colonization process shaped by Western models. This ambiguity—between liberation and domination—gave the Liberian project a deeply ambivalent dimension. While serving as a foothold for the expansion of American influence on the African continent, Liberia was conceptualized as a bridgehead for the future free “homeland.” This expanding “homeland” ultimately reflected an alternative vision of empire.
12These ambitions quickly led to tensions, not only with local peoples but also with neighboring colonies. Having gained its independence in 1847, Liberia faced the challenge of preserving its territorial integrity with the limited military capacity of a newly founded nation, in the face of competing imperialist claims from two empires: British Sierra Leone and French Ivory Coast. This situation raised major questions about the viability of Liberian autonomy. However, despite its expansionist ambitions underpinned by American imperialism, Liberia’s independence on the African continent was also a Pan-African symbol of freedom and “Black” sovereignty.
13This ambivalence of the Liberian project, which was both emancipatory and imbued with racialized domination, is exemplified in the trajectories of two emblematic figures who were involved in it: Edward Wilmot Blyden and Booker T. Washington. Both men played a central role in the formulation of Pan-African solidarity, while at the same time entertaining ambiguous connections with the structures of power in place, racial hierarchies, and dynamics of the establishment on the African continent. Born in 1832 in St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands of the West Indies, under Danish rule at the time, Blyden migrated to Liberia in 1850. A thinker and politician, he was one of the first to theorize the notion of an “African personality,” emphasizing the continent’s cultural, spiritual, and historical characteristics in contrast to Western norms, thereby reviving racial pride. By comparison, Washington was born in 1856 in servitude in Virginia, in the South of the United States, and was emancipated at 9 years old. As an educator and influential businessman, he led the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, whose model of practical and technical industrial education was later transposed to Liberia.
- 4 W. E. B. Du Bois,“To the Nations of the World,” London, 1900, Du Bois Papers (MS312). Special Colle (...)
14Although Blyden and Washington both felt a sense of solidarity and shared destiny with their “homeland” because of their belonging to the diaspora, this feeling was nevertheless based on a racial view of the world, in which Africa represented both a symbolic refuge and a place of renewal for people of African descent. This transnational racial consciousness is part of the broader context of what W.E.B Du Bois referred to in 1900 as the “color line” describing a common experience of racial oppression by populations of African descent throughout the world.4 For Blyden, as for Washington, the political and economic success of the Liberian project was closely linked to Pan-African emancipation.
- 5 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to President Woodrow Wilson,” ca. November 1918, W. (...)
15For Blyden, emigration to Liberia was an act of emancipation that was intended to reflect the agency of people of African descent taking control of their own destiny. He thus emphasized, in racial terms, the “African” character of the diaspora, which was to return to the land of their ancestors, unlike other intellectuals such as Du Bois, who placed greater weight on the contribution of African Americans to the construction of the American nation and demanded full American citizenship (Blyden 1967 [1887]).5 Blyden (1862: 88–89) insisted, with regard to Americo-Liberians that: “not only do we and the natives belong to the same race, but we are also of the same family. The two peoples can no more be kept from assimilating and blending than water can be kept from mingling with its kindred elements.” Liberia was to provide this space for Africans and the diaspora to develop together according to their own social system and therefore express the African racial personality (Blyden 1862).
- 6 His concept of “African personality,” which highlights the originality of Africans’ contributions t (...)
- 7 In addition to various indigenous peoples, African American migrants formed several social strata b (...)
16Starting from Liberia, Blyden supported the idea of territorial expansion into the interior of West Africa in order to form a large West African nation. To this end, Blyden made several tours of the United States to recruit African Americans to emigrate to Liberia (Leahu 2009: 155). As he developed a somewhat essentialist view of “Africans,” Blyden clashed with Liberia’s mulatto community.6 While encouraging the emigration of African Americans to Liberia, he formulated a request to the American Colonization Society to send only “pure Negroes” there (Sterling 2015: 132). Tensions with the mulatto community eventually forced Blyden to leave Liberia to settle in Sierra Leone as of 18857.
17From Sierra Leone, he nevertheless continued to advocate for Liberia’s independence and development. In 1908, he was invited by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Liberia and delivered a speech in which he listed three necessary steps for Liberia’s development: “emancipation”, “illumination”, and “harmonization” (Blyden 1908). By “emancipation” and “illumination”, Blyden meant a “return” to African roots. He was encouraging Americo-Liberians to break away from Western norms, emancipate themselves, and learn the rules of indigenous societies in order to establish a system in harmony with them:
Liberia is [...] first and foremost a Negro State. That is its basis and that must be its superstructure. All efforts to de-Negroize [sic.] it will prove abortive. To have a little bit of South Carolina, of Georgia, of Virginia as component elements of the State is not progress. We do not want the same thing in Africa we left in America. (ibid.: 27–28)
18If, for Blyden, the founding of Liberia was an illustration of Pan-African resistance and racial emancipation, its great strength lay in its African “purity,” which was thereby also defined in racial terms.
19Blyden was also searching for an autonomous African space and therefore supported the movement for an independent African church (Lynch 1967). This was realized in 1891 in Nigeria with the creation of the United Native African Church, which, while maintaining a Christian character, gradually adopted various indigenous cultural practices (Leahu 2009: 158). In 1901, the latter merged with the Native Baptist Church, also founded in Nigeria by one of Blyden’s disciples, Mojola Agbebi. This new African church constituted a space “governed by Africans, worked by Africans, supported by Africans” (Adi 2018: 18). Securing and reclaiming their own space within the Church was indeed considered as one of the first acts of anti-racist resistance by Africans deported to the Americas, a pioneering act of Pan-Africanism (ibid.: 7).
20Booker T. Washington's Black and African political struggles partly echoed those of Blyden, who argued that “each race was distinct but equal” (Blyden 1967: 277). Indeed, Blyden’s statement is reminiscent of the speech Washington gave in 1895 in segregationist Atlanta: “We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand.” Known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” this speech made him famous while sparking criticism from the African American community who considered his position too accommodating to the dominant White community. However, Washington’s words reflected his broader goal of racial uplifting through the practical and technical training of African Americans as well as their economic development. The “compromise” could also be interpreted as a political strategy allowing him more political freedom and influence vis-à-vis dominant politicians and businessmen.
21The relationships that Washington developed with African societies reflected this ambivalence of seeking power and social advancement without challenging the existing system of racial domination. Indeed, one of the most emblematic features of Washington’s policy was his interpretation of capitalist industrial development as a vehicle for the racial advancement of people of African descent, both in the Southern states of the United-States and in societies on the African continent. This is how the export of the “Tuskegee model,” named after the school he headed, was conceived of (Barnes 2017: 83–84). It was precisely this racialized pattern of capitalist exploitation of African “labor” that was exported to the German colony of Togo as the “Tuskegee model,” ensuring the continuity of the slavery in the American South and the colonialist system of the German Empire (Zimmerman 2010).
22Liberia was among the potential countries for exporting the Tuskegee model. In 1908, following repeated border conflicts, the Liberian government sought diplomatic intervention from the US government and sent a commission there. Booker T. Washington, whose growing political influence was recognized as far away as Liberia, was personally asked by the Liberian government to support this initiative before the US authorities. Washington did not fail to write personally to President Theodore Roosevelt to express his concern about the reception that the US government would give to the “first all-black commission” from Liberia (Washington 1982).
23The visit by the Liberian delegation gave Washington the opportunity to showcase his political influence. Expanding the practical education model he had developed at Tuskegee to Liberia was a key part of this. Before the official visit to the White House, the Liberian delegation was invited to the Tuskegee Institute and received personally by Washington. During this visit, an agreement was signed to send Liberian students to Tuskegee the following year for training in industrial education and to later apply it in Liberia. Washington himself volunteered the following year when an American commission was sent to Liberia, before being replaced by Emmett Scott, his personal secretary at the Institute. This assignment also gave Washington the opportunity to explore the possibility of expanding Tuskegee’s industrial education in Liberia.
24Now, it should be noted that this political ambition was supported by an equally Pan-Africanist motivation. When receiving the Liberian delegation in the United States, Washington emphasized the “racial” dimension of their representation. Just as in his letter to President Roosevelt, Washington declared in a speech he delivered to the National Negro Business League, welcoming the delegation: “They are here in Washington on an official visit, not merely as envoys of their land but as representatives of the entire Negro race” (Moniba 1975: 72). Here, the “Negro race” is seen above all as a network of solidarity. For their part, the Liberian delegates emphasized that preserving their national sovereignty was a demonstration of the African people’s ability to govern themselves. Thus, what was taking place, far beyond border and diplomatic conflicts, was Pan-African resistance against imperialist expansion. After this visit, Washington published articles in American and Liberian newspapers to gain public support for the Liberian cause. In recognition of this effort, the Liberian government awarded him the Order of African Redemption, a Pan-Africanist decoration.
25Alongside these diplomatic activities, the project to expand the “Tuskegee model” continued. However, Liberian students at Tuskegee complained about the conditions of their study in the United States, resulting in many dropping out. Subsequently, in 1912, the Institute changed its strategy from admitting students to supporting the establishment of industrial education schools in Africa, in general, and in Liberia, in particular. The International Conference of Negroes was convened to provide African elites with information about the practical industrial education model offered at Tuskegee. This call from Washington was seen by African intellectuals such as Joseph Casely-Hayford as a way to take back control of education in Africa (Barnes 2017: 138).
26Educated in Sierra Leone and a disciple of Blyden, Casely-Hayford was also editor-in-chief of the Gold Coast Leader, one of the most influential West African newspapers of the time, in which he published several of Washington’s speeches. Like Blyden and Washington, Casely-Hayford belonged to an intellectual elite shaped by Western and Christian education. Creating African-run educational institutions was, for these three figures, an act of Pan-African militancy: these schools were to provide not only a space for emancipation through knowledge, but also to demonstrate Africa’s capacity for self-governance.
27Washington’s educational project in Liberia failed in this regard: founded after his death, the institution that bore his name was taken over by the Phelps-Stokes Foundation and excluded Africans from its management. As a result, industrial education designed to train “Black” workers was transformed into a tool of imperial exploitation (Zimmerman 2010).
- 8 Gold Coast Leader, December 18, 1920 : 4.
28Following Washington’s death, it was Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association networks—expanding into Africa in the 1920s—that took up the mantle by promoting the creation of industrial schools. However, Garvey’s efforts to send African American envoys were not always well received. In the pages of the Gold Coast Leader, Casely-Hayford expressed his skepticism about what he perceived as Garvey’s unjustified pretensions, stating that he believed he could direct Africans simply because he was “a Negro from Africa”.8 This reaction reveals a divergence in conceptions of racial and African identity. While for people from the diaspora, their African racial ancestry was supposed to provide a guarantee of pan-African connection, the continent’s elites claimed their own African identity developed locally. This illustrates how there was competition for legitimacy to represent the African community.
- 9 This policy of “assimilation through marriage and blood” was implemented, for example, in Taiwan un (...)
29Closely following the initiatives of intellectuals and activists in the diaspora across the Atlantic, Casely-Hayford was always mindful of the position of Africans on the continent in relation to the diaspora, insisting the former were the best situated to understand their own societies (Casely-Hayford 1969). This position was shared by Kobina Sekyi, another member of the political elite from the British Gold Coast, who declared that: “the salvation of the Africans in the world cannot but be most materially assisted by the Africans in America but must be controlled and directed from African Africa and thoroughly African Africans,” emphasizing the different roles that each was to play (Sekyi 1924: 24). Sekyi also described these diasporas as “de-Africanized brethren outside Africa” while advocating for marriages between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora (ibid.: 36, 40). While marriage was considered in some empires as a tool of domination, transmitting whiteness through “blood,” Sekyi flipped this to transmit Africanity through “blood.”9 These perspectives reveal a concept of Africanity that’s both geographic and cultural, seen as transmissible through race but needing a territorial anchor to be fully legitimized. The tension between identifying with the diaspora and distancing oneself from it has always been present in pan-African discourse and practices, highlighting the complexity of solidarities built around race and African identity.
30While Pan-Africanism is primarily about connecting the demands for human and political rights of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora, founding a nation was one of the ultimate aims that would enable them to enjoy their rights fully. The articles in this issue address the ways in which a racial understanding of Pan-African networks was mobilized to conceive of this nation.
31In her article: “The Invention of Black Africa. Race, Nation and Diaspora in the Philosophy of Marcus Garvey,” Nadia Yala Kisukidi carries out a detailed analysis of Garvey’s nationalist discourse which, according to her, asserts “a substantial relationship between blackness and Africanity.” The author interprets this correlation between both elements in Garvey’s work as an attempt to restore the humanity of people of African descent who, under the classification of “Black,” were stripped of it.
32Furthermore, Kisukidi shows how this diasporic racial community was transformed into a socio-racial class that refuses any integration into the space of exile in order to claim a “land of its own” on the African continent. Building the Black Nation is thus the only way for Africans of the continent and of the diaspora to extract themselves from racial exploitation. One must therefore emphasize how key this existential challenge inherent to the conditions imposed upon Black people was to the movement for return.
33In the context of the construction of an international system following the Wilsonian principle of self-determination after the First World War, the Black Nation was also conceptualized as a sovereign space vis-à-vis other nations of the world. While the redistribution in the form of mandates of Germany’s old colonies in Africa to the French and British empires caused disappointment among many pan-Africanists, including Casely-Hayford, Du Bois, and Garvey, the Garveyan project to build a Black Empire focuses on Liberia as of the 1920s. The negotiations between the UNIA and the Liberian government which appeared promising initially were then met with numerous obstacles and ultimately ended in failure. The historian Keiko Araki interprets Liberia’s refusal to host the activities of the UNIA as an nationalist act in struggle for Liberia’s own sovereignty in the face of Western pressure (Araki 2021: 133–141). Indeed, in addition to the border conflicts discussed above, Liberia was suffering from a financial deficit and was about to accept a loan from the tire company Firestone, making official support for Garvey’s project a poor strategy for negotiations with Western powers. It is therefore paradoxical to note that the African diaspora’s quest for national sovereignty was confronted with another African national sovereignty.
34The criticism levelled by UNIA members against the Americo-Liberian oligarchy mentioned by Kisukidi is particularly interesting for its racial language: “degenerate and morally weak.” While the criticism was addressed against practices exploitative of native Africans, Araki also notes the tensions between UNIA and the Americo-Liberian minority, who felt their fragile dominant status threatened by Garvey’s project (ibid: 139–140).
35However, while this concerns two concepts of African and Black nation building, it is equally a question of the seizure of power and its legitimacy. This legitimacy was expressed in Garvey’s discourse, using racial language, thus emphasizing the racial character of the community.
36In the Americas, the circulation of Pan-African ideas of racial Black community, studied by Ary Gordien in his article “Nationalism, Race and Pan-Africanism in Guadeloupe: Thinking a Glocal Black Condition,” takes on another dimension. In the francophone Caribbean after the Second World War, nation-building was also central but this nation represented above all a local community.
37If we compare the situation with that of Garvey, Du Bois, and Washington in the United States, we find similar dynamics of socio-racial constructs and political tensions arising from them, with the sole difference being that Guadeloupeans of African descent, referred to as neg, are the numerical majority on the island. As the author demonstrates, taking this neg condition into focus paved the way for a transnational logic of the black diaspora that associates with the Pan-Africanist ideas of connecting human and political rights and demands mentioned above.
38Gordien’s article describes this oscillation in the conception of the Guadeloupean nation, which has evolved over time, between local roots and transnational Pan-African and Afrocentric connections. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the dominant anticolonial movement in Guadeloupe was anchored in the fight for independence and ethnonationalism, implicitly addressing black racial consciousness. From the 1990s and 2000s onwards, a (post-)modern notion of Blackness spread, particularly through African American and Jamaican subcultures (reggae, dancehall). At the same time, Pan-Africanism, and especially its Afrocentric branch, grew in popularity. The focus shifted toward affirming a sense of transnational Black belonging, while remaining anchored in Guadeloupe, based on the idea of unity and African civilizational greatness.
39While Garvey and the UNIA sought a physical reconnection of the diaspora with the African continent, Afrocentrists in Guadeloupe in the contemporary period advocate especially for a spiritual reconnection. It is interesting to note that the emergence of this current in Guadeloupe coincides with movements with similar Afrocentrist discourse in mainland France. These militants, following the example of those cited by Gordien, have indeed moved around the different spaces of the Black Atlantic (Auque-Pallez 2022). The anti-hegemonic and anti-system rhetoric, described by its proponents as anti-imperialist, has gained a certain audience at a time when the repercussions of growing global socioeconomic inequality have been felt most acutely by those who affirm, among other things, their Blackness. However, in a somewhat reverse movement, this transnational trend is being mobilized in the contemporary Guadeloupean context within nationalist debates to define a Guadeloupean identity that oscillates between Creoleness and Negritude.
40Despite the rich perspectives offered by the contributions in this issue, certain major themes remain to be explored. The place for the memories of the slave trades and slavery in contemporary African societies constitutes one of the keys to understanding not only relationships with the diasporas, but also the racialized concepts of belonging which developed through these relations. The year 2024 marked the 30th anniversary of the “Routes of Enslaved Peoples” launched by UNESCO in Ouidah (Benin), and in February 2025, the African Union adopted a resolution calling for “justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations” for slavery and colonization. Ghana spearheaded this initiative and had already made headlines in 2019 with its “Year of Return,” granting citizenship to more than 500 members of the African diaspora.
41These memorial policies and politics, strongly implicating members of the diaspora, are also linked to militant demands of a Pan-Africanism based on racial solidarity. The 9th Pan-African Congress, taking place in Togo in December 2025, is part of this dynamic and defines Pan-Africanism as an “ideology of racial solidarity.” This ideological renewal is also echoed in Afrocentric currents. This notwithstanding, critical analysis is needed as there is a risk of exclusivity inherent in solidarity based on so-called ancestral ties. As Farai Chipato points out, an essentialist conception of African identity gives rise to both nativist and chauvinist arguments, as illustrated by the xenophobic attacks that occurred in South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 2000s (Chipato 2023). Moreover, since the beginning of the century, technical advances in genetic studies, particularly in the field of medicine, have given rise, in the United States among other places, to a new trend toward the biologization of “races” (Bonniol, Edwards-Grossi & Wang 2021; Sabbagh 2022; Pontarotti 2023). The increasing use of commercialized genetic testing to “determine” the family ties lost to the slave trades are one consequence of this (Abel 2022). While Pan-African solidarity connections were always “imagined” as compensation for the original loss, the genealogies traced by these tests have the effect of cementing specific connections, thereby erasing any flexibility that had previously served the movement in terms of including multiple voices and adapting to diverging contexts.
42Counter-discourses to the chromatic identifications of Africa—such as those brought forth in the concepts of Creoleness or Afropolitanism—would be a welcome addition to these debates. While Africa’s relationship with the world is still a central issue, Afropolitanism as defined by Achille Mbembe takes up the notion of dispersion and, in a way, subverts it to associate it with that of immersion:
In fact, the precolonial history of African societies was, through and through, a history of people continuously on the move across the whole of the continent. It is a history of cultures in collision, caught up in the maelstrom of wars, invasions, migrations, mixed marriages, diverse religions that we adopt as our own, techniques that we exchange, and goods that we carry around to sell. The cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood outside the paradigm of roaming, mobility and displacement [...]. The other aspect of this circulation of worlds is immersion. It affected, to varying degrees, minorities who, coming from afar, ended up settling on the continent. So, it is not just that part of African history is found elsewhere, outside Africa. There is also a history of the rest of the world of which we are, by force of circumstance, the actors and custodians, right here on the continent. (Mbembe 2006)
43It is therefore both a dispersion within the African continent and an African identity defined through contributions from the rest of the world that makes Afropolitanism an implicit part of Pan-Africanism, constituting its complementary pole (Mangeon 2018: 48).
44Lastly, voices from regions often marginalized in Pan-Africanist discourse, such as those of North Africa, the Indian Ocean, and African diasporas in the Middle East and Asia, are likely to shed new light on the racial tensions that permeate the imagination and practices of Pan-African solidarity.
45The historical but also revived centrality of race as a principle of solidarity, resistance, and/or recognition demands reflection on its ambivalences. If Africa is an imagined place of racial emancipation, it included nonetheless limitations mirroring those Pan-Africanism had sought to overcome. It is within this dialectic, between symbolic power and conceptual vulnerability, that the future of Pan-African solidarities seems to be unfolding.