Pan-Africanism 101: In Conversation With Layla Brown

Welcome to the first episode of our Pan-Africanism series, our guest today is Dr. Layla Brown who is a Pan-Africanist and organizer with the All Africans People's Revolutionary Party GC, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and Africana studies at Northeastern University in the United States and co-host of the Life Study Revolution YouTube show. We have some more interviews and events on Pan-Africanism planned over the next couple of months so please tune in for more if you're interested, or reach out to find out how to get involved with our organization.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Transcript

Mohamed: Welcome to a new episode on 1919 radio. My name is Mohamed. In this episode I'm joined by Dr. Layla Brown, and we're going to provide an introduction to and background on Pan-Africanism, in honor of May 25th African Liberation Day. 1919 is a Pan-Africanist organization and while we are not currently affiliated with any specific party or philosophical trend within Pan-Africanism, we wanted to clarify our political foundations, address common misconceptions we hear about Pan-Africanism, and create an educational resource for our audience, members and readership. We also have some more interviews and events on Pan-Africanism planned over the next couple of months so please tune in for more if you're interested, or reach out to find out how to get involved with our organization. Our guest today is Dr. Layla Brown who is a Pan-Africanist and organizer with the All Africans People's Revolutionary Party GC, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and Africana studies at Northeastern University in the United States and co-host of the Life Study Revolution YouTube show. So to start us off Layla, can you tell us how you define Pan-Africanism? 

Layla Brown: So this is an interesting question, because there are a multitude of approaches and understandings of what Pan-Africanism is, and what I won't do, which I know academics have a tendency of doing, is say that mine is right, but what I will say what my understanding of Pan-Africanism is based on the political and organizing trajectory that I come from. So for me, as a member of the All African People's Revolutionary Party GC, we don't understand Pan-Africanism as a philosophy or an ideology. We understand Pan-Africanism as an objective, and that objective is the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism. So a unified socialist Africa, one unified socialist Africa, that is how we define Pan-Africanism for us as an objective. 

Now that is not to say that Pan-Africanism does not have an ideology. For us, ideologically, we see ourselves as Nkrumah-Toureists, and hat is based on the philosophies, the teachings, the praxis, the lived words of Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture, but also Kwame Ture. And so for us, you know, Nkrumah was a philosopher. He studied philosophy before he became a statesman. Sekou Tere, not so much in that way, but based on him having run Guinea as head of state, we do follow him as well, right? What we call Nkrumahism is based on his own study of Marx and other folks, and so scientific socialism as opposed to utopian socialism, forms the basis of what we understand to be Nkrumah-Turism. But what's important I think about us understanding ourselves ideologically as Nkrumah-tureists as opposed to Marxist or Maoist or whatever else is a question of culture. 

It's a question of history and origin. And this is quite important because for Nkrumah and Ture , they were both religious people, right? Nkrumah was a Christian,Tare was a Muslim, and they understood that an ideology that disallowed African people to have a particular kind of relationship to their spirituality was not indigenous to us.

As a people, we tend to have spiritual beliefs. And so Ture even explicitly said that as a Pan-Africanist and as a Muslim you must be the most principled Pan-Africanist Muslim you can be. And that those things must go together. So that is for us how we understand what Pan-Africanism is. It is working towards one unified socialist Africa with an understanding of what is indigenous to us as African peoples through our culture, through the way we interact with one another, through our spiritual beliefs. 

Mohamed: So going a bit more broadly, how has the historical experience of Africans under colonialism and in the New World diaspora influenced the developments of current expressions of Pan-Africanism as movement and philosophy today? 

Layla Brown: So there's an argument that Kwame Tare made that even without the advent of transatlantic slave trade of colonialism and imperialism, we still would have moved toward a unified communal Africa. But then there are other folks who will say that Pan-Africanism is in some way a direct response to the ways we have been dispersed all over the world because of the way the diaspora has been created, and that the earliest manifestations of Pan-Africanism happened in the diaspora. I think Kwame Tare would refute that, and he would say no, there were already sort of existing understandings of that on the continent. However, the way we understand Pan-Africanism now is most certainly in a lot of ways developed in response to our predicament as diasporic peoples. In essence, we are attempting to push back against the ways that we have been dehumanized that we have been denied culture that we have been stripped of our languages stripped of our religions …you know all of these things in order to be able to see ourselves as a united people, both in the diaspora and on the continent. The work that colonialism has done on us has made us believe that we are so distinct, and that we are so different. So like I said, there is a dispute about whether or not pan-Africanism in this modern expression would look the way that it started to look as precolonial Africa was developing, but I would say the current expression is a response to our predicament as a formally or even presently neo-colonized peoples living under empire. 

Mohamed: I like the way that you frame that twin understanding of pan-Africanism as both a movement that arose in a particular moment as a unifying force and a reaction to colonial expression but also rooted in the idea that this could have been a possible path or alternative future indigenous civilizations and society on the continent may have just naturally undertaken irrespective of colonial intervention. So my question is nowadays I find that the common perception of pan-Africanism has been more so focused on hoteps and around Egyptian monarchies, el-es-so on some of the figures you mentioned earlier that have been influential in its political and philosophical development as a liberatory force like the scholar and former president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah and of course the Ghana intro Kwame Turei formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. Why do you think that is and how can we recover the roots of pan-Africanism? 

Layla Brown:  I don't like the term ‘hotep’, I think we should really not use ‘hotep ‘in that way, because ‘hotep’ means peace. So when we use it disparagingly, we're taking on language that detracts from what it is and what we want to do. Now, we also know what we're referring to generally when people say’ hoteps,’ which I think is a particular kind of puppeting of western masculinity that I don't know is always indigenous to us as African peoples. 

In the early days of our coming to consciousness with ourselves as African peoples, there is a phase that we go through thats more of a cultural nationalism where we maybe adopt we we re-adopt names, or we might dress a particular kind of way, but when it comes coming back to a relationship with our with our understanding of Africa, I think what becomes problematic about that is that for a lot of folks in the diaspora, who don't have contemporary relationship with the continent, their understanding of Africa becomes only this sort of historical primordial understanding of Africa, and not of Africa as a current place where there are people living at the moment. 

Mohamed: I find the concept of Pan-Africanism can sometimes lead people to assume that emphasizing power through unity means ignoring all the historical cultural ethnic religious and linguistic diversity that exists on the continent and among African people around the world. How does Pan-Africanism acknowledge and respect that diversity in your view? 

Layla Brown: A lot of people have a problematic understanding of unity, and they think that unity means sameness. We understand that unity does not mean sameness. Ideally, we would be able to speak some common languages so that we could communicate with each other, but other than languages we do not need to be the same people, nor do we need to have the same types of practices. But we do need to understand that the contemporary nature of our oppression is a byproduct of the way we have been collapsed into one people, and so we do have to understand ourselves as connected in those types of ways. But that does not mean that we cannot be different people. One thing Nkrumah would always say is that he was fighting for the independence of Ghana as a territory, but the independence of Ghana means nothing without the independence and liberation of the rest of the African continent. So that's why Nkrumah, Ture, and Madhya Bokeita formed the Guinea-Ghana-Mali Alliance, because there was an understanding of the need to constantly go beyond this Balkanized Berlin Conference version of Africa. We have to move away from the tribalism and the micro nationalism. We have to understand that Haitians are still Africans and Jamaicans are still Africans, and recognize struggles that took place on that particular land, but also still recognize  that Africa needs to be primary in our understandings. Because as long as we lack a base, we will be disempowered throughout the rest of the worl. So I think what we need to make clear, is that unity does not mean sameness and that we understand that we are not the same people in all of these sort of small ways. In order to achieve our freedom, our liberation, and our full humanity, we have to unite on the basis of the material factors we have been oppressed based on.

Mohamed: so Pan-Africanism has its expression as an intellectual movement among scholars like in the first Pan-African Congress in 1919 in Paris following the aftermath of World War one but can you talk about about how you've seen it manifest as a movement beyond that you know as a political and cultural struggle carried out on the part of everyday people and organizers since then ?

Layla Brown: So the earliest iterations of Pan-Africanism that we see in terms of the modern expressions are mostly led by intellectuals and statesmen. We see its most modern form kind of really take shape in 1945 in Manchester England right when Nkrumah becomes a significant contributing organizer to that particular conference, and that is because he shifts the focus from intellectuals from statesmen to workers. This is the first time the Pan-African Congress takes on a distinctively working class character, as opposed to the kind of elite character of statesman and intellectuals. In this moment there are a lot of people there are a lot of people who want to continue to see the African Union as a manifestation of Pan-Africanism, which I do not understand it to be that, because I understand the African Union as it currently exists to be a neocolonial puppet. They are not doing the bidding of African people. So we also have to be careful about the fact that we see certain expressions of things that are called Pan-Africanism that are not true to the way many people who identify as actual Pan-Africanists understand Pan-Africanism. We need to distinguish between all of these different ways of contributing to Pan-African struggles, and to understand what it actually is again. and I think that that's why it's important for me that understanding Pan-Africanism is about that ultimate objective.

Mohamed: You mentioned diaspora wars, so I wanted to know what you think about when you see that kind of stuff online. 

Layla Brown: I do not experience the diaspora wars in real life, the way that we experience them online. Now I think the diaspora wars over like food and like all that's cool, that's fun. 

So because of my parents’ political organizing, I did grow up with folks from all over. For example, my name is Layla, Delulu Zanelli Seku Brown. My father was made an honorary member of the general union of Palestinian students at Shaw University, which is an HBCU. So he had friends who were members of the Fatah faction and the PLFP, And so Layla Khaled is still alive, a Palestinian woman who's known for hijacking a plane. And Delula Mugrabhi was a member of the Fatah faction who died in the coastal road massacre, which I believe was in 1968. 

I grew up in the South, my older brothers named after Patrice LaMumba, my younger brothers named after Kwamey Nkrumah. And, so I know a lot of people with lived experience like this. So while I won't deny there continues to be a lack of understanding of Africa in general for folks that can result ignorant comments, but I don't necessarily equate that with diaspora wars and the same kind of a way that I think we see online. I will also say that in 2006 was my first opportunity to go to the content of Africa and we went to Guinea to Conakry. 

We went there to both do some work, but also to establish connections on the ground. And when I went to Guinea, I did not have anybody telling me that I was not African. In fact, what I mostly heard was welcome home. I've been to Senegal like I've been all over Latin America Caribbean, you know all these different places and for the most part when I encounter other African African descended people. It's mostly a welcome. I don't have those same kinds of tensions.

Mohamed: On this point about diaspora wars and wars in the diaspora in general, we can't really talk about pan Africanism without talking about the assassination of major figures, like Thomas on Kara and Patrick from Mumba by Western powers, and even the jailing of people like Marcus Garvey in the United States. So why do you think this concept of African unity poses such a threat to the Western world? 

Layla Brown: Because our disunity is what allows Western imperialism to perpetuate. And so the notion of us actually being unified as African peoples is a threat to the US Empire. Western imperialism benefits from us fighting wars amongst ourselves and not understanding who our actual enemy is. So when people like Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales are pushing for us to see ourselves in a united struggle, that signals the beginning of the end of Empire.

Mohamed: One criticism of pan Africanism I've heard is this perception that it's dominated by men or patriarchal perspectives in general, or otherwise that women have contributed little to the development of the movements. How do you respond to that?

Layla Brown: So all of our heads of state who have claimed pan Africanism to this point have been men, because for the most part heads of state have been men. But we also know that there are so many tales of women doing this work. For the most part women are actually just doing a lot of work, and it's actually our responsibility to sort of recoup those histories. So because we live in a sexist and patriarchal world, obviously any manifestations of Pan-Africanism is prone to falling victim to that because of the world that we live in. But I also believe that, as Thomas Sankara said, “women hold up the other half of the sky.” There is no true revolution without women's revolution. Nkrumah said “the political maturity of a country is measured by the degree of its women's maturity.” Hugo Chavez says “no socialists is a true socialist without being a feminist.” So pan-Africanism is not distinctly masculine as opposed to any sort of other kind of way of being in the world. 

Mohamed: So there are those that perceive pan-Africanism as something that's exclusive to the continent, and specifically sub-Saharan Africa, which I find as a term is actually an external definition born out of racial and colonial difference, rather than something that maps on to real geographical and national and cultural differences. After all, border towns are generally more similar to each other culturally, demographically, and economically than the metropoles of the nations they're in. So my question here is, how does pan-Africanism relate to and go up beyond these nation-state divides? I'm also thinking about the kind of pan-Africanism advanced by institutional bodies, like the African Union and the ECOWAS here. 

Layla Brown: One of the reasons why Nkrumah chose to marry an Egyptian woman was because he was trying to symbolically model that there was no distinction between Africa north of the Sahara and Africa south of the Sahara. And so I think, again, that false distinction is a creation of the West. It is yet another of those tactics to create and divide us. And that is not to say that folks who live north of the Sahara don't experience a different type of anti-black racism in the places where they live. We cannot deny that. So I don't say that to negate those experiences, but true expressions of pan-Africanism include the entirety of the continent of Africa and the islands, South Ome, Mauritius, the Comoros, and beyond. If you understand pan-Africanism the way I understand pan-Africanism, which is the desire to create one unified socialist Africa, we know that the African Union and ECOWAS are making trade agreements that are betraying the people. So again, the ultimate question has to be who's bidding are you doing? And we see time and time again, ECOWAS and the African Union are not doing the bidding of the masses of African people. 

Mohamed: Lastly, part of the motivation of this episode was a recent development in the movements for pan-Africanism liberation, one of which being the Alliance of Sahelian States that was formed this past year. What are your thoughts on this current moment in pan-Africanism in 2024 we're living through? 

Layla Brown: So I first started doing my dissertation research in 2009 in Venezuela. But when I was doing work in Venezuela, every time I would be in Venezuela, I would be encountering black people from all over the world. And I was like, why are y'all here? And they weren't necessarily academics or anything. Like they were just like, I've been hearing about what's happening in Venezuela and I wanted to see it for myself. So to me, that's an indication of a kind of grassroots form of pan-Africanism. Like I want to know what it's about for myself. So then I realized, okay, but then they were also like paying attention to all of the police violence that was happening in the US. So then after Venezuelans in Venezuela were asking me what's happening with black people in the US. But then I was also trying to make these connections with like the OAU and the Bolivarian Alliance of American States, right, as state structures or super state structures. And so there are all these different ways I'm seeing these connections. 

I would say over the past like five to 10 years, I have seen pan-Africanism enter into our common lexicon in a way that I don't think I've seen at another point in my life. And there's such a growing desire for people to make those connections. Like the Alliance of the Sahelian States, right? Or even the kind of simultaneous uprising of formerly or Francophone African countries pushing back against Francophone rule. We saw the uprisings in Burkina Faso. And then we saw Mali and then  Niger and Guinea, right? They're calling that a kind of resurgence of the Guinea- Ghana-Mali Alliance of Nkrumah Ture and Keita. While I think there's a lot of discussions to be had about the validity of military coups, and the fact that so many of these folks have Western training, there is still a kind of calling back to some of the rhetoric we saw in a past era. And I think that that is in the interest of Pan-Africanism. And regardless of whether or not we are always taking the best steps all the time, I absolutely think at this moment we are seeing a rebirth of Pan-Africanism. So conversations like this are really important to clarify what it is that we mean by Pan-Africanism in this moment.