Popular Pan-Africanism

Abstract

The success of Garveyism in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere in the African diaspora calls attention to the manner in which pan-Africanism has spread not merely through the flow of ideas, associations, and cultural traditions generated and sustained by intellectual elites, but through modes of popular knowledge production. Following the spread of Garveyism beyond the organizational limits of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and in the guise of rumor and millenial prophecy offers scholars a method of tracking the breadth and depth of the movement’s wide-ranging influence. It helps us understand precisely why white authorities across the colonial world viewed Garveyism (and its publication Negro World) with such alarm. It invites a larger rethinking of the trajectories of pan-Africanism as a political device and about the parameters of the black global imagination more broadly. This chapter pays specific attention to the dynamics of Garveyism’s spread in South West Africa (Namibia).