On Pan‐Africanism and Secession: Thinking Anti‐Colonialism from South Sudan

In the early 1960s, a group of exiled southern Sudanese politicians published a book and a quarterly journal calling for the secession of southern Sudan from Sudan to be a global concern. Roughly coinciding with the 1963 founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the publications articulated a case for equivalence between anti‐colonialism and secessionism, thus raising uncomfortable and fundamental questions of the project of Pan‐African solidarity. This essay engages these works to explore the frictions within the Pan‐Africanist vision, with attention to the aftermath of what George Shepperson described as the moment when W.E.B. Du Bois ceased to be in direct control of the movement as it “passed into African hands” between the end of the Second World War and Ghanaian independence (Shepperson 1962, 347). In the process, it deploys a perspective on the Pan‐African world in which London and New York become secondary to Khartoum and Kampala. It offers a way to contrast an “actually existing” Pan‐Africanism from a universalist ideal version in order to help us to reckon with the contributions to Pan‐African thinking that derive from lived experiences of south‐south forms of domination, rather than from axiomatic propositions of continentally shared interests.