1 - African Decolonisation, Armed Struggle and Black Power, 1958–1973

Summary

Chapter 1 begins by broadly sketching how the movement of the masses of African peoples towards armed struggle can be understood within the framework of Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition. Within this context, the First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) of 1958 takes centre stage as it brought a number of soon-to-be liberation movement figures together with older veterans of the post-WWII anti-colonial struggle on African soil to deliberate on the direction the decolonization process would take. During the conference, a debate emerged among conference participants on Kwame Nkrumah’s non-violent positive action versus Frantz Fanon’s armed struggle. After exploring how this was resolved, the chapter moves on chronologically to a broad examination of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition as it in consistent patterns fuelled non-violent insurgencies, dreams of freedom and decisions to return to armed struggle. The second half of the chapter follows Stokely Carmichael in Tanzania. This section is less about Carmichael or Tanzania, but more about tracking how Black Power ideas, concepts and praxis interacted with and within various liberation movements and continental African peoples. Carmichael saw Black Power as important for emerging states which were majority African/Black but was met with resistance by the ANC.