Pan-Africanism, Ghana, and the "Year of Africa"

Pan-Africanism emerged as an ideological and political movement in the late nineteenth century among intellectuals of the African diaspora. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the American sociologist, organized and took part in several Pan-African Congresses between 1900 and 1945 denouncing European colonialism in Africa, while Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican leader, promoted Black racial pride through the Universal Negro Improvement Association and founded the Black Star Line shipping company in the 1920s. The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, brought together future independence leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, and it marked a turning point, shifting Pan-Africanism from a diasporic perspective toward a direct focus on African liberation; Du Bois himself eventually moved to Ghana in 1961, where he died in 1963.