Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In Black and African theology, especially in the North American and African contexts, there is consensus that claims of people of European descent being regarded as God’s chosen people, are heretical and serve to legitimise the domination in the name of differences with regard to race, class and culture. Such discourses may be understood to be a sustained critique, rejection, and even condemnation, of the injustices of imperialism, colonialism, human subjugation like slavery, and racial supremacy. In constructive responses to racial supremacy, claims have been made in certain political discourses, cultural philosophies and theologies, that instead, Black Africans who currently reside in Africa and those Black Africans whose ancestry is vest in Africa, may be regarded as God’s chosen people, and Africa as God’s chosen country. Such views are also expressed in some Christian circles and are discussed in the context of certain historical and contemporary North-American, and Pan-African theologies.

This dissertation examines the interplay of history, Pan-Africanism and soft power and its impact on how hegemony should be understood on the African continent. These dynamics were demonstrated through an examination of scholarship related to South Africa’s contested status as a regional hegemon. Using the theoretical framework of the Hegemonic Stability Theory, it argues that much of the current contestation is attributed to the limitations of transposing a global theory to the regional level without taking into account the dynamics and complexities of that particular region. The study adopts a qualitative design and is grounded in an interpretivist paradigm to allow a more nuanced and richer analysis of the regional system. The study is a literature-based study that relies on secondary sources. The dissertation found that the examined contextual factors rooted in the history and ideology of the continent combine to create powerful structural forces that impede the operation of hegemony in the manner envisioned by Hegemonic Stability Theory. Any application of hegemonic discourse to South Africa therefore requires a deeper understanding of the continent’s history, its Pan-Africanist ideology, and accompanying norms and values, as they actively constrain hegemonic ambition. Domestic complexities; contested space; increased competition; waning soft power and lack of secondary state followership also impede South Africa’s hegemony in Africa. / Mini Dissertation (MDIPs)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Political Sciences / MDIPS / Unrestricted

Utilizing Afrocentric thought, this dissertation examines digital Pan-Africanism as a new theory that demonstrates the liberatory potential of digital technology including internet-based writing and businesses. Focusing on the burgeoning Black travel industry, it specifically considers contemporary travel narratives written by African Americans visiting Egypt and includes a thematic analysis of travel blog posts. It highlights the role technology plays in making international travel more accessible to African Americans and the potential that diasporic travel has in creating and strengthening inter-cultural bonds between African people throughout the diaspora. To this end, this dissertation advocates utilizing digital platforms as a tool for increased diasporic travel and Pan-African activism. It conceptualizes this new theory, discusses its implications within and outside of the travel industry, and offers a model to demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability. / African American Studies

As former colonies and newly independent states of the ‘Third World’ organized internationally around anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, Ghana became a key site in debates over development at the height of the Cold War. Contributing to the new economic and political history of postcolonial Ghana, this study examines the national development visions and international political-economic connections of the Nkrumaist state 1957-66 and the first year under the post-coup National Liberation Council through the lens of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of national development is co-constituted with these connections. Kwame Nkrumah situated national development as a resource in uniting the African continent against foreign political and economic influence. The Nkrumaist state played a leading role in the formation of the Organization of African Unity, non-alignment, nuclear non-proliferation, and attempts at harmonizing national development continentally. The movements of individuals to Ghana seeking participation within the Nkrumaist project were also racialized and gendered. Women Pan-Africanist activists organized conferences and made internationalist commentaries, making claims for inclusive economic development and participation. Furthermore, Ghanaian national development, dependent on mixed-planning foreign capital, markets, and technologies to finance projects, became increasingly subject to non-national departmental debates and an emerging liberal disciplinary politics through 1962-1966. The International Monetary Fund, Britain and the United States came to a consensus regarding a balance of payments and foreign reserve crisis in Ghana. After a military coup d'état in 1966, the NLC introduced an IMF reform package and embarked on a program of unmaking Nkrumaism. This study contributes to understanding the translocal dynamics of postcolonial development and development discourses. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / I argue that Ghana’s national development from 1957 to 1968 was conceived of, practiced, and situated within, transnational and international connections that can be best understood through the concept of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of development cannot be separated from these relational connections. The research supporting this concept contributes to understanding African postcolonial national development in tension and co-constituted with non-national dynamics. As an idea and policy mandate dictated by Kwame Nkrumah, national development was defined as a resource in the struggle for Pan-Africanism but also entangled with the politics of Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and international creditors. These translocal connections are explored through the activisms and commentaries of women Pan-Africanists, activists, and political moderates travelling to Ghana as well as the formal Pan-African diplomacies in pursuit of the economic unification of Africa. Ghana’s development future was also subject to the interdepartmental politics of international creditors and an emerging liberal economic consensus. This study is necessary because it changes our understanding of how the politics of postcolonial development is understood, as co-constituted with non-national political, economic and social dynamics.

The study insists on understanding the miscarriage of “Pan-Africanism” and the role of “African” mentality with the help of Fanon’s psychoanalysis “Black Skin, White Mask,” exemplifying the immense colonial, slavery, and apartheid psychological damages experienced by Black individuals resulting Blacks/Africans self-hate and a desire to be “white” throughout the domain of Western culture, ideology, and language. To provide accurate analysis of the “Pan-African” failure to solve increasing blacks-hate-against-blacks/xenophobia in South Africa, concepts othering, mimicry, subaltern from the critical theory (postcolonialism) were applied. Thereupon, Qualitative Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis relying on the theoretical concepts were conducted, which underlined how the mimicry process makes Africa's interaction an elite-driven one, oppressing African/subaltern citizens. The findings showed a need for "Black-Consciousness" and Nkrumah's “Pan-African” vision (African unification) to end colonial-mentality generating collective subordination of Subaltern/Africans. Generally, the use of Fanon’s psycho-social analysis has shown that the generational oppression, trauma, and cultural stereotypes continue to robotize and dictate African leaders and the African Union's favoritism of Western “neo-liberal” policies. It is summarized that the “Pan-African” failure is a failure of gradual unconscious “Pan-Africanists” who pledge allegiance to “Western” policies rather than rededicating themselves to durable Radical “Pan-Africanism” which is an antidote to Africa’s self-hate/xenophobia, neo-colonialism, and the robotization of unconscious Africans.

This dissertation explores the memories and motivations of women who helped mold Pan-African cultural nationalism through challenging, refining, and reshaping organizations influenced by Kawaida, the black liberation philosophy that gave rise to Kwanzaa. This study focuses on female advocates in the Us Organization, Committee for a Unified Newark and the Congress of African People, the East, and Ahidiana. Emphasizing the years 1965 through the mid-to-late 1980s, the work delves into the women’s developing sense of racial and gender consciousness against the backdrop of the Black Power Movement. The study contextualizes recollections of women within the groups’ growth and development, ultimately tracing the organizations’ weakening, demise, and influence on subsequent generations. It examines female advocates within the larger milieu of the Civil Rights Movement’s retrenchment and the rise of Black Power. The dissertation also considers the impact of resurgent African-American nationalism, global independence movements, concomitant Black Campus, Black Arts, and Black Studies Movements, and the groups’ struggles amidst state repression and rising conservatism. Employing oral history, womanist approaches, and primary documents, this work seeks to increase what is known about female Pan-African cultural nationalists. Scholarly literature and archival sources reflect a dearth of cultural-nationalist women’s voices in the historical record. Several organizational histories have included the women’s contributions, but do not substantially engage their backgrounds, motives, and reasoning. Although women were initially restricted to “complementary” roles as helpmates, they were important in shaping and sustaining Pan-African cultural-nationalist organizations by serving as key actors in food cooperatives, educational programs, mass communications pursuits, community enterprises, and political organizing. As female advocates grappled with sexism in Kawaida-influenced groups, they also developed literature, programs, and organizations that broadened the cultural-nationalist vision for ending oppression. Women particularly helped reformulate and modernize Pan-African cultural nationalism over time and space by resisting and redefining restrictive gender roles. As such, they left a legacy of “kazi leadership” focused on collectivity, a commitment to performing the sustained work of bringing about black freedom, and centering African and African-descended people’s ideas and experiences.

<p>We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, draws on fifteen months of field research accompanying organizers, participating in protests, planning/strategy meetings, state-run programs, academic conferences and everyday life in these two countries. Through comparative examination of the processes by which African Diaspora youth become radically politicized, this work deconstructs tendencies to deify political s/heroes of eras past by historicizing their ascent to political acclaim and centering the narratives of present youth leading movements for Black/African liberation across the Diaspora. I employ Manuel Callahan’s description of “encuentros”, “the disruption of despotic democracy and related white middle-class hegemony through the reconstruction of the collective subject”; “dialogue, insurgent learning, and convivial research that allows for a collective analysis and vision to emerge while affirming local struggles” to theorize the moments of encounter, specifically, the moments (in which) Black/African youth find themselves becoming politically radicalized and by what. I examine the ways in which Black/African youth organizing differs when responding to their perpetual victimization by neoliberal, genocidal state-politics in the US, and a Venezuelan state that has charged itself with the responsibility of radically improving the quality of life of all its citizens. Through comparative analysis, I suggest the vertical structures of “representative democracy” dominating the U.S. political climate remain unyielding to critical analyses of social stratification based on race, gender, and class as articulated by Black youth. Conversely, I contend that present Venezuelan attempts to construct and fortify more horizontal structures of “popular democracy” under what Hugo Chavez termed 21st Century Socialism, have resulted in social fissures, allowing for a more dynamic and hopeful negation between Afro-Venezuelan youth and the state.</p> / Dissertation

La période suivant la fin de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale connut à la fois le démantèlement des Empires coloniaux et la montée de la guerre froide. La place de l’Afrique constitua un enjeu crucial dans ce contexte de reconfiguration de l’ordre mondial. Après avoir déterminé les protagonistes politiques et culturels des processus de décolonisation, nous nous proposons d’étudier ses enjeux tels qu’ils s’incarnaient dans les différentes définitions que chaque acteur donnait à sa société, toujours associée à l’« Afrique ». En suivant ainsi l’évolution de la référence « africaine », cette étude veut mettre en lumière la transformation des valeurs dans les sociétés coloniales et postcoloniales de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, afin d’y trouver la genèse des nationalismes. Tout en puisant les exemples dans trois pays ouest-africains, il s’agit de s’intéresser à l’aspect constitutif de chaque entité. Celle-ci fut pensée en interaction avec d’autres entités coloniales, régionales et impériales, souvent au-delà des frontières. À travers l’analyse de l’ensemble du processus de la décolonisation, cette thèse permet de comprendre l’articulation qui s’est opérée entre les deux dynamiques qui le composent : le panafricanisme et le nationalisme. / The post-Second World War period saw both the dismantlement of the colonial empires and the beginnings of the Cold War. The place of Africa became a key issue in the configuration of the new world order. This thesis examines the processes of decolonisation through the examples of certain political and cultural protagonists, and the different ways in which they tried to shape their respective societies in relation to their visions of “Africa”. By following the evolution of the notion of “Africa”, this study aims to shed light on the changing values of the colonial and postcolonial societies of West Africa, linking these to the emergence of their nationalist movements. While drawing its examples from three West African countries, this work also seeks to highlight the constitutive aspects of each of these entities, which were conceived through interactions with other colonial, regional and imperial units, often across borders. By examining the process of decolonisation as a whole, this thesis offers an understanding of the complex dynamics between its two constituent forces: pan-Africanism and nationalism.

The concern of this study is "locating the African Renaissance in development discourse: a critical study" and aims to investigate how the South African President Thabo Mbeki has conceptualized the African Renaissance. Through this the author has discovered the meaning of Mbeki's African Renaissance discourse with regard to its context in African development and how it is located in historical conceptions of development in Africa. Through this what innovation to development in Africa is presented by the discourse of the African Renaissance has been identified. Therefore this study is based primarily on an extensive literature research on conception of development and the African Renaissance. In comparison with other discourses on development, the study finds that Mbeki's African Renaissance discourse has been inspired by Pan-Africanist discourses such as self-reliance and African regeneration combined with dominant political and economic discourses such as globalization, good governance, structural adjustment and democracy. The study finds that the great contribution of Mbeki's African Renaissance is to call again on the Africans to realize their self-rediscovery and to restore the African's self esteem without which Africans will never become equipped for African development. However Mbeki stops short of attempting to suggest practical strategies to do so. The study finds that Mbeki' s Arican Renaissance discourse is moralistic and can no longer challenge global economic inequalities. / Thesis (M.A.)- University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

No description available.