1920s–1930s: (Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, and Négritude — Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association Preaching Africa for the Africans, the Profo…

1920s–1930s: (Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, and Négritude — Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association Preaching Africa for the Africans, the Profound Appeal to Young Nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s, Leopold Senghor and the Celebration of Africanité, and the Creation of Wider African Identities Rooted in the Common Experience of Colonialism and Racism): External influences were being brought to bear on the creation of wider African identities, rooted in the common experiences of colonialism and racism. The pan-African movement was expanding in North America and the Caribbean during the 1920s and 1930s. Marcus Garvey, who never actually set foot on African soil, was nonetheless an increasingly influential figure, founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association and preaching a message of Africa for the Africans and the expulsion of Europeans. Garveyism, eccentric though it was in some respects, had a profound appeal to young African nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s, heightening anti-colonial aspirations and instilling the kind of African pride expressed through the concept of négritude in Francophone Africa. Négritude, prominently articulated by the Senegalese poet and later first president Leopold Senghor, encouraged a sense of black self-respect and represented a celebration of Africanité and the antiquity of African culture and civilization. These were not merely intellectual exercises — they were acts of ontological reclamation, the assertion of a being that colonialism had systematically denied. From Harlem to Dakar, from Kingston to Lagos, the Black Atlantic was generating a counter-narrative to European supremacy that would provide the ideological fuel for the independence movements of the coming decades.