Early 20th Century–1950s: (The Widening Horizons of Belonging — Africa as an Abstract Notion Formed in the Western Imagination but Increasingly Invented by A…

Early 20th Century–1950s: (The Widening Horizons of Belonging — Africa as an Abstract Notion Formed in the Western Imagination but Increasingly Invented by Africans Themselves, Pan-Africanism Born Outside the Continent Among African-Americans Seeking Ancestral Identity, the Africanization of Imported Ideas Including Liberalism, Socialism, and Christianity as Weapons Against European Hegemony, and the Organic Growth of an Internal African Identity): Africa — like Europe or Asia — is an abstract notion, formed largely in the Western imagination through travel writing, art, and political discourse. The notion of Africa was given physical form at the end of the nineteenth century through partition, and we are still living with the consequences. Africa was continually made and remade in the European imagination, then invented in practical terms through conquest — mapped, known, governed. But this was no one-way relationship: Africans formed their own perceptions of what Europe represented and responded on their own terms. From the early twentieth century, Africa was being invented by and for Africans themselves — they shaped new political realities and developed a clearer appreciation of who governed them and how they were seen by Europe. In time, African exposure to Western political concepts led to the embracing of the nation and nationalism as weapons against European hegemony, all the while Africanizing imported ideas through customization and subversion. The pan-African movement constituted an external invention — the European conquest of Africa had ignited not only European but African-American imaginations, and at the first pan-African congress in 1900 only a handful of delegates were actually African, indicating how deeply rooted North American African consciousness already was. Pan-Africanism defined itself against perceived historic white dominance, brutality, and injustice. Africans would take certain ideas — liberalism, socialism, the tenets of Christian faith, the Islamic faith long embraced by millions — and make them subversive, turning them to the building of new political and cultural communities.