Pan-Africanism is a worldwide intellectual movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent. Based upon a common fate going back to the Atlantic slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans, with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States.[1] It is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political progress and aims to unify and uplift people of African descent.[2] The ideology asserts that the fate of all African peoples and countries are intertwined. At its core Pan-Africanism is a belief that African peoples, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny.[3]

The Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) was established in 1963 to safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its Member States and to promote global relations within the framework of the United Nations.[4] The African Union Commission has its seat in Addis Ababa and the Pan-African Parliament has its seat in Johannesburg and Midrand.

Pan-Africanism stresses the need for collective self-reliance.[5] Pan-Africanism exists as a governmental and grassroots objective. Pan-African advocates include leaders such as Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gaddafi, grassroots organizers such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, academics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and others in the diaspora.[6] [7] [8] Solidarity will enable self-reliance, allowing the continents potential to independently provide for its people to be fulfilled. Crucially, an all-African alliance would empower African people globally.

The realization of the Pan-African objective would lead to power consolidation in Africa, which would compel a reallocation of global resources, as well as unleashing a fiercer psychological energy and political assertion...that would unsettle social and political