Pan-African ideology and its call to unify descendants of the African diaspora are essential to the process of decolonising African politics. Pan-Africanism denotes the ‘politico-cultural phenomenon’ according to Peter Esedebe, which holds that the unity of African individuals across the continent is essential to the ‘regeneration and uplift of Africa’. However, how do we turn theory into praxis? Pan-Africanism might just be the answer. Using the following case studies from Ghana and South Africa to demonstrate, Pan-Africanism is a multidimensional and fluid ideology that could have the potential to decolonise the socio-political landscape of today.

Pan-Africanism and Literary Resistance

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, written in 1988, demonstrates the importance of literary resistance as a vital tool against colonial institutions and the internalisation of colonial ideals. Through written African creative expression, literature plays a key role in turning theory into decolonial action. 

Particularly, Armah’s literary critique of post-colonial Ghana through the symbolic characterisation of his unnamed protagonist ‘The Man’ boldly criticises the corrupted motivations of Ghana’s first post-independent leader, Kwame Nkrumah, and the neglect of his initial Pan-African principles. During Nkrumah’s political leadership, he rose to power by enforcing a single-party system, which Ama Biney argues, served to further self-interest, maintain political power, and restrict the voices of Ghanaian citizens who opposed his rule. Paving the way for viewing literature as power for the people, Armah’s analysis of Ghana’s political landscape prior to independence insightfully reflects on the similarities between Nkrumah’s rule and the centralised power enforced by the British Crown.

Despite Nkrumah’s distortion of core Pan-African principles, Armah shares with readers an alternative perspective – psychological liberation from the colonial mindset through Black Consciousness, breaking away from the structural remains of colonialism post-independence. By resisting pressures to conform to the colonial status quo through Black Consciousness, Armah’s novel shines as a beacon for Ghanaian resistance and the ongoing fight to reclaim one’s identity. A key moment in the book which demonstrates this is the unnamed protagonist’s monotonous journey from home to work each day, representing the harsh reality faced by Ghanaian workers collectively suffering under post-colonial rule. This is a nuanced phenomenon that Armah calls ‘the walking dead’, to expose how national independence alone is simply not enough as resistance against colonial structures (p. 61). 

The novel also takes on the struggles that come with internal alienation for African individuals throughout the diaspora. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary psychoanalyst of the condition of the colonial subject, Armah expands his ideas about alienation to emphasise how integral creative expression is, and continues to be, in forming a foundation for a widespread Pan-African movement. 

Political fiction provides a mirror to real-world experiences and the psychological impact of living in neocolonial institutions.

Traditions of South African literary resistance strongly reflect Armah’s creative focus on Black Consciousness. Steve Biko, a central figure in the South African Black Consciousness Movement, says in I Write What I Like that liberation must be ‘taken, not given’ through a total freedom of conscience and expression for all African descendants – a core theme within Armah’s novel (p. xii). I believe both figures show just how connected the struggle for self-determination is throughout the world. Through literary resistance, readers across the continent (and globally) have access to a revolutionary body of work focused entirely on deconstructing the colonial mind. 

While political leaders like Nkrumah might misrepresent the core goals of Pan-Africanism, African resistance literature has the power to protect the ideological foundation of the decolonisation movement. Yet, the question now rests on an important consideration: whether Armah’s courageous The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born holds as much power in current decolonial movements as the novel once did almost forty years ago. 

At the beginning of this year, former Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo established visa-free travel into Ghana for all African passport holders. This policy enabled the fluid movement of creative African expression throughout the continent and the support for events such as the Pan-African Festival of Arts and Culture in Cape Coast which, according to Africa News, takes place every two years. This evolution of Pan-Africanism from Armah’s writings in the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary united initiatives reflects the significance of Black Consciousness in furthering decolonisation by protecting the intellectual autonomy of African heritages.

Centring African identities through art is crucial to decolonisation because it helps to articulate the current realities of feeling detached from a truly decolonised Africa. Literary expression, then, must be understood as a healing mechanism from which, through language, we can conceptualise a future of self-determined freedom for all African nations. This is reflected in Armah’s later writings, such as Remembering the Dismembered Continent, which explores the importance of healing Africa’s ‘dismembered heritage’ by potentially reversing the divisions established by British and Belgian rule (p. 117).

Ultimately, in resistance to European literary norms, Armah’s powerful critique of Ghanaian politics in Nkrumah’s era, which challenges the passivity of post-colonial governance, uses the psychological burdens of colonialism on working-class Ghanaians to disrupt the Western myth that the marking of independence in African nations automatically signals the fall of colonial legacies altogether. Through themes of Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanism, Armah highlights how decolonising African politics is not only about political self-determination, but also about reclaiming the distinctive cultural and artistic identities across the continent. Anticolonial writers like Armah, who advocate for the freedom of Africans in a physical, psychological, and spiritual sense, push for a truly decolonial Ghana and, hopefully by extension, a liberated Africa. 

Pan-Africanism and Student Activism

South African student activism is another important component of decolonising African politics, which has strong Pan-African ties to decolonial education movements worldwide, especially in the United Kingdom.

At the University of Cape Town, frustrated Black students mobilised against Cecil John Rhodes’ violent colonial legacy as a prime exploiter of the country’s natural resources by organising the Rhodes Must Fall movement. This movement, established in 2015 when a South African student named Chumani Maxwele covered the statue of Rhodes with human excrement – aims to combat institutional racism by removing all historical representations of colonial rule and by campaigning to establish a Pan-African curriculum in higher education institutions. 

The movement is largely influenced by Steve Biko’s writings on Black Consciousness during Apartheid because, similarly to Rhodes Must Fall, his Black Consciousness Movement called for the intellectual autonomy of Black individuals not only in South Africa, but also in other African nations still recovering from the effects of colonial rule. The demands of campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall go beyond just the symbolic, like removing public monuments of problematic historic figures. By aiming to establish a Pan-African curriculum at South African universities, the movement also mobilises the fundamental goals within Ghanaian resistance literature because both Biko and Armah employ intellectual protest to challenge colonial structures. 

Since 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement has expanded into other forms of student-led activism around the world, including notably the campaign to remove another statue dedicated to Rhodes at the University of Oxford’s Oriel College in 2020. Oxford students have consistently protested the remembrance of Cecil John’s legacy for over ten years now, building upon the core Pan-African principle from the Rhodes Must Fall movement: ‘all Cecil John clones must fall’.

Unsurprisingly, this international aspect of the movement and its spread outside of South Africa is largely overlooked. An example of this is the ongoing refusal of senior educators at Oxford to fully dismantle the statue and their decision to instead showcase an exhibition in October 2025. This was a tone-deaf attempt to frame the impact of Rhodes’ imperialism as the university leadership saw fit, whilst also spotlighting African art. This exposes the disproportionate power still held by colonial institutions over the reclamation of African heritages. 

However, this is only part of the picture. In solidarity with students at Oxford, over 150 scholars since 2021 have decided not to teach at Oriel College to support the wider academic community who felt deeply discomforted by the presence of Rhodes on campus. Repositioning modern student activism in South Africa within a global context recognises how decolonisation is fundamentally derived from the pursuit of connecting the shared experiences of African descendants throughout the diaspora, in trying to challenge established colonial norms in our public institutions.

Student activism on the Oxford campus also draws attention to the golden thread that connects all anti-colonial efforts of the past and present. The Palestine Solidarity Encampment, a movement organised by local students to fight against the ongoing violent destruction of life in Gaza, epitomises the importance of recognising all systems of oppression as interlocked. This new wave of activism offers hope that younger generations are increasingly recognising the importance of achieving solidarity across international struggles, suggesting that attempts to promote limited perspectives on freedom by large institutions like Oxford are more futile than we might think.

The inherent connection between decolonial action in South Africa and the United Kingdom emphasises the key role that literary resistance plays in forming part of the foundation for student-led activism in universities internationally. Without revolutionary writings from authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Steve Biko, and Frantz Fanon, as well as the influence of their radical ideas worldwide, decolonial efforts would lack the nuances needed to effectively dismantle colonial institutions, particularly in rejecting the psychological internalisation of colonial ideals. 

Decolonising African politics must involve, amongst other strategies, synthesising literary resistance and political activism. The harmony which is beautifully created between both enables a stronger framework for lasting structural change. Acknowledging the creative and multi-faceted dimensions of decolonisation shows that at its core, Pan-Africanism is a nuanced, fluid concept with an artistic inflection that should not be neglected. Through literary figures such as Armah’s ‘The Man’ in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Pan-Africanism dynamically functions as an intellectual, artistic, and activist movement, marrying various spheres of cultural and political expression to contribute towards truly establishing a decolonial future in Africa on our own terms.

Recommended Reading:

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers by Adekeye Adebajo 

On the Postcolony by Achille Mbembe

I Write What I Like by Steve Biko