Pan-African Organizing Pedagogies: Radical Praxes of Learning Across Black Social Movements

• In Event: Accounting for the Black Radical Tradition in the Heart of Black Pedagogy

Abstract

In Black social movements, we find generative models of movement-based learning, which explicitly aim to raise consciousness, shift public discourse, and ultimately catalyze liberatory action across the African Diaspora. The concept of “organizing pedagogies” (Strong 2017; Rogers, Mendelson, and Strong 2023) is expanded in this paper to theorize Pan-African learning practices that are explicitly radical, counter-institutional, and constituted by those typically marginalized by academic institutions, in order to bring into focus the essential role of social movements as contexts of radical learning, and Black organizers as pedagogues. Drawing upon ongoing collaborative research and organizing within the Movement for Black Lives in the United States and youth protest movements in Africa, this paper examines three contexts of radical praxes of learning across global Black social movements: (1) popular education within historic African liberation struggles (Strong & Nafziger, 2021), (2) political education tactics in the Movement for Black Lives in the U.S. (Nafziger, Strong, and Tarlau 2023; Strong, Ndgo, et al., 2022), (3) and the Pan-African Activist Sunday School, an intergenerational popular education platform developed by/for Pan-African organizers (Strong, Nafziger, et al., 2022).

With roots in global decolonization movements as well as the rich traditions of African indigenous education, popular education has historically shaped revolutionary activists and broader processes of social transformation across African liberation movements. This first Pan-African organizing pedagogy—Popular Education for Black Liberation—highlights the specific contributions of Pan-Africanist revolutionaries to the broader philosophy and praxis of education for liberation, drawing special attention to the largely uncredited impact of Paulo Freire’s political and intellectual engagement with African revolutionaries and Pan-Africanist popular education movements on Freire’s liberatory pedagogical theories. The second Pan-African organizing pedagogy—Abolitionist Political Education—is grounded in the practice of political education in the Philadelphia chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), which focuses on integrating abolitionist principles within the daily life of organizers and movement activities rather than creating educational spaces that are separate from the movement itself. The final Pan-African organizing pedagogy—Pan-African Activist Collaborative Learning—explores the example of an ongoing online pedagogical experiment, the Pan-African Activist Sunday School and Solidarity Collective, which signals new directions and possibilities for revolutionary movement building through participatory and online modes of education and struggle. Together, these movement-rooted praxes of Black pedagogy affirm the significance of Black social movement-based learning to struggles for liberation across the African Diaspora as well as the cultivation of radical philosophies, consciousness, and solidarities that have historically made these struggles possible.

Author

• Krystal Strong, Rutgers University