Azania: South Africa's Radical Alternative

• In Event: Revolutionary Pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Description for Program

In the 1970s and 1980s, the South African Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) deployed the term “Azania” to describe the polity that they were fighting to liberate from both white settler colonialism and Apartheid control. The BCM popularized “Azania” to emphasize their claim to the occupied land, contending that Azania was the “Land of Zanj.” This re-naming amplified the anti-apartheid struggle’s claim to the land; demanded decolonialization; and forecasted redemption for the colonized nation. This paper examines the extent to which Azanian nationalism was a product of various twentieth-century anti-colonialisms, post-colonialisms, and Black internationalisms, while showing that within 1970s South African liberation debates, Azania refined what it meant to be against apartheid.

Author

• Amanda Joyce Hall, UC Santa Barbara