“Pan-Africanism’s Backwater: Ethiopianism in Colonial East Africa”

• In Event: The Atlantic as a River: Ethiopianism and the Black Struggle for Freedom

Description for Program

The story of Ethiopianism in East Africa is an important chapter in the history of Pan-Africanism, yet it has gotten rare awareness from scholars. Much more attention has been paid to the Black Atlantic, but the ideas of global black intellectuals had a major influence on the shores of the Indian Ocean as well. The story of Ethiopianism in East Africa, which centers around the figure of James Aggrey, has also been marginalized due to the fact that while Ethiopian ideas were morphing into more militant forms of black nationalism and anti-imperialism in Western and Southern Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, the focus of East Africanis inspired by Ethiopianism remained on visions of continental civilizational uplift, and not colonial liberation, into the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

Author

• Ethan Sanders, Regis University