6PAC: The Postcolonial State, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of African Liberation

In July 1974, the Sixth Pan African Congress (6PAC) convened at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (East Africa).  Mainly organized by African Americans, 6PAC brought together independent states, anti-colonial nationalist movements, and activists and nationalist organizations of the African Diaspora in hopes of fostering critical dialogue that would lead to a unified agenda for the future of African liberation.  Despite the fact that it was the first Pan African Congress to be held on African soil, 6PAC has largely been considered a failure and, as a result, a non-event given little to no mention in the historiography of Pan-Africanism. 

"6PAC: The Postcolonial State, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of African Liberation" will examine the successes and failures of this historic conference by assessing the ways in which nation-state politics trumped a politics of global black solidarity.  That costly triumph begs the question of whether the postcolonial state was the sole torchbearer of Pan-Africanism.  The interventionist role states played in the planning of the congress, the marginalization of African American participation at the congress and the ideologically driven debates on internationalism, nationalism, class struggle and race consciousness are the primary subjects of this paper.  In an attempt to illuminate some of the critical factors that contributed to the decline of the Black Power movement in the United States, Markle seeks to problematize the nation state form by drawing attention to the constraints it imposed on African diasporic political organizing in an international context.