Winning Hearts and Minds in Africa: Horace Mann Bond and the Institute of African American Relations

In 1957, shortly after returning from the celebration of Ghana’s independence, Horace Mann Bond, the African American educator and first Black President of Lincoln University, was asked to tender in resignation letter. One of the reasons cited for Bond’s forced resignation was his frequent travels to Africa and concentration on African students and African affairs. Using letters, newspaper articles, and speeches by Bond and other Black intellectuals, I examine Bond’s effort to institutionalize Pan-African education as a liberatory ideology for Black people in American Universities. Among the many ventures he undertook, Bond emphasized African studies to counter ignorance about Africa and its people. For Bond, the development and promotion of African studies could not be separated from Africa’s liberation and African Americans’ quest for racial equality. This paper contends that Bond used Pan-African education to re-imagine Blackness and to support the global Black struggle for liberation and development. Bond’s Pan-African pedagogy was a response to the crises of education for Black people in Africa and the United States who, through slavery and colonialism, were denied access to higher institutions and “miseducated.” Bond’s advocacy added to earlier works by Black intellectuals such as Carter G. Woodson and J.E. Casely Hayford who advocated proper education for Black people. Examining activists like Bond whose methods did not follow traditional anti-colonial and civil rights activism helps to see the shifting terrains of global Black liberation.