In December 2025, at the Ninth Pan-African Congress, held in Lomé, Togo, several hundred African and African-descendant intellectuals, businesspeople, culture creators, and activists gathered to explore the meaning of Pan-Africanism in the 21st century—its goals and paths to achieve them. Some of those goals bear strong similarity to those defined over a century ago. Franklin Nyamsi, a philosophy professor at the University of Rouen, expressed this goal distinctly when he remarked that “our first objective must be to support all policies aimed at dismantling the neocolonialist and imperialist forces on African soil.”
Other speakers, notably the Togolese head of state Faure Gnassingbé, laid out ways Africa can overcome the internal fragmentation and other challenges that it faces. In his keynote address, Gnassingbé insisted that fragmentation must end, because “if Africa remains divided, it will remain vulnerable. Indeed, united we stand, divided we fall.” Facing that challenge collectively makes Pan-Africanism an “imperative,” he continued, because Pan-Africanism is “a strategy for sovereignty. . . . based on a collective, realistic and ambitious vision.” It’s about “financing our economies, transforming our own materials, modernizing our food and health systems, and in particular, investing in our human capital.”
At this moment global economic forces, climate change, health crises, and technological innovation are transforming the international order, “no African nation can face those challenges on its own.” To meet the challenges of the 21st century, and to fulfill Africa’s potential, the continent must mobilize its own “natural resources, our young talents, our businesses, our diasporas, our knowledge, and indeed our cultures.”
Those who attended the congress took up the task of defining that “collective, realistic, and ambitious vision”—that is, defining Pan-Africanism and the paths of action it supports. For a week they explored ways to promote African independence and empowerment, both domestically and on the world stage, affirming the concept’s political, cultural, and economic dimensions.
Political Pan-Africanism
Several speakers emphasized Pan-Africanism as a political concept, urging a unified geopolitical path. The American entrepreneur Siphiweka Baleka said that Pan Africanism stands for “the political unification of African people for …. positive sovereignty. We must develop the power, the capacity to enforce the collective will of African people.” Corinne Jeanne-Helare concurred: “In a world dominated by major blocs—the BRICS, the European Union, and so on—no isolated African state can fully defend its interests.
June Christine Marie Soomer, a Saint Lucian diplomat who served as president of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, observed that Pan-Africanism addresses the historical injustices of colonialism, enslavement, subjugation, and systemic and structural racism. “It is time that all of us unite … [and] address the legacies of these injustices, [and] that we seek guarantees to prevent future acts of racial discrimination.”
Is Pan-Africanism a movement for democracy? Not necessarily, as several discussions on the sidelines revealed. The goal of a unified Africa would seem to presuppose the endorsement of a popular democratic base. But others pointed out that democracy is compromised in many places on the continent, and states should not be excluded if they are governed at a particular moment by an authoritarian regime.
Alfred Tulu, who chairs the Pan African Congress Kenya, insisted that Africa must unify to the point of becoming a single country. To his mind, the existing 54 African states are simply provinces of that country. “The problem is that each [existing] country wants to have a flag. Each country wants to have a currency..” United as a single country, Africa would have enormous influence, for example in trade deals with other powers. “Why can't we go to US as one nation” rather than as individual states? He wondered. If we did, “we would have a higher bargaining power.”
Cultural Pan-Africanism
Many other speakers recommended achieving Pan-Africanism through culture. Above all, Africa must “reclaim the narrative” about itself, as Gnassingbé insisted. . It must reject distorted images and “restore the truth of our history.” Indeed, “reclaiming our narrative and our identity,” he said, is “the foundation of our sovereignty.” A reframed African narrative, would enable Africa to unite, to become a place “where our voices come together, where our ideas rise, where our destiny becomes clearer.”
Reframing the African narrative, the Ivorian-American journalist Eric Agnero advised, is no mere “cosmetic issue” but would have a broad impact: it would “affect our diplomacy and our investment, the confidence of our youth and our place in world affairs.” African cities, he argued, must develop great universities that become “knowledge engines [that] generate data, research, and talent.” The world “respects scientific achievement. Africa must be present in laboratories, climate research, AI engineering, agro-industrial innovation.” A positive, de-colonized narrative, one that “projects an image of a modern continent that embraces science, embraces modernity.” would assure the world that Africa welcomes scientific innovation and attract it.
The Togolese culture minister Isaac Tchiapke buttressed the emphasis on culture in Pan-Africanism. Culture itself is “an instrument of sovereignty,” he affirmed, “of cohesion for the great African family.” As culture minister, Tchiapke has founded the Lomé Initiative for Pan-African Cultural Cooperation as a concrete framework for Pan-African cultural cooperation,
[get his name] singled out the restitution of African cultural treasures from European museums as a crucial project, an essential lever for achieving Pan-African sovereignty. Restitution is, he said, “a powerful act of historical justice, symbolic reparation, restoration of dignity, cultural sovereignty, and development.” It is “a legal and moral imperative, a debt of justice enshrined in the foundations of international law.”
The intellectual program, at many points, yielded the stage to cultural performances and celebrations. Performers sang and danced and drummed, as if by their own talent, skill, and energy they could strengthen the Pan-Africanist imperative--and in fact, they can, and they did.
Economic Pan-Africanism
If the Congress both theorized and celebrated culture, it also gave plenty of time to of Pan-Africanism as an economic concept. Africans may well take pride in their contributions to world culture, the. Nigerian-British filmmaker Onuora Anthony Abuah explained, but it’s not enough: even as “we export raw genius,” we “import finished power.” Today, he lamented, “We dominate culture, but not capital. . . . We dominate consumption, but not production at scale.”
To overcome this problem, he insisted, Pan-Africanism must have a material base: “Without economic power, political power is permission-based. And permission can always be withdrawn.” A self-determining African economy would put the continent’s future on a sound foundation. After all, he said, the forces that keep Africa down today are different from the repressive violence that was used under colonialism: “Our chains today are largely financial, educational, psychological, and technological. You no longer dominate a people with guns. You dominate them with debt, with creative control, platform ownership, supply chain dependency, narrative licensing.”
If Africa is to get out from under neocolonialism, it must become structurally independent, “Pan-Africanism must mature from a philosophy of resistance into a program of construction.” Africa must support broadly productive economic development: “we must build black-owned production, black-owned logistics, black-owned platforms, black-owned capital networks, black-owned education systems, black-owned technological infrastructure.”
Nubukpo Kako, of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, agreed with the material standpoint and offered a concrete program: all African countries, he admonished, should share a common currency. A common currency in itself would have unifying effects. “When you have the same currency,” he explained, “you can trade amongst yourselves because you no longer have transaction costs or exchange risks.” A common African currency would enable the creation of an “African Continental Free Trade Area.” It would allow Africa to “finance [its] own businesses”—they are currently underfunded—and create an African Development Bank “that would prioritize essential lending for the stability of our continent.” Such a bank, which could exist only with a common currency, could finance African states to build a strong public sector. Perhaps above all, it could provide jobs for the massive, rising new generation of African youth: “We need a currency to finance the entry of 600 million young people into the African job market over the next 40 years, at a rate of 15 million per year.”
Bearers of Hope
Many speakers pointed to the enormous generation of young people as a source of hope for the continent. “Our youth is our greatest strategic asset,” said President Gnassingbe. “They are the bearers of innovation, digital culture, creative economy, and social struggles. We do have the most dynamic, vibrant youth in the world.. . . We have creativity, energy, and innovation. Mobilizing our own capital means finally transforming this potential into power.”
Another group to be singled out was the large African diaspora, that is, Afro-descendants living outside the continent. At the Congress, elected officials and thinkers from Brazil, Central America, and the Caribbean made a strong showing. Voices from Cuba, Brazil, and French Guiana affirmed the unbreakable bonds between Africa and those areas. Maboula Soumahoro, a French Afro-feminist, reminded the Congress that the Pan-Africanist movement itself “was born in the diaspora” and remains integral to it because of the ongoing consequences of the colonization projects launched in the modern era.” Today’s self-aware diaspora, she said, “has cultivated the memory of its places and cultures of origin and recognized the common interests of its members.” The potential impact of today’s Afro-diasporans on their ancestral continent is huge, many emphasized, and are an immense source of knowledge and creativity.
Still other speakers celebrated women as long-standing contributors to the Pan-Africanist movement, even if they are too often uncredited, and as essential to a united African future. Women in Pan-Africanism fight for their own liberation in society as well as for improved conditions for Africans regardless of gender.
The Congress proved that Pan-Africanism as an ideology remains as relevant as ever to achieving an Africa that fulfills its potential to become a great power. It is not culture or politics or economics alone, but all of them together that potentially give the movement its force. Even a diehard materialist like this observer would have to agree with the Haitian scholar Jean-Fils Aimé, who exulted, “We are a beautiful people, we are a great people, we are a joyful people. It is time we lived our culture without any inferiority complex.”
