"What's the 'most work' Black Americans put in towards the Pan African movement?" -generic-username

[IllmaticDelta]

One of the most underappreciated areas of Afram based, Pan-Africanism that's owed a lot of debt, is that Aframs were the ones who made 'African Studies' (black studies, pan african studies, caribbean studies are ALL part of the same field) a mainstream thing/curriculum. When whites looked at Africa as not worth talking about; Aframs held the fort down and then decades later it would pass from "africanist-afrocentrics" to HBCUs to what we have today

to add to that:

From the 17th century onwards, debates over the slave trade, racism, and colonialism helped crystallise these negative narratives in western discourses. Abolitionists argued that Africa was a place of suffering because the slave trade provoked war, disease, famine and poverty; anti-Abolitionists said Africa was so forbidding as to make slavery in foreign countries a positive escape. Either way, Africa was full of "savagery" and constant war.

The growing discourse on race added a further dimension to these debates, supposedly explaining "African backwardness" and "savagery" as biologically-predetermined characteristics. Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer, and eugenicists, such as Francis Galton, exerted enormous influence and lent credibility to generalised xenophobia. That these works were extended exercises in sophistry and casuistry need hardly be mentioned.

Colonialism went even further; because of what they thought they knew about Africa – a land of fantastical beasts and cannibals, slaves, "backward races" and so on – the colonial powers managed to convince themselves that they were subjugating Africans (and others) for their own good. European violence was going to stop the wars endemic to Africa, and their enlightened (over-)rule would be to the benefit of all (via Livingstone's ideas of "Christianity, Civilisation and Commerce").

History of Africa through western eyes

These kind of views on Africa is why ADOS would pioneer black/africana studies

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^^the era before an offcial black studies program/curriculum, of Adosian scholars challenging white views of Africa. Below is the era of the official creation of said studies programs

as they would then spread to africa

and into europe