Pan-African Congress - 2nd Pan-African Congress

2nd Pan-African Congress

In 1921, the Second Pan-African Congress met in several sessions in London, Paris and Brussels. There was an Indian revolutionary who took part, Shapurji Saklatvala, and a journalist from Ghana named W. F. Hutchinson who spoke. This session of the Congress was the most focused for change of all the meetings thus far. At the London session, London Resolutions were adopted, later restated by W. E. B. Du Bois in his Manifesto To the League of Nations:

England, with all her Pax Britannic, her courts of justice, established commerce, and a certain apparent recognition of Native laws and customs, has nevertheless systematically fostered ignorance among the Natives, has enslaved them, and is still enslaving them, has usually declined even to try to train black and brown men in real self-government, to recognise civilised black folk as civilised, or to grant to coloured colonies those rights of self government which it freely gives to white men.

The only dissenting voice was that of Blaise Diagne who was a French politician of African origin. He represented Senegal in the French Chamber of Deputies. He soon abandoned the idea of Pan Africanism because he thought that the London Manifesto declaration was too dangerously extreme.

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