The long political and intellectual movement built on the idea that African peoples and the African diaspora share a common history and destiny and should act together — an idea that began among the descendants of the enslaved in the Atlantic world, crossed the ocean to help drive Africa's decolonization, and produced institutions from the Organization of African Unity in 1963 to the African Union, while never achieving the continental political unity its boldest advocates imagined.
Modern organized Pan-Africanism was not born first on the African continent. Its earliest formal institutions arose in the Atlantic diaspora, among people of African descent in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Britain. It began among people of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved, who had been cut off from any single homeland and given in exchange a shared condition: blackness in a world built to exploit it. Out of that condition came an audacious idea — that the scattered millions of African descent, on the continent and across the oceans, could be imagined as one people with a shared political destiny, and should act as one. The idea crossed the Atlantic, helped end colonial rule in Africa, and built institutions that still meet today. It has never, however, produced the single political community it dreamed of. The gap between that dream and the map of separate, often rival African states is the movement's defining tension.