The BlackQuaker Project is proud to celebrate Africa Day and to recognize Africa’s intense efforts at sovereignty and the long, continuous struggle of African peoples worldwide for freedom from colonialism, neo-colonialism, and continued exploitation and dehumanization.
The specific day (formerly known as “Africa Freedom Day” and “African Liberation Day”) was born with the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on 25 May 1963 to serve as the first continental union of independent African nations. Today it is known as the African Union. In addition to commemorating the founding of the OAU, Africa Day also celebrates the independence from Europe gained by all African nations over the 20th century; and honors the spirit of cooperation and collaboration of African peoples and nations in their ongoing struggle against the historical bonds of colonialism, both traditional and settler.
These political events in Africa would become a source of long lasting inspiration to oppressed peoples engaged in struggles of liberation all over the globe, especially Civil Rights activists in the United States.
Furthermore, the many revolutionaries who led the continent-spanning independence movements for which Africa Day was created were not alone, but part of a great family of international Pan-African activists who cared for and collaborated with one another across international boundaries. Kwame Nkrumah, who was educated at HBCU Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent years as a transnational scholar before leading his home country of Ghana to constitutional independence in 1957, is a great example of this. During both his college years in the USA and his maturing years in London, Nkrumah was hosted and mentored by famed truth-seeker-activist Paul Robeson. Robeson, along with his wife, scholar and journalist Eslanda Goode Robeson, had a strong influence on the revolutionary leader who remained in contact with them for life. Later Nkrumah, then Ghanaian President, invited Robeson to Accra to accept a professorship in Drama, an invitation the renaissance man could not accept because of declining health.
The BlackQuaker Project would like to honor the relationship between Nkrumah and Robeson as an example, among many, of the solidarity that Africa Day represents for people of African descent worldwide, as well as for their sincere allies, committed to the transnational struggle against the cancer of white supremacy.