GetachewWhen African and West Indian nationalists met at the Fifth
Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945 to articulate a global
vision of decolonization, national independence was high on their
agenda. But it was only one part of an internationalist framework
that looked forward to “inevitable world unity and federation.” From
Ghana’s Nkrumah, who helped to organize the Pan-African Congress,
to Jamaica’s Manley, anti-colonial nationalists pitched decolonization
on this global scale to address the global character of imperialism. In
their view, empire was a globalizing force that unequally and violently
integrated disparate peoples and lands. With the gun and the lash,
it had made a single world from many. It produced, according to
W. E. B. Du Bois, a global color line through which Europe dominated
the “darker... races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the
islands of the sea.” This structure of racial hierarchy endured well
after the achievement of juridical independence, finding a new form
in Manley’s “real battleground,” which demarcated the postcolonial
world and the Global North.
Seeking to undo international economic hierarchies and shore
up the right to self-determination, the NIEO sought to realize the
aspiration to “world unity and federation” by creating international
frameworks that would support self-rule at home. This novel combina-
tion of nation-building and world-making—the idea that democratic
self-governance depended on an international context conducive to its
exercise—emerged out of the sense that empire’s globalization could
be made egalitarian but could not be reversed. The world was already
unified, under the terms of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.
As Manley pointed out, the Caribbean itself was a global formation and
could not be disaggregated from the international political and economic
relations in which it was embedded. This extreme form of extraversion
necessarily required moving beyond national insularity.