The power of Pan Africanism: Tanzanian/African American linkages, 1947-1997

Tate, Lessie Burnita

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78446 Copy

Description

Title

The power of Pan Africanism: Tanzanian/African American linkages, 1947-1997

Author(s)

Tate, Lessie Burnita

Issue Date

2015-04-23

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Allman, Jean M.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Todorova, Maria

Committee Member(s)

• Monson, Jamie
• Roediger, David
• Brennan, James
• Maddox, Gregory
• Barnes, Teresa A.

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Black Internationalism
• Black hubs
• Pan Africanism
• hospitality

Abstract

Reconstruction of the fifty-year Tanzanian/African American relationship from the engagements of Pan-Africanism enhanced through black internationalism exposes the cross-cultural fertilization of Tanzanian nationalism with the US black community’s self identity in the 1960s. By examining the interactions of black networks and the extension of hospitality between Tanzanians and African Americans in the black hubs of the late 1940s and 1950s, the formation of linkages from diasporic African anti-colonial and antiracist solidarity comes forth. Archival records of Pan-African, human rights, labor, and civil rights organizations, as well as interviews with those who participated in the Tanzanian/African American linkages, illuminate the function, growth, and challenges of black networks that collaborated in the international quest for total black liberation from the 1950s through the 1970s. Language serves as the marker that identifies this African/African diaspora linkage as more than a casual relationship, but one that enters into nation building in Tanzania in the 1960s. Tracing the introduction of Kiswahili into the US black community to its symbolic adoption by African Americans in their black cultural nationalism through black print exposes the transfer of influence of Tanzanian nationalism in the United States from the black elite to the masses. Expanding the parameter of African history to include the continent’s Atlantic diaspora illustrates the results of Tanzania’s multifaceted practice of Pan-Africanism that included African descendants from America into its extended family through the implementation of Ujamaa.

Graduation Semester

2015-5

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78446

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Lessie Burnita Tate

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