Talented Tenth, Whole Nation

The Du Bois–Garvey rivalry of the 1920s was one of the fiercest ideological battles in Pan-African history, centered around class, integration vs. nationalism, and working-class mass movement vs. elite vanguardism.

Pan-Africanism didn't start on the African continent — it started among Black intellectuals in the Americas and the Caribbean, thinking about the condition of displaced, enslaved, and colonized African peoples as a shared global predicament. Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer, organized the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, which is usually taken as the formal starting point. The animating question at this stage wasn't yet "how do we govern Africa" — it was "what is owed to, and what is the destiny of, people of African descent scattered by slavery."

W.E.B. Du Bois picked up this organizing tradition and ran a series of Pan-African Congresses (1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and the pivotal 1945 Manchester Congress) that gradually shifted from petitioning colonial powers for reform toward demanding outright independence. Du Bois himself moved leftward over his long life, eventually emigrating to Nkrumah's Ghana and dying there in 1963 — a symbolic closing of the loop between diaspora intellectual and continental statesman.

Running parallel and somewhat opposed to Du Bois's elite, congress-based approach was Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a genuine mass movement in the 1920s with millions of members and affiliates worldwide. Garvey's Pan-Africanism was more separatist and nationalist: Black economic self-sufficiency, a "Back to Africa" repatriation project, and outright Black nationhood modeled partly on European nation-states. Du Bois, notably, despised Garvey and considered his movement demagogic and economically unserious — this wasn't a minor stylistic disagreement, it was a real class and strategic split within the tradition from the start.