Remaking Black Power by Farmer Ashley D.;

Author:Farmer, Ashley D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

The All-Africa Women’s Conference

Two months after ALD, black women from the United States joined activists from across Africa at the AAWC in Dar es Salaam. Founded in 1962 in Kenya, the Pan-African women’s conference was part of a growing network of African women’s organizations dedicated to women’s full social, cultural, and political equality across the continent. By the time the organization marked its tenth anniversary at the Dar es Salaam meeting, it had become one of the premier women’s organizations on the African continent.33 The 1972 AAWC participant roster included women in delegations from Zambia, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, Mali, and Zaire, as well as delegations from outside Africa, including participants from Cuba and Korea.34 It also marked the first time that organizers invited women from the United States to participate.35 From July 24 to July 31, women like Audley Moore and Alberta Hill represented black women in America, joining with activists from all over the world to discuss the conference theme: “The Role of the African Woman in Liberation Struggles.”36

AAWC organizers invited Moore to give a keynote address. She used this opportunity to cast the conference, and black American women’s inclusion in it, as a constitutive moment in the formation of a new Pan-African identity and agenda for women. Moore began by remarking on the significance of the conference committee’s invitation. “I have the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your sisters in the United States of America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you today in love and spirit,” she noted. “We feel greatly honored by this opportunity to be here with you in this All Africa Women’s Conference held in Dar es Salaam.” The seasoned activist insisted that the meeting was a seminal step in forging a unified, progressive model of Pan-African Womanhood. She noted that the committee’s “invitation to [U.S. women] across the Atlantic” had the potential to unite women across the diaspora “more than any occurrence since the terrible days of slavery” and that their unification could reinvigorate Pan-African organizing and help black women around the world defeat their “common enemies, United States imperialism, and racism, the most deadly enemies of the liberation forces in Africa today.”37

In order to mobilize her diverse audience around a unified concept of Pan-African Womanhood, Moore had to minimize their differences and amplify their shared history. To achieve this goal, she relied on the cultural nationalist–driven narrative of a universal African past. The keynote speaker dedicated the first part of her speech to developing a matrilineal history of African heritage and redemption as evidence of the need for black women throughout the world to unite around common identifications and goals. “The African woman can rightly be called the mother of civilization as she is known for her creativity, her humanity, her productivity, her valor, and her great beauty,” she explained. “From the earliest historical times, records show African women as queens and rulers of great dynasties, as warriors, and as merchants.” Moore

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