5th Pan-African Congress Commemoration 2025: Dhoruba Bin-Wahad
On the 18th and 19th of November, over 250 delegates from across Africa and African communities in the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe gathered at the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana’s capital, Accra, to commemorate the 5th Pan-African Congress held in 1945 at Manchester, England.
Delegates from Algeria, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, and China, met not only to remember the 1945 convention but to reaffirm the Pan-African vision declared at that historic Pan-African Congress.
At the original 5th Pan-African Congress, attendees W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and other Pan-African luminaries, who would later become anti-colonial freedom fighters, collectively called for a complete end to European colonial occupation and economic exploitation of Africa.
Ghana’s recently elected President John Mahama gave the conference keynote presentation. Not only did he pay tribute to earlier pioneers of Pan-Africanism, but he asserted “the inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations” for “slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation.” President Mahaha also announced the Accra Declaration of Reparatory Justice.
The Accra Declarationmandating the establishment of a “Pan-African Reparatory Justice Coordinating Committee” is currently being heralded as a new era of coordinated global action on reparatory justice,” said the Pan-African Progressive Front (PPF), the conveners of the conference.
Speaking later at the plenary session, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, former Black political prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, and well-known revolutionary Pan-African activist, provided a historical perspective of the current geopolitical state of affairs. Reminding attendees, that history never repeats itself – pointing out both the “historical rhyme of histories, and the contemporary reasons for today’s desperate attempts to keep Africans under the thumb of white supremacist nation-states and their neo-colonial allies in Africa and Western Asia. Baba Dhoruba pointed out the differences between 1945 and 2025.
Baba Bin-Wahad noted that when the 5th Pan-African Congress was convened in 1945, Western Europe lay in utter ruin, devastated by the greatest conflagration humankind had ever experienced,
Baba Bin-Wahad had previously highlighted that even though World War II can be defined as the second fully industrialized war, it was nonetheless an unprecedented opportunity for American industrialists, military contractors, and finance capital’s most wealthy families to recycle the debts of WWI into unimagined profits for America’s elite and enhance U.S. military power.
The U.S. and its European Allies, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and most significantly, the Soviet Union, (which lost over 25 million people in the fight against Nazis Germany and its Axis allies) emerged the victors of WWII with a geo-economic carte blanche to rewrite a new post-war global order, Bin-Wahad noted. The very global architecture we are subjected to today is a byproduct of the post-WWII concocted East–West rivalry, global trade manipulation by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and monetary subjugation by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. All these institutions were established after the end of the Second World War.
It was the U.S. Marshall Plan, America’s strategic economic, corporate, and industrial setup to revitalize a devastated Western Europe and amplify the West as a citadel of global financial capitalism that laid the legal framework for today’s global order. Monetizing the debts of worn-torn nations into enormous profits for America’s companies and industries, ushering in the rise of what Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex”, and the “American Century” of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down cold war prosperity, were all major contributors to the 20th-century rise of the American Empire.
Re-Counting The Cost
General George C. Marshall, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff of the Army, whose name the Marshal Plan bears, laid the foundation for the rise of the modern Military Industrial Complex, which would emerge under president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, would follow up with the moral bombast of virtuous Western democracy, and free market macro-capitalist ingenuity as the basis for political freedom and personal wealth, while demonizing fascist “crimes against humanity” and Soviet Communism in the same breath. Taking full advantage of the universal repugnance of fascism’s industrialized slaughter of millions of their fellow Europeans, the U.S. and its allies were able to camouflage their revitalization of European neo-colonialism in glowing moral and humanitarian terms of “ democratic freedom” and “universal human rights.” Even going so far as creating an International Military Tribunal in the wake of the Nuremberg trials of Germany’s wartime Nazis Leaders. It’s worth noting that the German industrialists who backed the Nazis and built the German war machine were never prosecuted at Nuremberg and would later play a central role in Germany’s post-war economic growth as Europe’s strongest economy.
When America created the United Nations,it did so partly to ensure that the ‘New World Order’ would remain subject to European political contextualization and effectively ensure not just European post-war economic revitalization but also translate into a U.S.-dominated Western military alliance that could challenge Russian Communism while simultaneously abetting Europe’s reacquisition of its former colonial territories. Toward these perverse ends, the U.S. and its allies created the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, both were created to monetize the debts of poor developing nations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Europe’s military Alliance created ostensibly at the end of WWII to protect Europe from Soviet invasion, would become militarily involved in backing U.S. military interventions in Asia, Africa, and the Middle-East during the entire period of the so-called “Cold War.”
But the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) however, was another scheme altogether. It was established to regulate Global Trade between the “have and have not” nations of the world. The WTO mandate was shrewdly started to protect Western capitalist manufacturing monopolies, which favored developed manufacturing nations over underdeveloped mineral-producing nations. It was never intended to regulate genuine “free trade” between equally sovereign nations. Ultimately, all of these institutions were underwritten with the maneuver of the Bretton Woods Agreementlinking the U.S. dollar to gold, making the dollar the de facto global reserve currency, a fitting tribute for the most powerful nation to emerge from the ashes of WWII. But history wasn’t just repeating events of post-WWI when a Europe, laid waste by war established the League of Nations, and Germany was made to pay reparations to its adversaries. No.
Baba Dhoruba reminded the dozens of Pan-Africans, Muslims and Christians alike, Socialists and Communists, from dozens of ethnic backgrounds gathered in Accra, to not just commemorate the historic 5th Pan-African Congress, but to understand that today we are witnessing the collapse of the world order fabricated in the 1940s. Except today, with climate change and increased consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, the self-destruction of humanity is closer at hand than ever before and the light for humanity at the end of the long dark tunnel of endless capitalist wars, debt and industrial pollution is a United States of Africa.
President Mahama also unveiled a plan for visa-free travel between African countries in his keynote address. Proposing a practical step toward continental unity, Ghana’s President Mahama used his keynote address to unveil the plan for the establishment of the “League of African Free Movement” along with seven other African nations that would abolish visa requirements between them, and he urged other African nations to join in this new visa-free protocol.
Delegate organizations from the Ivory Coast and Cameroon, spoke of solidarity with the Youth and Student uprising in Malagasy, Tanzania, Kenya, and solidarity with the Palestinian People. While African delegates from the diaspora were present, It was Black Power Media in the U.S. that commissioned Dhoruba Bin-Wahad as an official observer for the network who described the Rise of Fascism, Islamophobia, racist anti-migrant popularism in the Metropoles of Europe as Ethnic and Racial cleansing of Latin Populations, indigenous populations and all non-European. Making America Great Again, Keeping Europe Safe from 3rd World Migrants, demonizing Islam as ‘Terroristic” are all revivals of century old European Christian jingoistic White Nationalism.
Clearly, we are witnessing, in the age of global communications, how effectively Western democracy has deluded its constituents into a false sense of superiority that’s completely at odds with Europe’s historical track record of plunder, greed, and genocide visited upon the Global South, which is the primary cause for the current global migratory crisis to begin with. This delusion has inspired racist populism across the Western World.
The Euro-Christian white supremacist global order created after WWII we euphemistically call “globalization” today is rotting from within as European Union NATO puppets of American led jingoistic entanglements against Russia unravels in the Ukraine, stressing European economies while simultaneously, the Euro-Zionist Settler State in Western Asia (Palestine) has shredded the credibility of the American-European Global “rules based order” so pragmatically reformed and defended from 1945 to the present. Today is vastly different from 1945 and the mid to late 20th century.
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad
Dateline November 22, 2025
Accra, Ghana
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Additional Reading:
“Inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations for slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation”, an international Pan-African conference held on November 18 and 19, 2025 adopted the Accra Declaration on Reparatory Justice.
peoplesdispatch.org/2025/11/23…
Dhoruba bin-Wahad is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21.
source: Black Agenda Report
abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=…
#africa #antiColonialism #antiImperialism #blackLiberation #dhorubaBinWahad #ghana
