Kwame Anthony Appiah: Keynote address

W. E. B. Du Bois, co-founder of the Pan-African Congress Movement, declared, at the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, that the problem of the twentieth century would be ‘the problem of the color line.’ He believed that combatting White Supremacy would be a major challenge of the politics of the century to come. And he understood that involved a battle on two fronts: challenging racism in Europe and the Americas, on the one hand, and defeating the racism of colonial empires, on the other. Du Bois, born an American, died as a citizen of Ghana - invited there, after independence, by Kwame Nkrumah. The Manchester Congress, which brought him together with a new generation of Black leaders from Africa and the Caribbean, was a key turning point in the history of the Pan-African Movement: as the focus shifted, for a period, to the fight for independence in Africa. In this new century, in a world after European empire, the struggle for Black equality in Europe and the Americas, has been reinvigorated by the Black Lives Matter movement. How has three-quarters of a century of post-Manchester struggle for respect and equality for Black people—inside and outside the North Atlantic world—been shaped by the Pan-Africanist legacy?

Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah

Son of Joe Appiah, an attender at the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester, and eminent lawyer, who went on to be a politician in Ghana’s first Republic under Kwame Nkrumah, and later to lead a joint Opposition party in Ghana from 1970 – 72, and was Ghana’s representative at the United Nations. His mother Peggy nee Stafford-Cripps, was daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Labour Government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, from 1947-50. 

Appiah was born in London, grew up in Kumasi, Ghana and was educated at Cambridge. His Clare College PhD thesis, Conditions for Conditionals, was published in 1981. He is a naturalised American, philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. 

He has taught at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale and Harvard. He credits his meeting with Louis Gates led to his visiting the US and taking up a position at Yale, and eventually moving to America. He later on collaborated with Gates on the editing of  Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. He was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014. He holds the joint appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU’s School of Law.

He has written widely on culture, and philosophy, he has written novels include Avenging Angels, Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice. His books include In My Father’s House, Colour Conscious and the Ethics of Identity, he presented the the Reith Lecture in 2016 on the theme Mistaken Identities, his most recent book has been The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture, was published in 2018.