James Aggrey was the most influential pan-Africanist in the Anglophone African world in the 1920s and was the single greatest influence on the early leaders of the African Association (AA). This chapter does a deep dive into Aggrey’s intellectual biography and his connection to the AA to argue that Aggrey transmitted Ethiopianist ideas to East Africans. It carefully examines the life of this remarkable global African intellectual by investigating the Gold Coast political milieu of his youth, his educational formation in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church in the American South, and his time in New York at Columbia and as a member of the Negro Society for Historical Research. It argues that Aggrey helped directly tie East Africans in the 1920s into a network of black thought that shaped their understanding of African identity and their role in the continent’s past and future, inspiring some of them to become redemptive pan-Africanists.

The introduction engages scholarly debates around the topics of Tanzanian nationalism, African identity, pan-Africanism, and global intellectual history to indicate its contributions to those fields. It introduces the main question: How did an African identity come to have any personal or political purchase in East Africa in the twentieth century? The main case study focuses on the African Association (AA), a politically minded pan-African group with ideational connections to several streams of black thought. The members who chose this group, which promoted an African identity, usually did so for two reasons. They were either inspired by the redemptive pan-Africanism of some of its visionary leaders who engaged with the ideas of Ethiopianism surrounding Africa’s future and past and/or they were drawn to the strand of practical pan-Africanism cultivated by the leadership of the AA who sought to build African unity and open chapters all throughout the continent and even the globe.