PAN AFRICAN WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION (PAWA)
Several decades ago and not long before the independence of African countries, writers and other intellectuals of our continent made several undertakings in vain to organise themselves into a Pan African Writers’ Union, ever since the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists held a meeting in Paris in 1956. This subject was then raised and deliberated on in different fora at various places such as Rome, Algiers, Dakar, Lagos, Luanda, Tashkent, Cologne, Alma Atta, Pyongyang and in Brazzavile (Congo).
In 1986 an Extraordinary Assembly of 61 African Writers representing 46 African Writers’ Unions and Associations met and decided that Africa needed a long-overdue Continental Literary Organisation and therefore set up an International Preparatory Committee (IPC) and mandated it with the dual mission of organising the symposium “International Literary Symposium Against Apartheid” in Brazzaville, Congo in 1987, and to realise the old dream of the Writers’ Union as a dynamic association of Writers of Africa.
In working towards the formation of PAWA, the IPC sensitised African Writers’ Unions and Associations as well as African and non-African governments, called on the then Chairman of the OAU, the OAU Secretary-General and attended the Ouagadougou Conference of African Ministers of Culture in April, 1988, at which the OAU pledged support for the creation of PAWA.
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With OAU and UNESCO’s support, the Constituent Congress of PAWA was held at the Kwame Nkrumah Conference Centre, Accra from 7th – 11th November, 1989 under the theme: “African Unity; A Liberation of the Mind.” Representatives from over 36 countries formally signed the Declaration and Constitution that led to the establishment of PAWA, convinced that literature is the testimony of the people’s creativity and that it has a determining influence on national conscience development for the political and socio-economic liberation of the continent.
They were anxious to contribute to the revalorization of African cultural identity, putting a spurt on Panafricanism and the struggle against all forms of racial discrimination. They were conscious, thus, of the necessary co-operation African Writers and the world in order to break the language barriers and to promote the different cultures on the continent by developing them.
They were conscious of the necessary defence of the legitimate rights, especially, the right to freedom and promotion of writers by an independent and autonomous organisation, the melting pot of dialogues and cultures, and committed to promote world peace through literature.
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