This paper considers the meetings of the interwar Pan-African Congress movement. It examines the Congress in the context of how conferencing became a dominant mode of international politics in the 1920s and the opportunities this offered to non-state actors. The Congress exemplified the hope which race reformers placed in the new international system established after the First World War, and in the League of Nations specifically. The paper considers three key conferencing elements in turn: delegates, venues, and resolutions. In each case, organizers mobilized the framework of conferencing to validate their political demands within this international system whilst, also in each case, their constrained circumstances required them to be strategically ambiguous with the facts of their meetings. As such, the paper encourages a broader methodological reflection on how historians approach seemingly unreliable historical sources. I argue that inconsistencies in reports of the Congress are themselves important historical artefacts of the political manoeuvres undertaken by race reformers. Foregrounding these strategies allows us to consider how political authority was circumscribed in the past, the resourcefulness of those on the political margins, and the promise and failure of international governance on the race question in the 1920s.

中文翻译：

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泛非大会难以捉摸的历史，1919-27

本文考虑了两次世界大战期间泛非大会运动的会议。它在会议如何成为 1920 年代国际政治的主要模式以及这为非国家行为者提供的机会的背景下审查了大会。大会体现了种族改革者对第一次世界大战后建立的新国际体系，特别是国际联盟的希望。本文依次考虑了三个关键的会议要素：代表、地点和决议。在每一种情况下，组织者都动员会议框架来验证他们在这个国际体系内的政治要求，同时在每一种情况下，他们受限的情况都要求他们在战略上对会议的事实进行模糊处理。像这样，该论文鼓励对历史学家如何处理看似不可靠的历史资料进行更广泛的方法论反思。我认为，国会报告中的不一致本身就是种族改革者进行的政治演习的重要历史产物。将这些战略放在前台，让我们能够思考过去政治权威是如何被限制的，政治边缘者的足智多谋，以及 1920 年代国际治理在种族问题上的前景和失败。