United Africa First Conference of Independent African States, 1958, Accra, Ghana A

The All-African Peoples' Conference (AAPC) was partly a corollary and partly a different perspective to the modern Africa states represented by the Conference of Heads of independent Africa States. The All-Africa Peoples Conference was conceived to include social groups, including ethnic communities and anti-colonial political parties and African organizations such as Labor Unions and other significant associations in the late 1950s and early 1960s both in Africa and the Diaspora such as Europe, North America and South America.

The All-Africa Peoples Conference was conceived to represent the position that Africa should be returned to the peoples and groups, such as ethnic communities, from who it was grabbed by colonialism. The idea was mooted in Accra April 1958 by John Kale from Uganda. This was at the end of first Africa Heads of State Conference in Accra Ghana in March 1958. John Kale then operating from exile in Egypt, who was one of the organizers of the first Africa Heads of State Conference, was already the initiating secretary (and later Chairman) of the African Liberation Committee, the Africa Executive of Afro-Asian Solidarity which had its secretariat in Cairo and shortly after the Africa representative on the World Peace Council on which he was the Vice President.

For John Kale the main reason of the parallel organization to the then just concluded independent Africa Heads of States was that it had brought together only nine then independent Africa states excluding the majority of the Africa peoples both in the non-independent countries and in the Diaspora. The First All-Africa Peoples Conference was attended by delegates from independence movements in areas still under European colonial rule, as well as by delegates from the independent African countries, including representatives of the governing parties of some of those countries. In the Conference's own words, it was open to "all national political parties and national trade union congresses or equivalent bodies or organizations that subscribe to the aims and objects of the conference.

The Conference met three times: December 1958, January 1960, and March 1961; and had a permanent secretariat with headquarters in Accra. Its primary objectives were independence for the colonies; and strengthening of the independent states and resistance to neocolonialism. It tended to be more outspoken in its denunciations of colonialism than the Conference of Independent African States, a contemporary organisation which, being composed of heads of state, was relatively constrained by diplomatic caution. Immanuel Wallerstein says that the All-African Peoples' Conference was the "true successor to the Pan-African Congresses."

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