Pan-African History

Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787

Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134689323
• Print ISBN:
  9780415173537
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

Pan-African History brings together Pan-Africanist thinkers and activists from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds of the past two-hundred years. Included are well-known figures such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Delany, and the authors' original research on lesser-known figures such as Constance Cummings-John and Dusé Mohammed Ali reveals exciting new aspects of Pan-African activism.

George Padmore

(1902 – 59)

George Padmore probably has a much more rightful claim to the title of the Father of Pan-Africanism than W.E.B. DU BOIS, on whom the title was bestowed. His life was devoted to the true emancipation and unification of Africans and those of African descent.

The son of a government agricultural advisor and teacher, Malcolm Ivan Nurse was born on 28 July 1902 in Tacarigua in the British colony of Trinidad. He attended Trinidad’s model elementary school, Tranquillity, and then St Mary’s Roman Catholic College (1915–16) and the private Pamphylion High School. (At that time there were no state, only private and denominational secondary schools in Trinidad.) He was a boyhood friend of C.L.R. JAMES; the fathers of the boys were also friends. Young Malcolm probably got his early introduction to politics and Pan-Africanism from his father, a voracious reader, who had attended the meetings organised by HENRY SYLVESTER WILLIAMS during his brief return to Trinidad in 1901, and who roomed with Mrs Williams after Williams’ premature death in 1911. Hubert Alfonso Nurse held what for a Black man was a remarkable post in the colonial government: that of government instructor in agriculture. At first his son worked as an apprentice pharmacist, and then as a journalist on the Trinidad Guardian.

Nurse married Julia Semper, who was pregnant when Nurse left Trinidad in 1924 for Fisk University, Tennessee, USA. (All West Indians wanting post-secondary education had to leave their homes as there were no tertiary institutions anywhere in the British colonies.) He enrolled as a medical student in 1925. After two years he moved to Howard University in Washington to study law, in order, he wrote on his registration form, ‘to practice law in Liberia’. He continued to write, both for the Trinidad press and for the journals of the universities he attended. He also joined the Communist Party (USA), whose leadership then was advocating racial equality. He adopted the nom-de-guerre of George Padmore, in order to protect his family from repercussions for his political activism. As ‘Padmore’ he spoke on communist platforms and wrote for the communist press.

In 1929 he was sent by the CPUSA to the Communist International-sponsored Second Congress of the League Against Imperialism (LAI); he was elected to the committee (the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers – ITUCNW) being set up to organise a conference of Negro workers. Some months after his return to the USA, in December 1929, Padmore accompanied the CPUSA leader to Moscow, where he remained as a member of the Profintern (the Red International of Labour Unions) and was soon named head of the newly formed Negro Bureau. In 1930 he was detailed to aid in the organisation of the conference which had been suggested at the LAI meeting, and was eventually held in Hamburg in July 1930, under the chairmanship of the African American, James Ford. As no full list of delegates was published, it is unclear exactly how many Africans were present. Padmore definitely made a trip to West Africa to recruit delegates, as four West Africans are listed among the speakers; whether he also travelled to South and East Africa is uncertain. The conference’s resolutions included the development of an ‘efficient working class leadership’ and the formulation of demands to include ‘equal pay regardless of race, nationality and sex’ and ‘against racial barriers in trade unions’.

Padmore wrote six long pamphlets for the ITUCNW, including what was really a book, the Life and Struggles of Negro Workers, published in 1931. This analysed the situation of Black workers and soldiers in Africa and the Americas, and their political current ‘awakening’. The solution he advocated for their dire situation was naturally the communist ‘line’ of the time: the building of ‘revolutionary trade unions of blacks and whites’ which would lead the ‘united front struggles of the working class against the offensive of the capitalists’ (p.123).

It was probably towards the end of 1931 that Padmore replaced Ford as head of the ITUCNW and also as editor of its monthly publication, the Negro Worker. In the Worker, which was despatched to interested and/or activist Black peoples around the world, Padmore attempted a mass education programme on the importance, functions and organisation of trade unions and collective action against exploitation. The Worker also carried news of struggles and the situations faced by Black peoples (as workers) around the world, and inveighed against imperialism and racism. Banned by most colonial governments, Padmore arranged for seamen visiting Hamburg to smuggle the Worker into the colonies.

In 1934 Padmore resigned from the Comintern because of disagreements over Stalin’s pact with France, an imperialist power; he also disagreed with the revised Communist philosophy which required him to teach that the enemies of exploited colonials were not the imperialist powers, but the growing fascist movement. Much vilified and persecuted by the communists the world over, hounded by the fascists in Hamburg and under surveillance by the British secret service, in 1935 he settled in London and began to earn a living as a journalist for Black newspapers worldwide.

Padmore resumed his friendship with C.L.R. James and forged working partnerships with I.T.A. WALLACE-JOHNSON, a Sierra Leone trade unionist then in London, as well as with Jomo Kenyatta who had attended the ITUCNW meeting, and the British Guiana-born RAS T. MAKONNEN. Under the leadership of James they formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia in 1935 to campaign against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, one of the two remaining independent African countries. The campaign failed, and the organisation was transformed into the International African Service Bureau, which published Africa and the World (July – September 1937), banned in the Gold Coast in October 1937; African Sentinel (October 1937 – April 1938); International African Opinion (July 1938 – March 1939). The latter was edited by James; its motto was ‘educate, co-operate, emancipate’. The Bureau’s aim was to ‘fight for the demands of Africans and other colonial peoples for democratic rights, civil liberties and self-determination’; Europeans could only become associate members. The Bureau held public meetings and demonstrations (e.g. on the 1937 strikes in Trinidad), wrote letters to the press, aided visiting delegations from the colonies and lobbied Members of Parliament over colonial issues. In 1937 the IASB created an overarching organisation of all Black groups in Britain, the Pan-African Federation.

During the pre-war period Padmore also worked with the Independent Labour Party, addressed its meetings and wrote for its journal, New Leader, as well as for other left-wing British publications. He spoke at any meeting interested in colonial issues and maintained a vast correspondence with activists the world over. In 1938 with ILP help, he mounted an exhibition to counter the falsehoods he saw displayed at the Empire Exhibition then being held in Glasgow. From the mid-1930s Padmore wrote almost weekly for Black newspapers around the world, including the Jamaican Public Opinion, the Gold Coast’s Ashanti Pioneer and such US papers as the Chicago Defender and W.E.B. DU BOIS’ Crisis. His articles introduced readers to the Black world outside their own borders, informing US readers, for example, of contemporary events as well as the situation in South, East and West Africa, the metropoles and elsewhere in the colonised world.

Padmore was greatly assisted with both his research, his writing and the hosting of countless visitors by his partner, Dorothy Pizer. An ex-member of the London Communist Party, Dorothy earned a consistent income as a secretary. (She typed C.L.R. James’ manuscript World Revolution.) Probably before leaving to settle in Ghana Padmore and Pizer were married.

Though during the Second World War political activities had to be somewhat curtailed, nevertheless Padmore and other Black groups in London organised protests against Prime Minister Churchill’s declaration that the terms of the Atlantic Charter, which promised that ‘sovereign rights and self-government’ would be restored to peoples who had lost them, did not apply to the colonies. A Manifesto on Africa in the Post-War World was agreed by the London groups and sent ‘for serious consideration’ to the founding meeting of the United Nations in 1945. To strengthen the demands in the Manifesto, supportive meetings were called, including two ‘Subject Peoples’ Conferences organised by Padmore, which stressed the need for Afro-Asian solidarity and called for freedom for all colonised peoples.

The Pan-African Federation called a Pan-African Congress in 1945. Held in Manchester in October, the Congress, the sixth (not fifth, as usually stated) such gathering, attracted the colonial trade unionists then attending the first conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions, as well as Blacks resident or temporarily in the UK. Because of the problems of travel (the Second World War had just ended), the only African American present was W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in recognition of his having called the previous four Congresses, chaired all the sessions except the first, which was chaired by AMY ASHWOOD GARVEY. The Congress demanded, inter alia, ‘complete and absolute independence’ for West Africa; equality for all in South Africa; federation and self-government for the British West Indies; and that ‘discrimination on account of race, creed or colour [in Great Britain] be made a criminal offence by law’.

The financial genius who made all this activism possible was Ras T. Makonnen. Post-war Padmore established the Pan-African News Agenecy at his home and continued writing for Black newpapers around the world, until the anti-communist hysteria led to his exclusion, despite his very public renunciation of Stalin in 1934! Padmore became the international secretary of the Pan-African Federation, which continued its involvement in local and international issues. He began to explore with the Nigerian political leader Nnamdi Azikiwe the possibilities for holding a Pan-African Congress in Africa; however, after the victory of his party in the Gold Coast elections in 1951, it was KWAME NKRUMAH who undertook to convene it.

Padmore became a founding member of the short-lived Asiatic-African United Front Committee as well as of the British Centre Against Imperialism which became the Movement Against Imperialism. The times were not auspicious, Padmore wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois in October 1949. The ‘African nationalist and the anti-imperialist movements are branded as “communist” or as “Moscow agents” by the British, even the Labour Party. This has led to a split in the anti-imperialist movement’.

Barred from newspapers, Padmore worked on the book he claimed he had been asked to write by the delegates at the Pan-African Congress. A ‘brief over-all survey of the Colonial Problem in British Africa, in the light of the new Economic Imperialism, euphemistically described as Colonial Development and Welfare’, Africa: Britain’s Third Empire was published in London in 1949. Divided into four parts, the book surveys the situation of Africans in the various colonies, analyses the nature of direct and indirect rule, reviews the Colonial Development and Welfare policies, and outlines ‘how politically-minded Africans are meeting this challenge of the new Economic Imperialism’ (p.12). Padmore accused the British government – using the politicians’ own words – of planning to create a vast army in Africa in order to save British manpower, and of planning the even greater exploitation of African primary produce in order for ‘Western Europe to achieve its balance of payments and to get world equilibrium [vis-à-vis] the two great World Powers, the United States and Russia …’ (p.10, quoting Ernest Bevin). Not surprisingly within a year of its publication the book was banned in most of the British colonies in Africa.

Padmore soon began working on another book, Pan-Africanism or Communism?, published in 1956, which he called a ‘historical account of the struggles of Africans and peoples of African descent for Human Rights and Self-Determination in the modern world’ (p.9). Padmore wrote the book partly to discredit the propaganda being spread by imperialists that all political activism in Africa, and the demands for independence, were communist-inspired. Padmore had no problems with a ‘Marxist interpretation of history … but refuse[d] to accept the pretentious claims of all doctrinaire Communism …’ (p.18). This belief led him into sometimes vituperative criticisms of communist anti-imperialist activists. Padmore also criticised the British government for failing ‘to make good its promise of self-government within the Commonwealth, unless actually forced to do so by the colonial peoples’. Selfdetermination would, he argued, ‘be the most effective bulwark against Communism’ (p.20). He believed that there was a ‘growing feeling among politically conscious Africans throughout the continent that their destiny is one, and that what happen[ed] in one part of Africa to Africans must affect Africans living in other parts’; this would ultimately lead to the ‘creation of a United States of Africa’ (p.22).

Padmore’s small home was described in 1956 by his friend the African American novelist Richard Wright as his ‘office and workroom through [which] have trooped almost all of the present day leaders of Black Africa. They come seeking information, encouragement, and help …’. Among these men in 1945 had been the then Francis Nkrumah, recommended to Padmore from the USA by C.L.R. James. Padmore enlisted the recently arrived Nkrumah’s help with organising the Pan-African Congress. It was while acting in this capacity that Nkrumah changed his name to Kwame.

Thus began a partnership which was to last until Padmore’s death. After his return home in 1947 Nkrumah maintained close links with Padmore in London, who became the propagandist of the ‘Gold Coast Revolution’ and advisor to the Gold Coast Convention People’s Party’s National Association of Socialist Student Organisations, a ‘vanguard’ group formed by Nkrumah. Padmore also continued to write, speak and lobby against imperialism both in the UK and abroad.

In constant touch with Nkrumah, Padmore paid his first visit to the Gold Coast in 1951; in 1957 he was a special guest at the Independence Celebrations and later that year he returned to take up the position offered by Nkrumah as Advisor on African Affairs. The presence of yet another non-Ghanaian close to Nkrumah caused some resentment which Padmore had to negotiate. He travelled to the Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Liberia to finalise arrangements for the Conference of Independent States to be held in April 1958 in independent Ghana.

Soon he was travelling again to enlist activists in the freedom struggles and trade unionists in both free states and colonies for the All African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC) to be held in Accra in December. This was probably Padmore’s crowning achievement: the culmination of a lifetime of dreams, plans and struggles, perhaps symbolised by his use of the icon of a Black man breaking his chains, that he had first used in his ITUCNW days, on AAPC literature. Some 300 delegates representing 28 countries attended the conference which elected Tom Mboya of Kenya as chairperson and Padmore as secretary-general. According to Makonnen’s autobiography, while the ‘official [meetings were] in the conference hall … there were unofficial meetings at the African Affairs Centre where you’d find the trade union element mixing with the ideological groups from various countries’ (p.214).

The motto of the AAPC was ‘Independence and Unity’; its aims included the ‘acceleration of liberation; development of a feeling of community among the peoples of Africa; to work for the emergence of a United States of Africa’. It endorsed ‘regional groupings’ as a step towards achieving this. The resolutions included the demand for the immediate end to the ‘political and economic exploitation of Africans by Imperialist Europeans’; ‘full support to all fighters for freedom in Africa, to all those who resort to peaceful means … as well as to those who are compelled to retaliate against violence to attain national independence’; the ultimate objective of ‘the evolution of a Commonwealth of Free African States’; condemnation of ‘the pernicious system of racialism and discriminatory laws’ and the imposition of economic sanctions on South Africa. Finally, the Conference warned that the imperialists were attempting, and would continue to attempt, to perpetuate their power through fostering tribalism and religious separatism.

Padmore was put in charge of the permanent secretariat set up by the AAPC in Accra; its main aims were to promote unity, accelerate liberation and ‘mobilise world opinion against the denial of political and fundamental human rights to Africans’.

Padmore was also given the task of drafting a revision of the Ghanaian constitution and a socialist policy for the emerging new state. The policy, which aimed at ‘economic independence on a socialist pattern’, advocated, inter alia, the improvement and diversification of agriculture, and the possible introduction of cooperatives; the development of villages to provide social and cultural amenities; industrialisation, with financial input as well as technical and managerial assistance from the government, initially to ‘save importations’; educational reforms to ensure that traditional subjects were taught from an African perspective and to introduce training in technical subjects; and the severe punishment of bribery and corruption, which were deemed crimes against society. Padmore concluded that:

the colonialists, having been forced to concede the political power which automatically gave them control over the economic resources of our country, are concentrating upon the economic counterrevolution in an effort to restore their absolute control over us by economic means.

Resi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Dusé Mohamed Ali
• Ahmed Ben Bella
• Edward Wilmot Blyden
• Amilcar Lopes Cabral
• Aimé Césaire
• Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
• Constance Cummings-John
• Martin Robinson Delany
• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Frederick Douglass
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Olaudah Equiano
• Nathaniel Akinremi Fadipe
• Frantz Fanon
• Amy Ashwood Garvey
• Marcus Garvey
• Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford
• James Africanus Beale Horton
• W. Alphaeus Hunton
• C.L.R. James
• Claudia Jones
• Martin Luther King Jr
• Toussaint L’Ouverture
• Patrice Émery Lumumba
• Ras T. Makonnen
• Malcolm X
• Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
• Harold Moody
• Jamal Abd al-Nasir [Nasser]
• Francis Nwia Kofi Kwame Nkrumah
• Julius Kambarage Nyerere
• George Padmore
• Paul Leroy Robeson
• Walter Rodney
• Léopold Sédar Senghor
• Ladipo Felix Solanke
• Sékou Ahmed Touré
• I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson
• Eric Williams
• Henry Sylvester Williams