American Africans in Ghana

Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

Kevin K. Gaines

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807867822
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1957 Ghana became one of the first sub-Saharan African nations to gain independence from colonial rule. Over the next decade, hundreds of African Americans--including Martin Luther King Jr., George Padmore, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray, and Muhammad Ali--visited or settled in Ghana. Kevin K. Gaines explains what attracted these Americans to Ghana and how their new community was shaped by the convergence of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, and the decolonization of Africa. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president, posed a direct challenge to U.S. hegemony by promoting a vision of African liberation, continental unity, and West Indian federation. Although the number of African American expatriates in Ghana was small, in espousing a transnational American citizenship defined by solidarities with African peoples, these activists along with their allies in the United States waged a fundamental, if largely forgotten, struggle over the meaning and content of the cornerstone of American citizenship--the right to vote--conferred on African Americans by civil rights reform legislation.

1 Mapping the Routes to Ghana

Black Modernity, Subjecthood, and Demands for Full Citizenship

Six years before Ghana’s independence, a biographical account of George Padmore published by a radical West Indian newspaper illustrated the convergence of multiple histories of slavery and colonization in the life and career of the journalist and leading publicist of African anti-colonial movements. Born in Trinidad, educated in African American universities, based in London, and now, as the article reported, bound for the Gold Coast colony to assist the nationalist movement there, Padmore symbolized a renascent black world overcoming the fragmentation of enslavement. On this occasion, the narrative of Padmore’s life story consciously evoked the shared historical origins of peoples of African descent residing in the United States, Brazil, Latin America, and the West Indies whose genesis could be traced to what had been known as the Slave Coast of West Africa. According to this account by L. H. A. Scotland, Padmore’s great-grandfather had been an Ashanti warrior who was taken prisoner and sold into slavery on Barbados, where his grandfather had labored on a sugar plantation. The genealogy of Padmore’s slave origins reminded readers of the metropolitan foundations of slavery and colonization. Duly noting the slave-owning origins of members of British royalty and nobility, Scotland laid waste to the mystique of primordial Englishness and royalism. The sugar plantation on which Padmore’s grandfather toiled was “owned by the ancestors of the present Earl of Harewood, the son of the Princess Royal, sister of King George VI.” Padmore’s grandfather had migrated to Trinidad after the abolition of slavery in 1834, working as a stonemason and living to the age of 105. The article selectively sketched Padmore’s background, claiming that Garveyite race consciousness had sparked Padmore’s efforts on behalf of African emancipation and omitting mention of his tenure as the Communist International’s foremost expert on colonial peoples. Appearing as the movement for self-government in the Gold Coast gathered momentum in 1951, the article portrayed Padmore’s impending visit to West Africa as the closing of a circle, the resolution of a historical cycle of enslavement and impending freedom, exile and return.¹

Padmore’s peripatetic career provided a fitting symbol for the historical routes of mass migration, cultural and political formation, and movement building furthered by a global black press that converged in the independence of Ghana in 1957. The Trinidadian activist intellectual was hardly unique in this regard; this chapter is concerned with mapping the distinct but overlapping routes of political engagement traversed not only by Pad-more but also by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and African American sociologist and anthropologist St. Clair Drake. Though originating from disparate locations, all three men were linked by histories of racial subordination and anticolonial struggle. Moreover, these three figures were longtime political allies and worked together to promote pan-Africanism in Ghana after independence. In tracing the paths to Ghana of these and other individuals, I seek to endow the abstract notion of diaspora with the specificity of political projects, lived experience, and emancipatory hopes.² I do not just emphasize the layering of international historical and cultural influences that shaped the perspectives of these individuals and of African, West Indian, and African American peoples in the postwar period generally. I seek primarily to account for the social and cultural movements that led peoples of African descent to imagine themselves anew as political subjects and that informed their demands for freedom and full citizenship. The short African century of decolonization movements was advanced by the social transformations wrought by mass labor migrations, military service in world wars, intellectual attacks against Western white supremacy and the spread of anti-racist consciousness, and literary and expressive cultures that articulated black peoples’ aspirations for cultural and political freedom.

Afro-Modernity and the Short African Century

The activism of Padmore, Nkrumah, and Drake exemplified what political scientist Michael Hanchard has described as an oppositional culture of “Afromodernity,” the result of black people’s liberatory engagement with the institutions, ideologies, and technologies of the Western world.³ Over the short African century of anticolonial struggle and pan-African nationalism, multiple histories of migration, a variety of institutional settings, mass communications technologies, and social and cultural movements provided the basis for a global culture of black modernity linking colonies with metropolitan centers, forging a new sense of a unified black world out of once-disparate diasporas. The vibrant cosmopolitanism of Harlem and its traditions of black nationalist and left-wing agitation, along with those of other black urban enclaves, including Paris; London; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia, were important sites for the development of transnational black activism. At such African American universities as Fisk, Howard, and Pennsylvania’s Lincoln, the legacy of New Negro radicalism shaped interactions between African Americans and foreign-born students from Africa and the Caribbean. Elsewhere, countless African Americans and colonial subjects from the Caribbean and Africa were politicized by the international communist movement and its global agitation on behalf of the Scottsboro defendants as well as the involvement of the organized Left in black popular front movement activism during the 1930s and 1940s.⁴

A major catalyst for the creation of a global culture of black modernity during the early twentieth century was the unprecedented mass migration of peoples of African descent spurred by the demand for labor within industrial mass-production regimes. As Thomas Holt has written, “[M]illions of colored peoples on four continents were quite literally pulled or pushed out of ‘their place’” at the bottom of racially oppressive systems of coerced labor.⁵ Moving from colony to metropole, from rural villages to cities, they encountered a succession of similar yet distinct systems of racial subordination that exposed them to the promise and discontents of modernity. Describing the formative experiences of Caribbean-born black labor organizer Ewart Guinier, who worked in wartime New York City, historian Martha Biondi has also delineated a collective experience of emigrants, former colonials from the Caribbean, politicized by their encounters with American racism whether in the urban North or in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone.⁶ Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore underwent a similar passage through the crucible of Western racism. Traveling to the United States in search of education and professional training, Nkrumah and Padmore worked as laborers to subsidize their studies. The belated incorporation of peoples of African descent into mass-production industries spurred demands for political and economic rights within trade union movements. Whether in search of education or employment, migrants to European and American metropolitan urban centers from the rural U.S. South, from the West Indies, and from the country to cities throughout West Africa exemplified not only black and African peoples’ quest for greater economic opportunity but increasingly their demands for political change as modern historical subjects.⁷

Mass migration to metropolitan centers fueled anti-imperialist political organizing in London. Since the 1930s, African nationalist student activists and West Indian intellectuals, including Padmore and the exiled Marcus Garvey, agitated in London around pan-African concerns. Such efforts took on greater urgency after Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, which heightened nationalist sentiment among outraged black and African peoples throughout the world.⁸ World War II accelerated demands for freedom and rights consciousness as the dissonant experience of African American and colonized black and African soldiers fighting for democracy on the side of imperial and segregationist powers honed resistance to systemic racial oppression. In London, migrants and students from Africa, the South Asian subcontinent, and the West Indies envisioned themselves as a commonwealth of colonial freedom movements. In the United States, African Americans agitated for civil and voting rights within the March on Washington movement, which campaigned against discrimination in defense industries, housing, and the military and thereby initiated what scholars have recently termed the “long civil rights movement.”⁹ Just as African Americans looked to the federal government and the courts to declare unconstitutional racial segregation in the South, so did many young blacks of the postwar era draw inspiration from anticolonial movements. The victorious example of Gandhian nonviolence powerfully influenced the U.S. peace movement, facilitating the participation of such black American radicals as St. Clair Drake, Bayard Rustin, and Bill Sutherland in the politics of Gold Coast nationalism.

Black Expressive Cultures of Modernity: Highlife and Negritude

The main cultural artifacts of this urbanization of the black world, which led racialized and colonial subjects to imagine themselves anew as self-determining citizens, were West African highlife, Afro-Cuban music, Trinidadian calypso, and African American modern jazz, or bebop. During the 1950s, the calypsos recorded by Trinidadian singers in London offered wry commentary on the postwar migration of West Indians to England.¹⁰ In Nigeria and Ghana and throughout West Africa, highlife demonstrated a seemingly limitless capacity to absorb other Afro-diasporic musical influences such as calypso and mambo. Highlife, like calypso and African American modern jazz, epitomized the transnational routes and processes of migration and exchange that merged the cultures and struggles of peoples of African descent during the postwar era. As a form of expressive culture synonymous with the anticolonial movement, highlife, as its name suggests, connoted popular African aspirations for freedom and modernity. The music also promoted nationalism by synthesizing a cultural unity out of tribal and ethnic differences. Indeed, the variety of songs and their origins reflected the hybridity of a pan–West African culture defined by migration, ethnic inter-marriage, and cosmopolitanism. According to Wolfgang Bender, “Singers would perform in different languages, and the music’s changing rhythms reflected many musical cultures. The language used could be Yoruba, Fante, Ewe, Ga, Urhobo, Efik, Igbo, English, pidgin English, and others.” During the early 1960s, highlife and West African percussion styles would feature prominently in the compositions of modern jazz drummer Max Roach, and his collaborations with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., vocalist Abbey Lincoln, and Nigerian percussionist Michael Olatunji articulated African Americans’ solidarity with African liberation struggles. Such collaborations between African American and African musicians contributed to a broader articulation of a global, democratic vision of African American consciousness and citizenship.¹¹

In literature, the transformative spirit of black modernity found expression in Negritude, which emerged during the 1930s as a literary and cultural movement of Francophone African and black Caribbean intellectuals. Negritude crystallized a growing awareness among black intellectuals throughout Africa and its diaspora of a black voice, an African and diasporic vernacular rearticulation of modern culture through literature, music, and the arts. Before Negritude became known as such, the artistic evocation of a distinctly black vernacular animated the efforts of many artists, including the work of such poets as Afro-Cuban Nicholas Guillen, Jamaican-born Claude McKay and Louise Bennett, and Afro-Americans Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. Specifically, Negritude as cultural movement and manifesto represented black Francophone intellectuals’ response to the alienation produced by French colonial policies of assimilation that inevitably denigrated the ancestral African cultural heritage while patronizing the intellectuals as elite evolués for their mastery of Francophone language and culture. Against European contempt for Africa, advocates of Negritude affirmed African origins and recovered the submerged history of the continent’s ancient civilizations. Just as African scholarship and contributions in the arts and sciences represented crucial elements of Western civilization, so in modern times would black and African cultural innovation make singular contributions to universal world culture. As formulated by Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor, Martinican writers Paulette Nardal and Aimé Césaire, and a host of others, Negritude appropriated and synthesized such disparate Western and Afrodiasporic historical and cultural influences and touchstones as Bergsonian philosophy, surrealism, Marxism, Afro-Cuban literary negrismo, the Haitian revolution, the New Negro Renaissance, and European anthropology. These intellectuals’ declarations of black and African cultural autonomy, their assertion of the cultural unity of peoples of African descent, and their rejection of European cultural imperialism provided deracinated and exiled black and African peoples with a means of spiritual return to their African origins. Negritude also galvanized anticolonial resistance, as such figures as Césaire and Senghor translated its values into the political realm of decolonization. At its genesis, Negritude represented nothing less than a global assertion of black emancipatory modernity.

Cosmopolitan Afro-Modernity: The Diaspora Comes to Africa

As suggested by the multiple histories that converged in highlife and Negritude, throughout the black world, local subjectivities and demands for freedom were invariably enacted within what was widely understood as a global setting. With the postwar collapse of Europe’s empires and African Americans’ escalating demands for full citizenship, peoples of African descent increasingly regarded themselves as part of a global community of struggle. West Africans of the postwar era, for example, came of age within a diasporic culture that had long been cosmopolitan and a part of the West. As Paul Gilroy and Manthia Diawara have shown, mass communications technologies and expressive culture are crucial vehicles for the ongoing formation of transnational modern black and African subjectivities.¹² Indeed, as the culture of highlife suggests, “local” African cultures were inherently cosmopolitan and outward looking. For a youth in Lagos during the 1940s and 1950s, confirmations of the worldwide African presence were an everyday matter, from the local community of Portuguese-speaking repatriates from Brazil to American cinematic images of blacks. There was also Afro-Cuban dance music and such Afro-American heroes as boxing champions Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. In this sense, the Anglophone West Africa of Kwame Nkrumah’s youth was truly a part of the black diaspora, with its dense layering of intellectual exchanges and historical and sociocultural movements.¹³

For example, such Afro-diasporic influences as Garveyism, a cornerstone of the U.S.-based New Negro movement, contributed to a burgeoning African renaissance during the 1920s through which an Anglophone West African intelligentsia proclaimed Africa’s membership in the modern world and articulated popular aspirations for national self-determination. Such was the milieu that Nkrumah carried with him to the United States and Harlem, where he pursued an informal political education in addition to formal study at historically black Lincoln University. And the New Negro renaissance in America helped launch George Padmore on the path to radicalism and anti-colonial agitation at such black American colleges as Fisk and Howard. Such African American institutions—including churches, colleges, fraternities, and newspapers—were major sites of anticolonial ferment, venues for what historian Penny Von Eschen has called a “politics of the African Diaspora.” Relocated to London, Padmore’s pan-African organizing brought him into contact with Francophone West African labor organizer Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, a collaboration that, as Brent Edwards has written, demonstrated not only the crossing of boundaries between different colonial regimes and languages but more importantly the inherently international character of black radicalism in the interwar period.¹⁴ Along these routes of communication and within these hybrid diasporic settings that in a sense could not be considered strictly African, West Indian, or African American, anticolonial black activists and intellectuals articulated the emergence of a modern political community defined by self-determination and freedom.

As colonial subjects from Africa and the Caribbean kept abreast of African American politics and institutions, a segment of the African American intelligentsia linked its struggles for full citizenship in the United States with the global anticolonial movement. Taking for granted the congruence of their distinct struggles, members of this worldwide network of activists and intellectuals pooled educational, political, and intellectual resources in the service of pan-African emancipation. The organizing and planning for self-government by Nkrumah and Padmore in London paved the way for the nation-building efforts of Drake and others as the Gold Coast colony became the new nation of Ghana. Indeed, the extent to which African nationalism framed the activities of such African American intellectuals and activists as Drake, Bill Sutherland, and Bayard Rustin has been greatly underappreciated.

From Trinidad to America, West Africa, and England: George Padmore’s Transatlantic Odyssey

George Padmore was the leading theoretician, strategist, and publicist of anticolonialism and African liberation, linking metropolitan agitation to the nationalist movements on the African continent. As with so many other West Indian intellectuals, exile was an essential condition for his life’s work. Pad-more left Trinidad for the United States in 1927, seeking professional training. Instead, he joined the Communist Party the next year. Padmore quickly ascended to leadership as the Comintern’s expert on colonial peoples but was expelled from the party in 1934 when he objected to its pursuit of an alliance with Britain and France in return for its withdrawal of support for anticolonial challenges to those imperial nations. Beginning in 1935, Padmore based his political work in London until he relocated to Ghana in 1957 and became a special adviser to Nkrumah.

Born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Tarcarigua, Trinidad, on June 28, 1903, Padmore was the second child in a family of five. His father, H. A. Nurse, had achieved distinction as an agriculturist and botanist. Among blacks of Padmore’s father’s generation in Trinidad’s middle class, racial pride and solidarity were necessary responses to metropolitan racism. An insulting tract by an English writer, J. A. Froude, The English in the West Indies (1888), received a swift rebuttal from Jacob Thomas, Trinidad’s leading black intellectual. In his aptly titled Froudacity: West Indian Fables Expl...