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the fact that the game became ‘an embodiment of the political aspirations of the African people’ and was utilised as an ‘expression of defiance towards the state and of independence from their colonial oppressors’. As independence movements came to fruition across the continent, the game's radical political pedigree further stitched it into the fabric of African cultural and political life. In the immediate post-colonial period, some of the leaders of newly independent African nations, not least Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian father of pan-Africanism
international activists continued to connect this campaign with anti-colonial movements across the Caribbean and Africa, with which they maintained strong political connections. London provided a unique crucible in which colonialism and racism, and the struggle against them, combined. By the 1950s, Amy Ashwood Garvey had decades of experience organising in and against the British state. She had campaigned against British support for the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and she had co-organised the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, 21 which, like the
Pieterson’, African Arts 40, no. 2 (2007): 52–69. 26 Ali Khangela Hlongwane, ‘Commemoration, Memory and Monuments in the Contested Language of Black Liberation: The South African Experience’ , Journal of Pan African Studies 2, no. 4 (2008): 135–70; Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare …’ Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/index.html. 27 Colin Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance: Township Organisations and Non-Violent Direct Action in Twentieth