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in 1959, his political passions were mobilised in the cause of Pan-Africanism. He was an intellectual formed deep in the vortex of the age of extremes, and for most of his life he espoused positions which others perceived to be both extreme and fanatical. His politics forced an abrupt separation from the modes of life which an aspiring colonial professional would have anticipated: his future
Lux , the London journal of the Christian Evidence Society; 3 that sharp critic of politics and imperial racism, the Jamaican doctor Theophilus Scholes; Henry Sylvester Williams who organised the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900; and the medical doctors John Alcindor, James Jackson Brown and Harold Moody, all of whom had practices in London in the early part of the twentieth
we have been fighting for, let us use it to the full advantage’ – then Britain, with its blatant racism, demanded a more complicated and plural understanding of fights for freedom. 8 It was in this context, compelled by her growing awareness of Pan-African movements and the political urgency of contesting racial hierarchies, that Marson initiated the discourse on mutual liberation that is
years he gravitated to a firebrand variant of marxism, to Pan-Africanism, and to a much deeper understanding of what was required to break the power of colonial authority. In part, this shift in allegiance was abetted by his reacquaintance with his old childhood friend, George Padmore, who was instrumental in piecing together a new conception of anti-colonialism, in which the historical resources of
drawn to the sense of spiritual forces immanent in African ways of life, and wrote of them as connected by ‘submarine’ 20 links to the rituals and religious ceremonies of the Caribbean. In 1971 in a religious ceremony he was to change his name ‘Edward’ to ‘Kamau’. He received the name, however, not in Ghana, but in Limuru, Kenya, from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s grandmother, 21 indicating his widening, Pan-African
forces and protest against the abuses they endured. The broader context to the actions of individuals such as Butler and Payne and their followers was one of increasing awareness and anger about racial injustice, fuelled by the experiences of black soldiers such as Butler who fought for the British during the First World War, the rise of the pan-African movement and fury over the perceived betrayal of Ethiopia when Britain recognised Italian control of the country in 1938. Increasing political involvement was also found amongst the East Indian population of Trinidad
, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, 2008). 11 Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, 2005 ); George Ferguson Bowen, Thirty Years of Colonial Government: A Selection from the Despatches and Letters , vol. 1, ed. Stanley Lane-Poole (New York, 1889 ), 364
, mailing copies of Imvo Zabantsundu to British MPs. 31 Yet, as Peregrino’s life story demonstrates, South African culture was not only shaped by Britain and the British Empire but by the United States, pan-Africanism, and other transnational currents. The South Asian writers were perhaps more deeply enmeshed in an Anglo-Indian culture, but they demonstrated an avid interest in the history and