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T HIS ESSAY PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW of George Padmore’s contributions to the development of Pan-Africanism as an intellectual tradition and political movement. Padmore, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago at the turn of the twentieth century, does not enjoy the same levels of popular recognition as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah (see Morris, Grant, and Biney in this volume). And yet he was seminal in Pan-Africanism’s evolution, and his impact on the movement continues to be felt to this day
, whom he insisted be christened Blyden) joined him in the US. Gradually, Nurse was drawn into the Communist Party. He acquired a new identity which was to remain with him for the rest of his life: George Padmore. In late 1929 the party gave him two one-way tickets to Moscow. These were stolen, but Padmore scraped together enough cash to cover the cost of a single passage, and he set sail. So far as we can tell he never saw
Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.
was freed, but his relations with other UGCC leaders had frayed and he was removed as general secretary of the UGCC. He immediately launched the Accra Evening News , which would become both his own political voice and the voice of George Padmore. Even before he returned to the Gold Coast, Nkrumah had stressed the Gold Coast’s need for ‘a politically fearless and militant newspaper’. 5
diplomatic officials about Padmore, were weighted with irony: ‘Concerning George Padmore I am biased, for he is my friend’. 28 In a letter of 5 March 1956 Padmore expressed his appreciation both for the introduction and for Wright’s ‘friendship and sincerity’. Reciprocating the favour, he promised to review the English edition of Wright’s new book, The Colour Curtain , which Dobson had published after
imagined change and held together, in part, by George Padmore. The delegation from the Sudan, for instance, had a link to Padmore through his friendship with one of its members, Yagoub Osman, a Sudanese newspaper editor Padmore had known in London before the war. Padmore’s interest in the Sudan was longstanding – he contributed to the Sudan Star 25 – and now he went to work publicising the Sudanese
truly implement the sanctions, and the sanctions were eventually ended on 15 July 1936 after Italy had driven the Abyssinian royal family into exile and occupied Abyssinia. 20 The invasion of Abyssinia and the inept response from the international community convinced many Africans that they could not depend on the west to defend any African interests. As prominent pan-Africanist George Padmore recalled, “the brutal rape of Ethiopia combined with the cynical attitude of the Great Powers convinced Africans everywhere that black men had no rights which white men felt
It was the summer of 1934, and, in a village north of Paris, George Padmore wrote for hours, without sign of wearying, covering page after page with his nearly indecipherable scrawl. His hostess, the English poet and publisher Nancy Cunard, marvelled at his concentration, his ability to focus his mind while his political world was falling about his ears. 1 A year before, he had had the
documents relating to irregular activities of CPP political leaders’. Wright described the present Secret Circle as ‘composed of six members in Accra and one member in London, George Padmore. DD indicates that George Padmore has access to all confidential or secret documents of the C.P.P. and that he is an active adviser to Kwame Nkrumah and that a constant stream of communications flows between Padmore
workers were to take control of their government, workers on the continent would be inspired to take control of theirs. In preparation for that day, the ILP collected equipment to broadcast news of the revolution to the continent. 2 In that summer when revolution seemed possible, George Padmore called for self-government of the colonies as an essential step towards it. ‘[T]he liberation of the colonial