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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'.
already be gathered, but conditions in London were dire, too, and a colour bar there would make accommodation and dining difficult for those attending. At the last minute, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was relocated in the industrial city of Manchester, where Ras Makonnen could provide food at his restaurants and accommodation in the homes of his friends. 2 Considering the challenges of the hour, the
degraded ‘. 14 Among the few Africans at the core of the IAFE was the Kenyan Johnstone Kenyatta, who had known Padmore in Moscow and advised him on How Britain Rules Africa. ‘We had little African support’, James would write later, ‘and but for George’s contacts we would have been in a bad way’. 15 The West Indian Ras Makonnen, the British Guianan who had known Padmore in the United States, soon joined
together with their valuable items. With the advent of photography, the effigy was replaced by a photograph, which mourners held high above their heads ( Pankhurst 1992: 234 ). An example of this was evident at the funeral of Ras Makonnen in 1906, when it is reported that priests from churches in Addis Ababa spent the day mourning beside his portrait ( Pankhurst and Gerard 1996: 30 ). This particular use, although limited to the aristocracy, increased the appeal of photography and it became widely used for formal occasions and celebrations such as weddings. Photographs
Street, London, run by Amy Ashwood Garvey from the early 1930s or the Ethiopian Teashop in Oxford Road, Manchester, run by Ras Makonnen from 1939, or, indeed, the home of Dr Harold Moody in Peckham, a fellow Jamaican, with whose family Marson lodged. 6 Through Moody, Marson became involved with the League of Coloured Peoples, an organisation he had founded in 1931 to address the
ambivalent and the contingent. This was a mode of writing which had been tutored in an exclusively Communist pedagogy, and which existed on the political extremities. But posterity can be condescending. There is evidence, for example, that Padmore’s contemporary readers could engage with his writings in ways which are not readily available to us today. Ras Makonnen provides some clues. Makonnen himself was a
International Afro Restaurant run with her partner, Trinidadian Calypso singer Sam Manning, became a key meeting point for Caribbean and African intellectuals. She came into contact with continental Africans and was influenced by the more socialist-oriented West Indians and Africans such as C.L.R James, George Padmore (see Cudjoe and Duggan in this volume), Una Marson, Ras Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah (see Biney in this volume) and others. This interaction would be different from the black nationalism of the Harlem period, and, most significantly, it allowed for the
United States, and one copy fell into the hands of a British Guianan, George Thomas N. Griffith, who had taken the name T. Ras Makonnen the better to identify with Africa. Makonnen had known Padmore in the United States as Malcolm Nurse. Could Nurse and Padmore be the same man? Makonnen went down to the party office in New York to make inquiries. When an official offered him books by other writers
up in periodicals. Writing about the whole operation later, Abrahams said it reminded him of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World , carried from seaport to seaport by black seamen. 33 Garvey had died in London by the time Abrahams arrived, but Amy Ashwood Garvey was still there, running the Florence Mill Club where, Ras Makonnen recalled, ‘you could go … after you’d been slugging it
following soon after. They settled into a spacious two-storey house with flamboyant trees and bougainvillea in the garden, but her letters to Ellen Wright suggest her own loneliness in Accra and Padmore’s frustration in his new job. 76 Other high-level officials resented his presence. Ras Makonnen, who also moved to Ghana, would recall the scorn heaped by British-trained Africans who