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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'.
in the Congo up to and following the withdrawal of the UN force in 1964. It looks at the airlift of European hostages out of the city of Stanleyville in 1964 as an episode which highlights imperialist approaches towards the potential spread of Communist influence in Africa. By framing the Congo crisis as a key turning point in the process of decolonisation, this book highlights the agency of the UN and the Afro-Asian bloc in accelerating the anti-colonial campaign and attempting to reshape the relationship between North and South. The UN environment served to
Secretariat, particularly the Secretaries-General Hammarskjöld and Thant in creating mechanisms such as the CAC and the ‘Congo club’ and activating other channels of influence such as the Fourth Committee, served to increase the role of the Afro-Asian states in devising and effecting the formation of UN Congo policy. Moreover, their interpretations of the Charter and the function of the office signified the agency the UN wielded in directing the Congo operation and generally supporting the wider anti- colonial campaign. As the crisis evolved, ONUC policy and its
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
the lived experience of working-class African Americans, beautifully captures the very specific registers of these writings. While Briggs and Harrison address a readership where the explicit racialised violence of the state does not need theorising, here the violence of racialised poverty is also presupposed and it places the black worker as a part of a collective army of global resistance. This determination to connect the lived experience of race with transnational anti-racist and anti-colonial campaigns
It might also be added that most historians have ignored, or seriously downplayed, her dedicated involvement with anti-colonial campaigns in general, and Ethiopia in particular, from the late 1920s onwards. This chapter thus considers Sylvia Pankhurst ‘in the round’ and her contributions to a spectrum of English radicalism’s concerns in historical context. With all her faults, and they were many, she was consistent in ‘her fierce and uncompromising independence, her ruthless adherence to principles that she believed to be right regardless of the cost in terms of
worked on ideas of progress, tradition and religion that had been already made to fit the hegemonic reality of nation-states in Europe. These categories were however seldom the harbinger of pro-Western feelings. They more often provided ideational and argumentative arsenals to anti-colonial campaigns, like in China and Japan, where popular leaders even founded ‘new religions’, often taking the form of ‘redemptive societies’ with mass appeal (Duara, 2015 : 175–94). They stressed universalist cosmologies centred on moral self-transformation envisioning a connective
great day’ that they had been waiting for. 22 In late 1924 and throughout 1925, the PCF carried out its most sustained anti-colonial campaign when it sought to organise resistance to the colonial war in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. 23 The PCF-UIC campaign against the war was led by Jacques Doriot who saw in the resistance of the Moroccan indigenous leader, Abd El-Krim, against Spanish and French domination of the Rif region the perfect occasion for the PCF finally to prove its anti-colonial credentials to an
’. He (invariably) was charismatic with Caesarist tendencies combining a host of contradictory traits, including anomie, rage, compulsion and withdrawal. Other characteristics of the pioneering Caribbean national hero conventionally include leadership of national resistance – usually a radical anti-colonial campaign – rising from humble origins and the adoption of self-styled charismatic behaviour
.130 This failed Anglo-American initiative to neither direct UN Congo policy nor urge moderation upon the Afro-Asians led to increased attempts between Britain and the US to coordinate their policies, particularly as the Soviets continued their propaganda campaign with the Afro-Asians. Throughout the General Assembly debates on the Congo, the Foreign Office pressed upon the British the importance of giving the impression that ‘we and not the Russians appear on the side of Africa’.131 This connection to the anti-colonial campaign was emphasised by the Soviet Union as a