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Postscript in October 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress Convened in Manchester. Heralded As the New Starting-Point for Black

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Postscript in October 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress Convened in Manchester. Heralded As the New Starting-Point for Black POSTSCRIPT In October 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress convened in Manchester. Heralded as the new starting-point for Black anticolonial and anti-impe- rialist activism and the subsequent beginning of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, the congress was able to summon some 90 delegates from all over the African Atlantic, including 26 from Africa and 33 from the West Indies. Most of the elder generation of radicals participated, including George Padmore who was the main organizer of the event. I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and Bankole Awoonor Renner played leading roles, as did Jomo Kenyatta. W.E.B. Du Bois, the leading figure of the Pan-Africanist movement served as chair. Even more important was the attendance of the younger generation of African political activists, includ- ing Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the future leading figure in the Gold Coast’s independence movement and Ghana’s first prime minister and president, who by 1944 had become one of Padmore’s closest allies and was the congress’s co-organizer. Others were Obafemi Owolowo, who represented the Nigerian Youth Movement and later became one of the leading politicians in Nigeria, and Hastings Banda, Malawi’s future leader. Only three of the leading Black radicals active in the 1930s were miss- ing. The Germans killed Garan Kouyaté in 1944. James W. Ford and Otto Huiswoud were not present—perhaps they were not even invited, as they remained loyal to the Party. The developments on the radical Pan-Africanist scene after 1935 had little to do with the Comintern. By that time the organization barely functioned and was dissolved by Stalin in 1943. Instead, it was a new generation who was to lead the national liberation struggle in the Afri- can Atlantic. The departure of Wallace-Johnson from the Gold Coast in 1937 resulted into the disintegration of the WAYL. Although he tried to direct the affairs of the Youth League from London, he could accomplish little and by 1940, if not earlier, the WAYL had ceased to exist in the Gold Coast.1 In London, Wallace-Johnson worked with George Padmore, T.R. Makonnen and C.L.R. James for the International African Service 1 Boahen, Ghana, p. 145. On the disintegration of the WAYL, see Spitzer and Denzer “I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson”, pp. 448–449. The collapse of the WAYL in 1937/1938 was to some extent also linked to the 1937 cocoa hold-up. 718 postscript Bureau (IASB), an organization that had been founded by C.L.R. James in 1937, and edited the IASB’s bulletins African and the World and the African Sentinel. Wallace-Johnson remained tied with left-wing radical organiza- tions, such as the LAI and the NWA. However, 1937 these contacts must have been only on a personal basis. The LAI had more or less collapsed by 1937 and was subsequently disbanded by the CPGB. Instead, yet another organization saw its light: the Colonial Information Bureau, which was merged with the LAI.2 In 1938, Wallace-Johnson returned to Sierra Leone where he made a new attempt to establish a political mass movement, the Sierra Leone section of the WAYL.3 Padmore dominated The IASB until its merger into the Pan-African Federation (PAF) in 1944, which one-year later organized the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. About this time a new generation of radical West African intellectuals was about to take over, not least Kwame Nkrumah, who had been made the regional secretary of the PAF in 1944. The decolonization process in Africa was directly a result of the Man- chester 1945 Congress. At first sight, the political development in the Afri- can Atlantic had few, if any connections to the ambitions of the Black Comrades during the late 1920s and 1930s. James W. Ford, George Padmore and Otto Huiswoud had been fairly successful in their initial phase, but their project had collapsed by 1935. In retrospect, Padmore blamed the failure on the narrow-minded and colour-blind positions of the Comint- ern. While his attempt had been to engage whoever was a Black radical, be it an open-minded bourgeois intellectual or a worker, the Comintern Apparatus disavowed his attempt to put race ahead of class. This, in Pad- more’s mind, was the first mistake the Communist had made during the 1930s. Their second was their lukewarm, if not racist, attitude towards Black colonial subjects. He accused Moscow for downplaying Black activ- ism. Nevertheless, when Padmore wrote his analysis of the pitfalls of the communist engagement with Africa in 1956, his conclusion was frank. He argued that anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism in the African Atlantic was first and foremost a race issue, only second did class matter. By stress- ing the Pan-Africanist standpoint, he nullified the Comintern’s ‘class- 2 Bush, Imperialism, p. 241. 3 See further Leo Spitzer and LaRay Denzer, “I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League. Part II: The Sierra Leone Period, 1938–1945,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, VI: 4 (1973), pp. 565–601. On Padmore’s activities during the 1930s, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, pp. 298–299, and Makalani, In the Cause of Free- dom, Chapter 7..
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