Their solidarity was not, however, uniform. Nkrumah remembered in his memoirs that even at this point there was a marked conflict between "the Ghana line" and that of Nigeria. "The Nigerians claimed that there was no question of considering African or West African unity at the existing stage of colonial dependency and insisted
that we should leave these colonial territories to struggle for themselves, each one working out its own salvation as best it could.
Nkrumah left New York for London early in 191-5? ostensibly to continue his studies. He attended some
lectures at the London School of Economics, thought hopefully about writing something on "Logical Positivism" under the formidable Professor Ayer, and ended by neglecting his
studies to throwr himself into various political activities, including the organisation of the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Pan-Africanism had been born around the turn of the century, in the wake of the Boer War, the adventures of Cecil Rhodes, and the enacting of the "Jim Crow" laws in the United States. As Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois put it in his book The World and Africa, the Pan-African Congress held in London in 1900 was the
creation of "respectable men" whose plans "had in them nothing spectacular or revolutionary" but who felt that black men had
10
been crushed by circumstances. The first Pan-African Congress was sponsored by a Trinidad barrister and a bishop
11
of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Like the Congresses that followed, in Paris (1919) London and
Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York (1927), it was dominated by theorists from the United States and
the West Indies. At Paris in 1919, "the delegates celled on the colonial powers in Africa to abolish slavery and forced labour, to extend education, and to make possible
12 a gradual progress towards self-government.
10 See also W.E.B. Du Bois. "The African Roots of War",
Atlantic Monthly, vol. 15* The early Pan-African Congresses in fact'belied their names. They had no African roots.
In 1921 Blaise Diagne, deputy for Senegal in the French Chamber of Deputies and one of the few delegates at that year's Congress, told his fellow-delegates that "I am a Frenchman First, and a Negro Afterward." Cited in
Pan-Africanism Reconsidered e d . The American Society of African Culture (University of California, 1962), p.^5* Afro-American representatives to the early Congresses were preoccupied with the pursuit of civil rights within
'civilised' countries.
11 Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism, (London, 1965), P-21 12 ibid, Appendix I
53
But before 194-5? 'the Pan-Africanists had few working contacts with Africa, and their statements on Africa were
generally far from militant. The Congress held in Manchester in 194-5, therefore, marked a qualitative departure. A strong contingent of young African leaders was present. Besides Nkrumah, J. Annan, E.A. Ayikumi, Edwin J. du Plan,
Dr. Kurankyi Taylor, Joe Appiah and Dr. J.C. de Graft Johnson all attended from the Gold Coast. J The presence of so many Africans helps to explain the militancy and the continental
orientation of the Manchester declarations. The delegates issued a detailed critique of colonial rule, castigating the distortion of African economies to serve metropolitan demands.
"The British Government in West Africa," they charged, "is virtually controlled by a merchants' united front, whose main
objective is the exploitation of the people." The delegates also issued a "Declaration to the Colonial Powers" in which they called for "economic and political democracy" for the
14 peoples of Africa and threatened strikes and boycotts. For the first time in a Pan-African Congress, national
independence was asserted as the only valid solution for Africa's political aspirations.
Nkrumah, thus, took his place in the ranks of the Pan- Africanists at a time of decisive change in their orientation. The broad anti-colonial solidarity that had brought "fraternal delegations" from Annam, India, Morocco and the Philippines to the 1921 Congress, and the myth of race that identified a trans-Atlantic unity of black men were giving way to a more
13 ibid, p.
31
. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of Unity (New York, 1967), Ch. 1.Text in Begum, op. cit. , Appendix III 14
single-minded drive towards the independence and unity of
Africa. Some of the themes were old. Many of the delegates spoke with that bitterness resulting from a past burdened
with degradations that the poet David Diop articulated when he wrote that
Le Blanc a tue mon pere Mon pere etait fier
Le Blanc a viole ma mere Ma mere etait belle
Le Blanc a courbe mon frere sous le soleil des routes Mon frere etait fort
Le Blanc a tourne vers moi Ses mains rouges de sang
Noir
Et de sa voix de Maitre ^c
'He boy, un berger, une serviette, de l'eaul'
Pan-Africanism was for them the attempt to recover a lost dignity - perhaps even a potential weapon for revenge.
But for those who lingered after the Congress to found a Working Committee (of which Nkrumah became the first
General Secretary) the past mattered less than the future. Manchester proved to be the last Pan-African Congress.
Its successors were the All-African Peoples' Congresses: radically different in form and aspirations. The old
racial version, of Pan-Africanism became the theme of academic seminars endowed by American foundations, and of poetry-reahngs in Paris or Rome. Negritude became the subject for a nascent literature, a groping philosophy ("Black mother/Rocks her son/
15 "Le Temps du Martyr". Diop is a veterinary surgeon born and educated in Senegal. See L.S. Senghor (ed.)
55
And in her black head/Covered with black hair/She keeps 16
marvellous dreams")* it ceased to have relevance for a movement of continentalists who wished to absorb "white" Arabs and "tawny" Berbers in an African union.
Nkrumah was never racist. So much could not be said of all his supporters. Late in the Nkrumah regime, a
correspondent wrote in the Government-controlled Evening News: "Today we march with the whites in every achievement of
human endeavour - indeed, more often than not, the black man trounces, pummels, defeats and absolutely confounds the
white man and woman wherever the challenge is thrown,
intellectually, physically or spiritually... The black man is here. The twentieth century is the century of the Black
17
Man." But this kind of rhetorical over-compensation for the great lie about Africa (the argument that, because the
16 Kalungano, "Dream of the Black Mother" see African Writing Today (Penguin Books, 1967), P«535*
Negritude was initially the invention of a group of young black poets (including Senghor, Leon Damas, and Aim^ Cdsaire) who came together in inter-war Paris to found a journal called L 'Etudiant Noir. Its project:
"Revaloriser le nom, la personne et les valeurs du N£gre." See Helena Bobrowska-Skrodzka, "Aime Cdsaire: Chantre de l'Afrique" in Presence Africaine, no 59, Sept. 1966.
J 7 THoU ia/M J t L k l e c t i c a . f t r'teLA rW j io v t a)- c.S
Tki pWftU if «vt w A;frltt-Mi f/Trwi ba m sS* fa fa
A. S H li^ p */r < U? (-0 i t v S^aU.
Africans were technologically backward at the time of the European intrusion - "they never invented the wheel" -
they were in some sense inferior to Europeans as human beings) was never common in Ghana and was totally
uncharacteristic of Nkrumah himself. He was concerned
rather with setting the record straight. After independence, the universities of Ghana were to become centres for the
study of the African past.
After the Manchester Congress, Nkrumah became for a time a professional organiser. He set up the West African National Secretariat with its office in a Gold Coast lawyer's
chambers in the Gray's Inn Road. He organised West African student groups (with a vanguard group called "The Circles") and. a union of African workers employed in Britain. He planned a West African Conference to co-ordinate the
independence movements in the British and Erench colonies. Though it was called twice, the Conference was never actually held. Negotiations quickly broke down when Nkrumah visited the African members of the Erench National Assembly in Paris - Apithy, Senghor, Gueye and Houphouet-Boigny.
At this stage, the views of political activists in French and British West Africa were radically opposed. Although the period between 19^5 and I960 saw broadly
similar political transformations take place in the British and French colonies, with the emergence of nationalist elites and mass parties, and with the gradual replacement of
colonial bureaucracies by responsible African governments, the processes of decolonisation in each area were very different. The Manchester Congress brought together nationalists from the British colonies. They emphasised political independence as the prelude to economic and social