Signs at the event read “Freedom for all subject people”, “Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite”, and “Arabs and Jews Unite against British Imperialism”. Congress Resolutions The interviews are with those who were living in Manchester in 1945 and some who attended the Congress, including Sam Nelson and Alfred Gaisie. “The images don’t change the world, it’s what we do with them that changes the world. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pan-African_Congress&oldid=979869897, Articles with dead external links from March 2018, Articles with permanently dead external links, Articles with dead external links from September 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. [20] Hakim Adi, ‘Pan-Africanism in Britain: Background to the 1945 Manchester Congress’, in Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, p. 14. See Adi, ‘Pan-Africanism in Britain’, pp. Very often, as I learned when I began to take action to help these half-white scraps of humanity, the coloured American soldiers and the white mothers were both eager to marry, and the older generation on both sides assented to the union. It followed the foundation of the Pan-African Federation (PAF) in Manchester in 1944. In 1923, the Third Pan-African Congress was held in London and in Lisbon. Pursue your inquiry further and ask why Africa is poor, the “brilliant” answer is because Africa is backward. [44] Given this, it is disappointing that Ken Loach’s otherwise excellent documentary film, The Spirit of ‘45 (2013) did not mention the Fifth Pan-African Congress and other comparative moments of metropolitan anti-colonialist agitation. This had been supplied in the first case by Makonnen … a man of fantastic energy and organisational gifts who found the money, found the premises, kept them in order not only as an office but as a sort of free hostel for Africans and people of African descent and their friends who were in any way connected with the Bureau or needed assistance, organised meetings, interested people and did his share as propagandist and agitator. In October 1945, as European powers have retreated within themselves, decimated, disfigured and shellshocked by the tide of death that had swept over the continent for the last six years, 87 delegates representing 50 organisations met in a town hall in Manchester. [3], Given this, and as a counter-blast to the likes of Ferguson, rather than dwelling on those impersonal forces which apparently inexorably paved the way for decolonisation ‘from above’, it is perhaps useful to reverse the lens and see decolonisation as an active process, which in a central sense was fundamentally driven ‘from below’, by the actions of colonial subjects themselves. Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, p. 45. Our group provided the club of Negro soldiers with revolutionary newspapers and literature which had nothing. However, with the victory of national liberation movements came the ultimate transformation of Pan-Africanism from a social movement into a state ideology representing and legitimating the interests of new class elites.

[12] For more on this agitation, see Christian Høgsbjerg, C.L.R. 24, 26. [18] Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, p. 36. The development of Africa should be for the benefit of Africans and not merely for the profits of Europeans. [30], The significance of the Pan-African movement and the Fifth Congress. There is a home actually in existence, but money is needed to help it function.’[31].
We must impress upon the world that it must be Self-Government.’, ‘A great many of us want to say that we can govern ourselves now and govern ourselves well; that may not be true. Perhaps the most famous photograph shows John McNair – a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and secretary of the socialist Independent Labour Party giving his fraternal greetings to the assembly at its opening, with Dr Peter Milliard in the chair (he would soon hand over to Du Bois) and Amy Ashwood Garvey also on the platform. The congress was opened with 208 delegates signing "Lift Ev'ry Voice". However the two men disagreed over how far this might apply, with Churchill bluntly declaring in 1942, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’. When during the war he was able to run a successful restaurant business in Manchester, he devoted most of the money he made into furthering the interests of the work and helping to finance the fifth Pan-African Conference. All images courtesy Getty Images. [42] Kent Worcester, C.L.R. Kenyatta helped organize the fifth Pan-African Congress, which met in Manchester, England, on October 15–18, 1945, with W.E.B. Nkrumah brought to this work what had never been done before. But the U.S. also needed the support of Western Europe during the Cold War, and so colluded with for example the French Empire when it was under challenge in Algeria and Vietnam – a country where Washington would of course soon make a destructive and disastrous imperial intervention of its own.

[29] For the photograph of McNair speaking, see Brennavan Sritharan, ‘The Manchester town hall meeting that shaped Africa: remembering the Fifth Pan-African Congress’, online at  http://www.bjp-online.com/2015/07/fifth-pan-african-congress-70-years/  John McNair stressed to delegates that ‘the coloured races in the British Empire will never win political independence by trusting in the hypocrisy of the British imperialist class.
The Congress took place at the Chorlton-upon-Medlock Town Hall on the outskirts of the city centre. In 1943 Milliard had founded the Negro Association in Manchester, which was by then a quite multicultural community with prominent local black radical activists like the boxer and Communist Len Johnson and James Taylor of the Negro Welfare Centre. They could easily shoot down demonstrators, very often they would provoke them in order to put a quick end to a movement which threatened to involve large masses. For neo-conservative imperial historians like Niall Ferguson, any notion of African agency in decolonisation is seen as incidental at best: ‘What Harold Macmillan called “the winds of change” when he toured Africa in 1960 blew not from Windhoek or Malawi but from Washington and Moscow.’[2]  It is true that Washington under the guise of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘liberal right for national self-determination’ did want American businesses to gain access into previously protected imperial markets, hence the role played by the U.S. during the Suez Crisis of 1956 in blocking British and French attempts at further empire-building.

Miss Alma La Badie, a Jamaican member of the Garveyite Universal Negro Improvement Association, brought up child welfare, noting that ‘one of the most vital problems that the Congress is asked to consider is that of the children left behind by coloured American troops.’, ‘Many of these babies were born to married women whose husbands were serving overseas. He indicted Imperialism as one of the major causes of war, and called for strong and vigorous action to eradicate it’. Resolutions were passed and plans discussed for mass nationalist movements to demand independence… However, Picture Post covered the 5th Pan African Congress in an article by war reporter Hilde Marchant in Africa Speaks in Manchester published 10 November 1945. 117-167. These first four congresses however had been quite moderate affairs in themselves, calling for better provision of education and greater political participation for colonial subjects, but stopping short of calling for self-rule or self-government.

James (who was based in America during the 1940s and so missed the congress himself) once noted, ‘it was attended by over two hundred delegates from all over the world, the great majority of them engaged in trade union work or other type of work connected with the organisation of the masses of workers and farmers in Africa.’   But more than this, James stressed the new militant nationalist leadership around Kwame Nkrumah which emerged out of the congress, and would help lead Ghana to independence in 1957, just twelve years later: ‘Nkrumah had landed in Britain in June 1945. By 1945, the veteran campaigner Du Bois himself was identifying more and more with socialism and Communism. Six years of slaughter and devastation had ended, and peoples everywhere were celebrating the end of the struggle not so much with joy as with a sense of relief.