AWOONOR-RENNER, BANKOLE

Bankole Awoonor-Renner (circa 1907-May 27, 1970) was a prominent Gold Coast journalist, nationalist, and politician. He had studied in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and was an unrepentant socialist.

The son of Captain Peter Awoonor-Renner leader of the Gold Coast Bar, he was born in about 1907 at Elmina. His education by the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Coast led him eventually to travel to the United States where he attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He also studied journalism at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

While at Tuskegee, he was a joint-editor of the college magazine from 1924-25, and also wrote poems and articles which were published in the Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (N.A.A.C.P.), edited by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, and in a New York magazine called Opportunity. In 1925 he became the first West African to be admitted to the Institute of Journalists in the United Kingdom. An active journalist, he sometimes signed himself Kweku Awuno-Bankole.

From 1922-24 he had served as Secretary of the African Students’ Association in America. He then went to the Soviet Union to study at the University of Toilers of the East (K.U.T.V.U.) on Moscow. He remained in the Soviet Union to attend the International Conference of Writers and Artists held in 1927. In the same year he was made a member of the Association of Writers in Moscow.

From 1931-32, he edited the Gold Coast Leader in Sekondi, a position which the pioneer nationalist J. E. Casely Hayford had filled until his death in 1930. He also acted as assistant editor of the Times of West Africa, published by Dr. J. B. Danquah. Hailed as the “distinguished son of a distinguished father’ by the Nigerian Daily Telegraph on April 5, 1933, he contributed poems and articles to almost all the newspapers published in the Gold Coast from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s.

He was prominent not only in the Gold Coast press, but also in political affairs. Like Casely Hayford, W. E. (Kobina) Sekyi, and many others, Awoonor-Renner popularized the cause of national self-determination, and crusaded for African freedom from the 1920s onwards. He was suspect in official circles not only on account of his travels to the Soviet Union and because of his journalistic, activities, but also because he was a correspondent of George Padmore, the West Indian who headed the Negro Bureau of the Moscow-controlled International of Labor Unions and edited the Negro Worker, the mouthpiece of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers.

A highly-respected member of the Continuation Executive Committee of J. B. Danquah‘s Gold Coast Youth Conference, Awoonor-Renner was also the first president of the militant pan-African Council of the West African Youth League, founded by Wallace Johnson, the trade unionist from Sierra Leone, which sought to stimulate Gold Coast youth to strive for national self-determination.

Significantly, too, Bankole Awoonor-Renner was the prime mover in, and president of, the Friends of Asante Freedom Society, founded in Accra in 1934. A rival to the Asante Kotoku Union Society, which sought the restoration of the Asante Union, the Friends of Asante Freedom Society sought to persuade the chiefs of Asante, and through them the Gold Coast government in Accra and the British government in London, that the restoration on the Union was undesirable.

He was introduced to the intricacies of Asante politics by O. S. Agyeman, an educated member of the royal clan of Agona, who was notorious as a political intriguer, and who opposed the restoration of the Union. Under Awoonor-Renner’s leadership, the society objected to the restoration of the Union on three grounds: firstly, because it would help to perpetuate indirect rule; secondly, because it would both lessen the authority which the amanhene (paramount chiefs) exercised over their people and reduce the amanhene’s political status for the benefit of the Asantehene; and thirdly because the government should only reunite Asante if all the Asante chiefs requested it.

Although Awoonor-Renner and his close associates, like Wallace John-son, were able to make out a plausible case against restoration and appealed to the British Colonial Office, British Members of Parliament, and several organizations in the United Kingdom for help, their efforts failed, the Asante Confederacy being established on January 31, 1935.

Awoonor-Renner was a socialist and a strong advocate of Communism. Before World War II, when Soviet Russian politics could only be mentioned in hushed tones, and when to be found with Soviet literature was “accounted seditious,” he openly declared himself a Communist and a Bolshevik. In his Gold Coast office, he displayed pictures of Lenin and of Stalin, as well as the Red Flag with a hammer and sickle. On the eve of his departure to the United Kingdom to study law, he presented a framed portrait of Lenin to Sir Alan Burns, governor of the Gold Coast, as a gift to the people of the Gold Coast.

He was elected a councillor on the Accra Town Council from 1942-44, as the member for the Accra Moslem Party, a party hitherto unknown in Accra. As a socialist, he said he felt the need to lead “the down-trodden, unrepresented, and unrepresentable Hausa and other minorities who, mostly because of their Islamic faith, knew little English, the language of the Accra Town Council, and therefore had no chance of making their voice heard in municipal affairs, although they owned “more than one-tenth of the real estate of Accra. “Consequently Awoonor-Renner at this time abandoned Christianity for Islam, and became a Muslim.

In England, to which he travelled after his term on the Town Council, he had a brief career as a wartime “military contractor” before taking up the study of law. In 1946 he published The West African Soviet Union, which was read by Kwame Nkrumah and his West African colleagues who were in London at that time, and who constituted the “Young Turks” who in December 1945 had created the West African National Secretariat, after the Sixth (formerly called the Fifth) Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester the previous October, with Awoonor-Renner in attendance.

Awoonor-Renner was vice-chairman of the Secretariat, which was intended to serve as a coordinating center for the nationalist movements of West Africa. Earlier, in 1928, he had published, in Moscow, This Africa, an anthology of his poems dedicated to the “Emancipated Mighty Soviet Proletariat.” The English edition of This Africa appeared in 1943, with a brief biographical note written by Dr. J. B. Danquah.

Upon returning to the Gold Coast, Awoonor-Renner became one of the early leaders of Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ (C.P.P.), and was known as “Comrade.” He was imprisoned during the Positive Action campaign of 1950. His wife, Olabisi Awoonor-Renner, was also active in C.P.P. politics. He later broke with Nkrumah and joined the Moslem Association Party, formed in early 1954, and stood for election on its ticket in Accra during the 1954 general election. When the Moslem Association. Party became part of the opposition United Party (U.P.) in November 1957, he was appointed a member of the working committee of the newly enlarged party. Ill health made him abandon politics, and he lived quietly till his death.

S. K. B. ASANTE