GEORGE PADMORE
George Padmore (1903-September 23, 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, called the “father of African emancipation”, was one of a number of talented West Indians who helped shape African events in the 20th century. He played an active role in developing the Pan- African and black labour movements from the 1930s onwards and was a close associate and adviser to Kwame Nkrumah (q.v.), then prime minister first of the Gold Coast and then of Ghana, during the years immediately preceding and following Ghana’s independence in 1957.
He was born in Tarcaigua, Trinidad, and was the grandson of the slave born on the Belle Isle plantation in Barbados. His father was a botanist and agriculturalist. He himself was educated in a private secondary school, and after qualifying for a pharmacy course decided to go to the United States to further his education. He first worked in 1916 as a journalist for the Trinidad publishing company in port of Spain, Trinidad Publishing Company in the Port of Spain. Trinidad, until he clashed with an English editor whom he accused of racism and was dismissed.
He arrived in the United States in 1924, and at first studied political science at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. His outspoken views on race relations brought him to the attention of radicals.
In 1927 he transferred to the Law School at New York University, and then to the law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., at the suggestion of the leaders of the United States Communist Party. At this time, he changed his name to Padmore, and rapidly became very influential in communist party organs aimed at students, trade unionists, and especially Afro-Americans.
He came to the attention of William Z. Foster (1888 1961), president of the U. S. Communist Party, and in July 1929 was sent to Germany to attend the second congress of the League Against Imperialism in Frankfurt, where he helped to plan a black worker’s conference.
Returning to the United States, he was instructed to leave his studies and to prepare for communist international work in Moscow. He left the United States in December 1929, and never returned. In the Soviet Union, Padmore quickly became important in International of Labour Unions, lecturing on colonial problems at the University of Toilers of the East (K.U.T.V.U.). He was a member of the commission appointed by Josef Stalin (1879-1953), the dominant figure in the Soviet Union, to examine failure within the Chinese Communist Party, and played a considerable role in the first International Conference of Negro Workers at Hamburg, Germany in July 1930. He became secretary of the subsequently formed International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (I.T.U.C.-N.W), and in 1931 moved to Hamburg to become editor of the organization’s publication the Negro Worker.
Although both nationalist and labour organizations were then illegal in colonial territories, the membership of the I.T.U.C.-U.W. reached 4,000 persons throughout the world. Padmore himself seems to have travelled secretly to different parts of Africa and the colonial world, as well as to various European capitals.
In 1933, however, the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party arrested him for his political activities, and imprisoned him for six months, after which he was deported to Britain. Meanwhile his emphasis on racialism had brought him into conflict with his Communist superiors. In August 1933 the Communist International disbanded the I.T.U.C.-N.W., apparently as part of a bid to gain British and French aid against Nazi Germany. Padmore resigned his office with the organization. In February 1934 he was expelled from the Communist Party for “petty bourgeois nationalist deviation”. He never lost his respect, however, for the Soviet Communists’ attitude on racial questions.
After his break with his Communist, he was virtually destitute till 1937, earning his living by lecturing colonial students in London, selling occasional articles to American and British socialist publications, and depending on the charity of West Indian friends in Britain.
The Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-36 made Padmore well-known in certain circles. With his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the Troskyist historian C.L.R. James formed the International African Service Bureau (I.A.S.B), which became the most important African Lobby in Britain. He also became friendly with the leadership of the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.), which, though impotent in the British parliament, nevertheless provided vigorous commentary in its newspaper, the New Leader. Through its editor, Fenner Brockway, a former Labour M. P. (1929-31), Padmore became the publication’s principal contributor on colonial and racial matters. He helped to shape the I.L.P.’s policies but refused to join it or to stand for parliament as its candidate when invited. He regarded all Europeans as sharing the same views on racial matters and would not support any European cause. He regarded the Munich crisis of 1938, which brought Europe to the verge of war, as an opportunity for Africa, since he felt that all Europeans are colonialists. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he refused to contribute to Britain’s war effort against Nazi Germany unless freedom was promised to colonial territories. He deplored the entry of the United States into the war on December 7, 1941, because he feared that U. S. racial policies might delay colonial emancipation.
Padmore also insisted that Soviet successes flowed from the successful Soviet decolonization of the old Tsarist empire, and that only a socialist regime could speedily bring literacy and industrialization to the backward peoples. These views, expressed succinctly in his book, written in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire (1946), lost him favour with his socialist friends in Britain, the United States and France.
Five Pan-African congresses had already been held in the 20th century, four of them under the aegis of the famous Afro-American scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (q.v.), Padmore, in 1945, suggested the holding of a sixth, which was consequently held in Manchester, England, in October of that year.
One of Padmore’s closest associates during the preparations for the congress was Dr. Kwame Nkrumah (q.v.), who had just returned from the United States. The two men served as joint political secretaries of the congress, thus beginning 14 years of close collaboration. For the first time, the delegates to a Pan-African Congress included workers and farmers from Africa, as well as black intellectuals from the United States, who had dominated the previous four congresses. The congress rejected gradualism and contended that the seizure of political power was the prerequisite step towards true freedom. Delegates authorized the establishment of a permanent secretariat. Padmore’s home was its headquarters, and Nkrumah was its secretary.
Padmore agreed that it was in West Africa that events were moving the most rapidly. He advised Nkrumah to return home to the Gold Coast to accept the secretaryship of the United Gold Coast Convention (U.G.C.C.) when the post was offered to him, although the two men planned to subvert this party because in their opinion it was not radical enough. They also decided not to take sides in the growing tension between the Soviet Union and the western democracies that was soon to develop into the cold war. After this, events seemed to fall out as the two men had planned, and in February 1951, Padmore travelled to the Gold Coast to visit Nkrumah, now the triumphant leader of the Convention people’s Party (C.P.P.), which had broken away from the U.G.C.C. He was also able to witness Nkrumah’s appointment as leader of Government Business. At his friend’s request, Padmore wrote The Gold Coast Revolution (1953), which Nkrumah’s foes regarded as primarily a piece of C.P.P. propaganda, rather than sober history.
Padmore’s last and best-known work, Pan-Africanism or Communism (1956), was conceived as a historical survey of Africa’s struggle for freedom, and as a searching examination of current affairs, in which Nkrumah and the C.P.P. might be seen as the legitimate heirs of the Sixth (then referred to as fifth) Pan-African Congress. The book was critical of both Communist and anti-Communist. He subsequently began a book on the dangers of tribalism, primarily intended as a warning concerning the situation in Nigeria but did not have time to complete it.
Padmore was a guest of honour at Ghana’s independence on March 6, 1957. He later became Nkrumah’s adviser on African Affairs, and after 22 years left London to live in Ghana. But the final months of his life were marked by exhaustion resulting from frequent air travel, intensive work on conference agenda preparation, and interdepartmental quarrelling. In 1958 he was responsible for organizing both the April conference of independent African states, and the December all African Peoples’ Conference, both held in Accra. His special relations with Nkrumah, however, caused resentment. He was troubled by ill-health in his later years and went to Britain for medical treatment. He died in University College Hospital, London 1959. His ashes were interred in Christiansborg Castle, Accra on October 4. The Padmore Library, named after him, was opened in Accra, but after the 1966 coup which ousted Nkrumah, it was renamed the Research Library on African Affairs.
J. R. HOOKER
