The Legacy of 1930s Pan-African Leaders

In the 1930s, a group of young Africans and West Indians, formed an organization in London that would eventually settle on the name, the International African Service Bureau. They were writers and students, many living in crushing poverty and shabby bed-sits, because they often had to make their way themselves and by their own creative means (only a single university scholarship, for example, was offered each year for the entire population of Trinidad). The future first president of an independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, had to evade his landlady and occasionally peel stamps off envelopes and sell them to buy a penny-bun. Off he would go to a Chinese restaurant in Soho to meet up with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Joseph Danquah, Trinidad’s C.L.R. James and George Padmore and others. Those who read The Republic need no introduction, of course, to Nkrumah. Danquah would work for an independent Ghana after World War Two. James, trying to eke out a living with lectures and filing news stories on cricket, would write a classic about the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins. His friend, Padmore, had been a journalist in Germany until Nazi thugs made it impossible for him to stay.

What a meeting of minds! Later, they would congregate at the small social club and restaurant run by Amy Ashwood Garvey, ex-wife of pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey, and a formidable, accomplished activist in her own right. And what did they all talk about? Defeating Fascism. Because in 1935, Italian prime minister, Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts stormed into Ethiopia, the only African nation that had never been colonized. The Italians bombed Red Cross hospitals, used poison gas and massacred thousands of innocent people. Ordinary Italian soldiers liked to carry around “souvenirs” of beheaded resistance fighters and Ethiopians tied to trees and shot.