Aided by a letter of introduction from Trinidadian pan-Africanist C. L. R. James addressed to George Padmore, Nkrumah continued his political maturation after leaving the United States for Great Britain in early 1945. His only previous experience in the imperial metropole was a short layover in 1935 while waiting for his visa to the United States. As detailed in his autobiography, though, that moment had served as a political awakening. Arriving in London and learning of the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Nkrumah reported how he had stood in shock at the British passivity to the news of this blatant transgression of African independence and international law.39 Implied in the narrative Nkrumah presented in his autobiography was an understanding that the mission underpinning his return to London was an upending of the colonialist status quo, which had seemingly made the Italian invasion possible a decade earlier. Upon arrival, Nkrumah quickly joined Padmore in helping organize a new pan-African congress in the English industrial city of Manchester. Convened in October 1945, the Manchester Pan-African Congress brought together pan-African and labor activists to debate Africa’s place in the postwar international community. In contrast to the Pan-African Congresses organized by Du Bois in the 1920s or the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, the Manchester congress offered a clear rebuttal to the rhetorical progressivism of the liberal imperial order, arguing for the first time for an immediate end to colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. As stated in the congress’s “Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals,” its delegates insisted upon “the right of all peoples to govern themselves” and “control their own destiny.”40 Furthermore, the declaration presented the struggle for self-determination as a mass project of “complete social, economic, and political emancipation” from the exploitation of capitalist imperialism.41
The Manchester congress thus provided its participants with a collective outlet for expressing their discontent not only with colonial rule, but, more significantly, with even the prospects for colonial reform. Reminiscent of both Lenin’s and Du Bois’s early twentieth-century interrogations of the colonial project, the congress’s speakers and delegates focused their attention on the uniquely exclusionary and extractive nature of colonial rule, highlighting such issues as land alienation, forced labor, and inequalities in pay. In one of his addresses, for instance, Jomo Kenyatta, who nearly twenty years later would become Kenya’s first president, contrasted a rapidly growing Ugandan colonial economy based upon cotton production with a colonial social reality in which “there [was] not a single African doctor.”42 Similarly, G. Ashie Nikoi, chairman of the West African Cocoa Farmers’ Delegation (Gold Coast), painted a picture of British colonial rule in West Africa founded upon “broken . . . homes” and “natural leaders” alienated from “their rights.”43 Meanwhile, fellow Gold Coaster J. S. Annan—a trade unionist whose talk was covered by the Lagos-based West African Pilot—challenged the congress to address not only the problems of imperialism, but also the need to “set up administrative machinery to cope with the difficulties which lie ahead of us.”44
Nkrumah, who accepted credit for writing some of the congress’s most powerful declarations, adopted a similar reading of the event’s current and future objectives. Even more importantly, he also viewed it as part of a broader radicalization of anticolonial politics globally and of a transnational rethinking of the role of empire in the postwar world. For instance, just weeks before arriving in London he had taken part in a similar conference in New York featuring approximately sixty representatives from locations including Uganda, India, Burma, Indonesia, the United States, and the West Indies.45 As in Manchester later in the year, the Colonial Conference challenged colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as the delegates connected imperial failures to extend to colonial peoples the right of self-determination to the perpetuation of the poverty, illiteracy, famine, and disease which characterized the social and economic conditions of the vast majority of those living under colonial rule. Furthermore, just as Du Bois and Lenin had done with the First World War, the delegates in New York insisted that European imperialism lay at the heart of the twentieth century’s global wars, and, should it continue, only promised more violence to come.46
In his Manchester address on West and North Africa, Nkrumah would again pick up on many of these themes. According to the congress’s minutes, Nkrumah reminded the delegates that “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.” He, then, went on to warn that, given the inherently violent and rapacious nature of capitalist imperialism, this relief was sure to be short-lived “as long as Imperialism assaults the world.”47 The longtime Sierra Leonean trade unionist and activist I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, who earlier in his career had written regularly for Gold Coast newspapers, echoed his younger Gold Coast colleague. In his speech, he rejected the arguments of those within Europe’s empires who suggested that colonial rule served as a protection against “the tribal wars which took place in bygone years, and which might break out again if they [the Europeans] left West Africa.” Perhaps waxing a bit too romantically about Africa’s precolonial past, Wallace-Johnson, then, insisted that “Africans had been living in peace until the Europeans taught them to fight.”48 Others, likewise, returned to the necessarily undemocratic nature of the colonial system. In doing so, they presented a call to action in Africa, with the Gambian newspaper editor J. Downes-Thomas—whose address also gained the attention of the West African Pilot—asserting that “history shows that independence always has to be fought for.”49
The Manchester Pan-African Congress culminated with a direct assault on the fundamental ethos underpinning the European imperial system, particularly in its African and West Indian manifestations. The congress’s cadre of diverse delegations, with origins ranging from the continent itself to the West Indies to Europe and to North America, undertook a systematic dissection of nearly every official and popular justification of colonial rule—both contemporary and historical. Questions of African and other colonial peoples’ suitability or preparation for self-government or self-determination were met with comparisons to the global violence Europe had just inflicted upon the world.50 Meanwhile, promises of political reforms and technical and infrastructural development at best faced skepticism in light of the colonial powers’ past record on the continent and elsewhere.51 At worst, delegates depicted them as new examples and tools for the colonial powers’ future exploitations.52 Others took direct aim at the relationship between the European liberal ideals of individual freedom and democratic governance and the necessarily undemocratic and racially exclusionary nature of colonial rule.53 Pointing to a problem that had long vexed European thinkers dating back to at least the nineteenth century, the Manchester delegates thus presented the political and philosophical gymnastics undertaken to justify the colonial project as more than mere hypocrisy. Instead, they viewed the contradictions embedded in European justifications of colonial rule as mechanisms designed for the colonized’s continued subjugation.54
The world powers’ own wartime rhetoric only provided further ammunition for the congress’s critiques of the imperial system, most notably in regard to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 signing of the Atlantic Charter. For Manchester’s delegates, the charter’s proclamation of the universality of a people’s right to self-determination supplied a language with which to challenge Europe’s imperial powers on their own terms. Even more significantly, with Churchill’s clear refusal to acknowledge the possibility that such a universal right could extend to colonial peoples, the charter created a vehicle for the Manchester delegates and others to make clear the contradictions and double standards embedded within the imperial system.55 As the Nigerian F. O. B. Blaize, representing the London-based West African Student Union (WASU) at the congress, is reported to have argued in his address before the congress, “British democracy seemed designed only for home consumption. Nigeria has been given a new Constitution, but her people cannot accept it because it is undemocratic. They demand that if the Atlantic Charter is good for certain people, it is good for all.”56 Speaking on the West Indies, J. A. Linton—reading a memorandum from a group of workers’ organizations from St. Kitts and Nevis—also turned
