policies—such as a forced mono-crop economy and a property-based suffrage system—that had been detrimental to the islands’ peoples. In response, the St. Kitts and Nevis workers’ memo explained that what the Atlantic Charter provided them was the inspiration to begin exploring “greater unity, which can be attained only by a federation of the islands.”57
At the heart of the Manchester congress was a sense of a world in transition and a belief that Africans and other colonial peoples had an important role to play in that transition. In preparation for a volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the congress, F. R. Kankam-Boadu, who in 1945 was a Gold Coast delegate representing the WASU and who later in his career would direct the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board, recounted how “without doubt all who accepted to attend the Conference must have had their minds geared to finding a new way for humanity.” As Kankam-Boadu reminded his audience in his reminiscences, the congress occurred just as the Second World War had concluded, and that this was a war that had “been fought to save the world from the ravages of racial oppression, dictatorship and all manner of inhumanities.”58 In that light, the congress provided an opening for explorations into an alternative, and many delegates expressed a sense of personal and collective obligation in bringing forth this alternative. Writing in his 1990 autobiography, another Gold Coast WASU delegate and close Nkrumah friend—later turned bitter opponent—Joe Appiah, reflected on how “the journey to Manchester as a delegate . . . evoked in me all the emotion and sentiments of a Moslem pilgrim to Mecca.” For Appiah, as with many of the congress’s other delegates, the only answer to colonial rule had to be “force.”59
AFTER MANCHESTER
The close of the Manchester congress left questions as to the exact actions to be taken in the months that followed. In London and Manchester, Padmore, along with the Guyanese pan-Africanist T. Ras Makonnen, undertook the task of publicizing the congress’s resolutions and declarations via Padmore’s Pan-African Federation (PAF). “After this publicity campaign has been crystallised,” Padmore explained in a 1946 letter to Du Bois, “we intend to consolidate the organisational structure of the Federation by drawing in all Colonial organisations of a progressive character as affiliated bodies.” As Padmore continued, he insisted that “objectively the task we set ourselves is fairly easy.” The real obstacle for the PAF, he anticipated, would be the unfortunate lack of “cadres in England” willing to engage in the work of the struggle.60 Yet, as Padmore’s most recent biographer, Leslie James, has noted, more fundamental challenges afflicted Padmore’s PAF in the late 1940s, particularly relating to the organization’s funding structure.61 As James explains, the organization’s failure to secure a stable funding source not only required that Padmore write and publish the congress’s report himself, but it also forced him to establish the PAF’s headquarters in the cheaper city of Manchester as opposed to his own London base. As a result, Padmore became distanced from the day-to-day operations of the PAF as much of the organization’s work fell upon the Manchester-based Makonnen—who, like Padmore, would later become an influential advisor to Nkrumah following Makonnen’s 1957 arrival in the Gold Coast.62
As Padmore and Makonnen worked to establish the administrative infrastructure of the PAF, many of the congress’s West African delegates turned their attention to the continent. For them, including a number from the Gold Coast, the congress was a moment of radicalization which they now sought to turn into a pathway toward political mobilization, a pathway that became embodied in the late-1945 formation of the West African National Secretariat (WANS). Founded by I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, Kojo Botsio, Bankole Awooner-Renner, Ashie Nikoi, and Bankole Akpata, the organization nominated the elder Wallace-Johnson as its chairman and invited Nkrumah to serve as its general secretary.63 In name and membership, the organization was foremost a West African organization. However, it was also one largely formed out of the political context and networks manifested in the colonial metropole. Yet, for the activists who formed the secretariat, the organization harkened back to an array of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pan–West African political organizations, including the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) and the West African Youth League (WAYL), as they channeled their critiques of European imperialism through a language of West African political and economic unity.64 For, as Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah explained in the secretariat’s “Aims and Objects,” the WANS envisioned the “dawn of a new era” in West Africa. West Africans, they insisted, were now ready and committed to “combat all forms of imperialism and colonial exploitation” and, in doing so, to turn their attention to the broader “task of achieving national unity and absolute independence for all West Africa.” The success of such a project, they continued, depended upon the organization and coordination of the “economic and political ideas and aspirations scattered among West African peoples but lacking in co-ordination.”65 In the case of the WANS, these “economic and political ideas” were necessarily to be expressed in explicitly socialist terms. Bankole Awooner-Renner—who, by the mid-1950s, would become a vocal critic of Nkrumah—even went so far as to propose within the secretariat’s publications the idea of a “West African Soviet Union.”66
The WANS, however, did not limit its political program to anticolonial and pan-West African abstractions. Instead, by taking on issues such as the buying and selling of cocoa in West Africa, the secretariat also sought to integrate key local concerns affecting the region’s people into their broader critiques of the colonial system. In March 1946, for instance, an article in the organization’s flagship journal, the New African, on a proposed colonial cocoa monopoly accompanied others containing the WANS’s resolutions decrying the forced labor and land theft, among other forms of exploitation, that they associated with the colonial system.67 Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah further reinforced these sentiments in the organization’s “Aims and Objects” as they—reproducing the Manchester resolutions on West Africa—held up the structure of the colonial cocoa market as evidence of the “incompetent” nature of colonial economic policy in the region.68 Such arguments echoed interwar critiques of the monopolistic underpinnings of the early twentieth-century cocoa industry, which had dominated the West African press in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, radical newspapers like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Accra-based African Morning Post not only detailed the effects of the government’s cocoa policies on West African and specifically Gold Coast farmers, they also positioned these farmers on the frontlines of the colony’s battle with “white capitalists.”69 Just under a decade later, the New African reiterated this belief, advocating for West Africa’s cocoa producers to embark on a “total boycott” in response to any attempt by the government to limit the autonomy of the region’s farmers.70
As the secretariat worked to develop its own press and publications from its British base, a set of reciprocal relationships also grew between the WANS activists in the United Kingdom and West African newspapers throughout the region. In Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, the West African Pilot—another of Azikiwe’s newspapers—regularly covered the actions and pronouncements of the organization and its members, while in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the African Standard similarly reported on the organization’s activities. Meanwhile, in the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast Observer and Ashanti Pioneer covered the secretariat and its members.71 Furthermore, Nkrumah himself found a periodic voice within these Gold Coast newspapers, advocating, for instance, in a series of 1947 articles in the Ashanti Pioneer, for an “All–West African National Congress.” In doing so, he directly referred to the pan–West Africanism of the 1920s and specifically the National Congress of British West Africa made famous by Gold Coasters like J. E. Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi.72 Likewise, many of the secretariat’s diasporic allies, most notably Padmore, also maintained an active presence in the region’s newspapers over the period. In the case of Padmore specifically, Leslie James has calculated that, between 1937 and 1950, the Trinidadian pan-Africanist would contribute 508 articles to the West African Pilot and, between 1947 and 1950, another 182 to the Ashanti Pioneer.73
As a result, by early 1947 anticolonial pan-Africanists and activists from both inside
