Six days in a Manchester town hall in October 1945, where Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Padmore and Du Bois turned the demand for African independence into a plan.
In the cold, grey October of 1945, a few months after the end of the Second World War, a group of Africans, Caribbeans and African Americans met in a municipal hall in a run-down district of Manchester. Few people in Britain noticed. The newspapers barely covered it. Yet the six days they spent in Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall changed the map of the world.
At the Fifth Pan-African Congress, the polite requests of earlier generations were replaced by a clear demand: independence for Africa, won by the organised masses if necessary. Among the people in the hall were the future leaders of Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. Within twelve years the Gold Coast was free as Ghana, and within twenty most of British Africa had followed.
London, with its larger African and Caribbean communities, would have been the obvious choice. Manchester won because of the people who were already there. The Pan-African Federation had been founded in the city in 1944. Ras Makonnen, a businessman from British Guiana, ran restaurants and clubs in Manchester that had become meeting places for Black sailors, students and wartime servicemen. His money helped pay for the congress, and his contacts with the city's Labour council and Lord Mayor secured the town hall at a time when the "colour bar" made it hard for Black visitors even to find rooms.
The timing was deliberate too. Earlier in 1945 the World Trade Union Conference had brought labour leaders from the colonies to Britain, and many delegates were still in the country. Padmore used that moment to bring them to Manchester.
The first session, chaired by Amy Ashwood Garvey, looked at the "colour problem" in Britain itself: the colour bar in housing and jobs that Black seamen, workers and students faced in Liverpool, Cardiff, London and Manchester. The following days moved region by region: West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, the Caribbean, and the threat to Ethiopia, the one African country that had fought off colonisation and had just been freed from Italian occupation.
What made this congress different was who spoke. Earlier Pan-African congresses had been dominated by lawyers, clergy and intellectuals from America and the Caribbean asking politely for reforms. In 1945 the hall was full of Africans, many of them trade unionists, and the tone was angry and practical. Photographs taken for the magazine Picture Post show a packed hall listening intently to the speakers.
The congress adopted two key statements. The first, The Challenge to the Colonial Powers, demanded autonomy and independence for Black Africa, rejected racial discrimination in all its forms, and warned that if the colonial powers would not listen, Africans might have to use force as a last resort. Its message was summed up in one short line: "We are determined to be free."
The second, the Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals, was drafted by Nkrumah. It told colonial peoples that political power was the first step to economic and social freedom, and that the way to win it was mass organisation: political parties, trade unions, co-operatives and farmers' movements, using the strike and the boycott. It ended with a call that echoed around the colonial world: "Colonial and subject peoples of the world, unite!"
Padmore published the congress papers in 1947 as Colonial and Coloured Unity: A Programme of Action. In London, Nkrumah set up the West African National Secretariat to carry the work forward. Then the delegates went home and began to win.
Not every story ended well. Several of the men in the hall later ruled as one-party leaders, and Nkrumah himself was overthrown in 1966. But the Manchester congress remains the moment when the end of empire in Africa moved from hope to plan.
The former Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall stands just off Oxford Road, beside All Saints Square, about fifteen minutes' walk south of Manchester's city centre or a short bus ride along Oxford Road. Its classical portico survives as the front of Manchester Metropolitan University's Arts and Humanities building. The red plaque to the congress faces All Saints Square, and you can see it at any time. It names Ras Makonnen, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore.
The People's History Museum holds material on the congress, and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre at Central Library has collections on Black history in Manchester. In London you can see Nkrumah's blue plaque at 60 Burghley Road in Kentish Town and Padmore's plaque at 22 Cranleigh Street in Somers Town, where the congress was planned.
Manchester walking tours of the city's radical history combine well with a visit to the plaque. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
The two years in Kentish Town that prepared Ghana's first leader.
The city behind the congress.
The student movement that trained a generation of leaders.
From trading forts to the colony that became Ghana.
Kenya's war for independence, and the reckoning decades later.
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