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GEORGE PADMORE
[1902-59]
[“Caribbean Emancipators",
publication by the G.B. U. Public Relations Division, Office of the Prime
Minister, Trinidad and Tobago, 1976].
Trinidadians have played a conspicuous part in the
Pan African Movement, and in the African anti-colonial struggle. H.
Sylvester Williams originated the movement in 1990. George Padmore was one
of the fathers of African liberation in the 1940s and 1950s.
Born Malcom Nurse at Arouca in 1902, his father was
an interesting personality, a black schoolmaster, entomologist and
agricultural instructor. Malcolm's grandfather was a Barbadian who had
been born a slave. He was educated at Tranquillity, St. Mary's and
Pamphylian High School in Port of Spain. For a time he worked with the
Guardian, but he hated it and was soon fired. Trinidad seemed too confined
for the highly intelligent and ambitious young man. He left for the U.S.A.
in 1924, proposing to study medicine.
But Nurse was not destined to the respectable world
of Negro professionalism. Soon after his arrival in the USA, Nurse entered
the Communist Party, taking the cover name of George Padmore when engaged
in Party Business. He became quite an important figure in the US Communist
world. For Padmore, only the Communist seemed to offer an answer to the
colour question: it didn't exist. Workers would unite to throw off their
chains regardless of race or nationality. It was a time when the USSR
seemed to be the great hope for radicals all over the world, especially
the colonial world. In 1929, Padmore went to Russia and became the head of
the Negro Bureau of the Communist International of Labour Unions. He also
served as Secretary of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro
Workers (ITUC-NW). Both these bodies were COMINTERN agents to agitate and
moblise the Negro people in the colonial world and in the USA. For a time,
Padmore enjoyed great personal authority and prestige as an honoured
foreign comrade in Moscow. He founded and edited Negro Worker, the organ
of the Communist Negro movement.
But disillusionment was to come. In the early 1930s,
Stalin's regime reduced its anti-colonial activity in order to gain
greater acceptance for the USSR from the west. The ITUC-NW was disbanded
in 1933 because it was especially objectionable to the Western Imperialist
powers. Padmore immediately resigned all his COMINTERN offices and was
formally expelled in 1934. It marked a permanent break with the USSR,
though he continued to hold that the USSR was the only state which had
successfully eliminated racism. From this time on, Padmore's interests
shifted towards Africa and Pan Africanism.
For most of the rest of his life, Padmore lived in
London, nearly always in poverty, as a writer, journalist and agitator in
the cause of black freedom. Among his most important books were:
How Britain Ruled Africa (1936); How Russia
Transformed Her Colonial Empire (1946); Africa, Britain's Third
Empire (1949);and Pan Africanism or Communism? (1956).
The last named is probably his most important and certainly his best known
book. He also wrote innumerable articles in a variety of left wing
journals and papers, mostly on colonial matters. He lectured very
frequently, for instance to meetings of the British Independent Labour
Party, and conducted political study groups for colonial students in
London. His lodgings became, in the 1930s and l940s, the centre of
anti-colonial struggle in London. Among the callers were his boyhood
friend C.L.R. James, and also a young Oxford undergraduate named Eric
Williams.
In 1945, Padmore met a young African from the then
Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah. There was an instant mutual attraction. On
Padmore's death, Nkrumah was to say, "When I first met George Padmore
in London, we both realised from the very beginning that we thought along
the same lines and talked the same language. There existed between us that
rare affinity for which one searches for so long but seldom finds in
another human
being. Our friendship developed into that
indescribable relationship that exists between brothers."
By then, Padmore's interests focussed on Africa,
though he did not abandon his commitment to the wider cause of
international liberation. In 1944, with others, he founded the Pan African
Federation. The next year, Padmore organised a Pan African Conference at
Manchester. W. Du Bois, the veteran American black leader was its
Chairman, and among the participants were Garvey's widow, Mrs. Amy Jacques
Garvey, and Nkrumah. Padmore was the main planner of the Manchester
conference. After his relationship with Nkrumah developed, Padmore
focussed increasingly on the Gold Coast as the vanguard of the
anti-colonial struggle in Africa. He was influential in persuading Nkrumah
to return there to lead the nationalist movement, and he came to see the
African as the hope for a free, united Africa.
In 1957,Padmore was invited to Ghana for its
independence celebrations - Ghana being the first non-white British colony
to gain independence, the first of so many. He stayed on as Nkrumah's
personal adviser on African affairs. For just under two years (1957-9)
Padmore exerted a powerful influence on Nkrumah, Ghana, and black Africa.
There was opposition in Ghana to Padmore's influence - after all, he was a
foreigner - but Nkrumah placed great reliance on him. In 1958 he organised
a meeting in Accra of the Heads of the independent African states and
accompanied Nkrumah on various African tours. But his health began to
fail, and late in 1959 he died in London; his ashes were buried in Accra
at Nkrumah's request.
Padmore's career is one of considerable significance
for the modem history of Africa. He may rightly be regarded as one of the
fathers of African liberation. He devoted a lifetime to the cause of the
black man's dignity and freedom; his propaganda and agitation kept the
issues constantly alive in Europe, America and Russia. Padmore was one of
the men and women who inspired the struggle of the black man for freedom
from oppression.
[“Caribbean Emancipators", publication by the G.B. U. Public Relations Division, Office
of the Prime Minister, Trinidad and Tobago, 1976].
Reproduced with the permission of the
Caricom Secretariat from Caricom Perspective, January-June, 1993
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