African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 1c
George Padmore
George Padmore was born in
Trinidad, in the West Indies. After studying in the USA he spent four or five
years, from 1929, based in the Soviet Union, heading the Negro Bureau of the
Communist International of Labour Unions (Profintern, or RILU). This
organisation held a First
International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, Germany on July 7-8,
1930. South Africans W Thibedi and Moses Kotane were elected to the Executive
Committee of the organisation at this conference.
In London from 1934, Padmore teamed up with his contemporary
and fellow-Trinidadian C
L R James, forming the International African Services Bureau.
Padmore organised the 5th Pan-African
Congress, in Manchester, England, in 1945. This famous Congress was
also attended by Kwame Nkrumah, W E B Du Bois, and Jomo Kenyatta, among others,
including a young man called Norman Atkinson, who later became a Labour member
of the British Parliament.
After Ghanaian independence in 1957, Padmore moved there to
serve under Nkrumah, but died in 1959.
There is a web site dedicated to Padmore, here, and there is a section
within the Marxists Internet Archive for Padmore, here.
Apart from the texts that we have of Padmore’s - such as in
the attached document - for the purposes of this course Padmore’s story can
serve to show that the many National Democratic Revolutions that subsequently
took place in Africa had common, inter-twining roots, and those roots were not
far from the Great October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the founding of the
Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, and the founding of the Communist
Party of South Africa in 1921.
As usual, the best remedy for the varying and contradictory
interpretations that can be found of the life of a revolutionary like Padmore
is to read the person’s own work. The downloadable selection given here
contains work written in Padmore’s Profintern days, and also during the
Anti-Fascist War when he was in Britain, anticipating the “dollar imperialism”
that would follow that conflict.
Padmore brings us from the time of Sol Plaatje through the
1920s and 1930s to the war years and into the great post-war season of national
liberation of colonies all over the world.
- The above serves
to introduce the original reading-text: Selections from the
writings of George Padmore.
- A PDF file of the reading text is attached
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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