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(Dr. Klevor Abo). Shanae Connell's presentation
I considered a very important one,
so in her absence I will just summarize
the gist of the paper she wrote.
She wrote about three Caribbean activist intellectuals
who had a great influence on Nkrumah's life.
The first was C.L.R. James of Trinidad.
C.L.R. James arrived in England and first
started his career in England as a writer.
He wanted to be a writer of fiction.
He ended up becoming a journalist, most importantly
writing about cricket, which Anglophone Caribbeans
are rather very passionate about.
He also, C.L.R. James also became
involved in the anti-colonial movement and
worked with so many other intellectuals including
Paul Robeson and when the Italians invaded Ethiopia,
it was C.L.R. James and Paul Robeson who started a certain
campaign to mobilize Africans to protest Italy's invasion
of Ethiopia, which was at that time also called Abyssinia.
C.L.R. James also lived in this country
and worked as a mobilizer.
And in fact, it was C.L.R. James who Nkrumah
met as he was about to leave the
United States and go to England.
He gave him a letter of introduction to the next
Caribbean, another Trinidadian, his official name is Malcolm
Nurse, but he is known to history as George Padmore.
Nkrumah and George Padmore were responsible for
organizing the 5th Pan-Africanist Congress.
And this was the Pan-Africanist Congress that perhaps was the
most important in the history of the
Pan-African movement, which had its first meeting in 1900.
After the Pan-African Congress, Nkrumah was sent as part of the
Congress through a Congress resolution to go to France and
meet with all those African politicians who even before they
became independent were members of the French Parliament.
The French colonial system worked this way.
Each colonial territory had representation in France,
both in France's equivalent of the
House of Representatives and the Senate.
Nkrumah did go there, and perhaps the history of
Africa would have been different if Nkrumah
were a little bit more appreciative of the type of
colonialism that French Africa endured.
Seeing these Africans in Paris, while their countries were
still colonies, dressed up in their fancy clothes and
being more French than the French
themselves, Nkrumah gave up on them.
He said to these people, you better move on without them.
So finally when he did move back to Ghana, he sent for
George Padmore to be his special advisor on African affairs.
Of course this did not go down very
well in the then Goldcoast, now Ghana.
Many of Nkrumah's associates were asking,
why does this Caribbean, they had all kinds of epitaphs.
What does this Caribbean, sugar cane *** know about Africa?
Of course at the time, George Padmore was perhaps the most
knowledgeable on Africa because he had worked in Moscow.
He had worked as the Comintern's pointman on Africa.
The books that he wrote then caused quite a bit of a stir in
the empire because nobody in the colonial administration
had ever heard about a person called George Padmore,
let alone an authority on Africa.
George Padmore did move to Africa and worked
as Nkrumah's advisor on African affairs.
And just like he and Nkrumah organized the 5th Pan-African
Congress, this Caribbean man was again very critical in the
organization of what might be considered the
6th Pan-Africanist Congress, but it wasn't called that,
it was called the All-Africa Conference.
There were two, one conference of those countries that were
already independent, and the other was of all those countries
that were now on the way to becoming independent.
And anybody who was somebody in the anti-colonial movement in
Africa was there, Tom Mboya from Kenya, and of course Patrice
Lumumba from the Congo and Sekou Toure from Guinea.
The next Caribbean who had a critical influence on Nkrumah
who Nkrumah worked with very closely ended up becoming the
first black person to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics,
Arthur Lewis from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.
And perhaps we owe this St. Lucian a critical
understanding of how capitalism works and the
role that black people played in that process.
Arthur Lewis was the first to advance the argument that the
development of modern capitalism depended very critically on the
unfree labor of those who were enslaved in the Americas.
The standard history of classical economics from Ricardo
to Karl Marx was that surplus value is created
from that income that the workers are not paid.
So that perhaps is the beginning of classical economics from
Ricardo to Karl Marx who never factored into the equation the
value of the unfree labor of Africans.
And it was Arthur Lewis who argued that you have to factor
into the development of capitalism the unpaid
labor of African-Americans and other people
of African descent in the Americas.
And that it was their labor that actually created what we now
know as capitalism, the capitalist system.
The standard history is that there was the crusades which
allowed poor white people from Europe to get *** from the
Middle East, which they invested.
But that investment was important in the transformation
of Europe from feudalism to early capitalism.
The next stage of capitalism is development.
For that, the unfree labor of enslaved
Africans were critically important.
Let's say just two crops, tobacco,
or three crops, tobacco, sugar, and cotton.
These are all very difficult crops, but the history of
England and the history of the United States would not
be the way it is today but for the
unfree labor of those enslaved Africans.
So, he had these three critically important Caribbeans
as his associates and as his collaborators.
All of them had some kind of social democratic program, and
that helped Nkrumah understand the challenges he was going to
face if he wanted to transform the Goldcoast from a formerly
dependent colony to becoming a very self-sufficient one.
It's also important to note that during Nkrumah's time,
there were lots of African-Americans and
people from the diaspora who returned to
Ghana to work there up to today.
Street lights in a Accra is
the work of an African-American.
Even the whole history of how Nkrumah came to the United
States in the first place has to be traced back at least to the
late 1800s when another Carribean person
from Barbados, John [unclear audio] became the
first bishop of the Amazon church.
John [unclear audio] was responsible for the coming to
the United States of the most famous African in the 1920s,
James [unclear audio] who happened to be
Nkrumah's teacher in highschool who inspired
Nkrumah to come to the United States.
So, perhaps if we recall James [unclear dialogue] thesis about
the dismembering of Africa, we also have to bear in
mind that yes there was dismemberment,
but the dismemberment has never been complete.
So, that at least offers us a certain hope that
notwithstanding all the prejudices Africans and the
people in the diaspora have about one another,
notwithstanding the prejudices that mainstream society still
has about Africans and people of African descent.
That process of dismemberment has never been complete, and it
is precisely that fact that also inspired this conference to ask
students to look to find out what the connections between
the continents and the diasporas will be.
Perhaps one of his failings is that he was
a meddler in everybody's business.
The Caribbeans didn't like it very much when
the British proposed a Caribbean federation,
bringing all the islands together.
For the Caribbean politicians, this is England
trying to meddle in our affairs again.
The British also proposed that all the former dependent
countries in southern and central Africa also
found the Central African Federation.
Again, the politicians in those countries, what we now know
today as Zambia and Zimbabwe, Malawi, all kicked against this.
Hey, this is the time for us to have our own independence and
the British are trying to meddle in our affairs
by asking us to form a federation.
This is just another way that they could create a market.
These were proposals made by the colonial office
in England, but Nkrumah saw beyond it.
He saw beyond the fact that it was the British who are
proposing these federations because he understood
very clearly that these colonial units are
not capable of being self-sustaining.
So whether it was the British who proposed it or not, he saw
in it the possibility of Africa pulling its resources together
and incidentally that is also the point of view of those three
important Caribbeans who work with him, C.L.R. James,
George Padmore, and John [unclear audio].
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