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
(a.k.a. 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 white 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.
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The above serves to
introduce the original reading-text: Selections from the writings of
George Padmore.
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A PDF file of the reading text is attached
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To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
