On 20th October at 6pm, Professor Hakim Adi will present the University of Oxford’s 2015 Black History Month Lecture, entitled ‘The 70th Anniversary of the Manchester Pan-African Congress and Its Significance Today’.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress (Manchester 1945) was the most influential and politically significant of the seven Pan-African Congresses, as it brought together key activists who would later play leading roles in liberation struggles across the continent, including Jomo Kenyatta, the first leader of Kenya after independence, and Kwame Nkrumah, who later led anti-colonial resistance in Ghana. American writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois chaired the Congress, describing 1945 as ‘a decisive year in determining the freedom of Africa’.
The talk is free, but registration is recommended.
Hakim Adi has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora. His groundbreaking work includes the political history of West Africans in Britain, and the influence of Communism and Pan–Africanism on anti-colonial activism. He is the author of West Africans in Britain 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (1998), Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (2013); (and with Marika Sherwood) The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (1995) and Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (2003) He has also written history books for children, including The History of the African and Caribbean Communities in Britain.
