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Pan-Africanism

In October 1945 the sixth Pan-African Congress met in Manchester.  The previous meetings, beginning in 1900, had been dominated by mostly Black American intellectual activists but in Manchester the African and West Indian delegates would set the agenda.  Many famous names such as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah attended and the event was chaired by veteran West Indian journalist and campaigner George Padmore.  One of the resolutions affirmed, 'the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny.'  The Manchester congress was the first real coordinated step to independence in Africa and the West Indies.  As Kenyatta would later say, this was 'a landmark in the... struggle for unity and freedom'.

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