 George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism shares the distinction common to most great works of historical writing of being the creation of a participant-as-historian. For, next to the colossal figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, Padmore, the political revolutionary, holds an exalted position in the pantheon of Pan-Africanism, and in this, his chef d’oeuvre, he has presented us wi George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism shares the distinction common to most great works of historical writing of being the creation of a participant-as-historian. For, next to the colossal figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, Padmore, the political revolutionary, holds an exalted position in the pantheon of Pan-Africanism, and in this, his chef d’oeuvre, he has presented us with a most vivid account of that movement in which he played so exemplary a role. Indeed, there was in Padmore an admirable double-faceted vis historica – the revolutionary’s desire to make history and the writer’s impulse to describe it and grasp its meaning. The name George Padmore is a nom de guerre that he adopted when he joined the Communist Party. His real name was Malcolm Nurse. He rose to become the foremost black figure in the Communist International – the Comintern – and he was commissioned into the Red Army as a colonel. He travelled extensively in Africa in an effort to create the nucleus of a Comintern-directed African leadership. In this book he gives a graphic exposition of the history of African, West Indian and American Negro mass movements from 1787 to 1957, and their flirtations with International Communism. He helped to shape much of the latter phases of that affair. Soviet policy finally induced Padmore’s resignation from the Comintern and also from the Communist Party. As Aime Cesaire stated when he too broke with the Communists twenty-five years later: ‘It’s neither Marxism nor Communism I repudiate; the use certain people have made of Marxism and Communism is what I condemn. What I want is that Marxism and Communism be harnessed into the service of coloured peoples, and not coloured people into the service of Marxism and Communism. That the doctrine and the movement be tailored to fit men, not men to fit the movement. And – of course – that goes for others besides Communists.’ But in severing connections with them, Padmore did not join the frenzied ranks of the professional anti-Communists in remorseful contrition and fulminations over the god that failed them. Nor did he reconcile himself to imperialism and the oppressions of African peoples. There was in him a need to intensify the struggle against imperialism as also against that Communism which has been polluted by the exigencies of Stalin’s balance-of-power political struggles with the Western countries. Arthur Koestler once wrote that ‘if we survey history and compare the lofty aims in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilization pollutes its own revolutionary offspring’. Such an observation would lead – as, curiously, it did not lead Koestler – to the conclusion that if indeed the ‘revolutionary offspring’, Communism, has been ‘polluted’ by the civilization against which it has revolted, the struggle against this pollution becomes at once and simultaneously the struggle against the polluted offspring as also and inevitably against the source of that pollution. Padmore drew this conclusion. For though conceived by him as a bulwark against Communism, yet ‘Pan-Africanism recognizes much that is true in the Marxist interpretation of history, since it provides a rational explanation for a good deal that would otherwise be unintelligible.’ – Azinna Nwafor This book recounts the great saga of the rise of black people from slavery to freedom on an intercontinental scale and brings us to the crucial crossroads – a hopeful resolution for black freedom and a partnership of races purged of terror, lynching and colour lines, etc., or a continental mass struggle conducted by Africans in Africa, a struggle that will duplicate the tragic upheavals in Asia. It is not [solely] up to black men to say how this issue will be resolved; but make no mistake: the black man will cling tenaciously to his dream of freedom! If my words carry any weight, I commend this volume for close study to the white governmental officials of the Western world, to white churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, and equally to the dour and brooding white rulers in the Kremlin. I would urge them to read it and get a true, human perspective of the hopes, fears, struggles and hard-bought progress of the Negro in the modern world. I, for one, salute and congratulate George Padmore for his having kept the faith and fought the good fight. – Richard Wright [117]…more 

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