By Nigel Westmaas
In his book Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia Winston James, in a note on Caribbean Pan-Africanism, wrote,
“It is no accident that the Caribbean, being the area that has historically produced the most peripatetic of all African peoples, has also thrown up an extravagantly disproportionate number of Pan-Africanist political activists and intellectuals. Edward Wilmot Blyden, H Sylvester Williams, J Alembert Thorne, J Robert Love, Theophilus Scoles, Antenor Fermin, Rene Maran, Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Una Marson, J. A Rogers, Jean Price Mars, Ras Makonnen, CLR James, Aime Cesaire, Leon Gontran Damas, and, perhaps the most under rated of them all – the great George Padmore of Trinidad…” 1
While Makonnen is listed in the pantheon of pan-Africanist notables and while nowhere near the stature of George Padmore, scant attention has also been paid to his own enormous contribution to pan-Africanist cause(s).
According to Kenneth King, the editor and footnoter of Makonnen’s book Pan-Africanism from Within one reason for the relative silence on Makonnen’s stellar contribution to the Pan-Africanist movement (far more is known of George Padmore, CLR James and others) was due to the general bias of historians for the printed word. Indeed this text on Makonnen’s active political and social life is one of the most influential and only sources of his life work and provides deep insights into Makonnen’s complex, multifaceted contribution and thinking as a Pan-Africanist, his organizational skills, shrewd entrepreneurship and philosophy.
In 1921 Ras Makonnen, formerly known as George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith, left the village of Buxton to go abroad. For the next fifty years he would be an active Pan-Africanist – one who later worked on the African continent variously with two African Presidents Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta and was a significant presence in the Pan-African movement through its more important phases. Before his final settlement in Africa Makonnen was actively resident in the United States (Texas and New York), Denmark, and England. It was during his period at Cornell University in New York circa 1932(where he studied agriculture) that he changed his original Christian name to Ras Makonnen.
Makonnen’s activist role in pan-Africanism can be traced to his awareness of black organizing in British Guiana in his youth. He mentions in his book the pre World War I groupings and individuals in the colony who strove towards cultural and ideological cohesion of Africans. The following comment is typical:
“Edmund Fitzgerald Fredericks, another of these Buxtonians, had played a part in the early Pan-African conference of 1900, and had followed this with an important role in America before returning to Guyana. Then there was Bruyning, whose ancestors were from Trinidad but he identified with the local community. These men, along with Dr Nichols and a number of others, created a group reminiscent of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. It was primarily a cultural group they created in Guyana, but it nevertheless had an impact once it had fanned into a flame. They began, for instance, to talk about creating scholarships, because the single scholarship offered by the British government was not enough.”
Makonnen later recalls, in comparing his experiences in other parts of the world, the “sense of certainty in a place like Buxton; all the family and relations there the family church, the burial ground. And even if there is poverty in certain sections there is always a strong sense of belonging and identity. This is quite lost in America” His reference to “lost in America” partly addresses his multiple encounters with racism – experiences that most likely bolstered his activism and fervor for Pan-Africanism.
SOJOURN IN EUROPE
When Makonnen finally arrived in England from the USA he was part of a group that met called the International African Service Bureau (IASB). The IASB (it had had various forerunners) had been launched in 1937 partly to organize protest against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Notwithstanding its title, West Indians comprised most of its membership that included Padmore, Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, Wallace-Johnson, Nancy Cunard, and CLR James. The IASB, which was constantly monitored by the British Special Branch, possessed a constitution that was written by Makonnen with a “stress on cooperatives.” He was very interested in co-operatives and helped found the African Co-operative League and later studied the kibbutz system of Israel as it bore relation to the co-operative philosophy.
CLR James once claimed that Makonnen was no mean agitator and this was exemplified in his solidarity efforts over time not only in various countries but for organisations and people. Kenneth King also spoke of Makonnen’s active solidarity work:
“Being always more of a speaker than a writer, he was most formidable when people had to be lobbied face to face, or when a local committee had to be formed to fight a particular grievance. Thus British immigration authorities could be browbeaten personally over their treatment of West African stowaways; if Somali restaurant keepers were running into trouble with the police in Tyneside, pressure could be brought to bear on the local MPs and the mayor; and in many incidents of race hostility between West Indians and local whites after the war Makonnen had the contracts and the finance necessary to arrange bail, legal defence or whatever was necessary.”
Makonnen’s led him on a few occasions to get into trouble with governments. He was deported from Denmark for “suggesting that the mustard sold by Denmark to Italy was being used in the manufacture of the mustard gas” used in the invasion of Ethiopia.
It was in England that Makonnen’s latent propensity for business thrived. According to a number of printed comments, Makonnen opened a number of restaurants, a nightclub, a bookshop, and rented homes exclusively to blacks during his long sojourn in England. Generous to a fault he donated 5,000 British pounds to the building of a home for abandoned children fathered by black servicemen with white women who did not wish to keep their “coloured” babies” ( One of Makonnen’s employees in the restaurant was Jomo Kenyatta, later President of Kenya).
There is noted invisibility both in the general pan-Africanist organisations and biographies of the names of women who must have been active. This is the same with Makonnen’s printed views. Apart from a brief references to the exploitation of Ghanaian women and other ruminations on relations between black men and white women in England there is very little comment in his text on women or their role in defining and organising in the Pan-Africanist movement. But as Bonita Harris notes in her booklet “Caribbean Women and Pan-Africanism” while the recorded history of the Pan Africanist movement is adorned with the names of many outstanding Caribbean men information was “scarce on the women who would be the natural allies and the round the clock secretaries of our leading Pan-Africanists”. In Makonnen’s case we know little of his personal life, although it is known he was “married to a Ghanaian” with some kith and kin in Guyana including a “Ms Mildred…of Friendship.”
MAKONNEN’S GHANA PHASE
When Makonnen migrated to Ghana in 1957 the Gold Coast was sparkling with hope and in the throes of nationalism and independence. He would go on to become a confidante of Nkrumah. His presence, influence and work, in spite of his feelings about “outsider” treatment was impactful. Makonnen was very active in his Ghana phase. He was variously head of the national press established by Nkrumah; worked in the African Affairs Bureau; head of plans for African Cultural Centre; in charge of the state bakery; a diplomatic emissary of the newly independent Ghana (and in that role a key organizer of the OAU(Organisation of African Unity) meeting in Addis Ababa in 1963) . But there is evidence from his own testimony and other published material that he fell out with Nkrumah on aspects of the Ghana experiment and was later “demoted” to the post of director of hotels and tourism. This was not unanticipated. While Makonnen obviously held enormous respect for Nkrumah, he was not averse to criticism of his (Nkrumah’s) political style. He worried for instance, about the Ghana leader’s overtures to communists, the “atmosphere of intrigue” in Ghana, and was invariably critical of what he considered to be Nkrumah’s irregular and deviant economic strategies. He also took careful note of Nkrumah’s political methods and the “Machiavellian feel to government” in Ghana. Makonnen said Machiavelli’s
“Prince would be there on Kwame’s office table, and he was versed in it like the Bible. It meant that he played one group off against another. If he was sending a commission to the foreign minister’s conference in Addis, or to Senegal where an agenda was being prepared, I would be sent to keep some of the dangerous men from the Nigerian delegation in check…”
It is now generally accepted that Makonnen aligned himself to the Pan-Africanist wing of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, the other “wings” being the Marxist-Leninists and the Consciencists.
MAKONNEN AND GUYANA
For someone who once stated “I now had no ties with Guyana” Makonnen still managed to keep Guyana on his radar. For one thing he consistently referred to his background in mining in Guyana and about his respect for Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow and his union organising. He wrote that he later met “Critchlow myself when I invited him and paid his passage to attend our Manchester Conference of 1945.”
He also apportions favourable mention for the early 20th century Guyanese political figure A.A Thorne, whom he described as “a great scholar, had a bookshop not very far from the King George Hotel which was owned by my father in Georgetown… Thorne carried all these black magazines from America, like the Crisis; so we were not cut off from trends in America.”
In the 1960s from his influential perch in Ghana, Makonnen was tapped to intervene in affairs in his one-time homeland. According to Eusi Kwayana’s Buxton Friendship in Print and Memory, Makonnen “formed part of the Ghana delegation to Guyana in 1964 sent by Nkrumah to mediate between Dr Jagan and Burnham…”
Kwayana further notes that “after leaving Guyana in 1964 Ras Makonnen made in Brazil a public statement which disturbed Dr Jagan, as it did not relieve him of responsibility for the inter-racial situation in Guyana.” Makonnen commented on that role, with apparent partiality, in his book: “My anxieties about presenting the Indian case along with the African were sharpened by what was happening in Guyana. Here the Indian leader Jagan was apparently a close associate of the black leader Forbes Burnham.
But Burnham at that stage did not sufficiently realize the unevenness of the alliance – the great wealth and business power that the Indians exercised..”
After the overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966 Makonnen was imprisoned for nine months and after his release went to Kenya where he was given land by Kenyatta and became a citizen in 1969. After his settlement in Kenya there were various reports of Makonnen’s activity up to 1974 including his longtime interest in “agricultural economy and farming.” King even mentions that “even in the 1970s he (Makonnen) is exploring the possibility that South African exiles may be able to go and settle in his native Guyana.”
But little is known about Makonnen’s ultimate fate. Eusi Kwayana suggests that he became “disenchanted with the Kenyatta system”. This would not have been a surprise as he always appeared firmly grounded in principle. He might have lived up to the 1990s but this is also uncertain. Kwayana wrote in his Buxton-Friendship in Print and Memory, published in 1999, that Makonnen, “suddenly disappeared about five years ago and has been presumed dead”.
Clearly, more research on this underrated Pan-Africanist from Guyana is required.
(Sources cited include: Eusi Kwayana Buxton –Friendship in Print and Memory; Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within; Hakim Adi Ed. Pan-African history; Winston James, Hold Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia ; Bonita Harris, “Caribbean women and pan-Africanism” )
