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Article

Alcindor, John  

Jeffrey Green

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Born in Trinidad, John Alcindor was among the first black West Indians to practise medicine in Britain. Winning an Island Scholarship enabled him to study medicine at Edinburgh University, from where he graduated in 1899 with first‐class honours in three subjects. He was among delegates from the Edinburgh‐based Afro‐West Indian Literary Society to the 1900 Pan‐African Conference, where he met and developed friendships with Samuel Coleridge‐Taylor and W. E. B. Du Bois. Moving to London, Alcindor practised his profession in the city's hospitals, and for several years played cricket for the Mill Hill Park club. His marriage to Minnie Alcindor (née Martin) in 1911 produced three sons. In 1917 Alcindor established his own medical practice, and also worked as a Poor Law medical officer. He published three scholarly studies on his research.

Alcindor was a founder member of the African Progress Union over which he was elected president in ...

Article

Alcindor, John  

Jeffrey Green

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on 8 or 9 July 1873. Educated at the Catholic St. Mary’s College, he won one of the four Island Scholarships of 1893 and sailed to Britain, where he registered as a student of medicine at Edinburgh University in Scotland on 21 October 1893. Nothing is known about his parents other than his father’s name, Francis Alcindor, but the tuition at the college and living expenses in Scotland suggest some family wealth (his scholarship was worth an estimated £450 over three years and he studied medicine for six years).

He graduated in July 1899 with an M.B. and B.Ch. and moved to London, where he worked as a clinical assistant at several hospitals. He was present at the first Pan-African Conference in July 1900, as was the London-born composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The two became friends. From 1908 medical directories ...

Article

Alcindor, Minnie Martin  

Jeffrey Green

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Manager of a hostel for Africans in London in the 1920s and wife of Dr John Alcindor. Born in London of a French father, raised by her mother's family, she trained as a journalist. She was disowned by her family after her marriage in 1911 to John Alcindor, a Trinidadian.

While raising their three children, John (1912), Cyril (1914), and Roland (Bob, 1917), Alcindor also assisted her husband in his west London medical practice, often dealing with patients herself when the Harrow Road surgery was closed.

Along with her husband, Alcindor was active in the Pan‐Africanist movement (see Pan‐Africanism), and during the early 1920s was one of only two white women to serve on the committee of the London‐based African Progress Union, over which her husband presided from 1921.

Her husband's death in 1924 left the ...

Article

Archer, John Richard  

Ana Raquel Fernandes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Pan‐Africanist and the first black person to hold civic office in Britain. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a Barbadian, Richard Archer, and an Irishwoman, Mary Theresa Burns, but little is known of his early life, though he is believed to have lived in North America and the West Indies. Around 1898 he and his African‐Canadian wife, Bertha, moved to Battersea, south London, where Archer established a photographic studio. His concern to eradicate social and racial injustices led to a lifelong career in local government and national and global politics. In 1906 he was elected as a Progressive (Liberal) councillor for the Latchmere ward, and in 1913 Archer became Mayor of Battersea, Britain's first black mayor. His interest in colonial politics led to his involvement in Pan‐Africanism. In 1900 he joined the Pan African Association and he was a significant presence at the ...

Article

Awoonor, Kofi  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Kofi Awoonor's works in English focus on life in Ghana following independence from Great Britain in 1957, but they also draw heavily from the traditional literature of the Ewe culture in which he grew up. He published his first work under the name George Awoonor-Williams but has used his birth name since the late 1960s.

Awoonor was born in the coastal town of Wheta. In 1960 he received a B.A. degree in English from the University of Ghana at Legon, near Accra. He then served as managing editor of the Ghana Film Corporation. In 1968 Awoonor went to the United States, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1972. He later taught there and at the University of Texas at Austin. Awoonor returned to Ghana in 1975 to teach in the English department ...

Article

Awoonor-Renner, Bankole  

Marika Sherwood

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 June 2017

in 1898. His father was a politically active barrister, Peter Awoonor-Renner, and his mother was a member of the Elmina royal family. Despite representing Gold Coast organizations protesting against various rulings by the British colonial government, Peter Awoonor-Renner was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1937 for public services to the Gold Coast. Being from a wealthy family, Bankole was sent to the United States to study at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1922. In 1924 he moved to study journalism at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is noted as becoming the first West African member of the British Institute of Journalists that year.

Besides contributing poems and articles to the African-American magazines Crisis and Opportunity Awoonor Renner was the joint editor of Carnegie s student magazine He also began his long life of political ...

Article

Blackman, Peter  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Pan‐AfricanMarxist and scholar. Blackman was born in Barbados and won a scholarship to the University of Durham, where he studied theology. He was ordained in the Anglican Church and went to the Gambia as a missionary priest, where he clashed with his bishop over differences of pay for white and black clergy. Having resigned from the Church, Blackman returned to Barbados, but then, in 1938, he settled in London. He joined the leftist Negro Welfare Association, of which he became chairman, and also the League Against Imperialism, being a major speaker on both their platforms. He also became a member of the Executive Committee of the more liberally inclined League of Coloured Peoples, and in 1938–9 editor of its then occasional journal The Keys, writing critically on colonial policy; he also gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the West Indies. In November 1938 ...

Article

Blyden, Edward Wilmot  

Curtis Jacobs

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 3 August 1832 in St. Thomas, Danish West Indies (today, the US Virgin Islands). He was the third of seven children born to Romeo Blyden, a tailor, and Judith Blyden, a teacher, a free black married couple in a Danish colony where the majority of Africans were still enslaved. Members of an integrated congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Blydens moved briefly to Venezuela in 1842, where, in addition to discovering an aptitude for languages, Blyden observed that most of the emancipated Africans in that country were not far removed from chattel slavery.

Wilmot became a student of the Reverend John Knox of the Dutch Reformed Church upon his family’s return to St. Thomas in 1844. Impressed with his academic potential, Knox encouraged Wilmot in 1850 to travel to the United States with a view to gaining admission into the Rutgers Theological College ...

Article

Bourne, Clifford  

Frederick Opie

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala and Belize, was born in Barbados in 1881. He attended St. Stephen’s Grammar School and Combermere High School in Barbados. For two years he worked at a commercial house in England. He then took a job working for the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in Central America, where he joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a black nationalist organization. He established the first UNIA branch in Guatemala in February 1920 and was elected president of the local association. He later became the UNIA commissioner for Guatemala and Belize.

For some shrewd aggressive and hard working black immigrants like Bourne migration to the Caribbean coast of Guatemala had paid off handsomely Guatemala had proved to be an easier place for a black immigrant to become a property or business owner than the Jim Crow American South or the British colonial West Indies On ...

Article

Broadhurst, Robert  

Amar Wahab

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Pan‐Africanistleader in Britain in the early 1900s. Born in Sierra Leone, in 1869 he was sent to Cheshire to be educated and started working for the family firm, Broadhurst and Sons, in Manchester in 1905. By 1936 he is known to have been a cocoa merchant in the Gold Coast. He was heavily involved in the realm of Pan‐Africanist politics in Britain, becoming a founder member of the African Progress Union between 1911 and 1925. He became secretary of the Union in his sixties and continued as a member of the executive committee until its end. He worked with other leading supporters such as Duse Mohamed Ali, Edmund Fitzgerald Fredericks, and ‘the Black doctor of Paddington’ John Alcindor The Union organized around issues related to the welfare of Africans and Afro Peoples worldwide and vociferously advocated self determination This involved for example protests about ...

Article

Browne, Roosevelt  

Quito Swan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Pembroke (Middletown), Bermuda, to Joel and Henrietta Browne on 28 November 1932. His major political activities included coordinating the First International Black Power Conference (Bermuda, 1969), and a key role in organizing the Congress of African Peoples (Atlanta, 1970) and Sixth Pan-African Congress (Tanzania, 1974). He was also intensely involved in Bermuda’s suffrage movement, the push for Bermuda’s decolonization through the United Nations, and the island’s black power movement, and served as a parliamentarian for Bermuda’s Progressive Labour Party (PLP). During that time, he changed his name to Pauulu Kamarakafego.

An engineer by trade he fused his political worldviews with his technical work across the Americas Africa Europe Asia and Australasia He obtained a Ph D in ecological engineering from the California Institute of Technology Pioneering the modern sustainable development movement he became an internationally renowned ecological engineer UNESCO consultant on rural development ...

Article

Campbell, Robert  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Pan‐Africanist and Africantraveller. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, of black and white parents, Campbell began his working life as a printer's apprentice but gained some formal education and became a teacher. In the 1850s he emigrated to the United States, via Central America, where he worked as a teacher at an African‐American institute in Philadelphia. Campbell, ambitious for further education, was largely self‐taught.

In 1858 Martin R. Delany invited him to become a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, to find a site in southern Nigeria for an African‐American farm colony. ‘Return to Africa’ was controversial and divided African‐American opinion; many argued that, even with its pervasive racism, America was their home and not Africa; a further problem was that black emigration was supported by the white African Civilization Society. Campbell came to Britain in 1859 and although he failed to gain the support of missionary and ...

Article

Candace, Gratien  

Tracey M. Ober

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Gratien Candace was born in Baillif, Guadeloupe, into a family of farmers and former slaves. He earned a degree in natural sciences from the University of Toulouse, in France, and entered the education profession teaching technique, journalism, and trade. He served as an agricultural envoy to Tunisia and Trinidad and in 1907 worked in the French government as deputy chief of cabinet for René Viviani, minister for labor in the cabinet of Georges Clemenceau. Candace later edited La Justice, a radical newspaper started by Clemenceau in 1880, and eventually founded the review Colonies et Marine with Henry Bérenger.

Candace was elected deputy for his West Indies island homeland in 1912. He continued to be reelected to the French Chamber of Deputies until World War II.

In the French parliament Candace initially aligned himself with the Socialist Republicans after that with the Radical Left ...

Article

Casely-Hayford, Adelaide  

Barbara Bair

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

writer, educator, and feminist, was born Adelaide Smith on 27 June 1868 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Of mixed Hausa, Fanti, West Indian, and British heritage, she was born into the social world of the Creole professional elite, the daughter of court registrar William Smith and his second wife, Anne. Adelaide Smith moved with her family to England at the age of four (in 1872), and grew to adulthood in Britain. She was educated at the Jersey Ladies’ College, which her father had helped to found. The leaders of the school served as role models for the young Adelaide, who carried the message of female ability she learned at the college into her own adult life. The experience also influenced her lifelong dedication to education as a medium of social change for African women and girls.

Adelaide studied music in Germany for two years before her family s financial circumstances ...

Article

Casely-Hayford, Gladys May  

Lucilda Hunter

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

poet, dramatist, musician, artist, was born prematurely on 11 May 1904 in Axim in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Her father was Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford, a journalist, educator, and Pan-African activist of Fante origin, and her mother was his second wife, Adelaide Smith Casely-Hayford, a Sierra Leonean–born feminist, writer, and educator.

Gladys Casely-Hayford spent the first five years of her life between the Gold Coast and England. Her mother first took her there in 1906 to consult a specialist about a congenital hip defect that had made her left leg weak and misaligned, creating mobility problems. A second visit to England was for her mother’s own health and family reasons. Both visits lasted for months and might have contributed to the failure of her parents’ marriage, which ended with a legal separation agreement in 1914 Gladys went to Freetown when her mother returned to Sierra Leone and attended the ...

Article

Clarke, Cecil Belfield  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Medical doctor and Pan‐Africanist.

Born in Barbados, Clarke won an island scholarship and came to London in 1914 to study medicine. He graduated from Cambridge in 1918 and qualified as a surgeon two years later. He set up a medical practice in Southwark, south‐east London, where he worked until 1965.

Clarke was a founder member of the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) in 1931 and active in encouraging and also providing generous financial support for various Pan‐African causes. Clarke was non‐partisan and enjoyed good relations with the left and right Pan‐African factions in the 1930s–1940s, and this enabled him to act as a mediator in planning for the Conference on the African Peoples, Democracy, and World Peace held in London in July 1939 Many Caribbean and African visitors to Britain stayed at Clarke s home in Barnet which was also used for some LCP social functions for ...

Article

Diop, David Léon Mandessi  

Christopher Hogarth

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

French-African poet associated with the Pan-Africanist Négritude literary movement, was born on 9 July 1927 in Bordeaux France His father was Senegalese and his mother Congolese Diop was thus strictly speaking a European of African parentage but his struggle to affirm his African identity in the face of colonial Europe is reflected in his life and poetry As a child Diop and his family traveled often between France and Africa and he attended some primary school years in Senegal Diop s father died when he was eight years old thus leaving his mother Marie Diop to raise his large family he was the third of five children Diop lived his earliest teenage years in German occupied France and suffered greatly from bouts of tuberculosis meaning that many of his childhood years were spent in hospitals It was in sanatoriums that Diop found his passion for literature and he started ...

Article

Dusé Mohammed Ali  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Although information about Dusé Mohammed Ali’s origins is sparse and inexact, Dusé claimed that he was born in Egypt to an Egyptian army officer and a Sudanese mother. In 1876 he was sent to England for an education. As a young man he took up acting and toured the United States and Canada before returning to England in 1898.

Dusé left acting in 1909 for a career as a journalist, publishing articles critical of British racism and imperialism in the Islamic Review and the New Age, a leading socialist literary journal. In 1911 Dusé published In the Land of the Pharaohs, a short anti-imperialist history of Egypt, much of which he was accused of plagiarizing. Nevertheless, the book enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among black intellectuals of the day.

In 1911 Dusé began to publish African Times and Orient Review While the publication failed to gain a ...

Article

Edwards, Samuel Jules Celestine  

Terencia Kyneata Joseph

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born on 28 December 1858 in colonial Dominica to formerly enslaved parents. He was the last of his parents’ nine children. At about the age of 12, he stowed away on a French ship on its way to England, where he remained for most of his life.

Celestine Edwards’s work as a seaman permitted him to visit many countries. By his early twenties, he took up residence in Edinburgh, Scotland, a move that signaled his retirement from seafaring. Instead, he now earned a living as a builder or construction worker. It is about this time that he embarked on temperance work, most of which involved public lectures. Edwards’s other known places of residence include Sunderland, in northeast England, and by 1880 he occupied a home at No. 4 Bethnal Green in London’s East End.

In the 1880s Edwards s career as a writer antiracism campaigner pan Africanist advocate for ...

Article

Edwards, Samuel Jules Celestine  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Campaigning Christian evangelist, author, journalist, and Pan‐Africanist born in Dominica but educated in the neighbouring West Indian island of Antigua. An influential friend in Antigua was the Revd Henry Mason Joseph, later president of the African Association in London in 1897. In 1870 Edwards stowed away on a ship and over the next few years he travelled the world as a seaman visiting North and South America and Europe He landed in Sunderland and thereafter lived briefly in Edinburgh and Newcastle and worked with a group of black entertainers At some point he was converted to Christianity and as a Primitive Methodist worked as a temperance evangelist in Lancashire and Cheshire He had ambitions to go to Africa as a missionary but gravitated to east London where he ran a weekly Bible class for men and regularly preached in Victoria Park Some referred to ...