Pan-Africa: The Manchester Journal That Put Africa on Its Own Cover

When the Pan-African Federation launched a journal to carry its ideas beyond the meeting hall, it gave the publication the most direct title available: Pan-Africa. The magazine ran for roughly eighteen months, from January 1947 to April 1948, edited by T. Ras Makonnen out of Manchester, England, where he had built a small business empire of restaurants, a nightclub, a bookshop and a publishing house that doubled as the movement’s unofficial headquarters. Subtitled “A Journal of African Life, History and Thought,” it positioned itself as the printed voice of a federation still riding the momentum of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in October 1945 and attended by a 77-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois alongside a younger generation that included Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.

Makonnen was an unlikely figure to be running a magazine out of a British industrial city. Born George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith in Buxton, British Guiana, around 1909, he studied agriculture at Cornell before adopting the name Ras Makonnen in the 1930s in solidarity with Ethiopia following Italy’s invasion. By the time Pan-Africa launched, he had spent close to a decade in Manchester turning his commercial ventures into financing for the Pan-African movement, and the journal followed the same pattern: produced and distributed through his own bookshop rather than a conventional publisher, reflecting a period when independence activism was accelerating in Kenya, the Gold Coast and elsewhere on the continent, alongside India’s independence the same year the journal launched.

Its title carried a claim as much as a description. Framing the whole continent as a single subject in a magazine printed and sold in northern England was itself an argument that Africans, wherever they lived, shared a common political and cultural future, an idea the Pan-African Federation had spent the previous two years trying to organize into a movement. Pan-Africa folded after its April 1948 issue, closing not long after the British wing of organized Pan-Africanism began to lose momentum as the center of activity shifted back toward Africa itself, where the independence campaigns the Manchester Congress had helped energize were now being fought on the ground.