“Hands Off Africa” Marking the 60th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958

December 2018 marked the 60th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference (AAPC), which was held in Accra, Ghana, between 5 and 13 December 1958. Under the slogan ‘Hands off Africa!!’, the AAPC was a watershed moment in the history of Africa’s liberation from colonial rule and white supremacy.

To mark its significance, a major one day conference was held on 6 December 2018 at the University of London by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICWS), School of Advanced Study, and Westminster United Nations Association, under the title of 

‘Hands Off Africa!!’ The 1958 All African People’s Conference: Its Impact Then and Now’.

The AAPC was inspired by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of newly-independent Ghana, and George Padmore, Nkrumah’s Adviser on African Affairs, to advance the ideology of Pan Africanism. Its main themes were non-alignment, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and African unity. More than 300 political and trade union leaders responded to the call, representing some 65 organisations from 28 African territories. A schedule of the principal organisations is here.

The AAPC chairman was Tom Mboya, a prominent Kenyan trade unionist. Mboya drew a contrast between the conference in Ghana and a conference seventy-four years earlier, when the European powers had partitioned Africa – the Berlin conference of 1884. That meeting, he said, was known as the ‘scramble for Africa’. But, as of 1958, he said firmly, those same powers ‘will now decide to scram from Africa.’Other delegates at the AAPC included Patrice Lumumba (representing the people of the Belgian Congo), Frantz Fanon (Algeria), Sekou Touré (Guinea), Kenneth Kaunda (Northern Rhodesia), Joshua Nkomo (Southern Rhodesia), Holden Roberto (Angola), Ezekiel Mphahlele and Alfred Hutchinson (South Africa), and Michael Scott (South West Africa). Fraternal delegates and observers also came from countries beyond the African continent, including Canada, China, India, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US. There were a number of African Americans, some of whom represented civil rights groups.

The organizers of the conference stressed the importance of pacifism in achieving independence, but this was challenged: Fanon argued that Algeria could not achieve freedom from France without armed resistance. An impassioned ‘violence versus non-violence’ debate reverberated through the AAPC and through the subsequent years of the struggle for liberation.

Mandy Banton is a Senior Research Fellow at ICWS, David Wardrop is Chair of the Westminster United Nations Association, and Susan Williams is also a Senior Research Fellow at ICWS.
A film of the conference will shortly be accessible through the website of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

The organisers are extremely grateful for the generous sponsorship of United Nations Association London Region Trust and the Review of African Political Economy, without which this conference would not have been possible. Featured Photograph: All African People’s Conference leaflet, 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.