British Guiana, America, Denmark, and a Radical Education
George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith was born around 1900 in British Guiana — the South American colony that is today the independent nation of Guyana — into the British Caribbean colonial world that produced so many of the Pan-African movement's most important figures. The Caribbean of the early twentieth century, with its sharp colonial hierarchies, its plantation economy's legacy, and its population of African descent systematically excluded from political power and economic opportunity, was a powerful generator of political radicalism, and the young Griffith developed early the political consciousness that would define his life's work.
He pursued an unusual and widely ranging education — studying in the United States and then in Denmark, an exposure to European social democracy that gave him a practical understanding of how welfare states and cooperative economic institutions could be built that would inform his subsequent organisational work. He arrived in Britain in the 1930s, changed his name to T. Ras Makonnen — a gesture of solidarity with Ethiopia and its resistance to Mussolini's 1935 invasion, the event that galvanised Pan-African sentiment across the world more than any other colonial episode of the decade — and settled in Manchester, where he would spend the most politically significant years of his life.
Manchester in the 1930s and 1940s was an unlikely capital of African liberation politics, but it had a significant Black community — concentrated around the university, the port, and the labour movement — and it was far enough from London to be somewhat less surveilled by the colonial authorities and their intelligence services. Makonnen established himself there through a combination of political organising and entrepreneurial activity, opening Caribbean and African restaurants that became meeting places for the Black radical community and that provided the income that allowed him to fund political work that had no other reliable source of finance.
The Entrepreneur-Revolutionary: Restaurants as Political Infrastructure
Makonnen's combination of business entrepreneurship and political radicalism was distinctive and deliberate. He understood from the beginning that political movements require material resources — that agitation and organisation cost money, that publications need to be printed, that congresses need to be convened, that organisers need to be sustained — and that the Pan-African movement, which lacked the kind of institutional backing that established political parties or trade unions enjoyed, needed to generate its own financial base. His restaurants were the solution: they served a genuine community need, provided employment, created a social and cultural space for the Black diaspora in Manchester and London, and generated the surplus that he systematically redirected into political work.
This model — the political entrepreneur who builds economic enterprises specifically to fund liberation politics — was not unique to Makonnen, but he practised it with unusual effectiveness and consistency. The restaurants were not merely a private business that happened to support political work on the side; they were conceived as part of a political project, and their operation was informed throughout by the Pan-Africanist values that animated everything Makonnen did. He employed African and Caribbean workers, created spaces where the Black community could eat, socialise, and discuss politics in an environment free from the racial hostility of much of British public life, and used the cultural authority of Caribbean food and hospitality to build the kind of community solidarity on which political organisation depends.
"We could not wait for someone else to fund our freedom. We had to build it ourselves, from the ground up, from what our own hands could produce and our own minds could organise."
— T. Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within, 1973Building the Pan-African Federation and the Road to Manchester 1945
Makonnen was a central figure in the establishment of the Pan-African Federation in Manchester in 1944 — the organisation that brought together the various local Pan-African groups that had developed across Britain into a single coordinating body capable of organising on a national scale. The Federation was the immediate organisational vehicle for the Fifth Pan-African Congress, and Makonnen's role in building it was as important as George Padmore's in providing its intellectual direction.
His collaboration with Padmore was the core relationship of his political work in Britain — a partnership in which Padmore's strategic vision and intellectual authority were complemented by Makonnen's organisational capacity and financial resources. Padmore knew what the Pan-African movement needed to do; Makonnen figured out how to do it and found the money to make it happen. This division of labour — the visionary and the organiser, the thinker and the fixer — is a recurring pattern in successful political movements, and it worked with unusual effectiveness in the Padmore-Makonnen partnership.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held at Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester in October 1945, was the organisational and financial achievement that defines Makonnen's historical significance. Getting the Congress together required coordinating the attendance of delegates from across the African and Caribbean world, securing the venue, producing the documentation, managing the logistics, and covering the costs — all in the austere conditions of post-war Britain, with its rationing, its damaged infrastructure, and its exhausted and suspicious civil society. Makonnen managed all of this through a combination of his own resources, the networks he had built through the Pan-African Federation, and the connections that Padmore and others had developed through years of political work.
The Congress brought together W.E.B. Du Bois — whose involvement gave it historical continuity with the earlier Pan-African tradition — alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and many others who would go on to lead their countries to independence. Its resolutions explicitly demanded immediate self-government and independence for Africa and the Caribbean, marking the decisive shift of Pan-Africanism from the gradualist petition politics of the earlier congresses to the mass-based independence politics of the coming decade. Without Makonnen's organisational and financial contribution, the Congress would not have happened in the form it did, and its historical significance — as the event that launched the independence generation — reflects credit on him as surely as it does on the more celebrated figures who addressed its sessions.
Publishing, Political Education, and the Circulation of Ideas
Makonnen extended his practical support for the Pan-African movement into publishing — producing and distributing pamphlets, journals, and books that circulated the ideas of African liberation to audiences that the mainstream publishing industry was not interested in reaching. He published works by Padmore, by C.L.R. James, and by African nationalist thinkers, making available in accessible and affordable form the intellectual content of the liberation tradition that the movement needed to circulate among its own membership and among the broader African and Caribbean reading public.
This publishing work was an extension of the same logic that animated his restaurant operation: the Pan-African movement needed to build its own institutional infrastructure rather than depending on mainstream institutions whose interests were not aligned with African liberation, and Makonnen was willing to build that infrastructure piece by piece through whatever combination of entrepreneurship and political commitment it required. The pamphlets he published circulated across Britain, across the Caribbean, and — despite the colonial authorities' attempts to control the circulation of anti-colonial literature — across Africa, reaching audiences who had few other sources of Pan-African political thought.
Ghana, Kenya, and the African Years
When Ghana achieved independence in 1957, Makonnen moved to Accra at Nkrumah's invitation, joining the small community of Caribbean Pan-Africanists — George Padmore prominent among them — who went to Ghana to contribute to the building of Africa's first independent Black state. His contribution in Ghana was primarily organisational — helping to build the institutions of the young state, contributing to the Pan-African political work that Nkrumah was pursuing through the All-African Peoples' Conference and the Organisation of African Unity project.
After Nkrumah's overthrow in the 1966 military coup, Makonnen moved to Kenya, where he spent the final years of his life. He died in Nairobi in 1983, having lived long enough to see the wave of African independence that he had helped to organise reach its completion across the continent — though not to see it consolidate into the unified, socialist, genuinely self-determining African political community that the Pan-African tradition had envisioned and worked toward. His posthumously published memoir Pan-Africanism from Within (1973) is one of the few first-hand accounts of the inner workings of the Pan-African movement from the 1930s through independence, an invaluable source for historians and one of the relatively rare moments at which Makonnen's own voice comes clearly through the organisational labour that usually obscured it.
The Indispensable Organiser: A Hidden Legacy
Makonnen occupies a place in the Pan-African tradition that is at once central and obscure — central because the 1945 Manchester Congress, which he organised and financed, was the pivotal event of the movement's decisive decade, and obscure because organisers who work behind the scenes, who provide the practical and financial infrastructure on which more visible figures depend, tend to be forgotten when the movement's history is written. The names associated with the Manchester Congress in popular memory are Padmore, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Du Bois — the intellectuals and political leaders whose ideas and rhetoric gave the event its historical character. Makonnen's name is less well known, but without him the event would not have taken place.
His story is also a study in a particular model of Pan-African politics — the model of the practical organiser who builds institutions rather than movements, who solves problems rather than articulating visions, and who sustains political work through periods of low visibility and scarce resources through a combination of entrepreneurial creativity and unrelenting commitment. This is less glamorous than the work of the visionary theorist or the charismatic mass leader, but it is equally necessary, and its absence is equally damaging to a movement's capacity to achieve its goals. Makonnen understood this with unusual clarity and devoted his life to being the person who did the necessary unglamorous work — the funding, the logistics, the publishing, the organisation — that made the glamorous work of others possible.