Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 19. Mars 2007 / Time Line March 19, 2007
Version 3.503/19/2007
The Forgotten Alliance of African Nationalists and Western
Pacifists
By Lawrence S. Wittner
This year, the West African nation of Ghana is celebrating fifty
years of independence, based on the termination of British rule of
the Gold Coast (as Ghana was called in the colonial era) in
1957.
The independence ceremonies of March 6, 1957 had great symbolic
significance. Ghana was the first country to throw off colonial
rule in Black Africa. In addition, its first prime minister, Kwame
Nkrumah, was a fiery African nationalist who had led a daring and
unremitting campaign for independence. Proclaiming that Ghana would
dedicate itself to "the struggle to emancipate other countries in
Africa," Nkrumah argued that "our independence is meaningless
unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African
continent."
Today, with so many African nations mired in poverty, violence,
AIDS, overseas debt, and subordination to multinational
corporations, it is hard to recall the excitement of the late 1950s
and early 1960s. At that time, a rising tide of African protest led
nation after nation to throw off the chains of colonialism, to
begin ambitious programs for social and economic development, and
to reject Cold War military alliances. Ghana continued in their
vanguard—at least until 1966, when Nkrumah was overthrown by
a military coup.
Although most of this history is fairly well-known, a much
lesser-known development of this heady era is the close alliance
that developed between African nationalists and Western pacifists
in the context of Africa's liberation.
In 1959, the French government was laying plans for the explosion
of France's first atomic bomb—not in France, of course, but
in that nation's colony of Algeria. The opinions of the Algerians
(then engaged in a bloody struggle for independence from France)
did not count for very much among French policymakers. Nor did the
opinions of other African leaders and organizations, which
protested bitterly against the irradiation of their continent with
nuclear fallout and against France's latest display of colonialist
arrogance.
Into this explosive situation came a small British pacifist group,
the Direct Action Committee, which proposed dispatching an
international protest team to the site of the French bomb test.
Although the Moroccan government offered its nation as a staging
area for the protest, Ghana seemed a better bet. Not only did
Nkrumah's government appear thoroughly committed to
anti-imperialism and anti-militarism, but with the assistance of
Bill Sutherland, an American pacifist, a Ghana Council for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND) had been launched. Unlike its Western
counterparts, it had a semi-official status and enjoyed strong
support from leading public figures, as well as from the Ghana Bar
Association, the Ghana Medical Association, and the Ghana
Federation of Women.
As a result, with the backing of the Direct Action Committee and
its U.S. counterpart, the tiny Committee for Nonviolent Action,
leading Western pacifists—among them Michael Randle, A.J.
Muste, and Bayard Rustin—flew to Ghana to engage in intense
planning sessions with the leaders of Ghana CND. Radio Ghana
trumpeted their activities and they spoke before numerous mass
meetings, with audiences in the tens of thousands. The protest team
received the support of numerous African leaders, as well as the
official backing of the All-African Trade Union Federation. Bowled
over by the African enthusiasm for the venture, Rustin—who
left it reluctantly when Martin Luther King, Jr and A. Philip
Randolph pleaded for his help in organizing civil rights protests
in the United States—later remarked that this was the most
significant pacifist activity with which he had ever been
associated. It "tied together . . . militarism and political
freedom in a way that people could understand and respond to."
Beginning in December 1959, a small protest team—composed
mostly of Ghanaians, but with the remainder from Nigeria,
Basutoland, Britain, France, and the United States—entered
Upper Volta on the long journey to the site of the atomic bomb test
in Algeria. In response, armed French troops swooped down upon
them, arrested them, and deported them. Later that December, a
reconstituted team entered Upper Volta, only to be suppressed once
again by the French military. Protesters launched a more
unconventional invasion—proceeding on foot and, later, by
hitching rides—in mid-January 1960, but once more it was
broken up by military action and arrests.
At this point, the activists could see little purpose in
continuing, at least in part because they had already ignited a
storm of protest against French policy. During the team's attempts
to reach the test site, small demonstrations had broken out in
Upper Volta, Ghana, Nigeria, Britain, West Germany, and the United
States. Meanwhile, additional volunteers signed up for future
missions. In late January, with the nuclear test date nearing, mass
demonstrations erupted in Tunis and Tripoli. In Rabat, Morocco,
thousands protested outside the French embassy, despite a
government ban on demonstrations. In Paris, five hundred African
students from French Community nations presented an anti-testing
petition to the French government.
Although the French nuclear test went forward, in its aftermath
Ghana CND issued a stinging declaration, declaring that France, by
exploding an atomic bomb, had "resigned from the club of human
decency and respect for the rights of others." Many other Africans
and people around the world agreed.
Nor was this the end of it. The Reverend Michael Scott, a leading
British peace activist, convinced Nkrumah to organize a meeting
that would bring together leaders of overseas peace groups with
representatives of African governments, liberation movements, and
union federations to develop ongoing forms of peace activism on the
African continent. Running from April 7 to 9, 1960, this Conference
on Positive Action for Peace and Security in Africa drew prominent
pacifists from around the world, including Muste and the Reverend
Ralph Abernathy, King's top aide in the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. Advocates of armed struggle, such as Frantz
Fanon, were also on hand, and played a role in the conference
proceedings. Nonetheless, the pacifists emerged with considerable
support. By a unanimous vote, the conference applauded the
contribution made by the Algeria protest team to the liberation of
Africa, urged heightened protest against French nuclear tests, and
called for the establishment of training centers in nonviolent
resistance. According to Sutherland, the conference represented
"the height of influence of the world pacifist movement on the
African liberation struggle."
After that, the Westerners had a more difficult time. Although
Nkrumah told Muste and other pacifists that he was going to get
started immediately on a new anti-testing project, have a
nonviolent resistance training center built in Accra (his nation's
capital), and hire Sutherland and Randle to work full-time on the
project and for the center, none of these promises came to
fruition. Instead, Nkrumah seemed to grow distracted and to focus
increasingly on solidifying his personal power in Ghana. About all
that remained of his commitment was his government's financial
sponsorship of an assembly on disarmament, "The World Without the
Bomb." Convened in Accra in June 1962, it drew together about a
hundred participants from Western, Communist, and nonaligned
countries, including fourteen from African nations.
Even so, ongoing independence struggles and the sprightly pacifist
resistance to French nuclear tests opened possibilities for
pacifist advances in other African countries. Kenneth Kaunda, the
leader of Northern Rhodesia's independence movement impressed
pacifists with his Gandhian ferver, and they impressed him, as
well. In February 1962, at the fourth annual conference of the
Pan-African Freedom Movements of East and Central Africa,
Kaunda—the president of the organization—successfully
headed off calls to rally behind a program of violent revolution,
arguing that "we must find another way or perish." Rustin,
Sutherland, and Scott worked closely with Kaunda and, ultimately,
helped him pull together plans for a mass international march in
support of universal suffrage in Northern Rhodesia. Embarrassed by
talk of the forthcoming march, the colonial authorities in London
successfully pressured the white settler government in Northern
Rhodesia to scrap its discriminatory election rules. With universal
suffrage in place, Kaunda won nationwide elections and Northern
Rhodesia became an independent nation, Zambia.
Once again, however, overseas pacifists were disappointed by the
results. To be sure, Kaunda and Julius Nyerere, the president of
neighboring Tanganyika, acted in March 1962 to set up a nonviolent
resistance training center at Dar es Salaam, with Sutherland and
other pacifists operating it. But without adequate financial
support or a clear focus, the center did not get very far, and
collapsed a year later. Furthermore, as Kaunda assumed governmental
office in Zambia and as violent revolution escalated in southern
Africa, he began discarding his pacifist views and became a
more-or-less typical government official.
In general, then, Western pacifists, despite some dizzying
successes in Africa during the late 1950s and early 1960s, failed
to make the kind of dramatic breakthrough on the continent that
they hoped for. Nevertheless, their forging of an alliance with
African nationalists, even if only temporary, was a remarkable
feat—one more indication of their influence on world affairs
in the modern era.
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