It is a memory half-remembered—deliberately. Because to remember it properly is to unpick the seams of the story this nation tells itself. About order. About civilisation. About empire.
No television cameras. No prime ministers. No red carpets. Just voices. And conviction. And the clarity that the world could be different.
A Gathering Like No Other
I often think of George Padmore—Trinidadian, revolutionary, tactician. A man who understood that the theatre of history often begins in the smallest rooms. He knew the world would not give freedom. It would have to be taken. He chose Manchester not by chance but by instinct. A city with its own radical tradition. The city of Engels and the Chartists. The city where suffragettes shouted down the silence. And now, the city that would host a new kind of war room.
Eighty or so delegates made their way. Some by train. Some by foot. Students, dockworkers, teachers, ex-servicemen. They came from Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad, Sierra Leone. They brought with them their hopes—and the memory of bloodshed. They brought their ancestors with them too. These were the sons and daughters of colonies. And they were done waiting.
Among them: Kwame Nkrumah, then a student, barely in his thirties, burning with purpose. Amy Ashwood Garvey, fierce, brilliant, and insistent that liberation meant nothing if it left women behind. Ras Makonnen, the quiet power behind the scenes. And W.E.B. Du Bois—veteran of struggle, statesman of Black thought—who carried the weight of a diaspora in his voice.
This was not a talking shop. It was a strategy session. A declaration in waiting.
“We are determined to fight for the complete and absolute independence of the peoples of Africa and the West Indies.”
— Final Resolution, Fifth Pan-African Congress
The resolutions were clear. No compromise. No patience for gradualism. The age of empire was ending, and they would be the ones to end it.
“The delegates of the Fifth Pan-African Congress believe in the right of all peoples to govern themselves… We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth… We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.”
— Congress Declaration, 1945
Manchester as a Stage
There is a kind of historical poetry to Manchester. Its mills spun cotton picked by enslaved hands. Its wealth helped build the empire. And yet, it was here—in a draughty town hall in Chorlton-on-Medlock—that the blueprint for dismantling that empire was drawn.
Padmore’s choice was deliberate. Manchester was radical but overlooked. It gave them cover. It gave them space. And it gave them the support of local Black Mancunians who opened their homes, their kitchens, their hearts.
They met in small rooms. Ate cheap food. Debated through the night. Not out of romance but necessity. Because if they failed, it would not be academic—it would be personal.
You can almost hear the sounds: the soft shuffle of folding chairs; the rasp of match-struck cigarettes; voices heavy with Lagos, Kingston, Freetown. A room of people with nothing in common except this: they knew the future had to be wrestled from the grip of history. They were not waiting for permission.
The People Behind the Politics
Kwame Nkrumah didn’t just talk revolution—he lived it. He spoke of seizing power not as a threat, but as inevitability.
“Revolutionary methods of seizing power are essential to independence,” he would later write.
Amy Ashwood Garvey refused to be sidelined. Her feminism was not an add-on. It was integral. She had seen too many movements sacrifice their women for the sake of appearances.
“The liberation of a people must include its women,” she said.
And Du Bois? He held the room. Not because he demanded to, but because he had already seen the price of dignity.
“The Fifth Pan-African Congress carries messages which must not die, but should be passed on to aid mankind,” he later wrote.
Makonnen worked behind the curtain, anchoring the logistics and making sure the machinery of change kept running.
And then there were the unnamed. The women stirring pots. The printers who ran off flyers. The people who gave what they had. These were the midwives of history. Their names didn’t make it into the footnotes. But without them, the story doesn’t begin.
Padmore would later be exiled. Watched. Silenced. Nkrumah would be toppled by a coup. Ashwood Garvey would be marginalised by the men who owed her their platforms. The personal cost of revolution is not always seen in the parades. It lives in the solitude that follows.
The Demands
Their resolutions were not abstract. They were a manifesto:
- End colonial rule.
- Return land to the people.
- Protect workers.
- Educate every child.
- Elevate women.
- Unify the African diaspora.
They did not ask. They demanded.
They even addressed the independent Black nations that still stood:
“We assure the Governments and peoples of these States that we shall ever be vigilant against any manifestation of Imperial encroachment which may threaten their independence.”
This was not just politics. It was prophecy. It was scripture for a new world.
The Ripple Effect
Within a decade, Africa began to shake off its chains. Ghana. Nigeria. Kenya. Tanzania. By the end of the 1960s, the world map had changed.
Nkrumah rose. Kenyatta followed. New flags were raised. National anthems sung. But Manchester 1945 was the seed.
Even the US civil rights movement drew from this moment—from its urgency, from its clarity, from its belief that Black people need not ask to be human.
The world changed. But not because it wanted to. Because they made it.
Why It’s Been Forgotten
Because Britain doesn’t know what to do with this story. It complicates the myth. It shows that the empire didn’t fall because it was tired. It fell because people fought it. With ideas. With strategy. With fire.
There is no George Padmore statue in Manchester. No school trip to Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall. The silence is not accidental.
It was not forgotten. It was erased. It still is.
This silence has consequences. A generation grows up thinking that freedom is always granted, never taken. That Britain always stood on the right side of history. That empire simply dissolved, like sugar in warm tea.
But history doesn’t dissolve. It resists. And so must we.
Why It Still Matters
The Congress lives. In every protest against police violence. In every campaign for reparations. In every lecture on decolonisation. In every child asking why their history isn’t in the books.
It lives because the struggle never ended. It only changed shape.
Manchester 1945 wasn’t the end. It was the beginning.
So now, eighty years on, we are faced with a question.
Not if we remember.
But how.
Do we teach it? Honour it? Amplify it?
Do we place it where it belongs—at the very centre of our shared, complicated, unfinished history?
Because the people in that hall weren’t just imagining freedom.
They were willing it into being.
That Congress changed the world.
And it still can.