Pan-African Congress

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For the political organisation, see Pan Africanist Congress.

The Pan-African Congress was a series of five meetings in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945 that were intended to address the problems facing Africa due to European colonization of much of the continent.

The Fifth Pan-African Congress of 1945, held in Manchester, UK, is widely considered to have been the most important. Organised by the influential Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore and Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, it was attended by many scholars, intellectuals and political activists who would later go on to become influential leaders in various African independence movements and the American civil rights movement, including the Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, American left-wing activist and academic W. E. B. DuBois and Nigerian stateman Jaja Wachuku, as well Nkrumah and Padmore themselves. It also led partially to the creation of the Pan-African Federation, founded in 1946 by Nkrumah and Kenyatta.