By Mursi Saad El-Din Last Friday, the 25th, was Africa Day. Dozens of articles have appeared in our press, and, I am sure, in the papers of other African countries. And I do not intend to add yet another article about the role of the African Union or the steps that led to its creation. This has already been covered by political analysts and Africanists. I am simply writing about my personal pleasant memories of the continent's self awareness. My interest in Africa began immediately after the end of World War II. This war, in the words of the Zimbabwe nationalist leader, Rev Ndabaningi Sithole "had a great deal to do with the awakening of the people of Africa. During the war the African came in contract with practically all the peoples of the earth. He met them on a life-and-death struggle basis. He saw the so-called civilised and peaceful and orderly white people mercilessly butchering one another just as his so- called savage ancestors had done in the tribal wars. He saw no difference between the primitive and the civilised man." This contract, mentioned by Sithole, "taught the subjugated people to fight and die for freedom rather than live and be subjugated by Hitler". Sithole concludes, "Here then is the paradox of history, that the Allied Powers, by effectively liquidating the threat of Nazi domination, set in motion those powerful forces which are now liquidating, with equal effectiveness, the European domination of Africa." Yet the paradox is carried further to show that a number of leaders of liberation movements and future presidents of their independent countries were taught and nurtured by one professor in particular, Harold Laski. I arrived in London in June 1945, to assume my responsibilities as secretary of the newly established Egyptian Institute. In October of the same year I was asked by my government to attend a Pan-African Congress in Manchester. The Congress was called for by George Padmore, author of Pan- Africa, and a group of young African students. It was notable for two things: first, it was the first time the African element, and not that of Afro-Americans and West Indians, dominated the proceedings; and secondly, it was there that I met, for the first time, young Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Wallace Johnson, Joe Appiah, Peter Abrahams and others. Previous African conferences and meetings were organised by such leading personalities as William du Bois and Marcus Garvey, but the Manchester Congress was the first militant meeting of Africans who made their demands clear in the "Declaration to the Colonial Powers" of the Congress. "We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control, whether political or economic." My participation in that Congress was the beginning of my association with Africa. I joined the Organisation of West African Students, which embodied young, keen Africans pursuing courses mainly at the School of African and Oriental Studies, or the London School of Economics. Through that organisation the Egyptian government offered a number of post-graduate scholarships. I remember that one of them went to a certain Fabumbi from Nigeria (I can't recall his first name), who went to Egypt and produced a Ph.D. thesis on the Nile. I met him later during one of my visits to Nigeria where he became director of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. In April 1958 Kwame Nkrumah, who was at the time Prime Minister of Ghana, convened a Conference of Independent African States. In December in the same year he organised an All African Peoples conference and I was asked to go to Accra and assist in the organisation of the event. I was attached to the Bureau of African Affairs, headed by George Padmore, the organiser of the previous Manchester congress. In Accra I spent one of the most pleasant months of my life. The Conference was a great success, attend by such figures Franz Fanon from Algeria and Patrice Lumumba from the Congo. That conference was the beginning of a friendship between President Nkrumah and myself, if friendships can be established with presidents. We had many meetings and when in 1966 he was ousted while on a visit to China a, he went to Guinea where president Sekou Toure announced a union between Ghana and Guinea. President Nkrumah sent me a number of letters from Conakry, but that is another story!
