Fifth Pan-African Congress 75th Anniversary Celebrations PAC@75 (15-18 October 2020)
The 75th anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress –a crucial event in the African independence movement held in Manchester that brought together key figures who later led successful anticolonial campaigns –is being marked by the region’s universities.
In October 1945, 200 delegates including future African national leaders Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister and then President of Ghana; Nnamdi Azikiwe, Premier of the Eastern Region, and then President of Nigeria; and Jomo Kenyatta, first President of Kenya, met in Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall – now the site of Manchester Metropolitan University’s new Arts and Humanities Building.
The week-long event was the first time after the Second World War that a new generation of African leaders came together to develop new national strategies to demand self-rule, and was an important early milestone for a number of successful African independence movements.
With delegates from Britain and all over the world, it also signified solidarity with other causes moving from the Americas and the West Indies to racism experienced in the UK.
Despite its huge significance in shaping modern world history, the Congress has been largely forgotten in Greater Manchester itself.
Now, 75 years on, a four-day virtual celebration with internationally renowned historians, writers and performers will mark the anniversary and shine a light on its modern significance amid the Black Lives Matter movement and global protests against racial injustice.
From 10am-3pm on Sunday 18th October the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford will host a full programme of PAC@75 events accessible via the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology Facebook site.
This will include poetry by the Chancellor of the University of Salford, Professor Jackie Kay; panel discussions with the Presidents and representations of the Students Unions and Greater Manchester universities; poetry and dance performances by students Vashti Gbolagun (Salford), Carol Tiriongo (Manchester) and Isaiah Hull (in association with Big People Music); an interview with University of Salford Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Development) Jo Purves; and an online workshop for AHRC NWCDTP PhD students on Diversity and Inclusion.
This University of Salford and Students Union programme of events has been organised by Emma Barnes (University of Salford), Kwame Kwarteng (General Secretary UMSU), Ansh Sachdeva (President Bolton Students Union), and Rosalie Benjamin (University of Salford), with the support of colleagues in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford and Studio Salford. The event has been generously funded by the AHRC NWCDTP and SAMCT.
Visit the PAC@75 site, including full event details.
For more information about PAC@75 events, please contact:
Dr Jade Munslow Ong J.MunslowOng@salford.ac.uk
Emma Barnes E.M.Barnes4@salford.ac.uk
Sign up for some of the free online events now:
PAC@75 Online Sixth Form Conference
Live Q+A 12-1pm Thursday 15th October 2020
For more information and to sign up to this event, please contact Claudia Conerney at C.Conerney@mmu.ac.uk
The History, Politics and Philosophy Department (MMU) have worked closely with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust and will host an online sixth form conference on Thursday 15th October. Contributors include well-known speakers including Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood, and Terence Dooley. There will be a live online Q and A session with leading scholars and aspirational figures, including writer Alex Wheatle MBE, Paul Okojie, Chair of the Board of Trustees, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust, and student representatives. In the afternoon, students will be involved in creative workshops led by MMU academics, and colleagues, Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford) and Tunde Adekoya (Big Music Company) on issues relating to race through history, poetry and literature.
Opening of PAC@75: Visual Installation
5:30pm-9pm Thursday 15th October 2020
The projection show will be broadcast live at 5:30pm in the MMU channel
Michael Gorman (MMU) and his team of postgraduate students have created a visual tribute which provides a stunning memorial of the holding of the 5th Pan African Congress conference in Manchester in 1945. Michael and his team have projected the colours of the Pan African Congress on to the old Town Hall façade, now the front of the MMU New Arts Building. Words from the Pan African Congress Manifesto produced at the Manchester conference will be projected within the entrance and the 15 main windows of the building fronting onto All Saints Square are also lit up. This is a visual installation which sets the New Arts building as a venerable beacon of the past with the use of contemporary lighting to project this to Manchester. Due to CV-19 restrictions this will be a display that will be visible to the public but there will be no gatherings at the site.
This event signals the inauguration of the PAC@75 celebrations.
Dr Ray Costello, ‘Black Lives in Manchester and the North West at the time of the 1945 Pan-African Congress’, followed by Q+A
Hosted by Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage (MCPHH) with PAC@75
5:30pm-7pm Thursday 15th October 2020
Voices for Freedom
Curated by Manchester poet SuAndi of Black Arts Alliance and developed in collaboration with Manchester Poetry Library.
7:30pm-8:45pm Thursday 15th October 2020
The Voices for Freedom poetry event showcases performances of original and existing work presented by family members of the Manchester-based Pan-African Congress 1945 delegates. A fusion of oral history, dance, acapella and poetry, with extracts from writers including W.E.B DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Merle Collins and SuAndi. The screening includes new commissioned pieces by Ronald Samm, tenor, and Kevin.E.Turner, Company Chameleon, with musical score by Kevin Davy. www.blackartists.org.uk
Readers: Xenia McKenzie, Stan Finni, 'SAF -S2E', Isha McKenzie-Mavinga , Barrie Olkachookwu George, Ann Rufai (Sarge), Angela Lawrence, and Alima Sonne.
SuAndi is the freelance Cultural Director of National Black Arts Alliance and an internationally recognised Poet and Performance Artist. Her one-woman show The Story of M is now on the “A” Level syllabus. A popular conference speaker on the positioning of Black lives and culture she believes in representing. Her libretto for Mary Seacole the opera was seen by a sell-out audience over seven days at Convent Garden. In recent years, as the freelance Cultural Director of National Black Arts Alliance, SuAndi has worked to preserve the history of the pre- and post-war African and Caribbean communities in Manchester UK. The moving memories and histories of these families have been collected into the works Afro Solo UK and Strength of our Mothers. In 1999 SuAndi was awarded an OBE for her contribution to the Black Arts Sector. She has also received honorary degrees from Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University for her work in the literature and the arts in general.
Khadija Diskin in conversation with Afua Hirsch, followed by Q+A
10am-11am Friday 16th October 2020
Afua Hirsch, Guardian columnist, award winning writer of Brit(ish) film producer and presenter of the recent television series Africa Renaissance will be interviewed, by MMU PhD student Khadija Diskin. This In conversation event will be broadcast live and will be followed by a short Q&A session with a select ticketed audience of students and staff from the Manchester Universities collaborating in the PAC@75 event.
For members of the public, the event will be broadcast live on YouTube. Please sign up for a 'public' ticket to be sent the broadcast link.
For staff and students of MMU, University of Manchester, Salford University and Bolton University, you can join the event as part of our e-audience and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session. Please sign up for a 'staff/student' ticket.
The PAC@75:Viewing the Past and Looking to the Future Debate
With Prof Gary Younge, Prof Farida Vis, Dr Shirin Hirsch, Alnoor Mitha and others
Chair: Dr Kai Syng Tan
1:30pm-3:30pm Friday 16th October 2020
In this mixed live and recorded debate and reflective discussion, we have invited key thinkers and academics from MMU, UoM and across the UK to give their reflections and discuss their views on the statement above. This is two-hour an open ended session where we will be playing pre-recorded reflections from thinkers who are unable to join the discussion and debate physically online, and also giving platform to a number of invited speakers particularly those with Manchester academic connections to discuss and debate their views and positions on how our historical relationship with the past may or may not inform the present. The last 30 minutes of the session will be open to all attenders as a Q+ A session. Do join this exciting debate.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: From the Problem of the Color Line to Black Lives Matter’
7:30pm-10pm Friday 16th October 2020
W. E. B. Du Bois, co-founder of the Pan-African Congress Movement, declared, at the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, that the problem of the twentieth century would be 'the problem of the color line.' He believed that combating White Supremacy would be a major challenge of the politics of the century to come. And he understood that that involved a battle on two fronts: challenging racism in Europe and the Americas, on the one hand, and defeating the racism of colonial empires, on the other. Du Bois, born an American, died as a citizen of Ghana, invited there, after independence, by Kwame Nkrumah. The Manchester Congress, which brought him together with a new generation of Black leaders from Africa and the Caribbean, was a key turning point in the history of the Pan-African Movement: as the focus shifted, for a period, to the fight for independence in Africa. In this new century, in a world after European empire, the struggle for Black equality in Europe and the Americas, has been reinvigorated by the Black Lives Matter movement. How has three-quarters of a century of post-Manchester struggle for respect and equality for Black people—inside and outside the North Atlantic world—been shaped by the Pan-Africanist legacy?
David Olusoga in Conversation
2pm-3pm Saturday 17th October 2020
David Olusoga, writer, Black and British: A Forgotten History, Guardian columnist, broadcaster, Civilisations, and The House in Time, and historian, will be interviewed by Manchester School of Architecture Student Quadri Sogunle-Aregbesola. In conversation he will reflect on the contemporary British urban landscape and its relationship to the Black Lives Matter Movement and covid-19 events this summer. Quadri, a member of the MSA BLM team, will also discuss the Digital Black Urban Manchester map which will be launched online immediately after the event. There will be a Q+A session afterwards.
Virtual African Urban History Walk: Black History Digital Map of Manchester Online Launch
(Launch immediately after David Olusoga in Conversation)
MMU BLM-Architecture Students will be presenting their editable open source map that shows a number of key locations and buildings that highlight Pan-African associations with Manchester. With each of the identified locations there is also a brief ‘pop up’ text explaining the relevance (political/historical/musical/ etc) of the site or location. This is a launch of a a project that is expected to develop further and involve local voices in its evolution creation and development, which they hope will be an ongoing and ever evolving project for those interested in Manchester’s black urban history.
Manchester Writes: Manchester Creative Writers Discussions and Readings
Organised by Dr Muzna Rahman (MMU)
3pm-5pm Saturday 17th October 2020
As part of the Pan African Congress Anniversary celebrations, creative writers from Manchester will be providing a series of conversations and readings, addressing themes of home, race, postcoloniality and citizenship. These presentations will be made available as recordings, and will engage with contemporary issues of race and belonging, particularly in the wake of current debates around BLM and the killing of George Floyd. Writers will explore narratives of identity as they pertain to the Pan African Congress and its history, and discuss their own work and artistic trajectories. Participants include Alex Wheatle, Anjum Malik, Malika Booker and Jennifer Makumbi-Morris, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey and Zodwa Nyoni.
University of Salford and Students Unions Event
10am-3pm Sunday 18th October 2020
Streamed on https://www.facebook.com/watch/UoSArtsMedia/
The Fifth Pan African Congress that took place in Manchester in 1945 brought together young activists who wanted to make a positive and forward-looking change in the lives of Africans and people of African descent. They started this journey of change by meeting in Manchester to discuss and action a plan on how to lead an anti-colonial campaign and foster the understanding that black people are also capable of inciting social and political change. Seventy-five years later, we as students and student leaders wish to continue and reflect on these conversations that underpinned the Fifth Pan African Congress, and highlight the realities of colonialism and inequality that still exist in our society today. The Fifth Pan African Congress remains a significant historical moment that can inform our leadership journeys and the diversity and inclusion we seek to achieve in our society and the world at large. We will share these conversations in a free, virtual event, to ensure that these concerns are not only raised within academic institutions, but reverberate across the local communities within Manchester.
The event will include poetry by the Chancellor of the University of Salford, Jackie Kay; panel discussions with the Presidents and representations of the Students Unions and Greater Manchester universities; poetry and dance performances by students Vashti Gbolagun (Salford), Carol Tiriongo (Manchester) and Isaiah Hull (in association with Big People Music); an interview with University of Salford Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Development) Jo Purves; and an online workshop for AHRC NWCDTP PhD students on Diversity and Inclusion.
This University of Salford and Students Union programme of events has been organised by Emma Barnes (University of Salford), Kwame Kwarteng (General Secretary UMSU), Ansh Sachdeva (President Bolton Students Union), and Rosalie Benjamin (University of Salford), with the support of colleagues in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford and Studio Salford. The event has been generously funded by the AHRC NWCDTP and SAMCT.
For all press office enquiries please email communications@salford.ac.uk.
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