T. Ras Makonnen

T. Ras Makonnen (born George Thomas N. Griffiths; c. 7 October 1909 – 18 December 1983) was a Guyanese-born Pan-African activist and journal editor of Ethiopian descent.

Early life and family Makonnen was born George Thomas N. Griffiths in Buxton, British Guiana. His paternal grandfather was reputedly born in Tigre, Ethiopia, and was taken to British Guiana by a Scottish miner. Makonnen completed his secondary school in Guyana, before leaving in 1927 to study mineralogy in the United States of America.

During the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935, Makonnen changed his name to emphasize his African roots. He became an integral part of the Pan-African movement in Britain and collaborated closely with George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Jomo Kenyatta, and others, to organise against the British Empire. His children are T'Shai R. Makonnen, Desta Makonnen, Lorenzo Makonnen and Sheba Makonnen. Makonnen also listened on the street corners and at other meetings to Black socialists and communists, including George Padmore, "but never became a party man; [though] I borrowed a lot from them". Makonnen lent his energies to the Brookwood Labor College, working on "a primer on American history and a dictionary of terms essential to the workers' movement".

Makonnen's reading, to judge by his memoirs, was broad; it is known, for example, that he and Jomo Kenyatta visited Jamaican-born Theophilus Scholes to thank him for the great stimulus they had derived from reading his books, which were critical studies of African history and the diaspora. Makonnen was actively engaged in the raging debates of those days on the comparative merits of the views of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Makonnen's collaboration with George Padmore, then Malcolm Nurse; a nephew of Henry Sylvester Williams, also dates from this period. At Cornell, he continued his activities as a champion of the cause of Black people. He learnt from men like the economist Scott Nearing and the anthropologist Franz Boas. His brief flirtation with the radical American left during this period, drew in his own words, jocular remarks from Azikiwe and Ugandan Ernest Kalibala, who were also in America around that time. A good number of his generation got their early political education from associations on the left of the political spectrum.

In London, Makonnen became a founder member of the first attempt to form a Pan-African Federation in mid-1936, which brought together representatives from North, South, East and West Africa, and the Caribbean. Makonnen naturally also became involved with the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA), which was chaired by C. L. R. James; one of its leading members was Jomo Kenyatta. After the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, IAFA transformed itself into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), under the chairmanship of Padmore, with Makonnen as "executive and publicity secretary". Makonnen drafted the constitution. According to historian Jack Bowman, Makonnen was central to the IASB's success, spearheading the use of journals within the movement.

The IASB stood for "the progress and social advancement of Africans at home and abroad; full economic, political and racial equality; and for self-determination". The Bureau aimed to "co-ordinate and centralize" Black organisations around the world and link them "in closer fraternal relations" with one another, and with "sympathetic" White organisations. Membership of the IASB was restricted to Blacks, but Whites could become associate members. The office of the IASB, which was administered and funded through the efforts of Makonnen, was a "regular mecca for all revolutionaries from all the colonies and a rendezvous for the Left"; it also provided a place to stay for colonials. "[Makonnen] did a colossal job", C. L. R. James wrote: "he cooked, and cleaned the place himself … [And] he was no mean agitator himself."

The IASB was in touch with colonial organisations such as the Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society, which solicited its support for its 1935 petition regarding monopolistic control of cocoa exports. It organised various protest meetings in Trafalgar Square and sent speakers, including Makonnen, as far afield as Belfast and Scotland. On the Sunday platforms at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, Makonnen and other IASB speakers drew a crowd by using Prince Monolulu – an early funder for the IASB – as the first speaker. Monolulu, who earned an occasionally lucrative living as a race-course tipster, had a "kind of Rasputin tone [and] traded in subtle vulgarity of a high order". Makonnen himself is described by Nkrumah as a "gifted speaker". There, and at left-wing and other meetings, Makonnen assiduously sold the IASB's newspaper.

After the outbreak of World War II, Makonnen moved to Manchester, where he studied history at the University of Manchester. During the post-war years, Makonnen worked with members of the Somali Youth League in Britain to improve Somali-Ethiopia relations. Makonnen was one of the last people to see Kenyatta before he left Britain to return to Kenya. Makonnen's political contacts and activities also included work with the Sudanese Umma Party and particular with Abdalla Khalil Bey and Mohammed Majoub. Both Nkrumah and Kenyatta were soon to return to Africa. At the Congress Makonnen had spoken about Ethiopia, supporting its territorial claims on the Tigray Region.

Final years and legacy In his final years, Makonnen became increasingly perturbed with the general results of independence, especially African unity, which remained elusive. Too often he felt that excessive materialism, pomp and circumstance had become overriding preoccupations of independent Africa.

Makonnen died in Nairobi in 1983, aged 74.