I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular.
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism
My interest in pan-Africanism began 40 years ago when I was working at the Central American Resource Center in Minneapolis. Our goal was to build a movement across the North-South divide to end US intervention in Central America. This work led to my research in grad school on transnational anti-imperialists in the Americas during the 1920s. I wanted to know how humans overcome nativism. It was not just an academic question for me, but a personal one, as the child of a German Jewish Holocaust refugee, who grew up conscious of the dangers of German and Jewish nationalism. I studied the Latin American Continentalists and US and Caribbean Pan-Africanists who developed solidarities that crossed and dissolved national borders. So in 2025, I jumped at the opportunity to add Ghana to our itinerary. I was eager to learn of the country’s role in Pan-African history, as well as current realities.
While in Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Switzerland, and Italy, we kept our eyes on Ghana,
- We read about Ghana’s sixteen distinct ethnic groups while in the divided Balkans.
- We learned about Ghana’s uphill battle for LGBTQ rights while in Sri Lanka, where human rights advocates faced similar struggles. In both former British colonies, bigots revived laws passed by 19th-century Victorians. I began following LGBTQ rights organizers and Samia Nkrumah, who opposed the draconian anti-gay bill in the name of her father’s revolutionary values.
- We were in Switzerland when the World Summit on Plastics took place in Geneva. World leaders were unwilling to stand up to oil profiteers, and the summit failed. We heard that Ghana was at the forefront of the global plastics crisis. The nation is drowning in plastic waste. Recycling has become a primary exploitative industry and a health crisis. At the same time, Ghanaians lead the world in plastic reuse innovations.
- In Italy, we listened to Historian Frimpong Anokyea weave a tapestry of Ghanaian, African, and Pan-African history to answer the question, “Who is the founder of Ghana? At one point, he interrupted his materialist analysis to thank divine intervention for Kwame Nkrumah failing his law school entrance exam in London, so that he would go to the US and obtain a political education from US pan-Africanists and communists like George Padmore. The historian also argued that God intervened in 1947, ensuring that Nkrumah would be floundering and unemployed in London just when an elite political grouping seeking autonomy from Britain needed to hire someone to run their daily operations. They brought Nkrumah back to the British Gold Coast, and the rest is Ghanaian history.
- We tried to follow the flip-flops in Trump’s racist visa restrictions toward African immigrants and his cruel deportation schemes. We should have considered the possibility of reprisals.
Unbeknownst to us, Ghana’s visa regulations had tightened in August. When we arrived at the Rome airport, excited to finally be going to Ghana, the airline attendant would not allow us to board. In addition to the emotional disappointment and sizable financial loss, we now had no reservation for the night and an expiring EU visa. Immediate flights to anywhere were prohibitively expensive, as were hotels near the Rome airport.
We made an airport coffee shop our temporary home until we found a room we could afford 15 miles away, and a cheap ticket to London three days later. And that is how we landed in Walthamstow, an immigrant neighborhood in London. As it turned out, London was also a good place to expand my knowledge of transnational solidarity movements.
Banksy
Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School and Highgate Cemetery
At Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, I learned about Trinidadian-born pan-Africanist Claudia Jones, who worked to unite England’s Caribbean community. Jones started London’s Caribbean Carnival. She founded and edited the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News from 1958 until she died in 1964. The final edition was filled with international tributes to Jones, including one from Shirley Du Bois, wife of W.E.B., who had also just died in Accra.
We took the tour of the Marx Library. It was worth it, and also disappointing. The fact that both Marx and Lenin spent time working in this building was mildly interesting, but I wanted to hear more about local people like Claudia Jones and London’s labor movement organizers. We got tidbits about the typogrpahical workers of the 19th century and the miners of the 20th. The library was tantalizing, with its extensive labor paper collection. If you want to research these movements, it is a good place to start. I’m glad we went.
We also found pan-Africanists near Karl Marx’s gravestone in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Yusef Mohamed Dadoo, a South African of Indian descent, is one of those radicals who wanted a resting place close to Marx. His life intersected with Gandhi and Mandela. He escaped imprisonment in South Africa, moving to London, from where he traveled the world, working on Asian/African unity and an end to apartheid in South Africa. In 1963, he organized a mass protest in London. The next year, he spoke to the United Nations, calling for a global boycott of South Africa. He died seven years before the end of apartheid.
Highgate is a beautiful forest. We saw foxes! I thought it was funny that they charge to enter, and the ticket draw would be the tomb of Karl Marx. But it is amazing. What a huge head! He was a smart guy after all, as the words on the tomb attest: Workers of all lands unite is still a good idea, and ‘Philosophers interpret the world, The point is to change it,’ still puts academics in their place. Close by was historian Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that you can’t be a historian and a nationalist because “Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.” I put a stone on his grave.
I was intrigued by this stone (below). It sent me down a rabbit hole to learn about the journalists and printers of Fleey Street
Highgate Cemetery, near Karl Marx Memorial
Mass Civil Disobedience for Palestine and Free Speech, in Trafalgar Square
We arrived in London on September 30. On October 2—Yom Kippur—there was an attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England. Three people were killed. The attacker stabbed one Jewish man. The police killed the attacker and one man at the synagogue. The police asked the organizers of a planned mass civil disobedience in Trafalgar Square against the recent Supreme Court decision outlawing Palestine protests to cancel their event because they needed more police to protect synagogues. The organizers said, Protect synagogues. You shouldn’t arrest us for practicing our right to free speech. We will not cancel.
They carried out their protest. We joined the crowd supporting the arrestees, surrounding them and clapping for 1500 people ready to civilly disobey an unjust law. Many of the supporters were young people of color, Arabs, and Muslims. The arrestees were mostly white people in their 60s and 70s. They brought blank placards and markers. At the appointed time, they sat down on the cement plaza, many struggling with creaky knees. They took out their placards and wrote: I oppose genocide in Gaza. I support Palestine Action, and then waited for the arrests to begin. Many went limp, elongating the time and multiplying the number of cops it took to arrest them. The arrests took hours. After reaching 500, the cops ran out of time. They gave up on arresting and released all those already in custody without charge. Among both groups were those who identified themselves as Jewish. One man had a plaque that said, “I mourn the attack on the synagogue in Manchester and the genocide in Gaza.” Others held placards that said “Daughter/son/grandchild of a Holocaust Survivor. I oppose the Genocide in Gaza.”
In the past two years, we have protested in solidarity with Gaza in Cadiz, Spain; Madrid; Wales; Germany; Sweden; Northern Ireland; Iceland; Japan; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Switzerland; and Italy. In none of these places was there a Jewish contingent. (They existed in Stockholm but were absent the day we were there). I found myself stalking these Jewish activists. I started crying, standing in their light. My emotional self craved this feeling of belonging—a universal rich with all that is particular.
Banksy Exhibit
The work of political graffiti artist Banksy was exhibited in the Sussex Mansion, a venue described as a gateway to a world of cultural and urban prestige. The Kensington neighborhood is where London’s ‘rich and famous’ live. Passing the homes of billionaires, we walked into the gallery to view Banksy’s latest work: A British Supreme Court justice beating a protester – a response to the decision to make Palestine Action protests illegal. The graffiti artist has become so famous that his works have been cut out of walls and sold at Sotheby’s. In response, the artist wired some of his auctioned works so that after money exchanged hands, the art would shred itself. Banksy is not just a trickster. He is a genius. He recreated Monet’s garden and then added trash floating in the pond. He sculpted a boat filled with refugees, and then bought a yacht and went into the Mediterranean Sea to save refugees drowning in unseaworthy vessels. His political commentary scales border walls from the Rio Grande to Palestine. He has scrawled up Brooklyn and London. Even in this elite space, his work inspires.
Walthamstow
While it’s obviously true that aristocratic privilege and whiteness are among the basic assumptions of British ruling class ideology, it’s also obvious that Britain’s inner cities—London in particular—are now some of the most successful muti-ethnic experiments in the ‘Western’ world,
So wrote Akala in his Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, a book I read while in London. In the neighborhood north of downtown London where we stayed, that multi-ethnic experiment was on full display. The 140-year-old Market Street in Walthamstow is a kilometer of pedestrian heaven. I found a post on FB, waxing nostalgic about what Walthamstow Market in the 1980s. I thought it was still pretty fantastic in 2025–perhaps not as crowded, but it is still universally rich with all that is particular. Reportedly, the longest market in Europe, it could also be the most ethnically/racially diverse. It exists to serve the neighborhood, not tourists, and the prices make it a lifesaver for this working-class community. But it was not a utopia. There were signs on some of the indoor shops prohibiting more than one teenager from entering at a time.
Life is hard for youth everywhere, it seems. And race and class matter. It is hard to overstate just what a scary place London is to be a working-class black male teenager, wrote Akala in a chapter on police brutality and street violence in his childhood. Listen to Akala in 2020, compare US and British Black experiences, and the meaning of George Floyd in the UK. Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis was answered with mass protests in the UK.
We found a community space in Walthamstow that offered yoga classes for an introductory price. It had a climbing gym, places to hang out and get work done, a bakery, an all-gender changing room with privacy doors on all the stalls, activities for kids, youth, and parents of babies. It did seem a bit utopic, though I overheard two young Black men in the locker room talking about how they spend all their money at the climbing gym. “We’d have to come more than twice a week to make the membership worthwhile. That’s too much.”
Tax the billionaires in Kensington, I thought. Give Walthamstow a free community climbing gym and yoga center — now that would be utopic.
To the Accra Palace.
I found a Ghanaian restaurant a two-mile walk from our place. Our path there took us along the River Lea, a former industrial waterway, now lined with low-income houseboats. The shores were lined with working-class apartment buildings. It was Sukkut. Orthodox Jewish parents and children were also walking along the former towpath. This neighborhood has the largest Jewish community in Europe.
The Accra Palace was a tiny storefront with takeout. They let us sit at the table along the wall to eat our waakye with chicken, and plantain with red beans. The food was as good as the welcome. On the way back, we walked through several neighborhoods inhabited by Central African, East African, North African, Caribbean, South Asian, Eastern European, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian British people. Not where we expected to be, but a good place to land.
Lea River graffiti
This essay about a visit to London in October 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
