Co-Workers for Pan Africa: Rose and Jame Aggrey, the Politics of Co-operation and African Nationalist Thought

Co-Workers for Pan-Africa: Rose and James Aggrey, the Politics of Co-operation and African Nationalist Thought This paper dramatically revises understanding of the work of James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey, a Gold Coast native who relocated to the United States in 1898 for his education and went on to inspire African nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah and Peter Koinange. Aggrey has been named at different times the father of African education and the Booker T. Washington of Africa, but I reinterpret his politics by looking through the lens of his black American wife, Rose. With close study of the letters he wrote her as he toured Africa in the 1920s with the paternalist Phelps-Stokes Fund lecturing about educational initiatives, I am able to demonstrate their shared vision. By drawing on the past few decades of substantial work that traces the nature of black women’s Progressive Era reform work, I suggest that Aggrey’s vision – and thus the ideas of the African nationalists he influenced – emanated in part from black American women’s politics. I would only need projection to show some images along with the paper.