With ‘father of African liberation’ George Padmore commemorated with a plaque in London this week, Cameron Duodu reflects on Padmore’s enormous influence on the anti-colonial movement and his experiences in Trinidad, the US, the USSR, the UK and across Africa.

In the second part of a two-part article, Cameron Duodu reflects on the exciting and challenging times he had in the Congo in the 1960s and the experiences of George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba in seeking to support Africa’s liberation movements. Part one is available to read at

Cameron Duodu reflects on the exciting and challenging times he had in the Congo in the 1960s.

Although Ghana’s alliance with Congo was ultimately unable to save Patrice Lumumba’s life or avert Mobutu’s 40-year dictatorship, the ‘African Union (AU) would do well to rediscover the spirit of those days, when Africans knew what was good for their continent, and what was not so good,’ says Cameron Duodu.

US preacher Harold Camping conned people into paying him $80 million in donations, by persuading them that the world was ending on 21 May. In the US, Camping is ‘exercising his constitutional right to practise “freedom of religion”,' says Cameron Duodu, but in Nigeria that’s what people call a ‘419’.

With the IMF’s (International Monetary Fund) Dominique Strauss-Kahn in hot water over accusations of sexual assault in a New York hotel, Cameron Duodu revisits the effects of the fund’s structural adjustment programme in his home country of Ghana.

In the wake of President Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election in Nigeria, the government is faced with the tricky task of how to diffuse the violent northern Boko Haram sect, writes Cameron Duodu.

Reflecting on discussions with the audience at the screening of a documentary about the assassination of Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba, Cameron Duodu shares a less known fact that ‘the fiery politician was also as very good poet.’

As evidenced by Ivorians’ experiences in the wake of their country’s disputed election results and the looming threat of civil war, African leaders’ insistence on ignoring pre-established rules severely jeopardises their constituents, writes Cameron Duodu.

The ‘people of Libya deserve all our sympathy – for having been obliged to endure the calamitous rule of a man, apparently destined to inflict so much suffering on them,’ writes Cameron Duodu.