Pan-Africanism and Ethiopia

International African Service Bureau

​ Africans from the Diaspora and the continent set up the International African Friends of Ethiopia in 1935 to "assist by all means in the territorial integrity and political independence of Abyssinia". By 1937 the Friends had morphed into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), featuring George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, T.r. Makonnen, Chris Brathwaite, Wallace Johnson, CLR James, Nnamdi Azikwe and Louis Mbanafo. All these people were already or would become key political and intellectual figures in the struggle for decolonization and Pan-Africanism.  ​

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The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a seminal moment for this notable group of Pan-Africanists.

​Listen to Dorothy  Rose Du Boulay talk about her grandfather, Chris Brathwaite (a.k.a. Chris Jones), the secretary of the IASB