Bureau of African Affairs files
Documents and memoranda of the office through which Nkrumah's Ghana supported liberation movements across Africa.
Ghana-Net.com · Accra · Osu · Libraries, Museums & Heritage
Most monuments are statues. When George Padmore died in 1959, Kwame Nkrumah built him a library. Here in Osu, in an unassuming building on Ring Way, sit the files of the office that plotted the liberation of Africa: memoranda by Nkrumah and Padmore, papers of the Bureau of African Affairs, pamphlets of freedom movements from Kenya to South Africa, and nearly everything ever published in and about Ghana. It is one of the most important archives of African independence anywhere. Very few visitors to Accra even know it exists, and its own librarians have had to appeal for help to keep the collection from decaying.
He was born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Trinidad on 28 June 1903. As a student in the United States he took the name George Padmore and joined the communist movement, rising to become one of the Comintern's leading organisers on Africa and the black world, working in Moscow and Hamburg. In the 1930s he broke with Moscow, which he accused of sacrificing African freedom to Soviet diplomacy, and settled in London.
There his flat became a meeting place for the young Africans and West Indians who would lead the independence movements. In 1945 he organised, with Kwame Nkrumah, the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, where the demand for complete independence was first made openly. Nkrumah called him his mentor. His book Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956) argued that Africa must find its own way.
A German footnote: in the early 1930s Padmore worked from Hamburg, editing the Negro Worker for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, until the Nazis came to power in 1933, raided the office and deported him.
After independence Nkrumah invited Padmore to Ghana as his Adviser on African Affairs. From an office in Accra he planned the next steps: the Conference of Independent African States in April 1958 and the All-African People's Conference in December 1958, which brought freedom fighters from all over the continent, among them Patrice Lumumba, to the Ghanaian capital. Accra became the headquarters of African liberation, and Padmore was its strategist.
He was not popular with everyone. Many Ghanaian politicians resented a foreigner at the centre of power. Padmore fell ill and died in London on 23 September 1959. His ashes were brought to Ghana and interred at Christiansborg Castle, the seat of government. See our story on George Padmore on MyGhana2027.
Soon after Padmore's death Nkrumah decided that his memorial should be a working institution: a library to collect everything about Africa and its diaspora, with special emphasis on Ghana, and to serve the Pan-African movement. The Ghana Library Board supervised the building, and Nkrumah opened the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs on 30 June 1961, two days after what would have been Padmore's 58th birthday.
Three monuments, one idea: Nkrumah honoured the two great diaspora pan-Africanists who came to die in Ghana in the same way: Padmore with this library, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who died in Accra in 1963, with the house and mausoleum that became the Du Bois Centre. Nkrumah himself lies in the Memorial Park.
Documents and memoranda of the office through which Nkrumah's Ghana supported liberation movements across Africa.
His personal books, part of the Africa Collection Department, alongside papers of Nkrumah and other pan-Africanists.
Books published in or about Ghana, local-language publications, Acts of Parliament, parliamentary debates, maps and photographs of prominent Ghanaians.
Books and journals on every African country: history, languages, literature, sociology and philosophy.
Every Ghanaian book passes through here: the library is Ghana's legal-deposit library and the national agency for ISBN (books), ISSN (journals) and ISMN (music). Any Ghanaian author or publisher who wants a book number gets it from the Padmore Library, and it compiles the national bibliography.
The library operates under the Ghana Library Authority. Its readers are university students, lawyers, politicians and researchers from Ghana and abroad who come because some documents exist nowhere else; its staff have called it a "last-stop" research library.
But in 2017 its resident librarian made a public appeal: the collection needed urgent help to be documented, stored properly and digitised, in conditions that protect paper in Accra's heat and humidity. It is the familiar Ghanaian heritage story, also seen at the National Museum: a founding institution of the nation, opened with great ambition, then left to survive on too little money.
Why it matters: the independence of Africa was partly planned on paper in Accra. If these papers crumble, part of that history goes with them, and researchers will depend on copies held in London and Washington. See the museums of Ghana.
Guided tours of Accra: combine the library with the city's pan-African sites on a guided tour. Tours below are booked through Viator; Ghana-Net may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
The house and grave of the other great diaspora pan-Africanist. About 10 minutes away.
Where Nkrumah and his wife Fathia are buried, on the site of the 1957 declaration.
Christiansborg Castle, where Padmore's ashes were interred.
The Turkish-built mosque with the four minarets, about 15 minutes away.
The George Padmore Research Library is not a tourist attraction and does not try to be. There are no displays, no gift shop and no guides. But it is one of the most meaningful places in Accra: a monument that is not a statue, dedicated to a Trinidadian who gave his last years to African freedom, holding the paper trail of the liberation of a continent. Researchers should go. Everyone else should at least know it is there, and Ghana should fund it properly before its papers are lost.
Verified: 30 September 2026. The opening by Kwame Nkrumah on 30 June 1961, the location on Ring Way in Osu, the Ghana Library Authority's management, the collections, the legal-deposit and ISBN/ISSN/ISMN role, the 2017 appeal for help, and George Padmore's birth in Trinidad on 28 June 1903 and work with Nkrumah follow the Ghana Library Authority via the ISSN International Centre, Graphic Online, the Ghana News Agency and Wikipedia. Opening hours are not given because they change; please check locally. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.