States. The leadership of the UGGG accepted Ako Adjei's suggestion and agreed to invite Kwame Nkrumah, who already had a wide reputation as an experienced political organizer with a gift for leadership. Together with George Padmore and others he had organised in 1945 the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England. Nkrumah personally drew up the dynamic Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World, approved and adopted by the Congress. He was an eminently suitable person to galvanize the mass of the Gold Coast people and the youth to play an active part in the national liberation movement. Initially Nkrumah was hesitant about accepting the position, being aware that both the composition and objectives of the UGCC fell far short of the radical, political program he envisaged for the Gold Coast and for Africa. But after discussion with his colleagues he decided to accept, knowing that it might not be long before he would find it impossible to continue working within the UGCC. On 14 November 1947, Kwame Nkrumah set sail from Liverpool aboard the SS Accra, accompanied by Kojo Botsio, another friend from London who was also member of WASU and with that, the beginning of a new chapter in the modern political history of Ghana begun. Kwame Nkrumah was officially introduced to the UGCC's Working Committee as their Secretary on 28 December 1947 and soon got to work seeking to expand the support base of the UGCC by mobilizing the youth through local youth societies in the Colony (e.g., Apowa Literary and Social Club) and the Ashanti Confederacy (e.g., Asante Youth Association- AYA), whose members were farmers, petty-traders, drivers, artisans, school, teachers, clerks and letter-writers, many of whom were the growing number of elementary-school-leavers. In the beginning, the UGCC had only a handful of branches in the larger coastal towns and Kibi; it had no official presence in Ashanti and there had been no attempt to enlist support for the organisation in the Northern territories. Nkrumah set about to change this, travelling extensively and organizing mass meetings and within six months hundreds of branches of the UGCC had been established throughout the The 1948 riots At the time of Nkrumah's arrival in the Gold Coast in late 1947, there was growing discontent among ordinary people with the economy due to shortages of consumer goods and rising prices. Farmers were dissatisfied with the policy of cutting-out cocoa trees ravaged