A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Read online

  A History of Pan-African Revolt

  C.L.R. James

  This edition ©2012 PM Press

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-095-5

  LCCN: 2011939689

  Cover and interior design: Antumbra Design/Antumbradesign.org

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PM Press

  PO Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  www.pmpress.org

  Published in conjunction with the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company

  C.H. Kerr Company

  1726 Jarvis Avenue

  Chicago, IL 60626

  www.charleshkerr.com

  Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of ThomsonShore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

  Published in the EU by the Merlin Press Ltd.

  6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool, NP4 6ND, Wales

  www.merlinpress.co.uk

  ISBN: 978-0-850366-600

  Contents

  Publisher’s Foreword

  Introduction

  A History of Pan-African Revolt

  San Domingo

  The Old United States

  The Civil War

  Revolts in Africa

  The Old Colonies

  Religious Revolts in New Colonies

  The Congo

  The Union of South Africa

  Marcus Garvey

  Negro Movements in Recent Years

  Epilogue

  I. Africa

  Gold Coast to Ghana

  The Myth of Mau Mau

  Independence and After

  II. South Africa

  III. The United States

  IV. The Caribbean

  V. “Always Out of Africa”

  Publisher’s Foreword

  (1995)

  It is a real honor and pleasure for the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company to bring out a new edition of this classic work by the great revolutionary historian, theorist and activist C.L.R. James. Originally issued in England in 1938, and expanded in 1969, the book has heretofore circulated almost in “underground” fashion. Hopefully this new Charles H. Kerr edition will help bring it the wider attention it very much deserves.

  When Comrade James gave us permission to reissue two of his out-of-print works, it was his intention to write a new foreword for each. To the reissue of State Capitalism and World Revolution he contributed a foreword titled “Fully and Absolutely Assured,” which, despite its brevity, is an important amplification of his views. We sharply regret that our own financially driven delays in publication and C.L.R.’s 1989 death cause this edition to appear without such a foreword.

  Fortunately, however, this new edition features a valuable introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University. Author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists in the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1994), and co-author (with Sidney Lemelle) of Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (Verso, 1995), Kelley is a rare modern scholar whose breadth, clarity, and vision call James to mind.

  In his introduction Kelley discusses the book’s previous publishers: the Independent Labour Party journal FACT, the shortlived Drum and Spear Press of Washington, D.C., and the Race Today collective in London. This seems to be an appropriate place to acquaint readers with the publishers of the current edition.

  Founded in Chicago in 1886, a few weeks prior to the police riot at Haymarket Square, the Charles H. Kerr Company in less than a decade developed into the principal publisher of radical books and pamphlets in the United States. By 1900, the Kerr Company had rallied to the banner of international working class socialism. Through the first quarter of the twentieth century, “that struggling socialist publishing house in Chicago,” as Jack London called it in The Iron Heel, was the largest publisher of revolutionary literature in the English-speaking world.

  Publication of the revolutionary classics was an early Kerr Company priority, and it has remained so ever since. In the years 1906–1909 Kerr brought out, for the first time in English, the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, and also published many other works by Marx and his co-thinker, Friedrich Engels. The Kerr Company’s standard edition of the Communist Manifesto has been continuously in print, through countless editions, since 1902. Antonio Labriola, Paul Lafargue, Eugene V. Debs, James Connolly, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, “Mother” Jones, William D. Haywood, Sen Katayama, Louis B. Boudin, Mary E. Marcy, and Austin Lewis are only a few of the many important revolutionary writers whose works were made available by Charles H. Kerr.

  The Great Depression and the Cold War were an exceptionally difficult period for America’s pioneer working class publishing house, but somehow the fellow workers who kept it going managed to keep a good number of the socialist classics in print. When Fred Thompson and others helped get the cooperative back on its feet in the early 1970s, the Board of Directors resolved to do their best to reissue the out-of-print classics and, insofar as limited finances allow, to add new ones to the list.

  A Note on the Text

  Apart from Americanizing the spelling (labor instead of labour, maneuver rather than manoeuvre, today without a hyphen, etc.), and making a few minor corrections, the text of this edition follows that of its predecessors. Only twice have we dared to change a word. Writing for readers in the British Isles, James once (on page 63 of this edition) refers in passing to America’s Parliament; to avoid confusion, we have substituted Congress.

  The second change appears in the Epilogue. James’s Epilogue was dictated, not written, and in the course of transcription part of a sentence was omitted in the Drum and Spear Press edition, and was not corrected in the Race Today edition. Since no manuscript of this text exists, and the present location of the tape-recording of it is unknown, we have taken the liberty of attempting to fill in the missing words to make the sentence comprehensible.

  Introduction

  Should world events give these people a chance, they will destroy what has them by the throat as surely as the San Domingo blacks destroyed the French plantocracy.—C.L.R. James1

  I

  We are all indebted to the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company for re-issuing C.L.R. James’s important but little-known book, A History of Pan-African Revolt. Originally published in 1938 under the title A History of Negro Revolt, this brief but highly suggestive global history of black resistance appeared the same year as James’s magnum opus, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and thus lived in its shadow ever since. Although it was brought back into print with a new epilogue by James in 1969, and again in 1985, by small activist publishing outlets, A History of Pan-African Revolt—as the later editions were titled—has remained one of the best kept secrets among a handful of Marxists and black militants. It never sold many copies, but everyone familiar with James’s ideas or the resurgence of Pan-Africanism in the 1960s knew of its influence. The late Walter Rodney, the great historian and Guyanese revolutionary, once called it “a mine of ideas advancing far ahead of its time.”2

  Ahead of its time, indeed. Five years before the publication of Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts and just three years after the appearance of W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America (another book way, way ahead of its time), A History of Negro Revolt excoriated imperialism and placed black laborers at the center of world events when the leading historians of his day believed Africans were savages, colonialism was a civilizing mi
ssion, and slavery was a somewhat benevolent institution. James knew he was challenging established fictions. “The only place where Negroes did not revolt,” he wrote in 1939, “is in the pages of capitalist historians.”3 He had set out to tell the story of the so-called “inarticulate” masses in motion, of black workers and peasants fighting their European masters, of an ambivalent black petite-bourgeoisie whose stand vis-à-vis capitalism and colonial domination was never certain. By broadly defining black workers as all who labor or whom colonial powers hope to turn into cheap wage slaves or market-driven peasants, James casts his net widely and includes slave revolts, strikes, millenarian movements, and a vast array of anti-racist protests.

  As a study of “Negro” rebellions, A History of Negro Revolt completely revised African and diasporic history by focusing on the masses. Of course, there are leaders, but like Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo, leaders are made by the masses and the times in which they live. James makes a point of describing how the masses defend their leaders by freeing them from jail cells, hiding them in huts and cellars, pummeling their detractors into silence. It is the masses, and only the masses, that can make the Utopian speeches of a Simon Kimbangu, a John Chilembwe, a Marcus Garvey, or a Kwame Nkrumah a reality.

  A History of Negro Revolt, however, was not simply an outgrowth of James’s vision and brilliance. It was a collective endeavor, a product of specific political campaigns, debates and intellectual exchange with some of the leading black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. It is not just another history book; it is a historical document in its own right, a testament to the streams of radical thought that converged in London’s cafes, libraries, and underheated flats where young Africans and West Indians gathered during the 1930s—the decade when fascism and a depressed economy threw into question the fate of humanity.

  II

  Cyril Lionel Robert James was barely in his thirties when he began circulating among London’s black radicals. And given his background, living the life of a Marxist intellectual with Pan-Africanist leanings was hardly what he or his parents had in mind. The son of a school teacher born in the small village of Tunapuna, Trinidad, in 1901, James was raised solidly middle class—at least in terms of cultural capital if not actual money. He read Thackeray and Shakespeare with enthusiasm, and due to his mother’s influence he became an inveterate reader of history, literature, and to a lesser degree politics. He refused to stay within the boundaries of bourgeois culture, however. He adored Carnival, calypso, and jazz, despite his Puritan mom’s warnings, and he deeply loved the game of cricket. After earning a school certificate from Queen’s Royal College in 1918, he decided to stay in Trinidad and become a school master. In his spare time he wrote and lectured on many topics, including calypso and cricket, and soon developed a reputation throughout the island as a brilliant young scholar with intelligent things to say about Caribbean popular culture. He was drawn to nationalist politics when Captain Arthur Cipriani, the celebrated Trinidadian labor leader of French Creole heritage, asked him to write articles on cricket and assorted cultural and political issues for the Socialist, the organ of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA). James went on to write a pamphlet titled The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, which was published in Trinidad in 1932. (An abridged version appeared a year later in England under the title The Case for West Indian Self Government). While the pamphlet and his work with the Socialist represents an early stage in James’s politicization, he was still a long way from the militant anti-imperialist he would eventually become. Never an activist for the TWA, James identified with the Labour Party and firmly believed in parliamentary politics.4

  But England changed all that. In 1932, James left his homeland to assist Sir Learie Constantine, the great West Indian cricketer turned lawyer, write a book on cricket and English society.5 To make ends meet, James took a job as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and settled down in Lancashire. It was in Lancashire that he began his rapid drift to the left. His discussions with local workers made him more critical of capitalism and compelled him to study the “classics” of Marxism, including the book that would have a profound impact on his conception of history: Leon Trotsky’s three-volume History of the Russian Revolution. After relocating to London, he found his way into the Trotskyist camp and soon emerged as one of its main spokespersons. Indeed, by 1937 he had published a major book titled World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, which happened to be the first Trotskyist history of the Comintern ever published.6

  Thus it was as a budding Trotskyist and supporter of the Independent Labour Party that James entered London’s hotbed of black anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist politics. They came from different colonies and different ideological camps, but they all shared a patriotic love for the Motherland and her wayward children. Some, like Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali, veteran Pan-Africanist and founder of the African Times and Orient Review, were longtime residents of London. Others, such as Sierra Leonean radical I.T.A. Wallace Johnson, Kenya’s future president Jomo Kenyatta, and the Guyanese-born T. Ras Makonnen (born George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith) were—like James—fairly recent newcomers. These young intellectuals did more than talk; they formed a variety of political organizations and associations in London and throughout Europe, including the West African Students Association, the Ethiopian Progressive Association, and the League of Coloured Peoples founded by Jamaican physician Harold Moody.7

  One of the most important men among these circles turned out to be James’s childhood friend Malcolm Nurse. Now known as “George Padmore,” he had become a leading figure in the international Communist movement. He left Trinidad for the United States as a young man and joined the Communist Party almost as soon as he stepped off the boat in New York Harbor. A militant organizer while at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Padmore rose quickly within the Communist ranks and was eventually sent to study in the Soviet Union. So popular was he that the citizens of Moscow elected him to the City Council! As a student at the University of the Toilers of the East, he could have run into any number of African leaders who, like him, had been drawn to the Communist camp. Among the more prominent students were I.T.A. Wallace Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, and South African Communists Moses Kotane, Edwin Mofutsanyana and Albert Nzula.8

  The impressive gathering of black radicals in Moscow not only contributed to the development of a left-wing Pan-Africanism but probably shaped Padmore’s vision of a black international working class movement that could unite Africa and the diaspora in a coordinated effort to overthrow colonialism, racism, and ultimately capitalism.

  Thus, when he became secretary of the International Trade Union Council of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW) and editor of its journal, Negro Worker, Padmore saw no conflict between his work on behalf of African liberation and the struggle for socialism. In Padmore’s view the ITUC-NW (which he first directed from Hamburg until it was forced to move to Copenhagen and then Paris) was much more than the black arm of the Red International of Labor Unions (Prointern); it was the vanguard in the struggle for worldwide black liberation. Unfortunately, Padmore’s hopes for the ITUC-NW were dashed almost as soon as it got off the ground. By the time Padmore became James’s political ally in 1935, he no longer believed that the Communist International could play a progressive role in the African liberation movement. With the transition to the Popular Front, the Comintern made fascism its main priority and put anti-colonial movements on the back burner.9

  In retrospect, perhaps Padmore should have seen it coming. But in 1930, he had good reason to believe in the Comintern’s commitment, if not their sincerity, to the emancipation of Africans and people of African descent. As early as 1922, the Fourth Congress of the Comintern adopted a set of theses describing blacks as a nationality oppressed by worldwide imperialist exploitation. Because black workers’ struggles were now thought to be inherently anti-imperialist, Communists were obliged to vie
w black nationalist and anti-colonial movements more sympathetically. Moreover, the “Theses” recognized the success of the UNIA under Marcus Garvey, as well as the Pan-African Congresses led by W.E.B. DuBois, and urged that immediate steps be taken by the Comintern to call a world congress of African leaders.10 The Comintern did more than appropriate the familiar idioms of Pan-Africanism; during the late 1920s and early 1930s it actively supported anti-colonial movements. In 1926, for example, leading members of the German Communist Party founded the League Against Colonial Oppression to combat pro-colonial sentiments emerging in Germany. After a successful international conference in Brussels in 1927, it became clear to those in attendance that the League marked an important step toward coordinating various struggles for national liberation in the colonies and “semi-colonies,” and it served as an intermediary between the Communist International and the anti-colonial movement. The conferees, among them Jomo Kenyatta and Jawaharlal Nehru, passed a general resolution that proclaimed: “Africa for the Africans, and their full freedom and equality with other races and the right to govern Africa.”11

  The Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928 passed an even more explicit resolution asserting that African Americans in the U.S. South and Africans under white domination in South Africa constituted oppressed nations and thus possessed an inherent right of self-determination. For many black Communists in Africa, the United States, and even the West Indies, the resolution on black self-determination indirectly confirmed what they had long believed: black people had their own unique revolutionary tradition. Black Communists published dozens of articles documenting the autonomous traditions of radicalism among Africans and people of African descent. “Aside from the purely Marxian analysis,” wrote African American Communist Gilbert Lewis in the pages of the Negro Worker, “the Negro’s history is replete with many actual instances of uprising against his exploiters and oppressors.”12