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

In 1930, Padmore set out to document that history in an important book titled The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. In some ways it provided a model for James’s A History of Negro Revolt and inspired other contemporary and historical studies on African workers.13 Published in 1931 by the Red International of Labor Unions, this 126-page book was written primarily for workers in the Western capitalist countries who failed to comprehend why anti-colonial movements are integral to proletarian emancipation. Although he touches on slavery and pays attention to black resistance, Life and Struggles is more descriptive than historical. His primary purpose is to indict imperialism by documenting the horrible conditions black workers throughout the world had to endure. In addition to eliciting sympathy for black workers, Padmore wanted to show that the profits generated from the exploitation of colonial labor allowed capitalists “to bribe the reformist and social fascist trade union bureaucrats and thereby enable them to betray the struggles of workers.”14 In the end, however, the role of enlightened white workers—the progressives who had not been bought off—was to educate “backward” black workers of the futility of racial chauvinism and persuade them to cast their lot with the worldwide proletariat. It was a position James would find untenable.

  III

  As C.L.R. James drifted deeper into the world of Trotskyism, preparing for the Fourth International and cursing Stalinism’s betrayal of Lenin’s vision, Padmore drifted out of the Communist movement altogether. In 1935 they ended up in the same place, thanks to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Indeed, virtually every self-respecting black activist, irrespective of their national origins or ideological bent, joined the Ethiopian defense campaigns. Literally dozens of support organizations were formed throughout the world to raise money for relief and medical aid; and black men from the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa volunteered to fight in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army. T. Ras Makonnen, a comrade of James and Padmore in the Ethiopian solidarity movement, recalls the impact the invasion had on the black world: “Letters simply poured into our office from blacks on three continents asking where could they register…. And the same was true of Africa. When the Italians entered Addis Ababa, it was reported that school children wept in the Gold Coast.”15

  The overwhelming response to the invasion should not be surprising, for Ethiopia was not just any African country. Also known as Abyssinia, it held considerable historical, religious, and cultural significance for black people the world over. Not only had the Ethiopians under Emperor Menelik II managed to retain their independence while the rest of Africa was being carved up by Europeans, but their land had developed a reputation as the cradle of civilization, having been among the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity. In the black Christian world, Ethiopia has remained one of its principal icons and, in some ways, might be called an “African Jerusalem.” As historian William Scott explained, many African Americans believed that “Ethiopia had been predestined by biblical prophecy to redeem the black race from white rule.” Their point of reference, of course, was the biblical passage “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31). The Garvey movement, whose official anthem was entitled “Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers,” made constant reference to this African nation in its songs, rituals, and symbols.16

  For the black Left, however, sentimentality and racial pride clouded the issue at hand: imperialism. While “race” scholars praised Abyssinia for its ancient civilizations, its written language, its rulers’ proud claim of direct lineage to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, black leftists discussed a mountainous peasant region in the Horn of Africa ruled by a dying monarchy that did not believe in land reform. As one of the few regions on earth where slavery persisted well into the early 1930s, Ethiopia was hardly a land of milk and honey. Indeed, in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, Padmore characterized Abyssinia as a feudal oligarchy under a reactionary emperor and called for an internal revolution against “the reactionary religious hierarchy and the feudal system.”17

  But before the revolution could take place, they first needed to kick Mussolini’s troops out of there. In August of 1935, James formed the International African Friends of Ethiopia.18 With C.L.R. as chairman, its active members included Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, I.T.A. Wallace Johnson, Amy Ashwood Garvey (ex-wife of Marcus Garvey), T. Ras Makonnen, and Albert Marryshaw, who had attended the 1921 Pan-African Congress in London. James was the IAFE’s most active propagandist, publishing several articles in the New Leader, weekly paper of the Independent Labour Party, and one very substantial piece in The Keys, the official organ of the League of Coloured People.19 These articles reveal James groping to reconcile two political worlds: Pan-Africanism and socialism. On the one hand, he took the position that the imperialist countries used the defense of Ethiopia as a pretext for war. Yet, as a black man who probably felt a tinge of pride in Ethiopia’s legacy, and whose admiration for Africa ran much deeper than anti-imperialism, he felt obligated to defend the place of his ancestors. In his personal struggle to bring these two traditions together, he volunteered for service in the Ethiopian military:

  My reasons for this were simple. International Socialists in Britain fight British Imperialism because obviously it is more convenient to do so than fight, for instance, German Imperialism. But Italian Capitalism is the same enemy, only a little further removed.

  My hope was to get into the army. It would have given me an opportunity to make contact not only with the masses of the Abyssinians and other Africans, but in the ranks with them I would have had the best possible opportunity of putting across the International Socialist case. I believed also that I could have been useful in helping to organize anti-Fascist propaganda among the Italian troops….

  I did not intend to spend the rest of my life in Abyssinia, but, all things considered, I thought, and still think, that two or three years there, given the fact that I am a Negro and am especially interested in the African revolution, was well worth the attempt.20

  James, like many others, never had a chance to go. Haile Selassie discouraged volunteers in hopes of securing support from Western democracies and the League of Nations, and as soon as Italy’s occupation became an accomplished fact, he and the royal family fled to England.

  Soon after the Ethiopian crisis subsided, IAFE members regrouped and formed the International African Service Bureau (IASB) with Padmore at the helm. James edited its monthly journal. International African Opinion, from July to October 1938, and fed vital information to political organizations and newspapers about the situation in Africa. The IASB set out to keep the issue of colonialism in the public mind—not an easy task given the specter of fascism and the inevitability of war in Europe.21

  Nevertheless, Ethiopia was the turning point in James’s thinking and writing. The events surrounding the invasion and the failure of Western democracies to come to Ethiopia’s defense pushed James beyond European Marxism toward a deeper understanding of the traditions of the black resistance. In a review of George Padmore’s book, How Britain Rules Africa (1936), James lambasted his comrade for suggesting that enlightened sections of the ruling class could play a progressive role in the liberation of Africa from colonial domination. “Africans must win their own freedom,” he insisted. “Nobody will win it for them.”22 James had come to the conclusion that the European working-class movement could not win without the African masses (nor the latter without the former), and that only the African masses—workers, peasants, and perhaps some farsighted intellectuals—fighting on their own terms could destroy imperialism. It was precisely this understanding that produced The Black Jacobins and A History of Negro Revolt, both published in 1938. These books were not written to appeal to white workers or a sympathetic liberal bourgeoisie. Rather, as Cedric Robinson so aptly put it, they were declarations of war.

  IV

  A History of Negro Revolt first appeared in September of 1938, just one month before James sailed for the United States. Commissioned by Raymond Postgate, a comrade of h
is in the Independent Labour Party, the ninety-seven-page monograph was part of the FACT series published by the Party. This is what James had to say about it:

  Such a book had never been done before. I gathered a lot of material in it, and really I’m astonished now at how much there was that I didn’t know. But the book has the virtue that there were all sorts of problems—like the struggles of women, market women in Africa and so on—that went into it, aside from the historical things like the Haitian revolution and the blacks in the American Civil War…. The book has a peculiar history. Postgate’s name got the book sold in book-stores all over the country. When they found out what was in it some of them carefully hid it. There were places we went to where we found they had hidden it—they put it under a lot of other books, but when you asked for it they would say, yes, we have it.23

  The book was hidden for good reason. Like the Negro Worker, the ITUC-NW organ which Padmore edited in the early 1930s, it was profoundly subversive.24 It was a stinging indictment of colonialism, and James took no prisoners—not even his beloved France. Attacking France was not an easy thing to do, especially with fascism on the rise in Europe. The French not only let black colonials become deputies, governors, and cabinet ministers, but at the time James was writing. Prime Minister Leon Blum had become a sort of hero on the left. As the Socialist head of the French Popular Front government, Blum actively sought to neutralize fascist attempts to overthrow the Spanish Republic.25 In the long run, none of this mattered to James. As he put it, “imperialism remains imperialism…. [T]he French have as black a record in Africa as any other imperialist nation” (68). And he proceeded to document that record and the efforts to resist. Just as he had tried to do as editor of International African Opinion, James wanted to make sure that colonialism would not be subordinated to the struggle against fascism, which is why he makes a point of saying that Africans under Italian fascism were no worse off than “an African in the Congo under democratic Belgium, or a Rhodesian copper miner” (69). The point is clear; there is no kinder, gentler colonialism.

  What made this book even more subversive is the fact that James places black people at the center of world events; he characterizes uprisings of savages and religious fanatics as revolutionary movements; and he insists that the great Western revolutionaries of the modern world needed the Africans as much as the Africans needed them. The latter point is central to the entire book and is made forcefully in the first chapter on the Haitian Revolution—the world’s only successful slave revolt, according to James. “Without the French Revolution,” he asserts, “its success would have been impossible” (38). He is not simply talking about strategic support from Revolutionary France, especially since the nature of the alliance between the metropole and San Domingo’s black rebels shifted with each regime. Rather, the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity transformed segments of the rank-and-file and the leadership, notably Toussaint L’Ouverture: “They embraced the revolutionary doctrine, they thought in republican terms. The result was that these slaves, lacking education, half-savage, and degraded in their slavery as only centuries of slavery can degrade, achieved a liberality in social aspiration and an elevation of political thought equivalent to anything similar that took place in France” (47). Yet, while a burning desire for liberty, articulated in the aims of the French Revolution, drove the slave, production relations on the plantation organized him. Here he echoes his classic line from The Black Jacobins. By “working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at that time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement” (40).26

  But no matter how “proletarianized” the slaves were, they could not do it alone. In his discussion of the United States, James shows how a rich history of slave uprisings (in his words, they “revolted continuously”) resulted in little more than heroic martyrs and a more repressive atmosphere. Victory was possible, however, when the conditions resembled that of Haiti: during the Revolutionary Era when poor whites joined slaves, free blacks and Mulattoes under the banner of liberty. But because the United States was not a small Caribbean island, the slaves and free blacks were always outnumbered and dispersed. More significantly, slavery was much too important to capitalist development to abolish it on principle. Here we see possibly the beginnings of James’s influence on young Eric Williams, a former student of his back in Trinidad. Anticipating Williams’s classic study, Slavery and Capitalism (1944), James writes: “Slavery made cotton king; cotton became the very life food of British industries, it built up New England factories.” Furthermore, the growing impulse toward abolition was “not that sudden change in the conscience of mankind so beloved of romantic and reactionary historians, but the climax of a gradual transformation of world economy” (58).

  The U.S. Civil War was the moment of truth, the world event that gave these enslaved and half-starved black folk a chance. James’s analysis of the slaves’ actions during the conflict is taken straight from W.E.B. DuBois’s monumental Black Reconstruction in America, from his invocation of the “general strike” to his description of the slaves’ hesitant responses toward the Union soldiers (60). Land was key. Indeed, it was the struggle for land that rendered this newly created “peasantry” a revolutionary force, for who understands better than the uprooted that land reform was a necessary first step toward emancipation. “It was so in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917,” James argues. “Peasants today are politically alert as never before” (60). It was yet another challenge to Western Marxism—a tradition that had consistently distrusted the peasantry and invested all of its faith in the proletariat.

  Insisting that the peasantry—in this case ex-slaves—could be a revolutionary force in and of itself was not entirely new. Indian Communist M.N. Roy had made a similar point in his 1920 debate with Lenin over the national-colonial question.27 What is unique is James’s claim that revolutionary mass movements take forms that are often cultural and religious rather than explicitly political. He forces the reader to re-examine these seemingly odd movements with new eyes, to take the beliefs and superstitions of Africans and African descendants seriously. Perhaps he came to this conclusion independently, for his first and only novel, Minty Alley, and his 1936 play about Toussaint L’Ouverture, demonstrate an amazing sensitivity to the power of religion and culture as major social and political forces in black life.28 Or perhaps he was moved, as many people were, when he reached page 124 of DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and found his brilliant defense of the power of the Divine: “Foolish talk, all of this, you say, of course; and that is because no American now believes in his religion. Its facts are mere symbolism; its revelation vague generalities; its ethics a matter of carefully balanced gain. But to most of the four million black folk emancipated by civil war, God was real. They knew Him. They had met Him personally in many a wild orgy of religious frenzy, or in the black stillness of the night.”29

  Whatever the source, A History of Negro Revolt reveals James’s incredible faith in the masses and the supernatural forces that moved them. The Watch Tower movement, for example, a millenarian movement that believed all Western governments were evil and had to be replaced by a more just order, is described here as one of the most powerful revolutionary forces in Africa during the 1930s. Whereas most Marxist interpreters thought such notions absurd and tended to dismiss religion as a diversion from the real struggle, James insisted that the ideas behind the Watch Tower movement “represent political realities and express political aspirations far more closely than programs and policies of parties with millions of members, numerous journals and half a century of history behind them” (105). He also discusses religious uprisings in Eastern and Central Africa—most notably those led by John Chilembwe in Nyasaland and Simon Kimbangu’s cult in the Belgian Congo. If Marxists thought these black Christian radicals were insignificant or less important than, say, st
riking miners, the colonial state certainly did not: even the smallest challenge from these “sects” was met with immense repression and violence. At the very least, James anticipated a later generation of historians who viewed these religious-based movements as the source for some of the most violent anti-colonial contests of the twentieth century.30

  James’s biggest “leap of faith” is his discussion of Garveyism. By taking Marcus Garvey and his followers seriously, James diverged sharply from Padmore and most of his comrades in the IASB. In fact, Padmore (who, along with other IASB activists, used to heckle Garvey when he spoke at Hyde Park) had once written that Garveyism was “the most reactionary expression [of] Negro bourgeois nationalism” and therefore completely “alien to the interests of the Negro toilers.31 Although James criticizes Garvey for his limited racial outlook, his collaboration with imperialists and American racists (notably the Ku Klux Klan), and his inability to see the virtues of industrial organization, he nonetheless acknowledges that Garvey had built the largest black mass movement in history. So rather than dismiss Garvey as a charlatan, James tries to understand his appeal. He had no other choice; throughout A History of Negro Revolt James hammers home the point that the masses have the capacity to move on their own, to throw up their own leaders, to understand the situation at hand. If Garvey had merely duped his followers, then a good proportion of the black world were dupes.

  The success of Garveyism, James suggests, has a lot to do with the peculiar and complex nature of racism. While many of his radical contemporaries focused in on the political, economic, and structural aspects of racism, James’s chapter on Garvey explores its cultural and psychological dimensions. Instead of emphasizing how racism is used to divide the working class, he concentrates on how it is lived and experienced, “how the Negro is made to feel his color at every turn” (88). In a world where the very humanity of dark-skinned people was perpetually assaulted and questioned, Garvey gave his followers a sense of history and personhood. By linking the entire black world to Africa and to each other, he turned a national minority into an international majority. In James’s words, “He made the American Negro conscious of his African origin and created for the first time a feeling of international solidarity among Africans and people of African descent” (94).32