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

  James’s recognition of the revolutionary potential of black nationalism should have made A History of Negro Revolt an instant classic among the Left. By the late 1930s, virtually all left-wing movements were floundering on the “Negro Question,” including the Communists who had abandoned self-determination in favor of the Popular Front. In 1939, a year after James left England for the United States, he tried to persuade Leon Trotsky himself at a summit meeting in Coyoacan, Mexico, that the Left needs to support autonomous black movements on their own terms, and that the struggle against racism and for democratic rights is primary to the struggle for socialism. Black nationalism, he insisted, was not some diversion from the class struggle but a revolutionary force to be reckoned with.33

  Unfortunately, James was about three decades too early, or the Left was three decades too late. In the meantime, A History of Negro Revolt remained hidden just as James remembered. And to the many Marxists who still believed that the proletarian revolution would take the form of an industrial workers’ uprising with themselves in the vanguard, the book made no sense. It was not until a new generation of Afro-coifed young militants discovered this little book that its full import would be recognized.

  V

  When Drum and Spear Press, a black nationalist-oriented publishing house in Washington, D.C., decided to inaugurate their company by re-issuing A History of Negro Revolt in 1969, James had just been allowed to re-enter the United States the year before (he had been deported to England in 1953).34 The Press was an outgrowth of the Drum and Spear Bookstore, a black activist-oriented outlet founded in 1967 by about a half dozen former Southern Civil Rights organizers who had moved back to Washington. In addition to running the bookstore, they established a community school called the Center for Black Education. Frustrated by the dearth of books by or about black people, the Drum and Spear collective decided to publish their own books and bring important works back into print.35

  By this time, members of the collective had grown fairly close to C.L.R., who had moved to Washington a year after Drum and Spear Bookstore was founded. They had come to know James through Federal City College, some of them having been fellow faculty members there. His 16th Street apartment soon became a kind of meeting ground for these young activist/intellectuals to discuss black liberation, community organizing, history, sociology, politics, and a whole host of issues. Indeed, James not only participated in discussions leading to the founding of Drum and Spear Press, but it was he who volunteered A History of Negro Revolt as its first title. The Drum and Spear collective was happy to oblige, for they clearly respected James as an elder mentor for their generation. In the introduction to the new edition, Marvin Holloway of the Center for Black Education characterized James as a living revolutionary who had seen and experienced struggles that most young militants only read about. At a time “when black people throughout the world are clamoring for self-knowledge,” the sixty-eight-year-old C.L.R. “has become a great source of wisdom and counsel to youth in the Resistance Movement” (vii and viii). And what better time to be a source of wisdom and counsel? The year he returned to the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, the ghettos were in flames, the Black Panther Party was making front-page news, militant college students were demonstrating for Black Studies Departments, and Republican Richard Nixon was elected president on the promise of crushing the wave of dissent that threatened to destroy American civilization. James himself had just concluded a lecture tour in East and West Africa, so he was returning with first-hand knowledge of the situation in the newly independent African states.

  Along with the new title, A History of Pan-African Revolt, James added a forty-three-page Epilogue titled “The History of Pan-African Revolt: A Summary 1939–1969,” which briefly explores decolonization in Africa, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and recent conflicts in the Caribbean. The Epilogue is important, for it reflects James’s intellectual and political development since the book first appeared three decades earlier as a FACT monograph of the British Independent Labour Party. He does not simply attach more episodes of black rebellion to the story; he adds substantively to the conceptual framework he had developed in the first edition.

  First, the Epilogue gives us an even stronger defense of black nationalism than the earlier chapters had. Of course, by the 1960s black nationalism itself had become more forceful and radical, adopting a rhetoric and style far more militant than anything Marcus Garvey had imagined. Some black nationalists in the United States talked of armed struggle, expressed solidarity with other anti-colonial movements, learned African languages, and, most importantly, identified with the ghetto poor. But James’s growing appreciation for the revolutionary potential of black nationalism can be traced back much further—at least to the Second World War. As a member of the Socialist Workers Party and regular contributor to its newspaper, the Militant, James was deeply impressed with the rise of black self-organization and activism during the war.36 African American trade union membership rose from 150,000 in 1935 to 1.2 million by 1945; civil rights organizations recruited tens of thousands of new members (the NAACP, for example, had grown ten-fold during the war); and mainstream black leaders insisted on a “double victory” against racism at home and fascism abroad.37 The Double-V campaign, embodied powerfully in A. Philip Randolph’s threatened march on Washington in 1943, partly articulated the sense of hope and anger that a lot of black people shared. As black journalist Roi Ottley observed during the early years of the war, one could not walk the streets of Harlem and not notice a profound change. “Listen to the way Negroes are talking these days! … [B]lack men have become noisy, aggressive, and sometimes defiant.”38

  By the war’s end, James was convinced of the necessity of black nationalism as an essential element of the black freedom struggle. As early as 1945, he believed that “the Negro is nationalist to his heart and is perfectly right to be so. His racism, his nationalism, are a necessary means of giving him strength, self-respect and organization in order to fight for integration into American society.” Two years later, in an important document titled “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A,” he echoed these sentiments and pushed even further. By virtue of their experiences in the United States under racism and capitalism, he argued, black people were inherently revolutionary. “Anyone who knows them,” he concluded, “who knows their history, is able to talk to them intimately, watches them in their own theatres, watches them at their dances, watches them in their churches, reads their press with a discerning eye, must recognize that although their social force may not be able to compare with the social force of a corresponding number of organized workers, the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among them to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”39

  Thus the rise of Black Power did not surprise James at all. What surprised his old left-wing supporters, however, was how little he spoke about the proletariat during this period. Although he defensively reminded his critics that he was “still a man of the proletariat,” the Epilogue, like many of his speeches in the late 1960s, says less about working class struggles than the previous chapters. Instead, the dominant forces in the post-1938 black revolution are students, Civil Rights activists, intellectuals. This shift in emphasis is a product of the time and the context. James was quite taken with the Black Power movement, especially the more left-leaning spokespersons like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. In a 1967 speech, for example, he dismissed charges that Carmichael was a racialist and suggested that his vision was much closer to socialism than the white Left realized. Citing Lenin to prove his point, he argued vehemently that the Black Power movement constitutes a challenge to capital and therefore should be backed by the Left. Moreover, he reminded his audience of the importance of supporting black self-organization, irrespective of contradictions the movement might exhibit: “Who are we to say ‘Yes,
you are entitled to say this but not to say that; you are entitled to do this but not to do that’? If we know the realities of Negro oppression in the U.S.A. (and if you don’t we should keep our mouths shut until we do), then we should guide ourselves by a West Indian expression which I recommend to you: what he do, he well do. Let me repeat that: what the American Negroes do is, as far as we are concerned, well done. They will take their chances, they will risk their liberty, they will risk their lives if need be. The decisions are theirs.”40

  Where Black Power counted most, however, was in Africa. Clearly the linchpin of the Pan-African revolt was the continent itself, and the struggle that had the greatest impact on James took place in the Gold Coast—the British West African colony that became modern Ghana in 1957. The Gold Coast revolution and its esteemed leader, Kwame Nkrumah, is the centerpiece of the Epilogue. He believed, as did many of his peers, that Ghana would be the beacon lighting the way toward the emancipation of black Africa.41

  James had met Nkrumah years before while he was a student at Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania. With Padmore practically training Nkrumah to lead the independence struggle in his homeland, James had a tremendous amount of confidence in this young man. But it was his visit to Ghana in 1957 that really opened his eyes to the political importance of this small West African country. So moved by the events he witnessed in Accra, James quickly postponed plans for a pamphlet on Hungary and immediately set out to write a small book on Ghana. The level of militancy and self-organization he observed challenged earlier theories of revolution, including some of the ideas put forth in his own Black Jacobins. Now he questioned the extent to which revolutions in Western Europe and African revolutions were interdependent. While James worried that Ghana, like other newly independent nations, had the potential of being overtaken by bureaucratic corruption, he was nonetheless convinced that something different was happening under Nkrumah: true grassroots democracy. By making Ghana the center of a continent-wide African liberation movement, James surmised, Nkrumah would keep the revolution permanent. And by moving immediately to socialism through state intervention and “initiating new social relations from below,” Ghana could make the revolutionary transition that neither the USSR nor Eastern Europe was capable of making.42

  By the mid-1960s, however, his enthusiasm for Nkrumah and Ghana had diminished. He admitted that the new society he had hoped for was not built, and that Nkrumah allowed bureaucratic corruption to take over. Ghana’s failure provided James with two critical lessons for constructing postcolonial society, both of which carried over into A History of Pan-African Revolt. First, a revolutionary society cannot be created unless the colonial state is completely dismantled. Second, the new generation of African leaders needs to create and sustain democratic institutions throughout the country. Even if those institutions are critical of the government, a new society cannot be built without them. These two points bear the obvious imprint of Frantz Fanon, whose book The Wretched of the Earth James had read before writing the Epilogue (107). While James understood the importance of dismantling the colonial state in theory, he knew in practice that the African leaders of the newly independent nations tended to be Western-educated civil servants who were products of the colonial state and thus had a personal stake in maintaining it.43

  What was needed to rid Africa of its bureaucratic petite bourgeoisie was uncompromising revolt, permanent revolution from below. The political and cultural resources for such a revolution, he argues, can be found in traditional African society. Once again, James displays his enormous faith in the forms of organization and culture created by the masses themselves. But unlike the earlier chapters, the Epilogue looks to these forms not just as sources of resistance to imperialism but as the basis for a new society. “There are also the democratic instincts and practices of the African tribes,” he observed in 1957, “not those damned chiefs with their feathers and umbrellas and stools, made into petty tyrants by the British Government, but the old tribal method of appointing them by election and throwing them out if they were unsatisfactory.”44 Here he makes his sharpest break yet from the European Marxist tradition. Socialism, he concluded, need not be built on the logic of modern industrial organization; it can be built on pre-capitalist traditions of democracy and communal social relations.

  James obviously came to this conclusion independently, but so did several African nationalists, including Senegal’s Leopold Senghor and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere.45 When Ghana failed to live up to its promises, James decided that Tanzania was now Africa’s hope for the future. Indeed, he ends this book as well as his study of Nkrumah with a paean to Nyerere’s approach to socialist transformation titled “Always Out of Africa.” In hindsight, of course, we know that Nyerere’s attempt to establish a collectively-run national economy based on communal villages was an utter disaster, that his regime repressed strikes and opposition movements, and that his party—the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU)—had more than its share of corruption.46 But when James wrote the Epilogue, TANU’s famous “Arusha Declaration” laying out the philosophy and structure of Tanzania’s African socialist society was less than two years old. And, on paper, it was an incredibly progressive document. With bylaws requiring party and government leaders to be “either a Peasant or a Worker, and should in no way be associated with the practices of Capitalism or Feudalism,” (128) how could any socialist not be impressed? What attracted James more than anything was Nyerere’s ideas for public education. Nyerere planned to establish schools that would prepare students to create a socialist society based on traditional culture. James believed these were the key grassroots institutions that could sustain democracy and ultimately destroy the colonial state.47

  The book closes on a hopeful note. Nyerere had not only found a revolutionary path for Africa but made the most important contribution to Marxist thought since Lenin. As we now know, James was wrong on the first count, and depending on who you talk to, some might say he was wrong on both counts. The idea that Africans ought to draw on their own resources and cultures in order to build a socialist society is hard to contest; the problem lies in the belief that pre-colonial African societies were inherently democratic and practiced a form of “primitive communism” that could lay the groundwork for modern socialism. Several historians have challenged this romantic view of Africa’s past, exposing the level of class and gender exploitation internal to so-called “traditional” societies.48 That James accepted this view does not diminish in any way James’s brilliance or the profound insights this book has to offer. Rather, it simply means that he is no fortune teller. Yet, what I find quite puzzling is his complete silence on Tanzania throughout the remainder of his life. Even after sharp criticisms of the TANU government were leveled by radical intellectuals within Tanzania, James apparently never responded or corrected his earlier assessments—at least not in print. Indeed, he included his unaltered assessment of Nyerere in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution which appeared in 1977, one year after Issa Shivji, a Tanzanian Marxist historian, thoroughly excised the utter bankruptcy of Nyerere’s policies in his highly acclaimed book, Class Struggles in Tanzania. After Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution was published, however, the seventy-six-year-old radical could no longer maintain the herculean pace that made him one of the most prolific scholar/activists in the Western world. His relative silence on Africa, as with many other issues, should not come as a surprise.49

  VI

  A History of Pan-African Revolt is one of those rare books that continues to strike a chord of urgency, even half a century after it was first published. Time and time again, its lessons have proven to be valuable and relevant for understanding liberation movements in Africa and the diaspora. Each generation who has had the opportunity to read this small book finds new insights, new lessons, new visions for their own age. When the “Race Today Collective,” a gathering of people of color in London who edited the progressive multicultural magazine of the same title, decid
ed to bring back into print A History of Negro Revolt in 1985, they found the book as meaningful to their world as it was to the African and Caribbean radicals who had walked the same streets fifty years earlier. Although Ethiopia was not the pressing issue this time around, many of the battles they fought would have been familiar to the 1930s generation: South Africa, Grenada, the riots in Brixton, racist violence against immigrants, the struggle for black political empowerment:

  We publish this third edition at a moment when the course of negro [sic] revolt enters a period of increased acceleration. The masses of Caribbean Peoples are in open revolt against American imperialism. Such is the intensity of the movement that it takes the might of the American military to contain it. South Africa is stirring and the end of the apartheid regime cannot be long delayed. The emergence of Jesse Jackson, as a major figure in American politics, can only be explained by the mass movement from below of American blacks.

  We are certain that A History of Negro Revolt contributes to an understanding of these events and will inform action in a way in which few historical documents have.50

  In reading and re-reading this classic text, we ought to reflect on our own times and determine how this book might inform our own actions. What can this book tell us about postapartheid South Africa under president Nelson Mandela? The desperate situation in James’s beloved Haiti? “Ethnic cleansing” in Rwanda? What of heightened racism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States? The incredibly high rates of unemployment and violence in Western capitalist cities and the Left’s virtual abandonment of America’s black ghettos?