Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  The insidious and dishonourable propaganda which for selfish ends so distorts and denies facts as to represent the advancement and development of certain races as impossible and undesirable should be met with wide-spread dissemination of the truth; the experiment of making the Negro slave a free citizen in the United States is not a failure; the attempts at autonomous government in Haiti and Liberia are not proofs of the impossibility of self-government among black men; the experience of Spanish America does not prove that mulatto democracy will not eventually succeed there; the aspirations of Egypt and India are not successfully to be met by sneers at the capacity of darker races.18

  This manifesto references earlier pan-African appeals, but recasts them as more far-reaching demands, the boldest of which is a return to the ‘ancient common ownership of the Land and its natural fruits and defence against the unrestrained greed of invested capital’.19 Africa must be a ‘co-ruler’ of the world along with other peoples, and there can be no compromise on ‘absolutely equal’ political, civil and social power for Africa’s citizens, both black and white.20 In a striking inversion of the usual terms of argument, it is not so much justice that must be bestowed on the oppressed but injustice that has to cease on the part of those who ‘lynch the untried, disenfranchise the intelligent, deny self-government to educated men, and insult the helpless’.21 There is also a scathing dismissal of the ways in which the time lags of inevitably uneven development in human societies form the basis of ‘adventitious and idiotic’ race hierarchies populated by demigods and apes, rather than accepted as part of the ‘richness and variety of human nature’.22

  The London Manifesto is not without its own biases in favour of what it calls ‘cultured black citizens’, insisting that leaders from the black ‘intelligentsia’ are needed because the millions they sought to represent ‘have not even what we have; the power to complain against monstrous wrong, the power to see and know the source of our oppression’.23 At its ethical heart, however, is what it resonantly calls a ‘habit of democracy’ that must be ‘made to encircle the earth’ not least because there was nothing uniquely European about a capacity for democracy.24 Like liberty, democracy is not racially or culturally specific, as the colonizers would have it, ‘the secret and divine Gift of the Few’.25 In reality, ‘no habit is more natural and more widely spread among primitive people or more easily capable of development among wide masses’; indeed, it could be implemented ‘tomorrow’, though some ‘general control and guidance’ might be needed.26 Notably, in comparison to the more specifically Christian tone of the document of twenty years before, this text alludes to the twentieth century not just as that of the ‘Prince of Peace’ but also as ‘the millennium of Buddha and Mahmoud’ [sic], as well as ‘the mightiest age of Human Reason’.27 The real ‘shame of the world’ derives not from racial differences or developmental time lags, which are accidents of history, but from that which allows ‘the majority of mankind to be brutalised and enslaved by ignorant and selfish agents of commercial institutions whose one aim is profit and power for the few’.28 Capitalism and capitalist ‘world organisation’, in which ‘the favoured few may luxuriate in the toil of the tortured many’, are quite simply indefensible, the true blot on human civilization exacerbated by ‘the outrageously unjust distribution of the world income between the dominant and suppressed peoples’.29

  Here, in its closing paragraphs, the London Manifesto made visible a fault line that would haunt metropolitan anticolonialism and debates on the left over the next decades. In the execution of capitalist crime, where the project of empire was inextricable from the project of capital, could it be that white labour ‘is particeps criminis with white capital’?30 The authors and endorsers of the manifesto were not claiming that white labour was not exploited, as is clear from the proximate declaration that the wealth and well-being of the rich ‘rest on a pitiful human foundation of writhing white, yellow and brown and black bodies’.31 They also refuse to claim ‘perfect-ness of our own’, assigning black people responsibility for what the text calls ‘failure to advance’.32 Instead, it places a more challenging question on the table: how could and should white labour assess its role in the project of imperialism given the extent to which, both consciously and unconsciously, not least through its share of the vote in modern democracies, it had ‘been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes’?33 The manifesto is clear that this complicity, far from benefiting them, has had fatal consequences for white workers, as they ‘are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent by the resulting monopoly of the world’s raw material in the hands of a dominant, cruel and irresponsible few’.34 How could the problem of race in the context of global imperialism be addressed in its specificity and as it intersected with the question of class and the exploitation of labour? This question, as we shall see in the following chapters, became a lightning rod for debate.

  A Rebel Sojourner in London

  Anticipating points that would be made at the first LAI congresses, and then developed in the years to come, the London Manifesto put forward a difficult proposition.35 The problem of labour versus capital would not be solved in England, it ventured, as long as a parallel dynamic ‘mark[ed] the relations of the whiter and darker peoples’.36 The exploitation of black, brown and yellow labour through imperialism – and the dangers of white working-class complicity in that exploitation – was not a topic being addressed frontally or consistently on the British left in the immediate post-war years. Indeed, as Satnam Virdee has pointed out, the much-vaunted British working-class insurgency in the post-war period, manifested in strike waves, was accompanied by race riots. Racism and xenophobic nationalism were frequently intertwined with labour militancy.37 In an episode that encapsulates this intertwining, the well-known anti-slavery campaigner and anti-war activist Edward Dene Morel, famed for his exposure of Belgian atrocities in the Congo, wrote a shocking and sensational article titled ‘The Black Scourge in Europe’.38 A member of the left-leaning Union of Democratic Control, and later a Labour MP, Morel claimed sensationally and with crude suggestiveness that France was ‘thrusting her black savages still further into the heart of Germany’ by sending troops from the colonies into the area.39 He was referring to the presence of black troops. There, he averred, far from policing the area as they were supposed to, ‘primitive African barbarians’ with their unique ‘well-known physiological’ traits were ‘over-running Europe’ and busy raping or otherwise satisfying themselves on the bodies of white women, who consequently suffered particularly grave injuries often with ‘fatal’ consequences.40 The article, written for the most widely read left-wing newspaper in Britain, was a mix of deep racism and breathless righteousness as it bemoaned the fate of white women at the hands of the ‘black menace’: ‘Sexually they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectly well-known’.41 Whatever else Germans might be willing to let go, the article argued sympathetically, this rapine could never be forgiven. Insisting hysterically that the ‘abundance or otherwise of specific reports’ was ‘immaterial’, Morel’s argument was made in anti-capitalist and anti-militarist terms as it invoked the possibility of ‘black mercenaries being used against trade union and revolutionary movements’.42 Significantly, Morel repeatedly brought his unproved assertions back to the fate of the white working classes against whom this black weapon was being deployed. The casual slide from capitalist ‘lusts’ to the black slaking of those lusts is not especially subtle:

  For the working classes the importation of negro mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa, to fight the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist Governments in the heart of Europe is, as I have said elsewhere, a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain, France, and Italy will be ill-advised if they allow it to pass in silence because to-day the victims happen to be German.43

  Morel’s fevered article invoking ‘a terror and a horror unimaginable to the country’, facilitated by white degradation in the face of war, woul
d also be developed into a pamphlet, The Horror on the Rhine, which found wide international circulation and went into no less than eight editions.44

  In the first instance, however, it was carried by the Daily Herald, the Labour Party newspaper edited by George Lansbury, then a serving MP, as a ‘revelation so horrible’ that it had no choice but to carry it. A subsequent article on the front pages of the newspaper lauded its own courage in publishing Morel’s article, adding: ‘The Labour movement and all other people with a remnant of decent feeling demand the immediate withdrawal of the black troops and their return to Africa.’46 While defending the newspaper against the idea that it was ‘encouraging colour prejudice’ and insisting, in a preface to Morel’s article, that it championed ‘the rights of the African native in his own home’,47 Lansbury nonetheless wrote a supportive (unsigned) editorial titled ‘Brutes in French Uniform’ and subtitled ‘Danger to German Women from 30,000 Blacks’ in which he reiterated Morel’s claim that black troops with ‘primitive sexual passions’ were rampaging through Germany.48 Later that year, following the publication of the pamphlet version, around which women’s organizations held meetings, both the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party passed resolutions condemning the use of black troops by France. (Morel himself was a member of the Labour Party’s think tank on colonial issues, the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions.) The matter was also discussed in the ILP’s official journal, the Labour Leader, now under Fenner Brockway’s editorial hand. Morel’s salaciously overheated accusations, however, went largely unchallenged on the British left. As Robert C. Reinders has noted, Morel was known as a man who, to quote one co-worker, ‘had “agonies of sympathy with his beloved black man” ’ and unimpeachable ‘liberal credentials’.49 The Herald also urged British women to rise up in support of their German sisters – a call enthusiastically taken up, among others, by the socialist women’s campaigner Ethel Snowden, as well as several women’s organizations.50 Histories of the Labour left in Britain make little of the episode if they mention it at all, and it is not part of general knowledge about Morel, who is largely known as a champion of black rights and kindly defender of Africa.51 With Morel strenuously denying that his protest had been inspired by ‘racial bitterness’, the Labour Leader also gave space to him and others to discuss the issue without questioning Morel’s version.52 The pamphlet’s eighth edition carried endorsements from the Danish modernist writer Georg Brandes, the French communist writer Henri Barbusse, and Karl Marx’s grandson, the French socialist and editor Jean Longuet.53

  There was, however, one important dissenting voice and, importantly, it was that of a black man originally from the colonies. In early 1920, the poet and journalist Claude McKay, who would become a major figure of the literary and cultural phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance, had arrived in England from the United States (where he had relocated from his native Jamaica a few years before). At the time, McKay was a ‘scribbler’ who had also worked manual jobs for several years, including on the American railroad, before joining the staff of the left-wing magazine the Liberator. In the famous ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, which signified ‘at once the political repression of leftists and the bloody suppression of black rebellion’, McKay – shocked into bringing together his growing radical politics and his passion for verse – burst onto the scene with one of his most famous poems, the sonnet ‘If We Must Die’.54 With its compelling last line envisioning defiance to the bitter end in the face of racialist pogroms – ‘Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!’ – the poem was a recitative paean to black insurgency in the face of all-encompassing oppression. Having already witnessed white mobs in the United States launching brutal attacks on African-Americans, when McKay read Morel’s attack on the ‘black scourge’ in the Daily Herald shortly after arriving in London, his immediate response was to write a letter to the editor in which he asked that his rebuttal be published. Lansbury, with great disingenuousness, reiterated that neither the paper nor Morel subscribed to racial prejudice, but nonetheless declined to publish McKay’s riposte. McKay then contacted Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette, communist and antiwar agitator, who immediately agreed to carry it in her weekly, the Workers’ Dreadnought, which at that time was functioning as the organ of the British Section of the Third International. In the pointedly titled ‘A Black Man Replies’, McKay was bullishly confrontational, determined to hold the British left to account, noting that it was thoroughly inadequate for an ostensibly progressive newspaper like the Herald to claim not to be ‘encouraging race prejudice’ and to ‘champion native rights in Africa’ while carrying the ‘obscene, maniacal outburst’ of Morel, who otherwise ‘peddles his books and articles on “the poor suffering black” ’.55 The line between the acknowledged ‘odiousness’ of race prejudice and Morel’s legitimized brand of paternalism was thin, he suggested, and hardly likely to take forward the urgent task of helping ‘white and black peoples to a better understanding of each other’.56 Professing complete ignorance of the ostensibly ‘well-known physiological reasons’ that made the white women in question particularly prone to injury, according to Morel, McKay noted with stark simplicity: ‘Any violent act of rape, whether by white, yellow or black, civilized or savage man, must entail injury.’57

  McKay’s intervention – which, astonishingly, remains the only major rebuttal of Morel’s manifestly outrageous and unsubstantiated accusations – was important not only as a clear and direct exposé of the latter’s unpardonable and absurd racism, but also in exposing the broader British left’s persistent blind spot on race.58 The whole truth, McKay was obliged to point out, was that white men also rape, black men can control their sexual proclivities as well as any other men, white men have fathered thousands of disowned children among the ‘colored races’, and the syphilis Morel accused the French black troops of carrying had been contracted by sexual contact with whites. Socialists might indeed do well to stop the French exploitation of North African conscripts (not ‘mercenaries’), but not by peddling harmful racial generalizations:

  During my stay in Europe, I have come in contact with many weak and lascivious peoples of both sexes, but I do not argue from my experience that the English race is degenerate. On the other hand, I have known some of the finest and cleanest types of men and women among the Anglo-Saxons.59

  With the memories of the American pogroms fresh in his mind, McKay was insistent that his rebuttal derived less from the fact of his being a black man himself than from well-founded anxiety at the inevitable ‘further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted socially and economically’, that such propaganda would help incite.60 In fact, the poet’s powerful voice did bring to bear upon his intervention vital insights shaped by the experience of being a black man in a colonial and white-supremacist order. These enabled him to illuminate the British white left’s racial and national biases, implicating it in the structures of white domination. They also helped him make the case for a serious and genuine universalism that was predicated not on white humanitarianism, but on taking seriously the fact of an unequal global order in which the black experience of racial-capitalist oppression had to be integral to an understanding of world history. McKay’s use of the ‘lens of race’ was not one that segregated black working-class experience as incommensurable with others; it allowed for common cause to be made in the face of racial stratification, rather than the identity of working-class interests being simply assumed. McKay was grappling with problems that retain urgency in our own times: how is it possible to come up with a shared vision of emancipation and social justice that has universal resonances and scope, but does not lose sight of vastly different historical experiences which often come into conflict with one another? How can an identity of class interests be constructed when the experience and operation of class also rely on a racial hierarchy? My argument in the remainder of this chapter, which looks at McKay’s work for the Workers’ Dreadnought and at the pio
neering collaborative anthology Negro, edited by the poet Nancy Cunard, is that there were serious attempts during the interwar period to ‘teach race’ and make blackness matter on the British left, which, in tandem with the growing pan-African presence in Britain, are an important part of the story of metropolitan anticolonialism (and anti-racism). These pedagogical projects often took the form of collaboration and collective publishing in which radical white allies (both women in this instance) encouraged and facilitated the emergence of radical black anticolonial voices into the metropolitan public sphere, using their institutional and social networks to this end and often emerging as notable anticolonial figures themselves. These collaborations allowed for difficult, often awkward, conversations to take place, and were a vital part of the attempt to undo paternalism and replace it with a politics of radical, if often uneasy, solidarity. The universal would be aspired to through an understanding of the particular; world-historical knowledge would be accessed through the epistemology of the margins.