While there is not the space here to discuss the entirety of the Negro volume, one recurrent feature demands our attention. In the context of the emergence of twentieth-century anticolonialism as a decisive rejection of theories of tutelage and trusteeship, the shared critique of paternalism common to many otherwise diverse essays is striking. In one of the first essays in the volume, a mock-anthropological polemic against segregation and racism shot through with barely concealed anger, the African-American singer Taylor Gordon amplifies Cunard’s own introductory repudiation of the idea that the white man was in Africa for the black man’s good: ‘The caucasians [sic] are queer people. They think that any other people that can’t see things as they do are to be pitied and cared for. That if there’s ever an eternal peace among men, it will be because of their generosity.’145 It is almost impossible, given the way the literary sphere is segregated, to ‘read what the Negro really thinks’.146 Other writers, like the African-American scholar of Romance languages John Frederick Matheus, are no less stringent about the structural absences that facilitate both racism and paternalism: ‘European ignorance of the African Negro is monumental, and misinformation concerning the American Negro ridiculous, but in most cases not a bigoted prejudice, but sheer lack of knowledge.’147 Many essays in the volume seek to correct this ignorance, not least around black agency and the ways in which black struggle exerted pressures upon and elicited transformations in Western polities. An unsigned article, taken from the left-wing journal The Liberator, notes that while abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison often took fright at the thought of slave rebellions, believing words and pleas would suffice, actual rebellions often had the effect of furthering the cause of freedom: ‘Anti-slavery sentiment flared up even in the Southern States immediately after the Nat Turner rebellion. A number of petitions were circulated in Virginia, to the effect that, since the slaves had proved themselves so ready to fight for their liberty, it was hopeless to try to keep the Negroes enslaved.’148 The fact that slave revolts had essentially been written out of histories accounted for the undue prominence given to gradualism and petitioning in the abolitionist tradition. An article by Du Bois, taken from his journal The Crisis, also speaks of a long history of slave revolts, going on to observe with calm audacity that, quite apart from the black role in Emancipation, black agency had forged America itself. Democracy in America ‘has been developed because of the pressure of the slaves for freedom and recognition’; American women as a whole gained more status because ‘the Negro woman was a working woman before she was a housewife’, whose example spread to white working women; Negro art – music, literature, dancing – made a ‘permanent contribution to American civilisation’; and public schools were an ‘accepted institution, primarily because of the insistence of Negroes on free education’.149 Black labour had, of course, been fundamental to the making of America. Noting that black people had always ‘reacted and reacted sharply’ to their surroundings, Du Bois invokes a tradition of ‘many strong individual Negro thinkers’ across the Americas, as well as the success of the Haitian revolt.150 Yet Western thought routinely played down black agency, preferring instead the ‘widely held assumption that there is no inner reaction among the Negroes; that you are dealing with a people who, while they are swayed by certain primitive feelings and instincts, are not thinking and planning or moving in any self-motivated ways’.151 Michel-Rolph Trouillot makes a similar point when he notes that the Western historiography of the Haitian Revolution routinely trivializes ‘the slaves’ independent sense of their right to freedom and the right to achieve this freedom by the force of arms’.152
Du Bois’s essay was prefaced by a critical and somewhat crude demolition job from Cunard which both rehearsed the hostility of the Communist Party towards him and the NAACP and insisted that ‘the Communists are … the only defenders of the oppressed Negro masses’.153 Given Cunard’s leanings, and despite its undoubted political diversity, the weight of the volume comes down on the side of communism as the only social form which would end both racial and class exploitation. James W. Ford, an erstwhile vice-presidential candidate fielded by the Communist Party, wrote an essay for the volume called ‘Communism and the Negro’, which also attacked the NAACP as ‘petty bourgeois Negro reformists’.154 While accusing reformists (with more than a touch of purple prose) of attempting ‘to hide and destroy the revolutionary traditions of the Negro masses’, Ford too – ironically, in much the same vein as Du Bois – paid homage to slave rebel leaders like Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, as well as to the Haitians; all of these examples illustrated that liberation was not ‘something to be handed down, or denied, from above’.155 Reformism is the enemy, whether offered as ‘a favour from above’ or solicited by the ‘boot-licking diplomacy’ of the ‘Negro petty bourgeoisie’, whose ‘misleaders’ both make use of and hinder the liberation struggle by winning petty concessions from power without insisting on radical change.156 Liberalism too is identified as a problem, shamelessly peddling illusions ‘such as the “possibility” of liberation without a struggle against imperialism, of real democracy under robber capitalism, of emancipation from the skies’.157 Cunard picks up on this theme in her own comprehensive essay on the history of Jamaica with an assessment of the importance, but also the limitations, of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement: ‘He does not see that the white imperialists will never give, but that they must be forced, and for this that the actual condition, the system itself, must be revolutionarily changed.’158
Frequently illuminating the connection between imperialism abroad and racism at home, the anthology as a whole is also unstinting in its criticism of the ‘colour bar’ in both Britain and the United States. In a damning account of how the colour bar operates in British hotels, Cunard attacks the ‘vicious and scandalous actions of the English against people of colour’, many of whom are subjects of the British Empire or ‘other white capitalist nations’.159 Her angry account here includes a letter by Reginald Bridgeman on behalf of the LAI to the British Home Office protesting racial discrimination in hotels, but to no avail, leading Cunard to observe bitterly: ‘ “Teach niggers their ‘place’ ” is as much the government view as it has ever been.’160 Domestic metropolitan fights against racism were connected to the global anticolonial struggle, as an article taken from the Negro Worker, edited and probably authored by George Padmore, observed: ‘The British ruling class, frightened by the growing revolts of the colonial peoples for national freedom and self-determination on the one hand, and the solidarity struggles of white and coloured workers in England on the other, are intensifying racial and national chauvinism.’161 Once again, liberalism, with its petitioning advocacy of ‘better’ race relations – the reference here is to the League of Coloured Peoples – acted ‘to put a brake upon the growing resentment of the coloured workers and students against the shameful way in which they are being treated in this so-called democratic country’.162
The historical example of free Haiti runs through several essays, underscoring the history and relevance to the present of black resistance and self-emancipation. But it is Ethiopia which provides a contemporary focal point for discussions of black self-assertion and independent governance. As we shall see, within two years of the publication of Negro, the invasion of Ethiopia would also become a rallying point for anticolonial organization. In ‘Ethiopia Today’, a piece which would later cause him to be pilloried by some communists as supporting a feudal reactionary emperor, Padmore observes that the huge symbolic importance of that nation derives from the fact that Ethiopians are ‘the first non-European peoples since the Haitian Revolution to defeat the white race at arms’.163 Ethiopia’s closest contemporary in this regard was the republic of Liberia, which, however, suffered from a heavy US capitalist presence, and was ‘mortgaged to the Firestone Rubber Company, thanks to the machinations of Yankee dollar diplomacy’.164 The very fact of Liberia, ‘that a Negro republic exists in Africa’ at all, writes Ben N. Azikiwe
(Nnamdi Azikiwe), the prominent Nigerian nationalist and later first president of independent Nigeria, ‘naturally makes the white man conscious of the psychological effect of this on the self-determination of other indigenous natives’.165 That in itself explained the several incursions made upon Liberia’s sovereignty by European powers, including Britain. Liberia also gave the lie to another cherished colonial idea: that the black man had no ‘political capacity’ for self-rule. Azikiwe is defensive about the charge that Liberia was guilty of forced-labour practices, admitting that these must be eradicated but pointing to the hypocrisy in singling the black republic out when other African colonial possessions were guilty of the same, including ‘the incompetent semi-sovereign state of the Union of South Africa’.166 Ultimately, the republics of Haiti and Liberia ‘withstand the buffets and assaults of imperial countries’ to show that ‘the Negro … is capable of directing his political destiny and that ‘the African is a natural statesman’ with plenty of institutions of governance to draw on: ‘If his past history reveals such genuine evidences of political capacity, then his future needs no further comments or conjectures … Take it or leave it.’167 On the same topic, the Harlem writer George S. Schuyler notes that the exploitation of labour is hardly unique to Liberia, for in ‘the richest country in the world’, the United States, millions ‘were absolutely dependent upon grudging charity for their few crumbs of daily bread. No one was secure.’168 In the hinterland of Liberia, on the other hand, in village after village, all denizens work, eat and have shelter because ‘the land, on which all depend for a living, cannot be bartered or sold by a few individuals but belongs to the tribal collectivity, and therefore cannot be disposed of’.169 The future Kenyan leader Johnstone (Jomo) Kenyatta would also observe in his contribution to the anthology that ‘forced labor has no limits under the rule of British imperialism’, which liked to call it ‘communal labor’.170 Africa had its flaws, but the imperial powers were in no position to call themselves superior.
If the project of Negro was to lay out a panoramic history of black life and struggle across continents, using the tools of ethnography, among others, it was also a counter-history of Western imperialism and, relatedly, of ‘whiteness’. The last sections of the book prefigure later modes of ‘colonial discourse analysis’ in offering scathing and detailed examinations of the discursive modes and justificatory narratives of imperial apologetics – a kind of reverse ethnography. The Surrealist Group in Paris, for instance, contributed an essay translated by Samuel Beckett, resonantly entitled ‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, which observed: ‘The white man preaches, doses, vaccinates, assassinates and (from himself) receives absolution. With his psalms, his speeches, his guarantees of liberty, equality and fraternity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine-guns.’171 Inverting the usual terms of both ethnography and the civilizing mission, the pioneering Nigerian educationist T. K. Utchay undertakes to examine ‘the most barbarous thing in modern civilisation’; ‘white-manning’, he writes, is ‘a technical word to describe one of the world’s strangest actions ever in existence’ whereby one set of human beings think themselves superior to another simply by accident of a ‘white skin’.172 The term can be extended to those not of a white skin who, nonetheless, defer to white supremacy. ‘White-manning’ is, by definition, an identity politics focused on the entitlements of a particular racial type; it enables a person, ‘by virtue of his white skin, to ask and claim first consideration in every walk of life, in health, in position, in comfort and in luxury’.173 This includes, of course, a far greater cut of the material pie – wages twelve times those of the black man, for instance. ‘White-manning’ is not an inherent quality, Utchay stresses, but in fact an historical response to resistance at the point when ‘the black man wants to share in the natural and unlimited liberty enjoyed by the white’.174 For practitioners of ‘white-manning’, paternalism met with gratitude was acceptable: ‘The picture used to be the figure of a white boy stooping over his willing black pet. The white man pitied and determined to raise the black man’s condition to that of a civilised being, and set himself to work.’175 However, a black person’s claims to being equal were deemed insupportable: ‘How can he be? To me this is insolence.’176
Negro’s interest in universalism as constituted by thick particulars means that the tendency of the anthology is to reject both positivism and radical alterity. The anthology’s critique of colonial discourse is paired with extensively researched and detailed accounts of diverse African cultural resources and political institutions, some of which have been decimated by the colonial encounter, while others could provide the basis for independent polities to draw on. Especially interesting here are the contributions of Cunard’s collaborator on the volume, the young Frenchman Raymond Michelet, whose work features prominently towards the end. In ‘African Empires and Civilisations’, Michelet delineates at great length the tremendous diversity of various African polities and political institutions, taking pains to note, without unduly romanticizing them, that many states ‘enjoyed genuine prosperity’ as well as indigenous industries, several of which were now gone forever.177 ‘ “Primitive” Life and Mentality’ takes on Western colonial renditions of black thought in order to demolish the ‘extenuating’ notion of the inferior negro whose modes of thought and living are utterly different: ‘The system of forcing people to work for the exclusive benefit of their masters, on lands that have been stolen from them and under conditions verging on slavery, if not worse, very soon creates its own ideology, namely, that these people are, by definition, inferior and only receive the treatment they deserve.’178 It is an ideology facilitated by the complete lack of interest in understanding how the indigenes of these stolen lands actually think, since the travellers and colonists who wrote accounts of these cultures were ‘less interested in what a thing meant than in how it looked and how they looked beside it’.179 At best, there is some cursory acknowledgement of the picturesque and the beautiful, but ‘the white men on the spot are in no way concerned with understanding the natives, but only with extracting from them the maximum’; ‘imperialists of learning’ are represented by the likes of one major intellectual who holds forth on the supposed ‘pre-logicism’ of the ‘black mentality’, but ‘has never spoken with an African in his life’:180
In this system the savage appears as a kind of dismantled creature, bound to his environment, his group, food, dwelling, wife or wives, law of his clan, etc., by a variety of ‘mystical participations’, which are presented with the utmost extravagance by M. Lévy-Brûhl and his school. It is on this account, we are informed, that the behaviour of the Negroes is inexplicable and unreasonable … so that it is really nothing, but the old legend dressed up to the latest nines.181
Only by working expropriated land for the European and learning Christian morality is the black person deemed to emerge ‘from their vale of folly and ignorance into the light of pure reason’.182
It is not just Michelet’s attack on questionable stereotyping that is of significance here. More valuable is his refusal of both absolute difference and total equivalence in approaching black cultures – or what Césaire describes as the Western ethnographic ‘insistence on the marginal, “separate” character of the non-whites’.183 Even as he rejects ‘the model white rationalist … as the archetype of truth and practical wisdom’, Michelet charges existing inquiries into black life and thought with making
no attempt to understand how these ‘strange’ thoughts and actions may be an integral part of life itself, profoundly human and often evincing, what is more, an acute perception of reality and an ability to harness its most hidden resources – so acute indeed that it cannot immediately be apprehended by the narrow, cocksure brain of the European (or American) positivist.184
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