Rather than compare degrees of closeness to or difference from ‘the model white rationalist’, Michelet advocates studying specific historical and ecological circumstances in which, for instance, some people ‘were at liberty to develop in themselves to a high degree certain modes of perception and of action, apparently extra-scientific, but symptomatic in effect of reality quite as real, if not more so, as [sic] the positivist world of the European’.185 Michelet is talking here of that which is deemed to be ‘magical’ and ‘bizarre’, pointing out through a series of examples that many beliefs that seem ‘strange have only to be examined with a little attention to become perfectly human and normal’.186 It is possible to identify historical specificities and cultural particularities without taking them to be ‘the sign of a singular mentality’. The mind, in certain circumstances, can relate differently to the magical or the ineffable without therefore being incapable of reason or ratiocination. Scientific and experimental modes of thought are not absent in Africa, as shown by the existence of everything from metal-works and medicine to weapons and weaving looms. Michelet anticipates something of Césaire’s famous polemic against Eurocentric assumptions here: ‘That the West has invented science. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking, which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.’187 Significantly, Michelet diagnoses the widely held colonial belief in the African’s ‘positively chronic inaptitude to learn or receive fresh vigour from any alien source whatsoever’ as a colonial failure – a failure to read resistance to ‘European importations’ as a reasoned and deliberate choice, a failure ‘to realise that their refusal to abandon their way of living does not arise from an inability to assess for what it is worth the substitute proposed to them, but on the contrary from a definite act of preference and with full knowledge of what they are doing’.188 The European Positivist, however, is so hampered by his own pompous imagination and determination to impute inferiority that all evidence, including that of ‘a particularly rapid and accurate ratiocination’, ceases to matter.189 Here, Michelet draws on the example of African languages, both the specific ‘richness of their vocabularies, forms, locutions’ and the existence of equivalents for European terms.190 Given their inability to grasp the complexities of African thought, Michelet asks, could the truth be the inverse of the standard claim – that the real ‘arrested mentality’ is, in fact, that of the European anthropologist? Michelet’s alternative reading of Africans refusing to be treated by a white doctor, frequently cited as ‘another example of Negro stupidity and fastidiousness’, suggests that, once again, it is black resistance that is at stake.191 Drawing on the work of M. Leroy, Michelet points out that many Africans repudiated white doctors because they justifiably associated European medicine with brutality and violence. This was a point Fanon would also make years later in his essay ‘Colonialism and Medicine’: ‘It is necessary to analyze, patiently and lucidly, each of the reactions of the colonized, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are the heart of the drama – that of the impossibility of finding a meeting ground in any colonial situation.’192 In his closing essay to Negro, ‘The White Man Is Killing Africa’, Michelet lists, alongside a comprehensive index of colonial crimes, multiple colonial insurgencies, from French West Africa to British Gambia, and from the Gold Coast to Nyasaland and South Africa, and observes acerbically: ‘THE NATIVES ARE EVIDENTLY SO WELL SATISFIED WITH THE NEW RÉGIME OF PEACE AND HAPPINESS BROUGHT IN BY THE EUROPEANS THAT AMONG THE RISINGS WHICH EACH GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS TO KEEP DARK MAY BE ENUMERATED …’.193 A long list of uprisings follows, from French Guinea and the Ivory Coast to Nigeria, Cameroon and Madagascar.
Towards Ethiopia: Re-centring Africa
McKay pulled his piece from Negro when Cunard told him she could not afford to pay for the work, at which point an extensive correspondence appears to have come to an end along with a budding friendship.194 In a stern penultimate letter, McKay informed Cunard that his own romanticism about literature was ‘different from those nice people’s who ask and expect artists to write, sing and perform in other ways freely and charitably for a cause while they would not dream of asking the carpenter, caterer and others who do the manual tasks to work for nothing’.195 Both Pankhurst and Cunard would go on to become stentorian and committed voices on the British anticolonial left, and both would speak out forcefully against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, as well as against fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain. Pankhurst would excoriate Britain for standing by while ‘Ethiopia was vanquished’, attributing this failure to colonial thinking whereby ‘this is only Africa, this is not a White Man’s country’.196 She would repeatedly insist that the rank and file of the British labour movement had to understand that ‘imperialism is intimately bound up with its own enslavement to the capitalist system. International solidarity is a sentiment which only attains a sturdy growth among those who are convinced that capitalism has had its day.’197 For her, there were clear continuities between anticolonialism and anti-fascism, both of which involved the exercise of violence, governmental and extra-governmental, in the service of the capitalist state. In May 1936, after the invasion of Ethiopia/Abyssinia, Pankhurst launched the New Times and Ethiopia News, which remained in circulation for twenty years and would be a prominent campaigning organ against fascism and colonialism. It provided an important forum for black nationalism, not least in the form of a regular column titled ‘Africa for the Africans’.198 Like Cunard, Pankhurst grasped the value of African history being written by Africans. From the time McKay had been involved in it, her paper provided a forum for black academics and journalists; unlike many on the white left who dismissed Haile Selassie as a feudal relic, she developed a friendship with the emperor, understanding his positive symbolic value for black anticolonial campaigners.
‘Poets are the trumpets that sing to battle.’199 With this in mind, Nancy Cunard hoped to put together another volume after Negro, this time ‘a short symposium of poetry’ that would ‘make a record of the Negro’s rising spirit against oppression’. To be titled ‘Revolution – the Negro Speaks’, the book never materialized, although she drafted and sent out a call for contributions for a collection of poems which, as far as possible, should be ‘inspired by some revolutionary event, some phase of the struggle in Negro history, past and present’.200 Her aim was to commemorate insurgency, revolutionary events and resistance struggles in black history, once again emphasizing the black subject not as ‘slave’ or ‘victim’ but as a ‘revolutionary-born’.201 Cunard would remain heavily involved in the Scottsboro case in the decade that followed, having already launched the Scottsboro Defence Fund in London. She would work as a journalist, like Pankhurst – whose New Times and Ethiopia News she wrote for – frequently filing pieces for the Associated Negro Press, as well as various West Indian newspapers, on topics such as the invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, black intellectuals in Britain, and ‘race relations’. After she died in 1965, alone, depressed and ill, T. K. Utchay would note that he had named a school ‘Cunardia’ after her, and that she would always have a place in African hearts as one who ‘suffered slander, ostracism and loneliness because of us’.202 Whether or not it became, as Mckay hoped it would, ‘the rallying-point for a strong new expression’, Negro is now recognized as ‘ahead of its time, bursting with ideas whose time had only come in the intervening years or have yet to come’.203 Many of those ideas would be elucidated by black intellectuals in the decades that followed. The invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935, involving the slaughter of 275,000 Ethiopians, would also bring together many London-based black intellectuals and their allies, including Jomo Kenyatta, C. L. R. James and George Padmore, who would join the likes of Pankhurst, Bridgeman and Cunard in another coalition, the International African Friends of Abyssinia, that would once again put blackness – and Africa – at the centre of it
s analysis.
8
Internationalizing African Opinion:
Race, Writing and Resistance
Imagine what it meant to us to go to Hyde Park to speak to a race of people who were considered our masters, and tell them right out what we felt about their empire and about them … and yet, as George Padmore would say … ‘Where else but in Britain would you get Lord Bridgeman’s son heading the League against Imperialism, or the daughter of Lord and Lady Cunard – Nancy – associating with people like George Padmore??’
Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within (1973)
No race has been so noble in forgiving, but now the hour has struck for our complete emancipation.
Amy Ashwood Garvey, speaking at a Trafalgar Square rally in 1935
Walking down a London street in May 1935, the young student Francis Nkrumah was feeling dispirited and pondering returning home rather than continuing his onward journey to study in the United States when he ‘heard an excited newspaper boy shouting something unintelligible’.1 As the boy grabbed a bundle of the latest editions, Nkrumah caught sight of the headline on a placard: ‘MUSSOLINI INVADES ETHIOPIA’. He would note famously in his autobiography that this shocking piece of news was all that he needed to overcome his malaise: ‘At that moment, it was almost as if the whole of London had declared war on me personally. For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly realise the wickedness of colonialism … My nationalism surged to the fore.’2
Since Nkrumah was, of course, from the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, what was being evoked here was something far more expansive and powerful than a nationalism of birthplace. He was not alone; there were others in London and beyond, black thinkers and campaigners from across Africa and the Caribbean, who would be galvanized by incidents in Ethiopia. In London they included figures who would, in many cases, become household names across the decolonizing world: C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta, I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, T. Ras Makonnen, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Chris Braithwaite and George Padmore. In many cases, notably Padmore’s, they were socialists and communists disillusioned by the Comintern’s vacillations on the question of imperialism during that period, seeking a way to align anti-capitalism to a serious engagement with questions of race, colonialism and culture. The result was what Brent Edwards has described as a ‘striking shift from the institutions of international communism to a non-aligned effort at “international African” work’.3 London at this historical juncture has been described by Minkah Makalani, in a resonant phrase, as providing ‘a unique incubator for radical black internationalist discourse’.4 In his excellent account of C. L. R. James’s years in 1930s Britain, Christian Høgsbjerg observes that a critical mass of campaigning figures from the African and Caribbean colonies in London led to ‘black, radical, anti-colonialist activists … developing their own alternative counterculture of resistance in the imperial metropolis alongside more directly political campaigning in Pan-Africanist organizations’.5 Crucial to this counterculture was a vibrant black press, a ‘valuable source for understanding the roles played by Blacks in Britain’ during the 1930s and 1940s.6 As a ‘wave of black publications rolled off the presses in the late 1930s’ and ‘harangued’ the British government on a wide range of issues, from Ethiopia itself to the serious Jamaican riots of 1938, they also whetted and sharpened the cutting edge of British criticism of empire.7
Two events were vitally catalysing for that counterculture: the labour rebellions that shook the British West Indies from the 1930s onwards and ‘forced themselves into the consciousness of the people and rulers of the British Empire’, and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (later Ethiopia) which was met by fierce resistance from the Ethiopians.8 Very different in their manifestations, and yet possessed of shared features, between them these struggles helped give a high international profile to anticolonial resistance in both African and Caribbean contexts. After the invasion of Ethiopia, black campaigners held anti-war rallies which were attended by people of various ethnicities, including a ‘substantial crowd of English people’.9 At one, Amy Ashwood Garvey, a dynamic force in the London scene, though lamentably ill-represented in its archives, spoke forcefully to European colonizers: ‘You have talked of “the White man’s burden” … But now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.’10 While excellent work has been done on the contributions of black radicals in London and other European capitals, and on the development of transnational and diasporic networks, by Makalani, Matera, Edwards and Pennybacker among others, further attention needs to be paid to the extent to which this radical – and radicalizing – black counterculture in London drew on actually occurring resistances, learning vital lessons from insurgencies on colonial ground and interpreting them to a metropolitan audience. In doing so, black radicals, positioning themselves as both colonial and British in their London base, developed important tenets of anticolonialism, which in turn shaped the approach of their metropolitan allies. They also sought to create institutions and formal networks which would facilitate anticolonial thought and work in the heart of empire. The theory and practice of self-emancipation now emerged as a necessary corollary to an uncompromising rejection of paternalism, while questions of ‘blackness’, indeed of race itself, became much more salient.
C. L. R. James giving a speech at a rally for Ethiopia in London
This chapter considers the International African Service Bureau (IASB) and its journal, International African Opinion, as metropolitan institutional sites which facilitated the development of an anticolonial counterculture which, while drawing on Marxism, also sought to identify resources for resistance which were embedded in black colonial experiences. While insisting on the specificity of both black oppression and black resistance, this counterculture did not lay claim to incommensurable cultural difference; the task at hand was to reconstitute the grounds of the universal. Gary Wilder’s suggestion that ‘we now need to be less concerned with unmasking universalism as covert European particularisms than with challenging the assumption that the universal is European property’ is relevant here.11 The radicals of the IASB were doing both, calling European and American claims to universalism to account while re-centring Africa and the West Indies in a new cartography of liberation. Similarly, the diversity of lived experiences of race and global race hierarchies could not simply be reduced to epiphenomenal expressions of economic truths. As interpreters of Ethiopian and Caribbean resistance, the most important contribution of black radicals in London may have been to make questions of labour and capitalism central to black anticolonial thought, and, conversely, to make race and culture more fundamental to metropolitan discussions of labour and anti-capitalism. Rather than just ‘translating’ communist categories into ‘the idiom of Pan-Africanism’, the task at hand was one of creating a new language that did not repudiate other vocabularies of critique, but sought to bring them in more strenuous engagement with each other.12 Out of this, would emerge a revitalized collaborative anticolonialism. The collective work of the IASB pointed towards Africa and the West Indies as ‘co-producers’ of modernity, black intellectuals not just being influenced by European thought, but producing knowledge of the world.13
African Emancipation and Black Metropolitan Organizing
All this revolutionary history can come as a surprise only to those who, whatever International they belong to, whether Second, Third, or Fourth, have not yet ejected from their systems the pertinacious lies of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. It is not strange that the Negroes revolted. It would have been strange if they had not.
C. L. R. James, writing as J. R. Johnson
The whole history of British colonial rule has taught that native leaders and masses, be they Africans, Indians or West Indians, are only respected if they agitate for their rights and meet their rulers with courage and dignity. Cringing will get Africans nowhere. Let us stop it.
International African Op
inion, 1939
On 5 December 1934 a shot rang out in a remote part of Ethiopia known as Wal Wal, where a border dispute was underway between the Italian military, which had occupied Somaliland, and Ethiopian soldiers. A heavy fusillade of fire in two directions followed. At the end of several hours, during which three Italian aeroplanes strafed Ethiopian lines, there were 107 dead on the Ethiopian side and thirty on the Italian. Overpowered, the Ethiopians withdrew, but the incident was the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘Abyssinia crisis’, an event that would shake up the tenuous peace then prevailing in Europe and cause a flurry of frantic diplomatic activity. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist leader, would use the episode to clear the way for a full-scale invasion of Ethiopia, then the only country on the continent of Africa not under some form of European colonial rule or, in the case of Liberia, United States protection. Emperor Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari), crowned only a few years earlier, in 1930, would take the fateful but hugely important decision not to follow the path of appeasement urged by Britain, but to lay his case before the League of Nations, stating categorically that, as the maps showed, Wal Wal lay well inside sovereign Ethiopian territory.14 In doing so, he was boldly staking Ethiopia’s claim to equality of status with sovereign European nations and, equally significantly, challenging the league to show that its vaunted universal principles – collective security, peace and order – would be applied beyond Europe. His attempt to hold them to their stated universal commitments would fail signally, and that failure, which enabled Italy to invade his kingdom unchallenged, would reverberate across an outraged West Indies and Africa: ‘Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other’, he pronounced firmly.15 The failure was read, correctly, as a signal that Europe refused to recognize the independent status of a sovereign black African nation – and in doing so, was reifying the status of all of Africa as subjugated, not included in ‘universal’ rights.16 Africans were once again marked as something less than wholly free, which was to be less than fully human. If that status had never been acceptable to the enslaved and the colonized, it was now beyond the realm of possibility, to be challenged unequivocally and by black people across continents.
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