Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  One of the first texts to make this case with some force was A History of Negro Revolt, James’s exploratory companion to his monumental The Black Jacobins. It was a lengthy pamphlet produced in 1938 for Raymond Postgate’s FACT magazine, in which James detailed the continuity of the many attempts of the Negro ‘to free himself from his burdens’ in Africa, America and the West Indies. ‘Negroes have continually revolted’, James notes, beginning his treatise with ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, that in Saint-Domingue in 1791–1804: the Haitian Revolution.136 While he attributes the success of that great rebellion, as he does in his later, more famous work, to the scaffolding provided by the French Revolution, here he makes a more controversial claim: ‘The success of the San Domingo blacks killed the West Indian slave-trade and slavery.’137 It is less the case, James suggests, that insurgent slaves ‘embraced’ a revolutionary doctrine from Europe, than that the French Revolution provided a ready-made language as well as material support for aspirations that were already there but had been kept in check by the degradation and violence of the slave system. With their revolution, ‘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’.138 Rebellion itself, James stresses repeatedly, is rooted not in systems of thought but in a human response to intolerable conditions: ‘First of all, as we have seen, the Negro was no docile animal. He revolted continuously.’139 The persistence of this spirit could be documented in multifarious forms of resistance, from Sierra Leone and the Gambia to Nigeria, Nyasaland and the Union of South Africa. In the case of ‘the extraordinary women’s revolt’ of Aba, Nigeria, in 1929, in which over fifty women were killed, the rebels were protesting taxes levied on their work by chiefs under so-called ‘indirect rule’: ‘The women seized public buildings and held them for days. The servants refused to cook for their white masters and mistresses and some of them made the attempt to bring the European women by force into the markets to give them some experience of what work was like.’140 It was only in the wake of this unprecedented uprising that a more widespread agitation ensued, other workers also refusing to pay taxes and demanding redress for their economic and political grievances. Another form of rebellion, James observes, was religious in form but deeply anti-European in nature: ‘Such education as the African is given is nearly always religious, so that the leader often translated the insurrection into religious terms.’141 As Walter Rodney indicates, James stressed that the language of religion which inflected such revolts ‘should not obscure the fact that they sprung from such things as forced labour, land alienation and colonial taxation’.142 One such was the Chilembwe uprising in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), in which coffee estate workers rose up against syndicates that maximized profit and offered no development in return, whether in the form of schools or hospitals or missions. In the Belgian Congo, such resistance took the form of leaving European-controlled churches in favour of independent African ones under the leadership of Simon Kimbangu.143 In Kenya, the movement named after Harry Thuku agitated in more secular terms against high taxation and forced labour, among other grievances, meeting with suppression at the hands of the King’s African Rifles.

  The value of James’s work from this period, Rodney noted, was that it gave African freedom from colonial rule a backstory, allowing the resistant consciousness of contemporary Africans to be ‘heightened by knowledge of the dignity and determination of their foreparents’; to ‘give historical depth to the process of resistance’.144 Silences in colonial history about the fact of rebellion proliferated through the first half of the twentieth century. Underscoring the significance of James’s work, in an observation arguably applicable to the the IASB’s output as a whole, Rodney reminds us that ‘African resistance to European colonization was not supposed to have existed as far as colonialist scholars were concerned’.145 For James, such silences were facilitated by omissions in the historical records: ‘The British send out their punitive expeditions against revolting tribes and do not necessarily mention them in the annual colonial reports. But if the revolt awakens public interest, a commission will investigate and make a report.’146 He compares the organization of South Africa’s Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), which undoubtedly achieved great momentum in its first years, to the Haitian Revolution: ‘There is the same instinctive capacity for organization, the same throwing-up of gifted leaders from among the masses.’147 The dimension of self-emancipation, he suggests, might be even more relevant here given that there was nothing radical happening in Britain, like the French Revolution in the Haitian case, ‘needing the black revolution, and sending out encouragement, organizers and arms’.148 In the eventual – and, for James, inevitable – decline of its leader, Clements Kadalie, was the lesson that intellectual heft was needed for movements to succeed; what ultimately doomed the ICU was that Kadalie ‘lacked the education and the knowledge to organize it on a stable basis – the hardest of all tasks for a man of his origin’.149

  While he appreciated and drew attention to the indigenous dimensions of black revolt, James in this work was scathingly critical of Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist movement. He nonetheless understood it in terms of a misdirected articulation of sincerely felt liberationist impulses. Though James dismissed Garveyism as ‘pitiable rubbish’ and demagoguery, he was able to concede that ‘desperate men often hear, not the actual words of an orator but their own thoughts’, particularly when they are looking for a leader.150 For all that Garvey is a proto-fascist and chauvinist, and in James’s acidic rendering a ‘hare-brained’ schemer and a ‘dishonest’ anti-communist ‘reactionary’, he has to be credited with creating ‘for the first time a feeling of international solidarity among Africans and people of African descent. In so far as this is directed against oppression it is a positive step.’151 The impulse to achieve human freedom runs deep and wide across Africa, James suggested – a fact obscured by misleading colonial representations of many revolts as merely labour strikes that had got out of hand. Reading a powerful ‘native translation of the call for the strike’ written by one G. Lovewey, James observes that its language goes well beyond a ‘mere appeal to strike’, being rather ‘a summons to relentless struggle with mortal enemies’:152

  Listen to this all you who live in the country, think well how they treat us and to ask for a land. Do we live in good treatment, no; therefore let us ask one another and remember this treatment. Because we wish on the day of 29th April, every person not to go to work, he who will go to work, and if we see him, it will be a serious case.153

  As surely as the Haitian blacks destroyed the French plantocracy, if world events were to give them a chance, many of the currently colonized, now too ready to resist to the death, ‘will destroy what has them by the throat’.154 Speaking of the influence of the secret religious movement, Watch Tower, on the Northern Rhodesian workers, James again stressed the ways in which religion had ‘become a weapon in the class struggle’, and was able to ‘represent political realities and express political aspirations far more closely than programmes and policies of parties with millions of members, numerous journals and half a century of history behind them’.155 The Executive Committee summarized the situation in an open letter to the workers of the West Indies:

  Writing in The Tribune (June 17, 1938), Mr Bevan said: ‘A short time ago we had a discussion in the House of Commons on Labour in Trinidad. Tuesday we discussed Jamaica. Why? Because the conscience of Britain is disturbed at the sufferings of the natives in our colonies? No. It is because these natives have at last rioted against British masters. Even now, it is not their sufferings that are stirring us to laggard action. It is their protests. If they cease their protests, we will cease giving redress.

  If the work of the International African Opinion and its associated writers in parsing African and Caribbean insurgencies wa
s vital in its own right, contributing powerfully to the anticolonial discourse of the coming decades, it is worth noting that these uprisings were not without wider metropolitan impact. Ken Post asserts: ‘They shook the whole colonial system so severely that it was never quite the same again.’156 For all that sections of the British media attempted to explain away the convulsions as ‘one of those sudden explosions of excitement to which negro labour suffering from a sense of grievance is notoriously prone’, it also became clear that imperial rule would have to make significant changes in its mode of operation.157 Even the secretary of state for the colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, would admit that the disturbances in Jamaica pointed to a ‘condition [which] constitutes a reproach to our Colonial administration’.158 Questions were raised in parliament by Arthur Creech Jones, an IASP patron, and others (on 12, 16 and 25 May 1938), while the Trades Union Congress created a colonial advisory committee to study conditions in the colonies.159 Even Stafford Cripps, pilloried in the pages of the IAO for advocating ‘trusteeship’ in Africa, would announce in 1938 when he was a guest at the founding of Jamaica’s People’s National Party:

  I want to see the new peoples of the world rise in their power giving us a new and great and glorious, more humane civilization, and I hope that in the development of your new political life you will all develop the cultural life of the Jamaican people until here in the Caribbean there grows, perhaps small at first but gradually widening in its influence, a new culture, new people, a new humanity which can gradually take over the reins of government from the dying and decadent peoples of Western Europe.160

  Others, like the British socialist Arthur Calder-Marshall, would warn that unless significant changes were enacted, ‘troubles such as have occurred in Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and British Guiana will become more and more frequent’.161 As the influential liberal economist from the Caribbean island of St Lucia, W. Arthur Lewis, remarked in a pamphlet he wrote for the eminently moderate Fabian Colonial Bureau, ‘even before the emancipation of slavery the free coloured people were in constant conflict with the plantocracy, and throughout the nineteenth century that conflict continued’.162 Workers had become ‘very bitter and militant’ over long periods of unemployment, wage cuts and increased taxation, and there was a tendency in official reports to describe them erroneously as ‘hooligans’.163 The political consciousness of West Indian workers had been increased by the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Lewis tells his readers, making them ‘more willing to take their fate in their own hands’, and news of industrial action in France and America had also galvanized them.164 Lewis’s pamphlet remains a usefully succinct account of the unfolding of the rebellions, beginning with St Kitts in 1935, moving on to St Vincent, St Lucia, Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. He notes that the resultant formation of trade unions and labour legislation is less significant than the fact that ‘on the political front nothing short of a revolution has occurred’, with the working classes rather than the middle classes setting the agenda.165 In addition to the British government being ‘forced to appoint a strong Royal Commission specifically to investigate social conditions’, the concessions obtained were not insignificant: fixing minimum wages, making land settlements, expenditure on public works, slum clearances, old-age pensions, and workmen’s compensation.166

  If the British left were largely preoccupied by the growing threat of fascism and the Spanish Civil War during this decade, the political and intellectual stage was nonetheless being set for the rapid advance of decolonization in the post-war period. The criticisms of benevolence and gradualism would gather force in the 1940s, as would the rejection of such concepts as ‘trusteeship’. The ‘legend that the British Colonial Office patiently “taught” the Africans of the Gold Coast to govern themselves is a bubble which badly needs pricking’, James would observe in his later reflections on George Padmore and his protégé, Kwame Nkrumah.167 Indeed, James would go so far as to suggest that his own argument in The Black Jacobins had to be revised as it became increasingly clear that self-government and independence in Africa would come not from the metropolitan proletariat rising up against capitalism, but from ‘struggle in Africa itself’, led by black personalities.168 The IASB merged with the newly formed Pan-African Federation, which hosted the famous Pan-African Congress of 1945 – an event that could be said to have closed one era in the history of Afro-Caribbean anticolonialism and heralded another. Looking back on the period, Ras Makonnen recalls: ‘We were operating in the midst of a radicalism unmatched in Europe, but it was a gay period, a period of purposefulness. You had the feeling that the truth was being told once and for all. Britain was really in a ferment – seething, in fact, like an African pot.’169 Determinate efforts at sustained campaigning and organized institutions of consciousness-raising and education would continue into the war years and beyond, with conscious endeavours to forge crossracial and cross-political alliances. This involved an identification of common cause, but also an engagement with fractures and tensions. The next chapter explores more closely the role of IAO editor and centrifugal force George Padmore in London, not just as a catalyst for black radical organization, but also in putting pressure on liberal and left formations – specifically the British dissidents associated with the Independent Labour Party and its journal, the New Leader.

  9

  Smash Our Own Imperialism:

  George Padmore, the New Leader

  and ‘Colonial Fascism’

  It is only when there is some riot in Jamaica, or shooting in Palestine, or unrest on the North-West frontier, that the average Briton is made even remotely conscious of his responsibility toward the hundreds of millions of coloured people over whom the British ruling class speciously claim to be exercising a benevolent trusteeship.

  George Padmore (1939)

  Professor J. B. S. Haldane once asserted that he would rather be a Jew in Berlin than a Kaffir in South Africa. I can well believe him. It is no exaggeration to say that Hitler and his Gestapo sadists are merely applying, with the usual Germanic efficiency, in Poland and other conquered countries, colonial practices borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the British in Southern Africa.

  George Padmore (1941)

  Comrade George Padmore is a great intellectual force and the voice of our negro brothers.

  Arthur Ballard (1939)

  A few years after the publication of Negro, Nancy Cunard and George Padmore were involved in a second literary collaboration. Structured as a dialogue between them, The White Man’s Duty was published in 1942 as a pamphlet in a series produced by the International African Service Bureau. The ‘firm of Cunard and Padmore’ had produced ‘a bouncy half-caste’ to set tongues wagging, Padmore joked.1 Subtitled ‘An analysis of the colonial question in light of the Atlantic Charter’, the pamphlet invoked the manifold contradictions of an Allied document which made grandiose claims for a war of freedom against fascism without addressing Britain’s imperial holdings and their claims to democracy and freedom.2 Targeting a white British readership, The White Man’s Duty drew attention to the implications of Winston Churchill’s assertion that the charter’s aims of restoring sovereignty, self-government and national life did not apply to ‘peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown’ in quite the same way as it did to Europeans formerly under Nazi domination.3 For those under British rule, the only option was ‘progressive evolution’ to self-government – in other words, gradualism. The conversation between Cunard and Padmore also highlighted two other aspects of anticolonial discourse that had been growing in visibility through the ferment of the 1930s. The first was that such tendentious claims about the provenance of ‘freedom’ did not go unchallenged by colonial subjects – a fact which comes ‘as a shock and a surprise to the powers-that-be’.4 The colonized, Padmore noted, were ‘no longer satisfied with just the expressions of goodwill and the suggestions of better things in the by-and-by’.5 The second point, articulated by Cunard, who extolled Forster’s A Passage to India and Leo
nard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle as she did so, was that the time had come for those Britons ‘hating all race complexes’ and who ‘don’t get much of a hearing as yet’ to make their voices heard.6 They were those who genuinely sought exchange, espoused ‘human values’, and were willing to put ‘a bit of love into things … and a bit of humour’.7

  In many ways, of course, Padmore and Cunard themselves embodied the subjects they invoked – he, the defiant and articulate black colonial who would not settle for sops, and she, the intelligent and critically engaged white Briton who sought to forge solidarity with the colonized beyond the distorting relations of imperialism. What would be needed in the post-war era, as Cunard wrote, was not just reconstruction but ‘a new policy of life for humanity – for the whole of humanity’.8 Despite its proto-Socratic form, the pamphlet comes across as a real dialogue, ‘easy to follow and understand’, in which Cunard acts less as a pupil than as an intelligent partner who seeks to learn from an equal.9 Her extended preface to the text, written with an informed confidence, makes clear that her own grasp of the political terrain of empire and questions of race is derived from a clear sense of the experiences of those at the sharp end. Padmore, for his part, as a ‘specialist in colonial matters’,10 speaks with practised authority as he responds to Cunard’s question: ‘What should be done for the peoples of Africa, of the West Indies, of India, and all British colonial possessions … that the pledges given by our public leaders, if they be carried out, entitle us to expect after peace has been declared?’11 If Cunard sets herself up as the voice of the white progressive, Padmore’s job is to put critical pressure on the hope and goodwill represented in these views, but with an assumption that they are part of a shared endeavour to transcend the limitations of the present. The book addressed its readers directly on the cover: ‘Does the “Colonial Question” mean anything to you? It is one of the most momentous issues of our times, and here, in dialogue form – easy to follow and understand – you will find the facts. It is your duty to know them.’12