Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

It is worth acknowledging that for all the bitterness of the break from the Comintern, ‘the milieu of Third Period internationalism … also allowed Padmore to move towards alternative views of black liberation’ that still drew on Marxism.50 In addition to his associate, Kouyaté, now in Paris, also now blacklisted by the Comintern as a ‘renegade’, Padmore’s broader milieu in London would come to include, among others, C. L. R. James, then chair of the Finchley branch of the ILP; the ‘moderate’ founder of the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), Dr Harold Moody; the Jamaican writer and broadcaster Una Marson; the Guyanan-born Ras Makonnen; the labour organizer from Sierra Leone, Wallace Johnson; and Amy Ashwood Garvey, an important campaigner in her own right.51 West African students were also becoming politicized through the newly formed West African Students Union (WASU); Padmore was in contact with its leading members. ‘We became so well-known’, wrote James, ‘that in time leftist labour groups and unions would write to us for speakers.’52 A counter-discourse was developing – one that protested distorting stereotypes and ‘everyday ridicule’ in representations of Africa (during the British Empire exhibition, for instance) while insisting that analyses and understandings of empire be elaborated from black – Caribbean and African – perspectives.53 While he wrote for British publications and was close to many members of the ILP, Padmore would not ‘ever again join any European or worldwide organisation in which black or colonial peoples did not have the dominant and controlling role’.54 He did, however, direct his energies towards influencing British dissent and calling for solidarity with colonial peoples, constantly seeking ‘a manoeuvre with the Colonial Office, an avenue for some propaganda in the British press’.55

  In the summer of 1934, shortly after Negro was published, Padmore was ensconced at the French country home of one of his fiercest advocates, Nancy Cunard, where she typed out for him the manuscript of what would become How Britain Rules Africa. Cunard later recalled her own deep upset at the way in which Padmore, ‘one of the few people I reverenced for his integrity and very being’, should be vilified by ‘members of the ideology (communism) that I admired also entirely and wholly’.56 She would note, however, in the face of this ‘hideous, unjust crisis’, that communism and an actually existing Communist Party could often be two different things. In the bucolic surroundings of a village near Paris, Padmore – still a Marxist, still committed to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, and insisting to Cunard that Russia remained ‘the great example, the encouragement’ – wrote the book with fierce concentration, shutting out the ‘distress and disappointment’ of his break from the Comintern and the subsequent vilification campaign against him.57 He was supported by Cunard, who wrote to Nnamdi Azikiwe, a mutual friend, that she was ‘enjoying the typing out of his new book’ on the African colonies, and found it ‘fine’: ‘What an indictment!’58 In it Padmore would note that ‘Blacks have no powerful press, control no broadcasting stations, sit in no parliaments of the world, and therefore have no means of voicing their grievances.’59 That did not, however, mean that they were not ‘thinking seriously about the vital economic, political and social problems which confront them’.60 Why should this thinking not be central to metropolitan discussions? As though to prove its own point, the book had a hard time finding a publisher, and was rejected by several before it was finally taken on by Wishart. With Padmore’s permission, a heavily bowdlerized German edition was also produced. Although it annoyed British reviewers, one of whom saw it as an unsparing and unfair attack on ‘everything the white man has done in Africa’, the book was, in fact, also a warning that what was done in the colonies was coming home to roost in the form of fascism:61

  Habits once formed are difficult to get rid of. That is why we maintain that Colonies are the breeding ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today. Therefore, the working class of England and other defenders of the hard-won democratic rights of the British peoples cannot beat back fascism at home and at the same time continue to be indifferent to the intolerable conditions of the overwhelming majority of the coloured people of the Empire who inhabit colonial lands. The fight against fascism cannot be separated from the right of all colonial peoples and subject races to Self-Determination. For any people who help to keep another people in slavery are at the same time forging their own chains.62

  The point, which Padmore would make repeatedly in his journalism, was that British capitalism was not and could not be ‘hermetically sealed up’ in the British Isles: its global character meant that reserve forces of labour were always available to it – a fact which also worked against British labour.63 Even as his book sought to influence Labour’s colonial reform policies, Padmore’s aim was less to appeal to the good sense of Labour politicians than to expose their ‘indifference’ and ‘sabotage’ as part of the problem. Transformation, he suggested, would ultimately derive not from their initiative but from the resistance that was being put up to colonial depredations.

  Padmore’s move away from party vanguardism towards enabling ‘Africans to speak for themselves’64 is perhaps most evident in his engagement with the question of race and his probing of the ways in which race was deployed to undermine class solidarity, which he described unsparingly as ‘the spectacle of the white working class openly collaborating with the capitalists in helping to keep down their black class brothers in return for certain economic advantages and political and social privileges’.65 White workers and mine-owners were the ones, for instance, who demanded a colour bar in that industry. Since, in some places, ‘race is thicker than class’, Padmore made so bold as to say, the Marxian appeal to workers of the world to unite ‘finds no response among the white proletariat’.66 At the same time, a ‘twofold burden – class and race’ – was carried by black workers in the colonies. This not only called into question the claims of the British Empire to being ideologically different from ‘the racial philosophy of Hitlerism’, but also suggested that colonized black subjects had a different kind of war on their hands – one that had to be conducted on two fronts.67 At any rate, it was indisputably the case that, from this point on, ‘the coloured races do not intend to allow the white imperialist nations to trample over them as in the past’.68 Italy’s ongoing unhindered incursions into Ethiopia had been eye-opening in this regard: ‘It has served to reveal before the black peoples of the world who are their friends, and who their enemies’.69 Socialists and vaunted friends and champions of Africans, including ILP leaders like Fenner Brockway, were shown up when they declared that Ethiopian independence was ‘no concern of the British working class’.70 With or without the support of white allies, Padmore asserts bullishly, ‘the Blacks will fight for their country’s independence’.71

  For all its insistence on the specific provenance and scope of black anticolonialism, How Britain Rules Africa is not a separatist document. Indeed, having thanked Nancy Cunard in his acknowledgements for being ‘one of the staunchest and most trusted white friends of the black race’,72 Padmore ends the book by insisting that ‘the fact remains, that all Whites are not our enemies’; many, like their abolitionist predecessors, were ‘struggling against the new slavery – Fascist-Imperialism’.73 He would even suggest that the minds of some in the governing classes might be changed – a prospect James, reviewing How Britain Rules Africa, found improbable: ‘But, astonishingly, he welcomes the appeal of “enlightened and far-sighted sections of the ruling classes of Europe with colonial interests in Africa” to co-operate with Africans. That is madness.’74 James and Padmore were in agreement, however, that the Africans would have to ‘win their own freedom. Nobody will win it for them.’75 Padmore would not have disagreed that cooperation with ‘the revolutionary movement in Europe and Asia’ was vital for Africa, and that ‘each movement will neglect the other at its peril.’76 His book itself is offered as a ‘weapon in the struggle for the new social order’, and ‘to arouse the conscience of the British people, especially the common folks, who are being exploited at “home�
�� by the same classes that oppress the Indians, the Africans, the Chinese and other colonial peoples’.77 The key political shift, however, lay in the prominence of colonial subjects: it was the moral force of the aspirations and actions of the colonized which would serve to rouse white conscience, and not that conscience which would serve to uplift the colonized. If anything, it was the working classes of the metropolitan countries who would remain enslaved and unable, in another echo of Marx’s dictum, ‘to emancipate themselves without the fraternal support of the colonial and subject peoples’.78 Rather than simply condemn as ‘bourgeois-democratic’ the nationalist form taken by the aspirations of colonized peoples, Padmore thought it necessary to make the distinction between ‘colonial-nationalism’ (meaning the nationalism of anticolonalism) and ‘imperialist-nationalism’.79 If a workers’ dictatorship is not the same as a fascist dictatorship, which it is not, then it was ‘stupidly’ mechanical for communists to argue that ‘all nationalisms are the same’.80 Under the circumstances, racial chauvinism in an oppressing class had to be understood very differently from racial solidarity in an oppressed one. Padmore was clear that racial chauvinism was ‘part and parcel of the capitalist system’, and as such, despite his own experience with the Comintern, impossible in a place like the Soviet Union, where it was ‘not in the interest of the new rulers to foster or encourage’ prejudice.81

  Towards the conclusion of How Britain Rules Africa, in a short section on anticolonial insurgency in Sierra Leone, Padmore offers some important reflections on the relationship between aspirations to freedom and Westernization. While Western education could reinforce an appreciation for democratic institutions, in this part of Africa the push for freedom itself derived not from Western influence but from a history of resistance. Sierra Leoneans were descended from North American and West Indian ancestors who had ‘rebelled against chattel slavery’ and, when they migrated to the region, ‘brought with them not only their spirit of rebellion, but ideas of human liberty which they have since jealously safeguarded’.82 The organizational forms used by anticolonial insurgency in the region, whether trade unions or parliaments, may have been Western, but their emancipatory content derived from a history of black rebellion. Where colonial governments proscribed institutions such as trade unions, insurgencies sprang up that were ‘religious in form’ but ‘political and racial in content’.83 (Recall James’s parallel insight about West Indian slaves as ‘the most rebellious people in history’.)84 How Britain Rules Africa ends by explicating how Africa will rid itself of imperialism, citing Lamine Senghor’s fiery speech at the founding Congress of the LAI: ‘The Negroes have slept too long. But beware, Europe! Those who have slept long will not go back to sleep when they wake up.’85 Even if Africa did not yet have ‘a Gandhi or a Sun-Yat Sen’ – lacking, unlike India or China, a native bourgeoisie – Africans had rallied with ‘a tremendous feeling of racial solidarity’ around the flag of the besieged Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, the Italo-Ethiopian conflict acting ‘like dynamite in arousing and consolidating’ this as never before.86 The invasion of Ethiopia could act, Padmore avers, as a general clarion call to commence the final push against European empires. For Padmore, too, events unfolding in Ethiopia could constitute ‘the turning-point in the future relationship between White and Black’.87 He himself would put every effort into making it so.

  ‘Smash our own imperialism’: The Independent Labour Party and the Question of Empire88

  But the ILP is in altogether a different state. Its apparatus is not homogeneous and therefore permits great freedom to different currents. The revolutionary rank and file of the party eagerly seeks solutions.

  Leon Trotsky

  The white natives are going through the same hell that has been the lot of the blacks for centuries.

  George Padmore

  It is correct to say that, in the interwar years, criticism of empire in Britain outside the black radical circles already discussed was emphatically a minority discourse – albeit, on more than one occasion, one that was able to percolate through to and register itself upon public and parliamentary debates. One important forum for the emergence of such dissenting voices in the 1930s was the Independent Labour Party, a socialist formation committed to economic justice – some of whose most high-profile figures, such as Keir Hardie, we have encountered already. Founded in 1893 by a group of socialists including Hardie and Robert Blatchford, the ILP was a core member of the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. Functioning initially as a ‘ginger group’ – a radicalizing lobby – within the latter, the ILP, formally socialist, retained the right to formulate independent positions, most famously taking an anti-war stance in 1914 while the Labour Party voted for military action. Tensions increased in the post-war years, followed by a split and permanent disaffiliation in 1932. At the time of the split, the membership of the ILP was ‘over five times the size of the Communist Party of Great Britain’, and the party had returned five times more candidates than the Labour Party in Scotland.89 Before its influence declined, the ILP had ‘an extensive organisation at both national and local level [and] a well regarded national journal supplemented by many more local publications’.90 These provided an interface, as it were, between black anticolonialists and white British critics of empire; certainly the New Leader’s coverage of foreign affairs, and of colonial issues in particular, was possibly the most extensive among British news media at the time. The ILP was also active in organizing a socialist contingent to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the republican side. The most famous member of this brigade was, of course, George Orwell, who, Christian Høgsbjerg reminds us, met both James and Padmore upon his return from Spain in 1937.91 The editor of the New Leader at this time was Fenner Brockway, who would become a notable figure in post-war British anticolonialism (see Chapter 10). While it is true that, after its disaffiliation from the Labour Party, the direct political influence of the ILP was weakened, ‘the argument that the ILP was isolated and alienated in the 1930s overlooks the intricate networks of collaboration and co-operation between left-wing groups in this period’.92

  Satnam Virdee has noted that in the early decades of the twentieth century – during the race clashes of the post-war period, for instance – the ILP was ‘a party whose members often displayed a deep-rooted, almost unconscious attachment to nationalism … within which they located the struggle for working-class justice’.93 Where it might have challenged working-class racism, ‘the ILP chose instead to accommodate to it’.94 This was, of course, a racialized discourse in which some workers were seen to ‘belong’ to the nation while others did not. In the 1930s, however, a shift within the ILP became discernible, and we must assume that the presence in its wider milieu of black radicals such as James, Padmore, I. T. A. Wallace Johnson and Jomo Kenyatta, writing for the New Leader, had more than a little to do with this change of direction. In the late autumn of 1941, the ILP’s National Council passed four resolutions, the first of which had a dual aim: ‘To establish social justice in Britain and national liberation in the Empire.’95 As Leslie James has noted, though the ILPs membership was circumscribed, especially after its disaffiliation from Labour, ‘it maintained a disproportionately high profile in British politics’, not least through prominent members such as George Orwell and Kingsley Martin.96 It was ‘also the only party on the left willing to take an openly critical stance against Stalin’s rule’.97 From the 1920s onwards, the ILP had strong links with Indian nationalists through Fenner Brockway and Reginald Reynolds, who were close to Jawaharlal Nehru, among others; Nehru wrote occasionally for the ILP’s weekly newspaper, the New Leader. While the New Leader gave substantial coverage to the invasion of Ethiopia in the mid 1930s, the ILP was famously divided on how to oppose it: James, Brockway and others called for sanctions against Italy, while Maxton, McGovern and others in the party’s parliamentary grouping insisted that there should be no intervening in a ‘clash of imperialisms’. James observed bitterly
in the pages of the New Leader: ‘British imperialism will not fight Italy either for Abyssinia or for collective security. It will fight for British Imperialist interests and nothing else.’98 Notwithstanding James’s presence, a few pieces on the Scottsboro case, some dispatches on the situation in Palestine and some coverage of India via Nehru, Reynolds and V. Krishna Menon of the India League, the New Leader cannot be said to have engaged extensively with imperial issues until the late 1930s, with the arrival of Padmore and others associated with International African Opinion. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, much of its coverage in 1936 and 1937 concerned the Spanish Civil War and the threat of fascism. A piece by Kenyatta written in 1937 attempted to make the case for considering the links between fascism and imperialism, noting that such things as ‘democratic rights and civil liberties’ were ‘things unknown’ in British Kenya, where land-grabbing proceeded apace and detention camps were ‘similar to concentration or labour camps in fascist countries’.99 Kenyatta was clear: it was now ‘necessary for British Labour organisations to give more attention to the struggles of the colonial peoples’ if the latter were to ‘be able to distinguish the difference between the imperialist forces and the anti-imperialists’; it was time to cry ‘Down with Fascist rule in the Colonies’.100

  This was a cry that would be amplified relentlessly by Padmore after his arrival in London. Between 1937 and 1945, Padmore wrote a large number of articles for many left-wing British papers, but most notably for the ILP’s flagship paper, which rapidly became the main British weekly to carry articles on the colonial situation. Indeed, the correlation between Padmore’s arrival and the New Leader’s increased, bolder, more sharply critical coverage of colonial issues is striking. Padmore would relentlessly reiterate the call for white working-class solidarity with colonized workers towards the necessarily twinned projects of undoing both capitalism and imperialism. ‘To conceive of getting rid of the capitalists without smashing up the Empire is like trying to make the omelette without smashing the egg’, he noted, urging British workers to see colonial peoples as allies, not competitors.101 Providing painstakingly detailed accounts of events taking place across far-flung locations in the British Empire, Padmore repeatedly made the case for the British working classes to boldly support the claims of colonial peoples, in their own interest as much as anyone else’s. He would frequently make comparisons between contexts, noting, for instance, that popular efforts to achieve political liberties and acceptable working conditions were being resisted by the British in more than one colony: ‘The tragedy of India is being repeated in the West Indies.’102 In the latter, too, constitutional reforms were attempts to deflect rather than resolve long-festering issues, attempts to ‘bamboozle the West Indies, just as the East Indians, but they will succeed no better in one way than in the other’. Padmore’s British journalism relentlessly reiterated a critique of gradualism, benevolence and the wilful refusal to acknowledge what he described as the ‘quieter Fascist tendencies within the British Empire’.103 He had no hesitation in pointing out that the leadership of the ‘opportunist’ and ‘reformist’ Labour Party was also deeply compromised in its relationship to imperialism, being as willing as the Conservatives to ‘apply the most repressive measures to safeguard the interests of British capitalists in the African and West Indian colonies’.104 ‘People who can bomb Indians struggling for independence’, the Labour Party was not very much more committed to the principle of self-determination than the Conservatives.105 Within his old home, the Communist Party, Padmore identified a tragic contradiction between theory and practice, whereby a theoretical critique of capitalism and war did not prevent the pursuit of ‘a policy identical with that of the Labour party … re-echoing all the shibboleths … about “bourgeois democracy” and “collective security through the League of Nations” ’.106 Worst of all, in Padmore’s book, was the Comintern’s division of the imperialist world into the ‘good, peace-loving powers (Britain, France and America)’ and those labelled ‘bad, warlike’ (Germany, Italy and Japan). The net result was that, once again, colonial subjects were expected to ‘forego their struggle for self-determination and line up in defence of “democracy,” something’, Padmore pronounced damningly, ‘they have never known’.107 It also allowed for any ‘kind of imperialistic or reactionary move’ in the metropole ‘so long as the politicians are shrewd enough to dress it up as part of the struggle against Hitlerism. Hitler is a godsend to our home-bred fascists’.108