It was formed in 1919 by a Nyasaland native, Clements Kadalie, and the organization began with only twenty-four members. Without any help in finance, experience or encouragement, suffering persecution and arrest, these built a movement which matured in strikes, demonstrations and battles with the police, while white South Africa watched its incredible growth with alarm. Kadalie, as a native of Nyasaland, could easily have been deported, but somehow he escaped this fate and drove his movement forward.
The first sign of the I.C.U.’s real strength was the Port Elizabeth strike of 1920. The Port Elizabeth workers, mainly unskilled laborers, had demanded and obtained an increase of sixpence a day. In February 1920, a branch of the I.C.U. was formed in Port Elizabeth. This demanded a further increase of sixpence a day and as a consequence of fresh agitation, the workers obtained it. But this did not satisfy them and, on the advice of Kadalie, the President of the I.C.U., they advanced a demand for a minimum daily wage of ten shillings for unskilled male workers and seven shillings and sixpence for adult females. Meetings were held all over the district by the I.C.U., at which workers were called upon to insist on this demand even to the point of a strike. This I.C.U. agitation had a tremendous effect. Feeling was running high and the influence of Kadalie was increasing. At one meeting, the feelings of the workers were so aroused that some made a physical attack on Dr. Rubusama, also a Negro, who was known to be opposed to Kadalie. Dr. Rubusama was only rescued by Kadalie who, on seeing his danger, immediately intervened.
The police, in the meanwhile, were looking for an excuse to arrest Kadalie. This attack on Dr. Rubusama was used as a pretext. Rubusama made an affidavit concerning the attack on him, and Kadalie was arrested on October 23, 1920, without a warrant.
When news of the arrest became known, the workers congregated in the nearest square. A meeting was held and a deputation was sent to the police to ask for the release of Kadalie on bail. The chief of police refused. When the deputation returned with this news the meeting resolved to send an ultimatum to the police: unless Kadalie was released by five o’clock, they would release him themselves. The South African native was openly challenging not only white employers but the actual forces of the state.
The whole police force was armed. The railway police were called out. In addition, European volunteers were armed and stationed in front of the police station where Kadalie was detained. By five o’clock the demonstration numbered 3,000 people.
The mounted police were ordered to charge, but they were unhorsed. An attempt was made to disperse the crowd by means of a water-hose. But the masses replied with stones and other missiles. At this stage two shots were fired and the crowd began to retreat. It was at this moment, while the crowd was running, that the police opened fire upon it. The official Commission of Inquiry stated:
It is established beyond doubt that immediately after the first shots were fired, the crowd stampeded in all directions, and that a rapid and sustained fusillade was directed on the retreating crowd from the police station for sixty seconds, as alleged by some witnesses, or two minutes as alleged by others. One civilian admitted firing fifteen shots; another as many as thirteen shots, with the most fatal results, viz.: one European and twenty-three natives or colored males were killed or died of wounds. Native and colored males wounded, forty-five; females, one. European females wounded, four. Total casualties, seventy-six. Only two of these were shot immediately in front of the steps, the others fell in different parts of the street away from the police station, as far as Castle Street, 100 yards distant.
Obviously the police were seizing the opportunity to smash the workers’ organization once and for all. The net result, as so often, was to increase its strength.
So powerful a force did the I.C.U. become among the Bantu and colored people that Hertzog, a future Prime Minister of South Africa, thought it profitable to seek the support of the I.C.U. in the Cape Province. He sent a very cordial letter to Kadalie, enclosing a donation to the I.C.U., saying that he was sorry that he could not do more.
Of course, immediately Hertzog gained power, he persecuted the I.C.U. even more fiercely. But the movement continued to grow, and in 1926 it reached its peak. In that year it had a membership of 100,000. Teachers were leaving the profession to become agents of the I.C.U. In remote villages of South Africa one could find a representative. Many who had not joined rallied to it in time of difficulty.
It will be difficult to over-estimate what Kadalie and his partner, Champion, achieved between 1919 and 1926. Kadalie was an orator, tall, with a splendid voice, and at his meetings he used to arouse the Bantu workers to great heights of enthusiasm. At the conclusion of the speech his hearers were usually silent for some seconds before they were able to begin the applause. Champion was the very opposite of Kadalie in everything. More backward in outlook than Kadalie, who was aware of the working-class movement as an international force, he saw very little beyond Zululand, or Natal, and he was more organizer than orator.
The real parallel to this movement is the mass uprising in San Domingo. There is the same instinctive capacity for organization, the same throwing-up of gifted leaders from among the masses. But whereas there was a French Revolution in 1794 rooting out the old order in France, needing the black revolution, and sending out encouragement, organizers and arms, there was nothing like that in Britain. Seen in that historical perspective, the Kadalie movement can be understood for the profoundly important thing it was.
After 1926 the movement began to decline. It could not maintain itself for long at that pitch without great and concrete successes. It was bound to stabilize itself at a less intense level. 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. There was misappropriation of the funds. He saw the necessity for international affiliation. But though the constitution of the organization condemned capitalism, he would not affiliate to the Third International. The white South African workers refused his offer of unity, for these, petit-bourgeois in outlook owing to their high wages and the social degradation of the Negro, are among the bitterest enemies of the native workers. Kadalie came to Europe, affiliated the I.C.U. to the International Federation of Trade Unions and sought the help of left-wing labor members. He took back a white man, Ballinger, to assist him. But the decline of the I.C.U. continued. The organization split. Today the two sections are but a shadow of the early I.C.U., and Kadalie keeps a cafe, in Port Elizabeth, where formerly the workers had been shot down while demonstrating for his release.
5
Marcus Garvey
During the very period, 1919–1926, that the natives in South Africa were organizing themselves, a similar movement was taking place among the Negroes in America. A large population, more literacy, the greater wealth of the Negro and greater facilities for publicity and communication, made this movement the biggest Negro organization yet known. It is known as the Garvey Movement.
To understand the Garvey Movement one must have some idea of the status of the Negro even in modern America. The period of “reconstruction” did not last long and the Southern whites soon re-established their old domination on the new basis of Negro freedom. In many areas they prevented the Negro from voting, either by inventing fantastic qualifications such as those which find a Negro graduate of Harvard or Yale unable to exercise the franchise through lack of education; or quite simply by parading armed men before the polling booth and warning the Negro what would happen to him if he attempted to come near. In states such as Texas, the Negro is made to feel his color at every turn. He cannot ride in the Pullman cars, he must sit at the back of the streetcars; in certain areas he can own only a Ford car; the white always has the right of way in the street. The Negro must make up his mind that his black skin makes him a servant and he must remain so. Periodically, some years at the rate of more than one a week, a Negro is lynched by a howling mob of white citizens. In the more liberal North there is race prejudice, though it is not nearly so ac
ute.
Both in North and South, certain Negroes have emerged as businessmen, professional men, artists, writers, musicians. Some of them do astonishingly well and the circle of Negro intelligentsia is daily increasing. Yet the prevailing attitude to the Negro is one of strong and sometimes ferocious prejudice.
Before the Negro can struggle intelligently against this, in order that the layman may appreciate the efforts which have been made and the possibilities of success, it is necessary to inquire more closely as to the origin of this powerful prejudice which inevitably awakens kindred feelings in the Negroes. There is no question here as in Africa of alien civilizations. The American Negro, in language, tradition and culture is an American. He was in America almost from the beginning and he has helped to make the country what it is. Hostility to him on the part of the whites is not a question of physiological repugnance. The numerous half-breeds, the unceasing miscegenation in America as well as in so strong a fortress of race prejudice as South Africa, prove this. That the color bar exists only in daylight is a proverb common in Africa as well as in America. A Southern white woman will be nursed by a Negro wet-nurse, and will pass her childhood days with Negro servants. As she grows up she will be taught to ride by a black groom. Black servants will cook her food and wait on her at table. A young Southern woman, it is common knowledge, often has far more confidence in her old black nurse than in her own relations. A black chauffeur will drive her into town. She enters a restaurant, sees a Negro sitting 40 feet away having a meal, and shrieks that he must be put out. Obviously she feels no physical repugnance. This is a social and political question. The Negro must be kept in his place. This is the main reason for the Southern persecution of the Negro. As worker, as tenant-farmer, as sharecropper, he is at the mercy of his employer and he must be terrorized into acceptance of whatever conditions of life are offered to him.
What are the reasons usually offered for the attitude of the Southern whites toward Negroes? Sex is the one most usually urged: the Negro cannot subdue his passion for white women. Yet of 130 Negro revolts that took place between 1670 and 1865 in America, there is not a single case recorded of a white woman being raped by the revolting slaves. In the West Indies, since the abolition of slavery, there has not been one single case of rape or sexual assault by a Negro against a white woman. While the thousands of cases of Negroes lynched in America during the last halfcentury, charges of rape have been made in only twenty percent of cases. With what justification some of these charges have been made the Scottsboro case has within recent years given a glaring example. It is not strange that this is so. Sir Harry Johnston after his vast experience of Africa shows on what ground similar agitation has been raised against African Negroes:
There is, I am convinced, a deliberate tendency in the Southern States to exaggerate the desire of the Negro for a sexual union with white women and the crimes he may commit under this impulse. A few exceptional Negroes in West and South Africa, and in America, are attracted towards a white consort, but almost invariably for honest and pure-minded reasons, because of some intellectual affinity or sympathy. The mass of the race, if left free to choose, would prefer to mate with women of its own type. “When cases have occurred in the history of South Africa, South-West, East and Central Africa, of some great Negro uprising, and the wives and daughters of officials, missionaries and settlers have been temporarily at the mercy of a Negro army, or in the power of a Negro chief, how extremely rare are the proved cases of any sexual abuse arising from this circumstance! How infinitely rarer than the prostitution of Negro women following on some great conquest of their whites or of their black or yellow allies! I know that the contrary has been freely alleged and falsely stated in histories of African events; but when the facts have been really investigated, it is little else than astonishing that the Negro has either had too great a racial sense of decency, or too little liking for the white women (I believe it to be the former rather than the latter) to outrage the unhappy white women and girls temporarily in his power. He may have dashed out the brains of the white babies against a stone, have even killed, possibly, their mothers, or taken them and the unmarried girls as hostages into the harem of a chief (where no attempt has ever been made upon their virtue), but in the history of the various Kaffir wars it is remarkable how in the majority of cases the wives and daughters of the British, the Boers, and the Germans, after the slaughter of their male relations, were sent back unharmed to white territory.
All Negroes are aware of the mass of lies on which the prejudice is built, of the propaganda which is designed to cover the naked economic exploitation. But the Negro and his white friends have little chance to stem the propaganda. The main organs of publicity are in the hands of the whites. The millions who watch the films always see Negroes shining shoes or doing menial work, singing or dancing. Of the thousands of Negro professional men, of the nearly two hundred Negro universities and colleges in America which give degrees in every branch of learning, and are run predominantly by Negro professors—of this the American capitalist takes good care that nothing appears on the screen.
Thus the American Negro—literate, Westernized, an American almost from the foundation of America—suffers from his humiliations and discriminations to a degree that few whites and even many non-American Negroes can ever understand. The jazz gaiety of the American Negro is a semi-conscious reaction to the fundamental sorrow of the race. Often lynching is not the spontaneous madness of a crowd, but a demonstration carefully organized and announced in the press as being fixed for the next day. The American whites will burn a Negro alive. Less than ten years ago a crowd of white men, women and children danced round a burning Negro singing “Happy days are here again.” Little by little the Negro in the South, particularly in the towns, is fighting his way to better conditions. But the continuity of white policy is unbroken from 1650 to 1930. The Negro must be kept down. That is the background of Negro American life.
During the [1914–1918] war thousands of Negroes emigrated from the South to the North where there was work to be had, high pay, and racial discrimination was less offensive. Negro soldiers fought in the war and suffered not only from the race prejudice of their own officers, but, welcomed by the French, saw the American whites, by word and deed and written memoranda, seek to poison the French against them. So fiercely did the white Americans attack them that the French asked to take them over. The black regiment was brigaded with a French division and fought as a French unit. The first American to win the Croix-de-Guerre was a Negro. The regiment fought with great gallantry and when the war was over the French General Staff, appreciative and courteous according to their lights, gave these visitors the honor of being the first allied regiment to march into German territory. This did not make the blacks love the Americans any better. They came home bitter and disillusioned, to find that they had shed their blood in the war for democracy and faced the same undemocratic conditions as before.
In August 1914, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican Negro, a printer, and Amy Ashwood, his friend, almost a schoolgirl, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Kingston, Jamaica. They were the only members, and she appointed him the President, and he appointed her the Secretary. They carried on propaganda in Jamaica for two years, and then Garvey went to the United States, the Mecca of all West Indian Negroes before the slump. Amy Ashwood went to New York to meet him in 1918, and the U.N.I.A. then had seventeen members. Garvey spoke and agitated, and by 1919 he had about 5,000 members attached to his organization. Then he got arrested for libeling the Assistant District Attorney of New York. Negroes all over America were suddenly aware of him. The soldiers were coming back home, bringing their bitterness and their money. There was a boom and Negroes shared in it. Revolution was in the air, and the Negroes were ready for revolution.
There has never been a Negro movement anywhere like the Garvey Movement, and few movements in any country can be compared to it in growth and intensity. By 1920 it was proportionately the most powerful mass
movement in America. Supporters of Garvey have claimed that the U.N.I.A. membership in 1920 reached three million, and Garvey himself claimed in 1924 six million. The latter figure is certainly exaggerated, for that would have meant at least half of the total Negro population of America at that time. That nine-tenths of the Negroes in America were listening to him is probable, and as far as can be gathered, from very insufficient data, he may well have had two million members already in 1920. Money and members poured in from every state in America, from all over the West Indies, from Panama. Negroes sold their dearest possessions to send money to Garvey. His name rolled through Africa. The King of Swaziland told a friend some years after that he knew the names of only two black men in the Western world: Jack Johnson and Marcus Garvey.
What was Garvey’s program? Back to Africa. The Negroes must have Africa back for themselves. They would go and settle there and live in Africa as free and happy as Europeans lived in Europe and white Americans in America. How were they to get Africa back? They would ask the imperialists for it, and if the imperialists did not give it, they would take it back. That was in essence all that Garvey had to say. True, he attacked lynching, he formulated militant demands, equal rights for Negroes, democratic liberties, etc. But the program was essentially: Back to Africa.
It was pitiable rubbish, but the Negroes wanted a leader and they took the first that was offered them. Furthermore, desperate men often hear, not the actual words of an orator but their own thoughts. Daniel O’Connell preached the Repeal of the Union [in Britain], but the large majority of Irish peasants thought in terms of the expulsion of the British and the seizure of the land. And Garvey was a man of exceptional gifts. He was an orator, at his best a very great orator indeed, opportunist to the bone, skillful in tuning his words to his audience. But his words were always militant, and the Negroes listened, paid their money and waited. All the things that Hitler was to do so well later Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized stormtroopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades, and kept order and gave color to his meetings. He understood what was then supposed to be the psychology of the Negro with his childlike mentality. (But this was before some of the greatest peoples in Europe were swept off their feet by the same antics and promiscuous promises.) And while Garvey whipped up his audiences, like Hitler, he organized his millions of adherents with a German thoroughness.
A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Page 10
