A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library)

by C. L. R. James

  It is not improbable that the strength of the movement he had unloosed took Garvey by surprise. He and his wife covered the country, enrolling members. He built a hall, Liberty Hall, he organized mass demonstrations and congresses. He appointed himself President, Emperor, King and what not, of Africa, and created a string of Negro nobility, and titled followers, from Dukes to plain baronets. He sent deputations to the League of Nations asking for Africa. He embarked on a steamship scheme, the Black Star Line, and actually bought one or two ships that actually made one or two voyages. “The Black Star Line will sail to Africa if it sails in seas of blood.” But program for the Afro-Americans he had none, not even a bad one.

  Despite his militancy, furthermore, Garvey was confused. He attacked imperialism, but he was ready to propound the doctrine that the Negro must be loyal to all flags under which he lives. He viciously attacked Communism and advised the Negro workers against linking up with white workers in industrial struggles. He negotiated with the Ku Klux Klan for the repatriation of Negroes to Liberia. From about 1921 it was already clear that his aims were beyond achievement. But he was a man of great physical courage, he continued to hold great meetings, some of them in Madison Square, with police constantly striving to arrest him, and sometimes succeeding. He indulged in some unsound business schemes. He sent agents to Liberia, but the Liberian Government, satellites of America, would have little to do with them, and it is doubtful if Garvey ever intended to do anything serious. Yet for years he continued to have a huge mass following and exercised a powerful influence on millions of Negroes in America and all over the world. In 1926 he was charged for using the United States mail with intent to defraud. He was convicted, imprisoned, and then deported to Jamaica. There he at once began an evolution the signs of which had long been evident. He quickly made his peace with British imperialism. His movement disintegrated.

  One thing Garvey did do. He made the American Negro conscious of his African origin and created 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 progressive step. But his movement was in many respects absurd and in others thoroughly dishonest. It has resulted in a widespread disillusionment. Unlike Kadalie, he was petit bourgeois in origin and never thought in terms of industrial organization. Yet the Garvey Movement like the I.C.U. in its best days, though it actually achieved little in proportion to its size, is of immense importance in the history of Negro revolts. It shows the fires that smolder in the Negro world, in America as in Africa.

  6

  Negro Movements in Recent Years

  In the British Empire, there have been a series of Negro movements since the Ottawa Conference in 1932. This drove cheap Japanese goods out of the colonies and brought in British just at the time when the blacks were impoverished by the world crisis. The ensuing response to subversive propaganda led to the passing of drastic sedition bills. Thus the colonies have been, in recent years, the scene of revolt after revolt in the West Indies, in West Africa, in East Africa, and Mauritius. Let us take some of these revolts and try to analyze their particular significance.

  The Gold Coast, one of the old colonies, has recently experienced an upheaval. In 1937, in the Gold Coast and in Ashanti, a district in the interior, the cocoa farmers organized themselves against the “Pool” set up by the commercial firms and made up their minds to smash it. Early in 1938 the motor drivers, protesting against heavy fines for trivial offenses (imposed by an African magistrate) struck, and brought motor traffic to a standstill. The boat-boys went on strike. The strike was general, and a boycott of European merchandise was proclaimed. Anyone found buying or selling European imported goods was assaulted, carried before a chief and penalized. Sir Ofori Atta, a typical Government chief, supported the strike, so strong was the pressure of the masses. The population of Cape Coast, a seaport town in the Gold Coast, staged a mass demonstration against a new water-rate. The police tried to interfere and were driven back to the station, which was razed to the ground. The Government ordered police and soldiers to Cape Coast. Their way lay through Saltpond. The people of Saltpond barricaded the road and resisted the soldiers and police, who were driven back. By the time they reached Cape Coast all was calm.

  An extraordinary determination and unity linked the population. An unconfirmed report stated that, being owners of their land, the Cape Coast people gave notice to the United Africa Company, Lord Leverhulme’s combine, to quit, this by way of protest against the water-rate. At the expiration of the notice they forced the stores open and put the goods outside. Owing to the motor strike there were no lorries to take these away, and they were looted.

  Militant as was this movement, yet, as in most of the older colonies, there was not that militancy which thinks in terms of throwing out the British. The West Africans are increasingly proud, nationalistic, jealous of discrimination, but there is no national revolutionary movement. A Cocoa Commission from Britain helped to restore quiet and is preparing a report.

  In the West Indian colony of Trinidad there has been an even more powerful movement.

  The victory of the San Domingo blacks gave the final blow to the slave trade in the West Indies. Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery itself was abolished in 1834, due to the economic decline of the West Indies, the vigorous attacks of the abolitionists, and the support of the new industrial bourgeoisie to whom the privileges of the West Indies sugar planters were detrimental. The great insurrection in Jamaica in 1831 contributed materially to hasten the process. The Negroes in the West Indian islands have therefore developed in a manner peculiar to themselves. The blacks speak French, English or Spanish. They have lost all sense of their African origin and have become Westernized in their outlook. A Negro and Mulatto middle class has emerged. Racial prejudice and discrimination, though by no means abolished, have gradually declined. Though the whites control most of the industries, the Negro middle classes are gradually monopolizing the professions and the civil service. The Negroes are not a minority as in America, are trained in the Western manner, and the whites therefore cannot take undue liberties with them.

  Socially the situation is in no way comparable to that in Central or Southern Africa or the Southern States. In Trinidad a few years ago a white South African was appointed to a post in the civil service. For some reason or other he kicked a black laborer who immediately kicked him back. The South African was charged. The magistrate on the bench, a colored man, fined him. He was made to understand that he was no longer in South Africa, and that if he did not mend his ways, he would be sent to prison. Most of the colonies are governed by the Colonial Office, and driven by the confused, but steady pressure of the masses for improvement, the Colonial Office evades the issue by appointing more and more men of color to the higher posts in the service. The islands produce colored men of great intellectual brilliance who have distinguished careers in the inns of court, the hospitals and in the British universities. The colored middle classes are making great progress. They grumble at racial discrimination, but their outlook is the same as that of the rich whites, and indeed their sole grievances are that they do not get all the posts they want, and that the whites do not often invite them to dinner.

  The real difficulty of the West Indies is the poverty of the masses. The islands have been steadily declining in economic importance. The black and Mulatto intelligentsia sometimes use radical phases, but for the most part are interested solely in their own advancement. The Henry Norman Commission at the end of the last century recommended the break-up of the large estates and the spread of peasant proprietorship, but the officials and the nominated members of the Legislative Councils do not concern themselves with such projects, and malnutrition, bad housing conditions and low wages seemed to be the permanent fate of the Negro masses. The 1929 crisis and Ottawa have increased the burden on the poor. This situation has resulted in growing radicalization of the masses, a sharpening of racial feeling and a growing
social and political tension in the islands. It reached its climax in Trinidad last year [1937], and that the movement assumed the proportions that it did in Trinidad is no accident, and shows how human nature responds to environment, in London, China and Peru.

  Trinidad has a population of some four hundred thousand people, of whom over one-third are Indians, the descendants of men and women brought to the island from India as indentured laborers. Between them and the blacks there is no racial ill-feeling. As in South Africa and America, 1919 was a period of great unrest in the West Indies. There was a general strike of the dockers. They patrolled the town, made business close down, and were at one time in charge of the city. The white industrialists clamored that cruisers should be sent for and the mere landing of armed sailors was sufficient to restore the status quo. There was little organized industry, and as in Barbados, even up to the present day, artisans and unskilled laborers find it difficult to organize themselves. The writer was in the island at that time, and one feature of the disturbances caused widespread comment in informed circles: while the workers were in control of the town, the police were singularly inactive. It was stated that the officer in command was subjected to an inquiry and made good his contention that he could not trust his black policemen to shoot at the black workers. Race feeling is not acute at normal times. Children of all colors are educated together at the secondary schools. Whites, blacks, browns, Indians and Chinese play cricket and football together on afternoons, sometimes in the same team, and the various members of the community turn out to cheer their respective sides. West Indian cricket teams composed of all colors tour England and Australia together without undue friction and with a great deal of friendliness in many cases. But the division of rich and poor is also the division of white and black, and in moments of tension can become very acute. For the same reason, however, the possibility is greater here than elsewhere, that the police might take sides with the workers, and that is an ever present difficulty which is to be solved by the cruiser—as long as cruisers are available.

  Between 1919 and 1937 Trinidad, like the other West Indian islands, has lived an increasingly active political life. Self-government is one of the questions of the day, and the Legislative Council now has elected members. What has created the new Trinidad, however, has been the development of the oil industry, which now employs nearly 10,000 men concentrated in the southern part of the island. Large-scale industry has had the inevitable result of developing a high sense of labor solidarity and growing political consciousness. The slump threw the population into great poverty and the inadequacy of the social services intensified the resultant suffering. The Ethiopian question sharpened the sense of racial solidarity and racial oppression. News of the stay-in [sit down] strikes in France and America was eagerly read by these workers. They found a leader in Uriah Butler, an agitator with a religious bias.

  Butler’s career, despite his religion, is identical with that of many revolutionaries in Western Europe. Since the war the leader of the workers’ movement in Trinidad has been Captain Cipriani, a white man who identified himself with the interests of the black masses and did very fine work on their behalf. His Labor Party is a loose political organization, which protected the industrial interests of the workers as far as it could, agitated for self-government and was for years the only mass political organization in the island. But Cipriani is a reformist. Butler was a member of this party, he wanted militant industrial action and was expelled for holding “Communistic” views and being “extremist.” He went to the South and carried on his agitation among the oilfield workers. In June of last year the oilfield workers staged a stay-in strike for higher wages. The consequences were unprecedented.

  The Government tried to arrest Butler while he was addressing a crowd. The crowd resisted the arrest and the police had to retire. One Corporal King, a Negro (notorious in the district for his hostility to the workers), followed Butler. He was set upon by the crowd, and in attempting to escape, fell and broke his leg. While he lay on the ground he was beaten, oil was poured upon him and he was burned to death. The episode is almost identical with the lynchings of Negroes in the Southern states. King was a black man, but his whole career had identified him with the whites, and reports from the island state that the regrets expressed are not for the burning but that it was not one of “them”—meaning the whites. Later in the day the police were fired upon and a sub-inspector was killed.

  Thenceforth the strike spread. Destruction of property may have been the work of certain hooligan elements, as the official report states, but the strike was complete in Port-of-Spain, the capital, a town of 80,000 inhabitants, which is at the opposite end of the island, some 40 miles away from the scene of the first outbreak. This, the most outstanding feature of the disturbances, is referred to parenthetically in the official report as follows: “The same morning Port-of-Spain, where work at all the industrial establishments had ceased.” The Indian agricultural laborers, who might appear to have little in common with the black proletariat, no sooner saw these blacks in militant action than they too followed them and began to strike. In many parts of the island stoppage of work was complete. The Government sent for one cruiser. But whereas in 1919 the unrest subsided at the appearance of the sailors, much has happened since then, and the people were quite unmoved at the appearance of the first, and even of a second, cruiser. The Governor had taken a strong line at first, but, in the face of the determination of the population, he and one of the leading officials used language hostile to the white employers and attempted conciliation. The Governor has been censured for this and has now retired from the colonial service. His action was probably justified.

  Though the Commission’s report denies it, information from the spot states that race feeling was rampant, and it needed little to precipitate a general attack on the whites. It could hardly have been otherwise, for the Governor himself stressed the importance of the Ethiopian question in sharpening the political tension in the island. The majority of Negroes everywhere have the misguided belief that the blacks of Ethiopia were betrayed by the whites because they were black. The Commission has admitted the grievous condition of the poor in the island, and have thus indirectly justified the strike. What is important, however, is the political awakening which it has crystallized. The Commission’s report merely hints at, but does not state that, the workers demanded the forty-hour week, holidays with pay, and it is stated, though this is not as yet certain, a share of the profits. They demanded equal pay with white men for the same work, they showed their resentment against South African whites who have attempted to treat them in a way to which they have not been accustomed. After returning to work they again went on strike to force recognition of their newly formed union. Captain Cipriani, their idol for years, was not in the island at the time of the strike and spoke against them. They threw him and his party over at once. Trade unions are being formed all over the island, and the advanced workers are clamoring for revolutionary literature of all sorts, by Marx and Engels and other writers on Communism, and literature dealing with the Ethiopian question. In the recent elections, in the key Southern constituency, the workers’ candidate was Mr. Rienzi, an Indian lawyer, president of the new unions. Some of his opponents tried to raise the race question, Negro as opposed to Indian. But Rienzi had fought with them side by side all through the days of the strike. They refused to be distracted. They and their leaders poured scorn on the racial question and proclaimed that the issue was one of class. Thus these workers have almost at a single bound placed themselves in the forefront of the international working class movement. The Government is now seeking to pass a drastic bill imposing heavy penalties for the mere possession of radical far less revolutionary literature. The white employers are calling for soldiers to be stationed in the island. It is certain that racial feeling will gradually take a less prominent part in the struggle than hitherto, for the Negro middle classes are already aligning themselves and making the issue clear. They are with the
whites. Industrialization has been the decisive factor here. While it is unwise to predict, the clamor for literature shows how strong is the urge to know what is happening abroad and follow suit. Already a local pamphlet has been written on Fascism. The movement is clearly on its way to a link with the most advanced workers in Western Europe. This is a stage far beyond the Gold Coast. This study was already in proof when the Jamaica revolt forced the appointment of a Royal Commission. The Negroes in British Guiana are also simmering with unrest. In Trinidad mass demonstrations are still taking place. The history of all these territories is in essence the history of Trinidad. Consideration of the remedies is beyond us but they will need to be far-reaching.

  The third and last of the recent revolts selected for treatment here took place as far back as 1935. Yet it is of more importance than the other two. Trinidad is but a small island in the West Indies, the coastal districts of West Africa are but a fringe to the millions of Negroes in Central, East and Southern Africa. The report of the Commission of Inquiry on the revolt of the Rhodesian miners in 1935 gives a very clear picture of what is going on in the mind of the great masses of Africans.