Northern Rhodesia is a new type of colony. It is like Kenya in that there is no sort of buffer class in between the white settlers and the Negroes. There is, however, an industrial proletariat in the copper mines, and this at once gives native resentment weight. The wages are round about fifteen shillings a month, with the usual complement of segregation and racial discrimination. In October 1935, there was a strike in the mines. The tax had been abruptly raised and the workers protested in the only way they could. Soldiers were rushed to the spot, six natives were killed and twenty-two wounded, and peace restored. From all appearances this is hardly a revolt, but merely a strike which has got out of hand. Such a view would completely misunderstand the present situation in Africa and be wholly false. This, for instance, is a native translation of the call for the strike.
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. Know how they cause us to suffer, they cheat us for money, they arrest us for loafing, they persecute us and put us in gaol for tax. What reason have we done? Secondly do you not wish to hear these words, well listen, this year of 1935, if they will not increase us more money stop paying tax, do you think they can kill you, no. Let us encourage surely you will see that God will be with us. See how we suffer with the work and how we are continually reviled and beaten underground. Many brothers of us die for 22s. 6d., is this money that we should lose our lives for. He who cannot read should tell his companion that on the 29th April not to go to work. These words do not come from here, they come from the wisers who are far away and enable to encourage us.
That all. Hear well if it is right let us do so.
We are all of the Nkana
Africans—Men and Women.
I am glad,
G. LOVEWEY
It is clear that this is no mere appeal to strike but a summons to relentless struggle with mortal enemies. Should world events give these people a chance, they will destroy what has them by the throat as surely as the San Domingo blacks destroyed the French plantocracy. This note of having endured to the limit and being ready to resist to the death occurs in another notice found by accident which states: “Nobody must go to work on the 1st May. All tribes and people. We shall die. They will kill us on Friday. P.W.” The summons to strike makes a reference to the “Wisers far away,” probably those who are more intelligent than we and are guiding us. The official investigation shows that the Watch Tower Movement has some influence among the Rhodesian natives.
Watch Tower is a secret society originating in America. It issues political tracts and pamphlets. It has headquarters in Cape Town and its representatives hold meetings in Rhodesia and for that matter all over South Africa. The Watch Tower bases its teaching on the second coming of Christ. Having on previous occasions foretold the exact date it does not do so any longer, but it confidently expects Christ and thinks that when he comes the government of the world will be delivered into his hands. This is not very different from the doctrine of the missionaries. But Watch Tower goes on to declare that all the governments which are ruling the world, especially Great Britain and the United States of America, are organizations of Satan, and that all churches, especially the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, are emissaries of Satan. Religion thus becomes a weapon in the class struggle.
All the Watch Tower books and pamphlets preach a transparent doctrine. The Devil’s organization is made up “principally of those that rule and that are called the official part of the nation.” Governments are “the Beast,” particularly the seventh World Power, which is Great Britain. “The League of Nations is against God and his anointed, but who is primarily responsible for the League of Nations compact”? The Devil is its father, the British Empire its mother. “Catholicism is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, but the Protestants are even more abominable than Catholics.” Organized Christianity is full of filthiness, full of “hypocrisy, abomination, fornication and filthiness. Under the present form of government the people suffer much injustice and are greatly oppressed. Their taxes are high, while the products of their labor are low in price. The facts are that a great change from an extremely selfish government to one that is wholly unselfish and righteous is just at hand.”
The illustrations preach corresponding sentiments with a greater vigor. One feature for instance displays four people quarreling over a prone body. One is a fat gross European in a dress suit with top hat and hunting crop. The second is a similar figure in a frock coat and with a bag of money. The third is a European apache with a drawn dagger in his hand. The fourth is a fat Bishop with a mitre. Behind is the devil spurring them on. This is supposed to represent Universal War.
It is difficult to say exactly the true influence of the Watch Tower. The writer has been informed by Negro sailors that its influence is widely spread throughout Africa, and that it is the most powerful revolutionary force in Africa today. The gentle Jesus, meek and mild, of the missionaries cannot compete with the Watch Tower God. The Commission which inquired into Rhodesian “disturbances” recognized its importance and devoted many pages to it.
Such are the ideas moving in the minds of these African copper miners. They are absurd only on the surface. They represent political realities and express political aspirations far more closely than program and policies of parties with millions of members, numerous journals and half a century of history behind them. Watch Tower says what the thinking native thinks and what he is prepared to die for.
In his The Native Problem in Africa, Dr. Buell makes one very noteworthy observation:
The extreme credulity with which natives, under the spell of a leader claiming divine or mystical power, will throw away their material interests and recklessly sacrifice their lives is one of the most amazing features of Africa today. The African native is, however, not likely to express this type of fanaticism in a deliberate attack upon European authority. But he has already demonstrated an extraordinary power of passive resistance which will make the problem of control more difficult than if the native population attempted to massacre the Europeans in cold blood.
This apparent fanaticism is the best indication to the true feeling of many millions of Africans. They know what they want, but they do not know what to do. Except in colonies like Sierra Leone and Gambia and to some degree among the Negro intelligentsia of the coastal districts on the West Coast, this passion for liberation must be understood as lying behind every industrial dispute, every political agitation. This is the true Africa. And that is why the whites fear them so much and seek to terrorize them. Dr. Buell wrote over ten years ago. Since then have taken place the Congo revolts already treated which had little or nothing to do with religion. Watch Tower, it should be noted, preaches a fierce resentment against all the imperialist Powers. It does not seek to distinguish between the Fascist and the democratic imperialisms. To the vast body of Africans in Africa such a distinction is meaningless.
The implications of this suppressed but burning resentment reach far. If, for instance, a revolt began in the Congo and spread to South Africa, East Africa, West Africa, the Africans could easily overwhelm the whites if these could no longer receive assistance from abroad. In Nigeria, with a population of twenty millions, there are less than 5,000 white people, and in Lagos, a town of 150,000 people, there are only 1,000 whites. There are many whites in South Africa, which forms a special problem, but the real basis of imperialist control in Africa is the cruisers and airplanes of Europe.
Though often retarded and sometimes diverted, the current of history, observed from an eminence, can be seen to unite strange and diverse tributaries in its own embracing logic. The San Domingo revolutionaries, the black arm in the Civil War, were unconscious but potent levers in two great propulsions forward of modern civilization. Today the
Rhodesian copper-miner, living the life of three shillings a week, is but another cog in the wheels of a creaking world economy, as uneconomic in the twentieth century as a naked slave in the cotton-fields of Alabama a hundred years ago. But Negro emancipation has expanded with the centuries; what was local and national in San Domingo and America is today an international urgency, entangling the future of a hundred million Africans with all the hopes and fears of Western Europe. Though dimly, the political consciousness immanent in the historical process emerges in groping and neglected Africa. If Toussaint wrote in the language of ’89, the grotesquerie of Watch Tower primitively approximates to the dialectic of Marx and Lenin. This it is which lifts out of bleakness and invests with meaning a record of failure almost unrelieved. The African bruises and breaks himself against his bars in the interest of freedoms wider than his own.
Epilogue
The History of Pan-African Revolt: A Summary, 1939–1969
I have to review the thirty years from 1938 when this book was published to 1969. This involves the social, using the word in the broadest sense, and the political activity, defeats and successes of hundreds of millions of people in Africa; tens of millions in the United States; and a few million in the West Indies who make up in intensity and potentiality for the insignificance of their numbers. Apart from the mere mass of the material, few periods in history exceed, in fact approach, the range of achievement, change, dramatic events and striking personalities of this particular period in history. Under these circumstances it is necessary even, at the cost of a few hundred words, where words are so precious, to make clear what can be done and what cannot be done, in fact to set the tone and the mood in which this review must be approached.
Anatole France (now, alas, low in critical estimation) made many not only witty but wise observations: A famous ruler, after many successes not excluding failures, called together the wise men of his kingdom and told them he wanted them to study and report to him the facts and the understanding of History. The learned old men accepted the responsibility, gathered their assistants and their materials and retired for twenty years. They then returned with twenty volumes in which they had summarized the facts and the significance of History. By this time the monarch was an old man and he complained: “How do you expect me at my age to cope with all that, to read far less to study twenty large volumes? Go away, summarize the twenty volumes so that I will be able to read them.” The historians went away and after twenty years one very old man with a long beard returned with a single volume. “Sire,” he said, “my fellow scholars are all dead. I have summarized it all and here it is in one volume.” The monarch lay on what he knew to be his death bed, and he bitterly complained. “You mean to say that I will never know the facts and the significance of History? How can I read even that large single volume which you bring to me?” The old historian put the book aside and told him: “Sire, I can summarize the history of man for you so that you can understand it before you die: They were born, they suffered, they died.”
I wish my readers to understand the history of Pan-African Revolt during the last thirty years. They fought, they suffered—they are still fighting. Once we understand that, we can tackle our problems with the necessary mental equilibrium.
First Africa: I shall take only two of the nearly fifty African States, which have won their independence or increased their powers. The first is what we know today as Ghana, the second is Kenya. It helps that I have known personally the national leaders of both countries.
I. Africa
Gold Coast to Ghana
There lived in Accra a sub-chief called Nii Kwabena Bonne III. He was also a businessman. He made a short campaign through the country enlisting the support of the Chiefs. He then, on January 11, 1948, called a boycott on the purchase of European imported goods. The boycott was as complete as such an undertaking could be. It became general in the Colony and Ashanti and lasted until the February 24.
During the boycott events of immense symbolical significance took place. Native administrations, up to this point, like the Chiefs, tools of the Government, now used their legal position to impose fines upon those who did not cooperate in the boycott of European goods. Groups of young men went around the towns maintaining the boycott by force when necessary.
It was only on February 11 that the Government intervened. There was a series of meetings between the Chamber of Commerce and Nii Bonne III, with the Colonial Secretary in the Chair. It was agreed that prices should be lowered for a trial period of three months. Nii Bonne III then called off the boycott.
Meanwhile, the Ex-Servicemen’s Union planned to present a petition to the Governor setting forth their grievances on Monday, the February 24, 1948, but they postponed it until Saturday the 28th. On that day the Ex-Servicemen’s Union began their march. In the course of it they changed the prescribed route and announced their determination to march on Christiansborg Castle, the residence of the Governor. They found a squad of police in their way and in the course of the dispute which followed, the Superintendent of Police, a white man, fired at the ringleaders, killed two of them and wounded four or five. The news spread into the industrial district of Accra where the people for the first time in a month were buying European goods. They were already dissatisfied because they believed that the goods were not being sold to them at the prices stated in the published agreement, which had preceded the calling off of the boycott. The news of the shooting precipitated an outburst of rage. The people attacked the European shops and looted them. The police were unable to restore order for two days, Saturday the 28th and Sunday the 29th. There was destruction of property by fire and in the two days fifteen persons were killed and 115 injured in Accra alone: There were other disturbances in various parts of the Colony. The most important were at Koforidua where the outbreak began after the arrival of a lorry with men from Accra. They broke out in Kumasi and district on Monday, March 1st, an hour after the arrival of the train from Accra.
Nkrumah says that he and his organization, the United Gold Coast Convention, had nothing whatever to do with the disturbances, and, as we shall see, there is every reason to believe him.
These are the bare facts of the case. When, however, we look a little more closely in the light of after-events, an often analyzed logical movement discloses itself. These were no ordinary riots of a hungry populace over high prices. The first stage of every revolution is marked by a great mass movement of the populace, usually led by representatives of the old order. M. Georges Lefebvre of that great school of historians, the French historians of the French Revolution, has established that the bourgeois revolution in France in 1789 was preceded by mass rioting during what he calls the “crisis of the monarchy” which took place in 1788, one year before the popular eruption which captured the Bastille on July 14, 1789.52 In this case we are in the middle of the twentieth century.
The first outburst takes the form of an economic boycott that lasted a month, but it is led by a Chief and supported by the Chiefs. The people of Accra follow exactly the course that the masses of the people have followed in every great revolution. The only organization at hand was the organization of ex-servicemen, and when they began their march they were at once reinforced by large numbers of spectators and sympathizers. Whatever had been the original intention of the ex-servicemen, these sympathizers encouraged them to take the road to the Governor’s Castle. Anti-racial cries were frequently uttered. Among the remarks were such as “This is the last European Governor who will occupy the Castle.” (They were not far wrong; he was the last but one.) The crowd directed a heavy fusillade of stones against the police. When the police tried to stop them, they shouted insults at the European officers and invited the Africans in the ranks to abandon their duty. It seems that they were successful. For when the Superintendent finally gave the order to fire, the Africans did not shoot and he himself had to seize a rifle from the nearest man to fire the shots which caused the casualties. Superintendent Imray had with him at the time on
ly ten men. The idea that a crowd of 2,000, many of them men who had seen battle, was cowed by the shooting is ridiculous. They could have swept the ten men away in ten seconds, and as there was only two officers and twenty men at Christiansborg, the Castle could easily have become another Bastille. In these situations you have to work by inferences, similar conjunctures in previous historical situations and an absence of prejudice against crowds and against Africans. The crowd retreated because it realized that to sweep away the petty resistance which faced it would be to initiate a battle for which it knew it was not prepared. Therefore, as crowds will do under such circumstances, it preferred to retreat.
I am here using the report of the investigations made later by a Colonial Office Commission, and it must be remembered first that at moments like these what the crowd is really thinking and the motives of its actions are profoundly difficult to recapture after the actions have taken place; and in any case a Government Commission is not exactly the body which would know whom to question, how to elicit the answers that matter, and even to understand what evidence it does manage to collect. The Commission calls the crowd a “lawless mob.” That was precisely what it was not. It was acting instinctively according to certain fundamental laws of revolution and we shall see that it obeys these laws to the very end.
We should note these incipient actions carefully because, unless there is a great unsettlement of the settled policy of His Majesty’s Government and the other European powers, that is precisely what is going to take place over vast areas of colonial Africa. What has really taken place can be summed up as follows:
A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Page 12
