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

by C. L. R. James

  The people on a national scale have mobilized and organized themselves during the boycott and felt their power, and they have been able to do so rapidly because this first step is taken under their traditional leaders, their Chiefs.

  The call to the African police not to obey their European officers and not to shoot was not an accident. It takes place at the beginning of all revolutions. Neither was it spontaneous. Already, during the boycott, at the trial of a local chief on a charge arising out of the enforcement of the boycott, posters had appeared in Accra calling upon the police to strike and to refuse to obey the orders of the European officers.

  The march on Christiansborg Castle and the shouts that the Governor would be the last European governor show that out of the confidence built up in the month-long boycott, the people had proclaimed the ultimate slogan of the revolution, the end of imperial rule.

  They knew what they wanted. If they turned aside from the direct march to the Castle and hesitated before sweeping aside the police, it was because they understood the consequences of such actions. They had been waiting for somebody to lead them and they welcomed Nkrumah as a person to do so. Lawless mob indeed. Within eighteen months Nkrumah was going to call a Ghana Constituent Assembly in Accra, which would be attended by 90,000 people. Within two years these people would carry out a policy of Positive Action in which the life of the whole country would be brought to a standstill with the utmost discipline and order. Within three years they would give Nkrumah a vote of 22,780 out of a possible 23,122.

  Nkrumah was taken out of jail to be made Leader of Government Business. Then after years of in-fighting he finally achieved the independence of the Gold Coast in 1957.

  The Myth of Mau Mau

  Not African beliefs and tribal practices but land and white settlers on the land were to be decisive in shaping the character of the black revolt in Kenya. The railway made possible the export of cash crops by Europeans settled on the fertile temperate land of the Kenya Highlands. A policy of encouraging white settlement, a new policy in Africa, soon received the official blessing of the Foreign Office. Subsequently, under Colonial Office supervision, European settlement rapidly became the most powerful influence in the social, economic, and political development of the new country.

  It was in the first decade of the twentieth century that this new Kenya took shape. One of the largest early applications for land (500 square miles) was made in April 1902 by the East Africa Syndicate, a company with a strong South African interest. With only a dozen settlers established at the beginning of 1903, in August the Commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, sent his Collector of Customs, A. Marsden, to South Africa to encourage settlers to migrate to the country. By the end of 1905 over a million acres of land had been leased or sold by the Protectorate authorities. In 1906 a large party of Boer “Irreconcilables” trekked overland from the Transvaal to the Kenya highlands; others poured in by boat from Britain and South Africa.

  Thus began something new in an African colony: the struggle to make it a “white man’s country.”

  Nowhere in Africa was there such a struggle as began before 1914 and lasted decade after decade until it culminated in the independence of Kenya nearly fifty years later. Between 1903 and 1906 important areas of Kikuyu land were alienated. Some 8,000 shillings was paid in compensation to 8,000 Kikuyu, but more than 3,000 received nothing at all. Commissioner Eliot was to write that “no one can doubt that the rich and exceptionally fertile district of Kikuyu is destined to be one of the chief centers of European cultivation, and the process of settlement is facilitated by the fact that there are gaps where there is no native population.”

  By 1914, the exclusive “White Highlands” was already a reality, and the Europeans were demanding the conventional right of British colonists to elect their own representatives to the Protectorate’s Legislative Council.

  The struggle was continuous. Ultimately (by the early 1950s) the Africans, mainly but not entirely Kikuyu, took to arms, and from encampments and hiding places in the forests raided settled establishments and slew white farmers and those Africans who supported the British regime. Dedan Kimathi and Waruhiu Itote (“General China”) were generally acknowledged as the senior leaders of the nationalist armies. Food, funds, arms, medical supplies could be secured only by immense risks and labors. In some parts the Home Guard was strong, in others weak. In some areas the chief was sympathetic, in others he was a dedicated “loyalist.” There were some wonderful leaders whose names ought to be recorded—Kimathi himself, Stanley Mathenge, China, and Tanganyika in Nyeri, Matenjagwo, Kago, and Mbaria Kaniu in Fort Hall, and Kimbo, the cattle-raider, operating between Nanyuki and Maivasha. The difficult terrain prevented easy lateral communication within the forest itself, and the campaign soon developed into a series of local battles of attrition, ridge by ridge.

  Though defeated in the Reserves, and with some surrendering to the British Security Forces, nonetheless many men and women in the forest continued their resistance. Their aim, apart from surviving and carrying on the struggle for land and freedom, was to attract international attention to their cause. No outside help was forthcoming, and the Emergency did not give rise to a major political investigating commission from Britain.

  From 1953 to 1955, Kimathi sought to provide an overall perspective of the resistance in the forest. At one point, while in the forest, Kimathi was reported to have said: “I do not lead rebels but I lead Africans who want their self-government and land. My people want to live in a better world than they met with when they were born. I lead them because God never created a true and real brotherhood between white and black so that we may be regarded as people and as human beings who can do each and every thing.”

  Yet the plain fact is that the nationalist army in the forests was defeated by the huge forces sent by the British Government to maintain the colonial regime. Some 50,000 Kikuyu and other revolutionaries were detained in special camps to undergo special training to cure them of the mental disease which the British authorities discovered as the cause of their refusal to submit. Jomo Kenyatta was given a long prison sentence and, having served it, was confined far away from the center of Kenya politics.

  Despite this reconstitution of physical and military authority the British found that they could no longer govern the people of Kenya. Constitutional manipulation and constitutional maneuver were worked out, agreed upon by the British Parliament and its experts, only to meet rejection and failure. In the end Kenya had to be granted political independence. The stories spread about “Mau Mau” have been exposed for the anti-African myths that they are. There is nothing inherently African about “Mau Mau.” Their social organization and corresponding beliefs being broken up and persecuted by the British, what was (by the British) labeled as Mau Mau was an ad hoc body of beliefs, oaths, disciplines newly created for the specific purpose of gathering and strengthening the struggle against British imperialism, its military, political and economic domination and, in particular, the Christianity it sought to inject and impose.

  Independence and After

  In the Gold Coast and in Kenya we have the two extremes of the African struggles for independence. Nothing in modern history was more starting than the rapidity with which other African states achieved political independence. In Algeria the French imperialists had an experience similar to the Kenya experience. The French military had established what they considered military power over the necessarily not-well-organized Algerian nationalist forces. They believed that they had established control over the political resistance. They engineered General de Gaulle into power in France in order finally to teach Algerians that they were French. But the General understood a revolutionary upheaval better than they did. He realized that whatever the strength of guns and of prisons, the colonial mentality of accepting domination was broken and could never be restored. To the fury of the French imperialists and army he worked out an independence agreement with the Algerian nationalists, saving what he could for French finance
and capital. Such was the disappointment and anger of the French generals in particular that they tried to assassinate him. So blatant was their attempt that some of them had to be tried and even jailed. Such was the naked proof of the rapacity of that small section of the population of an advanced civilization, which profited by imperialism. Similarly, thousands of Frenchmen who had lived well by exploiting the Algerian people left Algeria and returned to France.

  The murder of Lumumba and the tireless efforts of the late Tshombe dramatized the attempt by Belgian imperialism to maintain its exploitation of the vast mineral wealth of the Congo, while giving some token recognition to the irresistible movement for national independence.

  The dozen years that have unfolded since the winning of independence by the Gold Coast in 1957 are some of the most far-ranging and politically intense that history has known. African state after African state has gained political independence with a tumultuous rush that was not envisaged even by the most sanguine of the early advocates of independence. The names of leaders obscure the political reality. What is to be noted is that Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Banda, to take the best-known names, were all imprisoned by the British Government and had to be released to head the independent states. The British Government, as did the French and Belgian, found that despite their soldiers, their guns and planes, they could not rule. The colonial mentality having been broken, the only way to restore some sort of order or, to reject a word now corrupted and offensive, the only way to have a viable society was to transfer the man in jail to be the head of state. In no other way could the African people once more accommodate themselves to any social structure.

  They accepted the African leader and his African colleagues. But that is precisely why in African state after African state, with almost the rapidity with which independence was gained, military dictatorship after military dictatorship has succeeded to power, the most depressing of all being the overthrow of what had appeared to be the most progressive and successful of the new African governments—the government of Mali. What are the reasons for this rapid decay and decline of African nationalism? The best known and the reason most often advanced by Africans and advocates of African independence is the continued exploitation by the industrial and finance-capital of Europe and the United States. Even people no more than casually informed are aware of the continual lowering of the prices of the commodities, most often single-crop or unit-minerals, produced by the African countries, and the raising of the prices of the manufactured goods needed by the newly independent African countries in their necessarily frantic efforts to modernize themselves. Banks, and old industries with new African names working through local agents (such as the East Indian community in Kenya), continue to control the life of the newly independent African communities. “Aid,” so small in quantity and so large in publicity, would gladly be dispensed with, if economic independence were automatically to result from political independence.

  However, without minimizing the continuing economic subordination of the newly independent African states, there are objective reasons for the apparent decline, in fact abrupt disintegration and resort to crude military dictatorship in African state after African state.

  The states which the African nationalist leaders inherited were not in any sense African. With the disintegration of the political power of the imperialist states in Africa, and the rise of militancy of the African masses, a certain political pattern took shape. Nationalist political leaders built a following, they or their opponents gained support among the African civil servants who had administered the imperialist state, and the newly independent African state was little more than the old imperialist state only now administered and controlled by black nationalists. That these men, western-educated and western-oriented, had or would have little that was nationalist or African to contribute to the establishment of a truly new and truly African order was seen most clearly by the late Frantz Fanon, and he established his still constantly increasing reputation by his untrammeled advocacy of revolt against these black nationalist regimes. Uncompromising revolt he saw as the only means of ridding Africa of the economic and psychological domination by Western civilization which, independence or no independence, seemed certain to keep Africa and Africans hewers of wood and drawers of water to Western civilization. Sekou Toure of Guinea seemed to be the only African leader who aimed at building a society which would use European techniques to strengthen and develop the African heritage. But not only was Guinea a very small and very underdeveloped state, but the Moscow assistants whom he hoped would help him, plotted to overthrow his regime and Guinea did not make the progress which would set an example for Africa. That example, however, was to come from Tanzania, under the leadership of Dr. Nyerere. The impact that the policies of Tanzania has made upon Africa and can in time make upon the rest of the world, underdeveloped or advanced, has already established the African state of Tanzania as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century. Tanzania is the highest peak reached so far by revolting blacks and it is imperative to make clear, not least of all to blacks everywhere, the new stage of political thought which has been reached. But first to establish some idea of what is happening in other areas of Negro political reality and response since 1938.

  II. South Africa

  Since the end of World War II nowhere has any regime in the world (or for that matter any modern historical regime) made it more clear what is its primary and permanent concern. This preoccupation is the repression and containment of the increasing revolutionary rejection of its exploitation and oppression by the millions of blacks on whose backs it lives and thrives. Such is the record which the South African regime of whites daily registers in contemporary history aided by the benevolent neutrality of Europe and America, and the border states that it seeks to build and strengthen against political destruction by a self-conscious independent African continent.

  All that will be attempted here is to give what is usually neglected, the pressure—the objective social pressure—which the South African blacks, the most highly developed in Africa, exercise on the very vitals of the South African regime.

  A Prime Minister of South Africa, Mr. B.J. Vorster, made it absolutely clear that the regime had no intention of giving political rights to urban Africans. Speaking in Parliament on April 24, 1968, he said:

  They remain there because they cannot provide employment for themselves. But the fact that you employ those people, does not place you under any obligation to grant them political rights in your parliament. Surely the fact that you work for a man does not give you the right to run his affairs? … It is true that there are blacks working for us. They will continue to work for us for generations, in spite of the ideal we have to separate them completely….

  The fact of the matter is this; we need them, because they work for us, but, after all, we pay them for their work…. But the fact that they work for us can never entitle them to claim political rights. Not now, nor in the future … under no circumstances can we grant them those political rights in our own territory, neither now nor never.

  That indicates the fear that white South Africa has of the blacks.

  Any examination of South Africa’s labor laws and policies will show the pretense and the reality of the status of Africans in the urban areas. More than 4,000,000 Africans live in the urban areas. In spite of desperate measures to limit the flow of Africans into the towns, the urban African population doubled between 1945 and 1960, when 3,471,233 were counted in the census. For twelve of those remarkable fifteen years, the Nationalist government was busily engaged in applying its policy of keeping the races apart.

  For better appreciation of the situation, one should study the racial composition of the thirteen principal urban areas, listed in the accompanying table. These centers of industrial and commercial activity have been designated “white” areas although their white population is far less than their non-white.

  The greatest concentration of industry is on the Witwatersra
nd, where there are twice as many non-whites as whites and Africans alone out number whites by over half-a-million.

  The purpose of the Urban Areas Act is to control the influx of Africans into the urban areas; to set apart areas for their accommodation; to direct their labor; and to impose strict regulations for their control and movement. In short, it aims at providing whites with black labor without allowing blacks to acquire residential, social and other rights in the areas where they are employed. Try as they will, the South African whites cannot isolate or circumscribe the black population. The simple truth is that without the participation of the black population the South African economy would fall apart.

  Here are some figures, published by the Anti-Apartheid Movement in February 1969.

  Population (mid-1967)

  Numbers Percentage

  Africans 12 3/4 million 68

  Whites 3 ½ million 19

  Coloreds 1 3/4 million 10

  Indians ½ million 3

  88 percent of Coloured people live in the Cape.

  83 percent of the Indian people in the Natal. They are debarred from living on the Orange Free State.

  There have been created three so-called African states, Transkei, Ciskei and Tswanaland, labeled Bantustans so as to create some sense of race and nation separate from white South Africa. That cannot alter nor mitigate the remorseless pressures of the blacks of South Africa against the whites. The imprisonings, the tortures and the shootings now have been met by guerrilla warfare substantially authenticated. One thing is certain. The existing regime in South Africa can continue to exist only by the increasing persecution and brutal repression of the existing blacks. History in general, and the particulars of this history, indicate a violent end to this regime sooner or later, and sooner rather than later.