Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  When he’d saved enough money for another berth, Garvey began making preparations for a further expedition. This time he’d test his mettle in a more temperate climate. Three weeks later the steamship would dock in the place which every British West Indian considered the cradle of civilisation: England.

  2

  ALMOST AN ENGLISHMAN

  I’ve a longin’ in me dept’s of heart dat I can conquer not

  ’Tis a wish dat I’ve been havin’ from since I could form a t’o’t

  ’Tis to sail athwart the ocean an’ to hear the billows roar

  When dem ride aroun’ de steamer, when dem beat on England’s shore

  Claude McKay, ‘Old England’

  AFTER seventeen days at sea, Garvey arrived in London in the spring of 1912. The record of his passage to England has not been found but the cheapest route would have been aboard one of the bi-weekly Elder Dempster banana boats that set out from Jamaica with a crew of just under 60, a maximum of 12 passengers and 50,000 bunches of bananas.

  After the experience of discrimination – which he characterised as the ‘stumbling block [of] “You are black”’ – together with the consequent limitations imposed on Caribbean people that he witnessed in Panama and Costa Rica, Garvey had set out for Europe ‘to find out if it was different there’.1 Like the few young men and women who’d ventured from the colonies, he was greatly excited about being in the metropolis, at the heart of empire. For someone of Garvey’s educational and social background, Jamaica’s rigid society provided only limited opportunities; Jamaica was somewhere you left. Garvey never spoke of any apprehension about what he was embarking on, but in many respects he was a pioneer. England for the vast majority of its imperial subjects was an abstraction. Jamaica’s newspapers often reproduced articles from the English papers on some of the wondrous but inconceivable tales of the daily working of the mother country; peppered with gorgeous accounts of society weddings and fashion tips for Derby day or the Ascot races. Sometimes, the Gleaner would print lively exchanges between readers in its letters pages on events taking place in London like the ‘Universal Races Congress’ of 1911 as pertaining to Jamaica’s Creole culture. But apart from the mariners’ tales of ordinary Jamaicans who traversed the Atlantic on the Elder Dempster Line, there had only been occasional celebrated news stories in the island’s papers about Jamaicans who had visited England. The ten members of the Kingston Choral Union who toured Britain in 1906 met with much acclaim. Their triumphs, typified by the Fruit Trader’s Journal’s appreciation of ‘their quaint enunciation and strict attention to light and shade’, were followed gleefully by readers of the Gleaner and the Jamaican Times back home.

  In an interview with the Times, the bassist Carlton Bryan lauded his hosts who, thank God, did not have ‘the American colour prejudice. It does not matter in England if a man is black, white, blue, green or yellow.’2 Jamaican readers of the Times had even purchased souvenir posters of the troupe, photographed in studied dignity: the bow-tied men in evening suits and the women in long and frilly white gowns. But a reader could spend a lifetime scouring the archives of the Gleaner and still not find news of a Jamaican printer ever being welcomed or established in England. That, though, is not what Garvey had in mind. In many respects, he saw his time in England as an opportunity to complete his informal education. Garvey had no university education: there was no university in the West Indies, and though it would have been unlikely he’d be able to afford a college place in London, at least he might benefit from exposure to its great libraries and the lectures of men and women on the public circuit. Garvey harboured a burgeoning thought that public speaking might be the key to his future life. In any case, he was determined to find his place in the world; and the centre of the world, for all British colonials, was London. ‘Viewing the Mother Country with an adoring eye,’ wrote Eric Walrond (a future associate of Garvey), ‘the Negro in the British overseas colonies is obviously at the mercy of a rainbow … This deception, common to the virgin gaze of African and West Indian alike, is partly a case of “distance lends enchantment,” partly a by-product of the black man’s extraordinary loyalty to the Crown.’3

  Marcus Garvey’s adoring eye yearned for such wonders that his compatriot Claude McKay had anticipated in his dialect poem, ‘Old England’, and to see ‘de ancient chair where England’s kings deir crowns put on’. Number 176 Borough High Street, south of the river, was close enough and renting a room there was just about affordable. Garvey was as delighted as Carlton Bryan with his first impressions: ‘When we visited England,’ he would later write imperiously of his time in London, ‘we found a different state of affairs. We of ourselves, who are not coloured but black, found no difficulty in securing lodgings.’4 Any doubts about how far this black, country boy from St Ann’s Bay had come were dispelled by the peels from the bells of Big Ben, a brisk walk away over Vauxhall Bridge.

  To obtain a gallery pass to the House of Commons one simply needed to queue. David Lloyd George was the British politician whom Garvey most admired. As well as great parliamentary speeches, he seems to have been just as much enamoured of the traditions and symbols of power invested in the House of Commons and Lords. The pomp and ceremony, robes and pageantry appealed to him. Joel A. Rogers, a Jamaican who made a study of his compatriot in later life, believed that Garvey was ‘never able to throw off the impression British folderol and glitter had made on him in his childhood’.5 When Lloyd George was not on the floor, the House was in recess, or the debates proved lacklustre, the twenty-five-year-old admirer of the cut and thrust of a good argument might soon wend his way to Hyde Park, drawn by the impassioned and irreverent opinions at Speakers’ Corner, that were not too far removed from the roiling arguments outside the rum shops of Kingston. To the uninitiated, this people’s parliament would appear the site of a dizzying array of competing voices, both toxic and benevolent: Latvian anarchists, millennial doom-peddlers, Sinn Feiners, stalwarts of anti-imperialism, crusading protectors of aboriginal peoples, eugenicists and suffragettes; but not many, if any, black notables. Commandeering a soapbox, Garvey energetically made his first faltering attempts at extempore public speaking, pitting himself against the regulars, vying for the attention of the curious, the committed and the cynics who gathered in great numbers each Sunday.

  Colour was his unique calling card; British citizens were largely ignorant about life in the outposts of empire. There were so few black people in England that they were considered exotic. As the London-based Sierra Leonean humorist A. B. C. Merriman-Labor wittily observed of Edwardian Britain, ‘credulous people … believe that every Negro with a decent overcoat and a clean collar is an African prince’.6 There were some outstanding black men and women in London. The composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, fêted for his recent operatic success, The Song of Hiawatha; John Richard Archer, soon to be appointed Mayor of Battersea; and the journalist and proprietor, Dusé Mohamed Ali, were perhaps the most prominent. But they constituted tiny specks on the cultural landscape. That such men thrived was not a testament to the liberal cosmopolitanism of early twentieth-century Britain but rather confirmation of a long-standing curiosity about exotic and noble Negroes who confounded the popular conception of Blacks as infantile. If the masses at Speakers’ Corner were to close their eyes as Garvey spoke, they might have imagined themselves in the presence of almost a gentleman – an English gentleman no less. But, as yet, there was little profit in it for a young Jamaican mimic who carried no letters of introduction to the traditional patrons of social engineering who might have been able to help.

  There were only a few thousand black people living and working in London in 1912. According to David Killingray, census returns for 1911 suggested that 4,540 ‘Africans’ were estimated to be living in the UK, with West Indians included amongst the ‘Africans’. The population of London was more than 4 million (4,521,685) at the time. There was no concentration of black people; they were scattered around the capital. The African Times and Orient
Review was especially keen to capture the success stories, like that of the two Nigerian brothers, Adeyemo and Olayimka Alakija who, along with Debeshin Folarin, were called to the bar in 1913. From his office in Manhattan, the black American editor, William Du Bois, also monitored stories that he characterised as credits and deficits to the race. In the September edition of the Crisis (a magazine providing a record of the darker races) for 1912 Du Bois was delighted to inform readers that ‘[Clement] Jackson, a colored student at Oxford University, won the 1,500 metre race at the Olympic games. The credit for this victory goes to England and the Negro race has scarcely been mentioned.’ In later editions of the magazine, Du Bois also pointed to the hypocrisy at large in English society. The story of the coloured physician refused an appointment in Camberwell on the grounds that ‘the fastidious poor would refuse to be attended by a Negro’, particularly enraged Du Bois. However, the majority of black people in London were not professionals. They were labourers. On 26 November 1903, the Anglo-African Argus cited the example of railway engineers and blacksmiths amongst the workers who had made their way to England. But there were also dockers, nannies, entertainers and sometimes impersonators. A man called Isaac Brown caused a brief sensation when he was arrested and convicted of impersonating the Jamaican military hero, Sergeant William James Gordon, who had been awarded the Victoria Cross in 1892.7 Con-men like Isaac Brown, though, were as likely to share the tabloid headlines with eccentrics like the amateur Afro-Guyanese inventor, Mr Williams, who on the money he made from the sale of his motorised horse was able to relocate to the more fashionable Marylebone High Street.

  The metropolis was a bewildering place to navigate, and the prospects for paid work among London’s black population was even bleaker than for the white working class. Within a couple of months Garvey was reduced to applying for assistance from the Colonial Office. Pride or luck seems to have intervened, though, because eventually Garvey found piecemeal work at London’s dockyards, where black labourers, who were prepared to accept less than the East End dockers, were blamed for driving down wages.8 There the enigma of Garvey’s arrival was compounded by the sight of these African and Caribbean merchant seamen who, worryingly, having given up on their own adventures, stuck close to the Thames and the harbours of Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff, on constant lookout for berths on ships back home.

  It was one of these brother seamen who tipped off Garvey about the intriguing prospect of alternative employment at the newly launched African Times and Orient Review. The paper was run by the Egyptian-born Dusé Mohamed Ali, a man of many talents who was a returning columnist on the Fabian journal, New Age, as well as a former theatrical impresario, renowned for his productions of Othello and The Merchant of Venice. The year before Garvey’s arrival, Dusé Mohamed Ali had forsworn the stage and embarked on yet another transformation, lending his support and organisational skills to a unique experiment in interracial cooperation – the Universal Races Congress which met in London on 26 July 1911. The Times reported approvingly on the elitist international gathering of 300 delegates that brought together such eminent scholars as the African-American editor of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois, the ethnographer Sir Harry Johnston of the Royal Geographical Society, and Sir Sydney Olivier, the Governor of Jamaica. There were papers presented on a range of subjects from ‘the hierarchical classification of the races’ and ‘the benefits of mixed marriages’. Sydney Olivier, warming to a subject dear to his Fabian heart, expressed the view that mixed marriages and their mulatto offspring were indispensable to the development of the West Indies because it ‘saves the community from any cleavage between black and white and helps form an organic whole’.9 The Times in London devoted considerable attention to the debates at the Universal Races Congress. But there were some critics, recalled Du Bois, who mockingly ‘professed to think it had something to do with horse-racing’.10 Discussions on racial matters were of minor interest in unenlightened Edwardian Britain. But speaking at a luncheon held at the Lyceum Club the month before, the noble-headed Du Bois had been gratified by the quiet applause of the calibre of guest befitting the high purpose of the forthcoming congress. They included ‘a bishop and two countesses; several knights and ladies and men like Maurice Hewlett and Sir Harry Johnston’.11 Buoyed by the dignity conferred upon it, Du Bois had addressed the opening of the congress, in the great hall of the University of London, and delivered his ‘A Hymn to the Peoples’, especially composed for the occasion. It ended with:

  Save us, World-Spirit, from our lesser selves!

  Grant us that war and hatred cease,

  Reveal our souls in every race and hue!

  Help us, O Human God, in this Thy Truce

  To Make Humanity divine!12

  Such sentiments were to inspire Dusé Mohamed Ali later that same year when he turned his considerable energies to print journalism with the Review. The Colonial Office took a dim view of the whole enterprise, marking Ali down as ‘a rather doubtful character whose paper was suspect, being inclined to the Ethiopian movement and in touch with undesirable elements in India and Egypt’.13 His love for his father’s homeland was evident in a 300-page history of Egypt that Dusé Mohamed Ali had recently published. The journey to its publication was strange and unexpected. The former president of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt, should, in no small way, have been included in the credits and acknowledgements. On a much publicised visit to the UK in 1910, Roosevelt stepped into the increasingly rancorous debate on the Egyptian agitation for home rule. Roosevelt had encouraged his British hosts to take any means necessary to suppress those ‘uncivilised Egyptians’ who were advocating a kind of self-government in Cairo which he considered ‘a noxious farce’.14 Ali had first tried to shrug off the comments, but had then become extremely vexed; and one day, as he fumed in the offices of the New Age’s editor, A. R. Orage had put it to him that writing a history of Egypt would serve as a vengeful corrective to the former president’s obnoxious remarks.

  In the Land of the Pharaohs was the result. With its emphasis on earlier civilisations, Ali’s book was craftily conceived to redress the belief in oriental inferiority – then widely held in Britain. That he was a genuine Egyptian lent the book added gravitas and validity, and with it Dusé Mohamed achieved national and international fame. The book had been cheered to the rafters by the informal club of Pan-Africanists in London and had silenced peddlers of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ view of history. But the routing of his enemies was soon reversed. Though well received at first, In the Land of the Pharaohs went on to scandalise literary London when the scale of its unattributed reliance on the work of Arab scholars such as Wilfred Blunt was revealed. The respectful applause of respected Englishmen came to an abrupt end, but the disgrace of plagiarism did not dint his reputation amongst the British colonial subjects throughout the empire. In the space of a year, the redoubtable Dusé Mohamed Ali had apologised, shrugged off further criticism, and rebuilt his acerbic reputation as an unrepentant chronicler of the era in the African Times and Orient Review.

  In its inaugural edition, Ali had called for contributions from the ‘young and budding Wilmot Blydens, Frederick Douglasses and Paul Laurence Dunbars’ (all notable black writers). The advert appeared tailor-made for the young Garvey, and in early 1913, after laying siege to its offices at 158 Fleet Street, he was taken on, not yet as a writer, but as a messenger and handyman.

  Less than a year old, the Review had quickly found its voice in the certainty of its cause, summarised by the editor, Dusé Mohamed Ali, as a ‘monthly devoted to the interests of the coloured races of the world’. The first volume proclaimed that ‘the recent Universal Races Congress, convened in the Metropolis of the Anglo-Saxon world, clearly demonstrated that there was ample need for a Pan-Oriental Pan-African journal at the seat of the British Empire, which would lay the aims, desires and intentions of the black, brown, and yellow races at the throne of Caesar’.15

  The paper’s continued advocacy of Egyptian hom
e rule and Ethiopianism (the generic term for the promotion of a Negro ethical ideal and African autonomy) caused greater irritation as the European imperial powers and therefore, by extension, their colonial possessions, flitted and fidgeted towards the cataclysmic conflict that was just a year away from engulfing the continent. In the lead-up to the Great War there was a reduced appetite for tolerance. Rumours abounded of secret agents; streets, parlours and parliament crackled with excited talk of the need for an alien register. Dusé Mohamed, despite his protests, was forced to comply. He presented himself at Brixton police station where he was registered as an Ottoman alien. The authorities doubted his origins and kept him under surveillance. Nonetheless, the Review did not fight shy of polemic and on a bad day its editor would be upgraded by British colonial officials from ‘suspect’ to ‘of doubtful loyalty’ – a euphemistic assessment which, stripped of its diplomatic language, could be translated as ‘of borderline treachery’. Even so, Ali escaped official censure and although his security file remained open, it was never acted upon.16

  More than through a reading of the pages of the Review, the reputation that clung to him was owed to his writing in the New Age. Ali had cut his teeth on the Fabian journal. The editor, A. R. Orage, had encouraged – indeed was quietly thrilled by – Ali’s righteous smiting of the promulgators of cant and hypocrisy in perfidious Albion. For example, he singled out those concerned Englishmen who, whilst deploring the growing number of incidents in London of ‘marital and sexual relationships between white women and “half-civilised” oriental men’, went on to slake their thirst for the mysterious orient ‘in brothels in Eastern seaports’.17 Time and again in the New Age, Dusé spelt out the case for the prosecution in the trial of British imperialism. And yet it is evident that he courted, and was flattered by, the attention of aristocratic acquaintances who ‘belonged to the good old days when a man of breeding was respected in England – and there was no colour bar’. And therein lay the rub, because there were some among those men of breeding who, having smelt the smoke in his plagiarism, began to look for the fire. Surely a gentleman would never have committed such a heinous act as putting forward the scholarship of another as the work of his own. Except for the amateur aristocratic sleuth, Ali’s peripatetic life was hard to follow and the trail of his genealogy soon ran cold.