by Colin Grant
Dusé Mohamed Ali maintained that he was the son of an officer in the Egyptian army killed in the trenches of Tel-el-Kebir during the land invasion that followed Britain’s naval bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. Much of Dusé’s education had been in England. Nonetheless, what aroused the suspicions of his critics was his inability to string two sentences of Arabic together. He claimed to have forgotten it through lack of use, but as one sceptic said of his inability to even recite the Muslim declaration of faith, it was rather like ‘a Catholic being unable to recite the “Hail Mary”’.18
His association with the raffish ‘profession’ of the stage only confirmed their doubts about him. In the decades before, Dusé Mohamed Ali had trodden the boards of theatres from Glasgow to London, and had even managed his own company in Hull. Although he was undeniably black, critics sneered that this was only conveniently so – on closer inspection, you might get a whiff of the burnt cork and greasepaint of the minstrel on his skin – and that of course the fez (which rarely left his head) was more of a stage prop than a badge of authenticity. For Garvey though, Ali was the real thing: the embodiment of culture and commerce. He looked on in admiration as his employer managed the extraordinary trick of irritating the authorities with his thinly veiled attacks and, at the same time, securing patronage from senior establishment figures like Lord Cromer.
That the Review boasted contributions from the A-list of intellectual and public life was largely down to a sly process of literary entrapment. Mohamed Ali had simply written to the elite of the British establishment – canvassing their opinion about whether such a literary venture ‘operated by coloured people could succeed in promoting goodwill between Orient and Occident’19 and then published their responses in the first edition. In this way the editor could justifiably claim the Countess of Warwick and Sir Sydney Olivier among the writers of the Review. Indeed, Dusé Mohamed Ali never overlooked an opportunity for promotion, even enlisting the support of the recently deceased Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: the Review’s obituary of the composer carefully included a letter from him praising the fledgling paper a little while before his death.20
Garvey too was learning how to maximise every possibility. He had few leads or contacts but he made sure to track them down. Sir Sydney Olivier’s tenure as Governor of Jamaica had come to an end in January 1913, and he had taken up a new post as secretary of the Board of Agriculture in England. No record has been found of their meeting (though Garvey would later brief journalists back in Jamaica), but the road to Olivier inevitably continued on to politicians who had already shown an interest in how the colonies in the British West Indies were run. Men such as Lord Balfour of Burleigh and the Labour politician, Joseph Pointer, were successfully courted and added to his book of contacts. Those meetings did not translate into tangible or immediately beneficial results but, in a small way, Garvey believed that he was taking steps towards establishing, if only in his own mind, a sense of himself as a public personality.
After almost a year of fetching and carrying down at the docks, Garvey had been taken on by Dusé Mohamed Ali, and he could sense his luck was changing. It was an extraordinary piece of good fortune to have arrived at the birth of one of the most exciting journals to come out of London in decades. In Dusé Mohamed Ali, he was to find a black man who, in doing something for the race whilst advancing his own self-interest, espoused a philosophy that the younger man had not yet articulated but most heartily felt. If under Alfred ‘Cap’ Burrowes Garvey had learnt the practical skills of printing from a master, then his time at the Review would serve as another kind of apprenticeship: a close study of Ali would reveal the secrets of a master propagandist.
Recalling his days at the Review, Garvey later glossed over his humble status and drew attention to the time when, after a few months of relentless lobbying, he managed to badger his way to a journalistic commission and moved temporarily from the back room to the freelance desks. In the October 1913 issue, he wrote a historical essay, ‘The British West Indies in the Mirror of Civilisation’, which was an unflattering account of European excess and rapacious greed in the Caribbean. Focusing on Jamaica, Garvey voiced a resentment of the way in which, in the outpost of civilisation of the British Empire, colour was an impediment to advancement. A system by which the much-coveted jobs in the civil service had previously been awarded on the strength of an examination, had been abandoned by the time Marcus Garvey reached adulthood. In open competition black youths excelled and had filled every position, whilst their white compatriots trailed behind. Within a few years the government was persuaded ‘to abolish the competitive system and fill vacancies by nomination, and by this means kept out the black youths. The service has long been recruiting from an inferior class of sycophantic weaklings whose brains are exhausted by dissipation and vice before they reach the age of thirty-five.’ Nonetheless, in a tone of youthful sobriety, Garvey prophesied a turning point in history when ‘the people of [the West Indies] will be the instruments of uniting a scattered race who, before the close of many centuries, will found an Empire on which the sun shall shine as ceaselessly as it shines on the Empire of the North today’.21
Praise for his essay came from as far as the USA, where the black scholar William Ferris (the author of The African Abroad) held it up as ‘a powerful and telling summing up of the History of the West Indies’.22 That kind of dialogue between black populations in the diaspora was just the kind of development that Dusé Mohamed Ali had hoped for. Though copies of the journal were shipped to black conurbations in the USA like Harlem, and a handful of cities on the African continent, the majority of its readers were still to be found in Britain.
At twenty-six, Marcus Garvey was twenty years Ali’s junior. In an audit of his achievements to date, he could only count on having lived a fraction of the life of his latest mentor. The Review served as a hub for black intellectual life. The trainee journalist took his place in the line of colonial admirers who thronged the offices at Fleet Street, and over whom Dusé Mohamed cast a long shadow. Essays by black leaders and thinkers such as the American educationalist, Booker T. Washington, and the Liberian scholar, Edward Blyden, jostled for space with satirical cartoons. Also included were reviews of recitals by African chamber musicians in London and the poems of at least one Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu, who was associated with Yeats’s ‘Monday Evening Circle’.23 For students of the black condition – and Garvey was beginning to see himself in this way – the African Times and Orient Review was regarded as a manual of black malaise and a road map for the redemption of the race.
Wages at the Review were modest but kudos made up for some of the shortfall. Garvey prided himself on his proximity to Dusé and the black intellectuals who swung though the doors at 158 Fleet Street. Never mind that others mocked Dusé Mohamed as ‘the pushing journalist’, he congratulated himself on his association with the white ruling class. Throughout 1913 Marcus Garvey hung around the offices of the Review but he had no entrée yet into the circles in which Dusé Mohamed Ali moved. Only a man fooled by his fictive persona would fail to glean that, measured alongside the great Dusé Mohamed, the young Jamaican was a mere minion. In between fetching and carrying for Dusé Mohamed Ali, Garvey spent all of his free time striving to make up for the shortcomings of his formal education. Despite a later fondness for being photographed in academic robes, complete with mortar board, Garvey had little hope of the finances needed to obtain a degree. He did, however, attend lessons in law at Birkbeck College, founded in 1823 as the London Mechanics Institute and predicated on the needs of working-class students without formal qualifications. The crest on the college arms – a lamp and owl alongside its motto, In nocte consiliem (‘Study by night’) – recognised that its undergraduates, like the newly registered Jamaican, could only afford to study part-time. And Garvey just about managed to scrape together enough for some evening classes. With some pride and justification, he now identified himself as a student and journalist.
Ali proved only a fle
eting mentor to Garvey who took rather less note of his overblown literary style. He was more intrigued by Ali’s ambitious business schemes, which included the setting up of an independent bank in Britain’s West African possessions to circumvent trade barriers erected by European competitors; and numerous import–export dealings. Invariably, they attracted more derision than serious consideration, as each project failed to win the blessing of the Colonial Office – without which they could not proceed. Many of these business ventures rode on the back of the African Times and Orient Review through which he sought potential partners but Dusé Mohamed Ali was ultimately a venture capitalist without the capital. Later, in 1921, he left England for America, making his way to Harlem where he was reintroduced to Garvey by a mutual friend, the veteran African-American journalist, John E. Bruce. Though Ali smarted somewhat at his former pupil’s success, he was humble enough to take up a column on Garvey’s own paper, the Negro World.
For now though, it was Garvey who had cause to be grateful. With the security of a small but regular income from his work as a handyman, he prepared to set off on a grand tour of European capitals. At this point, his sister Indiana had followed him to England.24 Garvey had written to her employer, George Judah, in Kingston, Jamaica, requesting that Indiana be allowed to accompany his family on a visit to England. She sailed from Jamaica with the Judah family on board the Barranca and docked at Avonmouth in August 1912. Indiana was employed in a job best described as a hybrid of domestic servant and companion to the children. Indiana failed to thrive in England. Though she was a simple and retiring woman, in London she was conspicuous. Sitting alone amongst a sea of white faces in the local church, she suffered quietly in her discomfort; after the service, she attracted the unsubtle attention of the congregation who were delighted with the opportunity she presented to test their pseudo-scientific racial theories. At the end of one service, ‘the minister’s daughter asked where she had hidden her tail!’25
Her brother, by contrast, courted attention. A tour of the capitals of Europe would be his next venture. Marcus Garvey settled his account at his lodgings in south London and arranged for his correspondence to be forwarded, care of his sister at 14 Durley Road, Stamford Hill.
One of his first journeys was on board the overnight train to Scotland where he stayed at least one night at the Cecil Hotel in Glasgow. On 10 December 1913, Garvey wrote excitedly to Thaddeus McCormack back in Smith Village, Kingston, Jamaica that the next time he heard from him, Garvey would be in Paris. Monte Carlo, Boulogne and Madrid were also on the itinerary. On mainland Europe, Garvey ticked off the great architectural wonders and soon fell in with some travelling missionaries. Not quite believing his good fortune, he was quietly pleased with the impression he seemed to make along the way. ‘I have seen wonders,’ he wrote enthusiastically to McCormack, ‘at some places … I have been the only black man seen for a good time … some of the tourists are wondering how a black man can travel about so much, some take me for an African millionaire.’26 In subsequent letters, Garvey cited his popularity amongst his aristocratic lady fellow travellers and playfully speculated that he might one day return to Jamaica with a white heiress on his arm. Two months later, it was apparent that it wasn’t just Europe’s great architectural sites that caught the young man’s attention. On 2 March 1914, Marcus Garvey confided bashfully to Alfred ‘Cap’ Burrowes, ‘I am engaged to a Spanish–Irish heiress whom I had the pleasure of meeting on the Continent.’
Providence had waved her magical wand, and an heiress had materialised. He had mused on the fantasy of a union with just such a creature. Remarkably, it now seemed a distinct possibility. It was a spectacular volte-face. Love had triumphed over his often stated and violently held belief that any union between blacks and whites was repugnant. ‘It is somewhat destructive of my principle,’ he conceded, ‘yet I hardly think I can change my mind in marrying her.’27 There had been marriages between black men and white women but they were rare in the extreme and, when subject to public scrutiny, were considered abhorrent. Stranded African seamen in Liverpool, whose romantic attentiveness was preferred to the drunken neglect of their white counterparts, had made lives and homes with local women without much censure. But just a few years earlier, polite Edwardian society had been scandalised by the engagement of an African prince, Peter Lobengula, to Kitty Jewell. Prince Lobengula was purported to be the son of the Matabele Chief, but his inability to speak the Ndebele language was evidence enough, for some, of his fakery. His credentials were not enhanced by his day job, at the centre of Savage South Africa, a bizarre show performed at Earl’s Court, which twice a day reenacted scenes from African life.
The Evening News just about summed up tabloid opinion on romance between Kitty and Peter when it wrote, ‘There is something inexpressibly disgusting in the idea of the mating of a white girl and a dusky savage.’ It was not a propitious time to be breaking with convention.28
Back in London, the good times were quickly coming to an end. Although he had been employed for the better part of a year, further work for the African Times and Orient Review failed to materialise. Dusé Mohamed Ali complained that he was lazy. It seems that Garvey’s estimation of himself (a journalist with a favourably reviewed essay) ran counter to the practical demands of his actual job description of messenger and handyman – albeit one who’d been released temporarily from such chores.
Marcus Garvey found himself close to destitution. His fortunes plunged even further when he was robbed of the little money that would have carried him over in lean times. Garvey’s dilemma was not atypical of young colonial subjects without means who had come to England. On 18 April 1913, Dusé Mohamed Ali had helped the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society to organise a conference to look into ways of helping young Africans in London. The conference, convened at the Westminster Palace Hotel, resolved that an African Club be established to provide both a physical shelter and a psychological shield from ‘harmful influences’. The resolution was circulated widely amongst sympathetic MPs and also sent to the Colonial Office for its perusal.29 No such provisions were yet in place by the middle of 1914, and Garvey was reluctant to inform the heiress of his impoverished condition.
When he was eventually forced to seek financial help, he knew which charitable organisation to approach. To the cynic, Garvey’s account of being robbed (he does not seem to have been injured) might have appeared convenient and apocryphal, but Travers Buxton of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society was sympathetic. The society composed a letter to the Colonial Office ‘to enable him [Garvey] to raise his passage money [to Jamaica] and pay off a few debts … He is willing in part to work his passage back.’ Travers Buxton offered to put up a guinea if the same (amount) might be matched by the Colonial Office.30 But the Colonial Office was not inclined to rescue adventurers who had turned into supplicants. To do otherwise would be to establish a precedent that would be cited by the very next colonial subject who was brave or foolish enough to gamble on journeying to the metropolis. Local parishes had a duty of care towards citizens who found themselves down on their luck in other cities; an unemployed Liverpudlian in London was encouraged to return to Liverpool. But relief was more problematic for the luckless colonial who found himself or herself without work abroad. When approached, officials pointedly directed applicants to the workhouse, although women, who found themselves amongst the ‘distressed natives’, were treated with greater compassion. Towards the end of 1910, the Colonial Office did lend a helping hand to the appropriately named Mrs E. Virtue and her daughter from Liverpool, paying half their fare on an Elder Dempster steamship bound for Jamaica.31
Marcus Garvey’s correspondence was still being delivered to Stamford Hill but he could not count on charity from his older sister. Though she might consider herself a governess, Indiana was paid the meagre wages of a domestic servant. She too found herself trapped in London, earning enough to survive but insufficient to return to Jamaica. In her straitened circumsta
nces, she would soon be following hard on the heels of her brother, through the doors of the Colonial Office, in a desperate search for patronage and funds towards her own repatriation.
Whilst awaiting a more favourable response, Garvey mustered one last effort to raise funds; he’d obviously discovered the freelancer’s skill of recycling old material because most of the content from the African Times and Orient Review article later appeared in the Tourist, albeit a distilled and diluted version, with much of the polemic softened. Swallowing hard, Garvey had bartered awkward principles against the practical need to pay for his food and lodgings – his article for the Tourist, euphemistically entitled ‘The Evolution of Latter Day Slaves: Jamaica, A Country Of Black and White’, reads in part like a conflicted (smiling through gritted teeth) but ultimately inoffensive tourist advert for the island where ‘white Americans have come to realise that all negroes are not pugnacious and vicious, for when they go over to Jamaica to spend their winter holidays they befriend the black natives just the same as they do with people of their own race’.32 But he ended with a bitter note of remembrance: ‘Jamaica of the present time is partly forgetful of the past. Although the 1st of August each year is observed as Emancipation Day … “It’s a holiday, and we must get merry,” is the only thought that is given to that historic day when their forefathers’ shackles fell off and liberty was proclaimed.’ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Tourist had been instrumental in disseminating abolitionist sentiment throughout Britain; in part Garvey’s essay idealised race relations in Jamaica, and would have left its British readers, as perhaps intended, with the self-satisfying thought that Jamaican harmony was the fruit of their endeavour.