Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  A ‘race man and a class man’

  In 1919, when McKay arrived in London, he found a scenario of labour militancy without labour unity. There was tension on the London docks as unemployment rose, and impoverished white workers, a few disenchanted ex-service personnel among them, were encouraged to turn their wrath upon foreign seamen, many ‘dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war’.61 There had been race riots, many taking place in different British seaports, spurred by the belief that foreigners, particularly blacks and Asians, were taking jobs that white seamen should have; renewed attempts were made to enforce a union colour bar.62 In turn, various organizations of black and Asian workers and residents were formed to protest and challenge racist discrimination. In a few cases, ‘black British sailors protested about the employment of foreign white sailors’.63 Not least due to the now extensive presence of black workers, including those who had served Britain in the war, race became a potent issue in the wider discussion of labour conditions and workers’ rights. ‘Amidst these racist riots’, Virdee reminds us, ‘no section of British society saw fit to recall how the British state and employers had scoured the four corners of its Empire in search of labour to fill the gap’ left by war-volunteer seamen.64 Recalling the moment in his memoirs, and noting that it was a period of ‘great labor unrest’ in the Rhineland as well, McKay writes that his aim in ‘A Black Man Replies’ was to remind Lansbury of the duty of ‘a radical organ to enlighten its readers about the real reasons why the English considered colored troops undesirable in Europe, instead of appealing indirectly to illogical emotional prejudices’.65 He also warned the politician and editor that ‘his black-scourge articles would be effective in stirring up more prejudice against the negroes’, to which Lansbury predictably replied that ‘he was not personally prejudiced against Negroes’.66 McKay rightly saw this as irrelevant, since what was at stake was not a ‘personal issue’, but the ‘public attitude’ of the Labour journal. He did, however, acknowledge that the Labour MP had ‘energetically denounced’ the situation of the previous summer, ‘when colored men were assaulted by organized bands of whites in the English ports’.67 He would note later that, while he was ‘not sentimental’ about his own race, ‘I hate oppression of subject races and peoples’.68

  Already host to several campaigning South Asian organizations, including the India League, run by the redoubtable V. K. Menon, London in the era after the end of the First World War would also witness a steady inflow of intellectuals and campaigners from its West Indian and African imperial possessions. By the 1930s, frequently facilitated either by white allies or through black-run organizations and journals, radical black voices became more powerfully audible. Black sojourners like McKay would, as Cedric Robinson has argued, learn from the radical left milieu they encountered in the great imperial capital, but they would also bring to it their own experiences of anticolonialism and struggles against racial oppression, including pan-Africanism. It is tempting, given the brevity of his stay, to suggest, as Robert Reinders and Wayne Cooper do in their useful overview of McKay’s year in England, that, if there is a broader significance to that sojourn of otherwise ‘limited importance’, it is as a ‘case study of the disillusioned colonial’.69 He is arguably deserving of more than ‘a footnote in modern British history as the first Negro Socialist to write for an English periodical’.70 In one sense, McKay stands at the head of a long line of West Indian and African intellectuals – among whom C. L. R. James and George Padmore are only the best known – who formed productive, if sometimes fraught, alliances with radical figures on the British left, and helped shape the contours of interwar British anticolonialism. McKay (who was prevented from travelling to any colonies other than Jamaica after his spell in England, where he was put under surveillance by Special Branch) also brought a vital transatlantic dimension to bear on questions of race, colonialism and radical politics. While he may not have viewed himself to be speaking ‘as a black man’, McKay indisputably articulated a perspective honed by the experience of both colonialism and metropolitan racism. His partnership with Pankhurst was vital to that understanding being disseminated into a broader progressive and left-wing milieu. In inviting McKay to her printing office in Fleet Street and offering him a job as a reporter at the Dreadnought, where she also asked him to ‘dig up something along the London docks from the colored as well as the white seamen’,71 and to ‘write from a point of view which would be fresh and different’, Pankhurst appears to have recognized the pedagogical value for the British left of a powerful voice which could speak eloquently on race and empire.72 She tasked him also with reading newspapers from the colonies and marking items to bring to the attention of Dreadnought readers. McKay first got to know Pankhurst at an international club, which he described somewhat ambivalently in retrospect as a place full of ‘dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London’.73 Later he would tell Nancy Cunard that, living in ‘uncongenial’ London, the club ‘was altogether a foreign milieu’ in which he had found refuge.74

  While the political partnership between McKay and Pankhurst was to last just about a year – she would be arrested later in 1920 over an ‘inflammatory’ article McKay had commissioned from a young sailor sent undercover to investigate conditions ‘below decks’, while he would return to the United States – it has both a symbolic and a material importance. Through Pankhurst’s connections within ‘the nest of extreme radicalism in London’, McKay met figures such as Saklatvala and Lansbury, describing the latter contemptuously as symbolic of all that was ‘pious and self-righteous in the British Labor movement’.75 In each other, Pankhurst and McKay recognized constitutively dissident sensibilities, a willingness not only to challenge the establishment but also to put pressure on and transform their own oppositional milieus. Such partnerships and affinities, even when brief and sometimes uneasy, were the warp and weft of metropolitan anticolonialism. McKay wrote of his feminist employer: ‘And in the labor movement she was always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been called the Dread Wasp. And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job.’76 McKay also described the Dreadnought’s relationship to the more established Daily Herald as that of ‘a little cat up against a big dog’ and ‘always spitting’.77 Pankhurst’s employment of McKay on clearly equal terms is particularly significant in a milieu where race feeling was far from absent, whether that took the form of hostility, paternalism or curiosity (George Bernard Shaw, for instance, would ask McKay why he preferred writing to pugilism).78 What is very clear is that, despite occasional disagreements with Pankhurst – not least over her refusal to publish a ‘scoop’ revealing Lansbury’s employment of strike-breakers in his sawmills – McKay left an impression on her and an imprint on the journal. Issues of the Workers’ Dreadnought after McKay left show a determinate rise in international and imperial coverage, with particular attention paid to Ireland, South Africa and India.

  McKay would also open up the fraught question about the relationship between race and class in the crucible of the Empire. In the very first piece that he wrote under his own name for the Dreadnought, in early 1920, McKay made the case for left-wing Britons to engage with anticolonial nationalism. Taking issue with some English communists who had remarked to him that they were not sympathetic to ‘nationalistic’ movements in India and Ireland, McKay, who would soon go on to a triumphal tour to the Soviet Union, opined that ‘for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to Communism’.79 English revolutionaries ought not to be ‘unduly concerned’ about the manner in which blows against imperialism – and, thereby, capitalism – were struck.80 McKay’s short piece was itself structured by productive tensions: on the one hand, he criticized organizations
like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) for failing to recognize that ‘the Negro question is primarily an economic problem’ that would not be solved by admitting a few chosen ones into white society through wealth and attainment.81 On the other, McKay conceded, such efforts did develop ‘race-consciousness in the Negro and made him restive’.82 Here he was drawing on his own fraught experience with Garveyism, where, despite disagreements with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he could see that black people ‘oppressed by the capitalists, despised and denied a fighting chance under the present economic system by white workingmen’, could find means of self-assertion through black nationalism.83 In making the radical case for nationalism, McKay argued, somewhat optimistically, that people ‘who are strong enough to throw off an imperial yoke’ would not ‘tamely submit to a system of local capitalism’.84 What McKay had begun to theorize was the necessarily dialogical relationship between race and class in the post-1917 era, in which European empires still held global sway.

  One of McKay’s recurrent concerns, evident in both his response to Morel and his later writing for the Dreadnought under the pseudonym ‘Leon Lopez’, was the way in which divisions between white and non-white workers were instigated by and played into capitalist and imperialist hands: ‘The whole plot is so obvious and yet the nicely fed and clothed labour officials play the capitalist game to perfection, by stirring up the passions of the workers against aliens (and need I add Jews?)’.85 The roving reporter ‘Leon Lopez’ describes going down to the docks and seeing the devastation wrought by unemployment with ‘scores upon scores of seamen, white, brown and black, waiting wistfully for an undermanned ship’. As Lopez wonders what will unfold as a consequence of these conditions, his question is answered by a screaming headline in a local newspaper: ‘CHINATOWN SCANDAL. WHITE GIRLS AND YELLOW MEN’. After a few sharp words for the ‘kept press’ and its disingenuous fascination with what ‘our English girls find in these foreigners’, McKay/Lopez proposes this: ‘The dockers, instead of being unduly concerned about the presence of their coloured fellow men, who, like themselves are the victims of capitalism … should lead the attack on the bastilles, the bonded warehouses along the docks to solve the question of unemployment.’86 Only a year later, McKay would publish, in Russia, Negry v Amerike (The Negroes in America), which is described by one critic as arguably ‘the first ever black-authored monograph theorizing the relationship between race and class’, and criticizing the left-wing elision of the race issue.87 In turn, McKay’s class radicalism was not always congenial to those who believed that organizing around race was the way forward for black Americans. He did, however, write to Marcus Garvey urging contact and alliances between ‘radical Negroes’ and ‘white radical movements’: ‘To me they are the great destructive forces within while the subject races are fighting without … We have a great wall to batter down, and while we are working on one side, we should hail those who are working on the other.’88 As Winston James notes, McKay was ultimately dialectical, ‘a race man and a class man’.89

  While clearly committed to colonial freedom even during the Dreadnought years, Pankhurst herself would become a full-time anticolonialist by the late 1930s, in the wake of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia – an event which would galvanize both pan-Africanists and British critics of empire (see Chapter 7). During the attacks on black workers in London, she had challenged those who were justifying them, making the connection between imperialism abroad and racism at home:

  Do you think the British should rule the world or do you want to live on peaceable terms with all peoples?

  Do you wish to exclude all blacks from England?

  If so, do you not think that blacks might justly ask that the British should at the same time keep out of the black peoples’ countries?90

  While some of Pankhurst’s Dreadnought editorials before 1920 were clear in their commitment to Irish and Indian self-determination, the latter achieved ‘either by taking it herself, or by a British Revolution extending it to her’, something of McKay’s influence can be seen not only in the increased coverage of international issues in the wake of his tenure on the weekly, but also in an even greater emphasis on colonial insurgency as itself inspirational to the working classes of Britain, requiring not just solidarity but also emulation.91 In early issues, unsigned Dreadnought pieces (likely to have been written by Pankhurst as editor) deprecated the ‘colour bar’ in South Africa, and took issue with moderate reformers like Annie Besant being seen as representatives of Indian aspirations. The influence of Saklatvala – who also contributed several articles to the Dreadnought around this time – is clear here. Later issues of the journal, however, took pains to point to the growth of ‘great insurgent movements in Ireland, in India, in Egypt’, suggesting, as Jones had once suggested to the Chartists, that they should ‘cause Communists to consider deeply: why are these movements so flourishing and so capable of action, whilst the working-class movement is languishing in apathy and ineptitude?’92 An editorial noted that Britain too needed ‘a movement that is moving’, as was the case in India, where a ‘vast revolt’ was in the making; India would also give confidence to Ireland’s anticolonial movement. Pankhurst would also deprecate Labour’s weakening of its internationalist inheritance in not offering ‘strenuous opposition’ to the weakly reformist 1919 Government of India Act, and accuse the party of lacking in ‘the sturdy democratic fibre of the Chartists’.93 After a tussle with the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain over control of the Dreadnought when she was released from prison in 1922, Pankhurst ran the paper for two more years before it folded. She would not return to journalism and public life again till the early 1930s, though she did write a book on India in 1926. While the book itself is not especially remarkable – one among many overarching histories of the region that seek to understand it in historical context – it does attempt to delineate the manifold ways in which colonial rule has had to resort to repressive measures for its survival, including legislating against ‘disaffection’. Pankhurst also considers the resources for democratic and egalitarian government already embedded in Indian vernacular traditions, comparing the village panchayats to the Russian mir. To the extent that empire attempts to render subject populations ‘dumb’ through the force of the machine, the claims of the civilizing mission are rendered void: ‘Civilisation must indeed be written down as a failure, if it could find no better means of spreading knowledge than is provided by the sword, and no nobler motive for doing so than that of exploitation’.94

  ‘Though still white’: Black Voice and the Extraordinary Dreams of Nancy Cunard

  YOUR BOOK IS MARVELOUS. LANGSTON.

  Langston Hughes, cablegram to Cunard, April 1934

  Voices crying in the wilderness

  At so much per word

  From the white folks:

  ‘Be meek and humble.

  All you niggers

  And do not cry

  Too loud.’

  Langston Hughes, ‘To Certain Negro Leaders’

  In 1931, McKay, now an established figure on the cultural landscape of Harlem, wrote an enthusiastic letter to a woman who had invited him to contribute to an anthology she was putting together:

  We poor Negroes, it seems to me, are literally smothered under reams of stale, hackneyed, repetitious stuff done by our friends, our moral champions and ourselves … We most of us live in fear of the fact of ourselves. And can hardly afford to render even the artistic truth of our own lives as we know and feel it; but it is unimaginable that you could be handicapped or allow yourself to be by the social-racial reactions that hamper us sometimes unconsciously even. And so I hope the stuff you are going to put out will be a revelation and inspiration to us.95

  Given a literary context where black voices – his own and those of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, among others – were in fact expressing the ‘artistic truth’ of black lives with increasing vividness and power, McKay
was being more than a little self-deprecating. He was right, however, to suggest that his addressee could potentially make good use of her cultural capital as a white author to put into the public domain a collaborative piece of work which would be fresh and revelatory. She was Nancy Cunard, a British aristocrat descended from the shipping baron Samuel Cunard, though by no means the wealthy ‘heiress’ the media sensationally portrayed her as. Already something of a celebrity as a poet, writer, journalist, art collector, artistic muse, music aficionado and publisher, Cunard had written to McKay to solicit a contribution for her anthology, Negro, originally titled Colour. The owner of the Hours, a small press which published European avant-garde work, and also a discerning collector of African artefacts, Cunard wanted to curate a panoramic work that would at once function as a cultural history of African and African-American life and as a forum for black liberation globally.96 The case which had galvanized her, as well as many others in Britain and continental Europe, to think about the problem of racism and white supremacy was the that of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, the nine young black men in America who had been tried and summarily sentenced (eight of them capitally) for purportedly raping two white women. As was obvious to many, there was no evidence of their guilt; the prosecution was based on the testimony of the two women, one of whom recanted. The League against Imperialism was one of the key constituents of the European Scottsboro campaigns, and Cunard was alongside, operating in Paris, London and New York. Her involvement and networks brought high-powered figures to the international defence of the Scottsboro nine, including Ezra Pound, Albert Einstein (a patron of the LAI who had also come out in support of the Meerut detainees) and Charlie Chaplin.97 The communist-led Scottsboro front also represented, not least through its transatlantic dimensions, the yoking together of anti-racism and anticolonialism in a global frame. In Britain, the campaign drew on the momentum generated by the smaller Meerut campaign, attracting many of the same key figures, including Saklatvala and Bridgeman. As a response to that moment, the Negro anthology constitutes a declaration that the raced voices of the colonized-in-struggle would henceforth have to be central to the project of decolonization. Symptomatic of this centrality was the change of the anthology’s title from Colour, with its emphasis on racial oppression, to Negro, with the agency and voices of black people in the foreground.98 The anthology not only produces ‘blackness as an inescapable presence’, but places the historical condition of blackness as a necessary particular through which it would be possible to think in world-historical terms.99