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Insurgent Empire

Page 41

by Priyamvada Gopal


  European historians of the Abyssinia crisis have tended to discuss it as a preliminary act of appeasement on the road to fascism which was not ‘an episode in the relations between European and African peoples’, but rather ‘a catalyst of the disintegration of international law and order in Europe, leading to a European and so to a World War’.17 In contrast, for many colonial subjects in Africa and the West Indies, as well as black intellectuals resident in London, the incursions upon and invasion of the only sovereign and fully independent African nation by a European power was precisely about African people and their relation to Europeans. The Ethiopian resistance represented a radical yet realizable possibility: defeating imperialism and seizing back the continent of Africa. James recalled that the attack on Ethiopia prompted him and others to organize a campaign and demand action against Italy, and even to consider forming a military organization to fight the Italians. An important cognitive shift had taken place with the invasion and Ethiopian resistance to it: a sense that ‘the African revolution’, as James termed it, was underway, and that it was important for black intellectuals to identify themselves ‘with those bands, hundreds and thousands of them, who are still fighting, and for years are going to carry on the fight against Imperialistic domination of any kind’.18 The result of this recognition among black radicals resident in Britain was the formation of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, which was soon renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia. This significant black presence and flurry of activity in the service of ‘colonial emancipation in general and African emancipation in particular’ meant, James opined, that, ‘As far as political organisations in England were concerned the black intellectuals had not only arrived but were significant arrivals.’19 It also brought black people from various parts of the globe into alliance, as Makonnen recalls:

  It’s very important to put the response of the black world to the Ethiopian War into perspective, especially since it is easy to get the impression that pan-Africanism was just some type of petty protest activity – a few blacks occasionally meeting in conference and sending resolutions here and there. But the real dimensions can only be gathered by estimating the kind of vast support that Ethiopia enjoyed amongst blacks everywhere … It brought home to many black people the reality of colonialism, and exposed its true nature … It was clear that imperialism was a force to be reckoned with, because here it was attacking the black man’s last citadel.20

  In ‘Abyssinia and the Imperialists’, a 1936 piece written for The Keys, the journal of the League of Coloured People (LCP), James acerbically hailed the invasion as a salutary pedagogical occasion, for ‘Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British imperialist education, needed a lesson’.21 Abyssinia posed a special challenge for all five imperial powers who desired it, since the people ‘are splendid fighters’, making it less easy for those powers to ‘steal it as easily as they had stolen the rest of Africa’.22 The lesson to be learned from this morass was applicable across colonial contexts: ‘The only thing to save Abyssinia is the efforts of the Abyssinians themselves and action by the great masses of Negroes and sympathetic whites and Indians all over the world, by demonstrations, public meetings, resolutions, financial assistance to Abyssinia, strikes against the export of all materials to Italy, refusal to unload Italian ships etc.’23 It is this recognition that makes the conflict, ‘though unfortunate for Abyssinia … of immense benefit to the race as a whole’.24 What the Abyssinia crisis had indeed done was to provide a concrete focus for black anticolonialism both in Britain and beyond, opening up a horizon of imaginative possibility – one that James would use, along with the ongoing labour unrest in the West Indies, as an inspiration for the work he had already begun on The Black Jacobins, his great historical ode to black self-emancipation.25 The invasion of Ethiopia, seen as the ‘final Caucasian victory’, came to stand in for European colonialism tout court – not least, of course, due to Britain and France’s reluctance to rein in Italy and the far-from-suppressed admiration accorded by Britain’s ruling elites to the likes of Mussolini.26 There was also material support in the form of arms and war materials.

  That the language of nationhood permeates what was a necessarily transnational endeavour is significant. In his important account of the black presence in London during this period, Marc Matera notes that black radicals shunned narrow racial and national chauvinism as ‘dangerous illusions’.27 While he is correct to suggest that many studies of resistance to colonialism have reduced diverse political imaginaries and struggles to ‘a Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination’, and that ‘the nationalist plot occludes whole realms of political imagination and struggle’, the fact also remains that a substantial amount of effort was put into demanding that principles of self-determination, articulated by both Wilson and Lenin in very different ways, be genuinely universalized.28 As the case of Ethiopia suggests, national belonging and transnational affiliations, nationalism and internationalism, were seen to have a symbiotic relationship; it was certainly not quite the case that ‘the majority of these black intellectuals and organizations rejected nationalism as a divisive and obsolete paradigm for political community’.29 In most cases, individuals from the Caribbean and Africa had no independent nations of their own to reject as ‘obsolete’, which is why tremendous importance was placed on Ethiopia and Haiti as the world’s only two independent black nation-states (Liberia had a more ambiguous status). In a sense, the national had to be clawed out of the colonial before a postcolonial – or a postnational – future could be anticipated and imagined. We should be cautious about reading back into a very different political moment that sense of jaded obsolescence which is an affective disposition of our own theoretical present. For these black intellectuals, it was also not just a question of offering solidarity to Ethiopian nationalists; the sovereign statehood of this one country was felt to be vitally organic, its violation symbolic of the violence and injury inflicted upon Africans as a whole. In Cedric Robinson’s words, ‘Ethiopia’ became a point of reference, ‘a term signifying historicity and racial dignity in ways the term ‘Negro’ could not match’.30 One nationalist newspaper in Sierra Leone went so far as to suggest that ‘peoples of the African group will admit that the dictator has done a distinct service’ in bringing them together into a united front with differences swept away by ‘the magic touch of kinship’.31 It certainly turned James into a fierce advocate of anticolonial alliances, enjoining ‘sufferers from imperialism all over the world, all anxious to help the Ethiopian people’, to ‘organise yourselves independently’.32 His metaphor was simple: prisoners broke their own chains – ‘Who is the fool that expects our gaolers to break them?’33 We know that, as a member of the politically moderate LCP in 1933, James was already inclined to advocate a ‘spirit of nationalism’ to liberate the West Indies from its colonial condition, making the case for ‘a West Indian consciousness, and a pride in the matters that pertain to [West Indians]’.34 With the invasion of Ethiopia, there emerged a clear sense that anticolonialism could therefore be necessarily at once nation-oriented (stressing independence from colonial rule) and determinedly transnational in organizational form: it would deploy the language of nation-states put in instrumental place by empire while defiantly exceeding its territorial and conceptual limits.

  This insight made it both possible and necessary to demonstrate how there were or had been viable communities and collective entities which had pre-existed colonial states, and whose resources could yet be deployed in the forging of altogether different post-imperial polities. Part of the impetus here was to lay claim to an understanding of freedom and rights which sought simultaneously to expose the colonizer’s version of the universal as in fact parochial, partial and self-serving, and to show that these were concepts with African roots of their own, hardly unique to Europe or the West. Already in 1934, when he had begun to study Africa in greater depth, James had spoken of the Bushongo of Kasai as an Afric
an people with ‘a civilisation which showed what Africa would have been able to achieve had it remained free from foreign interference. In fact, their moral code might have served as an example to the rest of the world’.35 Makonnen recalls: ‘George and I spent a good deal of time in the British Museum digging out some of the ancient history of Ethiopia.’36 Such research made it possible for them to ‘discourse at Hyde Park’ and to ‘attempt to educate English public opinion’ on the political possibilities deriving from anticolonial insurgency. It is important to resist the temptation to read this engagement with Ethiopia, even in James’s case, as evidence of a pre-Marxist culturalism which would eventually be replaced by a properly economic analysis. The combined inspiration of the Ethiopian situation and labour uprisings (the protests over the former frequently fronted by the leaders of the latter in the West Indies) spelled the emergence of a black anticolonialism that managed to take seriously culture and economy, race and class, putting them in necessary and dialogic engagement. This was also the period, as Davarian L. Baldwin notes, when the term ‘New Negro’ returned to discourse in the United States and beyond, referring both to ‘the assertiveness and defiance of the first generation of free black people’ and to ‘the more pronounced convergence of politically leftist and black radical internationalism’.37 As the question of capitalism and its deep implication in the structures of empire became vitally central, questions of race, nation and culture would not, could not, be subordinated to the status of superstructure. If ‘Marx and Engels did not see any revolutionary potential in non-Western peoples or their civilisations’, as Anthony Bogues argues, what was taking place in Ethiopia, Africa and across the Caribbean would require that contention to be revisited.38

  ‘We repudiate this imperialist benevolence …’: The International African Opinion39

  Of course we had people like C. L. R. James and Cedric Dover in the 1930s, but such few writers as there were had to enter a field that was predominantly white – white journals, white publishers, and nearly always white men writing about black. All right. But what this meant in even such a radical circle as the Left Book Club series was that your work had to be read by a white man to see if it had any merit.

  Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within

  You’d better join our group while you’re here. We’re a sort of brains trust behind the various colonial organizations in this country.

  Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo

  The first serious organizational attempt to create a global black coalition of resistance out of the Ethiopia campaign was made in Britain. The International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE), the brainchild of James and Ashwood Garvey, was the first prominent incarnation of these efforts; after the eventual defeat of the Ethiopians, it would transform itself in 1937 into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), a task which could be described in the terms Stafford Cripps used for Padmore’s work: a ‘bare and courageous exposure of the great myth of the civilizing mission of western democracies in Africa’.40 Disseminating anticolonial writing and critical analyses specifically by black campaigners and intellectuals was central to the work of the IASB, Abrahams’s thinly fictionalized ‘brains trust’. (That they were overwhelmingly male was a fact that went unremarked by them at the time, though, as Matera notes, the organizational labours of women, not least of Amy Ashwood Garvey, were, in fact, fundamental.) Well connected within both black and pan-African circles, Ashwood Garvey ran a restaurant and club, the Florence Mills Social Parlour, which famously afforded a congenial space for many black activists and intellectuals to meet. According to Ras Makonnen’s memoir, the explicit aim of the IASB was to direct anticolonial activity in Britain under black leadership and consciousness: ‘we were not going to have any European leadership’ and the ‘idea therefore was to emphasize service to people of African descent in as many ways as possible’.41 The IASB’s paper, International African Opinion (IAO), would note acerbically that ‘European organisations tend to ignore the African struggle and to use the colonial movement merely as a decoration to their own for ceremonial occasions’.42 As its general secretary, I. T. A. (Isaac) Wallace-Johnson, remarked, the Ethiopia episode and the failure of Britain and other League of Nations members to curb Italy demonstrated one thing: ‘that the world is still dominated by the philosophy of might over right. It has also opened the eyes of Africans the world over, that they have no rights which the powerfully armed nations are bound to respect’.43 In its own literature, the IASB described one of its primary purposes as helping to ‘enlighten British public opinion about conditions in the Colonies, Protectorates and Mandated territories in Africa, the West Indies and other parts of the Empire’.44 It would also campaign for democratic rights and freedoms in the colonies and against such things as child labour, forced labour and the colour bar. A prolific flurry of publishing activity by members of the bureau followed, including such works as How Britain Rules Africa and Africa and World Peace, both by Padmore, followed by James’s A History of Negro Revolt, Eric Williams’s The Negro in the Caribbean and Capitalism and Slavery and Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya.45 The one work from this period which has been given any sustained attention in postcolonial literary scholarship is James’s justly celebrated Black Jacobins, although Williams’s and Kenyatta’s works have been central to African studies over the years. Equally important are the collective efforts embodied by the IAO and related publications, emerging as they did out of a campaigning milieu of debate, discussion and organizational work.

  It is not only possible but right to think about many of the Asian and black intellectuals and campaigners resident in London in the 1930s as distinctively British figures, addressing British audiences and laying claim to British political and ethical terrain; they brought with them, of course, colonial histories and experiences, and sought to integrate these into their analyses of both the British and the global present. My point here is somewhat different from the way in which the likes of James and Padmore, for instance, are routinely figured as ‘Black Englishmen’, steeped – as they undoubtedly were – in English (but also European) literary and political traditions. Cedric Robinson has suggested that many such figures felt that ‘a part of their mission was to correct the errant motherland’, and that even the most anti-imperialist among them found it difficult to shake off a Whiggish belief in the eventual triumph of English ‘fair play and deep moral regulation’.46 James’s later, rather tongue-in-cheek, remark about his journey from Trinidad is, of course, widely cited: ‘The British intellectual was going to Britain.’47 Noting that even Trotsky considered James’s ‘cast of mind all too typically English’, Howe suggests that James’s ‘central thrust remained that of the extreme, indeed shameful, chasm between the British values he genuinely cherished and their betrayal in the colonies’.48 Schwarz notes of Padmore that he ‘mastered the culture of the colonisers, having learned to inhabit Englishness at perfect pitch’, and that for him, as for James, ‘mastering the codes of England provided a way out from colonial Trinidad’.49 None of this is untrue, but it is necessary to push beyond variants of Shakespeare’s ‘Caliban’ as a generic symbol for these figures, with the attendant implication that their ‘cursing’ criticism and analyses were fundamentally made possible by their mastery of the colonizer’s language. Something more interesting was going on during this moment of discernment, in which black campaigners and intellectuals found themselves undertaking a different kind of journey to Caliban’s. For those who had travelled from the West Indies and parts of Africa, what came into focus was their own sense of self, individual and collective. As Ethiopia was bombarded, while Britain and the League of Nations stood by, urgent questions presented themselves. Who were ‘we’, the black sojourners in Britain who had arrived there from across the Caribbean and Africa? Was it even possible for that diversity of backgrounds and histories to coalesce into a collective identity, deeply felt as a shared experience in the attack on a sovereign African nation few of them actually came fro
m but to which a shared affective allegiance united them? How could this collective African and black self, shaped by the colonial encounter but not reducible to it, be given voice – and, given the importance of self-representation to the act of self-emancipation, by whom? The black self in a historical frame became the object of study for these black intellectuals. Indeed, James appears to have said as much: ‘I began to gain in England a conception of black people which I didn’t possess when I left the Caribbean.’50

  To ‘close ranks’ in creating black organizations like the IASB was, then, a necessary step in this process of self-study and self-understanding, which entailed crafting a voice that did not simply echo European intellectual insights, and then making it heard. If one of the most important reasons for doing so was to repudiate white leadership and European tutelage in order to act from a place of confident self-knowledge, equally vital was a sense that there were resources to be drawn on which were not simply reducible to Prospero’s gift. These were, to some extent, provided by coming to grips with a history of ideas and achievements out of Africa – James confessed, for instance, that he had been completely ‘unaware that Africa had artistic structures and traditions of its own’ – but it was the resistance in Ethiopia and the insurgencies in the Caribbean which most inspired the insight that the language of black rebellion needed to be understood and espoused.51 If the Caribbean had been a foundational agent of capitalist modernity through plantation slavery – an argument James, among others, would make – it was also the case that the descendants of those rebellious chattels were once again leading the way in challenging the depredations of capitalism and empire.52 Now, as then, it was the metropole that had something to learn from the periphery, and the black radicals of the IASB sought to play a key role in this process. And so, while the organization was assertively black in composition and primary membership – and self-consciously more radical than existing black organizations like the LCP, which James had been involved with for a time – numerous sympathetic white Britons were listed as ‘patrons’ on its letterhead. They included Nancy Cunard; Sylvia Pankhurst, MP and future colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones; the publisher Victor Gollancz; the Rev. Reginald Sorensen; the writer Ethel Mannin; the MPs Ellen Wilkinson, Noel Baker and D. N. Pritt (among others); and the radical journalist F. A. Ridley. James would edit the organization’s journal, International African Opinion, which laid out the IASB’s aims and guiding principles with admirable clarity: ‘Educate – Co-operate – Emancipate: Neutral in nothing affecting the African Peoples’.53 It would provide speakers to go to ‘Labour Party branches, Co-operative Guilds, League of Nations Union branches, peace societies and religious organisations’.54

 

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