Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  In his illuminating assessment of black internationalism in this period, Minkah Makalani has noted that the IASB’s output was copious: ‘One of the more striking aspects of the bureau’s intellectual work was its sheer volume. In a span of just four years, a core group of roughly seven members produced nine books, a novel, a play, a score of pamphlets, and three journals and a news bulletin.’55 Authorship ensured a hard-won authority; James himself noted that speakers from the bureau often spoke at public meetings where there were more whites than blacks, and that ‘the fact that we had published books gave us some sort of status’.56 The International African Opinion, which billed itself as ‘a journal of action’, explicitly aimed not only at consolidating the oppositional energies unleashed by the invasion of Ethiopia but, as its pointed title indicates, at foregrounding a black non-metropolitan understanding of global events. Its masthead featuring a black woman holding up a torch with a world map in the background, the journal offered ‘the most wide-ranging and cogently argued articulation of the anti-imperialist position in the late 1930s’.57 The fact that its run did not outlast the newsprint shortage in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War should not lead us to overlook the importance of the terrain claimed by the journal. The collective efforts of the IASB executive and other IAO contributors gave clear and consolidated expression to the critical and analytical currents that had emerged from black resistance over the preceding years. Although the importance of the journal has been recognized in scholarship on black internationalism, a more detailed engagement is needed with its contents, and in particular its uncompromising delineation of a cogent, detailed anticolonialism.58 For the first time, a number of vital points looking ahead to the era of decolonization were made within the pages of a single journal, and expanded on by other writings associated with it. These included the recognition of the extent of black and other anticolonial resistance, and the concomitant centrality of self-emancipation; the repudiation of notions of tutelage and trusteeship; the importance of solidarity across racial and national lines; and finally, perhaps most controversially, a radical challenge to the presumed opposition between fascism and ‘democratic’ imperialism that was central to colonial myth-making which will be considered in greater detail in Chapter 9.

  The address of the IAO was determinedly global and cross-racial, even as it sought to build on a pan-African consciousness of shared racial oppression: ‘[We do not] believe that African emancipation is to be achieved in isolation from the rest of the world. But the freedom of the African or any other people can be won only by those people themselves.’59 Any engagement between white and black workers would have to be dialogical, ‘accomplished only by mutual confidence and respect on a basis of complete equality, learnt in discussion, struggle and danger, honestly shared and reciprocal assistance generously given’.60 While it stresses the necessarily racialized nature of this ‘awakened black political consciousness’, the journal is clear in its rejection of ‘racial chauvinism’ from any quarter: ‘We repudiate the idea of substituting a black racial arrogance for a white’.61 Although African emancipation could not be arrived at in isolation from that of the rest of humanity, organizational efforts would have to be constitutively ‘AFRICAN’.62 In a pointed reversal of familiar metropolitan gestures of inclusion, ‘while jealously guarding our independence’, the journal’s editors noted that the contributions of white friends would appear in the journal. (Their financial assistance was repeatedly acknowledged and thanked.)

  Universal Blackness, Global Anticolonialism

  The first editorial of the IAO deserves special attention as a collective statement of aims which brought together several of these points. It is important for its definition of shared ‘black political consciousness’ as deriving from ‘a common bond of oppression’ and ‘scattered’ struggles which need to be brought together.63 Conversely, it repudiated black middle-class petitioning or ‘seeking crumbs from the tables of their imperialist masters’ as a dead end: ‘No freedom will ever be given by any other people or any other organisation, and the black people must therefore shoulder their own burden.’64 This was also to reject in the most strenuous terms the ‘constant subordination’ that is a widely accepted tenet of imperial propaganda among whites, ‘that Africans can do nothing except under tutelage, this desire even on the part of our so-called friends, that everything should be done for the blacks and nothing by the blacks’.65 While announcing its retrenchment into an organization based on ethnic kinship and cultural affiliation – ‘membership of it is limited to Africans and to persons of African descent’ – the IASB and the journal ‘take no isolated view of our task’.66 The ‘common destiny of all the oppressed of whatever nationality or race’ would guide the mission. The IAO would seek to learn, assist and facilitate with due intellectual modesty:

  We know our limitations. We know that we cannot liberate the millions of Africans and people of African descent from their servitude and oppression. That task no one can do but the black people themselves. But we can help to stimulate the growing consciousness of the blacks, to give them benefit of our daily contact with the European movement, to learn from the black masses the lessons of the profound experiences that they accumulate in their daily toil, to point out certain pitfalls that may be avoided, to co-ordinate information and organisation, to do an incessant propaganda in every quarter of Britain, exposing evils, pressing for such remedies as are possible, and mobilising whatever assistance there is to be found in Europe for the cause of African emancipation.67

  Noting that it was a centenary year for the 1838 People’s Charter in Britain, the editorial suggested that colonial black people would take forward the demands of the Chartists as an intermediate stage towards full independence.

  Over its run, the IAO both identified aspects of colonial rule and showed, in counterpoint, how these were repeatedly contested and challenged. Padmore skewered the pretensions of the newly opened Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, which ‘was informing their Imperial Majesties what a glorious contribution to the peace and prosperity of the people of the Empire this Exhibition represents’, even as ‘the working masses of the West Indian island of Jamaica were being shot and bayoneted for demanding betterment of their miserable working conditions’.68 An essay on Ethiopia in this same first edition inverted the terms of civilizational discourse produced by the ‘noble teachers of barbarous savages’ to criticize ‘the jungle-law, which is imperialist diplomacy, though wild animals at least do not justify their killings by references to Christ and international morality’.69 Resistance by Ethiopians and then on the part of West Indians was putting paid to such hypocrisy, however, creating ‘disorder not only in the streets but in the calculations of the British Colonial officials, these men born to govern’.70 The ‘judicious management of the black intelligentsia, giving them jobs, O.B.E’s and even knighthoods’, would no longer suffice to control the ‘explosions in island after island’.71 All too often, imperial mythologizing was successful in masking resistance, a ‘self-boasting’ which, ‘like all advertising which is insistent and continuous’, had succeeded.72 As the conquest of Ethiopia receded in British public awareness, the West Indian labour rebellions provided a focus of organization and agitation for black radicals in London, with many public meetings in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, working ‘to build public support for the strikes in Trinidad and Barbados’.73 Reframing what was being dismissed as disorderly ‘hooliganism’ in anticolonial terms, the IAO noted that Royal Commissions such as that sent to the island in 1938 were predictable and familiar responses from colonial authorities, ways of killing time so that reforms could be staved off. This gradualist reformism had to be repudiated for good.

  The journal’s direct attack on imperial mythologies immediately found its target. Shortly after the first issue of International African Opinion went into circulation, its editors received an irate letter from an Englishman who had read it and wanted to share a few ‘home truths’. Dipp
ed in spiteful ink, the trolling epistle offered its own version of the ‘Caliban’ theory of resistance, whereby ‘sub-logical’ black men first learned the arts of freedom from white rulers:

  In the first place, but for the beneficent rule of this country and its administrators (at whom you lose no occasion to sneer) you would not have such a paper. Far from being able to write such articles, you would be unable to even read them. In short, it is only from the rulers whom you so hate that you have received the education that has enabled you to bite the hand that feeds you.74

  The letter found its way into print despite the author’s stated supposition that the editors would not ‘dare publish’ it, but was accompanied by a remarkably full editorial response that deserves some attention. Inverting the premises of their critic’s civilizational claims, the editors noted sharply: ‘As far as we know, it is to the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Greeks that Europe owes the foundations of its culture. The Arabs contributed heavily during the Middle Ages. But we have not noticed any special feeling of gratitude among the modern Europeans to either Arab or Jew, for instance.’75 It is not just that all cultures owe something to their predecessors and to other cultures, the editors informed their bristling interlocutor; quite specifically, ‘a very elementary knowledge of history would teach him that far from blacks owing anything to Britain, Western civilisation owes a debt to blacks which can never be repaid’.76 Some of the greatest business houses and family fortunes in Britain were built on the slave trade and on the West Indian sugar plantations. As to the familiar claim that the journal itself would not exist were it not for British education, far from Africans needing to be grateful to Europe for teaching a small number to read and write in European languages, many more Europeans owed their entire ‘standard of living and education’ to the ‘labour of generations of Africans’. In response to the claim that Britain was liberal enough to allow them to ‘so vilify the Government’, the editors noted that such freedom of speech as was available to them was a result of ‘the devoted struggles of the British working-class movement through the centuries’ and not the liberal beneficence of the Empire’s ruling classes.77

  A Question of Rebellions

  As Roderick Macdonald has noted, the 1930s represented a definitive break from ‘reformist and essentially élitist’ approaches where criticism of empire was concerned.78 To no small extent, this break was a result of ‘a state almost of insurrection’ that prevailed in the West Indies, which Padmore, along with others, gave several accounts of in the pages of the IAO:

  Unarmed, the crowd took to throwing stones. A warning came from the police. The Riot Act was read and shots were fired over the heads of the strikers. More stones were thrown, and the next volley, lasting for ten minutes, was directed straight at the men, women and children, who by that time numbered over a thousand. Many were wounded, and four workers were killed. One of them, an old Negro woman, was bayoneted to death. The crowd went wild, and, rescuing as many wounded as they could, they retreated into the fields, setting the canes on fire.79

  In an episode uncannily resonant of Morant Bay, on an April day in 1937 a small riot had taken place outside the Frome Estate sugar plantation office – owned by a subsidiary of the gigantic Tate & Lyle Corporation in the parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica. Workers were angry about the dilatory payment of wages. The action soon escalated into a strike ‘and then a large-scale violent confrontation’.80 For a host of reasons to do with wages (subject to arbitrary and severe cuts) and working conditions, including security of tenure, a volatile situation intensified, culminating in a showdown with armed black policemen commanded by white officers facing ‘about a thousand strikers who were armed only with bits of wood, iron pipes and stones’.81 By the end of the day, three people had been shot and one bayoneted by the police, two of them women – one old and one pregnant. Several people, including five policemen, were wounded, and nearly a hundred arrested. Subsequently thousands attended protest meetings and marches to draw attention to the situation of the working poor, and soon sporadic strikes ensued. On 22 May 1937 the capital city of Kingston was shut down, disorder spread, public property was set upon, streets were blocked and mobs occupied public utility buildings. A crowd of thousands being addressed by trade unionists Bustamante and Grant refused to disperse, and met the inevitable baton charge with a return shower of stones and bricks. As similar scenes repeated themselves over the next few days, extending to rolling strikes, looting and the firing of cane-fields, during which Bustamante was jailed, police numbers were reinforced by troop battalions, and several civilians died during violent clashes. The rebellion, described by Ken Post as a ‘counter-blow against capitalism’,82 finally calmed down when a ‘New Deal’ involving a large land settlement was agreed by the colonial administration under Acting Governor Woolley.83 Labour militancy would continue in various forms, however, leading up to another violent confrontation in June the following year, with an emergency declared on the nineteenth of that month. As one historian notes, ‘the economic foundations of slavery, especially in the general picture of land-ownership, had basically remained untouched’ since Emancipation.84

  In the necessary retelling of the history of black oppression as the history of black resistance, the Caribbean also came to occupy an increasingly important place for the intellectuals of the IASB. The arc that could be drawn from the moment of Ethiopia to the conflagrations that swept the British West Indies allowed precisely for the illumination of connections between the construction of pan-African solidarity and a conceptualization of resistance as necessarily rooted in the everyday struggles of black toilers. Both events could also be situated in the longer history of black resistance, which James, among others, saw as vital to the present-day struggle. In places like Jamaica, ‘Ethiopianism’ (also known as ‘Rastafarianism’) – in which all people of African descent identified as Ethiopian – already existed as a strong and vital force. The fate of Ethiopia came thus to stand in for the fate of all black people, not least those dispersed across the Caribbean. Tellingly, James ends his short treatise, The History of Negro Revolt, with an account of contemporary ‘Negro movements’ that includes an extended engagement with the Trinidad labour uprisings, beginning with Uriah Butler’s agitation among oilfield workers. Recounting how labour organizing in Trinidad shifted from Captain Cipriani to Butler when the former refused to sanction strike action against Apex Oilfields in 1935, James appears to track the radicalizing of his own political trajectory, from his making the case for West Indian self-government before coming to England in 1932 to writing histories of black self-emancipation through revolt.85 As revolts spread across the West Indies – to Barbados, St Vincent, St Lucia, British Guiana and Jamaica – James wrote: ‘Consideration of the remedies is beyond us but they will need to be far-reaching.’86 Like others, he ‘had become aware of the existence of a more vigorous Black opposition than that with which he was familiar in his own class … he had witnessed the capacities for resistance of ordinary Black people, the transformation of peasants and workers into liberation forces.’87

  This is not the place for an extended review of the causes and consequences of the waves of unrest that spread across the Caribbean in the 1930s, and certainly accelerated the islands’ progress towards decolonization.88 As in the nineteenth century, multiple difficulties to do with land and labour were at stake. What we can note, however, in the historical light of Morant Bay, are the remarkable resemblances to earlier forms of resistance: refusal to work or harvest crops; occupations of factories; gatherings which invited the charge of ‘riotous assembly’; the escalation of simple demands into active rebellion in the face of frustration; ringleaders identified and punished, unleashing further unrest; and, last but not least, frequent violent repression. All of these were followed by the decision of the British government to appoint a West India Royal Commission, which would submit a report of its inquiry. The Moyne Report, submitted in 1939, just over a year after the commissioners
arrived in the islands, would in fact be suppressed until after the war, only its recommendations being published in the interim, for fear of further controversy. ‘The labour rebellions of the 1930s’, noted the labour organizer and historian Richard Hart, ‘increased the self confidence [sic] of the workers in these colonies and convinced them of the influence they could exert by united action’, where there had been none.89 As Ken Post, another chronicler of the episode, points out, conditions on the island of Jamaica represented ‘the essence of the colonial condition’, a distinct mode of production that was nonetheless ‘closely bound up with structures of exchange and distribution in the metropolis and was indeed determined in its own structure by the demands of British capitalism’.90 This gave the resistance – generally agreed to be spontaneous, if reliant on strong leadership – an international significance of its own. However ‘dimly visible’, a ‘tradition of popular protest, often violent, spanned the years back through Morant Bay to the slave revolts … When other factors of consciousness, leadership and organisation were added to this tradition things of great importance could happen’.91