While ‘Ethiopianism’ was not the primary cause for the strength of this labour militancy, the return to the racial language that also circulated during the Morant Bay rebellion – ‘skin for skin and colour for colour’ – is striking.92 As noted in the joint memorandum submitted by the Negro Welfare Association, the IASB and the LCP in London to the Moyne Commission (which, tellingly, was reluctant to receive evidence from them), Ethiopia had served to consolidate and channel existing consciousness of a material oppression that clearly had a racial basis:
In 1833 there was reason to apprehend a universal Negro rebellion for freedom, and emancipation was granted from above to prevent the cataclysm of emancipation from below, as had occurred in San Domingo [sic]. Similarly today, when the rape of Ethiopia has given a great stimulus to growing Negro consciousness, it is not a question of rebellions if, but rebellions unless, democratic government is granted.93
In places like Jamaica, an eccentric mixture of Garveyism, Ethiopianism and Rastafarianism constituted ‘an important part of the political culture of resistance in Jamaica’ which was marked by ‘economic deprivation, social volatility and politicisation’.94 Garveyism had already spread a ‘Black Nationalist message of racial dignity and pride in an ancestral Africa’ even as its economic programme stressed ‘racial development through private enterprise’.95 Workers’ organizations in Trinidad staged agitations in which dockers refused to unload Italian ships, and actively attempted to illuminate links between issues at home and abroad. For the IAO, this rebellion had been some time in the making: ‘And in proportion to the tardiness of their awakening they are now aggressive in their militancy.’ Measures such as instituting a Royal Commission would not suffice any more: ‘There have been too many Commissions and too little action. This is just a method of killing time, in the hope that the temper of the masses may die down and the long-awaited reforms staved off.’96 Something had changed irrevocably in the West Indian colonies. ‘Yet to say that Quashee stood up in 1938’, writes Post, referencing the colonial stereotype of the happy and feckless black peasant made famous by Carlyle, among others,
is to say both everything and nothing. It is everything because, for once, the poor of Jamaica made their own history. It is nothing because there was not one Quashee – he is a stereotype, a reification, a device of the ruling class like shackles or wage labour. Rather, there were many Quashees … thousands of whom had come by May 1938 to feel that the stereotype must be transcended.97
While full independence from British rule was still a long way away, Quashee, it could be said, ‘did not bend as low as before, and after the middle of 1938 Jamaica was never quite the same again’.98
‘What are you going to do about it?’ Solidarity as Imperative
Solidarity with such forms of resistance underway in the colonies emerged as a keynote in many articles in the IAO. ‘The great masses of the British people’, announced the first issue, ‘must see what is being done in their name’.99 In an echo of Marx’s famous observation to the effect that white labour could not be emancipated while black labour was being oppressed, an article on the importance of the Anti-imperialist Exhibition in Glasgow, which was set up to counter the imperialist one (see Chapter 9), noted that ‘while the colonial workers are in bondage, the British workers labour but in vain to free themselves from the burdening yoke of Imperialism’.100 It was therefore incumbent on British labour to support Caribbean workers ‘without reservation’.101 One of the most striking editorials in this vein was produced as an open letter from the executive of the IASB to the delegates of the Trades Union Congress at Blackpool in September 1938. Having offered to make blacks everywhere aware of their common cause with British workers, the letter poses in turn a series of not-quite-rhetorical questions to white British trade unionists: ‘At the present moment Africans and West Indians are struggling for their elementary democratic rights. What are you going to do about it?’102 Traditions of resistance must be honoured in their global provenance without ignorance providing an alibi:
You celebrated the centenary of the Tolpuddle martyrs not long ago. All politically conscious Africans celebrated it with you. But Ulric Grant in Barbados, for daring to organise the Barbados workers, is now serving a sentence of ten years’ imprisonment. If you did not know it before, gentlemen, then you ought to have known it, and you know now. What are you going to do about it?103
From land-and cattle-grabs in Kenya to restrictions placed on trade unions in Trinidad, British labour was imperilled if it was not as ‘vigilant in protest and action on these issues’ as with its own concerns. Importantly, this call for solidarity was not only issued across race lines but, in another sharp open letter a few months later, directed at West Indian intellectuals and their own overlooked responsibilities.104 The West Indian uprisings, this letter began by noting, ‘have forced themselves into the consciousness of the people and rulers of the British Empire and the whole world, and the method by which this has been done is at once a reproach and a sign-post to the better-educated people of African descent in these colonies’.105 Admonishing the intellectuals of the islands for not having undertaken any noticeable political activity in support of the labour cause, the letter reminds them that the demands of the workers are theirs to espouse too, that their own liberties are threatened when those of the workers are threatened. If equality is to replace racism globally, so too are West Indian intellectuals tasked with ‘eliminating from their movement the reactionary discriminations that exist between those who differ in shades of colour’. Nor were the West Indian masses to be treated as ‘raw material for the political activity of the few’.106 The intellectual did have something to give to them, but ‘they have more to teach him’.
Towards a Theory of Colonial Fascism
This letter returns to a recurrent theme in the literature of the IASB – the nature and scope of fascism and its relationship to forms of imperial rule:
Fascism, which is the most brutal form of imperialism, puts a firm brake on all liberal ideas, all freedom, on every concept of human equality and fraternity. In Germany, it bases itself on a fanatical nationalism, and exaggerated racial arrogance. Its inhuman persecution of the Jews is a sop to national discontent and a convenient destraction [sic] from the real issues at stake. With giant strides it stalks all over the world. In Italy, Germany, Poland, Rumania, in diverse forms, it raises its foul head everywhere. It has appeared in Britain and in the British House of Commons.107
Unambiguous in its insistence that Hitler was an irredeemable entity, and crystal clear that both he and Mussolini had to be strenuously opposed, the journal raised a question which would become a point of discussion on the British left more broadly: what was the relationship between imperialism in its supposedly ‘democratic’ form and fascism of the German and Italian varieties? ‘The British democrats of property are democrats’, the open letter to intellectuals warned, ‘just so long as democracy serves them’.108 The treatment of trade unionists and workers in the West Indies rendered nugatory the frequent declaration by liberals, socialists, communists and Tory humanitarians – with regard to similar arrests in Germany and Italy – that this ‘could happen only in a Fascist country’.109 The term ‘colonial fascism’ was put into play by an unsigned article, possibly drafted by Padmore, to signify those authoritarian and violent practices of rule undertaken specifically in colonial contexts by the putatively ‘democratic’ powers.110 Another IAO editorial made a point that would be picked up in British left-wing papers, such as the New Leader, in the run-up to the Second World War:
We will not shed our blood to maintain the yoke around our necks. Let it be known that as far as we are concerned, the ‘Democratic’ imperialisms are fundamentally no different from the dictator Powers, for the conditions under which the vast majority of colonial peoples live savour of Colonial Fascism. For example, what rights have the natives in South Africa to lose? If we must fight, then Africans and peoples of African descent will fight for themsel
ves, confident that in taking this course we, like the blacks of San Domingo, will be playing an historical role in liberating not only ourselves but other sections of oppressed humanity.111
To no small extent, this view drew on the bitter colonial experience of the previous war and a now deeply felt aversion to being used as ‘cannon-fodder’ in a war that aimed at a ‘re-division of territory’ from which black people would ‘gain nothing’.112 As a black anti-war manifesto, probably drafted by Padmore, and reprinted in the International African Opinion (which had received several communications on the topic from across the colonial world) asserted: ‘Black brothers, what do we know of democracy? This is just a bait to catch us. In 1914 they also talked to us about Democracy and self-determination. Millions of us died on Flanders Field, in Palestine, in East, West and South Africa. But what did we get? More slavery, more oppression, more exploitation.’113 In another essay, the journal noted that blacks had ‘a strong sympathy with the Jews’ as a persecuted people, and that it was vital ‘not to cease to point out in Africa the greed, savagery and brutality which distinguished the Nazi régime and its ignorant and insolent claim to racial superiority’.114 At the same time, plans to resettle the Jews in East Africa constituted a way out of European capitalism’s difficulties ‘at the expense of Africans’. The IAO urged the pursuit of solutions that were ‘unconnected with the mean subterfuges of imperialism’, since that plan for resettlement also entailed ignoring the ways in which the Kenyans had been penned into reserves and deprived of their own lands.115 But it was also clear that ‘the struggle against anti-Semitism is an important part of the struggle against imperialism’.116
The situation in Kenya was also at the heart of a later editorial on the topic of ‘Hitler and the Colonies’, which delineated the practice of ‘colonial fascism’ even more unsparingly, ‘closing the rhetorical distance European powers tried to create between empire and fascism’.117 As plans were discussed for the possible ‘return’ of the East African ‘protectorates’ to Germany – another measure of appeasement – East African white settlers called for resistance to the proposals and solicited the support of black Africans in this. This situation was layered with rich historical ironies, as the IAO was quick to note. It was ‘a new phenomenon for East African whites to acknowledge coloured races in the same breath with themselves’, still less to allow them a voice in matters.118 The white settlers were not objecting to fascist methods as such, the editorial observed astutely, but only to becoming themselves victims of fascist annexation; after all, they had already taken land and forced Kenyan blacks, paid miserable wages, to carry a kipande or pass-book ‘like common criminals, register their finger-prints, live in filthy, stinking hovels. What further degradations could Hitler heap on them?’119 The sudden concern about how white minorities might be treated under German rule ought to raise the equally pertinent question of how Britain had been treating Africans, and black labour in particular: ‘Fascism is not a monopoly of Mussolini and Hitler, but is employed by the “democratic” nations throughout their colonies.’120 The Africans, for their part, opposed the transfer of the protectorates to Hitler because they did not wish ‘to be bandied about by one European Power to another’, and ‘not because they envisage any fundamental difference in treatment’.121 Where the false war between fascism and imperialism was concerned, the only legitimate response was ‘A plague on both camps!’122
Freedom’s Backstory
Consider the chronology of these fateful years 1935–1938. A sugar strike in St Kitts, 1935; a revolt against increase of customs duties in St Vincent, 1935; a coal strike in St Lucia, 1935; labour disputes on the sugar plantations of British Guiana, 1935; an oil strike, which became a general strike, in Trinidad, 1937; a sympathetic strike in Barbados, 1937; a sugar strike in St Lucia, 1937; sugar troubles in Jamaica, 1937; dockers’ strike in Jamaica, 1938. Every governor called for warships, marines and aeroplanes. The torch had been applied to the powder barrel.
Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean
With the transportation of the Negro from Africa to the Caribbean the germ of political revolt was transplanted to the New World. Contrary to the belief widely accepted among both whites and Negroes, the Negro slave was not docile and devoted to his master. The moment he was placed on the small tubs which made the Middle Passage, that moment he became a revolutionary, actual or potential.
Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean
The Caribbean rebellions and their mix of racial and class consciousness injected urgency into a series of anticolonial pamphlets which the IASB disseminated. One of these, The Negro in the Caribbean, written by the historian and future first prime minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, who would also go on to write the hugely influential Capitalism and Slavery, also suggested that there was an arc of continuity to be drawn from slave rebellions to the present-day insurgencies, an understanding of which required a ‘correct idea of the revolutionary role of the Negro slave’ who fought for his freedom.123 Explicitly referencing the Morant Bay rebellion, Williams notes the emergence and persistence, once again, of fault lines within black struggle. For the black middle classes in the Caribbean, ‘it was a struggle for a share in political power, for extension of the franchise, for jobs’, while for the working-classes, ‘it was basically an economic struggle, a struggle for land-ownership, for better wages, for decent living conditions, for the right to organize in trade unions’ – two sets of interests that nonetheless coalesced at times.124 Inasmuch as they marked the passing of the initiative ‘from the brown middle class to the black working class’, the years from 1935 to 1938 were something of a revolutionary watershed: ‘Rawle, Marryshow and Cipriani (a white liberal), gave way to Butler and Mentor, Payne and Grant.’125 Like others, Williams noted that political democracy would be taken where not given: ‘The explosions in the British West Indies indicate the danger of continued exasperation and continued repression: there is still time to heed the signals and so correct, by democratic reforms, an unsound economy and the present abuses of the sugar industry.’126 It was a view Padmore had articulated even more bluntly in an article for the ILP discussion journal, Controversy, in 1938, calling for British workers and socialists to support their Caribbean brethren: ‘This is the task which history has placed on the toiling masses of the West Indies – Indians as well as Negroes; for the West Indian bourgeoisie is one of the most reactionary colonial ruling classes and will never make any concessions unless forced to.’127 Another IASB pamphlet, The West Indies Today, demanded universal adult franchise, federated constitutions, higher direct taxation, land settlement, labour legislation, industrialization and greater social services. It reiterated the centrality of self-liberation: ‘West Indians know this. They know that unless they act for themselves they will get little; but they know, too, that if they are sufficiently well organised their rulers cannot but give in to their demands if unpleasant consequences are to be avoided.’128 West Indians had ‘taken the situation in their own hands … no longer prepared to acquiesce silently in their present intolerable conditions’.129 In this the solidarity rather than the leadership of white British allies was sought.130 To white British workers, there was a reciprocal offering of friendship on shared terrain in the face of the fight for real democracy, ‘Though you have neglected us in the past, to-day in this hour of common crisis, we want you to know that we Blacks bear you no ill will … Our freedom is your freedom.’131
‘Whatever the future of tropical Africa will be’, wrote James a few years later, ‘one thing is certain, that it will not be what the colonial powers are trying to make of it. It will be violent and strange, with the most abrupt and unpredictable changes in economic relations, race relations, territorial boundaries and everything else.’132 In his important comparative study of anglophone and francophone black internationalism, Brent Edwards takes this to mean that what James and Padmore were involved in producing was ‘an other epistemology of blackness’ altogether.133 While it is c
ertainly true that the milieu of the IASB sought to create something new which broke out of the dead ends of both race essentialism and mechanistic forms of Marxism, framing this black radicalism as epistemologically ‘other’ is to miss a crucial aspect of the work in question – indeed, the very source of its radicalism.134 What emerges in the historically grounded polemics produced by the radicals of the IAFE/IASB milieu – in the wake of the Ethiopian invasion – is precisely an insistence on reclaiming and reframing universalism and humanism as neither singularly European in provenance nor (therefore) radically ‘other’. The task they set themselves is radical in its very simplicity: to demonstrate that impulses towards freedom and equality can be seen to arise across multiple contexts and cultures, not least those of Africa, and as such would be impulses towards reclamation from rather than bestowal by Western benevolence. That multiple resources nourished such aspirations could be seen from the history of rebellion itself. Or, as Williams put it in relation to the Caribbean: ‘Slavery was a state of war, a constant struggle for freedom on the part of the slave. Liberty or death!’135 Freedom was not a discursive object to be passed down from a superior culture to a ‘backward’ one; rather, it was defined and forged precisely through the historical experience of oppression and resistance.
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