Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Let us return to July 1929 as the League against Imperialism (LAI) held its second conference in Frankfurt. In attendance, representing American labour, was a young communist delegate from the United States, George Padmore. We do not know much about Padmore’s specific contributions to the event; most of the talking was done, Padmore biographer James Hooker avers, by his companion, the black American communist and one-time presidential candidate James Ford, who was also a contributor to the Negro anthology.13 Padmore would forge some important connections in Frankfurt, meeting Reginald Bridgeman and others in the British section of the LAI, as well as members of the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party, some of whom he would continue to work with in years to come. Another delegate at the conference was Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, a West African labour organizer born in the French Sudan, and leader of the Ligue de défense de la race nègre and Union des travailleurs nègres in France, with whom Padmore would strike up an important political and personal friendship. Padmore himself would also become one of the most significant figures in both British and African anticolonialism in the decade that followed the conference, and it is his role in shaping and sharpening the rhetoric of criticism of empire in Britain that is the subject of this chapter. At the Second Congress of the LAI, in 1929, Padmore was among those delegated to organize a ‘Negro workers’ conference’; he would spend some time in Moscow, as a high-ranking party member and head of the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), also known as Profintern.14 He would also become editor of the Negro Worker, a Comintern journal aimed at organizing black labour globally through the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW).

  George Padmore in London, 1943

  The First International Conference of Negro Workers, held in Hamburg in 1930, was an important one, bringing together both black American trade unionists and, despite the denial of travel documents to most delegates from the colonies, a handful of attendees representing South African, Caribbean and West African labour. It was here that Padmore would articulate what would be an increasingly strong note of his interventions during the decades to come, ‘the growing awareness of coloured peoples that they could control their own destinies’, and the interconnectedness of black and Asian revolutionary movements in this regard.15 Shortly after he was jailed by the Nazis and then deported from Germany, where he had been based, he found his relationship with the Comintern strained when it sidelined the ITUC-NW. After a painful and controversial break from the organization, Padmore would spend several years in Britain, where he became an influential and authoritative exponent of an anticolonialism which took inspiration from actually occurring resistance in the colonies, challenged false geopolitical divisions, and sought to make progressive transnational and cross-racial alliances. In the process, like his better-known friend and colleague C. L. R. James, Padmore also became a powerful presence contributing both to black organizing in Britain and to shaping the views of white British left-wing criticism of imperial ideologies and practices. As others have noted, Padmore consistently refuted the notion that imperialism was ‘in any way concerned with welfare’, though in this, as we have seen, he was part of a longer tradition rather than an entirely ‘rare figure’.16 What Padmore did bring to the table was an analysis which insisted on considering the relationship between fascism and colonialism in a global frame rather than, conveniently, depicting them as opposed geopolitical forces. As Robin D. G. Kelley, among others, has observed, the idea that fascism was not ‘some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected rightwing turn’, but a ‘blood relative’ of European capitalism and imperialism, was shared by many mid-century black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois.17 Padmore was the most indefatigable of them all, not only in ensuring that the analysis of ‘fascism–imperialism’ or ‘colonial fascism’ was brought home to the broader British left, but in suggesting that it was only such an intertwined and brutally honest analysis that could provide the basis for resistance and solidarity in both colony and metropole. The metropolitan left would have to understand the relationship of racial capitalism to fascism, rather than seek either to separate the phenomena or reduce their workings to class alone. Just as the defenders of empire could not demand the loyalties of the colonized in a putative war for freedom, the left could not demand solidarity based on a presumed homogeneity of class interests without recognizing the intertwining of racial, capitalist and colonial ideologies.18 As we shall see, Padmore’s analysis shaped the response of at least one British left-wing and dissident formation.

  While George Padmore, ‘not a dashing writer’, as James would concede, has not received the kind of attention that the latter’s own magisterial corpus has justifiably elicited, there is now a growing interest in the work of this major figure in the history of anticolonialism.19 Padmore’s style does come across as information-heavy, but it was not devoid of theorizing; as one recent biographer notes, he was ‘deeply engaged in political thought of his own’.20 The broad details of Padmore’s political life have been elaborated in a slender 1967 biography by James R. Hooker, and a thoughtful, much fuller subsequent account by Leslie James, who focuses on Padmore’s later work. Other scholars, such as Susan Pennybacker, Minkah Makalani, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rupert Lewis and Carol Polsgrove have also written illuminatingly on Padmore’s work both as a political organizer and as a leading black intellectual.21 Born Malcolm Nurse in Trinidad to a schoolmaster father, whose own father had been born into slavery in Barbados, Padmore had changed his name after coming to the United States in 1924 for higher education at Fisk and Howard universities, where he became a communist and radical student organizer. Although he was never himself a votary of Marcus Garvey, Padmore’s teenage years had been spent in Trinidad, where Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had been active and influential. As James would recall, what his childhood friend brought to the table, while exiled in Britain – not least through his experience working with the Comintern – was ‘the courage, the world-wide historical vision, the political knowledge and organizational skills’.22 The break from the Comintern was just as vital; it gave Padmore a keen sense of the specificity and irreducibility of the question of race. Indeed, James would acknowledge: ‘I then was a Marxist and took the “black question” as part of Marxism – but Padmore was the one who said no! I am a Marxist too but this question needs special attention and he made me realise that the “Black question” was an independent question of great importance in historical development’.23

  Unlike James when he had first arrived in London, Padmore brought with him strong connections to labour organizers in the United States, Europe, West Africa and the West Indies. He also had links to black campaigners in North America, including W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom he corresponded after arriving in Britain. One habitué fondly recalled ‘the political magnetism of Padmore’s London flat which drew young people from Africa and the Caribbean’.24 As Leslie James notes, ‘Padmore’s own network was massive. From his Cranleigh Street base in London, he worked political contacts not only in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, but also in places as far apart as Denmark, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Singapore.’25 As an organizer within London’s black communities, Padmore also took seriously the task of shaping metropolitan opinion. He would be influential in putting pressure on and radicalizing at least one British organization until then only cautiously critical of empire;26 like James and, before him, Saklatvala, Padmore became closely, if often critically, involved with the Independent Labour Party. Padmore’s frequent contributions to the ILP’s journal, the New Leader (originally the Labour Leader, and from 1946 the Socialist Leader), allowed for a wider dissemination of their views and, crucially, facilitated greater awareness of and engagement with insurgencies and resistance movements in Africa and the Caribbean on the British left more generally, and in the ILP specifically.27 Of that period, James writes that ‘the chief thing that we did, and George organised it and kept it going,
was to keep in touch with the left wing of the Labour movement. We got into close touch with the Independent Labour Party … We were in close touch with the left-wing members of the Labour Party and left-wing organisations. And whenever the Communists held a meeting or some kind of conference, we were there, presenting resolutions, making speeches’.28

  If the New Leader’s line on empire became markedly radical in the mid 1930s, a good portion of the credit is due to Padmore’s increasing involvement with it. One scholar gives him almost sole credit for explicating black resistance to a British readership: ‘The growing consciousness both in Africa and the Caribbean became public knowledge through Padmore’s expositions.’29 ‘How easy it is for an Englishman to forget that his country is the biggest land-grabbing nation that history has ever seen’, Padmore observed, as he devoted his writing to explicating the British Empire to British readers.30 James also recalled that Padmore’s indefatigable correspondence and journalism on colonial questions ‘kept the situation alive’, and that when other media organs failed them, ‘there was usually Fenner Brockway editing the New Leader to give us a helping hand. On every issue, when The Times and the big Conservative press, the Colonial Office, the Stalinists, the Labour Party put forward their side, we saw to it that the anti-imperialist case was put forward.’31 (This was despite the fact that Padmore had attacked Brockway’s own moderation and gradualism in How Britain Rules Africa.) Padmore’s prolific journalism was described later by Peter Abrahams as a ‘major early version of a new, Third-World way of looking at the news’, and it is this way of seeing that, I argue, made an impression on sections of the British left.32 In his account of the rise of pan-Africanism in England, Immanuel Geiss notes that Padmore also held weekly discussions to which New Leader contributors like Reginald Reynolds, another noted critic of empire with a special interest in India, would come.33 Apparently Padmore repeatedly refused invitations to stand for election to parliament as an ILP candidate, but spoke for many years running at the ILP summer school, and was instrumental in shaping the interventions of the party’s MPs on colonial questions in the House of Commons.34

  In 1933, despite run-ins with the leadership on colonial matters, Padmore, as chair of the ITUC-NW, was still an important member of the Comintern executive, hewing to the Comintern’s line as he facilitated contacts between unions and activists in the African diaspora. But all was not quite well. Disheartened among other things by what they saw as a failure to address white racism within European labour movements, there was a sense among several black activists, including those like Arnold Ward in Britain, that the party used ‘Negroes when they are wanted’ but ‘put them aside’ when convenient.35 Then, in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, the Communist International changed course more sharply, telling Padmore: ‘George, you know, we have to change the line. We must say that the United States, Britain and France, they are imperialists it is true, but they are democratic imperialists; but Germany, Italy and Japan are the fascist imperialists.’36 Padmore refused, arguing that the new line made nonsense of what he and the Comintern had been preaching up to this point; his analysis of fascism and colonialism as deeply intertwined is surely in part a response to what he saw as an untenable separation. Later, he apparently told St Clair Drake that, when he received orders to soften criticism of imperialism in the Negro Worker, he decided that he was ‘no Joe Stalin’ but ‘just a West Indian darkie out here trying to help my African darkie brothers free themselves. And so I decided I wasn’t going to stop my agitation.’37 From this point on, Padmore would determinedly set fascism and imperialism within the same analytical frame, identifying overlapping features, without eliding either their respective provenances or their differences.

  When passing through London in 1933 – he would move on to Paris for a time – Padmore famously reconnected with his childhood friend, C. L. R. James, who had come to a talk Padmore was giving without realizing that the speaker was the boy whom he had known as Malcolm Nurse.38 After a glad reunion with James, who described him as then ‘tied up with Moscow’ while ‘I was headed away from Moscow’, Padmore became better acquainted with London’s socialist and Labour milieu.39 Among others, he met the future chair of the ILP, C. A. Smith, editor of the journal Controversy, to which he would contribute in the coming years. Shortly afterwards, his break with the Comintern would be finalized; Padmore resigned, writing that to thus ‘put a brake upon the anti-imperialist work of its affiliate sections’ was to ‘sacrifice the young national liberation movements in Asia and Africa. This I considered to be a betrayal of the fundamental interests of my people, with which I could not identify myself. I therefore had no choice but to sever my connection with the Communist International.’40 A few months later, in a gesture at once symbolic and redundant, he would be formally expelled and duly vilified in print as ‘A Betrayer of the Negro Liberation Struggle’.41 In James’s account, Padmore arrived at his flat one afternoon in 1935, looking dishevelled, telling his host: ‘I have left those people, you know.’42 As Padmore, who remained a Marxist, would always acknowledge, communism had been enabling, even as its limitations ultimately made staying on impossible: ‘I stayed there because there was a means of doing work for the black emancipation and there was no other place that I could think of.’43

  James was right that once unshackled from party affiliation, Padmore would live ‘to become an even more powerful enemy of imperialism than when he had at his disposal the immense resources of the Russian state and the Communist International’.44 The former Comintern member had already made his mark on anticolonial thought with The Life and Struggles of the Negro Toilers, remarkable for its condensed but sweeping account of black labour and labour resistance across continents. Banned immediately by colonial governments across Africa and the Caribbean, Life and Struggles makes the communist case for black labour to be organized by party activists into a revolutionary force, specifically through the Red International of Labour Unions.45 The RILU, was, Padmore asserts loyally, ‘the only international which conducts a consistent and permanent struggle against white chauvinism for equal rights for the labour movement in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, for the correct solution of the national-race problem’. Presaging the direction in which Padmore would go after his break with the Comintern, the book documents the breadth of anticolonial resistance by black people in various contexts, and the powerful repression that colonial governments had variously exerted in order to crush it. Strikes were of ‘frequent occurrence’ in Kenya, where the King’s African Rifles were deployed to crush Kikuyu uprisings under the doughty early nationalist Harry Thuku; so also in Basutoland, where military planes were deployed to suppress peasant revolts led by Lakho La-Baffo (affiliated to the LAI). In Nigeria, ‘over 30,000 women organised monster protest demonstrations against British imperialists and their agents’ in 1929, breaking into bank and trade buildings and occupying them for days. As reprisal, martial law was declared, hundreds were arrested, huts were burned to the ground and fields were laid waste by troops. Information sent to the outside world was severely limited and censored. The story repeated itself, mutatis mutandis, in the Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, as well as French and Belgian African territories. In an extended section, Padmore reported that the British West Indies had become a site of febrile ‘unrest among the natives’ – struggles over wages and labour conditions were at the heart of the movements, which, predictably, were met with bayonets and rifles – and that nascent nationalist movements were crystallizing under the slogan ‘The West Indies for the West Indians!’ As Leslie James points out, Padmore’s early experience of labour militancy, strikes and unrest in Trinidad in 1919 was of ‘profound importance … he witnessed active revolt that sprang up among workers of different professions and races’.46 Such revolt would remain absolutely central to his thought over the next decades. ‘We rebels never surrender until we are buried’, he wrote to a friend.47

  While dutifully denouncing ‘petty bourgeois reformi
sts’ among black activists (including Du Bois and Garvey) and calling for ‘Negro workers [to] conduct a more relentless struggle’ against ‘disrupters and splitters of the working-class movement’, Life and Struggles nonetheless hints at Padmore’s growing disquiet about the Comintern’s inability and apparent unwillingness to tackle the matter of race and imperialism. ‘Even in the ranks of the revolutionary workers’, he observed, ‘numerous examples of white chauvinism can be recorded.’48 Once his departure from the Comintern was final, Padmore was free to develop his thinking in less constrained ways. Writing to his friend Cyril Olivierre, Padmore explained:

  Last August the Communist International wanted us to close down our activities in order to appease the British Foreign Office which was raising hell because the blacks in Africa were beginning to wake up … Well, the Africans objected and I stood up loyally with them and resigned. Since then the ‘Reds’ … are trying to slander me in order to cover up their betrayal.49