Insurgent Empire
Page 48
Urging the extension of democratic reforms which had been stalled across the region, Creech-Jones suggested that it was a testament to the force of criticism emerging from the colonies ‘that so wide an extension has now been given to the legal meaning of sedition that almost any searching criticism of a Colonial Government by a black man or even of the conditions of employment in a Colony has become a punishable offence’.
In parliament, James McGovern was also quite clearly drawing directly from Padmore’s hymn-sheet when he went on to tell his colleagues: ‘When we see what is happening in these parts of the Empire, we understand the seeds of war, because the struggle between Mussolini on the one hand and France and Britain on the other hand, is a struggle to see who is going to exploit these people.’153 It was a point that Orwell would also make – undoubtedly, as Høgsbjerg notes,154 influenced by James and Padmore – in a pointedly titled review essay in which he attacked the ‘hypocrisy and self-righteousness’ of pitting a ‘Union’ of ‘democracies’ against ‘dictatorships’:
The unspoken clause is always ‘not counting niggers’. For how can we make a ‘firm stand’ against Hitler if we are simultaneously weakening ourselves at home? In other words, how can we ‘fight Fascism’ except by bolstering up a far vaster injustice?
For of course it is vaster. What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so … What meaning would there be, even if it were successful, in bringing down Hitler’s system in order to stabilize something that is far bigger and in its different way just as bad?155
Fresh from fighting fascists in Spain, Orwell was hardly suggesting that the war against fascism did not matter. He was, rather, much as Padmore had been doing, querying the ways in which anti-Nazi and anti-fascist rhetoric was turned into an alibi, a talisman to obscure colonialism’s own depredations.156 Certainly, one point that Padmore and his associates repeatedly hammered home made it into many articles on the pages of the New Leader: ‘How is it’, asked the anticolonial campaigner and erstwhile secretary of the short-lived British Centre against Imperialism, Dinah Stock, ‘that people who will demonstrate in tens of thousands to “save Austria,” who will send the Chinese all the money they can spare and more, who will even fight and die for the Spanish workers, remain so deaf and inattentive when Indians claim liberty or Africans demand democratic equality with whites?’157 Deeming Britain ‘the oldest and strongest Fascist Power in the world’, Stock deprecated the ways in which Britons ‘fix indignant eyes on Hitler and Mussolini, and persuade themselves that the Fascism of their own Empire is somehow less important’.158 While calling for British socialists to do all they can to assist the struggles of colonized peoples, a few weeks later Stock, reviewing Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, criticized what she called ‘professional friends of the African’ and their own deep-seated paternalism, which failed to recognize the existing resources for freedom and egalitarianism in other cultures:
British people, even British Socialists, are sometimes too much inclined to think of their own anti-Imperialist activities in terms of ‘doing something for’ the Colonial peoples who are presumed to be backward and to need guidance. That is perhaps the permanent mark of a guilty Imperialist conscience, and it is difficult to get over. A book like this is a good cure for that mentality.159
Through the early 1940s, the New Leader maintained its insistence that the fight against fascism could not be won if colonialism persisted in its prevailing form of authoritarian rule. Colonial peoples could be relied on to fight for ‘freedom’ only if it had truly universal scope. Not just India, but Palestine, Kenya, West Africa, South Africa, the West Indies, Brockway wrote, all ‘lie heavily on Britain as a continual denial of moral right to encourage the political and social freedom of other peoples’.160 A week later, Padmore would reiterate the point: ‘The support of the colonial peoples in the struggle for the overthrow of Fascism and Imperialism can only be won by renunciation of domination. Freedom is indivisible!’161 Other anticolonial figures, like the Sri Lankan organizer J. V. P. de Silva, echoed the point, declaring that ‘when the workers of Britain realise that the effective way to fight Hitler and his hordes is to fight Fascism at home, then millions of exploited colonials will be ready to fight side by side’.162 The New Leader also mocked the distinction made by imperial apologists between ‘dominium’, the reprehensible aim of Hitler and Mussolini, and Britain’s ‘imperium’, which ostensibly functioned as ‘a trusteeship for the bodies and souls of men’.163 But it was Padmore who kept up the comparisons between fascism and imperialism, including colonial equivalents of Lebensraum and Herrenvolk, offering forensic examinations of policies and procedures as well as ideological origins, never giving ground on either:
Nazism and all other manifestations of Fascism must be destroyed. There can be no compromise with this evil thing.
This, however, is no justification for Socialists to apologise for, and even attempt to whitewash, so-called ‘democratic’ Imperialism which, in its colonial application, is indistinguishable from European Fascism. It is not a question of which is better: Fascism or Imperialism. Both are bad. Both have the same common origin – monopoly capitalism – and can only be eradicated by abolishing the social system which permits the exploitation of man by man, class by class, nation by nation, race by race.164
Indeed, he was able to write or publish this piece at all, he pointed out, because he was resident in the heart of the imperium; in the country of his birth, a British colony, he could not do so ‘unless I wanted to spend the duration of the war in a concentration camp. British democracy is not for export. The whites are the Herrenvolk, the blacks the “lesser breed without the law” ’.165 When workers demanded their rights in the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia, they were met with immediate violence: ‘The Negroes asked for bread, but their masters gave them hot lead!’166
Even labour movements in the settler colonies, Padmore noted with a provocative biblical allusion, were not immune to the virus of racism: ‘It is as easy for a Negro to enter the South African and Southern Rhodesian Labour Parties as for a Jew to join the Nazi hierarchy.’167 Hitler, he opined, was too late in the race to implement racial hierarchies and enslavement in the colonies: ‘Cecil Rhodes did this long ago!’168 The failure to pay attention to the parallels was not just of academic interest; in many ways, it accounted for the present-day sufferings of Europe: ‘Now that imperialism has come home to roost, the victims are white. Europe has taken the place of Africa as “the Dark Continent”.’169 Fenner Brockway would also directly pose the question, ‘How far is the empire a dictatorship?’, undertaking a damning census of (the absence of) civil liberties in the colonies, making comparisons between colonial methods and Nazi techniques, and, as Padmore himself had done many times, dismissing trusteeship as ‘sheer hypocrisy’ and a ‘veil’ to hide economic exploitation, given that most living under it were ‘on a level nearer animal than human existence’.170 Brockway echoed Padmore in pointing out that any ‘democracy’ under imperialism was restricted to whites, with the result that ‘each white human being in the Empire governs six black, brown and yellow human beings’.171 In bringing this situation to an end, British socialists, Brockway reiterated, had a role to play: ‘We can express our solidarity by direct help and by agitation at the centre of Imperialism in this country … We must accept the present opportunity of the war to demand the national liberation of the colonies’.172
The war and ensuing pressures for unity also did not stop Padmore from pushing the envelope on left-wing blind spots and paternalist failures in the pages of the New Leader. He had already noted that reportage of wartime unrest in the West Indies had been jettisoned in favour of ‘feeding the British people and the American public with a lot of sunshine stories about the happy, smiling nat
ives contributing their widow’s mite to Spitfire funds’.173 He observed that plans for colonial ‘trusteeship’ as a benign mode of rule were being fiercely challenged in the African and Caribbean press:
Conscious of the fact that the British imperialists cannot pretend to be fighting those ‘evil things – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution’ – to use the grandiloquent expression of our late lamented appeaser, Mr Neville Chamberlain – and at the same time practise Hitler methods in the colonies, the native Press is everywhere demanding their ‘trustees’ to state their war aims.174
In fact, the war had afforded colonial governments the chance to further repress resistance and suspend civil liberties in the name of security. Censorship prevailed widely and interning agitators was commonplace. This included two Irish women who had come to Trinidad to help organize the labour movement there. Padmore’s tribute to Kathleen Donnellan, who died attempting to escape, and her comrade E. Cahill, was eloquent with anger: ‘White men – even those calling themselves Socialists – do not usually associate with coloured people in the Colonies … I am sure West Indian workers will remember them with affection and gratitude long after the little Hitlers who now sit on their backs have been relegated to the dustbin of history.’175
Padmore’s other target for criticism in the pages of the New Leader was what he diagnosed as a frequent failure among liberals and socialists to understand that it was not possible to alleviate imperialism through humanitarianism, or to postpone liberation for an indefinite period. Assessing the works of two Fabians, Norman Leys’s The Colour Bar in East Africa and Rita Hinden’s Plan for Africa, Padmore observed that, while both liberals seemed to have a clear sense of the evils wrought by British imperialism in Africa, neither ‘seems to wish to put an end to that Imperialism’ itself.176 ‘It is peculiar’, he wrote, ‘that most British Left-Wing intellectuals who see the dire results which British colonial policy (supposedly the best in the world) has achieved, nevertheless refuse to see that the only possible and lasting solution is the complete liquidation of the system of Imperialism which has given rise to the conditions which they deplore.’177 Padmore’s stringent and uncompromising condemnation of the failure of British ‘Internationalists’ to ‘see the claims of the coloured subject peoples of the Empire in the same light as the white ones under Nazi domination in Europe’178 is reminiscent of Césaire’s fierce later polemic against white Europeans’ blindness to parallels, for forgetting of Nazism that
before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples … reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.179
Even as he noted that the British press, which rightly condemned the Nazis, ‘remains silent … about the sufferings of the blacks in Southern Africa’, Padmore would state the problem in political rather than racial terms:180 ‘Imperialism is incapable of offering freedom to its subject peoples, the only means by which it can secure their loyalty and support. To do so would be to commit hara kiri.’181 He also deprecated the dishonest tendency to blame the Boers or the Dutch for fascist conditions in South Africa while overlooking British rule in Rhodesia: ‘Are they responsible for the “native policy” in Kenya? And the colour bar practices in other parts of the Empire and even in Great Britain?’182 In other articles, Padmore painstakingly detailed the appropriation of land in Rhodesia, in which natives had been corralled, ‘concentrated’ into reserves, amid declarations that whites and Africans could never be equal.183
As the Second World War continued its long course, Padmore began to write about an empire in crisis, unable to elicit the support of its colonies in its war aims. ‘How’, he asked pertinently, ‘could a people whose existence had been entirely ignored, presumably because they were considered unfit to participate in the government of the country, suddenly resuscitate themselves as it were, and assume responsibility in defence of the system which had until then failed to recognise their existence?’184 Where the New Leader had always had strong political and journalistic links to Indian nationalists like Nehru (with whom Brockway had a personal friendship), and covered the subcontinent regularly, it was only by the late 1930s, influenced by Padmore and James, that it began to pay sustained attention to Africa; this focus was kept up in the immediate post-war period. The veteran socialist Frank Ridley articulated the sense, correct as it turned out, that ‘the storm centre of colonial revolt against Imperialism will inevitably shift to the Dark Continent’; the latter had now to be given pride of place in the annals of anticolonialism: ‘After India, Africa!’185 Clearly influenced by Padmore and James, Ridley invoked Toussaint as evidence that Africa was more than capable of parlaying with the West on equal terms. Other writers in the New Leader, including Brockway, would point out that, while resistance movements against the Nazis were praised, those against British rule met with condemnation and worse: ‘Whilst Germany fought to gain an Empire, Britain fought to retain one … These territories are “occupied” by Britain. In these countries, also, Resistance Movements have arisen demanding independence.’186 Padmore, characteristically, was more explicit in a series of articles on ‘The New Imperialism’, noting that, having supported the war against Hitler, colonized peoples were now laying claim to the equality, liberty and fraternity enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Imperialism could no longer hide behind anti-fascism: ‘Truly, a spectre is haunting the Colonial Ministries of Britain, France and the Netherlands. The spectre of Colonial Revolution!’187 Attention would have to be paid, as Padmore was doing in his running commentaries, to machinations in the corridors of Western power – and in the United Nations, where ‘the statesmen are once again faced with the problem of finding some machinery for maintaining their imperialist system under a new disguise’.188 With the South African, Jan Smuts, at the helm, the rhetoric and practice of ‘trusteeship’ – which was nothing new, having been ‘the old formula of the Berlin Congress of 1885’ – would replace the system of ‘mandates’ put in place after the previous war. Once again, the right to ‘self-determination’ was off the table.189 Fenner Brockway argued similarly that where ‘Germany had fought to gain an Empire, Britain fought to retain one’.190 Both Ridley and Brockway wrote with a trenchant honesty that owed something to Padmore’s dogged exposition of the false opposition between fascism and democratic imperialism. Both men also expressed sharp scepticism about proposals to reframe the Empire in terms of ‘trusteeship’ and the ‘Commonwealth’, Ridley pronouncing firmly: ‘We do not advocate the retention of British Imperialism, nor believe that even by rebaptising it as a “Commonwealth” we change its essential nature.’191 Brockway notes that areas under consideration for ‘trusteeship’ had originally been annexed ‘for the same reason that Germany wanted to annex the rest of Europe – to gain markets and raw materials for its owning class’.192
When Labour took over the helm of government in post-war Britain, with India on the cusp of independence, efforts were made once again to give institutional form to the anticolonial dialogues and alliances of the last decade. After what appears to have been an abortive start in 1938, the British Centre against Imperialism was again launched, in late February 1946, at a London conference whose speakers included Padmore and Brockway. The gathering was acutely aware that it was taking place in London, ‘centre of the greatest Imperialism the world has known’. Widespread militancy in the colonies – ‘mutiny and riots in India, serious labour disturbances in the West Indies’ – gave it ‘a sense of a vast movement awake in the world, a gathering surge towards universal human liberty’.193 The conference hoped to achieve ‘a great unifying movement of anti-imperialist forces … a consolidating instrument for a world-wide struggle’. The aim of the British Centre was to find a way of channelling information from the colonies into the British public sphere
, linking with MPs who could raise colonial issues in the House of Commons, and finding ‘agitational means’ to raise working-class awareness of the need to end imperialism. Brockway’s reported remarks at the conference offer a definitive warning against paternalism: ‘The Centre must not begin in any attitude of patronage or philanthropy towards the coloured peoples. There must be a partnership of absolute equality. In fact, it would be a partnership in which the British would progressively become the junior partners.’194 In that spirit – apart from British members including representatives of the ILP, the Labour Party and various trade unions – the Centre had formal representation from India, Ceylon, West Africa, Kenya and the Middle East. Its high-profile British ‘sponsors’ included Frank Horrabin, Harold Laski, the economist Michael Foot, Will Cove MP, F. A. Ridley and Fenner Brockway. In his speech, Brockway cites Padmore, who gave an extensive account of ‘colonial Fascism’ in the West Indies and Africa, urging British listeners to involve themselves in the struggle: ‘You need our help as much as we need yours. Let us join hands together … Let us make this anti-imperialist centre a worthy instrument in a worthy cause.’195 He told them too about a conference that had taken place the previous year in Manchester, not picked up on by the wider British press, in which representatives of African peoples from various countries ‘said, to their imperialist master, “We will be satisfied with nothing less than complete independence.” ’196
The End of Paternalism: The 1945 Pan-African Conference
We are here to tell the world that black peoples, supported by the semi-colonial people in America and millions of other people, are determined to emancipate themselves.
Amy Ashwood Garvey
The tempo of coloured people has changed. Either the British government will extend self-government in West Africa and the West Indies or face open revolt.