A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library)
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No piece of literature can substitute for a crystal ball, and only religious fundamentalists believe that a book can provide comprehensive answers to all questions. But if nothing else, A History of Pan-African Revolt leaves us with two incontrovertible facts. First, as long as black people are denied freedom, humanity, and a decent standard of living, they will continue to revolt. Second, unless these revolts involve the ordinary masses and take place on their own terms, they have no hope of succeeding. As James once said of the revolution in Ghana, their struggles may appear “sometimes pathetic, sometimes vastly comic, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, but always vibrant with the life that only a mass of ordinary people can give.”51 And if world events are on their side, they just might win.
Robin D.G. Kelley, Haitian Independence Day, 1994
1. A History of Pan-African Revolt, 103. I am deeply grateful to Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger for inviting me to write a new introduction for A History of Pan-African Revolt, to Scott McLemee for sharing some of his research with me; to James Early for taking time out of his busy schedule to track down members of the original “Drum and Spear” Collective; to Charlie Cobb for providing valuable information about how Drum and Spear brought this book back into print in 1969; and to Paul Buhle, Robert Hill, and Cedric Robinson for their mentorship over the years—particularly with respect to James’s life and thought.
2. Walter Rodney, “The African Revolution” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle, special issue of Urgent Tasks 12 (Summer 1981): 5.
3. James, “Revolution and the Negro,” reprinted in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939–1949, eds. Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1994), 77. The essay is essentially a synopsis of A History of Negro Revolt written under the name J.R. Johnson for the New International (December 1939).
4. On James’s early life, see Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1988), 7–37; C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 4–46; Robert A. Hill, “In England, 1932–1938,” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle (London: Verso, 1988), 19–22; Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C.L.R. James Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 4–5; Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
5. Constantine’s book was published a year later under the title Cricket and I (London: Allan, 1933).
6. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983), 375; Buhle, C.L.R. James, 44–52; “In England, 1932–1938,” 22–23.
7. P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1963 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 66; A. Adu Boahen, “Politics and Nationalism in West Africa, 1919–1935,” in General History of Africa, Vol. VII: Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880–1935, ed. Boahen (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985), 629; Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen and Co., 1974), 730; Robinson, Black Marxism, 370.
8. James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (New York: Praeger, 1967), 10–37; Boahen, “Politics and Nationalism in West Africa,” 629; L. Rytov, “Ivan Potekhin: A Great Africanist,” African Communist 54 (Third Quarter, 1973), 95; Brian Bunting, Moses Kotane: South African Revolutionary (London: Inkululeko Publications, 1975), 58–59; Edward T. Wilson, Russia and Black Africa Before World War II (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1974).
9. Hooker, Black Revolutionary, 36–37; C.L.R. James, “Notes on the Life of George Padmore,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 288–95; C.L.R. James, “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary” in At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison & Busby, 1984).
10. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 320–21, 327–28; Robinson, Black Marxism, 304; Roger E. Kanet, “The Comintern and the ‘Negro Question’: Communist Policy in the United States and Africa, 1921–1941,” Survey 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1973): 89–90; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 225; Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home (New York: Lee Furman, 1937), 177–80; Billings [Otto Huiswoud], “Report on the Negro Question,” International Press Correspondence 3, no. 2 (1923): 14–16. The full text of the “Theses on the Negro (Question” is available in Bulletin of the IV Congress of the Communist International 17 (December 7, 1922): 8–10. The Fourth Congress was significant, but one might go back to the debates between V.I. Lenin and Indian Communist M.N. Roy over the anti-colonial movement and the right of oppressed minorities to self-determination. V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses),” in Lenin on the National and Colonial Questions: Three Articles (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 5; “Theses on the National and Colonial Question Adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern” in The Communist International, 1919–1943, Documents, vol. I, ed. Jane Degras (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 142. For Lenin’s views on Roy’s supplementary theses, see “The Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920,” in Lenin on the National and Colonial Questions, 30–37; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 321.
11. Willy Munzenberg, “Pour une Conference Coloniale,” Correspondance Internationale 6, no. 9 (August 1926): 1011; Willy Munzenberg, “La Premiere Conference Mondiale Contre la Politique Coloniale Imperialiste,” Correspondance Internationale 7, no. 17 (February 5, 1927): 232; Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Third International and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa, 1921–1928,” Ufahamu 15, no. 1–2 (1986): 110–11; Edward T. Wilson, Russia and Black Africa, 151; South African Worker, April 1, June 24, 1927; “Les Decisions du Congres: Resolution Commune sur la Question Negre,” La Voix des Negres 1, no. 3 (March 1927): 3.
12. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 18; Gilbert Lewis, “Revolutionary Negro Tradition,” Negro Worker, March 15, 1930, 8. Cyril Briggs published a whole series of essays on this score, such as “Negro Revolutionary Hero—Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Communist 8, no. 5 (May 1929): 250–54; “The Negro Press as a Class Weapon,” Communist 8, no. 8 (August 1929): 453–60; and “May First and the Revolutionary Traditions of Negro Masses,” Daily Worker, April 28, 1930.
13. The most obvious example is Albert Nzula, I.I. Potekhin, and A.Z. Zusmanovich, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa, ed. Robin Cohen (London: Zed Press, 1979). It was originally published in Russian as Rabochee Dvizhenie i Prinuditel’ni trud V Negrityanskoi Afrike (Moscow: Profizdat, 1933), which roughly translates as The Working Class Movement and Forced Labor in Negro Africa. (Nzula, at the time of publication, was using the pseudonym Tom Jackson.) As historian Robin Cohen notes, “In its scope, ambition and subject-matter, Padmore’s book clearly provided a strong inspiration for Nzula, Potekhin and Zusmanovich, though Padmore’s subsequent disgrace and expulsion has meant that there are no direct citations from his text by the three authors who only show by occasional allusion, that they are familiar with his work.” (Ibid., 15)
14. George Padmore, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (London: The RILU Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931), 6.
15. William R. Scott, “Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict, 1934–1936,” Journal of Negro History 63, no. 2 (1978): 121, 128–29; Naison, Communists in Harlem, 138–40; Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, The Ties That Bind: African-American Consciousness of Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987), 166–67; Cedric J. Robinson, “The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis” Race and Class 27, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 51–65; Robert Weisbord, Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-American (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1973), 94–100; S.K.B. Asante, “The Afro-American and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1934–1936,” Race 15, no. 2 (1973): 167–84; T. Ras Makonnen, Pan-A
fricanism Within, edited Kenneth King (Nairobi and London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 116.
16. Scott, “Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict,” 118–21; Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2nd ed.), 120–21, 126–28, 160–61; Edward Ullendorff, Ethiopia and the Bible (London: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1968); W.A. Shack, “Ethiopia and Afro-Americans: Some Historical Notes, 1920–1970,” Phylon 35, no. 2 (1974): 142–55; Magubane, The Ties That Bind, 160–65; S.K.B. Asante, Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1934—1941 (London: Longman, 1977), 9–38; Weisbord, Ebony Kinship, 90–92; Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 3435, 85–86, 122, 125, 134–35; George Shepperson, “Ethiopianism and African Nationalism,” Phylon 14, no. 1 (1953): 9–18.
17. Padmore, Life and Struggles, 77; on slavery in Ethiopia, see Jon R. Edwards, “Slavery, the Slave Trade and the Economic Reorganization of Ethiopia, 1916–1934,” African Economic History 11 (1982): 3–14.
18. The original name of the organization was the International African Friends of Abyssinia, or IAFA, but soon after its founding they decided to replace Abyssinia with “Ethiopia.”
19. C.L.R. James, “Notes on the Life of George Padmore,” 292; Buhle, C.L.R. James, 55–56; Esedebe, Pan-Africanism, 115. The essay James published in The Keys, “Abyssinia and the Imperialists,” was reprinted in The C.L.R. James Reader, 63–66.
20. Robinson, Black Marxism, 382.
21. See Esedebe, Pan-Africanism, 123–25; Buhle, C.L.R. James, 55–56; J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa 19001945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 338.
22. Quoted in Robinson, Black Marxism, 383; for the whole review, see C.L.R. James, “‘Civilizing’ the ‘Blacks’: Why Britain Needs to Maintain her African Possessions,” New Leader, May 29, 1936.
23. C.L.R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1977), 70.
24. The Negro Worker was also hidden; indeed, in Africa it was distributed in disguise. According to Robin Cohen, “some of the issues appeared in a cover bearing a cross and the title. The Missionaries’ Voice, The Path of the Cross, Organ of the African Methodist Episcopate of the London Missionary Society. The second page carried the inscription ‘Hearken ye that are oppressed and afflicted by manifold tribulations,’ while the puzzled reader had to wait for the third page to read the more familiar slogan ‘Proletarians of all Countries, Unite.’” Cohen, “Introduction” to Forced Labour in Colonial Africa, 14.
25. Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, trans. Tony White (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 321–65; David Carlton, “Eden, Blum, and the Origins of Non-intervention,” journal of Contemporary History 6 (January 1971): 40–55; M.D. Gallagher, “Leon Blum and the Spanish Civil War” journal of Contemporary History 6 (January 1971): 56–64.
26. Where he ends this first chapter is significant. He does not take San Domingo into nationhood or deal with Toussaint’s imprisonment under Napoleon. All we know is that the revolution in France retreated and “the old slave-owners regained influence and harassed the exhausted blacks”(50). By emphasizing the interdependency of Haiti and France, James missed an opportunity to illustrate a more important lesson: the need for complete and total independence from the colonizing country. Why this point is so clear in The Black Jacobins and missing from the first chapter of A History of Negro Revolt is a mystery. Perhaps the greatest mystery, however, is James’s absolute silence on Haiti after 1800. The absence of modern Haiti is all the more surprising given the obvious influence Padmore’s Life and Struggles had on the writing of this monograph. Padmore, for example, includes a fairly detailed discussion of Haitian opposition to American imperialism in 1929, of striking dockworkers shouting “DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM” while peasants marched from the countryside to the city. A movement of workers and peasants together, confronting a well-armed contingent of American marines, would have worked wonderfully in A History of Negro Revolt. After all, speaking of Africa James writes: “What the authorities fear most is a combination of the workers in the towns and the peasants in the interior.” Padmore, Life and Struggles, 104; James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, 79.
27. See Manabendra Nath Roy, M.N Roy’s Memoirs (Bombay and New York: Allied Publishers, 1964), 378; John Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 14–15; D.C. Grover, M.N. Roy: A Study of Revolution and Reason in Indian Politics (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1973), 2–13; V.B. Karnik, M.N. Roy: A Political Biography (Bombay: Nav Jagriti Samaj, 1978), 107–10. Also, see note 10.
28. Drafts of Minty Alley (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1936) were written years before the book was actually published, and “Toussaint L’Ouverture” was produced in London in March of 1936.
29. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 124.
30. See, for example, Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Religious Odyssey of African Radicals: Notes on the Communist Party of South Africa, 1921–1934,” Radical History Review 51 (1991): 5–24; Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modem Messianic Cults (New York: Knopf, 1963); George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Settings and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958).
31. Padmore, Life and Struggles, 126.
32. Paul Buhle makes this point in C.L.R. James: The Artistas Revolutionary, 57.
33. For transcripts of the debate between James (“J.R. Johnson”) and Trotsky, see Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978).
34. Haskell House Publishers in New York also published A History of Negro Revolt in its original form in 1969, apparently without James’s consent or his knowledge.
35. Author phone interview with Charlie Cobb, August 31, 1994. (Cobb was a founding member of Drum and Spear Bookstore and the press.) Beyond James’s book, the only other title they published was a children’s book written and illustrated by Jennifer Lawson titled Children of Africa. By about 1973 the store and the press literally faded out of existence, in part due to the effect the riots had on black businesses on 14th St., and in part due to the usual difficulties that arise with activist-oriented enterprises. Their business decisions were driven by political motives rather than profit motives.
36. Some of James’s articles for the Militant are reprinted in C.L.R. James, et al., Fighting Racism in World War II (New York: Monad Press, 1980). James’s understanding of the impact of World War II on African-Americans is also made abundantly clear in his recently published 1950 manuscript, American Civilization, eds. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, (London: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 200–11.
37. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 13–14; Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movementin the Organizational Politics of the FEPC (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1959).
38. Roi Ottley, New World A-Comin: Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 306. On black militancy during the war, see Richard Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55 (June 1968): 90–106; Herbert Ga
rfinkel, When Negroes March; Peter J. Kellogg, “Civil Rights Consciousness in the 1940s,” The Historian 42 (November 1979): 18–41; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 298–325; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 786–811; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 3018.
39. Letter to Constance Webb (1945) in The C.L.R. James Reader, 146; “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A.,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 188–89; Paul Buhle, “Marxism in the U.S.A.” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, 32; also see Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 70–73.
40. “Black Power,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 369.
41. During the 1950s, both Padmore and Richard Wright had written books on Ghana, and James would follow with his own in 1977. George Padmore, The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom (London: D. Dobson, 1953); Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in the Land of Pathos (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954); C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport, CT.: Lawrence and Hill, Co., 1977).
42. Letter of March 20, 1957, in Grimshaw, ed.. The C.L.R. James Reader, 269–70; see also, James, Nkrumah, 50–158 passim.; Manning Marable, “The Fall of Kwame Nkrumah,” in Buhle, ed., C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, 39–47. James was so taken by Ghana, that in his March 20, 1957, letter (cited above) he actually suggested that young blacks from the West emigrate there! Recall that in these very pages he calls Garvey’s emigration scheme “pitiable rubbish” (92).