Blyden on Blyden

Perspectives on Edward Wilmot Blyden by Prof. Nemata Blyden from Professor Gloria Emeagwali on Vimeo. This short video featuring Nemata Blyden, a descendant of Edward Blyden is worth a listen. Blyden was one of the most intriguing figures in the history of pan-Africanism, one whose shadow looms large in many areas pertinent to Africa and its diasporas. Although Haiti was, from what I have read of Blyden's work, largely absent or seen as an example of colorism setting back an independent black state, I have long thought of the possible parallels between Blyden and his Haitian contemporaries. 

Rambling Thoughts on Blyden, Christianity, and Islam

Source 

This intellectual and pan-Africanist is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the fascination with Islam among African-Americans. West Indian-born Blyden, who chose Liberia and West Africa as his ultimate homeland, praised Islam in West Africa for encouraging education, discipline, abstinence from alcohol, and for not degrading Africans into servile conditions like Christianity. Blyden saw Christianity's spread in Africa by European missionaries as instilling a servile nature in converts whereas Islam, with its longer history in Africa, had promoted learning, trade, and, according to Blyden, was a step above 'fetishism' of African traditional religion. Blyden was so taken with Islam that he also traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, studying the Arabic language and the Koran.

Blyden had also promoted the study of Arabic in Sierra Leone and Liberia, at one point envisioning a partnership between Christian Americo-Liberians and the Muslim states of the West African interior. Of course, Blyden saw Islam as a preparatory step to the 'true' religion of Christianity, but was unique among Western writers for acknowledging many positive elements of the faith. It also becomes clear that he romanticized Islam in Africa, largely ignoring the slave trade, and his praise of Islam over Christianity was clearly tied to the masculinist impulse of black nationalism as a political project. Unlike Christianity, which allegedly connoted servility (and therefore, femininity), for black men, Islamic African societies were masculine, strong, independent, and assertive.

I contend that Blyden, though writing for European and West African readers rather than African-Americans, influenced the way US blacks perceived Islam in relation to their own history and struggles. Islam and the black nationalist imagination of Blyden influenced African-Americans. Without Blyden, would there have been a Malcolm X?

The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society

After reading Adolph Reed's essay on Stein's work last week, I decided to pick up her Marcus Garvey book, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Since it is usually worthwhile to explore studies of Garvey or other black historical figures which are not works of hagiography, Stein's book grabbed my attention. She applies a class analysis of Garvey and the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) to elucidate its growth, meteoric rise, and fall, taking the reader along the way across the US, the West Indies, and Africa. According to Stein, Garvey's petty bourgeois origins and initial base inherited bourgeois notions of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism from the 19th century. Thus, according to Stein, differences between the UNIA and other black organizations such as the NAACP or elite African associations in British West Africa, were rather slight and all eschewed mass-based tactics (that is, until conditions in the 1930s favored them). 

During an economic boom and period of expanding economic opportunities for blacks in the US in industrial workplaces, as well as the growth of black-owned businesses, many saw the UNIA's message of racial enterprise and the Black Star Line as the future steps for the race's development of Africa and liberation. Stein outlines the rise and fall of the BSL through incompetence, poor planning, and economic conditions in the shipping industry of the 1920s, which indicates that Garveyism was already falling apart independently of sabotage from the US government. Her chapter on Liberia similarly argues that the UNIA's failures to establish settlements in the only independent West African state were due to Americo-Liberian elite opposition. Furthermore, given the lack of capital and resources possessed by the UNIA, it's unlikely their impact on Liberian development would have been great. 

However, the most important question of the book, the role of class and historical materialist history, can be misleading. She painstakingly demonstrates that Garveyism in the US and the Caribbean never really embraced working-class politics, but sometimes one cannot help but feel that Stein did not let the black working-class peoples of the US or the West Indies speak for themselves. Of course, due to the paucity of sources for much of the black working-class at this time, one can applaud how Stein finds the few sources she can. Furthermore, she is likely correct that as working conditions and prospects declined for the black working-class, especially with the Great Depression and the decimation of black businesses and employment, fewer would retain interest in the UNIA as it was largely irrelevant to their quotidian material needs. 

Moreover, as fans of Adolph Reed will know, most of these racial leaders were self-proclaimed and often condescendingly presumed to speak for or represent black constituencies which did not actually exist. For Garvey, despite being a mass movement for a time, the Parent Body in New York squabbled with the locals (not to mention internal dissension among the Parent Body) and did not necessarily have a strong say on how locals conducted themselves. Stein uses for examples of this the UNIA locals in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Gary. So, considering the UNIA's intellectual debt to 19th century black nationalist thought, within the context of urbanization and immigration, perhaps it's best scene as a transitional movement that endeavored to graft elite/bourgeois vision with a mass base, which it would lose due to the spectacular mismanagement of the BSL and other ventures of racial enterprise. 

But as a transitional type of organization, and with its charismatic leader whose transcontinental reach influenced subsequent Pan-Africanists and anti-colonial activists, the UNIA does appear significant for shaping subsequent black working-class views of nationalism in the years after his death. Sometimes, I cannot help but think leftists refuse to acknowledge how the black working-class, like others, could support and endorse some of the elite or petite bourgeois notions of progress and uplift without identifying class conflict as a major factor. This does not mean there were no tensions, or that class consciousness excludes racial or color consciousness. Some of the key figures in the annals of Harlem radicalism who appear in the book, such as Hubert Harrison, or members of the African Blood Brotherhood, combined a class-consciousness with racial and Pan-Africanist politics or sympathies. 

George Schuyler's Black Empire

George Schuyler's Black Empire, two novels of serial fiction printed together in a single volume, tell the magnificent tale of black unity and genius triumphing against imperialism and white supremacy in the 1930s. Using science fiction elements and the charged context of fascism, communism, and capitalism during that tumultuous decade, Schuyler's fantastic story of Carl Slater's involvement with Dr. Belsidus's Black Internationale is a tour-de-force. Satirizing elements of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, such as Garvey, Schuyler's ruthless Belsidus brings together the best minds of the Negro race to construct new technology, build a Temple of Love religion drawing on Ancient Egypt, conquer Africa, and defeat Europe. Belsidus's 'redemption' of Africa, however, is oppressive as it mercilessly punishes and kills those suspected of betrayal, installs Belsidus as dictator, and even imposes new diets and cultural practices on local African populations. Thus, a form of "authoritarian collectivism," identified by Moses as a pattern in black nationalist politics, appears throughout the text. Surely part of it is justified in this fantastic tale because of the extreme conditions against Belsidus and blacks across the world in the 1930s, but in some sense, Belsidus resembles the Barclay and the Americo-Liberians he overthrows. Viewed in that light, one can see how this novel was clearly influenced by Garvey, as well as possibly influenced Elijah Muhammad and perhaps Sun Ra, not to mention earlier 19th century black nationalists and the redemptionist narrative of Africa within Africana thought. As entertainment, this "hokum" of Schuyler's is irresistibly exciting and one can forgive some of the lapses in chronology or sequence. My only real question is, what was going on in the West Indies? Does the Black Empire of Africa plan on liberating the West Indies and India? Delegates from those parts of the world come to Kakata at the novel's conclusion...

The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925

"Black nationalism assumes the shape of its container and undergoes transformations in accordance with changing intellectual fashions in the white world."

As someone with a casual interest in African-American politics, history, and black nationalist "fringe" organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Five Percenters, the Nation of Islam, and Malachi York's various outfits, and the black women club movement, I have long heard about Wilson Jeremiah Moses and his lauded work on black nationalism. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 lives up to the hype. Everything that ties together Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, the "authoritarian collectivism" of Farrakhan, allegedly fascist tendencies of Garveyism, and black emigrationism is explained quite succinctly by Moses. The Ethiopianism strand of thought in African-American Christianity infuses all forms of black nationalism examined by Moses, and clearly has lived on despite the Islamic veneer of the Moors and Nation of Islam. All of these things, also explained in an interview by Cedric Johnson as black nationalism reflecting dominant trends in European philosophy and science of the time, prove beyond a doubt that black nationalism, black separatism, and notions of black identity cannot be understood as existing in a vacuum. 

Like the Haitian elite intellectuals who turned to folk culture under US Occupation, US African Americans turned to an embrace of the black lower classes around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, both cases indicating how shifting European opinion on the superiority of Western civilization led to primitivist phases and likely pressured Haitian and African-American intellectuals to embrace aspects of the lower classes and their culture, often based on essentialized notions of race and "blackness" in the case of African-Americans. Indeed, Moses book is Pan-African in scope, including West Indian and African black nationalists like Blyden and Garvey in his analysis, although Haiti or Latin American black nationalism is neglected, for the most part. 

More disturbing of an enlightening experience, Moses argues that James Theodore Holly, drawing on messianic and 'Anglo-African' Protestant black nationalism, believed African-Americans were necessary to guide Haiti to progress, much like Crummell, Garvey, and many more US black nationalists espoused a rather condescending vision of Africa and believed in their own role to improve or civilize Africa. These aspects of black nationalism, authoritarian collectivism, imperialism, and elitism, survive in varying forms today, but clearly illustrate some of the inherent problems with transnational black collaboration in the past. For instance, I always viewed Holly as a positive example of African-American solidarity with Haiti, but the religious, ethnic, and class biases of African-American black nationalists who ventured to the Caribbean or West Africa certainly poke holes in Pan-Africanism. Perhaps sentiment and skin color alone cannot forge meaningful politics or solidarity, certainly not any of the black nationalism modalities as defined by Moses. In addition to these problematic aspects of black nationalist projects of the 19th and early 20 centuries, troubling and religious understandings of black poverty and black family structure essentially paved the way for E. Franklin Frazier and Moynihan's troubling conclusions on the black family and black women, another indication that black nationalism is not, as Moses writes, invariably leftist or progressive. 

Stokely Carmichael

Enjoy this special Carib Nation episode on Stokely Carmichael, an important figure in the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, Pan-Africanism, Black Power, the international Black Left, and a Caribbean-American from Trinidad! It's excellent to not forget Carmichael's immigrant roots and Caribbean influences in his politics and outlook.

Edward Wilmot Blyden

Edward Wilmot Blyden, West Indian-born, educated in US, and significant pan-Africanist intellectual in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Blyden criticized Krio elites for emulating Western culture, praised Islamic West Africa's intellectual tradition (as well as romanticized them), believed Islam was better suited for blacks, supported a Dress Reform Society to push Krio men to wear African-styled clothes, supported "Africanization" of Krio names (something already in practice before Blyden's time), and argued for a 'Negro personality' that would lead to development on its own. Blyden was something of a hypocrite, since he never 'Africanized' his name, but his influence is sometimes overstated. Regardless, he was a towering figure in 19th century Black Atlantic intellectual thought. 

Carlos Cooks: Dominican-American Garveyite and Black Nationalist

Carlos Cooks, a Dominican-American black nationalist who influenced much of radical Harlem back in the day. He reminds me of Arturo Schomburg as one of those rare Afro-Latinos who moved to the US and became a part of various forms of Black intellectual and political circles in New York. This faithful Garveyite designated Garvey's birthday a black holiday, helped organize buy black campaigns in NYC (although an African-American Muslim called the "Black Hitler" by Jews who accused him of anti-Semitism also shaped 'buy black' consumerism in Harlem by organizing boycotts of white-owned stores in Harlem), influenced Malcolm X and shaped various forms of Pan-Africanist organizations and ideals. 

It really shows one how transnational and transcolonial Marcus Garvey's UNIA was in the circum-Caribbean world, probably spreading to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Central America through West Indian workers (and from them to New York, where Caribbean immigrants have shaped black resistance and radicalism since the early 1900s. 

Sources:

http://moorbey.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-contributions-of-carlos-a-cooks/

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xwhv9oqXNs

Firmin's Equality of the Races (De l'égalité des races humaines)

I finally read  The Equality of the Human Races translated by Asselin Charles after a preemptive review on this blog. This classic really challenges a lot of stereotypes about Haiti and Haitians: a black man (and not mixed-race like many of Haiti's intelligentsia and educated elite at the time) who is well-read, educated, articulate, open to scientific progress and positivism as well as connected to broader intellectual debates on the international level is striking since Haiti is supposed to be the "best nightmare on earth" and black Haitians in particular stereotyped as savage, 'Voodoo-practitioners'. In many ways the book not only offers a scientific and philosophical defense of the Haitian Revolution and black autonomy, but also a vindicationist text on ancient Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia as inherent proof of black equality, which, actually predates a lot of Afrocentric interpretations of the African past by several decades. I thought it was a little outdated at times because Firmin assumes a sort of "Western Europe" is best mentality at times by looking down upon the contemporary cultures of Africa ("now fallen into barbarism..." 287). That's hardly unique to him, I suppose, since many diasporic black peoples in the 19th century saw contemporary Africa through Eurocentric, racist lens or a Christian missionary perspective. Indeed, from what I have read via secondary sources, early 19th century Haitian writers, such as de Vastey, despite praising ancient African civilizations such as Egypt and Nubia, saw the African societies of the early 19th century as inferior culturally and technologically to Europe. Firmin also alludes to several Haitian literary and cultural figures, as well as scientists and other educated examples to further demonstrate the absence of scientific evidence for black sub-humanity or separate species. He includes "mulattoes" and mixed-race people as proof of the inherent equality of the human races, too:

But to acknowledge the intellectual equality of mulattoes and Whites is inevitably to admit the equality of Blacks and Whites. Indeed, if the two races had any innately different intellectual abilities, it would be impossible to understand how the mulatto is endowed, not with an average intelligence but, to the contrary, with an intelligence equal to that of the supposedly superior genitor. So most anthropologists simply refuse to recognize the intellectual equality of the mulatto and the White man, an equality so positively proclaimed by the author of L’Espece humaine” (204).

Nevertheless, Firmin's important text, though not nearly as widely known as that of Gobineau's Inequality of the Races, predicts future 'Afrocentric' thoughts quite brilliantly with powerful quotations such as the following, “Besides, the honor of having invented the science of numbers and surface measurement does not belong to the White race. The origin of mathematics goes back to Black Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs” (168). On page 242, he suggests that the ancient Egyptians were of a red-brown, or brick-like color, quite common in Africa, whereas elsewhere he defends African religion as practical rationalism instead of the dominant European perception of Africa as a land of superstitious fetish worship and irrationality (342). He also conducted linguistic research, examined the flora and fauna of ancient Egypt, studied migration patterns, and analyzed sculptural depictions to place ancient Egypt firmly in the world of black history, something which fit into a vindicationist framework centered on Haiti as the rehabilitation of Africa and the African diaspora.Thus, despite some rather condescending or pro-European views of 19th century Africa, the text offers a powerful critique of white supremacy and stereotypes of Haiti, Africa, and the silliness of scientific racism since ancient Africa was the bedrock of many ideas that contributed to human development and civilization. In addition, his entire book calls into question the notion of black mental inferiority from positivist and philosophical grounds, proof of how there was a space for black intellectuals from Haiti to respond to the burgeoning field of scientific racism and Social Darwinism in the late 19th century. Indeed, though Firmin was educated in Haitian institutions, he utilized the inductive positivist approach to anthropology developed by Auguste de Comte as well as personally engaging with Francophone anthropologists and scientists in Paris who actively debated the merits of scientific racism in terms of cranial measurements and outdated theories of polygenesis versus monogesis (an important debate prior to the irrefutable discovery of early anatomically-modern humans in Africa) within the Societé d'Anthropologie de Paris, where the leading scientists of the day gathered.

As an early text of Pan-Africanist thought by a pioneer in anti-racist  anthropology and science, Firmin's text's ultimate strength lies in its relevance to today's world, since pseudoscientific racism has again arose in the works of Rushton, The Bell Curve, and the recent appearance of scientific racism over claims of genetic differences between native whites in the US and Latin American immigrants that causes the latter to have lower IQs, leading to the author to call for limited immigration due to what would arguably be innately inferior IQ scores. The ugliness of scientific racism, a scourge that grew exponentially in the late 18th century and fueled by Social Darwinism and European imperialism, requires strong critiques, and Firmin's classic text provides a great example, despite it being published in 1885. Although disturbing at times for his statements (such as the mulatto being more beautiful than both blacks and whites, or referring to Africa as a land fallen to barbarism), Firmin is mostly on point by doing what the earlier black writers of Haiti had established since the days of Henri Christophe and de Vastey, vindicating the sons and daughters of Africa at home and abroad through a combination of history, science, philosophy, anthropology, and the progression of ideas over time. The equality of the human races, therefore, lies in the equal potential to reach the noblest heights of human existence, and since natural selection and evolution made human 'races' unfixed, it would be foolish to elevate one race as permanently 'superior' to that of others.

Thoughts on The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey

Amy Jacques Garvey: The Veiled Garvey

Ula Taylor’s The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, critically reassesses the life of Marcus Garvey’s second wife to highlight the role of women in crafting the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s ideology of Pan-Africanism and black nationalism. Since black nationalism is often conceived as endeavoring to construct a patriarchal nation with black women relegated to traditional gender roles, Taylor argues that women like Amy Jacques Garvey practiced community feminism that influenced the decidedly male-dominated leadership of the UNIA and Pan-Africanism in other organizations. Furthermore, a biography of Amy Jacques Taylor alleviates the problem of narrating her life’s story only in shadows or periphery of the better-known Marcus Garvey. Indeed, Taylor argues that Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and the Pan-Africanist message would not have spread so widely without the dedication, intellectual prowess, insightful writing, and life-long activism of Jacques Garvey.

Perhaps the most obvious theme of the biography, Taylor emphasizes community feminism and defends calling it feminism. Basically, it encompasses all the actions, caretaking, and activism of black women for the community’s benefit because community feminism counters a macropolitical model that implies there is something inherently "pure" or "essential" to feminist theory. By reorienting black feminism to these community-based activities that uplift the entire black community, Taylor endeavors to reconcile black feminism in the UNIA’s patriarchal structure. However, community feminism within the patriarchal context of the UNIA included male chauvinism, expectations of female subordination in the home and public, and traditional gender roles, making it difficult to reconcile the two views. Black nationalism and feminism can be reconciled, something exemplified by Amy Jacques Garvey’s personal life of resisting male authority, writing a column in Negro World for women, and thrusting herself into public and political spaces, such as the Fifth Pan-African Congress or Jamaican political parties such as the PNP.

In addition to highlighting the instrumental role of Jacques Garvey for the intellectual development and a lot of the organizing for the UNIA’s success, she was also an independent thinker and more leftwing than Garvey. Though often essentializing the African diaspora at times to bolster her claims for a united African diaspora,  she  possessed a more class-conscious and internationally-minded view of Pan-Africanism that deviated from the self-help, pro-capitalist attitudes of the UNIA. She never succumbed to redbaiting, and perhaps because of personal experience with raising children as a woman with limited income, fully defended more socialist-minded governments and policies to benefit workers and support social programs. In postcolonial Africa, for example, Jacques Garvey opposed African capitalism that would perpetuate the oppression of the African working masses and poor. She also opposed capitalist governments of Jamaica that resisted investing in public services and a safety net for Jamaica’s overwhelmingly poor, black majority.

Jacques Garvey went to Africa for the first time in the 1960s, something never done by Marcus Garvey, to see the independent West African nations of Nigeria and Ghana. Invited as a special guest of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jacques Garvey was clearly connected to Pan-Africanist causes and anti-colonial struggles in a way that suggests a better understanding and approach than her deceased husband. Jacques Her actual involvement and relationship with broader Pan-Africanism, especially after the death of Garvey, was also more expansive, far-flung, and connected to anti-colonial leaders and movements, as well as promoting specific policies and plans such as reading groups and pen pals across the African diaspora and Africa to strengthen racial unity in opposition to white supremacy and colonialism. Her collaboration with other Pan-Africanists such as George Padmore and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as emerging anti-colonial leaders like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya connected her with African diasporic figures her husband had a poor relationship with while also showing closer relationship and alliance with African activists. Instead of the old UNIA narrative of African diasporic blacks redeeming Africa through a paternalistic or condescending notion of blacks from the Americas bringing civilization to Africa, Africans have a key role as allies and participants in the creation of the Pan-African goal.

Taylor also explains that Jacques Garvey never fought for some romantic “Back to Africa” movement in the sense it is usually thought of, but rather an effort to overturn colonialism, white supremacy, and raise the living standards of black people everywhere by giving the race more international power and respect. Her critique of the PNP’s refusal to espouse black power or unity in Jamaican politics, coming from a member of Jamaica’s mixed-race elite, is an example of her use of blackness as resistance politically for leftist social policies and Pan-Africanist causes. Taking this into consideration, Jacques Garvey emerges as a savvy political player, intellectual, and ideologue whose stances, though similar to the UNIA, were more engaged in promoting black unity and power in Jamaica, Africa, and the US from a radical leftist perspective than her late husband.

This much needed biography of Jacques Garvey, useful for uncovering an entire dimension of the life of Marcus Garvey, also displays her own neglected contributions to Pan-Africanist and black nationalist politics. She felt ignored and thrust to the backburner of history herself, but Taylor’s biography revives her many contributions to a form of black nationalism often seen as patriarchal. Instead, a more nuanced view lends credence to the reconciliation of community feminism and black nationalism based on the life of Jacques Garvey, whose intellectual, personal, and independent contributions and leadership to the UNIA, Pan-Africanism, and leftism were essential for the success of anti-colonial struggles and black liberation in the US. Indeed, Jacques Garvey understood the Black Power era’s origins as heavily derived from the UNIA and forms of Pan-Africanism she developed through decades of work. Placed in this broader context, Jacques Garvey’s contributions to black nationalism earn their rightful place in the history of black feminist nationalism as well as showing the interplay of feminism, leftism, Pan-Africanism, and decolonization in the 20^th century.