Back when Britain loved Rastafari

On 21st April 1966, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I touched down in Palisadoes airport, Kingston, Jamaica. Thousands thronged the airport, rushing over barriers and through police lines towards the plane as it came to a stop. Ethiopian banners, ites gold and green colours flew everywhere. Chanting of His Majesty’s name filled the air. Never before had such an event taken place in Jamaica.

But a similar event had in fact happened before – thirty years prior in London, UK. The people were different. As were the times.  Yet the personality and presence was the same…

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…This is the text of the report by Sylvia Pankhurst in her New Times and Ethiopian News of the arrival of Haile Selassie I into Britain on June 5th 1936 on a misison to raise support against the Italian invasion and inaction of the League of Nations:

 A Right Royal British Welcome

In London at Waterloo station, a huge crowd thronged the station itself, and mustered outside. The Friends of Abyssinia, organized by the splendid activity of Mrs Napier and her helpers, made the welcome colourful by great scarlet banners of welcome and flags and armlets in the Ethiopian colours. Members of the public also spontaneously displayed home-made banners, hat-bands, button holes and badges. Young and old, even to the children, showed generous sympathy for the nation attacked by a cruel aggressor, and the man who has stood for world peace. In the crowded special enclosure on the platform were the dean of Winchester, Dr E.G. Selywny, Sir Norman Angell, Mr Vyvyan Adams MP, Miss Eleanor Rathbone MP, Sir George Paish, Mr Philip Noel-Baker, Lady Sprigge, Lady Bailey, members of the Indian Political Group in London, of the various African societies, and organizations, of coloured peoles, some of them in their own picturesque dress. When the train steamed in at last, masses of people had waited more than six hours. The greeting was tremendously enthusiastic and eager.

Mr O.C. Harvey, private secretary to Mr Eden entered the train to meet the Emperor and his party. Mr Spenser and Count von Rosen, Captian Brophil, and the expelled correspondent of The Times were greeted with smiles of recognition. The people in the special enclosure surged round the Emperor. Flowers were presented to the Princess Tsahai. Professor Jevons read the Address of the Abyssinia Society pledging itself to work till Ethiopia is restored in that freedom and peace essential to her happiness and prosperity.

The Abyssinian Association presented the following address:

Your Majesty,

We … beg leave to welcome your Majesty on arrival in Britain on behalf of all the members of the association. We sympathise deeply with your Majesty, your family, and your people in the terrible sufferings and misfortunes to which you and they have been subjected from the wanton and ruthless invasion of your country by the Italian armies. We are deeply grieved by the continuing miseries of the Ethiopian people.

We greatly admire the steadfastness and courage with which your majesty and your government have defended your country and the manner in which you have complied with your obligations to the League of Nations both before and after the commencement of hostilities, and we deplore the failure of the league so far to give your country the protection to which it was entitled.

We shall continue to work to the end that your country shall be restored to your majesty and to your people and that it shall enjoy in future that freedom and peace essential to its happiness and prosperity.

Harold Moody, League of Coloured Peoples

An address was also presented by the Pan African Federation, and there were present on the platform representatives of the International Friends of Ethiopia, the Gold Coast Aborigines Protection Society, the Negro Welfare Association, the British Guiana Association, the League of Coloured Peoples, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Gold Coast Students Association, the Somalia Society, the Colonial Seamen’s Association and the Kikuyu Association of Kenya.

The emperor replied in Amharic, his address being translated by Mr Ephraim Medheu of his legation:

 I am deeply touched by the welcome which you have given me to-day at this most anxious time to me and the members of my family we must express our profound gratitude to you and to the British government, which has shown us its sympathy, and been of great comfort to us.

We feel that you share our sorrow for Ethiopia is the victim of a war which was forced upon her. We left Ethiopia because we wished to avoid more cruel bloodshed. We have done all that we could; but the aggressor poured gases upon our children and women, and all our people, and so we have come to appeal, to ask for judgment from Europe.

As all league members have the right to expect the discharge of obligations which are imposed upon the rest, we have no doubt that our appeal will meet with the response that it deserves.

We are deeply grateful to your association for all the help which it has given our cause and we cannot find words to express our gratitude for the sympathy extended to us by the public opinion of great Britain. May justice reign over the earth for always. May the British crown and people live for ever. We pray to god, long live the king.

Una Marson, famous Jamaican author, secretary to the Imperial Ethiopian legation during 1936

The Indians, the Africans from Kenya and elsewhere came up with their addresses of welcome, and the  New Times and Ethiopia News, on behalf of its contributors and staff, an address which has been illuminated by Philip Cole. Mrs Napier presented the beautiful colours, the vellum scroll was lettered in script, in the colours red, gold, and green, and decorated with the lion of Juddah and a sacred picture from the Kebra Negast, the glory of the kings of Ethiopia.

At the [Ethiopian] Legation a crowd so vast collected that the police barriers were broken. The Emperor from the Balcony thanked the people for their welcome and the Princess [Tsehai] spoke to them in English.

For days the BBC had broadcast the fascist versions of Italy rejoicing over her Ethiopian victories without a word on the Ethiopian side.  Britain’s great welcome broke down in a measure this boycott, but some foreign broadcasting stations, notably the Danish, gave much filler accounts of the British welcome than that of the BBC.

At the Emperor’s reception for diplomats and others in the Legation, at Prince’s gate, were the ambassadors of Argentina, and China, the Finnish, Nepalese, Iraqi, Persian and Uruguayan ministers, the charges d’affaires of Japan, Paraguay, Columbia and Egypt. Lord Cranborne, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr Hore-Belisha, minister of transport, Mr Lloyd George MP, Captain V.A. Cazalet Mp, Sir Robert Gower MP, Commander Locker-Lampson, Lord Allen of Hurtwood, Prof Gilert Murray, Dr T. Drummond Shiles, General Evangeline Booth, Prof Stanley Jevons, Miss Eleanor Rathbone MP, Miss Sylvia Pankhurst and Mr Kryakas Mikhail, of the Nile Society, Mrs Napier and Mr R.C. Hawkin and Mr Herbert Morrison of the labour party.

In the drawing room, the Emperor, his sad eyes recalling the martyrdom of his country, with gentle simplicity, received the guests, supported by the young princess and her brothers, and the fine old warrior Ras Kassa, a figure of rugged loyalty and stoic courage.

Later, downstairs in the tea room, one saw Lord Cranborne representing the British Government, first in an animated conversation with the Emperor; then endeavouring to assure Sylvia Pankhurst and Mrs Napier that the national government really intends justice to Ethiopia, and that the return of Sir Samuel Hoare to the cabinet does not portend any lifting of sanctions or betrayal of the struggle to uphold Abyssinia and the covenant. One heard Mr Lloyd George asking to be presented to the emperor for whom he declared profound respect and admiration and then insisting vivaciously that Mr Eden would have Britain at his back and be the most popular man in the country if he clearly insisted on strong action to overthrow the Italian aggression, when the league assembly meets. Mr A.C. Hawkin, for many years secretary for the Eighty Club, replied with a challenge to Lloyd George himself “YOU can get the man’s country back for him!” One heard Eleanor Rathbone expressing the wish for a flash of the fire which made the old suffragette militancy, to stir the League.

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H.I.M. arriving at Bath in aug 1936

Some issues of New Times and Ethiopian News later, Hazel Napier remembers the following during this reception:

“We will do our utmost for Ethiopia”, I said. The words were re-interpreted into Amharic. He answered in Amharic and then moved toward the window. Cheer after cheer arose from the waiting London crowd. They too, would do their utmost for Ethiopia. And yet…

Were those African delegations at Waterloo present outside the Legation? Waiting for the British establishment to invite their presence onto the guest list also?

The impact of the 1935 Italian/Ethiopian War in Guyana

Common knowledge has it that it was in Jamaica where the Rastafari faith was first and foremost proclaimed. This is true; however, this truth belies the wider impact of the Italian/Ethiopian war of 1935/6 on the Caribbean region, and especially on its peoples of African heritage. African peoples in Jamaica were not the only ones who, using their existing political and spiritual resources, saw in Emperor Haile Selassie I their king – and even, perhaps, their God. In this post, I will look at the impact of the Italian/Ethiopian war on the African peoples of Guyana, focusing mainly on the historical context, that is, the roots and routes of this impact. My information is garnered from secondary sources as well as original research in the UK National Archives.

Let us start with the Demerara uprising against slavery, starting in 1823 on a plantation belonging to the father of future British Prime Minister William Gladstone, and spreading subsequently to sixty other locations.  In the trials that followed the suppression of the uprising, great importance was placed upon the complicity of Rev John Smith who, having been sent by the London Missionary Society, proceeded to narrate to enslaved congregations the story of Moses, pharaoh, exile and liberation. It is most likely, however, that these African congregations took what they found useful from these sermons without being too enamored by the London Mission itself. After emancipation, churches expanded greatly amongst the new “free villages” but most were organized around a strict and formal British liturgy that marked its civilized distance from “primitive” superstition. This growth proceeded parallel to a re-embracing of African faiths by the emancipated masses who had fast become disillusioned when the laity supported planters despite their decreasing wages in the late 1840s.

Obeah – along with drumming and dancing – were regularly outlawed in Guyana during the nineteenth century. Special attention, in this respect, was given to the African faiths that focused upon the spiritual agency known as Water Mamma. And the most (in)famous of these was Comfa. In many West and Central African cosmologies, rivers are powerful places that intersect the human and spirit worlds. The (usually feminine) spirits of the waterways are therefore powerful agents of intercession. Comfa works in a non-dualistic universe where the material and spiritual, living and ancestors are related. There is, therefore, an emphasis on spiritual mediums that actively guide the living. Baptism is easily placed within these practices, especially due to the relationship between water and the Holy Spirit. Hence in the late nineteenth century many practitioners of Comfa also attended church,  and over time a number of Comfa articles of faith came to be justified through biblical narratives.

Into this context stepped the Jordanites. The history of this faith demonstrates how interconnected the Caribbean region was during colonial times, both economically and spiritually. Joseph Maclaren, was an Anglican Grenadian working in Trinidad in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Introduced by his friend Bhagwan Das to Hinduism Maclaren also underwent a “baptism by immersion”. One of his subsequent disciples, a Barbadian man called Bowen, migrated to Guyana and there undertook a proselytizing mission, baptizing members into his “church”.  One such member was Nathaniel Jordan, a cane field laborer from whom the faith derives its name. The Jordanite Baptist faith had already been prepared by Comfa and the popularity of Water Mama. Indeed, the Jordanites place great emphasis on full immersion baptism as well as spiritual mediumship for communicating with ancestors.

Upon Jordan’s passing, Elder James Klein picked up the leadership who was a member also of the Guyana chapter of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. That there would be strong resonances between both groups (perhaps despite Garvey’s wishes) is not a surprise. Jordanites are adamant that God is Black and that Jesus had African ancestry, and this no doubt fitted the Ethiopian lens on God provided by Garvey. Indeed, both the Jordanites and Garveyites were seen by colonial authorities in the 1920s to be spreading the same seditious messages of “race hatred” against whites. Later, when the Italy/Ethiopia war began in October 1935, both organizations cooperated to agitate for Ethiopia’s defense. It was most probably the Jordanites and Garveyites who organized meetings to petition King George V for their members to be allowed to fight on behalf of Selassie I.

The Jordanites were not only strong in greater Georgetown but also along the east bank of Demerara, the rural area where, from October 1935 onwards, a series of uprisings commenced on plantations. As the Governor of Guiana noted at the time, while unrest amongst rural workers around cropping time was not unusual, in 1935 the low price of crops had combined with a “very strong sympathy which the blacks have for Abyssinia as against Italy”. This had led, reckoned the Governor, to a “new feature” whereby “combinations” of Black villagers had entered the estates and prevented mostly Indian laborers from working. The intensity of the uprisings led the Governor to approve the temporary enlistment of one hundred extra police. Additionally, the Governor requested all District Commissioners to relay the message to their local populations that Great Britain was doing its utmost to put a stop to the Italian invasion and that Black laborers could help by observing the law and keeping order. However, just one week later after this pronouncement rumors abounded that Italian doctors were poisoning black children in Georgetown and near East Coast Demerara. A similar episode had recently happened in Jamaica, and the Governor, judging the mood to be incendiary, requested a warship to patrol the coast.

A few episodes  from the rural uprisings in East Coast Demerara are of great interest to recount. In a report to the secretary of the Governor, the inspector-general of police testified that two overseers had been assaulted, compelled to carry red flags, and forced to march with strikers on the sugar estates. While rumors of communist infiltration always accompanied peasant uprisings in the 1930s Caribbean, this flag should not be confused with the hammer and sickle. For in the Comfa faith, red is the special color of Africa (as it is in a number of other African faith systems across the Caribbean). Another estate driver, providing evidence later at a labor disputes commission, recounted how a field laborer had tried to force him to perform an “African war dance” as drums were played. And in another incident, the overseer discovered that twenty strikers were blocking a bridge to the fields. “One fellow laid down and said he was an Abyssinian General. He defied anybody to cross and said he meant to chop anyone who tried to do so.” The Chair of the commission asked the driver what he supposed was to gain from these actions; the overseer replied “I suppose they thought that with the Abyssinia war on they would have a war too; in fact, that is what some of them said.”

The evidence is tantalizing. Some Africans in Guyana were, through their own spiritual and political resources, sighting the Emperor of Ethiopia as their living King and were prepared to fight for Him. Their faith systems confirmed that God was Black. Was Selassie I their King and God? Rastafari, as a faith, developed most keenly (and with most suffering) in Jamaica. Yet this does not rule out the deeper possibility that Rastafari is latent in the whole African trod out of slavery. And just waiting to emerge, in unlikely places, given the right conditions.

UNESCO’s statements on race: unfinished business

Antigua was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty – a European disease … Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master … you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

Jamaica Kincaid suggests that abolition and emancipation are bitter-sweet affairs. For the enslaved, freedom furnishes them with a human being that nevertheless awaits a meaningful personhood. Out of slavery the master fares better, redeeming his human being from being human rubbish. Kincaid’s suggestion is insightful. After all, abolition had a vibrant nineteenth century afterlife. White abolitionists enthusiastically allowed their humanitarianism to colonize Africa so that God’s chosen could sanctify themselves through the act of saving the natives from their selves. Meanwhile, William Wilberforce et al, convinced that slaves were human biologically yet lacked the social and cultural competencies of humanity, looked on fascinated at the experiment of self-government in Haiti. From this point onwards all future failings would be attributed to the epidermis, not the colonial relation. Presently, argues Kincaid, the landscapes of the old Caribbean plantations have been consumed by a white tourist gaze that has once again disavowed the living legacies of enslavement and colonization and denied meaningful personhood to its peoples. What remains of these places and peoples is only an “unreal”, picture-book beauty.

What are our narratives of race and racism? Whom do we follow in order to tell the tale: the masters or the enslaved – the humanitarians or the “sufferers”? Which tale confesses the “episteme” –the scientifically valid study – of race?

The 1950-51 UNESCO “statements on race” answered such questions in favour of the master’s narrative. Announcing a new era in human understanding after the terrors of war and irrationalities of genocide, the main purpose of the statements was to separate the “biological fact” of race from its “social myth”. The biological fact in and of itself was rendered harmless, pertaining only to “physical and physiological” classifications. Thus genetic inheritance, it was affirmed, could have no bearing on mental or cultural competencies and capabilities. Conversely, the social myth of race was considered extremely dangerous in that it rendered cultural difference as biological thus sundering the “unity of mankind”. This myth had to be dispensed with; hence ethnicity – as a social/cultural classifier – was proposed as a preferable classificatory regime to that of race. Ethnicity, after all, had not been tainted with supremacist hierarchy and could signify instead non-hierarchical diversity.

Although the scientists who collectively produced the statements on race were by no means all white, the majority hailed from Western academies. And the particular kind of anti-racism evident in UNESCO’s statements had already been formulated by famous Western anthropologists such as Franz Boas. They had sought to undermine scientific racism on its own grounds, i.e. by proving the un-scientific nature of the social myth of race. And this endeavour required debunking racialized identity – that which confessed their legal and natural inequality – as myth not fact. However, as part of this manoeuvre these identities had to be subsumed under a harmless social science of ethnic categorization. While this move redeemed white identities, it de-politicized the meanings of the sufferers’ cultural complexes and complexions, extricated them from inherited hierarchies of power, and thus segregated them from the inherited and living struggles against (post-/neo-)masters. In short, as Alana Lentin puts it, the effect of the statements was to separate race from politics.

But I would like to add to this point a further provocation: that the episteme – the scientific study – of race announced by UNESCO allowed little room to seriously consider the ongoing story of the sufferers and their  strategies for meaningful re-humanization and reclamation of personhoods.  Instead, the UNESCO research agenda on race and racism first and foremost promoted a science that enabled the master to sweep away his rubbish and redeem his humanity.

Care should be taken in assuming that the 1950-51 statements were primarily focused upon scientific racism and the Shoah. Just as important was the fact that the colonial subjects of European empires had paid the blood-sacrifice for keeping Europe free of Nazism, as had African-American troops, and yet racialized rule had survived the end of the war at home and abroad. While no nation post-war could dispute the judgement upon Nazism, it was a different matter with European colonialism and Jim Crow. Hence, prudence dictated that the living and ongoing struggles against racial rule would not appear in the 1950-51 statements. But this modus vivendi was broken in 1967 when certain newly independent states entering into the UN system, and buoyed by the global ideological confluence of liberation struggle, Black Power, and civil rights, impelled UNESCO to revisit the race question.

The fourth UNESCO statement on race once more denied any biological origin to the social problem of race. However, this time the seedbed of racial discrimination was traced explicitly to the global legacies of slavery and colonial rule, as well as to anti-Semitism. Moreover, the 1967 statement acknowledged anti-colonial struggles to be the mechanism for “eliminating the scourge of racism” while also decrying the way in which “ethnic groups” inhabiting western countries were pressured to give up their cultural identity in order to assimilate. While the term “ethnicity” was still used, the interlocutory intent of the 1967 statement was far less to redeem the master’s humanity from his past crimes, and much more to valorise the sufferers’ ongoing struggles for re-humanization and re-personalization (often against the same master cultures and societies).   Therefore, unlike its earlier articulations, the 1967 statement acknowledged that racialization had never been a passive project, a technology that moulded a blank object. And in this respect, the 1967 statement opens the door for a number of considerations to enter the research agenda that were excluded from the 1950-51 statements.

In order to flesh out these considerations I confess to using a particular departure point (as will already be evident), namely, the legacies of the struggles against enslavement by Africans in the Americas. Colonialism never moved into blank spaces, and slavery never, phenomenologically speaking, created slaves – i.e. empty bodies. Concomitantly, the master has never been the only scientist; the sufferers have always had their own sciences, despite the fact that sometimes they have also practiced the science of the master at a professional level. Moreover, I do not say any of this romantically; I do not attribute a natural nobility or goodness to the very diverse and often clashing sciences of the sufferers. But sciences they nevertheless had, and have. Sciences that keep particular parts of their stories, being and practices unspoken, hidden and camouflaged from the master even as he dominates (or evacuates) their meanings in the public sphere; and sciences that allow the brunt of racial rule to be at least partially transmogrified into a creative force wherein identification processes mobilize the European constructs of race in order to redeem extant personhoods and cultural complexes and complexions under the sign, precisely, of race.

Occasionally, these sciences reveal themselves in the public spaces of the master through visible insurrections that are aesthetic at the same time as they are directly political. The master’s science can only conjure slaves or incompetent humans; yet even the master’s bards can occasionally sense that there is something at work other than brute resistance. Witness, for example, Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of the famed leaders of the Haitian Revolution: “Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; there’s not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee; thou hast great allies”. But most importantly, the sciences of the sufferers require us to consider that there might be, in the words of Artwell Cain, not just one “blackness” – the tool of the master – but also a blackness other-wise, one that “seeks to reconstruct through knowledge of self an individual and a collective identification with others carrying similar markers while fostering a sense of togetherness geared at liberating humanity”.

Polynesians Against the Vietnam War. No Vietcong Ever Called me a Coconut

This other science of blackness is not important just for its nobility and heroism, but far more so for its cognitive, interpretive, aesthetic and political practices. True, the fourth UNESCO statement on race marks the zenith of the Third World project before its political defeat in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the sciences of the sufferers that ultimately supported this project have genealogies that prefigure, pre-empt and succeed temporal defeat.  And yet, all the same, these sciences still tend to be disavowed, excluded or re-forgotten in the Western Academy’s research agenda on race.

In keeping with the 1950-51 UNESCO statements,  current research on race and racism in Western universities  is predominantly framed through two key themes of contestation: the separation of the biological and social facts of race (re-animated recently due to the science of bio-engineering), and the horizontalization/de-politicization of race into ethnicity. In philosophies of race the two contestations are much more likely to interact, while the majority of critical work in the humanities and social sciences has engaged primarily with the second, i.e. the problem of de-politicization of race into ethnicity. With especial regards to this latter work, I suggest that there remains a consistent implied preference for the master’s science to set the grounds of debate over race in academic circles, propelled, moreover, by a particular anti-racism that is obsessed with the question as to whether the master can clean up his own rubbish and make good. And this preference is structural, not individual.

When does whiteness studies become yet another narcissistic mirror for the priviliged?

Take, for instance, the case of critical race studies, which has recently been flooded with “whiteness studies”. Initially designed as a political intervention to abolish white privilege such studies now tend to fixate whiteness as the dominant cultural complex and complexion to be explored. Critique of privilige is absolutely necessary. But, to return to the considerations made by Jamaica Kincaid at the start of this blog post, my main point is that this research agenda is dominated by one story – what the master does unto the sufferers – and addressed to one politics – can the master redeem the detritus of his humanity.

What of the sufferers and their stories and politics? Are they merely fragments of raw data? Or do they have an epistemic part to play in the research agenda on race and racism?

Aotearoa New Zealand: Inter and Outernational Struggles

During my four and a half years in Aotearoa New Zealand, I undertook work that helped to retrieve the inter-connections of indigenous struggles in the Pacific with those of the African Diaspora (Outernational). I did this in order to contribute to the appreciation of the global impact/coordinates/influence of/on these indigenous struggles, and also to help to support the notion that indigenous struggle has been consistent for many, many years, is still vital, current, and everyone’s business to support. Another reason was to help to flesh out the global coordinates of African struggles and their long-woven interconnections with other struggles.

I often show my students this 1870s map of the British Empire:

All eyes face Britannica. This is a colonial fantasy. Peoples were talking to and/or thinking of each-other behind her back!!!!

I’ve loaded up on Flickr some pictures I picked up along the way. The majority of them I uploaded because they are pictures you might not find elsewhere. I’ve put a few short commentaries underneath each.

Here are these Inter and Outer national struggles

A Global Story of Psalms 68:31

Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God

Psalms 68:31 is part of the global story of colonialism, enslavement, the “civilizing mission” and self-liberation.

We can pick up the story with the King James version of the Bible, translated into the vernacular in 1611. At this time it is practice to denote things African through the name Aethiops. More than just a polity south of Egypt, Ethiopia also encompasses Black Africa as a whole. By 1773, catechisms are being developed around Psalm 68:31 that directly address African enslavement in the Americas and the prospects of abolition, emancipation and liberation.

There are two key interpretations. One, cultivated by white abolitionists and subsequently used by Europeans who embark upon an African “civilizing mission”, holds that it is they – white/Europeans – who are God’s children. Hence, it is white/Europeans to whom Ethiopia is stretching for her hands for deliverance from slavery and primitivism. The other, cultivated by the enslaved and their downpressed descendants, holds that the Bible is their story –  the “half never told“. Africans will therefore righteously deliver their own selves from bondage.

The first catechism appears as early as 1773 in the letters of Anthony Benezet, a French-born Quaker living in North America. Scouring through the Bible to find  divine authority for the abolitionist cause, Benezet notes: “beloved friend, the passage we are seeking for is Psalms 68, 31.”; and “the people called Ethiopians are definitely African negros due to Jeremiah 13,23 – “can the Ethiopian change his skin?”. Abolitionists – especially British ones – are most concerned that the enslavement practised by white and European “Christians” would denigrate their status as the most civilized amongst humanity. By Benezet’s time, it is already a belief amongst the intellectual caste of  white/Europeans that they are the people chosen by God to express his Providence, through commerce and colonisation.

By the turn of the 20th century,
three European powers – Britain, France and Italy – encircle the last remaining independent African polity, Ethiopia. Partially in response, Crown Prince Ras Tafari engineers the admittance of Ethiopia to the League of Nations in 1923. Ras Tafari reasons that the League had been set up by European powers to promote their collective security and therefore Ethiopia is best positioned under this protective covering of so-called “civilized” nations. In October 1935, however, Italy invades Ethiopia, and the main powers of the League do little to stop it.

Around this point in time, the British based Missionary Service Bureau and Ethiopian Prayer League issue a pamphlet decrying the invasion. A forward, written by Brigadier-General F.D. Frost, entreats the reader: “Ethiopia … is stretching out her hands unto god. Will his people come to her aid headless of personal sacrifice or inconvenience…?” This principled support of Ethiopia should be acknowledged. However, the “God’s people” that the Brigadier-General entreats are not Ethiopians but white/Europeans. Therefore this catechism of Psalms 68:31 still promotes a “civilizing mission” to Africa. The Brigadier’s question is, how to accomplish this colonial mission if God’s “chosen people” are not acting civilized?

The second catechism emerges out of the “invisible institutions” of the enslaved, that is, the faith circles on North American plantations.  Africans bring with them to the Americas their cosmologies, faiths, philosophies and practices. Key in the re-combination of these elements in American captivity is the crossroads, the site of intersection between the sublime and profane, the living and the spirits/ancestors, and the lands of the dead (Americas) and the lands of the living (Guinea) that are separated by a veil of water.

When Methodist and especially Baptist preachers reach the North American enslaved in the latter part of the 18th century, aspects of their Christian worship resonate with what the enslaved  already know to be powerful from their own faith systems: e.g. a sanctified renewal through water, an active relationship between the spirits and the living (holy ghost), and the communication of  sublime knowledge  (Pentacostal). What is more, the Christian cross of suffering (so beloved by the slavemasters) can be used to smuggle the African crossroads of collective healing (so demonized by the slavemasters) out into the world to quicken the liberation of the enslaved. The Bible itself can be used to  tell their story – the “half never told”. Psalms become African redemption songs.

By the early part of the 19th century various mystics, poets and preachers begin to proselytize this message in public. Prince Hall, a Barbadian freemason, resident in Boston, proclaims that the Haitian Revolution is prophecy revealed: “Thus doth Ethiopia begin to stretch forth her hand, from a sink of slavery to freedom and equality.”  Around the same time as Hall, Robert Alexander Young issues an Ethiopian Manifesto, proclaiming that “surely hath the cries of the black, a most persecuted people, ascended to my throne and craved my mercy; now, behold! I will stretch forth mine hand and gather them to the palm, that they become unto me a people, and I unto them their God … Watch out slaveholder, your hour draweth nigh”! True, JAH does much stretching forth of hands in the Old Testament; however, Psalms 68:31 places the divine relationship firmly in the hands of Ethiopians. For Young, though, this Ethiopian supremacy is predicated upon the rectification of injustice. It is not, therefore, a prejudice to the sanctity of  other peoples: “peace and liberty to the Ethiopian first, as also all other grades of men, is the invocation we offer to the throne of God”.

David Walker – Methodist and Freemason – publishes an Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World that circulates widely in the South and is at least partly responsible for a number of insurrections.   The Appeal is a response to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia that extol the goodness of its society at the same time as justifying slavery on the basis of natural inequalities. Here is Walker: “…though our cruel oppressors and murderers, may (if possible) treat us more cruel, as Pharaoh did the children of Israel, yet the God of the Ethiopians, has been pleased to hear our moans in consequence of oppression; and the day of our redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near, when we shall be enabled, in the most extended sense of the word, to stretch forth our hands to the LORD our GOD, but there must be a willingness on our part”

 In 1890, WEB Dubois, famed African-American sociologist foretells  in his commencement oration at Harvard University, of a better world emerging from the struggle between strong and submissive men. In this respect, he tells the (white) audience “you owe a debt to humanity for this Ethiopia of the Outstreched Arm”. Around the same time, Edward Blyden, Pan-Africanist and preacher from St Thomas and emigrant to Liberia, writes a book on Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Like Dubois, Blyden points out the same debt with a chapter entitled: “Ethiopia Stretching Out Her Hands Unto God; or, Africa’s Service to the World“

Come the early 20th century, Psalms 68:31 is the most popular text for sermons preached at meetings of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Indeed, Psalms 68:31 has an official UNIA catechism: “that Negroes will set up their own government in Africa with rulers of their own race.” This is a meaning that is diametrically opposed to that provided by the white/European abolitionists catechism of Psalms 68:31 – that primitive Africans will be saved and sanctified by white/Europeans. By the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, one Mrs Satira Earle, a Jamaican active member of the UNIA writes: “the year 1935 was the commencing with Ethiopia stretching forth her hands unto god and not unto Europe as they think.” After 1936, due to various personal and political reasons Garvey begins to criticize Selassie I, and soon after the criticism turns vitriolic. Nevertheless, Garvey will still hold the line that: “probably it is through Italy in Abyssinia that Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto god and princes shall come out of Egypt”.

In 1935 Hon Leonard Howell publishes the Promised Key. The Jamaican, writing under his pseudoynm, Gong Guru Maragh, tells of the coronation of Selassie I in 1930. He imagines that the sceptre that had previously been stolen by the British but now returned at the coronation by the Duke of Gloucester, has inscribed on one side: Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God. From 1935 to 1937 almost the whole of the Anglo Caribbean erupts in strikes, riots, and uprisings. The causes are long simmering; however, the catalyst is the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Across the region people identify personally and/or politically with Ethiopia. And it is not just Howell that sights Selassie I as king – various people have a similar vision all over the region. In 1937 a Barbadian strike leader and UNIA affiliate Ulric Mcdonald Grant, is charged with sedition. A sergeant of police gives testimony concerning one speech made by Grant: “He next referred to Garvey, who he said, is a wonderful man. We have got to concentrate universally. Remember your mother country which is Africa. In conclusion he said that Ethiopia was stretching forth her hands and princes shall come out of Egypt”.

There is one more part to this story. It knits together the other two so that a third Pan-African space of human redemption comes into view: the “8th continent”, to quote my friend Mamma D.; the “continent of Black Consciousness”, to quote Erna Brodber. In 1937 Selassie I directs his personal physician, Dr. Malaku E. Bayen, to set up an Ethiopian World Federation that might unify the efforts of Africans in the Diaspora to defend Ethiopia. The slogan of The Voice of Ethiopia, the official EWF publication, is Ethiopia is Stretching Forth Her Hands Unto God. In occupied Ethiopia, and as part of the resistance, daily services of the Orthodox Church renounce the Italian invasion; the passages recited to this effect include Psalms 68:31.  When Selassie I re-enters Addis Ababa on May 5th 1941 alongside Commonwealth troops he proclaims: “today is a day on which Ethiopia is stretching her hands to God in joy and thankfulness.” From 1948 Selassie I starts to gift 500 acres of Crown land at Shashamene, under the auspices of the EWF, to those in the Diaspora who might wish to return.

Princes and princesses shall come out of Egypt; Ithiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto JAH! The question is, what catechism do we wish to apply to Psalms 68:31 in the present day?

Struggling to Remember Slavery

23rd August is the UNESCO sanctioned International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and of its Abolition. Importantly, UNESCO begin their description of the event thus:

The night of 22 to 23 August 1791, in Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Abolition is usually remembered in terms of William Wilberforce, e.g., the “slaves” are freed by the sons of the slave master culture. But kudos to UNESCO for these first few lines because they bring to light a titanic struggle to remember abolition in terms of self-abolition authored by the enslaved.  For example, funding seems to be always readily available for a film on William Wilberforce. Yet despite some help from Hugo Chavez, Danny Glover has found it much harder to fund his film on Toussaint L’Ouverture.

I was in the audience at a Sussex University graduation when Richard Attenborough, conferring an honorary PhD on Dr Mamphela Ramphele, acknowledged the latter’s criticism of his film Cry Freedom. Ramphele, a founding Black Consciousness activist and friend of Steve Biko, had, back in the day, introduced white journalist Donald Woods (star of  Cry Freedom) to Biko.  Ramphele was a consultant to Attenborough during the shooting of Cry Freedom and  was adamant that a film on anti-apartheid should position the struggling oppressed as the main protagonists. Attenborough conceded that he did not believe a film would sell among Western audiences that had an African as the central hero. But how did he know that? Perhaps Attenborough did not have enough faith in the message he was narrating. In any case, just as the story of enslavement so often becomes a story of Wilberforce thinking about abolition,  so Attenborough’s film became a story of Donald Woods thinking about Biko.

Remembering slavery days in terms of creative survival, struggle, and self-liberation is itself a struggle against the cultural and institutional apparatus of colonial amnesia. In fact, this remembrance reveals an encoded message that to the masters of slavery culture must be left un-cyphered because it is DREDD. The message threatens to unravel all paternalism, supremacism and un-accountable “humanitarianism”: remember that  the oppressed have carried forth the torch of humanity despite the best opposition of the “civilized”; remember that the enslaved fundamentally liberated and are liberating themselves.

Whenever I have taught the Haitian Revolution to university students, there has always been a broad swell of interest, amazement and revelation. This is especially so amongst students with Afrikan heritage, those with various colonial heritages, but also among white-European/Western students. When we start the topic, I catch feelings of disorientation, then a bit of outrage (WHY didn’t we get taught this at school?) and then a sense of over-standing. Because as soon as it is remembered it becomes common sense that, yes, of course(!) those who are down-pressed will press back (in many different ways) and save themselves, sometimes with a little help from true friends. Once students are allowed to consider this, they feel a little bit more at home in their own world and in their own skin.

There are, though, many pitfalls in the struggle over remembrance. Can we remember that great triarchy – Toussaint, Dessalines and Christophe – and at the same time remember the militias who, when the three had worked out an accord with the French in 1802, refused to put down their arms and in fact forced the three to pick up their weapons again? While we marvel at the monumental palace of Sans-Souci, built by Christophe in the interior of Haiti, can we also remember Jean Baptiste Sans-Souci, one of the militia leaders, killed by Christoph, and whose bones lie somewhere in the vicinity of the palace? As we remember Dutty Boukman, the Muslim priest who presided over the Vodou ceremony at Bois Caiman that inaugurated the revolution around the 23rd August 1791, can we also remember Cecile Fatiman, the priestess who warned all present of the sacredness of the blood oath of victory or death (itself a victory over slavery)? Were not men and women forging the struggle in their own capacities and intensities? Can we rise to the challenge of remembering in fullness? Remembrance of this kind is active, not passive. And it is a fundamentally democratic impulse. Colonial amnesia seeks to make the public sphere complicit in genocide. Not the killing of bodies, but the killing of ancestors, stories, and spirits that might enliven the down-pressed of our own era.

Neither are the battle lines that are drawn over this remembrance simply black vs white. Colonial amnesia is a contagious disease. For example, here is what the official Malaysian tourist website says of the culture of Melaka (Malacca), ancient entrepot of South East Asia:

Melakan culture is a tapestry woven over six centuries of diverse ethnic customs, folklore and traditions. The harmonious co-existence of people of different cultures and religions inherited from centuries of multi-racial living has produced the fluid intermingling of the Malays, Chinese, Indians, Babas and Nyonyas, Portuguese, Chitty and the Eurasians. Each ethnic group adds to the pluralistic and ever changing society of the people of Melaka that is itself a group of diverse, friendly and hospitable people.

Here is a 1871 census from the British imperially controlled Straits Settlements (incorporating Melaka):

Europeans and Americans

Armenians

Jews

Eurasians

Abyssinians

Achinese

Africans

….etc (at least 21 more categories of people – see below in comments. no one will be forgotten!)

Those Africans – forgotten by Malaysia Tourism Inc. – came mostly from the Indian Ocean slave trade. It was in existence before Europeans arrived, but was then dominated  by the Portuguese and subsequently the Dutch, and continued most probably into the 1860s in one clandestine form or another. The 1891 census mentions Africans too, but now under “other nationalities” – other to whom? Were there Toussaints, Dessalines, Christophes, San-Soucis, Boukmans and Fatimans in Melaka? There were certainly plantations; they operated differently in some ways to those of the Americas, but they were the same in many other ways. What happened to the memories of these struggles by the eastern rivers of Babylon? Who were the friends of the African enslaved (if any)? For there were other enslaved here too. What happened to their stories? Are they truly forgotten or, instead, not spoken? Are their descendants camouflaged… so well that the bodies that bear them don’t even realise? How far have they travelled? With whom? Are they feeling at home in their own world in their own skin? Who will remember?

Race, Class, and the Pan-African Congress in Manchester 1945

In a recent blog for Disorder of Things I talked about the tensions in much leftist thought when it comes to racial oppression and its relationship to class exploitation. I must admit, I constantly find myself frustrated by two counterveiling tendencies. On the one hand, the progressive and principled solidarity – especially at grassroots level – that predominantely white socialist/Marxist movements  have historically given to anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles and their peoples. On the other hand, a religious belief amongst socialist and Marxist theorists that class exploitation forms the core dynamic of social struggle, and that racial oppression is derivative of this struggle. I constantly find the unreflexive white privilige that is at the heart of this theoretical statement (regardless of whether individual non-white people believe in it) in serious contrast to the political record of many predominantly white socialist movements. I think it is naive at best to imagine that the end of capitalism will be the end of racism. But as Amical Cabral argues, theory is sharpened in struggle.  And those who inherit the struggle in various ways can do much to learn from those who have gone before and have had to do the sharpening.

So in this spirit, I am reproducing an address I found in the archives made by John McNair, General Secretary of the (UK) Independent Labour Party in Manchester 1945 to the Pan-African Congress organized by George Padmore, Peter Milliard and Kwame Nkrumah. 90 delegates from the African continent, the Caribbean and the UK attended, including an elderly WEB Dubois from the USA. Here are NcNair’s greetings:

“Comrades, I want to thank the Chairman and your committee for allowing me to interrupt in your programme. Unfortunately, I am rather in a hurry, but the reason for my hurry is not a personal inconvenience. I have promised to attend a meeting in London tonight in connection with the “Save Europe Now” Campaign, and it is because there are some millions of our white brothers in Europe facing starvation, I know that our black brothers will understand. We extend to our coloured brothers our warmest fraternal greetings. We can do no less. We wish to do more, because we as international socialists will never accept any form of national discrimination. We believe, with Lenin, that no nation is free which oppresses any other nation. We must remember that human liberty is absolutely indivisible. Wherever on the face of the earth, any human being suffers, we suffer with our brothers. Therefore, I want to say that in all your deliberations, you will have behind you the warmest support of our comrades in my particular organization …

In the first place, I would like to express to my comrades and friends that I reject the whole philosophic basis which assumes that we white people can give anything to our black brothers. I object to the whole basis on which this charitable (…) is built.

The debt which we white people owe to the coloured races is a debt which must and shall be paid. But the debt will take the greatest and noblest effort of the white people of the world. I say to my colleagues (coloured), the history of mankind is stained with the crimes perpetrated by white men against black, and I want to say that the English class, with the British Government behind it, is the greatest imperialist class of them all. I wish to say how delighted I was to find that in your letter to the Prime minister, you had included a number of constructive proposals.

[Regarding the West Indies] … as a white man, I look at your problem thus: you are first to win a battle for political independence. You will never win this battle by trusting the hypocrisy of British imperialists. British Imperialism has told you that we have gone to the Colonies in order to spread the light of Christianity and civilization, and in the next breath they say that Trade follows the Flag. The reason we wanted the colonies is because trade follows the flag, and trade for Britain is almost as profitable as war. Terribly profitable! There is the fundamental reason why the Colonies have been oppressed by British capitalism and British Imperialism.

When you have won the battle for political independence, I trust you will go on then towards the greater fight for social independence. This is your problem and I wish you the best of luck .

Before I close, I am going to paraphrase George Padmore. When George was replying to the North African Workers at a Conference in 1937, he told us then that the British colossus of capitalism and imperialism was standing with one foot on the bodies of the white workers and the other foot on the bodies of the black workers, and George said it was the duty of white and black workers to remember they were workers and give that mighty heave which would bring down the colossus and break it.”

The notes also record the following:

“Chairman (Dr. Milliard): The applause which Comrade McNair has received is evidence of the way in which you have received his address..”