Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MARCUS GARVEY – PHILOSOPHY AND OPINIONS OF MARCUS GARVEY – EDITED BY AMY JACQUES-GARVEY – 1923

This old book does not represent a constructed and well balanced  presentation of Garvey’s ideas, but rather a selection of many small excerpts, each one under s small title. Apart from some speeches at the end of the volume, and we cannot say whether these speeches are unabridged or full, everything else is tit bits of thinking in any haphazard jumble. We then have to extract a philosophy out of this patchwork.

These documents all have a unity in the fact that they are all from the Harlem period in Marcus Garvey’s life. He arrived in Harlem in 1916, coming from Jamaica. His problems with justice started as sson as 1922. He will find himself in prison in 1926 and will be deported back to Jamaica in 1927. He founded with some others the Universal Negro Improvement Association and organized the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World that lasted thirty days in 1920 with a mass rally in Madison Square Garden that brought together more than 25,000 people. Internationally he arrived in Harlem when the USA entered the War in Europe and moved many blacks from the south to the north to work in the war industry. Then this period (1916-1922) covers the end the war and the great changes that occurred in the world then and just after, particularly the Soviet revolution in 1917 that is actually referred to in the volume as being led by Lenin and Trotsky.

This mention of Lenin and Trotsky is important because the very first principle that emerges from this volume is that he has recuperated his main central concept from the Marxist catechism that was triumphing in Russia, and he has only replaced the word “class” in “class struggle” by the word “race” to produce a vision of everything in the world as being a “race struggle.”

For him there are three races.

·       The whites (this race is specified to be Europe and the west) who exploits the yellow and the blacks.

·       The yellow (this race is specified only once to be the Japanese) who exploit the blacks.

·       The blacks (this race is clearly identified as the Africans and Africa with no distinction whatsoever between North Africa, and Egypt is part of this Africa that covers all blacks in the world too and is only identified several times as Ethiopia) who are exploited by everyone.

The blacks are simply confronted to the simple choice:

1- recapture your autonomy

or

2- accept full extermination.

This choice carries in itself the answer. The problem then is how is that recapture supposed to happen?

This first principle is extremely radical and that will bring him a lot of hostility from the officials of the USA, all white of course, and from the moderate Black leaders and intellectuals, among whom W.E.B. DuBois is prominent. DuBois accuses him of being “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious,” of having “absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization” and of only having “objects . . . shot through with bombast and exaggeration.” This came shortly after the period we are considering but is pretty final. Garvey explains this hostility with jealousy because they are moderate and he is radical and what’s more he has managed to build a mass movement.

The mass movement is UNIA and the various branches and organizations he created around this movement: like the African Legions and the Black Cross, service organizations for the Blacks, and commercial ventures like the Black Star Line aiming at importing African products to the USA and West Indies, and the Negroes Factories Corporation to develop Black business. In 1924, hence outside the period concerned here, he specified the “Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of Negro Problem,” as the president of UNIA.

“The UNIA and African Communities’ League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society. . . [the aims are] to establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to assist in the development of Independent Negro Nations and Communities; to establish a central nation for the race; to establish Commissionaries or Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the information of all Negroes.”

This gives us some more organized vision of Marcus Garvey’s thinking. The motto of UNIA is “One God! One aim! One destiny!” that is a clear statement amplifying the quotation often attributed to Garvey: “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”

The first basic element after the race struggle is the religious reference to and inspiration from Jesus. The Jews are clearly and very emphatically accused of being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. The ideal attributed to Jesus is systematically presented in triads of terms like “a life of Love, Charity, Mercy.” “His innocence, His Love and His Charity” are attributed to Jesus. Africa is reduced to “Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuktu.” God is referred to as being “the Great Omnipotent, the Great Creator, our Eternal Father.” Jesus is called “our Master, our prince of Peace, our Redeemer.” He has “conquered death, the grave and hell.” Then “we sing and shout with the angels, we ring our joy bells; we blow our horns.” These three ways of sending a message with our voices, our bells and our horns are “in praise” of Jesus who is “the Jesus, the Christ, the Emanuel to us,” a triad by the form that is immediately amplified by to titles set apart by their form: “the Son of Righteousness, the Prince of Peace.” Then the conclusion comes with another triad that “shout[s] our praises to God for freedom, for liberty, for life.” Some will say this triad is artificial since freedom and liberty are the same thing. And yet, are they reality?

Strangely enough Garvey’s racial approach of the world and religion leads him to alluding to the fact Jesus is white and he rejects it with a strange argument saying that God created all men equal in his own image, hence with no racial distinction or discrimination. He suggests even that Jesus can be seen as the Son of God and thus belonging to all humanity, to all races. He of course would reject the Mormon explanation that the black race was  created when Cain was rejected by God and made black as a punishment for his crime. But then his strong racial approach would imply Jesus belongs to all races, hence can be seen as white, black or yellow, and this is a no-answer more than an answer. In fact as we have seen in the objects of UNIA, culture is not taken into account. Here we are dealing with a strong cultural element that is part of the African heritage of the Black slaves. Africans are deeply committed to an animistic vision of the world and life. This transcending vital force present in all things is connected with a spiritual world beyond the surface of everyday reality, and evil is not part of this energy but the fact of the existence of bad spirits and ghosts who are the dead evil men: evil is brought into the world by man himself. This deeply animistic vision was able to integrate the Christian approach easily, in fact the Catholic approach, either French or Spanish. They then became Christians or they developed an African religious tradition, Vodun, in Louisiana and the West Indies, with an extreme and morbid form in Haiti with the Tontons Macoutes of late Duvallier Sr. Note this tradition goes far beyond the blacks since Anne Rice for one example used it in one of her vampire books and Arthur Miller used it in The Crucible. This deep religious African heritage produced a vast Christian movement among American Blacks that is present in the oration of all black public speakers of any type. This too is a direct African heritage founded on the rhythmic experiential and existential capture of life, in fact a polyrhythmic capture that is the other enormous contribution of African heritage to American culture, and today global culture. This again is missed by Garvey who does not consider culture as an objective.

This religious tradition produced the ideology of “the Everlasting Brotherhood of Man and the Eternal Fatherhood of God.” There is no surprise in the total absence of women and the mother. This is both African heritage and loss. Heritage in the capture of women as being secondary, of society as being dominated by men, but loss in the absence of the mother because the mother is the real source of the legitimacy of a blood line and humanity. But his God has no motherly nor feminine dimension, in pite ogf the fact that he says that God made two people in his image, Adam and Eve.

Then Marcus Garvey develops a pan-African approach of his Africanism. The Blacks as a race must regain their nation and that is Africa, seen and repeated as being a whole and integrating all the Blacks in the world who have to return to Africa to take part in the “colonizing” of Africa by the Africans. We have seen he considers the Africans in Africa to be divided in tribes within the African nation and these tribes are “backward.” But the objective of reconstructing Africa when it is liberated from the colonizing presence of the Europeans, is asserted over and over again and only one center appears in this racial Africa: Ethiopia. His dream of decolonizing Africa, the “dream of an African empire” can go as far as supporting the German Dr Heinrich Schnee who advocates that:

“America [should] take over the mandatories of Great Britain and France in Africa for the colonizing of American Negroes. . . . he says: ‘As regards the attempt to colonize Africa with the surplus American  colored population, this would in a long way settle the vexed problem . . . and simultaneously ease the burden of German reparations which is paralyzing economic life.’”

This Doctor Schnee suggests this at a time when all German mandatories in Africa have been seized and shared between England and France as war reparations: Cameroun was even cut in two for that purpose. This support is surprising because how could he trust, even very indirectly, the USA to do a better job at colonizing Africa than the English or the French, and how could he believe the USA would only send their ex-slaves and their descendants to Africa to do the job. American corporations would certainly think differently and anyway that would have been at the time running against the “manifest destiny” of the USA, a conception that had already been trampled upon with the participation in the first world war.

His dual vision of reality comes from the radical opposition between the black race and the white race, the oppressed and the oppressor, the master and his serf/peon/slave, the master again and helpless imbeciles, dependent slaves and servants. Deeply inspired ,by slavery, its denunciation and the call to bring down all kinds of servitude as he is, Garvey clearly describes the sufferings of black slaves and even of the black victims of segregation, though he does not see how the colonists of old turned Africans into slaves on the model of what Willie Lynch suggested and he does not emphasize the resistance of the Africans withçn that frame of extreme animalization and domestication of this American brand of slavery that had no equivalent in the West Indies and in French or Spanish colonies in Louisiana and central or south America. He also contains the germs of the two ways of solving what comes from these slavery and segregation.

He of course does not call it Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder as is done today. But he contains the germs of the Muslim solution in the recapturing of the inner soul and value of each black individual in the positive sides, actions and features of his/her ancestors, including of course as slaves in the past, and him/herself and his or her fellow blacks. He calls it pride and it is obvious you cannot recapture your value if you do not reconstruct your personal positive contribution to life, and that of your ancestors. This can only happen within a collective organization and action, that will necessarily lead to the shedding of some blood, of all blacks if possible.

On the other side he is extremely favorable to the direct accusation of the whites and the demand of the blacks that the whites make amends and provide reparations. This is more in the line of the traditional Black Christian approach that will be so well illustrated by writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, among others.

In other words Marcus Garvey in this book appears as a conscious person who knows about the suffering of his people, who knows that these people have to recapture power and control, but at the same time he neglects the tremendous cultural and artistic contribution of African heritage brought to American by the African slaves. Jazz was just in the making with the development of the radio in the 1920s and jazz was and still is a complete turn-around of history in which the slaves or ex-slaves become the driving cultural force of the USA, America and the world. He seems to be conscious of the two approaches we can take as for solving the black problem, though he does not clearly see that the enslavement of the slaves was a lot more than just plain physical. It created a lasting disorder in the psyche of the slaves and their descendents. But he is trapped by his own radicalism that makes him declare when arrested: “The Negro Ministry needs purging.” Such declarations could only lead to a de facto convergence of action between the moderate black intellectuals and the white police forces and establishment. This split between radicals controlling a mass movement and moderates controlling the avenues of power no matter how small and restricted will reproduce the structure of mental dependence long after the end of slavery till it finally was identified as a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And even so, the Christian approach and the Muslim approach remain differentiated. The divide has still not yet been bridged because of the strong and deep survival of the dual vision of the world cut into two antagonistic races, just the wame way as ideological and sectarian communism took a long time to die because of the strong ideological survival of the dual vision of society cut into two antagonistic classes, a vision that is still quite active in the minds of many trade-unionists for example.

Duality is stagnation or aimless erring in history and in any scientific project. Nothing is either A or B. it has also to be seen as neither A nor B and as both A and B. The second formula means that there is necessarily other solutions or protagonists than A and B.

Historically this volume is essential. It contains the germs of the future and at the same time the shackles that were to hamper the possible developments that were, still are times and might very well be still in the future blocked by a reductive dual antagonistic conception of the world and society. It takes a lot more than two legs to walk with all kinds of sensors in the body, but anyway you need both legs to simple put one foot in front of the other. Any pair of antagonistic concepts are just doomed to fail explaining and predicting the past and the future. That’s what I regret about this book, even if it was composed in 1923.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

EXPURGATED VERSION FOR AMAZON PÖLITICALLY CORRECT BIGOTRY

This old book does not represent a constructed and well balanced  presentation of Garvey’s ideas, but rather a selection of many small excerpts, each one under s small title. Apart from some speeches at the end of the volume, and we cannot say whether these speeches are unabridged or full, everything else is tit bits of thinking in any haphazard jumble. We then have to extract a philosophy out of this patchwork.

These documents all have a unity in the fact that they are all from the Harlem period in Marcus Garvey’s life. He arrived in Harlem in 1916, coming from Jamaica. His problems with justice started as sson as 1922. He will find himself in prison in 1926 and will be deported back to Jamaica in 1927. He founded with some others the Universal N**** Improvement Association and organized the First International Convention of the N**** Peoples of the World that lasted thirty days in 1920 with a mass rally in Madison Square Garden that brought together more than 25,000 people. Internationally he arrived in Harlem when the USA entered the War in Europe and moved many blacks from the south to the north to work in the war industry. Then this period (1916-1922) covers the end the war and the great changes that occurred in the world then and just after, particularly the Soviet revolution in 1917 that is actually referred to in the volume as being led by Lenin and Trotsky.

This mention of Lenin and Trotsky is important because the very first principle that emerges from this volume is that he has recuperated his main central concept from the Marxist catechism that was triumphing in Russia, and he has only replaced the word “class” in “class struggle” by the word “race” to produce a vision of everything in the world as being a “race struggle.”

For him there are three races.

·       The whites (this race is specified to be Europe and the west) who exploits the yellow and the blacks.

·       The yellow (this race is specified only once to be the Japanese) who exploit the blacks.

·       The blacks (this race is clearly identified as the Africans and Africa with no distinction whatsoever between North Africa, and Egypt is part of this Africa that covers all blacks in the world too and is only identified several times as Ethiopia) who are exploited by everyone.

The blacks are simply confronted to the simple choice:

1- recapture your autonomy

or

2- accept full extermination.

This choice carries in itself the answer. The problem then is how is that recapture supposed to happen?

This first principle is extremely radical and that will bring him a lot of hostility from the officials of the USA, all white of course, and from the moderate Black leaders and intellectuals, among whom W.E.B. DuBois is prominent. DuBois accuses him of being “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious,” of having “absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization” and of only having “objects . . . shot through with bombast and exaggeration.” This came shortly after the period we are considering but is pretty final. Garvey explains this hostility with jealousy because they are moderate and he is radical and what’s more he has managed to build a mass movement.

The mass movement is UNIA and the various branches and organizations he created around this movement: like the African Legions and the Black Cross, service organizations for the Blacks, and commercial ventures like the Black Star Line aiming at importing African products to the USA and West Indies, and the N****es Factories Corporation to develop Black business. In 1924, hence outside the period concerned here, he specified the “Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of N**** Problem,” as the president of UNIA.

“The UNIA and African Communities’ League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society. . . [the aims are] to establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to assist in the development of Independent N**** Nations and Communities; to establish a central nation for the race; to establish Commissionaries or Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the information of all N****es.”

This gives us some more organized vision of Marcus Garvey’s thinking. The motto of UNIA is “One God! One aim! One destiny!” that is a clear statement amplifying the quotation often attributed to Garvey: “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”

The first basic element after the race struggle is the religious reference to and inspiration from Jesus. The Jews are clearly and very emphatically accused of being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. The ideal attributed to Jesus is systematically presented in triads of terms like “a life of Love, Charity, Mercy.” “His innocence, His Love and His Charity” are attributed to Jesus. Africa is reduced to “Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuktu.” God is referred to as being “the Great Omnipotent, the Great Creator, our Eternal Father.” Jesus is called “our Master, our prince of Peace, our Redeemer.” He has “conquered death, the grave and hell.” Then “we sing and shout with the angels, we ring our joy bells; we blow our horns.” These three ways of sending a message with our voices, our bells and our horns are “in praise” of Jesus who is “the Jesus, the Christ, the Emanuel to us,” a triad by the form that is immediately amplified by to titles set apart by their form: “the Son of Righteousness, the Prince of Peace.” Then the conclusion comes with another triad that “shout[s] our praises to God for freedom, for liberty, for life.” Some will say this triad is artificial since freedom and liberty are the same thing. And yet, are they reality?

Strangely enough Garvey’s racial approach of the world and religion leads him to alluding to the fact Jesus is white and he rejects it with a strange argument saying that God created all men equal in his own image, hence with no racial distinction or discrimination. He suggests even that Jesus can be seen as the Son of God and thus belonging to all humanity, to all races. He of course would reject the Mormon explanation that the black race was  created when Cain was rejected by God and made black as a punishment for his crime. But then his strong racial approach would imply Jesus belongs to all races, hence can be seen as white, black or yellow, and this is a no-answer more than an answer. In fact as we have seen in the objects of UNIA, culture is not taken into account. Here we are dealing with a strong cultural element that is part of the African heritage of the Black slaves. Africans are deeply committed to an animistic vision of the world and life. This transcending vital force present in all things is connected with a spiritual world beyond the surface of everyday reality, and evil is not part of this energy but the fact of the existence of bad spirits and ghosts who are the dead evil men: evil is brought into the world by man himself. This deeply animistic vision was able to integrate the Christian approach easily, in fact the Catholic approach, either French or Spanish. They then became Christians or they developed an African religious tradition, Vodun, in Louisiana and the West Indies, with an extreme and morbid form in Haiti with the Tontons Macoutes of late Duvallier Sr. Note this tradition goes far beyond the blacks since Anne Rice for one example used it in one of her vampire books and Arthur Miller used it in The Crucible. This deep religious African heritage produced a vast Christian movement among American Blacks that is present in the oration of all black public speakers of any type. This too is a direct African heritage founded on the rhythmic experiential and existential capture of life, in fact a polyrhythmic capture that is the other enormous contribution of African heritage to American culture, and today global culture. This again is missed by Garvey who does not consider culture as an objective.

This religious tradition produced the ideology of “the Everlasting Brotherhood of Man and the Eternal Fatherhood of God.” There is no surprise in the total absence of women and the mother. This is both African heritage and loss. Heritage in the capture of women as being secondary, of society as being dominated by men, but loss in the absence of the mother because the mother is the real source of the legitimacy of a blood line and humanity. But his God has no motherly nor feminine dimension, in pite ogf the fact that he says that God made two people in his image, Adam and Eve.

Then Marcus Garvey develops a pan-African approach of his Africanism. The Blacks as a race must regain their nation and that is Africa, seen and repeated as being a whole and integrating all the Blacks in the world who have to return to Africa to take part in the “colonizing” of Africa by the Africans. We have seen he considers the Africans in Africa to be divided in tribes within the African nation and these tribes are “backward.” But the objective of reconstructing Africa when it is liberated from the colonizing presence of the Europeans, is asserted over and over again and only one center appears in this racial Africa: Ethiopia. His dream of decolonizing Africa, the “dream of an African empire” can go as far as supporting the German Dr Heinrich Schnee who advocates that:

“America [should] take over the mandatories of Great Britain and France in Africa for the colonizing of American N****es. . . . he says: ‘As regards the attempt to colonize Africa with the surplus American  colored population, this would in a long way settle the vexed problem . . . and simultaneously ease the burden of German reparations which is paralyzing economic life.’”

This Doctor Schnee suggests this at a time when all German mandatories in Africa have been seized and shared between England and France as war reparations: Cameroun was even cut in two for that purpose. This support is surprising because how could he trust, even very indirectly, the USA to do a better job at colonizing Africa than the English or the French, and how could he believe the USA would only send their ex-slaves and their descendants to Africa to do the job. American corporations would certainly think differently and anyway that would have been at the time running against the “manifest destiny” of the USA, a conception that had already been trampled upon with the participation in the first world war.

His dual vision of reality comes from the radical opposition between the black race and the white race, the oppressed and the oppressor, the master and his serf/peon/slave, the master again and helpless imbeciles, dependent slaves and servants. Deeply inspired ,by slavery, its denunciation and the call to bring down all kinds of servitude as he is, Garvey clearly describes the sufferings of black slaves and even of the black victims of segregation, though he does not see how the colonists of old turned Africans into slaves on the model of what Willie Lynch suggested and he does not emphasize the resistance of the Africans withçn that frame of extreme animalization and domestication of this American brand of slavery that had no equivalent in the West Indies and in French or Spanish colonies in Louisiana and central or south America. He also contains the germs of the two ways of solving what comes from these slavery and segregation.

He of course does not call it Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder as is done today. But he contains the germs of the Muslim solution in the recapturing of the inner soul and value of each black individual in the positive sides, actions and features of his/her ancestors, including of course as slaves in the past, and him/herself and his or her fellow blacks. He calls it pride and it is obvious you cannot recapture your value if you do not reconstruct your personal positive contribution to life, and that of your ancestors. This can only happen within a collective organization and action, that will necessarily lead to the shedding of some blood, of all blacks if possible.

On the other side he is extremely favorable to the direct accusation of the whites and the demand of the blacks that the whites make amends and provide reparations. This is more in the line of the traditional Black Christian approach that will be so well illustrated by writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, among others.

In other words Marcus Garvey in this book appears as a conscious person who knows about the suffering of his people, who knows that these people have to recapture power and control, but at the same time he neglects the tremendous cultural and artistic contribution of African heritage brought to American by the African slaves. Jazz was just in the making with the development of the radio in the 1920s and jazz was and still is a complete turn-around of history in which the slaves or ex-slaves become the driving cultural force of the USA, America and the world. He seems to be conscious of the two approaches we can take as for solving the black problem, though he does not clearly see that the enslavement of the slaves was a lot more than just plain physical. It created a lasting disorder in the psyche of the slaves and their descendents. But he is trapped by his own radicalism that makes him declare when arrested: “The N**** Ministry needs purging.” Such declarations could only lead to a de facto convergence of action between the moderate black intellectuals and the white police forces and establishment. This split between radicals controlling a mass movement and moderates controlling the avenues of power no matter how small and restricted will reproduce the structure of mental dependence long after the end of slavery till it finally was identified as a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And even so, the Christian approach and the Muslim approach remain differentiated. The divide has still not yet been bridged because of the strong and deep survival of the dual vision of the world cut into two antagonistic races, just the wame way as ideological and sectarian communism took a long time to die because of the strong ideological survival of the dual vision of society cut into two antagonistic classes, a vision that is still quite active in the minds of many trade-unionists for example.

Duality is stagnation or aimless erring in history and in any scientific project. Nothing is either A or B. it has also to be seen as neither A nor B and as both A and B. The second formula means that there is necessarily other solutions or protagonists than A and B.

Historically this volume is essential. It contains the germs of the future and at the same time the shackles that were to hamper the possible developments that were, still are times and might very well be still in the future blocked by a reductive dual antagonistic conception of the world and society. It takes a lot more than two legs to walk with all kinds of sensors in the body, but anyway you need both legs to simple put one foot in front of the other. Any pair of antagonistic concepts are just doomed to fail explaining and predicting the past and the future. That’s what I regret about this book, even if it was composed in 1923.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU