Review Wardle Negro With a Hat 2013

7/27/2019 Review Wardle Negro With a Hat 2013

1/7

OAC Press ISSN 2045-5755 (Print)

BOOK REVIEW

SERIESHuon WardleUniversity of St. Andrews

GRANT, Colin. 2008. Negro With a Hat:The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and HisDream of a Mother Africa. London:

Jonathan Cape.

Marcus Garvey. Imagefrom the Library ofCongress collection.

In the summer of 1925, the most frequentplay in the Harlem policy numbers gamewas 19359: those were the digits that theAtlanta federal penitentiary had assignedto inmate Marcus Mosiah Garvey, recently

jailed for mail fraud. African Americansacross the continent had already taken a

massive bet on Garvey when they boughthundreds of thousands of dollars worth ofshares in his Black Star Line; Garvey hadenvisioned a fleet of ships that would rivalCunards White Star Line or the United FruitCompanys Great White Fleet. Thedifference would be that the Black StarLiners would be manned by black seamenand give passage to black passengers; andthey would carry beleaguered black people

back from the Americas to their homeland,Africa. Garveys prosecution for misuse ofthe U.S. mail struck the last nail in thecoffin of an already faltering Black StarLine, but curiously next to none of these

multiple thousands of people who hadplaced their money on Garveys dreamcame forward to assist the U.S. JusticeDepartment in his downfall. In the decadesafter the First World War, and well into the1930s, millions of people across the U.S., inthe West Indies and in South and CentralAmerica joined Garveys United NegroImprovement Association (UNIA). He wasthe leader of the single biggest blackinternationalist movement that has everexisted, but a decade after his death in

London Garvey seemed already almostforgotten: only the Rastafarians of Jamaicacontinued to revere the one timeprovisional President of Africa, as theirJohn the Baptist.

Reflections on Garvey typically reach forthe word enigma, enigmatic. Speakingfor myself, I first noticed him when I beganfieldwork in Jamaica early in the 1990s.

There he was, a self-repeating presenceamongst the many murals painted on the

zinc and chipboard walls of house-yards indowntown Kingston: always the sameimage the bullish, proud face in semi-profile and, of course, the striking bicornhat plumed with ostrich feathers. I am late,though, in reviewing Colin Grantsbiography; originally published in 2008there is now a Vintage edition where headds a forward explaining his choice ofeponym -negro with a hat a title I havenot been alone in finding odd. The choiceof phrase, he suggests, was deliberatelyaimed at alienating the reader: the authordescribes his experience at an exhibitionwhere a photograph of a white man wassimply titled man with a hat, while a blackman became negro with a hat. Was notthe negro also a man? Thus explained,his aim becomes more obvious is itpossible for us to see beyond Garvey, thenegro with a hat? At over five hundred


2/7


painstakingly researched pages, includingnearly twenty of bibliography andfootnotes, this is clearly the definitivebiography and has been widely praised. Aswe read, the protagonist takes different

shapes on the page, engages in varied,sometimes mundane, sometimes strikinglyeccentric, acts (making an unannouncedvisit to the Grand Wizard of the Ku KluxKlan, for example).

Exploring Garveys mass supportGrant shows in comprehensive detail how aflood of money and support enabled theUNIAs diverse projects; from black runlaundries and restaurants in Harlem toblack crewed ships and black aviators. The

UNIA was backed by a complex coalition ofrefugee sharecroppers, Central Americanplantation and industrial workers,longshoremen and New York urbanites whooffered money, and in many casesidolization, and to whom Garvey answeredin his famously orotund way. There aregaps in the discussion, however. Garveyand his UNIA was above all an intrusion ofthe utopian and the fantastic into theactually existing American society of thetime: explaining this in turn calls out for a

type of socio-cultural interpretation thatthis book perhaps avoids engaging in.

Understandably enough, the bulk of thetext is taken up with the period just afterthe First World War until the mid-1920swhen Garveys fortunes were rapidlytransformed and his ideas began to betreated seriously, even religiously, within amass movement. Arriving in New York in1916, one more clever, book-learned WestIndian, leader of an obscure associationfor negro improvement with a hand full offollowers, Garveys carefully nurtured skillsas an orator abruptly caught the publicattention of Harlem. Harlem was itself in aprocess of change beyond recognition dueto ever increasing black immigration bothfrom the Caribbean and from the U.S.South. Southerners were coming in greatnumbers to escape racist violence,

Caribbean industrial workers were arrivingtoo, often en route from the recentlycompleted Panama Canal, while educatedmiddle class West Indians were hereestablishing an income and an outlet for

self-expression; all converging on whatwould become, for a while, the unrivalledartistic and intellectual epicentre of blacksocial life in the Americas. Just a few yearsafter his arrival from Jamaica, Garvey,initially by way of relentless soapboxing,had gathered tens, then hundreds ofthousands of followers for his UNIA; muchto the irritation of eminent black sociologistW.E.B. Dubois who already ran the NAACP(National Association for the Advancementof Colored People). Dubois increasingly

viewed Garvey as an upstart foreignnuisance who was damaging the cause ofblack social progress in the U.S. Comingfrom the West Indies, where colour andclass were understood differently, Garveysaw Dubois as a member of the brownelite, as someone whose interests wereallied with the whites in power.

We can gain some sense of the chordGarvey struck by looking at his speeches,of which he sold phonograph recordings,

along with his newspaper Negro World.Garvey personifies an era in which politicalcharisma could fuse with mechanicalreproduction and trigger a mass response.Listening to or reading his words now is acurious experience, because the messageis a strange mix. A central motif is theballad of the self-made man: Garvey tellshis audience that they too can succeed bytheir own efforts, and here he useslanguage that Benjamin Franklin wouldsurely have approved of. Much discourse isgiven over to berating his fellow blacks forusing rude language and beingdiscourteous to those around them. This isthe conservative narrative of improvement that remained at the core ofthe UNIA; a clear reflection of Garveysupbringing in colonial Jamaica wherediscipline and manners were of theessence. The second theme, closely


3/7


following from the first, was that all humanbeings have the same capacities andpotentials, people of the black race thesame as people of the white: this was ofcourse far more controversial. While in the

British West Indies lip-service would havebeen paid to this idea so long as thepreeminence of things English, the cultureof Shakespeare and the de facto rule ofwhite Britons was maintained, in contrast,in the U.S. of the 1920s, this kind ofthought was uncontained gasoline waitingfor a match. Here, white supremacy, bothin politics and the human sciences, wasorthodox. During the 1920s the scientificracism of the Galton society was onlybeginning to be challenged by figures such

as Franz Boas.

The third pillar of Garveyism wasinflammatory in a different way; this wasthe idea of Africa for Africans at home andabroad. If Whites and Asians had theirhomelands, why should negroes not havetheirs Africa? The anti-imperialistentailment of this idea was of relativelylittle concern to white American politicians- on occasion they even supported it. Incontrast, the notion of returning the African

colonies to black people was deeplyseditious from the perspective of theBritish colonial office; in response theytried as far as possible to ban Garveysmassively successful newspaper NegroWorld from entering any of the Britishterritories. Despite the great appeal ofGarveys vision for blacks in the AmericanSouth and in the Caribbean, the truth isthat Garvey himself knew little ofcontemporary Africa. In part this wasbecause he was barred from visiting thecontinent by the British, but his ideas werefundamentally a loud echo of a religiouslyframed Ethiopianism that had existed inthe West Indies since slave emancipationand before. Africa in this vision was thebiblical Ethiopia from which emancipatedslaves had long drawn hope and to whichthey might some day return - Princes shallcome out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon

stretch forth her hands unto God was thephrase repeatedly quoted by Garvey. Thisis why UNIA documents referinterchangeably to Africa and Ethiopia andwhy the Rastafarians would later focus

their beliefs on repatriation there; noRastaman would die before he reached thepromised land of Ethiopia. When Garveychanneled thousands of UNIA dollars inarranging transportation of Americanblacks to one part of the actual Africa,specifically Liberia, the results were afiasco. Likewise, when Garvey declaredhimself provisional President of Africa (anidea he borrowed from de Valera, thenprovisional President of Ireland) this wasplausible to him, as to those around him,

because Africa was significantly a blankslate and a potent myth.

Perhaps what drew more attention toGarveys movement - includingastonishment and ridicule - than anythingelse was the mass pageantry of the UNIA.UNIA members often war quasi-militarygarb, with sabres and epaulettes forofficials and black serge uniforms forordinary members. Garvey would paradeas a Professor in a gown and mortarboard,

or as a Potentate in a turban, or, mostrecognizably, as an imperial Governor (orperhaps as Toussaint Louverture) in hiscocked hat and braided uniform. Thiscarnivalesque quality of the UNIA surelyhad West Indian roots. Marcus Garvey wasno more a university professor than the1960s calypsonian Lord Kitchener was anEnglish lord, but there is more to thesymbolism than either a cheeky inversionof the established order or an expression ofa stereotypically colourful Caribbeanparade. This aspect of the phenomenon ofGarveyism asks for further explanation, butto interpret it we need to know somethingmore about the West Indian colonial culturethan we can gain from this book. Within thecolonial situation, while acknowledgingofficial power with its offices, rituals anduniforms, colonial subjects developedparallel frameworks that mimicked the


4/7


official hierarchy appropriating some of itssymbolic forms. But again, behind thatfact, we also need to recognise how, by thebeginning of the Twentieth Century, theCaribbean had become a society of

migrants who, wherever they arrived,reorganized their social situation inparticular ways.

The Imperial EmigrantsAfter slave emancipation in the 1830s,anglophone West Indians had quit thesugar plantations en masse and manythousands began to migrate abroad, bothto secure subsistence for themselves andtheir families, but also as an act of escapeand defiance. Migrant work came in the

form of massive engineering projects firsta French organized railway across thePanama isthmus in the 1850s, then the firstFrench attempt at a trans-oceanic canalcompleted by the U.S. in 1914, then asequence of mostly U.S.-led railwayprojects in Costa Rica, Nicaragua,Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru. Britainand the U.S. had rival interests in the SouthAmerica, but a symbiotic relationshipdeveloped in which anglophone WestIndian labour became crucial for the

development of U.S. capitalism in SouthAmerica. A case in point is the notoriousU.S. company United Fruit which is unlikelyever to have existed in the form it took hadnot Jamaican workers supplied labour firston Minor C. Keiths railways, then expertisein growing and cropping his Costa Ricanbananas.

Work on these projects was deadly;thousands of West Indians died building therailways and in the three gargantuanindustrial projects in Panama. Workers wereblown to pieces in dynamite explosions,buried in mudslides, contracted pneumoniafrom sleeping week after week in the sameclothes in the rain. Official medicalintervention focused on diseases,particularly malaria, that killed whitesdisproportionately, but against which

islanders often had good resistance.1 WestIndians looked to practitioners of folk orbush medicine and avoided the hospitalswhere they feared contracting TB and otherdiseases. The Americans imposed strict

racial segregation on labour to the extentthat, in Panama, white workers were goldpeople because they were paid in gold,while black workers were silver peoplebecause they worked for Panamanian silverdollars. Their status as West Indians offeredthem very little; certainly not remunerativeemployment, of which there was barely anyto be had on the islands. They could,however, claim to be British Subjects; andin principle they could appeal to the BritishConsul for help. The figure of the West

Indian threatening to complain to theBritish Consul became something of astereotype and a joke. For its part, thecolonial government put aside money forthe repatriation of migrants to whicheverisland they came from, and had establishedsavings banks and a postal order system sothat remittances could be transferred home a lucrative source of investment forotherwise impoverished islandadministrations.

On the one hand, West Indians treatedtheir status as British Subjects withgravity. White visitors of the period oftencomment on West Indian adults andchildren introducing themselvesceremoniously as fellow Englishmen. Onthe other, they created a parallel valuestructure. In 1910, Sir Roger Casement wasinvestigating atrocities in the PeruvianAmazon. West Indian workers affirmed thatthe British Honorary Consul in Iquitos wasin the pocket of the rubber tappingcompany that was organizing the killingand mutilation of Amerindians there,however, they had their own BarbadianConsul - an elderly migrant called CarltonMorris.2 In the same year, Jamaican

1Chomsky, A. West Indian Workers and theUnited Fruit Company. Louisiana: LouisianaState University Press.

2Casement, R. 1997. The Amazon Journal of


5/7


workers on the banana plantations of CostaRica struck in protest at withdrawal ofwages and the use of torture by overseers.One of the leaders of the strike was

Jamaican Charles Ferguson; referred to as

the Consul - he was also an obeah man orsorcerer.3 Others involved included

Jamaican migrant J. Washington Sterlingaccused in Limon of practicing medicineillegally he was almost certainly likewisea medicine man, a sorcerer. MarcusGarvey arrived in Costa Rica in 1910, aged23, to take up a position as a bananaplantation time-keeper. He was quicklyrecognised by the authorities as asubversive, largely because of his criticismof local arrangements to celebrate the

coronation of emperor George V, and hisattempts to organize more elaboratefestivities without consulting the Britishvice consul.

Notably, Garvey spent some of the firstyears of his adult life travelling acrossCentral America, going as far south asEcuador to visit West Indians railwayworkers there; a journey of nearly twothousand miles from Jamaica by steamer.On his way he published pamphlets and

newspapers for the emigrant readership.These years in his career take up just a fewpages of Grants biography, reasonablyenough because relatively little is knownabout his travels: nonetheless, what we doknow for sure is that, not only did theCentral American workers become anindispensable cornerstone of support forthe UNIA, but Garvey and Garveys wifeAmy Jacques made repeated visits to Colonand Limon with the aim of re-gatheringsupport there. In return, as Grant shows,they received staggeringly large sums ofmoney, usually donated spontaneously atmass public meetings.

Reconfiguration in HarlemIn Harlem, the initial support for the UNIAwas solidly West Indian. As Grant points

Roger Casement. Dublin: Anaconda Editions.3Chomsky, A. ibid.

out, West Indian migrants stood out inHarlem in the 1920s: here they werenicknamed monkey chasers, King Georgeniggers and cockneys. They wereincredibly addicted to waving the Union

Jack in the face of their American cousinsrecalled the Jamaican poet Claude McKay(Grant 90-91). The islanders viewedthemselves as the better educated andculturally superior subjects of a globalempire: in turn, the pageantry andhierarchy of the UNIA mirrored imperialperformances. Elsewhere, West Indianmigrants had their black consuls anddoctors, here Garvey paraded as animperial official or a Professor. There wererecitals of stirring poetry and Garvey often

adapted lines from Shakespeare for hisspeeches. UNIA membership cards offeredblack people a new flag of empire; anEthiopian4 one with a black hierarchyregarding which those at home andabroad could be proud, and aspire to join.If Dubois movement was national,Garveys was universal, but the incipientmodel for his internationalism was thediaspora of West Indian colonial migrants.When the Chaplain of the UNIA, Antiguanborn George McGuire, decided to canonise

Jesus Christ as the Black Man of Sorrowshe was carrying this logic in a direction thatRastafarians would elaborate more fully,but he may well have adapted the ideafrom a figure already popular with WestIndians in Panama - the Black Christ ofPortobelo a statue processed in Catholicpre-Lenten carnival there. Either way, asGarvey reiterated; if whites can see godthrough the eyes of whiteness then weare going to see him through the eyes ofblackness (Grant, 389).

The race politics that pushed U.S. blacksinto espousing UNIA goals is laid out muchmore fully in the biography. Terrorismagainst freed African Americans had beenongoing from slave emancipation in 1865.In the thirty years before Garvey arrived in

4Bourgois, P. 1989.Ethnicity at Work. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, page 85.


6/7


the U.S. more than three thousandsouthern blacks had been lynched; manymore had been burnt out of their homesand forced into exile. These conditions, thedevastation caused by the boll weevil on

cotton harvests, and the search for work,propelled them North. Post-wardemobilization, combined with a majoreconomic downturn, triggered rioting bywhites in many U.S. cities; the riotersattacked the black population, particularlyblack soldiers who some claimed werespreading Bolshevik propaganda.

Many joined Dubois NAACP, but Garveysmovement was now visible too, offering anorganizational structure and even

employment prospects. Grant suggeststhat the difference in success betweenDubois and Garvey derived from the factthat Dubois was an analyst and socialphilosopher whereas, quite simply, Garveywas charismatic, a visionary and astupendously talented orator. We can stillcatch a glimpse of this in his writing, hisrhythm and style are evangelical: lookingback, people who joined the movementdescribe something akin to religiousconversion. The U.S. government quickly

took it that Garvey was a potentialBolshevik threat and they appointed afresh-faced Edgar J. Hoover to investigate.From then onwards the UNIA was subject tosurveillance and covert sabotage by theBureau of Investigation.

If the only authenticated recording of himto survive is anything to go by, Garveynever lost a very distinct, highly polished,

Jamaican accent. He and the other WestIndians were doubly outsiders, in as muchas geographical mobility had become soelemental in their worldview. The Americanblacks who joined UNIA were often exilestoo - outsiders in their own country, drawnto Garveys utopia out of a different set ofsocial facts. Importantly, then, the successof the UNIA was about the similarities butalso the contradiction between West Indianand U.S. viewpoints. In both sites race

hierarchy was an inescapable fact, butpeople of the Anglophone Caribbean hadlived in societies where most people wereblack, where colour prejudice was muted inaccord with the need to preserve colonial

order, and where race/colour was acomplex hierarchic continuum intermixedwith class standing and ideas of Englishness. In the U.S., people wereeither white or they were black but thatstark duality made little sense in the WestIndies. The coalition and fusion of thesealien perspectives amidst the oratory andpageant in Harlem is surely a crucialdimension of why Garveyism was sospectacularly successful. Garveysmovement created an extraterritorial

adventure, an anti-structural vista, insidewhich UNIA members could hold office atevery level of the social hierarchy whilebelonging to their own empire, Africa.

EndgameDespite the best efforts of J. Edgar Hoover,who cut his teeth destabilising the UNIA,there never was any plausible evidence ofillegal activity on Garveys part. Garveywas a visionary with no capacity, orseeming interest in, the day to day

accountancy of his multiple enterprises.Unfortunately, few of his rapidly puttogether leadership showed any greatercompetence than him. The U.S.government eventually recognised that thebest method of solving the problem of theUNIA was not by by keeping Garvey inprison but to deport him to Jamaica; whichthey did in 1927. For its part, the Britishcolonial authorities were coldly efficient inclosing off contact between Garvey and theUNIAs network of supporters across theempire. He was successively banned fromvisiting other British colonies and kept outof Panama and Costa Rica. In Jamaica, hewas as successful as ever, putting on largescale spectaculars on the life of ToussaintLOuverture and other themes. He alsofounded Jamaicas first political party thePeoples Political Party. Legal means wereused to remove him from his elected seat


7/7


as a city councilor; ironically or not, thebarrister who prosecuted him would laterbecome the leader of the Peoples NationalParty and prime minister of Jamaica,Norman Manley.

In the mid-1930s Garvey moved to London one of the few big cities he could nowfreely visit, but support for the UNIA wasalready dwindling. A new generation ofpan-Africanists including CLR James andGeorge Padmore had by now come to thefore: they were socialists and for themGarveys quasi-imperialist pomp was aludicrous distraction. Having lost hisorganizational base, Garvey struck anincreasingly strange and lonely figure in

London. In 1940 he died of a stroke. In hisabsence from the U.S, the UNIA in Harlemhad engaged in a chaotic sequence ofinternal battles and went into decline andthe international network fragmented andultimately disappeared. Costa Rica remainsthe last place worldwide where a UNIAbranch has continued to exist as afunctioning institution.

What then was Garveyism? The fact that Iwas still asking myself this question when I

had finished reading Grants biography waswhat prompted me to write this review.Certainly Garvey is still with us as a rangeof significant ideas and images, like thepictures of him that re-occur on the walls ofhouse-yards in Kingston, Jamaica. Someyears ago, walking through my fieldworksite in Kingston, I was pursued by a localeccentric, Upsetter; My Lord, My Lord! hecalled after me, trying to catch myattention. Two youths shouted at himreproachfully as he followed this white manup the street what happen to you man you forgot Marcus [Garvey]? you forgotMalcolm [X]? There is a great deal more,though, that could be said about thecontradictory worldviews which brieflyturned Garveyism into a mass socialmovement. The sudden explosive growthof the UNIA is an instance where ansubmerged nexus of utopian ideas and

values briefly pierce the membrane of whatactually exists and acquire a reality of theirown.

2013 Huon WardleOpen Anthropology Cooperative Press

www.openanthcoop.net/pressThis work is licensed under a Creative

CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative

Works 3.0Unported License. To view a copy of this

license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-

nd/3.0/

Review Wardle Negro With a Hat 2013

Documents

Transcript of Review Wardle Negro With a Hat 2013