Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

eliance and national independence. If Garveyism suffered
from practical short-comings, nevertheless its imposing
sweep of vision expressed the burning national aspirations
of the suppressed Afrikan peoples (and not only within the
U .S., but worldwide).
Garveyism's great contribution consisted of the
fact that it raised high for all to see a vision of Afrikan life
that was completely self-reliant, built around their own national
economy and culture, that waited on no European
to "accept" them or "emancipate" them, that was dependent
solely on Afrikan energies and will. In this Garveyism
was expressing the strongest desires of the Afrikan masses.
It is no accident that Garveyism and its successor, the Nation
of Islam, were the two largest outbreaks of Afrikan
activity and organization-building within the continental
Empire of our century. Even such a self-admitted "skeptic"
as Richard Wright was profoundly moved by
Garveyism in his youth:
"The one group I met during those exploring days
whose lives enthralled me was the Garveyites, an organization
of black men and women who were forlornly seeking
to return to Africa. Theirs was a passionate rejection of
America, for they sensed with that directness of which only
the simple are capable that they had no chance to live a full
human life in America. Their lives were not cluttered with
ideas in which they could only half believe; they could not
create illusions which made them think they were living
when they were not; their daily lives were too nakedly
harsh to permit of camouflage. I understood their emotions,
for I partly shared them.
"The Garveyites had embraced a totally racialistic
outlook which endowed them with a dignity that I had
never seen before in Negroes. On the walls of their dingy
flats were maps of Africa and India and Japan, pictures of
Japanese generals and admirals, portraits of Marcus
Garvey in gaudy regalia, the faces of colored men and
women from all parts of the world. I gave no credence to
the ideology of Garveyism; it was, rather, the emotional
dynamics of its adherents that evoked my admiration.
Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked
them but would never follow them, and I pitied them
too much to tell them that they could never achieve their
goal.. .
"It was when the Garveyites spoke fervently of
building their own country, of someday living within the
boundaries of a culture of their own making, that I sensed
the passionate hunger of their lives, that I caught a glimpse
of the potential strength of the American Negro."
The Garvey Movement's ambitious economic ventures
- in particular the ill-fated Black Star ship line -
became centers of controversy. There is no doubt,
however, that at the time they were often considered as
very difficult but necessary steps for Afrikan progress.
Even W.E.B. BuBois of the N.A.A.C.P., who was one of
Garvey's favorite targets for scorn as "a white man's nigger,"
initially spoke out in favor of Garvey's program (but
not his personal leadership):
"...the main lines of the Garvey plan are perfectly
feasible. What he is trying to say and do is this: American
Negroes can, by accumulating and ministering their own
capital, organize industry, join the black centers of the
South Atlantic by commercial enterprise and in this way
ultimately redeem Africa as a fit and free home for black
men. This is true. It is feasible ... The plan is not original
with Garvey but he had popularized it, made it a living,
vocal ideal and swept thousands with him with intense
belief in the possible accomplishment of the idea1."(39)
To the extent that Garveyism was naive about
capitalism (which it obviously was) this was a stage of
development widely shared by its critics as well.
Garveyism's weakness was that it saw in capitalism - the
form of social organization of the colonizer - the instruments
that Afrikans could use to free themselves. So
that the essence of nation-building was expressed in forms
precisely paralleling those of European society -
businesses, churches, Black Cross, etc., etc. Garveyism's
predilection for Western titles of nobility ("Duke of
Nigeria") and full-dress European court uniforms was but
a symptom of this. While this made the concept of independent
Afrikan nationhood instantly understandable,
it also was a contradiction and a blind alley.
Millions of Afrikans responded to the call of
Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association
(U.N.I.A.), read its newspaper The Negro World, bought
stock in its Afrikan business ventures, came out to its
meetings and rallies. In 1920 some 50,000 Afrikans marched
in a mass U.N.I.A. rally in Harlem. Garvey claimed 4.5
million members for thc U.N.I.A. His critics charged that
an examination of the U.N.I.A.'s public financial reports
revealed that the Garvey Movement had "only" 90,000
members of whom "only" 20,000 were paid up at that
time in dues. The U.N.I.A. was so overwhelming that its
critics could try to belittle it by saying that it had "only"
90,000 members. (40).
The U.N.I.A.'s international effect was very profound.
Claude McKay reminds us that: "In the interior of
West Africa new legends arose of an African who had been
lost in America, but would return to save his people." (41)
On the Nigerian coast Afrikans would light great bonfires,
sleeping on the beaches, waiting to guide in the ships of
"Moses Garvey." Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Ho Chi
Minh of Vietnam both said that Garvey had been an important
"inspiration" for them.
Clements Kadalie, whose 250,000 member Industrial
& Commerical Workers Union (ICU) was the first
Afrikan working class political organization in Azania,
said that he had been much influenced by the U.N.I.A. In
British Kenya the separationist KiKuyu Christians brought
in U.N.I.A. ministers from the U.S. to train and ordain
their own first ministers - and it was from these congregations
that much of the Kenya Land & Freedom Army (called
"Mau-Mau" by the British) would come a generation
later. The Garvey Movement, in Nkrumah's words, "raised
the banner of African liberation" on three continents.
(42)
In Haiti U.S. Marines violently put down the
U.N.I.A. In Costa Rica and Cuba the United Fruit Company
used police power to repress it. George Padmore, a
bitter opponent of Garvey, recounts that:
113 "In certain places the punishment for being seen