The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
This is the second article in the second Sunday of August – penned in commemorative acknowledgement of this month’s invaluable philosophical interpellation to those of us who are loyal adherents to the tenets of Garveyism.
This is the month we remember the life and contributions of our ideological God-father, Dr Marcus Mosiah Garvey, particularly his fundamental contribution to the popularity of a radical branch of pan-African thought. We remember the inchoate – yet genius contributions of Garveyism to the liberation gravitas which binds all Africans’ common consciousness of the need to liberate themselves from all forms of imperial hegemony.
Moreover, I should emphasise that reflecting on Garvey’s legacy is not a historical matter, but it is a process of making sense of how the conditions of Blackness have remained the same from the era of Garvey and others who have played a critical role in influencing our resistance to Western supremacy.
Turning to the memory of Garvey is crucial in making us understand how imperialism is still reproducing itself and thus inviting the need for present day confrontational efforts to imperialism borrowing our perspectives to this fight from the thought-power which was and still is the source of energy for Black resistance. Long Live Garvey!
Last week, I discussed the formative stages of Marcus Garvey’s contribution to pan-Africanism through his youthful sacrifices and commitment to self-education which gave birth to the formation of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
In this week’s instalment, I will explore in detail Marcus Garvey’s contribution of bringing into being the stature of Afrocentric (not in Prof Asante Molefi’s sense of the word) intellectual, cultural, political, economic consciousness.
At the outset, Marcus Garvey’s role as a philosophical anchor to Africa and Africans is contextual located in Africa’s contact with the West before and after the Atlantic slavery project.
As such, the philosophy which Garveyism proffered is sustained by the experiences of continental Africans who were at the disadvantageous receiving end of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
In that regard, the same Africans at home are subjected to soliciting involuntary fraternal/direct connection with the so-called “African Americans” and Africans scattered all over the Western hemisphere and the Caribbean.
To this day, Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of reparations resonates with continental Africans who lost loved ones in the Atlantic Slave Trade and remained emotionally connected to a memory of the gruesome capture of their kith and kin out of the continent.
To this effect, Garveyism’s ardent retrospective stamina to this episode of Africa’s meeting point with the West renders immense emotional validity to Garveyism.
This emotional bedrock of Garveyism offered memorial prospect of honouring those Africans taken into captivity and were never to return home again.
This suggests that slavery posed as an equivalent of a death penalty to its direct victims and in the process those left behind assumed an uncompensated state of perpetual bereavement.
It is this state of Africans’ perennial bereavement which has produced the polemic philosophical character of African scholarship which in some instances is referred to as racist.
However, the truth of the matter is that all Black philosophy is informed by polemic/frantic reciprocations to a history that naturally provokes anger to those directly affected by its impact – in this case the Africans.
This is why Marcus Garvey was never embraced by those having a claim to false Black and Whites integrationist and liberal leaning.
To these, Garvey remains an unwanted expression Black radicalism which is dismissed by some inclined to the a historical “Let bygone be bygones Tomfoolery.”
Therefore, Garvey’s relevance to our history as a people represents Africa’s plentiful mourning which to this day has not come to a pause owing to the accrued damage that slavery had to the ontological density of Blackness.
This is why the Africans in America defiantly reject the imposed status of their belonging to that land. The Garveyites even refuse to be aligned to their imposed cross-pollinated stigmatisation as African-Americans.
This view is not void of the fact that part of the diasporic enslaved mass and their descendants repatriated to the continent. It was such aspirations for reparations which necessitated the establishment of Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Consequently the emergency of the colonial project after the Berlin Conference ignited a new consciousness punctuated by fraternal – if not continental conversations between the diasporic blacks and Africans at home on the need for decolonisation. Professor Bernard Magubane argues that African kinfolks at home exchanged expressions of turning around their historical political-economy misfortunes and their sense of rootedness was grounded on a shared experience oppression, dehumanisation and identity massacre.
As indicated in the pan-Africanist body of literature, Africans at home and those in the diaspora needed a common ideological expression which was to serve as an interlocutor for forging African Americans’ experience with that of their home counterparts.
On the contrary, WEB Du Bois, a contemporary of Garvey did not provide relevant ideological stewardship to galvanise that historical and geopolitical incongruent which needed some sense of epistemic convergence to the pan/ synergising essence of the African reality which provides the normative foundation of today’s “pan-Africanism.”
This is how Garvey and the UNIA project became useful in fostering the linkages between Africans at home and those in the diaspora.
Moreover, this is what still popularises Garveyism and thus making it a seminal bedrock of the pan-Africanist agenda.
It is also important to underscore that as the 20th century unfolded the African and diasporic cultural production became inevitable.
This milestone was courtesy of ideas such as Garveyism general which were generally beamed around the world in print media, oral transmission, film, television and other forms of mass entertainment.
It is on this account that one is compelled to retrace part of this success to the journalistic dexterity of Garveyism.
This is because Marcus Garvey was instrumental in creating an inter-continental dialogue space for Africans through the Negro-World journal which attracted a following by Africans across the globe.
The Negro-World’s popularity was also impelled by its contextual sensitivity to the demands for freedom against imperial repression of Africans all over the world.
This suggests that Marcus Garvey’s legacy guides the valid need for Africans to be at the fore of producing knowledge which is relevant to their struggles, aspirations and experiences.
As a result, this is also suggestive of Garveyism’s role in terms soliciting a proposition for decoloniality of knowledge. While I may want to understand some scholars who challenge the inter-continental conversations between the Africa and the West by noting that Africa has such a mottled and dynamic history on its own terms, that it remains understudied in its own right, and that funding, publications, and general institutional support should not be disproportionately predisposed by the level of engagement with diasporic peoples.
Nor should African Studies centres find themselves in the scramble for scarce funds with African American / African Diaspora / Africana programmes that tend to ignore the real struggles, aspirations and experiences of Africa and Africans at large.
The variant interfaces of engagement of African Americans with Africans vis-a-vis African engagement with – and about Africa is explained well in Saidiya Hartman’s book, Lose Your Mother.
She discusses the coastal Ghanaians who were obviously aware of the streams of African Americans coming back to the slave dungeons, but she noted that many were puzzled by the desire to remember slavery or their slave histories.
Some local Africans were alternately offended and amused by what they considered African American self-absorption and victimization when they — Africans — had very tenacious instantaneous concerns and could not imagine having the material wealth needed to travel back across the Atlantic and stay in five star hotels.
Unlike the dawn of African American history, contemporary academic African historical scholarship derived largely from the works of early 20th century anthropologists, colonial historians and scholars of empire and colonialism, some of whom depend on placid oral histories of African peoples or travel narrative of European explorers, slave traders, missionaries, adventurers, etc.
Most of this work was continental based. But as the vast post-1965 African Diaspora continues to fan out across the globe, the academics within this diasporic stream will lead the charge in placing Africa and Africans at the centre of African Diasporic studies and placing African history in dynamic global contexts.
Professor Emmanuel Akyeampong and Paul Zeleza write extensively about the experiences of the post-1965 African diasporic societies outside of Africa.
These scholars are obviously well placed to put pen to paper about developments that reflect their own experiences- this personal interest enlivens their scholarly interests in ways very similar to African Americans writing about Africa.
These scholars, defined by the processes of diaspora apparent in Atlantic Slave Trade diaspora, and sponsored by the hegemonic nature of the US, the US academy, and publishing industry, will be the precursor of these new dynamic histories. To be continued.
-Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in pan-Africanism, decoloniality and Afrocentricity. He is the Project Coordinator of Leaders for Africa Network; Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the annual Reading Pan-Africa Symposium. Feedback: [email protected]
