The Sunday News
Richard Mahomva
AS we enter into this month, pan-Africanists are involuntarily compelled by the history of this ideology to celebrate the life of a pan-Africanist icon, Dr. Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
Therefore, because this is a pan-Africanist column which seeks to negotiate the space for African values in all day to day conversations on the condition of Africa’s being celebrating Garvey is a must.
This is why the opening instalment of this month is a tribute to the life of Marcus Garvey the great. He was born on 17 August, 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay.
Born to a background of slavery ancestry. Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the last of the 11 children born to Marcus Garvey, Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards.
His father was a stone mason, and his mother a domestic worker and farmer. Garvey, Sr. was a great influence on Marcus, who once described him as “severe, firm, determined, bold, and strong, refusing to yield even to superior forces if he believed he was right.”
His father was known to have a large library, where young Garvey learned to read.
Garvey’s illegitimate birthright in Jamaica formed the basis of his later career of confronting the establishment whose pedigree of dominance was sustained by centuries of plunder, exploitation, decapitation and exploitation of the mother continent. To this day, he remains a critical introspective point of challenging Western dominance and its history of subjugating the continent and its descendants.
Through self-education, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At 14, Marcus became a printer’s apprentice. In 1903, he travelled to Kingston, Jamaica, and soon became involved in union activities.
In 1907, he took part in an unsuccessful printer’s strike and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. Three years later, he travelled throughout Central America working as a newspaper editor and writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations.
He later travelled to London where he attended Birkbeck College (University of London) and worked for the African Times and Orient Review, which advocated Pan-African nationalism.
The formation of UNIA marked the climax of Garvey’s political career. UNIA was primarily committed to stimulating socio-economic and political awakening of the Black communities who were taken into captivity as a result of the gruesome Trans-Atlantic slavery project.
Part of the social amenities of the UNIA project was to foster repatriation of the African descendants whose fore-mothers and fathers were captured to the Western hemisphere as slaves.
UNIA’s economic portfolio mandate entailed the establishment of businesses in the United States of America in a bid to promote a separate black nation. To this effect, Garvey established the idea of a state within a state in America in a bid to challenge the political prejudice which slavery imposed on the basic rights of the Africans in America including their participation in the political processes of the time.
It is on this account that Garvey’s was convicted of mail fraud and deported back to Jamaica. However, Garvey remained defiant in Back to Africa project. As a result, his legacy prominently resides in the discourses of African awakening as well as African ontological restitution which had suffered denigration from Western capitalism.
To this day it is difficult to speak of pan-Africanism void of Garvey’s legacy and his contribution to the quest to liberate the being of the African people — those home and others abroad.
As such, Garvey’s life and teachings form that epistemic convergence point for those who belong to the continent including those in denial of their historically embedded clarion call to be decolonial. While much emphasis on the popularity of pan-Africanism to the oppressed African people across the world can be attributed to decolonial liberals like W.E.B DuBois, Marcus Garvey remains a crucial point of reference in terms of being a fatherly figure of pan-Africanism. This is because the objectives of UNIA resonate with the philosophical values of the establishment of the Africa Union.
Establishment of the United Negro Improvement Association
Inspired by the conditions of Black oppression, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1912 with the goal of uniting all of African diaspora to “establish a country and absolute government of their own.” After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, the
American educator who founded Tuskegee Institute, Garvey travelled to the United States in 1916 to raise funds for a similar venture in Jamaica.
In 1918, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper Negro World to convey his message across the whole world. By 1919, Marcus Garvey and UNIA had launched the Black Star Line, a shipping company that would establish trade and commerce between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.
At the same time, Garvey started the Negros Factories Association, a series of companies that would manufacture marketable commodities in every big industrial centre in the Western hemisphere and Africa.
This reflects that Garvey dedicated his life to forming the primacy of what later evolved to be the pan-Africanist project.
His residence in New York City leading to the formation of UNIA chapter in Harlem essentially promoted a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for blacks. The establishment mantra of UNIA still finds relevance in giving meaning to the idea of pan-Africanism.
This is because pan-Africanism represents an intellectual, cultural renaissance of Africa aimed at uniting all people of Africa to build structures of socio-economic and political transformation against a background of slavery and colonisation.
Moreover, pan-Africanism forms a template of rethinking the current neo-colonial ideas which are still prejudicing Africa’s development and participation in globalisation.
In August 1920, UNIA claimed 4 million members and held its first International Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Before a crowd of 25 000 people from all over world, Marcus Garvey spoke of having pride in African history and culture. Many found his words inspiring, but not all. Some established black leaders found his separatist philosophy ill-conceived.
Charges and Loss of Authority
In 1922, Marcus Garvey and three other UNIA officials were charged with mail fraud involving the Black Star Line. The trial records indicate several improprieties occurred in the prosecution of the case. It didn’t help that the shipping line’s books contained many accounting irregularities.
On 23 June 1923, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to prison for five years. Claiming to be a victim of a politically motivated miscarriage of justice, Garvey appealed his conviction, but was denied. In 1927 he was released from prison and deported to Jamaica.
Garvey continued his political activism and the work of UNIA in Jamaica, and then moved to London in 1935. But he did not command the same influence he had earlier. Perhaps in desperation or maybe in delusion, Garvey collaborated with outspoken segregationist and white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to promote a reparations scheme.
The Greater Liberia Act of 1939 would deport 12 million African-Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. The act failed in Congress, and Garvey lost even more support among the black population.
Death and Legacy
Marcus Garvey died in London in 1940 after several strokes. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred in London. In 1964, his remains were exhumed and taken to Jamaica, where the government proclaimed him Jamaica’s first national hero and re-interred him at a shrine in the National Heroes Park.
But his memory and influence remain. His message of pride and dignity inspired many in the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
In tribute to his many contributions, Garvey’s bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington, DC. The country of Ghana has named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, in honour of Garvey.
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]
