Written by Keith Hart
CLR James and the idea of an African revolution
Events in Tunisia and Egypt have brought back the issue of revolution to
international debate. Already I can feel my book, which was once called The
African Revolution and has since become Africa’s Urban Revolution, moving
with the times. It is too early to say whether North Africa’s “revolutions” will
change the world as profoundly as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of
apartheid in 1989-90. A counter-revolution may yet succeed in either or
both places. But the challenge posed by popular mobilizations to autocratic
regimes is already an irreversible fact.
I vividly recall watching the events in Tiananmen Square on TV with an old
West Indian revolutionary in his cramped Brixton bedsit. His name was
C.L.R. James, it was April 1989 and he died the next month aged 88. Who
can forget the Chinese man who stopped a line of tanks by running in front
of them? We both felt that this was a historical turning point, as did the
whole world. James thought that the Chinese government would probably
succeed in putting down the student rebellion; but their protest coincided
with an international meeting to which the Soviet leader, Gorbachev, came
and CLR told me that Eastern Europe could never be held by the Soviet
Union after this. It took a bit more than half a year for the East Germans to
bring down the Wall.
James had long believed that there were only two world revolutions left —
the second Russian revolution and the second American revolution. He
embraced Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement as a harbinger of the first,
but his keen sense of unfolding history saw Tiananmen Square as the
tipping point. He didn’t live to see his prophecy realised. Perhaps radical
regime change in the US would be the last world revolution, since world
society as a whole is by now an American fiefdom.
C.L.R. James left his native Trinidad for London in 1932 as a sports writer
with some published short fiction and a novel manuscript in his luggage.
He was 31 years old and, after loitering in Bloomsbury for a while, he joined
the famous cricketer, Learie Constantine, in Nelson, Lancashire, then known
locally as ‘Little Moscow’ for its working class activism. There he read his
first example of Marxist literature, Trostsky’s History of the Russian
Revolution, before returning to London. By the time he left for the United
States in 1938, he had become one of the leading Trotskyite spokesmen in
Britain, the first black Caribbean writer to publish a novel there (Minty
Alley), he got out a couple of pieces on West Indian self-government, wrote
the first history of the Communist International (World Revolution), was
employed by the Manchester Guardian as a cricket reporter, founded the
panafricanist International Africa Service Bureau with his childhood friend
George Padmore, involving also Jomo Kenyatta and later Kwame Nkrumah,
wrote a London play with Paul Robeson as Toussaint L’Ouverture and
published the definitive history of the Haitan revolution (The Black Jacobins)
as well as a short history of black struggles for emancipation on both sides
of the Atlantic over the previous 150 years (History of Negro Revolt).
According to James, the succesful Haitian slave revolt of 1791-1804
deserved to be seen as being equal in historical significance to the
American and French revolutions; yet it had been almost buried from view.
The slaves were in some ways the first moderns, uprooted from their origins
and made to work in the most advanced form of industrial capitalism of the
day, the sugar plantations of the French colony Saint-Domingue, under a
system of violent racial domination. Having beaten the French, they fought
off armies sent by the world’s great powers, just as Trotsky had to after the
revolution of 1917. The British lost an army of 60,000 men in Haiti and the
war against Napoleon was set back five years while they raised another one.
This was also the heyday of the international movement to abolish slavery.
The British prime minister, William Pitt, was persuaded by events in Haiti,
coming so soon after American independence, to abolish the slave trade
and turn the focus of the British empire from the New World to India.
James’s writing was not simply or even mainly an exercise in black
pride. The Black Jacobins ended with reflections on the relevance of the
Haitian revolution for the contemporary struggle for African independence
from colonial rule. An impressive coalition had grown up in the first half of
the twentieth century calling itself Panafricanism and drawing on all parts of
the African continent, as well as the European homelands of colonial
empire and the New World African diaspora created by the Atlantic slave
trade. As a nationalist movement aiming to restore control of African land
to Africans and fueled by the dream of a return from the New World,
Panafricanism brought together more people from different places and
languages than any other at the time or since. James placed himself
squarely within this movement. He liked to say “I had a fair wind at my
back, the anti-colonial movement”.
In the 1930s, very few people, whether European or African, believed that
the colonial powers could be forced to leave soon. James’s political
associates on the far left in Europe told him that African independence
could only be granted by a successful workers’ revolution in the homelands
of empire. He disagreed. What he took from the Haitian revolution was the
view that racial domination, when combined with exposure to advanced
forms of industrial capitalism, made for a potent revolutionary mixture. In
the History of Negro Revolt he set out to describe and analyze the uprisings
of Africans and people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic since
the Haitian revolution. He showed that the main theatre of action in the
19th century was the New World, but for the last half century Africa had
become the principal focus of conflict. He saw that the most promising
movements were in the principal concentrations of industry — the South
African gold mines, the dock workers in the Gold Coast, the Abba women’s
riots in Eastern Nigeria over oil palm exports. Capitalist exploitation + racial
inequality = revolution…and sooner than you think!
Well, the Second World War helped, but James was right and almost
everyone else was wrong. The collapse of European empire in Africa lagged
by only a decade behind its demise in Asia. It took a bit longer to displace
the Portuguese and the Southern white settlers, but independence from
British and French rule was an inescapable fact within two decades of James
making his prediction. Like his Martinican counterpart in the Panafricanist
movement, Frantz Fanon, James was quickly disillusioned with the path that
African independence took, writing a highly critical account of his friend,
Kwame Nkrumah’s turn towards nationalism (Nkrumah and the Ghana
Revolution, compare the long central chapter on “the pitfalls of national
consciousness” In Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth).
Egypt plays a pivotal role in all this when seen in a longer-term perspective.
Africa is both a continental territory and the home of a race, the place
where black people come from. And Eqypt’s relationship to a combination
of both is highly contested. North Africa was part of the urban revolution
that launched agrarian civilization five millennia ago, whereas most of the
rest of Africa was not. My argument here is that this difference has been
narrowed by the rapid urbanization of Africa south of the Sahara in the
20th century, leading to the installation there of variants of the Old Regime
of preindustrial civilization. But then the whole attempt to separate Black
Africa from Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral is an extension of the
imperialist cultural logic which divided Western Europe from its neighbours
by severing ancient Greece from its historical, geographical and cultural
links with the Eastern Mediterranean, including crucially Egypt (see Martin
Bernal’s Black Athena).
Many Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries believed that Eqypt was
the original source of world civilization and the Afrocentrics (see Cheikh
Anta Diop The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality) argue that
Eqypt itself should be seen as part of black African civilization. Certainly, if
the Sahara seems an obstacle to movement between the Mediterranean
and West Africa, the same cannot be said of the East, where the Nile, the
Red Sea and the Indian Ocean coast have always linked Egypt with the
peoples of Sudan, Ethiopia and East Africa and the wide savannah links East
and West Africa. Egypt has long been a significant member of organizations
defined by the African continent, ranging from the African Union to World
Cup football. If Nasser made Egypt the main centre of Panarabism and the
Arab-Israeli wars, followed by latterday demonization of Islam in the West
(“the clash of civilizations”), have reinforced that perceived alignment, the
importance of the North African revolutions for developments in Africa
more generally should not be underestimated.
CLR James studied revolutions in history because he wanted to help make
them. Right up to his death, he devoured biographies of the leading figures
of the French revolution such as Danton. He used to say that in any country
you will only find a handful of specialists in politics (including
revolutionaries like him), maybe a few tens of thousands. These people
dream about change and make plans for change all the time. Most people
just want to keep what they have and that is a good thing, he said; life
would be impossible without this inherent human conservatism. But “the
revolution comes like a thief in the night” (Marx) when no-one is expecting
it. Events move very quickly and many people soon discover that there is no
going back, they may have already lost what they had or at least can no
longer count on the status quo ante. Then something remarkable happens,
he said: you may have seen a guy with an umbrella at the bus stop for
years; he keeps his head down and says nothing; but now he turns up as a
leading organizer of a street committee. Revolution revolutionizes people
and everything becomes radically simplified at least for a time: freedom,
dignity, democracy as universally shared goals, universal solidarity as a
norm. At this time professional revolutionaries may have their uses.
In my next post, I will explore the specific implications of the North African
revolutions for Africa. This may help me to define a number of senses that I
bring to using the term “African revolution”.
Published by
Neil Turner
