Race and Transatlantic Identities by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351813327
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

‘Something to do with Africa’

In 1976, the Caribbean intellectual C.L.R. James gave a talk in North London about his compatriot friend, fellow Pan-Africanist and Marxist revolutionary George Padmore, with whom James had lived and worked in London in the 1930s. Padmore’s career had mirrored James’s intellectual and physical journeys. Each was born in Trinidad, spent time in either the United States and England, worked for the Pan-African cause in the 1930s in London, and was involved with Kwame Nkrumah and the independence of Ghana in 1957 (although Padmore was much more centrally involved in the fledgling government). At the end of his address, James was asked about why the 1930s Pan-African radicals from the anglophone Caribbean seemed less interested in local politics, especially in Trinidad. He admitted to concentrating more on Africa than the Caribbean in his youthful activism, which, from the vantage of the 1970s, might appear problematic: ‘we made it clear that the future of black people lay with the emancipation of the African people and not with the Caribbean. We were very short-sighted, I agree entirely … We undoubtedly did not do what we should have done in regard to developments in the Caribbean.’1 In acknowledging his turning away from Trinidad towards anti-colonial revolution in Africa, he cites his greatest work, The Black Jacobins (1938) as evidence of his commitment to change in Africa, not the Caribbean: ‘all that book is permeated with the idea that what I’m talking about is what Africans should do’.2

It is one of the ironies of early twentieth-century Caribbean intellectual life that issues of Caribbean political independence seemed to be of less pressing significance than the emancipation of Africa, which in many ways became the centre of gravity for political and intellectual dissidence. The physical journey of Caribbean intellectuals such as James and Padmore – and, in a francophone context, Frantz Fanon – also reflects an intellectual journey, from the Caribbean to the metropolitan dissident intellectual environments of Europe and on to the anti-colonial theatres of struggle in sub-Saharan and North Africa. Any dialogic relations between the two regions were of little interest – the circuit which bound the Caribbean to Africa was not reciprocal. Africa dominated; Africa was both reason and cause. The initiatives pursued by Padmore and others in Europe and Africa were not strategically taken back to the Caribbean region to become the beginnings of a radical, postcolonial political culture – even though, as James’s 1930s activism evidences, the desire for self-government in the Caribbean burned brightly. The site for meaningful revolution lay overseas. An opportunity was not taken to address the painful, traumatic relationship between Africa and the Caribbean engendered by the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. Africa and its historical legacies in many ways continued as troubling, unexamined and little-spoken-of pressure points at the root of Caribbean social and psychological identities, too raw and disturbing to address for many. Africa was not consistently brought into the vernacular spheres of the anglophone Caribbean. Beyond the

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