The Gifts of Africa by Jeff Pearce

Author:Jeff Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2022-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Volunteers in Harlem sign up in the hopes of going to fight for Ethiopia. Courtesy Critical Past.

Finally, Mussolini’s soldiers crossed the Mareb River into Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. The small, two-seater tanks made by Fiat had “Adwa” written on their sides, and the Fascist planes made a point of bombing Adwa and other small towns to drive home the message of vengeance—they then issued a denial, even though Mussolini’s own sons, who were pilots, bragged about their mission.

In London, Kwame Nkrumah heard a newsboy shouting and noticed the headlines. “At that moment, it was almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally. For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly realize the wickedness of colonialism, and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing about the downfall of such a system.”10 In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was a teenager. “I was seventeen when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, an invasion that spurred not only my hatred of that despot but of fascism in general.”11

Protests went on, massive and multiple ones, and in New York City, there were ugly fights between African Americans and Italians in the streets and in school yards. London was another arena where left and right collided. In Soho Square, Oswald Mosley and his British Black Shirts handed out pamphlets, declaring that “finance, oil, the Jews, and the Reds want war.” Police had to break up fights between his men and demonstrators. Nearby, you found African and Caribbean expatriates and students working hard for the activist group, International African Friends of Ethiopia. Kwame Nkrumah was a member, as was Jomo Kenyatta.

So were West Indies writers and activists such as C. L. R. James and George Padmore. Marcus Garvey’s ex-wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey—an accomplished music producer and lyricist as well as a talented speaker in her own right—founded the Florence Mills Social Club, where the radicals liked to meet, plan, and relax. In a brief article for The New Leader, the paper for the Independent Labour Party, C. L. R. James wrote, “Let us fight against not only Italian imperialism, but the other robbers and oppressors, French and British imperialism.”12 By the time he started drafting The Black Jacobins, his classic on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, he “had reached the conclusion that the centre of the black revolution was Africa, not the Caribbean.”13

Jomo Kenyatta became so immersed in the cause that he grew a beard in imitation of Haile Selassie and took to wearing a fez and cloak. In the flat he shared with Dinah Stock in London’s Camden Town, he painted the furniture in the traditional colors of Ethiopia. Stock remembered Kenyatta “half jestingly, half seriously, quizzing a distinguished aircraft designer—who happened to be a Communist—on the most effective way of sabotaging an airplane on the ground with a spear.”14

In America, the emperor’s one-time physician turned activist and fund-raiser Malaku Bayen also took innovative steps to enlist African Americans.

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