Martin Henry
MARCUS GARVEY, whose birthday slipped by with little notice yesterday, was not only the leading Pan-Africanist of the 20th century or of any century, he was a true internationalist. Garvey's philosophy of Negro improvement was one of tactical engagement and adopting from 'Babylon' things which worked.
In his uncompleted autobiographical sketch, Garvey freely acknowledged his debt to white support against Black and coloured opposition for the establishment of the UNIA in Jamaica. "Nobody wanted to be a Negro," Garvey wrote. "Men and women as black as I am and even more so, had believed themselves white under the West Indian order of society." Bob Marley, with his own substantial philosophy awaiting critical analysis as is Garvey's, would later wail, "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds."
"I had a large number of white friends, who encouraged and helped me," Garvey continued. "Notable among them was the then Governor of the Colony, the Colonial Secretary and several other prominent men."
"I succeeded to a great extent in establishing the Association in Jamaica with the assistance of a Catholic Bishop, the Governor, Sir John Pringle [of Scottish origin and then the largest landowner in Jamaica], the Rev. Willie Graham, a Scottish clergyman, and several other white friends."
MODEL FOR AFRICANS' ASPIRATIONS
The green in the UNIA/Pan-African black, red and green flag, Garvey repeatedly indicated, was for Ireland, the first British colony to gain independence in the 20th century and which was a model for the aspirations of Africans and people of African-ancestry in the diaspora.
A Times Literary Supplement article by George Bornstein, professor of Literature at the University of Michigan, on March 2, this year was devoted to a careful, scholarly identification of "The Afro-Irish-Zionist Alliance with which Garvey himself was involved. In fact Garvey's fired up, fertile imagination produced a vision of "a new world of black men, not peons, serfs, dogs and slaves, but a nation of sturdy men [not just seeking their own racial interests but] making their impress upon civilisation and causing a new light to dawn upon the human race."
Garvey lived in solidarity with the oppressed and marginalised as liberator. Bornstein points out that the Black-Irish-Jewish tension of today "differs markedly from the way that the groups themselves previously constructed such relations ... Blacks, Jews and Irish regularly associated themselves with each other in a positive sense to a much larger degree than we now suppose, while their external critics lumped the group together in a negative sense" the writer established.
"Racist, pseudo-scientists of the day," Bornstein noted, "regularly viewed all of them as inferior races and would jump from one to the other often on the same page and even in the same paragraph.
ZIONIST MOVEMENT
Correspondingly, Black nationalist thinkers liked to invoke the Zionist movement as a positive model for Africans or African-Americans, and leading Zionists paid tribute to the leaders and strategies of Irish nationalism."
Frederick Douglass toured famine-struck Ireland in solidarity. Douglass' filed moving accounts of the tour to the abolitionist journal 'The Liberator', which published under the motto, "Our country is the world - our countrymen all mankind" [Bornstein]
Modern Ireland of the last couple of decades, incidentally, has become the kind of economically successful and socially liberating place that Garvey dreamed of and that no majority Black state has yet achieved. On the 2004 UNDP Human Development Index, Ireland stands at number 10 of 177; Israel at 22. The highest ranking Black state, Barbados, stands at 29; and the highest ranking 'Black' African state, South Africa [with its peculiar race history] at 119.
Garvey, the 'Black Moses', in Bornstein's view was "the Pan-African leader who most emphasised the triangle of Black, Jewish and Irish causes", although he was not above "anti-Semitic outbursts about Jews and economics".
Early in the life of the UNIA, in 1919, Garvey wrote, and reiterated many times thereafter, "[The UNIA] is as serious a movement as the movement of the Irish today to have a free Ireland, as the determination of the Jew to recover Palestine." The locus of Garvey's views and actions was Africans and Africa; his scope was the universal liberation and development of the oppressed.
