Garvey: Relevant today more than ever

Oct 21, 2018 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

Book: Marcus Garvey
Author: Rupert Lewis
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Rupert Lewis’ Marcus Garvey is the quintessential study of the man behind one of the most ambitious economic initiatives in Africa and its Diaspora. Lewis’ clinical work well captures the telos of Garveyism. He presents the nuggets of an illustrious figure that epitomized tenacity, vision, wisdom, industry and chutzpah.
Throughout, Garvey’s ego is objectified in the form of the paternal figure, the Real. It is in his father that he sees himself: impervious, steely, obdurate, cerebral and managerial.
Indeed, Lewis offers an in-depth look into Garvey’s life. For Garvey, his father was “a man of brilliant intellect and dashing courage. He was unafraid of consequences. (…)
The politicization of Garvey emerged in the Caribbean, but his views took on a far more global reach, and it was in the United States that his movement generated spectacular interest. Garvey was impressed with the American Negro. “Industrially, financially, educationally and socially,” he writes, “the Negroes of both hemispheres have to defer to the American brother…In the cities I have visited, which include New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington and Chicago, I have seen some Negro banks in Washington and Chicago, stores, cafes, restaurants, theaters and real estate agencies that fill my heart with joy to realize, in positive truth, and not by sentiment, that at one center of Negrodom, at least, the people of the race have sufficient pride to do things for themselves.” (West Indies in the Mirror of Truth, Champion Magazine, Jan 1917)
It is from Garvey’s imaginative and creative mind that he established UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association) along with several business interests that included a thriving media house with bureaus in several Caribbean countries. But it was his larger economic projects that propelled him unto the global stage.
Lewis writes, “The Black Star Line was the most important drawing card for the UNIA. There was demand for this business in order to facilitate agricultural exports and passenger…The commercial prospects notwithstanding, was indentured with ideas of mass repatriation to Africa by diasporan blacks, and is embedded in the historical and contemporary imagination with repatriation to Africa.”
Garvey himself exhorted, “We must start business enterprises of our own: we must build ships and start trading ourselves between America, the West Indies and Africa.”
By 1920 UNIA has mushroomed in thirty-seven countries. In total, “there were over one thousand branches, of these, 836 were inside the United States and the rest outside in the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America.”
Interestingly, in his essay, ‘African Fundamentalism,’ Garvey addressed cultural appropriation, still an unsettling subject for today. “The world today is indebted to us for the benefits of civilization,” he wrote. “They stole our arts and sciences from Africa. Then why should be ashamed of ourselves. Their modern improvements are but duplicates of a grander civilization that we reflected thousands of years ago, without the advantage of what is buried and still hidden, to be resurrected and reintroduced by the intelligence of our generation and our posterity.”
Opposition to Garvey at a governmental level continued to grow and his politically motivated incarceration was hardly unexpected. Still, he was unbowed, using this time to crystallize his intellectual itinerary.
To this day, many hold that ‘Philosophy and Opinions’ best elucidates Garvey’s epistemological writings.
Notably, Garvey rejected pseudo political movements that clothed their leaders in hagiographic terms. “I do not promise the Negro anything more phenomenal than his own willingness to intelligently co-operate to his own problems,” he said. “The imaginary and mysterious hope of salvation will never come through the truant effort, but will surely be realized through the well organized and determined method of a sober approach.”
Lewis effectively addresses the misconstrued belief that Garveyism prioritized Africa. Garvey did say that “The objective of the UNIA is the founding of a great independent African Republic,” but Lewis adds an often overlooked dimension of the great Jamaican, i.e., Garvey was vocal on the issue of Federation and the US military presence in Haiti, and met and discussed workers rights with the region’s foremost labour leaders.
“We feel that Jamaica, and not only Jamaica, the entire British West Indies, will benefit from the recent strikes in Jamaica,” Garvey wrote. On this subject Lewis concludes, “Garvey, in his role as a Jamaican political leader in the 1930s, was a Pan-Caribbeanist, at the same time he maintained his firm commitment to the liberation of Africa and upliftment of black people wherever they lived.”
Despite the ebb of UNIA due to political persecution, mismanagement, corruption and a suffocating economy that choked many a business, Garvey’s light never extinguished. His movements were restricted, but he still managed to advance his ideals and champion the cause of the marginalized. He also found time to write and produce several theatrical plays. Such was the scope of his talents.
Garvey’s voluminous contribution to the black narrative is unsurpassed. Ever etched in the ‘Black Imaginary’ his dream awaits full fruition. The illusion of a post-racial America with the election of Barack Obama and the re-emerging socio-linguistic structure of white supremacy (imagined or real) only validates Garvey’s genius. For sure, the dialectic of race is ever present.
Arguably, the failure of black leaders to ably address the key areas of Garvey’s ‘Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of The World’ reflects their inherent weakness, disinterest or something frighteningly more perverse.
Garvey fully grasped the potentially destructive effects of ‘The Fantasy’ (as per Lacan) as a structural property that hauntingly splits the black psyche. It is an observation he prophetically addressed early in his journey when he noted, “Men and Women as black as I, and even more so, had believed themselves white under the West Indian order of society.” (…)
Remarkably, the neuroses of race are still with us.
Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
Marcus Garvey by Rupert Lewis
Publisher UWI Press, Mona Campus, JA
© 2018 Rupert Lewis
ISBN: 978-976-640-648-6
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Essential