Garveyism and Diasporic imaginations
In the Diaspora, one finds Marcus Mosiah Garvey as one of the earliest advocates of mobilizing Black people for purposes of re-membering them into a transcendental identity called Africans covering the continent and the Diaspora. His political imagination was fired up by the injustices ‘done to my race because it was black’; hence, he posed soul-searching questions: ‘Where is the black man’s government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared I will help to make them’ (Blaisdell 2004: 3). Garveyism as a reworlding process was complicated and multi-faceted. Burden-Stelly understood Garveyism as ‘a radical articulation of nationalist and separatist ideology that critique the ways in which white supremacy as technology of coloniality, national exclusion, and European imperialism precluded Black people from claiming their place in modern civilization’ (Burden-Stelly 2016: 5).
Garvey’s strong belief in race purity and his agitation for a separate and parallel Afro-modernity able to overcome imposed racial disabilities became the most controversial part of his philosophy of re-membering. Garvey strongly articulated the idea of a great Africa. To him, it was ‘by accident and unfavourable circumstances, the Negro lost hold of the glorious civilization that he once dispensed, and in the process of time reverted into savagery, and subsequently became a slave, and even to those who he once enslaved, yet it does not follow that the Negro must always remain backward’ (Garvey 1913: 22).
In Garvey’s thinking, Black people had to be autonomous in a double sense. First, they must free themselves from backwardness. Second, Africans have to rescue themselves from European ‘unrighteousness’ (Garvey 1913: 29). Politically, the realization of African freedom would be symbolized by the establishment of ‘a black imperial state’ capable of rivalling and combating European imperialism. To this trans-territorial Black imperial state would belong all Black people scattered all over the world in unity. To achieve this objective, Garvey strongly believed that violence would be the means of claiming the ‘Motherland’ (Jones 2013. 39).
In terms of location of the Black republic, Africa as the original site of civilization was the only space with the potential to offer real and genuine freedom and self-determination. This is what Garvey, as quoted in Blaisdell (2004: 29), said: ‘The Seat of Empire Northward Moves was true to history and poetry during the period of Negro decline. But its Northern limit has been reached and with the revival of Negro activity its path has again turned South. For Empire has not only a Seat but a Home and Home is in Africa’. Garvey was critical of those who wasted time on pursuing the objective of integration in Europe, America, and the West Indies, claiming that such a belief was focused on an impossible goal. To him, white people would never concede equal rights to Blacks.
To realize his dream, Garvey evolved an economic strategy to realize what one can call ‘black capitalism’. This involved laying a strong and autonomous economic foundation. The Black Star Line Corporation founded in 1919 was the vehicle to realize economic autonomy as a basis for political autonomy. Blacks dispersed across the world would be connected through business and trade, so that they might be counted within the mercantile and commercial world. The Black Star venture collapsed, and Garvey considered the dirty hands of European governments who were offended and opposed to the spirit of Black racial consciousness and big American companies opposed to Negro entrepreneurship to be responsible (Garvey 1947: 140). Garveyism as a reworlding idea became a ‘travelling’ theory of liberation. It reached all the corners of Africa and beyond. It laid a strong foundation for Black consciousness and pan-Africanism. It galvanized other re-membering initiatives.