Norris McDonald | Garvey’s Pan-Africanism lives in a united Africa and beyond

“Hail! United States of Africa-free!

Country of the brave black man’s liberty;

State of greater nationhood thou hast won,

A new life for the race is just begun.”

Marcus Garvey -1924

 

The African Union (AU) is making great strides in creating Marcus Garvey’s vision of a ‘United States of Africa.’ This February 2020, the AU in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, met with an agenda that included by 2025, creating a ‘conflict-free Africa’fully integrated African Union.

The Hon Cyril Ramaphosa, president of the Republic of South Africa, is the head. It was formed in 2002, in Durban, South Africa, and now unites 55 nations on the African continent.

The February AU convention focused on creating a ‘conflict-free’ Africa, economic improvement of the lives of the African people, deeper economic integration, and others aimed at achieving true freedom, prosperity, human rights, and justice.

PAN-AFRICAN VISION

All this falls within the ambit of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African vision.

Marcus Garvey’s epic 1924 poem, “Hail! United States of Africa!” proclaimed a vision that Nigeria, Mozambique, Zululand, Liberia, the Congo, and the rest of Mother Africa would be completely united under a common flag and build nations that reflected past glory.

It will soon be 100 years after Marcus Garvey wrote his epic poem, ‘Hail! United States of Africa.’

In 1924 when Marcus Garvey outlined his Afrocentric visions for African unity, he said:

“There is no state left out of the Union –

The East, West, North, South, including Central,

Are in the nation, strong forever,

Over blacks in glorious dominion.”

The spirit of liberty that drove the African national liberation struggles is reflected in Marcus Garvey’s Afrocentric bond.

In a practical sense, Marcus Garvey focused on the mentality of people, seeing Jesus Christ as “a Black man of sorrow,” who was a child of “the Black Madonna.”

Marcus Garvey paid the ultimate sacrifices, but his visions and dream can never die.

His noble work has been immortalised by the Rastafarian movement, in poetry, literature and in reggae music.

POLITICAL ECONOMIC STRUGGLE

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the father of the Pan-African movement. His moral philosophy helped to shape many freedom fighters, including the prophet Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, and many others.

Garvey’s Pan-African movement spread worldwide through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he formed in 1914 in Jamaica. In 1920, he relaunched the UNIA at Madison Square Gardens, New York. At this first international convention, there were delegates from 22 countries hailing from America, Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The UNIA became so powerful that in America, it had 38 branches with Marcus Garvey as founder and president.

While it was important to save and uplift the human spirit, Marcus Garvey recognised that to give hope to the black race, positive political economic changes must be made in their lives.

Garvey’s political economic programme was an important part of his moral philosophy. This included forming The Black Steamship company, The Negro Factories Corporation, and other projects organised to make black people become self-employed and to help lift them out of poverty.

A historical pattern of colonial treachery meant a consistent pattern of untrustworthiness.

Garvey was subjected to injustices stemming from these gross acts of betrayal. On the world scene, it was this treachery that gave rise to the Black African holocaust, the centuries of the African slave trade, and years of colonial and imperialist domination.

Colonial brutality was exemplified by ‘The Butcher of The Congo,’ King Leopold II of Belgium, who killed over one million Africans. He also brutally maimed another nine million who did not fill his demanded wealth quota.

Many western critics were shocked when Zimbabwe reclaimed its land, but no one recalled the betrayal of Great Britain which, in the Lancaster House Agreement of September 21, 1979, promised to pay for the land the colonialist had stolen from the Zimbabwean people.

Hitherto, Marcus Garvey told us what to expect from western emissaries. In the Tragedy of White Injustice (1927), he writes about the political emissaries of the west.

“Your lies, you called diplomacy

Are known to us, as brazen phantasy;

You imprison men for crimes not so great,

While on your silly wisdom your prate.”

Marcus Garvey was right: Diplomacy can be fraudulent.

The promised buy-out of the white farmers, under the Lancaster House Agreement, never occurred. This was a condition of the peace agreement signed between Great Britain and the Zimbabwean freedom fighters.

The late President Robert Mugabe was criticised for his land nationalisation policy, but now, South Africa is also repossessing land.

POWER OF DISCERNMENT

Writing from prison in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was framed and sent by an unjust, racist, segregated system that feared his powerful, black, emancipating work, Marcus Garvey wrote, in The Tragedy of White Injustice...

“There shall be a bloody mix-up everywhere;

Of the white man’s plunder we are aware:

Men of color the great cause we understood,

Unite they must to protect their land.”

Today, we live in a world in which a black woman in America is three times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman. Cancer, lung diseases, and other illnesses affect black people and other people of colour more than a white person.

Also, despite the fantastic growth in billionaires and millionaires’ wealth, wages have remained flat over the last 40 years for the working class, which, of course, includes many black people.

These miserable conditions of life must not lead to despair. It must be the driving force to inspire us, as it did Marcus Garvey, to fight for human rights and economic justice.

Just like Marcus Garvey, I am confident that the people of the Black African diaspora, wherever they dwell, will forever keep fighting for true peace, human rights, and political economic justice.

That is just the bitta truth.

- Norris McDonald is an economic journalist, social researcher, and political analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com