Up! You Mighty Race!

Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s iconic and timeless rallying cry echoes at the end of Roy Anderson’s wonderful, groundbreaking film, African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey.

The 85-minute film had its British premiere at the British Film Institute (BFI) on London’s South Bank on Saturday, February 5 and was screened to a full house of some 450 people. I was privileged to chair the post-screening panel discussion and Q&A. A highly appreciative audience heard from Professor Patricia Daley of Oxford University, a pan-African feminist and professor of human geography; Professor Cecil Gutzmore, public intellectual and one-time professor at The University of the West Indies, Mona, and to the audience’s absolute delight, Roy Anderson himself.

Anderson was known to many in the audience as the director and producer of award-winning films such as Akwantu: the Journey (2012), on the history of the Jamaican Maroons, the New World’s first successful freedom fighters and Queen Nanny: legendary Maroon Chieftainess (2015), one of the leading figures in the struggle against chattel slavery and the plantation system.

African Redemption charts Garvey’s life from his birth in 1887 to his remarkable rise as a pan-Africanist leader on the world stage and one who audaciously instilled in African people everywhere the belief in our essential humanity and potential and pride in Africa as the cradle of civilisation.

Just before his 27th birthday, Garvey launched the newly formed Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) on Emancipation Day, August 1, 1914, in Kingston, Jamaica. The UNIA-ACL was to become a worldwide movement, so that by the time of Garvey’s untimely death in 1940, there were over 1,000 branches worldwide and more than 4 million followers of Garvey and his vision.

The film amply demonstrates how, despite the challenges of international travel in that period, the First World War and the Great Depression, Garvey managed to mobilise African workers and grow a following in the Caribbean, the USA and Canada, Central America and Britain and continental Europe.

His stay in those places for varying lengths of time led him to make a central plank of his vision and purpose the realisation that wherever African people found themselves, they were at the bottom of the pile, exploited, abused, disrespected and dispossessed. He became increasingly conscious of the intersection of class and race and of how colonialism exploited that fusion and fuelled anti-blackness, causing African people to internalise all sorts of negative and debased definitions of themselves.

Speaking in Conakry in 1959, the President of Guinea Ahmed Sekou Toure famously said that “Decolonisation does not consist merely in liberating oneself from the presence of the colonisers: it must necessarily be completed by total liberation from the spirit of the ‘colonised’, that is to say, from all the evil consequences, moral, intellectual and cultural, of the colonial system.”

This was vintage Garvey and his message to Africans everywhere, including those who were brainwashed by colonialism to divest themselves of everything African: spiritual and cultural traditions and practices, their ancestral connections, including their names, their economic systems, even their lands, so that they could embrace the superimposed culture, religion, mores and values of the colonisers.

‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds’.

Whether in relation to the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement, the Black Power Movement, or the Civil Rights Movement, Garvey proved to be way ahead of his time in this respect.

Garvey had a vision of a unified Black race and of Africa reclaiming its diaspora and vice versa. The film demonstrates the measures Garvey adopted to establish and sustain links between Africa and its diaspora, including the operation of the ‘Black Star’ shipping company. This operation provided opportunities for the FBI to extend its reach into the Garvey organisation and subvert it, culminating in trumped-up charges against Garvey that led to his imprisonment.

Great leader

One of several things the film did not explore in any depth is the role played by Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus’ second wife, in the building of the UNIA-ACL and keeping the organisation afloat while Garvey was imprisoned or exiled. Amy Jacques speaks eloquently for herself and women in the Garvey movement in her 1963 publication, Garvey & Garveyism. Her role in ensuring that The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or, Africa for the Africans was compiled, even when Marcus was in jail, and as a leader and role model for women in the movement receives very little attention in the film, as does the role of women in the movement generally.

On the other hand, Garvey’s influence on the growth of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica and the major role Rastafari artists have played over many decades in keeping Garveyism alive globally is well depicted in the film.

The lively panel discussion and Q&A session after the screening explored some of the above aspects of the story in greater detail. What, for example, was the rationale behind Garvey’s decision to meet with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan and how much damage did that do to the movement?

The first Pan-African Congress was held in London in 1900 when Garvey was a mere 13-year-old. How did his brand of African nationalist pan-Africanism connect with the pan-Africanism of the likes of Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, WEB Du Bois and others with an avowed position on class, race and the pursuit of socialism?

After the First World War, Garvey welcomed and propelled the growth of Black self-affirmation among ex-service personnel and their demands for an end to racism. At the International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in Madison Square Gardens in August 1920, some 25,000 Africans came up with a declaration to that effect, marking the birth of a movement that was considered to be unstoppable. But, the film gives little information about if and how that momentum was sustained.

Given the new scramble for Africa and the weakness of the African Union as compared to the vision of Nkrumah and others who started the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, does Garveyism have a role in the increasing demands for a United States of Africa?

Emphasising the need for self-repair and to reclaim our Africanness, Garvey famously said that we should concentrate on taking the kinks out of our minds, rather than out of our hair. There was agreement on the panel that we all need to redouble our efforts to help our children and young people develop pride in their African heritage and know themselves and their roots. Alienation from their African selves and from the struggles and advances of their ancestors is reflected in the number of black folk killing one another at such a rate in Britain, Jamaica, Trinidad, across the USA and generally throughout the diaspora.

The schooling and education system reinforces alienation from self and heritage and contributes to what I have called elsewhere the destruction of hope and the death of aspiration; worse yet, for too many young people, the expectation of death before 25.

Garvey was way ahead of his time and the same forces that organised to undermine him and destroy his movement are at work today, eight decades after his death, with tragic consequences for Africa and its growing diaspora.

The rallying cry: ‘Up, you mighty race! You have nothing to lose but your chains’ should be a ‘call to arms’ now, no less than it was in Garvey’s day.

Roy Anderson deserves our praise and thanks for producing what is arguably by far the most authoritative film yet on Garvey and Garveyism.

Professor Augustine John is visiting professor, Office of Teaching & Learning, at Coventry University,and honorary fellow and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.