Timely discourse on Black unity
Published:Monday | October 14, 2019 | 12:00 AM
Book: Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation: African American and African Jamaican Connections 1782-1996
Author: Erna Brodber
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD
Erna Brodber’s ‘Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation’ bridges the historical faultlines between black America and black Jamaica.
Many a circumstantial marker facilitated the interfacing of these two peoples. The War of Independence in 1793 triggered the emigration of black Americans to British colonies in the West Indies, while some American entrepreneurs with property in the West Indies moved between geographic spaces with enslaved blacks.
By circa 1750, writes Brodber, “Jamaica supplied 30 percent of New York’s slaves,” and “Jamaica and Barbados were points to which New York merchants exported grain and lumber in exchange for sugar and sometimes slaves.” We also learn that “notoriously rebellious, sick, and old slaves were also dumped on New York.”
With the 1834 manumission of slaves, Britain and her West Indian colonies appeared attractive to Black America.
“The desire for freedom was contagious: desertion encouraged desertion,” Brodber notes. “This desertion, and the absence of immediate social control which came with it, naturally brought a significant degree of instability to the world of those fighting the War of American Independence.”
She elaborates, “Free Negroes became a national problem as early as 1691; Virginia felt threatened to pass a law that there should be no manumission of slaves unless their owners arranged their transportation out of state.”
By 1810, some 34,000 free Negroes were residing in Maryland.
One way of solving the ‘Negro Question’ was encouraging “African Americans to migrate to Jamaica to help solve its labour problem.”
Shortage of labour
Concomitant with abolition of slavery was a shortage of labour on the British-ruled islands creating an allure of opportunities for overseas blacks. During this period, many states, including Maryland and Virginia, actively dissuaded free blacks from settling (in their territory), threatening forcible deportation to Liberia or reinstitution of enslavement if they resisted emigration.
In fact, Thomas Jefferson confided in Governor Munroe, “Nature seemed to have formed these islands to become a receptacle of the blacks transported into this hemisphere.”
Arguably, black internationalism arose from these chaotic social and political forces in America and Britain.
As free blacks took up residents in Jamaica, the dynamics of colour, class and religious worship and, “distance in time from the state of slavery,” shaped relations between the two groups on the islands.
African Americans showed “extreme repugnance to enter into any apprenticeship, as they struggled to establish some form of cultural identity.
However, it was more than economic interests that spurred the connection. Religiosity buttressed oppressed peoples and many leaders advanced the destiny of their people around a single and identifiable redemptive trait. They advocated a definitive religious phenomenology based on exceptionalism and destiny. “They appropriated the Bible...and found in it dicta that they used to empower themselves, arise and free themselves.”
Ethiopianism in the context of Rastafari was born from the intellectual creation of Prophet Crowdy who established the Church of God and Saints of Christ. Crowdy’s religio-intellectual creation had spread its roots to Jamaica by the 1930s and arguably influenced Rastafari. Brodber probes, questioning “the roots of the theosophy that saw blacks as Ethiopians, and, by holy writ, God’s particular servants. “
She delves, further, “Was this by coincidence, the existence of two peoples of similar problems fashioning consequent similar solutions?”
Crowdy felt that black Americans were not in harmony with God, and were not effectively integrating their spiritual and material mandate. His messianic calling took him “far and wide,” ever determined to “reawaken the true children of Abraham.
Interestingly, the question of the Black Jew found meaning in the exchange of ideas between the two groups as suggested from a featured interview with Jamaican Moshe Ben Kohath.
Advent of Garveyism
Insightfully, Brodber traces the advent of Garveyism in the twentieth century, and the resistance the movement encountered from the black intelligentsia in the United States.
The movement of people and skills characterized the period between 1943 and 1996; the farm work programme having attracted many rural Jamaicans to the United States where they worked alongside black Americans. As World War 2 loomed, the social and economic projections of Britain and the United States took on new meaning. Millions of men would enter military service leaving a stark shortage of labor on farmlands. Anecdotal accounts by emigrants are presented in Brodber’s work. What is certain is the distinctive character (imagined and real) of the Jamaican worker. The image of the intrepid, assiduous and obdurate Jamaican ideal emerged. “If you hurt one; you hurt all,” said one narrator. Jamaicans and West Indians were different from African Americans in “their social fearlessness, their aggressiveness and determination to succeed,” according to observers.
West Indians blacks were reputedly assertive and aggressive; and they “would find a way of beating back lynch mobs.
How this affected relations between the two groups is inconclusive. Despite attitudinal and phenotypic differences, Jamaicans did identify with the systemic oppression of black America. “They knew themselves to be black; they laid claim to kinship with African Americas icons such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens and Martin Luther King Jr; and they rushed to buy and wear their Malcolm X shirts.” Still, “nationality trumped race.”
The brain drain in the West Indies at the turn of the 20th century led to emigration to the United States at a time when New York’s melting pot image was taking shape. Not unlike the Irish and other groups seeking fortune abroad, Jamaicans emerged as a distinct group within the black paradigm.
Throughout the black experience, the Mosaic totem emerged, i.e., the charismatic figure around which the oppressed rallied. Leaders jockeyed for pre-eminence. It is within this culture of hope that Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois found meaning.
As academic as ‘Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation’ appears, its appeal is broadly inclusive due to Brodber’s imaginative narrative and her ability to capture today’s cultural zeitgeist.
This is a treatise of overarching importance. It offers an unfailing insight into the black dynamic and the socio-cultural forces that could potentially derail the black collective.
With exclusivist rhetoric gaining traction on social media and threatening Pan Africanism in the process, Brodber’s meticulous thesis on the historical nexus between black America and the West Indies guards against those determined to spew division for their own sake.
Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation - African American and African Jamaican Connections by Erna Brodber
© 2019 Erna Brodber
ISBN: 978-976-640-708-7
Publisher: The University of the West Indies of Press, Kingston, Jamaica
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Essential
Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com