Alternatives to Creole nationalism in the early 20th century

Creole nationalism was not the only political idea current in the West Indies in the last decades of colonial rule. Very obviously, as we will see in the next chapter, the dominant view prior to World War II was white supremacy justified by a civilizing mission. However, the subordinate people generated visions of their own which differed both from the Creole nationalism that the emerging black and brown middle class were to adopt and from each other.

One approach was Black Nationalism, advocated by the Virgin Islander Edward Wilmot Blyden, who believed that Africans, that is to say both the inhabitants of Africa and the members of the African Diaspora in the Americas and elsewhere, should develop their own ideas and methods of organisation and had their own contribution to make to the world.[1] Blyden believed that there was a distinct “African personality” involving specific “intellectual and spiritual” qualities possessed by the black race.[2]

Blyden, however, was an émigré and spent his adult life in the United States and Liberia. The Jamaican T.E.S. Scholes was another early black critic of white supremacy, but he did not develop a coherent doctrine of racial consciousness.[3]

The most significant West Indian advocate of Black Nationalism and a specific black consciousness was the Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey whose ideas bore a strong resemblance to Blyden’s.[4] Garvey advocated both political nationalism, that is, that black people needed a state of their own, and cultural nationalism, the advocacy of a specifically black cultural identity distinct from and independent of that of whites.[5] Garvey also advocated racial purity and avoidance of interracial marriage or sexual relations. As Benn notes:

He felt that miscegenation would not only produce a mixed racial group, whom he considered to be traditionally unsympathetic to the aspirations of the pure blacks, but would also inevitably lead to cultural assimilation which he saw as incompatible with the goals of black nationalism.[6]

This is a mirror image of the belief held by white supremacist thinkers of the nineteenth century that the brown race emerging from the intermingling of black and white would be the appropriate master of the West Indies, having combined the intellectual capacity of the white with the physical aptitude for tropical climates of the black.

In addition, Garvey advocated economic nationalism, believing that lack of ownership was at the root of black economic dispossession and poverty. Indeed, Garvey’s economic policy was simply economic conservatism with a black face, ignoring, as Denis Benn points out, the relationship of capitalism as a system to the poverty of blacks.[7]

Garvey was to have considerable influence, to the extent of being acclaimed as a prophet, by the Rastafari movement which had its own key works such as the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy and the Promised Key. The Royal Parchment Scroll was published in Jamaica around 1926 by Fitz Ballantine Pettersburg; the author declares that “every Black Man and Woman is Black Supremacy.”[8] This “has nothing to do with white supremacy.”[9] One race has to “go down to dishonour” while the other rises to honour.[10] While black supremacy does not mean racism, since it will “promote the Mortals of every SHADE according to your power to go,” it does mean a prohibition on miscegenation because of “RACE ENMITY.”[11] This is because of the possibility of a restoration of slavery, an idea which lurks in the hearts of whites. Whites, indeed, are untrustworthy: “white Peoples Mind is the Snake's Mind. Before I trust a White Person, I trust a Snake.”[12]

Blacks have suffered to redeem the white man’s “leprosy” but this has had no effect as “He is STILL INFESTED with the indomitable INCURABLE accursed Deadly Diseases.”[13] The redemptive sacrifice of black people, including centuries of enslavement, having failed “Now we are Perfectly DISGUSTED OF THEM. We wash our hands of THEM, for life.”[14] This rejection of white people is coupled with a depiction of them as lepers that is polygenist.[15] The idea that blacks and whites are separate species is directly advocated with a claim that blacks were pre-Adamic, and that black prosperity would be assured once whites were extinct.[16] Africa’s misfortune is that it gave succour to “willfull (sic) idlers” who robbed it of its resources and enslaved its people.[17]

The Promised Key, by Leonard Howell, the founder of Rastafarianism, writing under the odd pseudonym of “G. G. Maragh,”[18] is a brief redaction of The Royal Parchment Scroll, which makes reference to the coronation of Haile Selassie I as emperor of Ethiopia, declaring that the Duke of Gloucester, as representative of the King of England, had acknowledged the emperor as overlord.[19] The suffering of black people at the hands of whites will be required and the whites will receive nothing but evil.[20] Otherwise, Howell’s themes are those of Pettersburg rendered with greater clarity and coherence. Howell’s focus on Ethiopia as a free black kingdom and a symbol of black redemption is certainly radical, but as Bogues points out does not challenge then normative concepts of male dominance and does not “create a revolutionary world order”.[21]

The black supremacy and Ethiopianism of Pettersburg and Howell were not the only political ideas current among lower class black West Indians. Another idea, with roots in the days of slavery, identified the British monarch as a benevolent despot protecting the poor lacks from the depredations of the better-off browns and whites.[22] Middle class advocates of Creole nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s had to confront the perception that their calls for home rule and eventual independence would mean “the eventual withdrawal of the protective arm of a paternal British Monarch” and this would produce not the expectation of opportunity but fear.[23]

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[1] Lewis 1983, 316.

[2] Benn 2004, 235.

[3] Benn 2004, 233.

[4] Benn 2004, 236.

[5] Benn 2004, 236-237.

[6] Benn 2004, 238.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Fitz Ballantine Pettersburg, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy (c. 1926); http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps10.htm accessed 16 June 2006.

[9] Petttersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps10.htm accessed 16 June 2006.

[10] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps24.htm.

[11] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps26.htm . Accessed 16 June 2006. In a later chapter, Pettersburg, calls the rape of black women by whites “advance rate”, suggesting that it was planned in order to create “3^rd class peoples.” (Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps44.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[12] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps29.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[13] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps34.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps37.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[16] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps45.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[17] Pettersburg 1926, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/rps/rps49.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[18] “Maragh” is an East Indian surname.

[19] G.G. Maragh (Leonard Percival Howell), The Promised Key (c. 1935); http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/tpk/tpk01.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[20] Howell 1935, http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/tpk/tpk02.htm. Accessed 16 June 2006.

[21] Bogues 2003, 165.

[22] George E. Eaton, Alexander Bustamante and Modern Jamaica; Kingston: Kingston Publishers Limited, 1975, 96.

[23] Ibid.