A CRITIQUE OF MARCUS GARVEY’S BRAND OF PAN AFRICANISM
A CRITIQUE OF MARCUS GARVEY’S BRAND OF PAN AFRICANISM
Hoteph Beloved Sisters and Brothers:
Well beloved, now you have the perception of an integrations/Assimilationist, theory as to why they must fulfill their dream of abandoning their Blackness, in pursuit of becoming as close to the White oppressors as they can.
There is no integrationist/Assimilationist that is qualified to Understand Garveyism, let alone critique the Honorable Marcus Garvey.
This below is a thesis in favor of Race Mixing and not an attempt to see and understand the Ideas and Sociological facts of Mankind, as The Honorable Marcus Garvey had became Qualified to See and based on all he saw and knew, he concluded that Black Separation is in fact the most Natural approach he must inform Black People about, as being the safest path to take, that is if we so desired to maintain the Natural Divineness of us being a Natural Divine Being, having no obligation to share this Blackness with anybody, because the Higher of all there is, the Essence of all there is, has so formed us Black People to be as we are, just as that same Essence has given us the Stars and Planets and the Elements and through such a Dynamic Relationship, we have and is a part of what we call the Universe, each member serving as its independent Sphere traveling along its on separate Path, Such is the Science of all objects that make up the Universe.
There is no Science that can prove that All Mankind is the Same, the only Scientific assurance is that the Difference in Body form and Structure, be it animated or inanimate, we all carry the same DNA that connect us all to the One Same Eternal Infinite Essence, but as we come forth from that Essence, the action there from, sprout Limbs to become the Universe Tree that it is, so on the level of so call Mankind, the Anthropomorphous Being, what we call Biological Nature, you have appearing Forms of a same inner Organic System but a different outer Body form, with the interaction of a system that produce a Chemical that cause the Body form to take on a Different Phenotype, among those Animated Mankind Beings.
So Black People are different from White People and let us keep it to be between these Two Anthropomorphous Beings, for sake of discussion and to show the DNA difference between Black and so call White People.
In an effort to Reason rationally and logically we must acknowledge that the Genome of the Anthropomorphous Being is what give that animated body form its phenotype identification and anybody that can not see and understand the difference that is so apparent between Black and White people, need to have their Head examined, because the Honorable Marcus Garvey was well aware of those differences, because Garvey was a practical Thinking Black Man, striving to reach a Divinity he was totally aware of that which we had been deceived of being, which is a Divine Black Being and not a Human Being because a Human Being is without the ingredients that give the Black Being its Phenotype identity, which is caused by the DNA that Black folks carry.
No intelligent person will argue that the Stars and Planets are the same, which they are not, even though they both carry the Basis DNA element that cause them to be as they are and as I have said, All things that make up the Universe come from the same Divine Eternal Infinite Essence, the GOD Energy of all Things, but those Things are Different in Body Form and appearance and Spirit ( Action )
There is no where that Nature teaches us that all things must become assimilated together, Integrated yes assimilated NO.
You see there is no conflict with the action of Separation and Integration, each can play a Dynamic role with each other without the other attempting to assume the other identity, such is not the Divine Teaching of Nature, observe Nature and see how all of its differences are integrated but remain separate, so are we not a Branch of Nature, the Divine Deity of the Divine Eternal Infinite Essence of us All?
Away with all of this assimilation hog wash, coming to attack our Divine Prophet, The Honorable Marcus Garvey, all because the Assimilationist has been given the orders to attempt to tarnish the Honorable Marcus Image because he stand tall in the circle of Black Separation, the assimilation advocates attempting to establish a false premise for race assimilation.
Garvey did not fail, he came as far as the Divine Force of the Essence has so prescribe him to come, he took a Black Race that was sinking fast into the cess pool of racial self hatred, developing a want to be like white people and lifted them up to catch their breath of Black Pride and self esteem of a high caliber, within the midst of an evil that white folks had created to attack our freedom, with the tool I speak of, which is segregation, which is different from Separation.
Black Separatist choose to be separate from white and all others of the Anthropomorphous Nature and we do so by choice but with an understanding of the Natural Dynamics of integration, but Segregation, that is an evil white folks created because they enacted a law that strangle our Freedom of Movement and association, so if anybody desire to point a critical finger at evil, then point it at White Folks and they most certainly are different from Black folks and no science can prove otherwise.
Now, there has not been a Black Separatist Leader that was able to amass a membership of over Ten Million Black People in these temporary Times , without having to pull a Gun on them, Lie to them, Enslave them and deceive them, this man call Garvey, served as a Magnet and as the Sun attract its Planets, so it was about the Honorable Marcus Garvey magnetic pull on Black People and just as in the Universe you have wayward run away Meteors and Comets so do we have those Black Folks to serve as our Meteors and Comets, those that are Hell Bent on assimilating with anything that walk perpendicular to the Ground and is different in nature from us, no beloved, such is the action of an alien to the Black Divine Mind, so be aware of those coming sensing the Energy that is about to cause the Rise of the Black World, you who serve as the Star of Mankind in our Anthropomorphous Universe, as they panic to deceive Black people about White People.
The Honorable Marcus Garvey did not fail, he did what he had been endowed to do and that was to educate and remind us Black People who we are and where we need to be and how we need to be and what must come back into our possession again, even though he did not get to the Sacred Land of our Ancient First Way Cosmic Divine Ancestors, he knew and taught us where we need to go and be and he made it plain and clear that the place our Ancient First way Ancestors so designated for us to be the care taker of, is our Land call Afrika, to use for the benefit of the Black Divine Being and nobody else, because Separate and Divine we must become again, any other Way will maintain the lost of our Black Divinity.
So beloved, there is no Black, White Arab or Jewish so call Assimolationist that can speak without a forked tongue when the subject is Black People and the Honorable Marcus Garvey, because The Honorable Marcus Garvey knew when the issue is assimilation and it is coming under the disguise of integration, it be Black people that have been tricked to urge such unnatural interaction as Race assimilation.
If my beloved brother Shaka had not solicit a response to this Unthinkable propaganda about Our Black prophet, The Honorable Marcus Garvey, I had decided not to dignify this diatribe with a response, and to ignore this deceiving attack on our Divine Black Leader, knowing there is no assimilationist qualified to critique such Divineness, our Most Honorable Marcus Garvey.
Only a Divine Mind is qualified of understanding the Dynamics of the Action of the Honorable Marcus Garvey, It is The Honorable Marcus who have put Afrika and the Black Nation in motion to become as it once were again.
When it come to Afrika and Black People, it is not about our Flawed Wants for Afrika and our Despised Black selves, it is about what Afrika and the Black Nation divinely Need, in order for the world to recalibrate its attitude and behavior toward the Black World.
The Divine Truth, black people Despise The Divine Truth.
Here Is Loving you
Hoteph
Osiris
Chief Elder
FWIOAM/SRM
Copyright@2007
www.myspace.com/osirisakkebala
mwariama1@aol.com wrote:
I typically would not dignify this garbage with a response, but Mr. Garvey did ask that we respond to such "mockery" of our heroes and heroines. Currently, I've been too busy to address this barrage of vitriolic diatribes waged against our Most Honorable Leader. That's why I 'm referring this email to some of you who I'm sure, if available, can offer an adequate rebuttal to some of this foolishness, before some unconscious and impressionable student of our-story deems this criticism valid, due to a lack of correction.
Your Humble Servant,
Mwariama
A CRITIQUE OF MARCUS GARVEY’S BRAND OF PAN AFRICANISM
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
I consider myself a Pan Africanist. It became necessary for me to look at what other Pan Africanists mean by the term Pan Africanism. One of those associated with Pan Africanism is Marcus Garvey. Therefore, I decided to take a look at his life and work (see brief bibliography).
Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. After brief elementary schooling (fifth grade) he dropped out and obtained training as a printer. For some years he worked as a printer at Kingston, Jamaica.
Like many West Indians of his generation, Garvey tried to improve his lot in life by exploring opportunities outside his country. He visited several Central American countries and for a while worked in Costa Rica. Thereafter, he went to Britain and lived at London for four years.
Exposure to English ways, apparently, opened Garvey’s eyes regarding how the colonists’ behavior contrasted with their behavior at home. Abroad English colonists, to the colonized blacks of Jamaica, seemed like gods but at home in England they were largely no more than laborers. Moreover, Garvey was exposed to African students from the continent of Africa and from elsewhere and his eyes opened to the wider world of blackism. Garvey was too poor to support himself in Britain and had to return home.
He returned to Jamaica and formed his Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. Initially, he wanted to establish schools that would improve the lot of his fellow Jamaicans. In 1914 he wrote Booker T. Washington at his Tuskegee Institute for financial help in replicating what Mr. Washington was doing in the USA in Jamaica. Mr. Washington refused him financial help but invited him to come visit his school. Garvey accepted the invitation but before he could make the necessary arrangements to visit Alabama Mr. Washington died (1915).
In 1916 Garvey came to the United States, any way, but instead of going to the South went up north, to Harlem, New York. He decided to stay in the USA. There he resurrected his dream of establishing a universal association for the improvement of Negroes. In 1917, he toured the United States giving lectures at Negro churches and seeking funds to enable him actualize his dream. He did receive quite a bit of funds and with that he returned to Harlem and began his operations in earnest.
Garvey established the Black Stat Line, a shipping business and other businesses, with the goal of ferrying goods and people between the new world and Africa. The shipping business was not exactly a success but that is not the issue of concern to me. The issue of interest is Mr. Garvey’s philosophy, his black separatism from other races.
Garvey appreciated the fact that everywhere in the contemporary world black people is discriminated against by white people. He recognized the reality of racism on the ground and sought a solution to this unacceptable situation.
As he saw it, white folks discriminated against black folks and the solution was for black folks to separate themselves from situations where white folks discriminated against them, and for black folk to start their own businesses, self-improvement.
The second goal, self-uplift can hardly be argued with. It is the first goal that is problematic. Mr. Garvey wanted to cut black folk off from the white folk. In his mind, as long as blacks were in association with whites they would always be second-class citizens. Blacks, therefore, had to separate from whites and, better still, blacks had to return to Africa where they would establish their own country and develop as they see fit without the white man telling them what to do.
Indeed, Mr. Garvey did arrange to buy some lands in Liberia and fully intended to relocate African Americans to Africa! His Shipping business, among other things, apparently, was meant as a means of shipping blacks from America to Africa!
To underlie his seriousness Mr. Garvey had meetings with known KKK members and other white racist groups clamoring for blacks to be shipped back to Africa. Apparently, Garvey sought their help in arranging for African Americans to be shipped back to where they presumably come from, Africa.
(As a matter of practicality: how about the mixed African-white-Americans, where did they come from; if a person’s parents are African and European, where did that person come from? Garvey’s thinking is too simplistic, too white and black.)
It would seem that Mr. Garvey had a meeting of minds with white racists and agreed with them that the races should not be mixed, that America is for whites and Africa is for blacks. Garvey wanted separation of the races as the solution to racism. His message is for blacks to empower themselves and separate from whites.
Mr. Garvey’s message of racial separatism apparently appealed to a certain segment of the African American population, mostly the uneducated working class. This group somehow believes that their removal to Africa would solve the problem of racial discrimination in America.
The black bourgeois (by that I mean those who worked at, say, the post office, as postal clerks, mail deliverers, etc, that is, persons performing socially insignificant jobs but who within the black community were seen as very important persons) resented Garvey’s message of separation. The black middle class aspires after racial integration. They want to be like their white masters and do not appreciate any one telling them to return to Africa. Indeed, many of them tend to see Africans as primitive, as their masters had socialized them to see them. A black American is most likely to ask an African if he lives on trees than a white American asking him that question.
Apparently, the black bourgeoisie colluded with the American authorities to ship this foreigner from Jamaica back to where he came from. Apparently, on trumped mail fraud charges Mr. Garvey was arrested tried and sent to jail. Thereafter, he was deported to Jamaica in 1927, thus ending his eleven years stay in the United States.
From Jamaica Mr. Garvey attempted to resurrect his UNIA business but could not make a go of it and relocated to Britain where he died in 1940 at age 53. He lived a tumultuous life.
GARVEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF RACIAL SEPARATISM.
Racism is real and we do not need to quibble with that reality. Apparently, in the African American community there is always a segment that wants to solve the problem of racism through racial separation. These people would like to have nothing to do with racists.
Apparently, every generation of blacks produce such groups (such as Elijah Mohammad’s Nation of Islam, Young Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panthers of the 1960s, Stockley Carmichael’s Black Power movement of the 1970s and their equivalents today). These groups, it seems, have a meeting of minds with white racists.
White racists do not want blacks around them (though they do not mind using blacks to do the hard work of developing America or having sex with black women so that the majority of African Americans have mixed racial backgrounds). White racists used Africans to develop America and now want to ship them back to Africa so as to retain what they believe is their racial purity, to not be contaminated by what they believe is an inferior black race. The white racists philosophy is “use them and discard them’ but be of no use to them.
Black separatists unwittingly buy into the racists’ philosophy and would like to either return to Africa or if they stayed in America lived in separated quarters. (Some even advocate having exclusive black states, such as the old south and giving whites the Pacific North West, the part of the USA that, in climate and ambiance, is most like Western Europe.)
What can we make of this strange philosophy? Not much. It is silly. I am responding to it because Marcus Garvey still has a lot of attraction for some misguided black persons. His philosophy needs to be counteracted before impressionable minds gravitate to it, to their detriment.
Here are the scientific facts. There is only one race of mankind. There is absolutely no shred of evidence of racial differences.
All human beings came from Africa and some moved out to other regions. The regions where they subsequently settled affect their color and behavior.
All human beings, regardless of their color, are still the same. Blacks, Whites, Orientals etc are genetically 99.9% the same (the difference is in such minor issues as skin color, hair etc). Because they are the same any philosophy that teaches that they should be separated is unnatural.
It is of, course, true that whites have greater access to science, technology, money and power and tend to relegate blacks to second-class status. This is unfortunate. However, the solution to it is to help blacks have what whites have: access to education, employment and other avenues through which human beings improve themselves. Society must be restructured so that individuals are able to compete and attain whatever social goods they desire.
I believe that Marcus Garvey embraced a defeatist philosophy and to the extent he propagated that philosophy he was a defeated man and ought not to be listened to. Only a philosophy that teaches human equality and living together is real and ought to be taught and listened to.
The so-called races of mankind, whether we like it or not, will be mixed. Separation was an accident of geography. Now that the means of transportation is improving human beings will increasingly live together. As they do so they will necessarily intermingle and the result would be so-called racial mixing.
A thousand years from today most human beings would be mixed, and, perhaps, brown in color. This is the inevitable fate of mankind and we ought to deal with it. To pretend that we can prevent the inevitable is to be misguided, to be like the proverbial ostrich that hides its head in sand. We cannot escape from reality.
What we need to do is provide all children with access to scientific education so that they learn to operate at the same wavelength. We need to provide all adults equal access to employment.
In the future world, it is impossible for the individual to separate from other people; we must live together and ought to find ways to make our children equally educated so that they do not have to regress to the superstitions of the past.
Marcus Garvey was a defeatist; he took the line of least resistance; for all his bravado he was not a courageous man. If he was courageous he would have stood up to white racists and told them the truth: that we are all the same and coequal and that they had better deal with that reality rather than idiotically rant and rave about racial differences and need for separation. Garvey sought a solution that would be accepted to white racists.
Garvey was very much like his role model, Booker T. Washington. Mr. Washington recognized that Southern whites resented educated ******* who challenged their authority, and sought to appease them by having blacks not liberally educated but, instead, attend trade and vocational schools, only. W.E.B. Dubois was more courageous than Booker T Washington in that he sought equal education for blacks despite white opposition to educating blacks. (Don’t educate them; keep them ignorant so that you can manipulate them was the racists’ mantra.)
Regarding Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, if it means having all of Africa become one federation where each African ethnic group forms a state that is fine with me. I work for a unified Africa. But if by Pan Africanism one means Africans separating from other races, such a philosophy is anathema to me.
For one thing, all human beings came from Africa and justifiably can claim Africa as their home. All human beings are Africans and ought to be able to live in Africa, if they so desire, just as all Africans ought to be able to live in other parts of the world, if they so desire.
This world, every inch of it belongs to all of us, and each of us has a right to live wherever he wants to live. To separate people on the basis of race and relegate some of them to particular corners of cities, countries or the world is the height of primitive behavior, a behavior mankind must eradicate if it is to do the right thing. Living together is the right behavior. It is in doing the right thing that people would finally live in peace.
Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of racial separatism is silly and ought not to be countenanced by any rational human being. Pure reason teaches us of our oneness, equality and sameness and so we must live.
Of course we must fight racism and other obstacles to equality but that does not mean separation from any one.
Garvey was defeated by racism and unwittingly accepted the racists’ view that blacks are inferior and ought to be separated from whites; avoid racial mixing; he conceded to racists that America belongs to whites and that blacks only belonged in Africa. This is cowardice of the first order; the truth is that the entire world belongs to all human beings. Those who are one, equal and the same should live together; separation implies differences; we are not different; we are the same.
Separatists, be they whites or blacks, ought to get the fact that all mankind is one into their heads. It is not up to them to change reality and make it what their fear wants it to become; it is for them to reconcile themselves to the real and give up pursuit of racial fantasies.
The most generous way to end this piece is to say that Garveyism is understandable given the time it was propagated and the propagator’s limited education; nevertheless, it was an adolescent philosophy and has no basis in mature discourse.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
April 22, 2007
Dr Osuji can be reached at:
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
FURTHER READING
Hill, Robert A., Ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. 9 Volumes. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
Martin, Tony. Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983.
Martin, Tony. Race First: The ideological and organizational struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, MA: Majority press, 1976.
Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine
