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Chapter 3: The Rise of Marcus Garvey and His Gospel of Garveyism in Southern Africa
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63 3w The Rise of Marcus Garvey and His Gospel of Garveyism in Southern Africa In 1916, a virtually penniless, twenty-eight-year-old Marcus Garvey, the son of a stonemason and a domestic, arrived in Harlem from his home in Jamaica. His purpose was to raise funds for a school in Jamaica modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. No one would have predicted that he would not return home for eleven years, after presiding over the rise and the decline of the largest black-led movement in world history before or since. At the peak of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the early 1920s, the organization had about three hundred thousand duespaying members in nearly twelve hundred divisions in forty-three countries, among them South Africa, where there were at least twenty-four.1 In the immediate post–World War I era, Garvey channeled the anger and disillusionment of blacks worldwide to promote his goals of black economic and educational advancement, religious autonomy, African political independence, and racial unity. Skilled blacks, through strong race-based organizations, would be expected to lead the UNIA program of “African redemption,” the resurrection of a glorious African past, in an independent Africa. Garvey’s record was one of stunning success and tragic failure. He was a master propagandist and organizer but an incompetent businessman whose most ambitious business, the Black Star Line of ships, collapsed in 1922. His ideas of racial purity and racial separatism led to controversial relationships with white supremacists, and in time, these dubious associations led black rivals like W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph to demand his deportation from the United States. He was imprisoned in Atlanta and deported back to Jamaica in 1927. And yet, Garveyism had wide influence, not only in the States but also in the Caribbean and throughout the world, including 64 w American Apocalypse southern Africa. The movement became what one historian has called the first “global expression of black nationalism.”2 Garvey’s ideas took on a life of their own in forms he had not imagined. Indirectly, he played a vital role in bringing about the end of white rule. from education to radi c al poli ti c s Marcus Garvey was born on 17 August 1887, a subject of the British Empire. He was the youngest child of Sarah Jane Richards, a domestic worker and petty trader, and Malchus Garvey, a stonemason, a bibliophile with a library of his own, and a respected arbiter of village disputes. (Even Malchus’s wife called him Mr. Garvey.) Marcus played cricket and other games with the neighboring white children until his teens, when white parents forbade their offspring to consort with a “nigger.”3 A voracious reader, he consumed all of the books in the libraries of his father and godfather, Alfred Burrowes. He listened closely to the political discussions in his godfather’s print shop, where he was an apprentice, and learned new words from his pocket dictionary.4 He observed the rhetorical styles of preachers, street-corner politicians, and teachers, and he took part in debating societies and elocution contests. “All the time when I meet him,” a friend said, “he wear jacket, and, every time, his two pockets full of paper, reading and telling us things that happen all over the world. How him know, I don’t know, but him telling us.”5 The editor of the Jamaican Advocate, Joseph Love, became young Garvey ’s mentor. The Advocate decried British colonialism and American Jim Crowism and glorified the Haitian Revolution. It also published news of Pan-Africanists like Du Bois; the back-to-Africa advocate Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, whose 1900 Pan-African Conference in London initiated the Pan-African movement. Garvey began to express anticolonial ideals in a short-lived newspaper of his own, Garvey’s Watchman, and in pamphlets of public speeches, as well as when he served as secretary of the National Club, the first black nationalist organization in Jamaica to protest colonial abuses. Blackballed from local jobs when, as the only managerial foreman at a government printing plant, he sided with the workers in a labor strike, he left the island at age twenty-three. In Costa Rica, where he worked as a timekeeper, he saw “mutilated black bodies in the rivers and bushes,” and he complained about working conditions through a daily paper...