From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution

Providential Design: American Negroes and Garveyism in South Africa

Providential Design American Negroes and Garveyism in South Africa robert vinson The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) was the largest and most widespread black movement ever. At its height in the early 1920s, the UNIA had an estimated 2 million members and sympathizers and more than 1,000 chapters in forty-three countries and territories. Founded and led by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, the New York–based UNIA’s meteoric rise resulted from an agenda that included shipping lines, corporations, and universities; a Liberian colonization scheme; a resolute desire to reconstitute African independence; and a fierce racial pride. Outside North America and the Caribbean, these aims and ideals—generically called Garveyism—had their greatest impact in South Africa, as reflected inthatcountry’seightofficialandnumerousunofficialUNIA chapters.Garveyism , furthermore, pervaded black South African political, religious, educational , and socioeconomic movements throughout the 1920s and 1930s.1 In this essay I make three arguments. First, Garveyism in South Africa was related to notions of “Providential Design” and modernity, which were central to the racial interface between black South Africans and “American Negroes,” a category that encompassed black West Indians as well as African Americans. Second, an international black sailing community played a crucial role in transmitting Garveyism from the Americas into South African political culture. Third, in South Africa, as elsewhere in the black world, religion was an important aspect of Garveyism. The conclusions here offered contrast sharply with interpretations that confine the UNIA to South Africa’s national boundaries, only to assert in the end that Garveyism was a “rather remote model” in that country’s black freedom struggle.2 Far from being peripheral, I argue, Garveyism was a central aspect of black South Africa’s political culture in the interwar years. Besides charting a transnational dimension of the black South African experience in the twentieth century, I also seek to call attention to the relative neglect of Africa and Africans in African Diaspora studies. In short, I make the case for a “homeland and diaspora” model that bridges the study of Africa and the African Diaspora.3 Segregation, Black Modernity, and Providential Design: The Making of a Transnational Relationship Britain’s conquestofvariousindependent Africanstatesinthenineteenthcentury ,alongwithitswaragainsttheAfrikanerRepublicsbetween1899and1902, culminated in the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Union of South Africa was part and parcel of a crystallization of segregation, in both thoughtandlegislation,intoarace-basedpoliticalandsocioeconomicprogram that would spur rapid industrial growth. The discovery in the late nineteenth century of gold and diamonds made SouthAfrica the world’s largest producer of both commodities, setting the stage for its transformation from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrializing one that relied on cheap African labor. Ultimately, segregation aimed to make the agricultural self-sufficiency of many Africans virtually impossible,thus compelling them to sell their labor to white-controlled mines, farms, and industry.4 As officialgovernmentpolicy,SouthAfricansegregationwasimplemented through a coordinated set of racially discriminatory legislation, the most significantofwhichincludedtheNativesLandActof1913andtheNatives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. The Natives Land Act rendered millions of Africans landless , forcing them to sell their labor cheaply to white-owned mines, farms, and other industries. The architects of South African segregation were hardly bashfulabouttheirobjectives.JanHofmeyr,oneofthemostprominentamong them, stated, “It is inconceivable that the white man should be able completely to dispense with the black man’s labor on his farms, in his mines, in his factories ; it is just as inconceivable that there should be set aside for the black man’s occupationlandsufficienttoprovideforallhisneedsindependentofthewhite man’s wages.”5 The Natives (Urban Areas) Act was the urban equivalent of the Natives Land Act. The Urban Areas Act undergirded a policy that sharply controlled and restricted the movement of Africans from country to town, allowing them into the urban centers only insofar as their labor was necessary to “minister to the white man’s needs.” Africans were also denied the right to Garveyism in South Africa 131 vote,were condemnedto thelowest-payingjobsby“color-bar”legislation,and had little judicial recourse against their systematic subordination. The rise of segregation in South Africa paralleled the emergence of Jim Crow in the United States, and therewas a direct relationship between the two systems of racial oppression. In this context Garveyism arrived and flourished in South Africa. Indeed, the black South African encounter with Garveyism merely continued, and deepened, a decades-long transatlantic relationship. Since the late nineteenth century, at least, black South Africans had seen African Americans as quintessential modern black people...