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CHAPTER 7 ERICWILLIAMS,AFRICA, AND * * * * * Fresh from a six-week tour of eleven African states, Prime Minister Eric Williams addressed one of his favorite audiences on April 22, 1964. It consisted mainly of West Indian students at McGill and Sir George Williams Universities in Montreal who had gathered to hear the former professor discuss his tour, the historical connections between Africa and the West Indies, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Energized byhis young audience , Williams said that "the historical connection between Africa, principally West Africa, is nothing to be ashamed about, though the West Indians don't like it and I get the feeling that the West Africans like it even less."1 This statement captured the historical ambivalences in the relationship between the peoples of Africa and of African descent in the Americas. Fifty years earlier (1914) Jamaican Marcus Garvey had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)to promote racial pride and a back-toAfrica movement. Eric Williams was born three years before Garveyfounded his organization and came to maturity at a time when peoples of African descent were beginning to struggle against colonialism. Intellectuals from Trinidad and Tobago played important roles in this campaign as well as in conceptualizing, fostering, and enhancing relationships among the peoples of African descent in the diaspora. Henry Sylvester Williams, for example, organized the first international gathering of Pan-Africanists in London in 1900. Attended by such African American luminaries as Anna Julia Cooper and W E. B.DuBois,the congress was called to "bring into closer touch with each other the peoples ofAfrican descent throughout the world" and "to the securing to all African races living in civilized countries their full rights," among other goals. The conferees established the Pan-African Movement to give organizational expression to their objectives and to fight for selfgovernment for colonized peoples in Africa and the Caribbean.2 AFRICANS 2 3 6 W I L L I A M S , A F R I C A , A N D A F R I C A N S The 1900 congress was held at a time when Liberia, Haiti, and Ethiopia were the only historically black countries that remained free from colonial rule. Finding this situation intolerable, the Pan-Africanists held congresses in 1921,1923,1927, and 1945 to raise the political consciousness of blacks in the diaspora and to contest European domination. Although the Pan-African Movement did not boast a large membership, the elites who comprised it were intellectually gifted, pugnacious, and eloquent in their condemnation of colonialism. Among the most prominent and influential voices were those of Trinidadians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Claudia Jones. The fledgling Pan-African Movement did not stand alone, however. Proclaiming "Africa for the Africans at home and abroad," Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association advocated an end to European domination of Africa when it was founded. The UNIA drew its membership chiefly from the lower middle and working classes and from persons who were phenotypically black. Espousing a philosophy of "race first," the association promoted the interests of blacks worldwide, including the assumption of political power and the assertion of economic independence. Garveyism politicized millions of blacks in the diaspora, but the dream of an end to colonial rule was never achieved in its heyday. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 dramatized the political weakness of blacks universally, although it elicited angry protests and demonstrations in the United States and elsewhere . Emperor Haile Selassie and Ethiopia came to represent the plight of blacks who were the victims of foreign domination, emphasizing the need to struggle against it and to command their own destinies. The anticolonial struggle was only partially driven by such developments as the American occupation of Haiti, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the racist ideology and its practice that caused World War II. Its major impetus came primarily from internal developments in the black colonial world. The Pan-African Movement and Garveyism had sensitized many people to fight for political independence. Colonized peoples and blacks in the United States were becoming increasingly literate, in many cases forming an expanding professional group and a growing middle class. Some of these highly skilled individuals were frozen out of jobs they deserved, as the colonial state and other employers preferred to hire whites. Such exclusionary practices based on race fed the demands for political change. Though it would be erroneous to maintain that the colonized peoples had never challenged their status, it is clear that new...

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