Black Power in the Caribbean

3. The Abeng Newspaper and the Radical Politics of Postcolonial Blackness

3 The Abeng Newspaper and the Radical Politics of Postcolonial Blackness ANTHONY BOGUES Black Power. I believe that this slogan is destined to become one of the great political slogans of our time. Of course, only Time itself can tell that. Nevertheless when we see how powerful an impact this slogan has made it is obvious that it touches very sensitive nerves in the political consciousness of the world today. C.L.R. James, “Black Power” The political slogan “Black Power” reverberated in North American society and found wings in the Caribbean.1 It was not the first time in the twentieth century that a radical black political idea had found motion, moving across the black world. One cannot think of twentieth-century black radicalism without grappling with political ideas that may have begun in one locale of the black world and worked their ways into different parts of the black diaspora. From Garveyism to Pan-Africanism to the radical black politics of George Padmore, there exists a long history of black political practices and thought that has been both transnational and internationalist. This internationalism has had two dimensions. In the first instance, it seeks to gather Africans and African-diaspora populations into a form of programmatic unity, and while oftentimes operating at a locally specific level, pays serious attention to transnational forms of political solidarity. Secondly, this form of politics, depending on the context of its practice, is antiracist, anticolonial, and anti-imperial. Thus Black Power in the Caribbean and Jamaica should be located within a historical trajectory in which it is understood as an an- The Abeng Newspaper and the Radical Politics of Postcolonial Blackness 77 ticolonial and anti-imperial instantiation of twentieth-century radical black politics reconfigured in a juridically postcolonial site. With this historical injunction in mind, we turn to the Abeng newspaper, founded as part of a radical political moment in the history of postindependence Jamaica. In twentieth-century radical politics, the newspaper has been both a tool of communication and a vehicle that creates and affirms critical consciousness while organizing and mobilizing significant social forces into action. Thus, typically radical political newspapers were interventionist political entities. They exposed fault lines in society, advocated clear political positions , and did so in order to facilitate the emergence and growth of a social and political movement. Historically, in some instances radical newspapers were the direct outgrowth of a movement already in motion. In others, the newspaper was both the expression and the organizer of the movement, with its primary role being to make possible the creation of organizational structures . In such a context, the radical newspaper, while giving form to the movement in motion, performs a double role: it is a bearer of critical consciousness and an organizer of social groups. It is important here to distinguish between the newspaper that attempts to create critical consciousness and engages in various forms of criticism while “speaking truth to power” and the newspaper that emerges out of social/political action and considers itself expressing the mood of the times while seeking to be that movement’s organizing tool. The Abeng newspaper belonged to this latter type, and its brief, explosive growth and then demise is an important story of a specific moment in postcolonial Jamaican politics. The folding of the newspaper in October 1969 was followed a few years later by the formal liquidation of the Abeng group as a political grouping, whose demise marked a specific moment of radical black independent politics in postcolonial Jamaica. The Context of Abeng The Abeng newspaper operated for nine months in 1969. It began publication in a period of social and political maelstrom in postcolonial Jamaica. In 1962, Jamaica had formally achieved political independence through the process of constitutional decolonization. This form of political independence occurred within the global context of the historical and political demise of colonial empires in the second half of the twentieth century. The post–World War Two end of colonial empires wrought changes within global politics, with the newly independent nation-states enlarging the terrain of international politics. However, these former colonies achieved nationhood during Anthony Bogues 78 the Cold War and under the long shadow of preeminent U.S. power—factors that were crucial in influencing the shape of postindependence politics and society in the Anglophone Caribbean. Thus, for example, in 1961, with political independence for the Caribbean in the air, there was discussion...