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Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean BLACK INTERNATIONALISM AND AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN INTELLECTUALS IN LONDON, 1919-1950 By MARC MATERA A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Professor Bonnie G. Smith And approved by _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919-1950 By MARC MATERA Dissertation Director: Bonnie G. Smith During the three decades between the end of World War I and 1950, African and West Indian scholars, professionals, university students, artists, and political activists in London forged new conceptions of community, reshaped public debates about the nature and goals of British colonialism, and prepared the way for a revolutionary and self-consciously modern African culture. Black intellectuals formed organizations that became homes away from home and centers of cultural mixture and intellectual debate, and launched publications that served as new means of voicing social commentary and political dissent. These black associations developed within an atmosphere characterized by a variety of internationalisms, including pan-ethnic movements, feminism, communism, and the socialist internationalism ascendant within the British Left after World War I. The intellectual and political context of London and the types of sociability that these groups fostered gave rise to a range of black internationalist activity and new regional imaginaries in the form of a West Indian Federation and a United West Africa that shaped the goals of anticolonialism before 1950. This dissertation examines the black organizations and other social spaces that brought people of African descent together in London to illustrate how the city functioned, at once, as imperial metropolis and global city, as the administrative center of the British Empire and the nexus of black resistance to racism and imperialism. ii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Afro-Metropolis: Black Political and Cultural Associations in London 11 Chapter 2 – Black Internationalism, Empire, and Sovereignty in the Metropole 102 Chapter 3 – In Search of Pan-Africanist Women: Black Internationalism and Feminism 164 Chapter 4 – African and West Indian Men and Sexuality 228 Chapter 5 – Black Intellectuals and the Emergence of Colonial Studies in Britain 271 Chapter 6 – The Invention of Colonial Development and the British Empire at War 319 Chapter 7 – The Labour Party on Trial: Black Intellectuals and Leftist Internationalism 382 Conclusion 463 Bibliography 471 Curriculum Vitae 481 iii 1 Introduction The presence of people of African descent in London typically is associated with the postwar period, linked indelibly to migration since the 1950s in the public narratives of the rise of multi-ethnic Britain. Yet, the early twentieth century also witnessed a sustained, if much more limited, influx of Africans and West Indians into the imperial metropole. During the years between 1919 and 1950—a period in which the Colonial Office’s approach shifted from a policy of indirect rule to colonial development—African and West Indian university students, professionals, artists, and activists in London established a number of organizations and publications that facilitated dialogue with the imperial state and the circulation of ideas and news around the Atlantic and throughout the British empire. Black associations became homes away from home, centers of cultural and intellectual exchange, and new means of voicing social commentary and political dissent. Through them, black intellectuals influenced the political imagination of British colonial officials, politicians, and others interested in Africa and the colonies, contributing to the major fluctuations in colonial policy during the final decades of imperial rule. Many of these individuals returned to Africa and the Caribbean in the years after World War II to become leaders of incipient anticolonial movements and prominent postcolonial politicians. The experiences of Caribbean and African intellectuals like Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah at the heart of the empire were often decisive in their intellectual and political development, making them a significant part of the prehistory of decolonization.1 1 See Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1968), p. 66. 2 In addition to developments in the colonies, both the racial discrimination and relative freedom that Africans and West Indians discovered in London informed their changing political commitments and personal identifications. The city attracted students, artists, activists, petitioners, and migrants from the colonies and brought them into contact with one another, African Americans, others from throughout the empire, and Britons from across the socio-economic spectrum. While some traveled to Britain to draw publicity to colonial issues or agitate for reform, many more, provoked by British ignorance and racism, engaged in political activities for the first time in the metropole. In 1936, Eric Walrond observed, “it is indeed a paradox that London, the capital of the largest Negro Empire in the world—the cradle of English liberty, justice and fair-play—the city to which Frederick Douglas fled as a fugitive from slavery—should be so extremely inexpert in the matter of interracial relations….”2 This “paradox” shaped the lives of black sojourners in London, who were interpellated as representatives of the larger collectivities of colony and race. In the early 1960s, a Nigerian university student wrote, “Down the ages, it as been the traveller who has helped to disseminate knowledge and who served as the unofficial ambassador of his own country.” When these “messenger[s] of peace” are themselves students who share a “common experience of bitterness and disappointment,” “the problem becomes more threatening, as impressions of scholastic days are erased only with difficulty, and most of the students of today are the leaders of tomorrow….”3 The capital of the far-flung British Empire, London became the frontline in the black struggle against British imperialism during the interwar years, and many West Indian and African intellectuals embraced black internationalism for the first time within the cosmopolitan space of the imperial metropole. 2 Eric Walrond, “The Negro in London,” Black Man 1, 12 (March 1936), p. 10. 3 Henri Tajfel, ed., Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian, and West Indian Students (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 2. 3 This dissertation explores the relation between the development of black internationalism and the exigencies and possibilities of metropolitan location by examining the whole social and intellectual lives of West Indians and Africans in London, not just their explicitly political activities. Black students gained their political education in the small apartments, cafés, and black organizations where they spent most their time as much as the universities of the metropole. The circulation of material forms and practices and a variety of social settings like the West African Student Union’s hostel became the quotidian basis of new collective identifications. These specific social spaces enabled cultural exchange and engendered new political imaginaries that contributed to a range of black internationalist activity. African and Caribbean intellectuals often mobilized the very terms of the colonial regime—concepts such as “Commonwealth,” “partnership,” “self-government,” and “development”—to articulate a variety of extra-national identifications, press for political reforms, and make material claims on the imperial government. In the end, of course, black intellectuals and activists were unable to move British politicians and colonial officials enough to create a truly equitable relationship within the framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and, by the 1950s, the continued existence of empire, in whatever guise, became abhorrent to increasing numbers of colonial subjects and sympathetic groups in the metropole alike. Most of the former ultimately chose to heed Kwame Nkurmah’s call to “seek ye first the political kingdom” of the colonial state and embraced, if any, a vision of pan-Africanism that entailed little more than cooperation between independent nation-states. Nonetheless, the anticolonial nationalisms of the 1950s and 1960s and the particular form of postcolonial states which they helped produce were not the results of an inevitable development, but rather triumphed at the expense of a number of 4 extra-national or international possibilities that circulated in the years prior to decolonization, from various conceptions of global black unity to socialist and communist versions of internationalism to empire. The political imagination of black intellectuals in London extended beyond (and challenged) the model of the nation-state in the decades before the dissolution of the major European empires led to the emergence of new independent states around the world.4 This thesis also considers the areas of convergence and dissonance between black intellectuals’ conceptions of pan-African or pan-“coloured” unity and their changing views on the British Empire. As the
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