Reserve Text: From Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Chapter 7: The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition
This brings us finally to the character, or more accurately to the ideological, philosophical and epistemological natures of the Black movement whose dialectical matrix we believe was capitalist slavery and imperialism. What events have been most consistently present in its phenomenology? Which social processes has it persistently reiterated? From which social processes is it demonstrably, that is, historically alienated? How does it relate to the political order? Which ideographic constructs and semantic codes has it most often exhibited? Where have its metaphysical boundaries been most certainly fixed? What are its epistemological systems? These are the questions which we now must address, relieved from paradigulatic and categorical imperatives which have so long plagued Western scholarthip and whose insistence stemmed largely from their uncritical application and the unquestioned presumption that regardless of their historical origins they were universal. Having arrived at an historical moment, at a conjuncture, at an auspicious time where the verities of intellectual and analytical initiation are no longer as significant to the Black ideologue as they once were, where the now current but dominant traditions of Western thought have once again been revealed to have a casual rather than systemic or organic relationship to the myriad transformations of human development and history, when and this is the central issue - the most formidable apparatus of physical domination and control have disintegrated in the face of the most unlikely oppositions (India, Algeria, Angola, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Mozambique), the total configuration of human experience requires other forms.
Our first step is relatively easy because it was always there, always indicated, in the histories of the radical tradition. Again and again, in the reports, casual memoirs, official accounts, eye-witness observations and histories of each of the tradition's episodes, from the 16th Century to the events recounted in last week's or last month's journals, one note has occurred and recurred: the absence of mass violence(1) Western observers, often candid in their amazement, have repeatedly remarked that in the vast series of encounters between Blacks and their oppressors, only some of which have been recounted above, Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence which they (the Westerners) understood the situation required(2) When we recall that in the New World of the 19th Century the approximately 60 whites
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killed in the Nat Turner insurrection was one of the largest totals for that century; when we recall that in the massive uprisings of slaves in 1831 in Jamaica where 300,000 slaves lived under the domination of 30,000 whites only 14 white casualties were reported, when in revolt after revolt we compare the massive and often indiscriminate reprisals of the civilized master class (the employment of terror) to the scale of violence of the slaves (and at present their descendants), at least one impression is that a very different and shared order of things existed among these brutally violated people. (3)
Why did Nat Turner, admittedly a violent man, spare poor whites? Why did Toussaint escort his absent 'master's' family to safety before joining the slave revolution? Why was 'no white person killed in a slave rebellion in colonial Virginia'?(4) Why would Edmund Morgan or Gerald Muffin argue that slave brutality was directly related to acculturation, 'that the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freemen whom they displaced, the more dangerous they became'?(5) Every century it was the same. The people with Chilembwe in 1915 force-marched European women and children to the safety of colonist settlement.(6) And in that tradition, in the 1930's, James ambivalently found Dessalines wanting for his transgressions of the tradition. Dessalines was a military genius, yes. He was shrewd, cunning, but he was also a man whose hatred had to be kept 'in check'.(7)
There was violence of course, but in this tradition it most often was turned inward: the active against the passive, or as was the case of the Nonequase of 1856, the community against its material aspect. This was not 'savagery' as the gentlemen-soldiers of 19th and 20th Century European armies arrogantly reported to their beloved publics at home. Neither was it the 'fratricide' of Fanon*s extended Freudianism.(8) And odly seldom was it the devouring 'revolutionary terror' of the 'international bourgeois democratic revolution which Genovese's neo Marxism has led him to acknowledge (9) This violence was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as a part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations. Rather it was their 'Jonestown', our Nongquase: The renunciation of actual being for historical being,' the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system which had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair. Like those in the 1950's who took to the mountains and forests of Kenya to become the Land and Freedom Army, the material or 'objective' power of the enemy was irrelevant to their destinies. His machines which flung metal missiles, his vessels of smoke, gas, fire, disease, all were of lesser relevance than the integral totality of the people themselves. This was what Chilembwe meant when he entreated his people to 'strike a blow and die'. This is what all the Jakobos in all the thousands of Chishawashas and at all the tens of thousands of beer-parties which dot the Black world have been saying for tens of generations: 'we had only ourselves to blame for defeat'.(10) This was a revolutionary consciousness which proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social
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formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.
It becomes clear, then, that for the period between the mid-16th and mid-19th Centuries, it was an African tradition which grounded collective resistance by Blacks to slavery and colonial imperialism. This is precisely what Gerald Mullin discovered and wrote about in his study of Blacks in 18th Century Virginia. There he concluded:
Whatever the precise meaning of procurement for the African as a person, his fellowship or affectivity, a core area of human behavior, remained intact as a sIave. Africans, assuming that resistance was a group activity, ran off with their own countrymen, and Ammican-born slaves including mulattoes.(11)
Further on, he would make the point again, only differently and more to our immediate point: ' "Outlandish" Africans often reacted to their new condition by attempting to escape, either to return to Africa or to foreign settlements of fugitives to recreate their old life in the new land. These activities were not predicated upon the Africans' experience of plantation life, but on a total rejection of their lot.(12) Such was the stuff from which legends were made among the Africans. Where to deny to one's self the eating of salt (the 'ocean-sea'?) was a guarantee of the retention of the power to fly, really fly, home.(13) All of it was a part of a tradition which was considerably different from what was made of the individualistic and often spontaneous motives which energized the runaway, the arsonist, the poisoner. It more easily sustained suicide than assault, and its ideological, psycho-sclcial, cultural, and historical currencies were more charismatic than political. When its actualization was frustrated, it became obeah, voodoo, myalism, pocomania ~ the religions of the oppressed as Vittorio Lanternad put it.(14) When it was realized, it could become the Palmares, the Bush Negro settlements, and, at its heights, Haiti. But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.
It was the mind, metaphysics, ideology, consciousness which was Mackandel's tool in mid-18th Century Haiti. He persuaded the Blacks and their masters to sense the hatred of the slaves in palpable terms. Ordinary precautions were irrelevant, what the slaves could be physically obstructed from accomplishing was unimportant. Their hatred was a material force, capable of snuffing the lives from masters who had gone so far as to import their foods from France and had unloaded the precious cargo with their own hands. It was the same with Hyacinth. His army could rush the cannon of the French forces without fear or care for the volleys', shoving their arms into she cannons' mouths. They knew, they believed that 'if they were killed they would wake again in Africa'. On that final day of March, 1792, 2,000 of them 'died', to a mere 100 of their opponents, but they were doubly blessed: they won the battle and even their dead were free. (15) Boukman possessed the same truth. And so did Romaine. Nanny, who had preceded her Haitian sister by 60 years, was warmed in her mountainous retreat in Jamaica by that very same consciousness.
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They lived on their terms, they died on their terms, tbey obtained their freedom on their terms. Thus it was with obeahmen and obeahwomen, and papaloi. These were the terms which these African peasants and farmers had brought with them to their captivity. They were also the only terms in which their freedom could be acquired. At Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 1800, Gabriel had not quite realized this vision, but his George Smith did. Smith believed in Africa and knew of the 'outlandish people', that they dealt with 'Witches and Wizards, and thus [would be] useful in Armies to tell when any calamity was about to befall them'.(16) In 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina. Denmark Vesey realized it, but his Gullah Jack knew it too little. And in 1830, old Nat brought it to fruition.
Only Nat Turner, who charged his plan with supernatural signs, and sacred, poetic language that inspired action, was able to transcend the world of the plantation and the city. Only Turner led a 'sustained' insurrection.(17)
It could not be otherwise. This is what the Black radical tradition made manifest. It was a consciousness implicated in what Amos Tuluola so many generations later would name 'the bush of the ghosts'.(18) In the 20th Century, when Black radical thinkers had acquired new habits of thought in keeping, some of them supposed, with the new conditions of their people, their task eventually became the revelation of the older tradition. Not surprisingly, they would discover it first in their history, and finally all around them.
The Black radical tradition which they were to rediscover from a Black historical experience nearly grounded under the intellectual weight and authority of the official European version of the past, was to be the foundation upon which they stood. From this vantage point they could survey the theoretical, ideological and political instrumentation with winch Western radicalism approached the problem of revolutionary social change. The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of lhe historical consciousness embedded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power. And it drew them more and more towards the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history in their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to re-evaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness. After all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement. And long before the advent of the 'madmen and specialists' (as Wole Soyinka phrased it), the military dictators and neo-colonial petit bourgeoisies who in our own time have come to dominate Black societies in Africa and the Caribbean, the Black radical tradition had defined the terms of their destruction: thee continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for
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liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.
1. '.. . Atrocities by rebellious slaves in the United States did not occur often. Rebels killed whites but rarely tortured or mutilated them. They rarely, that is, committed aglinst whites the outrages that whites xegularly committed against them. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, where maroon wars and large-scale rebellions encouraged harsh actions, reactions, and reprisals, the level of violence and atrocity rose. But everywhere the overwhelming burden of evidence convicts the slaveholding regimes of countless crimes, including the most sadistic tortures, to every single act of barbarism by the slaves.' Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, op.cit.,
2. Two observations by Henry Bleby during his investigation of the Jamaican rebelhon in 1831 are quite typical: 'The hired advocate of slavery, Mr. Bortwick, in his lectures of 1833, which were designed to defend and uphold the system, and cover or misrepresent its cruelties and oppressions, laid much stress on the murders, rapes, and other outrages, said to have been committed by the slaves in Jamaica during the insurrection; and the people of Great Britain were triumphantly referred to these as examples of what might be looked for from them in the event of their emancipation, But very few instances of such bacharities were ever brought before the public properly authenticated.' And elsewhere: 'I confess [ have always regarded it as a singular feature in the history of that period, that so few instances occurred of cruelty ptactised towards the whites, whether males or females, who at different times fell into the hands of the blacks, Fifty thousand slaves were, probably, more or less concerned in the insurrection; and am ongst these, it may be, twenty -certainly not more were directly accessory to such acts of atrocity as those which we have described.' Bleby, op.cit., pp.43 and 47, respectively.
3. Returning to the Jamaican rebellion of 1831 and the earlier (1816) Barbados revolt, we are reminded of Michael Craton's description of the repressions which followed. Of Barbados, he wrote: 'Roaming slaves were shot on sight and Negro houses burned.,.. Captives were commonly tortured.... Convicted rebels were publicly executed in different parts of the island and their bodies sometimes just their heads in many cases exposed on their home estates.' (p,102) Things went similarly in Jamaica 15 years later: 'Many slaves, including women and children were shot on sight, slave huts and provisions grounds were systematically burned, and there were numerous judicial murders by summary court martial,' (p. 110) Craton, 'Proto Peasant Revolts?', op, cit., ]'he literature of slave resishnce and repression abounds in such cruelty. For the EngJish p ublic's reaction, see Bernard Semlnel, Jamaican Blood and Victorian Conscience, Houghton Miftlin, Cambridge, 1963.
4. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slaery, American Freedom, op.dt., p.309.
5. Ibid.6. SeeGe°xgeShePPetsonandThomas Price, Independent African, op. cit.,pp,272_3,
9. C'LR'James, The Black Jacobins, op. cit., p, 256; see also Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution.
8. Frantz I'anon, The 143'etched of the Earth, Grove, New York, 1963.
9. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, op. cit., pp.9-1 I. Much ol Genovese's argument (ch.3) rests on the ideology of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Toussaint, however, was neither the initiator, the organizer nor the ultimate and dominant ideologue of the slave revolutionaries or the coloured revolutionists. (see David Nicholls, From
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Dessalines to Duvalier, op.cit., pp. I 1, 171 ). And if it is true that Toussaint had achieved the status of a slaveowner himself before the revolution (David Geggus, 'Haitian Divorce': review, Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1980), this provides a part of the basis for his attraction to French revolutionary bourgeois ideology. (See James, The Black Jacobins, op. cit,, pp.91-3). In the present century, Amilcar Cabral has come closest to developing a comprehension of this phenomenon: see Cedric J, Robinson, 'Amilcar Cabral and the Dialectic of Portuguese Colonialism', Radical America, 15, 3, May/June 1981, pp.39-57.
10. '... Lawrence Vambe's two volumes of reminiscences [From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, 1976 ], dedicated as they are "To all of my fellow men who died in the cause of Freedom"... [draw] on his own memories of life in CYnishawasha viiinee when he was a child there in the 1920s to depict a society dominated by recollections of the resistances,.,, He describes how the men of the village would regularly discuss their memories of 1896 whenever a serious general problem confronted the village.. . . The risings of 1896, and the tragic readiness of all too many of the people to lose heart and go over to the enemy, form themes of Shoaa poetry? T.O, Ranger. 'The People in African Resistance', op.cit., pp.126-7.
11. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, op. cit., p. 42.
12. Ibid, p. 18.
13. 'The African [who] don't eat salt, they say they [be] come like a witch...those Africans who don't eat salt - and they interpret all things. And why you hear they say they fly away/it is because] they couldn't stand the work when the taskmaster them flog them; and they get up and they just sing their language-- and they clapping their hands -- so and they just stretch out, and them gone so -- right back, And they never come back: Ishmael Webster. My grandmother had a grand
aunt seventeen years old, and One day she in the kitchen. and she blew on her hand toot, toot and she disappear. She didn't eat salt and she went back to Africa; Elizabeth Spence.' Monica Schuler, 'Alas, Alas, Kongo', op. cit., p.93.
14. Vittorio Lanlernaxi, The Religions of the Oppressed, New American Library, New York, 1965; for charisma, see Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order, State University of New York, 1980, pp.152-9.
15, C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, op.cit., pp.20-21,108-9.
16. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, op. cit. p. 159.17, lbid., p,160; See also the discussion of religion and resistance in Olli Alho, The Religion of the Slaves, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Helsinki, 1976,
18. Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of the Ghosts, Faber and Faber, London, 1954-
