Capital and Empire in Africa (Dispatch from Lisbon)

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022)

The spirit of inquiry of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has imparted a distinct geographical flavour to the records of Portuguese activity in Africa in that era. Indeed, whatever short-comings those records possess must be attributed to the Portuguese preoccupation with the gathering of geographical data, to the exclusion of much else. As the Portuguese moved south along the west coast of Africa, their main concern was the preparation of navigational aids, necessitating a close attention to detail. Frequent soundings were made off the coast and in the rivers, and wind and weather conditions scrupulously noted. In 1634, the Conselho da Fazenda approved the payment of a pension to Miguel Albernas, who had been in their service as a cartographer on the Upper Guinea Coast.” The result of his work, like the work of so many others relating to Asia and Africa, must have been known only to the Portuguese authorities, since it was the policy to keep such information out of the hands of rivals.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese roteiros, or charts, in spite of their limited objectives, are extremely useful introductions to the geography and the history of the Upper Guinea Coast. More substantial information followed later as European commercial activities intensified and forced them to look more closely at the land from which they hoped to reap a profit. Sierra Leone was particularly favoured, since inquiries were conducted with a view to Portuguese colonization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, English and French colonization projects generated similar interest. On the basis of such evidence, and with some recourse to more recent and more scientific studies, one can construct a tolerably accurate geography of the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount, which is the region described by the term ‘Upper Guinea Coast’ in this study... 

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Together with the Senegambia, the Upper Guinea Coast was being exploited for slaves in the 1460s, even before the southern sections of the West African coast had been charted by the Portuguese. Four hundred years later, the Atlantic slave trade was still being prosecuted in the area. Over this span of centuries, the Upper Guinea Coast was involved in all the phases of the slave trade. It supplied Europe, the mines of Central and South America, and the plantations of the Caribbean and North America. In the late eighteenth century, it was Sierra Leone that was chosen as the site for the first settlement of freed slaves in West Africa; yet in spite of this memorial to freedom, and in spite of the British Navy, the slavers were still present in the neighbouring estuaries and rias until the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, though the Upper Guinea Coast was not as notorious and unfortunate as Angola and the Bight, it is in many ways a classic region for the study of the Atlantic slave trade.

Fifty years after these shores had been seen by the Portuguese, the latter were shipping abroad, ‘when the trade of the country was well ordered’, more than 3,500 Africans every year. Captives taken were mainly destined for the nearby Cape Verde islands and the Iberian peninsula, with Madeira and the Canary Islands providing secondary markets. Sometimes captives from this section of the coast were procured by passing ships and became galley slaves—as, for example, in 1504, when the East Indies fleet of Alfonso de Albuquerque obtained seventy Negroes at Santiago.” This may also have applied to ships bound for the Americas. The Cape Verde islands were situated on the route of the sailing vessels proceeding from Portugal to Brazil, and it is not unlikely that small numbers of Africans from Upper Guinea were carried as slaves to Brazil at an early date.

It was the Spanish market which held out the greatest prospects. After the famous pleas of Las Casas, Charles V granted to a courtier the right to furnish 4,000 slaves to the Antilles, and the deal was eventually carried through by Genoese merchants, who made their purchases in Lisbon. A great portion of these slaves were obtained through Cape Verde enterprise. In 1512 a royal edict had declared that all Guinea slaves should go directly to Lisbon. The Cape Verdeans protested that in that event no ships from Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, or Spain would visit the Cape Verde islands,” and they may have broken this strict provision. In any event, many of the slaves on the Lisbon market would have been acquired on the Upper Guinea Coast and in the Senegambia. Indirectly, therefore, Upper Guinea was in touch with the market in the Spanish Indies since the second decade of the sixteenth century. By the second half of that century, the Spanish Indies had become the principal destination of captives from this area...

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In 1755 the captain-major of Cacheu reported aggrievedly that an English ship from Barbados had gone straight up to Zeguichor on the river Casamance without a pilot—something which no Portuguese captain had ever done. This was truly symbolic, because it was in the sphere of navigation that Portugal had led the world in the fifteenth century. But the financial infrastructure of European mercantilism and nascent industrial capitalism was never developed within the Iberian peninsula, so that the profits of Iberian expansion ultimately flowed to banking, commercial, and manufacturing centres outside of Portugal and Spain. With pretensions to a monopoly of world trade completely shattered by the seventeenth century, Portugal became a depressed area of the Western European economy.

Of course capitalism, even in the days of chauvinist mercantilism, was already an international phenomenon; and all Western European states displayed a great degree of interdependence in buying, selling, and transporting goods intended for Africa. However, Portugal’s relationship was one of dependency rather than equality. Joao Barreto stresses Portugal’s weakness as an apologia for that country’s responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade. His argument is that Portugal’s moral blameworthiness should be proportionate to the small profits they reaped. He says:

It is curious to note that the economy of Portugal was the one which profited least from the slave trade. In the first place, the national mercantile fleet was very limited; the majority of the ships which, since the sixteenth century, were used to carry slaves from the African coast being foreign, and no gain accrued to Portugal. . . . In the second place, Portugal did not produce the articles which the slavers made use of in their transactions with the peoples of Africa: cotton cloths, trumpery, beads, mirrors, iron, etc. 

Moral sophistry aside, he is substantially correct. 

Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1-2; 95-96; 242-243. A revision of his doctoral dissertation completed in 1966 at SOAS based upon work in the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and British Archives, Rodney’s first book is a great work of historical research and writing. Reflecting on his reliance on European sources from his post in Dar es Salam, Rodney wrote that “stumbling over such barriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.” “My debt,” he wrote in the preface to his book, “is greatest to the irredentist masses of the British Caribbean, who provided inspiration and finances (via the University of the West Indies).” He ended his preface with a philosophy of history: “I have sought to ensure that the integrity of the evidence was respected at all times, for this has always been demanded from those who practise the writing of history. Beyond that, the interpreter is himself nothing but a spokesman for historical forces.” 

Capital and Empire in Asia (Dispatch from Lisbon)

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022)

 

Though [Pedro Alvarez] Cabral had sailed away, the Portuguese had not abandoned the Indian Ocean. On the contrary, Dom Manoel assumed for himself the title of ‘The Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’ and fitted out an even stronger expedition with orders to enforce his claim to the supremacy of the Indian seas. It was Vasco da Gama himself who was appointed captain-major of this fleet. The fleet consisted of fifteen ships of which six were larger and more powerfully equipped than those which had previously arrived in the Indian sea. San Jeronymo was the flagship. The other five were lateen rigged caravels fitted with heavy artillery and the expedition carried 800 trained soldiers. Since it was realized that there might be serious opposition a reinforcement of five vessels under Estavo da Gama was sent five months later. 

The most impressive fact about this first and most decisive period of Portuguese endeavour is the remarkable manner in which the fleets in the East were kept reinforced by the Portuguese home government. Armada followed armada in unending succession under trained captains, and the Portuguese chiefs in the Indian waters knew that men and ships were on the way bringing succor to them. Even in the most difficult circumstances they could therefore hold out with the firm conviction that help was not far away. In this work, the Portuguese Government had the financial backing of the great merchant princes of Antwerp who, realizing the revolutionary change in trade that the Portuguese discoveries involved, had hastened to annex the benefits. The Weslers, for example, had invested in the Portuguese voyages of 1505, and the Lisbon Government had found it necessary as early as 1503 to open a depot for spices in Antwerp. To this system of continuous reinforcements, worked out by Dom Manoel with the assistance of Antwerp capital, must be attributed the success that attended the navies of Portugal on the Eastern seas. 

Da Gama and his associates, even before they reached the coast of India, began to enforce the claim of his sovereign to be ‘the Lord of Navigation’. Without any kind of warning he intercepted and destroyed any vessel he came across on his voyage. The following incident quoted in Lendas da India is typical of the policy of terrorism and piracy that he introduced into Indian waters. The Portuguese armada ran across some unarmed vessels returning from Mecca. Vasco da Gama captured them and in the words of Lendas, ‘after making the ships empty of goods, prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor and then ordered them to set fire to it’. The explanation for capturing the vessel is perhaps to be found in Barroes’ remark: ‘It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe and therefore the Portuguese as Lords of the Sea are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.’ 

Strange and comprehensive claim, yet basically one which every European nation, in its turn, held firmly almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. It is true that no other nation put it forward so crudely or tried to enforce it so barbarously as the Portuguese in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but the principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking (e.g. the burning of the Summer Palace) and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples (as for example when Britain insisted on the opium trade against the laws of China, though opium smoking was prohibited by law in England itself) was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia. So late as 1870 the President of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘China can in no sense be considered a country entitled to all the same rights and privileges as civilized nations which arc bound by international law. Till the end of European domination the fact that rights existed for Asians against Europeans was conceded only with considerable mental reservation. In countries under direct British occupation, like India, Burma and Ceylon, there were equal rights established by law, but that as against Europeans the law was not enforced very rigorously was known and recognized. In China, under extra-territorial jurisdiction, Europeans were protected against the operation of Chinese laws. In fact, except in Japan this doctrine of different rights persisted to the very end and was a prime cause of Europe’s ultimate failure in Asia. 

K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History 1498–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953), 41-43. Panikkar (1895–1963) was a prominent historian and diplomat in late colonial and post-colonial India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the author of a number of scholarly histories of the Portuguese Empire and its personalities, has contested Panikkar’s characterizations of da Gama and described Panikkar variously as an “idealogue” and “Indian nationalist,” which he was. Asia and Western Dominance was completed in 1951, just as Panikkar was finishing his tenure as Indian ambassador to China and moving to Cairo to become Indian ambassador to Egypt, however the idea for the book was conceived much earlier. “In 1925,” he recounts, “when I went to Portugal I visited the port of Belem from which Vasco da Gama set out on his fateful voyage to India and marveled at the momentous changes unleashed on the world by that trivial event. It was then that the idea of writing a full scale history of European domination over the Asian continent had occurred to me.” As an idealogue and nationalist, Panikkar oversaw the organization and elaboration of a series of cultural and intellectual projects related to the writing and publication of Indian and Asian history (more on those efforts, at length, in the future).

 

Third World? Which Third World? — Pierre Jalée (1963)

Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia 1:7 (November 1963).

Although we may not agree with some of the author’s sweeping historical claims below, in a time of renewed academic interest in the history of the Third World and mainstream enthusiasm for its cognate “the Global South,'' strident critiques are useful as ever. Published in Jacques Vergès' great if short lived Parisian journal of tricontinental Marxism, Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia Pierre Jalée’s 1963 essay below is characteristic of the moment and the magazine. Enthusiastic about Maoist China, deeply critical of Kruschev’s “revisionism,” and skeptical of Nehru’s non-alignment, Revolution published regular dispatches from those movements of national liberation still raging and acerbic criticism of imperialist thought and practice. Its editorial board would include Hamza Alavi, Hassan Diab (Samir Amin). Mohamed Babu, and Maulana Bhashani, as the historian Layli Uddin has noted. Siné drew many of the magazine’s brilliant cartoons. 

Despite being a prolific and widely published writer, very little has been written about Jalée himself. The pseudonym of Maurice Rue, a French communist closely involved with the nationalist movement in Morocco in the 1930s—and imprisoned for that activity—Jalée would go on to serve the independent Moroccan state’s finance ministry, before moving to France. His many books on the political economy of imperialism were published by Maspero and in English translations by the Monthly Review Press. Texts like The Pillage of the Third World, The Third World in World Economy, and How Capitalism Works, pepper the bibliographies of the 1960s and 70s. Pillage was among the 99 books removed from George Jackson’s prison cell after he was murdered in San Quentin. Jalée’s Moroccan career is detailed in a memoir, L'ancre dans l'avenir (Paris: Karthala, 1981). And the French conditions of his efforts are narrated in Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). But Jalée’s life and work deserves serious study.

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Third World? Which Third World? 

Although it first appeared only in 1956, the expression "Third World" has already had a brilliant career. Quickly entering the vocabulary of the economist and the journalist, it is known today even to the man on the street. Blossoming generously under the pens of capitalist technocrats and politicians, it nevertheless is not rare to find it also being used by Marxist theorists. The neo-colonialist and the neo-colonial use it. Even Frantz Fanon used it.

There is only a step to believing that this universality of use is explained by a clear, precise and indisputable meaning. However, let us not take that step until we have attempted to make an inventory of the term. 

For the French association which calls itself "Tiers Monde" (Third World), the problem is simple: there is an identity between the so-called countries of the "Third World" and the underdeveloped countries. But others have felt the need to try to be more precise. Jean Lacouture and Jean Baumier, in the preface to their book, Le Poids du Tiers Monde (Arthaud, Paris, 1962), try to explore the reality masked by these two familiar words. After referring to a kind of Third Estate or international Third Force, they suggest that the Third World might represent ex-colonial, underdeveloped countries, or, further yet, stand for the countries which refuse, if not socialism and capitalism, at least the socialist camp as well as the imperialist camp. The idea is put forward that the Third World might be made up of the nations which have benefited neither from the liberal capitalist and industrial revolution of the 19th century nor the socialist revolution of the 20th century and which seek their own form of revolution. Our two authors, after having been seduced by the definition "countries carrying out an inventory," finally decide on no single definition and leave the reader still unsatisfied.

The November 1962 issue of the French publication, Documents (La Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris), devoted to "Aid to the Third World," seems to go a bit further with less words, in so far as it denounces the confusion reigning about this "ready-made formula," a confusion which arises from the fact that the meaning of the term is essentially political, although it is usual to use it in an economic sense to designate all the underdeveloped countries.

To unmask a confused and even confusion-making term is already good but one should go further. For us — and although we have used this expression elsewhere — , we shall not wait to throw our pebble into the stream: there is no Third World. This expression is more than confused, it is a mystification.

Indeed, to call a group of countries without further definition the Third World is to say expressly that this group of countries belongs neither to the group of socialist countries nor to the group of capitalist countries. Objectively, such a group of countries does not exist, even if one wanted to make a faulty distinction between politics and economics.

The expression "Third World" can only have meaning by reference to the two other "worlds": the group of capitalist countries and the group of socialist countries or countries committed to socialism. It implies that the countries to which one applies the term belong to neither one nor the other, which is obviously false. But it is necessary to examine the question more closely.

A Third Force?

The expression "Third World," as has been said, dates from 1956. It could hardly be born or have much success before, because the Bandung Conference was held in 1955, and the equivocable nature of the expression depends upon the policy developed by the Afro-Asian countries after Bandung.

Indeed, the majority of these countries defined and claim to carry out an international policy which they qualify as "neutralist" or "non-aligned" or "non-committed," aimed at maintaining a certain independence in regard to the international policy of both of the two big blocs. Some persons even believed or let themselves be convinced that a third world force was coming into being.

But imperialism was sufficiently supple to tolerate youthful sins on the part of the newly independent countries, pardonable sins which consisted of affirming principles which in any case it would be difficult to oppose openly. The situation called for generous understanding of the countries obtaining their political emancipation. It was to let time and American aid do their work and to take action individually in concrete cases. The Congo was one of these, and it must be admitted that the non-committed countries did not cause many major worries for the imperialist camp on that occasion, the principal difficulty having arisen within the imperialist camp itself. In 1963, some twenty African States finally showed how docile they were by renouncing their demand that South Africa be expelled from the United Nations. They were left Portugal as a target, which embarrassed few persons, even in the West.

Hence, there is no third force either on a global scale or on that of various States. And this for the sole and sufficient reason that economics commands politics, and at present only two economic systems divide and dispute the world: capitalism and socialism. The so-called third ways are never more than a camouflage for the first, as Theodore Stibbe, in numbers 4 and 5 of the French review Partisans, and the Peking Review (in its issue of April 15, 1963—"Socialism and Nehru") effectively demonstrated in the case of India. The same is true for all the countries lumped together under the term "Third World," as well as for others. North Vietnam and Senegal are both underdeveloped countries; but the former belongs from every angle to the group of socialist countries, the second to the group of capitalist countries. There is no other problem, no other basic choice, and Jean Lacouture and Jean Baumier put forward an already exposed untruth knowingly a mystification, when they claim that "the debate between capitalism and socialism appears, from many aspects, to be outdated, at least in the Third World." Have they cited a single country that has escaped the dilemma?

The Storm Centres

But, no doubt we shall be asked, you are not going to place on the same footing, although classifying them in the same world, the United States, which has an annual per capita revenue of $2,400 and directs (not without difficulty) the politics of half the planet, and Morocco, whose national per capita revenue does not exceed $130? — Certainly, there can be no question of mixing together the great powers and the small, technically backward countries, the dominating and dominated economies. But the fact that imperialism has an essential internal contradiction between exploiting and exploited countries does not remove any of its unity. This unity is indeed the fruit of this contradiction, without which imperialism would not be imperialism. And the fact that the United States, Britain, France and several other countries exploit for the profit of their monopolist capital the economy of twenty countries of Africa and, in order to do this, guide or control the policy of those countries, not only does not remove the fact that both are basically part of imperialism, but creates that fact. On the other hand, although Morocco and Cuba have in common numerous characteristics that greatly distinguish them from the United States and France, it is nevertheless true that there is a primordial difference between them. One has maintained its ties with imperialism, the other has broken them. The former is politically and economically part of one group of coun- tries, the second part of another group. There is no third indeed, the most certain consequence of the expression "Third World" is to conceal that fact and confuse people. group. And, indeed, the most certain consequence of the expression “Third World” is to conceal that fact and confuse people. 

Every coin has two faces; let us recognize, nevertheless, that the fact of grouping together the underdeveloped countries dominated by imperialism under a special term, implies that they constitute a special zone within the imperialist camp. This is almost a preliminary hommage to an emancipation that is felt to be inevitable and relatively near. The "Third World," in its current use, means the underlings of imperialism. But these underlings are more or less aware of that and aspire with greater or lesser confusion to be that no longer. "Black Africa has had a bad start," some say, while others say it has not started off at all. In any case, it is the question of its departure, or new departure, that is in the air.

The countries given the misleading name of "Third World" are those at present where plots are multiplying against leaders committed to imperial- ism. Whether these plots are real or not, exaggerated or minimized, whether they do not often appear to have an immediate positive aspect, it is none the less true that plots in general do not flourish in the countries where the population is satisfied with its fate and the regime. They imply, if not popular support for the plots, at least a certain receptivity among the masses. Objectively, the gap does not cease to widen, despite all the "aid," between the economic level of the dominated underdeveloped countries and that of the countries that exploit them. And the weak national bourgeoisies in power in the former submit more and more to imperialism, sinking into nepotism and an insulting luxury amidst poverty. These countries in a state of ferment represent without a doubt the point of weakest resistance of the imperialist front. Some of them have already reached the stage of open struggle. And the Chinese Communists are right in seeing in them "the storm centres." "The various types of contradictions in the contemporary world are concentrated in the vast areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America; these are the most vulnerable areas under imperialist rule and the storm-centres of world revolution dealing direct blows to imperialism." (A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, June 14, 1963.)

The Basic Choice

Hence there is no Third World, but there are storm centres. The revolutionary can ask himself under which conditions will these areas be that of the good storm.

The basic conditions were defined impeccably in a speech of April 13, 1963 by Le-Duan, secretary-general of the Lao-Dong Party of North Vietnam: "The immediate task of the peoples of these nations must be that of foiling and breaking imperialism's attempts at domination. For independent nations, this task is reduced to a choice between two roads: the non-capitalist road of development or the capitalist road of development." This is an absolute condemnation of any so-called third road. One does not compromise with imperialism, one does not limit it or temper it: one breaks with it or one submits. 

If this is the golden rule for the countries directly concerned, it is also the rule that guides the action of the socialist countries and the proletarians of the developed capitalist countries in regard to the emancipation of the underdeveloped countries. And it is difficult to explain why certain leaders of Western Communist parties are maintaining that States with different social structures (capitalist and socialist) can, through mutual cooperation, intervene jointly for the progress of the underdeveloped regions. This is to misunderstand the very essence of imperialism, and one can understand why the Peking People's Daily, in December 1962, spoke out against the principle of "joint intervention," recalling that "the policy of imperialism in regard to the underdeveloped countries... can only be a policy of colonialist pillage: it can never be a policy concerned with the progress of the underdeveloped countries." The organ of the Chinese Communist Party stressed that it was obvious that the socialist countries must aid the peoples of the underdeveloped countries, first to conquer independence, then to develop their national economy. "But," it added, "the socialist countries must not second the colonialist policy of the imperialists, still less intervene jointly at their side in the underdeveloped areas. Whoever acted in that fashion would betray proletarian internationalism and serve the interests of imperialism and colonialism."

Hence, the fundamental choice between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and non-collaboration with imperialism.

But a primordial question of strategy is raised for the socialist countries and the world revolutionary movement: that of the importance of the aid to be given to the peoples of the storm centres. The Leninist theory that the front of imperialism is not uniformly strong is well known, and the clashes occur at the weakest points, with the best chances of success for the anti-imperialist forces. If, therefore, the "underlings of imperialism" are also its point of least resistance, if in these countries the storm threatens here and already rages there, it is obvious that the principal effort of the world revolutionary movement must be made in these areas in order to open a wide breech in the enemy front, which may determine the outcome of

the struggle. 

Thus, the letter of June 14 of the Chinese Communist Party, after recalling that the national revolutionary movement of the areas of the storm centre and the socialist revolutionary movement in the world are the two great historical tendencies of our epoch, adds: "In a sense, therefore, the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the people of these areas, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world's population." 

The terminology should be noted: "revolutionary struggle," "national revolutionary movement" of the peoples of the areas concerned. Lenin himself already warned against the emancipation movements of a non-revolutionary character which sought to disarm the workers before the bourgeoisie. He stressed the necessity of fighting against "reactionary and feudal elements," of "giving the peasant movement the most revolutionary character," of fighting "against the tendency to dress with the colours of communism the currents of bourgeois democratic liberation of the backward countries" and of supporting these currents only on condition that the elements of the future proletarian parties were "grouped and educated in the spirit of their particular tasks, tasks of struggle against the bourgeois democratic movements of their own nation"... etc. (On the National and Colonial Questions, June 1920). The Chinese Communist Party says the same thing in its letter of June 14, when it declares that the proletarian party of the oppressed peoples "supports progressive nationalism and opposes reactionary nationalism. It must always draw a clear line of demarcation between itself and bourgeois nationalism, to which it must never fall captive."

A Single Struggle in a Single World

If we have directed our attacks against the expression "Third World," it should be understood that it was not to begin a quarrel of linguists. To accept too easily the term, to introduce it in ordinary language, means to introduce insidiously the idea that the group of countries about which we have spoken constitute a particular entity, a world in themselves, in regards to which the theories and reasoning applied to the group of capitalist coun- tries and to the group of socialist countries as well as their relationship, should be revised, adapted, and more or less adulterated. Unconsciously, this is attacking the universality of Marxist doctrine and the unity of the revolutionary struggle on a world scale. The revolutionary struggles through- out the world only form a whole because the strategy of the international communist movement must start from the overall phenomenon, must study each country and its internal class forces, not as isolated entities, but rather by the specific weight that they have at various moments in the class

struggle, within a national and international proletariat. 

A single theory, a single struggle, in a single world, whose present division must not be made permanent, but overcome.

Pierre JALÉE.

Pierre Jalee, “Third World? Which Third World?” Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia 1:7 (November 1963),  3-9.

Stuart Hall reviews George Lamming's Pleasures of Exile (1960)

Caliban in exile 

The Pleasure of Exile 

George Lamming (Michael Joseph, 21s). 

Mr. George Lamming is always just ahead. He is not only the most sensitive and dangerous of the West Indian novelists. He is also one of its most formidable and elusive intellects. 

No West Indian writer would put pen to paper to describe the discovery of his own “Negro-ness” (the French word, negritude, is better, but there is, significantly, no English equivalent) without first having to write his way round Lamming’s first novel, In The Castle Of My Skin. 

And now here he is with the book every other exile would have written first. It is a bloody frustrating experience. 

Mr. Lamming moves mostly indirections and allusions. These are sketches of exile, loosely composed in no chronological order, marked off by comments, some of which are deep and moving, some of which are a bit pretentious and innocent. The structure, if there is one, is provided by his developing awareness of the complex relationship between the colonial artist and the metropolitan culture: that is, the history of Lamming’s own sensibility. 

A more arbitrary—and less successful—framework is provided by his use of the figures of Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest—a typical use of poetry to retell the story of colonial enslavement and liberation. 

Prospero sands for “England abroad”—not the England of wigs and plume-hatted Governors—but the whole process of cultural imperialism which has cut the West Indies off from a meaningful relationship with its African past. Caliban, the unspeakable monster who made a pass at the magician's daughter, the black outcast, is the West Indian writer. 

The power of Prospero over this slave is wielded, not by the tyranny of the colonial police, but by the terrible magic of the Gift of Language. Mr. Lamming is Caliban himself, come home at last from over the water, to break the wand. Caliban has the gift of tongues. When he recites, even the ICA quivers. The central chapter of the book is called, “Caliban Orders History.” It is an appropriately ominous note. 

But then, the solicitous social worker asks politely, what the hell is Mr. Lamming doing here at all? Why is the flower of Caribbean culture huddled in some frigid bed-sitter in London, W.11? In the first third of his book, with many twists and asides, Mr. Lamming sets out to answer that question. Caliban must capture the citadel of Prospero itself before he can be really free. 

Mr. Lamming is only working his way through what he hopes is the last twist of the dialectic: that terrible double relationship which makes the West Indian hate and love English culture in about equal portions. 

Behind him lies, not the sunny scenarios of the Caribbean travelogue, but a culture and society bearing upon its face the deep impression of Prospero’s long regime: a culture at once “liberated and Victorian, revering “the great masters of English poetry” and yet deeply philistine, profoundly proletarian in composition and yet rigidly middle-class in character—a “new nation” still as old as colonialism and slavery itself: free—yet still “in chains.” 

It is not until he stands in the ghastly amphitheatre of Paddington Station and asks himself the question. “Boy, what the hell you doin’ here any-at-all”? that the whole thing makes sense. “The West Indian writer hungers for nourishment from a soil which he (as an ordinary citizen) could not at present endure.” 

Mr. Lamming might be of the last generation of writers who have to do it this way: but that depends upon what sort of place “that acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head” turns out to be. 

The long rambling sections—scenes, sketches, bits of dialogue and reminiscence—are, properly speaking, the first literary commentary of its kind to be written by a West Indian. 

The ICA, the catacombs of the BBC’s Colonial Service, Notting Hill, David Pitts campaign in Hampstead, encounters with the English passim, are only a few of the incidents which provoke his asides. The approach here is sometimes too fragmentary, but almost all his comments illuminate one or other of the predicaments of the colonial sensibility in exile. 

The book turns, however, around a long and rather over-literary analysis of The Tempest and then, for two or three long chapters, gathers—not pace, of which there is too much—but depth. These are the chapters in which Lamming recounts the magnificent story of Toussaint L’Overture, the Haitian revolutionary, and via the book, Black Jacobins, engages the most formidable political intellect the West Indies had produced—C.L.R. James. 

These chapters lend a kind of oblique historical perspective to the book, and the absence of this elsewhere is a noticeable weakness. 

C.L.R. James and his protege, Eric Williams, are the political symbols of Lamming’s developing sensibility, and though, elsewhere, he handles the politics of post-colonial countries with a marked naivety, in the analysis of James’s development, and his account of Eric Williams’s “university in the square” in Trinidad, Lamming is on native ground. 

In the final section, Lamming describes his first visit to Africa. Here the poignancy and dilemma of permanent exile is complete. For Africa is, to him, a wonderful experience, and he is deeply bitten by the “freedom feeling” but he is a traveller in a foreign country. 

So that, with an appropriateness which Lamming himself can hardly yet see, the last chapter is the real beginning–himself and Sam Selvon, the first of the “last” emigrants arriving at Waterloo. 

Caliban in exile is a pretty resourceful bird. Mr. Lamming—who is not one to miss a final irony—calls the chapter “Journey to an Exception.” 

Stuart Hall 

Tribune (London), August 26, 1960, p. 11.

Law and Order — Edward Said

Rudy Giuliani by Amiri Baraka (via Howard Rambsy II)

During the past year, New York City has been racked by three major crises involving both the police department and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a very right-wing man of extreme as well as volubly expressed views that have frequently landed him in serious trouble with the people he was elected to serve. In the first instance, a Haitian black man, Abner Louima, was apprehended by policemen in Brooklyn, taken to the station for interrogation, and then badly beaten, sodomised with a bottle and subsequently hospitalised with several broken bones, including his jaw. At the criminal trial, the self-confessed police perpetrator of Louima's injuries, one Justin Volpe, was sentenced to thirty years, while his three accomplices were found guilty of obstruction of justice at a later civil trial. The second case was the shooting of an unarmed Guinean, Amadou Diallo, by white policemen who fired 41 bullets at him (of which 19 found their mark) because they said they thought he was armed. They were acquitted, to the whole city's astonishment. The third and in a sense the most inflammatory, thanks to Giuliani's support for the policemen involved, concerned the killing of an unarmed 21-year-old black, Patrick Dorisman, who was shot at his doorstep for no evident reason. Without justification, the mayor had Dorisman's police record -- the young man had been arrested and acquitted for assault and possession of marijuana -- released to the press, as if to justify the man's shooting, even though it was perfectly obvious that the white policemen who did the shooting could have had no prior knowledge of Dorisman's record.

The troubling theme in all three killings is not only that they involved blacks being shot by white policemen, but that Giuliani's sympathies seemed mostly to be for his officers rather than for their victims. In a racially divided society such as this, it is noteworthy that Giuliani's political reputation has been staked from the beginning of his tenure on the fact that New York's image had been that it was a violent, dangerous place (largely because it was known to contain a large non-white population of essentially poor people), an image which his administration has totally changed. It is certainly true that New York has now become one of the safest cities in the country: Giuliani has increased the police budget, he has put thousands more police on the streets and, most significantly, he has promoted harsh measures against the city's undesirables, i.e., the poor, minorities, the homeless, etc. As a result, it has been assumed that anyone not white and middle-class must fear for his or her safety, since the police have been encouraged to arrest or otherwise detain "suspicious" individuals with relative confidence that they will be rewarded rather than punished for their actions. Part of this strategy has been to put white policemen rather provocatively on the streets of Harlem, as if to say to the inhabitants of that section "here we are, whether you like it or not." The Diallo case in particular aroused the black community's ire; and the Dorisman killing, given Giuliani's egregious proclamations in support of the man's execution so to speak, fanned the flames of racial war.

Nor has New York been alone in the matter of police brutality. In Los Angeles, another huge city with a considerable minority population, policemen in the Ramparts area have drawn attention to their brutal methods, not only because of how violent they have been, but also because the media has revealed that in addition to its bullying the police has also engaged in drug-selling and extortion in the supposed discharge of law and order. The American jail system is therefore bursting with great numbers of unjustly persecuted blacks whose "crimes" are dubiously prosecuted by policemen who claim that they are acting on behalf of society to protect the majority from an already down-trodden and long-suffering minority.

Every government allows itself the prerogative of a monopoly on coercion, except that in the United States there is a constitutionally protected right for citizens to bear arms in their own defence. This is why the debate on possession of guns -- which is higher per capita than any place on earth -- is intense, and why also the lurid incidents in which schoolchildren kill each other are so terrifyingly frequent. For a country that preaches against violence and "terrorism" all over the world to be more violent than any other is deeply contradictory. And for elected officials like Giuliani to boast that they are eliminating crime by inciting the police to more, rather than less, violence is a terrible thing. The fact is that ever since the Nixon years the phrase "law and order" has acquired the status of a right-wing slogan. It first appeared during the Chicago Democratic Party convention in 1968, when the riots associated with Vietnam protest were brutally crushed by the Chicago police acting on the principle of law and order. Since that time dissent, debate and protest -- as in Seattle during the November 1999 riots against the World Trade Organisation -- have been opposed by the forces of law and order, as has agitation on behalf of integration, abortion rights, and anti-war protest. The idea is that whatever the government does carries with it the authority of rectitude, so that even abuses such as the killing of unarmed black men can be sanctimoniously ascribed to maintaining law and order.

In the American context, therefore, "law and order" has to do with an interpretation of law and order that favours the strong, the wealthy, the conservative currents in society, whether those happen to be in office or not. This is perfectly evident during debates while the presidential election campaign is in course: George Bush Jr is the law and order candidate, Al Gore is not. The notion is at bottom that the police is there to protect vested interests in the society and to make sure that social change occurs very slowly, if at all. This is why struggling minorities in particular associate the police with the blocking of their march towards equality and economic advancement.

In non-democratic societies such as those in much of the Third World, the police is also associated with the notion of law and order, except that law and order is a phrase implying the defence of the government, which would otherwise fall were it not for its battalions of policemen, republican guards, presidential security and so on. This is very much the case in the Arab world where as long as I can remember the police -- except for the lowly traffic policeman -- is immediately identified in the popular mind with interrogation, torture, unjust detention, surveillance, spying and cruelty. Think of the fear struck in one's mind as one faces a security official at the airport: this is no bureaucratic experience but rather a confrontation with the regime itself. It is highly significant that in most Arab countries the principal symbol of ruthless efficiency is not the tax collector or the legal system, but the security apparatus. Who has the most up-to-date cars, telephones, arms, and who is the best-dressed, the most spoiled and pampered? It is always the security teams whose main job is to guarantee the ruler's life, his regime and its interests, regardless of whether those happen to coincide with the interests of the population or not. There is no appeal for the average individual if he or she is picked up and taken to jail for "questioning." The whole idea imparted to citizens of so many of our "democratic" or "revolutionary" republics (and certainly of the monarchies) is that the police is there to strike fear in everyone in order to deter attempts against the regimes, rather than to protect the interests of a favoured segment of the population. But whereas in a democracy it is possible to change the administration and its methods through election, in our case we have no such option.

The result has been that terror has replaced the idea of law and order, terror that can be visited on the wayward or inattentive citizen. Armies, by the same token, are not necessarily there to fight against the enemy (despite the vast amounts spent on munitions, air forces, and heavy, mostly unusable artillery) but rather to confront the population should it entertain plans for democratic change, and of course to provide commission agents with handsome profits from arms sales. In the end, it is sadly the case that an objective alliance has grown to connect many non-Western security forces with those of the United States, where paradoxically the same distorted situation does not in fact obtain, and the police is subject to the law as well as citizens' review boards, elections, and so on.

The key to police brutality wherever it occurs is citizenship, the notion that all citizens of a society, including the police and security forces, are entitled to the same privileges and obligations subject to constant revision and re-interpretation. Political discourse in the Arab world has been so wrapped up in matters of security having to do with outside enemies (Israel, imperialism, etc.) that no attention has been given to the lamentable absence of real democratic processes inside our societies. Everything in those societies has suffered as a result, from education, to the legal system, to intellectual culture, to civil and political institutions. As every day goes by the situation worsens and for reasons that should make each of us profoundly ashamed the Arab world is the only part of the globe to appear as if it existed outside time and space in the ordinary sense. I said in an earlier article here, Godot will not come and it is no use waiting for a saviour. The problem of law and order, like all other problems, is one of our own making, and its only solution must be ours as well.

Edward Said, "Law and Order," Al-Ahram Weekly (6 – 12 April, 2000). Archived here.

Aijaz Ahmad (1941 – 2022)

A young Aijaz. 

Known better for his interventions in literary theory and his translations of Ghalib, in the late 1960s, Aijaz Ahmad was an instructor in (and, briefly, the director of) CUNY's storied and sometimes embattled SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) Program, alongside Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and other radicals.

****

Boston: March 28th. After living in America for more than two years I came into this city for the first time, expecting the lethargy, the chaos, the narrow streets, and the sort of stringent despair, the old-fashioned endurance I have known in other old cities: Delhi, Lahore, Lucknow. But what I find is a confrontation of ages: the new building over the old, and not building so well: the whole city is torn up, ripped apart. In the shadow of an insurance tower which is the pride of new Boston and looms over the old like a monstrous dinosaur, the hotel is antiseptic, labyrinthine, packed with university professors who, over the next couple of days, will dissect and counter dissect Asia like a frog; it is made of plastic, neons and concrete; the air-conditioned, crowded, ventilated, sound-proofed halls are so clean I am quite sure no one can catch a virus there, or find real water to drink. The paper I am to read is part of what I am told are celebrations of Ghalib' s centenary within this huge conference. A ceremony within a larger, uninspired, career-oriented ceremony of scholarship. Professors clean-cut like boy scouts. 

 

I am apprehensive. Not so much about the fate of my own paper as about what these celebrations, to be stretched over the next year and a half, may portend for Urdu language and literature. In a macabre moment of doubt typical of a foreigner, I wonder: is the ghazal, like the haiku, also fated to be a favourite form of poetry among midwestern housewives? 

 

I marvel at the twenty minutes during which my voice manages to remain steady as I drone on about the art of translation, about Ghalib, about the hunger I found among American poets to

meet a fellow-creature like Ghalib. As I sink back into my chair with relative fatigue and a taste of ashes in my mouth, the professorial onslaught begins. Of all varieties: American, Indian, German, male and female. The observation which has enraged them so much is, to my mind, rather a simple one: “Poetry is meant, first, for the reader who cares for poetry; second, for the poet who practices the craft; and, only lastly, for the scholar.” Immediately a cry is raised: "The

scholars have to defend themselves.” 

 

No one talks about poetry, or Ghalib, or what poetry means to the age, what poetry means to other poets. They talk about credentials, about academic positions and foreign tours, about the intricacies of grammar. I stop listening, and think, instead, of the role of the contemporary university in our lives, of my students in New York who are risking their careers even at this moment in protesting against an educational system they find oppressive and obsolete, of Black students across America who are trying to deal with history, which is to say their own lives. I think in particular of a student, again Black, who told me that he thought ‘The Rainbow’ was a political novel because it taught him how to treat other human beings. Love, politics, or literature, it comes to the same thing: poetry happens wherever men suffer and posit their humanity against their suffering. Viet Nam, Harlem, the Delhi of 1857. LeRoi and Ghalib. You hold out your hand and you tell another person what you are going through: that is the final poem. Poem of reality, as Stevens might have said. And Paul Goodman: poets write poetry in

order to survive.

 

As the shrill tirade drones to an end, my mind is beginning to clear again and I return to Ghalib.

— Aijaz Ahmad (1969)