The Groundings With My Brothers

Walter Rodney

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788731157
• eBook ISBN: 9781788731164
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique africaine

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated.

In this classic work published in the heady days of anti-colonial revolution, Groundings with My Brothers follows the global circulation of emancipatory ideas, from the black students of North America to the Rasta counter-culture of Jamaica and beyond. The book is striking in its simultaneous ability to survey the wide and heterogenous international context while remaining anchored in grassroots politics, as Rodney offers us first-hand accounts of mass movement organizing. Having inspired a generation of revolutionaries, this new edition will re-introduce the book to a new political landscape that it helped shape, with reflections from leading scholar-activists such as Carole Boyce Davies

The Groundings
With My Brothers

1

Statement of the
Jamaican Situation

In 1938, exactly one hundred years after the supposed Emancipation of the Black Man in Jamaica, the masses once again were driven into action to achieve some form of genuine liberation under the new conditions of oppression. The beneficiaries of that struggle were a narrow, middle-class sector whose composition was primarily brown, augmented by significant elements of white and other groups, such as Syrians, Jews and Chinese. Of late, that local ruling elite has incorporated a number of blacks in positions of prominence. However, irrespective of its racial or colour composition, this power-group is merely acting as representatives of metropolitan-imperialist interests. Historically white and racist-oriented, these interests continue to stop attempts at creative social expression on the part of the black oppressed masses.

It was only natural that imperialism and its local lackeys should have intensified the oppression of our black brothers. But, paradoxical as it may appear, they have been forced to create as a psychological prop to their system of domination the myth of a harmonious, multiracial national society – ‘Out of Many, One People’, as the National Motto pretends. In this way they are hoping that the black masses will never organise independently in their own interests. Today that system of domination and its justificatory myth are faced with serious challenges and reverses. For a new phase is beginning in the epochal march forward of the Black Humanity of Jamaica.

The break-up of the myth of a harmonious, multiracial society has been rapid and has assumed numerous forms. Firstly, the regime has been forced into carrying out a crude manipulation of the symbols of national black pride. Marcus Garvey and Paul Bogle were enshrined as ‘National Heroes’, when the methods and achievements of these Black Liberators point the way ever more clearly towards Black Resistance today. Their example violently contradicts the hypocritical claim of the state regime to be representative in any way of the Black Masses.

The most profound dilemma of all faced by a regime of alien class elements is that posed by the existence of the numerically powerful Rastafari Brethren, who have completely and inexorably broken with Jamaican society and its values, and who have chosen a faith and a culture based on Ethiopian Orthodoxy. At no time was this dilemma better demonstrated than when the local political bosses were forced into accepting a visit by His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, and then literally had to stand back while the population thrust forward enthusiastically to pay homage to the Ethiopian Monarch.

More recently, and at a time when the Black Liberation struggle taking place against white racist American society is fiercest, these same political bandits felt sufficiently threatened by the power of the example of struggle to carry through the banning of Brothers Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and James Forman. Even more damning has been their prohibition of the liberation literature of Carmichael, Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammad, at a time when the world is celebrating International Human Rights Year piously sponsored by the Jamaican Government.

The local lackeys of imperialism have long had to admit the existence of tremendous social injustice – the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ as they put it – but they asked the nation to live with the illusion that things were bound to improve. Now the ‘have nots’, who are the mass of the black people, know that things have been getting worse. The unemployed, numbering some 30 per cent of the potential work force, are understandably desperate and the whole repressive machinery of the State has been brought to bear on them.

The administration of the law has become more vicious and partisan. The number of charges imposed on black people for the possession of ganja (marijuana) are astronomical, and the government has decreed that the minimum sentence on conviction must be eighteen months. A charge of ‘suspicion’ has now been entered into the law books, and to be black and poor is to invite this charge in much the same way as the vagrancy laws operated in the period immediately after Emancipation. The quality of justice dispensed by the legal system still depends on skin colour.

Since ‘Independence’, the Black police force of Jamaica have demonstrated that they can be as savage in their approach to black brothers as the white police of New York, for ultimately they serve the same masters. The Prime Minister has not concealed his determination that the police should be used to maintain the present system of social oppression, and he has given them full authority to utilise whatever brutal methods they think necessary to carry out this mandate. Shortly after taking office last year, Prime Minister Shearer told the police, ‘I make no bones about it gentlemen. I want all Jamaica to get the message that the police force under this Government is not reciting Beatitudes to anybody.’ He later added that the police, whenever confronted with ‘criminals’, should not stop to find out what distance was between themselves and the criminals before ‘setting them alight’. In eight months between August 1967 and April 1968, there were at least thirty-one people who were set alight by police guns, sixteen of them dying on the spot. Other incidents of police brutality are too numerous to mention. Yet one of the most significant strikes in recent times was that carried out by the Jamaica police force, demanding higher wages. That strike was not so much a part of the movement of the black working class, but a part of the breakdown of the system of oppression, for the local political lackeys have shown their incompetence in every direction.

The stagnation in the rural areas has reached a stage of crisis. Marginal sugar estates continue to go out of production, leaving hundreds of workers jobless, and prospects for the banana industry are just as bleak. Apart from their inability to raise the living standards of the black masses, they have failed to make provision for increased water consumption and for drought, they have failed to modernise telephone communications, and they have failed to make allowance for the increased need for electrical power. Consequently, in recent months, the ramshackle nature of the neo-colonial structure has been cruelly exposed, and it was the very middle class who have benefitted from ‘1938’ who recently complained most bitterly when they suffered simultaneously from water rationing, extensive electricity power cuts, a limping telephone service, and no police protection for their property.

What matters above all else on the contemporary Jamaican scene is the action of the black masses in their various capacities. Their activities are in part responsible for the atmosphere of decay which surrounds the present administration, and at the same time they provide an indication of the shape of things to come. The racial question is out in the open, in spite of all the efforts to maintain the taboos surrounding it. The Rastafari brethren have been joined on this question by large numbers of other black people – many of them influenced by the struggle and example of black brothers in the USA – while culturally, there is a deepening interest in things African. Of the greatest significance are the effects at self-expression among black people – pamphlets, newssheets, and the like. These independent efforts are essential because of the complete control which imperialism and its local puppets maintain over the various established news media.

Meanwhile, the two reactionary trade unions, which are the most important social bases of the two reactionary political parties, are also facing the challenge of the workers. Not only has there been a wave of strikes without the complicity of the unions, but there is emerging an independent worker movement concerned with the unity of workers in their place of work or within a given industry. The large unemployed sector lacks organisational forms, but there is a widespread reappraisal taking place among unemployed black youths, who have recognised the farcical nature of the present two-party operation, and the self-defeating role which they themselves played so recently in 1967, when they gunned each other down on the orders of the political bandits of the two parties. Whether or not black youths have participated in violence on behalf of the oppressors, they have all suffered from police brutality, and they have seen recently the middle-class members of the ‘gun clubs’ coming forward to volunteer their services in suppressing the people while the police were on strike. Throughout the country, black youths are becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interests. For those who have eyes to see, there is already evidence of the beginnings of resistance to the violence of our oppressors.

2

Black Power, a Basic
Understanding

Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people. I’m putting it to my black brothers and sisters that the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us. I could have chosen to talk about people of the same island, or the same religion, or the same class – but instead I have chosen skin colour as essentially the most binding factor in our world. In so doing, I am not saying that is the way things ought to be. I am simply recognising the real world – that is the way things are. Under different circumstances, it would have been nice to be colour-blind, to choose my friends solely because their social interests coincided with mine – but no conscious black man can allow himself such luxuries in the contemporary world.

Let me emphasise that the situation is not of our making. To begin with, the white world defines who is white and who is black. In the USA, if one is not white, then one is black; in Britain, if one is not white then one is coloured; in South Africa, one can be white, coloured or black depending upon how white people classify you. There was a South African boxer who was white all his life, until the other whites decided that he was really coloured. Even the fact of whether you are black or not is to be decided by white people – by white power. If a Jamaican black man tried to get a room from a landlady in London who said, ‘No coloureds’, it would not impress her if he said he was West Indian, quite apart from the fact that she would already have closed the door in his black face. When a Pakistani goes to the Midlands, he is as coloured as a Nigerian. The Indonesian is the same as a Surinamer in Holland; the Chinese and New Guineans have as little chance of becoming residents and citizens in Australia as do you and I. The definition which is most widely used the world over is that once you are not obviously white, then you are black and are excluded from power – power is kept pure milky white.

The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites – the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas. A further subdivision can be made with reference to all people of African descent, whose position is clearly more acute than that of most nonwhite groups. It must be noted that once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman – these things pale into insignificance. Actually I’ve found out that a lot of whites literally cannot tell one black from another. Partly this may be due to the fact that they do not personally know many black people, but it reflects a psychological tendency to deny our individuality by refusing to consider us as individual human beings.

Having said a few things about black and white, I will try to point out the power relations between them. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the capitalist division of the world was complete. It was a division which made capitalists dominant over workers and white people dominant over black. At that point, everywhere in the world white people held power in all its aspects – political, economic, military and even cultural. In Europe, the whites held power – this goes without saying. In the Americas the whites had committed mass murder as far as many ‘Red Indian’ tribes were concerned, and they herded the rest into reservations like animals or forced them into the disadvantageous positions, geographically and economically, in Central and South America. In Australia and New Zealand, a similar thing had occurred on a much-smaller scale. In Africa, European power reigned supreme, except in a few isolated spots like Ethiopia; and where whites were actually settled, the Africans were reduced to the status of second-class citizens in their own countries. All this was following upon a historical experience of 400 years of slavery, which had transferred millions of Africans to work and die in the New World. In Asia, Europe’s power was felt everywhere, except in Japan and areas controlled by Japan. The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples – whether or not they are minority or majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in the section of the world under white domination – the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks.

We need to look very carefully at the nature of the relationships between colour and power in the imperialist world. There are two basic sections in the imperialist world – one that is dominated and one that is dominant. Every country in the dominant metropolitan area has a large majority of whites – USA, Britain, France, etc. Every country in the dominated colonial areas has an overwhelming majority of nonwhites, as in most of Asia, Africa and the West Indies. Power, therefore, resides in the white countries and is exercised over blacks. There is the mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence (e.g., Malaya, Jamaica, Kenya), but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has no power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area.

When Britain announced recently that it was withdrawing troops from East of Suez, the American secretary of state remarked that something would have to be done to fill the ‘power vacuum’. This involved Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Malaysia. The white world, in their own way, were saying that all these blacks amounted to nothing, for power was white and when white power is withdrawn a vacuum is created, which could only be filled by another white power.

By being made into colonials, black people lost the power which we previously had of governing our own affairs, and the aim of the white imperialist world is to see that we never regain this power. The Congo provides an example of this situation. There was a large and well-developed Congolese empire before the white man reached Africa. The large Congolese empire of the fifteenth century was torn apart by Portuguese slave traders, and what remained of the Congo came to be regarded as one of the darkest spots in dark Africa. After regaining political independence the Congolese people settled down to their lives, but white power intervened, set up the black stooge Tshombe, and murdered both Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Since then, paid white mercenaries have harassed the Congo. Late last year, 130 of these hired white killers were chased out of the Congo and cornered in the neighbouring African state of Burundi. The white world intervened and they have all been set free. These are men who for months were murdering, raping, pillaging, disrupting economic production, and making a mockery of black life and black society. Yet white power said not a hair on their heads was to be touched. They did not even have to stand trial or reveal their names. Conscious blacks cannot possibly fail to realise that in our own homelands we have no power, abroad we are discriminated against, and everywhere the black masses suffer from poverty. You can put together in your own mind a picture of the whole world, with the white imperialist beast crouched over miserable blacks. And don’t forget to label us poor. There is nothing with which poverty coincides so absolutely as the colour black – small or large population, hot or cold climates, rich or poor in natural resources – poverty cuts across all of these factors in order to find black people.

That association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony, i.e., it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer.

The Spaniards went to Central and South America and robbed thousands of tons of silver and gold from Indians. The whole of Europe developed on the basis of that wealth, while millions of Indian lives were lost and the societies and cultures of Central and South America were seriously dislocated. Europeans used their guns in Asia to force Asians to trade at huge profits to Europe, and in India the British grew fat while at the same time destroying Indian irrigation. Africa and Africans suffered from the greatest crimes at the hands of Europeans through the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies and the Americas. In all those centuries of exploitation, Europeans have climbed higher on our backs and pushed us down into the dirt. White power has, therefore, used black people to make whites stronger and richer and to make blacks relatively, and sometimes absolutely, weaker and poorer.

‘Black Power’ as a movement has been most clearly defined in the USA. Slavery in the US helped create the capital for the development of the US as the foremost capitalist power, and the blacks have subsequently been the most exploited sector of labour. Many blacks live in that supposedly great society at a level of existence comparable to blacks in the poorest section of the colonial world. The blacks in the US have no power. They have achieved prominence in a number of ways – they can sing, they can run, they can box, play baseball, etc., but they have no power. Even in the fields where they excel, they are straws in the hands of whites. The entertainment world, the record-manufacturing business, sport as a commercial enterprise are all controlled by whites – blacks simply perform. They have no power in the areas where they are overwhelming majorities, such as the city slums and certain parts of the southern United States, for the local governments and law-enforcement agencies are all white controlled. This was not always so. For one brief period after the Civil War in the 1860s, blacks in the USA held power. In that period (from 1865 to 1875) slavery had just ended, and the blacks were entitled to the vote as free citizens. Being in the majority in several parts of the southern United States, they elected a majority of their own black representatives and helped to rebuild the South, introducing advanced ideas such as education for all (blacks as well as whites, rich and poor). The blacks did not rule the United States, but they were able to put forward their own viewpoints and to impose their will over the white, racist minority in several states. This is a concrete historical example of Black Power in the United States, but the whites changed all that, and they have seen to it that such progress was never again achieved by blacks...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney
• The Groundings With My Brothers
• Commentaries
• Notes