On the History of Black Philosophy: Dr Robert Beckford and Dr William (Lez) Henry in conversation with Kwame Kwei-Armah

KK-A: This is a proud moment for me- to be in this room with you two brilliant black history scholars. To start who is the most important historical figure pre-Marcus Garvey, in your opinion?

 

RB: It’s got to be Paul Bogle, who led the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. His importance is two-fold. He’s the first Caribbean religious activist to unite religion, nation and politics, and he called on black people to “Cleave to the black” recognising that race is an important factor that can be used to fight and resist. Until then it hadn’t really been worked through.

 

KK-A: Why is “Cleave to the Black” important to you, Lez?

 

WLH: “Cleave to the Black” shows you are judged on your outward appearance. A lot of us aren’t aware of that, especially in the context of even contemporary Jamaica where they have shade-ism, and “the nearer to white the better”. I agree with Bogle. You can see his influence on Garvey because he used that same kind of aesthetic and the notion of the social gospel.

 

KK-A: Robert, why do you think theology is linked to the early black struggles?

 

RB: We have to recognise that in terms of nineteenth-century Caribbean history, the people who received education- a very small education at that- were people in the church. It was up to church leaders to lead any kind of struggle, or be central in collaborating with the colonial authorities. Religion matters because of the status priests had. The argument is that Christianity was adapted to meet the needs of African traditional religions. Faith is not divorced from the social world, and it isn’t just something that drops out of the sky for black people but is related to a long history that goes right back into  the belly of Africa.

 

WLH: In this book The Rastafarians, L.E Barrett makes exactly that point. He says Africans, or peoples of African descent will not go to church (and I’m paraphrasing here), or worship anybody or anything in which they do not see their everyday reality.

 

RB: Bogle is also an organic intellectual. He teaches that you can’t do intellectual work isolated from the community. You have to engage with and be part of it. He had that role as a church leader. The people who eventually put down his revolution are so-called ‘free black’ people, the Maroons. There’s a lesson there that we need to produce our scholarship in a way that engages with every facet of the community. Nobody can be left behind.

 

KK-A: Is that part of your theory about dealing with the heroes, but also looking at the grotesque?

 

RB: Absolutely. It’s key that when looking at the history, we look at the heroic and at the grotesque. The central ethic is emancipation. How can we look at our history, and produce scholarship that enables our community to thrive, to benefit and to enlarge its borders?

 

KK-A: Bogle organically laid down a lot of the work that Marcus Garvey went on to make both national and international. How important is Garvey?

 

WLH: Garvey is important because he took the struggle and gave it and international dimension. He demonstrated how Africans could organise and have levels of autonomy, which he set up especially in Harlem and the states. We have the UNIA [Universal Negro Improvement Association] and fringe movements associated with it; like the women’s movements.

 

RB: Many would argue that Garvey isn’t an intellectual. What did he write? Well, the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Garvey, some other writing, the newspaper…

 

WLH:.. And some poems.

 

RB: We’re talking about black intellectual thought which is similar but distinct from Western intellectual traditions-similar because people who have the power of ideas can transform the way we live, but dissimilar in that the role of an intellectual isn’t separated from the heart of the community. You can jump straight from Garvey, in this model of intellectual thought, to Martin Luther King. When people think of King, they only think of an activist, not that he wrote several books, studied, and wrote a PhD on Paul Tillich, a German theologian. King restructured how we do black intellectual thought, providing us with a model outside the European one, and distinct from African traditions of wisdom and of scholarship. It’s important to say that, if people question whether Garvey was an intellectual.  He was, and these are the measures we are using.

 

KK-A: Garvey was a thinker and a philosopher, he challenged aesthetic values of the day and then created the whole movements.

 

RB: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny” summarises his work. Also the idea that black people in the Diaspora had to unite around faith. He set up a church tradition to represent his theological ideas about God, Jesus, and economics. In black circles today, values about self-help and self-love come straight out of the Garvey movement.

 

KK-A: Garvey talks about the Black Star Steamship Line in one of his speeches. The Irish community at the time had the Green Star Line, one of the big, wealthy American Caucasian families had the White Star Line, and he said, we need the Black Star Line! Some might say that’s plagiarism, but actually it’s about application: in the same way he did it with God, saying, there is a white God for people who look white, there is a yellow God for people who look yellow, so let us create a black God, and let us see God through the prism of our eyes.

 

RB: If we return to Lez’s point about organisation, Garvey’s idea of Black Nationalism being built upon not just words and sentiment but on an economic organisation that can mobilise people, trade and have a stake in the world, is still relevant today. Garvey said that until there’s a powerful Africa, people aren’t going to take black people seriously, which is echoed in the work of Malcolm X, several decades later. If you look at the state we’re in as black people in Britain and in parts of North America as well, we’re still contributors rather than people who produce and manufacture.

 

KK-A: Let’s move to someone who it’s safe to term an academic, and an intellectual: Web DuBois, Garvey’s nemesis, many would say. How important is DuBois?

 

RB: DuBois is the most important African-American intellectual of the 20^th century. He must be placed in his historical context as a New England enlightment academic and therefore his approach to scholarship isn’t as organic as Garvey’s. Instead, he was working through establishment, penning articles, writing books, out of which emerge an understanding of black progress which has both similarities and dissimilarities to what Garvey was trying to do. DuBois, committed to the American way of progress and pragmatism, wanted to train black people, believed in the value of education and talked about developing a ‘Talented Tenth’, a group who can either-depending on your reading- re-educate other black people or develop an elitist tradition that can run parallel to the white tradition.

 

KK-A: Does the Talented Tenth work for you?

 

WLH: It doesn’t work for me, but I can understand why it would for others. The crucial thing about DuBois is, “coloured with a capital C or negro with a capital N”. Garvey used to send dark-skinned Africans to the front seats of DuBois’ church. In some ways Garvey used it as a device to ask, who is the ‘Talented Tenth’ representative of? In Garvey’s organisation at least it represented all so-called Africans.

 

KK-A: There are two sides to the argument. First of all, we’re talking about a class system that existed within the diasphoric experience; and then that Garvey sometimes only allowed people into his organisation if they were dark and supported what he wanted to do.

 

RB: Absolutely. He went for colour rather than competence, which led to the failure of some of his business projects, like the Black Star Line. But if we read both of them within the historical context, class matters, shade matters, and often the two collide. If you’re light complexioned and black, then you’re more likely to get a good job as a janitor in a hotel; if you’re dark-skinned, you’re going to be stoking coal in that same hotel. They’re not huge differences, except within that community where it does matter. Garvey provided grass roots, ‘bottom-up’ model and DuBois’ method was ‘top down’. Both are valid. However, we could critique DuBois and Booker T Washington, two ‘top-down’ men, having discussions at a top level, whereas on the ground, the women’s movements, churches and other clubs are moving people from the South into the industrial regions of the North. We have the biggest mass migration in American history of black people in the 20s and 30s. There’s a danger, when you’re doing black intellectual work, of missing what really concerns the people, which is why Bogle and Garvey are points of importance in engaged, organic scholarship.

 

KK-A: Let’s jump to the inheritance of some of the African-Caribbean thought. Garvey and Rasta, what’s that for you?

 

WLH: Garvey said “Look to Ethiopia for the coming of the black King”. Some said this was misread, some said it was Haile Selassie. The Garvey accused Selassie of being a coward, and that caused big rifts in Rastafari. One of the crucial things about Rastafari- pre ‘locks’, because that’s another issue- is that notion of ‘Africa for Africans’ and race first. Some people say the Garvey-ites/ Rastas are just being racist in reverse, some of the things dismissed by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton in their book, Black Power. But to me, crucially, the book endorses Garvey’s notion of the African aesthetic: you can see beauty in yourself as an African because you can use different registers to measure it. This fits into the idea of the “organic intellectual”. I’ve changed it to “grounded intellectual” in my book (because in the end they don’t really represent the communities they’ve left, something I’ve taken from my understanding of Antonio Gramsci), from Walter Rodney’s notion of groundings.

 

I used to DJ on sound systems. I hadn’t been to Jamaica, and could only talk about England in the context of being born black in Britain, a father facing various pressures. I went to Jamaica in 1985, and realised that to Jamaicans, having lyrics is significant: if you have lyrics, it means not only are you a grounded intellectual, but you can also articulate that intellectuality.

 

RB: Garvey prophesied in 1927 about a King arising out of Ethiopia who would eventually redeem black people. Garvey’s legacy is found in Rastafari and beyond Rastafari. While being a reasonably successful political movement on the ground, a cultural movement across the Caribbean, Rastafari becomes more significant when it enters a symbolic realm- when the symbols, ideas and perspective become a reservoir that people can draw from. Rastafari represents the Caribbean’s first liberation theology, because it sees at the heart of the Gospel, God working in history to liberate people.

 

KK-A: How significant is Walter Rodney within black intellectual thought?

 

WLH: Really significant. He shows you can write and communicate at many different levels. He deals with the academic- how Europe underdeveloped Africa- and also with “grounding with my brothers”.

 

RB: Rodney encourages black scholars of African studies and the African continent to have a more sophisticated and democratic approach to analysing the history and what’s happening on the ground amongst working class, working poor people. Also, if you go to any black supplementary school, you see posters of kings and queens on the wall, the good and the great. But Rodney takes the working class, working poor struggle of people seriously. He’s influenced by Marxist thought and, along with CLR James, represents the early Caribbean intellectuals who bring their leftist ideas to bear on the post-colonial struggle. That is the key with Rodney- his historiography, and engagement with Pan Africanism, anti-colonial struggle and Marxist thought, producing a distinctive approach to black history.

 

KK-A: There’s also the labour movement and the grounded intellectuals who led that, allowing the whole freedom march towards independence. There’s Eric Williams, George Manley…

 

RB: Look at the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the great intellectual development in African-American cultural and social history in the 40s and 50s, and people writing-

 

KK-A: Alan Lock, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes…

 

RB: The danger is that we become Afro-Americo-centric, and forget the anti-colonial struggle in the Caribbean. The Caribbean context is slightly different. There aren’t historic black colleges to educate people or train them as leaders.

 

KK-A: Who are the big influences? As you said, there is a real bias to the African-American thing and it’s not that the work wasn’t being done in the Caribbean-

 

WLH: Oh it was. Think of J.A. Rogers..

 

KK-A: Absolutely! Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in all Ages and all Lands (3 vols.)

 

WLH: One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro…

 

RB: You need to look at Caribbean literature from the 30s to now. Also, we get very male-centred. If we look at the present state of things, black women are starting more businesses, going into education at a higher rate, and are more likely to receive a doctorate than black men…

 

WLH: I wrote a lyric, years ago, that said “represent the black woman”. Women in the Caribbean create the so-called informal economies. It’s crucial to mention the difference between abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Once the slave trade was abolished, we got our plantation food, our provision growing, and it was crucial that the surplus was traded. African women created that. If you go to Grenada, Jamaica, and many other places, a lot of shops are owned by women. That’s part of the legacy, but people haven’t told that story.

 

KK-A: Who are the big female thinkers? Not just historically, but now?

 

RB: Bell Hooks, an African-American, and very important in terms of black feminist theory, cultural criticism. She’s unsurpassed, one of the first to talk about race, class and gender and how they intersect in the lives of black women. Then African-American Patricia Hill Collins’ work tries to codify black feminist thought and develop what she calls a counter-hegemonic epistemology, an alternative way of knowing, grounded in the everyday experiences of black women. In terms of Caribbean societies- and this is where my bias lies in terms of my work in Cultural Studies and theology- the work of Carolyn Cooper. She takes the best of the black British cultural studies tradition and re-analyses Jamaican popular culture and the role of women and sexuality from slavery to the present, but also produces excellent work on dance hall, Bob Marley, and a collection of essays about sound systems and politics. In Noises in the Blood she talks about ideology- systems or ideas in the West coming out of Marxist thought- but reshaped to describe how black people say one thing and mean another, and renames it ‘(h)ideology’.

 

WLH: Although her book about the dancehall wasn’t going to include DJ-ing. My point is that the thing that has made the world know Jamaican language is DJ-ing and reggae music.

 

KK-A: Who else working today, both American and Caribbean, do you respect?

 

RB: We can’t neglect the importance of Black Cultural Studies in schools in Britain- it’s worldwide. In terms of contemporary black British scholarship, we need to look at Lola Young’s work in film, visual culture, and the way in which race and gender collide in cinematic history in Britain. Also Stuart Hall.

 

WLH: He created Cultural Studies

 

RB: Here you have a Caribbean migrant in Britain, single-handedly developing the discipline of Cultural Studies and transforming the way we evaluate culture, and understand aesthetic sensibilities in the world today. I would also include Paul Gilroy, because he is the second most highly quoted in African-American and black studies worldwide, second only to Toni Morrison. Although Gilroy is the only one writing about anti-essentialism.

 

WLH: Michael Eric Dyson, who captures in his work the rhythms of black folk. He writes about crossing Africa, using diary entries: “Witnessed children dancing to the black-firing of a motor vehicle”. When I read Dyson- I thought, that’s it, that’s the rhythms of black folk.

 

RB:  Also, we can’t ignore the work of CLR James, who emerges from the Caribbean context. If we just look to America, we miss the importance of how the colonial order worked on and continues to work on black people. CLR James reminds us how the processes of colonisation work on the mind, work on physical spaces, and even on behaviour and play. His fantastic work in Beyond the Boundary shows how cricket becomes a metaphor for political resistance. Also, The Black Jacobins, retelling the story of the Haitian rebellion, is a really important work.

 

KK-A: Gentlemen, thank you for this quick tour of black thought, but it’s important to end by stating that the work both of you are doing is contributing greatly to our understanding of self, historically and in the present tense, and laying the ground for the next generation to advance holistically.

Dr Robert Beckford is a theologian, writer and broadcaster who lectures in African Diasporan Religions and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. Recent broadcasts include Blood and Fire: the Story of Jamaican Independence for BBC2; God is Black: The Rose of African Christian Fundamentalism for Channel 4; Sound Clash for BBC Radio 4. He regularly presents on BBC WM. Publications include Between God and the Gangs (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2001); Dread and Pentecostal: A Political Theology for the Black Church in Britain (London: SPCK, 2000); Jesus is Dread: Black Theology and Black Culture in Britain (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998). His latest book, Jesus Dub: Faith, Identity and Social Change will be published by Routledge in December 2004.

 

Dr William (Lez) Henry was born in London, of Jamaican parents. He is a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, an experienced youth worker, poet, and writer, and was one of the pioneer British reggae/dancehall DJs. He is also a research consultant/staff trainer on matters of race, ethnicity and cultural diversity with the ‘Nu-beyond Ltd: Learning by Choice’. he has lectured nationally and internationally and his publications include: ‘Chatting for Change’ (in The Auditory Cultures Reader, Oxford: Berg, 2003); ‘Music and Sound System DJs’, (in Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture, London: Routledge, 2002). He is awaiting the publication of a book entitled Hidden Voices, Conscious Choices: Sounds of the Black Experience.