African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 1
Frederick Douglass
This is the first main post of our new series of African
Revolutionary Writers. As a rule, you will receive four instalments in each
weekly part, over ten weeks, with each instalment highlighting one
revolutionary writer. These are your regular political education posts for the
first quarter of 2013. They are distinguished from other posts by the
background colour, and are also clearly marked as “African Revolutionary
Writers”.
We begin with a giant: Frederick Douglass.
Context
The first part of this ten-part series on African
Revolutionary Writers covers the period from slavery to Imperialism. The slave
trade begun when Portuguese ships passed Cape Bojador on the coast of present-day
Western Sahara in 1434, bringing them south of the great desert for the first
time.
They immediately took slaves. These, the first slaves of the
bourgeoisie, were sold to Spanish colonists on the Canary Islands, where the
original inhabitants (the Guanches)
had already been enslaved in situ and
worked to extinction. The triangular slave-trade pattern: Portugal - Africa -
Canary Islands - was soon afterwards scaled up to Britain - Africa - West
Indies (or alternatively Brazil or North America). The Atlantic Slave Trade
took slaves across the ocean via the “Middle Passage”, and brought back sugar,
tobacco, cotton and other plantation-grown commodities.
Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies
in 1492 and touched the continent of South America in 1498, the same year that
Vasco da Gama reached India by the Cape sea route. By 1502 the trans-Atlantic
slave trade was in full flow, first as a Portuguese monopoly, and later as a
British monopoly.
Although Marx notes in “Capital” that capitalism began in
the 1500s, yet for more than three centuries the dominant business of the
Western European bourgeoisie was not capitalism, but the Atlantic slave trade,
and the biggest operator in that business was Britain. This situation lasted
until the capitalist “Industrial Revolution” of the late 1700s, also in
Britain.
Only when the Western bourgeoisie made its turn towards
capitalism did it become expedient for it to avail some blacks, released
slaves, to create a literary genre called the “slave
narrative”, as part of the capitalist campaign to suppress slavery. This was
being done so as to make room for a new, more productive, exploited class: the
wage-slaves or working proletariat.
An early example of the “slave narrative” genre is
the work of Olaudah Equiano,
who wrote a book about his “Interesting Life” as a slave and then rescued
slave, published in 1789. These slave-narrative books tended not only to expose
the evils of slavery, but also to praise Christianity and capitalism in equal
measure, in order to flatter their sponsors and readers. But Frededrick
Douglass took the genre to a new level, transcended it, and left an incomparable
and permanent liberatory resource.
Douglass
Frederick
Douglass’s work was exceptional for the breadth and the rebellious
fearlessness of his rhetoric. Douglass broke free from the limits of the slave
narrative genre so as to begin to create a truly revolutionary black
literature. This is why our series begins with him.
After escaping by train from twenty years of slavery,
Douglass wrote an extraordinary slave narrative called My Bondage and My Freedom,
first published in 1855. He included, in the same volume, a series of six
transcripts of speeches or orations that he had given as a campaigner against
slavery.
Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865 at the end of the
US Civil War, and ten years after the publication of Frederick Douglass’s book.
These six particular lectures of Douglass’s are contained in
one of the two attached documents. “What
to the slave is the Fourth of July?” is a famous one, but they are
all outstanding. This was an orator!
Power concedes nothing without a demand
But the main reading, attached, is the most immortal of all
of Frederick Douglass’s speeches, known as “If
There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” from 1857, which contains the
famous phrase: “Power concedes nothing
without a demand.” If you read nothing else of Douglass’s, do read this
extraordinary piece of revolutionary literature, for the good advice that it
gives: power concedes nothing without a
demand.
The American Civil War of 1861-1865 was an armed conflict
between one part of the bourgeoisie and another. It represented the real capitalist
revolution in the USA, when the specifically capitalist bourgeoisie gained its
dictatorship over the slaveholding part, and also over the new proletariat that
it had created. In this way the US bourgeois dictatorship that still exists
today came into being.
For Africans, the global abolition of slavery was a relief
after three centuries of terrible mass-scale atrocity. But the abolition of
outright slavery also marked the beginning of wage slavery, and of military
invasions, conquests, domination, plunder, settlement and colonialism,
including a “scramble for Africa” in the second half of the 19th
Century. In the second half of the 20th Century, globalist
neo-colonialism followed.
African political writing tracked all these changes. In this
week’s part we look briefly at the literature of the period of slavery and
colonial expansion. In the next part, we will move into the literature of the
post-WW2 era of decolonisation.