African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1
Frederick Douglass
This is the first main post
of our 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 2015. 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
Context
The first part of our
ten-part series on African Revolutionary Writers covers the period from slavery
to Imperialism. The Atlantic 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 Trade took slaves across the ocean via the “Middle
Passage” and brought sugar, tobacco, cotton and other plantation-grown
commodities to Europe.
Christopher Columbus had 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 allow
some blacks – released slaves – to create a literary genre known
as the “slave narrative”, as part of the capitalist campaign to suppress
slavery. This was 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 as
a rescued slave, published in 1789. Such 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.
Frederick Douglass took the genre to a new level, transcended it,
and left behind 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, 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. It contains the famous sentence: “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 capitalist-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. This week we look 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.
·
The above serves to
introduce the original reading-text - Frederick
Douglass’s 1857 “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress”
·
PDF files of the reading text are attached, including six more lectures of Frederick
Douglass
·
To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
