ogc163
Superstar
By Adom Getachew
OCTOBER 29, 2019
A panel at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, November 1945. (Getty / John Deakin)
Had Peter Abrahams, the South African–born novelist, journalist, and Pan-Africanist, not been killed tragically in his Jamaican home in January 2017, he would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. Born in 1919 on the outskirts of Johannesburg to an Ethiopian father and a “colored” (in the parlance of apartheid) mother, Abrahams lived his life along the winding paths of Pan-Africanism in the 20th century. In the same year that Abrahams was born, W.E.B. Du Bois helped organize the First Pan-African Congress to lay out a vision of what the end of the “war to end all wars” might mean for the colonized and Jim Crowed, who had long been subjugated by empire and white supremacy. When the end of another world war spurred the creation of the United Nations in 1945, Abrahams was old enough to join in the Pan-Africanists’ Fifth Congress, serving as its secretary of publicity. By that time, he had escaped South Africa after being accused of treason for criticizing his country’s inequalities and had established himself as a writer with the publication of the short story collection Dark Testament and the novel Song of the City. At the Fifth Congress, he was joined by a cohort of black intellectuals—Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore—who would soon define the coming postcolonial era. “The struggle for political power by Colonial and subject peoples,” the congress declared, “is the first step towards, and the necessary prerequisite to, complete social, economic and political emancipation.”
Reflecting on the proceedings, Abrahams identified this call with a new “militant phase” of the struggle against colonialism. “Forward to the Socialist United States of Africa! Long live Pan-Africanism!” he exhorted after the congress’s closing. To Du Bois’s 1900 declaration that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” Abrahams and his generation answered with a vision of an independent and united Africa that could finally secure racial equality across the globe.
However, Abrahams’s story also mirrored the swift disillusion that followed with the emergence of neocolonialism and the fractures within the Pan-Africanist movement. In his prescient 1956 novel A Wreath for Udomo, he depicted the unraveling of Pan-Africanism just as it was becoming a wide-ranging movement. The book’s main character, Michael Udomo, is a composite figure (based on Nkrumah and Padmore) who moves from organizing for African independence in London to becoming the prime minister of a fictional “Panafrica.” Narrated in two parts, “The Dream” and “The Reality,” the novel tracks the exhilarating promise of national liberation, the hopes of a militant generation of Pan-Africanists, and the tragic choice that follows as Udomo weighs the costs of betraying the cause by accepting aid from a white settler nation or risking the ire of powerful states by supporting a fellow revolutionary. His dilemmas culminate in his destruction at the hands of his domestic opposition.
In the years to come, numerous anticolonial activists—from Nkrumah in Ghana to Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria and Patrice Lumumba in Congo—would meet a similar fate, witnessing their hopes for independence dashed in the face of domestic dissension, Cold War interventions, and persistent economic dependence. In an age of decolonization, the Pan-Africanist wager was premised on the view that nationalism and internationalism must go hand in hand, that national independence could be secured only within regional and international institutions. As a result, the early postcolonial constitutions of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, for instance, included clauses that authorized the delegation of sovereignty to a Union of African States when such an entity came into being. Yet over the three decades that followed World War II, internationalism and nationalism gradually came apart. While the sovereign state proved to be a limited vehicle for realizing independence and equality, its rights of nonintervention and territorial integrity emerged as powerful tools, especially against domestic critics and subnational challenges to state authority. In this context, committed Pan-Africanists and internationalists soon became wedded to the sovereign nation-state and its capacity to discipline newly independent and fragile societies.
“The one-man leadership thing I never condoned,” Abrahams later recalled, but even in the face of such thwarted hopes, he remained loyal to the cause of Pan-African liberation for the rest of his life. A chance meeting in 1955 with Norman Manley, who was then leading Jamaica’s anticolonial struggle, prompted Abrahams to move to the island, where he participated in its transition to independence and later supported the social transformation inaugurated by Norman Manley’s son Michael Manley, the democratic socialist prime minister who swept into office in 1972. Abrahams worked as the chairman of Radio Jamaica and hoped that the Caribbean might realize the democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist vision of society that he had long fought for. From his home in the mountains of Jamaica, Abrahams set his sights across the Atlantic, critically assessing the failures of the postcolonial African states and especially the rise of authoritarian regimes. But as he declared near the end of his long life, “Jamaica is Africa to me.”
The story of Pan-Africanism as a cresting wave of 20th century aspirations for African freedom and unity that crashed on the limits of postcolonial statehood is compelling because it attends to the defeats and disappointments that followed decolonization. Yet it is only one story of Pan-Africanism, and it renders invisible and illegible those projects of African unity that circumvented the aspiration to statehood and persisted in alternative institutional and ideological trajectories. Throughout his life, Abrahams used his novels to restage and recast Pan-Africanism’s promise of black freedom. In his last novel, The View From Coyaba, published in 1985, he offered a transnational and transhistorical story that begins in Jamaica before the abolition of slavery there and follows the life of Jacob Brown, a Maroon descendant who studies with Du Bois in the United States before traveling to Africa as a missionary. Forced to flee Uganda, Brown returns to the hills of Jamaica, where his ancestors once took flight from slavery. Rather than see his return as marking a full circle, Brown awaits another opportunity to fly back to Africa.
OCTOBER 29, 2019
A panel at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, November 1945. (Getty / John Deakin)
Had Peter Abrahams, the South African–born novelist, journalist, and Pan-Africanist, not been killed tragically in his Jamaican home in January 2017, he would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. Born in 1919 on the outskirts of Johannesburg to an Ethiopian father and a “colored” (in the parlance of apartheid) mother, Abrahams lived his life along the winding paths of Pan-Africanism in the 20th century. In the same year that Abrahams was born, W.E.B. Du Bois helped organize the First Pan-African Congress to lay out a vision of what the end of the “war to end all wars” might mean for the colonized and Jim Crowed, who had long been subjugated by empire and white supremacy. When the end of another world war spurred the creation of the United Nations in 1945, Abrahams was old enough to join in the Pan-Africanists’ Fifth Congress, serving as its secretary of publicity. By that time, he had escaped South Africa after being accused of treason for criticizing his country’s inequalities and had established himself as a writer with the publication of the short story collection Dark Testament and the novel Song of the City. At the Fifth Congress, he was joined by a cohort of black intellectuals—Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore—who would soon define the coming postcolonial era. “The struggle for political power by Colonial and subject peoples,” the congress declared, “is the first step towards, and the necessary prerequisite to, complete social, economic and political emancipation.”
Reflecting on the proceedings, Abrahams identified this call with a new “militant phase” of the struggle against colonialism. “Forward to the Socialist United States of Africa! Long live Pan-Africanism!” he exhorted after the congress’s closing. To Du Bois’s 1900 declaration that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” Abrahams and his generation answered with a vision of an independent and united Africa that could finally secure racial equality across the globe.
However, Abrahams’s story also mirrored the swift disillusion that followed with the emergence of neocolonialism and the fractures within the Pan-Africanist movement. In his prescient 1956 novel A Wreath for Udomo, he depicted the unraveling of Pan-Africanism just as it was becoming a wide-ranging movement. The book’s main character, Michael Udomo, is a composite figure (based on Nkrumah and Padmore) who moves from organizing for African independence in London to becoming the prime minister of a fictional “Panafrica.” Narrated in two parts, “The Dream” and “The Reality,” the novel tracks the exhilarating promise of national liberation, the hopes of a militant generation of Pan-Africanists, and the tragic choice that follows as Udomo weighs the costs of betraying the cause by accepting aid from a white settler nation or risking the ire of powerful states by supporting a fellow revolutionary. His dilemmas culminate in his destruction at the hands of his domestic opposition.
In the years to come, numerous anticolonial activists—from Nkrumah in Ghana to Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria and Patrice Lumumba in Congo—would meet a similar fate, witnessing their hopes for independence dashed in the face of domestic dissension, Cold War interventions, and persistent economic dependence. In an age of decolonization, the Pan-Africanist wager was premised on the view that nationalism and internationalism must go hand in hand, that national independence could be secured only within regional and international institutions. As a result, the early postcolonial constitutions of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, for instance, included clauses that authorized the delegation of sovereignty to a Union of African States when such an entity came into being. Yet over the three decades that followed World War II, internationalism and nationalism gradually came apart. While the sovereign state proved to be a limited vehicle for realizing independence and equality, its rights of nonintervention and territorial integrity emerged as powerful tools, especially against domestic critics and subnational challenges to state authority. In this context, committed Pan-Africanists and internationalists soon became wedded to the sovereign nation-state and its capacity to discipline newly independent and fragile societies.
“The one-man leadership thing I never condoned,” Abrahams later recalled, but even in the face of such thwarted hopes, he remained loyal to the cause of Pan-African liberation for the rest of his life. A chance meeting in 1955 with Norman Manley, who was then leading Jamaica’s anticolonial struggle, prompted Abrahams to move to the island, where he participated in its transition to independence and later supported the social transformation inaugurated by Norman Manley’s son Michael Manley, the democratic socialist prime minister who swept into office in 1972. Abrahams worked as the chairman of Radio Jamaica and hoped that the Caribbean might realize the democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist vision of society that he had long fought for. From his home in the mountains of Jamaica, Abrahams set his sights across the Atlantic, critically assessing the failures of the postcolonial African states and especially the rise of authoritarian regimes. But as he declared near the end of his long life, “Jamaica is Africa to me.”
The story of Pan-Africanism as a cresting wave of 20th century aspirations for African freedom and unity that crashed on the limits of postcolonial statehood is compelling because it attends to the defeats and disappointments that followed decolonization. Yet it is only one story of Pan-Africanism, and it renders invisible and illegible those projects of African unity that circumvented the aspiration to statehood and persisted in alternative institutional and ideological trajectories. Throughout his life, Abrahams used his novels to restage and recast Pan-Africanism’s promise of black freedom. In his last novel, The View From Coyaba, published in 1985, he offered a transnational and transhistorical story that begins in Jamaica before the abolition of slavery there and follows the life of Jacob Brown, a Maroon descendant who studies with Du Bois in the United States before traveling to Africa as a missionary. Forced to flee Uganda, Brown returns to the hills of Jamaica, where his ancestors once took flight from slavery. Rather than see his return as marking a full circle, Brown awaits another opportunity to fly back to Africa.