Dear Editor,
This letter comes late since it refers to the birthday of Marcus Garvey which fell on August 17. It is late because of the need for me to make sure of the facts I wanted to pass on to readers unaware of them. I received help from an international scholar of Caribbean origin who was able to confirm from documents the impressions that lingered in my mind from previous reading.
I am raising this now in your newspaper because countries in the Southern Caribbean are at present troubled by the need for colonized races of people to affirm their dignity and self-determination.
Marcus Garvey has correctly gone down in history as the founder of The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and as the person who with his first and second wives and other colleagues, played a leading public role in organizing and uniting to some extent the human remains of the Atlantic slave trade, inspiring them with hope and purpose and also uniting, “Africans at home and abroad.” He was the first African of the diaspora to conceive the idea of a united Africa.
However, in the present state of race relations in the Southern Caribbean it is helpful to remind ourselves of other things attempted and done by Marcus Garvey and the UNIA.
The UNIA did not dabble only in African affairs, although it specialized in them. There are documents that reveal that in South Africa the UNIA groups made common cause with the organizations of migrant Indians in South Africa and those of South African coloureds or mulatto groups. In 1922 Marcus Garvey wrote in The Negro World an article titled “The truth about India.” It was an effort at solidarity with the historical struggle of the Indian people for unity and Home Rule or Swaraj. There is a record that in 1926 Marcus Garvey on behalf of the UNIA sent telegrams of solidarity to Mahatma Gandhi of India and Mr Eamon de Valera of Ireland supporting their struggles for freedom. The leaders addressed graciously replied.
It is also known that local struggles in Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana, as researched by Nigel Westmaas while a graduate scholar linked with the Garvey project of Professor Robert Hill documented the work of the Garveyites in Guyana. The former Guyanese diplomat Cedric Joseph has touched on these themes on his studies on mutiny of West Indian regiment members serving in Europe at the end of the First World War.
When the five Enmore martyrs were sacrificed in 1948 I know from my own presence there that it was the Garveyites like Caroline Bourne and Laurie de Jonge in the friendly and burial societies who took the lead of organising in that sector memorials for the sugar workers who had been killed.
Those of us who have a reputation, sometimes not accurate, of struggling only within a single race, have a duty in my opinion to reveal more and more of the post-colonial struggle as I have done in many of my writings.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
