Matthew Quest questions why C.L.R. James is not widely recognised as a founder of African Studies. He asks readers to consider why James’ contributions to the deep study of African history and culture are less known compared to his engagement with anti-colonial African party politics and political economy. Foreshadowing his forthcoming, thoroughly researched study, Quest begins to reveal how James challenged the imperial cultural apparatus as a teacher and learner of African Diaspora heritage who inspired continental African scholars.
By Matthew Quest
CLR James (1901-1989) is a founding father of the modern Pan African movement. Yet, why is he not more consistently recognised as a founder of African Studies? This is a provocation, an incitement to raise questions and research his legacies. After outlining a renewed case for James’ contributions, alert to the hindrances he faced, we will share some amazing facts. They are astonishing for their transcendence of narrow political-economy toward asking cultural questions many have falsely manufactured as beyond his ken. Perhaps this is a result that James’ outlook on African Studies is not that of a Europhile, but clashes with certain cultural nationalists, black capitalists, and hierarchical thinkers.
African Studies, separate from James’ engagement, has always been political. Post-colonial scholarship has tried to center ethical dilemmas associated with these pursuits. Still, certain epistemic and cultural questions can be quite challenging. Especially when the African continent was artificially estranged from world history due to white supremacy and empire, the African Diaspora heritage learner bore the burden of this exclusion. James was manifestly among those who strived to reclaim Africa’s place in the humanities and social sciences and ignited sparks toward the African renaissance.[1]
CLR James deserves his place as a founder of African Studies. Respected by African continental scholars, James helped cultivate many toward intellectual breakthroughs. James also stood by challenges to Area Studies, or the imperial cultural apparatus, who in the name of objectivity openly and subtly gathered knowledge of Africa to keep the continent subordinate.
Mindful of Degradation: Speaking to the ‘Angry’ and ‘Emotional’
Mindful of a common heritage of degradation and contemporary disempowerment, CLR James knew how to teach students of Africa who were often dismissed by official authorities as excessively ‘emotional’ and ‘angry’. A master teacher who demystified colonial myths about why Africans could not govern themselves, he also led profound discussions about the content of civilisations. James would always leave his audiences imagining how they would take responsibility for economic planning, judicial affairs, foreign relations, and all education and cultural matters. Far more than we realise, that is what African rites of passage socialised humans to do, whether subsequently enslaved, conquered, feudal aristocrat, modern administrator, or aspiring toiler.
Most have grasped James’ confession narratives about what he could not easily understand as a young colonial and as someone who was educated to be a member of the British literary middle class.[2] Certainly, the colonial mapping of the continent and its distorted discourses, caused James occasional confusion. Some, in the name of race-first Black Nationalism, mistakenly feel James had permanent Eurocentric blind spots as a result of his Graeco-Roman classical education. Yet, this was almost always the education on the continent and in the diasporas through which the pioneers of African Studies began their lives, a generation before and after CLR James. This was not paradoxical, so long as we keep in mind all African thinkers need not be readers and writers. Why has this disproportionately been left at James’s feet as an unresolved historical problem?
After his formal education had been completed, James was first discovering Africa. Whether at historically black colleges among African Americans, elite colonial schools in the Caribbean, or African continental missionary schools, most began with Latin and Greek language, European history and literature, and the Bible. And it was by these means that the proficient and insightful discovered ancient Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nile Valley Civilisations.
For those who were not raised within African rites of passage, some were able to learn (after leaping over obstacles) about African languages, cosmologies, the arts, West and Central African and other pre-colonial civilisations, after having had foundations that if were not unfit, or an impediment to learning about Africa, delayed a proper focus. Nevertheless, the Graeco-Roman classics, were for many a secret language of movable tropes and changeable analogies, that empowered cultural nationalisms and anti-colonial self-confidence in the best sense as found in the African world.[3] To be manifestly clear, this doesn’t mean that we should not begin with African languages and more focused pre-colonial cultural engagement today. Still, CLR James, whether he and the world knew it or not, was prepared to be a founding father of African Studies.
Stimulating the Coming Emancipation of Africa
Many are familiar with James’s contributions to anti-colonial politics, particularly in defence of Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania. CLR is remembered as mentor, colleague, and fellow traveller of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and for a brief moment which must be revisited, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie. But famously, from the perspective of taking seriously bringing a new society closer, he was also their critic.
It has been a mistake to think James was only interested in questions about the state, political economy, and party politics, and gave very little thought to deeper African cultural inquiry. Why has this historical challenge not been made to his Trinidadian comrade in Pan-Africanism, George Padmore, who engaged the substance of African cultures far less than James in his own legacies?
In fact, with proper research, James’ interest in the nuances of African cultures was intermittent but not invisible. Further, when we historically reconstruct his private life of reading, we are astonished at his perennial interest in African anthropologies broadly defined.
As is made clear in his 1971 lectures in Atlanta, CLR James’ The Black Jacobins (1938, 1963), about the Haitian Revolution, “had Africa in mind” and wished to “stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa.” James was clear, despite archival research, that he could only imagine what the Haitian Revolution had been while being alert to the struggles he had been living through in the 1930s – what the Ethiopians and emerging Africans were doing to fight for their self-directed liberating future. There could be no Black liberation, underlined James, without clearing minds of notions that Africa was historically and culturally inferior.
His A History of Pan African Revolt (1938, 1969), especially in its first edition, highlighted obscure rebellions of Africans not merely as workers and farmers, but as inspired by their own ideas emerging from their own ethnic groups, religions, and cosmologies. In many ways this built on the conclusion to The Black Jacobins that many ignore; the future African revolutions will not be led by doctors, lawyers, or the formally educated.
James’ later Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977) restored direct democracy and dual power to the anti-colonial revolt of 1947-1951 and discussed a political leader who would be a cultivator of the popular will, that included Ghana’s market women, industrial workers, and the ‘verandah boys.’ While unique personalities cultivate the popular will, such as Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, leading a revival campaign of everyday people’s self-governing capacities (which had been degraded and conquered), at a certain point the obscure toilers take the lead of the anti-colonial revolution.[4]
The African proletariat is the chief actor of African History
James insisted that the chief actor in African history was the African proletariat (which he defined flexibly as the emerging enslaved, peasant-farmer, unemployed, and industrial worker). He underscored it is not leaders of party politics and the formally educated. Further, future movements would have to overcome the African nation-state for its elitist worldviews toward women and toilers in particular. As a historian, James had an unapologetic philosophy of history. He rejected pretences to objectivity and reason that believed everyday people (especially the barefoot) couldn’t govern society and that all there could be was reform of decrepit policies and revision of degrading elite representative government that was designed never to include the obscure African multitudes.
There is no question that Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiongo, Maina wa Kinyatti, and Oginga Odinga; Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Kenneth O. Dike, Herbert Ekwe Ekwe, Olafemi Taiwo, Toyin Falola; Congo’s Jacques Depelchin and Ernest Wambia-dia-Wamba; Ghana’s Kofi Buenor Hadjor, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, Charles Quist-Adade, and Vincent Dodoo; Somalia’s P.L.E. Idahosa and Hussein Adam; and Tanzania’s Issa Shivji, Arnold Temu, Bonaventure Swai, Godfrey Mwakikagile and James Karioki, among many others, have valued, and learned with James’ African Studies.[5] Scholars such as Terisa Turner and Leigh Brownhill, inspired by James, have centered women from Nigeria to Kenya in dynamic ways.[6]
CLR James explained that Walter Rodney’s generation (1942-1980) was able to more confidently pursue African Studies exactly because a series of diasporic thinkers and forerunners including Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Aime Cesaire, and himself previously established there was nothing inferior about African historical and cultural achievement before they were born.[7]
James, like earlier African Diaspora heritage and continental heritage learners, relied also on European scholars who had been colonial travelers and administrators, but whose insights began to approach and transcend concerns with equality with Europeans. Emil Torday, Leo Frobenius, and Maurice Delafosse gathered knowledge useful to early scholars emerging from the burdens of enslavement, colonialism, and institutional racism. They were confident that Africans, despite being systemically undermined, were equal to Europeans, when this was something astonishing for official society to acknowledge. In their social organisation, ethics, and cultural judgment they were often superior.
Still, James was living through a turning point, where African continental scholars wished to arrive on their own authority beyond moral and philosophical mediation by European scholars. James responded to European and American authorities embrace of African history and culture as a belated acknowledgement that their own gathering of knowledge had been insufficient. This meant by a certain logic, Africa’s arrival or return to the world stage. Even W.E.B. Du Bois could suggest something “new” was always coming out of Africa, from the perspective of the African Diaspora heritage learner. This outlook quite frankly astonished many continental African scholars who are constantly told their homelands are a series of crises, burdens, and problems.[8]
James’ African Studies begins at a turning point in the 1920s where opinion makers from Marcus Garvey to Maurice Delafosse, recognise that as a result of slavery and colonialism, the world had a false idea of Africa. False representations from the era of pseudo-scientific racism, insisted Africans or ‘Negroes’ were seen as ‘brutes,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘savage,’ with ugly or substandard physical traits. ‘Child-like’ and ‘primitive’ Africans, especially in the arts, were also said to be ‘retarded’ or ‘backward,’ sometimes even in the liberal mind, as a result of unfortunate or environmental circumstances. Africans appeared as irrational tribes with faith lives based on fetishes and magic.[9] The lingering notions that Africans are underdeveloped or exist outside time, with no historical achievement or progress, are incomplete transitions from invented images, where colonisers alone were said to possess reason, beauty, and technological strength.
African Studies before James was a senior, appeared to exist at its best, to prove that the continent’s humanity might be equal to that of whites. It was difficult to find the words on global stages to illustrate how Africans were superior or simply had concerns that many Europeans didn’t relate. But also many feared to find Africans had the same contoured humanity as Europeans, where individuals and small groups exhibited profound ethics, while some conveyed nasty behavior and many lacked a larger social concern.
If colonialism was a mere episode in African history, and Africans always traded with strangers including Europeans, Arabs, and other Africans deemed outsiders, the question remained why had Africans and Europeans been relative equals in the Middle Ages only for Africa to know great disparities of power technologically and economically in the twentieth century.
CLR James, besides his classical education that he shared with pioneers of African Studies, (including Cheikh Anta Diop, Drucilla Dunjee Houston, William Leo Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui) explicitly rejected racial thinking. Many who evaluate racial disparities of power today inquire if one doesn’t think with race and color, how can one redress historically rooted and contemporary structural inequalities?
What Happens When We Think Racially with Our African Studies
CLR James made it clear when we think racially we prepare our minds to accept that some Black people will sit on the backs of others.[10] It is true too many overstated cosmopolitans who wield Marxist political economy also accept this. But, it is important to consider how such outcomes are justified.
Almost all who vindicate African humanity, in general, do not affirm everyday Africans governing society. Instead, what is defended is states and ruling elites above society, Black accumulators and managers of servile life. Culturally affirming African humanity does not inherently discard hierarchy and domination.
James at his best was not preoccupied with disparities in state and capital formation for he knew decimal points of economic progress was not how African toilers, barefoot or not, would know popular and direct self-government. The barefoot for James were not a lingering African and Caribbean stereotype with gratuitous pesky flies; they were a reminder of who the post-colonial state will in no way elevate.[11]
He most often did not contribute to the notion that the aspiring African national bourgeoisie was, or could be, a progressive social class. Their relative economic rise would do nothing for everyday Africans. Many advocates of progressive political economy not only thought so, but hesitated to support African labour revolts because of their distorted search for power above society.
James did not think discussions of precolonial civilisations should be the intellectual property of those who pursued power at the expense of subordinating ordinary Africans. Similar to Eusi and Tchaiko Kwayana, who led the African cultural revolution in the Western Hemisphere, it was made clear that cultural inquiry and class struggle could be reconciled. African culture and cosmological thinking is what one found in the obscure local people.[12]
African Studies, in Britain and the United States, were not institutionalised until after World War II (1941-1945) in the imperial cultural apparatus. On the eve of independence (the late 1950s and early 1960s) many continental universities had no such courses. In the African Diaspora while some professors and journalists struggled to defend heritage learning, this existed side by side with pseudo-scientific and institutional racism. These are the contexts in which CLR James emerged as a founder of African Studies.
It is striking that those who question CLR James’s affinities, rarely equally question many continental Africans’ lack of kinship for the homeland of the African Diaspora. For those who believe they know CLR James’s legacies fairly well, consider these propositions. In the 1930s, James inquiring what it meant to be an ‘international African,’ became aware of the racial and ethnic conflicts within imperial Ethiopia and which Amhara elitists had benefited. He was aware distinct from the authority of European colonial mythologies, that some continental Africans wielded a constructed Afro-Asian identity, that didn’t relate to everyday Africans, whom they believed were culturally inferior if not worthy of servile labour. For example, most Amhara did not identify with the Oromo or Somali, and when Haile Selassie became a global figure despite the Rastafari’s movement’s affinity for him, he proclaimed he was not a ‘Negro’ or ‘Black.’[13] This dilemma is a historical problem as found among many in Sudan and the Swahili coast as well.
In the 1920s-1950s, James was alert early to the Kikuyu cosmology and what it told him about rites of passage, the education of children and land’s significance for Africans and Kenyans specifically. He was even early aware (though he could be forgetful) that British colonisers were threatened by Kenyans’ wish for education in their own languages, particularly Kikuyu and Swahili. James was instrumental in getting Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya published in the late 1930s.[14]
In the same period, James having read Emil Torday’s studies of the Bushongo (known today as the Kuba) of the Congo, concluded that before colonialism they had essentially lived a happy life. This was his initial pre-colonial gloss on the Haitian enslaved’s African heritage. But remarkably, he found that the monarch had little but ceremonial power, their homes and communities had a profound aesthetic vitality, and real political activity was distinguished by councils of labour and women.[15]
Before African Studies was Institutionalised: Lecturing About Precolonial African Civilisations
In late 1939 in New York City, James gave public lectures not merely on the political economy of slavery and colonialism as it impacted Africa, but also West African precolonial civilisations (i.e. Songhai, Mali, Mossi, etc) and Nile Valley antiquity. He was aware of Africans and African Diaspora heritage learners who saw Nile Valley civilisations as ‘black’ and thought the argument ‘clever.’ He also understood it was a mistake to think West African achievement in the Middle Ages was only a product of Arabic and Islamic influence. This was more than fifteen years before he wrote Every Cook Can Govern, his meditation on direct democracy in classical Athens.[16]
In the late 1950s, James felt the Ewe concept of time was crucial for understanding African market women in Ghana. He knew that all Ghanaian market women were not Ewe. However, what he had in mind is the way they organised the economics of wholesale-retail exchange with Europeans and Arabs, and how they prepared their work-week, essentially made them modern and cosmopolitans. They were independent women who expressed themselves in their own language and frame of mind.[17]
How many know that James’s effort to learn more about the Ashanti was repressed in his first sojourn to Ghana? Yet in his private life of reading he continued to study the political and cosmological implications of the sacred stools of the Akan, whether found among the Twi or Fanti speakers. James came to learn that the Ashanti and Akan more broadly do not see their ancestors as gods but intercessors.[18]
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, after the previous epoch where most African Americans played down their African cultural heritage fearful that white racist authorities would use these facts to take away their civic freedoms, James began to study and find that African cosmologies and philosophies, religion, medicine, arts, crafts, and scientific work cultures were intertwined. He increasingly was aware that if he didn’t study Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santeria, and African languages in Rwanda, Kenya, or Tanzania and emerging African literature properly – as a whole – one could sustain anti-African myths about “traditions” that existed outside time and progress.[19] James increasingly if intermittingly understood that the dead, living and unborn were in conversation in African ontologies.
Beyond Natives without Culture: In Search of African Cultural Survivals
In the same time period, James could intermittently argue that Afro-Caribbean people (not continental Africans) were “natives without culture,” and this placed them at an advantage for bringing a new society closer. Yet this was unsatisfactory to some Afro-Caribbean critics. At the same time, James increasingly placed the intellectual legacies of Jean Price-Mars in conversation with Caribbean Carnival as part of a larger and broader conversation in the region. Was Carnival always a mere festival of drunken and sexual revelry? James was insisting one cannot understand Haitian and Caribbean history and culture without centering the Afro-Caribbean peasant-farmer, their collective memory of assembling for communion rites and directly governing. Something no Afro-Caribbean politician has ever said before or since; James pioneered this outlook twenty years before.[20]
James continued to be interested in African cultural survivals in the Western hemisphere. Further, he recognised that by the late 1950s and early 1960s, continental Africans in Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, and Senegal wished to be in dialogue about them with Haiti, Brazil, and the Anglophone Caribbean. Twenty years before this was not so. With the rise of Nkrumah’s Ghana, the African heritage among African Americans is not as widely rejected as before. Heritage learners in the Americas increasingly find they have their origins in the Akan-Ashanti, the Dahomeans (today part of Benin), the Yoruba of western Nigeria, and the Bini or Edo people (Esan, Afemai, Isoko, and Urhobo) of eastern Nigeria.[21]
James found, from the perspective of absentee ownership, one could comparatively consider plantation systems in West Africa and the Americas. He was pleased to see the discourse on African religions as so many “fetishes” in decline. Further, he recognised the African Diaspora’s capacity to adapt their cosmologies to the Americas upon arrival. James affirmed that Africans had a facility with language both in West Africa and in the new world. Without closer study of African religions and languages, and James always had a mediating scholar to assist him, it made it impossible to see that Africans brought to the Western hemisphere their own capacity for moral philosophy and judicial affairs.
As James took part in wider discussions of rebel slaves in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, the cosmological significance of their political thought became clarified to him. Further, their lack of fear of apparent suicidal action. Yet James foreshadowed these notions but there was no global conversation about this among scholars when he was writing The Black Jacobins in the 1930s.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, James found that one could not overlook the significance of Yoruba sculpture and Ijala poetry for grasping history, religion, and contemporary thinking in Nigeria. Further, he found upon his visit to Nigeria few are aware, that a significant number of anti-colonial thinkers were placing local African histories and their cosmologies in conversation with Greek antiquity city-states and their communion rites.[22] These Nigerians included Wole Soyinka, Dennis Osadebay, and EJ Alagoa. But how many are aware James took interest in Duro Ladipo’s, Obatunde Ijimere’s and J.P. Clark’s plays without these concerns? Or the artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven? This modern African artist with cosmological themes was part of the cultural revolution that began to discard references to Picasso to legitimise African art. His inspiration was Oludamare. Whether James fully grasped this contention, we have evidence of his encounter with these amazing facts.[23]
In the 1970s, James lectured from Michigan to Mississippi, inquiring if his young Black Power audiences knew Africa had great precolonial civilisations. He would compliment his audiences, that he could see it in their eyes that they had a burgeoning consciousness.[24] He generously said that when he was their age he did not know of their presence or importance. In this epoch, at Howard University and Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), James taught in an environment where a Black capitalist oriented cultural nationalism predominated.[25] Many would be surprised to know while he of course leaned toward Julius Nyerere and Walter Rodney in his African Studies courses, he discussed widely with his students Cheikh Anta Diop’s African Origin of Civilization and Chancellor Williams’s The Destruction of Black Civilization. He taught about African art including the Tasili Frescoes that can be found in a national park in south-eastern Algeria. He also encouraged his students to watch the film Battle of Algiers. But he also stimulated discussion of Ewe proverbs, Congo masks and sculpture, and Akan cosmology’s relation to Christianity.[26]
In the 1970s and 1980s, James had an affinity for the Nyamwezi-Sukuma of northwestern Tanzania. Trying to penetrate an inner Africa, he found the history of these people was marked by long distance trade from the west to the east. Their heritage was not isolated or insular. When the contradictions and repression of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa experiment was finally exposed, James found they had created a “sungusungu” movement of popular committees to fight government corruption and crime among their own people. This initiative was a thoughtful self-directed response to the consequences of economic depression.[27]
Conclusion
Many can survey aspects of James’s teaching and learning and twist their face about his ideals and the limits of what he grasped about Africa, as he intermittently discovered and sustained understanding of African cultural foundations. Yet after middle age, what half-hidden but essential intellectual project has the reader taken up in relative isolation and disapproval to transform world understanding against the current?
From his early Caribbean years, CLR James was alert to African and syncretic forms of faith among toiling women. Also the place of Black domestic servants below higher paid Black wage earners contributed to his innovative grasp of the work cultures on the African continent. James saw in the African world a profound self-reliance among African market women, peasant-farmers, oilfield workers, dockworkers, and soldiers. He saw multi-directional flows of modernity through labour migrations. Science and technology, as knowledge for self-government, was most often gathered from below informally through workspaces. James knew advanced and global economic modes of production weren’t contained in imperial centers alone. Historical and economic development did not leave colonised Africans backward in any substantial way that impeded popular and direct self-government.
How many African cultural nationalists beyond hierarchy and domination are really concerned about this? Without a doubt, James while rejecting racial thinking meditated intensely on African cultures. This meant he never thought of African labour as an imperial or peripheral nation’s capital to be exploited and disposed.
James did not complete his journey in recognising and recording self-emancipating African toilers rooted in their own cosmologies, speaking their own languages, and conveying a heritage rooted in ethnic rites of passage, confronting not simply white imperialists but black officialdom. Nevertheless, despite his intermittent insights, he inspired others to find the words and methods about what he really tried to comprehend, and how we might improve on his understanding. The world of CLR James’ African Studies, beyond cheap gossip and hearsay, must be brought closer.
Featured Photograph: CLR James circa 1946, Photography by Carl Van Vechten, (Credit: Countee Cullen-Harold Jackman Collection, Robert Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center)
Matthew Quest has taught African, Caribbean, and African American history at many colleges including Georgia State University in Atlanta and University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
[1] Martin, William G. 2011, ‘The Rise of African Studies (USA) and the Transnational Study of Africa,’ African Studies Review, 54.1 (April 2011) 58-83; Mama, Amina 2007, ‘Is it Ethical to Study Africa: Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom.’ African Studies Review, 50.1 (April) 1-26; Aubrey, Lisa Asili 2002, ‘African Americans in the U.S. and African Studies,’ African Issues,30.2, 19-23; Martin, William G. and Michael O. West eds. 1999, Out of One, Many Africas. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999; Fyfe, Christoper ed. 1976, African Studies Since 1945: A Tribute to Basil Davidson, London: Longman
[2] See James, CLR. 1994. Beyond A Boundary. London: Serpent’s Tail. This is the main source for CLR’s political confession narratives of what he did not earlier understand as a result of his colonial education. Similar narratives can be found elsewhere in his archive.
[3] Ronnick, Michele V. 2004, ‘Twelve Black Classicists,’ Arion: A Journal of Humanities and Classics. 11.3 (Winter) 85-102; Goff, Barbara 2014,‘Your Secret Language:’ Classics in the British Colonies of West Africa. London: Bloomsbury; Greenwood, Emily. 2010, Afro-Greeks, New York: Oxford; Hairston, Eric A. 2013, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West. Knoxville, TN: U. of Tennessee Press.
[4] James, CLR 1963 [1938], The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage; James, CLR 1995 [1938, 1963] A History of Pan African Revolt. Chicago: Charles H Kerr; James, CLR 2000 [1971], ‘Lectures on The Black Jacobins: How I Wrote The Black Jacobins,’ Small Axe. 8 (September) 73; James, CLR 1977, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. Westport, CT: Lawrence & Hill.
[5] See among other sources of African continental scholars affinity for CLR James: Thiongo, Ngugi wa 1972, Homecoming, Nairobi: Heinemann; Thiongo, Ngugi wa 2009, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, New York: Basic Books; Soyinka, Wole, 1975-1976, ‘Ch’indaba = Colloquium,’ Transition, 50 (October-March) 5; Shivji, Issa 1993, Intellectuals at the Hill: Essays and Talks, 1969-1993, Dar es Salaam: Dar se Salaam UP; Depelchin, Jacques 2011, Reclaiming African History, Dakar, Senegal: Pambazuka Press; Depelchin, Jacques 2005, Silences in African History, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Mkuki wa Nyota; Quist-Adade, Charles and Vincent Dodoo 2015, Africa’s Many Divides and Africa’s Futures: Pursuing Nkrumah’s Vision of Pan Africanism in an era of Globalization, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; Falola, Toyin 2004, Nationalism and African Intellectuals, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Dike, K.O. 1956, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1855, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
[6] Brownhill, Leigh 2009, Land, Food, Freedom: Struggles for the Gendered Commons in Kenya, 1870-2007.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; Turner, Terisa 1994, with Bryan J. Ferguson, Arise Ye Mighty People: Gender, Class, and Race in Popular Struggles. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; Turner, Terisa E. and Leigh S. Brownhill 2004, ‘Why Women Are At War With Chevron: Nigerian Subsistence Struggles and the International Oil Industry,’ Journal of Asian and African Studies, 39.1&2. 63-93; Turner, Terisa E. 2022, ‘Ethnicized, Genderered, Class Analysis.’ In Routledge Handbook of Ecosocialism, L. Brownhill, M. Lowy, T. Turner eds. et al. New York: Routledge. 39-48; Terisa Turner 1980, Interview with C. L. R. James, Undated Recordings, c.1980s, 4 CDs, CLR James Papers, Special Collections, Columbia University, New York, NY.
[7] James, C.L.R. 1982, ‘Walter Rodney and the Question of Power,’ In Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar, E.Alpers and P. Fontaine eds., Los Angeles, CA: UCLA CAAS. 133-134.
[8] Murunga, Godwin 2008, ‘Thoughts on Institutional and Intellectual Links Between African and Black Studies.’ African Development, (CODESERIA)33.1. 40-66.
[9] Delafosse, Maurice 1931, Negroes of Africa: History and Culture, Washington, DC: Associated Publishers;
Guillaume, Paul and Thomas Munro 1926, Primitive Negro Sculpture,New York: Harcourt Brace.
[10] Frank, Mackenzie 2015 [1985], Interview with CLR James, In Celebrating CLR James in Hackney, London. G. Bennett and C. Hogsbjerg eds. London: Redwords. 60-61.
[11] In 1932-1933, before CLR James became a revolutionary he was aware that any post-colonial government, from the perspective of the Caribbean before arriving in Britain for the first time, would in no way empower the barefoot. See James, C.L.R. 2014 [1932-1933], The Life of Captain Cipriani. With the pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Government. Durham, NC: Duke UP; James’s concern for the barefoot in Africa and the Caribbean can be found in The Black Jacobins, 265.
[12] Kwayana, Eusi 2013, ‘But a Visionary, Returning Exile, and Guest Activist Ready to Join In the Work of Nation-Building: CLR James’s Infuence on Guyana and Caribbean Politics,’ CLR James Journal. 19.1&2 (Fall) 199-227; Eusi and Tchaiko Kwayana 2023. Scars of Bondage. Atlanta: OOOA; Eusi Kwayana. 2012 [1972] The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics. Updated Edition.Atlanta: OOOA; Kwayana, Tchaiko [Ann Cook] 1969, ‘Black Pride: Some Contradictions?’ In The Black Woman. T.C. Bambara ed. New York: Washington Square Press. 187-202. Quest, Matthew 2017, ‘Sister Tchaiko Kwayana: An Original Educator of the African World,’ Black Agenda Report, May 30; Kwayana, Eusi 2016, With David Hinds, The Legend: Post-Emancipation Villages in Guyana Making World History. Brooklyn, NY: Franklin and Franklin Press.
[13] Adi, Hakim 1998, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 70; Scott, William R. 2006, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941. Hollywood, CA: Tsehai. See especially Chapter 16 ‘Black or White: The Hamite Controversy.’; Jalata, Asafa 2009. ‘Being In And Out of Africa: The Impact of Duality of Ethiopianism.’ Journal of Black Studies. 40.2 (November) 189-214; Jalata, Asafa 2005, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-2004, Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. 65-102; Tibebu, Teshale 1996, ‘Ethiopia: The ‘Anomaly’ and ‘Paradox’ of Africa.’ Journal of Black Studies. 26.4 (March) 414-430; Tibebu, Teshale 1995. The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896-1974,Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press.12-15.
[14] Huxley, Julian 1932, Africa View, London: Chatto & Windus; Kenyatta, Jomo 1938, Facing Mount Kenya. New York: Random House.
[15] Torday, Emil 1925, On the Trail of the Bushongo. London: Seeley, Service & Co.
[16] James, CLR 1996 [1939], [JR Johnson], ‘Destiny of the Negro: A Historical Overview,’ In CLR James on ‘The Negro Question,’ edited byScott McLemee, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi; James, C.L.R. 1992 [1956], Every Cook Can Govern: Democracy in Ancient Athens, Its Meaning for Today. Detroit: Bewick.
[17] James, CLR 1977, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. Westport, CT: Lawrence & Hill, 15; See also Agblemagnon, F. N’Sougan 1957, ‘‘Time’ in the ‘Ewe’ Culture.’ Presence Africaine. 14/15 (June-September) 222-232. James may have read this article in French. This was a special issue collecting contributions of the 1st Congress of Black Writers and Artists; Zaslavsky, Claudia 1999. Africa Counts: Numbers and Patterns in African Cultures. 3rd Edition. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999. 71-72.
[18] James, CLR. Letters on Ghana. Robert A. Hill Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Archives, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY. These letters were summarized and compiled without dates for his political organization, the Correspondence group. There are other relevant dated letters about his first sojourn to Ghana; Danquah, JB 2017, [1944] The Akan Doctrine of God,London: Routledge; Sarpong, Peter K 1971, The Sacred Stools of the Akan. Accra-Tema: Ghana Publishing Corporation.
[19] Jahn, Janheinz 1961, Muntu: the New African culture. M. Grene trans. New York: Grove Press.
[20] Wynter, Sylvia 1975, ‘Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,’ Unpublished Manuscript; Price-Mars, Jean 2004 [1926] ‘So Spoke the Uncle.’ [translated excerpts] In The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation. O. Nigel Bolland ed. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. 192-199.
[21] Herskovits, Melville 1958 [1941], Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Beacon Press.
[22] ‘CLR James on Nigeria’ 1968, Unpublished Manuscript. CLR James Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Archives, Butler Library, Columbia University, NY; See Soyinka, Wole 1974, Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. New York: Norton; Osadebay, Dennis 1978, Building a Nation: An Autobiography, Ibadan: Macmillan Nigeria; Alagoa, E.J. 1964, The Small Brave City-State: A History of the Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.
[23] Ladipo, Duro 1966, Oba Ko So (The King Did Not Hang) Ibadan: Institute for African Studies, U. of Ibadan; Ijimere, Obatunde c.1968, The Bed: A Farce. Based on a story by Sam Selvon. Oshogbo, Nigeria: Adeyemo Printing Press; Ijimere, Obatunde 1966, The Imprisonment of Obatala & Other Plays, London: Heinemann; Clark, JP, Three Plays, Ibadan: Oxford UP; See Henry Glassie. Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, and His Exile in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
[24] ‘CLR James at Tougaloo College’ (1972). Thanks to Harry Cleaver for sharing with me this unpublished transcript; See also Quest, Matthew 2013, ‘CLR James and Kimathi Mohamed’s Circle of Black Power Activists in Michigan.’ Afterword to Organization & Spontaneity. By Kimathi Mohamed.Updated Edition. Atlanta: OOOA, 110; CLR in these lectures was particularly informed by the following two books: Davidson, Basil 1958, Old Africa Rediscovered, London: Longman; Levi-Strauss, Claude 1968, Race and History, 5th edition, Paris: UNESCO.
[25] McClendon, John H. 2005, CLR James’s Notes on Dialectics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.3.
[26] Nielsen, Aldon L 2020, Correspondence with Author, Spring; Nyerere, Julius K. 1973, Freedom and Development. New York: Oxford UP; Nyerere, Julius K., Freedom and Socialism. London: Oxford UP; Rodney, Walter 1981. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington DC: Howard UP; Diop, Cheikh Anta 1989, African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books; Cunard, Nancy 1996 [1934, 1970], The Negro: An Anthology. Edited and Abridged by Hugh Ford. New York: Continuum; Lhote, Henri 1973, The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The Story of the Prehistoric Rock-Paintings of the Sahara. London: Hutchinson.
[27] Abrahams, RG 1981, The Nyamwezi Today: a Tanzania People in the 1970s. New York: Cambridge UP; Campbell, Horace 1989, ‘Popular Resistance in Tanzania: Lessons from the Sungu Sungu,’ African Development (CODESRIA),14.4, 5-43.
