In this text, William C. Anderson critiques the idea that Black liberation can be achieved through nation-states. Tracing the history of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” campaign and prior projects of the kind from North America and the Caribbean to Liberia and Sierra Leone, he draws parallels with Zionism and argues that state power, by definition, reproduces hierarchy, violence, and settler logic.
“When the Jew said, ‘We shall have Palestine!’ the same sentiment came to us when we said, ‘We shall have Africa!” — Marcus Garvey
“The masses could never seize state power because the state is a hierarchical form of social organization and could only be seized in the name of the masses by somebody else.” — Joseph Edwards, aka Fundi, the Caribbean Situationist
The now bewildering “question” of the state lingers in the minds of radicals who continue to make the age-old argument that if “the people” just have state power, liberation will follow. Long ago, when this caused a divide in the socialist movement between statist and anti-state socialists (anarchists), perhaps it felt like time would tell. And, it did. The success of the Russian Revolution catalyzed successive global uprisings, laying the groundwork for the emergence of post-colonial nation-states. What became of them answered many questions about the utility of the state. However, we still find ourselves having to work our way backward, rehashing history, excavating the tombs of past thinkers, and kicking up dust that should be settled. Concerning the unhealed wounds of the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, this feels especially pertinent in its repetitions. The idea of a Black state or a Black country as a representation of an entire diverse population not only ignores much of the past but also our present reality. We should examine some origins of this idea and revisit previous colonial attempts to build Black Zionist states in order to break free from this cycle. If we don’t, we run the risk of letting Black Zionist ideas develop further.
“Black Zionism” might seem confusing as a term, but it’s not a new one. In his classic 1956 text, Pan-Africanism or Communism, the anti-colonial icon George Padmore discusses some origins of Black Zionism within Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” campaign. He states that, “Under the slogan, ‘Africa for the Africans at home and abroad,’ Garvey, a past master in the art of mass-psychology and impassioned demagoguery capitalized on the racial disabilities of the Negroes in America.” His pointing to “racial disabilities” here highlights a collective grievance. Padmore also notes that Garvey, “exploited the disillusionment which affected peoples of African descent everywhere after the First World War, in which they had fought in order ‘to make the world safe for democracy,’ and ‘the right of self-determination.’” This is a good starting point for understanding some of the colonial attitudes and ventures that have appeared in the name of resettling the descendants of enslaved Africans.
Before Garvey, in 1791, the Sierra Leone Company established a settler colony that brought in free and formerly enslaved Black people from Nova Scotia to the African Continent.
The “Black Loyalists” were a large portion of Black Americans who chose to side with the British during the Revolutionary War. Afterward, they were facing deadly threats and reenslavement by Patriot rebels fighting the Kingdom of Great Britain in its conflict with what would eventually become the United States. Figures like Thomas Peters, an African who escaped slavery in North Carolina to fight for the British, had to lobby on behalf of neglected Black Loyalist veterans and former slaves. The British promised freedom to those who escaped and fought against their Patriot enslavers. Although when the time came, they also had to fight to actually receive the resources promised to them. In addition to this, growing abolitionist, anti-slavery sentiments in the wake of this war led to a push for the relocation of vulnerable Black people. The British state took over the Sierra Leone territory in 1809, not long before the arrival of a similar project bordering to the southeast, pioneered by the Crown’s own former colony.
Just seven years later, in 1816, the American Colonization Society initiated a plan to establish a colony on the African Continent. What became Liberia in 1847 was a project to ship away increasing numbers of formerly enslaved Black people in the United States. Turmoil and disorganization plagued both of these settlements, with Liberia being overrun by disease, conflict, hardship, and ultimately becoming a settler regime that forced Native Africans into indentured servitude to the ruling minority Americo-Liberians. The new ethnic supremacy born here was, ironically, modeled in many ways after the US Southern slaveholding society. There were plantation homes and the trappings of a social design that one would assume formerly enslaved people would want absolutely nothing to do with.
However, for Marcus Garvey’s Black Zionist aspirations, Liberia was a place with potential for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) relocation project.
The anti-Black sentiment that helped shape voluntary deportation efforts to remove Black people shares some similarities with the antisemitism that helped push the creation of the Israeli settler-state. Like Jewish populations in Europe, formerly enslaved Black people in the United States, for instance, were seen as a problem to export elsewhere, with potential gains for the forces that also pushed them out. The grievance that organized Garvey’s Black Zionism carries an alarming resemblance to the inconsistencies, mythologies, and dangers of Jewish Zionism. As a matter of fact, it inspired him, as he told an interviewer, “When the Jew said, ‘We shall have Palestine, we said, ‘We shall have Africa.’” (The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920, 1983) Garvey once pondered, “Where is the black man‘s Government?’ ‘Where is his King and his kingdom?’ ‘Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?’” (quoted in Jessie Kratz, “Caribbean American Heritage Month: Marcus Garvey,” 2019). The answer was his own reflection; he had determined, “I am trying to make everyone a Marcus Garvey personified.” (Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars, 2007) He would declare himself “Provisional President of Africa,” echoing a statement that he himself would “make” what he could not find elsewhere for “the black man.” This entitlement, establishing oneself as ruler and regime over lands never traveled to and rightful heirs, simply because of oppression, had already fueled Black settler violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The attempt to establish Garvey’s autocratic project followed a like-minded Black Zionist rationale. However, it didn’t merely die with him.
This belief that people who experience oppression are made exceptional enough to either build on top of existing sovereignties or take possession of lands for themselves came from another angle. Garvey, a virulent anticommunist, threatened party-line communists at a time when “the Negro question” was the summation of debates about the emphasis race or class should have in struggle. His race consciousness and focus on Black nationalism disrupted class reductionist leanings that shied away from confronting anti-Black oppression as a distinct issue. The previously mentioned George Padmore documented that self-selected vanguard sects, unfortunately, much like today, created party-front organizations to enlist Black people. Then they regularly failed to corral those very Black people for the Soviet Communist International (Comintern) through infiltration of organizations or from their front groups. Padmore, a former affiliate of the Comintern himself, noted that at a previous Congress the Comintern bitterly stated, “By ignoring the question of racial antagonism our Party has allowed the Negro liberation movement in America to take a wrong path and to get into the hands of the Negro bourgeoisie, which has launched the nationalist slogan ‘Back to Africa.” (Pan-Africanism Or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa, 1956). Therefore, they needed to present an alternative.
Since Marcus Garvey developed an idea for a national home that attracted Black people, the Soviet alternative would be a Black Republic in the Black Belt of the US South. Padmore pointed to Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish-Soviet politician, as the originator of this particular conception of a nation within a nation. He scathingly wrote:
“This was Marxist sociology turned upside down. With Stalin’s blessing, this amazing piece of nonsense was imposed upon the American party. Those who rejected Kuusinen’s thesis were expelled as ‘right-wing deviationists.’ Among the victims of this purge were many of the most intelligent Negroes. Those outside the party contemptuously rejected Moscow’s gift horse. The Negroes wanted to know how they, a poor downtrodden and unarmed racial minority group, were to establish an autonomous self-governing ‘Black Belt State’ within the Republic of the United States.”
Subsequent ideas about creating a Black nation-state domestically within the US or abroad on the African Continent deviate in their ideological and material motivations. Some of these developments throughout history have led to theoretical, if not outright, collusion with white supremacists and their motivations. Garvey, for instance, stated in a 1937 interview, “We were the first Fascists. We had disciplined men, women and children in training for the liberation of Africa. The black masses saw that in this extreme nationalism lay their only hope and readily supported it. Mussolini copied fascism from me” (quoted in Paul Gilroy, “Black Fascism,” 2000). He spoke, almost admirably, at times about the “white man” and went as far as to meet with the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey made it plain, “This is a white man’s country. He found it, he conquered it and we can’t blame him because he wants to keep it. I’m not vexed with the white man of the South for Jim Crowing me because I am black. I never built any street cars or railroads. The white man built them for their own convenience. And if I don’t want to ride where he’s willing to let me then I’d better walk” (also quoted in Gilroy’s text).
Before Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) left the Nation of Islam (NOI) and was assassinated, he was sent to meet with the Ku Klux Klan about securing lands for Black people. Malcolm said, “I know for a fact that there is a conspiracy between […] the Muslims and the Lincoln Rockwell Nazis and also the Ku Klux Klan […]. They were trying to make a deal with him to make available to Elijah Muhammad a county-size tract of land in Georgia or South Carolina where Elijah Muhammad could then induce Negroes to migrate and make it appear that his program of a segregated state or separated state was feasible” (quoted in Gilroy’s text). It shouldn’t be lost on us either that Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the NOI, was subject to Garvey’s influence. It also shouldn’t be neglected that the NOI has already openly interacted with white supremacists before, such as inviting the leadership of the American Nazi Party to attend their 1962 convention.
All of this history and more make it perplexing, especially in the midst of a present-day escalated genocide against Palestinians, that the notion of a Black nation-state based on exceptionalism still thrives. This is not a simple matter of claiming land with a different economic model in today’s world. That outdated Cold War rationale has had disastrous consequences. It echoes now tragically when we recall that the Soviet Union was the first country to offer de jure recognition to the state of Israel. State-communism materially supported Zionist genocide. Of the Soviet Bloc, Former Prime Minister and first Israel ambassador to the Soviet Union, Golda Meir stated in her 1973 autobiography My Life:
“Had it not been for the arms and ammunition that we were able to buy in Czechoslovakia and transport through Yugoslavia and other Balkan countries in those dark days at the start of the war, I do not know whether we actually could have held out until the tide changed, as it did by June, 1948. For the first six weeks of the War of Independence, we relied largely (though not, of course, entirely) on the shells, machine guns, bullets—and even planes —that the Haganah had been able to purchase in Eastern Europe at a time when even the United States had declared an embargo on the sale or shipment of arms to the Middle East. One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
Another Israeli Head of State, Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion is also quoted having once said, “Czechoslovak arms saved the State of Israel, really and absolutely. Without these weapons, we wouldn’t have survived” (Gita Zbavitelová, “The Czech Arms that Saved Israel, 2020). When an arms embargo was limiting Israel’s ability to carry out its settler-colonial agenda, it was Soviet Union intermediaries that supplied the arms that kept Israel alive. If “having” a state and representative governance was going to save us from the horrors we’re witnessing globally, what went wrong for Palestine? Where are the states that do not oppress the people within their borders and can defend the oppressed in the name of rule by the masses? Why have they not stopped, or why can’t they stop what’s happening? When you ask these questions, the deflating dogmatic answer you get from ideologues is that we have to reattempt what’s already been done all over again.
Surely, this all cannot be as simple as invoking an oppressed identity and a self-proclaimed liberatory ideology. That’s the same reasoning that led to not only the creation of Israel, but also structures the US origin myth about religious persecution that helped the zealous pilgrims carry out their own genocide and conquest. Thinking that an identity, self-determination, and a nation-state are what liberate people has led to several ethnic cleansings, genocides, and disasters the world has yet to recover from. Admitting as much isn’t imperialist propaganda, but it is what gives us the fuel to develop new radicalisms outside of Western frameworks and reasonings that have inundated us with colonial statist aspirations.
Part of the problem here is that so much of what we think we deserve is based on a sense of ownership, territorialization, and property that has nothing to do with defeating capitalism.
Black Loyalists thought that serving the British would free them, only to find broken promises about land and protection on the other side of their situation. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders promised “40 acres and a mule” to Black people during the Civil War, who watched it fall back into their resentful oppressor’s hands. And these lands were none of these forces’ to give away after they massacred Native people to occupy them in the first place. People the world over have been led astray trying to engage in the rationale of nations and states in order to try to fit into frameworks that don’t serve the colonized and enslaved. The examples are endless, but it is essential to understand that we’re still directly negotiating with the violence of the colonial state form, whether through inclusion, reform, or the seizure of this class instrument designed to control populations (not free them). We do not seize the state; the state seizes us. Furthermore, it changes us by reshaping our struggles into a format that monopolizes violence and capitalizes on behalf of a ruling elite or Party. To think it does anything different at a point in time when a few people control the majority of the world’s wealth is nearly a fantasy.
The threat of Black Zionism haunts us because too many radicals today refuse to take up the task of developing new theory and new praxis. Instead, the old, overused ideas of yesteryear are resurrected like zombies stumbling towards us in decaying decadence. We’re supposed to grow old, thinking the solution is the same as what the generation before us said, despite changing conditions. We can appreciate what was previously accomplished, but first we have to let go of what we should identify within ourselves as a problematic idea of “essential innocence.”
In “Black Fascism” (2000), Paul Gilroy describes this phenomenon:
“The myths of essential innocence shield their supposed beneficiaries from the complex moral choices that define human experience and insulate them from the responsibility to act well and choose wisely. This kind of thinking would usher black politics into a desert: a flattened moral landscape bereft of difficult decisions, where cynicism would rule effortlessly in the guise of naturalized morality. Hidden within that exaltation of biologically grounded innocence is a promise that the political lives of the innocent will eventually be emancipated from moral constraint. Innocence makes the difficult work of judgment and negotiation irrelevant. And wherever that innocence is inflated by the romance of “race,” nationhood, and ethnic fraternity, fascism will flourish.
The capacity to perpetrate evil is not a modern phenomenon, but the scale and power of the modern nation-state expand and condition it.”
If we observe this within Marcus Garvey’s Black Zionism and its offspring, we can see how religion fed it, too. As Mark Christian Thompson writes, “Another aspect of Garvey’s ultranationalism is its belief in the biblically portended, divine nature of the black state.” (Black Fascisms, 2007). If the creation of Zionist states is not being solely driven by theocratic rationale, there’s always the idea that the state itself is Godlike because it supposedly structures a population to higher supernatural purpose. This how you end up with state violence that’s supposedly ordained by a deity no matter how cruel or evil it clearly is.
The worst, most dangerous regimes the Western world has to offer us right now are born out of stories of genuine displacement, oppression, and genocide.
Identity is not enough in a world shaped by capitalism to offset what will be repeated every time we tell ourselves that our motivations won’t produce the same results that those with colonial underpinnings always do.
As today’s US Black ultranationalists scream about reparations and xenophobically separate themselves from the rest of the African diaspora based on “lineage,” foundation, blood, and land, I worry deeply. I see the seeds being planted for new Black Zionism, Black fascism, and Black conquest. Among those who enliven the sentiments I describe here, there is a foundation being laid in US society to make oppression into fuel for new exclusions and ethnic hubris. And as much as some might dismiss such a concern, we have already seen former slaves become masters. We have already seen Holocaust victims become genocidaires. We have seen the national state socialist politicians turn anti-colonial projects into genocidal campaigns against the very masses they were supposed to free. We have seen cyclical evil turn those who many only imagine as victims into oppressors. Here is a warning: if we do not turn away from organizing our quest for liberation through the tools of our oppression, we will see and feel it happen, yet again. ■