Abstract
Taking his cue from the title of George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? The coming struggle for Africa, an influential work written amidst decolonisation in 1956, Hakim Adi in Pan-Africanism and Communism sets out to demonstrate historically the ways in which Pan-Africanism and Communism were not such completely separate currents in the inter-war period – as Padmore seemed to suggest – but rather became briefly, to some extent, fused in the struggle for black and colonial liberation. The result of a decade of archival research, Adi’s Pan-Africanism and Communism stands as a valuable and pioneering institutional history of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), which he rightly notes was ‘a communist organisation with a Pan-Africanist orientation’.
The book is divided into two parts. The first chronicles the relationship between international Communism and its attempts to answer what was then called ‘the Negro Question’, leading up to the founding of the ITUCNW as part of the Red International of Labour Unions (or Profintern) at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1928. After previous efforts to rely more or less on the Communist Parties of Britain and France to undertake such work had failed to effectively get off the ground, the formation of the ITUCNW, led by figures such as the African-Americans James Ford and Otto Huiswood and the Trinidadian George Padmore, was a significant advance. The organisation published pamphlets, a journal (The Negro Worker) and organised ambitious initiatives such as the first International Congress of Negro Workers in Hamburg in 1930, ‘the first ever conference of workers’ representatives from Africa and the Diaspora’. Adi’s research recovers much of the inspirational and heroic efforts of these ‘black Bolsheviks’ to forge transnational networks of militant black activists and try to help ideologically arm those fighting racism and colonial domination. His account of leading ITUCNW organisers’ work in often the most difficult of circumstances, including their secretive travels around Africa and the African diaspora, is particularly noteworthy, as is his use of their personal correspondence to explore political relationships. As Padmore wrote to one fellow activist in 1932: Always keep in mind that we are not doing anything for anybody – we are doing it for ourselves. What Negroes do not always seem to understand is that they are the most oppressed people in [the] world and that if they want freedom they have got to fight for it. They are always waiting for somebody to give it to them as a gift. We know better than this. The road to freedom is a hard road full of disappointment, difficulties, etc. etc. But we cannot turn back. We have got to make the journey.
Such a militant Pan-Africanist position was always likely to run into tension with Comintern officials, those Padmore referred to in 1934 as the ‘bureaucracy’ in Stalin’s Moscow. Adi gives us new detail about the circumstances in which Padmore famously broke from the Comintern around 1933–1934, after he had been briefly imprisoned when Hitler’s Nazis seized power in Germany. Adi also stresses the role played by the lesser known figure of Otto Huiswood, who, with the help of his wife Hermina (who used the pseudonym Helen Davies), tried to re-establish the ITUCNW after Padmore’s public departure.
In the second part of Pan-Africanism and Communism, Adi focuses on the work of ITUCNW activists and supporters in specific countries and regions (Britain, France, the Caribbean, West Africa and South Africa) until the organisation was gradually wound up as part of the Comintern’s turn towards building the Popular Front against fascism and war after their Seventh Congress in 1935. This leads to a degree of repetition, but usefully also sheds light on resulting tensions between the new turn of the Comintern and the traditional anti-imperialist and class struggle focus of the ITUCNW. Though he notes the ‘irony’ of the decision to wind up the ITUCNW in 1937 amidst, for example, a rising arc of heroic labour revolts sweeping the Caribbean, Adi’s own position is that ‘the end of the ITUCNW [was] for sound political reasons’. As he puts it, ‘changing international conditions, especially the menace of fascism and war necessitated different tactics and policies from the Comintern that would ensure the maximum unity of the people … rather than just focussing on the struggles of the workers’.
Throughout this detailed organisational history of the ITUCNW, Adi’s dedicated research and use of both old sources such as The Negro Worker together with new sources – including those from the archives of the Comintern in Moscow and the files of security services in Britain and France – means that Pan-Africanism and Communism stands as an important and welcome contribution to the existing scholarship on what many scholars have called ‘black internationalism’. Despite some typographical errors which will hopefully be corrected in any future edition, Adi’s volume includes many truly remarkable findings such as photos of various activists and protests, and references to a wide array of unexpected writings, for example Maxim Gorky on the Scottsboro Boys case (‘Capitalist terror in America’, The Negro Worker, January–February 1932).
However, while Pan-Africanism and Communism may stand as the definitive account of the rise and development of the ITUCNW, no small achievement, for all his attention to detail, Adi is distinctly less convincing when attempting to explain the organisation’s decline and fall. The decision of the Comintern to wind up the ITUCNW in 1937 (and then wind itself up as an organisation in 1943) can only be explained in the final analysis with at least some reference to events in the Soviet Union itself – most notably the rise of a counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. Adi may have convinced himself that the ever-changing shifts in the Comintern approach ‘reflected the experience, activism and conviction of those from Africa and the African diaspora’, but this argument can only be advanced by downplaying the experience and convictions of the many ‘black Bolsheviks’ around the ITUCNW (most famously Padmore) who dissented from the Comintern’s steady shift towards liberal anti-fascism and ‘peace’ through the League of Nations as a means of securing the national security interests of the Soviet Union after 1933. The decision of the Soviet Union to join the ‘thieves kitchen’ of the League of Nations in 1934 and to sell oil to fascist Italy during its war on Ethiopia in 1935 for example were clearly motivated by considerations other than the needs and wishes of ITUCNW activists.
Indeed, the fate of some of these activists was to be tragic. Albert Nzula, a black South African who went to study in Moscow and was chair of the ITUCNW in 1933, began to voice criticisms of the Comintern and apparently even smuggled out a message to Padmore warning him not to return to the Soviet Union. In early 1934, Nzula died suddenly in Moscow in still slightly mysterious and suspicious circumstances (Adi tells us he ‘suffered from alcoholism, which was a major contributing factor to his death from pneumonia’). The African-American Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first black member of the American Communist Workers’ Party and one of its delegates to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, was more clearly a victim of Stalin’s purges (as Adi notes, he ‘died in prison in the Soviet Union in 1939’). Another ITUCNW victim of Stalinist terror was its one time vice-chair, Sandalio Junco, a black Cuban Communist once ‘responsible for work in Latin America and parts of the Caribbean’. After breaking with the Comintern and becoming ‘one of the leaders of Trotskyism in Cuba’, Junco was to be killed by Stalin’s agents in 1942.
Overall, though Adi’s work stands as a useful and in some ways necessary corrective to Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (which did slip sometimes uncomfortably close towards liberal anti-Communism in places), the question Padmore posed has not been fully answered by Adi. Padmore’s powerful first-hand testimony regarding the betrayals and crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy with respect to the struggle for black and colonial liberation remains critical reading for historians and activists seeking to understand the experience of ‘black Bolshevism’ in its full richness and complexity.