by Nandita Chaturvedi.
Today, we face a new world, one ripe with the possibilities of new alliances and unity. The Western world crumbles under its own decadence and hypocrisy, and decays. Asia rises, and Africa begins its struggle once again for its place in the sun. A new epoch is about to begin, and the masses that make up humanity ask, on what basis will this world come to rest? Will we repeat the mistakes of the white man, and compete for domination, or can we reinterpret the age old humanism of Muhammed, the Buddha and Jesus for our times to sow the seeds for a more human future? Will we have the courage, wisdom, foresight and humility to take a step forward in the great struggle for human liberation?
As Omar Khayyam said,
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
The great drama of history unfolds, and progressives and peace loving peoples cannot let it proceed without their contribution. And so we must again engage in public discussion and debate. The time is right to once again talk about W.E.B. Du Bois’ vision of the unity of the darker nations and a world free from hunger, war and poverty.
True unity is based on principle. On what principle must we base the unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia? If our aim is to abolish human suffering, we must start as Du Bois does: we must start with the principle of Humanity. There is something incalculable about this principle — the fact that we must love each other. However, we can ask, what does the principle of Humanity mean for political practice? What are the assumptions we must proceed from if we are to see each other as human? I want to suggest that there are three assumptions that can form the basis of building unity going forward. These are in no way complete, but are an attempt to envision unity in the future by drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ body of work.
The first assumption is that as human beings, each one of us inherits History and Civilization. This is a crucial part of thinking of someone as human. Africa and Asia have not only been a part of World history, but have also shaped it such that an omission of their role would render the story of humanity to a complete lie. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa because he understood that without a history that put Africa in its proper place in the world, Black humanity would not look human to itself, or to others. He says in the foreword,
“Since the rise of the sugar empire and the resultant cotton kingdom, there has been a consistent effort to rationalize negro slavery by omitting africa from world history so that today it is almost universally assumed that history can be truly written without reference to Negroid peoples. I believe this to be scientifically unsound and also dangerous for logical social conclusions. Therefore, I am seeking in this book to remind readers in this crisis of civilization, of how critical a part Africa has played in human history, past and present, and how impossible it is to forget this and rightly explain the present plight of mankind. [..] If, out of my almost inevitable mistakes and inaccuracies and false conclusions, I shall have at least clearly stated my main issue- that Black Africans are men in the same sense as white Europeans and yellow Asiatics, and that history can easily prove this– then I shall rest satisfied even under the stigma of an incomplete and, to may, inconclusive work.”
In contrast, despite his progressive role in Europe, Marx was constrained by white civilization, and unable to understand this principle. In his writings on India, he says, “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone.”
The inheritance of History and Civilization by all human beings also means that we all come from traditions of knowledge; of Science and Art. In America, those who fail to see Black America as a civilization must deny the Blues and Jazz, or the immense scientific body of knowledge that we call the Black Radical Tradition. As human beings, we inherit the poetry of Rumi, the sorrow songs of Paul Robeson, the philosophy of the Buddha, the complex artform of African masks and Chinese ceramics. Each of us has a rich history and tradition that we are a part of, and that we can draw on to move forward.
Art and Science takes us to the second assumption: as human beings, we are capable of using Science and Art to discover the Truth. This is very important — it means that common people, all people, have the capacity to be intellectuals, and to understand the world. Matthew, the protagonist of Du Bois’ Dark Princess, questions, “And suppose we found that ability and talent and art is not entirely or even mainly among the reigning aristocrats of Asia and Europe, but buried among millions of men down in the great sodden masses of men and even in Black Africa?”
Today, there is a culture of celebrity which leads those with university appointments to suppose that they are the sole and final authorities on knowledge. Any experience with academics will show that the experts are narrowest in their view of the world. Common people, dealing with real life problems, tend to be broader in their thought, and their experiences condition them to the truth. We are told by academics that working people did not have time or the desire to read. I believe that this is utterly false. People strive to understand the world and the purpose of their life. It is human to want to know one’s place in the world. Du Bois understood this deeply. He knew that his relative success in the world was not the product of exceptional will and ability, and that all people were the same in the possibility of infinite development, but varying in opportunity. He was not above his people, he was of them. In Darkwater he says,
I began to realize how much of what I called Will and Ability was sheer Luck! Suppose my good mother had preferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on the precarious dividend of my higher training? Suppose that pompous old village judge, whose dignity we often ruffled and whose apples we stole, had had his way and send me while a child to a “reform” school to learn a “Trade”? Suppose Principal Hosmer had been born with no faith in “Darkies” and instead of giving me Greek and Latin had taught me carpentry and the making of tin pans? Suppose I had missed a Harvard scholarship? Suppose the Slater Board had then, as now, distinct ideas as to where the education of Negroes should stop? Suppose and suppose! As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain great fear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughing sprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice? I raise my hat to myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did not hesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein lay whatever salvation I have achieved.
We must believe, then, in the ability of all people to think.
The third assumption is that as human beings, we are capable of creating new Truth. We have agency, and each one of us can take on the task of changing the world through study, imagination, organization and action. The mass movements from the 60s and 70s were engaged in creating the new Truth of a world with Peace, Material well being and Spiritual Fulfillment. This is what the Panthers were doing with the Free Breakfast Program, what Gandhi was doing when he led millions of the people of India in marching across the nation, what the people of Selma and Martin Luther King did when when they marched towards freedom, what the Cuban people achieved when they eradicated illiteracy through the Cuban literacy program and what the Vietnamese people were doing when they fought for self determination. The Masses of People are capable of creating New Truth. Those who attack world historic movements in an unprincipled manner are denying this fact. They condemn humanity’s attempts to create a new reality, and are in effect saying that it is only Europe that is capable of creating a new world.
History has shown us that Europe has not operated on the three assumptions of Humanity: that all people inherit history and civilization, that all people can achieve the truth through art and science and that the masses of people can change the world. Europe has believed that their humanity is superior to the darker peoples’, that they are the sole heirs of Science and Art, and the only ones capable of creating it. Europe believed that only their history is History, with a capital H. Thus, deluded and unprincipled, Europe is incapable of leading humanity forward. In fact, in its current form, it is also incapable of being part of a principled unity of Africa and Asia. For the principle of Europe is the principle of White Supremacy itself. Thus the principle of Europe is the very opposite of the principle of Humanity.
This leads us to conclude that we must build our unity unmediated by whiteness, and unmediated by European civilization. Of course, I do not mean to imply that the white individual cannot join this alliance. Our unity is open to anyone who follows the principle of Humanity, but to do so you have to renounce the un-principle of whiteness.
We have seen the practice of this unmediated principled unity before, in the anti-colonial struggles of the world, in particular in the peace movement. A towering figure in the Peace Movement is Romesh Chandra. In a time when the anti war movement was dominated by liberal whites and university students, he involved the masses of the world in the peace movement. He worked closely with African American leaders to tie the struggle for peace to the struggle for Black Liberation, where it naturally belongs. Romesh Chandra stands as a model for us today of how to build Pan African Pan Asian unity. He said in a speech in 1978,
What we are pledging ourselves to do is that we shall not rest until we achieve what Du Bois aimed to do, what Paul Robeson aimed to do, what all great leader of the liberation struggle in every part of the world are aiming to do: we are going to create the kind of world in which no child will be burnt by napalm, no child will go hungry, no child will be thrown into the ghetto and all children will know what a sweet tastes like.
To end, I want to revisit the concept of Truth. Du Bois spent his life in search of the Truth. In 1956, he wrote a letter to Herbert Aptheker in which he expressed, “I assumed that Truth was only partially known but that it was ultimately largely knowable, although perhaps in part forever Unknowable.” It is the nature of experience that as individuals, we can see partial truth. Similarly, on the global scale, we are able to see clearly parts of the Truth, parts of the whole global system. The world looks very different from India than it does from Black America, despite a peculiar commonality.
As an example, the positioning of Black America in the belly of Empire means that it has clarity in analysis of Empire that perhaps no other group in the world does. White American and European thought affects everyone else, whether in the realm of popular culture, academic thought or even leftist politics. However, as Du Bois says about the Souls of White Folk, “I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language.” Without this view of the Truth, and an understanding of the color line, the rest of the world cannot build an effective movement for freedom.
But together, collectively, we can achieve the Whole Truth through Love and Science. As Du Bois says “I firmly believe that gradually the human mind and absolute and provable truths would approach each other like the Asymptotes of a Hyperbola.” As we climb to higher and higher stages of unity, we move closer to the Truth. And thus the Unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia will serve the Truth and the Truth will serve Humanity.
Much of this essay was first written for a presentation given on a panel on the Dark Princess at an event titled ‘Pan Africa- Pan Asia: A World United for Humanity’ as part of the 2018 Year of Du Bois organized by the Saturday Free School. More information can be found here https://www.yearofdubois.org/.
Organization for Positive Peace Blog 