Callaloo

He was one of the old West Indian types—I don’t know if you know what I mean—a Victorian type. He was one.

—C. L. R. James

I begin this essay with C. L. R. James’s description of George Padmore in a 1981 televised interview with Stuart Hall in which James declared Padmore’s victorianness as he pronounced him a true marxist and pan-Africanist (Hall, “In Conversation”).¹ But what is an “old West Indian type . . . a Victorian type”? How to understand this victorianist strain in such an eminent black radical, a marxist, and a pan-Africanist? Victorianism was vital to many we consider to be part of the black radical tradition; its black adherents believed in empire as the form through which they could achieve freedom and equality and perceived the British liberal empire as the ideal structure of imperial belonging. Put simply, their notions of racial equality and freedom depended on (a version of) victorianism, imperial belonging (as subject of Queen Victoria and citizen of the empire), and race consciousness that at one point saw the Cape Colony and the city of Cape Town as a center of its project of black liberation and racial equality. This included figures like: James, Padmore, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Solomon T. Plaatje, Fanny Jackson-Coppin, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Peter Abrahams, and many others.

I take the occasion of this essay to trace the genealogy of such a black radical tradition in the anglophone world that includes “old West Indian type[s]” and black intellectuals and radicals across the globe active from the latter half of the nineteenth-century to the middle of the twentieth. Loosely I define this period as extending from Emancipation in the British Empire in 1833–1834 to the end of World War II, but its zenith extends from the introduction of the Qualified non-racial franchise in the Cape Colony in 1853 to the Union of South Africa in 1910. The franchise placed the Cape at the center of at least one model of British liberal imperialism and made South Africa the “true home” of the black man (Williams, “Interview by W. T. Stead”). Many black British subjects attempted to fight for the British in the South African War (also referred to as the Anglo-Boer War) of 1899–1902. Denied the right to defend their queen and the empire they followed the war and the negotiations after quite closely. In his history of the Pan-African congresses James himself identified the South African War as “one of the first great wars for independence of a colonial people.” The war was central to the first Pan-African Conference and its [End Page 115] Afro-Caribbean convener, Henry Sylvester Williams; James explains to his audience that “Sylvester Williams was part of a world-wide movement. I want you to remember that . . . These Pan-African congresses all have their particular place in a particular history” (James, “Towards the Seventh: The Pan-African Congresses” 238; emphasis added). This “particular place in a particular history” hinged on the British Empire and Cape Town.² The racialized form of union that South Africa took after the Treaty of Vereeniging in the wake of that war began the slow evacuation of hope in the empire as a vehicle for black aspirations.

Such a claim for the Cape (contemporary South Africa’s Northern Cape, Western Cape, and the Eastern Cape) and the city of Cape Town might seem incommensurable to any reader familiar with contemporary South Africa or the formal start and end of grand apartheid.³ The Cape and the city of Cape Town are spaces that are entangled in notions of the land having been “empty” when European explorers like Vasco da Gama and settlers like Jan van Riebeeck arrived. Cape Town is often spoken of as the southernmost tip of the Mediterranean, the antithesis of its afropolitan counterpart, Johannesburg. Yet if we go to the writings of black victorians, a different Cape/Cape Town presents itself. This was the Cape Town on which...