Rastafari Speaks - The Legacy of Marcus Garvey

By Tony Martin

Marcus Garvey died on June 10, 1940 after building the most successful Pan-African government of all time. Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in 1914 at a time when the future of the African World looked grim. The final touches to the European imperialistic conquest of Africa were being put in place. Heaped upon the devastation of four and a half centuries of trans-Atlantic and Arab slave trades, there now came, in the wake of European conquest, genocide, forced labor, slavery and political and cultural subjugation.

In Afro-America the civil rights gains of the post-Civil War period had been wiped out. A reign of terror unleashed by the Klu Klux Klan and similar groups, aided and abetted by racist state legislatures, a conniving judiciary and an indifferent federal government, had all conspired to return the African-American population to the brink of slavery. By 1914 thousands of Black people had been savagely murdered in the streets, at the hands of mobs of white people, numbering at times in the thousands.

In the Caribbean, poverty and lack of educational opportunity had conspired to expel tens of thousands of emigrants who scoured the world in search of education, work and political space. Despite the relative absence of overtly racist laws such as obtained in the United States, the British colonizers nevertheless successfully prevented over ninety percent of its Caribbean subjects from voting. Amont the few voters, a disproportionate number was white. Similar distressing situations existed in other areas of African populations, such as Brazil and in areas of minor African settlements, such as Europe and Canada.

Full Article @ unia-acl.org

Garveyism and African Racial Reconstruction

by President/General Marcus Garvey Jr.

Marcus Garvey first called upon the African people of the world to know themselves; then he called upon them to be proud of themselves. "Up You Mighty Race, You Can Accomplish What You Will", thundered this unrepentant African Nationalist. Universal African Nationalism is a nexus of the basic prescriptions for African nation building that Marcus Garvey, the great exponent of African Nationalism, stressed relentlessly during his life. The following basic concepts of Universal African Nationalism comprise the positive and dynamic agenda for African Racial Reconstruction and the building of African power in the world.

The first concept is AFRICAN IDENTITY. This implies that all persons of African ancestry and origin are essential and integral parts of the same Black African Nation. For the Garveyite, the race and the nation are coterminous. A people who where separated from their ancestral homeland by the barbarous actions of the Aryan and Arab slave traders cannot be expected to accept the nationalities imposed upon them by their enslavers. The African, in freedom, has the right to determine his own nation, to delimit that nationality, and to seek the greater ingathering of African people from all sectors of the African Diaspora. AFRICAN IDENTITY is a matter of common ethnicity, ancestry and origin,

The second concept, AFRICAN PRIDE, as invoked by Marcus Garvey, means two things: 1) appreciation and understanding of the achievements of our great race in the past; 2) African self-respect and self-worth in the present.

Full Article @ afrocentric.info