MARCUS GARVEY

Who has never heard the name Marcus Garvey? In my old neighbourhood in New Haven, Enugu there is a major sreeet named after him. It is however unlikely that the generality of OUR people, including those immersed in issues of Black Consciousness movement, know enough about his contributions to the aims for which the late martyr Dr Martin Luther King is well known.

My first exposure to Garvey was a few paragraph dedicated to him in the 1953 book, African Glory, written by the late Africanist, Dr DeGraft-Johnson. What I read was a more recent reissue of that great historical analysis of the Black and African predicament.

Why this my sudden interest in Marcus Garvey? I have just came across this news that there is a groundswell of opinion seeking a presidential pardon from the outgoing Obama administration for Dr Garvey who was unjustly jailed in 1923 and subsequently deported to his native Jamaica. Of course this did not squelch his activism in the decades that followed.

I have dug out a report on one of the earlier pushes for this pardon in the form of a press conference by his living son. All other reports and commentaries necessarily build on that.

As we step gingerly into a new Trumpian world it will be interesting to note the following quote from the report:

"Garvey was also controversial because of his "back to Africa" promotion and his campaign for racial separation, born of the conviction that whites would NEVER allow blacks justice." In the light of current realities, after nearly a century, can anyone blame him? Was Garvey a prophet or what?

What exactly do we have here?
"We" have taken back our country!