Sunday, January 9, 2011: 8:50 AM
Room 208 (Hynes Convention Center)
Garveyism spread like brushfire through central and southern Africa in the years following World War I, shared in whispers, smuggled in newspaper parcels, carried to scattered villages along the region's massive migrant labor network from mine compounds, gold fields, and European plantations. Projecting a captivating and imprecise vision of racial rebirth, unity, and ascendancy, Garveyism offered a dramatic discourse of liberation onto which Africans – prophets, pastors, politicians, and common people – eagerly projected their dreams. This paper explores the means by which Garveyism served as a catalyst for a series of millennial religious revivals that emerged in the interwar period. In the Congo, Garveyism provided Simon Kimbangu with a global vision through which to channel his prophetic, anti-colonial revivalism, which exploded into a mass-based movement and threatened to bring the Belgian colony to its knees. Throughout central Africa, the Watch Tower movement, which adapted the millennial Christianity of the American-based Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society into an African discourse of anti-colonialism, used the symbolism and pan-African vision of Garveyism to project the departure of Europeans and the beginning of a peaceful era of black rule.
Across the entire region, the pervasive myth of an African American liberator, inextricably linked with the representations of Garveyism emanating from South Africa and the United States, offered millennial religious separatists a prophetic and worldly language of Jubilee. In all, Garveyism facilitated the transmission of a paradoxical dialogue of peaceful and non-confrontational racial separatism that predicated its appeal on a violent and confrontational future. It offered an ostensibly apolitical and nonviolent means of African autonomy and assembly that proved necessarily political, and was often met with violence, in the context of colonial rule.