An Ex-Communist Views Africa
PARRY, ALBERT
An Ex-Communist Views Africa Pan-Africanism or Communism? By George Padmore. Roy. 463 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Albert Pari Chairman, Department of Russian Studies, Colgate University Here is a...
...Wishfully he sees in the Soviet Union far more "tolerance on race and color" than in actuality has ever existed there...
...It is not these and other proposals that will disturb Padmore's liberal reader...
...Naively he writes that "the colored Soviet citizens of Central Asia—Uzbekians, Tajiks...
...Padmore's protest against the white man's inequities- which at times becomes sheer emotionalism, robbing the book of some of its balance of judgment...
...Rightly, the author blames the Communists for using "the oppressed Negro workers and peasants as 'revolutionary expendables' in the global struggle of Communism against Western Capitalism...
...Burials, etc.—enjoy absolute racial equality with those of Slav dissent...
...Reviewed by Albert Pari Chairman, Department of Russian Studies, Colgate University Here is a great anguished cry of the black man against the cruelties and stupidities inflicted upon his race and continent by the white invader...
...Du Bois extravagently as "vigorous of mind and politically ahead of many much younger in years," and fails utterly to qualify this praise of the doctor's "wisdom" and "integrity" even as he refers, all too briefly, to the doctor's work with the Communists...
...Chuvashians [really living in Soviet Europe, not Asia], Kalmuks...
...He tends to cry plague on all white men, be they of the West or of the Kremlin...
...Nor are these pages always to the point...
...to give to more and more parts of Africa medical help, education, democracy and, finally, sovereignty...
...In his condemnation of the West there is not enough recognition of the valiant effort historically and currently made by at least some Westerners to halt and redress the Western partition of Africa...
...He speaks of "pan-Africanism" and "African nationalism," but there is no black chauvinism in his detailed explanation of just what he means by these rather disquieting-sounding terms...
...It is a needed, interesting and, in some respects, valuable book...
...Thus, the worth of what otherwise might have been an outstanding book is gravely diminished...
...Chiding Stalin and Khrushchev, the author still reveres Lenin, apparently not realizing even at this late and sober date that Stalin-Khrush-chevism was the inevitable consequence of the retrograde core of Leninism...
...Castigating white Western Communists, particularly those in Britain and America, as not being wholly free of racial prejudice, Padmore speaks with misplaced admiration of Paul Robeson and especially of Dr...
...it is not for their race as are the non-Europeans in South Africa, but for political "deviations...
...Only some 90 pages, or one-fifth of the book, can be said to treat the Communist policy toward Africa and the Negro...
...Kirghizans...
...From a former Communist of such an exalted position in the Comintern (and the Profintern) we have the right to expect a fuller and more perceptive story of Communist designs upon Africa...
...This record of conquest and oppression is a detailed and shocking one...
...Kazans [?], Turkmans, Tartars...
...W. E. B. Du Bois...
...if I may dissent from Wright's satisfaction with what Padmore tells of these phases in his book...
...He lauds Dr...
...Yet, he regards this as primarily an error in tactics, not as the result of the larger, negative, reactionary essence of the Kremlin...
...Padmore quite evidently tells much less than he must know...
...In effect, Padmore equates even the latest and more enlightened record of the West in Africa too much with the apartheid shame of Johannesburg, and entirely too much with the Soviet opportunism and deceit in Moscow's African policy...
...It is the emotion of Mr...
...to stop the slave trade and abolish slavery...
...Yet...
...and that when "they are sometimes persecuted...
...Padmore's cogent argument to the West is: Give all Africans their independence immediately if you don't want Communists to triumph on that continent, too, through the misery and despair of its peoples...
...The care with which every highlight of injustice is assembled and accented is eloquent...
...He spells them out as conditions of unlimited racial equality between the blacks and the whites, complete self-government of Africans, civil liberties and the will of the majority, all eventually leading politically to a United Slates of Africa and socio-economically to 11 democratic symbiosis of private enterprise and state control...
...To quote Richard Wright's foreword to the book, Padmore "from the Cominterm itself helped to shape much of the later phases of the relationship of International Communism to African, West Indian and American Negro movements...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 47
