Biography: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and his Dream of Mother Africa By Colin Grant Jonathan Cape, 530pp. £20First-time author Colin Grant has turned up some fascinating material on Marcus Garvey, the former leader of the black liberation movement in the United States.
Top of the list for Irish readers is the discovery that Garvey - a man known as the "Negro Moses" for his ability to mobilise the African-American population - idolised none other than Eamon de Valera.
So taken was the Jamaican exile with Irish Republicanism under Dev that he named the New York headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Liberty Hall after its Dublin counterpart. He set up an underground intelligence network modelled on that used by Sinn Féin during the War of Independence. He made a delegation of Irish activists guests of honour at the inaugural UNIA conference in 1920. And, at the same event, he crowned himself president of Africa in exile - in a direct imitation of de Valera's then recent decision to appoint himself provisional president of Ireland.
"As the Irishman is struggling and fighting for the fatherland of Ireland, so must the new Negro of the world fight for the fatherland of Africa," Garvey declared.
Grant adds the commentary: "For Garvey, 'Irish' was virtually another name for Negro."
Today, Garvey is a relatively unknown figure. But in his heyday he led a organisation of more than a million members, and had a celebrity cachet that outstripped Barack Obama's today.
Grant competently pieces together Garvey's cartoonish career, from his early foray in politics in the Caribbean, and his unlikely business successes in America, to his ill-fated attempts to broker peace with the Ku Klux Klan and his ultimate departure from public life after being jailed for fraud.
AN ENTREPRENEUR AT heart, Garvey - in the words of one of his backers - "sold the Negro to himself". His most audacious act was to set up the Black Star Line, a shipping company that promised to "return" African-Americans to their native continent - somewhere that had been re-branded under Garveyism as a "land of opportunity".
Copying Sinn Féin's fundraising efforts in the US, Garvey tapped the African diaspora for cash, getting Negros - both rich and poor - to buy shares in the dream of an "Africa for the Africans". His efforts led to an upswell of "black pride", although, commercially, they were a disaster. The shipping company collapsed following a series of self-inflicted wounds, including Garvey's decision to market Liberia as a new home for African-Americans without first getting the consent of that country's government (consent that wasn't forthcoming).
Charmingly, Garvey didn't dwell on his defeats for long. As his second wife, Amy Jacques, confided, "He turned the pages of his past life as an avid reader turns the pages of an adventure story, and loses interest in the early chapters after reading them". In Grant's eyes, Garvey had different and sometimes contradictory motives - displaying a careerist streak, while at the same time making huge personal sacrifices for the cause.
Undoubtedly, Garvey was prone to believing his own hype. His penchant for ceremonial robes and military hats were at best comical, at worst narcissistic. There was also his habit of handing out titles like "Duke of the Nile" and "Baron of the Zambesi" to his friends. But it is hard not to have some sympathy for a man who spent his final days - deported from the US and banished to London - trying to advance the cause as a hapless orator in Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner.
According to Grant, moreover, his conviction for fraud was far from black-and-white. Garvey's was a technical offence, and there appeared to be no personal gain involved. Even one of his opponents wrote, "Garvey was not at heart a criminal . . . [ but] believed, foolishly of course, that by taking in more money he would rescue the enterprise and save everything".
Indeed, Garvey's five-year stretch for the "crime" seems all the more harsh when one considers how de Valera got off Scott-free over his controversial use of funds raised from the Irish diaspora in the US. But that's another story.
A MAJOR REGRET about the book is that it barely touches on Garvey's legacy. The UNIA leader is commonly credited with influencing struggle icons from Martin Luther King to South Africa's Steve Biko - the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, with its motto "black is beautiful". But Grant, sadly, leaves such paths unexplored. He also, somewhat disappointingly, declines to examine whether Garvey's Pan-African philosophy has relevance today, especially in a country like the US where a black president no longer seems an impossibility.
To the author's credit, however, he doesn't eulogise. Garvey could have been anything but, as Grant implies, the "messiah" who sought to lead blacks to the promised land is now best remembered - largely due to his own flaws - as a "Negro with a hat".
Joe Humphreys is an Irish Times journalist, formerly based in South Africa
