Nietzsche, Garvey, Hitler and the Superman: The Making of Garveyism

For more than 100 years, the racial analysis of Marcus Garvey has dominated the way that those once termed “Coloured” have imagined themselves. It is time to challenge the dominance of the theories of Garveyism in the western world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th Century German philosopher, wrote of what he termed in German, the “ubermensch”. A term that is often translated into English as the “superman”.

Nietzsche believed that the goal for humanity should be to birth a race of supermen. These supermen would create new values and stem the nihilism that had grasped the culture of the western world after the death of God.

Nietzsche proclaimed that although the concept of God had provided meaning for us for some time, today “God is dead” and Christianity is no longer able to offer life shaping values like it once did. With the death of God comes a cultural vacuum that if not replaced by a new value system will likely lead to nihilism taking hold of the western world.

Nietzsche believed that the ubermensch would act to create new values that would be able to fill the void that has been left by the death of God. The ubermensch would be an artistic tyrant, whose will towards value-making and the transvaluation of existing values would be a creative act, a creative act that would be beyond the limits of good and evil. For Nietzsche, there was nothing that the creative act of transvaluation of values would not justify, even absolute ruthlessness.

With the coming of the death of God and the moral vacuum left in its aftermath and without the alternative values that the ubermensch will create, there is no way to justify or criticise any act, even if it is harmful to others. All is permissible.

Nietzsche believed that although Christianity had its usefulness by giving meaning to life through acts of asceticism, the physical mortification and the will to nothingness that arose from its doctrine was damaging to man because it refused to affirm our most precious gift of life. Christianity gave us meaning but directed us towards other-worldliness. The new values that would be introduced into the western world by the ubermensch would be creative and life affirming.

For Nietzsche, at the time of writing, this new race of supermen and women had not yet been born but he believed that when they were born that they should not succumb to the doctrine of the soul and seperate man from our flesh into two halves. The physical, life itself, should be raised up.

The writing of Friedrich Nietzsche has always been shrouded in controversy. His declaration that a new “race” would arise; his use of the term the “blond beast” have often been associated with fascism.

Hitler misinterpreted the writings of Nietzsche and believed that the ubermensch were the mythical Aryan race, the pure white race, who had not been contaminated by the dark-haired Iberians and the Slavs and held the archetypal traits of whiteness, blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler believed that the term the “blond beast” referred to the blond hair colour of the archetypal white race before ethnic pollution. Nietzsche did not associate his terminology with race but with the fierceness of a lion. The blond beast was not a reference to hair colour but to the lionised strength and courage of the ubermensch to overcome nihilism and create a new value system.

Marcus Garvey was a man of his time, he was around when Nietzsche’s work started to become popular around the time of WW1; In 1914 at the outbreak of the war Garvey formed the UNIA. Garvey was well read and spent time in London as a student. Whether or not he read Nietzsche is unknown but he shares much of the behaviour that Nietzsche associated with the ubermensch. Behaviour that Hitler adopted too.

It is well known that Garvey declared himself and the UNIA as the first fascists. Garvey would not make this statement without knowing something about fascist doctrine, much of which was falsely ascribed to Nietzsche by the NAZI’s. I consider Garvey making this statement to be enough to accept that Garvey was aware of Nietzsche’s ideas and understood them. Like Hitler, Garvey misinterpreted and misunderstood the ideas of Nietzsche and styled himself as the ubermensch of the black race with the same aim as Hitler of standardising his racial ethnicity to be the new race of the ubermensch.

Nietzsche did not identify any figures of his time or beforehand as having the strength and courage of an ubermensch. He truly believed that they had not yet been born but he hinted that certain historical figures had some of the characteristics that he imagined. Julius Caesar & Napoleon.

In their quest to embody the ubermensch, Hitler and Garvey became something close to it and did change the values of the western world, however their misinterpretation and service of Nietzschean ideas to racial purity made a mockery of what he argued.

Garvey challenged the other-worldliness of the black population in the western world, he challenged the docility of the Black Church. He brought a new energy and a new value system and can be compared to a less heroic Napoleonic or Caesarian type figure. Garvey was an extreme charismatic, he was able to shift black populations in the western world away from the soul and bring them to the physical world of race. Garvey was powerful and able to challenge the politically dominant mulatto type populations into self-hatred and deep anger at their European ancestry. He was able to shift all slave descendants into the “Negro” identity category as black, even if they had other biological descendants.

Garvey was so charismatic in his ubermensch portrayal that he was able to shift the language away from the catch all term “Coloured” to the term “Negro”. He mounted a great political challenge against the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) that had been led mostly by mulatto types like W E B Dubois. A challenge from which the NAACP would never really recover. Garvey changed the way that populations of colour viewed themselves. When once they had been “Coloured” they were now “Negro”. A description that did not fit those mulatto types that had also endured slavery, not as negroes but as mulattos.

The legacy of Garvey and his use of the term “Negro” to describe anyone with a drop of African blood still lingers today. Garvey’s quest to standardise the mulatto as a negro and to term all African descendants in the western world as negroes has wreaked havoc on the consciousness of the mulatto. In the context of Garvey, like in the tropes of white nationalists, the mulatto type becomes a tragic figure, the tragic mulatto despising their European and/or African ancestry. Who must only exist to be standardised by others.

Political history is the history of charismatic figures that arise and shift the values and thinking. Garvey is one of those figures. His philosophy cannot continue to dominate black populations in the western world. It is too exclusionary.

If we do not become coloured again, the hundred plus years of black and mulatto unity under the banner of Negroism should come to an end because the terminology is oppressive to the likes of Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bob Marley, Muhammad Ali, Frederic Douglass, Booker T Washington, W E B Dubois, Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Beyonce, Rihanna and many of the heroes of so called black history who obviously do not look like Marcus Garvey or other dark skinned slave descendants and cannot be in an identity category where their physical appearance is considered a scar and something that needs to be purified.

ALT