This quote is perhaps best known from Bob Marley’s classic song Redemption Song, a song justly loved by many, poignantly yet soulfully “summarizing” in its lyrics the history of African enslavement. I think that in this case, mainly the lyrics make the song great.
Good messages with simple words were Bob’s strength – as Lee Perry once said of him -, but for Redemption Song, he quoted Marcus Garvey in the above line.
Marcus Garvey, the early Black Power leader and activist, surely focused on this “mental slavery” as self-evident part of his emancipation movement for African people at home and abroad.
Both psychologically and sociologically, there are intriguing ways to look at mental slavery.
OMNIPRESENT
The phenomenon “mental slavery” is in fact omnipresent in our world of unequal human relationships. Anything in the course of our lives when we do something we “have to” instead of “want to” –when we compromise – we become kind of a “mental slave”. Childs have to go to school and focus on school (subjects) since a quite tender age. Preparing for what? Citizenship, society, or just economy?
In time, many get caught in the system of “having to” work several days a week for a boss, simply for sustenance.
Of course, Garvey focused on the emancipation of Black people, and their “mental slavery” (self-deprecation due to the colonial past) relative to the White and other races. I argue, though, that Garvey often referred to deeper and more “universal” meanings, psychologically.
The “colonized mind” of Africans abroad, can even be seen as an aggrandized, extreme example of “mental slavery”, for all races to learn from.
PSYCHOLOGY
While I agree with people who consider this “Eurocentric”, I think that in this case it is at least “educational” to analyze in how far the “big names” in Western psychological studies, like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, might relate to Garvey’s treatment of an essentially psychological phenomenon (mental slavery). Was Garvey more a Freudian or more a Jungian, for instance? Or, to please the anti-Eurocentrism people: “who of Freud or Jung was more Garvey-ite?”.
Or: showed perhaps Garvey’s life whether Freud, Jung or others were right about human behavior?
FREUD
Sigmund Freud was a Jewish Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst who was of course quite influential. I have studied Freud before, and I personally remained intrigued by some of his known theories, testing whether they are realistic.
The whole line of Freud’s view, that sexual/biological energy is the primal urge behind everything, do I agree with that? I still don’t know, to be honest. Human history seems to reflect this as quite plausible. Substitutes for this primal sexual urge indeed seem to include “wars to conquer”, “destruction”, “subjugation”, addiction, greed, and enslavement.
In my own personal life - and even more of others I know of - , I do not always see a clear “sexual primal urge” underlying everything I do, everything I enjoy, or undertake. Substitutes for that sexual energy, in some way? I am not denying it, but it stretches the mind that e.g. “beating a drum” or “playing a guitar” are redirected sexual energy, while music offers a sensory sensation of its own, sensual, but not merely “sexual”.
Garvey’s large UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) movement in the US (and Americas), the largest up to then among Black people, with millions of members (in the US and Americas).. redirected sexual energy?.. No.. I would say: redirected love energy.. Love toward his people and fellow humans: thus a much broader energy.
Freud also argued that humans are determined by their history (others, like Jung, deem the present more determining, including current life goals).
In Garvey’s case, both Freud and Jung seem right, but also in the case of most human beings, when I think about it. After all: if you don’t know your past, you don’t know your present.
JUNG
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, and I studied his theories too, and like with Freud: I see some things confirmed among humans, some things seem less plausible to me.
Like Freud, also Jung gave Western languages many terms describing simply existing phenomena, which only needed to get a good “name” for them: word power. Inferiority complex, repression, subconscious, “extrovert/introvert”, archetypes, alter-ego, libido, persona, defense mechanism, projection, etcetera.
Jung came with the term “collective unconscious”, as one of the theories in which he differed from Freud. It represents shared, “cultural”, even ancestral, mental concepts in people’s unconscious.
That can somehow be related to Garvey. Marcus Garvey referred a lot to the enslaved ancestors and those before and after, and connected himself to them symbolically, for action today, . In this regard, Jung might have had a point, and is there something like a “shared” subconscious among nations. On the other hand: Garvey had a strong (“Freudian”) individual personality, as I also read in his biography, a bit contradicting that.
Another difference with Freud, is that Jung considered human psyches as teleological: working toward a goal, not just following biological urges, as Freud emphasized. That also seems to fit Garvey’s life and goals (Africa for the Africans, repatriation, African upliftment).
NEO-FREUDIAN SCHOOL
Then there is the “neo-Freudian” school, following up and deviating from Freudian psychological theories. Born Hungarian Alfred Adler was a main representative of this. This school places more emphasis on social relations and less on biological urges, as Freud did. Also, it focuses more on personal creativity and “life style” of humans as social beings, and on the “ego” in relation to others.
Adler argued that humans feel inevitably inferior and aim at superiority, relative to others: Adler more or less coined the now known term “overcompensation”. Relatedly, according to Adler, humans have an inherent “urge for power”.
In Marcus Garvey’s biography titled ‘Negro With a Hat’ by Colin Grant – with much attention to the person Garvey as well -, one might be able to suspect an “urge for power”, “ego”, or overcompensation. In my opinion, though, this does not apply fully, as Garvey seemed more focused on plans and collective goals, than on individual ego plays or individual competition.
In that biography by Grant, much attention is paid to Garvey’s “competitive conflict” with the other influential Black leader in the US at the time (around 1917) W.E.B. Dubois.
Garvey sometimes criticized Dubois’s adaptive, moderate stances as pleasing the White establishment, and found Dubois elitist toward the mass of labourers (Dubois thought that a Talented Tenth among African Americans should lead the other 90%), while Garvey rather sought to speak for these masses. On the other hand: Garvey sought open contact with Dubois, and invited him to his speeches and gatherings. Yet Dubois largely ignored Garvey, and soon ridiculed his influence among the masses as untrustworthy. Garvey felt offended by this, and paid back with interest, lamenting Dubois as too dependent on Whites.
Here, some “ego” aspects become clear (on both sides), as well as a “will/urge for (social) power” .
GESTALT
The later “gestalt therapy” school emphasizes “present human relations” as defining human personalities, rather than past or future goals. The life of Garvey (and others) show a planning for the future, thus contradicting it, although his relations in the presence shaped his directions and own style.
While aiming at democracy and politeness, Garvey dominated strongly his movement with his ambition, powerful speeches, and leadership, hereby even trumping ambitions of others within his movement, “chasing” some former comrades away, so to speak. Unintended mostly, but representing the versatile present, as in the Gestalt theory.
FROMM
Another psychologist is Erich Fromm, a Jewish German, who belonged to the “humanist psychology” school. Fromm pointed at the difference between humanistic and authoritarian ethics. He also analyzed why people made themselves submissive to dictatorships, even as collaborators, relating this to sado-masochism (demeaning codependency).
Though Garvey was accused of a big ego, and personal dominance, his movement the U.N.I.A. , and related endeavors (newspapers, repatriation efforts, economic initiatives a.o.) were relatively accessible for common Black people, even for expressing themselves. Garvey’s dominance can be seen as ego-based, but also as overly enthusiastic, as he mostly wrote and spoke about how to improve the position of all Black people – Africans, within world affairs.
This reflects a bit some theories of Fromm: a human urge for “positive freedom” and “love” to search for sense. Fromm’s rejection of both Socialism (deeming it too rational to be human) or Capitalism (prioritizing external material “things” over own humanity) has some similarities with Garvey’s views. Garvey identified with labourers, yet strived overall more to “own businesses” and economic independence of Black people from other races.. thus expressing their own (internal) worth and “humanity”, instead of following external, cold rational plans (communism) or things (capitalism) as in the main Isms..
GARVEY
Interesting is now whether Marcus Garvey had a perspective that the mentioned known Western psychologists lacked or disregarded, though he was not a psychoanalyst.
I think rather that some aspects of Garvey’s thought are a crucial addition to – or correction of – psychological studies (Freudian, Jungian, or otherwise).
The emphasis of race as physical appearance is one of those aspects, and how it results from colonialism, and the history of slavery. Another one is his more pronounced critique of elites.
Though some of the psychoanalysts I mentioned belonged to a persecuted Jewish minority (Freud, Adler, Fromm), and had to escape Nazism, the hierarchical race-class interjunctions in former slave plantation colonies like Jamaica, Suriname, Haiti, Martinique, Barbados, partly the US and Brazil etcetera, offers new psychological insights.
Whereas Jews like Freud, Adler, or Fromm indeed might have had some experiences with “othering”, discrimination, or dehumanization, in Germany, Austria, or elsewhere, the structural dehumanization through poverty and discrimination of black majorities in a country like Jamaica – ruled by a wealthy minority lighter-skinned elites – and the attempts of deculturalization of Africans, offers added insights into psychological responses, hitherto less explored. Garvey (and other Black power thinkers) explored this.
As part of this, Garvey paid much attention to resulting psychopathological effects among people of African descent. Garvey criticized Black newspapers in the US for having advertisements for skin bleaching, or the lengths other African American organizations, such as W.E.B. Dubois’s NAACP, went through to please White authorities, despite a somewhat comparable activist focus (racial pride, African connection).
So he noted among many Black people a (Neo-)Freudian defined “inferiority complex”. Likewise, the “overcompensation” from the Neo-Freudian school, Garvey noted too, as he lamented some of his race (some even darker than him) in Jamaica, trying to be, for instance, more British than the British themselves, thus denying their own race and cultural heritage..
Also the “Uncle Tom” notion – or as related term “Boasy slave” in Jamaican English/Patois – for an adaptive, overly obedient slave to White masters, stems from the slavery history, and has become common parlance, also of common Black folk, including related terms like “house slaves”.
This “uncle tom” phenomenon has self-evident psychoanalytical connotations and implications that can be found in the theories I discussed (self-deprecation, overcompensation, inferiority complex, repression, ego, split personalities). I argue that it has relevance beyond Black history, namely everywhere where masses are oppressed (ethnicity, politics, poor people, labourers, women, minorities) by powerful elites.
It is here where “mental slavery” gets his historical and sociological meaning, somewhat summarizing this all. It represents a crucial expansion of Western psychoanalytical thought, derived from the African diaspora, but relevant for all mankind. Garvey contributed to that.
SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
Psychoanalytical concepts like “inferiority complex”, “repression” apply, but certainly also Fromm’s notion of “authoritarian ethics”, in this case during colonialism and slavery. Though enslaved and forced, there were degrees of collaboration among a part of the enslaved Africans, betraying other (rebellion- or escape-planning) slaves, for some gain. Also, the internalization of European superiority, and therefore one’s own origins’ inferiority, was unfortunately successful among many Afro-Americans, leading to a disdain of much of preserved African culture. This results in another psychological phenomenon: schizophrenia, or “split personalities”, also a theme Freud treated.
Interestingly, Freud saw a split personality or consciousness as a way of avoiding a rupture of the ego, by effecting a division of itself.. It is also seen as a defense mechanism. Surely, also the term “cognitive dissonance” – combining opposing values mentally – is relevant.
Alongside these Western, scholarly psychological explanations, a main “psychotherapy” is found in the beautiful variety of Afro-American cultures that developed over time. Carnivals as parodies by Africans of European culture. Combining song types from colonizing countries, quadrille, English sea chants, Spanish folk styles, with own African influences, gave birth to several music genres, some more “African” sounding than others, but also with various instruments, including European ones, such as the predominant originally Spanish (with Moorish and Persian antecedents) guitar, or e.g. pianos, saxophones, or synths. All resignified with African musical patterns.
Most clear, the lost languages, replaced by Africanized variants of European languages (Creoles), and the lost family names of enslaved Africans, to be replaced by European ‘slave owners’ names, bear in themselves this “split personality” or symbolic schizophrenia.
This can be seen as a main theme throughout Marcus Garvey’s ideas and actions. This shows both from his writing, as from a biography on him. Divisions within himself, and among Black people generally.
DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
This “mental slavery” relates mostly to this “double consciousness” and it is quite ironic that the term ‘double consciousness” among Black people in the US came from a nemesis – or competitor – of Garvey among Black leaders, namely W.E.B. Dubois, coining this term in 1897.
After all, despite their conflict, Garvey and Dubois seemed to agree (in different wordings) on some themes, but also Caribbean thinkers like Paul Gilroy and Frantz Fanon, had theories very similar to Dubois’s “double consciousness”, and so did Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Turé), as part of the Black power movement. And Garvey. They owe this to Garvey at least as much as to Dubois and other thinkers.
Mental slavery refers to “double consciousness”, but so do other of Garvey views and statements. His emphasis on self-knowledge and self-confidence, own organizations and businesses, and to not look up to the White man, were all efforts to make Black people’s consciousness less “double”, or at least more focussed on own pride, you might say.
The “duplicity” in it is however there regarding the framework of European-centered – or modern Western - values: modern industries and technologies, money, and power politics, to which this pride inevitably relates and is bound. There psychoanalytical ideas on the “ego”, “overcompensation”, and an “urge for social power” – all from the Neo-Freudian school (Adler a.o.) – certainly apply.
Marcus Garvey added to this “positive freedom” – present in many cultures, but theorized in the Western world by humanist psychologist Erich Fromm, who opposed it to self-deprecation and sado-masochism under authoritarian (and slavery/colonial?) rule.
RASTAFARI
Rastafari now, take this even further, as the Rastas as a Jamaican scholar said; “used Garvey to go beyond Garvey”. Garvey was by necessity influenced by European culture, growing up in a British colony.
From what is said in Grant’s biography on Garvey, his cultural tastes were partly little known, but included global art (pottery, including European), biographies (including of Europeans like Napoleon Bonaparte), and were discussed by him according to British academic norms. Rastafari partly abandon these colonially inherited norms, seeking African spirituality and natural connection, and cultural expressions (life style, music, festivities). The cultural stage following on an actual freed and independent African people, free from subjugation by other races.
The importance of the Bible within much of Rastafari seems again “split”, especially as some Rastas dismiss African magic- and “spirit of the dead” folk beliefs like in Vodou or Kumina, like also Protestant Churches in Jamaica dismiss these as evil. Ethiopia in Africa being an early Christian country, before much of Europe, however kind of compensates for the colonizers perceived misuse of the Christian religion, and indoctrination.
This in fact exemplifies the past- determined (Freud), present-determined (Gestalt), as future-aimed (Jung, Fromm) psychological explanations. Especially Erich Fromm’s idea that humans psychologically inherently “search for sense”, explaining behaviours, can be related to part of the Rastafari ethos and goals. The sense in this case an African identity of people after all of African descent.
Also it responds to Jung’s idea that humans seek “wholeness” and the “social power and relationships” of the later Neo-Freudian and Gestalt schools. The urge to return to one’s biological/genetic roots/origins, has moreover some Freudian aspects.
Thus, Marcus Garvey’s very life proved them all wrong and right at the same time.
MENTAL SLAVERY TODAY
The analyzed “mental slavery” or “double consciousness” is still a wide phenomenon among people in today’s world, not just Black people, colonially indoctrinated. All people having to work for a boss, part of this surrounding material economic system, are somehow mentally enslaved, ignorantly or cowardly adapting/inconveniencing themselves for survival, as still are women in a largely male-dictated world.
We knew this already, about all this inequality in power structures worldwide, but I argue – finally – that this was not realized enough, questioned enough. We could e.g. have followed Garvey’s example (or Dubois, Fanon a.o.) of mental emancipation and self-determination vis-s-a-vis the wealthy capitalist minority in this world (a few % of billionaires), seeking to exploit the world at the cost of the poorer masses: starting wars, dominating economics, politics and governments.
COVID
The mass submission – or economic war against poor people - was tested over time with upcoming Neoliberalism (“hard profit-driven capitalism” aided by government policy), eventually to result in what even to more and more first gullible and government-friendly citizens, appears to be a covid “plandemic”. Seemingly less to do with actual health problems – the mortality rate and severity of the new strain Covid 19 soon in 2020 dropped to flu levels – than with an elitist aim of economic restructuring at the cost of democracy and human freedoms.
The fact that a prison/penitentiary term like “lockdown” became normal in democratic countries (before this only in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes) for a policy tool, and even accepted sado-masochistically (dixit Erich Fromm) by many common citizens, is worrisome to me, and, well, limits democracy. The psychological Uncle Tom-effect of easily bribable people – from the African Diaspora – is certainly noticeable in these obedient responses to such drastic (and medically unproven!) measures as lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, etcetera.
It moreover showed how the masses became indoctrinated with fear for this new Sars virus, making them collaborate with their own imprisonment end oppression, even long after the truth could be found out. Some obedient or “enslaved” mind-set or confinement keeps them from searching the truth. Garvey has some lessons to teach here.
This coronacrisis was and is maintained largely with instilling fear, effective even if largely irrational. So was slavery, of course: fear of punishment and violence made many slaves obedient, or even cooperative. Equally irrational racist theories of skin color or superior or inferior races, not making any objective sense, aided this then. Now a hyped up flu virus, related to Sars.
Now the same elitist – Rastafari people would say “Babylon” – forces, use fear and violence psychologically for such control and confine functions of annoying or dangerous masses. We must free our own minds first from this.
ATTACK ON CULTURE
Another shocking similarity – making Garvey’s and African Diasporan ideas equally relevant – is the attack/effect on culture of the coronacrisis. Banning gatherings, closing public places and cultural events cannot but limit and halt cultural development. The online replacement is only a meager alternative, leading only to a repetitive stagnation, not “living culture”.
Keeping Africans away from their cultures and own communities was purposefully done to mentally displant and use slaves economically, unhindered. Mental slavery, alright, and the power of the people tamed. Probably also for some economic reset, benefitting a few. Can’t say Garvey never warned us.
Also other psychoanalytical ideas seem confirmed in this crisis, with quite a lot of Freudian, male “phallic” and penetration symbolism (vaccine/injection, intra-nostral/anal testing, possessiveness (no parties with others, but state-sanctioned penetration), punishment, and stimulating primary fears.
The Freudian term "projection" (accusing others what oneself is) is likewise very evidently present in these p(l)andemic policies, largely consisting of powerful people stimulating fear for a virus - and infection through other people - whereas they themselves and their oppressive plans should really be feared.
As Garvey wrote in his 1927 long poem The Tragedy of White Injustice: "Capitalists and money sharks, make life unsafe, like ocean barks.." (quoted in a Wailing Souls song).
Jung’s collective consciousness (culture) and emphasis on relations, and Fromm’s “positive freedom” are sensed more than ever (in absence). Fromm’s idea on “sense seeking” obtained a deviation, though, as what is at conflict now is those that “invent” sense (fearing a disease more than required) as a part of psychosis or cognitive dissonance, and those that search actual sense in a world that confuses and worries them.
FREEING OUR MIND
“None but ourselves can free our mind”, is another intriguing line by Marcus Garvey quoted by Bob Marley in Redemption Song, that sure is confirmed now, with governments all over the world in love or seemingly even hooked on rights-trampling “lockdowns” as policy tools. People have to free themselves from such powers that be (“Babylon”) – corrupted governments - fighting against the people (and their culture), not with them or for them.
A nice way in this freeing of our own mind, is another line in Bob Marley’s Redemption Song, namely “Have no fear of atomic energy, cause none a them can stop the/Jah time”. There is a higher truth of essential humanity and inherent self-worth we all have within us.
Power is an illusion, yet this “positive freedom” (as Fromm called it), or “repatriation” or “sighting Rastafari” as others define it, other forms of spirituality, or even as “finding one’s self and identity”, remains there as a way to give sense, and keep our good senses. In that sense I agree with some of Erich Fromm’s theories.
This sense-giving positive freedom must awaken and reign among people to achieve an eventual freedom from this “mental slavery”, caused by hidden dictates from a wealthy, powerful few, resulting in psychological warfare.
A wealthy few that is – after all – also historically racially privileged.
There is in that sense nothing new under the sun.
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