Daily Inspiration Quote by C. L. R. James

For a thinker as allergic to slogans as C. L. R. James, calling “a United Africa” nonsense isn’t a renunciation of African solidarity so much as an attack on a comforting abstraction. James spent his life threading a needle: fiercely anti-imperial, suspicious of nationalism when it hardens into myth, and relentlessly concrete about how power actually moves. The line works because it punctures the romance of unity at the exact point where romance becomes evasion.

The intent is diagnostic. “United Africa” can sound like a moral destination, but James is asking: united by whom, through what institutions, under which class forces, and at whose expense? Pan-African rhetoric often flattened a continent’s political economies, languages, colonial borders, and local struggles into a single banner. James, a Marxist with a reporter’s nose for particulars, sees how that banner can be used to paper over authoritarian centralization, elite bargains, or the sidelining of workers and peasants in the name of “the nation.”

The subtext is also a warning about the postcolonial moment. After formal independence, unity talk could become a substitute for the harder work of democratic organization and regional coordination that respects difference. James isn’t mocking liberation; he’s mocking the vague, airbrushed version of it that travels well in speeches and conferences.

Context matters: James’s Pan-African commitments were real, but so was his insistence that emancipation isn’t produced by grand federations on paper. It’s built through mass politics, accountable leadership, and alliances forged in struggle, not declared into existence as a metaphor.