Marronage, Black Autonomy: Modibo Kadalie’s Intimate Direct Democracy
by JAMES POPE
in Spring 2022
Ani Lacy, Another Doris: Another Nation, 2022
…unawareness is the basic characteristic of a slave. Awareness is the minimum condition for attaining freedom.
George Lamming, 1960
…Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against.
James Boggs, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, 1963
The idea of democracy, specifically, democratic citizenship and the right to belong, is often lauded as a gift of Greece – Greco-Roman sociopolitical thought and cultural contributions to a conceptualization of ‘civilization’. A concept was needed to determine what it means to be human in a particular form of sociopolitical organization.
However, democratic citizenship—as expounded by Athens, the lauded form of sociopolitical organization that was intellectualized by an Athenian elite class—was conceptualized to exclude others.
The inclusion of ‘Others’ was seen as a negation of order and the rule of law. After all, it was Aristotle who invoked the notion of ius sanguinis (meaning ‘right of blood,’ or ‘by blood’) to be an exclusionary tool serving the interest of a dominant class, which is the operative mechanism in the application of ‘democracy’ and democratic citizenship that guides much of the discourse today.
Moving through the tenth and thirteenth centuries with religious/cultural conflict that eventually inform the basis of the nation-state, these origins became the foundation of what later in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is institutionalized in the structures and formations of social, economic, and political processes: the extraction and redefinition of personhood, a more intentional redefinition of what it means to be human. What is important to highlight here, is that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ushered in a limited articulation of what it means to be human as a justification for and maintenance of private property. A legacy within which the very definition of the political, the economic, and the social are continuously operationalized today.
What is clear in this current historical epoch, as Modibo Kadalie aptly points outs, younger people “are convinced that the nation-state is not offering them a future. Newer generations of researchers are now beginning to look for evidence of community and collectivity” (153). A collectivity that lies in the very fabric of Africana forms of knowledge and ways of being, fully articulated in the various forms of resistance found throughout the Americas expressed as maroon community.
In defining, mapping, and attempting to find the most articulate application of ‘democracy,’ Modibo Kadalie presents an important intervention into the questions that move in and throughout discourses on democracy. Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, The Great Dismal Swamp and The Human Quest for Freedom disrupts dominant discourses on democracy.
Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, The Great Dismal Swamp and The Human Quest for Freedom (On Our Own Authority, 2022)
Kadalie engages interdependent themes such as Black autonomy, radical public and social history, intimate direct democracy, social intimacy, Black geographies, and radical ecology, while centering a Pan Africanism that strengthens the conceptual lens through which continuities in Africana sociopolitical thought and resistance can be further identified. Kadalie’s perspective on Black autonomy, grounded in social intimacy as being the operative mechanism for a functional democratic society, is undoubtedly rooted in his own background. Kadalie grew up in Riceboro, a Gullah-Geechee community on the Georgia coast, where he learned African ways of being and forms of knowledge that were transmitted from generation to generation and deeply ingrained in his worldview throughout his early development.
This work is a delinking of African historiography and historicity from the American narrative, and thereby a delinking from the Western project to construct a democratic society. Its exploration of space/ geography as a foundation for liberation is a vital contribution to a range of categories of knowledge production—with the primary form of maroonage as the fullest articulation, then and now, of Africana resistance and knowledge. We see reverberations throughout the practices and thoughts of those categorized into a Black Radical Tradition, which has now reached a point of being gutted and overused by a particular class of Black neoliberal intellectuals who present as radical. This will be set aside for now. Kadalie writes: “[t]he strong and manifest impulse of the Africans of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose [Fort Mose] toward an independent, self-directed, development trajectory is seldom comprehended with all of its critical implications. Enslaved Africans’ intense quest for freedom and autonomy, rooted in their rich history from the Guinea Coast, has never been fully incorporated into any analysis of this community” (79). While the sentiment is true, the actuality of the research is and has been trending toward this full incorporation. Is it enough? No. But there are certainly identifiable efforts. The problematic is found in modes and methods of communication between peoples who are doing the work across geographical and linguistic boundaries. Nevertheless, the intentionality to study maroonage in Fort Mose and the Great Dismal Swamp provides the bridge to move across these boundaries, as it is a story of how and when African and Indigenous peoples met each other as oppressed people in the racist and hierarchical settler colonies of North America (33).
This work, in the words of Kadalie, “offers two historical examples that were not really similar (Fort Mose was a settlement built by a group of people while the Great Dismal Swamp was a natural place) and uses them to explore Indigenous directly democratic traditions” (150). From this study Kadalie has identified the operative principle of intimacy, a democratic intimacy that is essential for a direct democracy, a practice that was already present in Indigenous sociopolitical constructions from both continental Africa and throughout the Americas. Kadalie’s work attempts to give full consideration to the “social-ecological organization of Indigenous and enslaved African inhabitants of the Great Dismal Swamp and Fort Mose as they resisted the violent imposition of the earliest forms of capitalism. In doing so they were able to create (along with some dispossessed Europeans in their midst who were also being exploited) new forms of intimate social relations that we are just now beginning to understand” (32).
Our historical consciousness should be delinked from the formations of Western European institutions articulated through the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as a response to the conflict of the tenth to thirteenth centuries and institutionalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just as James Boggs in his response to Bertrand Russell captured in the epigraph above, for Kadalie, “[o]ur history is not a story of unrecognized contributions to the greatness of US ‘democracy,’ or that of any other nation-state. Our history is one part of a broader human struggle to dismantle nation states entirely and to create more directly democratic institutions that are compatible with and integrated into a more socially ecological world” [33].
In the process of mapping the history of Black resistance in the Americas, it is important to properly explore the intensity of the African impulse for freedom. And as Kadalie points out, it was the radical use of space that instinctively drove this African impulse. In fact, the way African peoples to this day will, literally, get up and go when an environment is inhospitable is rooted in a genealogy of resistance to systems, structures, and institutions that seek to impinge on the humanity of African peoples, continental and beyond. What is equally important is the way Kadalie highlights the meaning of Black autonomy as directly related to a collectivism, a form of intimate direct democracy.
In the end, cultivating a historical consciousness requires effort and purpose. A desire to organize information to develop projects that intend to directly confront and heighten the contradictions that inform structural inequities, which have direct and indirect implications on the lived realities of every person, every community around the world.
More than this, it requires an awareness. An awareness that maroons who utilized material and nonmaterial technologies inherent in their most intimate understanding of the symbiotic relationship to each other, nature, and the universe, re/created their lived realities in the most inhospitable conditions. As Kadalie writes, the real meaning of the communities of Fort Mose and the Great Dismal Swamp are found in the fact they are, “places of defiance, resistance, freedom, and ecologically symbiotic intimacy” (36). The form/s of Black autonomy that was expressed at these sites of resistance have much to share. We must begin to listen.
james pope is currently an Associate Professor & Program Coordinator, Africana Studies at Winston Salem State University (North Carolina, USA). He explores Africana radical thought and cultural resistance as it relates to the interaction between human rights, social movements, race/racism, and critical consciousness formation.