ABSTRACT
Bom in St Anns’s Bay, Jamaica on 17 August 1887, Marcus Garvey, the descendant of revolutionary slaves, grew up in a British colonial environment within the relative security of being in the racial majority. On finishing elementary school, he moved to Kingston where he worked as a printer, became involved in labour activities, participated in an unsuccessful labour strike, and was fired and blacklisted. Marcus Garvey’s philosophy evolved within the intellectual context and milieu of Negro thought in the period immediately following the First World War. New York had long been the centre of African-American intellectual and cultural life and this era also witnessed a Negro reaction to the frustrated hopes and race riots. Garvey denounced Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. By 1937, after the Italian military had overrun Ethiopia, Garvey boasted that he had been the first prophet of fascism. As with Edward Blyden and Paul Cuffee, the geographic target of Garvey’s utopian dream was Liberia.
