History Recalled: British and American Nazism

 By Mahadev Desai*

(This article was published in Harijan on February 15, 1942)

If Dr. George Washington Carver had been born a white man, his name would have been as famous in the world of science as that of Burbank, Edison, or the Curies. But he was born a Negro, and so – in spite of his epoch-making discoveries in the field of science – synthesising the products of peanuts and potatoes and making of floor marbles and building boards from waste materials, and showing the immense potentialities of his native soil – he remains in America the shunned Negro that he was nearly 80 years ago. He was born in 1864.

And yet a British explorer of the reputation of Sir Harry Johnston wrote about him: “Prof. Carver, who teaches scientific agriculture, botany, agricultural chemistry, etc. at Tuskegee, is an absolute Negro; but in the soundness of his science, he might be professor of Botany, not at Tuskegee, but at Oxford or Cambridge. Any European botanist of distinction, after ten minutes’ conversation with this man, would instinctively treat him as a man on a level with himself.”

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Dr. Carver occasionally sends his pamphlets and messages to Gandhiji, and the latest to bring these was Dr. John who was on a visit to America and incidentally visited Tuskegee. “I will not accept the messages,” said Gandhiji laughing, “unless Dr. Carver comes and delivers them himself.” Dr. John said Dr. Carver was too old now to come to India. But he works nevertheless in his garden, getting up every day at 4 o’clock, and remembers Gandhiji whenever he has an Indian visitor. He is so humble and simple in his habits that for weeks Dr. John mistook him for a gardener. Dr. Carver has now prepared potato powder which can keep for twenty years. The very first question that Gandhiji asked Dr. John about Dr. Carver was: “But even this genius suffers under the handicap of segregation, doe not he?”

“Oh yes,” said Dr. John, “as much as any Negro.”

“And yet these people talk of democracy and equality! It is an utter lie,” said Gandhiji in indignation.

“But,” said Dr. John, “Dr. Carver is never bitter or resentful.”

“I know,” said Gandhiji, “that is what we believers in non-violence have to learn from him. But what about the claim of these people who are said to be fighting for democracy?”

Well he is ‘an absolute Negro’, and when ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’ are mentioned the words ‘of the white races’ are understood.

That is what may be called American Nazism.

The New Statesman of November 22, just to hand, describes what it terms a species of ‘British Nazism’ . The Southern Rhodesia Land Apportionment Act of 1941, which came ihnto force in August 1941, divides the country into 49 million acres reserved for white ownership, 29 million acres for native ownership, and the rest as forest area and unassigned; it makes obligatory on the natives now living in the ‘white’ areas to leave by the end of 1942, unless they are labourers for Europeans. These 49 million acres are reserved for 55,000 Europeans, and the 29 million for 1,100,000 Africans.

The British Government has thus agreed to condemn a million British subjects to restriction to a third of their own country and service villainage in the rest of it for the benefit of a minority of 55,000 British subjects. And Parliament has had no opportunity to prevent this application of a purely Nazi policy, and one, moreover, in flat contradiction of repeated Government statements of colonial principle, within the British Empire.

The League of Coloured Peoples addressed a memorial to the Colonial Secretary, which stated among other things: That the half of the area reserved for the European population (less than one-twentieth of the whole) includes most of the best and easily accessible lands of the country; the ‘Native areas’ are overcrowded, inadequately watered, and infested with tsetse fly; that the policy is not even an honest policy of segregation but of compelling the blacks to toil for the whites and to own no land; that this is Hitler’s plan for the conquered countries in Europe; that it is wrong to suggest that the policy is favoured by the natives; that white agriculture is a failure in Southern Rhodesia, propped up by subsidies; and that Lord Cranborne, the Colonial Secretary, should display the ‘backbone to stand up to the small gang of white settlers who dominate the territory.’ He has not the backbone. For this letter has elicited a reply signed by a Colonial Office official saying that “no useful purpose would be served by discussing the principles involved.”