Over Westport in the county of Mayo on an April afternoon in 2018, a streak of clouds like an upside down canyon drifted from the direction of Croagh Patrick, so stark that I went down to the car and drove the seven kilometres out to Deer Park, at the bend in the road at Killadangan under the mountain. Around the bay, clouds were draping the mountaintops, and sitting folded on one another over the sea. I saw a curve of stream cutting a shape through the mud with the clouds swirling above, and I pulled over and got out of the car by the sea wall to take a photograph.
In the evening, taking a closer look at the picture, I made out a face in the clouds, a familiar face: Marcus Garvey. Marcus Garvey, Jamaican national hero.
Marcus Garvey’s name is known from Kinshasa to Accra and from Lagos to Addis Ababa. So why is Marcus Garvey hanging out in the clouds over Murrisk?
As it happened, I got a call a couple of days later from Ray Bassett, a retired diplomat who was on a visit to Westport to meet some friends. Another reason for his visit, he told me, was to track down some items for the national museum in Jamaica. Ray had served as the Irish consul along with representing Ireland in Canada, spending just a few months a year there. These items were once in the custody of Westport House, he told me, but a visit there proved fruitless. The items had been sold years earlier to a private collector in Switzerland.
Drinking a tea afterwards, Ray told me that Marcus Garvey got his family name from an Irish family. Ray had visited Garvey’s grave in Kingston, where some Rastafarians told him that Garvey was the name of a slave-owning family from Ireland. Ray had promised them that he would try to track down the Irish Garvey family. He asked me to help out.
I had already seen the Garvey name on shops and pubs across Mayo. The Garvey family came to Mayo six hundred years ago, as part of the great Norman conquest of the West of Ireland, first settling in Kilkenny. They became the rulers of the ancient townland of Murrisk, lying at the foot of Craogh Patrick. There, they had build a grand house on the west side of Murrisk. The Garvey land started where the Westport estate ended, at a place to the east of Murrisk known as Deer Park: the Browne and Garvey families were neighbours. The Browne family of Westport House earned part of their fortune from the plantations and enslaved Africans they owned in Jamaica.
Marcus Garvey at his desk, 1924.
That Westport connection provided a way for the Garveys of Murrisk to move to Jamaica, and acquire land and slaves of their own. Christoper Garvey of Murrisk, an officer in the British Army, was sent to Jamaica sometime in the mid-1700s, where he established the Garvey family.
It is his granddaughter Bridget Garvey who is listed as owning eight enslaved persons during an 1820s census in Jamaica. It was common practice in census taking and record keeping to deny enslaved persons their origins and list them with the same name as their owners. It was not, as is often recorded, that the enslaved people were given these names as any kind of gift, but as a way to erase their African identities. And so it was that William Garvey, who was born into slavery around 1805, was one of those who was freed from Bridget Garvey. The Marcus Garvey papers tell us that William Garvey was a mason, and that he eventually owned a home on Winders Hill. His son Mosiah Garvey was the father of Marcus Garvey.
I wondered if Marcus Garvey’s grandchildren were still alive, and knew of this connection. It turned out that Marcus Garvey’s son, the retired surgeon Julius Garvey, was alive and living in New York. I wrote to him and he told me that they knew the Garvey family name came from somewhere in the West of Ireland.
If the African Garveys of Jamaica knew that the family name had originated from Ireland, the Irish Garveys also knew of their connection to Marcus Garvey. Rosemary Garvey, author of the Garvey family history From Kilkenny to Murrisk writes that she received a letter from Mollie Batten, daughter of John Williams Frederick Garvey, that included a clipping about an exhibition in Harlem celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marcus Gavery’s birth. “Mollie writes to say that she knew [Marcus Garvey’s] widow, Amy; and that Amy always said that her husband’s family came from the West of Ireland.”
Marcus Garvey, journalist and publisher
It was Ray Bassett who pointed out the extent of Garvey’s admiration for the cause of Irish independence.
Marcus Garvey moved to Kingston as a teenager and apprenticed as a printer. He became a trade unionist and organised a printer’s strike, which ended with the union being closed. In his twenties, Garvey travelled through the Caribbean, noting the status of Africans in many countries, and resolved to do something to raise the awareness among Africans in the Americas of their common plight.
In 1914 he travelled to London, and it’s there that he took an interest in what was happening in Ireland. The famous lockout of 1913 had become a global story. With dreadful poverty and overcrowding in Dublin’s tenements, the workers of the Transport and General Workers Union started recruiting from the company of media boss William Martin Murphy. Murphy demanded that the workers give up union membership, and when they didn’t, he locked them out of the workplaces. As the first world war broke out across Europe, Irish nationalists resisted the imperial war and seized control of the General Post Office in Dublin on the weekend of Easter 1916.
With the world press close by in London covering the war, the Easter uprising became a front page story around the world, with nationalists in other English colonies cheering the Irish uprising. It captivated Garvey, Ray Bassett told me. He pointed me to a piece he had written. “To Marcus, the blood sacrifice to revive the national and patriotic spirits of a people colonised, denigrated and deprived of its cultural heritage had huge resonance. While he had been interested in and sympathetic to the Irish cause in the past, post-1916 it became one of the main determinants in the development of what was to become ‘Garveyism’. Marcus Garvey wanted black people to emulate Easter 1916. He expounded on this topic on 27 July 1919: “The time has come for the negro race to offer up its martyrs upon the altar of liberty even as the Irish has given a long list, from Robert Emmet to Roger Casement.”
By the end of the war, Garvey was living in the United States, where he formed the United Negro Improvement Association. “In 1919, he named the new HQ of the UNIA Movement in Harlem ‘Liberty Hall’, after the destroyed HQ of the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union and the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin,” wrote Bassett. “In fact, he named all 30 buildings operated by the UNIA in the USA as Liberty Halls. Garvey’s UNIA went from strength to strength and soon had over two million members. It spread internationally and was estimated to have reached, at its height, a membership of six million. It was the biggest black organisation in history.”
Basing himself in Harlem, New York, Garvey ran a newspaper and turned his hand to practical matters. He set up a black manufacturing business and established the Black Star Line to do trade between the Caribbean and the US - and then to Africa. The UNIA held marches up and down Manhattan, and a newfound black consciousness resonated with musicians and artists in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Garvey also kept up his correspondence with Ireland, writing to Eamon De Valera, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. De Valera had been jailed rather than executed and he became a central figure in the War of Independence. Garvey tried to arrange a joint speaking appearance.
Garvey began a correspondence with Ethiopian diplomats, among them the Prince Regent, later Emperor Haile Selassie. The Prince Regent followed with interest the Garvey movement and wrote to the UNIA in 1922, inviting black Americans to move to Ethiopia and help to modernise the country. Garvey was among those who wrote to congratulate the Prince Regent when he became Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930.
The American intelligence agencies watched Garvey carefully. When J Edgar Hoover became director of the FBI in 1924, he made Marcus Garvey his top priority. By 1925, Garvey had been charged with mail fraud and was expelled from the country. It was over 70 years before Garvey’s name was cleared of the charges, in a campaign led by his children. Hoover had framed Garvey.
Garvey finished his life in exile in London and died in 1940 but his African leaders from Jomo Kenyatta to Kwame Nkrumah acknowledged his work, and Jamaican musicians and singers lifted Garvey’s name back into the pantheon in the 1970s.
Return of Ancient
Few people see a face in that photo at Murrisk, never mind recognising Marcus Garvey. But it turned out that Marcus Garvey’s Irish connection is from the townland where I took the photograph, the original Garvey House only a few hundred metres away. Garvey House is gone more than a decade ago, a new hotel now taking place on the shore. But Garvey is back in spirit in the West of Ireland.