- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes.
- No animal shall sleep in a bed.
- No animal shall drink alcohol.
- No animal shall kill any other animal.
- All animals are equal.
Those are the original Seven Commandments of Animalism, as espoused by Squealer and Napoleon, the two leaders of the revolution at Manor Farm. The world found out the whole story on August 17, 1945, when George Orwell’s Animal Farm was first published. As you might remember, it was a story about a revolution that didn’t turn out well.
By coincidence, the two leaders of the revolution in Indonesia, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, initiated their action on exactly the same day, August 17, 1945. They were revolting against the Dutch Empire that included all the Dutch colonies around the world. By 1945 there weren’t many left, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the last one, Suriname, became independent.
The Dutch Empire arose in the 1500s. The King of Spain ruled the “seventeen provinces” part of Europe (including the Netherlands) for about 13 years — the Holy Roman Emperor basically just gave the area to him — until there was a revolt in 1566. The Netherlands declared independence in 1581 with the Act of Abjuration.”That title sounds odd nowadays, but it’s just because the word “abjure,” which means to renounce something, is hardly ever used any more.
The fighting with Spain went on for a while. Eighty years, in fact. Spain finally recognized Dutch independence in 1648. But while the war was going on, the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company — very similar entities to their British counterparts — were expanding their presence around the world.
The French were busily establishing colonies in those days too, many of them in Africa. August 17 is the day Gabon, on the West African coast right on the equator, became independent in 1960. It was one of the four French colonies that comprised French Equatorial Africa (Gabon, Chad, Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic). No revolution in this case; the territories were all represented in the French Parliament, and they simply voted to become independent.
They’re still independent nations, even though Marcus Garvey, whose birthday is today, once declared himself the Provisional President of Africa. He was not from Africa himself, but Jamaica. He was the founder of UNIA, an anti-colonialist organization based in Jamaica, and also founded Garveyism. He believed that everyone of African descent (except that’s everybody, so there would have had to be some clarification along the way) should be repatriated to Africa, which should become a single nation.
Garvey also founded the Black Star Line a shipping and passenger line that he declared would be “black-owned, black-staffed, and utilized by black patrons.” He got in some trouble for selling stock without a license, and was later arrested for mail fraud, but the Black Star Line managed to acquire ships and operated from 1919 to 1922. Garvey was jailed and later deported to Jamaica, although the whole prosecution was driven by J. Edgar Hoover and, according to Garvey, the NAACP, arguably for political reasons (it’s a pretty convincing argument).
The NAACP may or may not have been behind his prosecution, but they really were against Garvey. He met at least once with the Ku Klux Klan, and they both believed in “separate but equal” — although as Napoleon (the pig in Animal Farm) finally admitted, “all are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
