Before the concept of Pan-Africanism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, blacks in the African diaspora not only struggled against racism in the Americas and the Caribbean, they also facilitated the “repatriation” of blacks to Africa.
Paul Cuffe
Paul Cuffe was born in Massachusetts in 1759, the son of a freed slave who had been born in West Africa, and a native American mother. Cuffe built a profitable shipping business, and in 1815 he conveyed nine black families from Massachusetts to Sierra Leone.
In 1787 the British Crown had founded a colony there – the “Province of Freedom” – by settling 400 “Black Poor” in Freetown. They were joined in 1792 by some 1,200 freed slaves from Nova Scotia led by the self-liberated slave Thomas Peters, and later by about 500 “Maroons” – freed slaves from Jamaica. Following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the British Royal Navy landed thousands of freed slaves in Sierra Leone whom they had rescued from illegal slave ships.
American Colonization Society
On his return from Sierra Leone Cuffe made contact with the American Colonization Society who chose him to lead a further group of freed slaves to West Africa. However, Cuffe died in 1817 before he could make the voyage.
The ACS had been founded in 1816 to encourage slaves freed in America to make new lives for themselves in Africa. Some of the founders of the ACS were slaveholders who wanted to relocate “potentially troublesome agitators” before they disrupted the slave-based societies of the American South. Other founders, however, were well-intentioned liberals who believed that freed blacks would be better off in Africa where they would not experience racist oppression.
In 1817 the ACS and other colonization societies founded Liberia as a home for freed slaves. Over a period of 40 years the ACS sponsored 13,000 black Americans to settle in Liberia, an average of just 325 a year. The overwhelming majority of freed slaves considered themselves to be Americans, not Africans. They strongly disliked the ACS and did not want to emigrate.
Martin Delany
Martin Delany’s grandparents were born in Africa, and his father was a slave, but Delany himself was born free in Virginia in 1812. He trained as a physician’s assistant and later worked on an anti-slavery paper in New York.
In 1852 Delany published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. This set out some themes which later became core elements of Pan-Africanist thinking.
Delany argued that blacks were the equals of whites, pointing out that many blacks had succeeded in life despite the discrimination they suffered. Moreover, the African race had built successful and powerful societies in Africa. Africans should therefore be proud of their race and their heritage.
Delany later emphasised the unity of all blacks in the African diaspora, saying on one occasion, “Africa for the African race and black men to rule them. By black men I mean, men of African descent who claim an identity with the race”. Delany can thus be seen as the father of black nationalism.
Edward Blyden
Blyden was born in in 1832 in the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) to free blacks of Igbo heritage. In 1850 he applied to study at theological college in the US but was rejected due to his race. He then relocated to Liberia where he became a prominent citizen.
Blyden argued that blacks had a proud history and culture, and that with the help of blacks from the New World a vibrant civilisation could be built in West Africa. However, Blyden largely failed to persuade educated blacks to join him in Liberia and his importance in the history of Pan-Africanism derives mainly from his abilities as a theoretician.
Like Delany, Blyden collected evidence to prove that the black race was the equal of any other race, and took a keen interest in the histories of Egypt and Ethiopia. However, Blyden believed that blacks would never be respected until they had their own nationality and their own modern nation states.
In addition, Blyden considered that blacks had special attributes which amounted to an “African Personality”, and believed that the black race had a unique contribution to make to humanity – which would be a spiritual one.
Blyden’s reputation as a thinker was established by the publication in 1887 of his book Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. He suggested that Islam was better suited to Africans than Christianity – which taught blacks that they were inferior to whites. Moreover, Christian missionaries failed to take account of the “African Personality” in their opposition to polygamy and other aspects of traditional African life and culture.
Blyden, however, insisted that African culture was ideally suited to the condition of African people – African society was socialistic, cooperative and equitable.
With his book Blyden gained a reputation for being ‘the voice of Africa’, and his ideas were amplified by his successors, notably the prominent black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey – who will be the subject of the next article in our series about Pan-Africanism.