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Long but interesting.
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu  (February, 1999)

Tunde Adeleke.  _UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century
Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission_. Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xv + 192 pp.
Bibliographical references and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-8131-2056-X.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by John Saillant
<john.saillant@wmich.edu>, Western Michigan University

Key nineteenth-century American black nationalists--Martin
Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Henry McNeal Turner--are
derisively portrayed in Tunde Adeleke's _UnAfrican
Americans_. Professor Adeleke, educated at the University of
Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and the University of
Western Ontario and currently employed at Loyola University
(New Orleans), argues that Delany, Crummell, and Turner--all
occasional emigrationists who themselves sojourned in
Liberia--were collaborators in the late-nineteenth-century
imperialist ideas and policies that led to the colonization
of most of Africa.

Adeleke understands his subjects as reaching toward black
nationalism, or pan-Africanism, but failing because of two
conditions:  First, relatively few African Americans
endorsed or envisioned emigration to West Africa, so the
theoreticians of resettlement lacked the audience that might
have pushed them further into black nationalism.  Second,
European businessmen and governments were interested in the
natural resources and cheap labor that Africa seemed to
promise. Hence, Delany, Crummell, and Turner were led into
collaboration with economic and military forces that the
black men thought might serve their interests but soon
proved to be powerful beyond their influence. The strength
of _UnAfrican Americans_ is its author's frank presentation
of the anti-African, or civilizationist, face of its
subjects.  The weakness of the work is its blindness to the
historical background of emigrationism.

Adeleke begins his story around 1850, but many of the
patterns he analyzes--including the roles individuals like
Delany, Crummell, and Turner played in commerce, governance,
and migration--were established between 1780 and 1830.  The
black nationalists' beliefs and actions look less individual
and more structural, less idealistic and more self-serving,
if we consider the earlier history.  Moreover, the book
conveys an overall uneasiness with the idea of black
nationalism--an uneasiness the author does not confront but
that is worth discussing in a review.

Adeleke argues that, beginning with the approval of the Fugitive
Slave Act in 1850, former integrationist Martin Robison Delany
turned to Africa. Abandoning hope for liberty and self-governance
for black people in the USA, Delany announced that African Americans
could achieve civil rights in West Africa and, in 1859 and 1860, he
traveled in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Niger Valley to arrange
the future himself.  In Abeokuta (birthplace of Wole Soyinka, Fela,
and in the 1940s, a Nigerian women's anti-collaborationist
resistance movement) Delany contracted with local chiefs for land
for African American settlers.  Equality with indigenous
peoples--whether cultural, economic, or political--was an
impossibility for Delany, who was convinced that African American
men would carry civilization, including Christianity, to West Africa
and would be the governors of new states there.  He thought that
African American men could not achieve independence in isolation,
but would rely on European markets for West African produce (cotton
would be a prime export, he thought) and on cheap, indigenous labor
for agricultural production.  He envisioned what Adeleke acidly
calls a "triple alliance"--collaboration among European
industrialists, African American governors, and native laborers--in
the development of new societies and commercial systems in West
Africa.  To this end, Delany traveled to Great Britain in 1860 and
lectured to businessmen, scientists, and government officials about
the value of African produce and the cheapness and availability of
African labor.  Tension between the American North and South in the
1850s gave him an opportunity to predict to British manufacturers
the unreliability of the American cotton crop in the 1860s and to
extol West African agricultural produce for manufacturers who needed
steady sources of raw materials.  He did argue that "legitimate"
trade would muscle out the remnants of the slave trade.  But his
overwhelming vision was one of African workmen employed by African
American settlers who traded with European manufacturers.

As an episcopal priest, missionary, entrepreneur,
"civilizationist,"  and Delany's host in Monrovia, Crummell
could be seen as an even less attractive figure than Delany.
Crummell presented West Africa as a field of rich natural
resources waiting to be exploited by African Americans. He
justified the use of violence against indigenous peoples,
whether by African American settlers or Europeans.  Not only
did he assert the right of settlers to battle with native
peoples, but he commended the Belgian government for its
forceful moves against Africans in the Congo.  (Adeleke does
not note that other emigrations, like John Russwurm, saw the
Americo-Liberian settlers as being in the same relationship
that Englishmen had been with American Indians in the
seventeenth century.)  Moreover, Crummell argued that the
slave trade and New World slavery were providential, were
God's way of preparing black people to enter the modern
world of commerce, religion, and democratic governance.
African American settlers, according to this argument, were
divine instruments, forged in the New World, for civilizing
and converting Africa.

Turner, who went to Liberia some years after Delany and
Crummell, echoed their ideas about civilization and
commerce, but with some significant variations.  After the
federal retreat from Reconstruction and the Supreme Court's
recision of civil rights extended in the 1870s to African
Americans, Turner began to speak of "reparation" to blacks
for the sufferings and inequities of enslavement.  He
demanded of the federal government $40 billion to fund the
travel of African Americans to West Africa and start-up
costs for their agricultural and mining concerns there.  He
criticized American isolationism, contrasting it to European
focus on Africa.  He traveled as bishop of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church to South Africa and congratulated
the Boer settlers for bringing civilization to the native
peoples there.  Turner had an aptitude for the infelicitous
phrase.  One day, he wrote, "millions will thank heaven for
the limited toleration of American slavery"  (p. 101).

Adeleke's distaste for his subjects is evident throughout
his book, but he is also sometimes sympathetic to them.  He
resists the easy road of stating that Delany, Crummell, and
Turner were so enthralled by European civilization that they
dismissed African culture and, indeed, Africans' lives.
Instead, he argues, more complexly, that the three men aimed
for black nationalism but were hamstrung by their context
(insufficient interest in settlement on the part of African
Americans and overwhelming interest in commercial
appropriation on the part of Europeans).  They were at heart
American integrationists who had little true interest in
Africa and who returned to the USA as soon as they felt the
political climate was hopeful there. Crummell, for instance,
lived in Liberia only between 1853 and 1872.  They never
knew, Adeleke reasons, the Africa they betrayed and
abandoned.

Consideration of the seventy years before Adeleke begins his
analysis reveals that his subjects' anti-Africanism can be
explained in another way.  Efforts to quell the slave trade
by means of "legitimate trade" began in the 1780s, but were
neither purely pro-African in intent nor antislavery in
practice.  The Sierra Leone Company, for instance,
envisioned African laborers "liberated" from their
traditional societies and social leadership and busy
producing raw material for British manufacture and
consumption.  The same laborers were to become consumers of
British finished goods.  The "legitimate trade"  campaign
actually strengthened the institution of slavery in areas
where goods for the Atlantic trade could be produced.  The
goods were produced and transported not by independent
farmers but often by slaves.  The first generation of
Americo-Liberian settlers knew this and sought to take
advantage of it.

From its inception in the 1820s, Liberia was meant to be a
commercial colony utilizing cheap African labor.  Despite
the rhetoric of carrying civilization and religion to the
natives and undermining the slave trade, the
Americo-Liberians and their white supporters envisioned
Monrovia as an entrepot that would shuttle American goods
(including such slave-produced goods as tobacco, along with
whiskey, cloth, glassware, and guns) to Africans while
returning African goods (including such goods as palm oil,
camwood, and ivory, harvested and transported to the coast
by slaves) to the United States.  Records of the blacks and
whites who traveled to Liberia in the 1820s under the aegis
of the American Colonization Society reveal that they knew
that slave labor could produce tremendous wealth and had few
compunctions about dealing in slave-produced material even
if they opposed the Atlantic slave trade.  The violent
disagreements between the Americo-Liberian settlers and the
native groups, beginning in the mid-1820s, are usually
described as disputes about land possession, but it is at
least as likely that they were disputes about the misuse of
local laborers by the settlers.  Even less fortunate than
the locals who ended up working for the settlers were the
"recaptives," who were rescued from slavers at sea only to
be indentured to Americo-Liberian settlers.  A tradition of
the misuse of laborers would of course result in the
investigation in the 1920s by the League of Nations the
result of which was that Liberian officials were condemned
for profiting from the unfree labor of indigenous people.

The Americo-Liberian colonist is usually understood in
American historiography as an abolitionist or freedom
fighter, but he was really a middleman attempting to shuttle
goods produced by unfree or semi-free black people to the
Atlantic economy.  He was someone who transferred the value
of the labor of black people, often enslaved, to a larger
economic system, hoping to retain a portion for himself.
Perhaps a good example is Lott Cary, who is often seen as a
black Virginian preacher and abolitionist who sought a
greater freedom in Liberia.  In the early nineteenth
century, Cary was a hired slave in a Richmond tobacco
warehouse--exactly the person through whose hands the value
of slave labor passed.  In the 1820s, he sailed to Monrovia,
ostensibly as a missionary (one of his nineteenth-century
hagiographers conceded that there was no evidence that he
ever preached to the natives), but actually with plans to
settle himself as an entrepreneur moving goods between the
USA and areas around Monrovia.  The move to Liberia was
meant primarily to improve his position as a middleman.  He
became a scourge of the natives and died in a gunpowder
explosion as he was preparing for one of many assaults on
them.  The large question, of course, is why someone like
Cary has persistently gotten good press as an American
freedom fighter.

The importance of Cary and early Liberia for Adeleke's book
is that the role of middleman between black labor (whether
it was cheap, semi-free, or slave) and the Euro-American
economy was an established one into which men like Delany,
Crummell, and Turner fell easily.  It was part of the
structure of the Atlantic world, not merely a choice Delany
and company made.  Although black nationalist rhetoric might
be a part of it--Cary indeed said he was going to found a
black nation--the role was essentially economic and
suggested no abolitionist implications at all.  Often
skilled people with some experience of economic advancement,
the Americo-Liberian settlers, about 13,000 between 1822 and
1865, migrated in an effort to ratchet up their positions in
the Atlantic economy by availing themselves of indigenous
land and labor.  Perhaps the most accurate way to describe
the American black nationalists of the mid-nineteenth
century is that they stood at the interface of slavery and
imperialism, drawing their assumptions about labor and
markets from the past while gesturing toward the future
forms of commerce and governance they understood only
imperfectly.

Crummell earns particular scorn in _UnAfrican Americans_ for
the lengths to which he was willing to pursue the
providential argument that God had planned the slave trade
and New World slavery as instruments of a great good--the
Christianizing and civilizing of Africa.  The use of this
providential argument in the 1860s was even worse than
Adeleke relates, since it had been a standard application of
theodicy to the slave trade and to slavery in the eighteenth
century, but by the second half of the nineteenth century
had lost its respectability.  Had Crummell articulated the
providential argument about a century earlier, as did Quobna
Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Ukawasw
Gronniosaw, Lemuel Haynes, and Phillis Wheatley, he would
have been in the black avant-garde, which was using
providentialism to argue for its own role in the Atlantic
world, but in his time he was at best out of date, at worst
in bad faith.  Crummell's use of providence was entirely
self-serving and out of line with
mid-to-late-nineteenth-century Anglican theology.  The
omnipotent, omniscient God of the Protestant Reformation was
an overruling deity who brought good out of evil by
overruling the sins of humankind with events He wills to be.

The most obvious example was the overruling of the
Crucifixion by the Resurrection: the Reformed God worked in
human affairs by bringing good out of evil.  However,
beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century British
Protestants began criticizing the idea that God works
through human sin and suffering.  Central to Arminian
religion was the claim that suffering was not part of the
divine plan.  The older idea of a God who wounds with one
hand and heals with the other (as the Puritans put it)
retreated in the end of the eighteenth century into theology
branded derisively the "New Divinity" and often called
"hyper-Calvinism" or "consistent Calvinism."  This
discredited theodicy did have one value to Crummell in
exalting the person who could perceive and articulate the
providential design in human suffering.  Probably Crummell's
pronouncements on the divine design in the slave trade and
slavery were not the defense of "religious optimism" (p.
102) against the pain of racism, but rather an effort to
situate himself as the major interpreter both of centuries
of the slave trade and enslavement and of the establishment
of black settlers societies in West Africa.

Unfortunately, Adeleke does not treat reparations in depth,
but mentions the idea only as part of Turner's program that
had not appeared in Delany's or Crummell's.  But one assumes
that had he written more he would have argued that as an
idea reparations signify an effort to deal with the costs of
slavery, but in practice they are liable to become the
property of elites like Turner.  Funds for the establishment
of a governing, entrepreneurial class of African Americans
in West Africa can scarcely be seen as an honest effort at
reparations.

_UnAfrican Americans_ shows an uneasiness with black
nationalism, or pan-Africanism, that Adeleke does not seek
to resolve.  On the one hand, the author assumes that black
nationalism, or pan-Africanism, in the sense of ideas and
practices predicated on the unity of black people throughout
the world and aimed at their common good, does exist and can
be embodied in a state as well as articulated in a
philosophy. Delany, Crummell, and Turner, Adeleke reasons,
moved toward black nationalism but reached only an impure
form of it.  Black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, can
inhere in an African state as well as in the hearts and
minds of diasporic blacks. On the other hand, the author's
arguments imply the opposite-that there is no unity among
black people and that African states are not embodiments of
black nationalism.  Hence, on the one hand, Adeleke writes
that "a truly Pan-African and black nationalist program is
one propelled by conscious efforts to harmonize,
theoretically and practically, blacks in the diaspora and in
the African continent" (p. 145) and "the spirit of
Pan-Africanism ...  emphasizes, _a priori_, solidarity
between Africa and peoples of African descent in the
diaspora" (p. 151).  Yet, on the other hand, he acknowledges
complexity, diversity, and conflict among black people and
states that "to expect of black American nationalists
absolute and unswerving commitment to Africanism and
Pan-Africanism is unrealistic"  (p. 148).

A good example of the author's irresolution is his argument
that in "the articulation and defense of black/African
interests"  against European imperialism "one area of
success was Liberia." In reality, Liberia expanded its
borders through aggression, provided unfree laborers for
rubber plantations, and degenerated into various tribal and
settler factions that have poisoned the country with carnage
and mayhem.  It is true that Adeleke addresses only a slice
of Liberian history, but one questions the integrity of
thinking about Liberia in the imperialist decades without
also considering the colonizing decades as well as the years
in which Nigerian-dominated ECOMOG forces intervened in
Liberian politics in the name of stability.  Adeleke's
comments about black and African interests and Liberia's
"success" are strange.  Here, Delany and company are small
fry: the real questions are the legitimacy of black
nationalist philosophy and the legitimacy of African states
that have relied upon it.

If Adeleke is representative of current thinking about black
nationalism, the philosophy is probably in much the same
situation as American republicanism was in the
post-Revolutionary years.  A revolutionary ideology made
virtually no allowance for differences and conflict among
the white population and used various blunt instruments to
exclude blacks and Indians from political life.  Growth in
the population, in the economy, and in the size of the
nation blew away the revolutionary ideology forever and
pulled forward a middle-class democracy in which diversity
is accepted and in which the government must be responsive
to a mass of politically-active citizens.  Minority groups
like blacks and Indians did not advance to equality quickly,
but democracy has fostered their advancement in the long
run.  As democracy grew out of republicanism, older ideals
like the mental and moral unity of the citizens (what Karl
Popper called the mark of a closed society)  were replaced
by pragmatic notions like adaptation, inclusion, progress,
and toleration (what Popper called the standard of an open
society).  Perhaps tomorrow's black nationalism will grow
out of today's (or yesterday's) just as democratic ideology
grew out of republicanism. Acceptance of diversity and
different interests among black people could reform black
nationalist philosophy, and a reformed black nationalism
could deflate the rhetoric of center and unity as well as
guide a worthwhile political culture in nations like
Liberia.  Although he is not mentioned in _UnAfrican
Americans_, Wole Soyinka, one suspects, is the giant behind
the book, particularly in his arguments about the importance
of transcending the ideas and the politics of centralization
while still maintaining the African nation-states that were
formed in the imperialist and nationalist decades.

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