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Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940 by Ibrahim Sundiata Duke Univ. Press, 2003 442 pp., $24.95, paper |
From the beginning the Liberian colony had miserly economic funding from the ACS and no firm backing from the U.S. government. Many of the first settlers died of malaria as quickly as they arrived; those who survived were left weak and vulnerable to attack by unhappy indigenous people who did not welcome the encroachment by foreigners. Indeed, the settlers' relationship with indigenous peoples in the region—the Mandingo, Kru, Vai, and Dei—grew more divisive as the settlers increased in number over the course of the 19th century. As word quickly spread from the first wave of urban expatriates that the situation in Liberia was abysmal, the ACS began to concentrate their recruiting efforts on rural slaves. The chief factors that kept the ACS program going were the fundraising efforts of the Pennsylvania Quakers to hire ships and the constant desperation of black North Carolinians to find freedom—freedom from slavery, until the Civil War; freedom from Jim Crow thereafter.
Alan Huffman's book Mississippi in Africa covers much of the same historical territory that Clegg's better-researched book does. Huffman's assessment is more facile. He tells the story of discovering the legacy of Prospect Hill Plantation in Mississippi, allegedly burned down by slaves because the heirs of plantation owner Isaac Ross refused to honor his will, which required his slaves to be freed and allowed to emigrate to Liberia. Huffman story's, like Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, confirms for us in a human-interest story how intricately the lives of slave and master were interconnected. Unfortunately, Huffman is too eager to generalize about Americo-Liberians and Afro-Mississippians without substantial historical research about either. He tells us, for instance, us that the Afro-Mississippians who were able to settle in Liberia eventually duplicated the grand homes of Natchez and were as cruel to natives as whites were to them in Mississippi. However, because he has only superficially sketched the circumstances surrounding the formation of Liberia, his summary judgments are often unpersuasive.
The book is at its liveliest and most interesting when Huffman recounts his visit to Liberia in 2001. He hopes to visit the region where settlers from Mississippi gravitated but is unable to do so; the area was the site of some of the worst fighting in the civil war then raging. Here Huffman's journalistic style works well as we get a view of Liberia, especially Monrovia, under siege with streams of people flooding the capital city from the interior and the network of friends he develops, who help him to understand the strain of living in Liberia during the awful years of Charles Taylor's regime.
Ibrahim Sundiata continues this story of African Americans and Americo-Liberians in his erudite, and at times tangential, book Brothers and Strangers. He begins his history with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought to negotiate with Liberian leaders to make an opportunity for trade on Black Star shipping and some emigration by black Americans.
Garvey's plan, like the schemes of the ACS, was ill-fated. It was thwarted not by the indigenous peoples who had frustrated the goals of earlier generations of settlers but by the creolized population of Americo-Liberians. By the late 19th century, this group had extended its influence into the interior of Liberia through intermarriage and military conquest of various indigenous peoples. In the 1920s, the Americo-Liberian political leadership thought that a massive influx of African Americans might tip the political balance away from them toward Garvey's organization. In turn, the reluctance of Liberian government officials to assist the Garvey movement in establishing itself in the country made UNIA leaders suspicious of the Liberian political élite. After numerous broken promises, the UNIA became quite critical of the Liberian government, accusing it of gross abuses—including the use of slave labor or nearly slave labor to undergird its relationship with the Firestone Tire Company and Spanish plantation interests in Fernando Po (today the island of Bioko off the coast of Equatorial Guinea). Even after Garvey himself was convicted of postal fraud and later deported to Jamaica, the outcry against Liberian labor exploitation continued, eventually resulting in a League of Nations investigation.
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