The Diplomacy of Theodore Brown and the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War. Keith A. Dye
Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis considers the ANLCA to have been an important voice for the U.S. foreign affairs establishment. The author suggests that the ANLCA was a proxy for whatever weight the African American community bore on the U.S. foreign policy process on Africa. Tillery apparently thought it unnecessary to discuss any ANLCA projects, preferring instead to concentrate on how select U.S. government officials helped bring the group into existence. As a result, readers familiar with the group’s activities are left to wonder how Tillery may have interpreted the extent the ANLCA intersected with U.S. diplomacy in the Nigerian civil war, and the group’s relevance alongside government attention to the Cold War, Vietnam, and other international events. In fact, Tillery insists the more legitimate meaning of the ANLCA is simply that it arose under the auspices of G. Mennen Williams, assistant secretary of state for African affairs. This official used the ANLCA to boost the profile of the Bureau of African Affairs, an agency of low rank under President Eisenhower, but which carried over into the Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s ←12 | 13→recognition of the ANLCA, moreover, was less altruistic and more the result of “three empirical puzzles.” These were Kennedy acquiescence to ambivalences about the fragile relationship between himself and African American leaders; an incorrect notion by scholars that Kennedy promised a greater role for African Americans in the foreign policy process; and the fact that the new president was actually unaware of any criticism about African American absence in foreign affairs by the African American press. Tillery insists that the ANLCA can best be understood once these initial assumptions are removed. He maintains that Kennedy wanted a more conciliatory policy with African nations that differed from that of the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy endorsed the group but more as a tool to placate Africans than as a demonstration of a genuine concern for African American empowerment. By extension the ANLCA encounter with Nigeria could only have value, if Tillery is correctly understood, in so far as it served presidential purposes, especially during the Cold War. Negotiating a Destiny does not agree with ascribing to the ANLCA the role of proctor to the Bureau of African Affairs. In fact, the history of the ANLCA indicated a preference for independent action.19
A similar treatment of the topic by Philip E. Muehlenbeck echoes this latter point of Tillery about Kennedy in his laudatory account of the president in Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders. Muehlenbeck insists, however, that Kennedy should be given credit for at least some measure of concern for the welfare of African states and liberation, though only when the issue of civil rights discrimination against African Americans became the experience of African leaders visiting the United States. Muehlenbeck strangely does not mention the ANLCA, despite the material presented on interactions between Kennedy and African American leaders on Africa.20 My concerns here are with Muehlenbeck having overlooked a group Kennedy believed could inform U.S. Africa initiatives; and whether mention of the group in Muehlenbeck’s text, given their engagement in African affairs, might have further enriched his study.
In all, Negotiating a Destiny differs from these accounts by placing the ANLCA-Nigeria-Biafra affair in the forefront of arguments about successful African American and African cooperation. While ←13 | 14→it is certainly important for scholars to provide balance in their topics where it exists, accounts mostly lean toward the unsuccessful line. I argue that the ANLCA achieved a different and noteworthy success when they became mediators to the conflict. The contribution of this study for African American history, then, is to underscore an experience of one group of black activists that helped broaden changes in African American thinking during the unpredictable 1960s, and how that group saw the Nigerian civil war as an avenue in that process. Negotiating a Destiny therefore attempts to expand the sources on the topic as an original work.
Chapter one is a purposefully long historical overview of what produced African Americans, their beginning interactions with West Africa, and struggles against colonial conquest principally around the English-speaking Atlantic World. It attempts to give a broader background to the attention ANLCA leaders would later devote to the Nigerian-Biafran conflict. In other words, the episode was a turning point along the timeline of African American links with Nigeria. An Atlantic empire emerged that held Africans and their Western dispersed descendants in an oceanic grip of events and processes that, of course, spanned several centuries. Despite this circumstance, these peoples and their allies waged resistance to break the unwarranted embrace of a British Empire.
The chapter recounts select examples of daring European (again mostly British, with a supportive United States) activities that constructed the Atlantic empire, and African and African American resistance (this does not discount African complicity in this early, modified form of colonization). I briefly range back-and-forth between the mid-twentieth century and the beginnings of the slave trade for context, then move chronologically up to Nigerian independence. During this narrative I try to briefly highlight one aspect of the theme of the book: the growing encounters of African Americans with Nigerians, where independence of the latter was an important event for the former, who had matured in their understanding of the breadth of the cross-Atlantic colonial system. A key point is the idea of transition. Nigerians, African Americans, Britons, and Americans were all linked ←14 | 15→in a loosening embrace that accelerated the pace and broadened the parameters of the African American freedom movement.
Formation of the ANLCA, its early interest in the turmoil that beset post-colonial Nigeria, and the role of the United States with both command the narrative of chapter two. Because the book is not a history of the ANLCA but merely of its involvement in the civil war, I have avoided giving depth to their origins. Instead, the chapter chronicles the interplay between ANLCA organizers, the U.S. foreign relations establishment, and Nigerian leaders brought together as a result of the strife. To ensure proper context, the intriguing negotiations between the United States, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, and Igbo (later Biafran) leaders is presented. The role of the ANLCA surfaces principally through Theodore E. Brown, its executive director. He was the workhorse for the group and the connection between the ANLCA, Nigeria, Biafra, and the United States, a role greatly undervalued in other histories—brief though they are—of any African American interest in the civil discord. Available primary sources place Brown in this dominant role, which the chapter seeks to reconstruct as best as possible. Lastly, chapter two takes readers to the point when the ANLCA petitions for entry into the pre-war stage of the conflict, and ultimately to the point of open warfare.
The first subtitle of chapter three, “The ANLCA Engages Nigeria-Biafra,” aptly describes the focus of this section. Brown’s emersion into the diplomacy of the war during his first trip to Nigeria revealed the depth of the challenge he faced. Moreover, the broader context of other events, including the Cold War, decolonization, Black Power, and a rising human rights movement, though given light treatment in these pages, nonetheless bore some influence on Brown’s efforts. A hopeful meeting of the contending forces at Aburi Gardens in Ghana, brokered by then-president General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, is mentioned, more for the atmosphere its legacy created for Brown. In this regard chapter three describes how Brown’s conflict-negotiating skills enabled him to face the barrage of persons and events as he sought to help end the war and fulfill the moderate pan-African objectives of the ANLCA. The chapter makes the argument that at this point the ANLCA secured a relationship with Nigeria that opened a new avenue for cooperation ←15 | 16→between African Americans and Nigerians, and by association with the rest of Africa.
Chapter four primarily concerns the adjustments Brown made in his diplomacy as attempts to end the civil war did not sufficiently advance. The Organization of African Unity took the lead in negotiations, with Brown complementing the effort. Talks by then had become increasingly complicated and at this point some African leaders thought the ANLCA had more to contribute. As readers will see, by late 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the ANLCA were asked to directly assist Brown by scheduling a trip to Nigeria for meetings with the war contestants in mid-April 1968. As fate would have it, however, King’s assassination of April 4 ended this opportunity. This major setback saw the ANLCA continue to have a presence in war-ending talks, though now more a meandering creek than the rushing