The Diplomacy of Theodore Brown and the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War. Keith A. Dye
leader. These aspects of Nigeria nurtured the idealization African Americans had for a trans-Atlantic union with the land and its people, a sentiment that later resulted in the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa. Post-war disintegration of the colonial order, it was thought, could lead to a reunification that might restore to African Americans and Africans a self-determination severed generations previously by European interstate battles for power and security.
Other assets seemed to enhance this hopeful enterprise of African Americans as the years advanced. Nigeria by the mid-twentieth century had a large population, was reasonably productive, and had a thriving economy compared to its neighbors. The territory also had enough suspected oil reserves to lure any wildcatter. With the country commanding respect both regionally and from its international supporters, it seemed only a matter of time before the transitioning of Nigeria to indigenous statehood would help accelerate the pace of the African American freedom movement. There were challenges, but none preventing a first-time opportunity for African Americans to engage Nigeria as a leader among an emerging region of nations. This improvement to the African ←22 | 23→American capability for power was a departure from the pattern of previous African American relations with African organizations, these having lacked the advantage of sovereign authority. Liberia, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone were nominally free and inconsequential states within the colonial universe, barely capable of exercising the last word in their foreign affairs, though adamant about correcting this deficiency.2
Adjustments in World War II-era relations between African Americans and Africa were born of earlier African American opposition to the European empire system. One benefit was a more visible international profile. African American attacks on oppression in the broader arena became bolder as the decades advanced. Such endeavors often emphasized institutional development alongside written and verbal expressions of protest. All would combine as political investment with Africans when a post-colonial world was in sight. It might be fair to consider, then, that African American assistance to Africa had by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed the profile of special interest foreign affairs.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, these internationalist endeavors of African Americans included emigration societies headed by Martin R. Delany, Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and Henry M. Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and others who hoped to provide an African nationality for African Americans. This growing movement included the “civilizing” missionary projects of Althea Maria Brown; the industrial educational programs offered by the Tuskegee Institute and led by Booker T. Washington; and the first pan-African conference (congress) organized by Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams in 1900.3 Essayists and poets moved in and out of their genre by producing reams of turn-of-the century anti-imperialist literature. Small-scale business collaborations between African Americans and Africa were founded or advertised as having great potential, with indigenous Nigeria among the traversed areas. The record of these activities indicated they were not aimless thrashings about for immediate political favors, obvious since dates for independence were indeterminate. Perhaps a better understanding would have it that these undertakings were crusades that would accrue later as ←23 | 24→credentials for more substantive interactions with Africa charting its own course in world affairs.4
African American and African cooperation expanded after the turn of the twentieth century. Their joint intentions defied imperial conquest, upheaval in Europe, and prosperity turned into Depression. These destabilizing occurrences slightly loosened the controls stronger nations had on colonized peoples, drawing the similarly afflicted African American population closer to the oppressed. The cross-Atlantic operations against colonialism of the generation before would now be accompanied by more strident attacks, with West Africa a major beneficiary. Campaigns demanding release of captive peoples were noticeably more aggressive for the next contingent of liberationists. These included the agitations of the Marcus Garvey African redemption movement through his Universal Negro Improvement Association that, according to one author, was “strongest in West Africa,” as compared to other regions of the continent.5 Added to this were the W.E.B. DuBois-led pan-African congresses of 1919, 1923, and 1927. The decades-long cultural exposition famously known as the Harlem Renaissance ushered in a torrent of creativity in music, dance, theater, literature, painting, and film that linked African Americans with Africa. In some instances these protest, too, were against colonial constrictions. More voices raged against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, inspiring a contingent of African Americans to fight alongside Ethiopian forces. Collaborations by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Council on African Affairs, and Nigerian and other African activists in Africa and the Americas increased during the interwar and war years.6
All of this started without the cooperation of Great Britain, of course, the dominant colonizing nation engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and who stood to lose more than her imperial neighbors. For it was the objective of the British to retain their colonial possessions as proof of their continued sway over world affairs and resources.7 Maintaining this control was not easy for the British, as witnessed by the onslaught of the Axis powers that made “the good war.”8 Immediately following this military conflict was an equally volatile Cold War political contest primarily between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist ←24 | 25→Republics (USSR). Both were eager to become reigning superpowers years beyond what historian Eric Hobsbawn labeled the “Age of Empire,” 1875 to 1914.9 Hobsbawn’s declaration, therefore, was not the final word to such pursuits. The United States climbed further up the ladder of world power as an exhausted Great Britain sought recovery from the war.10 As if that wasn’t enough distress for the British, agitation for independence by India, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and other parts of Africa would top off the Empire’s troubles. African American activists assisted these colonized peoples whose plight they believed resembled their own, a view generally shared by leaders of colonial movements. African Americans and other peoples under the weight of the colonial system stood to benefit from its collapse. All of this meant that the British Empire, originally conceived of as a global construct, could no longer outpace the enlarging shadows of a setting sun.
Predecessors to the ANLCA realized, and later the group itself, that World War Two-era pronouncements about an insecure Atlantic World were a reminder of that region’s antecedents that helped produce West Africa, and what the upheaval meant for the old and new worlds.11 Both colonizer and colonized, as well as their supporters and detractors were confronting the war-era crisis of surging upheaval. Much as it had been in the past as for the wartime present, the depth of this combat would make later generations of activists, particularly those of the 1960s, aware of its well-known significance in Atlantic World history. African Americans were more than observers to the process, as would be indicated by the growing sophistication of their organizations.12
ANLCA executive director Theodore Brown later would become very familiar with the symbolic importance of the ocean, as evidenced by his many flights from the United States to Africa. Lagos, the political capital of Nigeria and an Atlantic construction would be his operating base upon entry to mediations between disputants to the Nigerian conflict. This experience would be one of several that helped make Atlantic World history relevant to the ANLCA. What mattered was the history of how these distant shores were connected, an inescapable and profound series of occurrences that produced African Americans and their many liberation organizations.
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Well before Nigeria-Biafra, therefore, the Atlantic served as a conduit for the nefarious slave trade. A series of Papal Bulls beginning in 1442 seemed to give ecclesiastical (legal) sanction to slaving, but especially so with Romanus Pontifex in 1455, and certainly as issued by Alexander VI in 1493 (Inter caetera), a document that divided the world between Spain and Portugal and thereby can be interpreted as a formal beginning of Atlantic slavery as an organized event. To smooth out further arguments between Portugal and Spain, it was recast as a political compact in 1494 as the Treaty of Tordesillas. Both were charters of the Atlantic that destroyed the freedoms of Africans.13 Expectedly unacceptable to nations excluded from the arrangement, it nonetheless withstood an attempt at modification by Pope Paul III’s executive decree that enshrined the right of native peoples (American Indians) to freedom