1. Week 3
Returning ‘home’? 19th Century ‘Back to Africa’ movements and becoming ‘African’
Lecture Week 2

2. Key Issues
How is Africa ‘imagined’ by those in the diaspora who took an active interest in returning ‘Back to Africa’?
In what ways is Africa considered ‘home’? Was this an attempt to become ‘African’? For whom?

3. Outline 1. Slavery and abolition in the 19th Century
Characteristics of 19th Century ‘Back to Africa’ movements:
language and emotion
Race
Belonging
Redemption
3. Sierra Leone
4. Liberia
5. Other ‘Back to Africa’ movements

4. Slavery and Abolition in 19th Century
End of slave trade to Eur passed via legislative or judicial acts: Portugal 1761, England 1772, several New England states 1780s, and France 1794.
Where slave trade abolished but slavery existed: Br Carib ( ), Fr Carib ( ), US ( ), Cuba ( ), and Brazil ( ).
Number of black people in slavery throughout world rose from 13 milion 1800 to as many as 30 milllion in 1860 and then declined to 11 million by 1900.
Slavery abolished in Latin America: Central Am 1824, Chile 1825, Mexico 1829, Bolivia 1831

5. ‘Back to Africa’ Motivations
RACE
BELONGING
REDEMPTION

6. Race No true home possible in the Americas, no possibility for proper
treatment and therefore need to return to own land
Paul Cuffe’s address to ‘my scattered brethren and fellow
countrymen at Sierra Leone’
Writing from Virginia in 1848, Peter Butler informed the ACS that:
‘i wish to Goy to Liberia So as I may ... ingoy the Right of
man. I have tride a great meny placeis in these united state and
I find that none of them is the home for the Culerd man and
So I ... wish to be and Emigrant for the land of man
auntsestors.’

7. Belonging Support among Europeans and Americans to rid their
land of blacks who did not ‘belong’
Based on belief in inevitability of racial prejudice
(outlined in P. J. Staudenraus text, African Colonization
Movements)
e.g. Henry Smeathman and beginning of Sierra Leone Co
Abraham Lincoln

8. Redemption
To rejuvenate Africa through a ‘civilizing mission’, by bringing the best intellectual and spiritual aspects of European civilization, into Africa
E.g. Samuel Benedict, president of the Liberian Constitutional Convention
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912)
‘Africa’s lot resembles Him also who made Himself of no reputation, but took upon Himself the form of a servant... And if the principle laid down by Christ is... that he who would be chief must become the servant of all, then we see the position which Africa and the Africans must ultimately occupy.’ (The African Problems and the Method of its Solution
Hilary Teague

9. Sierra Leone
1786 Henry Smeathman concocted idea based on number of black beggars noticed on streets of London.
1787 Sierra Leone colonization began
1789: local Africans burnt the settlement to the ground
1791 (30th May): Sierra Leone settlement bill passed 87
votes to 9 – est. Sierra Leone Company
1792: 1,192 men, women and children left from Nova
Scotia (64 died en route)
1794: French burned Freetown down
1799: settlers revolted
1800: Jamaican Maroons go via Nova Scotia
1801: indigenous inhabitants attacked colony

10. Liberia
Paul Cuffe ( )
1816 American Colonization Society founded
1821 Lt. Robert Stockton ‘buys’ land for Liberia
1822 Monrovia
1824 officially christened Liberia
1847 independent nation

11. Other ‘Back to Africa’ movements
Not just an English movement. Recent interest has fallen on Afro-Brazilian returnees, a new study called Back to Africa. Volume I. Afro-Brazilian Returnees and their Communities. Cape Town. Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2009.
1920s Marcus Garvey. See Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (2008)
Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (2006)