Ibrahim Sundiata

Many excellent works have dealt with the meteoric rise and fall of Marcus Garvey's (1887–1940) Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The organization rode the crest of post–World War I cries for the “self-determination” of peoples. Emigration to Africa, specifically Liberia, offered a place to “be somebody,” combined with the promise of untapped riches. Garveyism offered a most logical way out of the specifically American Dilemma. The abortion of Garveyism after 1924 has been attributed to many causes: the narrowness of its class aims; the opposition of the established African American elite; interference from the European colonial powers; harassment by the FBI. All of these played a part in the subversion of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. None of them is, in and of itself, sufficient. The defeat (rather than the “failure”) of Garveyism does not rest on the inherent illogic of its program. It rests on a failure to disentangle the claims of a national minority from those of pan-ethnicity. In Liberia, the site of the proposed West African experiment, the UNIA ran into issues of class and ethnicity that belied the very unity it proclaimed as its raison d'être.This essay argues that Africa remained a potent force in the North American Diaspora until the advent of World War II. The continent was of concern to groups as divergent as the remnant UNIA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Unprecedented in scope and detail, Brothers and Strangers is a vivid history of how the mythic Africa of the black American imagination ran into the realities of Africa the place. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey-convinced that freedom from oppression was not possible for blacks in the Americas-led the last great African American emigrationist movement. His U.S.-based Universal Negro Improvement Association worked with the Liberian government to create a homeland for African Americans. Ibrahim Sundiata explores the paradox at the core of this project: Liberia, the chosen destination, was itself racked by class and ethnic divisions and-like other nations in colonial Africa-marred by labor abuse. In an account based on extensive archival research, including work in the Liberian National Archives, Sundiata explains how Garvey's plan collapsed when faced with opposition from the Liberian elite, opposition that belied his vision of a unified Black World. In 1930 the League of Nations investigated labor conditions and, damningly, the United States, land of lynching and Jim Crow, accused Liberia of promoting "conditions analogous to slavery." Subsequently various plans were put forward for a League Mandate or an American administration to put down slavery and "modernize" the country. Threatened with a loss of its independence, the Liberian government turned to its "brothers beyond the sea" for support. A varied group of white and black anti-imperialists, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, took up the country's cause. In revealing the struggle of conscience that bedeviled many in the black world in the past, Sundiata casts light on a human rights predicament which, he points out, continues in twenty-first-century African nations as disparate as Sudan, Mauritania, and the Ivory Coast.