Brothers and Strangers: Black Zionism, Black Slavery, 1914-1940 FROM THE PUBLISHER
About the Author
Ibrahim Sundiata is Spector Professor of History and African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University and a Fellow at the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University (2002-2003). He is the author, most recently, of From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930.
SYNOPSIS
Unprecedented in scope and detail,
Brothers and Strangers is a vivid history of how, during the interwar years,
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 riven with contradictions.
Racked by class and ethnic divisions, Liberia, like other nations in colonial
Africa, was marred by labor abuse.Sundiata's account is based on
extensive archival research, including work in the Liberian National Archives.
As he explains, 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. DuBois,
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 locations as disparate as Sudan, Mauritania, and Cote
d'Ivoire.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Wilson Jeremiah Moses
"This much needed and long awaited book is a godsend, not only for its courageous handling of its controversial subject, but also for the more general information that it presents in the field of Liberian history. It is indispensable work for anyone professing an interest in black Atlantic studies." — editor of Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s and Ferree Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University
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