Читать книгу The Diplomacy of Theodore Brown and the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War - Keith A. Dye - Страница 11

Introduction

When the United States provided war resources and recovery assistance to its European allies during and after World War II, African Americans also lent their support to a struggling Africa as an international freedom movement had begun to accelerate. “Allies” as a victorious war term and something of a Cold War commandment was rapidly on its way to meaning more than an association between the United States and Europe.¹ The idea could easily extend to relations between African Americans and Africans during wartime, and those anti-colonial movements that would partly attribute their momentum to individuals and groups outside the continent.² And, as could be expected of allies, once independence had become an irreversible tide by 1960 these same contributors would also assist with nation-building as an immediate objective of former colonies. The process would be rife with challenges when these new states retained or adjusted their colonial boundaries or formed new ones all on European models of what constituted functional sovereign entities. In a manner similar to efforts by the United States government to stem further decimation of the post-war European landscape, the American Negro Leadership Conference ←1 | 2→on Africa (ANLCA), a civil rights-oriented African affairs organization, would by 1967 bring its concern and expertise hopefully to help arrest decimation of an African state itself then on the verge of post-colonial civil war.³

Having some idea about the construction of a post-colonial world, members of the ANLCA turned their attention to an unsettling political quake in Nigeria following their January 1967 conference on lingering European regimes in Africa. Growing turmoil over egalitarian governance in Nigeria threatened to undermine the liberated role African Americans envisioned for the newly independent nation. ANLCA leaders reasoned that chances for a setback to such aspirations were too high to be ignored. A worst-case scenario was not unthinkable as the group considered “with great anxiety … the breakup of Nigeria and the prospect of bloody civil war.” That meant a secessionist civil war having the possibility of offsetting the group’s grand expectations for African American—African cooperation. It was imperative, therefore, that the disputants “mediate their differences for us all.”⁴

Large states in Africa had arisen out of decolonization during the early years of the decade. The populations of several comprised many ethnicities that sought competitive advantage in government and economic affairs. Egypt, the Sudan, Mali, the Congo, and Nigeria were well-known examples, but especially the latter, having more internally contending elements than the others. Numerically dominant ethnic groups such as the Hausa in the north, the Igbos in the east, and the Yoruba in the southwest, and lesser peoples throughout, made state building less a fluid exercise and more the welding of several “Nigerias” into one political entity. Each group had held sway in their respective region prior to the colonial era. Their desires to maintain those individual ethnic controls carried over into the composite of a new Nigeria by 1960.⁵

By July 1967 the ANLCA realized that the conflict in Nigeria had escalated beyond local significance. Their quiet observance earlier that year quickly gave way to a need for immediate intervention. The only question would be if an African American perspective on the conflict was adequate to assist with negotiations between Igbo secessionists and the Nigerian federal government. Such hope had been premised ←2 | 3→upon their program that called for common struggle and nation-building between African Americans and Africa, and the encouragement of U.S. foreign policies that would strongly support the self-determination of an emerging Africa. Bourgeoning relations between African Americans and Nigerians, and the status of that country among other states, were in greater jeopardy with each successive month of hostilities.

African Americans, as one set of outsiders, would have a unique role in the embryonic and euphoric stage of Nigeria’s life. Their special position generally was to have an historical and purposeful connection to any number of the ethnicities shoveled into the borders of that country. A long history in this regard could be asserted by African Americans who, even though the majority could not identify their biological lineage to Nigeria, saw no barrier that had resulted from the absence of recorded proof. For them, a powerful post-colonial African state that hailed from their region of ancestry took precedence over scraping up the pieces of shattered parentage scattered over the Atlantic Ocean. And yet that same body of water could not bar the need for descendants to return. Events of the post-colonial world gave cause for the involvement of African Americans in helping Nigeria shape its destiny. Post-coloniality was a term suggesting transition out of a historic and frightful era that could bring African Americans into contact with Nigeria, apart from how they envisioned such ties. The ANLCA would count among its founding members veteran activists whose credentials fit firmly in the years of anti-colonial agitation, as would other groups.⁶

Without minimizing the depth of personal insecurity and public disorder, the importance of this circumstance was also made manifest by its timing and broader association. Occurring during the decade of African independence the years were a hopeful time borne of a “pan” movement sentimentally vibrant, if organizationally intermittent, since the early twentieth century. African American unity with Africa was part of the 1960s momentum against oppression, specifically the wave of anti-colonial activism then sweeping the globe. These challenges to the prevailing system brought with them assumptions that Africans and their cross-Atlantic descendants together might begin an era different from the legacy of the slave trade and colonial conquest.⁷ African ←3 | 4→Americans and Africans were confident about a first-time chance to consider how best they might secure their joint interests through the instrument of rising states, as the old-world order appeared to be unraveling. In this new epoch, the British, French, and other empires, as well as the U.S. government, were either on the decline or ambivalent about the course of decolonization.⁸ But interactions among struggling peoples could also experience difficulties, whether or not related to the thirst for empire by European states.

Up to that point, many Africa-focused individuals and groups had been preoccupied with anti-colonial activities, having viewed attacks on the European empire system as their priority work. With escalation of the war, however, these Africa watchers were faced with several choices: determine the most applicable political explanation that satisfied their ideological preferences; support the Federal Military Government (FMG) of Nigeria that sought to retain its territorial integrity; side with the seceded eastern region of the country having renamed itself the Republic of Biafra and support their grievance of an oppressed nation-within-a-nation; or refrain from any of the above to combat the specter of displaced and starving refugees as the conflict surged on unabated.

Leaders of the barely five-year old ANLCA thought differently. This assemblage of civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Asa Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Dorothy Height, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Jr., and labor activist Theodore Brown as executive director, reasoned that although a political implosion was on the horizon in Nigeria—a country believed by Africa watchers as the embodiment of a new Africa—it did not lend itself to a confrontation-oriented anti-colonial critique. Great Britain was no longer the principle foe of the first half of the twentieth century. When confronting imminent war in Nigeria the ANLCA was more comfortable with a moderate approach they believed could realistically nurture an African American relationship with Africa. Their collective background had been the peaceful mediation of disputes involving racial discrimination in the United States. This olive-branch strategy to tackle inflammatory issues was the ANLCA method of operation rather than an armed struggle mandate. The Nigerian civil war erupted as a complex matter internal ←4 | 5→to Nigeria that eviscerated armed struggle advocacy by third parties. The ANLCA jumped at the opportunity to fill the void.⁹

Negotiating a Destiny explores the attempt of the ANLCA to help end the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, and to expand Nigeria’s evolving links with African Americans. It is not a history of the Nigerian-Biafran war; rather it is an attempt to bring substantive attention to a new approach African American leaders had for the war in the interest of their constituencies. In doing so they widened what constituted decolonization activism of that time, and in like manner later ideas about African American relations with Africa.

The breadth of how the ANLCA established links to an emergent continent seemed apparent as the research unfolded. The narrative suggests that a battle of equal importance was the ANLCA winning acceptance as mediators to the Nigerian conflict. This study, therefore, presents the organization as having momentarily opened another avenue to assist with resolving new problems of a post-colonial territory. Moreover, since African liberation and African American liberation fed into each other, Negotiating a Destiny also insists that a historical marker was set when the ANLCA stepped into the internal Nigerian affair as part of an episode in the early post-colonial life of a country struggling for a mature political and social identify.

Another notable aspect herein presented is that the ANLCA diplomacy was characteristic of a state-to-state relationship that added a certain formality to their African encounter. The ANLCA effort was more than a series of written appeals to stop the fighting. Instead I assert their effort was a new, dynamic diplomacy rather than a static anti-colonialism, though in no way diminishing the historic value of the latter. Civil rights as a historically domestic construct now deigned to extend its reach in a way different from prior strategies that involved, say, African American delegations confronting colonialism at the United Nations in 1945. Framing the argument this way sheds a fuller light on the sophistication the ANLCA brought to such an unexpected circumstance. As the reader will see in these pages, ANLCA executive director Theodore Brown displayed the deftness of a diplomat as he journeyed back-and-forth between the United States and Nigeria (and other countries) on behalf of the organization. As best as can be determined, this account ←5 | 6→is the first full treatment of his excursions and a highlight in African American foreign affairs.

Furthermore, the position of the ANLCA in the trajectory of a U.S. foreign affair with an African nation was a twist on bipartisanship, much as an independent elected official works with Democrats or Republicans on legislation. As both the House of Representatives and Senate in the American political system have foreign affairs committees, my review of new and former primary and secondary sources indicates that something akin to two foreign policies—one by the government and another by African American activists—emanated from the shores of the United States. A new era of U.S. relations with Africa was underway having resulted from a collapsing European colonialism. United States diplomats were unable to close-out the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria when their efforts to help resolve the simmering discord there were exhausted. As another first-time angle offered in these pages, this happenstance defaulted into an opening that enabled the ANLCA to enter the diplomatic fray. This was not a defeat for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but rather an informal observance of a moderation in their influence to an international event. This too is a new opportunity to study another way how a non-governmental organization established a presence in foreign affairs when a dominating state power faltered during a crisis.

All factors considered, addressing problems of a new post-colonial African nation appeared to have required a different strategy by interested African Americans other than mass mobilization at every turn. For example, ANLCA leaders attempted to build a record of successes up to the civil war by private meetings with U.S. foreign affairs leaders around ending government support for the remaining European colonial empires in the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Central African Republic. While persistent dialogue was their standard method for pro-Africa activity, supplemented with educational forums, press statements and conferences it represented a new attitude on African matters apart from mass mobilization by this segment of African Americans—radical in their own right—as the empire system flitted about for new forms of control. Often, groups such as the American Committee on Africa, and the American Society on African ←6 | 7→Culture participated in ANLCA activities.¹⁰ Yet the challenge that faced these groups was the departure of the ANLCA from a high public profile. It was a simple matter of flexible thinking. Nigeria-Biafra seemed to make it more efficacious. Choosing the brokerage approach to resolve the Nigerian-Biafran conflict was more conducive to what had already been underway—negotiations—and in the midst of political dynamics in Nigeria unfamiliar to most African Americans. I contend that research about African American activism in the 1960s has overlooked the ANLCA as a topic deserving qualitative attention, this when according to Carl Watts it may have been “the only substantial attempt at organized group activity on behalf of Africa by black Americans” throughout the decade.¹¹

With a goal and objectives independent of the United States government, ANLCA leaders carved out an exclusive niche for the group when Nigerian and Biafran (Igbo) leaders permitted them to become part of the negotiating team to broker a peace settlement. Unprecedented in its recognition, mediation was an opening for a new African American relationship with Africa that differed from earlier ANLCA projects, and of other African American organizations also having an Africa focus. It was a success generally unaccounted for in the freedom movement, though costly if the loss of lives during the war are not ignored.

As an achievement along a spectrum of trans-national projects since the early twentieth century, this specific ANLCA endeavor is contextualized with other pressing issues of that day. Thus, the story line when viewed parallel to, rather than detached from, the attention-grabbing headlines of the Cold War, Vietnam war, Arab-Israeli conflict and Black Power movement is a coterminous but generally obscured episode in African American freedom work of the 1960s, and in U.S. foreign affairs. It was the sort of activism no less an invitation to danger given the procession of post-World War events particularly if associated with decolonization. That the ANLCA cultivated a privileged relationship with Nigeria and its secessionist movement, amid, for example, U.S. government demands for Cold War conformity, was both an achievement and invitation to possibly damaging scrutiny of their operations. An unavoidable contextualization.

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Yet the ANLCA would, in fact, expand its political arsenal with the Nigeria-Biafra circumstance. The group had to readjust its civil rights moorings when Nigeria descended into chaos borne of intricate and complex internal problems. They had to consider if Nigeria had become a victim of its own domestic missteps. Any inclination for an anti-colonial analogy common among African Americans thus had to be reassessed. For this study, inquiring how an African American foreign affairs group led by integrationist leaders had become a voice apart from U.S. government—Africa relations as the crisis unfolded is an intriguing juxtaposition alongside the Cold War, decolonization, and other high-profile events. And how this group, again assuming an independent posture, insisted on their own Cold War and decolonization nexus as events unfolded.¹²

This is especially so, therefore, when scholars encase the Nigerian affair solely in a Cold War context.¹³ Studies drawn to the excitement of the battlefield focus on control of oil production, possible foreign instigation of several coups, internal power struggles, and Cold War machinations as seminal outsider motives having helped drive the discontent that engulfed civil war Nigeria. A few provide an occasional hint other actors—African Americans in this case—were mere footnotes in the narrative. The appearance of African Americans in the big picture about which primary sources are unassembled and perhaps considered insufficient is slighted. Readers thus are left with secondary accounts concentrating only on the subsequent war completely bereft of an African American element. These works conclude that the Arab-Israeli, Vietnam, and Cold War conflicts limited U.S. government time and resources that presumably could have helped restore political order in Nigeria. United States government participation in Nigeria’s affairs, moreover, was subordinate (though not inferior) to that of the British; U.S. officials ultimately hoped the latter and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) would assume lead roles in the matter and absolve them of difficult negotiations.¹⁴

Two brief but important considerations deserve mention here that help underscore the point of this book. First, the Nigeria-Biafra episode enabled the ANLCA to observe attempts by the United States and Great Britain to attach remnants of a colonial empire to an apparently fragile ←8 | 9→Nigerian political landscape. A noticeable British presence in Nigerian political affairs especially in the northern region, and some configuration of the country’s economy for fit into the commonwealth, were paramount outsider influences. The result was an impasse in mediations when Nigerian and Biafran leaders began to distrust U.S. and British negotiators, as both outside nations operated to secure their respective interests. Chapters two and three provide a fuller account of this.

So contentious had this become that it seems reasonable to wonder if the disputants were unintentionally maneuvering for the participation of a neutral third party, one having an historically non-colonial stake in the matter. The issue, though, was that U.S. and British negotiators represented powers whose extensive global interests likely complicated as much as benefited proposed compromises. This paradox can be read in the increasingly worried correspondence between and among the State Department, the president’s office and other governmental agencies such as the National Security Council (NSC) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These detail how Nigerian and Biafran desires threatened to undermine U.S. interests. President Lyndon Johnson would decide that deference to British views on the crisis was the more prudent approach, rather than seek the commanding position in negotiations. U.S. engagement with Nigeria, trying though it was, became an alignment subordinate to a fragmented and grasping British hegemon. That the U. S. government posture during this phase of the conflict seemed more attributable to the wrangling for empire primarily between Great Britain and the Soviet Union (not to discount France), with the United States as potential inheritor for the west in a transitory colonial world, offers an equally valuable perspective to sharpen our focus on Nigeria’s civil descent and the reactions of the United States. Official U.S. government involvement in wartime Nigeria was a mutual recognition between it and Great Britain of a commonwealth status proscribed for the former colony, in a last throw for British Empire. The ANLCA would become first-hand observers of this dynamic when they joined the closed-door mediation process.¹⁵

Second, African American activism became bolder, more radical in proportion to dissolution of the British Empire. Post-World War II African liberation movements undertook more aggressive campaigns ←9 | 10→for freedom once cracks in European domination widened. As a result, African American desires for closer connections with Africa were commensurately inspired, though such forms could vary. This is a point needing further exploration in addition to its mention in these pages. Brief scholarly notice of the ANLCA role in Nigeria-Biafra either lightly credits the group with having distinguished between forms of activism appropriate for different circumstances or present it as the docile twin to the rising worldly militancy of a new generation of African American freedom activists. Works specifically mentioning the ANLCA by Herschelle Challenor, F. Chidozie Ogene, and Carl P. Watts label the group elitist and insist it was constricted, with an outdated program increasingly overshadowed by the surging Black Power movement. These critiques generally conclude that the ANLCA was stillborn and ineffective. A contrary point has to be raised. Addressing the problems of a new post-colonial African nation may have required a different strategy by interested African Americans than recommending mass mobilization at every turn. The ANLCA chose a brokerage approach to resolving the conflict, a means more conducive to what was underway—negotiations—and in the midst of a political crisis in Nigeria unfamiliar to most African Americans. This approach represented a new attitude toward African matters by a segment of African Americans who were radical in their own right as the empire system flitted about looking for new forms of control. The course of events that involved African American activism in the 1960s would seem to have included the ANLCA as a topic deserving qualitative attention.¹⁶

Several recent works, however, have broached the subject with more attention to details that at least tempt further exploration into the argument. Brenda Gayle Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 expands upon the theme of an African American agency when decolonization spread continentally, but most significantly, as participants having melded that process and its aftermath with freedom objectives in the United States. Her attention to ANLCA activism offers more than a glimpse into the need to reconsider U.S., African American, and African intersections in the decolonization era.

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Plummer ascribes a measure of viability to the ANLCA, whose venture into African American—African relations was a bond of liberation for the two peoples, one that did not require approval from the historically more Africa-minded black nationalist community. Plummer also argues that the Kennedy receptiveness toward ANLCA goals was in play only when absent a Cold War filter. More pressure group than confrontational, the ANLCA, notes Plummer, persisted with its charge despite the more attention-grabbing headlines of the March on Washington, violence against African Americans in Alabama, and the Kennedy assassination, all in 1963. The book’s accolades for and criticisms of the ANLCA entice readers to wonder if perhaps an expanded treatment of the ANLCA would have pointed to the group’s maturity from inception through the war stage, as I argue in these pages. On this point Plummer draws attention to the rapid pace of change in the African American freedom movement, a condition that seemed to imprint a constant need for revision of strategies and tactics upon activist formations. Because she did not give full attention to this aspect of the ANLCA, however, it is understandable why Plummer considers the ANLCA to have been an unsuccessful operation, rather than suggest it was a trial-run opportunity in a highly volatile period in world affairs (the arena the ANLCA chose to engage). This may also explain why her perceptive monograph does not mention any ANLCA projects during its short life.¹⁷ Negotiating a Destiny differs from Plummer on at least two points. First, it suggests that the rapidity of change in that era suffocated activist organizations having fixed positions and stiff organizational formats. Longevity and a rigid program were the reverse of how groups had begun to function. And second, therefore, Negotiating a Destiny suggests that organizational success for that era would be better measured by recognizing projects that had limited and short-term objectives. SNCC and the Black Panther Party, among others, with their voter registrations drives and free food program, were examples.

Though devoting less space to the subject than Plummer, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 briefly turns our attention to the importance of the ANLCA. Author James H. Meriwether, like Plummer, inserts the organization into the stream of African American attention to African affairs, believing the group ←11 | 12→had an assertiveness similar to that of black nationalists. He credits the ANLCA with having a determination for its objectives in the face of more attention-grabbing issues, such as demonstrations for voting rights and quality education. Meriwether describes the ANLCA as a “new chapter” in African and African American relations. Granted, he covers African American affairs with Africa only from 1957 to 1961, a brevity that obviously prevented further exploration into the subject. This was not a bar to his insightful observation that the logic of the ANLCA rested upon the transition of anti-colonial African American activism to a post-colonial pan-Africanism. Proudly insists that this dynamic compelled astute Africa watchers to acknowledge “the difficult complexities of an independent Africa.” This is his strong point, one providing a better understanding of the full value of the ANLCA. Noteworthy in his and Plummer’s works is the ANLCA struggle for survival, both financially and structurally.¹⁸ My work, however, considers the “new chapter” label more applicable to the ANLCA-Nigerian-Biafran episode that distinguished it from other Africa-focused formations.

A chapter contributed by Albert Tillery to The African Foreign 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 river they were when the sojourn began. Chapter four concludes with a discussion of what appeared to be sporadic engagement of a fragmented ANLCA around the war, along with some opinions of and activities by other African Americans, including Congressman Charles Diggs Jr and Senator Edward Brooke. Theodore Brown’s extensive interview in mid-1968 proved to be a highly valuable primary source on his involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra episode and other aspects of his life.

Chapter five covers a post-war (January 1970) ANLCA finding new markers to define its existence. This involved an important medical program in Nigeria that hoped to link African American medical personnel and supplies to Nigerian medical institutions. Finally, after providing a summary of the group’s legacy, the conclusion asserts that the group succeeded in an arena larger than that of other similarly focused groups. The sad paradox was the unfortunate loss of lives that compelled the ANLCA into Nigeria. To set the events of the ANLCA—Nigeria affair in its proper historical framework, however, the narrative begins with challenges to the European empire system in the first half of the twentieth century by persons of similar activist proclivities. These individuals and organizations helped pave the way for a new approach by the ANLCA to a post-colonial circumstance.

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A Note on Sources

One of the challenges for historians is accumulating quantities of source materials, particularly primary, as the basis for their studies. Negotiating a Destiny was daunting on this score. Available sources included scattered papers, reports, articles, meetings, speeches, interviews and similar items stashed away in libraries, archives, document compilations and a few audio recordings. And of course there were secondary references, but not a single monograph. I viewed this as more of an opportunity to explore an interesting event in African American civil rights and nationalist-oriented histories, and asking: what distinct influence did their efforts have on persons involved in Africa policy formation? I must point out that one likely reason for the dearth of materials is the difficulty locating any cache of ANLCA files and papers that could serve as the foundation to build other sources around; but this does not deter one’s research.

Fortunately, there were adequate and sufficient materials to do the writing. Seminal in this regard was the Brown interview of 1968 in the midst of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. It helped to tie together the documents not only chronologically, but in understanding the thinking of Brown in his own words on what the group set out to achieve during the war. From what I can tell, other accounts on the ANLCA and especially their involvement in the civil war do not reference this interview. Comparable primary sources on Brown of similar value were regrettably unknown to me. Nonetheless as the work progressed the picture of the ANLCA as having expanded African American options for establishing relations with Africa by way of the Nigerian affair became larger and clearer.

Notes

1. 1 Norman Stone, The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 38–73; George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 538–94; Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), 562–607.

2. 2 Daniel Hutchinson, “Defending the Lands of Their Ancestors: The African American Military Experience in Africa During World War II,” in Africa and World War II, ed. Judith Byfield, et al., 401–19; Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21–29. The African–African American history of joint action during the 1950s and 1960s was fraught with ambiguities, however, as discussed in Brenda Gayle Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2; still a good first-hand source on the topic is George Padmore, Pan Africanism or Communism? (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1971), 342–45; Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor R. Getz, Empires and Colonies in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 457, 459; Hollis Lynch, “Pan-African Responses in the United States to British Colonial Rule in Africa in the 1940s,” in The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization, 1940–1960, ed. Prosser Gifford and William R. Louis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 57–86.

3. 3 New York Amsterdam News, “Leaders Offer Help in Nigerian Crisis,” April 1, 1967.

4. 4 “Leaders Offer Help in Nigerian Crisis,” New York Amsterdam News, April 1, 1967.

5. 5 See chapters 2, 3, and 6 in Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

6. 6 James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 178–205; Martin Staniland, American Intellectuals and African Nationalists, 1955–1970, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 178–205; Lynch, Transfer of Power, 69–70, 86.

7. 7 Plummer, In Search of Power.

8. 8 John Kent, “United States Reactions to Empire, Colonialism, and Cold War in Black Africa, 1949–1957,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33, no. 2 (2005): 195–220, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086530500123804; John Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa,” in United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 168–87.

9. 9 Edward O. Erhagbe, “The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa: A New African American Voice for Africa in the United States, 1962–1970,” (Working Papers in African Studies No. 157, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1991), 1–17; American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, “Report of the Conference: The Role of the American Negro Community in U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa,” December 13, 1962, africanactivist.msu.

10. 10 “Call by American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa to all Negro Organizations to a Conference on the Role of the American Negro Community in U.S. Policy Toward Africa;” and “Press Release, American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa,” September 5, 1962; kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32-130-67-84 african…a_12419.pdf.

11. 11 Carl P. Watts, “African Americans and US Foreign Policy: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa,” in The U.S. Public and American Foreign Policy, ed. Helen Laville and Andrew Johnstone (London: Routledge, 2010), 107.

12. 12 Materials I found particularly helpful for providing sufficient overview of the background to the subject include Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa,” 168–75; Plummer, In Search of Power, 192–99; Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 61–92; Kairn A. Klieman, “U.S. Oil Companies, the Nigerian Civil War, and the Origins of Opacity in the Nigerian Oil Industry,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 2012): 155–65; Peter Dumbaya, “The United States and West Africa: The Institutionalization of Foreign Relations in an Age of Ideological Ferment,” in The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 237–54; Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 193–205; a very good pre-war analysis is in Olayiwola Abegunrin, Nigerian Foreign Policy under Military Rule, 1966–1999, (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 17–50; Robert Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, 1945–1963, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 261–89.

13. 13 Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92.

14. 14 Robert Shepard, Nigeria, Africa and the United States, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 35–41; F. Chidozie Ogene, Interest Groups and the Shaping of Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies of United States African Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 62–67; Oye Ogunbadejo, “Nigeria and the Great Powers: The Impact of the Civil War on Nigerian Foreign Relations,” African Affairs 75, no. 298 (January 1976): 14–32; a brief mention of African American attention to the war but not its pre-war stage is found in Roy M. Melbourne, “The American Response to the Nigerian Civil War, 1968,” Issue: A Source of Opinion 3, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 33–42; Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 147.

15. 15 Shepard, Nigeria, Africa and the United States, 37–38; John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 351, 356–68; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 499, 610–16; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 68–69; William R. Louis, “American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire,” International Affairs, 61, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 397, 406, 417–20; Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa,” 173–81; and especially Kent, United States Reactions, 195–217. On the effort of France to maintain its empire in Africa, see Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 55–115.

16. 16 Mention of the ANLCA as ill-conceived can be found in Herschelle S. Challenor, “The Influence of Black Americans on U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Africa,” in Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy (revised edition), ed. Abdul A. Said (New York: Praeger, 1981), 160; Ogene, Interest Groups, 71–72; Carl P. Watts, “African Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa and the Rhodesian Crisis,” academia.edu/1921011/The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa and the Rhodesian Crisis, 112–13, accessed October 13, 2014; Theodore E. Brown, interview by Robert Martin, August 20, 1968, audio transcript, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, 12–19; Milton Morris, “Black Americans and the Foreign Policy Process: The Case of Africa,” Western Political Quarterly 25, no. 3 (September 1972): 458–59.

17. 17 Plummer, In Search of Power, 122–27.

18. 18 Meriwether, Proudly, 205–7

19. 19 Albert B. Tillery Jr., “G. Mennen ‘Soapy’ Williams and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa: Rethinking the Origins of Multiculturalism in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis, ed. Hanes Walton Jr., Robert L. Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 45–65.

20. 20 Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press), 199–205. Moreover, a fuller discussion of the ambiguities of the Eisenhower administration toward Africa and its spillover into the Kennedy presidency is noted in Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 122–34.

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