ALAO ADEDAYO IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE!-HIS NEWSPAPER "ALAWOYE" CAN SELL UP TO 150.000 COPIES AN ISSUE - MORE THAN ENGLISH PAPERS SELL- YOU MUST DO YOUR PART TO KEEP YORUBA LANGUAGE FROM DYING -BUY ALAROYE EVERY WEEK AND ALL OTHER YORUBA MAGAZINES,TENI-N-TENI MAGAZINE YOU NAME IT SO THAT YORUBA WILL NOT DIE!

from yeyeolade.wordpress.com

Alaroye Newspaper IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE From DESTRUCTION!-ALAO ADEDAYO FOUNDER TELLS HOW HE FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN PRODUCING A FLORISHING YORUBA NEWSPAPER ! –YORUBA IS DYING! —WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SAVE IT??-FROM VANGUARD NEWSPAPER((NIGERIA)

by Yeye Akilimali Funua Olade

 Alao Adedayo-Founder/savior of Yoruba Language thru his GREAT newspaper Alaroye! Do Your own part and BUY it every week, get your children to read it- FIGHT TO SAVE Yoruba Language. FROM DYING!       

                                                                                                                                                                                        I stumbled four times to make Alaroye a success story – Alao Adedayo
July 8, 2011
Musa Alao Adedayo, a.k.a Agbedegbeyo, is the Publisher/Chief Executive Officer, World Information Agents Limited, the publishing company of the popular Yoruba newspaper, ALAROYE. He spoke to BASHIR ADEFAKA about himself and how he stumbled four times to get it right with the vernacular paper that has today become a success story in the newspaper industry in Nigeria. Excerpt
How did you start out in life?
I am a Muslim but I am not a biased person because God Himself never loved a biased person.  But those who know me from the beginning used to call me Alao Agbedegbeyo.  When I talk of people who know me from the beginning, they are people from the  70s, early 80s and so on.
I came from Abeokuta to Lagos in 1980 doing Ewi (lyrics) artist.  In those days as an Ewi person, you must be attached to a particular musician and I was with Dele Abiodun, who was like my master.  Ewi was like side-attraction at a show and it would come on stage while the musician and his band members were taking a rest.
I had also participated in some dramas through the likes of Jide Kosoko, Ishola Ogunsola, (Dr. I. Show Pepper) and Adebayo Salami (Oga Bello).  It was because of the Ewi that I used to present in those days that Jide Kosoko would always come to Dele Abiodun’s shows.  He would say to me, “Alao, we are having an outing somewhere and I want you to perform your Ewi there,” and I would say no problem.
How did Ewi correlated with the broadcaster that you were?
By and large as God would have it, through that channel, as I have mentioned before, I became a broadcaster.  Sometime in 1979, Radio Lagos started a programme called, Kebuyeri, which was mainly for the Awada Kerikeri group that was then run by Adebayo Salami popularly called Oga Bello.  We went to a show at Ebute Metta and Adebayo Salami and his group members had also come to that show.
It was there he saw me and said, “Ah, Alao! Radio Lagos has just given us a programme and we want you to be in it” and I said no problem.  We didn’t even discuss money because what was more important to us at that time was the job.  That was how we started the programme and it became overwhelmingly popular turning me into a celebrity.
Behind that programme, a plan was going on by the management of Radio Lagos and the producer of the programme, Adebayo Tijani, communicated to me that management was talking about me and that was how I became a newscaster with Radio Lagos reading Yoruba news at that time.
I left Radio Lagos in 1981, which was a real year of politicking in the country.  Then, Radio Nigeria Ikeja which was established within that time was located in Ikoyi and in fact when we were there, we were always abusing and calling them, “Agberekusu f’ohun Ikeja” that is, people who were on the Island claiming to be speaking from Ikeja (laughs).  I eventually found myself at the Radio Nigeria Ikeja and later NTA but I did not stay long before I left.
When you left service, where did you go?
When we joined broadcasting, most of us did not get the job because of our educational qualifications and so, when I left the NTA, it was an opportunity for me to now go and improve myself, which then took me to the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ) and then the universities for my first and later second degrees.
How did Alaroye come into the show?
It was in May 1985 when I was 25 and while I was still working as a Yoruba newsreader with the NTA that I decided to try my hands in publishing, which brought about the Alaroye.  Between May and October of 1985, I was only able to publish four editions of the tabloid that was meant to be weekly.  I was doing it alone because I had no such money to hire people.   It thus became a staggered publication because it was a one-man’s idea and as a result, no prospective partner was willing to support or invest in the business.  It was also like that because Yoruba newspaper business at that time was seen as a barren land.  So, naturally, it died.
Further effort was made at resuscitating the paper in 1990 but it couldn’t get to the vendors,  though it was being published. It was to be launched that year so that some funds could be raised. On the day of the launching, a prominent member of the community who was a friend of both the chief launcher and chairman, Lai Balogun, died. So it was a wrong day for the Alaroye’s show as the whole community was thrown into mourning and no one remembered the launch.
In 1994 when I made the third attempt at the publication, I was convinced that Alaroye would one day emerge a success story because, for four weeks, I was able to publish the weekly paper consecutively and throughtout the period,  it was well circulated and generally accepted.
And because I had acquired more knowledge about all it required to make a successful print media, Alaroye was able to stand and  able to meet the standard of a newspaper. Yet, it couldn’t go far because I could not raise the required fund to keep it going.  And for two years, it remained like that until July 2, 1996, when we were able to revisit it and tried our best to make it what it is today.  That was the fourth attempt and it has now come to stay.
I thank God that today, Alaroye is seen not as a happenstance, but a planned revolution in the newspaper industry in Nigeria.  And it is so because, no Yoruba newspaper has been so successful because most of the earlier issues, people have said, were translataion of English newspapers or repetition of news items already carried on radio and television.
Alaroye is original for its thorough analysis, research works and investigative journalism that many have appreciated as having put the newspaper on a very high pedestal. It informs, educates, entertains and analyses events as they unfold through the Yoruba culture. For this, it circulates in Nigeria, wherever Yoruba domicile, with the print run sometimes as high as 150,000 copies per week.  I have the reason to really thank God today because, in Nigeria, particularly among the Yorubas, Alaroye is a language. It is the culture.
The Conference of Yoruba Leaders showcased by your newspaper, which debuted in 2002, hasn’t seemed to produce any result considering the fact that Yorubas are still intolerably disunited.  What is the problem?
The problem we have in Yorubaland is the way we play our own politics.  What Alaroye is trying to do is to serve as a bridge to bring all the leaders together.  There is need for a connecting point, which will connect all Yoruba people with one another.  We have very, very intelligent, well exposed and highly patriotic sons and daughters of Yorubaland.  We cannot run away from the fact that we are Yorubas; we had been Yoruba people before Nigeria and we will remain Yoruba people within Nigeria.
Yes, political party differences are there but we should be able to know that there is difference between politics and governance.  So, during election, you can abuse and criticize yourselves but once election is over, issue of governance becomes the central point while politicking is set aside for another election season.  And if you are the governor, you should see yourself as the father of all, as the head of government and people should see the governor beyond his party but as the leader that all of us should relate well with as one of our own.
In the year 2002, I went to Papa Abraham Adesanya and I said to him, “E ma bawon se oselu.  Ema bawon da si oro oselu.  Asiwaju Yoruba ni ki’e je” (That Papa should not be part of politics other Yorubas played but that he should be okay with himself as Leader of the Yoruba Nation).
He asked me why.  We talked a lot about it and he agreed with me.  Not only that I went to discuss it with him, we made it a critical editorial issue, which some of the Afenifere members then responded to.

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Tags: AFRICA, African Americans, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN, BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK WOMEN, NIGERIA, YORUBA, YORUBA IS DYING!..YORUBA, YORUBA LANGUAGE

This entry was posted on December 25, 2011 at 11:35 pm and is filed under AFRICA, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AFRICAN LANGUAGES, AFRICAN LANGUAGES ENDANGERED!, AFRICAN MEN, AFRICAN WRITERS, AFRICAN WRITERS LIST IN YORUBA, AFRICANS IN AMERIKKKA, AKINWUNMI ISOLA, BLACK BOYS .BLACK WOMEN, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK CULTURE, BLACK GIRLS, Black media, BLACK MEN, BLACK MEN BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN BLACK WOMEN, BLACK NATIONALISM, BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK WOMAN, BLACK WOMEN, BLACK WRITERS, BLACK WRITING IS GROWING, BLACK YOUTH, BLACKS IN AMERIKKKA!, BLACKS IN CUBA, NIGERIA, NIGERIAN LANGUAGES IN YORUBA, NIGERIAN WOMEN, NIGERIAN WRITERS, NIGERIANS ARE THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.

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BACK TO AFRICA ! -JOURNEY OF HOPE- THE BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT IN ARKANSAS- A SUMMARY

FROM http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/200

288 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 4 maps, 2 figs., notes, bibl., index $65.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8078-2879-3 $22.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8078-5550-8 Published: Fall 2004  Add Cloth to cart  Add Paper to cart  View cart  Checkout

Journey of Hope
The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s

by Kenneth C. Barnes Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, penned these famous lines in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty, then being constructed by the French Republic as a gift to the United States of America. Nearly a decade later, Lady Liberty would witness an ironic scene unfolding in New York Harbor. On the rainy afternoon of 10 March 1892, the Dutch steamer Werkendam arrived after a two-week voyage from Rotterdam on the North Sea. The 569 passengers speaking Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, and a host of other European languages must have chattered excitedly about their hope for a better life in America. One can imagine that many eyes became misty as they beheld Lady Liberty, torch held high, next to Ellis Island, which had opened just two months before. As the Werkendam made its way into the bay, it passed a much smaller, old-fashioned sailing ship, the Liberia, which had left Pier 6 on the East River earlier in the day. The Liberia was packed to the brim with black families from Morrilton, Arkansas, who were leaving the United States to return to their ancestral homeland of Africa.[1] Perhaps the passengers of the Werkendam and the Liberia waved to each other as they passed in the bay. This image sums up the paradox of American society in the 1890s. While millions of Europeans were coming to the United States to follow their dream of political freedom and economic opportunity, thousands of black Americans, especially in Arkansas, were equally anxious to get out of this county. The hope for many African Americans centered on the Republic of Liberia in West Africa.
As Africa's only independent black republic, Liberia encouraged and symbolized race pride for African Americans in the late 1800s. With an elected black government that offered American settlers free land, Liberia represented a chance for a better life for the South's black farmers. Interest in African emigration peaked among black southerners in the 1890s, a time when cotton prices hit rock bottom and white racism reached its zenith. The 1890s saw the greatest number of lynchings in American history. As it became increasingly clear that black Americans would not get a seat at the table, Liberia posed an alternative to integration, an escape to an all-black world. One black man from central Arkansas asked in 1890: "Ar tha any White People over in liBery? if there is—none [of us] ar going there."[2]
Of all areas of the South, Liberia emigration fever was most intense during the late 1800s in Arkansas. More Liberia-bound emigrants left from Arkansas than from any other state—more than a third of all known black American emigrants to Africa in the years from 1879 to 1899—despite the fact that Arkansas's black population was smaller than that of any of its southern neighbors.[3] And for each one of the approximately 600 who left Arkansas for Africa, hundreds more applied unsuccessfully to go. To understand the back-to-Africa movement in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow years, one must examine Arkansas. Ironically, before the 1890s, Arkansas had served as a destination for black migrants leaving other southern states. A high percentage of African American men voted in Arkansas elections, and many held public offices on the county level. But Jim Crow measures, disfranchisement, and a wave of brutal racial violence dramatically changed the situation for black Arkansans. I will argue that the rapidity of this shift from relative well-being to subjugation, rather than the magnitude of the oppression, convinced many African Americans to leave not just Arkansas or the South but the entire United States. The Arkansas counties with the most competitive political environments, where white elites most targeted black voters, saw the most intense interest in African emigrations. Among sharecroppers and country preachers there swelled a remarkable wave of fascination with Africa—as a place of refuge from white oppression and as an ancestral land that helped define a black national identity. While middle-class blacks were more resolved to live as black Americans, many rural poor folk gave up on the United States and looked to Liberia to construct a better life. This study will compare the Liberian dreams to the reality Arkansas emigrants found in their African fatherland. For those who left, and for those who stayed behind, the meaning of Liberian emigration was simple: it was a journey of hope.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, Liberia evoked mixed images in the minds of black Americans. People of color must have pondered a return to Africa as soon as they arrived in the New World, but an organized back-to-Africa movement began in the late 1700s. British abolitionists worked together with free black immigrants to found Sierra Leone on the continent's west coast as a place for the return of black people from British territory. The first black settlers arrived from England in 1787, and others came afterward from Nova Scotia and Jamaica. Sierra Leone became a British crown colony in 1808.[4] In the United States, black Americans' discussion of African colonization originated among New England religious circles that opposed slavery and the slave trade. Paul Cuffe, a prosperous half-black, half-Indian Quaker of Massachusetts who owned a small fleet of whaling ships, transported thirty-eight free blacks to Sierra Leone, largely at his own expense, late in 1815. Cuffe died two years later, but he had inspired a movement.[5]
Humanitarian concerns, like those of Cuffe, joined with very different motives to found the American Colonization Society, just before Cuffe's death. Slave owners in the South had become increasingly worried about the presence of a free black population clustering in southern towns. Some whites thought the very existence of a free black community undermined the slavery system and inspired slaves to revolt. In 1816, the Virginia legislature, dominated by slave owners, asked the U.S. Congress to find a territory on the African coast to become a place of asylum for free blacks and emancipated American slaves. Slave owners and antislavery forces gathered at the Davis Hotel in December 1816 in Washington, D.C., and founded the American Society for Colonizing Free People of Color in the United States, a name later shortened to the American Colonization Society (ACS). At this first meeting, antislavery leaders, such as Daniel Webster, promoted the idea of an African colony as a place of protection for a persecuted people while slave owners, such as Henry Clay, who chaired the first assembly, saw an African colony as a dumping ground for free blacks who had no place in America. Through its early years, the ACS struggled with this tension between humanitarian and racist motivations. Black Americans stood divided on the issue of emigration. A few black church leaders gave signals of support for the ACS, and free blacks in Richmond, Virginia, made the first public pronouncement in January 1817 favoring emigration. But most free blacks in northern communities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston united against emigration, seeing it as a ploy to expel free blacks from the United States.[6]
On 21 January 1820, the ship Elizabeth sailed from New York carrying a party of eighty-six free blacks from the Illinois Territory who had volunteered to resettle in Africa. The ACS had received financial and moral support for this expedition from President James Monroe. Nearly a decade after Congress had outlawed the slave trade, American ships were still capturing and confiscating cargoes of illegal slaves bound for the New World, and by 1819 a new slave trade act had authorized the president to establish a place in coastal West Africa where recaptured slaves could be returned. Thus, the ACS began its resettlement work as a private agency carrying out a public policy. The Elizabeth arrived in Sierra Leone, where the settlers waited for more than a year while white agents acting on behalf of the U.S. government and the ACS located a site for a colony. They found one at Cape Mesurrado, more than 200 miles south of Freetown, Sierra Leone, where a rocky promontory juts out into the sea near the mouth of the mighty St. Paul River. After much discussion with the local African ruler—the agents ultimately put a gun to his head to encourage cooperation—the ACS received the cape in exchange for an assorted package of rum, muskets, beads, tobacco, and other items worth in total less than $300. The settlers in Sierra Leone, augmented by another group recently arrived from the United States, first set foot in the colony on 25 April 1822. The ACS named the colony Liberia, after the Latin liber, meaning free man. The colonists choose the name Monrovia for their first permanent settlement, in honor of the president's support for the colonization effort.[7]
The first settlers, and virtually all the emigrants from America, struggled to survive in their new environment. The ACS agents had chosen one of the most inhospitable locations in West Africa for their colony. Beyond the rocky hill overlooking the coast, mosquito-infested swamps surrounded the new town of Monrovia. Settlers invariably came down with malaria in the first months after arrival. Nearly a quarter of the early settlers to Liberia died within the first year of settlement. Those who survived the "seasoning" found it difficult to make a living. The thin, leached soil did not easily yield American food crops, and settlers found local foods unpalatable. The early settlers eschewed agriculture and largely subsisted on imported foods. They searched in vain for some commodity in demand on the world market, first looking for gold or ivory, then finding camwood, used in the dye industry. But the venture never became economically profitable.[8] Nevertheless, yearly reinforcements brought settlers to Liberia, which remained a colony of the ACS for the next twenty-five years. The society's resident agent in Monrovia presided over the colony, assisted by an elected council of settlers.
The emigration of free blacks to Liberia particularly increased after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. During the next year in Maryland, for example, the state legislature passed laws restricting the liberties of free people of color and even appropriated money to pay for their resettlement outside the state's boundaries. In 1832, the American Colonization Society resettled 796 emigrants to Liberia, more than in any year of its history, and the Maryland auxiliary of the ACS itself sent another 146. As the movement became increasingly dominated in the 1830s by slave owners who wanted Liberia to absorb the free blacks of the South, antislavery forces largely turned against the society. William Lloyd Garrison led the charge, decrying African colonization as a plot to continue the slave system in America. Prominent free black leaders, such as David Walker, loudly and consistently denounced the colonization enterprise through the emerging black press, from pulpits, and at every national Negro convention of the 1830s. In a time of conflict within the ACS, state auxiliaries, such as the one in Maryland, began to go their own ways and even establish their own resettlement colonies along the coast southeast of Monrovia. Despite this internal dissension in the society, some free blacks, mostly from slaveholding states, continued to apply for emigration. A few slave owners emancipated slaves with the expressed goal of sending them to Liberia. In addition, more than 5,000 African slaves, confiscated by the U.S. Navy on the high seas, were returned to Africa and left in the colony of Liberia.[9]
Liberia's status changed when the colony gave way to an independent republic on 26 July 1847, a day still celebrated as Liberia's national holiday. It had become evident that a colony owned by a private philanthropic society had little legal and diplomatic standing. Under ACS direction, the settlers drew up a constitution based on that of the United States and designed a flag, again emulating the American model. Thus, beginning in 1847, an elected president and congress of black American settlers governed Liberia, and the ACS's role became virtually that of an emigration agency, transporting settlers and assisting them once they arrived in country.
Emigration picked up in the 1850s when the new Fugitive Slave Act encouraged runaway slaves to seek a destination outside the United States. And then the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857 demonstrated that people of color possessed no rights that white people of America were obligated to respect. Many free blacks became even more pessimistic about any future in the United States. Free black leaders, still viewing the ACS as a racist organization in league with white slave owners, sought other locations for black emigration. Martin R. Delany, a prominent black physician, tried to establish a colony in the Yoruba region of today's Nigeria as an area for American settlement. Others looked to Haiti or Central America as destinations. But these movements had leaders but few followers. No settlers actually emigrated to Delany's Nigeria colony, and only a few North Americans moved to Haiti.[10] However, by the beginning of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 black American settlers had come to Liberia, and the black republic controlled a strip of English-speaking settlements scattered along 250 miles of coastline, a few miles deep. Indigenous Africans, who always formed the majority of Liberia's residents, were considered neither "Liberians" nor citizens, and they had no voice in the republic's affairs.
By 1861, the Republic of Liberia had emerged as a symbol that could unite or divide black public opinion. Some black Americans, as well as white abolitionists, believed Liberia's very existence suggested that persons of African descent had no place in America outside of slavery. Prominent black leaders saw the American Colonization Society as a white man's movement that was part of America's racial problem, not its solution. Others saw in the Liberian Republic a symbol of black nationalism, a place where "civilized" black people ruled themselves. At the end of her famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe sent George and Eliza off to Liberia with their family but kept some of her black characters home in the United States. George, the strong and angry black man, cannot live in America but expresses his black nationalist feelings by building up the black Republic of Liberia. Likewise, in real life, some emigrants applied to the ACS every year willing to trade in their residence in the United States to follow their African dreams.
Black interest in Liberia emigration plummeted when the Civil War promised the end of slavery and meaningful change to the status of black Americans. Ironically, President Abraham Lincoln's administration suddenly became interested in colonizing freed slaves, especially those who trailed behind occupying Union armies throughout the South. Looking past Liberia, Lincoln's officials searched for locations closer at hand, in the Caribbean or Central America, for the resettlement of freed persons. Despite a congressional appropriation for colonization, the Lincoln administration mustered only one small unsuccessful colonization expedition to Haiti. Likewise, the ACS during the war had difficulty finding emigrants for Liberia and ultimately had to recruit settlers from Barbados instead of the United States.[11]
The end of the Civil War saw significant change in the fortunes of the American Colonization Society and the idea of African colonization. By the time the society celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 1867, its revenues had sharply declined, its loyal following of wealthy white men had largely grown old and died, and the state auxiliaries for the most part had ceased their operations. The ACS had really become the work of one man, William Coppinger, the society's corresponding secretary, who after 1872 worked out of an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Coppinger, a white Quaker, had begun work with the colonization movement in 1838 as a ten-year-old office boy in the Pennsylvania auxiliary. By 1864, he became corresponding secretary of the ACS and devoted the rest of his life, until his death in 1892, to the work of Liberia emigration. He single-handedly administered the ACS's dwindling resources, edited the society's quarterly journal, the African Repository, corresponded with the people who desired to resettle in Liberia, and made the arrangements for those accepted for emigration. A dedicated, humble, self-effacing man, Coppinger appeared to believe sincerely that freed people of the American South could better their lives through emigration to Liberia, and he worked tirelessly to that end. No longer a big-budget institution, the American Colonization Society had become virtually a one-man show.[12]
But at the same time, the momentum in the back-to-Africa movement was shifting from white northerners to poor black farmers in the South. Freedom's rewards were slow in coming and fewer than expected. The Liberian government promised twenty-five acres of free land for each emigrant family, ten acres for a single adult, who came to the black republic. After the war's end, Secretary Coppinger made yearly trips to Georgia and the Carolinas recruiting emigrants. Between 1865 and 1869, the ACS expended much of its remaining funds and transported a record number of 2,394 emigrants to Liberia, more than the society would send over the next thirty years. Through the 1870s, with even less money in its treasury, the ACS sent a yearly average of only ninety-eight emigrants, and that average dropped to seventy-four in the 1880s. Finally, in 1892, the society decided to stop sending groups of emigrants entirely.[13] However, the decline in the number of emigrants in the post-Reconstruction years reflects the dwindling financial resources of the society, not motivation among African Americans. In fact, the most intense black interest in emigration, as measured by the volume of the ACS's incoming correspondence, came in the late 1870s and early 1890s. Both of these periods were moments of sharp racial conflict, and nowhere was the desire for African emigration greater than Arkansas.
African Americans' desire to move out of the South swelled as Reconstruction came to a halt in 1877. Reconstruction had been winding down gradually before its final closure. White Democrats had reclaimed state governments in Tennessee by 1869; in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia by 1870; in Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas by 1874; and in Mississippi by 1875. By 1877, the party of Lincoln controlled only the statehouses of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Public opinion in the North had begun to sour on military occupation of the South, and business interests in the Republican Party pushed for the reintegration of southern states into the national economy. The election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in 1876 signaled the end of federal oversight of local affairs in the South. Ironically, Hayes's campaign platform called for strong protection of black citizens in the South. But when the election mired down in controversy because of disputed returns in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, Republicans worked out a compromise that gave them the presidency in exchange for measures formally ending Reconstruction. In an extremely complex turn of events, the necessary electoral votes went to Hayes while the statehouses in the disputed states went to the Democrats. Hayes withdrew the federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana and included some southern Democrats, even ex-Confederates, in his federal patronage and cabinet appointments. Historians have debated whether Hayes's policy reflected a genuine attempt to heal sectional strife or a mere ploy to win a disputed election and consolidate power. In any case, Reconstruction, with its use of force to protect the rights of black citizens, had come to an end.[14]
The symbolic meaning of Hayes's policy seemed clear to white southern Democrats. The federal government, while it would use troops to fight Indians in the West and to break a railroad strike in northern cities in the summer of 1877, would not intervene in southern affairs. In black-majority areas, white Democrats had already begun using terror tactics against black Republican voters in the elections of 1875 and 1876. Before the state elections in Mississippi in 1875, white military companies in Yazoo and Coahoma Counties, deep in the delta, attacked black Republican meetings and murdered several black leaders.[15] In South Carolina's piedmont area, gangs of white men rode through the countryside before the 1876 election terrorizing black neighborhoods and keeping Republican voters home on election day. Obviously, Hayes's actions of 1877 further emboldened white Democrats. The violence and fraud in the next election, the state and congressional races of 1878, shocked many northern Republicans into admitting the failure of the president's southern policy. Again the atrocities were greatest in black-majority states where white Democrats needed to suppress black Republican votes to get or maintain power. Reports from Louisiana suggested that animals preyed upon the unburied bodies of African Americans slain on election day. The number of Republican ballots cast in South Carolina dropped from 90,000 in the fraudulent 1876 election to a mere 4,000 in 1878. The Republican Party thus crumbled in the Black Belt southern states that had the largest number of potential Republican voters.[16]
The pattern would continue in the 1880 elections. Only two Republican votes were recorded in Yazoo County, Mississippi, a county that was 75 percent black. The Republican presidential candidate of 1880, James A. Garfield, received his lowest percentage of votes in states that had the highest proportion of black residents, while he polled the greatest percentage of southern votes in border states with the lowest black populations.[17] Thus, African Americans virtually lost voting rights in the areas where their numbers threatened white control.
African Americans understood the meaning of the president's retreat from Reconstruction. In the same areas where Reconstruction's end brought sudden change to their political status, a black migration movement took root quickly and sprouted in the last three years of the 1870s. The day after President Hayes withdrew federal troops from South Carolina, John Mardenborough, a black lawyer in Edgefield County, wrote to the American Colonization Society's office in Washington begging the society to send a group of seventy-five local black residents to Liberia. Edgefield County, in fact, was known throughout South Carolina for the most extreme political violence against black citizens. Mardenborough explained why his group wished to leave Edgefield County: "While I write a colored woman comes and tells me her husband was killed last night in her presence by white men and her children burned to death in the house; she says her person was outraged by these men and then she was whipped—such things as these are common occurrences. In the name of God can not the Society send us to Africa or some where else where we can live without ill treatment?"[18]
By the summer of 1877, interest in Liberia emigration had spread throughout South Carolina. One of the black leaders from Edgefield County, Harrison N. Bouey, traveled to Charleston to serve on a federal jury, and there he linked up with others interested in emigration. When Bouey arrived in Charleston, "Professor" J. C. Hazeley, a native African, was in town to deliver lectures promoting African emigration at the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Apparently displeased with the ACS's response to prospective emigrants, leaders at these meetings proposed the formation of a joint stock company to purchase their own ship and to transport emigrants to Africa. Thus was born the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, which sold stock at ten dollars a share. By early 1878, the company had raised $6,000 and purchased a ship in Boston, the Azor, which arrived in the port of Charleston in March. Five thousand people turned out for the worship service that consecrated the vessel into service. The elderly Martin R. Delany, eminent Charlestonian and longtime promoter of African emigration, spoke, as did the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, future bishop of the AME Church and the coming generation's spokesman for the emigration cause. A month later, the Azor finally set sail with 206 passengers, and 175 more remained behind awaiting a second voyage. But the Azor would never sail again. Upon its return, bills from the first voyage came due, and the ship was sold at auction the next year to pay the company's debts.[19]
At the same time that black South Carolinians were organizing for African emigration, a similar movement broke out in Louisiana. As early as December 1875, a group of black clergymen from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia had held a conference in New Orleans to assess the situation for southern blacks. The group discussed migration to the western territories or to Liberia. One of the delegates to the meeting, Henry Adams, a tireless political organizer from Caddo Parish, in northwest Louisiana, returned home and founded the Colonization Council to plan a way to go somewhere, anywhere, outside of the South. In July 1877, Adams's council drew up a petition to President Hayes asking for the government either to protect rights of black citizens or to give them a territory of their own. If Hayes could do neither, the petition asked for a federal appropriation of funds to send them back to their own land, Africa. The next month, Adams wrote to the American Colonization Society claiming to speak for 69,000 African Americans in Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas who wished to move to Liberia. The aspiring emigrants even proposed to send a delegation to Liberia to investigate the conditions there and report back to the group. Coppinger made it clear that the ACS could not fund a mass migration to Liberia and that any investigative delegation must travel at its own expense. He encouraged the group to keep organized, collect dues, and send a few settlers each year. Given the impoverished conditions under which they lived, this advice could hardly satisfy. Only seven known emigrants left Louisiana for Liberia, a group from New Orleans settled by the ACS in 1876.[20]
As possibilities for emigration to Liberia were waning, interest shifted to a destination closer at hand: Kansas. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a former slave from Tennessee, had arrived in Kansas in the mid-1870s and immediately begun work to promote the state as a haven for black settlers. Singleton and other land developers circulated handbills throughout the South encouraging black people to consider Kansas. Political actions further inspired black southerners to move west. In January of 1879, Senator William Windom of Minnesota introduced a resolution calling for a U.S. Senate committee to study the feasibility of federal aid for migration of black citizens from areas where their rights were denied to western territories where they would be respected. After much debate in the Senate, the Windom resolution eventually died from inaction, but rumors about the resolution swept through the South and further inspired black interest in migration and the possibility of governmental assistance. By spring 1879, Liberia fever in the lower South had become Kansas fever, and hundreds of migrants camped along the Mississippi River waiting for steamboats to take them north. Reports of a mass migration from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas in particular aroused much interest among politicians and newspaper editors. The U.S. Senate even established a select committee to investigate the situation. However, informed estimates suggest that only around 8,000 black migrants actually moved to Kansas in 1879 and 1880. Poverty rather than lack of interest probably best explains the modest numbers, for few rural blacks could afford the steamboat and railroad passage needed to get to Kansas.[21] The Kansas exodus of 1879, like the Liberia emigration movement, illustrates the keen interest among African Americans in escaping political oppression in the South. While in antebellum years, free black Americans had criticized the American Colonization Society as a racist organization hell-bent on removing the country's free black population, one can only wonder what slaves may have thought or said about Liberia in the years before freedom. After Reconstruction's end in 1877, most prominent black leaders continued to oppose African migration, but for ordinary black Americans, many whose lives had begun as slaves, Liberia became a symbol of a new life, free from white oppression. These men and women were more than willing to work with the ACS to get to Africa. During the late 1800s, as the back-to-Africa movement shifted from being a white man's institution to a black grassroots movement, interest would be no greater anywhere than in Arkansas. The story of Arkansas's African emigration movement will illustrate not just the severe realities for black southerners in the late 1800s but also their hopes and dreams for a better life.

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LOOK WHAT THIS WHITE BOY SAID ABOUT US BLACKS GOING BACK TO AFRICA!-FROM NEWS.STANFORD.EDU

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/march1/colonize-030106.html

Stanford Report, March 1, 2006

Historian situates 'back-to-Africa' movements in broad context

L.A. Cicero David Brion Davis, foreground, responded to a question during a discussion session connected to the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which he delivered on campus last week. Panelist Walter Johnson looks on.

BY BARBARA PALMER
The so-called "back to Africa" movements, which sent American blacks, willingly and unwillingly, as colonists to West Africa and elsewhere during the 19th and 20th centuries, often have been considered as a kind of sidebar to American history.
In presenting the Tanner Lectures on Human Values on campus last week, noted slavery historian David Brion Davis made the experience of African American colonists in Liberia, and the symbolic meaning of colonization, the centerpiece of his talks. In two lectures titled "Exodus, Exiles and Promised Lands," Davis, the Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, also put African American colonization within the broader context of the global history of mass deportations of groups of unwanted people by linking it to the archetypal story in Exodus of the Israelites fleeing Egypt. And he described a circuitous route by which colonization fueled black nationalism and played an ironic but crucial role in the development of the civil rights movement.
Davis is the author of many books, including the seminal works The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823 (1975). His two lectures were based on three chapters of an upcoming third volume, The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Emancipation, which will complete the series.
Davis' talks, and the public discussions that followed them, underscored the broad support of colonization by African Americans in West Africa and elsewhere at various moments in the 19th century and the persistence of the idea into the 20th century. Virtually every national leader from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln held the conviction that blacks and whites could not coexist as free and equal citizens, Davis wrote in his 2003 book, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.
A list of supporters of African American colonization would include "John Marshall, James Madison, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Stephen A. Douglas and even Harriet Beecher Stowe," Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, pointed out in a discussion session on Friday.
The motives of whites for supporting the colonization movement were themselves complex and contradictory, Davis demonstrated. The American Colonization Society (ACS), which was founded in 1816, had the support both of white philanthropists who sought a refuge for blacks from degrading living conditions and slave owners who were living under the "nuclear threat" of the Haitian revolution. Slave owners wanted free blacks removed from the nation for fear that they might ignite an insurrection among slaves.
Historians understandably have treated the ACS with hostility, Davis said. But the inherent racism in the ACS should not obscure the fact that 19th-century colonizationists were, on many points, more realistic than the abolitionists, Davis said.
It's not that colonization was the right solution, the historian said, but colonizationists believed—with good reason, it would turn out—that "white racial prejudice would remain intractable for generations, that progress would depend on black solidarity and collective effort, and that emancipation could not be divorced from the crucial need for a social and economic climate in which freed people could exercise their full capacities for human development."
'A city on a hill'African American settlers in Liberia, who took to Africa with them American political, social, cultural and legal conventions, were frequently likened to the founders of Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, Davis said. Nineteenth-century supporters of colonization envisioned a role for settlers in Liberia of "civilizing" Africa and building a society that would be as attractive to American blacks as the United States had proved to be for immigrants, Davis said. Liberia was to be, as John Winthrop imagined Puritan settlements, "a city on a hill," he said.
Black immigration to Liberia was framed within the Exodus narrative, much as the first English colonists in North America had conceived of their migration as a journey to the Promised Land, Davis said. Supporters of British colonization to Virginia promoted it as a way to bring civility and Christianity to the "savages" of North America, and to redeem England of the idleness and crime of its unemployed masses, Davis said. "The failure of all these expectations did not kill the initial dream or deter Virginians and other Americans from applying a very similar formula, over two centuries later, to the colonization of Africa."
In Liberia, with limited aid from the United States, the Americo-Liberians built churches, schools and colleges, maintained stable political parties, managed to assimilate Africans liberated from slave ships by the U.S. Navy and established a constitutional republic in 1847, Davis said. The survival of their nation made an important though often overlooked contribution to black pride and hope, Davis said.
Achievement in Liberia also underlined the futility of progress for blacks in a society dedicated to white supremacy, he said. Slave emancipation in the northern states had led to a black population living in abject poverty and deprived of education, civil rights and any hope of meaningful improvement, he said.
Although colonization was in many ways disastrous—malaria decimated the colonists and Americo-Liberians engaged in bloody battles with tribes who were already living in West Africa—the experience of African Americans in Liberia helped nourish black nationalism and, in turn, an increasingly popular domestic demand for equal civil rights, he said.
In the 20th century Marcus Garvey championed colonization and compared immigration to Liberia to the Jewish recovery of Palestine, Davis said. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Davis said, Garvey was the first man "on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody."
A glaring defect of colonization ideology was its failure to recognize that "from the very beginnings of American history, the lives of blacks and whites had been intertwined on the most complex social, cultural, economic and psychological levels," Davis said. Whites themselves were yoked to the blacks they had enslaved, he said. "The nation as a whole, modeled on ancient dreams of deliverance and fulfillment, could march no farther forward than all the victims of its self-betrayal."
Efforts to remove African Americans from society have not ended, suggested sociologist Larry Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor, at a discussion session Thursday. "Are we not in the process of creating incredibly harsh new 'internal colonies' with our vast prison industrial complex?" he asked.
In the United States today, there are more African American men in prison than in college; half of all those in jail or in prison are African American, though blacks are only 12 percent of the U.S. population, and one in three black men in their twenties is under some form of criminal justice supervision by the state, Bobo said.
"There is no other way to view this than as a form of social removal," Bobo said. "It borders on the sort of 'social death' [Harvard sociologist] Orlando Patterson once characterized as accompanying slavery."
The Tanner Lectures were established in 1978 by Obert Clark Tanner, an industrialist and legal scholar who studied philosophy at Harvard and Stanford and later served as a member of the Stanford faculty in religious studies. The lectures were presented by the Barbara and Bowen McCoy Program in Ethics in Society and the Office of the President.

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FROM ARIWA.COM
  

Posted by ariwamad on 24, May 2011

Ariwa Sounds are proud to present The Back to Africa Festival in the Gambia January 2012.

This festival is part of the celebration of Ariwa Sounds 30 year anniversary in business.

The festival site is in the south of the country, in the sea side resort of Batukunku

The festival will be spread over the week starting January the 20th until January the 25th.

Festival goers will be entertained with live performances from a variety of artists from the label.

We also plan on having workshops, seminars in the morning before performances and an exciting Miss Natural Beauty contest!!

There will be a variety of performances from local and international artists.

Website: www.backtoafricafestival.com

Ariwa Sounds

34 Whitehorse Lane
London SE25 6RE
United Kingdom
Studio: +44 208 653 7744
ariwastudios@aol.com

10 Africa Lu

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BACK TO AFRICA FESTIVAL-ARIWA.COM -COME BACK JAN. 2O-25TH 2012! -COME BACK TO AFRICA!

FROM ARIWA.COM  

Posted by ariwamad on 24, May 2011

Ariwa Sounds are proud to present The Back to Africa Festival in the Gambia January 2012.

This festival is part of the celebration of Ariwa Sounds 30 year anniversary in business.

The festival site is in the south of the country, in the sea side resort of Batukunku

The festival will be spread over the week starting January the 20th until January the 25th.

Festival goers will be entertained with live performances from a variety of artists from the label.

We also plan on having workshops, seminars in the morning before performances and an exciting Miss Natural Beauty contest!!

There will be a variety of performances from local and international artists.

Website: www.backtoafricafestival.com

Ariwa Sounds

34 Whitehorse Lane
London SE25 6RE
United Kingdom
Studio: +44 208 653 7744
ariwastudios@aol.com

10 Africa Lu

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BACK TO AFRICA! -MALCOLM X TOLD US "WHY YOU LEFT YOUR MIND IN AFRICA!" -BLACK MEN COME BACK TO AFRICA NOW AND BE FREE OF PRISON,MURDER,WHITE COP KILLING-GENOCIDE!

FROM yeyeolade.wordpress.com

ACK IS BEAUTIFUL!

DEDICATED TO SAVING BLACKNESS WORLDWIDE!

« >MALCOLM X ON "GOING BACK TO AFRICA"-FROM MALCOLM X SPEAKS-WE CAN EITHER GO BACK TO AFRICA OR BECOME AFRICANS CULTURALLY IN AMERIKKKA AND DEVELOP STRONG LINKS WITH THE MOTHERLAND IN THE PROCESS!

MALCOLM X-OUR GREAT BLACK LEADER PRESENTED THIS TO AFRICAN HEADS OF STATE -AN HISTORIC BLACK FIRST !-WE NEED TO GET BACK TO OUR AFRICAN CULTURE AND STOP BEING 21ST CENTURY SLAVES IN AMERIKKKA!-FROM NATHANIELTURNER.COM »

MALCOLM X ON”GOING BACK TO AFRICA”-FROM MALCOLM X SPEAKS-WE CAN EITHER GO BACK TO AFRICA OR BECOME CULTURALLY AFRICAN WHILE IN AMERIKKKA BUT BE TOTALLY LIBERATED FROM BEING 21ST CENTURY SLAVES AS WE ARE NOW IN AMERIKKKA!

by Yeye Akilimali Funua Olade

FROM yeyeolade.blogspot.com
Friday, May 06, 2011
MALCOLM X ON “GOING BACK TO AFRICA”-FROM MALCOLM X SPEAKS-WE CAN EITHER GO BACK TO AFRICA OR BECOME AFRICANS CULTURALLY IN AMERIKKKA AND DEVELOP STRONG LINKS WITH THE MOTHERLAND IN THE PROCESS!
ON GOING BACK TO AFRICA- MALCOLM X’S COMMENTS TO A QUESTION AT A HARYOU-ACT FORUM FOR DOMESTIC PEACE CORPS MEMBERS,HARLEM,DEC. 12,1964
MALCOLM WAS ASKED HOW HE THOUGHT AFRO AMERICANS WOULD BE RECEIVED BY THE AFRICANS IF THEY SHOULD GO BACK TO AFRICA.
Malcolm : After lengthy discussions with many Africans at all levels, I would say some would be welcome and some wouldn’t be welcome. Those that have a contribution to make would be welcome,but those that have no contribution to make would not be welcome\;I don’t think any of us, if we look at it objectively could find fault with that.
And I believe this, that if we migrated back to Africa culturally, philosopically and psychologically, while remaining here physically, the spiritual bond that would develop between us and Africa through this cultural, philosophical and psychological migration, so-called migration would enhance our position here, because we would have our contacts with them acting as roots or foundations behind us. You never will have a foundation in America.You’re out of your mind if you think that this government is ever going to back you and me up in the same way they back others up. They’ll never do it,It’s not in them.
AS an example take the Chinese. You asked me about Red China. The Chinese used to be disrespected.They used to use that expression in this country:”You don’t have a chinaman’s chance”. You remember that? You don’t hear it lately. Because a Chinaman’s got more chances now. Why? Because China is strong. Since China became strong and independent, she’s respected, and she’s recognized. So that wherever a Chinese person goes, he is respected and recognized because of what he as an individual has done;he is respected and recognized because he has a country behind him,a continent behind him. He has some power behind him. They don’t respect him but respect what’s behind him.
By the same token, when the African continent in its independence is able to create the unity that’s necessary to increase its strength and its position on this earth, so that Africa too becomes respected as other huge continents are respected,then wherever people of African origin ,African heritage or African blood go,they will be respected-but only when and because they have something larger that looks like them behind them. With that behind you,you will get some respect. Without it behind you you can do almost anything under the sun in this society-pass any kind of law that Washington can think of-and you and I will still be trying to get them to enforce that law. We’ll be like that Chinaman (about whom they used to say “He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance”.Now you don’t have a Negro’s chance. But with African getting its independence, you and I will have more of a chance.I believe in that 100 per cent.
And this is what I mean by a migration or going back to Africa -going back in the sense that we reach out to them and they reach out to us. Our mutual understanding and our mutual effort toward a mutual objective will bring mutual benefit to the African as well as to the Afro-American. But you will never get it just relaying on uncle sam alone. You are looking to the wrong direction. Because the wrong people are in Washington D.C. and I mean from the White House right on down. I hope I don’t step on anybody’s toes by saying that I didn”t vote for him so I can say it.

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Tags: AFRICA, African Americans, BACK TO AFRICA, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN, BLACK PEOPLE, Black woman, BLACK WOMEN, MALCOLM X, RACISM, SLAVERY, THE BLACK RACE

This entry was posted on May 6, 2011 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Jammu Africa Says:
   May 6, 2011 at 3:26 pm | Reply Repatriation is one half of the Key to African Americans true liberation and freedom. This will not happen unless the Most High is guiding the movement and the people. This repatriation of African Americans cannot and will not be successful, if we attempt to bring anything of the Enslavers religion or Government with us to our new nation. We must establish what everyone has rejected and refused to do, i.e., establish the Diin of Allah, and the Government of Allah. No other people has had the faith, the love for the Most High, nor spiritual strength to do this, The New United Republic has unapologetically established this reality for those repatriating to West Africa with us, “The African Americans Back to Africa Movement”! The New United Republic, rejects Egyptology because the Torah says not follow the Egyptians and their polytheism, even though many of us have Egyptian blood in us. We reject Christianity because it is the Enslavers religion. We reject Judaism because it is the religion of the Canaanite (White) Hebrew, (African Americans are not Hebrews, we have shown this clearly with the Torah). We reject Islam because Prophet Muhammad was ordered to follow Diin Al-Hanifiyyah (we have shown this clearly with the Qur’an). We know that Uthman changed Al-Hanifiyyah to Al-Islam in the Qur’an after Prophet Muhammad was murdered by his two wives Ayesha and Hafsa, two Canaanite (White) women, in conspiracy with their fathers Abu Bakr and Umar (Canaanite White men). Prophet Muhammad was a Black man as reported by Dr. Carter G. Woodson and other historians, for more information about black Prophet Muhammad and his black family and tribe, visit the web site therealabrabs.com. In addition, we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Islam is Vedic Hinduism.
   We are willing to address any group concerning this Divine Movement to restore our women and children to their ancestral homeland.
   Visit our web site http://www.thenewunitedrepublic.com, read our Declaration of Independence, read our appeals to Muslims, Christians, Black so-called Hebrews and Black so-called Jews, Egyptologist, and the rest of the camps in which we have congregated. We must set things right with our history, and with world history before we leave to resettle on our ancestral “Land” our original place of Domicile. (Be on One Accord)
   Salaamun as the New Nation rises, The New United Republic, (The NUR). Join us now, sign up to be a citizen, the citizens list is growing!
   

BACK TO AFRICA! 1896! 300 BLACKS LEFT ON THIS SHIP AND HALF WERE FROM ARKANSAS! -SMART BLACK PEOPLE-THEIR ANCESTORS NOW ARE ENJOYING BLACK FREEDOM WHICH BLACKS IN AMERIKKKA CAN NEVER GET FROM AMERIKKKA!-COME BACK TO AFRICA BLACK MAN ESPECIALLY SINCE THE WHITE BOY IS OUT TO DESTROY YOU IN AMERIKKKA!

Departure of the Back-to-Africa Movement ship Laurada bound for Liberia with approximately 300 passengers, half of them from Arkansas; March 1896.

Courtesy of Illustrated American Magazine

BSack-to-Africa SMMovement
Post-Reconstruction through the Gilded Age, 1875 through 1900

BACK TO AFRICA! -"THE RETURN TO SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA"-FROM EXPLORINGAFRICA.MATRIX.MSU.EDU

from exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu

Unit Three: Studying Africa through the Humanities

Module Fifteen: Africa and the World

Student's Edition

Activity 6: The Return to Sierra Leone & Liberia

Thus far in the unit, we have focused on the movements of Africans from Africa to other parts of the world. However, the movements between Africa and the rest of the world do not occur in only one direction. At several periods in history, Africans and people of Africa descent have migrated back to Africa. In this activity, you will learn about the return to Africa and the founding of the African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia.[Map: Colonial Africa] The "back-to-Africa" migrations that resulted in the formation of these two countries came from highly organized efforts in the Nineteenth century on the part of Africans in the diaspora to return to Africa.
Africans in the Americas and Europe continued to return to live in Africa in somewhat smaller numbers throughout the twentieth century. For example, there were a number of African American missionaries who moved to Africa. Moreover, when African countries became independent in the 1960s and 1970s a number of African Americans and Africans in Britain immigrated to these newly independent African countries. Ghana, which became independent in 1957, was one of the most popular destinations for Africans from the diaspora. For example, Professor W.E.B. Du Bois, a very important African American scholar and civil rights leader, was among those who immigrated to Ghana in 1958. He remained in Ghana until his death in 1963.
Most recently, when South Africa became independent in 1994 after a long period of struggle against Apartheid, people of African heritage in the United States, Canada, and the West Indies moved to South Africa.
After you have read the information included in this section of the module, please read and respond to the questions and complete the activities at the end of the activity.
I. Resettling in Africa: Sierra Leone [Map: Sierra Leone , Info on Sierra Leone]
As we learned in Activity 4, many American slaves and slaves from other parts of the world came to London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to find freedom. This group of blacks became the first to be resettled in Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa. Two main reasons explain why whites organized and financed the resettlement of blacks in Africa. First, the former slaves lived in poverty and were considered a social problem for the government. Second, a group of men who believed that slavery was wrong wanted to help create a free, black community in Africa.
An English botanist (a scientist who studies plants) had been to visit Sierra Leone to study its plant life, and sent back reports about the country to the English government. The reports said that the country would be good for farming, so the government decided that it should repatriate (return to the place of their birth) the former slaves to this country. Four hundred and eleven immigrants left England in February 1787 and arrived in Sierra Leone on May 14, 1787.
Sierra Leone, consequently, has a unique history. Most of Africa's 54 countries were colonies of European nation-states from the late 19th Century. Sierra Leone became a colony of Britain nearly 100 years earlier in the late 18th Century. This means that Sierra Leone became a colony of Britain just after the thirteen American colonies gained their independence
from Britain.
Sierra Leone was also different in another way from other African colonies. Britain formed the colony to be a home for freed slaves from North America. The first freed slaves returned to Africa from Canada in 1787. In 1808, the British government outlawed the slave trade. In an
effort to stop the Atlantic slave trade, the British navy intercepted slave ships from Africa which were heading across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The slaves freed from these ships were taken to Sierra Leone. Tens of thousands of freed slaves captured from slave
ships or groups who returned from North America (many coming from the West Indies), settled in Sierra Leone during the 19th Century. Only one other African country was founded by freed slaves from the Americas, Liberia, a name taken from the word liberty, Sierra Leone's neighbor to the south.
If you have seen the movie Amistad, you may remember that at the end of the movie the slaves freed from the ship Amistad were sent to Sierra Leone.
Based on this information we can see why the capital city of this colony was called Freetown.
For most of the 19th Century, the colony of Sierra Leone was limited to the area along the coast and nearby hinterland. Hinterland refers to an area to the interior of the coast. Since the freed slaves came from many different parts of West Africa, North America and the West
Indies, they spoke different languages. In Sierra Leone, these settlers developed a new language based primarily on English but with many words and phrases from African languages. This language is called Krio. By the end of the 19th Century, the descendants of the freed
slaves became known as the Creole community.
Although the freed slaves who settled in Sierra Leone played an important role in the history of the country, most Sierra Leoneans are descendants of ethnic groups that have lived there for hundreds of years. Long term inhabitants of a given area are called indigenous people. Native Americans are the indigenous population of the United States; the main indigenous ethnic groups in Sierra Leone are the Mende and the Temne. Both of these ethnic groups spread across the boundaries of Sierra Leone into neighboring Guinea and Liberia.
As you can imagine, relationships between the new immigrants from North America and the West Indies and the local Temne peoples, who lived in the coastal regions near Freetown, were not always good. They were educated and Christians and felt that they had an obligation to covert and "civilize" the indigenous peoples. The Temne, not surprisingly resisted efforts by the returning Africans to take control of the coastal areas that had belonged to them for many years.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, two important changes took place in Sierra Leone. First, British businesses and the British government became interested in expanding their control into the interior of the colony. Secondly, as a result of this expansion, many Temne and Mande peoples from the interior moved to Freetown and the coastal region.
British business companies were interested in taking advantage of agricultural and mineral resources offered by Sierra Leone. In the early part of the 20th Century, colonial officials encouraged the production of palm oil, cocoa beans (chocolate) and coffee. In the 1930s, diamonds mines were opened. Later bauxite (mineral from which aluminum is made) and rutile (gemstone) were found in deposits large enough to be mined. These raw materials became the basis of Sierra Leone's export economy. However, the vast majority of the people made their
living as small scale farmers, growing rice, casava, and groundnuts (peanuts).
In the first century of colonial rule, the British allowed the Creole (freed-slave) community to participate in the administration of the colony. However, by the beginning of the 20th Century, as they expanded colonial rule into the interior, the British reduced political participation by Sierra Leoneans. The British colonialists, as they did elsewhere in West Africa, instituted a system of indirect rule. [See Module Seven B African History and Module Ten: African Politics] In this system, the colonialists appointed local chiefs and headmen to help them govern. While this system helped traditional rulers to maintain some of their power, it did not allow for the majority of Sierra Leoneans to participate in governing their own communities or
country.
During the time of colonial rule, Christian mission societies began to build schools. Through these efforts, and with some support from the colonial government, a system of elementary and secondary schools was built in Sierra Leone. At independence in 1961, approximately one
third of the population was literate, could read and write in either English, Mende or Temne. These efforts were complimented by Islamic schools, which taught students to read the Q'uran (Moslem holy book) in Arabic. In spite of the low levels of school attendance, Sierra Leone
has a proud history of higher education. In 1827, Fourah Bay College was founded by the Church Missionary Society. This college was the first English-media college in all of West Africa. Indeed, for almost 100 years it was the only college in British governed West Africa which offered degrees. Students came to study at Fourah Bay from as far away as Nigeria and Ghana. On April 27, 1961, Sierra Leone gained its political independence after nearly 160 years of British rule. All of Sierra Leone's neighbors in West Africa also gained their political independence from either Britain or France between 1957 and 1962.

***********************************************************************
You can read more about contemporary issues in Sierra Leone on the Current Events page of Exploring Africa. [See specifically, Diamonds and Warfare, The Africa Connection]
In addition to the information contained in the Current Events activity, you are encouraged to find out more about contemporary Sierra Leone by visiting the following web site. In addition to the information provided on this site, please use some of the links to learn more about Sierra Leone. For example, there are links to newspapers in Sierra Leone. By reading stories and reports from these newspapers, you can gain a perspective on how Sierra Leonians think about issues in their country, in Africa, and indeed in the United States.
http://www.msuglobalaccess.net/geo/africa/country.asp?ID=62.
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II. Resettling in Africa: Liberia [Map of Liberia, Info on Liberia]
Liberia was the second African country to be formed in part by Africans in the diaspora returning to Africa. The history of Liberia however, is somewhat different from that of her neighbor Sierra Leone, even though freed African slaves played an important role in the founding of both countries.
One difference in the history of these neighboring countries was that almost all the returning Africans who settled in Liberia were ex-slaves from the United States, whereas most of the returnees in Sierra Leone came from Britain, Canada and from slave ships captured by the British navy after Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807.
The second difference in the history of these two countries is more significant. Sierra Leone was formed as a colony of Britain and remained so until independence in 1961. Liberia, as you should remember from Module Seven B: African History, was one of only two countries in Africa never to be colonized by a European power. Do you remember the other African country that was not colonized?
The return of freed African slaves from the U.S was at first facilitated by the American Colonization Society (ACS). This society was formed in the early 19th century by a group of wealthy white men in the United States. The prime objective of the ACS at its founding was to locate a place in West Africa suitable for "colonization" and then to assist freed African slaves return to this area.
From the text so far you may find a couple of issues to be somewhat strange.

• First, why was the ACS founded and controlled by white men-particularly since there were freed slaves in America who were interested in returning to Africa? Clearly even freed Blacks in early 19th century America did not have the opportunity to organize and have their voices heard. In this social and political environment, sympathetic whites had to take leadership in this movement. However, while some of the leaders of the ACS were strong abolitionists who thought that a return to Africa was in the best interest of freed slaves, there were others whose motives were quite different. Part of the leadership of the ACS was composed of men who supported slavery. Can you think of any reason why they would support the return of freed blacks to Africa?
  
• Secondly, why was it called the American Colonization Society when we indicated that Liberia escaped colonization? It is true, and very important, that Liberia was not colonized by a European power as were all of its neighbors. However, the leaders of the ACS did perceive the returning Africans from the U.S. as colonists. Yes, they were returning to Africa the continent of their recent ancestors, but for most of them they would not be returning to the exact location from which their ancestors had been captured and sent to America as slaves. Moreover, the new Liberians did not settle in an empty area. Just as was the case in Sierra Leone, the returnees had to interact with the indigenous populations-thirteen ethnic groups-already living in what was to become known as Liberia. In addition, from 1847, when the African immigrants in Liberia declared their independence from the American Colonization Society and formed the Republic of Liberia, until 1980, Liberia was controlled by this community that was very small in comparison to the indigenous population. In reality, the thirteen indigenous groups had limited political and economic rights and opportunities. Consequently, some indigenous Liberians have argued that while they were never colonized by an another country, what they experienced had somewhat similar to what their neighbors experienced under direct European colonialism.

The American Colonization Society founded in 1816 sponsored the first group of African "colonists" to West Africa in 1820. Money for this initial endeavor came from three sources: support from the U.S. government, grants from wealthy white members of the ASC, and from membership subscriptions sold to freed African slaves in America. The membership fees were $30, a princely sum in the early 19th century! Yet, the ACS was able to raise $50,000 between 1816 and 1820. This demonstrates the strong support on the part of free Blacks in the U.S. to the goals of the ASC!
To facilitate the 1820 trip, the ASC purchased a ship, the Elizabeth. This first effort faced considerable difficulty. Soon after landing in what is now the north west coast of Liberia, the immigrants became very ill, and they had to retreat to Freetown, the capital of neighboring Sierra Leone. However in the following year, new groups of African immigrants arrived in West Africa, and the ASC was able to establish a permanent settlement south of Sierra Leone. They called this settlement Monrovia after the U.S. president James Monroe, and they called the colony they hoped to establish Liberia. Can you think of why they decided on the name Liberia?
Over the next three decades, the African settler population in Liberia grew steadily through continued migration from the U.S. As their population increased, the Amerio-Liberians African immigrants began to identify themselves demanded more and more autonomy from the American Colonization Society that governed Liberia. On July 26, 1847, the Liberians declared their independence from the ASC under the leadership of Joseph Roberts, who became the first president of the Republic of Liberia.
Soon after declaring its independence, Liberia was officially recognized by the United States, Haiti, and a number of European countries. This official recognition was important since it meant that the international community would respect Liberia as a sovereign country. This international recognition meant that during the Scramble for Africa (1885-1914) when Europe was colonizing the rest of Africa, no attempt was made to colonize Liberia. [See Module Seven B: History of Africa and Module Ten: African Politics]
The constitution of the independent Republic of Liberia was based on the U.S. constitution. The government was divided into three branches: the executive (president and cabinet) legislative (congress) and judicial (courts). The Americo-Liberians developed two political parties to represent their interests. These were the Republican Party and the True Whig Party. However in 1870, the True Whig Party won control of the Presidency and congress and remained in power for 110 years until 1980 when the then President William Tobert was overthrown in a military coup d'etat.
Politically, the relationship between the Liberian government and the Americo-Liberians, on the one hand, and the indigenous population on the other hand were often strained. Politically, the Americo-Liberians who never comprised more than ten per cent of the population, wanted to make sure that interests of their community were protected. This meant for most of the period between 1847 and 1980, the indigenous population had only a limited franchise. This meant that although they were in the majority, they were never able to take control of congress or to elect a president from one of the thirteen indigenous ethnic groups.
In an attempt to allow the indigenous population a voice in their own affairs, the Liberian government implemented a system of indirect rule in the rural areas. You will remember you learned about in-direct rule in Module Ten: African Politics. In this system, African ethnic groups were given some responsibility in their own local affairs. However, in-direct rule did not provide for participation in the central government where all the major decisions and policies were made.
To promote economic development in Liberia, the government encouraged a plantation system under the ownership of Americo-Liberians. Sugar and coffee were the primary plantation crops in the nineteenth century. However, while the Liberian plantations were efficiently run, there was much competition from other nations in the world market. Liberia's national economy got a boost in 1926 when the U.S. based Firestone Tire and Rubber Company opened a huge rubber plantation in Liberia. However, this investment came at a cost to Liberia. Land that was controlled by Liberia and used for the production of food crops was converted into rubber plantations. Moreover, to insure an adequate supply of labor, the Liberian government set up policies that encouraged Liberians to work very cheaply for the Firestone plantations.
While there were certainly similarities between Liberia and neighboring European colonies in the political and economic arenas, there were also fundamental differences. Unlike most colonial regimes, the Liberian government was dedicated to developing a politically and economically viable independent African state. A state in which race was not a factor. In promoting this agenda, the government supported education and health care to an extent not matched in neighboring colonies. Indeed, the first the Liberian government in the 1850s opened Liberia University, the first western style university in West Africa.
However, the Americo-Liberians believed that their community alone was capable of realizing this important vision for Liberia. This meant that the vast majority of the Liberian population felt that they were politically disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged. In the 19th century, these feelings led to a series of rebellions against the government that were suppressed. Throughout the twentieth century, opposition to the government of the True Whig Party grew. In 1980 President William Tolbert, the last Americo-Liberian president to govern Liberia, was overthrown in a military coup d'etat.
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You are encouraged to find out more about contemporary Liberia by visiting the following web site. In addition to the information provided on this site please use some of the links to learn more about Liberia. For example, there are links to newspapers in Liberia. Reading stories and reports from these newspapers you can gain a perspective on how Liberians think about issues in their country, in Africa, and indeed in the United States.
http://www.msuglobalaccess.net/geo/africa/country.asp?ID=46
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YOUR TURN

Please complete that following questions and activities. When you are finished, please place them in your Exploring Africa Web Journal.

Questions - Engage, Explore and Explain

1. Why do you think that West Africa was selected for Africans in the diaspora who wanted to return to Africa? Why not Central Africa, Southern Africa or East Africa?
2. Why did freed slaves in the U.S., Canada and Britain decide to return to Africa?
3. Why do you think that British called the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown? Why did the founders of Liberia select this name for their new country?
4. What was the nature of the relationship between the Africans who returned to help found Liberia and Sierra Leone and the indigenous peoples of these areas? What reasons can you give for nature of these relationships?

Activities: Expand

1. On a copy of a world map that your teacher will provide using a different color to show each route, draw in the routes taken by returning Africans who settled in Sierra Leone and Liberia. On your map you should label Sierra Leone, Liberia and the countries from which the freed ex-slaves came from: Britain, Canada, West Indies, and the United States. [Link to printable World Map]
2. Write a short story in which you imagine that you are a 14 year old girl or boy whose family is among the returning Africans who moved to Liberia in the middle of the 19th century. In your story, you can report on the reasons why your family decided to leave the United States, the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and settling in Liberia. You can comment on how this new life was different from the one you left behind in America.
Go to Activity 7 or select from the other activities in this module:
1. Africans in Mexico
2. Africans in India
3. Africans in Brazil
4. Africans in Canada
5. Africans in England
6. The Return to Sierra Leone & Liberia
7. Summary-Africa in a Global World
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