Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film

A Study in Globalectics

Lokangaka Losambe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000532906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Literaturkritik

This book chronicles the rise and the development of postcolonial agency since Africa's encounter with Western modernity through African and African diaspora literature and film.

Using African and African diasporic imaginaries (creative writings, autobiographies, polemical writings, and filmic media), the author shows how African subjects have resisted enslavement and colonial domination over the past centuries, and how they have sought to reshape "global modernity". Authors and film makers whose works are examined in detail include Olaudah Equiano, Haile Gerima, Amma Asante, George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, Wole Soyinka, Dani Kouyaté, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Leila Aboulela.

Providing a critical study of nativism, hybridity and post-hybrid conjunctive consciousness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African and African diasporic literature, history, and cultural studies.

IIThe Black American stranger and postcolonial agency in AfricaThe Congo narrative

2The anti-enslavement/-colonial activistGeorge Washington Williams (1849–1891)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429322426-5

George Washington Williams was born on October 16, 1849 in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania. Although free blacks, his father Thomas Williams and mother Ellen Rouse struggled to garner enough resources to provide a good education for their children. George Williams, therefore, joined the Union Army in 1864 at the age of fourteen (with an assumed name and a falsified age statement). As John Hope Franklin remarks, at that time, “For a young black male with no education and few marketable skills, the army appeared to be one of the most attractive of the few options open to him” (1998:6). After the civil war (and following his brief adventurous stint with General Espinosa’s republican forces that fought to dethrone Emperor Maximilian in Mexico), Williams reenlisted in the United States Army until September 1868. Thereafter, he enrolled at Howard University (a historically black university) before moving to the Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts in 1870. For four years in Newton, Williams combined his studies with social activism and became well known in the circle of high-profile members of the black community in Boston. In November 1873, he spoke at a meeting organized by “the colored citizens of Boston” to denounce what they termed “the general mistreatment of blacks in the South” (Franklin 1998:12), and in December 1873, he sent a letter to the New National Era, a Washington newspaper edited by the social activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, urging black people in the whole country to support the then forthcoming Washington convention that was to advocate a speedy passage of the civil rights bill. Before the convention, Williams had already been in contact with prominent black activists and writers in many parts of the country, including J. Sella Martin of Washington and James M. Trotter of Boston. On June 2, 1874, he married Sarah A. Sterretts in Chicago and became the first black student to graduate from Newton Theological Institution on June 10, 1874. A day after his graduation, Williams was ordained as a Baptist minister in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Pastoring for racial and social justice in America

The excellent, foundational liberal education that Williams received at Newton, together with his personal experiences as a black soldier in the United States Army and as a social activist, focused his interest on a profound exploration of black people’s history and on a social vision of Christianity that could actively promote the common kinship of humanity. The mentors who played a great influence in shaping his critical thought at Newton include Galusha Anderson who publicly spoke against slavery and later became the president of the old University of Chicago, and Herman Lincoln who taught him church history.

Williams’s first public articulation of his desire to see the spread of Christianity to Africa and the end of Africans’ enslavement came out in the valedictory speech he gave to his classmates, faculty, and invited guests at the 1874 commencement. The title of his address was “Early Christianity in Africa.” He started off his address by pointing out the painful travail that accompanied the rise and spread of Christianity in Africa with early leaders such as Athanasius, Origen, Cyprian, Tertullian, and Augustine. Then, he proceeded to indict the greedy Western world for hampering the march of Christianity through their inhumane and immoral preoccupation with the enslavement of Africans. Williams concluded his speech by asserting the validity of the theory of “manifest destiny” or “providential design” (Jacobs 1982:16) for African Americans in relation to the evangelization and modernization of Africa:

For nearly three centuries Africa has been robbed of her sable sons. For nearly three centuries they have toiled in bondage, unrequited in this youthful republic of the west. They have grown from a small company to be an exceedingly great people—five millions in number no longer chattel, they are human beings; no longer bondsmen, they are free men, with almost every civil disability[…].With his Saxon brother, the African slakes his insatiable thirstings for knowledge at the same fountain[…].The Negro of this country can turn to his Saxon brothers, and say, as Joseph said to his brethren who wickedly sold him, “As for you, ye meant it unto evil, but God meant it unto good, that we, after learning your arts and sciences, might return to Egypt and deliver the rest of our brethren who are yet in the house of bondage.” That day will come!

(Williams, June 10, 1874)

Williams continued to uphold this vision when he was appointed the pastor of the Boston Twelfth Baptist Church, following the death of its famous pastor and his Christian mentor Leonard Grimes. In the introductory sermon he gave to church, he said about Africa:

My heart loves that land, and my soul is proud of it. It has been the dream of my youth that that country would be saved by the colored people of this country. And my heart is more hopeful today than at any previous period.

(Williams 1874:60–61)

The sense of activism for racial and social justice that Williams developed while in Newton no doubt guided his action in his versatile professional career as a Baptist clergyman, a journalist, a historian, and a politician in the United States and as an explorer in Africa. The passage of the civil rights bill in March 1875 brought a sense of hope for African Americans throughout the country, and Williams seized that opening to move his activism from the confines of the Baptist church to a more far-reaching public arena. He then decided to resign from his position as pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston and move to Washington D.C. to found a journal that would educate Black Americans about their struggle, rights, and possibilities in the United States. Williams articulated the goals of his project in a letter he wrote to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on July 24, 1875:

The time has come when the Negro must do something. […] This is a plastic period. The Negro will begin to make history. What manner of history will it be? That is the question. […] To this end I go to Washington and edit a journal. It will be their teacher, their friend, their mirror. As a teacher it will discuss educational and social problems; as a friend it will lead them from the political arena to the firm foundations on enlightened citizenship and nobler manhood; as a mirror it will reflect the virtue, genius, and industry of the emancipated millions of this country.

(Williams 1875, July 24)

With the endorsement and financial support of the Washington Black elite that included the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (whose newspaper the New National Era had just ended) and the poet Langston Hughes’s uncle John Mercer Langston (dean of the Law School and vice president of Howard University), Williams founded a weekly journal The Commoner and thus filled in the vacuum left behind by the demise of the New National Era. He published a sample in September 1875, and it was well received. He then travelled throughout the country promoting the journal as the mouthpiece of the black people’s cause. During his travels in Southern States (Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi), Williams saw firsthand racial violence perpetrated against Black Americans and deplored the unraveling failure of the American Reconstruction project in his lectures and subsequent journal editorials. In his public lectures, Williams emphasized the importance of what he called “the Agencies of Race Organization” in the development of a collective Black American subjectivity. The maiden issue of the journal appeared on November 6, 1875, but it folded after only seven other issues due to a lack of financial support from its subscribers (mostly working-class Black Americans).

Following the collapse of his journal, Williams accepted an invitation to pastor the Union Baptist Church of Cincinnati in Ohio and was inaugurated on March 2, 1876. As he did in Boston with Twelfth Baptist Church, here, he also successfully integrated the gospel mission of the church with social activism and expanded the church membership exponentially. He continued to give public lectures on his cherished themes of “The Agencies of Race Organization,” the contributions and sacrifices of black soldiers in the Union Army, and the anti-colonial struggle of the 18th-century black leader of the Haitian revolution Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803). He also used liberal-leaning newspapers like The Cincinnati Commercial to advocate better social conditions and civil rights for the black people in Ohio and the rest of the country. In August 1876, Williams became a member of the executive committee of the Colored Protective Association, an organization that fought for the civil rights of the black folks in Cincinnati. He remained an astute pastor and social activist until December 1, 1877, when he resigned from the Union Baptist Church in order to devote more time to his law studies and political activities as a member of the Republican Party. After two years of political campaign and social activism punctuated by public lectures that promoted the interests of black people and those of the Republican Party in Cincinnati, Williams was elected to represent Hamilton County of Cincinnati in the Ohio House of Representatives. He took his seat on January 5, 1880 and immediately went to work. During the first legislative session, Williams sponsored progressive bills such as the one on the regulation of the police power in Cincinnati and the other that sought to repeal the act against interracial marriage that the Ohio legislature had passed in 1861. Although the latter bill did not pass, the debate on it certainly refocused the attention of the Ohio legislators and the public on the inhumanity of that racist law.

Williams had already gained prominence as a champion of black people’s rights and a staunch member of the then liberal Republican Party when he declined to seek reelection to the Ohio legislature. Between 1881 and 1885, Williams spent most of his time researching black people’s history and giving public lectures on the retrogressive stance of Southern States to the projects of Emancipation and Reconstruction in America. His research project resulted in the publication of his two landmark books on Black American history, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (1885) and A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1887). From 1884 to 1889, Williams continued to crisscross the country giving lectures and worked hard to secure an appointment as the United States diplomatic representative to Haiti (after being nominated for the post by the outgoing Republican President Arthur and confirmed by United States Senate). When he finally lost his bid for that diplomatic post to Frederick Douglass, Williams turned his attention to the persistent, inhuman slave trade that continued to take place in Africa. He called on the United States government and the American people to fight against it, and on September 28, 1889, he sailed to Europe in order to attend an antislavery conference in Brussels as a reporter for S.S. McClure’s Associated Literary Press.¹ The conference was held on November 18, 1889, and it brought together delegates from seventeen countries that sought to end the slave trade.

Crusading against black people’s enslavement and colonial brutality

In Brussels, Williams made useful contacts with influential individuals who had interests in the Congo Free State, including King Leopold II with whom he had an interview, the American railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington, and Henry S. Sanford, a former United States minister to Belgium, who (from a racist and segregationist stance) encouraged Black Americans to move to Africa and “civilize” the continent. At the end of their interview, both King Leopold and Williams came out with favorable opinions of each other. Williams, like Alexander Crummel and John J. Coles (see Walter Williams 1982:134–135) before him, bought into King Leopold’s ostensibly proclaimed philanthropic mission in the Congo. According to him, during the interview, King Leopold proudly stated that the Belgian people had two motives in occupying the Congo: “One is trade and commerce, which is selfish…and the other is to bring the means and blessings of Christian civilization to Africa, which is noble” (quoted in Franklin: 1998:181). In turn, Williams succeeded in persuading the King to allow Black American low-level professionals to join in his administration in the Congo Free State as laborers and office workers.

Captain Albert Thys, the chief administrative officer of the Belgian Commercial Companies in the Congo Free State, also welcomed Williams’ proposal and commissioned him (with a monthly salary of $150) to go ahead and recruit a number of Black American clerks, carpenters, engineers, and mechanics. Williams enthusiastically returned to the United States and arrived in New York on December 9, 1889 to carry out the mission. Shortly thereafter, he visited and addressed students and faculty at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) but failed to persuade skeptical young Black Americans to join the Congo project. After only spending three weeks in the United States, Williams returned to Belgium. As he returned to Europe without the promised Black American recruits for the Belgian Commercial Companies, Williams’ contract was terminated by Albert Thys. King Leopold, who had been in the meantime informed of Williams’ political activism in the United States (probably by Henry Sanford), also became reluctant to support his trip to and stay in the Congo Free State. However, determined to fulfill what he and many other Black American activists of his time saw as a “Providential Design” mission for the development of Africa, he sought assistance from other sources. Franklin states:

Even without a commission from King Leopold and the Belgian Commercial Companies, Williams had sufficient assignments to make a visit to the Congo worthwhile. He would visit as much of the country as possible in order to give President Harrison a detailed report on the state of affairs there, as he promised. He would write a series of letters to the Associated Literary Press to be distributed to its subscribing newspapers, pursuant to his commission from S. S. McClure. He would also look at the route of the proposed Congo Railway and make a report, presumably to Collis P. Huntington, regarding its feasibility.

(Franklin 1998:188)

King Leopold’s withdrawal of his support for Williams (he denied him access to any of the state vessels) turned out to be salutary for the latter in the end as it enabled him to carry out an independent investigation on the activities of the Congo Free State administration and its treatment of the Congolese natives. Upon receiving the financial assistance he had solicited from Collis Huntington (£100), who was keen to secure a railroad construction in the Congo, Williams wasted no time to get ready for his exploratory journey to Africa. In the letter that he enclosed with the check, Huntington wrote to Williams:

I hope all will go well with you in your new field of work, and shall await with interest your first letter giving impressions of the Congo country. I think you are well qualified to enlighten Americans upon this subject – particularly as to the actual condition and extent of civilization of the native population, concerning which I believe much misapprehension exists.

(Huntington 1890, January 7)

On January 30, 1890, Williams sailed from Liverpool for the ...