Bitter Canaan

Story of the Negro Republic

Charles S. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000675955
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: History

A neglected classic, unpublished until now, Bitter Canaan is a historical-sociological account of Liberian society. Written in 1930 and revised in 1948 by the influential, pioneering black sociologist Charles S. Johnson, it has remained talked about but unknown. Founded in 1821, Liberia was conceived as a haven for freed American slaves. Johnson traces the historical development of American race relations that lead to the emigration of thousands of blacks to Liberia. The struggles in leaving America and settling the African wilderness are detailed. He shows how a Liberian nationality evolved and how the social, economic, and politi-cal foundations of the nascent state affected its history. His critical study of American corporate intervention in Liberian society in the twentieth century has the flair of contemporary political analysis.

PART I INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780429336157-1

1 Passage to Africa

DOI: 10.4324/9780429336157-2

Tenerife juts suddenly out of a vast plain of ocean like a black convulsion. Once an outpost of civilization, Spanish and isolated, it lives behind a moving world of ships. By day swarthy south Europeans move languidly about in a mellow glow of heat fanned from the tropics. Days fade quickly, and at night the lights, viewed from shipboard, are like glittering fireflies impaled on a dark mound. It is here that spring suddenly becomes summer and summer an intensity of humid heat.

Far out over the green surface of quivering water, where the sky touches, there is a film of fog—all day, without change. The sailors, quiet and intent, move about eternally scrubbing and painting or, grimy and black, twist at heavy machinery. Canvas tops are threaded and tied into knots that will resist a tornado. Now it is an African sea, smooth with little bubbiing white tufts, and the gentle but treacherous blandishment of the sun. Two days later we are slipping through an oily sea. The tiny waves have ceased to cavort. Instead, there are only long swells of heaving water, streaks of turbulence. The color has changed from green to foggy gray. The sun, blanketed in its threatening mist, has robbed the waves of their color. The atmosphere is heavy and depressing. The deck, washed as usual at daybreak, is not dry at noon. Then, night again in the dreary monotony of water.

Freetown

The pounding of the engines ceases. Across the way there are lights. It is curiously quiet without the audible, throbbing heart of the vessel and the splash of the waves. A Black official appears, clothed in the blue coat and brass buttons of authority. He moves about the first mate’s quarters, studying charts. Another in khaki asks with matter-of-fact crispness for passports. Here, one ventures, is Britain’s new colonial technique. There are no Whites in evidence except as visitors and passengers. The boat crew is waiting for something. Then a soft, deep swishing of the water back in the darkness, and someone remarks, “The Krus are coming.”

Since Europeans first came down the coast these Krus have been their aids, as vital to transportation as the lighthouse and the surf boats. Even when slaves were being snatched from Africa the Kru boatmen negotiated the last brief but treacherous passage from shore to ship. They are still the eternal liaison with Africa. A huge tugboat with padded prow, its cabin high in the air, crawls through the water with slow dignity. It is piloted by an extravagantly dressed Black native in white, and tows a tandem of flat-top lighters. Standing stiff and erect on the prow of the first of these, like some fantastic masthead, is another Black, a band about his head, loose and flowing smock, wide trousers reaching to the calf of his leg, and a coil of rope on his arm. Behind him is a group, some sitting, some standing, all alert and straining their eyes upward, like one of the mass scenes from the modern theatre. Behind this lighter another and behind that still another, with its crew posturing near the prow, drawn along in slow procession by the tug, dipping and swaying across the waves.

From the ship two sharp beams of light streak down, throwing queer shadows of the moving mass of men against the bottom of the lighter. Across the way other streaks of faint light from the cabins of an anchored ship pattern the water with dancing yellow stripes. The boat crew clambers up the side of the boat, a jolly and noisy lot, and once aboard fall into casual postures, as if merely coming aboard were the object and end of all the excitement.

There is an endless diversity of dress within the limits of a few garments, and in these one sees the first half-absorbed stock in Europe. There is one in blue smock and another in khaki shorts and a felt hat, another with kerchief bound turban fashion under his hat. Some are in blue denims, some in linens, undershirts, sun helmets, sleeve holders. They talk in Kru dialect, which seems to have been made for deep voices and leisured conversation. The headboys and foreman rush about with preposterously wide gestures of concern and give their orders to the truly casual laborers in the familiar pidgin English of the coast. It is curious for its unexpected omission of violent invectives: “Come, come with me,” one would shout with profane decorum, “Open these hatches!” “No! Go!” A ship without the Kru boys is a ship foundered in sight of land.

The unimaginative English have given, characteristically, blunt substance to colony building, even though at the expense of beauty and comfort as measured either by European or African standards. The imposing cement structure of the Government House with its high arches and ostentatious screening, is the heavy and immovable hand of the Empire itself. The streets are level, with deep gorges on either side to carry off the water. There are stretches of dwellings constructed of heavy metal, rows of “cabin tenements,” painted red, with high doors opening up the entire front, veritable boxes, utterly devoid of grace or comfort. They are effective shelter; the materials are durable and transportable, but they fit neither into native lifestyles nor into the needs and moods of the people. The government hospital, the mission, and the cemetery are conclusive enough symbols of the blessings of civilization. Native vendors sit patiently behind their stands exposing cheap trinkets, tobacco, rice, and spices for their shillings—shaded by Sunlight Soap advertisements or cinema signs offering the incongruous art of Constance Talmadge. Native women with rigid spines and grossly animated hips weave in and out, bedecked in excessively brilliant kerchiefs and blouses, the gift of European cotton mills. Westmoreland Street runs with shabby dignity through a row of Kru huts. Syrian merchants sit back in shops with full open fronts, tempting foreign tastes with flaming gewgaws of incredible inutility. In the shadow of the hotel a gangrenous native woman, toothless and brazen, employs flip phrases of solicitation, borrowed whole, it would seem, from the port towns of Europe. On the curb sits a derelict White man, stupid with trade gin, receptive but incompetent.

The descendants of repatriated sons of Africa under the British are referred to as Creoles, and one may find a third generation of literates. As a coaling and military station, Freetown has offered jobs of a sort enough to turn attention away from agriculture. The Black “darks” come near to representing the intellect and aristocracy of Casely Heygood, who died during the very month of this visit. The most dismal commentary of the future of Africa is the assumption of certain Britishers, from which they appear to take some satisfaction, that these Creoles and occasional natives have in all probability reached the highest point to which the African Black can aspire.

Monrovia

The view of Monrovia from the sea is perhaps its only advantageous aspect. The sun flashes brilliantly against red roofs set in green foliage. The houses, gleaming white and elevated, take on an arched dignity as they spread in hazy outline along the uneven but graceful contour of Cape Mesurado.

Incident

Tuwely Jeh, tall, bronzed, and magnificent, came from a proud family of tribal rulers famed for their unfailing courage and justice and their sustained eras of peaceful security, as well as for their imperial dignity which lent barbaric splendor to the long history of the tribe. Many generations before they had joined the trek westward, which continued until they found themselves triumphantly at the ocean’s edge, where they settled. When civilization came to Africa, Jeh’s people called themselves the Webbos.

Near the mouth of the Poo River, where Europeans in the early nineteenth century had set up their slave factories, was another tribe of the same Kru family, designated simply and separately as the Poo River people. They could “hear” the Webbo dialect, as they could “hear” the Grebo speech, but they disdained speaking either. When they found themselves in the line of the Webbos’ natural outlet from the back country to the sea, they capitalized on this advantage and imposed heavy tolls on the Webboes for the privilege of using it.

In recent years these tribes had learned to settle their differences and keep the peace by arbitration and treaties. One bargain was that the Webbos, in return for palm nuts and oil, piassava, and wild rubber, should be permitted to pass unmolested through the Poo River country to Cape Palmas, a seaport and new center of trade. But truces are White men’s brittle tools for keeping the peace—not African—and so it happened again and again that Webbo men going alone to market through the Poo River country were attacked and killed. But not only men were attacked; it even happened that two women traveling unprotected were killed. These outrages were nursed as bitter memories, and there was no Webbo youth who did not cherish the hope of some day avenging these deaths and even notching two for one on the handle of his cutlass.

Since the coming of the Black Americans, the Webbos’ guns had been taken away, their age-old methods of settling their differences stiffly penalized, and their proud chiefs humbled and confused by strange courts of law. With each insult they had appealed to these new laws and, just as often, got impatient replies about being weaklings and eternal nuisances to civilized government.

A Poo River man one day landed from his canoe on the Webbo side of the river. Strolling casually on the beach, he came upon a dead fish that had been washed ashore. Excited by his find, he yelled across the river to announce it. This was either thoughtlessness or brazen insolence, and the Webbo fisherman who heard him relieved him of his find, arguing reasonably enough that, since they had set the traps and the fish had landed on their side, it rightfully belonged to them. Swiftly the old feud flared anew. The Poo River men, seeing one of their own in trouble, swam the river to his defense. A fierce struggle followed and continued into the night, resulting in the Poo River people recovering the fish but losing one of their men. At daybreak the contest was revived with blows, taunts, and arguments, and the Webbo people were accused of a cowardly murder. From such a base charge Jeh’s people recoiled in soberness, suggesting that the man was probably lost and would turn up again eventually. The Poo River people taunted: “You are cowards. When we kill one of your men, at least we have the grace to dump him on your side for ceremonial burial. You should be men enough to show our man after you have killed him. We showed you seven." The passions of the Webbo men broke loose with this last insult, and they fell upon the Poo River men and with their bare hands beat two of them to death.

This incident, trivial in itself in the life of the tribe and in the affairs of the smallest of states, developed into national proportions involving the full fabric of the government of Liberia and, because of the frequent interrelation of world economics and diplomacy, eventually came to engage the ponderous attention of the League of Nations.

This is how it happened: The Liberian Commissioner of the Kru coast, when he learned of the incident, summoned King Jeh and sixty of his subchiefs. He ordered his soldiers to strip them and bind them with ropes. They were then flung across the road and lashed into the proper preliminary respect for his authority.

He called the swollen and bleeding Jeh before him and imposed a personal fine of 100 pounds and, on behalf of the government, he sent out his soldiers to apprehend the murderers. They picked up seven natives at random and brought them in. The commissioner then dismissed the chiefs and closed the incident.

Gaping and incredulous, the seven native youths were turned over to the county superintendent, who was also a recruiter of native labor and who shortly afterward became vice-president of the republic. This gentleman was about to send them the way of all stray natives when it was mentioned that a goodly sum of money had been paid to the commissioner. His brows puckered and the case took on more seriousness. The law had been offended, the chiefs had defied its dignity in an intricately pernicious fashion. Jeh was rearrested and impressed with the seriousness of his “rebellion” against the authority. He had to get lawyers immediately.

“But,” protested Jeh, “I don’t know a lawyer in Cape Palmas.” The superintendent magnanimously named three, two of them senators and one the county attorney. He ordered Jeh to go home and bring 100 pounds for these gentlemen. Jeh called together his elders and the sum was finally collected in shilling pieces which his boys had saved from coast labor. He paid this over but was immediately sent back for 300 pounds more. This new sum Jeh borrowed from traders, thereby exhausting all further credit. He was released again. The incident reached the president of the republic, who, in his turn, reopened the case, called Jeh to Monrovia, imposed a new fine of 300 pounds on behalf of the government, and demanded that Jeh produce the murderers on penalty of having his towns destroyed. Jeh was then placed in prison until the new sums could be collected.

Tarplah and Karpeh, the two faithful attendants of the chief, were sent home from Monrovia to collect the 300 pounds. They were met at Cape Palmas by the superintendent who knew that Jeh’s money was gone and his credit exhausted because he had been responsible for both. Playing upon the tribe’s affection for its chief, he offered to borrow the funds, provided they agreed to turn over to him, without the necessity for chase and capture, 500 boys to be sent away to the Spanish island of Fernando Poo. The messengers demurred, because their men bitterly opposed going to this place from which so few ever returned. Besides, they were not empowered in native law to make agreements for the chief. Finally, the superintendent forced an agreement with the threat of further fines and punishment, and ordered the Spanish ship Mont Serrat to call at the Webbos' narrow outlet to the sea. Here the ship rested and awaited the delivery of the men. At midnight they had not arrived, and the beach town saved itself from destruction by marching its entire population aboard to be held hostage until the interior villages yielded enough men. At daybreak the broken subchiefs marched 316 of their young men down to the ship. The superintendent received fifty dollars for each man landed alive at Fernando Poo.

When Jeh returned from Monrovia, he found great consternation and grief in his towns. His women were weeping, his elders in melancholy council, and his strong men had been carried away. “What!” he exclaimed, “they break our country.” They told him of the demand for 500 more. “They cannot go. It will destroy our country,” he shouted desperately and as it turned out, fatally. The protest so vexed the superintendent that he sent his soldiers into the land of the Webbos to chastise this insolence and capture the men he needed. Under a dashing young captain, the Frontier Forces executed a clever and overwhelming maneuver. Quietly leaving the Cape, they marched peacefully through the Webbo towns from Cape Palmas to Julacan, the extreme border town of the section, and there they rested. When night came, they prepared as if to continue their decorous journey and, on a signal, fell suddenly upon the unguarded village, throwing it into a screaming panic. The younger men, swiftly comprehending the purpose behind this strategy, dashed madly through the lashing whips and swinging rifle butts and concealed themselves deep in the bush. The older men of the town, the traditionally respected elders, were caught, tied, flogged, and finally marched as hostages back toward the Cape.

The Frontier soldiers, who lived chiefly by plunder, being then more than nine years in arrears in pay, helped themselves to the town’s cattle, fowl, and rice, while the commander imposed arbitrary fines as his share of the spoils. The raids were repeated in Obankin, Soloken, Jalateh, Kordor, Webbo Beach, and the men taken back to the Cape, leaving women and children panic-stricken and weeping in their trails “What be this matter!” the bewildered subchief Martin cried. “Be this more Fernando Poo palaver? The first men gone; 500. Why you not let me know you come for more?”

To impress the old men, the soldiers flogged them and required them to carry the captured goats on the long march until their arms were paralyzed with fatigue. These old men then were held hostage and required to work on the private farms of government officials until the younger men for exportation returned from the bush and surrendered. The ship sailed again with another cargo of “boys” consigned to the Sindicato Agrícola de los Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea.

The “boy" traffic, so old to most Liberians that its stark angles have been blunted through familiarity, came eventually to the notice of the world. Despite a prevailing callousness to native interest in its own right, it became impossible for the nation to escape the blight of so vast and sustained an exploitation of its labor, an exploitation that stripped the country of its manpower while its monetary returns dulled the conscience of the state. The traffic revived the horrors of slavery itself and involved in intricate meshes the economic and colonial policies throughout Africa. That the Republic of Liberia became the focus of protest is a further incident, given the irony that this republic is itself a colony of ex-slaves. But to understand the charges and the presence of slavery, forced labor, and Black imperialism in the Republic of Liberia, it is first necessary to understand Liberia. And this is another long story.

Note

• This chapter was omitted from the final draft, M.H. Johnson to Mrs. Allen, May 27, 1944, box 411, folder 12, Charles S. Johnson Special Collection, Fisk University.

2 Exodus

DOI: 10.4324/9780429336157-3

Get thee from out of this land, And return to the land of thy kindred.

On February 4, 1820, the 2,000-ton frigate Elizabeth lay rigid and motionless all day in the icy North River, at the edge of Rector Street in the city of New York. Throughout the night, numb hands, hacking patiently but to no avail, fought the unyielding ice of one of the city's worst storms. Morning came, but the fury of the night had only gripped the ship more securely. No voyage outward from New York had ever been less auspicious in its beginning; none had been more blindly speculative nor more dismal in its first prospect. None had been compounded of stranger motives, for this was a voyage embarked upon by the first Black emigrants to Liberia. They were the Black freedmen, fugitives and manumitted slaves, and political remnants of a new American republic which had been fed and fostered by their tough hands; they were the objects of noble pity by those Fathers who so recently had struck a blow for their own freedom. These emigrants were going somewhere—home. What irony that in their bold launching they could not free themselves from the icy grip of America!

Crowds gathered during the second day to watch the little band of Blacks strain at the ice locks under the futile guidance of three White men, agents of the American Colonization Society and of the United States government. Into the crowd of onlookers strolled Cornelius Vanderbilt the First, rugged, bearded, and young, captain on a steam ferry running between New York and New Brunswick. He knew ships and he knew the New York harbor. He had ferried produce and passengers between New York and Staten Island, and had provisioned the vast fortification projects in the harbor. After watching the men's vain efforts for a while he turned away. As he threaded his way out of the crowd he commented: “They are not doing that right. I could get them out in no time.” Someone told the agent who, in desperation, followed him. The captain’s knowledge, however, was not without price: For $100 he made a sliding platform of plain boards on which he rested a heavy anchor. This was pushed forward toward the thin ice until it broke through. Eventually a path was cut and the ship was freed. Then silently it turned its prow eastward and headed out to the sea.

There was something bitterly valiant about this sailing. Here was compulsion sustained by blind hope; here was a slave’s dull dream of freedom and of an empire about to take substance. Here was reluctant escape and adventure and the beckoning of other men's ideals, a challenge of the ability to rule of Blacks who had never yet been citizens. Here was a leavetaking impelled strangely and sternly by the first mutterings of a new spirit in the New World. Here was the first forewarning breath of a conflict that split a nation.

The year 1820 was weighted with ominous portents. The back of the slave traffic had been broken by an aroused world conscience. In 1806 England had checked its slave traffic to the West Indies and had turned its eyes toward the buried wealth of India and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introductory Essay: Bitter Canaan’s Historical Backdrop
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The Waters of Marah
• Epilogue: An Interpretation of Charles S. Johnson’s Life and Works
• Appendix: Ten Men
• Bibliography
• Index