Whitehall and the Black Republic

A Study of Colonial Britain's Attitude Towards Liberia, 1914–1939

Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319704753
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319704760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book examines the history of the relationship between Liberia and Britain—the world's first black republic, founded by former slaves, and the world's strongest colonial power. Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri excavates a wealth of archival sources to reconstruct a turbulent narrative spanning key points in twentieth-century Liberian history. Pal Chaudhuri argues that the Black Republic was never a serious item on the British agenda for constructive action in West Africa, as seen in the repeated failure of their concessionaires, their interference with the Firestone rubber project, and their efforts to have Liberia expelled from the League of Nations. Untangling the conflicts and contradictions between Britain's colonial interests and humanitarian ideals, Whitehall and the Black Republic is a long overdue contribution to the history of Liberia and the British Empire.

© The Author(s) 2018

J. Pal ChaudhuriWhitehall and the Black RepublicAfrican Histories and Modernitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70476-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Outline of the Past

Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri¹

(1)

Kolkata, India

End Abstract

Liberia is located on the south-west coast of West Africa, covers a land area variously reported as measuring between 37,950 and 43,000 square miles and is home to about 3.7 million people. Geographically, it is in the forest belt which extends inland into the savanna from the coast of West Africa. The southern shores of Liberia are washed by the Atlantic Ocean and are 350 miles long, although the maximum inland distance to the north is only 170 miles.¹ Beyond the savanna lies the Sahara Desert separating black Africa (usually referred to as sub-Saharan Africa) from North Africa inhabited mostly by the Arabs. Arab travellers and writers referred to sub-Saharan Africa as Bilad al-Sudan, land of the “black man”. Beginning in the eighth century C.E., great kingdoms were established in western and central Sudan, referred to as the Sudanic Kingdoms, with centralized administration, a standing army, excellent law and order, and flourishing trade with merchants of North Africa. The Arab authors called the first of these Ghana (the land of the gold), the successor state was called Mali and the third was known as Songhai . The area the kings of these great states controlled varied from time to time but was confined within the southern limits of the desert in the north and the northern limits of the forest in the south, the Atlantic Ocean in the west and Lake Chad in the east. As in the Sudanic Kingdoms, in Abyssinia there was the Axumite Kingdom and later in southern Africa the Mwanamutapa Empire which had all the paraphernalia of centralized states. The polity of the rest of black Africa was different. There, the political institutions commonly associated with the “state” were noticeably absent. Historians and anthropologists use the expression “stateless society” or “acephalous society” to describe it. An acephalous society had a minimal government without any recognized authority who could make a decision and enforce it. Order was maintained in the society not by institutions but by consensus. There were other societies where the political units were small and controlled by chiefs who ran the administration with the advice and help from councils of elders. Most ethnic groups that resided in the region, now known as Liberia, had, with some variations, this third type of polity.

By and large, the inhabitants of this area spoke dialects that belonged to three language groups: the Mel, the Mende and the Kwa. The Kissi and the Gola, residents of western and north-western Liberia, belong to the Mel group. The Vai, Malinki, Mende, Loma, Gio and Kpelle belong to the Mende group, and the Kru, Bassa, Grebo, Krahn and Dey belong to the Kwa group.

There is a tendency among many ethnic groups to invoke autochthonal status while talking about the period of their stay in a particular region vis-à-vis other groups. The obvious purpose is to legitimize their claim over land as opposed to the claim of others. In the context of this region, the Gola claim to be the earliest inhabitants seems to have some takers among historians.² We do not wish to go into any detailed study of the chronology of the arrival of various groups, as the theme is outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that there were several waves of migration of various groups from the adjoining areas into this area at different times and as a result of different factors.³ The African past had witnessed the Bantu migration and Nilotic migration where thousands of miles were traversed by migrants. Compared with those, the migrations into this region were much smaller in magnitude and in the distance they covered. Perhaps two factors prompted them to migrate. First, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the Atlantic coast had become lucrative for trade because of the frequent visits of the Portuguese and other European merchants. The lure of trade, for natural reasons, drew them closer to the coast, although many authors doubt that the volume was large enough to keep European interest in this region alive.

Second, the dismemberment of the Songhai Empire by the Moroccan invasion at the battle of Tondibi (1591) destabilized the southern savanna region and forced many groups to seek new pastures further afield.

The visits of the Portuguese merchants to the coast of West Africa were actually the culmination of a process that started much earlier, in 1415, when Prince Henry, a younger son of the Portuguese king, was appointed governor of Ceuta, which Portugal had captured. Henry, the Navigator, as the young prince was known, organized systematic exploration of the west coast of Africa by Portuguese ships. Soon other seafaring European countries joined and a large part of the West African coast became the favourite haunt of the European traders. For convenience, they used new nomenclature to geographically divide the West African coast. The coast from Cape Blanco to Sierra Leone was referred to as Upper Guinea, and the stretch from Sierra Leone to Cameroon was known as Lower Guinea. Lower Guinea was subdivided into four sections, each named after a principal export. The section which corresponds to modern Liberia was called the Grain Coast from the “grains of paradise” of Malagueta pepper which this region offered the European traders. Similarly, Ivory Coast and Gold Coast received new names, and, later on, the area between the River Volta and the Niger delta came to be known as the Slave Coast according to the items the respective regions supplied to the Europeans.⁴

As we mentioned earlier, the unstable political situation in the savanna and the lure of trade on the coast attracted many ethnic groups to the Grain Coast, although the waves of their migration hit the Grain Coast at different times. These brought the Dyula, Moslem traders of Malinki origin who, in turn, converted the Vai to Islam. In the northern and central parts of Liberia, a pattern of loose confederation developed among several clans. Such confederations, however, proved to be ephemeral. Consequently, the centre of power shifted. The Condo Confederation comprising the Gbandi, Loma, Kpelle, Vai, Dey and Gola was controlled by the Malinki. It was formed in the eighteenth century and had Boporo as the major centre.⁵

In the south-eastern part of Liberia, especially along the coastal strip, the major ethnic groups were the Bassa, Kru and Grebo. They were busy with agriculture, although the Kru preferred to work as seamen on European ships. The trade movement between the coast and the interior, however, was very limited. The Grain Coast did not have the items which the Europeans sought during the period of legitimate trade, nor did it figure prominently as a centre of supply of slaves. According to Professor A.J. Hopkins, it was only after the coming of Firestone in Liberia in 1926 that Liberia found a permanent and successful item of export.⁶

Rivalry in trade and competing claims over “right of way” to the coast created tension and conflict, but as Warren L. D’Azavedo states, “intertribal relations during this early period were characterized by intensive population mixture through marriage, migration, conquest and slavery. The multiplicity of temporary federations reinforced regionally effective institutions such as the Poro secret societies and tended to unite sections of different tribal groups under what were to become historically validated common traditions and alliances. Despite the profusion of languages, and the wide range of types of social organization, there is a high degree of cultural homogeneity and sectional traditions which often supersede local group solidarity and antedate the further integrative effect of colonial and national policy”.⁷

We just mentioned that the Grain Coast did not figure prominently during the Atlantic slave trade as it was not an important centre of supply of slaves. The Atlantic slave trade, however , had a great impact on this region in a different way.

The slave trade had landed a large number of Africans in the New World. For obvious reasons, North America had a considerable share of this black population. Historians have been debating the approximate number. Professor Philip D. Curtin⁸ puts it at about 9,300,000, although Robert Kuczynski talks in terms of over 14 million arriving in America and Basil Davidson is convinced that it cost Africa at least fifty million souls.

West Indian scholar Hilary Macdonald Beckles, in his book Slave Voyages: The Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans,⁹ gives an interesting picture of the number that present-day historians have arrived at through their research on the transatlantic slave trade. According to him, “Curtin’s figures have generated considerable debate, particularly among scholars who view them as being too conservative, though such critics themselves have tended to make only moderate upward adjustments. Paul Lovejoy’s 1989 calculations, for example, give a figure of 11,863,000 for Africans being sold into the transatlantic trade, with about 10.2 million arriving in the New World”. Joseph Inikori , a critic of Curtin’s calculation, offered a larger global figure of 12,689,000 in 1998 yet was keen to point out that “this figure has been contested by more scholars, and while the process of revision continues, it seems probable that the ultimate figure is unlikely to be less than 12 million or more than 20 million captives exported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade”. In 1995, Per O. Hernaes offered figures 100,000 in excess of Inikori , and in 2000, David Eltis presented a calculation that showed a total of 11,062,000 departures.

Britain declared the slave trade illegal in 1807 and the USA the year after. By 1810, two years after the US government had declared the slave trade illegal, the African-American population had stood at 1,378,000,¹⁰ and the number of free African-Americans was 186,466. The government and the European American population of the USA knew how to deal with an African slave. But they did not quite understand how they would handle a free African-American or a “free man of colour ” as they were called.

The contradiction between advocating egalitarian principles, on the one hand, and recognizing the existence of slavery as a legitimate institution, on the other hand, bothered many thinking Americans. What equally bothered ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. An Outline of the Past
• 2. The British Foreign Office and Liberian Neutrality During World War I
• 3. The Sequel to the Declaration of War
• 4. British Reaction to the Firestone Investment in Liberia
• 5. The Fernando Po Labour Crisis of 1929–1930
• 6. The League of Nations Plan of Assistance
• 7. The British and the Unrest on the Kru Coast
• 8. An Improving Image Abroad 1934–1939
• Correction to: Whitehall and the Black Republic
• Back Matter