Department, and Dean’s office at the University of Michigan—Dearborn; the history department at Oakland University (special nods to De Witt Dykes and wife Silverenia, Bernadette Dickerson, and Mary Karasch with our annual get-togethers; Dan Clark and Sean Moran); the University of Detroit Mercy; University of Toledo, and the Africana Studies Department at Wayne State University. And a special thanks to Chaka Nantambu, Doris Triggs, and Kim Smith. All mistakes are mine. Lastly, thanks also to family and friends that provided encouragement.
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When the United States provided war resources and recovery assistance to its European allies during and after World War II, African Americans also lent their support to a struggling Africa as an international freedom movement had begun to accelerate. “Allies” as a victorious war term and something of a Cold War commandment was rapidly on its way to meaning more than an association between the United States and Europe.1 The idea could easily extend to relations between African Americans and Africans during wartime, and those anti-colonial movements that would partly attribute their momentum to individuals and groups outside the continent.2 And, as could be expected of allies, once independence had become an irreversible tide by 1960 these same contributors would also assist with nation-building as an immediate objective of former colonies. The process would be rife with challenges when these new states retained or adjusted their colonial boundaries or formed new ones all on European models of what constituted functional sovereign entities. In a manner similar to efforts by the United States government to stem further decimation of the post-war European landscape, the American Negro Leadership Conference ←1 | 2→on Africa (ANLCA), a civil rights-oriented African affairs organization, would by 1967 bring its concern and expertise hopefully to help arrest decimation of an African state itself then on the verge of post-colonial civil war.3
Having some idea about the construction of a post-colonial world, members of the ANLCA turned their attention to an unsettling political quake in Nigeria following their January 1967 conference on lingering European regimes in Africa. Growing turmoil over egalitarian governance in Nigeria threatened to undermine the liberated role African Americans envisioned for the newly independent nation. ANLCA leaders reasoned that chances for a setback to such aspirations were too high to be ignored. A worst-case scenario was not unthinkable as the group considered “with great anxiety … the breakup of Nigeria and the prospect of bloody civil war.” That meant a secessionist civil war having the possibility of offsetting the group’s grand expectations for African American—African cooperation. It was imperative, therefore, that the disputants “mediate their differences for us all.”4
Large states in Africa had arisen out of decolonization during the early years of the decade. The populations of several comprised many ethnicities that sought competitive advantage in government and economic affairs. Egypt, the Sudan, Mali, the Congo, and Nigeria were well-known examples, but especially the latter, having more internally contending elements than the others. Numerically dominant ethnic groups such as the Hausa in the north, the Igbos in the east, and the Yoruba in the southwest, and lesser peoples throughout, made state building less a fluid exercise and more the welding of several “Nigerias” into one political entity. Each group had held sway in their respective region prior to the colonial era. Their desires to maintain those individual ethnic controls carried over into the composite of a new Nigeria by 1960.5
By July 1967 the ANLCA realized that the conflict in Nigeria had escalated beyond local significance. Their quiet observance earlier that year quickly gave way to a need for immediate intervention. The only question would be if an African American perspective on the conflict was adequate to assist with negotiations between Igbo secessionists and the Nigerian federal government. Such hope had been premised ←2 | 3→upon their program that called for common struggle and nation-building between African Americans and Africa, and the encouragement of U.S. foreign policies that would strongly support the self-determination of an emerging Africa. Bourgeoning relations between African Americans and Nigerians, and the status of that country among other states, were in greater jeopardy with each successive month of hostilities.
African Americans, as one set of outsiders, would have a unique role in the embryonic and euphoric stage of Nigeria’s life. Their special position generally was to have an historical and purposeful connection to any number of the ethnicities shoveled into the borders of that country. A long history in this regard could be asserted by African Americans who, even though the majority could not identify their biological lineage to Nigeria, saw no barrier that had resulted from the absence of recorded proof. For them, a powerful post-colonial African state that hailed from their region of ancestry took precedence over scraping up the pieces of shattered parentage scattered over the Atlantic Ocean. And yet that same body of water could not bar the need for descendants to return. Events of the post-colonial world gave cause for the involvement of African Americans in helping Nigeria shape its destiny. Post-coloniality was a term suggesting transition out of a historic and frightful era that could bring African Americans into contact with Nigeria, apart from how they envisioned such ties. The ANLCA would count among its founding members veteran activists whose credentials fit firmly in the years of anti-colonial agitation, as would other groups.6
Without minimizing the depth of personal insecurity and public disorder, the importance of this circumstance was also made manifest by its timing and broader association. Occurring during the decade of African independence the years were a hopeful time borne of a “pan” movement sentimentally vibrant, if organizationally intermittent, since the early twentieth century. African American unity with Africa was part of the 1960s momentum against oppression, specifically the wave of anti-colonial activism then sweeping the globe. These challenges to the prevailing system brought with them assumptions that Africans and their cross-Atlantic descendants together might begin an era different from the legacy of the slave trade and colonial conquest.7 African ←3 | 4→Americans and Africans were confident about a first-time chance to consider how best they might secure their joint interests through the instrument of rising states, as the old-world order appeared to be unraveling. In this new epoch, the British, French, and other empires, as well as the U.S. government, were either on the decline or ambivalent about the course of decolonization.8 But interactions among struggling peoples could also experience difficulties, whether or not related to the thirst for empire by European states.
Up to that point, many Africa-focused individuals and groups had been preoccupied with anti-colonial activities, having viewed attacks on the European empire system as their priority work. With escalation of the war, however, these Africa watchers were faced with several choices: determine the most applicable political explanation that satisfied their ideological preferences; support the Federal Military Government (FMG) of Nigeria that
