study, inquiring how an African American foreign affairs group led by integrationist leaders had become a voice apart from U.S. government—Africa relations as the crisis unfolded is an intriguing juxtaposition alongside the Cold War, decolonization, and other high-profile events. And how this group, again assuming an independent posture, insisted on their own Cold War and decolonization nexus as events unfolded.12
This is especially so, therefore, when scholars encase the Nigerian affair solely in a Cold War context.13 Studies drawn to the excitement of the battlefield focus on control of oil production, possible foreign instigation of several coups, internal power struggles, and Cold War machinations as seminal outsider motives having helped drive the discontent that engulfed civil war Nigeria. A few provide an occasional hint other actors—African Americans in this case—were mere footnotes in the narrative. The appearance of African Americans in the big picture about which primary sources are unassembled and perhaps considered insufficient is slighted. Readers thus are left with secondary accounts concentrating only on the subsequent war completely bereft of an African American element. These works conclude that the Arab-Israeli, Vietnam, and Cold War conflicts limited U.S. government time and resources that presumably could have helped restore political order in Nigeria. United States government participation in Nigeria’s affairs, moreover, was subordinate (though not inferior) to that of the British; U.S. officials ultimately hoped the latter and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) would assume lead roles in the matter and absolve them of difficult negotiations.14
Two brief but important considerations deserve mention here that help underscore the point of this book. First, the Nigeria-Biafra episode enabled the ANLCA to observe attempts by the United States and Great Britain to attach remnants of a colonial empire to an apparently fragile ←8 | 9→Nigerian political landscape. A noticeable British presence in Nigerian political affairs especially in the northern region, and some configuration of the country’s economy for fit into the commonwealth, were paramount outsider influences. The result was an impasse in mediations when Nigerian and Biafran leaders began to distrust U.S. and British negotiators, as both outside nations operated to secure their respective interests. Chapters two and three provide a fuller account of this.
So contentious had this become that it seems reasonable to wonder if the disputants were unintentionally maneuvering for the participation of a neutral third party, one having an historically non-colonial stake in the matter. The issue, though, was that U.S. and British negotiators represented powers whose extensive global interests likely complicated as much as benefited proposed compromises. This paradox can be read in the increasingly worried correspondence between and among the State Department, the president’s office and other governmental agencies such as the National Security Council (NSC) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These detail how Nigerian and Biafran desires threatened to undermine U.S. interests. President Lyndon Johnson would decide that deference to British views on the crisis was the more prudent approach, rather than seek the commanding position in negotiations. U.S. engagement with Nigeria, trying though it was, became an alignment subordinate to a fragmented and grasping British hegemon. That the U. S. government posture during this phase of the conflict seemed more attributable to the wrangling for empire primarily between Great Britain and the Soviet Union (not to discount France), with the United States as potential inheritor for the west in a transitory colonial world, offers an equally valuable perspective to sharpen our focus on Nigeria’s civil descent and the reactions of the United States. Official U.S. government involvement in wartime Nigeria was a mutual recognition between it and Great Britain of a commonwealth status proscribed for the former colony, in a last throw for British Empire. The ANLCA would become first-hand observers of this dynamic when they joined the closed-door mediation process.15
Second, African American activism became bolder, more radical in proportion to dissolution of the British Empire. Post-World War II African liberation movements undertook more aggressive campaigns ←9 | 10→for freedom once cracks in European domination widened. As a result, African American desires for closer connections with Africa were commensurately inspired, though such forms could vary. This is a point needing further exploration in addition to its mention in these pages. Brief scholarly notice of the ANLCA role in Nigeria-Biafra either lightly credits the group with having distinguished between forms of activism appropriate for different circumstances or present it as the docile twin to the rising worldly militancy of a new generation of African American freedom activists. Works specifically mentioning the ANLCA by Herschelle Challenor, F. Chidozie Ogene, and Carl P. Watts label the group elitist and insist it was constricted, with an outdated program increasingly overshadowed by the surging Black Power movement. These critiques generally conclude that the ANLCA was stillborn and ineffective. A contrary point has to be raised. Addressing the problems of a new post-colonial African nation may have required a different strategy by interested African Americans than recommending mass mobilization at every turn. The ANLCA chose a brokerage approach to resolving the conflict, a means more conducive to what was underway—negotiations—and in the midst of a political crisis in Nigeria unfamiliar to most African Americans. This approach represented a new attitude toward African matters by a segment of African Americans who were radical in their own right as the empire system flitted about looking for new forms of control. The course of events that involved African American activism in the 1960s would seem to have included the ANLCA as a topic deserving qualitative attention.16
Several recent works, however, have broached the subject with more attention to details that at least tempt further exploration into the argument. Brenda Gayle Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 expands upon the theme of an African American agency when decolonization spread continentally, but most significantly, as participants having melded that process and its aftermath with freedom objectives in the United States. Her attention to ANLCA activism offers more than a glimpse into the need to reconsider U.S., African American, and African intersections in the decolonization era.
←10 | 11→
Plummer ascribes a measure of viability to the ANLCA, whose venture into African American—African relations was a bond of liberation for the two peoples, one that did not require approval from the historically more Africa-minded black nationalist community. Plummer also argues that the Kennedy receptiveness toward ANLCA goals was in play only when absent a Cold War filter. More pressure group than confrontational, the ANLCA, notes Plummer, persisted with its charge despite the more attention-grabbing headlines of the March on Washington, violence against African Americans in Alabama, and the Kennedy assassination, all in 1963. The book’s accolades for and criticisms of the ANLCA entice readers to wonder if perhaps an expanded treatment of the ANLCA would have pointed to the group’s maturity from inception through the war stage, as I argue in these pages. On this point Plummer draws attention to the rapid pace of change in the African American freedom movement, a condition that seemed to imprint a constant need for revision of strategies and tactics upon activist formations. Because she did not give full attention to this aspect of the ANLCA, however, it is understandable why Plummer considers the ANLCA to have been an unsuccessful operation, rather than suggest it was a trial-run opportunity in a highly volatile period in world affairs (the arena the ANLCA chose to engage). This may also explain why her perceptive monograph does not mention any ANLCA projects during its short life.17 Negotiating a Destiny differs from Plummer on at least two points. First, it suggests that the rapidity of change in that era suffocated activist organizations having fixed positions and stiff organizational formats. Longevity and a rigid program were the reverse of how groups had begun to function. And second, therefore, Negotiating a Destiny suggests that organizational success for that era would be better measured by recognizing projects that had limited and short-term objectives. SNCC and the Black Panther Party, among others, with their voter registrations
