Though devoting less space to the subject than Plummer, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 briefly turns our attention to the importance of the ANLCA. Author James H. Meriwether, like Plummer, inserts the organization into the stream of African American attention to African affairs, believing the group ←11 | 12→had an assertiveness similar to that of black nationalists. He credits the ANLCA with having a determination for its objectives in the face of more attention-grabbing issues, such as demonstrations for voting rights and quality education. Meriwether describes the ANLCA as a “new chapter” in African and African American relations. Granted, he covers African American affairs with Africa only from 1957 to 1961, a brevity that obviously prevented further exploration into the subject. This was not a bar to his insightful observation that the logic of the ANLCA rested upon the transition of anti-colonial African American activism to a post-colonial pan-Africanism. Proudly insists that this dynamic compelled astute Africa watchers to acknowledge “the difficult complexities of an independent Africa.” This is his strong point, one providing a better understanding of the full value of the ANLCA. Noteworthy in his and Plummer’s works is the ANLCA struggle for survival, both financially and structurally.18 My work, however, considers the “new chapter” label more applicable to the ANLCA-Nigerian-Biafran episode that distinguished it from other Africa-focused formations.
A chapter contributed by Albert Tillery to The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis considers the ANLCA to have been an important voice for the U.S. foreign affairs establishment. The author suggests that the ANLCA was a proxy for whatever weight the African American community bore on the U.S. foreign policy process on Africa. Tillery apparently thought it unnecessary to discuss any ANLCA projects, preferring instead to concentrate on how select U.S. government officials helped bring the group into existence. As a result, readers familiar with the group’s activities are left to wonder how Tillery may have interpreted the extent the ANLCA intersected with U.S. diplomacy in the Nigerian civil war, and the group’s relevance alongside government attention to the Cold War, Vietnam, and other international events. In fact, Tillery insists the more legitimate meaning of the ANLCA is simply that it arose under the auspices of G. Mennen Williams, assistant secretary of state for African affairs. This official used the ANLCA to boost the profile of the Bureau of African Affairs, an agency of low rank under President Eisenhower, but which carried over into the Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s ←12 | 13→recognition of the ANLCA, moreover, was less altruistic and more the result of “three empirical puzzles.” These were Kennedy acquiescence to ambivalences about the fragile relationship between himself and African American leaders; an incorrect notion by scholars that Kennedy promised a greater role for African Americans in the foreign policy process; and the fact that the new president was actually unaware of any criticism about African American absence in foreign affairs by the African American press. Tillery insists that the ANLCA can best be understood once these initial assumptions are removed. He maintains that Kennedy wanted a more conciliatory policy with African nations that differed from that of the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy endorsed the group but more as a tool to placate Africans than as a demonstration of a genuine concern for African American empowerment. By extension the ANLCA encounter with Nigeria could only have value, if Tillery is correctly understood, in so far as it served presidential purposes, especially during the Cold War. Negotiating a Destiny does not agree with ascribing to the ANLCA the role of proctor to the Bureau of African Affairs. In fact, the history of the ANLCA indicated a preference for independent action.19
A similar treatment of the topic by Philip E. Muehlenbeck echoes this latter point of Tillery about Kennedy in his laudatory account of the president in Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders. Muehlenbeck insists, however, that Kennedy should be given credit for at least some measure of concern for the welfare of African states and liberation, though only when the issue of civil rights discrimination against African Americans became the experience of African leaders visiting the United States. Muehlenbeck strangely does not mention the ANLCA, despite the material presented on interactions between Kennedy and African American leaders on Africa.20 My concerns here are with Muehlenbeck having overlooked a group Kennedy believed could inform U.S. Africa initiatives; and whether mention of the group in Muehlenbeck’s text, given their engagement in African affairs, might have further enriched his study.
In all, Negotiating a Destiny differs from these accounts by placing the ANLCA-Nigeria-Biafra affair in the forefront of arguments about successful African American and African cooperation. While ←13 | 14→it is certainly important for scholars to provide balance in their topics where it exists, accounts mostly lean toward the unsuccessful line. I argue that the ANLCA achieved a different and noteworthy success when they became mediators to the conflict. The contribution of this study for African American history, then, is to underscore an experience of one group of black activists that helped broaden changes in African American thinking during the unpredictable 1960s, and how that group saw the Nigerian civil war as an avenue in that process. Negotiating a Destiny therefore attempts to expand the sources on the topic as an original work.
Chapter one is a purposefully long historical overview of what produced African Americans, their beginning interactions with West Africa, and struggles against colonial conquest principally around the English-speaking Atlantic World. It attempts to give a broader background to the attention ANLCA leaders would later devote to the Nigerian-Biafran conflict. In other words, the episode was a turning point along the timeline of African American links with Nigeria. An Atlantic empire emerged that held Africans and their Western dispersed descendants in an oceanic grip of events and processes that, of course, spanned several centuries. Despite this circumstance, these peoples and their allies waged resistance to break the unwarranted embrace of a British Empire.
The chapter recounts select examples of daring European (again mostly British, with a supportive United States) activities that constructed the Atlantic empire, and African and African American resistance (this does not discount African complicity in this early, modified form of colonization). I briefly range back-and-forth between the mid-twentieth century and the beginnings of the slave trade for context, then move chronologically up to Nigerian independence. During this narrative I try to briefly highlight one aspect of the theme of the book: the growing encounters of African Americans with Nigerians, where independence of the latter was an important event for the former, who had matured in their understanding of the breadth of the cross-Atlantic colonial system. A key point is the idea of transition. Nigerians, African Americans, Britons, and Americans were all linked ←14 | 15→in a loosening embrace that accelerated the pace and broadened the parameters of the African American freedom movement.
Formation of the ANLCA, its early interest in the turmoil that beset post-colonial Nigeria, and the role of the United States with both command the narrative of chapter two. Because the book is not a history of the ANLCA but merely of its involvement in the civil war, I have avoided giving depth to their origins. Instead, the chapter chronicles the interplay between ANLCA organizers, the U.S. foreign relations establishment, and Nigerian leaders brought together as a result of the strife. To ensure proper context, the intriguing negotiations between the United States, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, and Igbo (later Biafran) leaders is presented. The role of the ANLCA surfaces principally through Theodore E. Brown, its executive director. He was the workhorse for the group and the connection between the ANLCA, Nigeria, Biafra, and the United States, a role greatly undervalued in other histories—brief though they are—of any African American interest in the civil discord. Available primary sources place Brown in this dominant role, which the chapter seeks to reconstruct as best as possible. Lastly, chapter two takes readers to the point when the ANLCA petitions for entry into the pre-war stage of the conflict, and ultimately to the point of open warfare.
The first subtitle of chapter three, “The ANLCA Engages
