meant for the old and new worlds.11 Both colonizer and colonized, as well as their supporters and detractors were confronting the war-era crisis of surging upheaval. Much as it had been in the past as for the wartime present, the depth of this combat would make later generations of activists, particularly those of the 1960s, aware of its well-known significance in Atlantic World history. African Americans were more than observers to the process, as would be indicated by the growing sophistication of their organizations.12
ANLCA executive director Theodore Brown later would become very familiar with the symbolic importance of the ocean, as evidenced by his many flights from the United States to Africa. Lagos, the political capital of Nigeria and an Atlantic construction would be his operating base upon entry to mediations between disputants to the Nigerian conflict. This experience would be one of several that helped make Atlantic World history relevant to the ANLCA. What mattered was the history of how these distant shores were connected, an inescapable and profound series of occurrences that produced African Americans and their many liberation organizations.
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Well before Nigeria-Biafra, therefore, the Atlantic served as a conduit for the nefarious slave trade. A series of Papal Bulls beginning in 1442 seemed to give ecclesiastical (legal) sanction to slaving, but especially so with Romanus Pontifex in 1455, and certainly as issued by Alexander VI in 1493 (Inter caetera), a document that divided the world between Spain and Portugal and thereby can be interpreted as a formal beginning of Atlantic slavery as an organized event. To smooth out further arguments between Portugal and Spain, it was recast as a political compact in 1494 as the Treaty of Tordesillas. Both were charters of the Atlantic that destroyed the freedoms of Africans.13 Expectedly unacceptable to nations excluded from the arrangement, it nonetheless withstood an attempt at modification by Pope Paul III’s executive decree that enshrined the right of native peoples (American Indians) to freedom while excluding such extension to Africans. England, among dissenting parties, had heard enough. They, too, claimed a right to the Atlantic and its unfolding events, and would not accede to anything resembling a trans-national edict that locked them out of the anticipated riches of an enlarging oceanic world. They instead took matters into their own hands. According to one author, “the English … lacked any initial founding charter issued by an international authority. Henry VII’s letters patent to John Cabot of 1496 were to some degree an attempt to replicate the language of Papal legislation ….”14
The Atlantic Ocean would grow in its reputation for torrid affairs. It became a tricontinental theater involving Africa, Europe, and the New World that seemed to foment more disputes on the timeline to twentieth-century empire troubles. These would include the controversial charge by American patriot Thomas Jefferson in 1776 that Great Britain forced the slave trade onto his fellow colonists, then headed for independence. Or when that same British Empire and the United States declared an end to slave importations by 1808, with the British seeking its enforcement by patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, the waters of the Caribbean islands, and the West African coast. The British Empire was intent on maintaining their expansionist proclivities over the Atlantic World. They sought further control of the water highway when they sanctioned an end to slavery in their colonies with implementation of the Emancipation Act in 1833 (questionable, as it allowed for gradual ←26 | 27→freedom, contentious as disavowed by the U.S. government, but an inspiration that led to the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia). This Act would pose challenges to slave plantation owners in the Americas whose livelihood was derived from transporting goods produced by slave labor over the ocean. An innocence of the Atlantic Ocean was no longer sustainable. It soon would resume its role as a passageway for the European colonization of Africa with the U.S. government a quiet witness to the process.15
Traversing the ocean, finally, meant continuing its association with controversy when colonized peoples were dragged into two of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century. The second of these—World War II—was the culmination of five centuries of remarkable yet rancorous civilization for Atlantic World inhabitants. It metaphorically forced a reversal of the ocean’s flow to become a conduit for reinstituting previously discarded human rights. This new worldly conflict became “a war of competing empires and contradictory visions for transforming the global order.”16 As an example, representatives from America and Great Britain met on the HMS Prince of Wales, an Atlantic Ocean vessel, in September 1941 to produce the Atlantic Charter. This was an arbitrary but hopeful bilateral guarantor of freedoms from fear and want and the rights of free worship and speech for the world’s peoples.
That charter as the modern incarnation of what the ocean had come to mean for empires did not, however, completely settle the waters. Its third clause was of special regard for the African. “[T];he right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and … to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” was interpreted differently by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his colonial secretary Oliver Stanley. They insisted the phrase did not apply to subject peoples of that empire. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt disagreed but eventually decided not to reject their views.17 Deputy British prime minister Clement Attlee, however, said the charter applied to Africans, somewhat rescuing any remaining chance to make good of an Atlantic metaphor. West Africans immediately denounced the Churchillian perspective through editorials, articles, and delegations to England demanding representative government.18
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There had been and would be other conferences by the same nations and their allies that issued statements interpreted by Africans as potentially capable of alleviating their oppression.19 These gatherings were launched by nations that had helped to define its symbolic meaning, and of course the British were ever present. Such were Bretton Woods in 1944 and Yalta and Potsdam in February and July1945, respectively. Decisions were made at these confabs by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States to maintain a united front. They hoped to put the finishing touches on the Axis powers, to disassemble the overlordship imposed on less powerful European nations by their expansionist neighbors, and to work out post-war European reconstruction. Emboldened by the attention to what was seen as a new post-colonial world, Anglophone Africans sent memoranda and other requests to the resident British colonial office seeking to present their case for an end to empire rule. This protest was organized by Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe, owner of the widely read West African Pilot and later first president of an independent Nigeria. He, along with a delegation of other West African newspaper owners, submitted a request titled “The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa” to the secretary of state of colonies. It called for major reforms as a prelude to full independence. The petitioners received no consideration.20
Not giving up, Africans sought attendance to a conference announced in March 1945 and to be held in San Francisco for the establishment of a supra-national organization. The United Nations (UN) project was a highly ambitious gambit to foster permanent peace and cooperation among countries of the world.21 This seemed to answer African calls for international attention to their plight. They hoped—again—to denounce the colonial arrangement governing their lives if given an opportunity to appear at the affair.22
The odds that Africa could expect substantive assistance from the United Nations were unfavorable. For one, the proposed UN was not the first time in that century that a gathering of nations presented themselves as a forum for restitution of crimes suffered by colonized peoples. The League of Nations called into existence following World War 1 had disappointed Africans on the colonial question. The League refused to enjoin European colonialists to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s ←28 | 29→principle of self-determination for subject peoples in Africa, an idea among his war-weary Fourteen Points. The world’s expectations for the success of this UN predecessor were small; even the United States withheld its membership. International relations during the inter-war years apparently never departed from Hobsbawn’s Age, remaining just as enticing but deceptive and volatile. Africans knew it from first-hand experience.
Rebuffs
